It took me way too long to finish the second season of Beef on Netflix. Every time I sat down to watch it, I would tire in the middle of an episode, nothing having to do with the quality of the show, but instead with the heavy themes of capitalism and Marxism that Lee Sung Jin, the creator, went to lengths to explore. And every time, my brain was too wary, my body too tired, to focus on it the way the show deserves.

Beef focuses on two couples: an older couple Josh (Oscar Isaac) & Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) and a younger one, Austin (Charles Melton) & Ashley (Caileey Spaeny). Josh and Lindsay have spent years chasing proximity to wealth and status and move to California to run a prestigious country club that caters to the 1 percent. Austin and Ashley are deep in the kind of naïve, all-encompassing, idyllic infatuation that only young love can produce. They don’t have much, but at least they have each other.

What sets this season off isn’t road rage à la season one, but something more dramatic in my opinion: the younger couple witnesses—and subsequently films—the older couple fighting with rage and violence. The footage becomes a tool of blackmail, setting off a chain of chaotic events, entanglements, and plot twists. The young couple’s hope is that the video can be leveraged to move up the ranks at the country club—and it works. But that’s only the beginning.

The real plot isn’t actually about the incident itself, but about what proximity to power does to people. As the season unfolds, nearly every relationship becomes shaped by usefulness. Beef suggests that capitalism does not merely shape our working lives but fundamentally reshapes our emotional ones too, conditioning people to approach love through utility, stability, leverage, and survival rather than emotional vulnerability and real connection, whatever that means. The tragedy of the show is not that love is impossible, but that under systems defined by scarcity and competition, healthy relationships require forms of emotional risk and mutual care that capitalism actively discourages.

At the center of the country club is owner Chairwoman Park, a billionaire whose wealth and influence quietly dictate the moral logic of everyone beneath her. Park embezzles money out of the club to cover up wrongful deaths by her younger plastic surgeon husband, Dr. Kim. As scandals surrounding the family begin to surface, the people orbiting Chairwoman Park become increasingly willing to lie, betray, and commit heinous crimes in exchange for power, protection, and upward mobility.

When Eunice, the chairwoman’s assistant, grows close to Austin, he begins to believe he’s experiencing something deeper than the idyllic infatuation he shares with Ashley. But what he mistakes for intimacy is actually just usefulness. While Ashley pours all her love into Austin unconditionally as a codependent compulsion, Eunice merely relates to Austin as someone tied to her own survival under Chairwoman Park.

If looked at under a Marxist framework, Josh, Lindsay, Austin, Ashley, and Eunice are all members of the working class “proletariat” who, in the end, should theoretically bond over their shared exploitation and worsening inequality plaguing their lives. In the eyes of Chairwoman Park, they are all the same, even though Josh and Lindsay have spent years aspiring to align themselves with the very people who exploit them.

I thought that Dr. Kim’s monologue did a lot of the heavy lifting to set up the ending of the show. He basically gives Austin, Ashley, and Lindsay a cautionary warning about their future, and an offer to escape the capitalist structure he failed to remove himself from, but they totally miss it because they don’t speak Korean. It’s my favorite scene in the show. Marx believed capitalism itself would eventually push the working class toward collective action because of their collective struggle. But in the end, collective solidarity never materializes. After all, they have to survive somehow. And the people at the top will do everything in their power to stop the working class from banding together.

In the finale, Austin realizes he has not been failing at love so much as participating in another form of transactional relationship entirely. What is most harrowing is what he does with that realization. Rather than stepping outside the system, he chooses it because it feels safer to inhabit a world where relationships are openly transactional than to risk the vulnerability of being unwanted. Moral compromise and exploitation become not obstacles to his ascent, but the very mechanism through which he rises. In the final scene, he and Ashley run the country club, just as Josh and Lindsay once did.

Josh is the only one who is able to break the cycle. He gives up status, leverage, and any possible return to that society when he takes the fall for the embezzlement. There’s no upside, no deferred benefit, no guarantee Lindsay even remains loyal to him until his prison release (she doesn’t). For once, love is stripped of status, utility, and self-interest. It exists outside exchange value. It lines up with the Marxist idea that once relationships are no longer mediated by utility, something more genuinely human can appear.

Capitalism and relationships are deeply intertwined. There’s no one without the other. Human relationships, and most significantly romantic ones, are tied to value, stability, future payoff, and security. Capitalism doesn’t just distort love but it conditions people to prefer exchange over vulnerability. Who do we want to be and what do we want? How can our partners help achieve that?

A lot of online discourse about Beef has touched on how the show paints love as futile. Lee Sung Jin isn’t offering up any groundbreaking statement about why love doesn’t work today. Every generation suffers under the pressure of capitalism, even when it believes it profits from it. Trauma is nothing new, we learn behavior from our childhoods, and we all bring our pasts into our relationships. All of this creates deeply destructive, and often dysfunctional, relationships that survive for the sake of mutual survival, convenience, and fear of loneliness.

The ending, as pessimistic as it is, felt oddly refreshing. I don’t think Lee is suggesting that love is futile, but rather asks why humans remain so obsessed with winning—both in romance and within society itself. How can we build truly healthy, harmonious relationships when we exist within an economic system that keeps us in a constant state of instability, competition, and self-preservation?

It’s not lost on me that there’s an insane rise in popularity of online relationship gurus like the “sprinkle sprinkle” lady and others championing women to be “in their feminine” to find a provider man. What’s framed as a return to femininity, softness, or traditional romance is actually a symptom of late-stage capitalism and further reinforces the patriarchy. Men are conditioned to believe that their only value is in their ability to provide, and women are conditioned to perform the emotional and physical labor that makes it necessary for that to happen.

What’s underlying these creators’ quippy videos is the pervading fantasy of relief. A lot of women are not necessarily fantasizing about dependence in the old-fashioned sense. They’re fantasizing about relief from precariousness, from optimization, from having to constantly monetize themselves, self-improve, negotiate, hustle, perform emotional labor, maintain beauty labor, build careers, and somehow still remain desirable and emotionally available. The “provider man” becomes less a romantic archetype and more a fantasy of structural stability in an economy that increasingly feels unstable and extractive.

Marxist feminists believe capitalism and patriarchy reinforce one another through the nuclear family unit itself: women uphold the family through unpaid emotional and domestic labor, while men control the family through provision and productivity. Patriarchy may privilege men structurally, but it also punishes male vulnerability. Which perhaps explains why so many modern relationships feel emotionally starved beneath all the language of “masculine energy” and “feminine softness.” Everyone wants tenderness, but no one feels entirely safe stepping outside the role they believe secures their survival. Under capitalism, relationships are economic arrangements. Everyone becomes a portfolio of assets.

I write all of this as at least three girlfriends send me daily voice notes about their dating woes and how “men are not lonely enough.” No one seems to be having a particularly good time dating right now. Some people persist in searching anyway, clinging to the possibility that intimacy might still redeem the exhaustion of modern life. Others are opting out altogether. As another friend says, “it’s a really bad time for straight men right now.” I would argue it’s bad for straight women too.

I have spent a great deal of time in psychotherapy and one of my favorite things my psychoanalyst has told me is, “The beauty of relationships is that you can craft the exact situation you want.” Which is why life feels most meaningful in the rare moments when people stop performing curated versions of themselves and allow their real desires, griefs, disappointments, and vulnerabilities to emerge. Someone once told me that a good first-date question should be: What are your core wounds, and how are you actively working through them? Which is an intense thing to ask someone you just met. But just imagine…what if we were able to answer this question honestly?

Maybe what people are actually searching for is not a perfectly optimized partner, but relief from performance itself. Relief from having to embody competence, desirability, status, control, self-sufficiency, emotional management, all at once. Perhaps this is why genuine vulnerability now feels almost radical: it briefly allows people to encounter one another outside the rigid rules of performance, transaction, and survival. There is light here, but it’s thin and often fragmented. That fragile refusal to give up on one another may be the most hopeful thing left in us.

My fridge broke down last week and the ensuing meltdown I had over it was admittedly disproportionate to the issue at hand. Of course, it wasn’t really about the fridge. Besides the fact that I had to throw away all my beautiful produce and sentimental foods like my kimchi from Korea, it revealed how quickly a practical inconvenience can tip into existential overwhelm—how something as banal as an appliance malfunction can conjure questions of support, safety, and even loneliness. My landlord did what she could. My mother wailed with me over FaceTime. My superintendent, somewhere in Ireland, ghosted me until I found a repairman myself: a Turkish man who didn’t speak English and told me through Google Translate that the fix would take five to seven business days.

I’ve found that what undoes me is rarely catastrophe. Catastrophe, oddly, I can handle quite well. It’s the mundane roadblocks and the tiny ruptures that expose where I am already depleted. My refrigerator saga revealed a quieter grief: not a wish to be rescued, but a longing for someone beside me to help me—to share the burden of troubleshooting, to problem solve in tandem. Or someone to just wail with me, not over FaceTime but quite literally beside me.

I thought, too, about how many years I’ve lived in this country alone, without family nearby to call and ask to come over. Friends become chosen family over time, yes, but it is different. I’ve navigated much of my 13 years in America on my own. Proud as I am of what I’ve built, it’s comforting to know there can someone you can lean on when something just…breaks. And usually, that someone is a partner or family member.

I’m halfway through my WSET Level 2 wine course and already mourning what was once the beginning of a new endeavor and the earnestness with which I took it on. In the past five weeks since embarking on this journey from hobbyist to (hopeful) expert, I have found a new kind of confidence, which I can only attribute to a trust in self that grows when curiosity is given structure. There is a kind of dignity that comes when a passion is taken seriously. And this is why they tell you to have hobbies!

I’ve been going to bars and restaurants and telling my servers I’m taking the course, and they respond with great enthusiasm. At Chambers—something of a mecca for wine in New York—a quietly formal sommelier (John Paul <3) in a navy twill blazer brought out a spittoon and four blind tastings mid-meal. It was a complete, kind surprise and I was touched. I only got the Pinot Noir correct, and was taught to discern why the others were what they were. At Stars—a new wave wine bar overlooking a freshman NYU dorm I have too many memories in—a disarmingly casual but razor-sharp young bartender in low-slung jeans did the same, sans spittoon. I only got the Vinho Verde correct. (I had gone with a new friend from wine class who also went to NYU with me, and the whole thing felt strangely full circle: back downtown, a student again, but of something entirely different.)

Different priests, same lesson in humility.

I didn’t attend a single brand event this past week except for a ceramics-making night with a clothing brand I worked with once four years ago. The openness in my schedule has done more for my mental clarity than any meditation or mindfulness exercise ever has. I’ve traded back-to-back obligations for early mornings spent writing and midday naps in a red light bed. This, I think, is true wealth.

During the ceramics class, other creatives who I am sure are overloaded every day were hyper focused on shaping clay into whatever vessel they wanted. It was one of those odd nights where you’re locked in to the kind of work you almost never get to do, participating in a small communion built around something tactile. I got a 91 Oura sleep score that night.

Ava and I decided to meet on the Upper East Side—somewhere we both always seem to feel especially happy—for our reunion after a month and some weeks apart. We are both always spending extended periods of time in Asia and we looked forward to this reunion for weeks. Sant Ambroeus Madison was a somewhat random pick on my end, but after being turned away from there on a random Wednesday the other week trying for a solo lunch, I was determined to participate in the fantasy of being transported to Milan in the middle of Manhattan. “YESSS”, Ava responded.

Ava is around six months pregnant, and the first of my close friends to be expecting. I don’t think it has fully hit me yet that her life—and, by extension, our friendship—will be changed forever. There’s a quiet awareness that our time as just the two of us is becoming finite. And if I feel this way, imagine how couples feel!

The momentum of life, and its quiet insistence on change, feels stronger than ever. I feel it when I look at Ava, who appears exactly herself except now with the improbable presence of a little baby inside of her. I hope she still texts me back immediately even after she gives birth.

At the Knicks playoff game, a man seated behind me spent most of the night tossing around small talk and jokes with my friend who dabbles heavily in sports—straight male banter, as I like to call it. It’s fun being in environments where I don’t always know exactly what’s happening, as though I’m borrowing entry through atmosphere alone. I go for the viiiibes, after all. But as we stood to leave, teetering out in my Matthieu Blazy pumps, the guy tapped me on my shoulder, grinning: “Great shoes, by the way. Great. So good, that collection.”

Fluency takes many forms and we contain multitudes. One person reads the game; another reads the shoes. And god forbid sometimes a man can read both!

Charlotte invited me to a dinner at the James Beard House for some sushi innovation that has apparently taken Japan by storm. An odd invite, but we were mainly there for the free sushi and as a launch pad for a girls’ night in the West Village.

The company’s CEO gave a speech and, after apologizing for his poor English—which was really not poor! I’m always sad when non-native speakers feel obliged to disclaim this in a room full of Americans!—stage fright seemed to overtake him. After what felt like a 60-second stretched out silence in his speech, I had to physically move my body into another room from secondhand embarrassment.

Almost absurdly, two waitstaff approached me to ask what perfume I was wearing, saying it was the best thing they had ever smelled. They asked so I had to answer and I felt even more ridiculous for pointing them to a perfume combo that my sister reminded me is literally a thousand dollars.

I realized I lived much of this week offline. And in doing so, I noticed how life keeps unfolding in the analog, interrupting abstraction through human contact. We are always colliding with other people’s attention in ways that soften life.

Why was I so touched by a sommelier bringing out blind tastings I never asked for? Why was my friend so moved on my behalf that he left a 50 percent tip? These gestures register differently from the fucking matrix. And for all the ways I remain plugged into the matrix, I find I can still discern the difference. I’m reminded more than ever how restorative these minor exchanges in the world can be.

I woke up the next day thinking about that sushi robot CEO and how stage fright may be one of the most human experiences left untouched by the digital—the body faltering in public, and a room full of strangers feeling it with you. Embarrassment, too, is a form of communion. Almost nothing is an original experience and that is so comforting.

After getting back from long-haul trips, I leave my suitcase out for multiple days, sometimes even over a week. And lately, most of my travel has been long-haul, so the familiar sight of an opened, full suitcase sprawled across my living room has become normal. It gives me anxiety, but seemingly not enough to do anything about it until a full seven days has passed. Today is day seven, so I suppose I have to.

My clothes in there aren’t folded. Instead, all of my stuff has formed a tall, rounded mound, the result of me rummaging through for very specific things—usually souvenirs or beauty purchases I want to use immediately, as if that justifies leaving everything else untouched. I don’t unpack all at once, only in parts. This isn’t just about my suitcase.

I’m so type B it’s crazy, and it’s gotten worse with age, I tell my friend over lunch at home the other day. The open suitcase was right there next to us. I was a little embarrassed.

The food at the Aritzia luncheon is almost too beautiful to eat, but the moment one person breaks the seal in the spread, we all follow. There’s a wall of farm-fresh produce—some collaboration with an internet buzz-y farm I follow on Instagram—and I fill my bag with it, preemptively stocking up for the weekend I already know I’ll spend alone, recovering from this week of socializing.

I have two more events later that night, and I can already feel how quickly that sense of gratitude could tip into something more brittle. So I make a quiet effort to stay inside the gratitude—to let the day feel full instead of letting the anxiety override.

I made sure my first event back in New York after traveling was a good one. I get to see so many people I admire, people who remind me, in a very immediate way, how lucky I am to exist inside this particular world. To go to a beautiful lunch and call it work.

Michelle and I are among the last to leave, which feels like proof that it was, in fact, a good time. There’s still so much food left. We wrap chunks of Gouda in a napkin and take them with us. The next day, she texts me how happy she is that we took the cheese.

I’ve spent the past year or so trying to cultivate an identity as a writer first, and a content creator second. The insecurity I used to have about “just being an influencer” has shifted into something else—an anxiety around the credibility and legitimacy of calling myself a writer at all.

When people ask what I do, I still feel a kind of anticipatory discomfort around the question and knowing I’ll have to answer it.

You’re very charming, my ex-boyfriend tells me over FaceTime. It lands less like a compliment and more like a reassurance. I don’t think he realizes how much I like hearing that, or how quickly I accept it as enough.

I like how our relationship has evolved into something far deeper than at any point when we were actually together. It feels cleaner now, or at least less reactive. I’m less agitated, less viperous, which I think has allowed me to be softer with him. I’m trying to be softer in general, including literally the volume and intensity of how I speak.

I still can’t feel the turn of spring, which is very rarely the case this time of year. And this is how I realize that I’m not thrilled to be back in New York after three weeks in Korea and Japan. Usually when I take an early spring trip, I come back and feel a noticeable shift, like the city has been waiting for me to return to begin again. But this winter, as everyone keeps saying, has been relentless.

But still, I emerge out of winter relatively unscathed. I feel a particular gratefulness and joy knowing I can do whatever I want in this life. And I realize this comes from being as untethered as possible to literally anything, including a relationship. I’m learning the art of detachment, among other principles that have genuinely made me adopt a more stoic lifestyle, something that seems entirely antithetical to my persona just one year ago.

But then I see one rogue tree on the sidewalk with purple buds and I almost cry.

I stopped by LA on my way back to the U.S. after Tokyo. I needed a sunny buffer before diving back into life as usual on the east coast. My first stop was Erewhon, which I took a Waymo to get to and from. Sitting alone in the backseat with no driver felt slightly illegal, but it was also the coolest thing I’ve done as of late. Like the first time I got to be naked in my first solo adult apartment. I called it cute for knowing how to do the weird, scary left turn thing you do in LA. The contrarian in me orders a blue coconut smoothie instead of the strawberry Hailey Bieber one everyone gets. It tastes fucking good and this is literally something New York will never have.

I used to hate LA in the way every other staunchly proud New Yorker hated LA, which is to say I had already decided how I felt about it before trying to spend any real time there. After just a few days in a hot, bright LA—days filled with shoots, meetings, and seeing friends I’ve gotten really close with in just one year (<3!!)—I realized why I hated it: I literally never had anything to do there before.

Any place is just infinitely better with a purpose and people you love. It sounds obvious, but it didn’t feel obvious before. I think I used to expect a place to give me something on its own. Now I feel more responsible for constructing what I want.

Girls in athleisure with overfilled lips still abound, though.

I started my WSET wine course this week, and in the first class we go around the room and introduce ourselves and say why we’re there. I haven’t felt nervous to introduce myself to a room full of strangers since my NYU seminar days. I liked it immediately—the feeling of being a little too aware of myself. I like randomly feeling nervous.

Everyone is so cute and funny and interesting, I text my friend in the middle of class. There’s a couple taking the course together and I think, how cool is that. Two brothers are taking it so they can better communicate with their Italian winemaker grandfather. Another girl wants to destigmatize Chinese wine.

When it’s my turn, I tell 20 strangers I’m here because I love beauty and leisure and pleasure and travel, and wine sits inside all of that. I want to understand the earth and the history and the artistry behind something that makes me feel so much. I wonder if they liked my answer. I liked all of theirs and I suddenly want to make new friends, an odd feeling I don’t usually have.

I have to leave my first wine class early because of a brand event. I show up to coat check and check in my textbooks and then get my photos taken for BFA.

I keep thinking about Will Welch’s final editor’s note at GQ (it’s a fantastic read, btw), where he recounts asking Jay-Z how he moves so seamlessly between such different worlds of music, sports, politics, and art. Jay-Z just shrugs and says, “I walk into every room as myself.”

When Welch first got to GQ nearly two decades ago, he describes himself as awkward, eager to please, constantly morphing into whoever he thought he needed to be. That was probably me too, five years ago—moving through the various rooms this career, and this life, has put me in, adjusting as I went.

I don’t do that anymore. The anxiety is still there sometimes, as evidenced by my many Irish exits and lone wolf decompression weekends, but it doesn’t change who I am in a room. This first week back from my trip feels like a small distillation of that. Moving through different rooms with confidence, curiosity, and a kind of steadiness I didn’t have before. I know I’m exactly where I want to be, and I’m enjoying learning how to exist inside it.

People keep reminding me that I’m crushing it. That I am so lucky. It feels strange to hear because I know exactly who I am and what I want, despite not fully knowing exactly what I am doing. And at the same time, I have no idea who I am to other people. I walk into every room and let it be whatever it is. I’m starting to think that’s the point.

This urgency to share everything has only intensified in our current age of social media, in which we all engage with ~feelings~, ~thoughts~, and ~ideas~ online first. Substack, for instance, has championed deeply personal essays as an art form, encouraging us to alchemize every passing discomfort, grievance, or half-formed realiz…

Read more

I like lining my lips with a bold color and dabbing just a light sheen of sparkle onto my eyelids. I get a thrill from taking off my coat, checking it at coat check, and feeling good about my outfit. I’m attending chic holiday parties in multilevel townhouses and being dressed by fashion houses my teenage self would never believe is my current reality. I have a lot of fun indulging in shopping this time of year. I feel an overwhelming sense of joy gifting loved ones things I’ve chosen for them and watching their eyes light up. I once cried watching my sister unbox a pair of shoes I gave her, and that’s when I knew: I fucking love gift-giving!!!!

December is a month rife with consumerism. There’s a lot of product pushing, a lot of content positioning shopping as identity (a conversation I absolutely contribute to), and a lot of indulgence that forces us to reckon with our relationship to stuff. I’ve outgrow…

Read more

In Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), the narrator wanders around Paris revisiting the spots that connect him to his teenage love. After eating a madeleine dipped in tea, vivid memories of his childhood summers come flooding back. And this simple story of a madeleine dipped in tea became a cultural shorthand for involuntary memory—for the way memory lives in the sensorial body, and how its emotional truth often runs deeper than any factual one.

Yesterday, on a dull November morning, I walked through City Hall Park, as I do almost everyday, and saw a big, full ginkgo tree blazing neon yellow against the grey sky. I stepped closer to admire it, to take some photos. And then the scent hit me—sharp and sudden—and instantly I was back in other Novembers: in New York, in Seoul, where trees just like this line the streets I walked with a cracked heart, pretending I wasn’t unraveling lol. Pretending I had it all figured out. My angsty chi…

Read more

Here I am back in Seoul for the fourth time this year trying to self-soothe myself after an incredibly busy past five months and as I gear up for what the business world calls “Q4”. In my industry speak, that’s code for final-holiday-season-push-to-work-as-much-as-possible. My brain, as it currently stands, straddles the dichotomy of exhaustion and ambition, all the while going through my own little October canon event. “I’m baby,” I would once remind myself, but now I am a fully fledged 30-year old. I am in a messy entanglement of growth and setbacks where the cumulative effect doesn’t look like much progress but I have to trust that all the little decisions I make for myself are amounting to something. These trips home amount to something.

On my plane ride here, I listen to a 3-hour track of 432hz frequency noise on loop in between training my TikTok algorithm to give me exactly what I want to watch. Scrolling, in this instance, is soothing. I dab on an essential oil blend called “Altitude Oil” that I randomly found in a PR package. The combination of everything lulls me into a sleep that feels utterly transformative.

I love the lore of my real life because it is mine to laugh at, mine to love, mine to own. I don’t need anyone else’s on top of mine, something I only recently learned. I once thought I did. I thought being partnered only made life more interesting, more romantic, less isolating. It does do that, in part, but it is also testing. And I don’t have the capacity to be tested like that anymore.

Self-soothing means returning to myself—through movement, through ritual, through flight if I must. It’s not always healthy, not always gentle. Sometimes, self-soothing is recording random tiktok videos and keeping them in my drafts for me to see. Sometimes, it’s sending an email out with a 2am time stamp just to feel in control again. Other times, it’s letting my mother massage my feet in silence.

There’s something deeply human about finding calm in chaos of our own making. We call it “self-care,” but often, it’s a negotiation with our own restlessness. Self-soothing isn’t about escaping discomfort, but learning to recognize it as a signal—one that says I need to come home, whether that’s a place, a person, or just a version of myself that feels familiar again.

“How are things in Korea?” my therapist emails me while trying to find a time to connect. “Always so transformative and comforting.” I reply. Because it’s true. Every time I land in Seoul, I feel a recalibration happen quietly under the surface. I don’t post about it right away. I let the place do its slow work on me. I let myself be small, a daughter again, a version of myself that doesn’t need to be optimized.

Self-soothing, I’m learning, is not about quieting the discomfort, but the trust that I can meet it. That I can survive it. Because I always do.

I have not logged onto TikTok or used ChatGPT in…

Read more

I have been absent on here for some weeks and I apologize. I realize this recognition comes with both guilt—I must hold myself accountable—and tenderness to myself as I undergo what I believe to be one of the most transformative periods of my adult life thus far.

The tulips on Park Avenue are not only completely gone but quite literally uprooted. It’s jarring to see the flower beds, once vibrant and full of life, barren and devoid of any color; nothing but mere soil canvases waiting for something completely new to be planted. I like this a lot.

In this time of my absence on Substack, I continue to work with my dream brands, like talking to Fendi about making kombucha and resigned my apartment lease for a third year, which, by the end of the third year, will mark the longest I’ve been in any home in my 12 years as a New Yorker. Recommitting to this space means hardcore nesting and adorning my home with some new pieces, including pink bedsheets I’m certain will greatly improve my life.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about self-care and how I am a master at it in some ways but fall massively short in other areas. I have a charming home that I take shelter in, I wear beautiful garments that make me feel good, I eat food that nourishes my body. All of this comes with great privilege, yes, but also with a meticulous understanding of what it means to self-soothe in healthy, joy-inducing ways. I love being a woman of taste to indulge in so much beauty as a way to cope with the harshness of the world! It is for the same reason we need art, fashion, comedy, and the like.

Subscribe now

Another classic me move to self-soothe is to return home to Korea, a place that reminds me not only of my roots and my origin story (lol) but also of the importance of community, collectivism, and national identity. I also iterate that these mechanisms of self-care are positive and never harmful, though they probably require more time, money, and effort than a simple breathwork exercise.

But copious amounts of tending to one’s “self” does not equate to a holistic and lasting tending to oneself. Along the way, there are things that get neglected; in this case, I stopped writing again even though writing, in many ways, is another tool I can use to self-soothe. About two months ago, I started seeing a therapist for the first time in my life; specifically a psychoanalyst. And while this is nothing groundbreaking for the average self-aware American seeking to better themselves (please be gentle on me, I did not grow up here!), the work I am uncovering is a kind of reckoning I am proud of. It’s the kind of self-care I’ve neglected in my adult life. I’ve even opened up to my parents about this decision, something I never thought I’d have the courage to do because of Korea’s complete disregard for such services. I, too, once shared these judgements but have since made strides in overcoming any pompous sentiment in the name of enlightenment.

I am reminded of this excerpt by Carl Jung, whom I am (sometimes/often) thrilled to share a last name with:

The thing about getting older (with what “older” wisdom I have at 29) is that you begin to realize that being alive equates to suffering of all kinds. And it’s perfectly okay and definitely not as dramatic as that sentence makes it out to be. Beyond Jungian psychology, this is what modern-day behavioral therapists and Buddhists alike call radical acceptance: the ability to fully accept one’s reality no matter how painful or difficult it may be.

Read more

I can’t stop thinking about the ending of The White Lotus Season 3. I can’t stop thinking about Rick and Chelsea. I can’t stop reading every Reddit thread on the relationship or watching every TikTok that the moral of the story is you can’t fix a broken man or else you’ll die trying.

I saw so much of myself in Chelsea: this happy-go-lucky sunshine girl who feels it is her duty to cheer up the self-destructive and emotionally turbulent people (man) in her life. My sun and Venus are in Cancer, which, if you dabble in astrology, already paints a vivid picture on how I love and the intensity I bring to my relationships. Me even mentioning this further confirms my alignment with Chelsea, who, throughout the show, can’t help but plug astrology in whenever appropriate.

Rick, on the other hand, is a man who holds deep psychological and emotional pain from the childhood trauma of his father being murdered. He moves through the world carrying this pain and targets an enemy to avenge his father, thinking it will bring him the peace he so seeks. His inability to respond to the overwhelming love and support that Chelsea showers him with is a product of his deep sadness and not so much his disinterest in their relationship. He loves her, but he can’t battle his own demons and probably even hates himself so he instead comes across as closed off, cold, and dismissive. It’s not a healthy relationship by any means… but there (unfortunately) is real love there. They are, perhaps, even soulmates. It’s sad yet deeply relatable and all too common.

"It's like we're in this ying and yang battle, and I'm hope, and Rick's pain, and eventually one of us will win.”

Read more

As of writing this, my Saturn return has just ended. Like literally, hours ago. All my writing, postulating and making sense of things during my most pivotal phase of my life to date has culminated to this moment: starting this essay in bed at 10pm on a Friday night in my linen gingham mumu with three pimple patches on my face, and a Sleepytime tea on my side table. In a way, this is exactly how this penultimate moment should be. A great big sigh of relief.

To clarify, I am not totally ruled by divine providence. I only dabble in it to make sense of current phenomenons to help me through moments of deprivation and rigidity. The composure I seem to have amidst the chaos that comes and goes in my life is thanks to that persistent ability of mine to imagine something better; imagine it as though it were more tangible than any unfavorable reality I’m experiencing; imagine it as though there are greater forces, as there always is, at play that shape my reality. I think there’s a term for this… maladaptive daydreaming?

I am unilaterally offended by the concept of being upset because I don’t think I deserve to feel so. And when I am feeling upset, I’ll do anything to make something of that feeling, even if it means romanticizing it by way of amplifying it temporarily. I’ll write my heart out, listen to pertinent songs that drive home my feelings even further, and text my friends my thoughts on my situation so as to sit in it longer. It feels necessary and indulgent to build a world much larger than the one I’m currently living in because the involuntary nature of life is always front and center. I like being indulgent in everything that I do and I think it has more to do with my obsession with beauty than anything else. There’s even beauty in heartbreak and in the offensiveness of reality, I’ll tell people.

I can’t stop listening to this song called The Spinning Wheel by an artist I’ve never heard of before but once again so grateful to my Spotify algorithm for introducing me to. There’s a lyric that stands out to me:

Read more

I like to think that my recent lack of content output, in our current iteration of the word “content”, is my artist’s instinct. It makes me feel better about how I spent a large chunk of my January: introspective, silent, and making a whole lot of meaning out of every little thing and then keeping it to myself until I know what to do with the feeling. But I’m not so sure it’s my artist’s instinct so much as it is a result of my retreat into my comfortable cave, a habitat that becomes all too familiar whenever I visit home for an extended period of time; this time, it was nearly a month.

In this time, I thought a lot about how some of my best writing is born out of heartbreak. A kind of determination that only exists within observation and perseverance to make something out of a very specific kind of channeled energy. I romanticize heartbreak just as I do with everything else in my life. It keeps things interesting even though masked underneath is a kind of melancholic reckoning that is more abstract and limiting. In this reckoning, I become obsessed with output and more notably, creating lucrative projects that give fodder to the kind of life I always imagined I would live when I was just a teenager dreaming up the life I have now.

I made a third of my income in the last two months of 2024. I realize that the way in which I admit where this channeled energy went to is ostentatious, perhaps a little embarrassing. It’s not something I consciously dreamed up of but simply where I landed as a result of finding a tangible purpose as an influencer in the interim as I “make it” as a writer.

But still, my life, as ever, humbles me. With one great success comes one setback. With one great compliment comes one bout of criticism. I sat next to a very big and successful Substacker at a fashion week dinner the other night and while I was talking to her, I didn’t know what to feel more: envy or immense admiration. She just writes. She posted on Instagram four times last year. I was baffled. I made a mental note to do some more manifestation rituals this weekend so I can direct whatever it was that I felt during that dinner towards achieving whatever parameters I have to declare myself having “made it” as a writer.

I have maybe ten more paid subscribers than I had last time I posted on here and that means a lot to me even though one social media partnership would pay for one person’s yearly subscription one hundredfold. I know I’m not supposed to think like this but that’s just where my mind goes. Moving on from the melancholic reckoning of my recent past that put me in a state of borderline manic productivity, I want to now romanticize something else: the paradox of not knowing what comes next.

A few weeks ago, my sister shared this poem in the group chat with myself and my mom:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

The Real Work by Wendell Berry

“I like this poem :)” she wrote. I proceeded to read it over and over and over again before sending it to someone, also a creative, whose work ethic and output is unmatched. “I’m always baffled!” he responded.

At this very specific time in my life, I want to also romanticize confusion and turbulence and doubt. Even in writing this, after a strange bout of writer’s block I haven’t quite experienced before, I call to shift the perspective on struggle from something to avoid to something inherently valuable and intrinsic to creativity.

Unfortunately, I oftentimes still feel the most comfortable in a capitalist system. I think most of us do because it gives shape to our purpose and direction, especially in the state of the world we’re living in. It’s a kind of proclamation for sure—what kind, I do not know—but one that is honest and one that recognizes that feeling lost or uncertain is not a failure but a sign that we are engaging in the real work. I want to feel baffled. Maybe not always because stress is another component I'm not recognizing in the immediate. But any resistance to clear, defined, recognizable feeling or direction in life is a good thing, I promise you.

Fashion week started yesterday and I see my peers posting their bi-annual Instagram posts joking about the upcoming month, something about the “stress Olympics”, or a very niche reference only those in the know will get, or that one scene in Sex and the City where Carrie and the girls are freezing their asses off in the name of fashion, etc. I can empathize and laugh-cry with them but I also feel, for perhaps the first time ever, that partaking in this is a choice. And I feel both hands off and satisfied in my decision to let the comfort of my mind and body take precedence over the optics of this industry. I’m attending two shows that mean a lot to me. I’m shooting three campaigns next week. Then I might go to Mexico at the end of it just for the hell of it! I’m baffled because I can do this.

What once felt like a default perfunctory course of action to keep up with the pretenses of my job is giving way to a new kind of feeling I’m not quite familiar with. Without any loud fanfare, the real work begins. May we all be baffled.

Laura

I’m supposed to be in Paris right now but a stomach bug snuck up on me and I was forced to cancel the trip, which has me feeling pretty devastated.

This trip was spontaneous but the four days I had carved out felt like the perfect storm: I cleared out my calendar, flights were cheap and a beautiful hotel that just opened invited me in. I also never got to experience Paris during the holidays and I was excited to do so for the first time.

One of my favorite ideas of Freud is cathexis, the libidinal mental and emotional investment of energy in an object, idea or person. Cathexis explains how we form attachments or fixations, how we find meaning, fulfillment or connection. It’s not just about the object of our focus (a person, job, trip, or idea); it’s about what that focus symbolizes for us. The things we cathect to often reveal our deeper desires, fears and unmet needs. And because the id does not distinguish between a mental image and reality, i…

Read more

As someone who has been able to monetize my lifestyle, I really have the gall to write about the commodification of art and culture. But maybe that’s the point. The unquestioned hegemony of consumerism over every facet, every mode of society’s cultural production has not only led to a flattening of culture but also a besiegement of slow, romantic and, most importantly, authentic living. It has infiltrated artistic expression so that the battle has become a cultural one. Never have the forces of cultural opposition been so blind to the task at hand, to the nature of the conflict; the conflict being creating for the sake of being versus creating for the sake of profit.

My ethos, creatively and personally, is to live as authentically, beautifully and intentionally as possible and the rest, be it monetary success, purpose, impact, will follow.

In Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, they write:

“Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the advertisement."

The artist, in this day and age, has become a lifestyle one takes up as a kind of consumer decision, much as one decides on any commodity. It’s a look and attitude that symbolizes a certain variety of hyper-consumer, though not consciously adopting the mindset of one. The artist is the person who perpetually leads us to new styles, habits and modes of living and seeing. We create because we have something to say. We create because we feel an urge to disseminate ideas. And we create because we hope that along the way in doing so, people will buy into it. Our role in powering the great wheels of consumer capitalism is real, even though our intent is to simply to have something to say.

I’ve been a full-time creator for almost five years and with every passing year, I remind myself that while my work serves many purposes, one of them being consumer-facing, I must always revert back to living my life as authentically as possible. I don’t want to lose my critical social position and become more or less a propagandist for planned obsolescence. And this feels wild to type out!!! Because I get paid to run ads off the content I create!!! And yes, I’m using extremities here; creatives are not propagandists. But in the day and age we live in today, where profit reigns supreme, cultural capital is predicated on our social influence and we all, consciously or subconsciously, become cogs in this monocultural machine.

As creatives today, we must create art that is as thought-provoking and authentic as possible and at least as well done as advertising—if not so blatantly, then at least as persuasively. We cannot afford to regard the postmodern “condition” of detached images and cheap, immediate bites of information and entertainment an innocuous and inevitable development of our times. We have something real to say…so say it.

When I wrote that note, I was inspired by a tweet that I can no longer find by one of my favorite video creators who has since taken a hiatus (or maybe a total withdrawal?) from creating to live in a van across the country. I don’t think the call live out your life as art has to look like that—to give up most materialism and comfort and seek supreme spirituality through nature. But it’s of note to demand a new aesthetic of resistance, a secession from the rat race of constant creative output and look inwards at what we’re actually trying to say. How do we actually want to live? How do we honor life and beauty and creation by simply being? We must call for art that is radical in its content. And what seems radical now is actually quite simple: just be authentic! be slow! be you! don’t fold to the parameters of the market!

I don’t know what that looks like for you but for me, living my life as romantically as possible subverts the cadre of consumer monoculture. I’m literally just me. And in an age where the great capitalist forces conspire to keep us dumb and complacent, we must dedicate ourselves to simply being.

I love you,
Laura

I arrived in Seoul a little over a week ago and I will be here through the end of the week. Some would say I fled America during what is arguably the most consequential election of our lifetime. I tell them I came to visit my family during the most beautiful time of the year in Korea and to celebrate my sister’s birthday. The latter was the impetus, the former was a little bonus. My dual citizenship has afforded me a physical respite from the chaos that will ensue for days but I cannot deny my Americanness in this moment.

I’ve lived in America for 11 years now. I was 21 and in my last year at NYU when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. The morning after election night still haunts me to this day. My professors cancelled class and the barista at my coffee shop cried while pulling my espresso shot. And since then, my own rhetoric surrounding life in America has been riddled with apathy, disillusionment and betrayal. Not just because of the crushing, embarrassing reality that is Trump’s America but also because of the dupe of liberal representational politics.

The delusion of the American empire has long plagued my mind and it has continued since 2016 and will continue no matter who wins this election. This delusion exists, grows and multiplies because that is the very nature of a nation that represses critical debate and political action seeking to challenge its dominance. It lulls you into a languid state by convincing you of its inherent goodness, its necessity, that the only way to exist is for capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy to be the driving forces of the nation but it keeps mutating and taking on many faces. It could look like Joe Biden, it could look like Kamala Harris, it could look like you, it could look like me. We all fall prey to the system because that is how we make it in America. That is how we survive. And when the system is you, it can’t possibly betray you, right?

This is how capitalism and the delusion of empire implicate us. Many of us believe that there are ways to protect citizens without waging proxy wars or enabling a genocide, that mass consumption is wrong, the rich cannot keep getting richer, that there is a way to coexist across the spectrum of identities. But we are too wrapped up in our own compulsions and greed that we aren’t ascending into a greater mode of being that we all seek. The delusion of empire makes us feel like we are helpless, that we must hold onto our entitlement, our elitism, our narcissism in order to achieve upward mobility. It pits us against each other in our own communities and in communities abroad. It fear mongers.

I once had a man, with his heteronormative masculinity and nationalist pride proclaim, “If you don’t like it here, maybe you should leave!” after hearing about my gripes on democracy and feigned liberal ideologies. There are so many things wrong with that statement, namely the ethnocentric attitude that somehow I don’t belong in America if I possess this hypercritical lens; how dare I flesh out my discontents about a nation that is actually failing us. But I’ll instead focus on my response, in which I said, “But I do like it here and I’m not leaving!” I stay because in my disillusionment and my betrayal, there is a call to reimagine what America could look like if it prioritized people over power. If we all did our part in pursuit of a better country, a more equitable society, a kinder, more loving world. There is a steadfast belief that a better reality is possible and maybe I can be a part of it. This work, of community and true freedom, doesn’t start with any on candidate. But it’s still in all of us.

That this isn’t going to be a “landslide” victory the Democratic Party has in the bag will surely be studied for generations to come. I hope they take note. It must be people over power. People over imperialism. People over arrogance. I honestly wasn’t even planning on writing anything at all but I woke up with an urge to remind ourselves that no matter what happens, there is so much work to do to learn how to be human. How to expand with love, how to foster community, how to forgive, how to move with care, how to put down our pessimism and capitalist conditioning and keep marching forward.

I was talking to a Swedish guy who has been living in America as long as I have and just got his American citizenship earlier this year. This morning, he sent me a selfie with his “I VOTED 2024” sticker. He says he feels hopeful. We are both expats from nations that do a pretty good job at taking care of its citizens. Yet, there is something to be said about our insistence on holding dual citizenship with America. We carved out a life of belonging, no matter how jagged and rough those edges may be. Yes, democracy very much feels like it's veering off course—actually, possibly even careening off of a cliff. But I do know that the solution isn’t in leaving the country because you’re acutely aware of how fucked up it is. As a woman of color, I always knew that there was work to be done in order to find a sense of belonging in this country. That work started the moment I got to America and the work will continue. The reality is that we owe so much more to ourselves and to each other. I want to give one more last ditch effort to commit to what I’m hopeful for. And to never see Elon Musk’s midriff ever again.

With love always,
Laura

I took a comparative literature class in college called “Enlightenment Evil” where we, a tiny seminar consisting of nine students, set out to explore and make sense of the existence of evil in the world and in us. We read through poems, letters, philosophy and novels of the eighteenth century from the writings of intellectuals making sense of the incomprehensibly unjust universe and if man’s free will introduced evil into a world that was supposed to be inherently good. It was my first comparative literature class and it truly ~enlightened~ me to think about and discuss these banal concepts in a critical way. By the end of the semester, I left with a big fat crush on my classmate who my friends called “Comp Lit sweetie” and a headstrong belief that people are just inherently good or inherently bad. Nuance be damned because at the end of your day, you’re just a good person or a bad person.

Read more

When Taylor Swift came out with Red in 2012, she became the reigning queen of autumn. The album has long served as the perennial soundtrack for contemplative trips upstate driving down windy country roads lined with foliage and having moody fireside chats with a new lover. The album is quite literally called Red and “autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place" is one but many lines that directly reference fall. The album has served me incredibly well for the past 12 years as I’ve gone through every iteration of fall possible: alone, not alone, deeply in love, confused, content. I’m especially grateful for Red (Taylor’s Version) with its ten-minute version of All Too Well, which may be the shortest ten minute song ever in that I know every single word and it always ends way sooner than I’d like. The song, but really the album as a whole, is a slow-burn account of sunsetting love, where every memory—like lost scarves and crying in a party bathroom—is mythologized into one’s own life lore that you may never really get over. It sets the perfect tone for the beginning of fall, a season where everyone wants to be nostalgic and cozy and it’s fun to even be a little sad.

So when Charli XCX decided to drop Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, a surprise remix album of her world-dominating album Brat, at Storm King Art Center, the upstate NY destination come autumn, my mid-week trip upstate took a turn. I was meant to exclusively stream Red (Taylor’s Version) but suddenly I have a remix of Everything is romantic featuring Caroline Polachek and I’m now a little charged. In swapping out the club for a bucolic trip upstate, Charli said sad girl autumn is sooo out and I want to talk about it for a second.

Read more

A brutally honest but important piece of advice I got recently came from someone I deeply respect and admire, and it punched me a little harder than it should have:

“You’re so much more interesting in real life. You’re so much smarter than your online presence makes you out to be. You need to go deeper and show your edge.”

And it kind of hurt. It hurt because there’s some veracity to it.

I’ve never doubted my intelligence, my wit, my passion or my curiosity. Call it narcissism, call it confidence, call it being raised by a “they’re just jealous of you” mom. And yet, when it comes to my career as a writer and a content creator in the fashion and lifestyle space, I constantly find myself wincing every time someone outside of my periphery asks me what I do for a living. It’s not doubt. It’s something else entirely. It’s a uniquely harrowing feeling—one that I keep hoping I will never feel but am constantly confronted with due to the inherent realities of what people think about influencers. I resent the influencers that have given the rest of us a bad name. More importantly, I resent and reject those who cast judgement on who I am, who we (“influencers”) are just because we fall under the many working definitions of an “influencer”.

On face value to the people who fall in that latter category, we are nothing more than mere self-obsessed, entitled internet persons vying for attention, praise and recognition. But when you peel back the layers, there is something beautiful about individuals who are able to amass a following on the internet, no matter how big or small, for content that serves a specific niche, lifestyle, interest or look. The underdogs of traditional media who were able to carve out their own path in the Wild West that is the digital landscape. I think about my early days on the internet when I used to spend hours on end on lookbook.nu and would emulate the style of my favorite Asian bloggers, their faces a familiar sight that reminded me that I, too, could be an authority in how to dress. I got my first taste of social media on Tumblr, like many creators of my generation. Seeing people follow me and take liking to my images, my curated feed, my writing and my personality was gratifying and exciting. My Tumblr was my little creative world I took refuge in from the cookie cutter confines of the environment I grew up in. It opened up a world of possibility for me who always felt like an outcast in my high school for loving fashion the way that I did, studying the runway shows during my free time in study hall and wondering how, one day, I could be a part of it in a tiny way. My peers went off to become doctors and lawyers, and I went off to become an influencer.

The ones who are the most critical of us are often the ones that are the most confused and the most obtuse and maybe even a little insecure. They are usually the ones that inadvertently or, more shockingly, directly benefit from people like us. The older men and women who don’t realize that their own industries and constituents are propped up by people like us. These critics cannot fathom that we’ve somehow been able to circumvent “the grind” boomers and Gen X so love to go on about. That circumvention was to market yourself, to spend less time being self-effacing and instead buy into your discerning tastes, your personality, your penchants, your life… I feel very lucky that this is my career.

I don’t ever doubt the legitimacy of my industry and the work that I put out. The influencer industry is a substantive and lucrative one that is expected to reach $480 billion by 2027. This is an industry that has completely turned the traditional advertising and media landscape on its head and democratized who gets an audience, who gets one’s attention, who gets to dictate purchasing power. We hear countless stories of editors leaving their tenured positions at magazines to pursue freelancing full time and end up making more money than they ever thought possible. Or watch with envy the TikTok videos of creators having enough cash to buy homes in the Hamptons all while maintaining a $7K a month apartment in the city. PR and marketing girlies facilitating the brand deals are meanwhile wincing about the numbers:

It’s true: the budgets are growing at a hefty and alarming rate, and this is perhaps why this industry is so insulting to those on the outside. My friend who is popular on TikTok once declared that “content creators are the new lawyers and doctors.” In terms of compensation, maybe I wasn’t so far off from my high school peers after all.

Over the past year, there’s been a crazy uptick in content creators jumping on the Substack train, to many OG Substackers’ dismay. I don’t consider myself an OG Substacker though I did start my publication on here three years ago, before this new influx. Had I been a little more consistent on here, maybe I would have a lot more subscribers, who knows. I’m not gatekeepy about this platform, maybe only a little bitter that I should have worked harder before it got so saturated. The sentiment among these early adopters of Substack writers is that they are feeling very “you can’t sit with us” about this new wave of writers because this platform is now filled with ~influencers~ who couldn’t get their writing published elsewhere. We’re the ones who were probably voted best dressed in high school and needed to challenge that merit somewhere, anywhere. I think it’s cute. I champion those people because they are me and I am them. Why listen to what a giant corporation of a media site is recommending you when you can get that same (better, more tailored, etc) information from your favorite it girls you already love and follow? That’s really all it is.

While my writing is some of the most personal stuff out there, my role as a content creator on other social media platforms and the content I create for brands, both behind and in front of the lens, is not entirely personal. I mean, sure, it’s obviously personal because I’m sharing aspects of my life across a multitude of verticals but there is a distance to it because I’m still an incredibly private person. I’ll never be one of those girls dishing out juicy, intimate details of my personal life for clickbait. I am cautious of giving the public access to this part of me because I know what happens to the girls who do. In sum: it is terrifying being personal online.

For the past six months or so, I’ve been deeply contemplating what the trajectory of my life and my career could look like and I don’t think I’ve been fair to my role as an influencer. I don’t want to feel ashamed for identifying as one because I’m not ashamed. But I have felt stifled as a result of hearing unnecessary feedback of those on the outside who try to put us down. And for what reason? Unclear. As a result, I don’t want to record the Get Ready With Me videos because I’m shy. I don’t want to do voiceovers in my reels because I cringe at the sound of my own recorded voice. But this is the kind of content that the algorithm feeds off of and I am a content creator after all!

In a way, writing this issue has been cathartic because it has reenforced what I always knew to be true about myself and this industry: there is a need for it and there is room for everybody. I want to reiterate my gratitude to everyone and anyone who has continued to follow me, engage with me, subscribe to me, message me and work with me. I am filled with a lot of inspiration going forward on how to channel everything I’ve harnessed the past five years of creating content as a full-time job. You could say I’m re-engaged, focused and determined to see it out. I will find my cadence on here and I will continue to share my life intimately in the best way I know how because that’s why you’re all here in the first place.

I’ll be heading to Paris next week for fashion week. It will be my first season in Paris after almost five years of creating full-time. In a way, it feels momentous because it’s what I have always dreamed of in my adolescence. But there is an undeniable sense of imposter syndrome creeping in and I find myself asking questions like “Why am I going?” or “Do I have a place there?” to which self-actualized me has to come in and say “Yes, you do have a place. And even if you don’t, document the shit out of it.” It seems like the right time but it has also been humbling. Paris is a whole other beast and I have had to align my expectations with reality that while there is space for everyone, this is still an industry that thrives off exclusivity and optics. I’m going in with a positive attitude and knowing that just being there, in the midst of the action through observation and dance, I can still be a part of the magic. Fourteen-year old me in study hall livestreaming those runway shows would be beaming and I’m bringing you guys along.

With love and gratitude,

Laura

I woke up to a text from my mom urging me to root for America during the Olympics too, and not just for Korea. I replied with “Why would I do that?” and she insisted that I cannot alienate my followers. I’ve only ever really felt national pride for Korea, so this is confusing to me but I will keep note to make sure I’m always sharing real experiences and feelings with my audience. I get her sentiment.

July 31, 2024

I started my summer vacation in Paris to watch the Olympics for a few days. How lucky I am to have had an opportunity like this. And yet, I prematurely cut it short before I even got to Paris in anticipation that the Olympics would be an absolute shit show that I did not want to partake in. It was the wrong decision, one that I know I will regret for days, weeks, months, years?! I just got to Lake Como and I wish I were still in Paris. I am often frustrated at myself for my inability to stick to my decision, enjoy the moment and not dwell on how my situation could be even more ideal had I not made said decision. The older I get, the more I understand that this is a result of my extreme conditioning to a good time. I am forever committed to feeling like I am doing everything right, maximizing an opportunity and feeling good about where I’m at, both figuratively and literally.

I’m upset because I wish I stayed longer to watch Korea win some more medals. Go to more of my favorite wine bars while the city was clean and empty and peaceful, a rarity. Watching the Olympic Games is actually so much fun. For the first time in a really long time, I felt real camaraderie, real sportsmanship, real collective joy. It is so needed to experience and witness collective joy.

August 1, 2024

I’ve heard so much about Lake Como over the years. I feel like this place had a real moment five, six years ago. It’s one of those places that could either very well be worth all the hype or extremely overrated. So far, I think it’s the former. It’s actually fucking beautiful here. A totally different landscape from the Italy I have known — seaside cliffs, lidos and sexy cities like Rome. Switzerland is just 20 minutes away and I’m reminded of that time my parents put me in summer school in the mountains of Switzerland, the landscape kind of like the distant mountains you see from the lake: grand, alpine-y, precious. I didn’t particularly like my experience at that summer camp but now that I look back, it’s yet another example of how I never truly appreciate things in the moment. So much of what we did in camp I would kill to do now: hike, swim in glacial waters, forage for some local greens and cook them. I must give myself a little grace… I was thirteen and when you’re thirteen, concepts like gratitude and self-awareness aren’t so sharp. I didn’t even know who I was or what I liked. Only time and reflection can make me realize a sweet moment for what it was. I’m trying to enjoy that sweet moment right now being here in Lake Como.

I wonder what my camp roommate is doing now. She was surely the daughter of a Russian oligarch because she only wore Blumarine. She annoyed me so much because her flip flops made the loudest clicking sound and woke me up way too early every morning. She gave me a Blugirl tank top when we said bye at the end of camp because I complimented it one time. I thought that was very sweet of her and I’ve loved Blumarine ever since.

Subscribe now

August 2, 2024

The food in the nearby towns of Lake Como is bad, but Tanya warned me of this so I’m not too bummed. For a few days, I’m in a storybook fairytale setting at Passalacqua, which was voted the #1 hotel in the world by World’s 50 Best last year. I hate lists like this because what do these organizations (media companies?) know about what’s best in the world, especially for ME? With my discerning taste?! I can’t stand World’s 50 Best’s restaurant list so I’m not going to put too much weight on this distinction. But… Passalacqua is definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. I feel like I’m in someone’s private home slash private art gallery. The other guests are surprisingly unstuffy and unpretentious, which is refreshing. This adds to why it feels like I’m in someone’s home.

Lately, I have qualms about being in spaces where I’m seemingly not supposed to be in. Like how if I wasn’t a content creator I would not have access to some of the places I stay at or afford the things that I have. Or if I didn’t hang around people who have homes in certain places or have a certain level of affluence (and real influence) that gives way to being in certain spaces, I wouldn’t be in them too. I’m not saying I don’t deserve to be here right now but my sense of reality is warped when I’m in such a heightened state of luxury. I love these experiences but I’m not always used to them.

Read more

It’s already HOT SUMMER NIGHTS, MID-JULY and I haven’t written all month! I turned 29 earlier this month on a last-minute trip to Rome to celebrate my solar return in a ceremonious way. There’s nothing quite like turning the last year of your 20s to send you into a contemplative spiral of your fleeting youth and the consequences of an increasingly serious life. And it’s precisely why I decided to do something out of the ordinary and looked to the sun, the moon and the stars to figure out how I should celebrate this new year. I did what I believe to have been the most beautiful, self-honoring way to do so. I’m not woo woo but I realize that flying to Rome for 72 hours because of astrology and writing about it proves otherwise. Be kind!

I generally hate the word “manifesting” because it has taken a simple concept which I have known to work my entire life — the law of attraction — into a brand of TikTok content shared and consumed by individuals I hope to never interact with. A simple search of the word “manifest” in the TikTok search bar will grant you suggestions like, “how to manifest your crush to be obsessed with you” or “how to manifest your dream salary” without much substantive guidelines other than mirror talk and thinking you’re that bitch. (To be fair, we should always think we’re that bitch) And do NOT get me started on “lucky girl syndrome”. I get the sentiment, but really, some of us are more predisposed than others to reap the benefits of said syndrome. I won’t divulge on this further today.

Today, there is still this strong collective belief in the ability to bend magical forces in our favor to unlock the secrets of the world through stars and spells, superstitions and magic. And it has existed for as long as there have been humans on the planet. Apparently, 40% of people in the world believe in witchcraft and the global astrology market is estimated at a staggering $22.8 billion. (Career pivot, anyone?) These numbers scare me because I cannot and will not subscribe to this new consumerist and often harmful incarnation of “spirituality”. When looking at these numbers, the people making free TikTok videos actually appear more endearing and are far more benevolent than bros who claim to be a “specialist embracing technology in a big way” convincing you to spend your life’s savings on their interpretation of the metaphysical. What I’m trying to get at here is that there has to be more solitary reflection and personal introspection than throwing money at someone to make sense of your life. While I can wholly empathize with society’s collective desire to rebrand one’s life and achieve one’s dreams, none of it is possible without one’s own effort beyond the metaphysical powers that exist in your own little universe.

I’ve briefly written about both my solar return and my Saturn’s return on here (make no mistake, they are different!) and to this day, I can’t really decipher the meaning of my solar return chart on my own. Something something, Jupiter in my tenth house, something something. Basically, a solar return takes place at the moment the sun returns to exactly the same location in the sky where it was at the time of your birth. So why did I go to Rome? The thinking behind solar return traveling is that just as the place where you’re born has an impact on your birth chart — which supposedly reveals major themes in your life — so can the place you spend your solar return affect the year ahead. An astrologer will use your birth chart and then searches for the place where the stars and planets will be most ~auspicious~ at the moment of your solar return, and so you travel to that location to make the most of the auspicious placement. It’s like hacking your horoscope.

For my 29th year, I’m buckling down on my career goals and maximizing the networks I’ve built up until this point. Rome, with its own unique position, was the ideal place for me to set my intentions for these career and financial goals. This is not to say I don’t feel immensely proud of what I’ve achieved thus far. I feel eternally grateful for all the major decisions I’ve made in my life to get me to where I am now: a full time writer, model and content creator living in New York City with a beautiful community of friends, family, chosen family. I get to work on my own schedule, be creatively fulfilled, see the most beautiful corners of the world and cultivate a life of discerning taste. My life is a culmination of luck, timing, output and desire, and it always will be.

But I yearn for more and that is okay. This desire to expand and grow set the tone for my trip.

The older I get, the more I realize that life has a funny way of making you feel the opposite of what you’re supposed to be feeling. Usually by virtue of contrasts: a feeling of safety and a need for independence, long-awaited vacation and existential dread, quiet reflection and unhinged spiraling… and now, for me specifically, growing older and feeling energetic. Settling down? I truly don’t know her.

I like to think that traveling to Rome was a way of honoring my life in a ceremonious way. Beyond affirmations and mAnIfEsTiNg, there is a real force out there that has an impact on the way things work out for us. And part of this force is actually just our own personal belief system that in and of itself is a powerful tool. Yes, there is a quantifiable science and methodology behind astrology no matter how much or how little you believe in it. But since that first astrology session that determined it will be Rome that I go to, I’ve shifted my focus more on how powerful our minds are when we set our goals with hearty intention. If you can believe it, you can achieve it. Some people talk to themselves in the mirror and make TikTok videos about it. Others travel thousands of miles and write about it. And you, you might just roll your eyes and continue to live your life but deep down, there is your own belief system that doesn’t involve the sun and the moon and the stars or the word “manifest”, but a quiet life of meaning and intentionality. My act of travel, more than anything, was a commitment to myself. My own little belief system.

I usually never celebrate my birthday in any big way. In fact, in the past, I largely avoided making a big deal out of my birthday out of anxiety that no one would show up to celebrate. My birthday is kind of in the perfect storm of a scenario in which no one would show up: it’s high summer, always straddles F*urth of July weekend and most people are out of town. But somehow, this year, the perfect storm of a flop birthday actually turned out to be the perfect storm of a beautiful one. I ran away to Rome for my actual birthday and then scheduled a birthday party with my friends the following week in which every single one of my friends (save for a few who no longer live in New York) happened to be in town. Call it fate, call it everyone now realizing that July in New York is actually quite nice.

As my birthday dinner was winding down, one friend asked, “Tell us what you learned in Rome” to which I responded, “Not much” and proceeded to laugh. There is no a-ha! moment with your solar return, and I don’t think there is supposed to be. In your quiet solitude, there is power in reflection.

We should always use events in our lives as a marker to check in with ourselves and ask how we want to live our life. This can come in the form of birthdays, or major life milestones, or even just a moment of contemplative brooding. How can we take something we passively experience and turn it into an act of intentionality? Life is meant to be beautiful and ceremonious. Moments of languor matched with jolts of energy. A little ceremony that synchronistically dances with other forces that shape our lives: luck, timing, output, desire. It is beautiful and one worth celebrating. I can’t wait to do it all again and again.

Subscribe now