There are a lot of musicians I can think of that fall in this category, but why should I put other people down? Why can’t I just hold confession highly in my own work?

I’ve been confessing to the internet for eight months, and the world a whole lot longer.

My grandparents came to visit, and my grandma had questions about the songs I’d been sharing. “They’re all sad,” she says as I lay down on the couch, stomach full from our feast at the local Korean restaurant. “Can you write a happy song for me? They make me cry. There’s enough to be sad about these days.”

“I write happy songs,” I protest, but I’m not sure if I mean it.

I used to fantasize about being missed, about haunting those who left me, like a little part of me would always be stuck to their skin. Now that I am, I do not envy those who have always been the ghosts of someone’s past. Knowing your memory brings someone pain is no fun.

I wake up from a carb-induced coma thirty minutes before my sister and I are set to leave for Yankee Stadium. I fell in love with America’s favorite pastime in the spring when my sister drafted a fantasy team for me while I was watching my professor perform. We had bought the tickets a month prior and eagerly awaited our evening of a free Bobblehead of Cody Bellinger, who was then injured.

We find ourselves seated next to two aggressive French Canadians and a very racist Mets fan from Hoboken, New Jersey. I cheer so much I develop a headache. I miss my sister dearly as soon as I get back to Massachusetts.

While I stand in line for the bus back to Boston, a yellow ladybug crawls up my arms and onto my bag. Against my better judgment, I google, “yellow ladybug meaning” after “yellow ladybug poisonous”, which symbolizes “good luck, positive energy, happiness, and new beginnings”. What a sign I was lucky to receive, one I’m glad landed on my gentle skin.

Starting Tuesday morning, I began to pack up the apartment I have lived in for the past year, nestled in the heart of Fenway. I will be moving to a new neighborhood with a new roommate and a new room, and clothes, trinkets, and other pieces of my life all littered on my hardwood floors. I keep photos I shouldn’t, but a large bag of clothes lies by the door to be donated. One step at a time.

I used to walk past Fenway Park on my way to school, and I was so horribly miserable to be here, but I remembered that I was living someone’s dream, and I should always make the most of that.

I own a ridiculous amount of items, all being shoved in big blue bags my mom ordered me on Amazon. I lie on the floor resting my laptop on them as I watch hour after hour of Veronica Mars and YouTube. I don’t buy groceries and instead live off of eggs, toast, green grapes, and takeout.

It feels like a fever dream, like I am stuck between two realities. My walls haven’t been bare in any room I’ve lived in since I was thirteen, yet only two posters remain now, and the cutout of Kirsten Dunst’s lips from The Virgin Suicides above my bed.

I’m a tad sentimental, but I’m eager to leave a place that no longer feels like mine. Also, the toilet is always broken.

On Tuesday, Ethe and I reunite after ten days apart (my being in New York, and their being in San Diego), and we embrace like two soldiers returning from war. We down rice and stir fry as we debrief our time apart, sharing camera rolls and secrets. “I mean, we can’t ever predict why people do what they do,” they say between bites. “I know,” I sigh, “just like, ugh!” I smile, but not at my plight, at being reunited with my friend. “God, I missed us!”

“Back and better than ever,” we end in unison.

On Wednesday, I am glued to my bed. I get up only to pack and get dinner.

Thursday, we embark on a journey to Michael’s.

“So, [REDACTED] has been liking my Instagram stories, and that’s so sus,” I let the end of the phrase fry, embracing my faux-LA girl accent. “Do you guys talk to each other?” Ethe asks as I throw my head back. “We famously didn’t like each other.”

I think it is really difficult for me to understand that I am not being seen the way I used to be. Before college, I weighed at least fifteen pounds more (which, mind you, was still a healthy weight) and I wasn’t confident in myself. I wasn’t a prize then, or desired. I was messy and “too much” and once told that I’d be really pretty “once I lost my baby fat”.

It is still hard to believe I’m not that anymore. That people aren’t pointing and laughing at me for thinking I could be beautiful too.

I am very disillusioned now, and instead of being so desperate to be wanted, I’m more desperate to be known, and very few people will actually give you that luxury. I’m very lucky to have friends who do.

We end up with a picture frame, two boxes, bedsheets, a TokiDoki blindbox, Mod Podge, and a bag full of paper scraps as we sit on my stoop to open the blindbox. Ethe is a special kind of friend I can spend all day with, do anything with, and have fun the whole time. I have subliminally been trying to get them to move in with me when we move to New York next year.

On that note, I am about to start my last year of college, which is wild. I came into college with one semester of AP credits and took a summer semester to even it out, and in May, I will be 21 years old with a Bachelor’s Degree. I don’t really regret this decision, because my unnamed music school is not really a traditional college. If you took college and removed the parties and the big classes and the school tradition and made all the horny, undeveloped students also popstars with massive egos, then you’d find yourself in my seat, which feels like a repeat of my four years of performing arts high school. In fact, when speaking to an alum who is also my favorite underground pop girl right now, she too compared this school to just high school 2.0.

There is definitely something terrifying about being on the edge of something new and not having a hand in how to form the life I want. It’s too early to apply for jobs, yet I also am guaranteed nothing when applying for them, and I don’t know if I can afford to live anywhere that isn’t my family home, and I have so many “maybe”s and “what-if”s that an anxiety-prone, overthinker like me can’t help but be freaked out.

I do know, however, that I belong back in the city that made me the artist I am. I am ready to carve out my future.

I have three more days left in my move, and four more until my first day of senior year, and a laundry list of things to do, but I think of the yellow ladybug who chose me, who is telling me good things are coming.

I feel like, just like when the ladybug crawled up and down my arm.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Bitches Talk Shit by Sophia Stel

• Rewatching Veronica Mars and drinking Poppi on the floor of a half-packed room

• GamePigeon Pool

• Bricking your phone

• Strangers by Belle Burden

• The new season of Adults, which I am watching as I publish this

Hi! I’ve been very busy packing, so this is a short one, but I am so excited to get into the swing of things again and settle into a new routine. I hope you had a very fun week!

xoxo, Maia

So, let’s see how far I can run without stopping

And she can pretend to be me

Since she took my place in my bed, on that stage

I have not lost any sleep

Being myself wasn’t easy

Like any daughter of Lena Dunham and Carrie Bradshaw and the confessional sad girl singers of the 2020s, I know quite well how wonderful heartbreak is as inspiration. It gives you so many minds to pick apart: how simple it is to play the villain and then the victim, and how easy it is to hold on to resentment, to let it grow like a pit inside you, lighting up your throat with fire.

I am not immune to this (very clearly), but I can choose when it’s time to close a chapter. I am not in love anymore, nor have I been for a while, and I am about to start a new school year, with a new lightness I’ve been missing.

I’m ready to let it all go and give in to fate, for good this time.

Friends gone during the summer will be returning, and I will be moving into a new apartment with a new roommate, and I have a new person I smile about when a song about a crush plays. I fill my closet with tops that cover my chest and dresses that show off my legs. I’m back in New York (who is surprised), but this time likely for the last time until Thanksgiving.

New York City has served forever as this beacon of light for artists and weirdos alike. Every music-making bisexual from my university plans to make the pilgrimage, but to me, it is my small hometown. It is where my friends live a seven-minute walk from my apartment, and fetishize it all you want, but I was born to be here, unlike some transplants who love to cry about when they have publicized beef on TikTok (yes, I did fall down this rabbit hole).

My brother was the ball boy for NYCFC, and we all trek to Yankee Stadium in the rain to cheer them on, and I spend most of my week with my family, shopping with my sister or at the diner with my mom, cuddled up on the couch with my dog, and forcing my brother to try TikTok trends. I am engulfed by their warmth quickly and entirely.

I am sitting at a trendy Mexican restaurant in Greenpoint with Emelia and Ella, clanging shot glasses full of free frozen margaritas and laughing about the topic of threesomes and dating. I am feeling the sun on my skin at Washington Square Park, hoping I don’t run into anyone from my high school who is a microcelebrity. I am ordering eight-dollar lattes with lavender syrup on my way to the L train. I am walking from SoHo to Murray Hill and then to dinner in the Lower East Side in strappy sandals.

My therapist sits in front of me in her chilly office as I play with the threads at the bottom of the overalls I found in a box under my childhood bed, and I can’t help the tears that prick in my eyes as I tell her, “I feel hopeful for once. I think I am about to have a lot of good things in my life.”

“So, this breakup, it was a gift to you,” she says matter-of-factly, and I smile softly. “Like, in January, I just felt so shitty about myself. I lost myself, too,” I inhale sharply, “But it’s been eight months. I’m me again. I’m excited about someone again. I love my friends, in Boston and New York.” She is in her mid-sixties and blonde and warm, and I know the pride I see on her face isn’t fake. “I will resent him for what I put up with, and I feel horrible for whoever will hate me the way I hated all those other girls, but I’m free. I know I deserve to be happy.”

I am exiting the R at 57th Street, and a Slavic woman taps me to say, “You are very beautiful girl.” When I spot Felix in SoHo to meet up for overpriced matcha and gossip, he says, “Okay, Carrie Bradshaw!” I laugh as I feign embarrassment. “The guy you just passed sprinted down the street to say hi to you. It was, like, so weird.”

The confidence I have grown over my eight months of relearning to love myself is contagious, apparently. For three days straight, all I can listen to is Bobby or Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.

I’d always assumed that I’d eventually write a post-mortem on this relationship when I felt like I was finally free; in fact, I started posting on Substack a week after we broke up, but I no longer believe I have to immortalize it. It doesn’t carry that much weight with me anymore.

I lost myself in caring for someone else, and I believed that that was love, until I realized I didn’t remember who I was anymore. I didn’t have my own life anymore. I took on the emotional weight of someone else’s struggles, and in the process, broke myself. The healing process that I thought would be centered around unloving was instead learning to re-love myself. I am the center of my story, and that does not warrant a post-mortem. It warrants a celebration of strength and determination. I am not autopsying; I am proud of myself.

My friends always make fun of me for my horrible taste, and I’m ready to let that joke die out in my new phase of life.

I go back to Boston in four days to clear out my first big girl apartment, which holds so many memories: my first love, my first heartbreak, my first rebound, the many visitors who spent weekends here, movie nights with my best friend Ethe, songs I’ve written, Substack posts I’ve crafted in bed, meals I’ve eaten while watching Law & Order: SVU, and now, I am ready to close this chapter. I am eager to pack it all up in a box and leave the hurt behind. I have healed each wound with time and care, and I am ready for new firsts: new love, new friends, new special memories.

I’m learning to be okay with embarrassing myself. I am trying to post more music to get attention, and I hate it. I pull my hair with every TikTok I hit post on, or trial reel that flops.

I want to follow my dreams, and unfortunately, that means learning to sell myself in 15-second clips and posts of my enviable life. I’m experiencing major fatigue from the song clips that are parts of my soul for fifty likes, like I am Oliver Twist, and instead of bread, I need attention. I don’t need validation; that is something I’ve come to learn about myself, but I picked a career where you can only succeed if people care about you, and so, I am going to try to play the game until I physically can’t anymore.

I used to worry about people making fun of me, but then I remember that I can’t hear any of it, and I shut the thought out of my head immediately.

My parents were always my inspiration for my unconventional life; My mom, a freelance costume designer who has been working since she was twenty years old, traveling the world before settling her work here in New York, and my father, who immigrated from Italy with nothing and built his own business. My parents never had a traditional 9-to-5 workday, nor jobs that sounded boring to me. They taught me to take the jump, but the creative economy right now might not catch me.

I run the risk of sounding ungrateful to be in a position to follow my dreams, in a place so many dream of, but I am nine months away from the rest of adulthood, and though I am excited, I am, plainly, fucking terrified.

I’d rather give up when I’m dead. I have not lost any sleep. Being myself wasn’t easy.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Our Hero, Balthazar (2025, dir. Oscar Boyson)

• Bobby by Phoebe Bridgers

• Milk Fed by Melissa Broders

• Rhode Peptide Lip Tint + Illia Lip Liner for the best lip combo ever

• Shaken Coconut Cortados

• Boo-ing the opposing teams at sports games

Hi hi Substack friends old & new! I hope you guys had a great week! I am seeing the Yankees tonight, so I am on cloud nine & feeling the same optimism I am writing about. I hope you feel it too.

All my love,

Maia xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

Ethe and I are the Jalen Brunsons of spontaneous trips: in fact, much of our friendship developed over heading to random train stops, but George’s Island might’ve been our most ambitious yet. Our journey required thirty minutes on the train before a forty-five-minute ferry ride, all of which to start a full walking day.

I, perhaps naïvely, am shocked to find that Fort Warren, utilized in the Civil War as well as World War II, is entirely bare, with plaster peeling to reveal red brick. The floor is uneven, and nothing remains in these echoey halls. “Not that, like, anyone pays me for urban planning, but I’m not liking how ugly this is. God, what a depressing place to live.” The compound is covered by lush grass fields and beautifully colored weeds. “Oh, fuck, it’s hot.”

We seek refuge in the shade and split a hot dog they had been carrying for the past twenty-five minutes. “I’ve been thinking a lot about like, people who collect friends they can show off. Like they’re curating a museum. I don’t know, people probably think I’m lame, but I’m happy. I’m happy with just letting friends come in.”

“It’s always more genuine when connections grow naturally,” they say as I nod with a smile. “Like us,” I beam. “Like us.”

Our ferry back to the Harbor was supposed to leave at three, but upon its arrival to the island, they sent it back for “maintenance”, but assured us another boat was on the way. Little did we know, we would not be leaving for another two hours. We sought refuge by the mist fan (named “Mr. Mister” by the rangers), playing Words With Friends and watching the newest episode of Adults.

Once we finally get on the ferry, I am curled up and out cold until we get to the harbor. I spend the rest of the evening in bed eating stir-fried noodles and watching baseball.

I spend most of my weekend with the AC cranked up to its highest setting, typing away at my laptop, trying to keep up with the onslaught of assignments that are due within the next few days. Soon, my sixth semester will be over and lead straight into my seventh, and I will wake up in May and be 21 with a bachelor’s degree. I will move back in with my mother and have to get a real job. I stay up each night wondering just how fast time is moving around me, and if I can hold on to it tight.

In a few weeks, my ten-year-old brother will become my eleven-year-old brother, and I can’t help but feel old as he tells me on the phone that he’s “gaming”, throwing out terms foreign to me. He is still the kid I have loved for a decade, though, when he tells me all he wants for his birthday is the newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, which I happily preordered for him.

On Monday morning, I meet with my friend Chloe for breakfast outside of the Christian Science Headquarters, where we discuss the blasphemy of an additional religious text (coming from a retired Catholic and a Jewish girl), the loss of the original Dunkin’ six-dollar meal deal, and friendship (all the hallmarks of a good time).

“I can’t be around people who have no drive,” she says, and I nod eagerly in return. I think about this the rest of the week as my boss and I discuss ex-friends of ours who put us down because we got somewhere they won’t put the work into receiving, or how the unhappiest I’d ever been was when I was surrounded by people with no ambition, or how I can only feel like myself when I feel my dreams are within reach.

I am a very anxious person by nature, which has manifested itself in many ways. First is my obsession with my mail key, which I convinced myself I lost. That led to Ethe and me trying to pick my key for forty-five minutes with two bobby pins. I see my anxiety in my inability to eat when I am stressed, and then my inclination to throw up because I haven’t eaten enough and I’m also stressed, or maybe it’s because I’m sad, and am I sad because I am stressed?

Classic chicken or the egg scenerio, I think.

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen and feeling inexplicably moody as I leave my Afrodiasporic music final, clutching my earbud wire and squeezing my shoulder, rubbing around the bone. I am eager to go home, eager to lie on my family couch.

I have a heart-shaped bruise on my knee, which to some may be concerning, but to me is a sign from my father.

I read a piece in Polyester Magazine called On Digital Voyeurism, Relationship Breakups and the Lost Art of Goodbye as part of my research for my art exhibition on the topic, and it sticks with me like the itchiness of grass hours after it touches your leg.

“Though someone is gone from our lives physically, we fear the pain of loss so much that we settle with the idea of them. It’s difficult to let go, but we were never meant to internet stalk old lovers indefinitely. Our inability to let go results in emotional purgatory. People aren’t focused on the life they’re living and the people they’re physically with and we fill the void online, cheating ourselves out of the profound experience of saying goodbye.”

In February, I notoriously deleted social media for three weeks, something I documented in one of my first-ever Substack articles. I am starting to ease back into a life online, which unfortunately is expected of artists, and I feel the same dread sink in. The same desire to stalk exes, ex-classmates, ex-friends, and people I don’t think of when I shut my phone off.

I am now motivated to “brick” my phone (minus the actual Brick because I should not buy anything else), so I don’t feed into this need for connection. It is time to master the Art of Goodbye.

At the final moment, I cried … I always cry at endings

I spend most of the week in bed every evening watching TV and texting my family, unable to manage long nights. I watch a lot of baseball and read before I fall asleep, surrounded by my things. I’ll be back in my childhood bed by tonight, and in three weeks, in a new apartment. Time is rushing past me.

I think about how one day I will have a new person in my life, someone I open my heart and world to again, and then a degree, and a real job, and maybe a family, and the world around me won’t stop moving whether or not I do.

One day there will be a new girl in my favorite side of the bed, and maybe she’ll know my name, and maybe she’ll find herself wondering if she deserves it, just like I did, but all I know is it won’t ever be me again.

I’ve served my time, and now I know the answer is I was always deserving of it.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

• The Governor’s Waltz by Phoebe Bridgers

• rewatching Overcompensating season one because I watched MBB’s stand-up special and now I miss them so much

• On Digital Voyeurism, Relationship Breakups and the Lost Art of Goodbye by Ione Gamble for Polyester Magazine

• byChae matcha on Newbury Street

Short & sweet because I had the longest week of my life & I am now headed home to sleep & hug my family! I love this new Phoebe album & I am in desperate need of a break.

I love you

xoxo, Maia

When I was sixteen years old, I bought tickets to see LA shoegaze band MILLY (rumored to be broken up by an Angelino from my class last semester) perform at Baby’s All Right. My friend who I’d originally asked came down with strep throat, and instead, I last-minute invited another girl in our friend group to come with me. That girl is one of the only people from my high school I am still friends with, someone unafraid to call me out and let me grow, someone I’ve cherished for years since.

That night meant a lot for me. It made me feel like the music world was something I could be a part of, something I was being invited into by those I admired. Though still a child, I felt like maybe, one day, I’d be a peer. I didn’t really fit in with the scene of people my age; I still don’t. For once, though, I felt like I could. The title of this page, Talking Secret, comes from a MILLY song I heard live that night.

I also met Martin that night, photographer extraordinaire. When I knew I needed new pictures for my site, there was only one person to call.

My stylist, one of my best friends, Emelia, comes ready to go with an oversized grey bag full to the brim with clothes. Emelia is effortlessly stylish, and instantly soothes my nerves. We play dress up as my sister passes judgement on my couch, and then we are off to meet Martin for coffee, tea, and breakfast focaccia by the waterfront.

Between bites, we catch up, talking about what it’s been like being in Boston these past two years. “I don’t really fit in with the scenes here, like I’m a little too edgy for the inner circle of songwriters, but I’m too soft to be punk, so I just kinda do my own thing,” I sigh, sipping my lavender mint iced latte. “But it ultimately has been great for me to grow.”

“So your brand is being a digital girl? I read your Substack; I have a lot of questions, but we’ll get to that.” I rub my shoulder. “I guess. I think I’m the brand. I think I just sell myself.”

The three of us make our way to the shoreline. I had been deadset on taking photos at Bushwick Inlet Park, where I used to play soccer, where I gave Aeriel her first blunt, where we’ve been locked in, where I grew from a girl into something else. “I’m really awkward,” I laugh as Martin pulls his camera out. “Just walk around, be comfortable. Just be you.” I feel the rocks under my feet, the sand crunching under my boots, as I try not to slip. I settle on a rock as Martin sits across from me, fixing the lens. “So, just talk about what you’re doing”

“I don’t really have a lot of control in my life. It feels really scary to lose your autonomy like that. So, my words give me some of that. I’m not really an abrasive person, but my words can do that for me. Say whatever you want, but I won’t let it bother me. I’ll give you everything about me.”

Immediately after the shoot, I am in New Jersey in a car with my mom and siblings. My sister (and fellow Substack-er) has been doing a camp on sports broadcasting, and we all go to the grand finale: a play-by-play of the Somerset Pirates, which are the Yankees Double A team. We indulge in sprinkle-topped soft serve and hot dogs as my mom and I embarrass my brother. The next night, I giggle with the three girls who I have grown up with, teasing each other over a Hugo Spirtz and a bowl of vodka pasta.

By Sunday night, I’m back in Boston, taking myself to the movies past sunset, clutching my purse as I wait at the station.

I wrote a song that I am very proud of called “Forever, For Now”, and I played it for my 11 am songwriting lecture, and I am still always shocked when my professor likes my work. “Yup,” he goes as the last note rings out, an unresolved chord. “That’s the stuff!” The song is my final letter-I-can’t-send. I love you forever, but I’m leaving you for now.

Tuesday flies by as eight hours of classes feel like nothing, even giving me extra time to hang out with Ethan. I have an hour to kill before I trek to Cambridge, and in seeking refuge indoors, I inadvertently sent myself on a spiral.

There is a girl that I have come to envy. I have a conspiracy theory that she will be my ex’s new girlfriend, and I now get why QAnon people really get their kicks off of this shit. It eats at me as I mute her on Instagram, avoid eye contact in public, and become physically ill in her presence. I am nauseous for hours, unable to shake how small I felt.

She is not the problem. I am. I created my own torture device, and it’s simply my mind.

I am a proponent of going out and sticking to obligations even when you don’t feel like it, so I listen to The Beach Boys on the bus to Cambridge, where Malavika’s boyfriend, Tommy, is on second at the songwriter’s night at a green awning-clad bar. The friend of the bouncer laughs as I flash my ID, but I’m too excited by the sight of Mal in front of me to give some sass.

Tommy is generally pretty quiet, but he truly shines on stage, his lyrics lingering in the air like molasses. I look over at Mal, her face lit up, and I can’t help but feel it too. It hits me that the love I have spent so long mourning could never hold a flame to what they have. What two wonderful people like them deserve.

After work on Wednesday, I meet up with Parker, who was one of my first friends in college. We ultimately ended up drifting apart with time and drama, but I’d always kept her fondly in my heart, and caught up with her on her quick move to Boston.

Though we met at music school, she is now set on making music videos, and on a low-top table, we talk about the switch. “I’m really excited for you, P,” I beam as a smile grows on her face. “You know I love music, like love it. But I don’t need to be the one making it. I will for me, but I want to be the one who sees it, who documents it. I want to make music to make cool videos.” She has always had an excellent eye, our friend group’s favorite photographer, with the ease and confidence only city-raised children carry.

I go home beaming about how magical it is to fall right back in love with a friend you’ve missed.

I am now in a groupchat of all the songwriters I met that fateful evening with Malavika and Tommy, and it has me scheduling things like “songwriting in the commons” in my calendar and “game night after Cantab”, and I feel like I might be on the edge of something really good.

I also feel like that about a pretty girl in my phone, but that’s for later assessment.

If you know me, you know I spend an unbelievable amount of time with my friend Ethe, who is my best friend in all of Boston, Massachusetts. We had agreed to finish our British cooking and romance reality show and play Monopoly, and now I have a Monopoly game set on my floor for the next week.

We laugh until our sides hurt as Ethe increasingly lost money and potentially hope.

I met with my career advisor, and she asks me what kind of jobs I’m looking for post-grad, and we end up with a very scattered list. “I think you’re really putting your best foot forward,” she says as I beam. “I know you’re a go-getter type.”

The Latin phrase our school lives by is “To be, not to seem”, and my classmates have been dissecting this the past few weeks. “I can tell you are one that is not a seemer,” my classmate says, and I hope that’s true. I hope I am as authentic as I believe I am.

There is only one reason I can think of that my friendships have been blossoming, and that’s because I stopped being obsessed with perception. My best friend Aeriel told me about this thing called “cool baggage” that her orientation students have to let go of to let themselves have fun, and I’ve dumped mine off and never looked back.

Summer is coming to a close, but I feel it. I’m on the edge of something great.

Things that inspired me this week:

• I Want Your Sex (2026, dir. Gregg Araki)

• I Just Wasn’t Made For Times Like These by The Beach Boys

• Piña Colada Matcha from Farmer’s Horse in Boston, MA

• The Heat on ITV. Please renew this. I have a twitter account dedicated to getting it renewed

• Granny Smith Apples for breakfast

• Playing Monopoly on the floor of my bedroom

Hiii! I wasn’t super motivated this week but you know I’d never miss a Talking Secret Friday! I love you

xoxo, Maia

Today is the first day of August; however, yesterday marked six months of Talking Secret! This platform has been very kind to me over the past few months, & I wanted to celebrate the best way I know: a piece! I will be sharing a bit about myself as well as my July favorites!

As for July, this month was long & sometimes stressful, but friendship-filled! I had many lovely guests staying at my place, and it was so fun to be a tour guide. I have had so many great bites, watches, and reads to share with you this fine August morning!

WHO OWNS THE BAG?

My name is Maia (though most of you know that…) & I am twenty years old! I grew up in New York City but am based in Boston right now as I finish up my bachelor’s degree, during which I’m studying creative entrepreneurship, songwriting, and the business of live music. I also have Italian citizenship through my father, who immigrated from there. I am the oldest of three and love my siblings to death, and at home, I have a crusty white Maltese named Chip. When I grow up, I want to keep making music and writing forever, and hopefully work in the live music sector behind the scenes!

& various fun facts…

• I won a hoola huping contest when I was nine years old

• I’ve been on TV three times in total for three different shows & sang at the U.S. Open when I was in high school

• I broke my elbow when I was four, and I used to not be able to bend my left thumb all the way down

MY BAG: Jelly Firkin

I have wanted a Jelly Firkin ever since I saw Sabrina Fuentes of Pretty Sick had one a few years back and finally obtained this magical purse! It is pretty spacious and a statement piece that is very low maintenance with a high reward. I will warn you: they get dirty easily & aren’t super simple to clean, but style over practicality any day.

MY OUTFITS:

July has been all about basics that make me feel good & put together, but still fun & personality-filled. One of my recent staples is my 99 Baby Tee in Cream from Charlie Beads ($49). I have been loving my red flats from Sam Edelman, which I got on Depop in September for $6 (though I found a similar pair here). I also love the Los Angeles Apparel mini skirt ($44), but what really defined my style this month was pieces I’ve had forever, such as my Vana Youngstein ATOMIC Cherry Tank ($65, sold out), or simple pieces, like a white tank or the pink children’s dress I bought for $12.

MY READS:

I had less time to read this month since I had many lovely visitors, but I luckily enjoyed every read this month! My favorite read of the month may be a controversial pick … but it is Delusions: Of Grandeur, Of Romance, Of Success by Cazzie David. This book will not please everyone, but I enjoyed how sarcastic, honest, and ruthless she is in this collection of essays. As far as nepo babies go, Cazzie gets a pass from me.

My full list of reads… Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress (★★★★/5), Big Swiss by Jenn Beagin (★★★/5), Transcription by Ben Lerner (★★★★/5), Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick (★★★★/5), Girls Our Age by Phoebe Thompson (★★★★/5),

Currently reading: Nymph by Sofia Montrone

MY SNACKS:

• Jeni’s Brambleberry Crisp Ice Cream

• A fresh, juicy nectarine

• Second Chances Mangoes

BEST NEW EATS:

• Chili Chicken & Eggplant Noodles at Noah’s Kitchen in Brookline, MA

• Beet Salad at june bug in Somerville, MA

• Salmon Scrambled Eggs at Juliet in Somerville, MA

MY WATCHES:

The best show of the year has to be Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on Apple TV, which kept me on my toes every single Wednesday morning as it aired. My favorite new movie was The Invite (2026, dir. Olivia Wilde), which made me sob. I remember why I make art when I see a movie as good as that. I also tuned back in to Law & Order: SVU towards the end of the month, which will always be a show I love unconditionally, and watched a lottttttt of the World Cup (rip).

Now … let’s talk Love Island: UK. I personally was so fatigued by the end of the season and truly just wanted it to be over. I am comfortable now to come out as Julia supporter, so I was very thrilled to see her triumph, but I am really tired of the “girls girl” conversation on a show about literally dating a bunch of hot people…

I also enjoyed … Minions & Monsters (2026, dir. Pierre Coffin), We Were Once Kids (2021, dir. Eddie Martin), & rewatching Pitch Perfect

I hated… Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (2025, dir. Ruben Fleischer), which I shouldn’t have to elaborate on

IN MY EARBUDS:

Last month I wasn’t feeling super inspired by what I was listening to, but this month that couldn’t be further from the truth! I am still furiously bumping Olivia Rodrigo and Eilish Constance’s releases from last month, but I have a positive take on Music, Fashion, and Film, Charli’s divisive latest album. As a musician myself, I think there should be space for raw, stream-of-consciousness that isn’t necessarily polished, and while this album isn’t perfect, should all good art be? Can we enjoy art that isn’t perfect?

My favorite single from this month is ADÉLA’s smash hit Ain’t In LA. I fell in love with her work earlier this year & can’t wait for her new album. I also loved ditch’s silent movie actor, acting, which is a grungy alt-rock hit from my favorite indie secret. Finally, I have to shout out the one, the only Cosette, who I had the utmost privilege of interviewing this month, and not only is she brilliant, but kind as well. If you need somewhere to start with her, I love the CONQUEST ep, and her new singles (both on the playlist) are bangers!

As for podcasts, as always, I have to tune in for my girl Jordan Theresa! I loved her episode on how Love Island is a humiliation ritual for its female contestants. I also loved Julian Feeld on Doomscroll with Joshua Citarella, where they discussed social media’s impact on politics. I’ve also been listening to Moody Bitches by Julie Holland on audiobook.

Anticipated August releases: Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers & It Goes On by Westside Cowboy

OTHER GOODIES IN MY BAG:

• Cica Cleansing Water Pads from Meebak ($18.97) I am unreasonably lazy before bed, and I forget to remove my makeup, which led me to these! They are not only effective but fun to use, and smell amazing.

• Merit Bronze Balm ($32) I like a very minimal makeup look & this bronzer has always been my favorite. It is light, easy to blend, and so beautiful!

• Purple Beret I bought off Depop ($5) The one time I wore a beret to a function was the time I got the most compliments ever, so I must lock back in.

LOOSE STUBS (aka highlights of the month):

• Seeing Noah Kahan with my sister , who is also a writer of the sports variety! While I am not a Kahan-er, I loved spending time with her

• My bestest friends Mia & Aeriel visited me this month which was an absolute blast

• Watching the World Cup final with other Spain fans … there is something so beautiful about celebrating a win together

• Seeing two baseball games with the best company: Red Sox w/ my Chloe, and the Somerville Patriots with my brother & mom!

Happy August! It seems so wild that summer is coming to a close, and I hope it has brought you nothing but wonderful weather and time with friends & family! As mentioned early on, I am still celebrating my six-month Substack-aversary, and I am just so grateful to have so many people willing to read what I bring, whether it be long-winded week recaps or what snacks you must eat!

I talk more about how I’ve grown in this time in this week’s piece!

I love you! See you next week

xoxoxo, Maia

It’s funny that this passage of time is significant to me; before, I had been single for all of my life, whether because I couldn’t commit or because of my choice of suitors who couldn’t commit. Seven months ago, I had convinced myself I was happy in love, and only distance can show you that being in love doesn’t always equate to being happy. I had lost so much of my autonomy, of the joy I once had, the friendships that I no longer was putting in all my love to, and though I was madly in love, I was also going a bit mad.

I’ve tried my hand at going back out into the world. I was on Hinge for two weeks before I remembered that online dating is so dystopian and deleted my account. I went on three dates with a lovely girl before we realized it wasn’t going anywhere. Now I’m here, sat in my bed, evaluating how I wish to proceed.

I used to stalk the girl who came before me, though I never admitted it to anyone else. I don’t think he knew I knew her name, but I now knew all her friends, where she worked, how she still wears the shirt of his that she never gave back, that she is undoubtedly more artsy than me, and that he liked her post on Halloween, which I was sour about for months. I had to block her because she made me hate myself.

Everywhere I go, vague lookalikes pop up and make my heart race, but they’re not him, and I think that’s the universe telling me it’s over. It’s time to go.

My therapist told me that now I should know that a relationship adds to your life, not subtracts. Over my six months of single-dom, I have formed so many fulfilling friendships, learned I’m someone who requires a lot of alone time to feel functional, and that my sweet tooth is satisfied with pastries, which has nothing to do with being single, but still important. So, I make a firm decision: I don’t need to look to fill this space. I’m quite happy without it, and if someone is meant to add more to my life, they will, but right now, I want to spend my free time eating dinner with my girls, movie dates on my own, and calling the people who held me up before I knew I needed it.

The first time I ever went to your family home, your father suggested we sing, and we picked It Ain’t Me Babe, and I wonder if I was just unable to understand that we might’ve meant that beyond just singing it.

In six single months of single girl spring into summer, I’ve successfully made my ex hate me (I’m fairly certain, but also dramatic), treated a really kind man really shitty because I am an “anxious avoidant” type, and ended up here, back in my bed, reading to a playlist of ambient songs from May.

I told that kind man that he would get bored of me, forget about me, and move on, and he did. Perhaps I had pushed him to do so. Perhaps I was right all along. Men only want what they can’t have.

This past weekend was the first weekend in over a month where I wasn’t running around, where I didn’t have a guest to entertain, where I wasn’t between cities, and instead, I spent the rest of my time running errands and cozied up in my bed.

Saturday I go to the library and pick up my books, and then I pick up more coffee pods, and then I watch Law & Order: SVU in bed. At night, I cozy up with the doc about the making of Kids, which I was captivated and disgusted by as a virginous high school freshman, and seeing the band of exploited and tortured misfits clad in Zoo York makes me cry.

My parents were in their thirties when they had me, but my father loved skater brands until the day he died, and Zoo York was a favorite of his. I now own two shirts from his beloved collection, the rest in my sister's closet back in New York City. I had been so tough, stories of him, both in life and beyond, slipping off my tongue sweet and syrupy, but here I was, crying again, alone again.

My mom texts me that maybe I need to ask him for a sign, so I look up at my ceiling, and in Italian, I tell him that I love him, and I need him, and I’m worried I’ve made a huge mess of my life.

A few days later a pigeon lands on the ledge beside my window seat, and I know it’s him. Piccone, he’d call my mother.

The grief of someone like a parent, I’ve learned, embeds itself into your skin, eating up a piece of your insides for it to rest in. You learn to live every day with an uncontrollable emptiness, one that is not ever satistfied no matter how much love you feed it. You will forever wake up and go to bed with the same hole you’ve had for years now.

I’ve also learned that heartbreak is quite similar, in the sense that you wake up and go to bed with this hole. You become haunted by what-ifs and what-could’ve-been-changed and how-did-I-not-see-that-we-were-dying-in-front-of-my-face, and I shamefully still sometimes feel an intense resentment form like a peach pit in my gut.

I still maintain that in five years, when I no longer have to worry about respecting my ex-boyfriend’s privacy, I will write a book about that period in my life, and what actually broke me down, but I cannot now because I have to be a good girl. In five years, I won’t protect him anymore.

On Saturday morning, I rush over to Brookline for free yoga in the park with my friend Chloe, who asks me if I want to accompany her to the Red Sox game later that day. I admittedly had never done yoga outdoors, though I’ve been practicing consistently for six months (wonder why I picked it up), and feeling my fingers curl around fresh grass, my eyelids squeezing as I let reds and yellows and oranges fill my sight. Kids nearby squeal and giggle and flip over soccer nets as their parents chase them around. A cat perches nearby, and when we both rise, we look up at each other in awe. “Fuck,” I sigh as she nods. “That was good.”

Chloe and I later become friends with a man from Alabama at Fenway Stadium, which really meant he kept asking us questions that we were forced to answer, such as if we’re Boston locals (no), where we’re from (New York and Colorado), where we go to school, and how we met, which could’ve been spun into an elaborate lie, but we both tell our very anti-climactic tale of epic friendship: we met through a mutual friend. Chloe and I both slept over in the same dorm of Emerson College our first semester of college, which was the room of my longtime friend Franny and her then-roommate Lili, which then turned into a TikTok-friendship, and then a full-fledged one in our second year.

We are both very big people who at our core are just the girls we once were.

That night, I cuddle up in bed and watch YouTube, where I learn about a controversial take on Obsession and that Olivia Rodrigo apparently has a boyfriend in finance, which I think about a lot longer than I’d like to admit. I google “Olivia Rodrigo boyfriend,” and I click the Reddit link, and I would like to know how she can give in to love again, because I don’t know if I’ll ever feel giddy again. Dear Olivia Rodrigo, what’s wrong with me?

I wonder if you heard my song, and if you hate it, or hate me, and I hope we never have to talk about it again. I meant it, though. I love you forever, but I have to leave that behind now.

On Monday, what was supposed to be a calm morning into a slow workday lead me to learn apparently every doctor in New York City is booked up until mid-September (which begs the question of how?), when I was eighteen years old I did not file an individual tax return and Drita at my accountants office is lovely, and the least useful people will be who answers when you need to withdraw from your student health insurance plan that you’ve never used. I ignore the barrage of texts and emails and to-dos and throw myself down on the grassy park nearby, and wonder when the last time I felt really present was. You can learn a lot online these days, but my therapist and best friends told me to stop using Reddit to solve my problems.

Later that evening, I get dinner with my lovely Malavika, back from a week in New York City and a weekend in Vermont. In the cutest denim capris and a slouchy long-sleeve of the city skyline, she sits before me while we sip sangria and spill each detail of our past two weeks. Malavika is a magical person who came to me by means of fate, revealed when we needed each other most. “I just, like, I don’t know how I can be with someone else,” I sigh, “like who the fuck was the girl who put up with that. I literally look so different”

“You were in love, and you believed it, and you will again.”

On Tuesdays, I eat horribly because I have no lunch break, so this week I ate babybell cheese, a protein bar, and protein pretzels. After hours of horrible substitutes for sustenance, I make spaghetti for dinner, it forming a heart in the pot as it boils. My dad, once again.

He’s working hard, I text my mom.

After my 2 pm lecture, I stand outside of the building as I shield my face from the wind threatening to take my curls down. My neighbor/friend crush and a composer classmate, who is one of two people I think of who can talk more than me, join me as we laugh about our morning lecture on “what makes you YOUnique”.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” the composer says, “the story you told last week, about the psychic and your mom, it really stuck with me.” Ah yes, when I told my class I believe I should pursue music because my mother’s medium sent me a message from my father beyond the grave. “I am surprisingly very woo-woo.”

James and I laugh as he raises his hands. “I know, you’d never guess it. But I understand what you were saying about not knowing if you believe it, but it still meaning something. That these things still mean so much even if you don’t believe. It’s still special”

I nod, a small smile growing on my face. It is special.

For my professional development class, I had to interview someone I deem “successful”, and I somehow fenagled myself a Zoom with the incredible Cosette Lunsford, artist name Cosette, who is one of my favorite artist/producers. I found her music sometime in April, and I have been a massive fan since (I’ve even mentioned her a few times on here).

I had admittedly been nervous all day. I am an extrovert at heart, but I have been plagued by pretty bad anxiety since I was a teenager. However, it turned out to be the loveliest 45 minutes of my day. Cosette is warm, funny, and passionate, and very blunt. We talked about online promotion, how difficult it is to be a woman, and how little college relationships meant to her, and it felt like looking at who I hope to be in five years.

Just like her producer tag says, I love you, Cosette!

I am once again with my therapist, and I tell her through the screen about my six-month anniversaries. “I just, like, have been reflecting, and remembering so many stories that make me wonder why I didn’t get more mad. Why I let that behavior slide,” I sighed, pulling my knees into my chest. “It seems like a lot of insecurities he had were placed onto you,” she nodded, “but you were in love. You fell for him, and his flaws make him human. You feel like you can’t trust your judgement anymore.”

My nose crunches as I push a strand of hair back. “I don’t want to be loved. I just want to be taken care of.”

The idea of a woman’s role, the way a woman is looked at, the “structured subconscious” comes back up again in my art history class, and the six of us present share our own thoughts. “The U.S. has really bad laws around this kind of voyeurism,” my professor shares. I think of France and the man who was arrested for filming up women’s skirts, and we talk about Korea and their lack of action, and I think of the man who filmed me in South Boston, and my head hurts, and my stomach twirls.

It’s hard not to be a feminist these days. I can’t stop saying that.

I am the girl that six months of living in single-dom, online gut-spilling and inadvertent voyeuristic bait, and finding friends that I make me miss this second-rate city I’ve been living in. Who knows where I’ll be in six more.

Things that inspired me this week:

• We Were Once Kids (2021, dir. Eddie Martin)

• Phoebe Berman’s Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick

• silent movie actor, acting by ditch

• rewatching Law & Order: SVU cozy in bed with Jenni’s Brambleberry Crisp Ice Cream

• Miss Cosette Lunsford (you must hear Rain)

• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey

Happy Talking Secret Friday! This is a really special one for me, as it has officially been six months of this publication. You have all changed my life & made me believe in sharing my most authentic self with the world, and I just can’t explain how thankful I am. I wrote my first piece on here at one of my lowest points, and you all have shown me so much kindness and empathy each week since. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

See you tomorrow for my monthly round-up, What’s In My Bag, with some special sections! I love you so much

xo Maia

A light breeze blows through my bare legs as my Opening Ceremony x Chloë Sevingy T-shirt lines my sides. My stomach is full of warm dim sum as Ethe and I trek to the historical Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Art is meant to make us feel things: discomfort, joy, sadness, relief, amongst those, and when I encounter art that really overwhelms me, I remember why I chose this life for myself, why I love creating more than anything in the world. Seeing The Invite leaves me gasping for air, unable to move while the credits roll and Graham Nash’s Our House demo hits me like a bullet to my chest, the sweet harmonies of Joni Mitchell making me sob more and more.

This is why I do what I do, I think as Ethe and I stare at each other, unable to say much.

My grandma reminds me that I was always coming up with rhymes and little songs as a young girl.

I am the kind of person who is best friends with most of their friends. I have very few casual friendships, and instead nurture my circle like they are my garden of beautiful blossoms. I have many different best friends, depending on where I am and their significance to me, but if I had to really think about what qualities a “best friend” should have, they all belong to Aeriel, who came to visit me this weekend.

Aeriel and I have been friends since we were four years old and were in the same Pre-K class, and somehow, I’ve been lucky enough to keep growing with her for nearly two decades now. Aeriel is the kind of friend who makes you laugh until your sides hurt and has literally come running when you need her. The first person I called when I found out my dad passed away was her, and less than five minutes later, we were sitting on my stoop, avoiding the rain as she held me.

The greatest joys in life include realizing you have a free coffee when you had a bad day, your train running express when you are running late, and waking up next to your best friend.

Her weekend visit coincided with the World Cup, which left Time Out Market’s lawn flooded with chairs, half-drunk beers, and tall British men blocking my view. Aeriel, Ethe, and I found a nice spot to stand our ground as we drank bright red cocktails and screamed at the screen (mainly me…)

I grew up playing soccer as all daughters of Italian immigrants do, and though I was quite horrible, I always loved rooting for a team. My grandmother on my mom’s side is of Spanish heritage, and our family still there makes an Instagram group chat to celebrate the win. After nearly losing my voice from yelling for three hours, I ride the high of the win for the rest of the evening. So long, “World Cup Optimism”, you were kind to us while you lasted.

Now that my three-week-long visitor bender is over, I finally collapse into my bed alone and realize I am completely and utterly exhausted. My brain feels like sludge for the next week, my sinuses flaring and my throat sore. My mom has me swallowing Oregano pills every night, yet my mind is still too foggy to come out of the fog it’s been in for the past few days.

My summer semester is starting to come to a close; in two weeks, it will be finals, and then I will officially begin my last year of college. When I chose music school, I naïvely believed that everything I never had growing up would magically come true, and while I was in a really unfortunate place heading into college as my dad had passed away, I was not prepared for how difficult it is to be a woman in the arts.

I love my female friends. In fact, my close male friends are few and far between. I love how fulfilling these friendships become, how they even rival romantic relationships, but in the arts field, it is unfortunately quite difficult to form genuine connections at times, especially when many women inadvertently pit each other against you. Not only competition in the musical world, but then add in the romantic realm, and there are at least ten women I can think of praying on my downfall merely because they think I have what they want, things that only appear shiny and real in the spotlight. When you turn off the glamour, I am the one left in my room to pick up the pieces.

I have been incredibly lucky to find so many amazing women who inspire me in this environment, who support me when I need it, and allow me to grow and evolve as an artist and friend, who if I named them all, I’d have to make a separate piece on how much they mean to me, but I have experienced a lot of women not giving me a second glance because we are “competition”, whether we are both girls with guitars or simply because they desired to be loved by my ex-boyfriend, and for a lot of my time in college, I’d never felt so alone.

I believe to my core that my work is uniquely mine, that no one else is competition but sharing their own unique experiences, and this can only be when you believe in yourself more than anyone else does.

Each recent semester, a man with a girlfriend has seemed to be intrigued by me, and instead, I develop a wild desire to be their friend. Not only am I obsessed with them, but also with their beautiful, cool, artsy girlfriends. Last semester, it was a man called Grant, whom I originally detested after our group project on the birth of hip hop. Afterwards, he would sit next to me every class, whispering facts and jokes into my ear.

My ex-boyfriend took that class with me (pro tip: do not register for a class with your boyfriend because you might break up a week into the semester and have to cry in the bathroom for the first week of this class), and after each class, we’d spend twenty or so minutes smoking cigarettes on the corner of the building leading into the alleyway, catching up and occasionally crossing into the territory of un-friend-like banter. “Dude, Grant seems to think that we’re friends.” I laughed as I exhaled, looking across his shoulder. “I think he likes you,'“ he mumbled as my face scrunched up. “You’re crazy.”

“I mean, I just think he does.” I scoff. “Like a crush? He has a girlfriend.” I passed the cigarette over to him, rolling my eyes. “Oh,” he sighed.

This semester, it is a man I’ll call James, whom I give career advice to in return for the validation of being called hardworking and smart.

In my journal, I draft the first line of my newest research assignment: “It’s hard not to be a feminist in this age of digital voyeurism”.

I am no stranger to the internet; I spill my guts on a blog once a week and post a thirst trap for my digital crushes, and I used to be a TikTok microceleb known for having a cute boyfriend and better outfits. This performance I am consistently putting on has only become more and more dystopian to me, especially as I started to try to ease myself back into posting on TikTok.

Picture this: I am in my bedroom, propping my phone up on my air conditioner, and suddenly my whole room is in view, and I remember that I am inadvertently letting people into the most private space in my life. I am fully clothed, but I suddenly feel naked in the context of the internet. I am receiving messages from men who want to pay me five hundred dollars a week to respond to them. I am no longer a normal girl, who I truly am, but a desire. I strip myself of my humanity.

I’ve been really interested in the artist Julia Scher, who has been making art on surveillance since the 80s. One of my favorite pieces of hers is called Mama Bed, where three beds, inspired by Goldilocks and the Three Bears, all have cameras on them.

In letting the internet see into our innermost private spaces, are we not hooking up a camera to our beds? Are we not letting the world engage in a form of voyeurism as they sexualize the ordinary? Why is there an erotic nature hard to avoid online?

Julia Scher said in 2016, “Like many artists from the city, I am influenced by what you can still photograph that has not already been shot. It is clear that observation is ‘gendered’; it is, primarily, by and for men. Hollywood movies alone tell us that… Did that mean, if one takes a sexually neutral position – or a position that seems ‘neutral’ – that one was free, and could go unnoticed with a camera? This experience confronted me with a set of questions: How do I relate to people with a camera? What role does my gender play? What about proximity and intimacy, and what about violence? How do I enter the scene?”1

I don’t want to engage in this digital eroticism, yet how can I not? Women aren’t offered a separation between body and mind online.

What I find most isolating about the internet, honestly, is how it forces you to live in your body; you do not exist outside of it, and you must curate it for digital eyes to gawk at. You can be a writer, or a doctor, or a scientist, or simply a girl, but you will always be a face and a body, regardless of how much you prove you are more.

So, I continue my battle, a one-woman push-and-pull against the internet that I see no end to. My brain goes in and out of clarity, and there’s nothing to do but keep moving. I refuse to give up the gun.

Things that inspired me this week:

• The Invite (2026, dir. Olivia Wilde)

• Why Should I Be Sad? by Britney Spears

• Matcha Pocky

• Transcription by Ben Lerner

• Justice for the verse (ft. Audrey Hobert) on Switched on Pop

• Julia Scher on Hyperpublic

I have never believed in a “bad part of town”. Growing up in New York, I fundamentally believed that good and evil exist everywhere. I’ve been to every borough, every neighborhood, and each step is one of complete security. The days when the world reminds me that I am a girl and inherently not safe tend to be few and far between. Boston seemed to tell me a different story.

Wonderland is the last stop on the Blue Line, but it was anything but. On the platform, a man in an olive green Pearl Jam shirt and Mardi Gras hat was filming me. When leaving the house in mini shorts, I was not anticipating this sort of reaction, much less inviting it, but here I was, shuffling behind my sister, typing on my notes app to tell Ethe what was going on. For the rest of the ride, after we got away from him, I felt as if I was being chased, my heart racing and my breath shallow. I still look over my shoulder now.

That night, my sister and I went to see Noah Kahan’s Fenway residency. Truthfully, as much as I wish I were, I am not a Kahan-er, or whatever his fans call themselves. I have nothing but respect for the man, but you will never catch me enjoying stomping and clapping and IPAs. However, she adores him, and I brave a stadium full of intoxicated white men and girls in bug costumes for her sake.

I somehow felt aged by that experience, someone so out of touch with the “youth”. The frat-esque yet lovely drunk finance brothers who pointed at us and sang with the crowd in our area, the girl with a ladybug crocheted top, the two children and their parents who were superfans, and then me, sitting down with mild dehydration. I thought of the first concert I bought tickets to, black midi, and how my dad pretended to have a good time for my sake. I felt lightheaded as I realized my sister never had that. A reflection of a life we won’t know again.

I stand in line for overpriced hipster ice cream and go to bed.

I have a friend who has a new boyfriend. They say “I love you” and text constantly. Though I haven’t met him, he seems nice enough until I start to hear that she feels the need to “tone down” her anxiety. That he can’t take it. That she needs to call him while we’re getting ready together.

I can’t help how my stomach drops. Admittedly, I am jaded. I am six months single and not sure I can believe in love yet. I love my friends fiercely. I used to be the girl afraid of being left, afraid of not being enough, afraid of being too much. Afraid I was the problem. I wonder if this is how I sounded to everyone scared for me then, and I wondered if they truly had been right all along.

I once believed it was love to know that you’d never leave your partner, but they have the capacity to leave you. I know now how stripped of my agency I was then.

My high school varsity soccer coach used to be in an emo band, and they had a song called “Single and Loving It”. In my honest opinion, I don’t love how my room hasn’t been neat since my breakup because I no longer need to be seen as stable and starting-a-family-with worthy.

My co-worker, who I estimate is about 35, comes over to my desk while I am lazily scrolling through Pinterest. “So,” she begins, “I have a date tonight.” I turn to face her, clad in a black boatneck top, a skirt, and platform flip-flops. “Is this cute? It feels so nineties.” Her date is a boy with whom she went to high school, who recently moved back from LA, who had always found her cute, and who also had open-heart surgery. I try to muster what little encouragement I can find in my frozen heart. “It’ll be fun,” I smile. “Get a drink, ask him about the anesthesia he was under, good times!”

“Ugh,” she sighs, resting her arms on the cubicle divider, “dating is so hard.” I almost gave her my own dating troubles, but it is a tad pathetic to keep rehashing your six-month-old breakup (at least, to people who didn’t know me then. It is free game to anyone who endured the levels of psychosis I was in).

I have no dating apps anymore and probably won’t ever again.

I nearly gave in to my hubris and started posting TikToks again until I remembered that I need to keep letting everyone touch me through the screen. I interview a musician who tells me she is inspired by how dystopian our relationships have become. How much more am I willing to give to digitally pleasure myself?

I have been relapsing on my social media ban because I have to create content for work, which has led me down a dark tunnel of wondering why I am not as cool as everyone else, if I genuinely have body dysmorphia, if every couple on my feed secretly hates each other, and which of them is on SSRIs, and if my own feed makes people hate me. By Wednesday, I can recognize it is seriously driving me crazy, and I feel like I must admit it, like in AA. Online Girls Anonymous? Internet Addicts Anonymous? I Love To Torture Myself Anonymous?

I’m Maia. I’m 20 and a half years old, and it has been fifteen minutes since my last painful scroll. I want to come clean. Crucify me at the stake.

The saint I picked when I made my confirmation was Joan of Arc, so that fate seems fitting.

“Are you like this with everything? Do you always have to go cold turkey?” My therapist asked me as the fan next to me blew through my hair, giving me the look of a windswept model as I tried not to get distracted. “Um, like not with substances. I’m not addicted to alcohol, or cigarettes, or, like, pills. I can have a drink and leave it at that, and like, smoke a cigarette one day and then not for three weeks.” She nods her head knowingly. I wait for a response until I realize she wants a bit more from me. “I get so addicted to feelings, though. Like the dopamine I get from shopping. Or the way people feel to me. I described my breakup as recovering from addiction at some point. But I’m so addicted to feelings.”

I often have an online crush I secretly pray follows me because they are in love with me and we will one day have a whirlwind romance. Currently, it is a musician who posts slightly cringe promo videos and looks like he’d really enjoy Curb Your Enthusiasm. It used to be a nepo baby I went to high school with, but I forgot to respond to his text and decided fate would prevail if it was meant to.

My first crush was Paul McCartney (famously), but my first real crush was on a lanky blonde in the first grade. He liked soccer and acted in all my plays, and I rationally decided he was the one for me. Fittingly, we both ended up going into the arts and reconnecting after graduating from high school. Last summer, we hooked up in his bedroom after watching a fourth of Sexy Beast on his family’s Criterion account and playing beer pong with no beer with our two best friends, where I lost a Catbird earring I never got back and palmed a sweatshirt of his I’d never return. I heard not too long ago that his mother told the mother of a friend of mine that she suspects something happened between us. I am honored to keep the mothers of Williamsburg and Greenpoint perpetually entertained.

Being a single girl means summer is for having your childhood best friend of twenty years and six months fill the space in your bed that once held a lover and now holds my water bottle, my keys, and the book I’m reading. Our weekend entails of Love Island watch parties where we are the only ones dressed as Bombshells after taking the invite too literally, tanning at the beach, observing the sweet girl picking up shells and the native Bostonian’s accents slipping out, and drinks in an off-kilter trendy restaurant. The feeling of being truly known engulfs me until I am once again falling asleep next to my pile of things in an empty room.

I read an essay by Cazzie David saying that when you are thirty, you will realize you don’t have to wear thongs, but I am twenty, so I went out to buy more.

A girl who used to decide who I was had been confronted with the reality of who I am. I texted Aeriel, “Sorry im not just an idea to you now and a real person”.

My weekend of best friend-induced bliss comes to a rude awakening on Tuesday morning when I tune in to the previous night’s episode of Anderson Cooper 360, boasting the title “Deadly ICE Shooting in Maine.” My heart sinks as guilt rises in my chest. Before that, my biggest concern this morning was Pressed Juicery closing in my neighborhood. I was allowed the luxury of shutting off the world for a few days, but that is a privilege. Not many people get to be that lucky.

I am unsettled for the rest of the week. It feels dystopian to me that shutting off the world is as easy as not going online for a few days. That I have that sort of privilege.

One of the best memories I had with my ex-boyfriend was a rainy November day when our classes were canceled, and we spontaneously went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Every photo from that Tuesday I have hidden from my camera roll because I can’t bear to see how in love we were. Afterwards, we ordered the best dumplings in town and cuddled in bed watching Veronica Mars.

Ethe had never been, so we ventured over. The expansive courtyard, covered in blue blossoms, makes me feel small under the skylight. I had once felt so beautiful under this light, under the eyes of a lover. Now, I felt strong. I felt here.

I started rewatching Girls but surprisingly picked a later season, which I usually avoid. Perhaps this is getting older.

I plod through a mental and literal daze as the week goes on, the skies turning a rusty yellow from the Canadian wildfires that always find their way over to the East Coast. My mind seems to be running endlessly like a fan left on, the burgeoning tasks to complete and dreams that won’t seem to stop spewing into the forefront of my mind. Feelings that are all-consuming now are minuscule in the grand scheme of the world, yet I give in to them each time. I am engulfed by my mind.

This is mildly exacerbated by the fact that I have more words than melodies, more dreams than plans, and more eyes on my body than I know what to do with, eyes on a body that I barely feel present in.

Perhaps I’m the last single girl on Substack (Yes, I am exaggerating, and no, I don’t care), or the last tiny brunette manic pixie dream girl yet to be claimed, or the former muse turned aimless struggling artist. I’d truthfully rather that than the life I once had, than to fear being left again as if it were the monster under my bed. To be molded into a villain or a victim by people who would never go far enough to learn my truth.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Brinitty winning Love Island USA. I did not watch anything but the finale, but it brought so much joy to everyone at the watch party and renewed my hope in love.

• Delusions: Of Grandeur, Of Romance, Of Progress by Cazzie David

• The way surrealist artists were obsessed with accessing their subconscious. While I am not into Freud nor that weird with my art … perhaps it could be fun

• Rewatching my favorite crash out movie: Frances Ha (2012, dir. Noah Baumbach)

• cigarette smoke by Olivia Rodrigo

• Making french toast for breakfast and putting strawberries and maple syrup on top

Hi hi dear readers & internet friends … hope you all had a wonderful warm Summer week! Been obviously a bit spaced out but I love checking in with you all every Friday

I love you longtime

xo Mai

The next afternoon, I would be on a bus back to my Boston apartment.

The decision to live between two worlds didn’t seem that big a deal when I finalized my plan for a summer semester in January; I am desperate to graduate next spring, and I like living on my own. A few of my favorite friends also decided to stay in Boston over the summer, and I deludedly convinced myself I’d come home all the time.

I don’t think I realized before that I had spent much of my life growing up in between. I am a European citizen by means of my father, who immigrated from Italy. I spoke Italian at home, spent summers in his town, and ate only the best food. My family friends were mainly Brazilian, and we adopted birthday and holiday traditions from them too. I’ve never really felt American, but I am an American girl. I was born in New York City, and, hopefully, I’ll die there too.

I forget how much being home makes my heart swell until my best friend and I are eagerly waving to each other from opposite sides of the sidewalk. Everyone’s a winner, baby, that’s the truth plays into my ears, and I do feel like one.

My sister, younger than me by three years, came back with me. I stress everyone out on our way to the bus, only to realize my keys are in my mom’s car, which is now driving into Midtown to drop them off to me. We are bumped to the bus an hour later by the kind company of the unnamed budget bus we took. Little did we know how treacherous that journey would be.

My heart is warmed by the fact that the people both in front of and behind me are watching the same World Cup game I am. I clutch my rapidly dying phone as I bite my nails. Suddenly, our bus pulls to the side of the highway. I turn to my sister, eyes wide. What the fuck, I mouth, to which she responds Just speak Italian. “So, this has never happened to me. Cool!” Our bus driver turns to the pair sitting in front of us, anxiously stepping from side to side. “Um, my phone is dead. Can I use yours? I need to call the mechanic.”

The entirety of our bus watches the driver pace on the grassy patch next to the parked bus. When he emerges, a passenger in the back of the bus angrily storms up. “So, uh, what’s going on?”

“We can only go 45 miles per hour; I think it’s a fuel thing. I have to FaceTime the mechanic.”

My sister and I can’t help the giggles that escape our mouths. I feel less like twenty years old and more like ten by her side. The driver goes painfully slow for the rest of the evening.

Having my sister in Boston is both incredibly fun and a bit reflective in a way I didn’t anticipate. My sister and I get on like a house on fire until we don’t, and then the house burns down, and our mother serves as our mediator. We are also quite similar; both sarcastic, a bit hotheaded, and quick thinkers. She is the most fun to watch Love Island UK or gossip with. She also brings out sides of me no one else sees that I wasn’t expecting to reveal.

On Monday night, I take her to see the USA vs. Belgium game at the most secret, popping place to scream with fans: Time Out Market. Malavika and Ethan join us as I scramble for coveted front row seats and overly salty dumplings. Though the U.S. suffers a crushing defeat at the hands of Belgium, I feel like an absolute winner as my friends and I giggle down Boylston Street, Ethe and I ahead of a chatty Stella and Malavika. Sitting on my front steps, laughing so hard we fall over, long hugs with tight grasps; I go to bed thinking I’ve won.

I used to be very fixated on the idea of winning; “winning the breakup” was a phrase my therapist made me reject and deconstruct repeatedly for months. I couldn’t quite understand who I was supposed to be proving something to. Myself? My ex? His friends that I don’t like? The girls who envied me for being picked and rejoiced when he finally realized I wasn’t the one- something they’d known all along?

My obsession with winning ate at me as the winter melted into the spring. The harsh wind bit at my skin like the pressure to vindicate myself did. Every step in slushy snow was a reminder of all I had to prove. At some point, I felt I’d done it, like I’d shown them all just how much better I am at moving on.

But it felt more horrible than incredible. I’d hurt myself and someone I’d loved in the process.

Whether I’ve “won” ultimately isn’t up to me or even you. “Winning” doesn’t really exist.

On Wednesday, Ethe and I take Stella to our sacred bonding spot: The Harbor, which somehow leads to us watching her opening hockey cards while a nearby street magician sets up his act. A lanky man holding a boom box walks over to us in a Miami Heat jersey and ripped jeans. “I’m going to freestyle for you,” he says matter-of-factly. “Where are you from?” The three of us go dead silent, eyes each saying variations of “to interact or not?”

“Ooh, I love the shy ones,” he exclaims. He pulls out his iPhone and hits play. “Let’s do it.” He calls Stella “Angelina Jolie”, Ethe “Big Bang Theory”, and me fucking “Shirley Temple”. Shirley fucking Temple? I’m twenty and in my fucking prime!

We do laugh, though, and clap when he wraps up and gives us his Spotify. The rest of the week of sister (and best friend) bonding includes taking her to lectures, putting her on to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, and watching low-budget Christmas movies and playing romcoms. I miss my single girl living in my big girl apartment, but I love feeling six again. I love feeling known.

At the end of the day, I know the girl I am. I live in her skin and can take her mind apart and rebuild it in an instant. I am learning to be softer each day. I can be seen as many things I am not: a canvas for someone to paint their perfect girlfriend on, boring if I won’t get them hit, cruel and unforgiving, lazy and uninspired, or someone who has been told too many times they “aren’t like other girls” and took it to heart.

But I get to put pen to paper and make all of this final. I started this platform for the same reason I gravitated to songwriting: I want to feel in control of my own narrative. When I get to speak to an audience, real or through a screen, through text or song, mic-ed up or typing away, I am the only one who can dictate who Maia is. Who she might be one day.

In a world of ex-friends, ex-boyfriends, and the random assortment of people who are so desperate to turn you into something you’re not, the only way through is to love yourself and have friends that you love even more.

Corny, Carrie Bradshaw-esque ending because I am not really cool or scary but instead soft and awkward and maybe lost and definitely restless but somehow happier than ever.

Things that inspired me this week:

• The doll-esque kitten heels Chloe found me at the Allston Goodwill that I can’t take off

• Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

• Everything I Know About Love (2022, dir. China Moo-Young)

• The Sofa by Wolf Alice

• Ben Rice, my favorite New York Yankee, who is one of the only locked-in players right now … I love you Arroz

• Vegan Oatmeal Iced Cookie from Oakleaf Bake Shop in Boston, MA

A little word vomit, nothing burger from a good week <3 I need a new show to get into so if anyone has recs…. hmu.

You know I love you but I must say it each week because I mean it. Thank you for opening your hearts to me & your mind to my girl world. I’m so lucky!

xoxoxo, Maia

I spent a long weekend with my mom’s side of the family in Cape Cod, which involved a lot of flipping my brother’s floaty over, gatherings around the TV to get way too invested in sports games, and the natural dinner table fights. I seem to have a short fuse. My mom drops me off at the bus, asking me, “Is everything ok? You’ve just been really weird. A little prickly.” I roll my eyes at her as I hug her side, but as I rest my head against the window, I pick apart her words with a fine-tooth comb. It seems I don’t know who I am when I am surrounded by love like that a family can provide to you. Perhaps I feel suffocated by tough love. I find myself sinking back into that six-year-old girl who had to fight everything.

My first plan was to meet up with Ethe, who, though I had seen three days prior, I missed terribly in our time apart. I remember the first winter break that we had been friends and how sad it was saying goodbye for a month, and I laugh now that a weekend makes us squirm. My Uber driver tells me I have a nice smile and turns up the inspirational R&B on the way to Ethe’s on-campus tutoring sessions, where the only student to show up is me.

The heat wave that I didn’t believe was coming makes my head pound. I experienced the worst sleep in months, as the one fan I have cools only my legs. I chug a glass of water mixed with electrolyte packets every morning before I leave the house. The path to the train smells like a Diptyque store exploded on the streets, and Latin rap blasts from passing cars. I have never wished for air conditioning more. I wear the tightest tank tops I own and underwear only every time I enter my room.

Tuesday night, Malavika and I snag a reservation at a trendy Sichuan restaurant in Brookline. Between bites of brothy tofu and spicy noodles with the most purple eggplant I’ve ever seen, we engage in every girl’s favorite activity: beating a dead horse. No one is safe, not exes, ex-friends, or anyone else possessing evil.

“Wait, I don’t think we ever talked about your dad dying,” she says, as the condensation from my white wine drips onto my leg. “We don’t have to talk about it, though.” I turn my head, a bittersweet smile gracing my lips. “I’m pretty open about it, honestly. Um, he had colon cancer for five years. We went on a trip to see his family in Italy during the spring break of my senior year, and when we came back, he was in the hospital. It was really a time to be alive.”

I forgot the whirlwind my life was until recently. It was like living in a hurricane and finally making it to the eye, wondering when everything would hit you once again. Wondering when the rug will be pulled out from under you.

Instead, I spend nights now at dinners with pretty cocktails and World Cup viewings, where no one is a stranger anymore, regardless of team. I have a soft place to land when I fall, a cushion of friends, family, and things I love to keep me from breaking bones when I fall. But I’m still falling. I’m pushing myself down sometimes.

When no external forces threaten your peace, you are forced to reckon with your biggest enemy: yourself. I love my friends near and far; I’m booked and busy, and I’m motivated to work on myself. I am at peace with being single. I still feel this haze over my head most days, this sense of restlessness. An unsease in my skin. There is no one to blame anymore, not a breakup or grief or a friendship fallout. I am left to sit and reckon with myself, and I feel like Laura Palmer in the red room from Fire Walk With Me.

I have been tasked with defining success for a class, and it has consumed the past few days. I have always had something to prove, not only to the people who have sacrificed to get me here, to those who believe in me, but also to those who always doubted me, who called me “too much” and made fun of me for trying, for caring. My heart is bleeding out on pages and keyboards and guitar strings and friends.

I have wanted to be famous most of my life. I will be happy ultimately if I continue to make art, if I continue to love big and hard, and if I can make music and write full time, but I can’t help my greediness. I want to make it. I want to walk red carpets and have people take my picture. I want to be an older actor’s controversially young girlfriend. I want to be praised for my beauty and talent and heart. My heart may be big, but it is also greedy. I can’t help how much I want.

Is it pathetic to admit I want to be famous? Maybe. But what is more pathetic is pretending you don’t.

Before my friend left for France, she asked me if people stare at me on the street. “Um, like no?” I responded, her face instantly contorting into confusion. “Maia, you just don’t notice. They definitely do.” The summer before I left for college, I was a hostess at a Thai restaurant, and the older waitresses used to ask me how I made my ass look so good when I walked. I told them I didn’t know, but nearly three years later, there is something to the way I walk: the rhythm, the confidence, and the feeling of being untouchable. I am a star on the sidewalk. I am walking the runway of a Boston side street. I will pose for you, but you will never touch me. I will never be yours.

I think this stems from being misunderstood for most of my life; I was too much, too anxious, too sad, too hard to love. I let these seep into my skin.

It is hard to believe that there are so many people who would read the above lines, who are part of my heart, who know me, who would disagree.

“You’ve got big expectations!” Malavika jokes, and though referencing the song, she’s right. I have never believed I deserve more than I’ve settled for now.

I go on a second date with the unnamed dream girl from last week’s piece. She makes me laugh, she makes me smile, but, worst of all, she makes me nervous. Tongue-tied, stomach-dropping, babbling, nervous. I beat myself up for my lack of moves over debrief texts until I realize later in bed that I’m not used to “slow”. I’m not used to “normal”.

My last relationship was a whirlwind. We became exclusive the day after our first date, and he would be my boyfriend two weeks later. I met his parents a month and a half into the relationship, and I knew I loved him two months in. A dear friend who came to visit the weekend we started dating told me I was being lovebombed. I still don’t think that is the case, perhaps naïvely, but instead, I choose to believe our joint inexperience and our excitement at finally feeling the love we’d always craved took over all logic. I don’t quite regret this, but I find myself relieved at the end of the night that I am putting my brain first. Wearing your heart on your sleeve just gets it dirty.

In reflecting with Malavika, however, this relationship, as tumultuous and explosive as it was to my life, taught me more about finding myself than I had realized. I had never felt comfortable being silly, being ugly, or being boring, or sad, or angry with a person before that I hadn’t known my whole life. My ex-boyfriend saw me at all those points and was still by my side every night, held me in his arms like only my mother had ever done, and opened his world to me, to the girl I was too scared to let most see. He believed in what he saw. Why didn’t I?

I am still thinking of you, but to love is to know when to leave.

I am twenty and a half years old, and I know myself as if I were six and a half years old. I am all the things I taught myself to hide; I am silly and sometimes careless. I am energetic and sometimes obnoxious. I am dressed head to toe in color, from my shoes to the bag in my fingertips to the top I wear. I am sometimes ugly. I let what many call my LA-girl accent, which truly is just because I’m online, slip out. I’ve never been to California, actually. I’m still a romantic at heart even though I can be cruel.

My outward expression has become that of a real-life Polly Pocket doll. I bought scented nail polish and can’t stop smelling my hot pink nails. I can’t settle- more like won’t settle- however, not in friendship or in lovers, because I love the six-year-old in me. She deserves the world.

No one is falling in love on trains or at record stores or by falling in front of cars anymore. We fall in love on screens, unless, that is, we’re lucky, or we choose to fall in love with ourselves. I had a meet-cute relationship once, and now I met myself, and it’s quite cute.

The setting sun streams through the scuffed windows of the train as Olivia Rodrigo’s stupid song is in my ears. I lean melodramatically against the walls. I may be dramatic; I may be overly anxious and hard to please, but I’m hopeful. I haven’t been so light in years.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Minions & Monsters (2026, dir. Pierre Coffin)

• The Gay Taylor Swift Conspiracy video essay by ! So well researched & perfect to listen to while working or cleaning

• Girls Just Wanna Be Famous by Meg Smith … make this girl famous she is my popstar secret

• My jelly firkin! We’re attached at the hip & I love her. Her name is Scarlet & we’ve been tealmaxxing together

• Heart The Lover by Lily King

Little short little sweet little week! Hope you all stay cool & show some love to your friends & family! Next weeks piece will be very different since I have a lot on the docket next week (my little sister is staying with me) so I am giving you all a treat … an original song xo

I’ve been really inspired by my musings on here & I hope you like it……..

I love you longtime

xoxoxoxo Mai

MY BAG: Yuri Leather Purse

The Yuri Bag my father bought my mom many moons ago wins as bag of the month yet again! I had a lot of fun personalizing it this month with things like a pin I made a few months back for a horse-themed party, and my incredibly tiny vintage Kewpie Baby keychain I bought on eBay. I love this bag & it is undeniably a certified Maia staple.

MY OUTFITS:

If you’ve been keeping up with my pieces, you know I got back into Sex and the City, so naturally Carrie was my curly-haired, cute girl fashion inspo all month. Biiiiig into a slip skirt & a black tube top (clearly) because it is not only chic but will keep you cool. I’ve been implementing a lot of hand-me-down vintage from my muse (my mother), such as my vintage Yankees bomber (you can find lots similar on eBay) or the Lilly Pulitzer skirt I wore to Ethe’s show. I’ve loved playing with contrast as well, like my vintage Paramore T-shirt with flats, or my thrifted distressed denim Acne Jeans with a pastel cardigan. Moral of the story: buy secondhand & love those pieces forever! I also have a new favorite bathing suit & it is from Siren Basics, which I definitely think is a wonderful middle point for bathing suit pricing.

MY READS:

This month I read a whole lot of mid… I’m glad to rid my TBR of these, but I was very disappointed by a lot I checked out of the library this month. My favorite read from this month was Heart The Lover by Lily King (★★★★/5), which I enjoyed far more than its prequel. A heartfelt and twisting story of love and growing up that I devoured in one day!

My full list of reads… White on White by Aysegül Savas (★★★½/5), Worry by Alexandra Tanner (★★★/5), Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews (★★/5), Girls Against God by Jenny Hval (★/5), Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman (★★★/5), Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector (★★★½/5), It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Meltzer (★★★½/5)

DNF: We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad. I loved Bunny; in fact, I read it in one sitting, but this took all the worst parts of it and amplified them. I’m just … disappointed.

Currently reading: Notes to John by Joan Didion

MY SNACKS:

• Strawberry Fields Gummy Candy from Trader Joe’s ($2.29): I don’t always have the biggest sweet tooth, but I am genuinely addicted to these. The flavor is more authentic than your typical strawberry candy, and I love the texture. I am very sad to learn these are a limited-time item

• Oatly Mint Chip Ice Cream ($4.99): I am 95% sure I’m lactose intolerant and decided that instead of going to the gastroenterologist, I’d just cut out dairy, which led me to this delicious hidden gem. The flavor is just spot on, and it is also pretty filling and creamy for a dairy-free ice cream. I will say take this with a grain of salt if you don’t typically like Oatly or oat milk, since I am a longtime Oatly customer

BEST NEW EATS:

• House fried noodles at Málà Project in Brooklyn, NY

• Iced Saigonese Latte from Phinista in Boston, MA

• Turkey Avocado, Hashbrown, and hot honey sandwich from Tasty Cafe & Kitchen in Medford, MA

MY WATCHES:

I’ve been on a big Sex and the City rewatch kick these days, which is, again, no surprise. In addition, I’ve been locking in for Love Island UK six nights a week, as well as the World Cup and the Yankees games. My favorite girl is 100% Jasmine & I ride for her. My favorite new movie I saw this month was Obsession (2025, dir. Curry Barker), which I gave four stars. I quite enjoyed the commentary on female bodily autonomy and men’s dehumanization of women they are romantically interested in, and Inde is obviously a star! My favorite new show is Not Suitable For Work (2026), which I am praying gets a new season!

I also enjoyed … watching Now You See Me (2013, dir. Louis Leterrier) with Ethe even though they gaslit me, seeing Stop! That! Train! (2026, dir. Adam Shankman) in theaters with Chloe, & Erupcja (2025, dir. Pete Ohs), & 22 Jump Street (2014, dir. Phil Lord & Chris Miller), which I somehow forgot the entire premise of.

I hated… Sidelined 2: Intercepted because I will force myself to watch these Tubi romcoms and still be shocked when they are horrid!

IN MY EARBUDS:

This month, I am “launching” a singular Talking Secret/WIMB playlist that I will update every month! This has been a very pop-heavy month for me because I have been fighting against the demons in my head & who better to keep me sane than the one and only ADÉLA. My favorite release of this month was undeniably you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love by Olivia Rodrigo, who I really think is just a master of her craft. It’s fun, it’s heartfelt, and it is perfect for summer. My favorite single this month home2hide by Pretty Sick. I have been obsessed with Sabrina Fuentes & Pretty Sick since I was sixteen, and I have really enjoyed her pivot into electronic music so far. It maintains the same ennui and grit of her old lyricism with a new sonic palette, and I am obsessed.

In podcast news, I’ve been tuning in weekly to Voicenotes with Jordan Theresa. I have long been a fan of her YouTube video essays, but listening to them in podcast form is life-changing. I also loved the A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein episode on Gwen Stefani, which is old, but so fascinating to me as a girl who grew up idolizing Gwen and was disappointed in her turn to conservatism.

Anticipated July releases: Tweaker Poem by Frost Children, The Voices Became Louder by Pearly Drops, & Music, Fashion, Film by Charli xcx

OTHER GOODIES IN MY BAG:

• Vintage Cathy Ganz Mug ($20) I literally owned two mugs & needed a new one, and I fell in love with Cathy through Pinterest, and now she’s mine!

• Owala Stainless Steel Coffee Tumbler ($25) I have owned many a coffee tumbler & I am also a klutz so I have spilled all over myself and many tables. If you are anything like me, this will change your life because it’s actually leakproof.

• Merit Flush Balm in the shade Postmodern ($30) I lost this same product in October when I jumped at a show too hard in my ex-boyfriend’s jacket, and nothing will ever come close to the love I have for this blush! She’s perfect she’s sexy she’s natural!

LOOSE STUBS (aka highlights of the month):

• Seeing the Yankees play twice (once in New York & once in Boston)!!! I have become very maternal over these boys & I love to support my city! They lost both times, unfortunately, but they are my everything

• I went to the MFA Boston twice this month for my Contemporary Art & Gender class, and I always forget how much I love to walk around & soak it all in

• Minion Facebook memes are back & better than ever. I love these fuckers.

• Spent a long weekend in Cape Cod with my family, which was much needed & gave me a wonderful tan

June was quite a long month but I found a lot of beautiful things in it! I hope you check out some of these recs & I will see you again Friday for your classic Talking Secret update. Happy almost July! I love you all

xoxoxo, Maia

The happiest place on earth is not in fact Disney World, but New York City after the Knicks are crowned champions, where every street corner someone is selling shirts and hats, and every ad either contains Jalen Brunson or a pun on the word “Knicks”. A weight has been lifted off the city right when it most needed it, in the age of Mamdani-optimism, where all you dream of is possible.

Last time I came home, I struggled a bit to reconcile who I had become in my time apart. I was hardened by the time that had passed, weathered by the torrential rain of becoming alone again. Yet, I was still soft and sensitive to my core, bleeding out for all willing to look closely. This trip back, however, reminded me of who I am.

My hair is unruly again, and I haven’t straightened it since my prom nearly two years ago. I embrace the humidity. In fact, I even feel pretty.

My mom is fifty-four and fabulous, and her birthday gift to herself was a meeting with her medium. I had come into a quiet house after sitting outside to tan and write my formal art analysis, my sister shushing me as soon as I opened the door. “Mom’s on the phone with her medium, you need to be quiet,” she whispered as I lowered my glasses. I rolled my eyes, plopping my laptop on the coffee table, until suddenly, my mom burst into the living room. “Stella,” she stammered, tears welling in her eyes. “You need to come. He asked for you. He said Stella Bella.”

The two of them rush back into my mom’s bedroom as I rummage through our fridge, pulling out caramelized onion hummus and strawberries from the fridge. “Maia.” I turn my head at my sister’s trembling voice, “he wants you. He wants the performer.”

My mom has known this medium far before my father’s passing two years ago. He is a friend of her best friend, who also doubles as my childhood best friend’s mother, and gave her a message from her grandmother at a party nearly a decade ago. However, he became an annual fixture in her life naturally recently. I’ve always admired her spirituality. I lack that kind of trust.

I am finally face-to-face, or I guess face-to-Zoom, with my mom’s medium, who I had always pictured as an old white man who looked like Willem Defoe, but instead is actually quite handsome. “I’m in my bathing suit,” I blurt out to my mother as she tosses her robe over to me. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to sing Hamilton to you, is that something significant?” The three of us laugh at the idea, knowing that nine-year-old me was, to put it plainly, obsessed.

“You had a performance recently?” He asks, and I nod. I had my first solo show in May, something that I was positively terrified of. “The empty seat there, your dad wants you to know it was him. He was there.” I can’t help the tear that escapes my eyelid, dripping down my glossy cheek. “He knows he can’t be here for you physically, but he is. 2026, this has been a big year of growth for you. You’re on the right track.”

If you have been reading for a long time, or if you know me at all, it is not news that this year has been an emotional rollercoaster. In January, I suffered my first heartbreak, which sent me on an intense journey of self-discovery. I found myself again, months after losing it in the muddle of a love that took more than it gave. There was nothing malicious in our split; in fact, it was one out of love, but it is hard to believe it when someone loves you enough to realize they can’t love you enough. It’s hard to believe that you are worthy of that kind of love at all.

Instead, nearly six months later, I have a very different life. I have friends who get drinks and watch World Cup games with me. Friends who plan trips to Ikea and random train stops with me. Friends who go to yoga and are down to hang out at the drop of a hat. Friends who go to a bar with me to talk for three hours. I like to do things alone; no one is scared of it. I don’t put up with the bare minimum people used to serve me on a platter. I enjoy museums. Passivity is so, well, passé. I make music and write pieces I’m proud of. I’m a girl who works out, watches sports, and drinks for pleasure.

I still am learning every day about myself. I am still learning how to separate myself from others’ expectations and ideas of me, or how to ask for what I want. I am learning how to be better at washing my dishes and be better at responding to texts and calling my grandparents. I have a shopping addiction and could easily find myself in debt one of these days. I am learning to stop letting my anxiety take over and give in to hope.

I am in my element when I am at a coffee shop with a Tax The Rich sign and the couple in front of me wearing Knicks 2026 championships shirts. My mom woke me up with the news that we’re going to a Yankees game. Even though they suffered a crushing loss, I had a wonderful time drinking Diet Pepsi out of a souvenir cup and getting scolded by my mother for my excessive swearing.

It was quite bittersweet to leave, slugging a heavy duffel and a bag full of shoes and food up and down the steps of the MTA. My silk slip skirt inches down my waist as I pull it up subconsciously, shuffling my liked songs. I’ve come to love Boston; my friends there are fun and comforting, living on my own is the best, working fulfills me, and I still feel like me in both places, but I am in love with my home city. I am in love with the cramped subways and overpriced lattes and dive bars and friends I have loved since I was four and the warmth of my family. We are in a committed relationship, and I will never love anyone else like I do New York City.

Due to the World Cup, last-minute Amtrak booking is off the table, which is how I end up on a bus that picks me up on the side of the Javits Center. On the journey back, I stare at the picture-perfect clouds peering over the trees that line the highway. I don’t think I’ve seen a clearer blue sky in ages.

My friend Marianna is leaving for a few months, so I come over for dinner and Diet Cokes two hours after I get back into town. Except that our dinner is heavily delayed because we spent so much time talking. My ex-boyfriend had made (likely accidental) contact with me, and I sighed, turning my phone over. “Maia, I love you, but I have to keep it real with you,” she begins, and I shyly bite the inside of my cheek. Now I’m in it. “You are someone with so much empathy, your heart is so big, and so many people who have lost as much as you have could be really horrible. But you take this love, and you give it to yourself and others. You need someone who you don’t need to raise. You need someone who can give that to you. He didn’t.”

Marianna is gorgeous and worldly. Marianna can speak easily to anyone, floating through parties and charming people everywhere. We spent twenty minutes at the nearby deli because she was engaged in a chat with the owner about his family dynamic back home in India. Marianna’s praise is something I hold highly, and as I walk back to my apartment, my arms stretched out, my head shaking along to the music in my ears, I can’t help but think of her words. I can’t help but wonder why I chose to fight against the life I once knew.

On the topic of choosing good or evil with what you’ve been given, or essentially, either using your lemons to make lemonade or squirt them in someone’s eyes, I read a quote that perfectly summed it up while finishing Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector: “Unhappiness has nothing to do with evil”.

I made a conscious choice in January of self-improvement instead of destruction. I deleted Instagram and TikTok for three weeks, I started working out, I let go of friendships that didn’t serve me, I put myself out there and found friendships that did, I read like crazy, and I sat in the discomfort of being alone. I sobbed into pillows and on Zoom calls with my therapist and FaceTimes with my best friends. I upped my medication. I pushed myself to go to class, parties, and hangouts even though I felt like my insides were giving out on me. I suffered endlessly for months, but then one day, you realize it was all worth it. I took my unhappiness, and I turned it into love. Love for friends, family, art, nature, food, spontaneity, and structure. Love for all I still have.

Evilness is a choice. I could spend hours cursing ex-boyfriends and friends and plotting revenge. Instead, I am choosing to become a person I am proud of.

I run across the street, clutching the giant umbrella I found in the closet of the office. I have a fruit fly infestation, which is how I find myself face-to-face with you, my beautiful yet tumultuous ex-boyfriend, on your first day of work at the Hardware Store. You pretend not to know I went home for the weekend, and I pretend I don’t know you’re lying, and we engaged in the friendliest small talk we’ve had in a while. I text my mom, “I think this was weirdly fate.” I don’t know what I was supposed to learn from this, but I’m happy to find out you don’t hate me, that you’re willing to approach me and say hi, that you have a job, that things are moving in a positive direction. She responds, “I didn’t want to say that, but I do too.” On the off chance you read this, which I doubt you do, but if one of your friends does, I hope they tell you that I am proud of you. I am happy that you are finding your way again.

I think fate wants me to find my way back to you to tell you all of this.

Or is it fate at all? Is it that I just want to believe we are divinely tied together by a beautiful ribbon?

What even is fate? The “red string” tying you to those you love? The secret force pulling you in and out of stories? God? Is it even real?

I googled “what is fate,” hoping the answer would change my life, but then I remembered that nothing on the Internet has ever done that for me.

“Ok, hey, God,” I croaked out into my dark room, staring at the outline of the big light on my ceiling, the one I’ve never turned on. “I don’t really understand what you are trying to tell me. I would appreciate some clarity. Then we can talk about me coming back to church.”

I was raised Catholic, the whole nine yards - Sunday School, sacrements, and I sang River of Glory with a bunch of married sixty-year-olds every week. My saint name is Joan of Arc, naturally, because she seemed like the most feminist pick. Being burned at the stake for what you believe in seemed twisted and poetic to twelve-year-old me.

A big part of any organized religion is professing your faith; telling God that you believe in his story, his words, and will live in his image, for all to witness. I distinctly remember being six years old, kneeling in a colorful sundress, asking myself if I actually believed in God, or Jesus, or the resurrection, or if he would come again, and I never could profess my faith with a full heart ever again. I believe in the overarching message of treating others with kindness or generosity, but the rigidity of the culture, forever prudish and restrictive, never fully sold me on the idea.

How could I continue to believe in a savior I never truly believed in when I had the choice to leave the church? How could I believe in a savior who let my dad die? Who left my mom to raise three children alone? Who allows so much starvation and genocide worldwide? So, I don’t, until I’m really desperate to feel less in charge.

I pick and choose when to believe in fate, or astrology, or horoscopes, as long as it serves me in the moment. However, I always believe in love.

Being single, which I am coming to find is a beautiful thing, means time for the people you love. I am the lucky kind of girl who has a lot of people to love, near and far.

I did, however, go on a successful date for the first time since my breakup. She has freckles peppered along her nose and cheeks. She is so offline that not only does she not have social media, she doesn’t even like her laptop. She studies literature and art and compliments me when I make a self-deprecating joke. She is funny and easy to talk to, and I can’t help but beam after.

The optimism that comes with Summer and the World Cup is unrivaled. I find myself addicted to watching the game near my apartment in a space full of fans (team alternating based on whoever is playing). Paired with the cheapest cocktails I’ve ever bought outside of Europe, I have found heaven. On Monday night, I take Ethe to draw and seek shelter inside while the game is on. Wednesday night, Malavika and I enjoyed fries in dire need of salt and twin cocktails, sharing family drama and life updates between each half and hydration break. We become adopted by the Korean fans and mourn their loss together.

I find the camaraderie of the World Cup beautiful. A shock to most, but I played soccer most of my life. As the daughter of an Italian immigrant, it was non-negotiable, and I was even on the varsity team in high school (don’t be fooled, we lost every game), and my favorite part was always being part of a team.

My team on Thursday afternoon was my Contemporary Art & Gender class, growing unattractive tans as we assembled in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. We find ourselves standing in front of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who became a “homewrecking, child-stealing she-demon” because she wouldn’t submit to him. Forever trapped on Earth, forever punished for asserting her own authority.

I tear up a bit telling my therapist about all that plagued my mind the past week. “I just … I feel like it’s so hard to find someone who sees me. Like, men will always want to project someone else onto me. They think I’m this canvas, and they don’t want the real me. I’m stubborn, and I’m not nice about it.” My therapist laughs at this, making me crack a smile.

“I am so scared of having who I am stripped away from me. I am tired of being stuck in this cycle.”

I’m not special for wanting out of my body, out of this strange gaze I am trapped in, yet it doesn’t comfort me. I pick at the skin around my nails and bite them and claw at my own skin. I grip my shoulders fiercely. I want to be the girl with the most cake.

I tell her I’m not sure if I believe in God, at least not always, but I always believe in fate. I can always calculate how each decision I’ve made has set me here, set me down in these relationships and new starts.

Fate is forming me into a better girl every day. Fate is pushing me further and further toward people who like what they see in me. Fate is kicking me in the back and pushing me down when I sit up again. Fate is the horse I can’t control, the one that I will always try to conquer to no avail. I will never stop trying to swim against the tide, yet I will never stop basking in the magic of finding your people.

Fate holds so much for me, the master of my long life to come.

My horoscope today says, “In order to love, you have to be alone.” I can’t decide whether to sink or swim yet.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Strawberry by Ally Evenson

• Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

• Not Suitable For Work (2026, Hulu) - I am an Avantika fan first and foremost & I love Mindy Kaling slop, so this is for me!

• Baseball games, because it is, indeed, America’s greatest pastime

• Jasmine from Love Island UK! That girl is not only beautiful, but she stands on fucking business.

Friday it’s Friday! I love hanging out with my friends & I love writing on Substack! Next week will see the next instalment of WIMB … if you missed the last one, check it out below!

Thank you so much for all the kindness you’ve shown me on my last piece! I do not take it lightly & I am the luckiest girl on this site!

Let’s go Yankees & fuck the Red Sox … See you soon!

xoxoxo, Maia

However, it has also introduced me to some of the softest, sweetest hearts around, those that simply ooze with goodness. I still consider one of my high school friends one of my best ones: My friend Gillian, an art major turned philosopher, who is effortlessly charming and a master at tough love, who has held me at my lowest and also told me to get serious. I have met some of the kindest, brightest hearts just this year alone, but it is no surprise to long-time followers of this publication that my best friend in the hellscape of music majors is my friend Ethe, who is also one of the most magical performers I have ever seen. A composer that makes me love music without lyrics with unnerving focus and delicate strokes, Ethe is just as good a musician as a friend, and they are one of the best friends I have ever had.

My power has always been words. Songwriting, memoir writing, poetry, birthday texts; I have never struggled to speak my mind. I don’t know if I would be making music if I weren’t as good a singer as I am - my passion for music doesn’t hurt, but I’ve always felt my strength wasn't in composition. However, Ethe manages to create full worlds, full conversations without a single word. I am forever in awe.

Ethe is also my ex-boyfriend’s roommate, whom I knew I would run into at their benefit show.

Your hair is the shortest I’ve ever seen it, still growing out from the buzz. I hate your cutoff jorts, and I hate your polka-dot socks even more. I can tell you’ve stopped eating, and I wonder if you search my frame for the same thing. You greet my friend until you learn she is indeed here with me, which I can see scares you. It pains you to even say hi to me, but I can feel your eyes burn into me from across the room, as if someone threw cigarettes at my soft skin. I feel you settle in right behind me. Though we’re both in a church, I don’t believe God was looking out for me this time.

Malavika, who is sweetness through and through, like a marshmallow with a chocolate center, read my mind before I even could; It was time to get out. I leave as soon as they finish and order the yummiest-sounding cocktail at the Thai Restaurant three blocks down. “You know this is all him. Like, all his problems are internal. It’s not you,” she sighs as I clutch onto my elbow. “He’s just a little bitch,” I scoff. The waitress tells me I look young when I hand her my fake ID that has frayed edges, which I bought from a Chinese website when I was eighteen, that no longer scans. I’m six months away from being 21, and I pray it makes it to then.

After I break from drinks with Malavika, I lift a cigarette to my lips shakily, the constraints of my vintage Lilly Pulitzer pencil skirt keeping my pace slower. After one month cigarette-free, I caved to the fear of seeing my ex. I am only so strong. I feel like you’ve found a new way to take your guilt out on me, to make me feel the chains that shackle you down, the anger you like to hold towards me. When I update my mom, she responds with “It’s heartbreaking,” and that is the only word to describe what rose in my chest, the sadness poured out like the cocktail I downed. What a waste of unconditional love.

I let myself curl up into bed with my Greg Heffley shirt resting just above the lace hem of my underwear. I never listen to Gracie Abrams anymore, not since I was a sophomore in high school, but I let myself indulge as I scream into my pillow. A slight buzz and tears blur my vision.

It's a pain that I caught you at a bad time/It's a shame that I memorized your outline

Since we broke up, I’ve had sex with one person. I cried the second night he came over. I dissociated the whole time, eyes fixed on my bookshelf. Before he left for three months, I told him to expect nothing from me. I am ashamed that I don’t miss him and the kindness he showed me, but I just truthfully wanted to get hurt again. I wanted you to hurt me again.

I don’t want to regret loving, much less loving you, but to feel used and discarded makes me resent you. I love you, because how could I not, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in love with you again.

The next morning, I lie near the pond on sheets from my freshman year twin bed, my first proper tan of the summer. I kick my feet up as I click-clack on my laptop. Not even the ducks are coming around this morning; besides the two older men chatting on the rock across the way from me, I am alone to crisp my skin. I have Olivia Rodrigo’s new album on repeat because I am finally learning that the coolest thing you can do is admit to liking popular things. I want to be her friend and live in her brain, and I’m not scared to say it, goddammit!

The last time I was at the Museum of Fine Arts was in February, when I wrote one of my favorite pieces here, and then, I was the observer. I wanted to watch the world then, but this time, I wanted to feel the weight of each piece physically. I’m taking a class on Contemporary Art & Gender, and I have a paper due on Friday, so I was a woman on a mission. My bathing suit strings pool out of the sides of my skirt, and I feel each step from head to toe. I have Ethe’s compositions in my ear as I watch the sun hit every corner. I spent a lot of high school adjacent to visual artists, and maybe adulthood made me appreciate an art form I am quite bad at. I let not only faceless artists speak to me through shapes and colors, but Ethe as well, from a time before we met.

My campus has been overtaken by high schoolers hoping their dreams will come true in a one-week summer program at their dream school, which, after two and a half years of attendance, I can guarantee is not true. I am brooding and moody on the corner of campus, and a Mormon missionary asks if I want to learn about the Church of Jesus Christ, and for once, I am kind and polite, and say, “No, thank you,” because I have a soft spot for Mormons after watching a gay Mormon romcom with my younger sister and I once had a big crush on an ex-mormon. “That’s okay,” he sighs. “You have cool glasses!”

I’ve been working out a lot again. Part of it is because I forgot that my CorePower membership unfroze and accidentally paid for this month, bur also but it just simply feels so fucking good to move my body. It used to be about losing as much weight as possible, but now I simply want to move and contort into spine-relieving shapes. I’m policing my eating less, even when my brain tells me to stop, and to my surprise, the world didn’t end. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel great to feel small, to associate thinness with desirability, but what feels much better is to feel strong.

The Scots have overrun my neighborhood to celebrate with artisan beers and kilts, and they are certainly a lot happier than I am as I walk myself around the block to avoid any more pouring of my heart. My hair is flat and big, my cheeks sticky. A Joe’s Pizza opened up across the street from my place, a little taste of home I’ve yet to indulge in. When I pass by in my I HEART NY mini shorts I bought for a tourist-themed dress-up day my Senior year of high school, and an old Brandy Melville tank top, I pray no one looks at me hard enough. A drunk guy next to me starts singing Don McLean’s American Pie, which always makes me think of the summer before college when Emelia worked at Brandy Melville, and it was always playing. Instead of being surrounded by teenage girls looking to buy another tank top, I am haunted by his wiry voice. Bye-bye, Miss American Pie. I decide to end the night with Sex and the City and dairy-free mint-chip ice cream. I cry until my eyes are itchy and blurry on the phone with Ethe and decide I am on a strict feel-good-music-only diet from now on.

A strange word suddenly leaves my mouth this week, foreign on my tongue. “Oh, I can’t that night! I have a date,” is not something I have said since October, since before my move to the land of Girlfriend-dom and my exiling, since before I fell into love so hard I crashed into the floor and broke a tooth, since I have grown to love and hate you more and more every day.

Except that the date gets canceled. Whether intentionally a fade or not doesn’t actually seem to concern me. I am surprised by how little it seems to affect me personally, as it would’ve years ago. I was once desperate for connection, to be understood, but instead, I know it is a possibility. I’ve been understood and loved as a whole being by a man, sure, but even more by my friends. By girls I think are beautiful and cool. By adults whom I respect and admire. By people who knew me as part of two and love me as one. Instead of potentially wasting a free Tuesday evening on someone I don’t know, I got pizza and watched a movie with Ethe, laughing until my sides hurt. Who needs a partner when you have friends like that?

After a brief week and a half of being eagerly on the market, I now remember why the best part about being in a relationship is that you get to stop dating. Maybe I’m just not a Hinge-r. Or maybe I should just never date again.

I fall in love with the man in the pasta aisle in Target. I fall in love with the man buying tickets to Furious, The while I wait for Chloe at the AMC near the Commons. I fall in love with the girl in the green paperboy hat on the T. I fall in love with the father taking his son out to breakfast while I wait for my coffee, who eyes me up and down. I am timid when we make eye contact. I turn around quickly and can’t bear to look back.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the internet, more specifically, the parasociality I seem to cultivate. I attract a lot of attention, most of it foreign, most of it because of my looks. I began to play into it, because if I can’t control it, I might as well have a little fun. It’s not degrading if I like being objectified, right? At some point, the fun wears off, and I’m left with the same emptiness I started with; a feeling that I am never going to live a life unremoved from my body.

It is not, and has never been, a compliment when a man tells me I am going to make it as a musician because I “have the look”. In my book, that has always resulted in a ghost.

There is a song by the band Mitsubishi Suicide, who I saw as an opener at Bowery Ballroom when I was sixteen, called Song for Ciara H, which opens up hauntingly with a woman saying, “ You will never meet me. You will never hug me. You'll never hold my hand. And I'll never be with you”. It has been on my mind all week, because I have been wishing I could say something of the sort, wishing I could free myself from everyone’s desires I will never fulfill. I found out this voice, and Ciara H, was Ciara Heron, an underage 4chan darling who would spam post often and date multiple incels, who allegedly overdosed on heroin. The incels that outlive her have had her immortalized as an “attention-seeking whore”. She is lost to time, trapped in the cyberrealm she tried to seek comfort in.

I would have never stumbled upon her otherwise. I’m clearly not involuntarily celibate, nor have I ever been. I don’t get off on goading incels to be sad they can’t have me, nor do I enjoy interacting with men who hate women because they are unfuckable. I have no interest in 4chan. But, I can’t help my fascination with Ciara, with her tragic death, and even more tragic rise. I can’t help but feel for her. A girl who was so desperate for love, to be seen. Isn’t that what we all want?

The internet grows these grifters and reactionaries like a farmer grows crops; carefully, precisely, and with growth hormones. The Dasha Nekrasovas of the world, or the Claviculars, or the Ciaras, even, exploit their deep-seated insecurities for more clicks, more likes, more money. You, too, can be like me. You, too, can stop eating and take methamphetamines to be skinny. You, too, can profit off of right-wing grifting and edgelord content. The rest of us will carry the hopelessness we feel like baggage.

Am I any better? Typing every feeling, every moment, every tragedy, for the pity. The validation. The complex you gain when people call you “talented”.

I saw you through the screen.

In my contemporary art & gender class, we watch Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance piece Cut Piece, in which she sat motionless as she invited audience members to cut pieces of her clothing off. In the beginning, women came up cutting tiny pieces of her sweater. As the video progresses, a man comes up to cut her bra off. “I don’t want to cut her,” he says as you watch her stillness begin to falter. The video ends with her holding up her chest.

It is horrifying to watch a woman’s armor stripped away in front of your eyes. Instead, we watch it online.

I love to play with juxtaposition in my art. I had to give a sort of artist pitch, to which I started by saying, “I am soft. I am really sensitive, and I’m a big, big feeler with big, big things to share. So, I play with that. I like to be raw and vulnerable and still sweet.” One of my classmates raised his hand after I finished, standing timidly in the front of the room in my thrifted Acne Studios jeans and a tank top that hugged my sides, subconsciously shifting up and down my torso. “I found it really interesting when you said you were soft, because you’re so confident. I’m really glad you talked about this juxtaposition.”

I’ve been “the feminist”, the fiery kind that opposes everyone, but I don’t necessarily think that is my place to stand anymore. I am not the kind of girl who should be at the front of the fight, because I am luckier than most. But, at the risk of being that girl again, I shared why this juxtaposition fascinates me. “When I started making music, I was really angry. But women aren’t usually angry and pretty. I really fell in love with so many women who were these things, who were angry and sexy and pretty and raw. Women aren’t always allowed these multitudes, but I have them. We all do.”

Today, my hair is frizzy and wild. I wear my purple Hunter rainboots, except I never run into any rain, and lazzily sling a Hysteric Glamour sweater I bought when I was in high school on top of my shirt. I spent one hour before noon at the T-Mobile store because I erased my phone and disconnected my SIM card. I will wake up tomorrow morning in my childhood bed.

The girl I sit next to on the cramped bus back to the city circles between reels, YouTube shorts, TikToks, and episodes of High Potential.

Like any native New Yorker, I despise Time Square, but watching the billboards full of celebratory films of the Knicks, the streets full of royal blue and orange, still, a week later, I can’t help but choke up a bit. A weight is always lifted off of me when I remember that I am home. Just like my mom will when I open the door to our apartment, New York is opening its arms out to me tonight as my head rests against the window pane, vibrating as we hit each bump.

I’m tired, but of what? Of having something to prove? Of eyes on me? Of my eyes on others? Of my body? Of my mind? Of the internet?

You will never meet me. You will never hug me. You will never hold my hand.

Things that inspired me this week:

• …has sails that are made of silk by Ethan Huang … I still can’t believe I know someone who can create such magical things

• Matcha with coconut water! No places near me make this so I use matcha from my favorite cafe, As You Like in Williamsburg, BK, and Vita Coco water

• Making your classic breakfast foods in the morning, I had French toast & pancakes this week, and it made me truly happy

• Watching silly movies with your bestest friends. I rewatched 21 Jump Street with Ethe & saw Stop! That! Train! in theaters with Chloe, and we were dying

• Pigtails! My hair is curly so I typically avoid them but I was inspired by my girl Ms. Carrie Bradshaw. Also bobby pin buns… see below

• home2hide by Pretty Sick!!!!

Hiiii! Today is a special Talking Secret Friday because it is my mom’s birthday! If you are a longtime reader you know how special she is to me and how strong she is & I’m so lucky to be home to celebrate her!

Happy birthday Mamma <3 In addition, my interview with is also out today! I had so much fun answering these questions & I am honored to have joined Substack’s favorite condiment to talk about my work!

Alright … enough from me! I will see you all next week for another Talking Secret piece! As always, all my love

xoxoxo Maia

I have a very minor tan from simply walking outside for twenty minutes at a time. I’m back to doing hot yoga, and I’m flirting again, for better or for worse. Phrasing it like that makes me think of the Björk song. All that she meant was good. Give her some time.

These days, I spend hours outside letting grass tickle my legs, thin sunglasses frames hiding me from the rest of the world. I read, I write, and I watch the world pass by; the couples, the best friends, the bikers, and the children giggling as they run from their parents’ extended arms. The old smokers and young skaters, the businessmen off work, and the teenagers slinging their backpack over one shoulder. I am the center of gravity that stays still.

A girl stops me on the street to tell me I look beautiful, and I beam for the rest of the day. My coworker and I talk about LinkedIn slop and nearby restaurants. I got a second job by showing someone my Substack. Everything’s coming up Maia.

My mom calls me while I lounge on my bed in nothing but a bra and underwear, feeling my body become one with my mattress. “I know you used to think I was annoying for asking you if your old therapist was really helping you, but you shouldn’t be in therapy forever. What are you, like Woody Allen, who has had an analyst all his life?” I can’t help but laugh at her reference (though I should hope I’m nothing like Woody Allen), but I bite my lip. I’ve been in therapy since I was thirteen, making it seven years since I started, and I still am nowhere near ready to leave the nest.

That night, I went out for drinks with my friend Marianna, who is possibly the most beautiful and worldly girl I have ever met. She grew up in Germany but is Brazilian and Canadian and speaks just about every Latin-based language under the sun. Two pints of Guinness and a margarita down, and the bouncer teases me for sitting on the stool with one leg crossed under the other. “What are you, a ballerina?” He laughs, and even as we awake the next morning, we smile at the joke.

“Even at the restaurant before, the guy wanted to talk to you. You’re in demand, girl!” I can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm as I shake my head. “I think I’m just not really used to being seen like this, like something in demand. I’ve never really been that girl.”She lifts her glass of Chardonnay as her eyes brighten. “Girl, you’re cool, you’re a baller songwriter, and you’re beautiful. Take the ego boost and don’t take everything seriously.”

When I was in high school, my long-time crush called me “too much for him”. Senior year, we made out on a stoop after prom while I showed him Charli xcx on his busted iPhone with a green line blocking half of the screen and then never spoke again. It amazes me how when I get what I want, I never want it again.

I wake up with her nestled into my side as I rub her back, my phone playing a video of a woman cleaning crawfish in her sink next to my side. My favorite part of being a girl has always been the innate intimacy of every relationship; the comfort that can rival that of a partner, the warmth that can only be reciprocated by someone who knows all of you, and the gentleness that only someone who understands how soft a heart can be.

I call my little sister quite often these days, much to her annoyance, but I know she secretly loves to tell me what teenage trouble she gets herself into and who hates who this week, and I secretly miss her telling me all those things in person.

I started rewatching Sex and the City because I miss New York, and I think I’m the most non-committal I will ever be, which seems like the perfect storm for a Carrie Bradshaw summer. I surprise myself with how cold yet cloying I can be. I used to be so soft, my skin bruising at every touch, but now I am the one to bruise others. I am the one to wield the power I used to relegate to potential lovers, and I am still unsure if I enjoy the trip or not. I fear I am still too gentle to break anyone’s heart.

I lie in bed with my fan blowing on my legs, a tight tank top and underwear all I can manage to wear in this heat, and I respond to the influx of texts from beautiful girls and coy men who I somehow tricked into finding me interesting, and I can’t help but wonder: am I cut out for this?

Everybody wants to be loved; it’s universal. Everyone wants someone to come home to and hold them. Everyone wants someone to complete them. When I was in love, I had all of these things, and the novelty of it wore off quickly because seemingly everyone else wanted what I had. I had somehow found a man so magnetic that multiple girls outright hated me for having him. I, in turn, hated myself for that too, because how was I the lucky pick? Over you?

Loving was anything but easy. So, now, I’m sexy and kind. I’m playing the game. I’m weaponizing my assets.

In the end, no one but me knows what it was like to love him because no one else was given the chance. No one can understand how much I lost in loving someone like that.

There’s nothing super radical about Sex and the City, and it is certainly outdated, but there is something undeniably special about women having sex, and a lot of it, and not being punished for it (unless it’s Carrie cheating on Aidan, in which her punishment is very justified). We all want to live in a world where we can buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of shoes and afford New York City rent on a writer’s salary.

I love to run across the street, my flats hitting the pavement like pebbles thrown into a pond, and it reminds me of Carrie and Frances Ha, and my middle name is Francesca, so I am basically her. I listen to David Bowie’s Modern Love and skip across the street, and I am still alone in my world.

This isn’t Sex and the City because I’m twenty, which is a perfectly acceptable age to be single, sexy, and unmarried; in fact, if any of my friends told me they were engaged, I’d be more concerned than excited for them. No one policed Carrie’s shopping addiction, but my mom does mine. I still don’t believe it when someone calls me beautiful.

I wonder if this life I’ve pictured, this fantasy I’ve made up of what happiness will look like to me, is one that I actually want. Maybe I just think that way I can be saved.

On Thursday morning, I meet up with my friend Chloe for breakfast, swirling my matcha around. “You need, like, a fun baddie, someone who can be there for you emotionally. You’re, like, obviously going to have emotional times, and what is a man supposed to do? ‘Sorry, fam’?” I choke out a laugh, my pointer finger resting atop my nose.

I think of a man I once went out with, whom I’ll call Charlie. Charlie was a chain smoker who only really enjoyed playing bass and drinking cheap beer. Charlie had a poster of Mulholland Drive in his living room and a magazine clipping of Bob Dylan on his bedroom wall. One night, I opened up to Charlie about my dad dying, to which he said, “I’m obviously sorry for you, but I didn’t really know your dad, so I can’t be that sad.” Last I heard, he dropped out of school and works in a liquor store. I spent a lot of time regretting letting him go until I realized he is, to put it plainly, a loser.

My therapist tells me I “look strong” and “seem lighter” as I rub my arm against my bare shoulders. Ala-Carrie, I have on a tube top and midi slip skirt, my curls wild after being washed last night and exposed to the humidity of the ninety-degree day. “I guess I am. People always tell me I’m strong, but now, after doing hot yoga, I’m physically strong. I believe it, because it’s, like, a fact now.” She beams at me through the screen, a timid smile gracing my face. “You are!”

I still ask for guidance before bed, though I’m not sure who I expect to answer. Sometimes, my dad sends me a heart, a sign of his presence. Sometimes, I get a vision of what I truly feel. Sometimes, I wake up from a dream I can’t remember with my pillows scattered around me, and I ask God again why he won’t seem to give me a hand.

“I know that these things don’t always last forever,” I tell my therapist, “But I feel good. I want to savor it instead of being scared.”

As of Saturday, June 6th, 2026, I have officially been to the first and last stop of every single offset of the Green line, a goal Ethe and I set for ourselves at the beginning of the spring semester. Our first trip set off after I had a very humiliating night. My ex and I had both been invited to a birthday party, and both showed up, though we had broken up two days prior. I was not as strong as I believed and ended up having a panic attack in the bathroom of a Murder Mystery themed party after two glasses of wine and a Cutwater, and woke up in my ex’s bed alone, unable to breathe. Ethe and I went out to breakfast, where I continued to pour out my horrible feelings like wine. “Everything in my life belongs to us. I moved into my apartment only a month before we started dating. Every restaurant, every street, it was just us, and now it’s just me, and I can’t even leave my room because I think of him in my kitchen. Holding my hand down the street.”

“Have you ever been to the harbor?” They asked as I shook my head. “Let’s go. Right now”. It was below 20 degrees, and our faces froze off, but it began our duo journeys, and was a turning point in our friendship. I can’t imagine my life without Ethe. This week, we went to the harbor once again, watching the ferries pass as the small children were helped up by their parents as they peered into the viewfinder, wind on my bare legs. “This is so full circle,” I laughed. “It all started here. That was, like, one of the worst nights of my life, and this fixed everything.”

I did win the Best Actress award at the murder mystery party, though, and I carry that pride with me for life.

I write about Ethe so frequently that you all may feel like you know them as well as you know me, that you yourself might have your own Ethe, but if that isn’t the case, I hope you find one. I lie in bed writing this, smiling at the memory of our evening at the Christian Science Center, laughing about Minions and swinging our legs to contort our backs into wicked shapes. My legs itch from hours on the grass, but I have no regrets. That night, I make a wish I hold tight to my chest, and see my first constellation: the Big Dipper.

I think you were wearing my bracelet today, and I was totally wearing your ring. I am going to let you go because I love you, and you let me go because you loved me. I hope one day we can be the person the other needs again, but I won’t hold my breath. Maybe I won’t write to you again. You never answer back anyway. xoxoxoxo Mai

Things that inspired me this week:

• The Katseye problem from Voicenotes with Jordan Theresa

• Who’s the Clown? by Audrey Hobert!!!! Been a fan from day one, but I’m spinning this one a lot this week

• Fruity Pebbles Matcha from Farmers Horse in Boston, MA … I am sorry I enjoy drinks for girls!!!!

• Crafting Pinterest boards for the apartment I’m moving into in three months

• Rewatching Kurtis Conner movie reviews. I don’t care if people want to throw slop allegations at him … like that’s my friend!

• Pulling Teeth by Alix Page

Hi hi! Happy #talkingsecret Friday! Not much to share about this week but it is so special to me that you have read this! I love you all

xoxo, Maia

I’ve had to give many first introductions/elevator pitches, and I started calling myself a writer, and then it was a Substack, and then it became a “glorified blog”, and I am your neighborhood GirlBlogger, selling my sadness and sex appeal, capturing the mundane of my life to put on a platter for internet people to follow. I am a GirlBlogger of constant sorrow, which is what Joan Baez should’ve sung about, and I am feeding you GirlBlogger slop weekly. I’m like a sadder Carrie Bradshaw, because of course I compare myself to Carrie Bradshaw, and my ex-boyfriend is my Mr. Big. You're welcome!

I couldn’t help but wonder, am I doomed?

It’s officially summer and everyone is love.

The famous “texts-I-can’t-send” notes app has been revived, except I started a new note for it because seeing me beg for love makes me sick to my stomach. Turns out quitting thinking about someone was harder than quitting cigarettes. My leg bounces up and down, like I’m physically reeling. I do five pushups every time I think of you.

I think I couldn’t admit until now that I likely went into that relationship believing if you loved me, then I’d love me, and maybe you did, too. Except that the more we loved each other, the more we seemed to pick apart ourselves. More nights I couldn’t sleep, worrying you’d find someone better. More girls I’d stalk online, wondering why you chose me over them. More medication. More fights we had about how you liked me as an idea, not a person.

Maybe I did feel that way, but maybe I turned you into my mirror. I made you in my image, one of extreme self-scrutiny.

I miss you a lot and I hope you are good and by that I mean that you miss me too

I place the photo strips I hid months ago in a Jeffrey Campbell shoe box and think of Chloë Sevingy’s photo book, where she covered her exes’ faces with stickers, and think one day, I’ll do something similar. It doesn’t pain me to see these anymore, but I started crying about being alone again, which both frustrates and confuses me.

When I was fifteen, I used to be really obsessed with horoscopes and subsequently gave seven websites with names like tarotreading.com or dailyhoroscope.com or something along those lines my email address. Five years later, I’m still too lazy to unsubscribe from those messaging services, but this morning I received an email with a headline boasting, “Your past lover’s mistake is NOT your fault, Maia,” and even though I know these websites are totally scams, the satisfaction of this message sits well in my chest. I think I did believe that, and I think I needed to hear that I was wrong.

My horoscope today said my love is “one for the books.”

I wonder if my art wasn’t directly tied to my feelings, if I would still live in my head all the time, capturing as much as I can to turn into something. Every moment is like a film scene, and I pause and start over to keep as much as I can.

My brand only works if you believe you know me. If I can sell you my face, my body, my mind. If you believe maybe you could touch me one day, but you can’t, so you can just look and pretend. Pretend that you know me, that you love me, that maybe one day, I’ll love you.

On Sunday, I saw a screening of Bongard’s Babystar, which follows a family of vloggers who have been filming their daughter since she was a child, and now want another child since she is aging out of the channel, and how she tries to break the cycle of exploitation she grew up in. Since then, I’ve been mentally fixated on the topic of exploitation. My family never forced me to do anything; I sang because I wanted to. I pushed myself in school because I wanted to. I created and subsequently rejected a TikTok brand based on looking cute and having a cute boyfriend because I wanted to. Now, I am making music because I want to. Instead, I pushed myself to be the product. To be palatable. To be sold.

On Monday afternoon, Ethe and I go on a spontaneous long walk, instantly falling in love with the South End. Every brownstone makes us “awe”, every fountain makes us gasp, and every street makes me fantasize living there. “Imagine calling your children to go to the school bus, and they walk down these beautiful steps, I can’t!” I laugh as Ethe shakes their head. “Your children would fall down those steps! Look at them!”

“My children would never fall down the steps. I’d hold their hands!”

I am so lucky to have friends who hold a mirror up to me, my good and bad and in between, who love me through it, who know me better than anyone else. I needed two people to describe my strengths and weaknesses for a class assignment, and I turned to two of my best friends, naturally, who know me in different settings and still see right down to my core. I nearly cry when Ethe and I shower each other with our favorite things about each other, and the weakness Aeriel shared with me is one I’ve always known. To care deeply is a blessing because I am then surrounded by people who inspire me to be better, but a curse; I care too much about perception, and I overthink every single sign that could indicate that I’m going to be left.

“I wasn’t the ‘cool girl’ growing up. I was awkward and weird and geeky and I wasn’t ‘cool’ until I was eighteen. Then I meet this person who picks me over other more beautiful women, cooler women, and it feels so good. And, like, I think I’m pretty cool, but the world doesn’t always see me that way.”

Ethe has a particular smile that is comforting and all knowing, giving it to me as I quirk my lip. “You still don’t see yourself that way.”

Ethe is usually right.

I say I’m restless because I’m waiting for something to happen, so instead of waiting patiently, I replay every single thing that has ever happened to me instead to pass the time and use it to torture myself.

It was only Tuesday and my laptop was fully busted, my cute dress doesn’t feel cute on, every single classmate seems to ask questions perfectly geared to grind my gears, my mom was too busy to answer my calls that consist of just complaints, and I can’t focus no matter how hard I try. I become a laptop-less freak, a bedridden lounger, and a professional whiner before the day ends.

The T is packed on the way home from the Apple Store, middle aged Red Sox fans in comically large gold chains and caps lining each seat, and I was myself smushed in the reflection of the window, my arm tired of holding the bar and the novel I’m about to finish, and I can’t help but wonder why even this insignificant moment makes me squirm. I wonder if I look sad, if I wear it on my Polly Pocket lime green polka dot dress. Or if they all can tell I’m a Yankees fan, which won’t end well for me.

We have to use a metaphor to describe our lives and my professor wrote “house” but if looks like it says “horse”, so I run with it, and I say my life is like in those movies when there is one horse that is untamable named Starlight or Crystal or something similar and the girl who is “not like other girls” tries to tame it even though everyone else tells her it’s impossible. I’m sure I sound brain dead but in the moment I think maybe I’m also entertaining, and I end my metaphor with, “of course, I can fix anything”, and though I appreciated the laughs, it is pretty laughable for me to believe I can tame the wild horse.

I’ve been trying ever since I was thirteen and my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I thought I had finally grabbed the reins until I was chucked off after his death two years ago. Between bad breakups, worse friends, and enough hours in therapy to perhaps mean I’ve mastered it, I’m still trying to tighten my grip. I have not quite tamed Starlight or Charcoal or whatever name I choose for my horse.

Another class requires that we share our reasoning for picking music as a career. I go first, launching into how my immigrant father and NYU Tisch graduate mother taught me to take risks, how music is the only way I feel like I can take control of my feelings, and how I’d be happy just being able to do it forever, even if I work another job. He doesn’t take even a second before he gets real with me. “See, you got it, but you’re missing a key aspect. People who grow up amongst humbleness, like your parents who work so hard to make a life for you, who are humble, forget to let themselves want more. You’re realistic, but you need to ask for more. You need to be comfortable asking for too much.”

He wasn’t wrong at all. I don’t want to ask for too much, to be seen as ungrateful, but I want to be famous and successful and to follow my dreams. I want to make a home and feel satisfied that I seized every chance I’ve been given. I don’t have a scarcity mindset when it comes to success and our own metrics of it, but I do believe life is not infinite, and that in this one, I’d rather fail at my dream than fail at settling.

This week I feel particularly wicked, and I decide wicked is what I’d rather use than “batshit”, because my brain pulling away from logic and into pure emotion can’t be anything but evil. What I want is no longer rational. I am reminded constantly that these people taunting me through memories are nothing but figments of my own imagination, my insecurities lashing out at me through the guise of my memory of you. “You both are big feelers, and it makes sense that you take it out each other,” I am reminded.

I’d consider “big feeler” an understatement for me particularly. When I was a kid, I couldn’t leave stuffed animals at the store without getting emotional about how they’d think no one wanted them. When I’d fight with my dad, I’d hide everything that reminded me of him so I wouldn’t remember how much I loved him. I cried when I was told I’d miss a week of school in the third grade because I was really excited about the unit on Brazil. I started therapy at thirteen, and in my first semester of college, I barely left my room for a month because I was too angry to hang out with my friends. It seems like feeling the mundane is the only stable part of my life besides my mother and my flair for the dramatics. I’m worried I wouldn’t know me without a deep seated sadness.

“You’re very empathic, and that’s a really beautiful thing,” my therapist starts, “but it means these ‘big feelings’ take over your whole life. You’re going through it.” We both can’t help but laugh.

That night I go to a wine bar in Cambridge for girls night, and we also happen to accidentally attend Trivia night. Between each story of bad friends and exes and what’s on our TBR, we also answer questions about Anne With An E, Weezer’s Pinkerton, and a coffee chain in Oakland. One glass and a plate of fries make the night a success, and walking to the bus, we burst into laughter. “We’re so coming back,” I giggled, “we’re cracked!”

Because my laptop is broken, I spend a lot of time rating restaurants on Beli and reading.

I say I’m at a standstill, but I don’t know if that’s true; I don’t like to sit in discomfort. When I don’t know something, I let my brain fill in the blanks, and those blanks are more like bullets. I don’t know if it is quite a standstill, but more a disillusionment with the idea of taking what I want.

I can’t and I won’t.

When we ran into each other yesterday I did cry after, and not because I think we were perfect together, but because I want to prove that we meant something to you, because I’m only sad because I love you. I still do and I hate it.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Babystar (2025, dir. Joscha Bongard)

• ADÉLA on In Your Dreams with Owen Thiele

• Big Trick by Sabrina Song

• Iced Saigonese from Phinista in Fenway, Boston

• Rewatching Mike’s Mic video essays except on my phone because my laptop is still being fixed

• Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

• Ethe and I found this father-son Ramen rating duo after we tried Buldak Swicy noodles and I just love them

Hi friends! This has been a pretty long & challenging week but we all must power through! I hope you all had a much better week & I’d love to hear about it. My love to you all always #postedoniPhone

xoxo, Maia

May felt like a prolonged fever dream that would never end, where a whirlwind of great days and anxious nights blended into the same. My hellish spring semester came to a close early on, and I spent half of the month at home preparing for my first performance and catching up with friends, which made me feel even more delirious, like I was a girl who didn’t quite belong in either world. However, the sun has been shining (for the most part), I am soaking up some sun, and feeling incredibly motivated, creatively, and career-wise. I have been so excited to share what’s in my bag this month because I have made several impulsive purchases that I don’t regret! Hoping you all found your own little joys in May!

MY BAG: Yuri Black Leather Purse

This bag was bought by my father for my mother in Italy many moons ago, and I am guilty of stealing it … after the spring semester ended, she’s been my go-to, especially since I can fit my laptop, a book, a waterbottle, all my lip combo needs, wallet, and a treat, and on days when I only need my laptop for class, she is perfect! I unfortunately cannot help you find one of your own, as I searched tirelessly online and couldn’t find one. The Smiski charm was my Christmas gift from my younger sister, though I did take it off recently because it looked “unprofessional” … she will return soon!

MY OUTFITS:

I have a shopping addiction if you ask my mother, and she is unfortunately right. This month, my closet grew (and so did my heart). My first favorite new purchase was the Suzy Stripe Capris from Blondita, which are so unique and fun, and the perfect statement piece for the party my roommate and I hosted. Secondly, I found the most perfect blue satin Jeffrey Campbell Mary Jane flats on Depop, and they are the perfect pop of color! I also bought an 80s cropped varsity jacket, which I was able to snag a few days of wear in before things got really hot, and it is perhaps my new prized possession. I have donned the same white silk slip skirt many times, and I made a very impulsive but necessary cop of the Jeffrey Campbell M-V-P flats in Metallic Blue. I am madly in love and can’t take these off.

MY READS:

My favorite read of this month (to no one’s surprise) was Famesick by Lena Dunham (★★★★★/5). This month, I published a piece about how much Girls has impacted me, and reading Famesick made me really appreciate what she went through to bring her world to audiences. She is witty, detailed, and controversial, which makes for the perfect memoir, and it truly sickens me to know how traumatic those years of Girls were for her. A must-read for Lena haters and lovers alike!

My full list of reads… My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (★★★★/5), Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (★★★★/5), Writers & Lovers by Lily King (★★★★/5), I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (★★★/5), Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (★★★½/5), Go Gentle by Maria Semple (DNF, I hated this. The prose was insufferable), Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (★★★★★/5, close runner up for my favorite read this month!)

MY SNACKS:

• Herr’s Ketchup Chips: I rediscovered ketchup chips, which were a treat I only ever enjoyed during summers in Italy, until I learned you can get them imported from Canada. These are tangy and perfect

• Ithaca Jalepeño Hummus with baby carrots: I used to be an Ithaca hater, but this flavor made me a fan, and paired with yummy baby carrots … I eat this every day

• Cherry Merlin dipped cone: An after-school ice cream cone is my weakness, and Cherry Merlin is my poison of choice. The bottom of the soft serve has sprinkles, and the top is dipped in a hard artificial cherry shell, and it is perfect

• The perfect snack plate: I’ve been loving Allie Appleton and her snack plates, and it’s been my favorite afternoon activity to craft one. Mine don’t differ too much from hers, but I do like to skip on the tomatoes.

• Cucumber & Edamame salad My mom put me on and I’ve eaten it every day for one week straight. She makes a really wonderful oil-free dressing, and I am simply her student.

MY WATCHES:

One of my most anticipated watches was Mile End Kicks (2025, dir. Chandler Levack), and it did not disappoint. Barbie Ferreira is charming as music journalist Grace, who learns about love and friendship while falling for two members of the same up-and-coming band in Canada. It is a true feel-good and pure nostalgia bait and something I see myself returning to a lot (I’ve already seen it twice…). As for TV, I rewatched a lot of Veronica Mars, loved the new season of Law & Order: SVU, and am seated for the new AppleTV series Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. I also tuned in for most of the Yankees games this month because the Mets suck (and I’m not sorry about it) and I’m a New York City princess. Very excited for Love Island (US & UK)…….

I also enjoyed … Lola Versus (★★★★½/5), laughing at 27 Dresses with Aeriel (★★★/5), finally learning how a person named Cleatus would act in Hatching Pete (★★/5), & forcing my mom and sister to watch Minute Men

I hated… Broken English (2007), which made me learn that Parker Posey can’t always save a horrible movie, even though she is the cutest ever.

IN MY EARBUDS:

I got very into what a friend calls “unhyper hyper pop”; give me a girl that produces her something gutwrenching and I’m there. I am very obsessed with ADÉLA and love Cosette. In addition, I fell back into my indie rock roots. I still have the new Snail Mail record on repeat, as well as Biting Heels by Lucky. My favorite single from this month was Adultery by Viji, someone I’ve been following since around 2020. Her switch to Dan Carey (of Speedy Wunderground fame)’s production continues to elevate her songwriting and compelling performances. I also loved the new Olivia Rodrigo single, because how can you not? My favorite release of this month was bitknot by feeble little horse. I’ve been following them for about four years now & have met them, and I am still always in awe of their continual evolution. Mixing their crunch alternative rock with electronic elements gets a instant five star from me! Favorite tracks are Rewind, Shady, and Shopping.

Anticipated June releases: Singing for fun by Eilish Constance, Your Day Will Come by Chanel Beads, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love by Olivia Rodrigo, and Roses by Widowspeak

OTHER GOODIES IN MY BAG:

• Sol De Janiero Beija Flor Body Lotion ($48) People tell me I smell good quite often, and I have notoriously soft skin, and this is my secret. It does, in fact, smell amazing and is very nourishing to my skin!

• Boston Public Library Card (free): I have lived in Boston for over a year and a half now, and I only got my library card this year. It truly changed my life. Reading has always been tied to my identity, and there is nothing that makes me feel happier than slugging a bag full of books back to my apartment.

• Beli (free) My friend Ella invited me to join & I am a sucker for apps where you rank things, so I have been addicted

LOOSE STUBS (aka highlights of the month):

• Going to Mt. Auburn Cemetery with my best friend Ethe in Cambridge, MA. It was absolutely stunning & the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen in all my days

• Performing my debut solo show in Williamsburg, BK, where I grew up! Friends and family from so many different people in my life rallied around me, and I still am overwhelmed by how much love my work and my heart were given

• My roommate & I threw a really fun party for the end of the semester, & it was lovely to gather so many people I love in one place!

• Getting to spend time with my best friends back home! I have always been incredibly lucky in the friend department, and seeing my New York City day ones was the best reward for a hard semester

• Exploring Somerville, MA, which has incredible community spaces

Happy June Talking Secret readers! I am excited (and a little scared) of what is to come this month & hope it brings you all joy! See you on Friday for my first piece of the month

xoxo, Maia

Subscribe now

I didn’t quite fit back in at home like the wooden puzzles I used to do as a kid, and I felt deflated that the world didn’t magically make more sense in a new city. Where am I to go now? How can I keep separating myself from you?

My friend Ethe and I talked about what separation really means over delicious Chinese food, the bizarre covers of 2012 pop hits playing in the background making us laugh with every realization of what they were. “It’s not only physical, but eventually, you have to mentally separate from them, too. You have to stop thinking about them,” they said, as my lip quirked slightly. “I really want to,” I sigh, “But I’m so angry and resentful. I can’t control how it runs through my mind all the time. I can’t stop it.”

I’m consumed by some mix of longing, anger, resistance, and resentment, and I can’t seem to loosen my grip on it. If I drove, I would be upset that gas costs five dollars, but I don’t have my license. I miss smoking, but I pinky promised I would quit forever, and I am a woman of my word.

I saw you for five seconds, ten feet away from me, and I had a minor panic attack, and I hate you and think you should just transfer schools and move to Siberia and never talk to anyone again. Backspace on the whole message. Delete, delete, delete.

We’ve upgraded to waving now. That’s good. Delete, delete, delete.

I think about what it will be like next time we speak to each other and start sobbing, so I order FroYo and watch a movie starring Greta Gerwig and cry into my pillow.

I am doing a summer semester, which has proven to be the right choice for me. I am one of the types of people who need human interaction to survive. I’ve often been told I could talk to a wall, and in high school, my AP Environmental Science professor removed me from all my friends to sit in the back of the room with the one student who never talks. She was upset to find that we became fast friends, and he would slide candy over to my side in each class.

When I was in high school, I had a debate with a friend of mine who was a drama student, who said that acting is harder to teach than singing because acting requires an “innate understanding of the human condition”, and while I don’t think that statement is wrong, I think he was overall, because I would not make music if it wasn’t me trying to understand my humanity. If it didn’t make me feel alive.

In my sophomore year, I really loved this movie called Take This Waltz about a woman who cheats on her kind husband with an artist. It is also beautiful and tender, and my favorite quote from it was, “You seem restless, but in a permanent kind of way.”

I slip back into the familiar loneliness of summer, as numbing as the hot New England sun pelting my exposed shoulders. There’s only so much hanging out one can do, and I was always the last one to leave for school, leaving so much time to sink into myself. I used to be afraid of silence, of being alone, but I’m not now; instead, I’m surprised by why this loneliness feels like psychological warfare. I fight with myself before bed and fry my irises by the water. My roommate is in California, so I wander around our narrow kitchen in nothing but a T-shirt and underwear and curl up into a ball when I eat dinner.

On my way home, I tap my hand against every nearby surface.

I'm sad, but I'm laughing/I'm brave, but I'm chicken shit/I'm sick, but I'm pretty, baby

One of my courses is a seminar that every student is required to take to build a professional portfolio, and our first assignment was to ask two friends how they’d best describe me. Luckily, I had a similar assignment two semesters ago, and I opened up my Google Drive to find it. Writing that paper made me desperate to see myself through the eyes of others. My sister detailed how we were in our father’s death together, my best friend shared how in high school I still made time for her even though I was incredibly busy, and my then-boyfriend called me "the most genuinely compassionate person”. I spent most of my childhood obsessed with “goodness”; how to grow up and be good and do good. Seems like it worked.

One of the most special people to me has also said one of the most special things to me, words I’m honored even belong to me: That my heart is one-of-a-kind.

I told my friend that it is “hot girl summer”, and even though I could be considered a “hot girl”, it is not my summer to be so; all I want to do is see my friends and sleep. I have very little “hot girl energy” left at the moment.

I am required to reflect a lot in my line of work, and it has left me emotionally hungover. I am overwhelmingly proud of how long I’ve been making music of some kind, and even more proud of how I feel like my voice is finally mine; like all those years of trial and error and mental blocks and bad songs have paid off to make me feel like a real, fully fledged writer. I am proud of how I’ve turned the unfortunate things that have happened to me into beautiful lessons and morals to live by; I know now that life is short, and there are no second chances. I need to take control of the time that flows by and fill it with satisfaction. I’m proud of the lover I am to those who know me; I’m proud of the friend, sister, and daughter I have become.

It is hard not to sit on love lost, love that slips through my hands before I can grab it. Love that can never be replaced, like that of my father. Love that didn’t want to leave. I am always going to feel some void in me, I sense, because no one else will ever fill that, and no one has come close in recent years. I am learning to live in harmony with that emptiness instead of fearing it. I am empty because of how much that love meant to me in the first place.

The night before I headed back up to Boston, my siblings, my mother, and I went out to dinner at a new restaurant in our neighborhood, paired with the staple ice cream store my friend’s mom put us on to, and the laughter that made my ribs hurt and the sweetness my siblings showed me still makes me smile now. My father is gone, but I am so incredibly lucky for the love I still have.

I fidget with my hands quite often. I can’t sit still no matter how hard I try, and I’m endlessly restless. I stare out the window at work at the strange, barren streets of Back Bay as the office erupts around me. I missed feeling important, and each co-worker complimented my dress and asked how my time off was. I spoke endlessly to my mother about how she’d get a kick out of them, and it seems that they, too, get a kick out of me.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by the idea of love. I was desperate to be delicate for someone, to be soft for someone. I would peck the walls and pretend it was a lover, never someone specific, but this fantasy I had constructed of what that might be for me one day. I then spent years rejecting it until it one day landed in my lap, and it went as fast as it came.

I described myself to my songwriting class as a hard candy with a soft, gooey center.

Someone tells me I sound like the lead singer of Wednesday, which is a compliment because she “likes their music, except for the heavy metal stuff,” and I really needed a compliment then and there.

I know myself well, and I know I have to be alone right now, that I am not ready to love again, that my body rejected any attempts at doing so recently, which places me in an awkward limbo. It is strange how fuzzy my head feels now without the instant gratification of dating apps or being set up with friends of a friend’s boyfriend. How odd it feels when I do receive this attention, as if there is someone else steering my body. I have been nothing but reserved and distant to you, and that works now? After all those years of searching and waiting and longing? I spent so many years trying to be desired, and now all I want is to be ignored.

It is strange how I find solace in being alone, yet crave someone else, yet reject the idea altogether. I secretly, and ridiculously, fear the end to my madness will never come. But I like sadness, I like to feel everything. I like that I can cry. I like it when hot tears stream down my face, and I know I’m alive. Maybe I’m worried that I won’t be me without it.

In my art history class, we look at Edouard Manet’s Le Balcon, and my professor points out a woman of “passive sadness”, fidgeting with her wrist, and I gaze down at mine, locked in the grip of my left hand.

However, I feel instantly better sitting in the shade along the pond, watching pretty birds with blue and red metallic breasts landing on nearby branches. Across the pond, a man sips from a red solo cup, pacing, as the pond gleams under the sunlight. I am here. I am okay.

I squeeze my legs into my chest as Ethe and I sit on Commonwealth Avenue, laughing at each other’s bad food takes and nearly crying at the sweet words we say to each other, and I feel my wicknedness melt away. It’s hard to let your anger eat at you when someone sees nothing but good in you.

I refuse to do anything but keep going. I refuse to stay stuck in my own mental prison. I refuse to stay tethered to you. I refuse to stay where I am. I am a girl of constant evolution.

I am not blind to the fact that when my week starts rough, it always ends better, but that is indicative of life itself: time is the cure. The passing of it heals wounds and creates new ones to heal all over again. I may be impatient, but I’m hopeful.

There is a saying in my dad’s region of Italy, “tin bota”, which roughly translates to “throw with your strong arm.” I intend to live by that forever.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Jeffrey Campbell M-V-P metallic flats

• Jagged Little Pill (Acoustic album) by Alanis Morissette

• Mile End Kicks (2025)

• The New York Yankees. What incredible wins from my boys this week… Ben Rice lover 4eva

• Cherry Diet Coke (extra points when it’s free in the office)

• Metropola by sound artist Susan Philipsz, who used the intimacy of an untrained voice to illicit discomfort in a Tesco. Very cool!

• Audrey Hobert’s Triple J Like A Version of Earrings by Malcom Todd. They are such a cute sibling duo, and the tone of her voice is addictive

Another short & sweet piece because writing is a muscle and I’ll never miss a week, but my brain has been so incredibly scattered this week that my thoughts make little to no sense. Wishing you all a wonderful end to May … but don’t get too sad, I’ll be back with the May edition of What’s In My Bag on Monday. If you missed last month’s edition & want to check it out, click here!

All my love

xoxo Maia

If I love, then love will come. If I live, I love.

Summer is alive and well after a long nap. My shirts cling to my skin, and anything but shorts seems like a form of torture. My mom cuts watermelon in the kitchen while my sister and I watch baseball, and we buy steamed buns at the Chinese bakery and dirt for her gardening. I buy my little brother ice cream from a truck after school. My life flashes before my eyes when a shelf falls on Aeriel, Ella, and me at a Japanese market by the East River. Blood stains Aeriel’s white socks and dents her silver flats, and our soon-to-be half-off sushi is now free. I count how many influencers I see to relay to a friend trapped in North Carolina.

I walk through the West Village, and the streets smell like pollen and half-smoked blunts. Every single corner boasts a crowd of art school graduates in a cap and gown that only took four years and 400,000 to obtain, a stinging reminder that next year, it’ll be me, except I’ll be twenty-one and done a year early, and finally the woman I’ve waited my whole life to become.

Besides the one year left of obtaining a music degree, I’m quite close to what I’d always hoped twenty-year-old me would be. The kind of men I ogled at as a shy sixteen-year-old ogle back. I’m barely five foot two and don’t weigh enough to donate blood, which shamefully pleases me. I have adult interests like memoirs by dead people and movies in black and white, and have been around the block enough to have been drunk and sober and California sober and somewhere in between and back. I’ve learned I don’t like myself when I drink, yet I seem to do so every so often, and that maybe I’ll go back to sobriety again, even though I am not an alcoholic and also twenty. I pinky promised I would quit smoking. I can ignore my confusion with my feelings enough to be normal during the day and fun and charming.

You told me once, when you were cold and cruel, that I used you to fill a void, but I don’t think you were right. The void I’m trying to fill now is one shaped like you.

The second anniversary of my father’s death was two days after I played house with someone else, and I don’t forgive you for letting that frustration stop you from reaching out to me. I never asked if you read my work, and I’d rather not know, but I hope that if you are reading this, you now know I am upset. I think I’ve been fighting with you every night since we ended. I am not above anger. In fact, it feels familiar.

I’m wearing a Yankees cap and a silk slip I left here last fall and your shirt that I refuse to give back, and glance up from my novel every so often to watch the children running and shrieking, chubby legs and soccer jerseys. I told the 4-year-old my sister babysits that I’m getting a music degree, and she told me, “In my school, I learn.” I hop on the swing next to her until it makes me wildly motion sick, and I remember I am no longer as young as I once was.

I see my psychiatrist on the hottest day of the week, and my skirt sticks to my legs. “I’ve, like, had people that have been jealous of me, and I’ve lost friends because of it, but I’ve always been really frustrated with it. Like why? My dad is dead, my boyfriend dumped me four days before my birthday, and I’m so sad all the time. I don’t get it,” I say, rattling off these thoughts with a flourish of my fingers. “I’m super honest, too. If anyone asks me how I’m doing, and I’m doing badly, I’ll just say that. I don’t really put on a show anymore.”

She smiles sadly as I grab my water bottle off the carpeted floor, wiping sweat off my forehead. “It’s not jealousy of what you have, but how resilient you are. You are someone constantly bouncing back. You’re strong, Maia, and most people are frustrated by that.”

I am indeed boundlessly resilient. I somehow have crawled out of every pit with no explanation. I shock myself with my unrelenting trust that things can’t get any worse.

People ask me why I want to spend the summer in Boston, why I want to finish a year early, why I feel the need to keep going, and the only answer I really have now is I don’t know how to stop. I have unexplicable momentum I can’t let go of, like lightening in a bottle.

I have been a performer of some kind since birth; before I was ten, I’d already dabbled in singing, acting, tap dance, and writing screenplays (for short films about the Brady Bunch, of course), but I’ve been a songwriter since I was thirteen and heard Live Through This by Hole. I had never been so physically struck, unable to move, by a record. From then onwards, I drafted many horribly angsty pieces about boys I liked, and my dad’s cancer diagnosis, and it filled the void I had.

When I started college, I knew I had already grown closer to wanting to major in more than vocal performance, and during orientation, I played my new friend a song I’d written about a boy I drank Fireball with while we were dressed in horribly campy outfits on a warm Halloween evening. Though we no longer speak, I will never forget the astonishment that graced her face. “If I could write like you, I’d never shut up.” I haven’t since my first semester.

Historically, I’m not one to get stage fright. When I was the lead in the musical in sixth grade, I pretended to have it for attention, but truthfully, I never felt any fear getting on stage.

However, I was consumed by a pit in my stomach for most of the day before my show. I barely stomached half a bagel and a matcha, and haphazardly grabbed a protein bar I knew I wouldn’t eat on my way out.

I am still overwhelmed with the love my friends and family showed me that evening. My set consisted of six original songs, little sonnets ripped from the stitching of my own skin. The vulnerability that I had to display still frightens me. To have lights blinding my view, a room full of people who love me, and nowhere to hide is something that both thrills and disgusts me. I crave nothing more than this form of torture: a complete barring of my soul to all willing to listen.

I cried hugging my best friend, I cried hugging my mom, but the tears fell most unexpectedly when the man who helped raise me alongside my parents, who now lived in Portugal, who extended his trip to see my show, wrapped me in his arms and began to cry himself. “You did good,” he whispered, “so good.”

When I woke up the next morning, my mom pointed out that it was the closest I’d ever get to my father at a show.

My friends and I walked through the park licking multicolored gelato, laughs following. “Maia is such a Carrie,” she says as I nod. “Thank you!” One of them lets out a snort, “It’s not necessarily a good thing.” I roll my eyes as I grab my long, now frizzy hair behind my shoulder. “My friend Kate once called me a ‘new age Carrie Bradshaw’, so I have to agree. Anyways, I feel like that has to be right.”

We continue to walk down the street we’d always known; the dive bar where we went on a crawl once, the liquor store where the owner gave us pens with lemons on top and told us to “bring back a poem next time”, mere blocks from the elementary school we went to for approximately two years. “I’m, like, at a place where I know I’m not ready to see anyone else. I tried, and it just didn’t feel like I could,” I sighed as they nodded. “That’s okay, Maia,” I scrunch my nose as I shake my head. “And of course, I find the only man who actually wants a girlfriend. I spent all those years seeing men who didn’t, and the one time I don’t want one, I find the only emotionally available man left.”

If I wasn’t sure I was a Carrie yet, that moment pretty much cemented it for me. I am similarly asking myself her famous question: “If you loved someone and you break up... where does the love go?”

Similar to Carrie, I spent a good chunk of my biweekly paycheck on Jeffrey Campbell shoes I don’t technically need (though it feels like it) and alcohol.

I wish I could conjure a better ending but the only thing I have in my head now is the ending to Chopsticks by Liz Phair, in which she says, “Secretly, I’m timid”.

Things that inspired me this week:

• The Cardamom bun from Smør Bakery in Williamsburg, BK

• The Club by Evil Adeline

• Writers & Lovers by Lily King

• Watching the Yankees play every night with my little sister

• Making Shirley Temples with seltzer because we ran out of soda and it was surprisingly perfect

Short (I think?) but sweet (I hope?) and certainly disjointed but I am feeling all of those things <3 Thank you for reading see you next week

xoxo Maia

Subscribe now

When Girls was released in 2012, I was approximately six years and three months old, had a bob, chubby cheeks, and liked tap dancing and watching Mamma Mia! four times in one day. I was far from the show’s target audience, and it wouldn’t find me until my senior year of high school, when I fell head over heels with Dunham’s world, not because it was unfamiliar and exciting, but because it mirrored the life I had always known.

I grew up in the hipster mecca of New York: Williamsburg, in its prime. My parents left Union Square for an apartment building where Brazilian models, music industry personnel, and others with unconventional employment resided, who became my family. I still struggle to explain how close these adults were to me at the most crucial times in my development, sometimes raising me alongside my parents. The girl downstairs is still one of my closest friends, and I spent weekends around our neighborhood with our sister pairings.

Growing up in such an eclectic environment is something I don’t take for granted. I never once thought about how I was in a bicultural household because most of my peers were. I attended Shabbat dinners, frequently sang Happy Birthday in Portuguese, knew conversational Polish, and spoke Italian at home with my father. When I started college, I was no longer the norm, but I was worldly, well-versed, and cool, something I had never been considered before.

The Williamsburg I knew and loved doesn’t truly exist anymore. There are remnants of it, like the local library I grew up in still having my favorite librarian, certain mom-and-pop establishments still thriving, and my home the same as ever. Except my father’s restaurant is closed and he is gone, and storefronts by the water boast Chanel and Hermes signs, and my mom sends me a new business closing once every two months. No one is seeing acts in the McCarren Pool (my very cool father saw the Beastie Boys there in 2009, and I envy him), and beloved venues are closing, even with backing from companies like Bowery Presents.

In 2024, the New York Times ran a piece on the rapid gentrification in the area1. Steven Kurutz, a reporter on the Styles desk at The New York Times, stated, “The global rich is in that neighborhood now,” and it is undeniable. No longer can people on the cusp of success, like the adults I grew up with, afford it. In fact, after college, I won’t be able to move back to my neighborhood without moving back in with my mother. Once considered a “working-class, bohemian” neighborhood has become a new enclave for transplants, TikTok microcelebs, and the privately wealthy.

I, for one, am none of those things, and neither were my parents: my father, an immigrant from Italy who worked as a waiter then, and my mother, a freelance costume designer. I am simply a girl from New York who considers herself an artist. I am privileged enough to be able to study and pursue my dreams, but it comes at a high cost, one that I am fearful I won’t make back.

Funnily enough, the Williamsburg I grew up in was just as the gentrification began, yet on the East side, we wouldn’t see this until much later. Hotels, chains, and hipster attractions like Smorgasburg and a Supreme store become neighbors to Michelin star restaurants and an Apple Store.

I am nostalgic for that era, for the freedom to grow up and believe you could be an artist in New York who works in a funky coffee shop. In fact, moving to Boston in the fall of 2024 to get my bachelor’s degree made me incredibly homesick, as I moved to a very sterile and corporate neighborhood. I missed my friends, I missed my family, and I really missed a cardamom bun and a walk along the East River skyline.

My saving grace was HBO’s Girls.

Girls captures the era I grew up in perfectly. The way the characters have the freedom to bounce from job to job, to be writers who don’t write and musicians who don’t perform at points throughout their journey, and still afford a two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, is the so-called millennial optimism so many people yearn for.

The backdrop to much of the show is streets I’ve walked on, places I’ve been. In one scene, Marnie and Elijah pass the glasses store on the way to my best friend’s house. My elementary school crush lives a few blocks from “Hannah’s” apartment. They hang out in a park where I used to play soccer. The bookstore where Hannah and her Republican boyfriend, played by Donald Glover, kiss is my favorite in the neighborhood, one where I’ve unsuccessfully applied for a job every summer since I was a freshman in high school. Watching the characters, just as lost and annoying as I was as I cuddled in my lofted bed in my economy triple with one roommate who I loved and one who hated us, made me feel close to those I missed.

I have seen myself in all four of the main girls. In fact, my friend revealed to me she perceives me as a Jessa/Hannah hybrid (when I told another friend, she agreed but did state, spoiler alert, that I’d “never do what Jessa did with Adam). I have been known to embody Jessa’s blase attitude and avoidant tendencies, as well as Hannah’s proclivity for writing about my life (obviously) and occasionally considering myself brilliant, but I have also seen myself in Shoshanna’s long-winded rants, or Marnie’s delusion. The Girl’s Rewatch Podcast dubbed the catchphrase of “Girl, which girl are you?”, but the beauty was we’re all one of them, or maybe even all of them.

What was so appealing about Dunham and the show was how “shocking” it was to see these kinds of girls on screen. At times, the four main girls are unbearable. Jessa, Marnie, Hannah, and Shosh (though I’d say to a lesser extent) are at times horrible partners and friends, and have their flaws; they are vain, insecure, and repeatedly hurt each other, but in a way, it’s more realistic than any other friend group pairing I’d ever seen before. My friends and I have moments where we are the most tight-knit group, and some days where we are all fighting; at the end of the day, however, regardless of how different we are or how tricky maintaining adult friendships can be, we are four girls who are forever tied together by our love and history.

Girls has become synonymous with me to most people who know me: I had a semi-viral TikTok about it over the summer, my friends text me when they watch it, and it has been representative of where I really am from, not the idealistic, stylized Manhattan out-of-towner’s romanticize through Sex And The City (before anyone comes at me, I love SATC, even if it does not represent my New York). My New York growing up was punk shows in Bushwick art galleries and sunset soccer at Bushwick Inlet Park, Froyo on North Seventh, gossiping through McCarren Park, and less Manolo Blahnik buying and hitting the hottest clubs in Manhattan. I began rewatching Girls in prep for this piece, and I have laughed, cried, and remembered how much it means to me.

I love the humor, I love the absurdity, I love how distinct and unique the characters are, but what keeps me from coming back is the underlying heart: the moments in which they are human, raw, and real. One of the biggest fan favorite episodes is Season Five, Episode Six: Panic In Central Park, where Marnie (Allison Williams) tries to escape her volatile relationship with Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) by going on a wild, romantic side quest with ex-boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott), only to learn he is now addicted to drugs, which forces her to reckon with her unhappiness in life. It is a true masterpiece that is not only human but unpolished; we are witnessing the collapse of a marriage, of a dream, and a character truly having to make a change, and it’s grimy.

One of my favorite moments is when Hannah’s mom, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker), tells her she isn’t sure Adam (Adam Driver) is the one for her, and it hits me every time. “I don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog, making the world a friendlier place for him. It’s not easy being married to an odd man. It isn’t,” she tells Hannah, and it strikes many chords for me. Not only is Loreen desperate to stop Hannah from repeating what she considers her own mistakes, but she wants Hannah to recognize her own worth, which is the whole crux of her character arc throughout the show. I found myself being just as hit as Hannah was in that moment.

My friend Kate tells me my life is like a TV show, and if it were anyone, I think it would be Girls, where my Jessannah self endures so many horrible occurrences in such a short period of time that it’s almost comical. I think a really good indicator of the irony of my life is that after my dad died, my mom learned not only was his will lost, but the lawyer who drafted it is disbarred and in prison for illegally setting off a firearm. This is my typical day in the life, honestly. I can appreciate the humor.

Many people who aren’t native New Yorkers, such as I, have asked me if I wish I had grown up differently, or if I long for country living, and both of those couldn’t be further from the truth if they tried. To grow up in New York is to grow up free, to grow up and have the world at your fingertips. I can get anywhere with $3 (Zohran Mamdani, please lower the MTA prices, I beg) and a nice pair of walking shoes, and I have access to all an artsy girl could dream of. I went to a performing arts high school for free and gained an impressive resume for free, and it pains me to know that this kind of access to the arts is not only available to all but is being targeted by our current administration. The fierce independence I have comes from growing up in a world where you can play the adult role as early as thirteen.

There are so many unique stories I get to pull out of my pocket, the kind only a New York City girl can tell. I must keep a few up my sleeve so I never run out of Substack material.

I’m at a transitional point in my life right now, which can make me feel like I’m going slightly insane. Somedays I feel out of place, aimless even, though I’ve never felt more driven or determined in my life. The purgatory of knowing-myself-so-well and knowing-there’s-more-me-to-explore, where most twenty-somethings seem to be trapped for a decade, leaves me restless. Going home is my antidote, even if it is a momentary relief. I got in late last night, and today I will spend time with my sweet brother and see my best friends this weekend. I will cuddle up in bed with my mom and force her to watch Law & Order: SVU with me, even though she has not seen the season at all.

Above are my girls and I, born and bred Brooklynites, separated by the distances of our colleges. It would be pointless to assign us each a girl, to shove ourselves into boxes we’ve outgrown. On the far right is Ella, who is effortlessly beautiful, fiercely independent, and makes me laugh without even trying. Next to her is Aeriel, who has the biggest heart and even bigger drive, someone as determined as they are kind. Our selfie taker, my Emelia, is hysterical, adventurous, and has the best closet out of anyone I’ve ever met. We have all known each other since we were around four years old, and have grown from babies to teenagers to women together. When we can finally gather the four of us together, dinners at our favorite ramen place, poker nights at Aeriel’s, sleepovers accompanied by horrible comedy films, and nights out where we meet Irish tourists feel like second nature. The beautiful thing about girlhood is how easy it is to come back together as if no time has changed. How well we know ourselves when we are with each other.

This weekend, we are all finally back in Williamsburg, ready to hug each other tight and debrief our long semesters. To eat FroYo by the East River and watch Colin Firth movies, and eat our weight in sushi.

Home is a feeling, but New York is a place that knows many versions of me and has embraced each one. Home is being with my girls, long walks, gossiping over drinks, or watching bad Disney Channel Original Movies with my younger siblings. Home is these feelings; New York is my backdrop.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Famesick by Lena Dunham

• Biting Heels by Lucky

• Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA. Hear me out pleaseeeee it is beautiful

• Duncanyounot prank calling scammers

• Baking cookies! This week I made chocolate chip & raspberry ones, and then ones with chocolate-covered pretzels & strawberries and that brought me a lot of peace

Hello friends! This week I was the production assistant on a show, so my brain was one big scatter plot but I am excited to be a New York City princess again and to get back to my regularly scheduled week analysis.

Not only am I home to see my favorite faces and giggle but #promo I have a show on the 20th in Williamsburg & I am so nervecited. You can get tickets here!!!

I love Girls I love New York I love you all!

xoxoxoxoxo, Maia

This semester started with a bang, if you consider a breakup three days in one. Cliché or not, I had a lot to learn, not only in the classroom but also in the school of life. This semester is ending with a bang, too: a party in my cramped two-bedroom apartment (technically a one-bedroom split) hosted by my roommate and me. When you have no choice but to change, it becomes essential, like breathing. You find yourself drowning until, magically, you relearn how to swim.

I am a new girl compared to the one who came back here in January. I have a job, a semi-impressive one in the field of work study, and new best friends, and I've gotten really great at making pasta sauce with tofu. I’m chronically offline and have to redownload Instagram when I have to post something. I got back into reading, fashion, and reruns of 2000s teen crime dramas. I hang out with people I always convinced myself hated me (and I turn out to be wrong), and I have a reputation for being fitted up regardless of the day.

My new philosophy in life has formed as these months come to a close: give the world all the love you can, and it will return to you tenfold.

I am a bit of a go-getter, and I will be graduating with my bachelor’s degree a year early, making next year my final year at my university. When I got in nearly four years ago, and with a scholarship, it felt like a dream come true. However, I have been dealt a lot of cards that have made it hard for me to enjoy my time here. When reflecting on this semester, though, I didn’t totally hate it. Instead, I had a lot of great memories glimmering in a sea of horrible times, all because this semester has brought me closer to some of the most incredible people I have ever met.

Though I have no regrets about planning to cut my time here short, I am grateful for how many special people have come into my life in such a short time.

As this treacherous yet rewarding time comes to a close, I will impart my newfound wisdom to you all, free of the cost of the tumultuous emotional battle I endured.

Lessons in … love

The mysterious and all-consuming feeling hit me like a truck and then ran over multiple times before cutting me loose. While I will be remaining rather vague on the circumstances of my split (because a. I’m not ready to write it out and b. I have so much care for my ex and want to respect his privacy), I will be sharing my most important lessons with you.

A. Sometimes love isn’t enough

You can love someone with all your heart and have it just not be enough to keep you two together. It sounds simple that way, but it is a hard thing to grapple with, because as much as we are taught to believe love conquers all in books and movies, loving someone hard cannot “fix” everything. Some things love can help, but never heal, and as hard as it is to understand, sometimes letting go is what is best for both of you. In the words of Dove Ellis, in a song I listened to a lot towards the end of our relationship: “Love is not the antidote to all your problems.”

B. My Breakup Survival Kit

In trying to relieve myself of deep emotional pain, I found many crutches to help me stay up on two feet (though the only true cure is time and processing your emotions). Firstly, find something you can do purely for yourself. For me, this was getting into hot yoga. The time you are required to give yourself to take a workout class (in my case) is time devoted to your own soul, which doesn’t benefit anyone else. This gave me a sense of control I lacked. Second, read, read, read, and then read again. Read everywhere, and you will never feel alone. Finally, being alone is only scary if you let it be. My biggest fear has always been ending up alone in life, but in having more free time, I began to find joy in doing things alone. The first step is always the hardest.

C. Grief is hard to shake

I would be lying if I said I was fully healed, if I magically found the cure-all miracle drug that makes you forget how great it is to feel seen by someone you adore. As someone who has experienced grieving after losing my father, I know better than anyone that grief is a feeling that comes in waves. Some days, you are on cloud nine, and some days, the world is out to get you at every turn. While grief and breakups obviously have their distinct differences, they are both rollercoasters, and both only end with peace with time.

Lessons in … friendship

A. Some people come with expiration dates

Trust, I have dealt with many confusing friendship splits, and I have also had many friends I have loved since I was four years old, which makes me a friendship expert. Some people aren’t fully equipped for all your life has to offer, and while it is hurtful, it is natural to outgrow people. It is natural to have people who come into your life for short periods of time. Some people will grow with you, but some find you when you need them and leave when you need to grow. In addition, you are not a bad person for leaving a relationship that no longer serves you.

B. Vulnerability is met with vulnerability

Many people crave closer relationships, and the only way to achieve the tight-knit relationships you crave is by opening up. It’s horrifying, but so is trying to put yourself out there at all. One of my best friends and I grew close because I was honest with her that I was struggling, and in return, she feels comfortable sharing her own struggles with me. Our quick bond was only made possible because I allowed her to see me in the way I desired to be. Once you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the people who will accept and love you at any stage come.

C. Friendship is the best medicine

The only thing that brought me any sort of relief on my hardest days was my friends, both near and far, who spent dinners, FaceTimes, and train adventures with me. I am a lucky gal to have so many special people in my life.

Lessons in … the music industry

Though I have spoken about my journey as a musician a bit on here, I have not revealed that my major is aptly called Professional Music, where I get to build my own course load, aided by the major-mandated classes on branding and building a business from the ground up. I will keep some things secret (duh), but I will leave you with three major takeaways:

A. Research, research, research

This semester, one of my finals required a business plan, which put me out of my depth entirely. I am someone who doesn’t really center money in my art, but it was eye-opening to really have to think about where my money is coming from, as well as who. Part of my plan was market research, which allowed me an opportunity to read up on the current financial state of my industry, as well as my target market. Even if you aren’t a musician, these trends are really helpful to have a grasp on.

B. Your brand should feel effortless

In finding my personal brand, I realized I didn’t really change anything, which is part of my “brand” identity: being authentic almost to a fault. In trying to stick out from others, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice who you are. You inherently are unique, so don’t force a persona that doesn’t represent you and your art.

C. The mind is a muscle you have to work out every day

I write every day, whether it be music, essays, or poetry, and sometimes it is really good, and more often than not, it’s quite middling. However, none of my “good” work comes without trial and error. Carve out the time for yourself each day to work out your creative muscle, and if it isn’t good, move on with your day with no regrets.

Lessons in … yourself

A. It is easier to lose yourself than to find yourself than to find it again

It is easy to lose sight of yourself; we’ve all been there at some point, whether we want to admit it or not. I lost myself, and my journey to feeling like me took a lot of commitment and trust. I had to carve out time to relight my spark, and that is a choice in and of itself. In a journey to find yourself, you have to choose to do so, but you also have to be willing to agree to the time it takes.

B. Find what makes you feel good & commit to it

At my lowest points this year, I still had one thing that kept me remotely sane: carefully crafting outfits that expressed my inner sparkle. While I might have felt like I was dying, wearing a fun outfit to class or work not only gave the illusion that I was put together, but made me inturn feel powerful. If this isn’t the case for you, find what it is and treat yourself to a little joy every day.

C. Listen to the advice you give others

I am a well of support for those I know, so why deny myself my own kindness? When I advise on tests, relationships, or friendship drama, I will never diminish their feelings, and instead tell them it’s normal to be stressed, it’s normal to be overwhelmed. Yet, I spend a lot of nights convinced I’m a horrible person and that I am crazy, which is not true. Once I started giving myself grace for my shortcomings or feelings, I was able to work past them rather than ruminate.

Other assorted lessons:

• Changing your therapist can potentially be the best thing that can ever happen to you

• Get off of social media!!!! I am TikTok-free and only return to Instagram when I have to post or respond to a DM, and I am a much happier person. This was a step I took in regulating my anxiety, and it really helped.

• Do not count calories. Just don’t. More on this lesson sometime soon.

Things that inspired me this week:

• Rewatching Veronica Mars because her style was impeccable

• Late July Jalepeño Lime Tortilla Chips

• My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Albert Florin

• Really big green grapes

• god minded by Cosette

• Saying things like “Mama has a final” or “Mama needs a coffee” because it makes me feel funny

Happy #talkingsecret Friday! If you’re reading this, finals did not kill me, and I am a free agent (until my summer semester starts in two weeks)! I drank a lot of diet soda and did a lot of complaining, so I thought I’d spare you the boredom of my week with some things that matter to me <3 I hope you can take something special out of this & that this summer brings nothing but joy to you all!

In addition… I have a show in two weeks! In New York City! Sharing all unreleased works & I’m so nervous & excited! You can get tickets here!

So much love from me,

xoxoxoxo Maia