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.