I count seven forest green uniforms as I queue to board the flight.

One’s hand is resting, perennially, on his handgun - another is walking a straight line, parallel from ours, almost absentmindedly but not quite.

He seems to be looking for something other than the insignia on his shoulder. He doesn’t seem to be interested in finding drugs amongst these passengers. That is most likely because there are none at all, and he knows this.

I count again, and two more suddenly appear. Then four of them stand, a few meters between them, in a straight line; the sheep keep walking, lulling from side to side almost comfortably. They keep asking questions about my final destination as if they were ever in the power to guard anything but my safety - even though it has felt as everything but that for as long as I can remember.

The car is coming to a brief pause as my mother draws our front windows down. A guard peeks at her briefly, his face emotionless, an automatic rifle by his side. We are among mountains and cliffs, valleys and roads surrounding us, nothing more than them and the four people in this car.

Even if I don’t want to, I suddenly feel small.

My mother is defiant even in the way that she stares. You don’t know for sure, but you can just tell; she would move these mountains and destroy these pavements millions of cars pass through to protect her own.

What a different world these two figures inhabit: the mother, her fight to survive, the military green badge, their permission to kill.

When I have children one day I will not tell them about the humiliation of the tinted windows behind the airport security checkpoints. How the physical separation from those who have nurtured you hurts less than the darkened panes of glass. How you will be asked the same questions, over and over, by forest green suited badges that have no business in knowing about you, but their thirst for power over you - intimidation - will bend you to answer all of them.

I will tell them about the million hues of brown and green and yellow, almost blended to perfection in the mountains, bigger than anything I have ever seen. Even buildings and planes and entire fleets of ships cannot compare to this.

I will tell them about the Sun, how it seems to burn in the sweetest way. How hard I pressed my skin against my window seat in the plane: how badly I wanted to feel its warmth, even as it was slipping away.

I will tell them of the sky, how not a single cloud ever hung above us. How warm and blue and endless it seemed to stretch, as if the mountains ended where it began, or began where it had ended. And how for once, it didn’t bother me to not know.

I will tell them about the grass, about the forest, about the waterfalls. About how I took baths there and left cleaner than I had felt in my entire life. I will tell them about the heat, how it enveloped me and sometimes was suffocating, but how a slight breeze could balance the waves of warmth like nothing else did.

I will tell them about how vast and endless the landscape looked, no matter which direction you stood from. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere; there was land, there was sky, there was immensity.

I will tell them about the white hot sand, how it seeped into my toes and clothes and I did not care. How the water would carry me over the shore, algae and shells and hair, the temperature never cold, the waves never hard, the tide never biting.

I will tell them about the rivers and roads cutting through entire state lines. How beautiful the rocks glimmered under the sun and how badly I wanted to stop and feel them under my feet, how precious the streams drew and drew and drew more water down the shore, always unrelenting, smoothening every surface lucky enough to be touched by it.

When I have children one day I will tell them about what once was mine. Once the land that carried me, that nestled me deep in its warm hands. I will tell them that it is not mine anymore not so much by choice but by transformation: suddenly the mountains are menacing corners for violence caused by those who once swore to protect me. The darkness of the sky welcomes dangers you do not want to find. The beach is no longer mine: gunshots have tainted the white sand with blood too many times.

I have had to give it all up. And I will tell them that so did millions of small glass souls: they have all walked the same ground as me and have sacrificed those dark tinted glass doors because they know, they cannot raise a future in a land that does not want them any more.

I have had to let it go. And I will tell them that so did thousands of people just like me: young and hopeful, who had to learn to be graceful in their goodbyes, because they have had to say them so many times.

I will tell them how hard it was to silently agree to be remembered, for years, in airport departure halls. How migration tries, incessantly, to remind you that this is not your land. To strip you of equal treatment because you were not born in it. How you will have to work ten times harder than the person beside you because when you signed those papers, you signed a contract to keep going: to find your place in the world, because you felt that the land you once came from did not want you any more.

But First

I will tell them about the yellow bright trees in the sides of the road, how they wasted their color on the sidewalk below. I will tell them about how beautiful every sunrise was, drowning you in every possible hue of orange, how different it all looks under the wet pavement once the rains have swept everything clean.

I will tell them that wherever you go you will feel as part of the Earth as it is part of you. That this is the same land that so many others before you once came to, looking for a place to belong.

And I will tell them that if the day ever comes, we will reclaim all that was once ours.

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Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is shit, says my therapist, but you are also here to be happy.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children.

Life is shit, I missed the train, and I’ve been gracious as much as I’ve been ungrateful in a thousand little ways, a thousand and one ways I keep from the world.

The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

And it continues spinning, incessant! The days are relentless, aren’t they. I still believe the world is more good than not, it is the only explanation we’ve evaded human extinction. Or maybe we are incurably narcissistic, fighting by the skin of our teeth to survive, like cockroaches.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake.

For every laugh a child makes a mother screams watching her child die. For every loved thing, a bird broken, bagged, a horrible thing sinks.

Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children.

Life is shit and the world is too big to make up my mind about its goodness yet, I am 29 and still naïve, still hoping, and for every kind person, there is one who might break you, though I silence those voices when I walk alone at night.

I am trying

to sell them the world.

I am trying to buy the world, still, even with the exorbitant prices, a bag of chips chronically half-empty. I am an optimist. A romantic.

Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Anyone with a bit more to fight for, walking you through the world, drones on about the light in its darkest of places. This place could be beautiful, right? We could make this place beautiful.

“We forgot the eggs,” I told my dad one afternoon, bright 3 p.m. sunshine streaming through the windows, the sun’s gaze on the mountains - and the pavement far below - unforgiving. Sweltering outside, it must’ve been somewhere around 30 degrees when my sister and I took a trip to the grocery store, a five minute drive away in a car-centric city in Venezuela. We stop at one of the two stoplights on our way there and a kid who must not be above age thirteen stands in front of us, his skin warm and a honey-brown, juggling three worn-out tennis balls, his hands moving quickly and dexterously. for your consideration, for your entertainment. I tell my sister with what can be read as gigantic, tone-deaf privilege that I don’t know how to stand it; every day this kid is at the stoplight, juggling tennis balls with his two other friends, walking down a straight line after a quick show, asking for tips. How much longer are they going to have to do this? I ask her.

The answer has been evading us for approximately 26 years.

Most of the context of Venezuela in the past week, specifically the first week of 2026, you are already aware of. You already know the familiar beat taking over your Instagram feeds, BBC News, The Guardian. Notice how I combine Instagram among two reputable news sources - myself included, we all seem to digest more news, more frequently through a few minute-long reels or carousel posts breaking down complicated issues. You’ve seen the videos of ICE tearing families apart across the U.S. and you’ve seen videos of children in Gaza, crying as their parents’ bodies are covered in sheets. Now you’ve seen videos of Maduro being perp-walked in New York City on his way to a much-awaited trial, set to take place on March 17th. You’ve also seen the videos outlining the ongoing discussion of polarization in politics - it’s not left vs. right - it’s liberation vs. authoritarianism. So on, and so forth.

A few people I know have posted tid-bits and clips outlining the past week in Venezuela, U.S. interventionism, the harm the Trump administration has been causing for months in the region, and beyond. The incessant pursuit of oil and power. Again, you know all of this - you’ve seen it play out. You’ve also seen protesters claiming “Hands Off Venezuela”, outlets like novaramedia claiming Maduro was an elected leader of a sovereign country, or accounts I follow like thought leaders in community work, social impact and beyond decry the removal of Maduro from power.

What has always been most fascinating is the puritanical and moralized perspective of the Internet Left. I call it the Internet Left (although, somewhere, someone must’ve already come up with a much more clever name for it) because it’s being a leftist for the idea of being a leftist’s sake; they seek perfect political worlds where we don’t have to make negotiations, where compromising is seen as corrupt, where coalitions can never be “clean” of this moral high ground they seem to stand on. It is also furiously reductive, dangerously ignorant and overall, deeply simplistic. I’ve seen moralists on the Internet Left call Maduro a leader of a sovereign country, and it makes me laugh more than it makes me angry - I am able to tune out ignorance alarmingly quickly these days. The times where I’d be ragebaited on the internet are long over; have been long over. I like to use my rage towards more efficient, helpful ways. Turn over my rage, boiling in my stomach, making my head feel light and heavy at the same time, and choose to consume differently, spend my money elsewhere, spend time doing things that will make something materially better - give away clothes, sign up to Doctors Without Borders monthly donations, drop a letter to my neighbors wishing them a happy 2026. Things like that. But I digress.

The question of how to explain Venezuela to people who are not Venezuelan is not new. Neither is the typical perspectives our country’s situation is viewed from abroad:

Venezuela is often reduced to a morality play: a noble project sabotaged from abroad, or a cautionary tale stripped of agency. In both cases, Venezuelans themselves disappear. We are either victims of external forces or footnotes in someone else’s ideological argument.

How does it feel, really? When I walk out into a bar and meet someone new and, upon answering the typical where are you from, and the immediate response is a mild, polite grimace, and a question, oh it’s really bad there isn’t it? Unsure, what exactly, I am expected to say here. Are they looking for a deeper conversation into my place and feelings about being from a country in perennial free fall? Do they want to dissect the ways in which my identity has become a thorny subject because of the rage I feel, the injustice, and the sheer unwillingness to still, never give up what is rightfully mine - the mountains, the valleys, the sea? How it will long, long outlive any dictatorship?

No. Of course not.

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A few days after going grocery shopping, I am reading more news on my phone, specifically Reuters this time. My browser history is familiar with this dance: “reuters venezuela” has been searched for nearly every day since November 21, when a U.S.-issued 90-day warning was published, deeming Venezuelan airspace “unsafe” for air traffic, effectively paralyzing air travel to and out of Venezuela. Never mind me or the thousands of Venezuelans flying in, or hoping to fly out, expecting holidays with their families. The freeze would continue well into December, a few Venezuelan people who also lived abroad posting the sad news on their timelines, unable to spend Christmas at home, or stranded in Madrid or the U.S., waiting for a next flight back. Many had to buy last-minute tickets they couldn’t really afford, thousands of dollars spent trying to exit or get back into the country.

Outside, life continued with regularity: no panic-buying in the grocery stores, no long lines for any essential service, really, beyond the typical wait-time spikes at the gas station. It was around that time I increasingly began to think of the U.S. as what it really is: a business. The reason it runs the way it runs is not because it is a country - it is a business. Anyone who tells you any different isn’t only lying - they’re willfully ignoring history.

Politics of extraction and exploitation are as old as modern civilization is. For every privilege and benefit in one corner of the world, one very “lucky” country, another one is bleeding. You can rest assured of very few things in this world, but you can rest assured of this. The immensity of it is certainly overwhelming and would take too long to type out and write in its entirety, and I lack the knowledge and expertise to walk you through these dystopian realities. You also, already know most of these.

But what is really insidious in this entire ordeal hasn’t even been the inevitable geopolitical interest in Venezuela, the endless barrels of oil in a warming planet, the incessant demand for more, more, more. It’s the desperation many Venezuelans felt around me when I’d bring up the legality of the Trump administration’s treatment and bombing of boats off the coast of Venezuela, or a potential invasion. The general consensus seemed to be that things couldn’t be worse, and so perhaps U.S. intervention was the only way it could get better. Someone’s going to make money off it - that was never the question. Which is why I found the Internet Left delusional and frankly, insulting. It was about whether the young boy at the stoplight would ever, eventually, see even if a small percentage of profit turned by oil channeled into public schools, an education, access to electricity and running water, to be able to pay for a new pair of shoes.

You see, the issue with these online debates and speculations about what will happen next that fill my WhatsApp these days is exactly that: they are online. In the days that followed Maduro’s removal, social media went into an immediate frenzy, if not long-form think pieces about the consequences: many leftists condoned the move, many Trump-supporters - especially Venezuelans living in the U.S. - celebrated, posting photos of “freedom”, going outside with their flags and caps, dreaming of a finally free Venezuela. On the ground, my sister tells me the streets are empty: no one is going in or out of their houses. There’s long lines in the grocery stores for a day or two, people stocking up, looking for bottled water and canned foods. It’s quiet; every non-essential business is closed. She tells me she hasn’t slept well in days. She’s unsure of what to say. She’s relieved, but she’s also scared. What comes next? The only people who seem to celebrate are Venezuelans abroad; romanticizing the idea of another Messiah who has come to save them - this time from the Right - the irony doesn’t escape me. In my family groupchats, we turn on disappearing messages once again, remind our eldest aunts and uncles to watch what they post on Instagram.

Security forces have established numerous checkpoints around the country to stop vehicles, question passengers and search their phones for signs of opposition to the government, rights groups and Venezuelan citizens said.

“They went through people’s phones, opening their WhatsApp and typing in keywords like ‘invasion’ or ‘Maduro’ or ‘Trump’ in the chats to see if they were celebrating Maduro’s arrest,” said Gabriela Buada, director of Human Kaleidoscope, a Venezuelan organization that is tracking the crackdown.

The contrast with Venezuelans in El Doral, Florida is, at the very least, striking, if not offensive or downright tone-deaf. What exactly are we celebrating? What, in God’s fucking green Earth, are you thinking?

Pardon my French.

So, what happens next? I don’t have the answers for you - neither do the seemingly hundreds of political analysts sharing their takes on Instagram, nor the legit ones who are speaking on Al Jazeera, the BBC, and beyond. All we have is theories and hypotheses, and our own reservations and deep cynicism of a regime that has one thing we don’t have - an iron-clad, sociopathic desire for more they refuse to rein in, and a well-versed, deep-rooted love for ideology, honoring their Messiah, their leader - Hugo Chavez. He played all of this incredibly well to make Venezuelans foam at the mouth at any mention of socialism or simply, the welfare democracy. Hence, I am unable to have productive conversations with many Venezuelans, really. It seems impossible to hold several truths at once: no, I do not support the regime. No, I don’t support U.S. intervening, either. Yes, I feel a sense of relief. No, it didn’t last long - a snake with many heads is what we have, chopping one off does not make a significant difference. And yet. Do I hope it begins a period of transition, years as though it make take, of change? I do. Of course I do.

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Much has been written, and will be written, in the days, weeks and months ahead. Some ideological purists will keep claiming Maduro was a wrongfully kidnapped leader of a sovereign nation. Trump supporters will applaud his tough policy and his Donroe Doctrine. Others — many others, I think — like me, will feel a discombobulated sense of self, the echoes of the permanent dislocation migration brings, the relief of the head of a snake with many heads behind bars, the reverberations of uncertainty pounding at the base of our skulls every morning, dreading the next heads of the snake, the way a dictatorship has found a way to starve, murder, and incarcerate thousands, and displace millions of people, in under 30 years.

Much will be discussed in the days, weeks and months ahead. But in my mind’s eye I still see that teen boy at the stoplight in my hometown, juggling worn-out tennis balls for change. I still see a mother and her baby, selling lollipops in the dilapidated city center. I still see the young boy who hugged me, dropping off donations at an empty church after Christmas. I still see young men offering a quick windshield cleaning at the gas station. The smell of petrol on the pavement, heat emanating off it, Sunshine bouncing from our windows, heat surrounding everything.

When I think of the reality of the world, I don’t think about the moral high ground of the Internet or the deluge of Instagram reels, or the virtue signaling, or the hot takes coming from Idealist Leftists who would rather spend time debating their impeccable political stances than the lived realities of people affected by them. The truth is, either spectrum of these politics are deeply uninteresting to me. I am far more interested in our work with communities, where we put our money, where we invest our time, who we’re helping, where we look for joy.

Is there anything I can do for you, my friends ask.

Yes, there is something you can do for me. If you expect a village, be a villager. Invest your money where your mouth is. Spend more time giving things away and commit to at least one place that sends over resources to a cause of your liking. Stop waiting for your governments to represent you. Stop waiting for perfect politics, for the right representatives, for the work to get done. The work is now. It was always now.

“You look AMAZING.” Declared in the train station by a friend I hadn’t seen in two years. I know what it means, just like you know what it means - that politically correct, perfectly well-meaning way of telling someone they look beautiful, a direct result of nothing changing, except their weight.

“Maybe it’s because you feel more confident, you notice it more,” another friend tells me when I mention how astounding it is to receive so much more male attention, their gaze snagging on me when I walk down the street. The difference being, of course, my weight.

“You should really consider modeling! You have striking facial features,” my friend tells me over dinner, while we discuss how the past year has gone, how my body has been changing with the seasons. Of course, I register the compliment, I accept it graciously. But I become curious about it later, when I mentally file through my week before bed on Sunday. How interesting, I think. They’ve known and seen my face for years. Of course, the difference is the changing shape of my body.

I accept it all graciously and yet I hold these feelings in both hands: the slight discomfort of being seen after a life feeling very, well, unseen, and the dark, dark void behind the words they’re not saying, the thoughts they’re not sharing, the stories that hang around us, misty and immaterial, but very real and concrete nevertheless.

I am seen as more beautiful because my body is smaller.

I am seen as more attractive because I’ve dropped four sizes.

In bed, a man looks at my body and tells me, “I’ve never been with a thicker girl”, and it almost makes me laugh in his face. Did he know me thirty-four kilos ago? Would he have seen me, sitting at the bar? Would he have registered anyone there, anyone interesting to him at all?

The thing about bodies I find most fascinating is people’s reactions to them, quite frankly. It’s always been that way. Growing up as a woman in a body that was not deemed desirable turned out to be a fantastic personality developer for me. A story I’ve gotten used to telling about my childhood when asked - specifically about growing up in a conservative society, or as someone whose body has changed drastically - is that, from as early as age seven, I knew I wasn’t beautiful like the rest of the girls in school were.

Instead of molding and shaping myself to a kind of beauty I felt impossible, I completely went the other way. I’ll be funny, I’ll be witty, I’ll be smart. If I cannot be beautiful, I’ll be everything else. And it worked! It worked so well, I’ve spent the later years of my twenties discovering how much of me wants to please, how much of me is asking for permission to be, just how much of me ached to be seen, to be loved. How much of me I was willing to hide, to sacrifice, for the feeling of being loved. (Most notably, of course, in my dating life. As it is).

“Hi! I hope it is okay if ask you this, but I saw that you lost some weight, and I would love to know how you did it.”

“Girl, you look so amazing. You look insanely beautiful… tell me how?”

Lo and behold, far and wide — I did it! Beautiful, capable, interesting women in my DMs asking me how I did it. Women who had never asked me such a question before. Women who surely had complimented me, at some point, in my teens - for the most part, did not mention a thing about my appearance - they came out of the woodwork, asking for the secret, the potion, the cure.

Reader, I’ve unlocked a new reality, one I never imagined existed: other beautiful women are asking me for beauty tips. It is morbidly fascinating to me, after an entire life relying on my humor and personality, to be asked about my appearance and how, exactly, it was achieved. Measured steps, surely measurable outcomes. Why not try some portion controlling. Drop all the processed sugar. Try some more exercise. Just mold and mold and shape and shape, sacrifice at the altar of conventional beauty, and surely, you will receive the same results.

This was the script behind every decision in my later teens and into my adult years. I would watch my mother portion control to the point of recurring migraines, while overjoyed at dropping six kilos in a month (by the way, a healthy curve of weight loss, if there is even such a thing, is approximately 2.5 kg a month). I would see her steal a spoonful of Nutella from the jar at eleven p.m. sometimes, her eyes screwed shut in happiness, when she wasn’t having a gigantic cup of coffee every morning, or going to spin class with the girls.

A young divorcée, she was thirty five and the world was her oyster. My whole life, but particularly then, I knew my mother was beautiful. I could sense it in the same quiet way I can sense the world reacting to me now. Perhaps this is how I know I am now deemed beautiful — I see the same look in men’s eyes they used to give my mother when she entered a room, when she walked down the street with me. I hear the same tones of wonder and appreciation from my peers my mother’s friends gave her when we went to birthday parties, dinners, evenings at the cinema with my friends and our mothers, playdates.

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It is truly macabre, the type of shit that happens when you turn pretty to the world. You start questioning whether the men who are vying for your attention on Hinge would ever be the same men that texted you years prior - and you know the answer. I was a dating app user throughout the past decade; there were matches, great conversations (and awful ones), a very mid experience overall, a few hits, a few misses. I updated my dating profile in May and the results were simply fucking astronomical. I would filter through virtually hundreds of likes in one week, fatigued by day 7, feeling like a robot in a fever dream, trying to swipe through enough matches so I could keep talking to all of them. It was fucking crazy.

And I know how it sounds! Oh poor her, with all those matches! No, girl, this is fucking insane. The dark, dark void stared back at me then. Well, now you’re pretty, look what happened! All this attention. This is what it’s like when you turn pretty.

It’s fucking devastating, actually. You grow up sharpening your knives and dispensing them with humor, slicing through tension, awkwardness, difficulty, navigating life’s trials and tribulations with hard-earned intelligence and a knack for making the best out of what’s been given. Or something. And then you find out how easily the world opens up when you fit into that tiny, glowing, sliver of a window of conventional attractiveness.

The promised land. And you remember that one girl from your university years with a bitter taste in your mouth when she told you, for lack of a better word, how impressed she was with the looks of the guy you were dating. Because you’re not as attractive as he is. It hangs in the air - you do a double take, look across the table at your other friend, he’s as shocked as you are. It all starts making sense. All the pieces come together, slowly but surely. All the work you’ve done to navigate this world despite all the fucked up stories about beauty pays off in your compassion, your optimism, your freedom to be cringe, your impeccable sense of humor. But none of it really compensates or compares to the way the world sees you when you inhabit a “hot” body. What the fuck! I’ve been scammed, actually. All of this sucks.

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The truth is, I can’t give you the answers you are looking for. I fear there are stories I won’t be sharing for public consumption. The truth also is, the details of my changing body — how it changed, why I chose to change, the decisions I’ve taken every day in favor of that change — are not nearly as fascinating as the ways people have reacted to it.

I am far more interested in the dark, dark void I stare at every once in a while, ripples and waves of dark water, thoughts that curve and swerve and climb like vines, up, up, up, unreachable and sometimes impenetrable in the delicious way questions with no real answers haunt you in your sleep.

What can we say of the world that once was full of body positivity? What do we say of the return to thinness as the beauty standard? I would know — I’d tell you it never left. I’d tell you to sharpen your knives, build an arsenal of confidence, wit, humor, intellect. I’d tell you to keep your tools useful and your wits about you. The world keeps spinning, and listening to everybody will drive you fucking crazy.

So, whenever I’m asked how I feel, whenever the way I look becomes a line to question me on — what I really want to know is, how does my body make you feel?

On a cloudy day in January last year, I visited the Amsterdam Stadarchief, lured by an exhibition covering club culture history in the city: To Dance is to be Free. I loved it so much I went twice, fascinated by the posters and clever, tiny invites made of gold-colored paper, images of revelers at the RoXY, polaroids in blurry, joyful colors. The historic Amsterdam club hosted the first balls of the country, spaces where community and freedom of expression thrived. It wasn't only a space for dancing — it was a space for celebrating life.

Several generations of clubgoers have developed their identity, made friends or found love in Amsterdam’s nightlife. In a club, shame is set aside and daytime rules do not apply. Here, people of all ages celebrate a parallel existence. Thanks to an interplay of music, dance, light, decor and other sensory stimuli, there is room for total ecstasy and euphoria. Moving closely together in the dark, people can forget the stress of everyday life for a while. To dance is to be free.

I spent most of 2023 and 2024 outside of the club. During times when work was scarce, I slashed my “going out” budget in favor of other things, like occasional eating out or paying for short holidays. Sometime in early 2025, after a stint of new work seemed to last long enough, I started getting curious about the nightlife again. Where are the new spaces we're celebrating life in? Where are clubgoers enjoying themselves most these days? Amsterdam offers something for everyone, that much is certain. I visited Raum for the first time in February, Lofi after a couple of years in March, and a long-lost memory slowly started taking shape: the reminder that for an evening, we're all sharing the same space, moving along the same plane, building the dancefloor together.

It is probably the opposite reaction I've historically had to partying - a night out as pure escapism. I looked down upon it (ever so slightly!) as a waste of money, all-out hedonism at its finest, and not the kind I condoned. And yet! The winter rolled into spring, rolled into summer, and the parties kept going. I buy tickets to see one of my favorite DJs in May, and later this coming August, I join one of my friends at her set in a festival in Amsterdam Noord and stay much longer than planned, dancing in the front row with strangers.

I am curious about the night air, the spacious quality of it, and the people you meet in the smoking area. The world opens up as if to say, don't you remember what it's like to leave it all behind? To push everything in and out and around on the dance floor?

How much has the club scene changed, if at all, in the past forty years? Club nights in the 80s looked more present, more visceral. That much I can sense when I walk through the stadarchief exhibition. A few clubs in Amsterdam today prioritize the dance floor as a space for connection - I've read house rules encouraging clubgoers to save talking for later, to enjoy the dance floor as a space for co-creation with the evening's performers. It's interesting to notice how club etiquette has evolved in the past years, featuring stickers on phone cameras, shared bathrooms, the possibility to refill your cup with water from the sink.

There's something liminal and otherworldly about entering a space where photos aren't allowed, light is minimal at all times, and there are few if any windows. Clubs remind me of casinos, airports, train stations. We are all in-betweeners, identity becoming homogeneous, all of us stopping over between here and the next place, our signifiers going out the window with them. We're gamblers, flyers, commuters, dancers. I like the idea of this suspension of reality taking over the club at night. I like the energy surrounding it, the possibilities it affords us. I like surrendering your plans to an evening that can lead you to interesting places (and faces), from the moment you get ready, ritualistic, to the moment you've arrived.

In the European Union, a significant portion of the population experiences loneliness. A 2022 EU-wide survey found that 13% of respondents reported feeling lonely "most or all of the time" over the past four weeks, while 35% felt lonely at least some of the time. This translates to roughly 50 million Europeans experiencing loneliness most of the time. Young people, particularly teenagers, report higher rates of loneliness compared to older generations.

I know what some of us are thinking. I've thought it too: what does a place like the club have to do with this? And yet, age isn't necessarily the problem. Venues like Melkweg regularly organize parties for teens, ranging from ages 14 to 18, opening their space to young dancers wanting to enjoy the night. Creating spaces for shared experiences has always fascinated me because of the contrast I've experienced at home. In Venezuela, it's common to spend time with people of all ages in parties and bars, making cross-generational interaction easy and integral to our culture. I haven't been able to find something similar here, except in Amsterdam's nightlife, if not in day festivals across music genres, inviting the young, the old, and the in-betweeners to experience something together.

By 2050, the share of those 85 and older in the European Union will more than double. Organizations like Papy Booom, a Belgian nonprofit, aim to address loneliness among older people and create more opportunities for fun. One of their goals is increasing interaction across age groups, which the World Health Organization says is critical to aging well.

Papy Booom organized a club night for a group of residents from Brussels retirement homes, with many not having been out in over 40 years(!). The event was a big hit. Clubgoers in their early and mid-twenties enjoyed dancing with octogenarians, dressed to the nines in their best outfits and ready to dance together.

Finding these kinds of articles reminds me that in the clurb, we're all fam. There is no age limit to sharing the dance floor.

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Nowadays, a return to clubbing feels like a way to unwind and feel safe, ironically, surrounded by strangers. It feels fun. The ticket fees and ticketswap hunts and the overpriced coke zeros feel like part of an experience, the beginning of entering a liminal space to let go in. Practicing presence somewhere full of stimuli feels like a rewarding search, something like tracing the outlines of a map that leads somewhere, finding the next steps along the way.

I like the idea that on the dance floor, everybody's equal; a reminder that there's power in movement, in creating a space where we can all feel free. Journeying into the night time together and taking the odd Uber out at seven in the morning is, yes, weirdly transporting. I don't care how insufferable that sounds. Dissecting the evening on the car ride home, laughing as you're biking back into your neighborhood, the sky tinted in beautiful, impossible colors. For the evening, we're all together, suspended in time. We're all experiencing it, we're all in it. A return to the dance floor is a return to community, if you want it. It's our house.

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Performed this one during our “Hot & Bothered” storytelling night with . Join us in September! Subscribe for more. !

Are you getting hot this summer? I decided I’m getting hot this summer. And by hot I mean

I want you to get weirder. I want you to be a little cringe.

I saw a meme of cyclical virality about how the cringe will set you free / and you know what? they’re right / I want you to be a little too much / I want your excitement to overflow

and I want people to feel a mix of surprise and vague concern / because you’re alight with everything you love.

This summer I don’t want you to keep your cool. / The thing is, people equate vulnerability with embarrassment. / I want you to do things that feel a little bit embarrassing. / I want you to hug that embarrassment.

I want you to run towards fever pitch temperatures / and I /

want you to break in sweats because you love something so much.

Haven’t you ever loved something so much?

Remember what it feels like? To love something so much?

—

I want you to get unbearably hot this summer. Sweat everything out. Cringe yourself out with how hotly you feel - I want you to embarrass yourself in front of your crush at the bar - a hottie at the terrace - in front of someone you wanted to impress

Isn’t it deliciously humiliating? / To show someone how much they affect you?

When I feel desire I feel it low in my belly / when I feel excitement it’s fluttering lightly in the center of my chest / that’s the thing! None of these things are - cool - none of these things

are moderate, room temperature, comfortable to the touch / actually / they are

overwhelming -

The heat is bursting, everywhere / bouncing off your skin / in your mouth / feel it in your teeth / can you feel it in your teeth? / Can you unclench your jaw? / can you surrender?

—

I want you to discover something good and I want you to get all up in its grill - make horrible paintings - and write things that don’t make sense -

and be insufferable at the cinema

I want you to cry at the museum / and I want you to lay under the trees / the leaves are moving

Get hot this summer. Get to unbearable temperatures / feel like you might die if you don’t feel it all / because you might / die, that is, if you never feel the true size of what you feel

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*

breathe.

*

Walking down the street I feel a little bit weightless / even as my shoe soles are slapping the pavement / life is right here, holding me, even when I feel uncertain /

and / breathe.

Certainty! So sexy. But also as impossible as treading your fingers through water, wishing it to be solid. Yet I can accept that quality easily.

The other day I remembered we all get a little bit lost sometimes and it was a comforting thought. My friend tells me It’s weird! I feel I have nothing to say! there are years of contracting and expanding, where there is a lot to say, where there is only a lot to integrate / and /

breathe

What do you want to feel certain of? I think, as long as I have my own back. / and / breathe

*

Spring begins! As above, so below. The Sun is here, and there is some trust in that. Even when you can’t see it. And / breathe.

Treading and treading and treading through water.

The skin feels so sensitive, anything could puncture it, tread lightly and carefully, or careen into it and / crash into it and / run towards it and / see?

Breathe. You lived.

A room. The compulsive need for order. The pathological impulse to rationalize. Neatly. Into boxes. Lest they burst. And /

breathe

People are beautiful. And their beauty isn’t orderly. This is easy to accept in theory. Much less in practice, sometimes. And / breathe.

What are you looking for? A piece of paper to sign off that is tying you to time? That’s interesting! Why? And

breathe.

Easier to think, grass is greener. This. This is difficult. But I also chose this! Didn’t I? And / breathe. and breathe. and breathe.

*

Reading a book. Sitting on the windowsill. Picking up bread. Smell of butter and pastry. Rewatching a 2000s movie. Over and over. Simplicity and homesickness, rolled into one.

Go traveling? Rent out a comically small, closet-sized room on the 6th floor of a downtrodden Parisian building again. For the handsome price of €300 a week. All the amenities! If you just use the space cleverly.

And / breathe.

Winter — spring — summer — fall — seasonality shows you there is movement, after all. And

breathe.

*

The search for certainty finally comes to an end, much like anesthesia leaving your body/ drip drip drip

and. breathe.

The end of April comes and then May arrives and then it doesn’t feel so urgent anymore. To tie meaning to it.

You can squeeze tighter and get to where you’ll be, or let it go and get to where you’ll be. Weightless. Soles slapping the pavement.

and,

breathe

*

July, 2015

The sun is heating up, and so are the streets. THE STREETS! They feel so romantic lately. Just the other day, I missed my tram home by a solid 15 seconds — the kind of tram you miss due to an ill-fated red light, just across the street — and I thought to myself, after a moment of frustration, well, I just wasn’t meant to take that one. Figures. I think these thoughts fairly often nowadays, when small little stones collect in my shoe, when inconveniences arise and I want to bitch and moan about them. So I get on the tram and I start blasting So High School and I am entranced by it, listening to it in a loop until I head out during a light spring summer evening, early May.

The scene: a bridge, crossing over it, the end of Kinkerstraat and the beginning of my right turn home. A couple — it’s their first, maybe second date, I can tell — the way she puts her arms around his neck and throws her head back, laughing, a little self-conscious but also with a dash of abandonment. His back is to me, and after laughing, they kiss — it feels like the beginning of something. Kismet! The chorus of So High School begins ringing in my ears just as I’m walking past them and I swear my feet feel lighter, my face breaks into a smile and I keep on going, crossing a bridge, leaving them behind. You can almost feel the electricity of it, cinematic, the world an open, waiting cup.

This particular moment may seem mundane and even overly dramatized to the average viewer, but this specific window of time was a mirage of sorts, a glimpse into who I’ve always been, someone who hangs every word a crush says, a yearner and a piner with a deep unshakeable belief that despite it all, in spite of everything, maybe because of everything, this kind of feeling is always possible. I was unsure of that, lately; I think rounding the corner of my late twenties has been insightful but also a little brutal in this area. Year-long relationships swirling the end of their timeline, commitments that seemed to spell out forever fading away from your fingertips, growing apart, changing of seasons. The intimacy that’s been built up over time falls apart under scaffolding that was once thought sturdy, and it was, but it just didn’t account for the changes and valleys that becoming someone new with every year can bring. Life gets a little weird. Things are unpredictable and uncertain and volatile, and the grasping at straws of it and breaths and gulps of air of it — certainty — is a little more desperate lately, until it isn’t one morning for me, until I think, none of this is set in stone and that doesn’t need to frighten me into a neurotic state of anxiety, a person whose only desire, above all things, is control.

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This is a very different, maybe even opposing energy, to the art of romance. I think — have I lost it? I think, is it gone? All those grand illusions about big gestures and declarations, handwritten love letters, this monumental effort and display of affection I saw in all those movies growing up. And yet I was so quick to gloss over the romance of my friends, remembering my favorite dish and cooking it for me, the romance of a date, eating thai food under bright pink lights and having a beer, the romance of getting ready for a party with your friends and, delicately, one of them places a row of eyelashes on each end of your eyelids.

Romance has become a thing of the past, some say. Where are the gestures of huge, romantic love and the dark jokes of men used to go to war flood my Instagram algorithm every once in a while, whether it’s a line delivered by a comedian or a meme with a dark, ironic twist. Romance in the 21st century has been picked at and ridiculed the past few years — and they say romance is dead — they quip sardonically, and people love to complain, and the digital age has ruined everything, and Tinder is a blazing trash can of all the remains and the leftovers and the ones looking for sex.

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No! Maybe romance is also in sharing dinner and going for a long walk at sundown and hugging someone closer and feeling so close, I'm right here. Romance is mundanity and everyday-ness and joy and the middle-aged lady who said bless you when a big sneeze escaped me, biking fast down a long street. THANK YOU I tell her and I feel it: this bubbling feeling that romance is possible, that the kismet of it and the joy of it is always around you (that being corny is the way to go) that feeling home and holding hands is the most romantic thing of all.

There is some value to be found, I think, in the work of redefining romance as this ongoing relationship to things and people. I’d go as far as to say that it’s one of the most important strengths and muscles we can build through life, especially as we get older. Life can be swift and brutal and far from joyious, and there’s not a lot we can do most of the time when we’re faced with the immensity of grief and multiplicity of tragedies at any given point in time. And then there’s romance — the romcom is a burgeoning genre once more, especially those with an air of nostalgia — a window of time where you can suspend all belief and just fall in love, a lot, or a little bit. There’s a reason we’re flipping back the channels, the storylines, a retro feel to the heroine of times past, a reckoning for Bridget Jones lovers. Romance is necessary. It adds a little pep to your step. It makes life more flavorful.

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I had a short-lived existential crisis of approximately 3 days where I thought all notions of romance had been cruelly zapped from me as a result of heartbreak. Even though my heart has healed since then and I’ve got some hard-earned quasi-wisdom to show for it, it’s like I’ve sobered up from drinking overly sweet and extremely alcoholic cocktails and after a solid 800mg of ibuprofen and more ice than water, I’ve noticed the syrup isn’t real and the alcohol feels good, but isn’t good for me. Maybe those were the late teens making an exit from my body, the illusion that only romantic love can redeem you and save you, that only this kind of love is the one that will show you who you are, what your worth is, what you’re capable of. Romance holds you in all its ways, I’ve told you that before. And I think my Instagram feed has to agree - more and more, I see love letters to friends, about friendship, I see the changing seasons of a friend's relationship to her parents; growing sweeter, more tender, with time. And that’s the thing, isn’t it. Time can make you tender. It can melt away what isn’t real, if you let it.

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I recently read a book called Instructions for Heartbreak, although curiously, I have left the world of the heartbroken, and I find romance in the characters’ deep friendships instead. And I think about how the grand gesture of romance isn’t in the person who came back or getting an apology you gave up on ever receiving, or a message acknowledging how special what you had was. Romance is taking the long walk back to the train with a friend, talking things through, holding your hand as you sit down for the ride home. It’s filled with love, that moment, it can look cinematic from a different point of view. It’s growing so easy for me to forget the romantic things a life can hold if you just open to it, the world a waiting cup.

Crushes inspire us to write in our notebooks and add a little extra sparkle to our outfits if we know we're going to see them, secretly yearning for a second look - a hey you look nice - a hint of a smile - an acknowledgement of sorts - they’re at least a little bit as affected as you are by being near them. And when it’s a bad case of the crush… even remembering to breathe properly gets a little hard! It gets caught in your throat when you see them dancing, hypnotic, or by the bar, or on the street, or walking past each other to the coffee machine early in the morning. (I’ve had a million crushes and I am certain I will have a million more).

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Then — the next inevitable stage of the crush — the comedown. Oh, the comedown! Crashing down into reality when the crush is busy, or unavailable, or unrequited, or simply crushing on someone else. You are distraught! Tragedy strikes, full of ennui, burnt out from the mania of a pseudo-romantic obsession. You lie down, exhausted, coming down from the high of your own fumes.

But… when sunlight hits their face! When you see a smile break across their face unexpectedly! When you keep finding things to find interesting about them! The possibilities are endless. You are drunk on the idea of the future and you are insatiable, wishing and praying and hoping the crush will stick around. Swimming between the currents of attraction, confusion, and embarrassment, a crush is a delicious, potent experience when it isn’t devastating, or maybe especially then.

Adults like to hide their crushes and pretend they’re too grown up for that kind of volatile emotional landscape. Adults enjoy thinking they’re elegant little creatures who feel very moderately after their teens. They are lying. No one feels any less just because they’ve been around on Earth longer. I do think we get better at metabolizing intense feelings — in our teen years, we tend to emotionally or verbally vomit all over ourselves — but all of that crushing hope and devastating devotion remain.

A crush is a force of nature, a mirror, a moment to look into the potential of something and feel inebriated and off-balance in an otherwise meticulously structured Adult World.

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When a crush ends, it fades imperceptibly — like the transition to feeling wired after a big night out — after a good sleep and a return to normalcy, the comedown is over. Bit by bit, the excitement and the rush of electricity wind down because they have to; because it’s unsustainable, because a tension like that, wound up against yourself, cannot hold.

But how delicious! How exciting! For a few weeks or months — sometimes even as long as a school year! — the crush is a little spark, a fizz, a ball of energy in your stomach, careening inevitably towards burnout. How BLINDING and BRILLIANT it is in the meantime. How entrancing the light is when it’s burning. How brightly it all burns before it’s over — the crush becomes A Person and then the magic wears off, the show must go on, the tape winds down, we are back to mundanity.

And Then. A new crush enters your periphery. There they are! Skin under the sun! And you’re back where you started, a live wire, drunk on potential.

I remember getting home and settling into a routine again, building an altar, asking my dad about his mother and his grandmothers and The Divorce, suddenly curious to dig up memories from an old dusty box, forgotten in the basement. This is what led me to asking these questions — I found piles and piles of photo albums stored in a cupboard under the stairs — I leafed through them and stared and stared at the faces in sepia tones, looking back at me, open and unaware of the world to come. The life that would happen. The things they would lose.

I came home around a year after my cousin’s passing, and I talk about the grief and the mundanity of it with my aunt in a crowded cafe one Tuesday afternoon, the heat that day blistering. She is unmovable as she tells me that it’s something she is continuing to get used to. She talks about grief like it’s her new live-in permanent roommate, an annex in the house that is her heart.

She tells me about my younger cousin, how she finds him holding an old t-shirt, crying in the laundry room. What if everyone forgets him, he asks her. She comforts him. When we love someone, we can never forget them. I remember we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and sipped on black coffee and let the silence sit between us. With my aunt, loss is never awkward or strange. It is mundane because it is. Her daily life is inundated with it.

I kept these photos by the window of my shared living room: of her as a teenager with a cigarette in hand in my grandmother's home, an uncle who I never met smiling into the camera, mid-laugh, my grandmother, all awash in tones of beige and maroon. To commit things to memory is a form of making a home. I hang them up across the world again this June, and slowly things start falling into place again. I moved houses in August, and the summer heat is blazing, and people are everywhere, arms and legs and skin! So much skin! and I fall in love.

I have been reading again, and waking up every morning has been easier. Moving houses proved to be the best decision I have made in years, and my name is on a contract for the first time since I moved back to Amsterdam in 2022. Stability eluded me until it found me again, and I settled into a feeling of permanence without even noticing it.

Getting older surprises me because I was always keenly aware of how temporary everything was: moving houses 9 times across as many years, changing jobs, changing projects, traveling back and forth between cities and friends, my mom moves countries, my visits to Venezuela get longer. It is the familiar rhythm of a life that’s uprooted, like millions of people who decide to leave home.

Getting older surprises me now because I wake up wanting a sense of permanence and repetition, months into a new structure and routine. I feel safe, and the predictability of it gives me a sense of control and consistency. It hasn’t been this way in years! And I think, this! I want more of this. I want to know my days better and enjoy the sunlight on my face and have a rhythm to my time that is comforting and grounding. For the first time in a long time, my desires change radically, and I radically change with them.

What does that mean to me? I’ve written about wanting what I want before. Getting older is also silencing that embarrassment about wanting what I want. My kneejerk reaction is to stifle the desire down into the pit of my stomach and tell myself the only path to a sense of stability is in living alone or buying a house, which are not currently possible. Of course, very me to make a desire absolutely unreachable unless it is met with certain conditions. I decide instead I can just choose to say what I want and let life handle it. RADICAL!!!!! LOL

Getting something you once wanted comes so sneakily and quietly sometimes. Most times, really. It will come through something mundane and unceremonious, like an email. After a period that felt weird or uncomfortable, the sudden comfort of getting what you want isn’t as jarring at first but more like a rebound effect. Months down the line, I’m upset about a project ending sooner than expected and a change in my roommates’ plans, and then I notice: remember when you didn’t have any of these things you once wanted? When you were hoping for some kind of certainty, living in an ocean of endless maybes and not right nows and who knows when? and the answer was just to take things one day at a time, and it felt like it was going to kill you? Guess what, you survived.

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I think it’s hard to write about it because it exposes my many neuroses and compulsions to try to arrive at a point of 100% certainty rate. I want predictability to feel safe. I want something like a job or a rental contract to always remain the same. These are not things to feel ashamed of wanting! What you want isn’t wrong or unnatural or impossible to ask for. Maybe I’m not as nimble and adaptable as I was when I was twenty, and I haven’t lost anything by it; maybe I’ve just gained something new.

When I went home last April, I felt a newfound fondness for the ability to get there in the first place. My mom cannot leave her new home until her papers are sorted, and we know how immigration works. (To say, we never know). Wars are raging on, and we know how quickly buildings crumble and situations escalate and detonate everything around them, and everything becomes rubble.

And maybe getting older for me means wanting to lie down with a taste of permanence in my mouth and telling myself I’ve been tasting as many apples as I could.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

This also means we recently attended the fabled Christmas company party. This is a universal concept for people working in most companies around the world: the one night where it’s socially acceptable to drink excessively with your colleagues, stuff yourself of free dinner, and maybe end up in a dive bar on a Monday night because Monday Madness is always open (this is a real story, and I was expected to log on at 9 am on Tuesday).

What stood out to me during the company dinner party wasn’t the delicious food or the ever-running stream of wine. (These are fan favorites at the Company Christmas Party and you feel a slight, exciting pressure to consume as much of the free stuff as you can). It was a conversation with an intern who recently turned 23. I can’t remember exactly what it was I said, but whatever it was doesn't really matter. She just turned to me and asked me how old I was. Twenty eight! I tell her. She seems to sigh a little (relief? I’m not sure) and smiles. You give me hope, she tells me. That when I get older I won’t have to be so serious. And it could’ve been the third glass of white wine or the atmosphere of a hedonistic staff party that only occurs once a year (I think they should happen more often); but I leaned across the table to get closer to her and said with all the seriousness I could muster, it's all bullshit! they're lying to you. Don’t believe it! I ran off somewhere else and we didn’t get to discuss it for longer. But I’m still thinking about it a few weeks later, and I think I had to write it to you.

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The world is going through it. It takes about ten seconds to read the latest headlines and feel muscles cramping up in 28 different places in your body. And as you get older, there’s always something more to be scared of. In my 28-year-old body, some fears are being exchanged for others, newer and exciting ones - do I want to have children? and if I do, is it true my uterus will wither away as soon as I hit 35? what if I haven't met someone I want to have children with by then? is the career I’ve built starting to bore me? am I meant to stay in this profession forever? - the fears all wear different faces but the feeling is the same. If you’re a woman in her late twenties - or a person in their late twenties, really - there begins a little, ticky tocky clock sound that subtly starts trying to tell you that time is moving faster. Or maybe you're completely serene and in full acceptance of your life, trusting your timing resolutely - and if you are, I commend you. Skip this part.

In these moments, it is easy to lose sight of joy. It is easy to let this effervescent feeling take the backseat and focus on Bigger Things and Other Priorities. We also happen to be in the era of self-improvement and personal development. We have never had more access to workbooks and resources than we have right now, at this very moment. A quick Google search tells me that in the U.S. alone, 15,000 self-help books are published every year. Can you imagine? 15,000 new ways to work on yourself, from attachment styles to healing from emotionally immature parents (a big hit!) to learning how trauma is stored in the body (the body do be keeping the score, another hit). It is a lot. There are endless options and routes you can take towards being a better you, towards uncovering something new, towards leaving no stone unturned, no mystery unsolved.

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And yet, for all the things you could be better at, for all the self-improvement hiding under a slight terror of not enoughness, joy persists. I find the feeling of joy akin to what people call silliness. My whole life, some of my most persisting memories of feeling like an outcast are tinged with a scolding — don’t be silly, don’t laugh so loud, don’t be so noisy. And I was a chatterbox from birth, so you can imagine how that went. I was always reprimanded for the same qualities that, every year, my friends write beautiful birthday messages about: my lightheartedness, my sense of wonder, my jolly personality (that's a new one this year), my silliness.

I derive incredible satisfaction from making people laugh, especially when it’s an unexpected one. I love the look of brief surprise and delight on someone’s face when I tell them I’m not havermelk elite by choice — if I drink cow's milk I'll shit myself. Or when I tell a colleague a detailed story of how I thought I would actually shit myself at the office at 9 am on a Tuesday, how I imagined calling an ambulance to pick me up, how my denim pants were the lightest blue I owned. (You get the idea).

Besides stories about doing a voluntary or involuntary #2, I think silliness is akin to the feeling of joy because what silliness really is, is your ability to tap into the feeling of joy you hopefully experienced as a child. That kind of joy isn’t aware of societal conventions of what is acceptable or passable or in good taste. Oh my GOD, I HATE the phrase “in good taste.” the harbingers of good taste are often insufferable, so why should I care what they think is appropriate? Besides the obvious faux-pas like making people uncomfortable at the workplace, ,harassment or puking in front of someone's dinner, I don’t find an occasional overshare or an unexpected inappropriate laugh such a sin. Ever since I started my first office job (a student assistant at my school’s admissions office), it baffled me that we didn't have more laughs or really tried to talk to each other. I understand the world is serious and the job is serious and what you make of your time here on Earth is serious. But so much of that seriousness goes into the sacrifice of feeling unbridled silliness or a moment of real, pure joy.

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Slowly, these moments are stored away preciously for the next holiday or the weekend or waiting for Friday or drinks with your girls. And those moments are beautiful. They are worth feeling all your joy for. But I think there’s something to be said about safeguarding your capacity to feel joy to its greatest extent in your daily drudgery of mundanity (if that’s how it sometimes also feels to you). You deserve to keep your relationship to joy and to mend it, to nurture it, to take it seriously. Because it is. Because keeping a direct line, access to joy — it is part of the biggest, most serious work you can do in your life. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that. Go back and read a few headlines.

We have never been so alone together. We have never been so aware of everything that is happening, of everything that could happen, at any given moment in time, in our history. I avoid horror movies and violence in films because there is enough violence around me. I read about the latest updates in Luigi Mangione’s case and I read about how Blake Lively sues a man for undertaking a sophisticated — and very effective — smear campaign on social media. I think about how difficult it is to tell good from bad when there’s imperfect victims, and people’s selective outrage when violence is direct and tangible instead of systematic (ahem, the thousands of preventable deaths a year in the U.S. due to the predatory healthcare system).

And then, what do you think I do? I think about my values. I think about my choices. I think about all the ways I’m going to get older (if I am so lucky) and how I don’t want to cut out parts of myself so as to not be affected by the world.

So what is the next best thing? What is right at the touch of my fingertips? Unbridled joy. Unbounded silliness. It is the one thing I believe is every human’s true birthright - to feel it. To toil and toil and try and try and work and still, find the time to hold it in your hands and enjoy it for what it is - a magnificent thing in the mixed shitbag that life can be, and often is.

This is where I tend to get very impassioned and very serious about joy - because it is a precious source of energy, what lightens up the world around you, what can fuel you when nothing else is left. Don’t listen to killjoys, to people who tell you you feel too much, to people giving you weird looks because your laugh is confusing or a little too loud, because making snorting sounds in a fit of laughter is in bad taste, or to those who tell you that growing up means taking things seriously and taking yourself seriously.

Yes, take your growth seriously. Take your ability to learn from your mistakes seriously. Take your relationships — choosing them, maintaining them, nurturing them — seriously. As Esther Perel says (and I’ve quoted more than once), the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.

And yet - be very serious about your capacity to feel joy, and the flip side of the coin, which to me is grief. Be very committed to your ability to feel it and its many manifestations in your life. If there is anything real and true in this world worth keeping, it is your joy and your silliness, and you should never compromise on that. It gives you strength. It energizes you. It touches and ripples over everyone around you, and in a world where we tend to feel alone together, this is the most natural, most abundant gift you can give.

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As we get older, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that some things will become more difficult. Getting older also means more things happen in a life; we are at its mercy. Things happen all the time to people we love and to us, and they will continue to. Across the world and close by, wars are being waged. Violence continues to be a tool of oppression. There are people who would hurt you for their benefit. There are people who profit off many, many dark things, too many of them to list. Human nature can be scary to face and we are capable of causing horror and strife for each other — that’s most of what we’ve done for centuries. I am not a positive person because I am delusional. I am optimistic because it’s the only way I can live and cope with being in a world where everything beautiful and everything terrifying happens in equal measure, at the same time.

So it is important, it is the work of a life to find that joy, to keep that joy, to claim a right to it. It is important to keep a connection to joy because living in a world like ours requires us to live with everyone else, a massive group project on the brink of extinction. Can you imagine holding all that existential weight on your shoulders and then being disapproved of, outcast, not taken seriously for being silly? for feeling unbridled joy? Absolutely fucking not.

Fight for the right to your joy like it is your birthright to feel it. Because it is.

What a year!!! It was partly wackadoodle town but also not(?) in so many ways. Sofia recently asked me what my word for the new year would be (we discussed a new era, as you do with birthdays, and I needed help brainstorming) - and although I traditionally would sit and think about these things by January, maybe marking the year with a December birthday is kismet.

Kismet is a great word. I like that it's a bit whimsical and uncommon to use. I think the year that's passed was the kind of year when everything happens all at once, whereas the year before, it felt like nothing was happening. For a long time, I've been waiting to see where the gift of 2023 was. I've been known to refer to it as the worst year of my life. I suppose the gift — now that 2024 is ending — is that I made do with the deals I was cut, the cards I was dealt, during a year where many moving pieces finally whirred to life, after what felt like ages of stagnation.

I think 2023 was a strange test of endurance and it showed me where my weaknesses lie. Weaknesses are not bad. They're not meant to be made fun of or minimized. They're just softer spots that need more love. More attention. (Love is paying attention). I learned that I tend to swell up inside myself and outside of myself when I feel unsafe. I disconnect from my body when I feel I am in danger. I turn to food for comfort and I quickly envelop myself in a coccoon, I tend to close down and retreat into silence. I learned silence can be a weapon you use against yourself too. When you choose not to talk about how you feel or about the truth of something – how something is wearing you out or exhausting you, or how it is making you feel defeated – it cannot make the feeling of defeat smaller or disappear just because you're not talking about it.

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In a way, 2024 being the year of the dragon did resonate with me (doesn't it always make sense for a reason?) i spent time at home, the most consecutive weeks I’d ever been there since moving away nine years prior. I also came home to my body – my physical body, becoming aware of it, its planes and curves, the way it swelled up with sadness and silence for months before I decided to make incisions that would alter it forever, from the inside to the outside.

The perspective of it changes, but the one I settle for is that it was the way I chose to reclaim my body from a foreign land and into my home again. I became who I always was. I was gifted a blank slate, a way to start over. I was given the opportunity to recognize the ways I was numbing myself and to choose whether to confront it or to submit it to silence. I still think about how these stories are carried down through generations and how I happened to come from people who turned to food as a bid for control, for reassurance, for comfort. I think it's a story I will be rewriting for years to come. And I am actually okay with that! That is probably the next gift.

The grief I felt in 2023 was a preamble to everything I would feel in the year following; a complete loss of control and a complete loss of reality as I knew it. I was untethered to everything except my house in Amsterdam, which was also tumultuous, so by every account, it was Not a Good Year. I found it very humbling. I find a little bit of shame there sometimes for "allowing" myself to neglect my physical body that year. And then just as soon, I remember that I was doing what I could to survive; that we turn to what we know to guarantee we will make it through; that we cope with reality when it is unbearable in many different ways; some of them more visible than others. I learned that in an Especially Bad Year, self-compassion is the better choice if you want to give yourself any grace at all. If you want to have a good chance at forgiving yourself and letting go of it, then self-compassion is the best way to get through it.

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In 2024 everything sped up by the time I had surrendered into having a Hard Time. Something about hard times I’ve learned is that leaning into them doesn't mean I've given up and this will be the rest of my life (it never is). It means I gave myself permission to accept things were shitty. There is some sort of peace to be found in laying on the floor of your bedroom, accepting that life simply is pummeling through you at 240 mph with a shit storm and it's easier to take it than it is to strain every muscle in your body, hoping you will trasverse it. In reality, it's a storm - there's no way to walk through a storm. You'll exhaust yourself. The best you can do is pack for the weather and accept the skies are on fire and try again when the storm is over.

And when I did, the most miraculous thing happened: the storm passed. I sublet my room within a couple of days and I found a good ticket home within the same time span. It all flowed so easily. The friction that filled the air around me, the echoes of slamming doors in my career, the stagnancy of a day in and day out, aimless period of my life became something other. It was as if accepting I was stuck was the first part to getting unstuck. As if acknowledging my reality allowed me to make it into something different, something new.

I went home in April and May and I made incisions to my body I also realized that the home I grew up in deserved a bigger space in my life; if anything to learn more about the generations before me, who they were, what they did, what they loved, who they became. It was a very insightful time. I asked a lot of questions. I received many answers. I learned that women have played a big part in my lineage, much more so than men, that their choices and sacrifices are what shaped our family. That their endurance was revered and their positions were respected. It showed me how the parts of me that are strongwilled and fiercely loyal and stubborn are one and the same parts of the women before me, passed on to guarantee that I would survive. That I would live.

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Then June came and with it, I had found things to take up my days again, work became meaningful and my prayers were answered, and I was so lucky and so happy to begin again. And it's been that way ever since. So many new things to learn, explore, and understand. I've become part of a team again and it's been a great blessing, to feel like I belong after a year of isolation and loneliness. To know you're in it with someone, together — I love that feeling now. The hardheaded independent girl in her early 20s has shapeshifted into a hardheaded interdependent girl in her late 20s. She is still strong-willed but she listens more. Her idea of work is more malleable than it was before.

I am so grateful now to be able to work anywhere, and the world feels so open again. Like the next opportunities will come, and to stay awake for them, to think of them as a flow of life, and to still plan in advance enough to feel like if they don't, home is always a flight away. To know the net of home is always underneath me. And I perhaps would've never learned this if not for 2023.

In 2024 I also fell in love. I hesitate to say that, because my ego hates the idea of having a love who didn't even let you tell them you loved them. But anyway, I digress. He is a really special person who is kind, intelligent, and soft in all the ways I love, but he also needed to face a lot of silence in his life. And there's no space for me in his life if he doesn't address the silence that stifles him, that doesn't let him breathe or get closer to me. I understood how it isn't personal, how even if you extend your heart out in your hands, someone might not want to, not be able to receive it. what an important thing that is to learn. It fills me with certainty and peace to know I did all I could. I've done all I can. And I showed myself, again, the ways I cope; booking trips and events and making endless plans to keep myself busy. Until the crash inevitably comes, until you have to confront yourself. Again and again. Life is always showing me that wherever you go, there you are. In different flavors, but nevertheless - there you always are.

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And now the fall passed and all of a sudden it's winter. I'm leaning into saying yes and no more often in equal measure rather than allowing myself to take something, whatever it is, just because it's being offered: there's a difference between an offering and having to take it. You don't need to take every offense being offered. You don't need to show up to every showdown. You don't need to battle someone's projections. You don't need to argue with someone's idea of who you are. You can choose to continue, and to let it be as it is. Let people get mad! Let people be who they are. Let it be what it is!!!!!

And now I'll turn 28 with this feeling of peace and tranquility. The kind of peace that comes when you make peace with the year. When you accept what has been and you think, "That was that!" And there's nothing else left inside you to try and change it or negotiate with it or find a sense of hard-won redemption in. The redemption is in just accepting what was. Embracing it, even - even if it feels like the hot iron that was 2023 branded me so deeply I will forever be different than the person I was before. From it came the year of the dragon and the year of going home. The year of understanding more roots before it is time to bloom. To understand my ancestry a little better and put feelings to the women who painted the past and in doing so, created the future.

It might be true that we romanticize struggle, that overcoming adversity has its own merit, that sweating and pushing and straining can make success feel more hard-won. And yet I don't want to strain and push anymore - I succeeded when I did just the opposite. So I think my biggest wish is to remember surrender when life brings another strange, unexpected test of endurance. As if to say, do you remember? Do you remember who you were before the storm arrived? Hold on to her. She will hold on to you.

We met that day on a Sunday and lying in bed that evening I told you I was dating you. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to feel like I was asking permission to be more, to play a more solid role in your life. Mostly because it felt like I already did, after a stint back home for two months doesn’t shake you off from my life, after coming back and alternating summer holidays don’t make it easier for us to lose touch or to lose grasp of each other. In the heat, dying down in August, the first day of September, I remember telling you it’s been six months since we met and you were surprised, said in six more months it’d have been a year. You had mentioned a conversation in two years about marriage and paperwork and passports, and I didn’t want to take you seriously. Mostly because people say things they don’t really mean all the time — not personal, just a habit. I hang onto every word you say anyway, because I like you, because that’s what you do when you hope something is going to last.

We sat on the couch after that and then I ask you what you’re looking for, the question always at the tip of my tongue but the moment feeling right only now, as I sit across from you after eating takeout. Your eyes widen and you look nervous. I tell you you can take time to think about it if that’s what you need. I was curious, and I figured I would be better at this this time around, I would be a bit smarter in giving myself away — at least give myself time before I decided to jump in with both feet. But of course, feelings have their way of swimming along before you know it and you’re in the water. you’ve been there for a while. 

I started talking about needs and attachment styles and it was my way of intellectualising my feelings and not get overwhelmed with the uncertainty of where I stood with you. Funny, you were always one foot out, one foot in, now that I think about it. Always so close but for a few, crucial centimetres. I could feel you and I could touch you but I wasn’t where your heart was. I was always close, so close, but never quite there. It wasn’t intentional.

What I was trying to say back then is I love you, even if it feels like it would’ve been early to say or maybe more just scary to say, what I was trying to say about my needs and consistency is I like you, even if you felt that you should’ve done better, it was good for me, it was a good thing, I was trying to say. I wanted to try and most importantly — I wanted to try with you.

That is what it is about in the end, isn’t it? To be willing to try. To be willing to learn. Love is a beautiful thing because you just learn and learn and learn about each other and how to love each other better - in every sense of it, platonic, familiar, romantic. In the end it’s a choice that lets you run with it and see where it goes. And I understand. it’s not for everyone and it’s not always the best time for it, is it? You said it was a red flag once, how I’d never been in a relationship. I hate to say it, but it’s probably because I keep falling for guys like you. 

Which isn’t the worst thing! Guys like you are mostly kind and always sweet and have always shown me a degree of consideration. Guys like you have always done me the kindness of letting me know they’re not fully in it when they notice that I am. Guys like you have always decided it’s best to bow out before I continue feeling the way that I do. Guys like you recognize the look in my eye before I do. 

So it ended two weeks after that, maybe not quite but just about, and it was unceremonious, during a walk in a park I hadn’t been to yet — and don’t plan to go to in a long time or ever again, to be fair. The weather’s changing and the days are getting dull and short, wet, brown and muddied and the park doesn’t seem so inviting anymore. I remember the light had been golden and it was the first day I wore a thicker coat this year, admitting defeat to the gods of the seasons. And it wasn’t concrete and it wasn’t closure, it didn’t feel like closure at all. It felt like bowing out from something that was real, for the time that it was, for however long it was supposed to be real. And it was! It was for me. 

I’ve treated it as such since then — just something that was real and that I wanted and that made me very happy for a while. I really thought we would make it. But as a friend tells me, sometimes it’s just been ordained, this is just how it is, you just have to roll with the punches. I think that’s easier, isn’t it? The pressure spreads across the body instead of taking a solid strike, one single hit, and then your body distributes the weight of it. The impact of it. Rolling with the punches ensures you can recover quicker and keep going. It doesn’t matter what I want I tell myself one night, ruminating on what it all means, on whether this break means I will never see you again, not even by happenstance. 

I don’t entertain things like what if’s and scenarios and probabilities, because I’ve been down this road before, and age does make you a little wiser in helping you prevent imaginary pain. You get better at it, at living in stride, at compartmentalising, and keeping busy. You get a lot better at rationalising things. Putting them in perspective. It could’ve been a lot worse! Even if it could’ve been a lot better. Most importantly, it is what it is. And you know I love that turn of phrase.

I also think it’s sociopathic to feel the equivalence of an alleyway shanking and to have to get up and pretend like you didn’t just fall victim to a stabbing. Oh, me? Don’t worry about that! The bandages around my chest? Routine procedure, honestly, to get your heart broken in a park or a train station or a café on a cloudy afternoon - happens all the time, far more than we think, more often than not. My patron saint of heartbreak Taylor Swift is right there as she laments, how did it end? I tell her I know but I don’t know, really, and closure is this brilliant imaginary thing that sounds cooler in theory but is just as heartbreaking, if not more. The finality of it won’t make it sting less. So I wake up and I get ready and I get a haircut, and I book a flight to Budapest, and I send emails and I call my friends. Life continues as it does. It used to be devastating to realize, but that’s the other thing - when you get older and the gut punch arrives, it’s more of a relief.

You, me, this is how it’s meant to be always

I jump from the train or the tram to the bar after my

Family holiday how have you been I can’t wait to see you 

I fly to Barcelona to meet you at the hotel and kiss your cheek I'm so excited for this family trip lets go get coffee!

I walk a kilometer or two to the station to pick you up and then we go to the Negen Straatjes let's go to that empanada place we tried last time, I loved it

This is how it's meant to be, always

My hand in your hand

Everything about the summer is warm and familiar, probably because back home it's always an endless Summer for me,

Everything is warmer! Even the people are,

Can you believe we've waited for this season for so long? 

Jump in, the water's perfectly cold,

They're jumping off those rocks and into the ocean! 

They're wearing their bikini bottoms lying down topless! 

Everything spreads endlessly before you, this is how it's meant to be always

It is warm and technicolor even when the heat breaks and rain is exploding

This is how it's meant to be always

You get on a plane and we meet somewhere sunny, look, buy a magnet, take a souvenir with you, here's a necklace, the silver's glistening

This is how it's meant to be always

We are together, sweaty, and we're tired, and we're happy

Without noticing, over the course of a few weeks, I accidentally build an altar.

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The first few days of April were a flurry of activity. I woke up very early during the month of April, often checking my emails at 6 in the morning — Amsterdam’s noon — for updates and news about potential job opportunities. Maybe I won’t stick around for long and make it back to Amsterdam by mid May! I thought. Of course, as is usual with me, I tend to make decisions from some kind of other place and then they follow through exactly as they were decided. To be clear: I booked tickets for 8 weeks, a period covering April and May. And it was exactly the amount of time I remained here, thinking about the transitions of spring to summer, thinking about how I feel about family, thinking about how those of us who move countries tend to forget the altar in the effervescent excitement of becoming ourselves first. 

Coincidentally, I graduated high school on a day like today nine years ago. I was 18 and in hindsight, more full of faith than I have ever been then or since. I decided to go to the Netherlands on a whim, after reviewing a few pages on a university website, thinking it sounded good and was taught in English, so why not give it a go. I wanted, more than anything, to develop a sense of self, far away from everything I knew and deep into the unknown. I moved to a city I had never visited. We had our first winters, our first snows. I found it such a sight! If you’re from a typically warm or tropical country, you know the wonder of it: everything blanketed in white, for a moment, sounds muffled across the street covered in particles of ice and snow. If you’ve moved away from home, you also remember spending days leading up to Christmas break working or studying or keeping busy, some of those Christmases on your own or with friends, some of them home, returning for the festivities and a million homemade meals. If you’re lucky, you get to come home. If you’re lucky, you still have a home to return to. 

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I build an altar over the course of a few days and then, after a few weeks, it’s complete. First, I find a photo of me and my sister, aged ten and three, in a silver frame. This photo comes alongside a two other frames: my paternal great-grandmother Rosa, another of her as a young mother, with my grandfather, standing next to her, and my great-aunt in her arms. Then I find two more photos: a side by side of my sister and mom at around the same age. Their similarity is uncanny. Black and white, looking into the camera but not quite, at something just a little above it, the same fringe, the same jet black straight hair framing their cheeks. The same nose, the same almond-shaped eyes. The same chin. They’re interchangeable, almost, except they’re decades apart. 

I find more photos as the days progress, tucked away in photo albums from decades ago, faces and landscapes painted in sepia tones. They’re my paternal grandmother’s, having made their way here mysteriously and on my lap. They’ve been left in one of the hallways in my father’s house for years, and I find them while I keep digging for more images of my ancestry. I find my grandmother when she was young, a matching set in the 70s; my grandfather reading the newspaper; a rare surviving photograph of them together, maybe already in their 30s or early 40s. Photos of my aunt, who looks like a movie star, a cigarette hanging from her hand in a casual way, sometime in her early twenties. Before marriage, before children, before unspeakable loss. In this photo, she’s smiling ahead at the world and almost nothing has yet happened. Her whole life spreads far and wide before her. She has nothing to lose.

I find another photo of my uncle; he passed away at 26 and I never got to meet him. He looks eerily similar to my dad. He’s covering his face halfway, laughing, probably telling the person behind the camera to not come so close or to stop taking photos. But he’s good-natured, I can see it; he’s happy, I can feel it. 

I combine all these photos on the dresser and add a few things I've brought from home: a couple of stones I’ve caught over the years at spiritual stores or gifted from friends, a rock gifted by my baby brother, two tarot cards signed by Caroline Calloway: the wheel of fortune and the queen of pentacles. I collect two big rocks in a terrain my dad is working on to build a small countryside house, pink and jagged and cream, one of them sparkling under the sun, lucid and marvelous. I lay down a photo of my dad in his first communion, another one of him by the piano, another one of him holding a guitar. I had never collected images of my family before. Not in the way I would display them in front of me, next to my door. 

I wonder if moving away has some kind of delayed effect on touching back on your roots or whether it’s a decision you make once you get a little older. Migration at an early age is a little disconcerting because you’re so keen on becoming a person and being an individual and making all these choices for yourself, but you have no roadmap or idea of where to start, and it’s exciting, but it can also be disorienting. And yet I have a sneaky suspicion that this happens to everyone, whether they’ve moved away from home or not. I build an altar without knowing it for weeks at age 27 and I wonder how many more altars look exactly like this for other people. Do they also trace photos in sepia tones from when their grandparents were young? Do they trace the faces of their parents when they were teenagers, looking to the mirror to see what they inherited, and from whom?

I think they do. 

Nowadays, the concept of home is under a lot of scrutiny. The idea of indigenous land, ownership, rights and allowances is on a lot of our minds. Who gets to call a place home? What ideology shaped it? Who gave who a claim to a home or to a land? All of it is imbued in politics; it is silly to not recognize that. My dad told a taxi driver today on our way home that the biggest battles happen on your knees. I have to agree with him. The biggest violence comes from a religion, if not religious, commitment to some kind of belief. Who lays a stake to land? Who has the right to demolish a home in the name of building their own? Should we allow it?

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Home is a structure as much as it is ancestry. Developing a sense of self is necessary as much as it is to recognize the selves that birthed you. Growing in isolation — or what people call individuality, to me it’s become sort of the same thing, really — is one; not possible, because you’d have to live far from civilisation. Two — not real or true; if anything, it is deception. The difficulties generations before me faced have all been embedded into the person I am today. There is much to learn from their trials, their insecurities, their mistakes, their regrets. The times they lived in were vastly different and marked by struggles that I might not see as clearly today, except I have a gut feeling that every struggle is connected and multifaceted depending on what you can see. 

So can you see beyond the deception that you’re only built on your self, your own ideas? Can you accept the truth — that you come from somewhere and there’s a root to you, beyond everything you’ve refashioned and changed and evolved over the years? 

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Can you look at it whole, unflinching, and learn where you’ve come from? And once you do, can you honor who you are? Can you honor who you’re yet to become?

I didn’t honestly think much about last Spring until I got to Venezuela this April in 2024. I think that I had to survive and so I survived, and I performed well where I could — I invested myself in my friendships and I threw myself into finding work — but the reality is that it made me look at my relationship with work right in the eye, in more ways than one. I realized I attached a lot of my value to my employment — I wanted something to do, and I wanted to find it, and I got so focused on finding it that I was in a sort of temporary disembodied disconnect. I hired a coach, I went to exercise every once in a while, but the reality is I was feeling depressed. It was different this time than the last blue period, much less desolate and lonely in a different quality; the blues weren’t so noticeable and the lows felt so subtle, I was always an undercurrent of low. And to the external eye, I just kept getting bigger and bigger and I think it had a lot to do with finding refuge in comfort foods and trying to feel solid and safe in something I knew. So many different demons came out to play. The grief and the sudden loss of someone I love. The endless procedures and interviews and the blows to my self-esteem, the endless grey of a Dutch winter. The truth is, there was no other way the year was going to go. And there’s so much there, still; and now I feel this grief and relief of letting that version of myself go — the light is back in my eyes, the gratitude keeps me alive, the knot in my throat when I tell my friend I’m so blessed to have a home to return to. 

I used to think returning home was one of the lesser evils in the choices I had to make to survive life abroad. But I wasn’t meant to survive life abroad — I was meant to build a life abroad. And I found myself unanchored and unknown to myself, this new version of me — side of me — I never met before. Nowadays I’m also curious about her and what she had to show me; the grief and how she felt through it, blindly following her footing into darker thoughts like what if I were to die tomorrow and nothing is in my control, everyone I love will always be a frail, little thing in the face of the world and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The pain or the suffering or the joy or the grief of it. How can I bear it and then there were daily things like client outreach and emails and creating content on LinkedIn and I can see now how the banality of it was offensive to me. Everything felt banal and kind of useless in the grander scheme of things except I was also a lost soul like in the movie, before breaking out of a trance, before I rewatched it for maybe the 5th time, this time with my dad in the living room, in April 2024. I held back my tears as I told him, see, this is everything that we were meant to do. Life was meant to be lived all along right here. 

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I think the gift of everything is my eventual understanding that life isn’t meant to be done in the pursuit of joy. Life is just meant to be in the now, and again, and again, and again. Life only asks you to be here. To be present for the feelings and the emotions and the thoughts you’re having and to witness them. Life just asked me to be there for it while it was happening. It was never about reaching some kind of joy that could sustain itself through the grief, but about being present for the grief with the patience and understanding that it would become easier to carry, one day. One day, even if it wasn’t today or if it wasn’t tomorrow. All it asks of you is to be here. What a simple and difficult thing to do. 

Having certainty is having faith. Having security in yourself that the difficulty of something will pass eventually is faith — faith that nothing is permanent, not even the weight of feeling like this will last forever. Certainty is faith because it’s solid and also intangible in the way it can hold you through. I understand why people become spiritual or are born-again Christians or fervently pray to a rosary at Sunday church. The way we circle back, always make our way back to something that gives us a reason to live, to navigate whatever it is we are going to, can be beautiful. God can be beautiful. The world isn’t beautiful, most of the time, and grief is present, most of the time, but brilliance is possible. It is always possible. Sometimes it will crack through my chest when I feel grief but the color of it is always brilliant. Blinding. Love can also be this — presence — it can also be sitting with everything that is here. The pursuit of an eternal wonderland is reductive. That isn’t the whole picture. The whole picture exists alongside brutality and injustice, pain and suffering, brilliance and joy. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot exist in an imaginary place where everything is only joy. Joy is possible, but it is also fleeting — the more you grasp to it, the quicker it slips through your fingers. And it is true because pursuing it means so many things nowadays. The little silly treats, walks to get coffee, going to your favorite cinema; these things exist whether the joy exists to carry them or not. All life is asking you now is to be here for it. I punished myself for a long time thinking that I wasn’t reaching the joy I should reach, only to realize it was always there; but more multifaceted and sometimes trickier to access. If I didn’t give the grief the space to suffocate me, how could I come up again for air? 

And then the weight falls when you decide to go home. This year was a lot about going home for me so far. What feels like home? What does it represent? I have the blessing (and the curse, always both) of feeling at home in two different countries. I travel the vastness of my homeland with the practiced tempo of someone who’s done this for close to a decade. My family, running veins across opposite sides of the country, different accents marking their Spanish, the house my mother grew up in, four generations of them and yet it still stands every year, the balcony opening the world to me as if to say we have always been here and we’ll always remain. The mountains surrounding my hometown, the drive to my grandmother’s house, where she raised my father and my aunts and uncles. The old room at my other grandmother’s house, painted lilac and soft baby pinks, my Hello Kitty radio. My cousin’s apartment in the capital, marbled tabletop, my beloved cream sofa bed. The birds coming for breakfast every morning at 7 a.m. feeding them rice. The shopping streets and winding roads up, up, and up, to the hill where my dad stays every once in a while. The clinic where my grandfather died.

And yet all these places mean nothing without the people in them. My great aunt serves me coffee every afternoon over the weekend, chopped fruit in the mornings. My dad installs a small TV so I can watch Netflix from bed without my laptop screen. My grandmother covers my back in body cream and draws my age, 27, like she did when I was 11. Her practiced hands travel down my shoulders and to my arms, just like they did when I was a child. I have a difficult time imagining a day in which none of them will be around to hold me. When I will no longer be someone’s daughter or grand-daughter. And how important it is to acknowledge it. My sister tells me on the drive home, you forget about moments like these, between everything that goes on in a day. You forget to appreciate them. You forget how you don’t know how long these moments will last. And I know it. 

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May 16th, my cousin would’ve been 33. I go to church on a Wednesday to meet my aunt and our cousins for mass. I stand there and wonder if he would’ve come to the service had it been someone else. I tell him I don’t know whether he believes in all this, the ceiling covered in beautiful paintings, swirling pastel clouds of yellow and pink and blue. I swallow my tears back because I hate crying in public. We repeat after the reverend and I listen to how he says it’s important to keep caring for one another. Someone reads the names of people who’ve died on a long list and I make out his name and realize it’s the first time I’ve heard the name of someone I love in the prayer list for church. I wonder if he thinks this is appropriate or if he believed in God, or even this kind of God. I realize I can’t ever really know.

Surrender my cap reads, accidentally left on furniture high above my bed, right across it. I happen to read it over every time I wake up lately. Funny, I think. The last thing I ever wanted to do was surrender but here we are; melted and laying on this bed that’s been around nearly for as long as I’ve been. In a room I used to dream in when I was 10. And it doesn’t feel at all like I thought it would feel. In your childhood room trying to make life work! Not at all. It feels like being someone’s daughter for a while and being held in a home that’s always been there for me, whether life feels like it’s working out or not. 

And life is working out. I am alive. I only have to be here to watch it unfold. 

It has been really interesting to think about my relationship with my body and the way that my mind disconnects from it when things are feeling particularly difficult. In difficult periods - like the one between March 2023 and March 2024 - I was feeling mainly more stable and grounded throughout the storms, but I was also doing so from a place of more disconnect rather than embodiment. It was like I knew that embodiment was necessary but I chose to fully focus on my inner world rather than get out of my head and into my body.

This became increasingly obvious with my habits - I stopped cooking as often and completely avoided sensory activities that brought emotional or mental release, such as the yoga practice I had taken up since my early twenties and the playlists I would listen to on walks, during showers, or when writing. I also avoided writing often, and only made the space for it in focused bursts for the sake of producing something, making my newsletter the priority for the only writing I ever wrote. For months, I would sit and pick and choose topics around home, travel, feeling lost, and finding footing again (all very quintessential 20s), but I stayed far away from the murky waters of dissociation and what it was doing to me. So many things become autopilot actions once they’ve been ingrained into your system. It’s no wonder that evolving is a constant, that consciously choosing to change is a decision that’s made every single day — while holding patience, as long as possible, in each hand as you do it. It’s not meant to be easy but sometimes I wonder if it’s supposed to get easier with time, or at all.

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I grew up in a household that was very afraid of weight gain. My dad had chosen to circumvent it through gastric surgery; my mom had chosen other more psychologically violent avenues. We would cycle between strict restrictions for soda, candy, cookies, or Nutella only to catch her eating it straight from the jar at eleven p.m. with mindless abandon, like a kid finally left to play to their whims in the sandbox after a long day of summer school. Both parents were filling themselves up with the same things - but they were hiding it in different ways. Isn’t that interesting? One of them continues to eat all kinds of treats and foods throughout the day, passing the time, while working, while driving, on the way home, leaving home. Another polices the rate of sugar and carbohydrates in her kids’ food and tells them to stop eating so much, they’re going to get unhealthily heavy. But then she hides the spoonfull of Nutella. Humans are paradoxical, strange things.*

*(I love my parents, in case that needs saying, but there is also a wonderful gift to be found in being able to look at them as people who are flawed, had kids, and were doing their best).

My weight fluctuated through my twenties. I am now 27 and back on an uptick, after a year of grieving and finding multiple difficult junctures all at once — the sudden loss of someone I love at only 31, the lack of direction in a post-Covid recession, the second-guessing that comes in your 20s when you realize everything’s burning everywhere and there must be something you can do. My favorite snacks became my dinners. Cooking for myself became increasingly tiring, drawing me out to the cupboard where I could make pasta in ten minutes, eat eggs on toast in under five, make chocolate milk for dinner, and get chicken nuggets after a long, tiring day (there were many).

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If I were to measure my homesickness and my need for safety in the past six months through how many chicken nuggets I ate, the number would be higher than it’s been in the past six years. I put on weight slowly and then all at once; I came to my hometown on April 1st and after a shower, saw myself again, almost as if I hadn’t been really looking in the mirror for what felt like a very, very long time. There were new curves and dips. My legs were the palest they’ve ever been. My arms felt fuller and new, different from what I remembered. And there I was again, as if my mind came back into my brain and connected to the rest of my body. Where have you been? What have you done? 

The morality attached to weight is absurd. It is even more absurd to live in when you’re inhabiting the body of a woman. You know this, and I know this. Such a reality is exacerbated when you travel to countries outside of Western Europe (do not be fooled, Western Europeans are very Eurocentric and thin-centered under the guise of health, but that’s another story). In my hometown, beautiful, thin women adorn the arms of overblown-bellied men with unkempt beards and ill-fitting jeans, often ten years their senior. The women seem to take the least amount of space possible; both in how they walk, how they dress. They are elegant, beautiful, and impossible. Perfectly manicured hair, shiny, bright colored nails, matching gym sets, impenetrable sunglasses, hiding their gaze. They are beautiful. They are immaculate. I wonder how much effort it takes to look like this, and wonder how much of it is a choice and how much of it is a learned habit.

I think of myself and my unkempt nails, growing body hair, how my cousin tuts at my unpainted toenails. There is beauty in the upkeep, that’s for sure; a sensory experience to feel pampered, to feel more put together. I discuss this over the phone with a friend and tell her maybe I’ve taken it to the other extreme just to prove something. My whole life I thought, isn’t there something more interesting than what I look like? I want to nurture that instead. But to live under the pretense of creating a rich inner world at the cost of neglecting any kind of adornment on the physical body is just as absurd. There is no way to win — there never was. There is only one way to go about it: through constant, curious experimentation (yawn).

My changing body has become a topic of discussion amongst my family members, just as any other topic would be dissected at the table (boyfriends, jobs, whether I am ever moving back from the Netherlands). There are several opinions; there are very few questions as to what I would want, and how that would make me feel. I have fielded questions by sharing the honest truth of it: I was feeling depressed and anxious about my life — upended by sudden grief, unemployment, and a general sense of impending doom by the climate crisis — oh, and there are ongoing genocides as we speak. This is not suitable for the dinner table, but questions about the way I look aren’t, either. 

I am not writing this so that you’ll think; oh, this is horrible! let’s see how the weight loss journey goes for her. Maybe this is about loving your body and being body positive and what matters is on the inside, etc. and yes — what matters is also on the inside — but no; you cannot forego your physical body in the name of absolute acceptance. The absolute acceptance comes from accepting the shadows, too; that you’ve inherited a relationship to your body, not only created it; that the way we look shapes the way we live our lives, will always be a determining factor in one way or another; that the world is fucked and we should surely focus on more things than the way we look in the first place. And yet. And yet, eating 3 balanced meals a day for yourself and sleeping enough, and having a modest exercise routine make your brain work a bit better. The burdens, whatever they might be in your life — given you’re not living in a war zone — become easier to bear as a result. Your resilience is deeper. You’re less likely to catch a cold. Your immune system becomes stronger. Your fertility (if you’re into that sort of thing) is boosted — or at least not in harm’s way. And and and. And a million other things. 

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I’ve been reading a few articles about the body positivity movement losing steam; how the rise of Ozempic and Moujaro have been slimming plus-sized influencers for the past year, how once loyal followers, loving supporters are bashing creators for leaving their plus-sized bodies and claiming their entire lifestyle was just a money grab. A MONEY GRAB! When people are just free to choose the kind of body they would like to work with, regardless of what that body looks like. When they want to become more active and address their health and address their desire to simply change. It is impossible to divorce it. The stories around food, the stories around weight gain, the stories around beauty and desirability. The politics are ruthless, and no body is safe. There is no end to the scrutiny and the judgment. There is condescension for using medication and there is a weird applause for people who “muscled and fought their way through it” to “beat obesity” and “change their lives” but also; don’t change the way you look because you’re beautiful as you are! 

I don’t have the answers to any of it — there’s an essay from a beautiful woman who laid her patterns bare in front of us, addressing her sudden weight loss after months of questions and an unrelated hospitalization. A lot is going on at the moment. She decided to tell us about the ways she learned to control her body so it would become a shape she was taught to find more acceptable, more lovable, more desirable(?) Or maybe all of the above.

The truth is that there is a lot more to bodies and weight and food and gender than the communities that exist online; that there are ways you learn to relate to the foods you eat that were inherited; that genetics play the biggest role in how we look, how we are shaped; that trends favor a new, different kind of body every few years; that we’re surely reverting to an era that reveres thinness. And yet, and yet, and yet. 

Connecting to the physical body is essential. A spiritual life — an intellectual life — whatever kind of life you want to call it — is simply not possible without inhabiting a body. Being in your body isn’t about how to make yourself love it; that is too lofty a goal to set for a society that’s hell-bent on trying to control itself. But connecting to it? Tending to it? Moving it because you know it will make you feel better? This is doable. This is real. This is tangible, and true, and doable. Finding ways to be in it, to connect to it? It is possible, in many different ways, no matter what the body you have can do or is shaped like, or its limitations.

Perhaps my answer was not in rebelling against the conventions of beauty, but in making sure to eat my fucking vegetables.

I want 'em back, I want 'em back
The minds we had, the minds we had
How all the thoughts, how all the thoughts
Moved 'round our heads, moved 'round our heads
I want 'em back, I want 'em back
The minds we had, the minds we had
It's not enough to feel the lack
I want 'em back, I want 'em back
I want ‘em

You can’t wait to get out of this city that feels like an amorphous and confusing town, the same conjunction of 5 streets and 3 neighborhoods. The last school bell rings at three forty-five and it’s time for dismissal. Grab your backpack and your friend because it’s her senior year and you told your mom you’re riding home with them. You drive back to the opposite side of town then sideways into the rolling hills and Country Club fields and next to the lake. Tiny as it ever was and completely unfit for swimming in, but it was yours. 

Your first cigarette! Cleaning your hands of the smell with Bath & Body Works pocket-size, obscenely scented body cream. You didn’t take such an immediate liking to it but you’re seventeen and you’re on fire. You drive back to the neighborhood and make a stop by the same 4 avenues lining the rest of that side of town, driving it in a loop, over and over, by five thirty p.m. Ribs is in the background then and it is in the speakers on the highway too, you’re the only friend I need / sharing beds like little kids / there is nothing else to do in this prepubescent city than to drive from the Country Club suburban million-dollar houses and back to school, to the 24-hour pharmacy for Oreos and then back home. You can’t wait to start your life elsewhere without the faintest clue that one day you’ll be twenty-seven and borrowing your dad’s car to drive through the same four avenues, Ribs in the background, it drives you crazy / getting old. 

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The years go by and are followed by more dazzling, technicolor ones; the first years abroad, when your prepubescent little spirit leaves the prepubescent city and shapeshifts into something unrecognizable and yet deeply understood. The decade behind you leaves everything prior as though it were wrapped under layers of transparent film, elastic and sticky, coming to you in flashes when you’re driving around town. You couldn’t wait to get out of here when you were seventeen and now here you are. The afternoon light bathes the trees in the same way — the Sun above you is glittering. The leaves mark their patterns on the concrete, streets laden with potholes just as they always were. The decade behind you has been the end of your teens and your twenties, and you’re climbing the steady road of the last of them, with the kind of conscience you can’t fake. 

Remember when you couldn’t wait to leave it all behind? The suffocating roles and the endless summers. You were so sure that the world was waiting on the other side and you couldn’t wait until you got to it. The streets here look the same and you’re always taking the same routes to the same places and you’re only ever in some parts of town because that’s where everyone is. Remember when you played Iris and you’d ride home with your friend from the party who lived next door to you and you would sing through the darkened streets, say hello again on Monday? 

The world is waiting and you finally get on your way after the last school bell rings and your life is sprawled right where your eyes can barely reach, rolling hills and Country Club beef dishes and frappé lemonade just behind you. The world is waiting and you just can’t wait a second longer and without knowing it, barely ever registering it, the world is right there and it’s September and another school year begins, far away from here. The world is waiting and then it’s been nine years and you’re twenty-seven now, the sky is just as blue, the yellow trees are blooming and you wondered whether you’d ever be back to see them glow in April. The world is waiting and then you remember — the twinkling afternoon light, the echoing patterns, leaf after leaf, sunlight reflecting the rearview mirror. Telling your parents you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house who told her parents she’d be sleeping at yours. The parties and the mud-stained shoes and the bottled sangria and the drive-arounds in the same three cyclical neighborhoods — enough to make your head spin — the night always sprawled out before you. Believing in their infinite impossibilities. 

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Now you are twenty-seven and you play Ribs in the car and you text your friends a photo of the console, the trees lining up the road down the same four avenues you used to drive through. Passing by the park with the built-in exercise machinery / the corner coconut milkshake place / the sloping valleys by the Country Club, glimpses of a bright green golf course / the orange sun dipping, slowly, behind the mountains / you’re the only friend I need / sharing beds like little kids / 
we’ll laugh until our ribs get tough / 
but that will never be enough

Here in Amsterdam, sunlight is begrudgingly making its way into the weekly forecast. Little by little, almost coaxed out of the sky, a few rays appear in the afternoon on a weekday - by Friday it’s misty and rainy again, droplets fanning my face like a battery-powered spray in my pocket, exhausted from a sunny, humid Florida day. 

The Spring Equinox was just yesterday, March 21st. The day marks the official start of Spring - the day is as long as it is short - counting down the minutes, day by day, until the days become lengthier, fuller, bursting with more time and sunlight, Summer days a promise that, year after year, is fulfilled. 

I’ve been thinking about faith very often. How it rests in our ability to trust the unseen. How it holds us in silence, asking only devotion from us, if blind, then all the more solidified by our persistence. To have faith in something is to believe that it will come, just like the seasons do, that what’s being planted will bloom, if given the time, if only given the space to breathe. A living, pulsing thing, faith carries a simple promise, hold me delicately in your hands, devote yourself to me, and I will hold you through. 

I have a difficult time recalling this time of year last year; grief truncates our memories and surroundings in that way. I do remember painting in the kitchen, listening to Marjorie, group chat messages flooding my phone every day for a few weeks, pictures, videos, and voice notes carrying the memory of my cousin, whose messages we would no longer receive, whose laugh we would no longer hear, in real-time, recorded anew. I remember a friend telling me that for every loss, or every grief you face, there is always a gift, and to look for it when it was time, when I felt ready.

Maybe the gift of the loss is still underway, or maybe I have stifled its arrival with lofty expectations, maybe I am not letting it take flight in the grandiose way I hoped. I read the stories about overcoming immense loss and grief and emerging, anew, with a shiny quality, a halo of light hovering over the mourner’s head. Saintlike. I don’t feel saintlike. I feel like a human person.

Or perhaps the gift of the loss we faced had to do more with a new way of thinking of faith; how believing that after every winter, just under the bones of the trees, the roots in the mud, there are little, imperceptible, pulsating seeds. Little promises to start again, moving quietly and in minuscule steps, invisible to our eyes. The world has been turning and the seasons have been changing beyond everything we can immediately see. I don’t question the arrival of Spring. I sit and stare out the window, magnolias blooming in our neighbor’s garden. Impossible grasping, the color of faded pink, towards an endless grey. 

If I can believe that this is the way of the world, then I can believe in holding on to faith. 

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How can I hold his hand when he’s not here to hold? 

I still talk to him, in intervals, probably more than I did when he was alive. In the sense that now he’s someone I ask to take care of my aunt, his mother, and his brother. I tell him to keep them close to him, to show him that he’s still there. 

In my mind’s eye I can see him sitting next to my grandfather at the airport. I ask them when the right things will come my way, when the better times will come. “Just be patient, we’re working on it” and somehow, this makes it all feel better. More solid. Faith can take the shape of this imagery, a vivid picture of his checkered shirt and my grandfather’s khaki pants, sitting by the colorful tiles spread on the airport’s floors in the capital. 

My lower lip shakes at the memory in a heated room, laying down with my arms at my sides after exercising for the past hour. My eyes welled up with a few tears. I miss you, I think, and my grandfather waves. He comes to visit whenever I lay really still, usually after a class, having stretched and contorted into different shapes for an hour. When the mind is quiet and there’s only the sound of our breathing.

Faith comes in many shapes — it is a gift, to love and to be loved. This is also faith. To know that you were loved. 

Back at home, across the world, Spring is synonymous with the months of April to June, leaving the rest of the year in a perennial Summer. The days are always exactly the same length - the sun rises by 6.30, it sets by the same hour. I remember waking up every day to go to school, met by the same metallic, unbreakable blue sky. Rainy season limited itself to an hour of torrential downpours every afternoon after lunchtime. It only became more humid, growing the lush green around us to incredible heights.

There is time to reap and to sow there, just like everywhere else. But the passage of time is marked by an altogether different thing. Every December rolls around with deeper nights, the breezes cooler, imperceptible but still somehow felt, the change in the seasons. Drier landscapes take over. And yet — I know the trees will bloom again — the Araguaney will bleed the streets with yellow petals — the mangoes will ripen and fall, fall, fall down the trunks — the cities will light up with fireworks in December — you can have faith this will happen again, with certainty, with simplicity. No artifice.

It is a gift to hold faith in your hands, to ask it to stay. I was here with you, all along, it says. I choose to trust it.

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And so to get on with it—

I’ve been on a reading bender! I feel so superior to myself last year, and even though I still scroll on Instagram and devotedly ignore most of my “you’ve spent your time limit today” pop-ups to extend the limit “continue” instead of a 15-minute add-on to my time limit, I’ve also read 3 books in quick succession the past month and a half(?) so, HA! You can’t fucking catch me.

My last newsletter was very poetic and touched by Patti Smith’s pen; at the time, I was reading the beautiful, poetic, and enviously sharp, concise Just Kids, a memoir equal parts inspiring and devastating. I spent a weeknight last week (not sure which one) deep in Robert Mappelthorpe’s work, tired of reading about it, with a strong desire to see what the fuss was about. Well, I get the fuss now.

Today’s newsletter is more a part reflection/review of one to two books I’ve read in between, Good Material by the world’s agony aunt, Dolly Alderton, and Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey, writer of Schitt’s Creek and Working Moms and other really cool, witty series on TV.

Coincidentally — and without knowing it — I snatched both copies at the American Book Center sometime in late January, reflecting the innermost thoughts and feelings after a devastating breakup, one from the male perspective, a flailing comedian (Good Material's Andy), another from the female gaze, a woman with an obscure PhD resigned to leaving a love that both had fallen out of (Really Good, Actually’s Maggie). They both go through what I am now calling the Hero’s journey. Coincidentally, I also call George and I’s life that, currently. We are somewhere in the challenges and temptations section, or perhaps turning the corner to the death and rebirth part of this cycle.

In the context of the two books I just read, this is GREAT news. I tell you this because, as Andy and Maggie go through the stages of grief that only heartbreak can drown you in the depths of — better than death but definitely worse than most other ruptures in our human relationships — they go through the cycles of self-improvement, gym obsessions, binge drinking, rebound sex that is the canon event of recovery from the depths of Hell.

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How does this relate to our lives, especially when we’re not the people who have just gotten divorced or gotten dumped after 5+ years with our partner? Well, we, too, flounder. We, too, have our weakest moments; those blips of time when the inconveniences we’re navigating, completely out of our control, take over our lives and make us a little delusional. And maybe a tad self-centered.

In these books, both heroes go through cycles of deep defeat and misery, and their relationships suffer as a result — Andy doesn’t know how to connect to his male friends, because it’s a bit hard to talk about their feelings (masculinity is a prison, we must free them) — Maggie has many big feelings, and wants to self-improve her way (drink, rebound, date, you get the idea) into overcoming the throes of grief that divorce has her in. Neither situation is ideal, but what it is, is very human and messy and wallow-y. Maybe too wallow-y for my liking, but it’s real.

It’s weird, because I think being 27 now doesn’t mean this period has been easier than the last time I was here, at 23, but it does mean I’ve learned to cope with it better. Although my breakup event is the job situation, the existentialism and heartbreak of not knowing what the next step is feels a bit dire; not knowing whether it’s a difficult job market, or maybe, it just isn’t the right time to start something new, is also confusing.

Either way, not an ideal situation to be in when you’re a proud late-20-something who’s always had a job. I now find myself two weeks out from visiting my family in Venezuela, signed on for a two-month period of… what, exactly? We don’t know. But I am in my Hero’s journey, so I should be rounding up the corner called THE ABYSS and I’ll be staring into it — it’ll be staring right back.

What do I do when I have no control over external, life-defining circumstances? I can be a lot like Maggie and Andy. I go to spin class and devote myself to the self-improvement tirades at Rocycle, Mitchell making me feel literally nauseous because his intensity level is a bit insane and unhinged (Meagan loves his classes, but she also does CrossFit, so, you know, she’s part cyborg).

I go to the corner restaurant with the 1.5 euros cappuccinos before 11 AM. I sell things I don’t need on Vinted (get on it, it will SET YOU FREE, BABE!!!!) I write these newsletters from different locations; the public (Free!) library, the kitchen table, my bed (currently).

I get a glass of wine with George, who is on a (two? three?) month journey by now, seeking his next home; he’s currently staying with a previous flatmate and her girlfriend in Utrecht. “Mothers,” he calls them affectionately, or “The Girls”. We commiserate over our joint efforts to sort out aspects of our life that feel key to our well-being without going insane.

I go to hot yoga class begrudgingly, noticing that I need to breathe into my core and my internal organs and also melt my spine forward and keep my pelvis tucked in and also touch my toes while microbending my knees if that’s what’s available to me today.

I read Patti Smith’s best-selling memoir and think maybe I, too, have been born with a Blue North star, which is to say I should keep working at my art, even if it sounds mildly pretentious and insufferable. Patti didn’t think she was insufferable! She didn’t know any other way to live.

These moments are singular, universal experiences; in the micro, the career shift or the career questioning, whichever comes first; in the macro, a wave of layoffs, restructurings, and recession(s) post-pandemic that have knocked even the giant, endless tech money companies to their knees. I avidly network when I finally understand that it’s not about hard selling but about taking some coffee and sharing where you come from, what you’re looking for, what you love. There is no way I would say I love networking but I don’t hate it anymore, so that's a massive improvement.

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In the meantime, things keep happening: I remind myself that a moment of reckoning in the later part of my 20s was going to come at some point. Surely, you cannot outrun the lesson that I’ve been outrunning since forever; external validation is no sustainable fuel to self-worth. And I do love myself, but sometimes that love also comes from other people telling you they love your work, your output, whatever you want to call it. And you didn’t think you were going to get away with it forever, did you? Better to be confronted now before the lake freezes over and you’re thirty and it’s SET IN, like Taylor Tomlinson says. Winter IS coming. Addressing this type of messy shit is EXACTLY the type of thing that happens in this decade.

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This is the funny thing though, isn’t it? You think as you get older, you get immediately wiser — no you don’t — you just get better at dealing with the tumbles and the roughhouse roulette that is life sometimes. I barely turned 27 three months ago and apparently, Saturn has been fucking up my shit real bad since before that, and will continue to do that, until I’m 31 (or something like that). For those of you unaware, Saturn is the cosmos’ Big Papa who teaches you lessons, one way or another, that set you up into the new best decade ever, your 30s. Yes, that’s what astrology says. You can take it up with them.

For now, I am actually perfectly content with the space I’ve arrived in since I bought my airplane tickets last week: I have not given up, I’ve surrendered, which might look similar but are entirely different things. I have not stopped trying; in fact, I’ve tried my best, after more than 7 months of applications and about a year altogether of seeking new horizons. So much of this shift is simply telling yourself you’ve done the best you can and believing it, with your full chest, and sometimes you only get there after you’ve been squeezing yourself like a lemon a bit too hard and you have a panic attack at the library (did you know panic attacks aren’t what they sound like, but more like “It's getting hot in here and the air is kind of stale, I'm dizzy and I wanna lay down”? I always thought they were like in the movies, but there are different kinds. This new information is valuable. I am connecting to my body more in response. Wild).

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I’m okay, I think! Maggie and Andy remind me that you think you’ve sorted out a few things — a relationship, or a job, or a place — and there it goes; fantastically falling apart so you can figure things out again, over and over, because you changed or they changed or everything changed, and it’s time to try something new.

After my book binge, I do know this: the heroes in these journeys are all navigating constant reinvention. Life is a CONSTANT carousel ride and you’re getting on, and off, and on, and off, and the ride is ALWAYS changing. My attempts to figure out the ride have so far, been useless. I have developed a certain self-awareness to know when I am grasping for control, and when I need to let go. And then this was probably part of the Hero’s journey where I understand that bit again: you get to decide how you’re learning about yourself, whether that’s through white-knuckling it at the proverbial library or by giving yourself grace, buying your favorite childhood snacks, and watching The Office until Netflix asks you if you’re still there. Have a good cry. You know, standard.

Human life is fascinating, and we’re in Exciting Times; I am part of a coveted, highly privileged group of young adults who look up “millennial ennui” and doubt the institution of marriage, and stupid shit like that really, REALLY doesn't matter. Except that it does, because in your ability to cope with life, you’ll find the way you’ll start contributing to the world in a way that matters. You cannot pour from an empty cup, they say. They’re annoyingly right.

So… pour into your cup! I will be pouring into mine, mind you! I'll post it all over the internet (or maybe I will overcome this compulsion). I am no longer an unemployed existential girlie but a funemployed woman seeking the next Great Perhaps. Something gives in really nicely when you decide to roll with the punches, have a good cry, and say it is what it is. Surrender feels delicious when you give yourself permission to accept you’ve done everything you could.

I hope I try this again sometime, sooner than how long it took me this time around! God knows it’ll come. The joyride never stops! But neither do I!

Love ya, happy Sunday xxxx