There is a phrase I have been embracing in my own life, and, by definition, have repeated to several people around me, because I am an external processor who needs to say things out loud for them to feel real: “Strong opinions, loosely held.” I didn’t make it up. (It seems like a strategist did in 2008.) But I saw...
Hullo, friend. Here are some things that have not changed in the last four years: my love for public accountability and periodic self-reflection,my belief in building the life you want,my appreciation for all the lives I get to live,my trust in my own self to know what’s right for me and to make mistakes and to keep trying anyways,and my...
Sunset in Lisbon is earned. I have seen it only after climbing up steps and navigating clanging yellow trolleys and slotting myself in between a pair of Spaniards preening for a photo and a Dutch couple with their faces pressed into each other’s necks. I have stood there, catching my breath, as I watched it start: saw it throwing light...
I leave for Lisbon tonight. It’ll be my first international trip in well over a year. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m ready. I don’t know how to answer them. Am I ready logistically? I suppose—I have a new suitcase and a renewed passport and two weeks of accommodation booked. Emotionally? Also yes. I’m sad to leave New York, but...
Hello from the passenger seat of my beloved (and newly reconstructed) Penny as the valleys of central Pennsylvania rush by my window. Smoke hangs in long coils above the copses of oaks and aspens. Blue-grey clouds, long and low like train-flattened pennies, crowd in the rearview as raindrops splat and shake their way up the windshield. I’m on the road...
Welcome to New York (It’s Been Waiting for You) A fun little essay in which I tell you my life philosophy and how it served me as three (okay, it was actually four) very unpleasant things happened to me all at once. Blood (not mine), penises (also not mine), and vehicle damage (sadly, mine) are all involved; take this as...
Hello! Here I am! Showing up on my little corner of the internet, writing down what I hope this year contains, as I’ve done once, twice, three times over (and a dozen times in an old notebook before I took myself and my ambitions digital)! I don’t think about setting annual goals as navigating some brave new world. Or as...
I hold no illusions that the world will change when the clock strikes midnight tonight. We will still be living in a country that is mismanaging a pandemic, built on a capitalistic system that disproportionally punishes people of color, led by an out-of-touch man who won’t do enough to change the status quo (even if he’s from a different party...
No tears this time around. Wild how three months will do that to you, isn’t it? Take you and reflect you back to yourself, warped and wavy along the edges. Time is funny that way. Years feel infinite until you break them up into their disparate days. Every time I sit down to write one of these, I feel like...