I woke up this morning with a faint rattling in my chest, like the airway of a kazoo. Troubling. When I got dinner with my ex last week he warned that he was feeling a bit sick, that a wayward cough on our shared plantains might lead to my eventual demise. I appreciated the courtesy but assured him I would be fine, that my youthful immunity, unlike our relationship, was still very much in tact. There’s no cure for hubris like a summer cold in the middle of marathon training.

Nonetheless I peeled myself out of bed and ran 12 miles on the treadmill, a fate I accepted once I realized it was too humid to do them outside without irreparable damage to my fragile runner’s ego. My strategy of combating illness with sweat only sort of worked, but since my period has begun to signal its arrival I’ve decided any and all ails now fall under the umbrella of menstrual woes and are thus out of my control, cough included.

Gnawing: Frozen yogurt and my sense of self. I started the week feeling, quite frankly, ugly. Not in any way that concerned my outward appearance, though that goalpost exists in perpetual motion, but like there was something gnarled and poisonous rooted deep inside me, a rot that was beginning to break through the skin. Last weekend rattled my perception of myself, made me question a lot of things about how I choose to live and think. I woke up on Monday feeling like every bad thought I’d ever thought had accumulated on my body like a film, forcing me to bear my nastiness to the world, a body painted in scarlet letters. I wanted nothing more than to hide away, to stop speaking until I forgot the sound of my own voice. I believe the colloquial term is “scaries.”

What I didn’t realize until I stepped out for a run on Wednesday was that I had forgotten what my voice sounded like. I’d forgotten who I was at all. Perhaps it was listening to the voices of my beloved Julia and of Binchtopia for the first time in awhile, but with the sun on my face and my feet against pavement, the early hours of the morning growing into day around me, I felt the hardened crust of my misgivings fall away and the breath in my lungs become mine again. The urge to start caring about my life returned, in a way that meant cultivating it to reflect who I truly believed myself to be. I move through life with a lack of seriousness that is meant to be protective but has proven detrimental. It is hard to maintain a sense of self when you let life blow you around like a leaf in the grass.

Sweat pouring from my temples, a cramp stitching itself into my abdomen, I looked out across the glittering Hudson from my stop along the pier and resolved to put roots down, so when I tend to the garden of my life I’ll see flowers I chose to plant instead of weeds I let grow.

Eyeing: A new running set. I pushed the limit on the amount of money I’m comfortable having in my bank account at any given time and purchased a pair of royal blue running shorts and a matching sports bra from Lululemon, an attempt to buffet the running slump I can feel approaching like a stranger at my back. My biggest hesitation around running a marathon was signing myself over to a training plan and relinquishing the freedom of running whenever and however I want. My life belongs to something bigger now, and I can feel my need for control squirming against the required mileage and strength training and scheduled rest days. The only way around it is to ply myself with treats and rewards, like my favorite carb sources and a $128 set of spandex. It’s working, but for how long?

Necking: My own company and that of good books. I got exactly what I wished for at the start of the week and spent most of the weekend alone, on purpose. It was glorious. I finished Stoner, which was fitting considering it’s a meditation on solitude and the search for meaning in an ordinary existence and I didn’t speak to anyone for over twelve hours on Saturday. The writing was beautiful despite being such a bleak read. I feel like I should continue reading older, more classical writing because I’ve built up the muscle for parsing more opaque prose, but instead I jumped straight into Vineland by Thomas Pynchon—which I bought because I loved One Battle After Another, which it inspired— and the writing is much more chaotic and fluid. Hopefully it’ll be in the Necking category next week. I can sense an early feeling of neck coming on.

Ignoring: Multiple bids for social connection. My Partiful has never been fuller and yet my schedule has never been emptier. I felt a twinge of something like guilt for my future self, who will look back on her early years in New York and reminisce not on late nights in crowded clubs but on watching No Country For Old Men alone by the orange light of her Kohl’s lamp. But it’s a distant, weak guilt, not nearly strong enough to pull me out of my house to stand around and talk to people I don’t particularly want to talk to. I know I’m becoming another data point for those surveys about Gen Z drinking less and socializing less and leaving the house less but in the spirit of understanding who I am and sticking to that, I must accept and my love of being alone and nurture it. I will not interrogate my own solitude in hopes of curing some nonexistent malaise that pushes me to be alone rather than with people. Maybe one exists, and maybe it starts with a D and rhymes with expression, but right now I am wholly content, happy even, in my seclusion. I am at peace.

Unearthing: My first ever Tui Na massage. Over the past couple months I’ve become acutely aware of my trap muscles, from a combination of bridal content invading my feeds— brides are getting something called “Barbie Botox” in their trap muscles to minimize their necks and maximize their clavicles— and an increasing tightness in that area, no doubt a result of running 20+ miles a week with a slight hunch, lifting heavy things, and staring at a computer for 8 hours a day. Instead of paying $5000 to a medspa for multiple injections of botulinum toxin, I opted to pay $55 to a middle aged woman to knead, slap, prod, and rub my entire body for an hour. A lot can happen in an hour. There were few parts of my anatomy this woman did not see and touch, my entire ass not being one of them. She even massaged the webbing in between my toes. It ended up being around $81 with tip. Absolutely money well spent. QQ Bodyworks on 14th does not play.

Sinning: Failure to adhere to my own self-imposed rules and a refusal to take anything seriously, two things that beget each other. I know what’s good for me and I know what’s bad for me, but I struggle with the part of adulthood that is moderating how much of those two things enter and exit my life. I tell myself not to eat gluten, but then I fall head over heels in love with the romanticized version of myself that eats burgers and drinks beer, not to mention the taste of a good burger and a cold beer, and then I’m shocked, flabbergasted even, when my stomach inflates and I’m stifling acid reflux burps. The part of me that refuses to take anything seriously tells me that denying myself gluten is stupid, that life’s too short to not eat real bread and also nothing really matters that much so you might as well eat the bread, but then I have to keep living said life after eating the bread and its kind of unpleasant and I’m burping a lot and I wish I’d had a bit of stronger will against eating the bread but the nihilism inherent to my psyche and most of my generation won’t let me get over how stupid it is not to eating the fucking bread.

I’ve struggled with this subtle sense of nothingmattersness a lot since graduating and even more since my breakup, because love gives life purpose and although I love my work and my friends and my family, there’s nothing like mutual devotion to make you want to keep living. This nihilism infects my entire life. It makes me put off writing, put off planning, put off putting myself out there. I’m still searching for a reason not to believe it. I think the answer starts with Bricking my Instagram for longer than 12 hours at a time. Will try this week and report back, although I probably won’t try too hard, because I can’t follow my own rules, because nothing matt— you get it.

This was an extremely psychoanalytic recap of my week. Next week I’m going to Vermont, so I hope I can come back and gush about the lush foliage and sparkling lakes instead of my own neuroses. I hope never to become one of those people who eschews products in lieu of actual life, but it might be nice to discuss a good sandwich instead of like, my own hopelessness.

Depraved and brainy,

I’m writing this on Monday, 19 hours and 4 minutes past my self-imposed deadline of 11:59 on Sunday, visited by the same dull dread that comes with finishing a graded assignment right as the teacher comes by to collect it. The only difference is there is no punishment on the other side of my failure to publish on my own timeline except for a deep shame and a profound reconsideration of my own accountability. But I digress.

The skies in New York are grey and heavy, the weighted promise of a thunderstorm lingering overhead. I’m recovering from a weekend with more time spent drunk than sober, slouching through the day on a triple shot espresso and 6 hours of intermittent sleep. It’s called being 22. I’m craving complete and total social isolation and the soft underside of my duvet. Hoping the rain will deliver me to that and from evil, the evil being my actions this weekend and the headache lingering behind my puffy eyes. Amen.

Gnawing: On cold beers watching the USMNT beat Australia. Pepperoni pizza. White pizza with prosciutto. Greek fries. Tiramisu. A perfect iced matcha. An espresso martini, a lemon drop martini, a Guinness, a Peroni. Leftover tiramisu. An Aperol Spritz from one of those kitschy Little Italy restaurants that was 80% Aperol and 20% cursed and left me with a splitting headache I can liken only to wearing a bear trap as a hat. Salvation in the form of my roommate’s homemade salted chocolate chip M&M cookies that are the size of my head and as thick as my skull and the perfect ratio of gooey to crunchy.

Eyeing: Financial stability. Everything listed above was not free, aside from the kindness inherent to my lovely partner in rent. I’m eyeing asceticism, freedom from earthly wares, the will to resist the numerous vices promising to pad my pathetic dopamine stores. I’m eyeing a trip to the middle of the woods with nothing but books and my thoughts. Actually, just books. But in the spirit of saving money, a shaded bench in Central Park will have to do.

Necking: The World Cup. I love having a built-in excuse to go out and do something, especially when that something involves the sport I played for 12 years and often a beer or three. And because all the games are at separate times, you know that anyone watching is watching the exact game as you, whether it’s 6pm in Paris or 12pm in New York or 2am in Baghdad. That is a beautiful, rare feeling. It’s the world’s most beautiful game, after all. Literally. Have you seen these men?

Ignoring: My own shortcomings.

Unearthing: My own shortcomings.

Sinning: This past week I was reminded of my ability to become a deeply ugly person when confronted with certain emotions I like to pretend I don’t have. I consider myself level-headed and pragmatic, perhaps to the point of passivity, but deep down is a level of neuroticism and bare-faced rage I’ve spent a lifetime trying to conceal. The mask, which was already thin, slipped a few times this week. Pride and the ego are a noxious combination, lethal in the presence of alcohol and insecurity. It’s really fun being 22.

I feel a strong urge to disappear inside myself, to dig around my own mind for the darker parts and shine a little light on them. They are beginning to seep into my life like carbon monoxide, ignored until deadly. I have not been putting nearly enough beauty into the world and it shows. Right now the internal male voyeur that Margaret Atwood so poignantly identified is getting an image of me most reminiscent of Carrie on her magazine cover. Single and feeling far from fabulous.

Go watch soccer with strangers. Think before you speak. Remember that all energy comes back to you, good and bad. Wear sunscreen but never deny yourself the medicine of sunlight. There are scarier things than aging. Count every single blessing then count them again. Call your mother, then throw your phone in the river. Landlines exist. Next week I hope I’ll be less vague and ominous as a result of being more mentally sound. Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m fine. I have a propensity for hyperbole of which you’re well aware.

Nefarious and astute,

I’m writing this from the cool safety of my Chinatown apartment, my air conditioner blasting with a fury that will undoubtedly come to haunt my ConEd bill. A disgusting heat has blanketed the city, thick and unyielding, the kind that makes walking feel like a swim through molasses. I’ve resolved to stay indoors despite the siren call of a 7 UV index. It’s not worth it. The city is holding its breath, waiting for a stentorian storm to relieve us of the humidity, a Knicks win to absolve us of our sins, and a tsunami of tourists to crash onto our subway shores. Even in the blistering heat, it’s a great time to be a New Yorker. Paycheck just hit, meeting just wrapped, weekend schedule is open wide. Knicks in five.

Gnawing: On a martini and burger from Balthazar, eaten solo at the bar with a complimentary glass of champagne and a dog-eared copy of Stoner. A free Knicks-are-NBA-champions bean and cheese burrito from Son Del North dunked in their yummy sauce that I’m not afraid to admit is too spicy for me. Ice cream from Van Leeuwen because every frozen yogurt shop either had a 40-minute wait or was out of yogurt entirely which, what the fuck— looking at you, Madison Fare. On my fingernails, eyes half-shut, watching Obsession, a terrifying, heart-dropping, bone-chilling, stomach-turning masterclass of a horror movie that has kept me awake every night since viewing.

Eyeing: Some kind of baggy green pant. My style lives somewhere between clean, simple silhouettes colored in black, white, and blues and a utilitarian boyishness designed to comfort and conceal. The latter is currently winning out. I’m feeling called to find a kind of loose, wide leg cargo pant distantly evocative of blue-collar work that I can wear to my cushy job at a creative agency. And I want them to be green, because I’m beginning to tire of the inability to tell any of my clothes apart by color. The vision is Kim Possible if she wrote copy.

Necking: My new KOSS KPH40 Utility headphones. After burning through four! pairs of corded Apple headphones at $20 a pop, the last of which lasted three! days before going out in one ear, something had to give. Music is king when I’m putzing around New York all day. These babies were $40 and while they aren’t noise cancelling, they are reliable which, in a sea of increasingly shitty marketable goods, is priceless. I’ve loved feeling like Patrick Bateman clicking down the halls of my office.

Ignoring: My better judgement. The book I said I’d read. The book I said I’d write. My Oura activity goal. My bank balance. The leftovers in my fridge. My timesheets. The concerning amount of times I’ve listened to “Thinking of You” by Katy Perry.

Unearthing… the blissful liberation of making a decision. I was recently presented with an opportunity to shake up one of the three Big L Areas of Life™— living, loving, or laboring, i.e where you call home, who you kiss, and what you do for cash. I won’t specify which one, but it was a decision I’d been weighing for a while, which in turn began to weigh on me. When I got the final piece of information I thought I needed, I realized my gut had known all along. The moment the choice solidified in my brain I felt my synapses open back up, the branches of my fig tree regrowing in front of my eyes. Clarity is a beautiful thing.

Sinning: I haven’t done anything entirely too terrible this week besides spend money with reckless abandon and consume concerning amounts of alcohol, two things that may or may not be related. It might also bode well for me to talk a little bit less shit, but how else am I supposed to connect with my bestianas? The flagrant lack of taste displayed in the recent wedding of one our favorite micro-influencers is not going to discuss itself. Gossip is to women what golf is to men. These lips will continue to move.

Gossip with your girls. Find an early-aughts pop song and listen it to a pulp. Take yourself out to dinner, preferably at an esteemed New York institution that knows how to curate a vibe as much as a menu. Whatever you do, don't see Obsession. Or do, then prepare yourself for multiple sleepless nights and visions of grotesquerie I cannot in good conscience articulate in this letter. It is an excellent movie though.

Wicked and sagacious,

I look in the mirror to find a subtle, welcome glow in my face, like the sun is rising within me. I feel as much. I don’t stop to fixate on the angry scabs carved into my cheeks and chin, the same ones I had agonized over in the days before, popping and patching and picking and patching, a game of whack-a-mole playing out across my skin. I feel a renewed sense of calm and earthly goodwill, a call to serve my fellow man and embrace the gift of my life with more humility and compassion than ever before. If I lived anywhere near a church I would stop in to worship, to thank God, maybe not that God but definitely a God, for letting me live to see another day. A glance between my legs from my undignified place on the toilet confirms what I already know. There goes my uterine lining, watch her as she goes.

Comedian Jordan Jensen has a bit about admiring the stray blood clot that escapes when you’re forced to do the awkward naked dance between the toilet and shower on your period: “There’s a part of you that looks at that glob and goes ‘that’s my boy!’.” I might entertain a fleeting ounce of pride, but the coagulated glob of useless cells mostly stirs in me a muddied blend of relief and loathing. I almost cannot believe that this thing, this stain that would be otherwise classified as medical waste is my only reward for a week spent toiling away inside a body and mind completely foreign to me.

Just the night before I laid in my dark bedroom, curled in fetal position, and sobbed into the empty air, the kind of stuttered howling that steals the breath from your lungs. It was game 3 of the NBA finals and I was crying because I couldn’t believe I was laying alone in a dark room during such a historic time in New York history, couldn’t believe that years from now, when people look back and remember this Knicks run with reverence and awe, I would be forcibly reminded that I was an ugly friendless loser, never mind a bad New Yorker, who didn't watch game 3 of the NBA finals with her fellow citizens or even at all, who instead chose to cry alone in her room, subsumed by a white duvet and self-pity.

That is crazy for a lot of reasons, the foremost being that I don’t even care about sports like that. While I am obviously so happy for my city and happier still for the fans that have waited over five decades for something like this to happen, in my right mind I know my place and won’t pretend that this historic Knicks run is something sitting top of mind. But I was not in my right mind. That is the problem.

I was my own Mr. Hyde, except with none of the same villain swagger. Before I bullied myself into swimming in a pool of my own tears, I’d cried on the phone with my mother about the fact that I was a useless writer, that I was too insecure about my abilities to ever be successful, that although she says my writing is amazing and that I should share it more, she’s my mother and has to say that so it doesn’t count. Then I cried about my own ingratitude and callous refusal of my mother’s support.

Before that I’d moped around the city at dusk, listening to Radiohead and noting the dysmorphic size of my thighs and bloated stomach in the reflection of empty Soho storefronts.

Before that I’d spent the workday mute, breaking my silence only to snap at people I consider dear friends and coworkers while internally berating my own copy until I was convinced my termination was imminent.

Before that I’d seriously considered texting my ex-boyfriend and apologizing for every single thing I’d ever said or done.

Before that I’d committed a mass casualty event on Broadway via nasty, unspoken judgments aimed at complete strangers, after which I flayed myself for the sheer ugliness I was capable of thinking about people I didn’t know.

Before that I was doubled over a stack of used copies of Giovanni’s Room at Codex on Bleeker, unable to stand while the six Advil floating in my bloodstream struggled to subdue the feeling of hot coals nesting inside my lower abdomen.

This is not the behavior of a normal, well-adjusted person.

There is a popular scenario that plays out in culture which a straight male character, whether out of naivety or spite, asks his female partner or acquaintance if she’s on her period in order to rationalize and/or minimize any negative emotions that may or may not be directed towards him. Asking a woman if it’s “that time of the month” can, indeed, have the invalidating effect of reducing her frustrations to a product of temporary hormonal imbalance. I, however, and I say this with full knowledge of the risk of sounding like a gender traitor, would personally welcome the suggestion that I am acting so unlike myself that the only plausible explanation is the complete possession of my mind and body by the primordial evil known colloquially as premenstrual syndrome. I’m begging you, actually, to let me outsource the reasons for my appalling behavior to the unruly tides of estrogen and testosterone. Absolve me of my guilt, menses!

For I am not, in fact, a judgmental monster destined for a life of isolation and insecurity—at least not for three weeks out of the month. But I fear that spending one-fourth of my life as that version of me, harsh and cruel and histrionic, is beginning to blur my perception of myself. It’s becoming harder to trust what is my true nature and what is the work of the red weevil burrowed in my ovaries. And though I might feel like I’m floating above my body the week before my period, the consequences of my altered state remain earthbound. A Venn diagram between the times in my last relationship when I started a fight and my luteal phases would be a near perfect circle.

In the early days of humanity, getting shunned from the pack meant losing access to shared resources, protection, reproduction, the joys of mammalian camaraderie. When it came to survival, social exclusion equaled death. So it makes sense, then, that if a woman proves herself unable to reproduce, her hormones would collaborate to turn her into such a raging cunt that the group has no choice but to leave her in the dust, our bodies’ natural way of betraying us as liabilities before we even have the blood to show for it. At least that’s my theory. How else do you explain why I become a warped, broken-mirror version of myself, convinced of my own unlovability and worthlessness and hell-bent on alienating myself from every single person I love exactly three days before the egg I failed to fertilize falls out of my cooch?

Growing up I thought the bleeding would be the worst part of a woman’s period, all chocolates and heating pads and crying during sad movies. That is the Disney version of a Grimm Brothers Tale. The bleeding sucks, it does. It’s cramps and ruined clothes and a pervasive sense of being unclean. But the blood is a necessary release, literally and metaphorically, from the hell that is a premenstrual body. The only thing fictional about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that they’re men. That evil double shit is happening in real life, all the time, to beautiful innocent undeserving divas everywhere.

This recent PMS was so humbling that I was forced to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about myself. A ego death of menstrual proportions. Perhaps it was an overdue karmic reckoning, population control on the amount of conceited thoughts I’m allowed to have about myself. Maybe it was my ovarian cyst’s final act of vengeance. I don’t know. I wish I could look at my period as this beautiful reminder of my ability to create life, a sign of a healthy, functioning body. Instead I stare at my online tracker with dread, counting down the days until I fall back into the Sunken Place.

This is me asking for permission to be unbelievably difficult and borderline clinically insane for seven days out of every month, and swiftly acquitted for all that I said and did shortly thereafter. Don’t hold it against me your Honor. It was my luteal doppelgänger. And if you happen to run into her during those cursed seven days, I’ll pray for you. I do that now.

GNAWING… on the bars of my enclosure, my enclosure being the edit studio that is also my office/living room/cafeteria for the next month. I’m trying to marry the reality of my job—getting fed and paid to sit on a comfortable couch, stringing together cuts of an ad I helped write and produce—with the reality of inhabiting a physical form that benefits from regular movement, meals, and work hours. The marriage is in counseling.

I worked through last weekend and woke up on Thursday with an unwelcome heaviness, the closest thing to legitimate, NameBrand depression I’ve felt in a long time. I had one finger hovering over the number of the psychiatrist I ghosted in 2020 until I felt my boobs get sore and understood that this was all just one giant cosmic clusterfuck of biology and timing intended to force me to rest.

Life will be worth living once I get my sleep and Saturdays and body back from the overstayed welcome of my useless uterine lining. In the meantime, I’ve been gnawing on at least three cups of coffee a day. I’ve become partial to a cortado, which makes me feel chic and skinny and Italian and superior to everyone in the same way I imagine a specific brand of tattooed white dude feels ordering an espresso tonic, a drink I believe shouldn’t exist.

EYEING… things I can’t have. Gluten. Cigarettes. Pretty clothes. I walked by this girl on the way to work with a bitch face carved from stone, resting under slim little black sunglasses and framed by perfectly straight, shiny black hair. I couldn’t blame her expression because she looked chic and she knew it and when your outfit’s good and you know it you’re allowed to be a cunt on your strut to work. I moved out of her way.

She was wearing black heels, wide leg black slacks, and this black silk puff-sleeve Reformation top that I immediately tried to find on Poshmark to no avail. I couldn’t find it anywhere, actually. I’m not normally drawn to Reformation but she made this top look fiercer than anyone at that company could’ve ever imagined it would and now she’s on my rob list.

NECKING… “The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan. My second Egan after A Visit From The Goon Squad, which I devoured just as fast as this one because the way Egan plays with prose is brilliant and inventive and delectable. There’s a chapter in Candy House written entirely in sets of imperatives and hypothetical rules, like “giggling is sometimes better than answering” and “the goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.” It’s the most gripping of the entire novel. I have a crush on her mind. I’m reading Stoner next, which I hope ends up under “N” instead of “I” on this list next week.

IGNORING… the pressing need to clean my room. I lost one of my favorite possessions, a ring my mom gifted me for my high school graduation that has been one of the few pieces of jewelry I’ve managed to keep up with over the years. I was a hungover puffy fuck who had to work on a Sunday but couldn’t type with the ring squeezing my hungover puffy fingers so I put the ring in my pocket and forgot about it. Then, when I ripped my jeans off with violence and urgency, as one does upon returning home after a long, sweaty New York day, the ring must’ve flown out of my pocket and nestled somewhere inside my dusty ass room, which has grown increasingly disheveled in direct correlation to the amount of time I’ve spent working.

Cleaning my room will, ideally, recover my ring and free my mind from dust-induced anxiety, but I’m not hopeful on both of those things happening so I’m choosing to ignore it for now and pray to St. Anthony, the god of lost things, instead.

UNEARTHING… a new game from the New Yorker called “Catalogues” where you have to list trivia answers in the correct order according to a theme. I don’t know what to say besides I love it and am obviously good at it because remembering names is a sport I’ve won gold in my entire life but also it’s kind of pathetic that my biggest discovery of this week is another online word game to add to my already extensive repertoire of Ways To Pass Time At Work. Outside time is clearly at a low right now.

SINNING… by way of the clandestine. I have been amassing a collection of secrets about myself over the past month to the point where I’ve begun to question what even qualifies. I think the answer lies in a) your willingness to lie to protect it, and b) the amount of people involved. I am not a good liar. In fact, it is almost impossible for me to lie. But I am skilled in the art of bullshitting, which is where you say technically true things and omit the parts that make them technically untrue. And in order for something to become a secret, another person must be involved in or made aware of said information. If it exists only to you, it’s just something private… unless you feel the need to lie about it. Then congrats, you’ve just birthed yourself a secret.

I like having secrets. I keep random things secret for fun, like how many miles I’m going to run or my Halloween costume. Sue me, I love to shock and awe, surprise and delight. Most of my secrets are as stupid as an upcoming hair appointment or this Substack. If this was a leather couch and you were my shrink I’d tell you that I’ve probably been collecting these secrets as a source of comfort, to have something that’s mine and mine only, a twisted way of grounding myself through recent bouts of ennui. Or I’m subconsciously distancing myself from everyone in my life by refusing to let them perceive me. I like to think I’m protecting my energy, maintaining a closed line with the universe to hasten the speed in which I receive all for which I’ve asked. Perhaps a salacious little combo of all three?

Regardless, I am now the proud owner of a bushel of secrets ranging from laughable to jaw-dropping. I’ve become so good at keeping them that it’s almost as if they never happened, pushed so far into the folds of my brain I couldn’t reach them if I tried. The biggest challenge is remembering who I’ve told what— you know what they say about secrets and twos…

That’s enough navel-gazing for now. Sprinkle a little mischief into your week by keeping a few secrets. See what happens. Maybe even make a surprise out of it. Just don’t egregiously lie or blow up your life beyond repair. And say a prayer to St. Anthony for me.

Conniving and brilliant,

This June has brought with it a familiar melancholy, a subtle heaviness rolling in beneath the lightness of the summer season. This time last year was the loneliest I’ve ever been, the kind of loneliness you try ignore for fear of succumbing to it. I’d just moved to New York, into on sublease on Bowery with two roommates three years older who lived the grand, beautiful lives I hoped for myself. I knew no one.

I spent many weekends in the company of books and movies, which sounds idyllic, but the silence of my own company grew oppressive with nothing to punctuate it. The empty expanse of my weekends felt as suffocating as the heat trapped within the city streets. I didn't have anyone to see even if I wanted to, no agency in the matter of my aloneness. At the same time my relationship was starting to crumble, I was terrified to spend money, and I was being visited by grotesque visions of filth invading my body. One day I wrote:

“Even in the oppressive heat of New York summer, I didn’t crave a shower. All I could think about was the months of bodily detritus crawling, like ants, from its place on the yellowed tile, marching up through my toes and over my knees and into my mouth and my nose and my ears, my eyes bleeding with congealed hair and dirt and soap like a low-budget reincarnate of the girl in “The Ring.”

…I’d become increasingly aware of every microscopic bodily sensation, both inside and out. I noticed every hair sprouting on my chin, the smallest drop of liquid in my bladder, every bit of dirt in between my toes, even the blood pumping in my right thigh. I could smell the fresh pizza down the block and the dried urine on my stoop and the sweat creeping out of my pores and the trash rotting in the kitchen. All of my senses were heightened. I lived on high alert.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how my skin was covered in the dirt from the sidewalk and the dust from the bathroom and the food in the sink, and suddenly I couldn’t wash my hands enough and my feet couldn’t touch the bare floor and I held my breath every time I walked into a room. The slightest discomfort, like underwear that was too tight or socks that were too loose or food that was too soft in my mouth, would cause me to twitch and shudder and convulse. I felt infantile, a toddler one wrong texture away from a tantrum. I wanted to curl up in a ball and lay completely still so that the world’s spores and germs and particles would pass over and not into my body, so that the hair from the shower drain would not shove itself into my throat.”

I see now that these nightmares were of a product of my loneliness. I would go days without speaking to anyone in person, my own voice becoming unrecognizable and far away when it was time to use it again. The more time I spent inside my mind the more room my fears had to grow, my attention like oxygen to an ugly flame. I had too much time to think and not enough to think about, aside from my partner’s growing coldness and my dwindling bank balance. Fixating on every bodily sensation was a final attempt to assert my physicality, to stop myself from backsliding into the emptiness of my own interiority.

A year has passed and my life is different. I’m no longer in a relationship. I no longer cling to every dollar that passes through my hands. I’m no longer tormented by visceral images of violent sludge. And, surrounded by people I want to be near and who want to be near me, I have been returned the agency to decide when I want to be alone.

But as June settles upon New York with the same long, bright hours and pink sunsets, the weight of winter lifting off the city’s shoulders with a collective sigh, I am reminded of that lost, languid summer spent withering away inside my own mind. Sometimes when I find myself alone I panic, remembering those days and the terror of their insurmountability. They sit at the edge of my memory, a reminder of my own pathetic humanity. That I am not invincible, carved in steel, that my quality of life is dependent on the presence of other people. I am not a self-sustaining unit. None of us are.

That is the way June works, I guess. The first sips of balmy summer nights give us a reason to gather, which forces us to contemplate who we might gather with, and crushes us when we realize there may not be an answer. But there will always be another June, with its gold mornings and cool breezes and hope. 365 days is not that much distance between the crumpled girl being swallowed by her aloneness and the one writing this post, a fact that is both terrifying and inspiring. Like June.

That’s purely anecdotal evidence gathered from the three times I’ve been outside in New York since Sunday, when a historic snowstorm blanketed the five boroughs and Shaun White jumped over Shane Gillis with a snowboard, because according to lung.org they’re not. Spare me this overgeneralization for the sake of the essay.

They say snow purifies, and for awhile, it did. I woke up on Sunday to a cold breeze through my open window and something solid in the air, tiny flecks brushing against my face. I felt like a child, as I’m sure did the rest of New York, watching our streets and sidewalks and fire escapes disappear into a sea of perfect white, a blank canvas for our hands and feet to paint as our own. The city was reborn, and so were we.

I went to Central Park and sledded with people half my age and twice it. I ate a brownie sundae with a friend at PJ Clarke’s and admired the snowflakes on our eyelashes. I shivered from the wind chill and wished I’d listened to my mother when she told me to dress warmer, and I drank hot chocolate under layers of blankets while Friends reran on the TV. But the presence of purity implies a presence of filth, and as the snow slowed its descent the temperature did not, hardening the city into a grotesquerie of its former self; the filth revealed at last. What was once light became dark. Dark grey, dark brown, dark yellow, or sometimes all three at once.

Snow in New York is like getting wine drunk. One moment you’re traipsing through the streets with flushed cheeks and the conviction that life is a miracle worth living, enlivened in blissful communion with your fellow man. The next you’re awake and forced to bear witness to the cruel duality of nature— that fermented grapes can feel both so good and so, so bad; that snow can be both soft and beautiful and also gnarled and ugly and slimy and muddy and icy and dangerous.

I think more people are smoking cigarettes because, like a hangover, our impulse control is dampened. We’re reaching for comfort around every corner because the ground feels unsteady. We trudge through the streets slouched and trembling, scooting through gaps in snow mounds, shuffling carefully along sidewalks that weren’t salted and silently thanking those responsible for the ones that were. Single file, like timid schoolchildren. To misstep no longer means stepping on a mystery substance or trash pile— they still exist, only now they’re ensconced in snow— it means getting caught in the sludge and carting around a cold wet pant leg for the rest of the day, or slipping and damaging more than just your gloves. The stakes are high. We’re in more layers than any other time of year, and yet we’re our most vulnerable. So we’re smoking more cigarettes.

Maybe, subconsciously, I just really want a cigarette. I see them everywhere, smoke tendrils curling next to hot breaths in the cold air. I find I’m bargaining with myself a lot. If I brave the snow to make it to the gym, I can buy myself the good creamer on the way back. If I walk to work instead of working from home, I can get a warm lunch out— and have a cigarette when I get home. I’ve become convinced I deserve a prize for doing anything in this weather. I feel, again, like a child, one that has to be coaxed with the promise of a reward. I’ve regressed in my susceptibility to instant pleasure, perhaps because pleasure feels so hard to come by nowadays.

There’s no sun to warm my body, no solid ground for me to walk on, no trees to shade under, no grass to plant my feet. There’s no color in my face or the sky above me, no music in the streets. Innocent people are being murdered by governments at home and abroad, though really they’re all the same government— my country’s government— and innocent families are being ripped apart by a living, breathing evil. Everything is expensive. Everything is enshittified. Nothing is certain. So we’re smoking more cigarettes. I feel weaker for my bargaining, especially when I know that 50,000 Minnesotans stood in much lower temperatures with no promise of a reward and an added threat of violence. Then again, I’ve always felt weak for wanting things. I pride myself on my proximity to monasticism, subsisting off an imagined moral superiority predicated on my denial of creature comforts. But pleasures of the ego only last so long.

I used to believe winter was about bareness. That it required retreating, stripping my life down to its naked branches, denying myself earthly pleasures in solidarity with the season. I’ve spent a lot of Januarys starving and alone. But one of the earliest stories we learn as children is that of the bear. The bear collects what she needs to survive the winter and brings it into her home. She finds food and gathers her family, and together they feast, then rest, in order to emerge renewed in the spring. The bear does not deny herself what she needs to survive, and I bet if the bear ever tried a cigarette, she would not deny herself those, either.

The winter asks more of us, not less. More effort, more forethought, more grit. It asks us what to evaluate what matters, and what we’re willing to endure for the things that do. It asks us to look harder for life within the season of death. Warmth will not come easy— we must work to find it, to create it ourselves. A hearty meal with friends, the tablecloth stained with wine. A drink in a dark bar full of ruddy-faced strangers, coats stacked high by the door. A day of sledding in Central Park. An excellent book. A bad movie with excellent company. A sundae, just because. The winter is cruel and unforgiving, the world even more so. But it is because it takes so much from us that we search for more, supplementing what we’ve lost with earthly comforts that are perhaps meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but not in the long hours of a January day.

Now is not the time to deny ourselves a cigarette.

1. Stop being a viciously judgmental snot nosed little bitch

2. Put down the phone. Never forget how bad the phone is. Very very bad

3. Live in service of others

4. Live below my means

5. Stop tweaking

6. Wear sunscreen

7. Count blessings every single day and thank the universe for its divine guidance and abundance

8. Stay hot, get hotter

9. Consistent yoga practice

10. 2 books a month

11. Take writing seriously

12. Accept my own earnestness. Stop trying to paint over it with sarcasm

13. Track cycle like life depends on it (it does)

14. Chase whimsy

15. Say yes

16. Run a marathon?

17. More movies, less TV. Unless with roommates

18. Start lifting weights again

19. Write down everything all the time

20. Slow down. Literally walk slower

21. Decenter alcohol

22. Be gentle

23. Grow hair out

24. Figure out what femininity means to me &embody that

25. Stop speaking ill of those not in the room

26. Trust in divine timing always

Specifically, two scoops of the Illy Intenso Bold Roast 100% Arabica Ground Espresso, packed tightly into the silver portafilter of my brand new DeLonghi Dedica Duo Espresso and Cold Brew Machine and poured into a cup of steamed full-fat milk mixed with a dash of Chobani Chocolate Cookie Dough creamer because I am a snob about a lot of things but creamer is not one of them.

A recipe for ascension. A portal to a spiritual plane. Especially if, like me, you’ve spent the past 6 months drinking coffee that closely resembled the last dregs of fuel in an airplane engine. In the words of the great Addison Rae, “they say the lows are what make the highs higher.” Shitty coffee makes real espresso feel like a hand-wrapped gift from God.

I came to New York with a deep-seated anxiety about many things, but mostly about how expensive it is. I spent 4 years in a tiny college town where beers were $6 and mixed drinks—heavily poured, guaranteed to get you crankin’ that Soulja B—were $11. I came to New York acutely aware of the feeling that paying $15 for a coffee can induce. It’s a bad feeling.

I’m also ignominiously frugal, despite (or perhaps, in light of) growing up in the garden of riches that is an affordable milquetoast mid-sized Southern city. When I moved to New York, I vowed to resist, at all costs, the high-rolling temptations of this twinkle town, with its $22 cocktails and $70 Ubers and $12 novelty pastries. I downgraded my wardrobe, my skincare, my diet, subsisting almost entirely off snacks from the office pantry (again: ignominious). And I drank the free coffee at work, which meant I only had to cover my caffeine habit for the few days I wasn’t in office. Here, dear reader, is where I went wrong.

When you’re trying to change your consumption habits, there’s a difference between discerning and depriving. Discerning is buying the $3 private-label milk instead of the $8 name-brand one. Depriving is not buying milk at all. It’s up to you to decide what you can and can’t live without, but that can be hard when, like me, you have inherited anxiety around money (love you Mom). You might convince yourself you’re okay living a life without milk so you can save $3. But then you find yourself making a recipe that you know would be better with $3 milk, but you only have $0 water, and now look what you’ve done.

My first month in the city, my frugality had lead me down an alarmingly monastic path. I’d already barred myself from most earthly delights— wine, sweets, a gym membership, sushi— in the name of saving money, when I decided to also sacrifice my coffee. It was only a couple days a week. I bought a $25 French press from Target. I told myself it was chic—Clare, it’s French!—and that I would finally learn to drink coffee like An Adult. It’s amazing how something so simple—grounds and boiling water—can ruin your fucking life.

Roughly 3 days a week for 6 months I drank some kind of cross between lizard piss and tar. Despite trying every ratio of water to grounds, the coffee always came out a bitter, black sludge better suited for stripping paint, and did in fact strip me of both my stomach lining and dignity. An entire carton of full fat CoffeeMate could only do so much as to turn the goop from jet black to shit-brown, which was fitting considering most instances were followed by a violently emptying of my bowels, an experience I would liken to having a small demon stick its hands up your backside and begin carving from the inside out. I think I was only a few trips away from complete rectal prolapse. I got a colonoscopy/upper endoscopy in October because I was worried I had severe IBS or early onset incontinence. Turns out I just had a coffee maker express-delivered from Hell.

And yet, for all my shitting and gagging and choking down cups of caffeinated sewage water, I refused to buy a new machine. I, like so many recovering Christians, believe there’s nobility in suffering. Bitches love to play martyr. I was more pious for enduring my horrible coffee because it meant I was above base human pleasures, the temptations from which all suffering stems. To be seen wanting/liking/aspiring to material things was an abject moral failure, a sign of a weak mind. Classic protestant work ethic rearing its lame head. I’m as stubborn as I am frugal. I was determined to make that medieval torture device work for me and the $25 I spent like 6 months ago. It’s gone girl. Let it go.

Eventually I did let it go, though not of my own volition. I received what can only be described as cosmic princess treatment, a stroke of luck so perfect it couldn’t be luck at all. The universe saw my broken spirit and decimated insides and raised me a $250 gift card, won through a raffle at my office holiday party. It was divine intervention. A celestial smack upside the head. Truly, my stomach could not have handled much more. $250 bought me a DeLonghi Dedica Duo Espresso and Cold Brew Machine, and access to stores of happiness I was previously unaware existed.

Money does not buy happiness. Money buys security, and security begets happiness. Buying nice things for the sake of their niceness will not lead to sustained feelings of happiness. Knowing what is important to you and being secure in that knowledge, then prioritizing those things, is how you manufacture a steady trickle of serotonin to the dome.

But money does buy a nice coffee maker. And I know now, after months of muddy bean water, that I absolutely love my morning coffee, and I will pay however much it costs for it to be good. Money buys coffee that regulates my digestion in a way that is kind rather than violent. Try feeling secure when you can’t trust your farts. You can’t.

Omg. They’re typing. They're typing. Ok. Ok…………………………… Wait. They like it. They like the work. Omg. I’m goated. I’m literally goated. I’m the female Dan Wieden. Ogilvy who. Goodby who. Everyone start climbing cause you’re not on my level.

My sister said she imagines my job is like stand-up. I won’t give myself too much credit because comedians are much braver and funnier and more of gift to this earth than advertisers, but she’s not entirely wrong. My job is cracking jokes I spent hours writing and waiting for various creative directors to laugh, though sometimes I don’t even get to deliver the joke in-person and have to send it in a Google Slide and hope it reads well. I guess that’s all writing, though. Repeat vulnerability. Opening the windows to your weird little mind and hoping people like what’s inside. Knowing you don’t have a job if they don’t. It’s giving Carrie at Big’s door.

Wednesday, 11:30am. Sitting on Teams, waiting to present. The other creative team, the other, (and this is important) male, creative team— has eaten into 40 minutes of an hour-long call presenting their scripts, leaving us roughly 15 minutes to present five campaigns. Cool. Did I mention I’m a woman, and my partner is a woman, and we’re the only women on this team?

I operate with a stubborn, unyielding naïveté that causes me to believe the world is actually a much better place than evidence suggests. Call it what you want—toxic positivity, misplaced optimism, willful ignorance, youth. It’s served me well so far, except when it ends up hurting my feelings, because the world actually isn’t a happy place, or a fair one, or a kind one, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise.

I know that sexism exists. I know that men are systemically raised to believe that women are less than, that we’re to be seen and not heard, that we’re smaller and dumber and incapable of doing what men can do at the level they do it. Deep down I know that I’m not immune to it, and need to accept that I will encounter it. But knowing all of this doesn’t stop bruises from forming every time my male bosses critique down rather than up, when they repeat my ideas like they’re their own, when they sit there, stone-faced and silent, as I walk through my work, heart on my sleeve, Carrie outside Big’s door. I always think it’s going to be different and it never is.

God I love being melodramatic on a Wednesday. It’s easier for me to blame the ills of the world for a negative reaction to my work than admit that I’m not an All-American creative with a perfect batting streak of ideas. I’m a woman in a classically male industry. C’est la vie.

I should spend less time shattering the glass ceiling by trying to estimate the role of my gender in the success of my creative endeavors and spend more time on what I actually can control, which is my grip on the English language so I can become the sharpest cleverest most concise writer ever. That sentence is an oxymoron in itself. Cleverest, most concise writer. See? I’m already getting better. Could a woman do that?

I’m tired. And hungry. I’ve spent more of the day in meetings than not. The sun is lowering in the sky and taking my eyelids with it while I sit in on a deck run-through for a meeting I’m not even going to be in. Rude.

This was like kind of a work vlog and I’m really not trying to make that my brand. Not a good look to be Substacking on the job. But it’s a better habit than, say, coke. Or the NYT games. I’ve managed to kick both. Kidding.

I still do the Crossword.

6 am-10am

Woke up at 6:30, said fuck you to my running alarm and went back to sleep. Woke up again at 8:30, regretted telling off my original alarm, apologized to the air and scrambled to find clean running clothes.

Hobbled through the last mile of a 4-mile run. Literally hobbled, like an elderly man about to shit himself. I went bow-legged. I usually never get side stitches but all I ate before the run was like half a stale fig bar so my body reacted accordingly. Sorry body.

Posted my 10-minute miles on Strava because I have no shame.

11 am-12pm

Got a notification that my rent was due. Moved money from my savings to my spending account, which was properly humbling. Hit “Make Payment” and shuddered. The payment portal charges me an extra $10 transaction fee for debit cards and an extra 25% fee for credit cards because everything is evil and I exist on this earth to get robbed. I can either pay an extra $10, which feels insulting on top of the already exorbitant ridiculous vomit-inducing amount, or pay even more than that and collect credit card points towards like, a flight upgrade or something. I pay with my debit card and then do breathing exercises. I love living in New York. I love living in New York. I love living in New York.

Look at my account balance after the rent payment hits and feel overwhelmingly grateful that I didn’t get duped by all the Black Friday ads on my feed, specifically this lovely little silk mini cape dress I’d been eyeing. I kept trying to convince myself I’d have plenty of places to wear it, what with all the cocktail parties and brand events I attend (???), then I checked the product details and it was 100% polyester. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT?! The silk isn’t even in the room with us.

Again—I exist on this earth to get robbed. Robbed of my money, my attention, my right to quality clothing. The dress was also from one of those influencer x department store collaborations, which explicitly goes against my brand as a Poshmarksinista. As much as I think that polyester piece-of-shit would look fabulous on me (and do wonderful things for my broad shoulders), I couldn’t stomach having to tell someone the designer is an influencer. Next.

1pm-2pm

Had scrambled eggs with avocado and a single slice of leftover halloumi. Very Australian of me. I love halloumi so much but it’s like $14 for one block. $14 for rubbery, salty cheese, but I love the way it feels in my mouth. I eat as much for texture as I do for taste. I would eat velcro if I could. Like, if it would not cause irreparable damage to my already fragile gastrointestinal system I would be popping strips of velcro like gum. I should be given zero authority on food. My mouth is watering thinking about chewing salted velcro, which I think is a sign of autism.

Worked on a couple of social scripts for a food brand we’re pitching on Thursday. I love my job so much. Once I climbed over my massive ego and stifled some of my resentments about participating in one of the more grotesque manifestations of capitalism—selling people shit— I was able to accept that I get paid to be weird and silly and, ultimately, write a lot, as well as work with lots of funny and creative people who are cooler than me. I love my job so much that I actually went through one of those phases where I was constantly scared I was going to get fired, which I believe they call anxious attachment. But a little fear is good, I think. Keeps the fire lit.

2:34pm

Googled “is eating food for texture a sign of autism”.

3pm

Browsed some Cyber Monday sales in between meetings. Ended up at one of those stores I can only describe as BBL chic. I had no business being there aside from the fact that I, like every young woman, am forever searching for the elusive ephemeral Perfect Going Out top. Ultimately all of their options were either too skimpy or too office siren. I have no desire to look like I work a corporate job outside of working my corporate job. The search continues.

5pm

Worked some more. We’re in the early idea stage of a new campaign, which is the most fun stage to be in because you’re just throwing everything at the wall, trying to come up with the most creative way to say what needs to be said. Once the client buys an idea it gets slightly less fun, because then they have the control and veto power. But coming up with ideas to pitch to clients is a creative Wild West—anything goes. The more unexpected, the better. My head hurts from thinking so much about this campaign. This is probably how Oppenheimer felt trying to split the atom.

6pm

Took my nail polish off during a meeting that was supposed to be an hour and half but was only an hour. Bless. Have to make edits to one deck then put three full-baked campaign ideas that I don’t have in another deck by tomorrow at 3. Less bless. Going to stop writing this so I can actually focus on the writing I get paid for, which is at my JOB that I LOVE, even when it comes with impossible deadlines.

6:36pm

Oh my god I need to close this thing out but it’s so fun to write. Going to do it more often and join the endless churn of self-indulgent diary entries and listicles plaguing this app. At the end of the day it’s a social media platform like any other and I basically just made a written DIML vlog. I’m no better than any influencer. Just funnier.

I don’t know anything and I don’t think I’m supposed to. I’m so young. I’m supposed to be supple and cute and blissfully naive and spend all my time learning from my elders and my inevitable mistakes. I’m supposed to be a sponge for information (so the elders tell me) and just soak it all in. Lie down and assume pink Scrub Daddy. But it feels awful not to know things, or at least to feel like I don’t. I don’t even know where the right place to put “at least” is in the above sentence. Is it before or after the “to”? I guess I could look it up, but I’m also viciously stubborn. Youth, you know.

I majored in advertising. Literally what even is that. It’s a made-up industry. I majored in selling things. My sister is going into healthcare. She’s studying the centuries-old art of healing the human body. I studied how to write call-to-actions. Buy now! Click here! Log off! Touch grass! There may come a point where I’m writing a script to sell a drug brand she prescribes, and I’ll tell myself I’m doing something good for the world by getting people the medicine they need, and that her and I are deeply connected in a noble mission to heal the world. This will be a lie. A really pretty, ridiculously fun lie. Advertising.

I’d like to think my degree, which I earned by making fake ads on Photoshop, gives me some claim to having and spotting good taste, but what do I know. I’ve met people in my industry with AI-generated photos as their computer backgrounds. But to be good at advertising is to not only know exactly what’s moving the cultural needle, but to be able to subvert it in a way that resonates. And to do this, you need a modicum of understanding of what works vs. what doesn’t, which is taste. Or, again, maybe just pattern recognition. I know nothing!

A lot of people on Substack have excellent taste, as far as my sense of it goes. There are writers who carved out unique voices under the watchful eye of professional editors and media companies, which I imagine is probably hard (I’ve never had to do it), as well as people who know a lot of things or know a lot about one specific thing and can articulate this knowledge in new and cool ways. I admire these writers and want to be like them. An earnest little pink Sponge Daddy I am. Reading their work pushes me to write more and better, even though sharing my writing literally makes me want to throw up and shave my head and go live in a monastery. Hence why this page is anonymized.

At the end of the day literally no one except me cares, and I’m not actually naked even when sharing my work makes me feel like I am. I still feel weighed down by how much I don’t know, but I’ve learned this is a normal feeling when you’re in your twenties. Cliche and Gross, but admitting is the first step. I’ll get over it.

This is Evil Genius, of which I’m neither.