T and I went out the other night, had a spontaneous dinner at a Palestinian place and after, we drank tequila on a bench outside because it was nice out. He asked me what I wanted my life to look like in five years and I answered, but how could I really know what the next five years hold when my life looks so different than it did six months ago? When I finished speaking, our phones went off and Trump had bombed Iran. He absentmindedly put his arm around me as we both scrolled and I touched his fingertips lightly, grateful we have found this friendship after romance.

I had a dream last night that —— and I fucked or rather we didn’t fuck, but it was that after feeling and I was laying his arms and he was kissing my hair and I asked if I should drive back to Brooklyn with him later that night and he said no because he needed to go see another girl. What I really said was “would it be weird if I came back to Brooklyn with you” and he said “yes, but I’m gonna say no” and I said “we don’t even have to hang out” and he just looked at me and then the dream turned and I was in the bathroom and only in a towel and there was blood running out of me, but it was all different colors, although now that I’m thinking about it, it really was just pink and blue and that does not take a lot to figure out, and while I was bleeding color, I looked at my phone and the man who broke my heart in February had sent me an Instagram message and all it said was “what are you doing today” and I did not even open it. In the dream, I was not not sad, but just a little sad. In the dream, while I was in the bathroom, I knew that —— was cuddling with another girl and it upset me, so I just went to bed and eventually, he came to my room to grab my face and kiss me and when I woke up, I really did miss him. I looked at my phone after waking up and my Co-Star said “your lover is just a fantasy” and, that’s true, he is a fantasy, he’s a very good one, because when I woke up next to him in Boston, it was hot in his room and his hand was on my hip and the night before, when he’d asked me to spend the night, I told him he’s the only person I’ve felt comfortable enough to fall asleep next to since the winter and I reached up to tap the freckle on his cheek when I said that and the way he looked at me when my fingertip finally found his face made me happier than I’ve been since February.

Feels like I am spending too much time in these pages complaining instead of turning my words into art.

Feels like every time I look at my phone I think I will have a missed notification. Feels like devastation when there’s nothing there. Feels like I don’t want to just exist on someone’s screen.

Feels like accomplishment. Feels like satisfaction. Feels like sometimes pleasure and desire are elusive or frivolous. Feels like guilt when I don’t participate in them, in pleasure, in desire, but also feels like guilt when I spend the day doing nothing, too — feels like fascination by my own duality.

Feels like I am always exhausting. Feels like I am always exhausted. Last night, I slept from 8 PM to 5 AM and my Oura ring still said I didn’t get enough sleep – that’s how burnt out I am. Feels like I cannot catch up at all. Feels like I will always be overwhelmed by it. Feels like I felt overwhelmed because he didn’t feel overwhelmed. It’s hard to believe April happened. Maybe next month will be different.

Feels like I get turned on thinking about him, but I don’t feel anything else and that makes me kind of sad. Feels like I thought it would be hot when we were in the bar and he was kissing me in the grimy booth, but it just felt disrespectful. Feels like it was not as hot as the first time. Feels like it’s uncomfortable that we’ll be in the same room and don’t speak and we used to make each other come. Feels like I should be sad that I am not in a spot to want anything serious. Feels like I should – should want to show up for someone, should want to be known – and I liked that, I loved that, actually, but feels like I’m not ready to do that for anyone else.

Chris said yesterday if what you are doing doesn’t scare you, you aren’t growing and that’s not good, to feel like you aren’t growing.

Feels like I’m not growing. Feels like I have lost the plot of my own life.

“I’d like to be a physicist,” he said, fingers full of chicken, “I want to study string theory.”

“Oh!” I replied, excited I actually knew what he was talking about. I usually did not understand what he was referring to when we spoke about math or science – we’d been together for three years, but the closest we’d ever come to breaking up was when he tutored me in chemistry and couldn’t fathom why my brain was not even kind of absorbing any information.

“That’s cool,” I said, “Like, with the monkeys!”

“What do you mean…the monkeys?,” he said, looking at me curiously.

“You know,” I told him, distracted, searching for a napkin for our greasy fingers, “the monkeys who proved there is no free will!” He stared at me blankly from the driver’s seat as I recounted for him the story I’d read online a few months prior titled String Theory.

“Basically,” I said, “There’s no free will because there are these tiny, invisible-to-the-eye-but-actually-purple-in-color monkeys. And, they have these small little hammers and these small little nails and those small little nails are connected to a small little string.”

I could tell by his face he was not following which, in my opinion, did not bode well for his future career studying string theory.

“Okay, for example,” I said as he reached between the console to rip off another piece of chicken, “you didn’t decide to just eat that chicken. Your tiny purple monkey – a millisecond before! – hammered the tiny nail connected to the tiny string from your hand to the chicken. Your monkey made the decision for you! And, it makes all your decisions for you! So, see? No free will!”

When I finished, my boyfriend’s tiny purple monkey hammered its little nail from the car to the side of the road for him to pull over because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, drive or eat chicken. When he recovered, he explained that was not the string theory he wanted to study – in fact, that wasn’t string theory at all, just a fictional story from the Internet – then drove us back to school, perhaps now understanding why my brain was so bad at chemistry.

I know (now…) there is not a miniature lavender animal furiously hammering my fingertips into the keyboard as I type this sentence, but… I do still think about the monkeys occasionally, especially when so many things in life seem fated or connected.

Most recently, I was thinking about them in London. I’ve always said London is the only place I could see myself living other than New York, but that was based on a pretty rough thesis – I’d lived there for three months during the 2012 Olympics, but hadn’t been back since. When I had the opportunity last month to go for work, I extended my trip from the requisite three days to almost two full weeks to pressure test my hypothesis.

I, alongside my monkey, had chosen to move to London when I was 19 to work on contract for the Chicago Tribune. In doing so, I also chose that experience over staying in a long-distance, long-term relationship with my high school boyfriend, a man who will be horrified to learn I am still relating “string theory” to animals wearing construction belts and am only 80% sure I used the scientific term “hypothesis” correctly in that last paragraph. Because of this, London was the first city I ever lived independently, with my life not tied to someone else’s. As I re-explored the place I’d loved so many years ago, I was comforted that I still felt deeply at home.

Because sometimes things just work out (or, I don’t know, maybe our monkeys are friends!), the man I am seeing – who is spending the next year-ish on a nomadic adventure – was able to fly from Tunisia to spend 48 hours in the city with me. (“Wow,” my co-worker told me when I admitted I wasn’t going to be spending the entire extended trip alone, “What an example of ‘if he wanted to, he would!’”)

Before he left on his nomadic year, we didn’t know when we were going to see each other again. In a gesture that I am grateful he found endearing rather than psychotic, I wrote him a multi-page letter detailing my favorite moments from every single one of our dates… which is how I can say, with accuracy, that our 15th date took place in a different city in a different country on a different continent. It was a little surreal to recognize that less than five months ago, we were strangers and now, we were somehow walking around London, a city we’d both lived in and loved separately, together.

On our last day, I let him fully take the lead on what we should do. I’m annoyingly independent, but had decision fatigue after being on my own for so long. It felt nice to turn back into a passenger princess, give up a little free will and let someone else take charge of the logistics on what my day could look like. That night, walking through the canals, we found ourselves in a bookshop inside of a houseboat. The selection was tiny (obviously – it was a houseboat), but it stuck out to me that they had a copy of The Alchemist.

If you knew me in 2015 or if you’ve ever gone through a small-to-medium crisis about the direction of your life, I’ve absolutely talked to you about The Alchemist. It’s a story of adventure and the importance of finding meaning in your personal journey. (When I first moved to New York, I met a man out dancing and we sat in a diner talking until sunrise about the book. I ended up taking him home – my first, real one-night stand – and, when he left the next day, I gave him my spare copy, telling him to read it before he could take me on a date. (“That is… absolutely not what you were supposed to do,” Zach told me when I called him immediately after to tell him I’d slept with a stranger for the first time)). While potentially not the best gift to give a one time hook-up, it is the perfect book for someone starting out a year of travel and before we left the houseboat, I squeezed the man I am dating’s hand, telling him he should read it.

Later that night, when I had to fly home, I didn’t want to leave. In order to make the flight, I had to leave our hotel at 4 AM and, to maximize our time together, we had decided to stay up all night. After the canals, we went to a cocktail bar and ate a fancy dinner, then went dancing and ordered take-away chicken to bed. Cuddling in our hotel room for the last time for an indeterminate amount of time, my sleep-deprived and martini-fueled mind thought about the tiny purple monkeys. Through my tears (I, famously, always say I am not going to cry when we leave each other and, famously, always do!), I could almost see the shadow of a small animal hopping onto my laptop, opening up my travel portal and changing the flight so we could spend one more day together. Instead, not wanting me to be fired, it nailed its string into my alarm clock, prompting me to get up.

The man I am seeing left for his adventure at the end of February and something I have been feeling since he’s been gone – and even more so since I’ve come back from our time together in London – is that my life feels small while his feels big. This, of course, is not true. I love my life and have worked hard to cultivate creative outlets, community and meaning in this place I’ve called my home for over a decade. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little boring when I’m receiving photos of him snowboarding in Italy or climbing cliffs in Africa or riding motorcycles in Spain and my only real update is that when I told my mom I was spending Easter Sunday by going to see the play Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) with Tony Shalhoub, she said, fully serious, “Oh, I didn’t know you two were friends!”

While explaining to my mom that, no, Tony Shalhoub was in the play and, also, it absolutely would have come up at least once in the last twelve years if I was friends with Monk, I saw my own well-loved and water-logged copy of The Alchemist on my shelf. (I have a habit of reading in the bathtub and a tendency of dropping books in moments of surprise). It had been awhile since I’d last read it, but as I cracked the pages open to see phrases I’d underlined my first year of living in New York, it felt fated, like the book had been hammered back to me at the perfect time.

“When each day is the same day as the next,” I read, my fingers tracing my past pencil marks, “It’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day as the sun rises.”

Since I re-read those words, I’ve been trying to remember how much I love my life, to recognize those moments that make up the fabric of my routine I am so, so lucky to have. They are little things like Olive burrowing herself under my covers, the smile of a new friend at a creative event, the regularity of feeling confident at the gym. Even now, just being able to sit in the sun with a cup of coffee on a weekend and write this essay for people to read who care about me enough to get another email delivered to their inbox every time I press publish is truly a gift (thank you!!!).

I have, unfortunately, not finished The Alchemist again. A few days after re-starting it, I met up with my friends for drinks during the day. It was a Saturday filled with hours of laughter, the exact type of day that reminded me how grateful I am for the life I’ve built here with people who know and love me. So fiercely focused on appreciating my time with my friends, I forgot my annotated copy of the book on the outdoor patio as we left.

The next day, after seeing my best friend Tony Shalhoub play King Creon, I retraced my steps back to the bar in the pouring rain to see if they had the book. They didn’t; someone must have taken it. I wanted to feel annoyed, but couldn’t — I hope whoever grabbed it reads it, sees my annotations from ten years ago and, in doing so, gets a step closer to finding their personal legend.

After all, I have to believe their tiny purple monkey nailed its small little string from their hand to my book for a reason.

I am angry that every day is a struggle and it should not be this hard.

I am angry that I’ve let men I’ve been with write the story of us and then I would narrate it to have some semblance of control when really, I know I have no control over any of it.

I told Anna that I do not feel like myself. I cry every week in therapy as soon as I say his name and I wonder when it will stop.

Seeing him on Sunday didn’t feel fun or romantic — it just felt like… something. When I saw him, I realized I had forgotten how bad things were, but also how good things were before that. And, I guess that’s what I wanted…for him to apologize, for him to see how much I had wanted us to work a year ago. I was happy to go home with him, but in a way that I knew, even in the moment as I was letting him call me baby, that it wasn’t going to work, not now, not really. I slept over, but I wasn’t as comfortable as I used to be, back when he was my boyfriend, and I told Eileen when I got home from his place that it’s frustrating to recognize the spiral because it would be so easy to fall back into this, but my brain won’t let me.

I am not fucking stupid, but I want to be.

And — I am glad I slept with him, although I do wonder if I want him to fall back in love with me, just to prove I can. When I was leaving his apartment, I realized I am trying to live my life more for myself and less for other people and I need to be more confident in my choices, even when I know they are wrong.

It feels like I am getting better. It feels like other people are noticing. It feels like I am noticing, too. It felt nice to go to Indiana to do the speech and have someone who has known me my entire career — and who helped make me into this person — recognize the change in me, recognize that I am confident and assured.

I like that, that I have done the work to become this person I am proud of.

There was a line I read in a book the other night that said “I am not here because of you, I am here by way of you.” I am doing it — me. I made myself into this person who I wanted to be proud of and I had relationships along the way that nudged me in that path, but none of them did the actual work or made the choices. I did.

Earlier this month, I felt like I was drowning every day and I just noticed I don’t feel like that anymore. I do not want to look for any more signs. I do not want to feel sad that it did not work out. I am no longer crying in therapy. I am no longer angry.

Maybe the thing Eileen says about finding your person sometimes annoys me because I don’t think there’s just one person for everyone. I’ve seen three of the people who used to be my person this month alone. I don’t always use their names in my writing and years from now, I wonder if I’ll read these journals and not know which man I meant when I said “him.”

And — there was a moment when I was laying on the couch, my dress pulled up, and he was quiet, sitting on the chair across from me and we were just looking at each other and I thought “Oh, no…” but I don’t think we are going to fall in love, not again.

And — I love him, but I don’t feel like he’s ever really listening to me, I feel like he just needs someone to monologue at.

And — I’m not attracted to him anymore — this always happens to us, we have a weird energy that burns too bright, but now it’s faded into something more solid, like friendship, and I do think that’s better.

But — I wonder if he thinks about me when he is making breakfast, when he is chopping mushrooms, when he is cleaning his stove. I’m not angry anymore, but I’m still sad when I wonder if he thinks of me at all… because when I left him on the sidewalk in front of his apartment in February, it felt like I had this piece of him inside me and he had this piece of me inside of him and I thought he’d be more affected by me not being around, but he didn’t want anything to do with me, not anymore, not really. He probably threw that little piece of me out before he even walked into his front door, before I had even reached the end of the street.

And — I guess that isn’t true, it’s just how it feels.

The next morning, we made coffee and got back into our positions on the couch and when I looked at him, the sunlight in the subletted loft reflecting down on us, his hair sticking up, the imprint of my arm on his cheek, I started crying because I was so happy, because I was so sad, because he is leaving. And, he held me and told me he wanted me to feel my feelings, but he didn’t understand why I didn’t believe him when he said he would be back, when he said he was going to call me in April.

But, I know why. Or, at least, my body does. If anyone had seen my last partner and I together on our last night — the night we really broke up, the night we went to our favorite bar and I asked him in a quiet voice if he really thought this was the end while his hand was slowly kneading my thigh because that night, there was never a moment we weren’t touching, trying to hold on still to what we’d already decided to let go of, and when I asked, he hit my right leg, lightly, but with a firm sound in his voice when he said, “Don’t say that, of course not. I’ll call in April,” — well, if anyone had seen that, they would have thought he was going to call, too. I thought that. I thought he’d call all of February and all of March and all of April and it wasn’t until the middle of May that I let myself start to realize I wasn’t ever going to hear from him again. And, my mind knows this man in front of me, this man looking up at me through deep chocolate eyes on the couch, this perfect person I’ve spent a handful of the happiest of months with is not the same, but when he says he will call, in my weakest and most vulnerable moments, my thigh still stings a little from the memory of last year and I worry he will not.

The two of us were walking down the street by my apartment last month holding hands and ran into the owner of my favorite bar. Without thinking, I scratched my right leg. I see him around often, used to run into him all the time after my old partner and I had broken up and he’d always ask why we hadn’t been in. I made up excuses, usually — I thought I’d hear from him by April, I didn’t want to overshare — but eventually, by the summer, the owner stopped asking. On that last night, the night we were breaking up, my old partner made me promise I wouldn’t go to the bar with anyone else, a thing that felt unfair at the time when I thought our separation would only be for two months and outright ridiculous now with the knowledge that he knew he was never coming back. I’ve started to return, slowly, but never with a romantic partner. I didn’t want it to, but sharing our place with someone else still felt too special.

Really, the only person I felt like I could take there, that I would have even wanted to in the past year, was the man whose hand I was holding and as I turned to tell him that we should plan a date, I saw the owner coming down the street. And, the owner, his face — it lit up at the sight of us together, fingers intwined, and as we approached, I realized with fascination that he thought this was my old partner.

“It’s so good to see you two together,” the owner said, thrilled; the man holding my hand, confused.

I could understand why he saw the resemblance. The two men are similar in build, in skin tone, in the way their smiles take up their whole face, in the way my eyes light up as I search for theirs. When we first started dating, I could see the shadows of similarities between them, too, but now when I look up at the person who has sparked my energy for months, I see so much more: the feeling of his hand securely on my body, guiding me through the museum on our first date; his skin peeking through the soft white linen sheets, pulled onto the ground on the mornings we wanted to cuddle and have coffee on the floor; his child-like laughter cutting through the sounds of a blizzard as we had a snowball fight in the hours no New Yorker’s were even supposed to be outside.

I’ve been reading a book called “On Love” and, in it, the author writes about how no one cares about the specific stories that make a couple special, except for the couple. While I’m tempted to fill the rest of the page with my favorite memories of us — after all, the assignment here was to write my life like a movie and, if I were, this would be the montage section, a cut filled with slow mornings and late nights and sharing a sink while washing our faces and sipping homemade cocktails and wandering the LES and incredible sex and us arguing if cats can eat pancakes and not coming to a conclusion and him feeding my cat a pancake when I was not looking anyway and sweet treats and waking up in the middle of the night to keep talking and only ever watching films with ambiguous endings and him complaining about that the entire time we brush our teeth after and me always trying to make a point with a mouth full of toothpaste foam that would drip down my shirt and sharing books and baking a pie in my absurdly small kitchen and how my job went from sous chef to “making-sure-the-pans-didn’t-fall-off-the-fire-escape” when we ran out of counter space and long phone calls and journaling together at coffee shops and candid photos and the time we got in the wrong Uber and I could write for hours, but no one other than the two of us would really know or care how special those moments are.

There is this, though: when I was crying on the couch the other morning, I told him that I wasn’t sad that he was leaving, even though maybe that’s not true. I am sad he’s leaving, but only because I’m being left behind. We were in the car the other day, moving all of his stuff out of the loft for his next nomadic adventure, and I’d cried then, too, explaining through my tears that the sublet had felt so special because it’s where we got to know each other and now, we would never be able to go back. It didn’t belong to us — and maybe I feel now that he’s leaving, he doesn’t belong to me, either. He never really did. The irony is not lost on me that I’m reading a book called “On Love” while the piece whose prompt was “Pretend your life is a film” is titled “On Situationships.”

But — the night that he was sick, when we were laying nose-to-nose, he told me that he had lied to me. I’d asked him what his favorite part about our last date was, a night that I’d come over spontaneously and we’d made a new recipe for dinner. My favorite part, I told him, was when we were in the kitchen and I was tying the twine around the parchment paper bundle of fish. I was so focused on it, my tongue bit between my teeth, my fingers shaking, trying to make it perfect. I was embarrassed when I glanced up and caught him looking at me — I’d wanted every detail to be excellent, to show in my little uniform bows how grateful I was for how he treated me — and then we laughed and he pressed me against the wall, kissing me slowly and when his fingers tucked the hair behind my ear, I thought “Oh… this might be the happiest I’ve ever been” and we kissed some more and then ate an hour later than we were supposed to. He’d said that was his favorite moment, too, but now he was telling me, he’d lied.

His real favorite moment was when I’d first walked in. He’d left the door to the loft cracked open and I could hear jazz playing as he banged around the kitchen, every utensil used. I pushed through, not bothering to knock. Face freezing and pink from the cold, balancing a bottle of wine a top all my bags and kicking off my shoes, I called out to him that I’d arrived.

And, he told me, whispering, nose-to-nose on the couch, that was his favorite moment — that his first thought when he heard my voice was “Jen’s home.”

If this was a movie, that’s where I would want to end it… a happy note. On us, laying on the couch, comfortable, two people who have finally, after a long journey, once again found a home in someone else. It’s not the end of the film, though. He’s gone now and I don’t know if he’ll call in April. I don’t know if he’s even coming back. I don’t know if our scene will be cut off abruptly, a story lasting only a few months without a real ending, just like all those movies we watched cuddled in my living room. All I do know is this — in “On Love,” the only sentence I underlined, thinking about our time together, said: “…it is not the length of time that matters, it’s everything you’ve felt and done coming out intensified. To me, it’s one of the few times when life isn’t elsewhere… I’ll never forget how much I adored waking up and finding you beside me.”

I have been reading my Co-Star pretty religiously and it keeps talking about how this is my period of “self-actualization” and “learning betterment” which is funny because I feel the most lost I have ever been. Maybe that’s the point, though.

After we fucked the other night, we were laying in his room, talking easily in bed the same way we used to six years ago. He told me it was my choice to break up with him and I don’t really remember it that way, but I’m glad we did. I became someone different completely. I couldn’t have done that if we were together.

Funny that I’m still in his bed all the same, though.

I have really been leaning into the notion that it is all going to work out in the end, but now I think that maybe it’s not. I have been trying to stay busy and I do something every night after work, but then I get home and it’s midnight and I am on my couch and I am still alone and I don’t want to be this out of control, I want to be in love.

I just need to be around someone who actually knows me…which is why I keep cancelling on everyone to hang out in bed with ——.

—— was a bad boyfriend, but at least he read every word I ever wrote.

When I woke up from surgery yesterday, I had to fight back tears that he wasn’t there which is silly because I never would have let him see me like that if we were together. I kept thinking he would wake up and change his mind, but he did not. He doesn’t know who he is and he doesn’t want me to be there to find out.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and do not recognize the person staring back at me at all. I cry every Saturday morning and I look at myself in the glass while I am doing it and wonder how he could have started to love me anyway.

I sent —— my speech for feedback, but it’s not for feedback, it’s because I want him to be impressed with me. I told Eileen I was anxious about my speech because of the state of journalism and she said it was good that I wasn’t feeling imposter syndrome about being chosen for the speech anymore and was only stressed out about journalism being dead, but I don’t really know if that made me feel better and then we talked about how I cried when we were texting the other day and —— called me a good girl because I just want to be his friend and friends wouldn’t do that.

I am sad that I need validation from other people still and that I always feel like nothing is good enough for me, but also that I am not good enough for anyone else, either.

Last night, I had a dream about him, but he did not look like himself, he looked like an actor, that one guy named Nicolas from the movie where he plays a gay prince, and we were in bed and he was kissing my forehead and reassuring me that he loved me, but I just kept thinking that he hadn’t watched my film. And, when I woke up, I remembered that I didn’t have a film, but I knew the dream was about how writing is such a big part of who I am and always has been and it is frustrating that he told me once, off-handedly, after we’d been together for months, that he’d never read anything I’d ever written and it made me realize that he’d never chosen to see the vulnerable parts of me I’m sharing with the rest of the world and all I wanted to tell him in that moment, all I still want to tell him right now, is that I want to be known, but you have to want to know me, too.

2025, especially in the beginning, was not an easy year for me. It was a year where I had to learn how to choose myself over and over and over again — in jobs, in relationships, in priorities — even when choosing myself was the much more difficult path. I felt like I had to relearn who I was and what I wanted. I had trouble with creating art and connecting emotionally. I cried — a lot!

Every day since 2023, I’ve journaled three pages every morning. Mostly these are mindless thoughts — lists of what I need to do, worries about my life, an anecdote about something that happened to me that week. As I’ve pulled out of the struggles from last year and started feeling more myself, I’ve been re-reading what I wrote, documenting sentences I find striking or telling of that snapshot in time.

My goal for 2026 is to explore my difficulties — and my growth — of 2025 as a writing project. Each month, I’ll go through my journals from a year ago and turn the sentences I’ve compiled into a story.

This first one, a piece of last year’s February, is sad. My hope is that, through this, I’ll be able to track how I got from that to where I am now.

Marie read my tarot last night at my birthday dinner and twice I pulled cards that were not actually from the deck — once for my past, once for my future. One was the rules of the tarot. One was a joker. When we looked up what that means, a panicked “what does it mean when someone who just had their heart broken pulls tarot cards that aren’t actually in the deck TWICE,” the Internet said it was a sign that I needed to slow down, to breathe, to place myself in the moment… or that I was asking the wrong questions to the cards.

I know I was asking the wrong questions because I feel deeply jealous of everyone who is a partner and gets to work on their relationship. I don’t get to do that anymore.

I am not showing up for myself as fully as I expected to. I was focused on him coming back to me and I need to break out of that mindset. I liked my body in the mirror this morning. I wish I didn’t dislike it right now. I might read all of our texts once and then never again. I can’t believe I wrote “I think I am falling in love with him” and then we broke up a week later. I hate that everyone lets me go.

Anna and I were walking in Central Park and it was snowing and it felt like we were the only people there and it was so beautiful and then a biker rode by playing his music loud and break ups are so dumb because why was I with my best friend, but sad about hearing a Shaboozy song?

He told me he couldn’t believe we were walking away from this and I said, “I’m not walking away, you are.” But, now, every day, I want to take a really long walk, I don’t know where, just until I can’t think anymore.

I think I need to delete Instagram. Or just check it once a day.

We are going to go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef which was not on my bucket list because I don’t have one, but it is on other people’s. I need to know myself a little more, maybe. In my dream last night, I was walking around a hotel in these connecting rooms and every room had someone from my past, but when I went to introduce them to each other, I couldn’t remember anyone’s names and when I woke up, my heart was racing because being forgotten is my biggest fear.

He told me he couldn’t wait to see what I did with my life and I said, “How will you see it, you won’t be there” and when I think about him looking at me in the back of that car, I think about how I had never seen someone’s eyes actually fill up with tears until that moment and it makes me feel nauseous.

Both of my biggest relationships in the past year ended because they weren’t ready, but would they have been ready with someone who wasn’t me? I get this hole in my heart when I think about his smile or the way his eyes would light up when I would ring the doorbell and I wonder if he even thinks about me at all. I know he says he needs space, but what if he finds someone else?

Funny to write a whole entry on independence and end on that.

But – I hate that he is going to fall in love with someone else and kiss their forehead when they cry and make them coffee in the morning and watch them sleep on his couch in the sun. I hate that I made him a better partner and the partner he ends up with is not going to be me. I hate that I was falling in love with him and he let me go and, really, what I hate the most is the dumb inside jokes because I’m in another Uber, but this time, I’m alone and now my eyes are the ones filling up with tears, sad about that stupid song again.

2. I’m on the train on my way to my last blood work appointment before they put me under tomorrow thinking about how I thought the morning appointments were going to be the hardest part — daily, I have had to trek an hour into Manhattan for blood work and an ultrasound and then an hour back home to Brooklyn — but I’ve actually enjoyed the routine of it and seeing the data that my body is doing something quite mind blowing if you really stop to think about it…which I don’t very often because then it makes it feel too real and I’ve been waking up earlier than I normally do for these appointments to play with O before I leave because I adopted a kitten last week, named her Olive, did it all almost on a whim, but it felt like the right time, finally, when a friend of a friend had found her and I went to go meet her, I thought “Oh, wow, I am coming home with an animal” and I was so unprepared, but I took her and I love her and I’ve wanted to take care of someone other than just myself for so long… wanted to come home and have responsibility even though it does feel such a peak thirties girlie thing to do, to adopt a kitten the same week my eggs are being frozen and this makes me laugh while also making me a little sad for no concrete reason because I genuinely like my life, but the hardest thing about those appointments actually is seeing all the other women there — I always show up in my sweatsuit (the only thing that fits me right now), alone, and everyone else looks pristine, with their partners and their fat diamond rings and I know if they are in the same office as me, they are going through their own struggles, but yesterday, I realized it made me feel weird and it made me miss my ex, even though egg freezing was always something we had talked about as me doing for me, not me doing for us and I think about the first time he came to my apartment, he told me it felt like there should be a cat in it and I agreed, but I knew I couldn’t get one because I was so busy taking care of him, but I don’t have to do that anymore and I like the mornings with Olive, even though they are not calm — my old morning routine was sitting with a cup of coffee and writing in my journal and now, I have a three pound animal jumping on top of me and running the length of my apartment, a marathon for her, her little tongue panting in exhaustion when she’s done, but I like the way spending time with her has forced me to slow down and be mindful because I have been trying to be more present in my relationships and, while I currently feel very siloed with egg freezing and barely leaving my home because I am so uncomfortable, I’m grateful for the opportunity to practice being in the moment and the most present I have felt in a long, long time was when he was here visiting and I told him last week how grateful I am that he actually flew up to see me — being with him made me feel so light and fun and myself and made me realize how much of myself I was hiding from my ex at the end to try to make him feel better when, really, I think I was making us both feel worse which is why I have been trying to figure out why I have missed my ex this week when I haven’t in so long and I think, in addition to the added hormones, when I had started to talk about egg freezing with him earlier this year, things between us were still so good — I miss that version of him, I miss who we were in those moments, but, then, I think about him: I think back to those compounded three days and there was this moment when we were overlooking the skyline with our friends, two other people from our past his visit allowed a reconnection with, and god, I just felt so open and grateful and I used to think about him in snapshots — here is the moment we met at the bar and I froze, feeling already how important he would be; here is the night we were going to bed and I opened my sleepy eyes to see him staring at me with a slow smile on his face; here are all the mornings I’d wake up before him and trace one finger down his spine: now that I know him again as a person, not just a character from my past, I can think about him in a more solid form, but that night on the overlook crashes back over me as I sit here writing on the train because, somehow, he made me feel connected again.
   

3. I know it’s naive, but I thought my body would have bounced back to normal by now, but instead, I am still in so much pain, not at the 7 I told them when I got out of surgery (and why, immediately after saying “7,” did I try to correct myself, telling them “Well, maybe it’s not that high” as if I was embarrassed to monitor my own suffering when my pain was so high, I thought I would throw up?), but I am uncomfortable all the same and my insides still feel swollen and it’s apparent in the way my belly will not lay flat and I read somewhere that during this process my ovaries went from being the size of a grape to the size of a grapefruit and I don’t know how factually accurate that is, but with how my body feels, I could believe it because I feel too full, I feel too much and I have also been struggling with feeling too privileged for this — how grateful am I that my company pays for something like this, a perk I can take advantage of when I’m not even sure if I want kids, but I am so indecisive that I can give myself an insurance policy just in case the me of the future finally has an answer to the question she was almost faced with at 24 and someone I know is going through this at the same time and she’s paying for it completely out of pocket and her medications alone were $8,000 — for the same ones, mine were 74 cents – so it’s made me angry, that I get to do this for almost free where other people who really want children don’t have the opportunity and I am wracked with guilt over it, a thing my therapist says I take on in so many other aspects of my life too, so it’s not surprising, she said, that this experience has left me feeling the same way and I felt isolated during all of it, even though I was sharing what I was doing on the internet and even though my friends were so supportive, but because I felt so sad that I knew there were people in my life who wanted to be doing what I was, but could not financially and then I went back to feeling guilty because I want my body to go back to how it was because I was so strong before this, the fittest I have ever been — this time two weeks ago, I had visible abs — and I know I will get back to that and I feel so shallow for even being concerned about how I look, but I went on a walk with a friend during lunch yesterday, my first physical activity in 14 days, and I wanted to cry with how difficult it was for me to just take steps forward, a dull thud radiating throughout my swollen abdomen each time my foot hit the ground and when I woke up from surgery, my heart rate kept dropping too low, enough that the machine kept going off and the nurse had to repeatedly check on me, then, finally, she asked “Are you a runner?” and I explained my workout routine, the 90 minutes of daily cardio that structures my whole life, and felt annoyed that I felt proud that my resting heart rate reflects that because I don’t feel like that person anymore and I know I will get back to it, know that in a week, hopefully, I will be fine, but how difficult it is to struggle with myself in all aspects at this very moment.
   

4. I woke up this morning, still bloated in bed, and watched the videos he took of us having sex when he was here because I’m always annoyed when I’m having penetrative sex and can’t visually see what is happening and he knows that about me, offering on our last afternoon to film us on my phone in different positions and I thought they would make me turned on, and they did, but they also made me sad at how much I miss him because it was such a beautiful three days, reconnecting with this man I hadn’t seen since I was 24 and back then, I was so certain I was in love with him and then spent years not trusting those feelings, but now, I don’t think I am in love with him, but I do love him – I love who he is; I love who he makes me into when we are together because I’m so fully myself around him, so much more than I even remembered and so much of our time together last month that we didn’t spend in bed was just spent laughing or staring at each other and always, always, touching, trying to fit eight years into three days and I hadn’t made plans for when he visited because I didn’t really think he would come — I was so used to being let down by him in our younger years — and so, we didn’t have anything concrete to do, we spent one day literally just walking aimlessly around Brooklyn, always meaning to stop somewhere, but getting too caught up in the other person to ever make a choice and it was so hot that day and we were both sweaty and, when we stopped at a crosswalk, I unthinkingly licked a sweat bead off his chest because it’s always been like that for us — just so primal, natural, needed and I think I woke up this morning wanting to watch our sex videos because I missed the way he smelled and one of the nights, the night on the overlook, when we were walking to go meet our friends, he turned to me and told me he had forgotten to wear deodorant and he wondered if we should go back and we decided not to, but as the night went on, I could smell him, but he didn’t smell bad…instead, I was so turned on, couldn’t stop smelling him all night, trying to disguise it by resting my head on his shoulder and when we finally got home, we barely made it up the stairs, fucking like we used to when we were 24, standing up with all our clothes on in the doorway of my apartment and the first night we fucked like that, a lifetime ago, was the first time he made me come so hard I crumpled to the ground, bursting into tears and he had to pick me up off the floor, carrying me to bed, covering my face with small kisses and wiping my tears as we both tried to process how intense our connection was, laughing at the absurdity of what had happened, of what we had found within each other, but this trip, I didn’t cry until the last time we had sex, when he made me come and I was still on top of him, him still inside me, my face still buried in his hair when he whispered “Did you miss me?” and I answered honestly that I hadn’t known I did, but now, even though he was touching me, even though he was here, I missed him so, so much.

The biggest delight came from notebook pages I found shoved in my desk, torn out of a journal. Handwritten, I’d titled it “The Red Cat” and dated it Sunday, November 4th, 2018. The writing recounts an evening I remember vividly, a night I felt a little lonely, missing my family, specifically my mom. I went to go read at a bar we’d been to together and ended up interacting with multiple strangers. I remember walking home that night in the cold and feeling warm with the magic of connection — even if I’d never see any of those people again, they’d made an impact on my existence.

The Red Cat no longer is in business, but I walked by the building that housed it on Saturday… how funny to find this story the very next day.

“The Red Cat” | Sunday, November 4th, 2018

For me, New York wavers between being very, very small and very, very large. I am a stranger to so many people and yet, all of us are key background characters in each other’s stories.

Like, last night:

I get antsy in my apartment. It comes from feeling like I am not fully grasping what it means to be living — not living in New York, just living in general. I hate not taking advantage of what the world has to offer and yet, I find myself constantly ending up in the same places.

I was reading a book at The Red Cat because I miss my mom. She was the one who gave me the book, told me about the beautiful way the sentences were structured. Have you ever picked up a book and, shortly on, realized you will be crying by the end? And, not for the characters, no, but for the author, for how incredibly they touched your life. This author, he wrote phrases I’d thought — less elegantly, of course — but still, thoughts I’ve had that, reading them on the page made me feel fully understood. And, as I was sitting there reading, missing my mother, a mom and her daughter were sitting next to me at the bar, having the same type of evening my mom and I would have if she was visiting me.

“Jealous,” I wrote in the margins of my book, a hard period at the end.

But, as they got up to leave, the mom turned to me, asking about the book. She, too, had read it. She, too, had recommended it. And, for a second, it’s like she knew I needed that — a sign from my mom.

Of course, I’d been observing the mom and daughter long before they spoke to me. It’s become a habit of mine after sitting at bars alone. To my right had been the mother and daughter and, to my left, two hip, older women who spent the evening chattering between politics and fashion. The one closest to me was a lawyer — she had artsy earrings and had recently recovered from a serious illness and had opinions on our current government that mirrored my own, causing me to make a fist of righteous, silent agreement under the table whenever she made a logical point.

Her companion, a tan woman with a severely chic gray bob and thick black glasses and bangles up to her elbow also politically agreed with my tastes, though she was drinking tea all night instead of wine, a habit I have not yet fully gotten the hang of… although, truly, I would love nothing more than to actually say no to a glass of alcohol.

And, it was probably impossible, but still — I felt like I knew her.

Like I said, New York can be very, very small. I see the same people every day on the street, in the subway, at the gym. Lately, everyone’s faces have begun to look familiar. I’m not sure what this means, but as the lady with the chic bob took the hand of her companion while she was talking about her illness, I was certain I knew her. I watched out of the corner of my eye as her thumb treaded gently and squeezed the other woman’s hand and I’d felt like I’d seen the action before — maybe on the street carrying a coffee or on the subway holding a pole or…

…Or, maybe I don’t know her. Maybe I’d never seen her at all. I’ll never know. When they left, I said nothing, but “Have a lovely evening,” and her knowledge of me as a person passed straight through the door, disappearing back into the frigid air.

I do know the bartender, that is for certain. He was here on the day Emmanuel and I went on our not-date date, when we were talking about weed and sex and the bar snack radishes before deciding that, yes, he should come with me to that concert in Queens. The bartender remembered me, he winked when I came in. Later, after I’d finished three beers and was ready to go home, he stopped me and bought me another.

“You’re going to finish this book on my watch,” he told me. “We’re in this together.”

Funny how I knew his name was Christian, but I never thought to ask. I knew because a man next to me had taken the place of the mother and the daughter along with his wife and he asked, right after Christian made him a Manhattan.

As a couple, the pair were not talkative. She spent a large portion of their time next to me tapping away on her phone while he took photos of his Manhattan to post on Instagram, which reminded me of my father, who’d done the same thing with his Negroni on the night we’d all last dined here together.

They were not a talkative couple, but as a person, the man was. He sparked a conversation with Christian about being a bartender, about his favorite drink tricks, about which he liked best. With me, he asked about my book (I told him about my mom) and my opinions on the radishes for consumption on the bar (I told him about Emmanuel), but when Christian came back to take their meal orders, I could feel his wife’s eyes staring at me instead of her screen, so I comfortably settled back in to my book.

“Any allergies,” Christian asked after taking their menus.

“None that I’m aware of,” the man said and I choked on my beer at hearing the phrase my mother had trained me from a young age to use during any doctor’s appointment.

She was everywhere tonight.

Not everyone who sat next to me spoke to me and not everyone who spoke to me sat next to me. There were three women — all fabulous and clearly tourists — who were so close that I’d presumed them to be sisters, right up until half an hour after they’d sat down and one said to the other, “I’m quite sorry, how do you pronounce your name?”

Good spirited, the woman recited her name, then in the next breath, asked Christian for a Negroni because, “There’s nothing better than an afternoon drink!” (It was 9:34 PM).

There was a couple who sat across the bar from me. I’d acknowledged they were there only in the sense that I have been living in a city for long enough to be aware of who and what is happening in a room at all times. Still, I was shocked when they came up to me, full from their meals and giddy with wine.

“We have to know what you’re reading! You look so enthralled,” the woman said, her words so eager that they spilled on to each other.

There was another man who took the seat of the mother next to me before the talkative man and his silent wife occupied it. He was alone — unmarried, from his finger, but ordered a meal and a drink and was thoughtfully quiet the entire evening. After an hour, when he’d finished and paid and stood up to leave, he tapped me on the shoulder.

“It’s been an honor sharing the joy of our silence together,” he told me, shrugging on his jacket and following the two hip, older women out the door.

Earlier in the day, I’d been feeling alone. It was part of that angst that led me out of the apartment. I was deep in my solitude, but needed to be surrounded by the chatter of people to not feel the quietness of my current life. Maybe that’s why I came back to a place I’d already been before — I wanted, I needed to be acknowledged, at least as the background character in someone else’s story.

Doesn’t everyone?

“Underneath all that is a real important truth,” the chic woman with the bangles said to her friend at the end of their meal. She leaned in close to whisper what the truth was, her thick frames touching the side of her friend’s face. She told the real truth too quietly for me to hear, but it didn’t matter — being able to be a joyful silent witness to their exchange was important enough.

This, in and of itself, is not surprising. We live in Brooklyn, in an apartment building of six units that used to be an entire house – the walls of our home are essentially made of paper mache. My roommate, Olive (read: she is a cat), and I wake up at 5 AM because my upstairs neighbor wakes up at 5 AM and we’re in tune to his alarm. It is not uncommon to hear someone in the building, but not in my unit, sneeze. I have made years worth of content filming myself listening to my landlord and super yelling friendship-ending phrases at each other through the floors of the apartment below mine, each sentence crisper than the next, all while never seeing their faces. No, the disturbing part about being able to hear my neighbors having sex is not actually being able to hear them – it’s the sounds themselves.

To put it bluntly: someone is faking.

The first time I heard it happen, I woke up in the middle of the night and it took me ten full minutes to realize that the sounds were actual sex. While enthusiastic, their rhythm was just…off. There’s just no possible way the noise coming out of those two people at different frequencies are experiencing the same amount of pleasure! I wrote it off as a fluke, but the second time it happened, I had a witness. I, too, was being intimate with a new-ish partner and when they started next door, their sounds of loud moans and inconsistent screams were killing our vibe. Quickly, I scrolled through my phone to put on music that could reset our mood and, in a panic, chose… Andre 3000’s flute album.

Almost immediately, I realized this was the wrong choice, but I forged ahead with confidence, pretending that having sex to an album once described as “an 87-minute devotional to new age, ambient jazz and spiritual discovery” was a hot and normal thing to do. “It kind of felt like we were fucking at a wellness spa,” he told me after we’d finished and it became a running joke for the remainder of our relationship.

After he left, though, I thought about how, if I could hear my neighbors having sex, they could also hear me and now, they would probably think wellness music turns me on. I didn’t consider it a problem – we did not utilize Andre 3000 again – up until earlier this month when I started playing calming music from my television 24/7. My apartment, no matter what time of day, is now always filled with soothing jazz and that is because Olive is lightly depressed.

My roommate, Olive, who, again, is a cat, was very, very sick this month. I spent the better part of a week dragging her to x-rays and ultrasounds and, in the moments I wasn’t handing my life savings over to the vet, I was sobbing while sitting next to her in the kitchen because the cold tile was the only place she wanted to lay and I thought she was going to die.

I love O deeply. Last summer, on a whim fueled by egg-freezing hormones, I took her home after friends of friends found her outside their apartment. (“We’ve named her Chrysthamum,” one of the girls told me, as if I could possibly spell that on every vet form). Olive is the most chaotic cat I have ever met. When I said that we wake up at 5 AM to my upstairs neighbors alarm, what I did not mention was that she wakes me up by dangling herself from my ceiling, Mufasa-style, until I get out of bed. I have not slept through the night since August 2024 and yet, every time we are laying on the couch together, O purring on my chest, I look at her and say, “We are so lucky we get to live together.”

Olive greets me every time I come home by running the length of my railroad apartment from window-to-window like a 9 pound Olympian sprinter, so when I walked in the door after work earlier this month and she was lethargic, something felt off. Even more concerning than her lack of energy, she couldn’t use the bathroom at all. Over the course of the evening, she was in and out of her litter box almost 50 times and yet, nothing came out.

After a week’s worth of tests and drug trials, the results came in – Olive gave herself stress stones, likely caused by depression from me starting a new job and not being home as often. This, obviously, sent me into a spiral (and also gave me stress stones... I actively have a stomach ulcer as I type this) and after purchasing every stress-reducing cat toy on Amazon, I also began playing calming music in the apartment in attempts to relax her while I’m not home.

Outside of my close group of friends and the people who see me daily, no one knew Olive was sick – just like no one knew the other bad things that happened to me this month. Shortly after uttering the sentence “I think I want to run a half marathon,” I woke up unable to put any weight on my leg. (After getting my own set of x-rays and ultrasounds, I learned I have a torn quad muscle!). Someone came back into my life with a large romantic gesture and, despite having some reservations about the intentions, I decided to take the leap and say yes to going on an international trip together. (A week later, he told me he actually wanted to go alone!). For unknown reasons, my full fucking fingernail fell off. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Usually, all of these were things I would share in a quipped tone on a curated, black and white Instagram story, but for the first time in a long time, I really didn’t want to be perceived. I didn’t want to post Olive’s shaved tummy for an exchange of crying face replies. I didn’t want to choose a photo of me looking cute with my new haircut, knowing that I was sad under the surface. I didn’t want to pretend that everything was ok or funny! My cat was maybe dying! I couldn’t walk! My fantasy of “finally ending up together” was over! I Googled and learned IT TAKES SIX MONTHS FOR A FINGERNAIL TO GROW BACK – I was not well and didn’t have the energy to pretend to be so, as all of this was happening, I decided to quietly disappear from the Internet.

I haven’t lived without social media, really, since I was in college and they forced us to deactivate our Facebook’s for a month during sorority recruitment. I thought maybe I would feel disconnected to my friends – I didn’t know what anyone dressed as for Halloween! I was missing so many memes! – but I found I didn’t miss looking at my phone at all. I felt so much more present with the people around me. I didn’t receive any Instagram likes on a photo of Olive looking sad, but I did have friends who volunteered to work from my apartment to spend time with her while I had to go to the office. This month was hard, yes, but it was also filled with dinner parties and intimate evenings out and new hairstyles and winning awards at work and late night conversations over meatball sandwiches and martinis and cuddling with animals and being with my family and joining new creative communities and running into old friends on the street and breaking patterns and meeting new people and accomplishing significant goals and being vulnerable and accepting my limitations and being fully offline for all of it made me deeply grateful for the community I’ve curated in my real life.

It is funny, I guess, to write an essay about not being online knowing that you are… going to post it online. I don’t have a desire to return to social media in the way I was once consuming it – I found myself taking photos this month and thinking, “Who is this for?” and was pleased when the answer went from being “Instagram” to “Myself.” That being said, I don’t know what the future of my social media usage looks like, but I do know it will be less than before. I want to spend more time laughing with my friends, creating things with my hands, asking for help from my community and making myself known, really known, outside of a 4:5 frame.

Before Olive got sick, I pulled a card for my storytelling writing prompt project and got “Talk about a time you felt free” and then, almost immediately, spent a week trapped inside with an unwell cat and a hurt leg. It’s a little too on the nose to say that I ended up writing that essay anyway, just like it’s too on the nose that I am the owner of a cat with light depression and stomach issues (“Hot girls have tummy problems,” I say to O now while we are laying on the couch, both in pain). But, I’ve been thinking a lot about the steps I needed to take to make sure that Olive got better. She needed quality time and relaxation and music and activities that stimulated her brain – how silly it is to only realize now that’s what I needed to feel free, too.

For what it’s worth, I did not want to tell this story. Something I am trying to do less of is write about men. I’ve been writing about my relationships on the Internet for over ten years (if you dated me in 2016, I am so sorry) and, while I do love being described as the friend who has the wildest first date stories, I hate when people will compliment my writing by telling me “Wow, you really are just like Carrie Bradshaw!” I have only seen the series once, but… my friends, that is not a compliment! She’s literally the worst of the characters! All of that being said, I did, unfortunately, actually feel like Carrie last week when I went through what could only be described as the 2025 digital version of her devastating post-it note break up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about meeting someone I really connected with and how sad I was when the “relationship” ended after only one week. In it, I specifically noted that I was not writing this to beg for him back, but a couple weeks after it went live, he reached out, asking if we could talk. I’d assumed he wanted to address me calling him my Business Week Boyfriend on the Internet without his permission. Instead, I was shocked when he said he actually wanted to give us another try.

Over dinner, he told me that he missed me. He said he hadn’t stopped thinking about me since he’d ended it and couldn’t believe he’d walked away from something that had the potential to be so good. I was pleasantly surprised. I’d gone to our meeting expecting to have to answer for my keyboard crimes and, instead, was coming out of it with… certainly not a boyfriend, but someone who could maybe, someday, fill that role. We spent the weekend together — talking in the park! cuddling on the couch! babysitting my brother’s pup, Vito! — and then, exactly one week after our dinner, I woke up to a text from him, in so many words, telling me “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.”

I was surprised but, honestly, I couldn’t even be mad — begging me to come back and then breaking up with me exactly a calendar week later for the second time while accidentally quoting one of the more iconic break up lines of our generation is, unfortunately, an extremely funny bit.

Vito, when he realized he was going to have to share his couch with me AND a man.

When my Business Week Boyfriend text me to end it, again, I was actually on a Business Trip. I’d flown to Seattle for a creative conference and spent a few days surrounded by other designers at my company, listening to talks from extremely well-known artists. While the official through line of the conference was technically about AI, the unofficial topic almost every speaker mentioned was the importance of finding creative outlets outside of our careers. We should be pushing the limits in our 9 to 5, yes, but inspiration doesn’t need to just come from inside our computer screens. Creativity can be found in how you decorate your apartment, how you interact with the outside world (almost every person said some variation of the sentence “Please, go touch some grass”) and, the one that really stood out for me, was finding creativity in how you dress.

In the past few months, I have gone into my new office 47 times which I know is accurate because I have a running list in my phone of every outfit I have worn there. I have a walk-in closet with floor-to-ceiling shelving – something that sounds like a luxury until you remember my super, who I love, but who I also believe is currently knocking down a load-bearing wall while renovating the unit below me literally as I type this, is the person who built them and every day as I am getting dressed, I fear it will be the day his makeshift shelves will fall and crush me. Despite this fear, within those unsturdy shelves, I have a lot of clothes. When I started going into the office five times a week, I decided I would wear something new each day until I ran out of options. I haven’t purchased anything – which goes to show how much my closet really can fit – and it’s been exciting to put together new combinations of clothing to outwardly express my creativity. And, on this business trip, coincidentally the day I was Digitally Burger-ed, I wore a dress that I hadn’t put on since I’d flown back to Ball State in April.

Earlier this year, I was asked to return to my college to be the keynote speaker for something called J-Day. J-Day is, essentially, journalism-nerd boot camp for high school students. (It should surprise exactly no one that one of my jobs in college was running this event). For a singular day, all the newspaper and yearbook students in the state of Indiana come to Ball State to learn from professionals working in the field and the entire tone of the event is kicked off in the morning with the keynote speaker. When my old boss called me to ask me to speak, he told me there was no theme (I believe they stopped theming the events after they realized it was insane to pay me to dress up as an animal and dance in a music video for our extremely 2014-coded theme, “What Do the Facts Say?!”) – and that I could fill the 30 minutes allotted on stage to talk about anything, as long as it related to journalism.

I was deeply honored to be asked to speak. The Ball State journalism program made me who I am – the only reason I have the career I do is because of the opportunities opened up to me while going to school – but every time I sat down to write my speech, I didn’t know where to begin.

When I was a little kid, I used to dream about being successful. And, success means different things to everyone, but for me, I knew that it meant I wanted to work somewhere well known. I’ve always been embarrassed to admit that – that even as a seven year old, success felt so contingent on my content being seen – but it’s the consistent goal that carried my career to where it is now. My first job out of college was at one of the more prominent newspapers in the country and ever since, I have continued to find myself at institutions people tend to recognize. (Once, at my last job, I took a therapy call from a glass conference room and realized I’d forgotten to tell my new therapist where I worked when a co-worker waved to me through the window and my therapist had to stop mid-sentence to say, “....was that Al Roker?”)

Still, despite my career seemingly littered with wins, I felt like an imposter being asked to speak. Who was I to get up on stage in front of 1,000 literal children and tell them about how I got to where I was?! Also, do you know how long 30 minutes is?! The crux of the issue, really, is that I was successful, but I didn’t feel successful. I thought about what I would have wanted to hear at that age, what I would have wanted to tell my younger self (which – that’s the question on my prompt card this week for this personal project! I got to the thesis statement eventually!) and I decided I wanted to normalize this feeling of imposter syndrome.

I ended up giving a speech on three different times in my career I didn’t feel like I was capable of completing a project – and how I overcame that imposter syndrome to prove myself wrong. And, while I was up there talking to the teens, something fascinating happened. For maybe the first time ever, I actually did feel successful. I had never seen my career laid out in Powerpoint Presentation mode before and looking at everything I had accomplished since leaving Ball State really did feel excellent.

The first time I’d sat in that same auditorium, I was 18 at freshman orientation and my dream was to someday have a well-known career in journalism. As I stood on that stage, I was finally able to recognize that I did it — I actually was living that dream.

One of my friends recently told me that every morning, she wakes up and the first thing she says out loud is, “Show me how good it can get.” I absolutely adored this and wanted to implement it immediately into my own life. Not wanting to steal her catchphrase, I was reminded of when I visited an art exhibit / Instagram Curation Palace last year — before walking through a room full of mirrors, I was asked to stand still and stare at myself. As I waited, words appeared in the reflection that said, “Are you living your dream?”

So, every morning, I try to have those be the first words I say out loud. I will not lie to you — it does sometimes feel a little facetious to speak “Are you living your dream?!” on mornings I wake up sad or stressed or, let’s say, I don’t know, to a text from someone I saw a future with breaking up with me, again. And, I am not naive enough to think every morning that I wake up, the answer to that question is going to be resounding “Yes!” especially in an industry as volatile as journalism… but it is a good reminder to consider daily my accomplishments and creativity. My younger self was so obsessed with brands and titles that I’d forgotten about the actual work I did to get to where I am now — and maybe being able to finally have that recognition is what success really is.

I was surprised by our relationship ending before it could even really begin. It had only been a week, but it had been a good week – ice cream! walks in the park! movie dates! massages! conversations that lasted hours! – and, for the first time in a long time, I had been excited about the potential of what we could become. I was shocked when it was called off… both because the last time I’d seen him, I’d run out of my apartment door straight into his arms and he’d picked me up like Ryan Gosling picks up Rachel McAdam’s in “The Notebook,” kissing me while carrying me down the street and, also, because the “break up” conversation began with him sending me a photo of him biking, me responding that I was at the gym, him saying “you know what I have been thinking about?,” me replying “tell me!” OBVIOUSLY THINKING IT WAS GOING TO BE SEXUAL, and then him sending a text that said he didn’t think it was a good idea if we saw each other anymore.

For the amount of time we had known each other, I was disproportionately upset. Still, while I recognized the reaction was Too Big, it didn’t stop me from crying in a conference room. I’m a good dater and date a lot – it’s fun to meet new people, go to new places, drink new drinks, see new things – but I rarely have a connection that makes me want to take a relationship to the next level. I’ve dated people casually for months, sometimes even years, always having a good time, but never a great enough time to have them, like, I don’t know, meet my mom. I was crying because I’d felt differently about this man from the moment I’d seen him which, with my dating record, tracks. The handful of times I’ve met someone who I’ve thought had the potential to share my life with, it is, almost always, an instantaneous connection.

Zach and I have been friends since we were 18 and we got in our Second Biggest Fight Ever last year over him making fun of me for getting attached to someone too fast. (It deeply pains me to say our First Biggest Fight Ever happened in the Times Square Red Lobster over whether or not my boyfriend at the time was depressed. (He was – I was wrong). Our Third Biggest Fight Ever happened in Zach’s living room in 2015 over whether Chris Brown is a featured artist in Nicki Minaj’s song, “Only.” (He was, I was wrong and I do still owe ZG $100 because of this)).

Despite me losing the majority of our heavy-hitting arguments, I feel strongly that I won our fight last year. We were at dinner — not in Times Square — when I brought up how much I liked someone I was newly seeing, someone with whom I had such a strong bond with immediately upon meeting that the bartender serving us on our first date thought we had been a couple for years. Zach laughed at me for falling too fast, citing the other times in our friendship we’d had this exact conversation. I was mad at him – partly because I really liked this guy (“This is different!!!,” I insisted loudly, certain we’d be together for a long time (I was wrong)), but mostly because I admire that I have the ability to put myself out there and be vulnerable when the opportunity arises. And, yes, this does lead to me sometimes getting my heart broken for falling too fast! But, if it feels intense enough, if the connection seems effortless – even when it ends, I’ll always think it was worth it.

When I pulled my card for this week’s prompt, it asked me to tell a story about a time I admitted I was wrong. I guess, if you look at it from a number perspective, Zach was right and I was wrong – I’m sitting at a bar, sipping a martini (I am, desperately, trying to become someone who likes martinis) writing a piece about how I am single despite being so sure about multiple men. Initially, I was going to make this post a list of all the times I had realized I was wrong, a list of all the times I had realized that the person I had been so sure about was actually, maybe, not the man for me. And, there were many examples – the ex who told me he was surprised I wasn’t skinnier for how much I worked out! the man who said “I can’t believe you are single”… while he was in my bed! the guy who always insisted on making us salmon for dinner even though it gave him diarrhea literally! every! time! – but as I started writing, even though all these things were objectively Very Bad, I realized I wouldn’t have done anything different in our relationships. The reasons were varying as to how I eventually concluded these men were wrong for me in the long term, but in the beginning, that initial spark, that feeling of knowing this person was going to be important – I’d never want to change that intuition or excitement.

It did make me wonder though (not me typing “I couldn’t help but wonder” literally with a martini next to me, I am a caricature of myself and anyone who ever watched even a singular episode of “Sex and the City” right now) what made me feel differently about the men who immediately gave me a spark and those with whom I went on dates with that were just… fine. Why did one first Hinge date this time last year end at four in the morning, me extracting myself from him and his home only because I had to feed my cat in an hour when an app date earlier this month, full of interesting conversation and laughter, left me feeling nothing as I left by midnight? What is it that makes the fire happen?

And, of course, something I have been thinking about too as I get older is the difference between feeling that connective energy at 23 and falling for someone when you are 33. At 23, I made eye contact with a bartender from across the room and the strength of his stare literally stopped me dead in place. Had he asked me to marry him the next day, I probably would have said yes, no questions asked. Now, it’s a little (a lot) different. Two years ago, I attended an industry event where I spent the entire evening exchanging eye contact with a photographer. When we finally spoke, the energy was electric and I knew our meeting was important — which, it was! we are no longer romantically together, but I would consider him one of my closest friends (I am, quite literally, meeting him for dinner as soon as I finish this awful martini) — but, despite knowing in the moment he would be an excellent addition to my life, I still wouldn’t have committed to him immediately without knowing other information about him first.

Because when I do have a spark with someone, it’s rare and special, but I’m now also compounding it with other factors – if they are responsible with money, if they have good habits, if they take care of their body and their home, if our lives are compatible, if they prioritize their friendships and their families. For what it’s worth, all of these things were not only attributes the man I spent a singular week with had, they were also things he said he admired in me on a night we were laying in bed and I asked, “What do you like about me?” Truthfully, I had been expecting him to list physical qualities about why he found me hot (famously, I once asked my boyfriend at the time the same question and the only things he could think of were “your smile and your ‘porn star quality asshole’” which was around the time I started to be less sure about our relationship), but the fact he listed the same features I found important in a partner made me feel even better about our potential future — and made it harder when he called it off.

It’s important to note I am not writing this essay to beg for my Business Week Boyfriend back. I’m writing it to remind myself that connections, big ones, can happen anywhere and when I’m least expecting it — at parties, on Hinge, at that industry event I have attended only twice in the past three years and both times, somehow come out of it with the number of a man I felt had the potential to change my life. Often, after relationships that have a momentous start end, I tend to feel a little despondent. After such a deep energy exchange, after such a gratifying connection, after feeling so known and so seen, it can feel like something like that will never happen for me again.

I’m writing this essay because I hope I am wrong about that.

My grandpa passed away in late 2021, but because he lived right outside the city I’ve lived my entire adult life, I had the distinct privilege of getting to see him often. Every six weeks or so, pandemic non-withstanding, I’d take a 45 minute train ride to the house my mother grew up in and have dinner with him. Most nights, I ended up staying, falling asleep on a couch older than me, so that we could extend our time and have breakfast together in the morning.

During the time I was alive, my grandpa lived my dream life — every morning, while he was still able, he’d wake up early to go for a long walk around the lake. He’d then read the entire newspaper, front to back, while drinking coffee and then, pending on the season, alternate between reading books on the back porch in the sun or in his favorite living room chair. At night, after eating ice cream, he would watch what I always considered old movies, but really, I guess were just movies that made him feel young again. Despite being in his 90’s, he often stayed up later than me — the couch older than me was very cozy — and I loved the comfort of falling asleep in my twenties to the same sounds I fell asleep to in my childhood, knowing he was right next to me.

For my entire life, my grandpa couldn’t hear well and, while some things were lost in translation — for a portion of my career, he believed I was a writer at The New York Times instead of an art director at TIME (perhaps this is one of the reasons he read the newspaper front-to-back each day… once, he looked up at me exasperated over the paper at breakfast and said, “When are they finally going to give you a byline?!”) — but we were always close and always able to communicate. Before we moved to Idaho when I was two, I saw my grandparents almost every day. And, along with select stories from the war (my grandfather was a WWII Marine) and stories about growing up in the Bronx (my personal favorite is his youngest sister using garbage trucks as her preferred form of transportation, hopping on the back of them to get around the city daily) and stories about how deeply he loved my grandmother (our family curse, truly, is that no one in their blood line will ever be as hot as they were), he loved to talk about this brief period of time.

I get my preference of walking over driving from him. Whenever I came over, he’d load me up into my stroller and walk us a few miles on his daily errand to pick up the newspaper and a singular pack of M&M’s. (The amount of times I have ran this exact errand in my adult life is numerous — if it was not already obvious, my grandfather and I were very, very similar). Every week, we spent hours together, him pushing me; me, even then, yapping.

I do think it’s important to note that I spoke in full sentences from a freakishly early age. My mom often talks about how people would look at her in abject fascination and horror at the store when they realized the voice asking, “Why are you buying Pampers if Huggies are on sale?” was coming from the peanut sitting in the shopping cart who was actually going to be wearing the diapers. On these walks, I never stopped talking and my grandfather, unable to hear well even back then, always nodded along, just pretending to understand what I was saying. His favorite story, the one he told often, was how I would finish speaking and turn around in my stroller, looking up at him expectantly for a response to my monologue. Every time, he’d say, “I didn’t know that!”

And, every time, throwing up my hands and giggling, I’d say, “I didn’t know that either!”

This was one of the last stories my grandpa told me before he passed away. Toward the end, I saw him often, taking the train every couple weeks trying to make up for the lost visits the pandemic ripped from us. I was lucky enough to be there the day hospice came, a hauntingly beautiful sentence to type. Not only did I get to say everything I ever wanted to say to my grandfather on the last days of his life, I got to do so alongside my mom and four of her six brothers. It was a special experience to be able to look around a room and be surrounded by multiple men who I know would drop anything if I needed them. My grandparents raised seven children and my grandpa built the foundation that’s led to our family still being so close — it was important to me that I was able to be there while he heard our gratefulness for that one last time.

The night my grandpa died, my brothers and I went to a bar in Brooklyn. I remember the night a little as a fever dream — I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, had decided to still go through with getting my Covid booster shot that day. I remember looking around and thinking, “I am a different person in here now than I was 24 hours ago.” Death, even when you are expecting it, still changes our lives and our stories. I was no longer a person with any living grandparents. I was no longer a person who would be traveling monthly on that 45 minute train. I was no longer a person who would ever fall asleep on a couch older than me, in a house my mother had grown up in, knowing someone who had loved me my entire life was happily sitting in the room, too.

I didn’t go back to the bar, couldn’t have even told you what the name of it was until a few years later, when I was seeing someone and his grandmother died. That night, as a distraction, he asked if I wanted to go out and sent me the name of where to meet. And, when I walked inside, I realized it was the same place. I didn’t tell him until later, the next morning, when I was asking him to tell me stories about his grandmother. I remembered what it was like to have that realization something was over, that you were a different person, in the exact same place he must have had those feelings, too.

“Oh, wow,” he said, when I told him about the coincidence. “I didn’t know that.”

And, I didn’t say it, but all I could think was: “I didn’t know that either.”

On a walk during my lunch break, I stumbled into a book store and picked up one of those popular “get-to-know-people-intimately-by-asking-them-insanely-personal-questions” card games. At the time, I really had no interest in hosting people to play it — I love my apartment, but my heat is spotty at best during the winter months and, while they do love me, I didn’t think my friends would enjoy being interrogated in the cold. Still, the concept of picking a card and telling a story was appealing to me, so, every month, I wanted to choose a prompt at random and write whatever came to mind.

I did it twice — “Anxious Sun, Avoidant Moon, Secure Rising” and “Stick of Gum” — and then, during what Zach and I refer to as the Q2 Crash Out (save for four nights, I did an activity every! single! evening! for two-and-a-half straight months; this inevitably led to a montage of chaos, culminating in me sobbing on the MetroNorth at midnight out of pure exhaustion), I couldn’t find time for writing (this is upsetting because writing is the thing that makes me, me) and stopped.

I am no longer crashing out and have actually gotten pretty good at prioritization in my personal life, so — as we are approaching the last third of the year, I wanted to try this project again. With fresh eyes and spirit last Monday morning, I pulled a random card out of the deck before leaving to workout. I was… immediately annoyed. The card said “tell a story about a time that makes you cringe” — and I couldn’t think of anything that really made me cringe. I rarely get deeply embarrassed anymore, something I realized a few weeks ago when I slipped down a full set of subway stairs in the rain, landed splayed out like a starfish, and just… got up as if nothing had happened.

Still, I figured I could pull together some sort of cringey story based on that fall. (I had been coming from getting my septum pierced and, after it was done, noticed a lot of men were looking at me on the train. I thought it was because I looked hot with the new piercing – I later realized the fall had caused my tube top to shift and my entire nipple was out on the whole commute from East Williamsburg to Astoria). Writing a story around that had been my plan until I walked into my workout class, saw my ex-boyfriend in the room and… immediately cringed.

To clarify, this does happen occasionally. My ex works at my gym and, while I’ve been mindful to try to switch our schedules assuming he likely doesn’t love seeing me at his place of work, sometimes our paths cross. And, every time they do, I am humiliated – not because we dated, but because of how I acted… and how I ended it.

A handful of summers ago, I was upset over a boy. It was the “can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, call-Zach-while-crying-on-the-subway-and-leave-a-voicemail-insinuating-I-was-going-to-throw-myself-into-the ocean-with-the-sharks” type of devastation. (I was down bad). I had not felt this way about someone in a long, long time — from the moment we met, the two of us felt locked in, like something big was happening and, so when he began to pull away, I felt incredibly small.

Eventually, our communication fully fizzled out (read: he ghosted me) and I swore that the next person I dated was not going to be someone I felt I had to convince to be with me. I wanted to experience what it was like to be genuinely wanted. When my now-ex asked me out shortly following that break up, he told me on our first date that he was dating intentionally. Despite me not knowing what my intentions were, I felt like this was a good sign of what I had said I’d wanted and we began seeing each other regularly.

Our relationship was not long – two-ish months, if that – but it moved fast and in a way I hadn’t yet realized I wasn’t comfortable with. He told his family about me right away, referring to me as his girlfriend before we’d actually had that conversation and, even though I definitely thought it was too early, I didn’t say anything. (I, famously, once dated the same person on and off in secret for two years because we were co-workers and, when he asked if I wanted to be official a year-and-a-half in, I said, “Don’t you think it’s soon?!”). One night, he was coming over late and, knowing I would be asleep and that my building’s doorbells are decorative, not functional, I gave him a spare key. When we woke up in the morning, I forgot to ask for it back. A few days later, instead of giving me my key back, he handed me a key to his apartment. I should have told him I felt uncomfortable that things were moving too fast, but I again was silent, placing the key on my keychain with a smile plastered on my face while a panic arose in my throat.

And, that’s what I am humiliated about when I see him – that I was an adult woman and still couldn’t communicate my feelings. Again, he was lovely and, all things considered, a really excellent boyfriend. It’s on me that I never showed him any signs of the internal panic that was gripping at me every night. I once again couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, but for very different reasons. I now had what I had wanted, but I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t seem right.

This, of course, led to me finally breaking up with him in a way that must have seemed sudden and, of course, because I can’t do anything normally, in a way that made every person in my life groan when they heard what I had done. (TLDR: we met up for lunch and, with my head in my hands before he could even sit down, I said, “I can’t do this anymore.” When pressed for reasons, I didn’t say anything from the paragraphs above. I just kept repeating that same line over and over and then, (this is the bad part) handed him a gallon Ziplock bag full of Christmas ornaments I had taken from my own tree because we were supposed to decorate his tree later that evening and I felt bad that I was no longer going to be participating).

In “Before Sunrise,” my second-favorite movie and a movie I can only watch if I am Mentally Well, Ethan Hawke’s character tells Julie Delpy’s character a line that lives rent free in my brain. He says:

“You know what's the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with and you realize that is how little they're thinking of you. You know, you'd like to think you're both in all this pain but they're just like "Hey, I'm glad you're gone.”

I thought about this a lot when my ex reached out a month after I’d given him the ornaments, asking if I had had enough space and was ready to try again. I was not – I had already started dating someone from a previous job (a different one than the man mentioned before (I know)) and actually had not thought seriously about our relationship since he’d walked back out of that cafe door, Ziplock bag in hand.

I thought about that scene again – and maybe this is why I am so embarrassed whenever I see him – after I got broken up with this year. I was now on the other side of the break up. I was Ethan Hawke instead of Ethan Hawke’s ex-girlfriend and I. Did. Not. Like. It. Recently, I was reading through my journals from that time (mid Q2 Crash Out) and I found a line where I wrote, “I am angry that he is posting on Instagram while I am crying about him in therapy.” Reading that made me sad for the April version of myself, but also sad for my boyfriend from years before. I was not thoughtful in the weeks after I left him and I am humiliated and humbled by that now.

Ironically, the first person from this story – the boy that made me not eat, not sleep, made Zach come all the way to Bed-Stuy to wellness check me (he lives on the Upper East Side! he took five trains!) – has become one of my closest friends. Almost a year after we’d broken up (read, again: he ghosted me), we met up to clear the air and somehow, that devolved into him now being the person I text when I fall down the subway stairs, the person I call when I need dating advice, the person who snapped the cover art for this story while we were spending a spontaneous Saturday together.

Some of the most comfortable hours of my summer have been spent in his presence. By fully removing the romantic element between us, it’s led to a different type of intimacy – a platonic friendship that I cherish deeply. We knew when we met that our connection was big. It’s been fascinating to take that energy and transform it into the type of relationship that doesn’t run the risk of an expiration date.

A few weekends ago, the two of us were in the backyard of a cocktail bar, having the type of vulnerable conversations you can only have with someone with whom you feel incredibly safe. I expressed something about a previous relationship that had been on my mind and only later did I realize it was the thesis statement of a scene in “Before Sunset,” my first-favorite movie and a movie I can only watch if I am Very Mentally Well. Toward the end of the film, Julie Delpy’s character is telling Ethan Hawke’s character about how their one romantic night, years before, ruined her experience of love. She says:

“In a way, I put all my romanticism into that one night, and I was never able to feel all this again… It made me feel cold, like if love wasn't for me! Reality and love are almost contradictory for me. It's funny. Every single one of my ex’s, they're now married! Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married! And later they call me to thank me for teaching them what love is…”

I talk about this concept a lot in therapy – I am a good dater and I enjoy meeting new people, but I can count on one hand the amount of men who have given me moments that made me feel like that. When those relationships end and I am thrown back into the dating pool with people I’m not fully connecting with (does the Q2 Crash Out make more sense now?) while they, inevitably, start dating someone else seriously, I can feel incredibly alone. I am no longer crying in therapy about my old partner posting on Instagram (we instead need to do a deep dive into why I am scared, at the age of 33, to tell my parents I pierced my septum earlier this month and yes, dropping this as a line in my newsletter they subscribe to is how they will be finding out), but I would be lying if I said that my feelings wouldn’t be hurt to learn we broke up because he wanted something serious… just not something serious with me.

And, to go back to the point of this story, the prompt that started it all, I couldn’t even be upset if that was the case – I myself did that years ago to my ex, which is why seeing him now makes me cringe.

Recently, I was at the gym, fighting for my life on the treadmill wearing my 16-pound weighted vest when someone I used to see who works there (not my ex this story is about, another person who works there (I know, my therapist and I see the patterns, too!!!)) approached me because he wanted to tell me he had a girlfriend now. I genuinely was happy for him – our relationship had always been casual and, while it had been hot last summer to be picked up by someone who was 260 pounds to my 130, he was not one of the handful of men who’d made me feel like that. (Also, he once asked if he could use my bathroom and then proceeded to do so with the door open). As I struggled to catch my breath while asking questions about her, the timeline of his relationship became more apparent… I was likely the last person this man had been with before meeting his now live-in girlfriend. It made me think of the next line Julie Delpy’s character says in my favorite monologue. She says:

“Why didn't they ask me to marry them? I would've said no, but at least they could have asked!”

I am aware there is a third film, “Before Midnight,” that, if I watched it, would likely become my third-favorite movie. I have yet to do so. Finishing the trilogy is something I would have to be Extremely Mentally Well for, and I don’t think my therapist will give me that type of full clearance until I stop writing blog posts about past relationships (or dating people who work at Equinox). Still, the fact that I am writing again, that I actually broke out of the Q2 Crash Out, feels good. While writing this, I flipped through my journal from that time again and found a different line, a more positive note to end with. I said:

“There was a line I read in a book the other night that said, ‘I am not here because of you, I am here by way of you’ and I loved the way it made me feel. I am doing it — this, life, me. I made myself into this person who I want to be proud of and, while I had relationships along the way that nudged me into this path, none of them did the actual work or made the choices. I did. Maybe people I date who I wanted to be with seriously find other people — maybe that’s okay. At the end of it all, I’m comfortable with myself.”

One was someone I had dumped on a park bench outside my office in 2019. He was sweet, incredibly so, but despite trying desperately to make it work, I knew we weren’t compatible, mostly because whenever anyone asked me what my favorite thing about him was, I almost always said his delicate tattoos. Eventually, after enough of my friends had stared at me blankly when I gave my answer, I knew I needed to let him go.

Another was someone who had technically never broken up with me, nor I with him, but we hadn’t seen each other since 2021. We’d dated casually for eight months and the last communication we’d ever had, when I’d expressed that I was upset he had canceled on me before leaving on a vacation where he’d be gone for three weeks, was a text message that said, “Don’t worry, Angel, the time will pass by quickly.” It was unclear to me, despite us being together for the better part of a year, if “Angel” was a nickname or if he literally thought my name was Angel, but in his defense, the time did pass by quickly — when I ran into him at a karaoke bar near neither of our apartments in early June, it was hard for me to believe it had been almost four years since he’d sent me that text and we’d never spoken again.

And, of course, the last one, the one this story is about, is someone I had not expected to see ever again when I’d broken up with him…less than 48 hours earlier.

To give a little background — in February, two days before my birthday, the person I’d been in a “casual” relationship with that had quickly devolved into one of the more serious connections of my life had decided we should no longer date each other. Seeing as we had met three weeks after he got out of a five year relationship, this was not surprising, but was ultimately devastating. When I returned from an impeccably planned two week trip to Australia immediately after our break up, I felt determined to come back to America and prove that I could energetically tackle the world of dating again.

From the first date, I was extremely clear with all the men I started to see regularly that I was not interested in a serious relationship. This seemed to be information enthusiastically received by all of them — and, one of these men, was Eddie. (This is not his real name as I have learned my lesson about using men’s real name’s for dating stories on the Internet after referencing the bartender I dated in 2016 by his god-given name so often in posts after we broke up that he cold DM’d me about it after eight years of silence. Once again, sorry for that, Jake, and also, sorry because the bit is going to continue on the Substack).

Over the course of two months, Eddie and I went out on four dates. I had a tendency to cancel on him — Olive, my cat, had an emergency vet appointment; a college friend surprised me by being in town; a work dinner ran late — so our hangs, while fun, were few and far between. Looking back, I think this was partially because I could sense he was more invested than I was and that made me feel guilty. Our dates always lasted hours (we were both yappers), but I knew he thought I was giving 100% of who I was to him and, at the time, I really only had the emotional capacity of about… 30%. (The only first dates I have been on in the past year where I have excitedly and without any effort given someone my full energy was very long ago, with the man who later broke up with me before my birthday, and very recently, with someone who is now, as you are reading this, driving everything he owns to move across the country — one would not say my timing for finding men I connect with is great).

Anyway, on what would end up being our last date, it had been about a month since Eddie and I had seen each other. Over dinner, he asked me if I was still not interested in being in a serious relationship with him and I responded that yes, my answer had not changed — I still was not.

“Okay,” he told me, “In the spirit of full transparency, I do have to let you know… I am going to be in an exclusive relationship with someone else starting July 1st.”

Seeing as we were having this conversation on a date during the first week of June, this was a… fascinating timeline to me. Obviously, I needed to know more.

Basically, Eddie had also been seeing other people, a thing I fully supported as my own roster at the time could have competed as the starting line up of a basketball team (and, probably won — this is not relevant to the story, but everyone I had been seeing was Very Tall). One of the women he’d been dating was someone he’d been seeing for about a month and, the weekend before, they’d gone upstate to a quaint bed and breakfast to celebrate their shared birthdays. On their way home from their adorable celebration, this sweet, sweet woman had told him she’d like to be exclusive. And, instead of saying yes or instead of saying no, Eddie said…

“…can I have until the end of summer?”

And, instead of saying yes or instead of saying no or instead of walking away and saying, “Actually, you can have your whole life,” which — for everyone reading this, is the correct response, this sweet, sweet woman said…

“…you can have until July 1st.”

Negotiating a relationship as if it was a start date to a job was perhaps one of the most insane things I personally had ever heard when it came to dating but, because I had been thinking, “Yeah, July 1st seems like about the time this relationship is going to wrap up for me anyway,” I didn’t add any commentary to the confession. Instead, after checking the date and making sure we were at least two weeks out from me hooking up with someone’s boyfriend, Eddie and I went home and had sex for the first time.

Despite having a girlfriend literally on deck, one of the reasons I knew Eddie was more into me than I was into him was because he used to get upset that we did not text often. Once, he told me I was “the worst texter he’d ever encountered” because I only ever messaged him when we were coordinating schedules for dates.

“You never just text me to ask about my day,” he told me once, to which I replied, maybe kind of harshly, “Why would I need to know every detail about your day? You are saved as ‘Eddie Hinge’ in my phone!”

All of this is to say, we’d already made plans to see each other again, so I was surprised to look down at my phone about a week after we’d hooked up for the first time to see a text from ‘Eddie Hinge.’

“Heyyyyy,” it said, “Question for you….. when was the last time you were tested?”

This, obviously, threw me into a spiral. I don’t believe there should be a stigma around STD’s and I am extremely open to having conversations about sexual health, but, all that being said, I was not receiving this text during a time in my life where I had the capacity (emotionally, physically, spiritually or logistically) to deal with the consequences. After a short panic attack on the bus, I responded (“In March, before egg freezing, why, what’s up?”), and was furious when Eddie text me back, “Nothing in particular... I didn’t burst into flames or anything.”

The cavalier attitude of sending a text like that without any context — and without any reasoning — was the final straw of me realizing I no longer was interested in being in casual relationships and had to break up with my basketball team. The weekend before, I’d been over at another man’s apartment, someone I had been seeing fairly frequently since right after I’d gotten back from Australia. After we’d finished our adult activities, he immediately got up to go to the other room. I’d assumed he was grabbing a glass of water and was coming back, so was surprised when he did not return and I heard him talking to his dog instead.

“Don’t worry, Stanley,” he told the dog (Stanley is the dog’s real name), “We’re going to go to the bar in 20 minutes.”

As I started to get dressed and listen to this one-way conversation, it became clear that while Stanley was invited to the bar, I was not and, knowing I was too polite to say anything about it, this man was using plans with his dog to essentially kick me out of his apartment. I found this deeply hilarious, but on my walk home, realized the fact I found it funny and not disturbing was likely a sign it was time to move on from these casual relationships.

The afternoon after the STD text, I sent Eddie a kind, but firm message explaining that our communication the day before had thrown me off. “I think it’s incredibly important to have conversations about sexual health,” I wrote, “but those talks DO take a lot of energy and I realized yesterday after you sent your text that I don’t have the energy to do that. It’s been fun getting to know you, but I want to reprioritize some other parts of my life instead of casual dating.”

Seeing as we were now less than three weeks out from him being in an exclusive relationship with someone who was not me, I thought he’d take this text pretty reasonably.

This was a miscalculation on my part.

The rest of my day was full of lengthly paragraphs expressing confusion at why I was ending things so suddenly. He asked for us to meet up, to have a phone call, to get closure (again, we only went on four dates and I think it’s important to note I did not need closure after the eight month / “Angel” example from above!). When I reiterated that I didn’t think there was anything else for us to say, he told me he thought I was using the STD conversation as an excuse for what I was really upset about — the fact that he was going to be exclusive with someone else soon.

“Hey, no, it really has nothing to do with that,” I wrote before I fell asleep. “I think it’s really nice you have found someone and I’m excited for the two of you! It’s more me… when I got your text without context about being tested, it made me re-evaluate if having casual sex is worth the risk for me if I don’t feel super invested in the long term and the answer was no. I’m going to spend less time dating, more time prioritizing me until I’m at a spot where I can be more emotionally present in relationships.”

When I woke up that next morning, I had a final text from Eddie. And, it was mean. The general gist of it was: “this relationship has always been very, very much on your terms” and “it was just a little bit of fun you were having” and “it didn’t mean much to you” and, finally, “it’s whatever, I guess your other situationships are a better fit for you.” While I was tempted to respond, again reminding him that he was about to be a boyfriend in a few week’s time, he was, unfortunately for him, correct: I had only been looking for a bit of fun and, while I had enjoyed our hangs, it didn’t mean much to me.

I didn’t bother to write back.

The next night, my brother’s girlfriend, Marie, invited me to get drinks with her, my brother, Jonny, and our friend, Sophie. The bar she’d picked happened to be the bar Eddie and I had gone on our first date at, but considering it was nowhere near either of our apartments, I didn’t find this concerning.

Despite it not being close to our apartments, Jonny and I had decided to walk and, ultimately, because of this, were late. Marie and Sophie, getting there before us, had sat down in the front of the bar at one of the only free tables. The bar had squeezed an absurd amount of spots within the space, so Marie and Sophie were sitting so close to the couple next to them, who appeared to be on a first date, that their shoulders were practically touching.

When Jonny and I walked in, I was delighted to see Marie and Sophie…

…and then was significantly less delighted to see Eddie, sitting directly next to them, one half of that first date.

For the next three hours, I sat next to the man who had written to me just 48 hours prior that he needed closure while he was not only on a first date, but the SAME first date he had taken me on. Neither of us acknowledged each other, though the frantic text I’d had to send to Jonny, Marie and Sophie after I’d sat down explaining the situation (I have not seen three people so fully shocked reading a message in a minute) did acknowledge that the girl he was with was absolutely not his July 1st girlfriend.

I know this only because I am a journalist by trade — I paid off my student loans last month and, damn it, I will be making sure I get my money’s worth out of my Ball State Journalism degree! After Eddie’s mean text, but before running into him on a date, Marie and I had looked up his future girlfriend on Instagram. I would sooner die than do anything with this information (except, I guess, write about it on the Internet), but I was surprised to find out her and I had a mutual, someone I consider a close friend, though we have occasionally gone out on a handful of dates over the years.

Today is July 1st and I would be lying if I said I did not wake up this morning wondering if Eddie and that sweet, sweet woman are finally exclusive. I can’t ask my friend, he doesn’t know — when I told him the story, making him promise he wouldn’t tell her as I didn’t want any of this to get back to Eddie, it turned out they were no longer in touch. SHE had been someone HE had been seeing from Hinge before the July 1st deadline as well (“NOT US DATING THIS COUPLE!!!!!!!!”, I text him in all caps when I found out). They didn’t totally hit it off romantically, but had tried to stay friends, though he told me he didn’t think anything was going to come of that. He’d recently missed her birthday party… the same birthday party Eddie had made the cake for, then taken me out on our last date the very next day.

I only heard from Eddie once after I saw him on that date. I was sitting at a coffee shop, working, when the man I’d broken up with, the one with all the tiny tattoos, walked in with his current girlfriend. I’d seen him, but he hadn’t seen me and, wanting to keep it that way, I pretended to become engaged in my phone.

Looking down, I was surprised to have a text from Eddie.

It was an apology text, a long one, with my favorite lines being “I think upon reflection I think I was starting to actually like you a little bit and I think that was confusing” and “I think you are very very cool. And hot.” Notably, this text did not really recognize that we sat next to each other at the bar, though it did say “I hope we can see each other again in the future, but I’ll leave that in the hands of the universe lol.”

I did not feel the urge to respond (to it or to the identical message sent via Hinge exactly one minute later), but I am grateful for Eddie. After my break up in February, it was impossible for me to give my full emotional capacity in a relationship, so I sought out these casual connections and my basketball team served me well for that. But, now, I’m realizing while I might be ready to start thinking about more vulnerable, more real connections, I’m not in a rush to find someone new to date. These men like Eddie thought they knew me deeply, but I only let them see less than half of who I actually am, of who I actually can be — I’ve missed being known, but even more, I’ve missed prioritizing myself.

And, so, sitting in the coffee shop that day, I read Eddie’s apology message on Hinge…

…then, deleted the app.

I didn’t realize I was crying until after he had fallen asleep, his arms wrapped around me tight, but not with as firm of a grip as they used to hold me. Had he been awake, he wouldn’t have been able to tell either. I was always careful to be quiet in my grief and besides, his sweatshirt was black, a dark slate to disguise my emotions. My tears seeped into the fabric, then disappeared, just like how I felt I was disappearing from him, just like how I felt he had already disappeared from me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d cried in front of him, unknowingly, about his depression. I’d wanted this, us, for years — had waited for it, had fought for it — and to see the future we’d built up so suddenly slip away to this newfound heaviness was too much for me to hold inside. I’d try to hide my tears for as long as I could, not wanting to burden him with how much it was affecting me. I’d sneak to the bathroom late at night to run the faucet while sobs wracked through my body as silently as I could make them. I’d come back, eyes red, telling him about allergies that didn’t exist, resting my head back on his rising chest, falling asleep to the heartbeat I was thankful I could still hear.

Only once did I slip and let him see me cry. It was a rainy Saturday, six am, an early morning where the whole world is already painted in gray. Five months ago, we would have spent that time tracing our fingertips down each other’s bodies, whispering words both sweet and shocking in each other’s ears, releasing ourselves in the pleasure of finally, after all this time, choosing each other.

But, now, his pleasure receptors were gone. Now, he was telling me – he maybe wanted to die.

The first night he realized he was serious about me was far from the first night we had slept together. There was a girlfriend back then, too, but the title didn’t belong to me yet. We hadn’t spoken in months, a silent stalemate, but I’d thought about him every day, drawn to him still in a way I didn’t understand. I tried so hard to stay away, to respect the boundaries of a relationship that didn’t include me, but one message, late at night, was all it took to have me perched back up on his kitchen counter, the first place he used to kiss me slowly whenever I’d come over in the past.

He always knew exactly what I needed, exactly how to kiss me, exactly how to make me his. That night, sitting on his counter, before I would let him touch me, I asked if it was okay that I was there. I knew it was not — knew he was, on paper, not mine — but I asked as a half-heartedly fake attempt to absolve myself for what was about to happen. I wish I could say I felt guilty, but I didn’t. As soon as he placed his thumb on my lower lip, all I felt was that I was back where I belonged.

I’d always felt like my pleasure had been linked to him. In those months we hadn’t been together, I’d unintentionally made myself come to him every day — I tried not to, tried to think of something, anything, else, but the memories of his face or body or sounds or touch would pop into my mind and I’d inadvertently lose myself in that palpable desire. It was more than just a physical need that drew me to him, though. He’d made me feel like myself, was the only sexual partner with whom I’d been able to articulate my wants and needs fearlessly and the only person I’d felt who really knew me. The sigh I breathed into his mouth as his lips slowly touched mine that night was the culmination of months of denied pleasure, but also, the desire to be seen finally being recognized.

Later, when we had found each other fully and moved from the counter to the couch to the floor to the wall and eventually, were in bed, I took my glasses off and put them on the side table – my side – before rolling back over to face him. Looking at me, his eyes unintentionally got wide and in them, I saw everything. I pretended not to know why — asked if I had something on my face, made light of it — but I knew I had witnessed his whole world shifting.

I knew I had seen the moment he realized he only wanted to be with me.

We’ve been together, really together, ever since. And, I’ve been returning to that moment over and over and over again in the past month, as things have gotten harder and I feel so removed from the reminder of who we used to be, of who we could have been by now. His depression doesn’t make me feel desirable and I feel guilty for that. With a false casualness, I put on all the things I know he likes, the lacy lingerie, the sexy skirts, hoping maybe this time will be different, will be like before. I perch myself up on the kitchen counter whenever I walk in the door, but instead of running his mouth down my neck or threading his fingers through my hair or placing that one thumb, perfectly, on my lower lip, he gives me a light kiss and walks away to lay down without me, my desire left unfulfilled and my heart, broken.

I know his depression doesn’t have anything to do with me and that is why I hide my tears – I don’t want him to feel worse for how bad this is making me feel. We still have sweet moments and I cling to them preciously – the coffee in bed; the easy conversation; the laughter, when it comes, that lights up my ears and my hope whenever I hear it – but those moments are so few and far between now that they devastate me a little bit more whenever I leave. I’ve only cried in front of him once, but every Uber driver who has picked me up from his apartment in the past month has seen me come undone the second we start to drive away.

I feel isolated and heavy trying to keep the both of us afloat, like I am constantly struggling to breathe. I don’t want to leave him — how could I leave the person I chose, the person I literally watched choose me — but I feel so disconnected from who we were and from who we could be. I think back a lot to the early parts of our relationship, when we’d spend hours talking and fucking and laughing on the couch or the floor or the bed and how, when he would look at me with his gray-flecked eyes, I’d feel airy with possibility. He looks at me now and I don’t recognize him. He stares up at the ceiling while I trace his tattoos lightly with my finger and I realize I’ve been laying next to a shell of the man I wanted to fall in love with.

In turn, that’s made me a shell of myself, too.

The first night we ever fucked, years ago, we were very drunk. We were friends, mildly flirtatious, but out one night and deep into vodka tonics, I bravely told him we should go home together and was surprised when we did. When I woke up that next morning, I awoke violently, confused. I did not know who was behind me, could not piece together the specifics of the evening until I looked down and saw his tattooed knuckles, familiar to me then only in an amicable context and now, intertwined within my own.

There was a relief when I realized it was him. I felt safe — I’ve always felt safe with him. But, how awful, now, so deep in our time together, to be experiencing this again. Every morning, I wake up to him wrapped around me and I wonder who it is. Is it him or is it the version of him who has been occupying his brain for the past few months? Is it him, the man who would start each morning by kissing my neck, by rolling me over, by staring into my eyes, by making me feel seen? Or is it this person I do not really know — this person who won’t get help, this person who is there, but looking through me, this person who is physically touching me, but is so, so far away?

The night before the morning he told me he had been thinking about dying, we’d been laying on his floor. We used to do this a lot, my head tucked into his shoulder, my legs intertwined with his as we talked, staring sometimes at the ceiling, but mostly at each other. On this night, we weren’t touching and we were out of words — I’d exhausted him with my pleas to get help, to talk someone, to fix this and he’d exhausted me by lying, by saying he was fine. For the first time, I let myself wonder in the silence if I’d rather be somewhere else, with someone else, other than here with him.

I wouldn’t — I always choose him. But, I can’t be everything for him. I can’t fix him. I need him to choose himself, too.

I never know how much is enough. Once, my brother was cooking for us, a group of our cousins, and he asked me to pick up broccolini before I came over and I asked him how much and he said, “Enough for eight people,” and I stood in the produce section for ten full minutes, staring at the vegetables, trying to discern how much that would be.

And, in the end? I bought too much.

Someone I know once gained 40 pounds in a month by eating a pint of ice cream every day during the beginning of the pandemic and at the time, I found this fascinating. I was discussing it in length with my old roommate and she told me she found it fascinating that I found it fascinating because I also did that – ate a pint of ice cream every day. I’ve always been bad at math… I’d thought he’d been eating a quart. A pint didn’t really seem like a lot. To be honest, at the peak of me trying to drown my sad numbness in excess, a pint didn’t really seem like enough.

I don’t do that anymore, eat a pint of ice cream every day. I used to try to add color to my life by oversaturating myself, by filling up on too much of a good thing. But, lately, when I’ve tried to return to those behaviors, just to see if I could still use them as a means to a distraction from the touch of depression that’s painted these months since my egg retrieval, I’ve found I can’t. When I’ve had too much, the food turns ashy in my mouth and I’m unable to swallow, unable to finish – sometimes, unable to breathe.

I was seeing someone last year and we would often eat homemade ice cream on his couch, sharing it in the tiniest of spoonfuls. Those moments cuddling, laughing as we fed each other, were some of the happiest of my life. We ate so slowly, with so much pleasure, so much gratification – I don’t think we made it through the whole pint in our entire relationship. It’s probably still sitting in his freezer, small indents from our shared spoon made at the top and I wonder, sometimes, when I miss him, if he thinks of me every time he opens the cold door.

We were in a relationship that was classified as casually open, a relationship that let us seek pleasure from other people. Initially, I thought this was everything I had ever wanted. I often feel constrained by the thought of monogamy, of being with one person for the rest of my life. But, despite having the freedom to do so, I kept finding it difficult to step out, to seek that pleasure from anyone else. I was so, so happy with my partner. For the first time in my life, I didn’t need more, more, more – I just needed him. For the first time in my life, I felt like this was enough.

It was jarring for me, then, despite us discussing our relationship status in length, to find a used condom in his bathroom trash can when I returned from a vacation. It took me by surprise even though it shouldn’t have – we’d already communicated very clearly that sex with other people was acceptable, if not expected – but all I could think when I saw it was, “How could he possibly do this?” and I thought that right up until I had sex with someone else and then I thought, “Oh, that wasn’t that hard.”

And, it wasn’t that hard, but – I didn’t feel as much pleasure as I had been expecting. I’d assumed that my body would be on fire from being desired by multiple people, but when it came to the actual acts, they felt good, but it was not as strong, not as intense, not as beautiful as I felt when I was with my original partner. It was almost this feeling of too much desire – I’d spent my entire life saturated with excess and now, after experiencing the slow happiness of deep intimacy with a singular person, too much physical pleasure was making me numb.

I think about this a lot now that I am single, now that he is gone, now that I am back navigating a world of app notifications. When a person I used to see years ago found out I was dating again, he jokingly sent me a message that he wanted us to try again. I sent him back a screenshot of my Hinge notifications, a number in the 500’s, and said, “Get in line,” and that was a joke, too, but in reality, the line is too long. I no longer need that much excess, that many options. Because of that, I no longer know how to be in this situational landscape of sexual encounters. I used to be a person who would have been excited about 500 matches on a dating app. Now, I just want that one person to sit on a couch with, to slowly feed me ice cream, but I’m still too broken from this break up to find them — and too healed from experiencing a deep, real connection to gorge myself on a pint alone. I don’t have the emotional capacity for anything other than a physical relationship, but I find myself becoming bored by all the steps of sex with strangers and for the first time, it’s not that I don’t know how much is not enough – I just don’t feel like enough.

I never felt like I crossed a boundary when I would be with other people when I was in that last relationship because we’d established our ground rules, one of which was not spending the night with anyone else. Funny, then, that I felt like I crossed the line the first time I took someone home after our break up. We didn’t have sex, but fell asleep cuddling and when I woke up, unfamiliar arms wrapped around me, I had a dry, chalky mouth, just like I’d eaten too much ice cream. My fear of intimacy, real intimacy, with a person other than the man who broke my heart hasn’t allowed me to spend the night with anyone since. I’m dating multiple people, but I haven’t let any of them get close and I always jump out of their beds as soon as it’s appropriate. There’s one man I am seeing, someone I met the night before my egg retrieval, who routinely brings me pleasure with the physicality of the sex and the words he whispers in my ears, but it’s all transactional. I never come as hard when I am with him as I do when I am touching myself thinking about it after. All of the sex is good, but none of it feels the way it did when someone else’s body is made for your own.

Maybe because of that, I let my new sexual partners push my boundaries in ways I haven’t explored as deeply before. I let them tease me, make me beg for them, hit me, call me names, anything they want as I try to feel something more. But, a lot of the time, during sex now, I find myself thinking about my past partner — would he think this is hot? Would he have done these moves? Is he doing them with someone else right now? We used to finish at the same time, almost every time, and lay in bed for hours after, tangled up deeply in each other's pleasure. I slept with someone I’ve been seeing on Sunday and I timed how long it took me from laying on his bed with his hands on my throat to standing fully clothed in his elevator, on my way home — it was seven minutes.

The morning after we broke up, I scheduled my second round of egg freezing and looking back at that now, I think it was an attempt to feel some sort of control over my future. The future I had seen, the one I really wanted, the one with him, had been ripped from me in the night, so I threw myself into the reality of making a new one, even if I couldn’t envision how it was correct for me. The customer service rep for the fertility place kept asking if I was sure I wanted to do this as I’d spent the entire phone call crying, but toward the end, the numbness kicked in and I felt like I was an actor, just following the lines in a play.

It’s the same feeling I have now whenever I step into the elevator after sex, an actress performing the role that’s expected.

On a week this past April, I had a date with a different man every night for five straight days. A past version of me would have thought this was the dream life, but this version of me would come home after being in rooms I’d never been in and stare at a miniature glass spoon placed on a shelf in my dining room. For my birthday, the last gift he’d ever buy for me, my partner had given it to me — a symbolism of our time spent on his couch laughing, a reminder to enjoy life as slowly, as gratefully, as we ate that one pint of ice cream.

I used to feel happy and warm when I looked at it, but now, I feel overwhelmed, like I did that afternoon when I was staring at all the vegetables in the grocery store, trying to calculate how much broccolini was enough. I look at that spoon and I miss him in the way I hope he looks in his freezer and misses me and wonder when I will stop feeling numb, wonder when I will want to feel connected to someone else, wonder when the memories will no longer feel like too much.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately – been thinking about if I am a good person, a bad one, a selfish one, someone I am proud of. I don’t know if hoarding gum 15 years ago counts toward making me an unkind human, but I do know it doesn’t make me feel good. There’s a lot of things about my past that don’t make me feel good. For a long time, I sat in that discomfort – bathed in it, felt it on my skin every day. Someone I’ve shared more of my experiences with than others wrote me a birthday card this year that said to never be ashamed of who I had been because it’s made me who I am now. I’d pretty much come to the same conclusion myself after years of therapy, but still — it was nice to be seen, really seen, by someone else.

I’m reading a book and I can’t quite figure out the thesis – sometimes I think I am dumber than I used to be in high school. The paragraph that’s stuck with me, though, is about how some people are fated to share their lives, share their art, share their souls. They walk around naked because they are destined to expose themselves. Others, they wouldn’t know how to take their clothes off if they tried. I can’t quite figure out which type of person I am — I write about my entire life on the Internet, but I don’t feel known by that many people. I saw a tweet once that said the secret to not letting people know anything about you is actually to overshare everything surface level about yourself, almost to an obscene level, so that people have the illusion of knowing you, but it never goes too deep and I was horrified, truly, that I do this.

Maybe, actually, that tweet is the thesis of the book.

I wrote part of this in Australia, on a flight to Brisbane. I wrote another part in my head, on a walk around my neighborhood after I FaceTimed Zach and he said “Why are you crying?” and I said “I’m not” and he said “But I can see the tears on your face” and then I felt my cheeks, surprised by the wetness that came away on my fingers. I wrote the rest at a bar in Bushwick, killing time before another date. I should be writing other things, I should be doing other things, but instead, in multiple places across the entire fucking globe, I’ve been doing this, wandering and writing and wasting time, thinking about high school, thinking about gum.

In college, I was in a sorority and if you were too drunk or too loud or too much at an event, the sober monitor would come up to you and hand you a stick of gum. It was a quiet signal to turn it down, get it together, be different, be smaller, be better. It only happened to me once, but when she handed me the gum, I forgot it was a sign. Instead, I was delighted at being given the gum, once such a commodity, just saying “thank you, thank you, thank you!” over and over again as I chewed, still being too much.

On the flight to Brisbane, I started thinking about pain – not my pain, just everyone’s in general. I do this sometimes when I am sad, try to heal the hole in my heart by thinking about other people’s problems. It usually just makes me feel worse, like I am stealing false emotions, like I am, once again, operating only under the illusion of being kind.

I didn’t want to make a lot of noise, so I ripped all my fake nails off on the flight so I could type that sentence without the pitter patter of false plastic on a screen and I felt bad for the guy sitting next to me, watching me do that, just like I had felt bad about the incessant tapping in the first place. But, when I glanced over at him, he wasn’t paying any attention to me at all – he was sketching a house, making his own art, listening to a podcast about Jesus.

His sketch wasn’t very good, but I don’t feel like this essay is, either.

Sometimes, I feel like my writing doesn’t contain anything at all.

I hate wearing fake nails, but I hate getting my nails done even more. I sit through the uncomfortableness because I like to appear made up, professional, put together (and, wonder, always, if this makes me shallow). When I was ripping them off on the flight, I was thinking about the first manicure and pedicure I ever had. The woman was telling me about how she once met the singer of Third Eye Blind at a bar and he wanted her to go home with him, but he was so fucked up that she didn’t think it was really him and said no. Later, she looked him up and realized it was him and thought, “I wonder if I should have gone.” Her and the other women in the salon discussed the implications of this for the rest of the time she painted my toenails. I stayed silent – I was silent a lot back then.

A few weeks after that, the kids of one of the women who had been there were in an accident. They’d been playing with a gun and one of them accidentally shot their sibling to death. I think about that every time someone touches my feet, everytime someone does my nails, everytime I hear the opening chords of “Motorcycle Drive By.”

That’s not my story to tell and I feel bad about telling it. When I was in Australia, I read books, lots of books, on the plane, by the pool, falling asleep to the sounds of animals I didn’t know. One of them was about a writer who mined stories off her friends without asking. Conversations would occur and, later, her friends would see their words, their experiences, in her work – their lives on paper, written in a more contextual, more beautiful prose, but their narratives, nonetheless.

I worry I do that – mine my experiences with others into something that could maybe be called art. But, before I left for Australia, I got drinks with an ex, the one I used to write about a lot, the one I hadn’t seen in five years. I asked him, for the first time, how he felt about that – me putting our relationship issues in writing for others to see – and he told me that he was on a date once where exes came up and he mentioned my writing, my inclusions of him. The next day, his date text him asking to read one of my pieces and I thought that was hilarious. There’s a snapshot in my mind of that night now, the two of us laughing on bar stools about the pain of the past and it’s funny, I guess, how much time really does change everything.

Being in Australia made me feel like time was fake. I was in the future and everyone I knew and loved was behind me, living a day I already had experienced. When I would check my clock to see where we all were in the world, the hole in my heart would rip open slightly when I would see it was night time in America, but I don’t really want to tell anyone why.

I guess that’s what I mean about not being known — I’ll tell you I’m crying, I’ll write it into a funny story, but I won’t tell you what I’m crying about. It’s easier to just write about gum instead.

At my birthday party this year, I stayed out until 6 am. Time felt fake under the club lights there, too. Once, hours in, I walked out of the bathroom and couldn’t find my friends, but I could feel the lights and the sounds pulsing through me and I thought, “Maybe I can just stay here forever” and I don’t know how long I was there by myself, dancing to house music surrounded by strangers, but it could have been seconds or minutes or hours and then, suddenly, I was with my friends again and one of them offered me some gum and my first thought was not that they were offering me a kindness — my first thought was that I was too drunk or too loud or too much or too anything. My first thought was that I needed to turn it down, get it together, be different, be smaller, be better.

Funny, I guess, how it all stays with you.

While we were at drinks, I told my ex that I think I am done writing about him, but maybe that isn’t true because he’s mentioned in this essay. I’ve been re-reading my old journals and when I flipped open to a random page, the first sentence I read was “I do not want to lose him, but I do wonder how long it will take to lose myself.” I hadn’t written it about him, but I probably could have. I probably could have written that about a lot of people I’ve dated and I don’t know how I expect people to know me when, back then, I couldn’t even claim to know myself. When I saw the words, though, I wondered if, in five years, the person I had written it about would someday sit across from me on a bar stool and we’d be laughing together at all the ways we accidentally shot each other in the heart.

When I started this essay on the flight to Brisbane, I thought I knew how it was going to end. Before I left, I had framed that birthday card and hung it on my gallery wall — no one else would ever realize there was writing underneath, but on days I was feeling unknown, I knew I’d be able to look at it, remembering the message on the back that made me feel so seen. There was something there to tie this all together, I knew it, but at the bar this weekend, waiting for a date to begin, I was struggling trying to type my whisps of thoughts into an actual metaphor. I was staring blankly at my iPad when the drunk man on the bar stool next to me closed out his tab. Before he got up, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had a stick of gum.

From my purse, I pulled out a full pack.

I have always carried my nerves in my stomach and I remember my mom said that to me once, that she carried all her nerves in her stomach, too. When Molly told me that Will died, I crumpled over in our garage because as soon as I heard the words, I felt like I was being stabbed. And I remember thinking, before anything else, before “this can’t be happening / I have to tell my family / why / why / why / why / why,” my first thought was, “Oh, I am like my mother,” and every time my stomach hurts from anxiety, I think of that day in December, the first time that feeling ever happened, and I can’t believe, still, that it’s been 15 years and

I had never heard of attachment styles until a man I was dating one summer called me out of nowhere to tell me he thought mine was anxious. And I thought it was wild for him to call me, just to tell me that unprompted, but I liked him so much that I was glad he called me for anything and before we stopped dating, we would sometimes Facetime before bed and I’d fall asleep with a smile on my face, but later, when he pulled away, I would feel that anxious feeling in my stomach and wonder if he was right about my attachment style or if I felt this way because he told me I would. I didn’t eat for days during those stretches of silence because I couldn’t keep anything down and that seems so dramatic now, that’s what I mean when I say I am better now, I am more secure and

I do check my Co-Star every day and I know it’s silly, I know it’s not real, but also, I spent $14.99 to see what their predictions for my 2025 would be. You know, just in case. The app says that this winter I will be moving in silence which I guess feels right because sometimes it seems like I talk and talk and talk and no one hears me, I am too quiet, so maybe I will just stop talking because the app said so and my brother went to a party once where he met a copywriter for them and he asked how it felt to know she had the power to ruin everyone in Bushwick’s day, but today, mine said, “Nothing will surprise you like your own body” and you have to admit, that’s generic, but it is real and

I am in a subway car that has three dogs in it and they are whining at each other. I wonder what they are saying / I wonder when I will feel completely secure / I wonder when my body is not going to be so unpredictable. Ash is the only other person who took Katrina’s sex writing class who also lived in Brooklyn and she said once that she wrote in her notes app every day on the train, so that’s what I’m doing now, typing this into my phone and listening to the dogs and

Every day, before I get on the train, I stop by the bodega next to the station and buy a banana and two power bars. The same man is working the register each time and I am embarrassed, always, about what he must think my life looks like, but I am just trying so hard to feed myself, to be better than I was before. I used to not eat and sometimes, when I am feeling anxious, I still have trouble forcing food down and

In December, I cried on the subway eating a banana and re-reading a story I wrote about my ex-boyfriend. I wrote it when we were still together and looking back on it now, I am so sad for both of us. I sent it to Katrina because I didn’t have a title for it and I needed one before I share it with her new writing groups and when she sent it back, she had called it “A Shell of Myself” and I cried when I read that, too and

Last month, before I sent it to Katrina, I was working on editing it while I was sitting on a grey couch in the sun-drenched room of a guy I am seeing, someone who had only seen me happy. And he asked if he could read it, I think thinking that a story I wrote in a sex class would be hot, but it’s not hot, it’s the saddest fucking thing I have ever written, and I wanted him to read it badly, so badly, but I couldn’t let him because he didn’t know me that sad and

I think it’s also because I wrote a poem once and published it and, in it, I wrote that my boyfriend smelled like home. He read it and we never spoke about it and we broke up five days later and I never saw him again and sometimes I wonder if it was because I showed too much of myself, if I was too vulnerable / too comfortable / too much and

One time, before we broke up, I was sitting on his counter and unprompted, he said he didn’t understand why I wrote my little stories for the Internet and my face was very still, but my entire being shut down because I realized then that if he didn’t know why I had to write, he didn’t know me at all. And I didn’t say anything, just carefully got up to go to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for what felt like hours, but was probably just minutes because when I came out, he didn’t realize anything was wrong and maybe that was the moment I realized I was going to leave. I knew I needed to leave, but I stayed and I felt like an imposter to my own independence for the rest of our time together and

I used to feel like an imposter when I was drinking. Every time I was at a party, I felt like that scene in “Garden State,” you know the one, the GIF everyone had on their Myspace page or maybe that was just me, too, the one where everything and everyone is moving around Zach Braff and he is completely still and in my mind, the scene happened in a pool, but I just looked it up and in the most famous GIF, he’s sitting on a couch and I guess that depiction makes even more sense. That’s how my head has always felt, at parties, in social situations, everywhere and isn’t it funny, but not funny, that I have known that since I was 15 but could never put it into words until now and that I never knew it was anxiety until I said it slowly out loud to my therapist this year, as if I was testing it out and she nodded, just as slowly, letting me come to the answer myself. I thought about that scene when Will died and everyone came to our house and I felt frozen while all the people who loved him were moving around our kitchen and I knew all of our lives had changed and

I have lived here for ten years, last week, and I read an essay once about living in New York and how everything changes so fast and how, eventually, if you live here long enough, places would no longer become as meaningful as they once were. I guess that’s true because I used to not be able to walk on 23rd Street without taking a deep breath even though I would still go out of my way to walk on 23rd Street because the ghosts of those memories were both my best and worst. And, now, I can walk by the empty building that used to house the bar of my past without forcing myself to breathe through my nose, just like I go by his old apartment, the apartment I ironically live down the street from now, the apartment where we fucked for the first time against the door and I still, almost a decade later, remember the exact sound he made and I look up at that third floor window and don’t really feel anything anymore and sometimes, that makes me sad and

Nine years ago, I walked into his bar late at night and asked why I hadn’t heard from him in days and he gave me an excuse and I accepted it and let him take me home and the next morning, I woke him up asking if he was dating other people and he said “yes,” and I said, “I have to go do karaoke” and we never spoke about it again, but I wrote about it on the Internet and when he reached out this summer after years and years and years of silence, he said he always wondered what would have happened if we hadn’t been avoidant and had just had a conversation and I always wondered, too and

He came to visit this summer, three days that felt like magic and at the end of it, he told me the old days were fun, but he likes this version of me better and hearing those words were the most beautiful gift anyone, especially him, could have ever given me and

The night he flew home, I went to a bar I had never been to with my friends to celebrate my brother’s birthday and now, I am at that bar all the time because a man I am dating lives above it and I love when time is a circle in that way and

When I think of Molly, despite years of friendship, the first thing I always think about is the way she said “Jen, I’m sorry” in the phone 15 years ago and I wonder if that’s the first memory the people I had to tell have of me, too and

Sometimes, at parties, I get in my head that I am too quiet, already practicing that season of winter silence, because all the anxieties that alcohol used to drown out are rushing around in my brain and I know now that they are anxieties, so last month, sober, I forced myself to grab a microphone in a conference room at a holiday party surrounded by strangers and I sang off-key and I felt happy in that moment. I thought, “Maybe I am secure / maybe I am changing / maybe this is good,” but briefly, I was back in that bedroom, putting on my clothes, telling him I had to go do karaoke later and

I think I can control my drinking again, think I could be a different person around alcohol and that feels both exciting and scary. So much of it is because I have changed. Maybe part of it is because he has forgiven me for how I used to be. On New Year’s Eve, I had a singular glass of champagne and I didn’t finish it which would have been unheard of five years ago, I would have finished the bottle and then some, but I can’t lie, it felt good to have that warm feeling in my stomach, the tiny flush in my cheeks. When I started telling my friends I was thinking about reintroducing alcohol into my life, they were supportive, but then Zach said to make sure it was for me, not for someone else, and especially not for a man and then I started to panic because I hate thinking that my life could be defined by someone else’s, especially a man’s. I even hate that some of my best writing is about men, hate that even now, I am on the subway writing this fucking essay about men and their opinions of me and

When I was drinking, I used to need a lot of validation, usually of the male variety and I told my therapist the other day that I don’t really feel that way anymore. I tell myself that I write my “little stories” on the Internet for me and that is mostly true, but I do also love the validation from having my art consumed by other people and every day, I think about deleting Instagram and every day, I don’t and

Last week, I woke up and I felt sad for no particular reason at all. I crawled out of the bed that was not my own and rested my head on the shoulder of the man who had just made me coffee and told him I was sad and he rubbed my back on that grey couch in his sun-filled room until I felt better and I thought, “Oh, I guess he could read that piece I wrote about my last relationship now” and

Fifteen years to the day Will died, I had coffee with the man who once called me to tell me I had an anxious attachment style. We were talking about Co-Star and we pulled up our compatibility profile. We only were compatible in sex and aggression and we laughed and laughed and laughed in the coffee shop because it was true, everything else about us was broken. He used to have a bald spot in his beard when we were together, a blank space that was the perfect shape of my thumb and I used to love pressing the pad of my finger against it. It’s gone now. It had been so long since we’d seen each other that his hair has grown over it and when I instinctively reached up to touch his face, then drew my hand back sharply, I felt a little sad that it was gone. He walked me home and met my cat and looked at the dining room table we used to fuck on and neither of us said anything about that and then he said it seemed like I was doing really well, like I was doing better and I said I was and it felt good to hear it, but this time, with this man, I didn’t need to hear it and then he left and

I thought about the last time he left my apartment, a year and a half ago, on a day he disappointed me. He’d asked me what I was going to do when he left and I said, “Probably cry about this” and he shut the door and I did and we didn’t see each other again and I felt so anxious in that moment, but in this moment, I only felt secure, but

Sometimes I worry that maybe this is the story I tell about myself that isn’t entirely true.

2011: Anna and I skipped class to buy materials for our informal costumes. I spent the night at home and made costumes with Allie, Kate, Alex, Ethan and Dia. I am covered in feathers.

2012: We woke up early and went to the Farmers Market in Bloomington. We bought a chili plant. After exploring IU, we went to Dia’s sister’s fall party — it was so fun! There were games, fire, photos, food and so much cider.

2013: The Fitzgerald’s came over for lunch / dinner and we all went on a walk. After everyone left, Mom and I watched “Legally Blonde” and I designed Ball Bearings until really late at night.

2014: I was super stressed today because of the Photoshop file and trying to get everything done on time. I felt very bad at my job and like I had failed at most basic things.

2015: I was pretty exhausted at work because I got home so late last night, but I didn’t have much to do, so it was okay. I’m also getting very sick, so yoga with Omri was a huge struggle for me today.

2016: I realized last night that all of my make up was missing, so that was unfortunate, but we also all got bonuses at work and my parents bought us all Kanye tickets.

2017: Because I got home at 5:30, I was severely hungover / still drunk all day, but Cymbre, Abby, Chels and I got lunch and I was asleep by 8 pm after eating pizza.

2018: Serria, Jess, Bridget and I took the train up to Lawrence Hill to go apple-picking and it was so much fun. It was truly a really good experience for the four of us.

2019: Taylor and Kyle dropped me off at Anna and Johnny’s after Cody and Kyle cooked us breakfast. The three of us went to a brewery and then met up with Chris and his new girlfriend, Abby, for dinner.

2020: I took over a lot of the magazine this week to prove that I deserve to be here and it was really tiring, but I prefer to be busy. It felt like all of us were in very weird moods, too.

2021: The whole art department went into the office today to work on the refresh which was nice to see everyone. At night, I had my date with Jackson which was nice, but I think we might just be better friends.

2022: I took a sick day because I feel awful. I still haven’t been able to eat anything, but I am hoping that this is going to be the end.

2023: I did not feel productive at work today in any sense — I think I am a little bit in mourning of what’s happening at 305 and I feel guilty for not being as present as normal, but I did have a really lovely class with Emma.

When I started therapy in January of 2023, the first thing I told my therapist was that I had trouble envisioning the future. “It’s not like everything is all black and completely dark, like I want to die,” I said — a thing I have since been told is actually a Very Not Cool thing to say to a therapist, because if you bring up death (especially in the first session!) they will, in fact, think you want to die — “but,” I told her, “when I think about the future — a year, five years, ten years from now — I can’t see anything concrete. It’s like everything is just all murky and gray and, through it, I can’t possibly see what I want my life to look like.”

This grayness was not a new occurrence for me, though it was the first time I was putting my experience into words and saying them out loud to another person. It’d been around for years, maybe even my whole adult life. I had an incredible life in New York — I had lovely friends, an unusually competitive and cool career, a social calendar that was full and hobbies like 305 that I enjoyed so much, they bordered on obsession. Still, things just always felt… stagnant. I felt a little trapped in the makings of my own life. Every day was good, sure, but they also all felt the same. I wasn’t overly excited by anything, not really, and didn’t feel like I had a grasp on my own preferences, wants or needs. I started to get worried that life was just passing by without me making any concrete goals for myself. I had no idealism of who I was or what I wanted for the future. Over and over again, I would close my eyes and try to imagine where I wanted to be in a year, five years, ten years, and what steps I needed to take to get there.

Over and over again, all I saw behind my shut eyes was gray.

My therapist, for her part, tried — kind of. We talked a lot about burnout and perfectionism and the way I tend to live my life with an almost unhinged type of physical dedication, ruminants left over from my youth as a dancer, but she lost me, fully, when she suggested I purchase a workbook focused on self-confidence for millennial women. It wasn’t so much the contents of the workbook that offended me — rather, a former straight A student and lover of gold stars and checklists, I actually enjoyed the concept of filling out pages to reach an intended goal — but the design of the proposed workbook was so tacky, it made me question every nugget of advice this woman had ever given me. The farthest I got in this particular self-help experience was flipping through the chapters, seeing the pages littered with bad typography and basic quotes (“You’ve got this, girlie!!!”) and, immediately, throwing it in the trash.

Six months later, in October, things were still pretty gray. I’d moved on to a new therapist (if we are being technical, she’d moved on from me, citing she needed to graduate… which made me realize I had not been speaking to a licensed therapist, but instead, to a grad student the entire time. This made both my $15 co-pay and the cheesy millennial design of the workbook make much more sense.). My new therapist was…. fine and had not gotten any closer to helping me map out what I wanted my future to look like. The only thing that was keeping me even somewhat grounded was my practice at 305 and, this time last year, our studio was about to close with no solid contingency plan. In one sweep, I was losing my community and the only physical activity that made me feel like myself. I was still concerned about my future and the grayness, yes, but the thought of no longer having access to the one place that was keeping me mentally sound was enough to jumpstart me into a panic about changing my day-to-day first.

I thrive under structure (I am, obviously, an eldest daughter!) and, so, began searching for rigid programming that’d help me reformat my life with the same dedication I’d previously poured into 305. For context on my commitment, it is important to note that this was during the time my Achilles was so injured, I was only getting through the dance classes by periodically pausing to shove full ice cubes down my sock in an effort to numb my ankle. Thinking back to my first therapist and how I’d initially been excited about the thought of filling out a workbook until I’d taken it out of the packaging while also fearing long-term repercussions if I pushed myself into a new physical activity, I started The Artist’s Way, a twelve-week, workbook-based program focused on sparking creativity that fully changed my life and, importantly, gave birth to this project.

I didn’t know what was going to happen when I started this project — despite keeping diligent records of my days for over twelve years, I’d actually never looked through any of the entries. It has been fascinating to explore who I used to be and peering through that data with the lens of who I am and who I can become. Working on this not only made me become a more consistent writer for myself, it also inspired me to complete so many other goals that added color to the previous grayness of my days.

Physically, I did multiple rounds of a fitness program I’d been struggling to finish since 2016 and, also, successfully accomplished 75 Hard (all without making it my entire personality which is, actually, an impressive feat because when you are drinking a gallon of water every day it, somehow, has the side effects of making you have to pee all the time and feel morally superior to everyone else for how hydrated you are! Sorry!). I hate admitting I need help, but recognizing I was struggling with both fueling myself and overexertion, I got a nutritionist and a physical therapist, two people who helped me learn to chill the fuck out and listen to my body and to whom I have promised to never rely on ice cubes to get me through a workout or a hunger spell ever again.

Creatively, I went to more shows and became a regular at artistic meet-ups. I joined more museums and actually went. And, I started making real art again — for me, not just for my job. Also, I think I should still get credit for joining a 10-week printmaking course even though I quit after a month when the instructor stopped showing up and, instead, the class began to be taught by the 17-year-old TA named Tobias who knew less about printmaking than me, but did teach our class quite a bit about Tik Tok.

Emotionally, I extracted myself from a relationship I realized was no longer right for me. I saw through the grayness far enough to make the decision to freeze my eggs (to be honest, this procedure, which rocked my world this summer, could be filed under “physical” and “mental” as well) and adopted a three-pound kitten/gremlin who wakes me up every morning at 4:30 to play and has destroyed everything I own, but floods me with gratuity when she greets me with love each time I come home.

Mentally, I committed to continuing the Artist’s Way practice of writing three pages every morning and those 30 minutes I take for myself each day to sort through my thoughts are some of my favorite moments from this year. It’s a practice that has become so engrained in the fabric of who I am now that it’s hard to believe I haven’t been doing it forever. Writing each morning has allowed me to find both my voice and get a better grasp on what I want and need. Part of what I learned in those quiet mornings to myself was that I wanted to be more vulnerable and find the confidence to share my life and art in bigger ways, both with my friends and people I did not yet know. That led me to join a year-long writing group focused on exploring the tenants of sexuality and the community I have found there, a group of people all across the world who make me feel safe and seen (especially at times this year when I was not feeling safe or seen in real life relationships), has allowed me to open myself up to a more beautiful and generous life.

It’s been hard for me to write this piece, I think because it is the last one. I had thought, maybe, I’d continue this project for longer than a year — I am proud of the writing I have created this year and reliving my past in such a specific way was lovely, but after a three-week period this summer where, perhaps sensing I was recently single and mentally sound, almost every person I have ever dated reached out, giving mad “If you’re still in line to talk to Jen, stay in line!!!” energy, it felt like a sign I should stop digging so deeply into my past. I’m grateful for the ability to have the resources to do this project — grateful to myself in 2011 for purchasing my first Five Year Diary and grateful for all the iterations of myself who have continued to fill them out, day after day, throughout all these years. It’s been so interesting to be able to look at every mundane day I used to consider gray —“We bought a chili plant,” “Cody and Kyle made us breakfast,” “I am covered in feathers”— and remember those as the beautiful, colorful moments and relationships that make up my life. Not only has writing these twelve essays given me structure each month (she loves an accomplishment — you know a checklist hates to see me coming!), but it’s changed how I spend my time and energy. I now push myself to do so much more, for both my community and myself, and because of that — even though I still don’t know what I want my life to look like in a year, five years, ten years — I no longer see gray when I close my eyes. Instead, I see possibility.