In a past life, I worked with Jacob and, years later, bumped into him at Cardi B’s Met Gala afterparty (lol). Over a blaring DJ set, I screamed into his ear “IT’S SO NICE TO SEE YOU! THE DOCUMENTARY YOU MADE ABOUT YOUR MOM MADE ME CRY! IT’S SO WELL DONE!” and woke up the next morning with scaries of biblical proportions.

I watch the documentary in part to reorient myself, to hear myself in the choir of voices telling me who to be and what to be and when to be it. It’s what I put on whenever I feel misunderstood or uncertain to remind me that those I revere have not only felt this way too, but maneuvered through it victorious. As an adult I’ve drifted away from organized religion as a way of life and have, instead, replaced all pious texts with this movie instead. It is my holy grail. When HBO took the film off streaming (a crime), I bought a DVD (this and Elf are the only two movies I physically own) because I was certain I could not spend the rest of my life, let alone the year, not watching it.

Nora is to me what Dorothy Parker, at one time, was to her: a North Star for women who would like to consider themselves witty, precocious and are sometimes mistaken for cunts. “The point is the legend,” she wrote in a column for Esquire. “I grew up on it and coveted it desperately. All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table.” At some point, after diving deeper into Dorothy’s work, and after concluding her writing was actually “so embarrassing,” the pedestal Nora had once placed Dorothy on all but crumbled.

“Before one looked too hard at it,” she wrote, “it was a lovely myth.” That spell, at least when it comes to Nora, has yet to break for me. In truth, it’s likely because her work isn’t the point, though I Feel Bad About My Neck is a seminal piece of writing that should be federally-mandated, required reading for every woman once they turn 25. To me, Nora’s legend and lore is about her personhood, about being decisive and following your instincts. Often, it got her in trouble, but it nearly always got her what she wanted. It’s why, each time I’ve tried writing about my new job and my new world, I’ve started writing about Nora instead. She trusted her gut. She wrote in her own way. She bit when she needed to bite. And god, it seems like she loved having fun, and she took that fun seriously. She allowed herself the courtesy of enjoying new endeavors — screenwriting, playwriting, directing — tossing her hat in the ring and jumping in after it. That’s what I want this next chapter to look like, to feel like.

My four years at New York Magazine and The Cut were unforgettable. I had the job a million girls would kill for, and what I learned there quite literally could not be taught without living it. I did everything I had ever wanted to do (Cover stories! Scene reports! Big ass features! Trips to Shanghai, Copenhagen, and Montclair, New Jersey!!!!) and then some. I never knew a person could be afforded so many opportunities, and I will take that with me forever. For now, though, it’s time to leap.

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Okay…? What’s your new role though…?

Right, great q. I’m now deputy editor at Substack, where I’ll be helping spearhead editorial alongside the amazing team here. You’ll mainly see that materialize on The Substack Post (watch this space, etc. etc.).

What does that mean for your work?

I’ll be curating The Weekender and commissioning writers to work on some delicious pieces for The Post. I’ll still be writing (HMU, don’t be shy!!!) because I would combust otherwise.

What does that mean for this newsletter?

More consistency and a mild expansion. This world typically serves as space for my inner monologue, or inside voice, and while that’s still going to be the crux, going forward, I’ll be semi-regularly writing pieces about the outside world (mini scene reports, takes on cultural moments, the occasional q+a). Basically this newsletter is undergoing a mini transformation akin to Pinocchio finally becoming a real boy — going to look and sound the same but, like, kinda different when you look at it in a certain light.

That’s all for now! Bye!

Once, while sandwiched next to Cathy Horyn at a fashion show and with one cheek hanging off our shared bench, I asked if she ever gets stagefright while writing. “No. I just try to write as clearly as possible.” My response was so stupid. I think I exhaled a “wow” that sounded like Owen Wilson and a whoopee cushion experiencing a Freaky Friday switcheroo, but instead of swapping bodies, their lifeforces got tangled up at some point in the commute and fused into one. I wished (wish) I was like that — wished (wish) I were clear and concise and caring in my work, because as much as I want you along for the ride, the truth is I’ll write in circles and squiggles and even in tongues as long as it tickles my fancy.

Stagefright has been a near-lifelong affliction for me (although I remember performing a rousing group dance number to “See You Again” by Miley Cyrus at the elementary school talent show without a hitch, so perhaps there’s some EMDR therapy or early-life regressions I can do to cure it). Consider the inciting incident: 7th grade. I’m cast as Miss Flannery in Thoroughly Modern Millie. I have to wear a pinstripe vest I thrifted at Savers that still smells like an estate sale and cat-eye glasses. I still have a gap in my front teeth and a side part so deep my hairline is fighting to lay in its god-given way.

I don’t remember what the plot of the musical was, let alone my character’s purpose, but I remember having a single line solo. Stage front, just before the key change, I’d belt “BARNEY SCHRIBER C.P.A.” (once again, writing in tongues, wtf does that mean to anyone?). During a preview of the musical, one in front of the entire school, my tiny little solo came out in the form of a screech rather than song. In the bleachers, as the sound of 15 sirens (murderous mermaids, not ambulances) set itself free from my vocal cords, I made eye contact with my crush. His mousy brown hair swept to the side, JBiebs style but more tousled, and his mouth was agape. If I’d known what it was back then, I would’ve committed seppuku via the 76 bobby pins holding my for-the-stage bun together.

I’m ill-fit for theater. Ill-fit for the kind of “putting yourself out there” that requires live, scripted speech, monologuing or any type of presentation with the word “solo” involved. It’s a wretched hand to be dealt for someone who loves to perform — someone who loves to be seen. It’s a miracle I found this loophole behind a computer screen, where you can’t see me and I can’t see my crush wincing, where I can do the old song and dance. Writing is how I perform. I get to be a character here, one that stretches the bounds of reality and sometimes, or often, tells the truth. I get to be myself or someone else entirely or hop scotch between, without any guardrails at all between the two. It might not always spill out how I’d like, or even spill out well, but at least it does so safe from the sound of screeching.

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What I…

… saw

I spent the weekend on Cape Cod, lying on the beach far too close to a sand dune and fearful ticks were crawling over me, both then and now. On the drive back into the city, somewhere in the great state of Connecticut, we saw a priest in a gray Tesla, complete with a fat cross hanging from the rearview, get rear-ended by a tiny red Honda. An incredible sight on its own, but what happens to the man at fault? I’d personally spend the rest of my life waiting for the comeuppance that follows partially destroying the possession of a man with a direct line to god. Or perhaps one must wait until the afterlife for the other shoe to drop.

BONUS: I’ve been using the app and it rocks. It’s like a receptacle for my brain, my eyes, my scroll. This isn’t sponsored (obviously lol) but this app is going to be the next Tumblr if you let it.

BONUS BONUS:

… heard

Going micro-retro mode and blasting this song all summer long. A song ahead of its time tbh.

… tasted

This lobster roll from some place on Cape Cod where many of the patrons looked like they didn’t believe in vaccines, which meant this was either going to be the best or absolute worst sandwich I’ve ever eaten in my life. No in between.

This specific roll lived closer to “best” on the spectrum. I eat a lot of seafood nowadays as a pescatarian (my mercury levels must be through the roof but I actually don’t want to know), but I spent about 20 years lobster-free after making eye contact with a lobster, his claws immobilized in thick, blue rubber bands, in a tank at the local Price Chopper. I started crying in the store (I was five) and vowed never to eat lobster again. I kept that promise for two decades until my first trip to the cape, where I was presented with a roll absolutely doused in butter. No sane person would have said no.

… smelled

I’m addicted to this diffuser from Glasshouse (this isn’t a shopmy link and I don’t remember if this is the actual scent, I don’t want to get up to look). What I can tell you for sure is that the scent carries without being overwhelming. YUM.

… touched

This time something has touched me. This piece from the beautiful, kind and smart Laura Pitcher about her cat’s cancer diagnosis. Everything I’ve ever wanted, I take for granted once I’ve had it long enough. Not my cats. I sat next to my sweet (and sometimes incredibly fucking ornery) cats, read this, and I bawled my eyes out for a long time, well after I shut my laptop and headed up to bed. Girls with cats 5ever.

I originally wrote a version of this piece last year for the magazine, but due to extenuating circumstances, it never made it to the page. So here you go.

On a warm Friday night last August, Baker Falls, a dimly-lit bar in the Lower East Side, teemed, half-full, with a crowd of men in khakis carrying tote bags and women in all-black, piecey ensembles. Inside, Chris Jesu Lee read one of his fictional short stories.

“I did my usual thing where I jerked myself off to the girl who’d opened the door of porcelain skin beauty. Her face, a collection of the most prized of recessive traits — the organic, all natural product of class conscious mating,” he read. Lee, whose protagonist had just dropped an unnamed delivery off at an unnamed woman’s house and commenced masturbating immediately, stood on an elevated stage. No one, apart from a trio of older patrons who spoke well above a whisper throughout the night, made a sound. It was impossible to see if others were put off by the explicitness of Lee’s story or enthralled by it. Roughly 40 people had arrived to attend what was marketed as an all-men’s literary reading. Only about a dozen chairs had been set out. Most people stood, their boozy drinks and plastic cups in hand, for the duration of the night, except for a handful of 20-something women with patchwork tattoos who opted to sit cross-legged a few feet from the stage. At some point, one of them whipped out a sub sandwich and began eating it mid-reading.

“She wasn’t even that pretty, which made it even hotter as I thought of her stripped naked and bent over in front of everyone out there, while having every hole of hers infiltrated by lovers, friends, enemies and strangers alike. None of them looked like me,” Lee went on, his reading material at great aesthetic odds to the rustic charm of the decor around him; gilded, antique chairs littered the stage and doors with chipped paint flanked it, a wooden creaky bench perched on the old, creakier floorboards, and mismatched chandeliers dangled unevenly from the ceiling. The wall inches from where I’m sitting in the corner, painted with a mural of a raven perched on a leafless tree, gazing at a full moon. It was as if Edgar Allen Poe had moved into an abandoned LoveShackFancy store.

“Of course, as usual, my cum felt extra thick and warm in my hand. I made sure to squeeze every sticky drop before walking over to the shower and smearing my globby handful all over the nozzle and high up on the walls, anywhere that wouldn’t get easily washed off,” Lee went on. When he departed the stage, a mild grin on his face, a round of sincere applause broke out. A trio, two men and one of their girlfriends, pulled him aside and told him how much they enjoyed his piece.

Lee was a part of a group of seven male writers who had come together tonight to stage a “night of male readings,” according to the invitation shared on Instagram, which featured a tongue-in-cheek illustration of the late, ultimate male lit icon, David Foster Wallace. “Please come and celebrate (or castigate) the litbro, the high brodernist, the vanishing male writer,” the caption read, an evident ploy at branding the evening, as most events are now in New York, ironic. But when Nick Dove, a photographer and writer who hosted the reading, kicked off the event by asking a rhetorical question, one that numerous media outlets have played pedantic hockey with for over a year now, “Where have all the literary men gone?” Someone in the audience responded in earnest: “In this room!”

The conversation around the disappearance of literary men— re-emerging every few years and debated in the New York Times, Vox, the Atlantic, and many, many Substacks—is about two things: the relative dearth of famous straight, emerging male writers and the supposed decline of male readers of literature. Both problems are articulated in a New York Times opinion piece from last December entitled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” In it, David J. Morris, a creative writing professor and former Marine infantry officer, writes: “Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women.” He cites the Times’s fiction best-seller list, around 75 percent female authors, and a statistic about how women readers make up a whopping 80 percent of fiction sales—a figure recently debunked by yet another Vox piece—to make an argument that boils down to this: less male writers equals less male readers equals less empathetic men equals a worse world for us all to live in. Published soon after Trump’s re-election, the piece is a sort of cri de coeur about the radicalization of isolated, confused American men, who may be more influenced by right-wing podcast bros than by the written word. Each generation has its Hemingway, Kerouac or Foster Wallace, the argument goes. Who can claim that mantle today? Who is the straight man of letters in 2026 who could ostensibly guide his peers to better (or at least, more erudite) masculine pastures?

Morris’s piece was the battle cry that launched what feels like a thousand ships. In the months that followed, thinkpieces on the search for the literary man, specifically the straight, white literary man, ping-ponged across the internet. The Times continued to publish, like a snake eating its own tail, several articles chronicling the search for male readers. Letters to the editor came flooding in, English teachers in the ”books” subreddit commiserated around a growing faction of male students who don’t read and think it’s “gay” to do so. On the flip side, Substackers clamored to criticize Morris’s argument, and British GQ decried the discourse, highlighting contemporary male novelists who are very much so writing. Esquire published affiliate link listicles to entice their audience into purchasing male-written novels (there are two books on the list) and Jeremy Gordon, an editor at the Atlantic, lauded himself and men like him, men who don’t read for “empathy,” but rather for the love of the game: the “thrill” of the prose, and the chance at escaping their day-to-day.

Last April, the online discourse metastasized into the real world. The writer Jude Cook launched Conduit Books, a male-centered publishing press, calling its establishment a “timely corrective” to the “excitement and energy” currently prevalent around female authors, a phenomenon he believes happened as a result of the “toxic male-dominated literary scene of the 80s, 90s and noughties.”

Now, in line with Cook’s vision, Dove also hopes these events can remedy that man-sized gap. “The basis of this is that it’s ironic to put on a platform for men to read their work, but I wanted to construct something as an outlet to showcase that there is room for an expansive male literary fiction,” Dove told me in a back room of the bar, where a small group huddled over the table vacated the couch for us. He hopes this inaugural reading will be the first of a regular series centered on male writers. “I’m not really someone who gives that much of a shit about the discourse. I just want to write and listen to my friends read, whether it be men or women.”

Write and read Dove’s friends did indeed. Throughout the course of the evening, often conjured under the guise of satire, one writer after another took the stage and read work devoted to self-exploration. Alongside Lee, Sam Venis read an essay detailing his circumcision and his “mean” grandmother, who stripped naked in front of him when he was 8-years-old. Ross Barkan, perhaps one of the accidental founding fathers of this discourse, took the stage and relished in the “aesthetic” of all the male writers reading from paper rather than their phones and proceeded to read a 16-minute long excerpt, essentially filibustering the event, from his forthcoming novel about a pastor and his mistress.

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I don’t care if you’ve heard it all before. Because every time I land in Kansas City (there are cows grazing literally just beyond the landing strip!!!), every time I see the sunset on a spring evening, every time my dad puts his glasses on, the ones that make his eyes look five times bigger than they are, I cry. And although I cry often (1-3 times per week, minimum), it’s always a sign of something within that needs expulsion, either through screaming, speaking or writing. Choosing the latter is my version of pacifism.

Home feels both same as when I left eight years ago (the Zac Efron poster hanging over my bed is proof enough), and also so distant, somewhere between a relic and hallucination. Past versions of me are in the high school gym and the skate park behind the pool and the tragically-yassified Panera down the street, but who I am now has never existed anywhere in this city, has never made a life on her own here, no longer knows it beyond isolated spurts.

And the people I’ve left behind have all marched on bravely toward their own futures, arriving at a present day that I am not, and cannot be, part of. They’re living lives that feel so familiar yet entirely foreign to my own. I watched my friend’s baby roll over, giggle, frown, crawl, put my car keys in his mouth, and take in the general splendor of a sunny day in a world entirely new and evolving before him. I watched, at approximately 12:55 p.m., as his mom gently wrangled his flailing limbs into footie pajamas so that at exactly 1 p.m., we could carry him to his crib, zip him up in some blanket/sack hybrid, pop a pacifier in his mouth, and watch him drift off to sleep swiftly on the baby cam downstairs. I watched it all and suddenly felt a timer ticking somewhere in my gut.

My college friends are 20-weeks pregnant, are having C-sections and naming their children after their grandparents, are thinking about second children, are playing Mahjong with their mom groups on Mondays and passing secrets of the trade along to one another, secrets about epidurals and sleep schedules and breast feeding and pacifiers, secrets I tuck in my notes app and screenshot for and if that time ever comes for me. All these girls (women) meant the world to me. We’d whip our cars in circles around this fountain just over the Missouri border, listening to “We Are Young” (by fun. (rip) featuring Janelle Monae (lol)) or stick our heads out the sun roof veering down Tennessee Street, and in those moments I’d tell myself I’d remember every single detail, only to find all these years later that I can only revisit the memory through blurry, shattered fragments, if at all. There are tiny versions of these people now dawdling around in Phoenix and Kansas City and Boston, babbling extensions of people I love that I’ve never seen, never met, never held.

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There’s an aching somewhere in my chest, a knowing, while I text my friends in New York about egg freezing and which DJ is headlining the Valentino party this week and whether JFK Jr. was a himbo or visionary (the answer is both). I wonder what I’d look like, feel like, carrying a baby on my hip from room to room, babbling at the Kansas sky with them from a blanket in a grassy backyard. At the moment, I hop freely between this fantasy and my reality without abandon or worry; two parallel timelines that don’t yet need to converge. But I know this window of time, one where I can have my cake and eat it too, is closing.

Modern dogma states women need not choose between a life, a career, a family, a home. Women can do it all, have it all, sacrifice nothing but themselves in the pursuit of it all. But my mother always told me people make choices with their money, with their love, with their lives, especially when they think that they’re not.

What I…

… saw

Every midwestern sunset is a perfect one. Some of you are going to try to argue with me, but I have, in my almost decade of living here, only seen a handful of New York sunsets that can compete with what the Kansas sky factory is producing on a night-by-night basis. Some evenings, I would just stand outside and watch the sun dip below the horizon and make some wonky face while on the verge of tears (gotta hit my weekly cry quota) while questioning every decision I’ve ever made.

… heard

This song = I’m 12 and in the backseat of my friend’s family minivan, windows down, the summer heat swirling on my cheeks. We’re going to the mall to buy 5 for $25 thongs (we’ve just started wearing leggings as pants) from Pink and a tank top from Abercrombie, where we’ll shop next to teen girls we think are so cool with their deep side parts and braces who are rifling through the sale section, trying shirts on in the middle of the floor. We can’t wait to be 16. We’ll wash the embarrassment of our youth down with a strawberry banana smoothie from that stand outside the Lush store and meet your mom near the Nordstrom Rack at 4 p.m. like she asked. We’ll trade Lipsmackers flavors (vanilla for watermelon) as she drives us home before dinner. We don’t know who we’re going to be in five years nor do we care.

BONUS:

… tasted

While celebrating Eid with my family this past weekend, I developed a genuine, deep sadness for people who don’t have an Arab friend/lover/family member making sure they’re eating right. Imagine not knowing the feeling of biting into a lemony stuffed grape leaf or dipping freshly cooked pita bread into salty labne. That saggy old man is bombing our homelands for what? Because he and his equally-saggy homie are jealous we got real ass shawarma? Perhaps the answer to world peace lies within white people simply learning about the power of cooking with herbs and spices, thus negating their desire to invade countries where this is innate knowledge. Y’know, seasoning!!!!!

BONUS:

The moment I landed back in New York, my body sent me signals that it was in deep need of a bodega sandwich. Look at the fucking tuna on this guy. (If you’re a pescatarian like me, lmk if you want the most delicious, vinegary order)

… smelled

If none of this newsletter has made sense it’s because someone coughed on me and I’m now dealing with the consequences (Nyquill-flavored brainfog). Through the congestion gripping my midface, I brewed a pot of water with cinnamon sticks and orange rinds to stick my head over this morning. From what few notes are making it through the mucus overpowering my sinuses, I think it smells quite lovely.

… touched

My precious, wonderful, perfect, old boy. I realized how close to his chompers I was while petting him and how the possibility of him biting my face, too, hadn’t even crossed my mind. This is more so a testament to his sweet temperament and not my resilience, considering I started crying after a Corgi freaked out and snarled at another dog behind me at a wine bar.

I’m here because I hope to be made into something beautiful — a creature with poreless, iridescent skin, with a face that catches light and shadows only where it’s supposed to, with little to no proof of an imperfect, perhaps careless, past. I want to forget that a dog bit me and that I stopped skiing because a pole went through my philtrum and that, at 25, something happened in my body that made my face erupt in anger. I want to be clean; to look clean.

Someone I love died two weeks ago and my friends’ families are forcibly evacuating their homes in Beirut and I’m here in midtown eyeing myself in the mirror, inspecting the scar on my nose and calculating how many more sessions of laser it might take to make it invisible. I’m thinking about what I might like to do to my face now that I’ve ripped the bandaid off on cosmetic treatments, how many more needles I could stomach — beneath my eyes, in my chin, on my forehead. Is it crass to be so vain?

I have one foot in the American Dream, of building yourself entirely new on the premise that nothing could matter more than how you’re seen, and the other in an unending pit of reality. Somewhere between the two rests a vat of shame. Timothée Chalamet made himself a mockery in sunglasses and Timbs at the Oscars and Clavicular says maybe we should smash our faces with hammers and Kylie Jenner is spilling the deets on her boob job because we want to believe we are a society devoid of real pain and real suffering, are operating under that false pretense. Our heroes do not endure any agony, have no noble cause beyond their own triumphs, and must therefore voluntarily microdose discomfort for crumbs of the human experience. We are a country bolstered by shiny, hollow idols with myopic, fucked up ideals. And here I am, salivating over what they have, crying for it, frying my face for it.

In moments of stress, I try to take myself elsewhere. I close my eyes and always envision the same thing: a home on a grassy hill, a willow tree out front and the knowledge that the ocean is just out of sight. A place that feels like peace incarnate. Today, accompanied by the smell of burning flesh, I only see flashes of light.

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What I …

… saw

The New York skyline while biking over the Williamsburg Bridge on the first 70-ish degree day in the city. The Wuthering Heights (haven’t seen it) soundtrack blasting in my wired headphones, front to back, no skips. Since I’ve moved to New York and abandoned my car, since I’ve traumatized my spine and thus given up running, I’ve missed moving fast. There is nothing like the feeling of moving fast.

BONUS: When I was in London for fashion week, I stopped this girl in the street outside of the Lucila Safdie presentation to get the deets on this fish bag. I told myself “cool, I’ll remember that,” and proceeded to both not remember it nor write it down. An open-ended mystery for us all to endure.

… heard

Mitski, don’t make me cry in the cereal aisle of this bodega right now. Mitski, I fucking mean it. What do you mean, “I’d never live in a small town.. ‘Cause anyone you can get close to smells like your first time around” and “in a big city, you can start over / And everywhere you go makes your heart ache?” ????????? Mistki, you’re hurting me.

… tasted

The evening our television broke, I relished in our last few (unknowing) moments together by making myself a snack spread with some crunchy cornichons, and pulling the coffee table up riiiiiight next to the couch so I could sit cross-legged and watch my favorite beauty YouTuber’s new tutorial.

And if you must know, our TV is still broken and, in place of the high from binging Downton Abbey, have developed an addiction to Scrabble. This is something, I’m not shy to admit, I love saying at parties due to the fact it makes me feel/seem both insufferable and Offline. Look at me! Putting little letter tiles on a board! My phone? A screen? God, I can’t even remember the last time I cast my gaze upon those trivial things….

BONUS: Dessert this week went especially hard. I went to Citarella after my boots-on-the-ground reporting excursion at C.O. Bigelow and acquired this delicious, citrusy lemon raspberry tart for no special occasion beyond it being Tuesday. On Friday, I split a scoop of coffee ice cream and a flourless chocolate lava cake with my girls at Cafe Kestrel.

… smelled

I’m going to my parents house for Eid, and all I can think about is the scent of rice cooking and wafting up to my childhood bedroom. The smell used to embarrass me in high school (why couldn’t my parents make sloppy joes for dinner like the other kids!?!?!?), and now all I want to do is bottle it up in a vial and sniff it each time I get homesick. A little halal popper for diaspora kids.

… touched

After getting my aforementioned laser treatment (I really do love the results, sorry), my doctor gave me a juicy Skinceuticals mask to use that night. It was so un-slimy, like most of the other sheet masks are, and felt so delicious on my skin that I decided I just had to purchase a few for myself. I could tell this was top-level shit, but how bad could it be? 20, 30 bucks a pop? Okay well what if I told you one singular mask was $120. Then what? I left that thing on for 10 minutes longer than I was supposed to just to get my doctor’s money’s worth.

Each day, I’m met with two realities, one in which the world is invariably ending and another where the greatest horror facing humanity is an epidemic of dry skin that only the Medicube Collagen Jelly can fix. Perhaps both are true. All I know is that I have to move through them each just the same. As such, and to falsify some feeling of momentum, I’m trying new things: ballet classes on Sundays, going to sleep around 2 a.m., taking the subway when I don’t feel like it, bricking my phone, cooking. None of these things mean much, in fact a few of them are adding unnecessary strife to an already strenuous time, but they remind me I’m alive I guess. That I do have the power of free will, even if I’m actively using it to make my life mildly more abrasive, and that there are discoveries to be made in the everyday.

To be frank, I don’t really trust you if you’re not feeling existential despair at this point in time, at this point in winter, particularly if you live in New York. If you’re not shoving your emotions deep into the crevasse of an empty soul or on a far stronger medicinal cocktail than I, every day should feel like army-crawling, naked, over shards of broken Budweiser bottles.

I can’t definitively tell you when this will all end, but what I do know is that spring’s arrival is imminent and that something is going to give. Eventually, whether within you or out in the world, the drama and the strife and the pessimism will subside and this winter, this year, will feel like something that happened a long time ago; something that happened to someone else.

—

Inspired by , if you reply to this email with a receipt of a donation over $10 to one of the orgs suggested by Stand With Minnesota, I’ll comp you a six month paid subscription.

—

What I…

… saw

Living with other women is the closest a girl can get to nirvana. Everyone and everything blends into one another. You are both irate and blissed out at any given moment. Your home is a citadel teeming with simultaneously angelic and demonic vibes. New words are invented that give way to new language, secret tongues and secret speech litter every bedroom, living room and bathroom. The television is sacred and the stand on which it sits a shrine. Everything has meaning.

For weeks now, I’ve been combing through the BBC Archive on YouTube, and though nearly every single video tickles my fancy, none so much as a mini-doc from 1965 on four women living in a “flat” together. All in their twenties and making their way in the world (the voiceover mocks them for being unmarried), there’s a tenderness and sense of benevolent mischief that a stuffy, British production still managed to capture. By the end, I was indeed crying.

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… heard

Like a cat returning from a nighttime romp with a tiny and alive mouse in its mouth, I present to you a medley of noisy treats today of starkly disparate yet aesthetically congruous taste.

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All I wanted was to have a little dorsal bump on my nose and nostrils that look like my grandfather’s and a smooth, unaltered patch of skin overlaid on top of it all once more. All I wanted was to look how I did an hour ago, just before this dog bit my face. Maybe “bit” was too strong a word — he nipped at my face and sliced parts of it open, but didn’t latch on. My friends, ever supportive, sent me TikToks in the following days of girls who had their lips and noses chomped off and eaten by dogs. I, on the other hand, still had all my facial orifices. My nose, my eyes, my mouth; all still intact. That was lucky. Everyone was already telling me as much.

There are some FAQs that come along with experiencing something that I’ve come to learn is kind of rare. Allow me to get ahead of them in these next few lines: Yes, I’ve known the dog since he was a puppy. Yes, I was petting him at the time of The Incident. No, I did not see it coming, and all I remember was the white of his teeth. Yes, I am up-to-date on my tetanus shot. No, I did not cry right after it happened, but in the car on the way to the ER I bawled and reverted to infantile status, asking for my mother, who was 3 hours away, over and over and over again. No, the first ER doctor I saw did not irrigate the wounds and he certainly should have. Yes, I went to a different ER the next day. Yes, they put me on an antibiotic the size of a golfball. Yes, I needed stitches but the doctors used Steri-Strips instead to minimize scarring and prevent infection. Yes, I attended two weddings in the days after with my face bandaged up. Yes, I’ve developed a mild phobia of big dogs but also, yes, I did drive to my parents’ house to pet our beautiful, sweet husky for exposure therapy. Yes, I feel as though I’m making this a bigger deal than it needs to be and also not quite big enough.

Doctors assured me that this wasn’t anything a trip to a plastic surgeon’s office couldn’t fix, and if we were lucky, just a few sessions of laser would allow me to revert back to the face I had once disparaged. This, they told me, would leave a mark though. No use in lying. Human bodies, unlike our brains, aren’t concerned with aesthetics and utilize the quickest healing processes possible, often at the cost of cosmetics. There are animals out there, though, who heal beautifully, who don’t scar, like salamanders or starfish, the latter of which can completely regenerate lost appendages. I wonder if they know what a stroke of luck that is, that if they, in their own animalistic ways, aren’t honoring the ancestors who evolved to follow such giving genetic pathways, they should.

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Maybe if humans had never given into the temptation of our own reflection, if Narcissus had never met a body of water, we wouldn’t have all of this egotistical bullshit going on — these tech bros who are in an arms race to destroy themselves and the earth, weird influencers who think they’re immune to the inanity that comes with existing, all of us writing our blogs as though our lives are at the center of this universe and the next. (Maybe that last one is different from the rest, important even. Written histories; the connective tissue of the human experience and whatnot). Nevertheless, each morning, nearly every single one of us is confronted with our own reflection. Just you and some bozo locking eyes in a piece of glass, contending with your shared existence. It’s what makes it so jarring when something drastic happens to your face. What you know to be real, what you know to be indicative of who you are, is suddenly disrupted and at risk of permanent alteration. There is no gradual learning curve. There is only the immediate now.

I avoided looking at myself in the first few days after the bite. It wasn’t necessarily frightening to see my face, just more so a reminder that I was entering something unknown — that I hadn’t been in control of my future that night, nor was I now. That my trust in something had faltered. In truth, I avoided myself altogether. I couldn’t write anything of substance for weeks, nor did I want to. Each time I sat and told myself “type,” I just stared out the window instead or scribbled, sometimes angrily, in a notebook. There must have been some noble or at least beautifully-tortured reason why real words were evading me — why I couldn’t get myself here, in front of a computer, moving my fingers and letting my brain sprint forward aimlessly. The distance between myself and my voice must mean something, must be special. But I knew under all that posturing and bullshit was the simple fatigue that saddles alongside fear, the kind that forces you into submission, into floating.

I’m healing fine; the swelling has gone down, the wounds are closing and I’ve walked past the dog park several times without flinching. I am reminded daily, on this stupid brick of a phone, of the people out there who have it much worse. As for the covenant I entered with God, I’ve kept my end of the bargain. I’ve only uttered neutralities, and at times praise, about my face. The complaints I once hurled carelessly about my nose have ceased, and what I see in the mirror now is someone trying quite hard to care for themselves, whether they know it or not.

no links this time, love u

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“I realized that it was not just his thing but our thing,” Rama Duwaji told me earlier this month. “I wasn’t necessarily offended, but it was more the perception of being seen as someone’s wife. I was spiraling about how, that night, the first article to come out was like, ‘Who Is Zohran Mamdani’s Wife?’ Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was so upset because that one article showed up when you searched my name and not an interview I did on my art, or my work, or the things that I’ve done and the achievements that I’ve had as an artist. And now there’s, like, a bajillion of them.” We were sitting together in the back room at Huda and, when she spoke, her voice came through soft yet clear. She told me she wanted people to still see her as Rama.

When I started working on this profile, that thought kept percolating in my head on replay, over and over, a loose quarter bouncing about in a dryer. This artist, who captures the essence of the Arab experience so poignantly, had been reduced to spousal support during her husband’s bid for mayor by the tabloids. But she was, and still is, determined to maintain her individuality — to maintain her practice, her friends, her sense of self. I’m going to say this, write this out, and then leave it alone:

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I whispered a request for a “little softer” pressure, giggling when I said it because I felt bad about the possibility my masseuse might, in turn, feel bad about the pain she was causing me. She obliged for about 5 minutes, then seeming to forget that my bones were crackling beneath her fists, she returned, with an elbow deep into my shoulder blade, to kneading me into a flat, fleshy dough with the force of 32 she-hulks. By the end of the session, I had my arms and legs crossed as she hovered over me on all-fours on the table, somehow yanking each set of appendages in opposite directions, my back ringing out involuntarily like a used water bottle. Now spineless both metaphorically and likely literally, I thanked her and tipped handsomely when I left.

I walked home (standing up straighter, but at what cost) thinking about whose advice I should follow and to what end (if you’re the friend that recommended this place, I shan’t blame you and actually will try it one more time under different hands). For much of my adult life I’ve oscillated between thinking I knew exactly what needed to be done and wishing, hoping, praying that someone would tell me what to do instead. This frustrated me to no end. I always wanted to be the kind of person who ran ahead swiftly, confidently, never turning to look over their shoulder to make sure everyone else was doing the same. But, as I enter a new decade, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m someone who is both stubbornly committed to and confident in whatever it is I decide to be committed to and confident in, just as much as I am someone who looks to the people I admire, people who I love or respect or who have done things I want to do, to at least illuminate the way for me, even just a smidge.

In celebration of my newfound self-acceptance, and on the eve of entering a new decade, I asked 10 people I admire, all for various reasons, what advice they’d give to someone about to turn 30. Here’s what they said.

:

• Whenever you catch yourself wondering what a friend thinks about you, abort mission. I spent way too much time in my 20s trying to figure out what friends (people I spend time with, people I’m in group texts with, new friends, work friends, longtime friends) thought of me, and trying to make sure it was the right version of myself. It’s a waste of time. When I stopped doing that, some of those friendships changed, but I got a lot of time back.

• Hangovers get harder every year you get older.

• Get into a habit of calling friends or emailing them and intentionally catching up. Life moves at different speeds for different women in their 30s and losing touch hurts a lot, sometimes it’s hard to get back on track after falling out of communication.

• You don’t need to post/tell everything about your life to everyone.

Lauren Daccache:

• Time is a construct and so is age and you can be whatever you want to be whenever you want to be it ❤️

• If you are like me and get overwhelmed by how fast everything happens, you can slow time down by immersing yourself in something new. Novelty causes your brain to process more information/the brain has to pay closer attention to unfamiliar situations, so when you want to slow down the passing of time… just break from your routine and do/see something new

:

I think a lot about the Sarah Polley book “Run Towards The Danger,” and I think that’s kind of what your thirties are about. Also, building new structures for yourself and structures of womanhood and dismantling a lot of what your twenties did for you. Being in your twenties is so much about getting through that decade and surviving it and your thirties is about looking at yourself and being like “okay what’s not working here?” My advice is just push it, push it even further.

As women, people have an idea that in your thirties, this timeline starts ticking, and I’m really not interested in that. I think that it’s about creating a timeline for yourself. New things are just waiting to be uncovered. Those first few years [of my thirties] it was so much about trying things on and seeing how they fit —reckoning with things like domesticity and relationships. Your twenties are so much about figuring out who you are, then your thirties are about how do I make life work for me?

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:

I think the most important thing to do upon turning 30 is exhale. You did it. You are just barely dipping your toe into the good part now. It has just begun. The 20s are behind you and thank god for that, because just wait, it is about to get so much better (no like really, suddenly you’re fumbling less and loving yourself more and heaven knows you deserve it). By now you’ve learned and grown for three whole decades, and thanks to that (sometimes trying, less than pleasant) time, you can practice trusting yourself, hugging yourself, thanking yourself, nourishing yourself, and being proud of yourself. Take a moment to look back on the shit you’ve navigated thus far and think—honestly and from the depths of yourself—damn, I really fuck with her, I really fuck with that girl. And go forth into your new decade with the very specific swag that comes with that.

:

Go on walks with your headphones in where you listen to nothing at all. When I turned 25, in an effort to ‘make something of myself’ I decided I needed to optimize every single moment of my every day. Perfection couldn’t escape me if I always had a plan, if I was always learning and listening and reading and thinking. I put a book in every bag, filled the silence of every walk and moment at home with either music or a podcast or an inspirational interview with someone who I wish I was. And it’s only recently that I realized what I really needed all along was some silence. Not all the time! Just sometimes. So now, a couple times a week, I go on walks with my headphones in and listen to nothing. I think it opens you up to more awe in the everyday when you’re just walking around without this need to perform for yourself. It’s made me realize a lot of the time I have the answers I’m looking for, I just need to give myself the space to find them without all the background noise.

Also! Accept that the best is yet to come and if the best had already happened, the rest of the journey wouldn’t be nearly as good. I’ve wasted so much precious time worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet. And...I still do. All the time! But I’ve been trying to shift my mindset from one of disappointment to one of excitement. Like, there are so many of my best days ahead and I have no idea what they will be. That’s so fun! And that’s so much better than wasting time thinking about what could have been…because time and time again I’ve learned something is always waiting for me. And I’ll get there if I run or walk, but it’ll probably take longer if I cry and wallow every step of the way. (I still like to cry though, because I am a Pisces).

Stella Bugbee:

Don’t let other people set your limits. It’s never too late to become the person you want to be. Keep pushing hard for the life you want.

Also: Start an IRA immediately if you haven’t already. And contribute as much as you can every month. That shit is real! DO NOT WAIT.

Peyton Dix:

• You’re free.

• Stretch… Now.

• Do your morning pages!!!!

• Take a pre/probiotic and trust your gut.

• No one thinks about you more than you. Everything is embarrassing (no Sky) therefore nothing is embarrassing.

• You’re allowed to change!!!!! You’re supposed to!!!!!

• Get into your body and get out of your head.

• The only lame thing you can do is not try.

• Romanticize your friendships as much as you do your romantic relationships.

Chantal Fernandez:

I think in your 30s, it’s easy to feel stuck. You feel too young to upset the apple cart of your life, but you’re also like, is this the apple cart I really want? I’ve felt that at different points and it can be discouraging. But often, those limitations are all in your head! Forget about where you should be and try to not waste time stuck where you no longer belong.

Jess Testa:

It is true that the older you get, the closer you get to your truest self. This can be quite frightening if you don’t actually know yourself. If your 20s were like mine — a period of surviving various catastrophes, swinging around chaos, dodging mistakes and ruin like Frogger on that highway — let your 30s be about building the life you really want. Deliberately, thoughtfully, intentionally. You’re driving the semi-truck now. Let’s go somewhere.

My Mom:

Be your beautiful, smart you! Enjoy every minute of it! Don’t let anyone, anything, take away your happiness. Be determined to achieve any goal you put your mind to.

Trust yourself. You will be somewhere soon.

When I spoke to a class at Parsons a month or two ago, one of the students, a literal freshman who was likely at prom less than one calendar year ago, asked how old I was. She couldn’t believe I was 29, I “didn’t look old enough.” I think I said the exact same thing to a 32-year-old when I was 22, so no shade, but let’s all agree that’s backhanded!!!!!! Like thank you I guess!!! But I’m not old!!!!!

I turned 20 on a Thursday night, a big night to go out in college (I went to a state school). I remember sitting on the floor of the room I shared with two other girls in my skimpy going out outfit and, first and foremost, feeling hot, and, second and secondmost (?) journaling journaling journaling. Heartbreak had clouded the past few weeks and I was so ready to turn a new leaf, to become someone who was okay, someone who was mature, someone who was an adult, someone who was in charge and thus couldn’t be hurt out of their own volition. Obviously, I didn’t know anything then, likely still don’t know anything now. There’s just so much I still want to be and still want to do, and I’ll do it all, but I just hope everyone else will let me. Like, should I have written a book by now? Sold a show to HBO? Come into a modest yet life-changing fortune? Become internet famous for nearly nothing and coast through the rest of my life? Thirty is still young but 29 is younger, and youth is a hard habit to kick, mostly because backs don’t really start aching until around 22 and it only gets worse from there. I figured that, by the time I turned 30, everything in my life would have been miraculously fixed: money? Plenty of it. Debt? None. Skin? Clear and sparkling. Hair? Frizzless. Career? Absolutely flawless. Body? Tea. Mortgage? Have one. Paid off my parents’ too.

All of this is kind of just drivel because I know I’m going to love my thirties. Plus, it’s so cliche to write about getting older when you’re still young. so maybe as consolation (or further punishment), here are some thoughts I had during my 29th year:

• Holy shit, this is going to kill me.

• Holy shit, I’m going to kill him.

• I love my cats.

• I love my home.

• I can’t wait to get home.

• I should probably go outside.

• Do they feel sorry for me?

• Do they hate me?

• I don’t want to be on my phone anymore.

• Should I get a flip phone?

• I’m going to try the Artist’s Way.

• God, I can’t stand the Artist’s Way.

• I’m going to try the Artist’s Way again.

• Should I move to Copenhagen?

• Should I move to Paris?

• Should I move to LA?

• Should I move home?

• I love New York.

• I hate New York.

• How am I going to afford that?

• I should sell my clothes.

• I love my clothes.

• I can’t believe I missed out on the 90s/2000s magazine era.

• I should watch the Nora Ephron documentary again.

• I wish my friends lived in my neighborhood.

• I wish I had a car.

• I wish my dog could live forever.

• Why do my parents look older?

• I miss Cape Cod.

• I’m so lucky.

• Should I get back surgery?

• I hate walking.

• I like sitting in the park.

• Maybe I should’ve tried harder.

• I’m burnt out.

• Do they know that was mean?

• Am I crazy?

• I love my friends.

• I love him.

• I hope my parents are proud.

• I know how to start over. I can always start over.

P.S. I have a birthday treat for us all planned tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who I’m meant to be and if I was supposed to be her by now. For a smidge of time there, I thought I was, felt like I was. It’s making me sick that I can’t consider much beyond myself. The entire world is happening inside of my head, and I’m moving through it all like Jello. Nothing really sticks like it’s supposed to right now, just kind of mushes into me, jiggles my psyche, then bounces off. As such, I’m not in much of a writing mood. I have to hear myself to be able to write and I’m not hearing much in that noggin beyond static. I’m in more of a scroll-scroll-scroll mood, but the beast of the internet doesn’t quite take excuses, doesn’t quite understand what it means to be tired, to live through a winter. Algorithms can’t feel (yet) and therefore can’t stop, have no reason to stop. I’m agnostic (sometimes Muslim, depending on how I’m feeling), but I don’t think God created us in his image — I think we were created to build robots in his image, mere messengers of his whim. How could we grow weary, grow sad, grow angry, grow anxious, grow envious if we were truly cast from a perfect mold? Perfection has no room to grow.

I stuffed myself sick last night with seven other girls under candlelight. Somewhere between the brussels sprouts and the potatoes and the apple pie, we asked ourselves who got to be offline — which artists and creatives and writers didn’t need to scroll-scroll-scroll and post-post-post to have something to say, to have content to construct, to keep from sounding like they inhabited some other universe than our own. Sometimes you can hear it in a writers’ voice, see it in their words, when they’ve ascended into some distant echelon and they’re not interacting with people who need to make rent nor people who scroll to self-soothe. It’s kind of like engaging with one of those bros who does ayahuasca once and finally, at age 26, unlocks the concept of empathy and starts acting like a thought leader, posting epiphanies that you had around age 14 to his Instagram stories. I wish I could be them. I wish I could throw my phone into the bathtub and lie down under a tree and stare at the sky through its leaves.

Will someone who’s been writing longer than me, and I’m talking by a decade or two, let me know if it’s always felt like this? Like some hamster wheel or rat race or some other rodent-oriented idiom? This constant churn churn churn? For about 3 seconds here on Substack it felt like a pause, like we could just write whatever whenever and it was fine and no one would be disappointed, but all of these nebulous leaderboards and, honestly, Notes, has changed that. I know, I don’t have to be here! This is just my blog!!! I don’t need to use this app and email everyone ramblings on a bi-weekly (typically) basis. As of now, I still want to. It’s where I get to play and experiment and poke fun, usually at myself. But, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think the wheels are going to fall off, and fall off they will soon.

What I…

… heard

My boyfriend sent me this song from somewhere over the Atlantic ocean — I don’t know if it made him think of me or if he just wanted me to hear it. I didn’t ask when he got home. I wonder if other people think about me the way I think about them, think of me as often as I think about them. I wish I lived in a village of about 100 people — two of the villagers would annoy me incessantly, becoming my sworn enemies whom I enact elaborate pranks and petite plots of revenge upon. Roughly eleven of these villagers would become my best friends, my chosen family in tandem with my actual family, and I’d be able to hold them all in my hand and never let them out of my sight where I might forget to call them or text them or fly home and visit them.

… saw

Clodagh McKenna!!!!!! You all know I’m a simp for my YouTube algorithm (my old roommates will often text me to tell me how much they miss it) and this week she bestowed yet another gift upon me. If you’re not familiar, Clodagh is kind of like a down-to-earth, kinder, Irish version of Martha Stewart imbued with more whimsy than she knows what to do with. I need her to guide me through life, through the ins and outs of hosting, of cooking, of baking a perfect cheesecake and planting a garden and having your favorite beer on tap in a shed you’ve converted into a bar. Clodagh, if you’re reading this, I’m begging you to start posting weekly videos. I will watch every single one. Nay, I need every single one.

… smelled

My boyfriend got a bottle of Chanel’s new L’Exclusif cologne (remember when I was ragging on writers for being out of touch? lol). I like the smell enough on him — clean and sharp — but part of me also wants to take a spruce tree branch and mush it all over him instead. I like when men smell like they’ve been handling an ax in flannel all day.

… tasted

I made my seasonal apple pie last night for girlsgiving and, while it tasted good, I’ve made far better. I apologize to the women who ate it without knowing it wasn’t my best work. I rushed the process. I approached the pie with panic instead of tenderness. I will repent to the Pie Gods for my actions.

… touched

My high school friend held my hand last weekend at a wedding while I cried a little. She had joked that I should move back home to hang out with her more, and from somewhere within me this intense yearning manifested into tears. She just had a baby a few months ago, and I haven’t met him yet. That realization kind of killed me. He looks so much like her — he’s got her smile and her eyes and, from what I can see through pictures of him, a lot of her personality already. My brain works in this way where, maybe in order to protect myself from the distance of it all or because I could probably benefit from a few milligrams of Vyvanse, I forget things when they’re out of sight — I forget about pairs of jeans I have, I forget about books I own, and I forget that everyone I love forges on with or without me, making lives that, instead of being intertwined, only barely intersect with mine.

I’m in Dory mode right now. Specifically, that scene in Nemo when (spoiler!) that little blue tang fish decides to trust her tiny male friend (always a mistake!) and swim through an absolute minefield of jellyfish, getting knocked around and zipped and zapped and practically filleted until she’s fried unconscious.

That’s how I got here. That’s why I’m being held against my will at the moment, forced to watch the World Series. My boyfriend, the one who wants the World Series on and also the one who’s stirring a pot of hot chocolate on the stove for me because I asked, does not know this — that something about seeing men spit globs of seed and whatever else (they can’t chew tobacco anymore out there because of Woke) and wearing skinny scrubs is icking me out. That the only good thing baseball has ever afforded me is the chicken tender bucket at Yankee Stadium (I’m a pescatarian but break that rule at most sporting events for the tenders).

I have not said a thing to my boyfriend. My throat chakra has sealed up and the words won’t come out, partially out of apathy. Honestly, I don’t even really care that the game is on, after all I’m “writing” right now. I only care that it’s inhibiting my immediate access to my Cocomelon (Olivia Jade’s vlogs). I’m nothing but a ditzy fish, post-gelatinous battering, currently lying limp and lifeless in a set of tentacles still gently electrocuting me. I think many of you are right now, too. I don’t have the proof to back it up, I just know. You’re reading media people on this website, so I just know.

Nearly every facet of life has felt abrasive – including, but not limited to, the fact that I’m sweating profusely every time I take the subway even though it’s cold outside, sleep has been evading me, at around 6 p.m. every day I think it’s actually 9 p.m., and 13 other inconveniences I’m not supposed to tell you about — and that makes me feel ashamed because these are not real problems. These are Fake People problems, but my brain unfortunately can’t differentiate between a lethal threat and someone hurting my feelings. In fact, my record shows (we’ll get into this another time) that I perform better in the former than the latter. I’ll give that tiny clownfish credit where credit is due, he went back for his lala lady friend and, after putting her in grave danger in the first place, saved her. Won’t someone scoop me up by my broiled dorsal fin too? Swim me out to clear water, where the World Series can’t stream? Grip me tightly and guide me through the sting of it all? Maybe somewhere the light filters through? Or do I have to do it all by myself.

Wanna know what I…

… heard

*chanting* norah jones fall. Norah Jones Fall. NORAH JONES FALL. NORAH JONES FALL!!!!!!!!!!

On account of being 6 (I’m sooooooo young) when Jones’s debut album came out, I really only knew her discography to the extent of “Come Away With Me.” For the entirety of this month, I have been blasting her songs into my wired headphones, which I started using again because I thought I might look cool and then discovered the sound is SO much better through them, plus I don’t have to take care of them at all. I can do my favorite thing and just shove them deep into my bag and not really worry about them again until I have the urge to listen to a song. Anyway, Norah. Please listen to “Back to Manhattan” as you’re driving over the Williamsburg Bridge (or whatever bridge exists in your town) and pretend like you’re heartbroken. If you’re already heartbroken and living in New York, you have a leg up on the rest of us. Don’t rub it in. You’re in the perfect position to milk the melodrama out of your life, you lucky duck.

… saw

I participated in New York’s favorite October pastime: the local park’s dog parade. I captured most of it on my camcorder (footage to come) but for the meantime you’re welcome to the superfluous affirmations I paired the dogs with.

Also, watching a classically-trained artist do a makeup tutorial using underpainting and whatever else she learned in art school tickled my fancy. I have not used a single tactic because I’m a creature of habit with sensitive skin, but maybe someday… maybe someday..

Up next on the docket: whatever this is.

… smelled

I keep thinking of Kansas this time of year and how crisp the fall air is there and how every tree glows amber right about now. To be honest, I’m always thinking of Kansas; lovingly, begrudgingly, sorrowfully.

… tasted

Divas, it’s soup season, and I’m practically brewing up a pot every single night. I want to share my recipe with you, but I use Better Than Bouillon instead of, like, organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised, astrologically-aligned bone broth, and I want to keep the illusion (what illusion you ask? I’m not sure) alive.

… touched

I regret to inform you, I don’t think my hands have touched much beyond the keys of my keyboard. Despite the desperation I feel to get out and go upstate, every time Saturday or Sunday roll around, the most I can muster is getting myself to the park, or at most another borough. Car rentals are expensive anyway…

bonus cocomelon because I love you:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8D1Cn1W/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8DJ1FCc/

That abyss tried to swallow me whole this week. I had one of those subway experiences that makes you question both God and New York — a 10-minute delay on a hot and muggy platform, one that reeked of urine and general human suffering followed by a packed, DTB (dick to butt :() ride on the train in which someone attempted a pole dancing routine within our lurching, glorified sardine tin. How could a just and loving all-knowing being subject mere mortals to such disquieting sensations and general olfactory malaise?

I’ve been at odds with the city from the moment I arrived. My first week in New York, I ended up in the hospital overnight with a kidney infection (I’d gone to urgent care TWICE to say “hey guys, I think this is a kidney infection and not a regular ole’ UTI” and they said I was being dramatic and sent me home and then I almost got sepsis. Shout out!!!!!). By the time I arrived at the hospital, after hallucinating mildly in the back of an Uber alone, the world had begun to grow fuzzy and time was slipping away quickly. Everything blurred together. I was horizontal. I was moving. I was pushed. Sterile white lights glared at me as someone yanked my sweater to my shoulders and 10 or so hands began smacking little sticky pads and electrodes to my body, needles punctured my veins and a medical tech sitting in the corner of my hospital room, watching as I was stripped naked, watching as I grew pale and wavered in and out of consciousness, felt it an appropriate time and situation to ask for my number at some point in it all. Men rock! I was sent home from the hospital around 6 a.m. and, too fearful to call out sick on my second day of work as an assistant, arrived at The New York Times building for my shift about three hours later. I understood then that I was in for it — that my ass was about to be handed to me by the city at large.

Rest assured, it has been. I’ve been chewed up, chewed on, swallowed, digested, regurgitated, stepped on, slipped on, only to be re-ingested by a rat or pigeon or whatever. My spine has collapsed in on itself and I will never recover from making eye contact with actual human faces in the garbage can outside my apartment. But I’d be nothing without New York. I would still be a person, but I would be nobody. The world has unfurled in front of me here, revealed itself to me in ways I didn’t know existed. My life has become much bigger and much smaller than I could have ever imagined. I have morphed into something entirely new, at odds and distant with what I once was and somehow the same as I’ve ever been. At one of my first ever fashion shows (Coach, seated fourth row lol) I teared up as the lights dimmed. At that moment I figured I’d made it. There were no more mountains to summit, there were no more ladders to claw my way up through. This was the pinnacle. This was success. This was a dream. It took only a year for that illusion to shatter, for the city to help me recalibrate, for me to understand stuff like that does not fucking matter.

Rain is trickling against the windows. Three candles are flickering, one of which smells like something I once made in an EasyBake oven. The television has gone idle and Roku City’s scrolling purgatory is casting a purple glow across the room. The cats are engaged in a rare ritual and have curled up against one another and my hoodie is new, still soft against my skin and undisturbed by an abrasive wash cycle. This matters. The cavern did not engulf me, and this matters.

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I…

Heard

A few years ago I started bawling somewhere very much in public when this song shuffled onto my playlist. I’d never heard it before and was taken aback by how earnest and folksy it was/is. Khobs (“bread” in Arabic) was written in the ‘70s by Issam Hajali, a Lebanese folk singer and musician whose lyrics are inspired by Palestinian author Samih El Kasem. I love folk music. I love my native tongue. I love hearing them together. I wish I spoke better Arabic. I hear this song and I see it all. I see summer. I see the pool at my uncle’s house. I see my grandmother. I see my cousins. I feel every inch of distance.

Saw

Whatever this lamb is doing. So happy for Florence. Kind of wish I were Florence.

Also, this cat on this man’s shoulders.

Smelled

Listen to me carefully. This pumpkin-shaped candle is preemptively curing my seasonal-depression. I should’ve ordered 10 but only bought three like an idiot and have to ration them out from now through December 1.

Tasted

My palate has evolved into a particular one and I’ve begun requesting very thinly sliced cucumbers on my bagels. The resulting sensation is refreshing and ego-swelling: here I am, someone who could have simply had a breakfast of very little nutritional value have instead chosen to imbue it with a vegetable.

Touched

I got my hands on the Sandy Liang x Gap doe-print jacket and I regret to inform you all that it’s incredibly soft and cute. That said, I am definitely incredibly flammable in this coat (i.e. polyester city) and at that price point kind of wish it felt… less like that? As pointed out, there a multiple pathways, perhaps via Japanese eBay, that might bring you to a better end point.

I feel like the lights are about to snuff out which is to say I feel like a lemon that’s been squeezed over and over and over again which is to say I like I’m getting burnt out. My brain is rejecting the written word. When I sit at the computer to start or fix or finish a draft, go through notes from my editor, everything becomes quite foggy. I got nauseous just thinking about writing this. The problem, it seems, when you go into a line of work that you’d always considered a “dream,” one that felt far off and unsure and nearly impossible, is that you don’t quite know when to stop. I supposed it’s a scarcity mindset with prose or whatever. But I know I need to find a stopping point soon. This merry-go-round is dangerously close to crashing.

Do you wanna know what I fantasize about when my head gets muddled like this? My subconscious goes one of two places: the first, somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere that doesn’t exist. It’s a Tudor house with ivy growing up the front and lush green grass stretching out to the horizon and an English garden in the back. There’s a willow tree that sways, and even though I’m in the countryside, the ocean still coos closely by. No one in this town owns a computer, nor do they know they exist. Everyone uses house phones to call each other up to ask for sugar or to borrow a lawn mower or request your presence at a full moon ceremony alongside a coven of women.

The second place my mind wanders to is my grandmother’s kitchen in Syria. This room existed. It still does, but I haven’t seen it in 15 years. I’d stand in the doorway there and watch my Teta shuffle across the white tile, from the stove to the sink. I think the walls were blue and the smell of rice always stuck to them. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d wander in and somehow she was always there, like she knew I’d come looking for her. She’d warm up some ayran —a savory, yogurty drink— for me on the stove and we’d go sit in silence on the balcony. The marble out there was cold from the night but I loved the way it felt against my feet. We’d watch the sun rise over the mountains, bleeding pinks and purples into the sky. I wish I’d been old enough to understand where I was and what I had.

I…

Heard

Every few months, this rendition of this song assaults my algorithm. I feel obliged to watch it every time it pops up. I sit there and stare at that cat, snuggled up, and I listen to the violins and I wonder if that cat is still alive and I think of my own cats and everyone I’ve ever loved and I think of my mom and my dad and all of the things I want and I cry. And then it’s over and I’m sitting in silence and I feel so silly.

Saw

1. I love YouTube. I pay for the premium subscription every month, and it is beyond worth it. This week, I found a clip of this visually stunning short animated film called Callisto, la Petite Nymphe de Diane, originally released in 1943. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen anything so captivating.

2. When I got dinner in Chinatown on Saturday night, I bumped into this teen girl who had turned her bag charms into a shrine. Deeply inspiring

   

   

Smelled

This morning when I woke up, the house smelled of sausage and potato and I knew someone was making breakfast. It’d been so long since that had happened. It made me miss home.

Tasted

At an otherwise beautiful dinner, I had a very frightening piece of shrimp. I can’t remember the last time I spit something out (I’m deeply un-picky about food, which feels very un-chic) but this little chunk got dumped into my linen expeditiously. It was somehow tough and mealy at the same time? It tasted as if I’d licked the inside of a middle schooler’s gym locker. I went home and was fearful I’d wake up a few hours later gagging, but some patron saint of crustaceans or something must have taken pity on me and spared my life.

During that dinner, someone asked me “how does one get into writing?” and I kind of responded without thinking “have a lonely childhood.” That made me feel quite clever.

Touched

Did you know there’s a place downtown where the sole purpose is to play on claw machines? My boyfriend and I visited Anime Claw over the weekend and spent 30 dollars attempting to capture toys mostly worth, like, five dollars. I spent a chunk of that evening wriggling around joysticks and trying to remember the techniques my mom had taught me. Growing up, we went to this all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant almost every week that had a claw machine, and my mom, about eight times out of ten, secured a toy for us on the way out. Women are incredible.

We left Anime Claw with a measly pack of Lilo and Stitch trading cards and a Labubu keychain, which we only acquired because the store employee took pity on us and literally rigged the machine to help us out.

Hi, miss you. I’m trying something new out. It’s been about a year of my beloved MishMashy, and I’ve realized my big, beautiful ADHD rat brain neeeeeds structure in order to produce any sort of output. Otherwise everything becomes quite nebulous. I wish I could show you all how many half-finished essays/newsletters I have in my drive. Maybe some day I’ll push them all out, or perhaps we can all gather and wear black and have a funeral for them. We’ll celebrate their compulsion to exist, but mourn their inability to make that desire a reality.

Anyway, that’s what this new format is about. To find a method to tame the madness. My plan is to send something like this out weekly and intersperse longer essays, the stuff I usually do, when I have the brainspace/time. What I’m doing here is not novel. I’ve resisted Machine In the Garden-ing myself. But, god, I’ve got to take some of the pressure off.

I’ve been feeling more and more insane as summer nears its end. Typically, as the oppressive New York heat subsides and, here and there, I catch glimpses of the palliative fall, I tend to feel more grounded. I tend to feel more free and happier and more like myself — like the clutter in my brain has been cleared out, like I can think again. Not this year.

Most of my waking time is spent staring at my computer screen. In the morning, I open my eyes about 15 minutes before I’m slated to sign on for work. There is no bridge, no gradual incline, between sleeping and waking. Only one sharp jolt from the astral realm into a digital one — not a moment to spare for a layover in the real world. Sometimes I obsess over the routines of creatives that have come before me. When did they wake? When did they work? When did they play? Could they teach me how to be someone who makes?

I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I always do. Look at all I can juggle!!! I can do it all!!! I’ll do everything you ask of me and more!!! Is that enough to be adored??!! I always have something to prove to people who aren’t even watching, to people who can’t comprehend satiety. So which part of me is leftover for you? Which part of me should I hand over to you? Everything I say to you, everything I write to you, is so drama drama drama. You know I can try to be funny too.

I…

… saw

The tiny leaves that fall in our tiny backyard have started to gather in miniscule clumps. Spencer doesn’t want to acknowledge them — doesn’t want to accept the arrival of fall, the death of summer. Looking away doesn’t keep things from changing. I always know the season has officially begun to change when I start sneezing in that repetitive, constrictive way.

Part of me says good riddance, is relieved for the season to end. For much of my adult life, I’ve known summer to mean discomfort, to mean strain. It’s not what I knew as a child. I’ve only put a swimsuit on once this summer, which feels like an offense equal parts tragic and embarrassing to me. The ocean is literally right there. What kind of a person doesn’t go to the place they feel most called?

This past spring, I purchased a Sony camcorder from like 2005. I’ve been taking it everywhere with me and splicing the videos I take into silly little things. There’s something comforting about this camera: the fuzziness of the imagery, the clicking sound that comes through from the zoom function. It’s sole purpose is to watch, observe and capture. I’ve been posting whatever I feel like to YouTube every Sunday to an audience of none. How freeing. I took this little guy on my trip upstate, a trip I needed so desperately (there will be a forthcoming essay soon). For now, here’s a video of my time on the Beaverkill River. It’s set to Fairuz so…

… heard

Do you guys know about Frou Frou? You know, the electronic music duo composed of Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth? I didn’t. At least not until Spotify curated an early 2000s playlist for me and, I think while I was biking to work and letting my headphones hang around my neck (never on my ears because I’m scared) as a treat, I heard the most sublime sound trickling out of them. “Let Go” by the duo was blasting, a sound somehow so simultaneously modern and retro, and I was immediately transported. I’m not heaving my body and this heavy e-bike over the Williamsburg Bridge: I’m in a club, circa 2002. The lights are dim apart from the pink and purple strobe lights pulsating along to the beat. My hair is slicked back into spiky space buns and my chrome pants are low slung. Frosted eye shadow and crystalline lip gloss shimmer on my face as I bob my head, throwing my arms up in the air and snaking my hips. The iPhone hasn’t been invented yet and no one knows about “circling back.” I know algorithms are evil and homogenizing but sometimes they lead to glory. By the way, they are indeed on the Shrek 2 soundtrack, the true measure of taste.

… smelled

There’s a spot in the Seaport, right under the Brooklyn Bridge and along the East River, that has one of the most pungent, grotesque, gnarliest smells I’ve ever smelled. It’s indescribable. It’s so odiferous it almost has a taste. It utterly mars the magnificent view of the water and the bridge. Every time I go into the office, I pass this specific intersection and think “someone has got to put some oysters in that water.”

… tasted

The last few weeks of summer, even though I’ve been waxing on about how ready I am to get them over with, fill me with regret, remorse for all the warm-weather activities I never got around to and those I took for granted. Take, for example, eating ice cream. Walking through the park after work, nearly everyone is licking or scooping from a cone or cup. I’m no different, no better. The sheer number of frozen dairy treats I’ve had this week should have sent me into some catatonic state.

• On Saturday, after a night out and ramen at Marufuku in the East Village, we stopped at Van Leeuwen. I can’t remember what flavor I got, but it had chunks of something in it. I <3 chunks.

• On Monday night, after pizza, pasta and calzones with Lucali with , and Kat, we stopped at Farmacy in Carroll Gardens. Have you guys ever had an orange dreamsicle float? If not, you’ve never known true euphoria. I don’t care if you’ve experienced the miracle of birth, this dessert feels, at the very least, like a close second.

• On Tuesday night, a mini Oreo ice cream bar with Spencer. Something terrifying happened to this treat in transit and only a tiny nub of the stick poked out. Nevertheless I persisted.

• On Wednesday night, ice cream hiatus.

• On Thursday night, this fish-shaped, red bean ice cream thing.

I have nearly turned myself off from the stuff. Just the thought of soft serve is making me kind of queasy.

… touched

There’s a bruise on my arm from where the nurse stuck me with a needle — where she couldn’t find my vein and dug around for a moment until she punctured a vessel. I always watch as the needle goes in so I don’t flinch, so I don’t make it worse, so I’m prepared. I watch the blood trickle into the vials too. I want to know the moment it’s over.

I’ve been running my fingers over the bruise, feeling the lump that’s settled under my skin. My doctor told me some sad things, but I love her still. I’m good with doctors, and this one reminds me of my mom. When she’s listening to my heart with her stethoscope, I focus on steadying my breathing, stabilizing my pulse. I want my insides to sound like they’re supposed to. I want them to sound beautiful. I cry after every appointment.

NEVER FORGET: FREE PALESTINE. There’s currently a Palestinian-American teen stuck in IOF detention. Call your local rep and demand they work toward his freedom and an end to the genocide in Gaza. As always, you can donate to Healing Our Homeland, who is doing grassroots work in the strip.

The same can be said toward those sniveling some indifferent dribble; writers, artists, people I once admired, up in their bubble wrapped offices among their gilded books, penning their arguments over semantics and publishing lukewarm “both sides” takes that hinge on feelings rather than capturing reality, rather than putting the world into words. They toe the line of neutrality as some omniscient observer, one who is unaffected by the gargantuan loss unfolding before us. They are disconnected from the unifying thread of humanity, and instead perch above it, dutiful, cerebral overlords, casting down a vacant consensus from time to time full of analysis and hand-wringing and no heart.

In Zadie Smith’s infamous New Yorker essay, she ludicrously and earnestly argues that “language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction,” a notion so preposterous, detached and disgusting to me as Palestinians, even then in May of 2024, were facing genocide against real weapons of mass destruction. She argues, in between advocating for a ceasefire, that calling israel a “colonialist state,” a factually correct statement, carries the same weight as saying, “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” carries the same weight as the actual killing and murder and bloodshed enacted by the occupation in Gaza. In response to where she stands on freedom for Palestinians, Smith finishes ambivalently, feebly, by writing: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.” Smith’s argument that the emotions of one faction of people should be taken into account as equally, if not more than, a group suffering mass death is remarkably disgraceful, but she’s inadvertently correct in one aspect: words, and their absence alike, are consequential.

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In the past five years, there’s been ongoing discourse ad nauseum about “performative” activism, about the weight words like Smith’s carry. She seems to believe they’re irrelevant, meaningless muck despite using over 2000 of them to say so. I’m here to tell you they are in fact heavy, and they are in fact significant, especially in this country where consuming propaganda is only second to creating propaganda as our favorite pastime. Think of the domino effect one single person in the spotlight often makes. Take for example Ryan Trahan, that YouTuber whose content is so saccharine it toes the line between wholesome and unnerving, who is on a cross-country journey to raise funds for St. Jude, a noble cause. Staple Games, an app developer, promised to match a dollar for every download made by one of Ryan’s followers. To date, they’ve contributed $815,642 to his campaign — meaning nearly 1 million downloads on account of Ryan’s passing suggestion. Imagine if that influence, that pressure, was also applied in such mass on our government to end our financial and rhetorical support for israel’s war machine. Sure, it might take years for these cinderblocks in office to budge, but moving the needle is better than stagnation. Furthermore, when the population currently enduring a genocide is asking you to call attention to their plight, to post their GoFundMes, to share stories of their loved ones, to tell the world they existed and have existed for millenia, the entire conversation around performance kind of goes out the window anyway.

I’ve been filled with equal parts disgust and distress watching the world turn, watching people with influence and power either stay silent or crank out some neutral, milquetoast take — squandering their humanity and proving they never had any impact to begin with. They’ve never had what they need to be someone real, to be someone who matters — no teeth, no spine, no ability to see outside of their immediate reality as more than a mere onlooker.

I’m telling you right now, no one worth a lick of your time has remained nor will remain silent about Palestine, about Gaza, about genocide, about occupation, about colonization. No one worth a lick of your time is afraid to use those words, call suffering by its name, give it both credence and a set of eyes to bear witness. No one with a real point of view, one that actually matters, is willing to bequeath their humanity in the name of personal, capital gain. All of these “creatives” who have done so, who have neglected to use their platform, neglected to direct donations, neglected to engage with the real world consequences of generational apathy, have effectively shown they refuse to stand on their own. They cannot stand on their own.

I’ve watched influencers with millions of followers not even allocate one single Instagram story toward fundraisers for Palestinian babies who are being forcibly starved to death by israel, toward women’s organizations on the ground in Gaza distributing pads and tampons, toward some utterly noncontroversial charity providing basic aid and necessities to a population being decimated. I’ve watched institutions water down their coverage, attempt to manufacture the public’s consent for the atrocity unfolding unto the Palestinian people. I’ve watched the people I once looked to for guidance, looked to in order to shape my own taste, my own worldview, look the other way. I’ve watched people, ones who say they’re loving, ones who paint themselves as intellectuals, put their vanity and their wallets first, have greed control their tongues, let apathy be their guide.

No one who is able to distill the world, parse and disseminate it any meaningful way through words, fashion, food, film, whatever, is going to let themselves and their self-obsession entirely supersede a genocide. No one who is able to give you a worthwhile looking glass intrinsically or out into the ether is going to loiter in silence or passivity. The work that results from detachment is not worth merit, not worth absorbing, not real. That work and the hands and brain and mouth and eyes behind it are utterly untethered from the reality that you and I live in. They are not driven by the same human impulses as the rest of us. They cannot show you the way through a world that undoubtedly exists, the one you and I can touch, only whatever fake one they seem to inhabit.

Call your representative here. Donate to Palestinian relief below.

• Healing Our Homeland

• The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

• Grassroots fund for displaced Gazans in Egypt

• Watermelon Relief

  Mish Mashy by Danya Issawi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The world was so big, and I was so small, but I never even noticed. Everything just felt like it belonged to me and I belonged to it — the grass, the mud, the trees, the cold sidewalk after sunset. At dusk, the cicadas sang from the leaves and the parents on our block brought lawn chairs out to watch us extinguish what was left of that day. Time didn’t feel like it was passing, I only saw that it did. I didn’t know that each afternoon that spilled into night meant I was getting older. Meant I’d soon feel all the unrest that saddles up with the seasons.

Somewhere within the years, ones that seem to come at me faster and faster, all that splendor fell away. I stopped finding meaning in the sky, in fact, I stopped looking up all together, and the earth I used to mush and mash in my fists became little more than dirt under my feet. Most tragically, the summer light, the one that felt like kin, dulled. I’ve been trying to find it again. The past, even the bit that hurts, is a comfort. A memory is always the same, no matter how many times you turn it over in your hands, in your mind. Wouldn’t you go back if you could, even just for a little? Just to see if everything looks the same through different eyes? To hold your mother’s hand crossing the street? Run to the door when you hear dad’s Suzuki sputter home from work? Give your first cat a scratch on the chin? Cry when he dies?

Maybe it’s a vice. Maybe I am weak. Maybe I’m feeble-minded, unable to handle the realities of adulthood in the modern day. Maybe I just miss nature and getting dirty and my freedom and sitting at the dining room table, bored and restless, in the middle of August and my mom braiding my hair and the Seventeen magazine posters peeling off my wall and the secret knock the kids in our neighborhood used and Baskin Robbins and the yellow slide at the pool and pizza dipped in Dorothy Lynch and Gilmore Girls on at 4 p.m. and crying when I felt like it and Shrek 2 on the Gameboy and the ice cream truck and lemonade powder by the spoonful and listening to Hilary Duff on my portable CD player at Pizza Street.

Yesterday felt like the first day of summer, was the first day of summer. Those with means left the city behind, left us to be her keeper. I wandered around my part of New York. I sat on a bench. I read a book. I drank a watery coffee. I missed home. I thought about leaving too — about driving out of the city, to some beach. I thought about lying there, about letting the sun melt me, the sand erode me. I thought about sea glass, about how nice it must feel to let the ocean rock you back and forth like that, foamy and soft, along its coast. I used to think of summer that way: lulling and gentle. I’d like to try and do so again.

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Thanks for letting me be melodramatic. Let’s pretend that never happened and move on.

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts, media.

• A televised genocide continues to unfold in Gaza, the occupation continues to annex and destroy the West Bank and my heart just ruptures and explodes and then weakly fumbles itself back together every day watching it unfold. What Gazans are enduring now, no human on earth should have to endure. How free is our country if we can’t get our “leaders” to listen when we say stop the genocide, when we say no more wars, when we say leave migrants alone. Giving up and burning out is not an option. Our lives are far too cushy to do that. We have to keep pushing for an end to the genocide, an end to the occupation and a free Palestine. In the meantime, donate to Healing Our Homeland who does amazing grassroots work in Gaza.

• A lot of flip phone content… more on this later…

  

• I bought a Sony cx240 camcorder and I love her sooo much. I documented the spring and beginning of summer. Maybe I’ll show you guys. I’ve been editing on iMovie (lol) but if anyone has a better free recommendation (maybe CapCut), I’m all ears.

• Voted today. Ranked Zohran, did NOT rank Cuomo. A deliciously fun fact is that my beautiful and smart friend beat Zohran out for class president when they were at Bronx Science together. She just endorsed him for mayor but maybe we can band together and convince Tara to run someday??? She’ll be the first woman in office to wear Simone Rocha. Inspiring.

  

• I’m very into pedicures right now, not even in a weird feet-y way. I feel like someone who doesn’t neglect themselves when I’ve got polished toes, you know?

• Just finally finished reading Martyr! (apt timing I suppose) and I’m processing. There’s no doubt it’s a brilliant book written by a brilliant author. But I’m processing. I’m reading The Bell Jar next lmao.

• Like everyone else, I’ve been obsessively reading ’s newsletter every day. 1. scrumptious stuff. 2. I’m trying (and failing) to be on my phone less, and Casey’s newsletter is a partial antidote to the doomscroll.

• This piece from on writing/publishing/ego vs. survival had me hollering internally as I came out of a migraine.

• Finally:

Anyway, back to the heartless among us.

First and foremost, I want you to know that this scold is a gender-neutral one. When I use words like “bitch” and “wench” and “girlies,” I’m referring to men, women, non-binary people, really anyone who falls anywhere within the gender spectrum. We’re very inclusive over here at Mish Mashy and proud of it. These are just words that are familiar and dear to me.

It’s come to my attention that some people really truly and earnestly believe they have the right to live within a bubble — they’ve come to the understanding that they deserve an untouchable existence, untarnished and uninhibited by the miseries of the world. They deserve, because they were born into an affluent, cushy life, one they must work very hard to maintain (aperol spritzes in the West Village at 2, zeitgeisty brand event in Soho at 6, martinis at balthazar 9 and a nightcap at jean’s (they’re on the list duh) before going home to the brownstone they paid over market price on in a previously working-class neighborhood. Pay no mind to the family who just got displaced from the building, look how cute the sconces are!!!!!), to scroll through their “proenza dupe” links in peace.

There’s obviously been an influx of accounts who are either people trying to survive a genocide in Gaza or posing as such in many newsletters’ subscriber chats. Some of these requests do look bot-like and do look spammy and Substack should likely have a better vetting system in place (many such cases), and I can understand that it’s mildly annoying to have 15 bot notifications to scroll through before you can access the actual conversation at hand. But it’s not exactly life-altering. It’s literally not hard to just scroll past them if that’s your journey. I’d hope you’d turn around and donate some money to the PCRF on your way. What’s been interesting to watch is people, primarily in a lot of fashion/culture Substack chats, complain incessantly about these messages. “It’s beyond ridiculous” one member of a chat said of the DMs, “I just block profiles as they pop up,” responded another. At the very least, these messages are a mere reminder of the anguish our governments are causing on a trapped population. We should be reminded of that, and often. And if that’s a real person on the other end of the Gofundme ask, you’re coming off quite cruel.

I’m trying, desperately, to wrap my brain around what might make you sooooo perturbed by an account, bot or not, asking for help, and thus ignoring it. They’re not hacking your computer or asking for your social security number. It’s literally not a real-life inconvenience should you choose to look the other way. And most everyone does. People on this app are asking each other about $400 shoes to purchase and shopping the SSENSE sale for Margiela and importing Italian leather bags, and sure, these are all things I like talking about too! I’m, by trade, a fucking fashion writer. But I need us to be so for real — children in Gaza are being forcibly starved. I know someone volunteering there as an international aid worker right now, and he’s eating one meal a day that consists of rice and canned tuna, and he’s considered lucky.

These atrocities do not exist in a bubble and neither does your soft life, and assuming that’s the case is what has brought fascism to our doorstep. In one chat, someone asked for clothing rental recommendations for visiting tel aviv while Gazans and international anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide movements are calling to boycott israel/israeli goods (it was the final straw in crumbling South African apartheid). One member with a grip on reality recommended “not visiting a country carrying out genocide,” to which another, desperate for a crumb of propriety on the internet I guess (a famously tame landscape), said there was a “time and place for discussions about this, but this is NOT it. Being rude is neither helping your cause nor convincing anyone. Let people mention israel without acting up like one of those fundraising bots in all substack chats…” A lot to unpack there! First and foremost, that last sentence is giving racism/bigotry etc. And, actually, there is no right time and place to bring up a literal genocide, to be bring up the AT LEAST 13,000 children killed by israel, 57 of them due to malnutrition caused by the intentional aid blockage. Kids who should be in school, skipping a jumprope, drawing with chalk on sidewalks and beading friendship bracelets, are DYING. We’ve all seen the images of children shredded to bits; one young girl, pigtails in her hair, filleted and hanging from a power line, we saw a grandfather cling to a child’s tiny corpse, crying over her lifeless face, and we all heard Hind’s last words — a 6-year-old girl whose family car had been shot at relentlessly by an israeli tank. Surrounded by the deceased bodies of her loved ones, she placed a call to the Red Crescent. Her voice tiny and shaking.

"The tank is next to me. It's moving."

"Is it very close?"

"Very, very. Will you come and get me? I'm so scared."

Hind’s body was found five days later, the car she was traveling in littered with hundreds of bullet holes. Her last moments on this earth were spent, audibly, in outright fear, with the sound of a tank closing in and the sight of her most loved ones bloodied and lifeless. Our tax dollars made that moment, made her demise, a reality.

And! Let’s address the whole “mention israel without acting up” bit. How do you think that state was founded? Bingo! Another genocide! Mass displacement! Ethnic cleansing! I talk about it incessantly, but my father literally grew up in a refugee camp, completely impoverished, after he and his family were violently expelled from Palestine. It makes me wretch thinking of all the comfort that was stolen from him — the life that was stolen from him. Maybe if the world had taken a deeper interest, a more firm stance, on the plight of the Palestinian people back then, he and his family could’ve gone home. Could’ve had a home.

If you’re wondering how the rest of the conversation went in that subscriber chat, a few girlies recommended Nuuly as a great clothing rental option! Yay! Enjoy your trip to the ruins of Jaffa! If you can, swing by my grandparents’ homes in Haifa and Safad! Our family heirlooms and the gold rings they passed down for generations might still be somewhere in the attics. And I hear it’s beautiful there this time of year!!! If you’re hellbent on ignoring all this very real suffering, at least try not to be a dick about it. Regardless of whatever trauma you’ve gone through personally, none of us have been tasked with surviving a relentless genocide like this, and you look insensitive beyond belief when you try and minimize being confronted with it to a nuisance — to indecency. It’s been made abundantly clear to me, living in the heart of the empire helping enact this genocide and working in the nucleus of an industry so enraptured with self-promotion, self-ascension and self-centeredness that empathy, to some, is a mere concept rather than an implicit way of being.

There is, believe it or not, more to life than designer Tabis or reclining in a chaise lounge on a stolen seafront. The genuinely coolest people I know care deeply about the real world and understand the way they move through it has a ripple effect — has real, tangible consequences, big and small. They care about their neighbors, they care about the planet, they care about people they don’t know. And many of you out there, and on here, obsessed with mimicking a lifestyle filled with effervescence, bliss and cashmere sweaters draped over shoulders, will never, ever be able to tap into the deepest most human thing tethering us all to one another: compassion. What a shame it must be to live like that.

@msrachelforlittlesI was so honored to spend time with Rahaf from Gaza. Rahaf is a 3-year-old double amputee who lost her legs in an airstrike. She’s absolutely adorable and the most loving, smart, playful little girl.🥹💕 I am so thankful to @The PCRF for facilitating her medical evacuation. They are my heroes! I will link to them in my bio. When I saw pictures of Rahaf in Gaza on the hospital floor, I saw the devastating consequences of endless bombing and continuous violations of children’s human rights. Rahaf is now thriving because she has access to medical care, food, water and a safe place to live. It’s so clear what we need to give children so they can grow up into healthy, happy adults. I was also honored to spend time with Rahaf’s wonderful mom, Israa. She is a teacher as well. We FaceTimed with Rahaf’s two adorable, young brothers who are still Gaza with their dad. I watched her look at them proudly, like I look at my son. I imagined myself holding up the phone in the US with my daughter, now a double amputee from an airstrike, away from my son and husband in Gaza, unable to help them - unable to feed them and keep them safe. Israa and Rahaf don’t eat in front of the boys anymore on FaceTime because there’s so little food there. Israa and I both love our children with all of our hearts. We’re both teachers who know what kids need to thrive. We want the same things for our sweet babies. But my son will have dinner tonight, a story and snuggle with me, school in the morning and hers won’t. It’s so clear what needs to be done for kids in Gaza by the global community. We know treating children like they are being treated in Gaza isn’t right morally and ethically. We know it in our souls and hearts. It doesn’t align with the teachings of our religions. We also have so much research on brain development that shows how trauma and malnutrition during the first three years of life can have life long consequences. Leaders who are silent and not helping these children, you should be ashamed. Your silence will be remembered. Help my friends, like sweet Rahaf, now. Proud to be married to Mr Aron, who brought her so much joy and so many giggles! #gaza #msrachel

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if you’re against what the modern-day Mister Rogers is doing, you need to CHECK YOURSELF SOOOOOO HARD.

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Eid Mubarak. I’m in my childhood bedroom and all the magazine clippings I taped to the wall at 12 — Joe Jonas with a chemically straightened perm, thigh gaps from a denim ad in Seventeen, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus in hippie headbands — are staring back at me. Remnants of who I was, who I wanted to be, who I was desperate to become.

A new body, a new face, new hair, a new home, the promise of social salvation. I wished I could squeeze my body into a different shape, eat cabbage soup and yogurt cups and will into existence thighs that didn’t touch, that some girl in my class wouldn’t call fat, and cheeks my aunties wouldn’t pinch. I wished I could shrug it all off, the weight, the worry. I wished I could wipe the brown off of me back then too. And sometimes, in the summers, I did try — with a wet wipe and wet skin, I’d scrub my knees, my shoulders, the parts of me that resigned themselves gladly and willingly to the sun. Sometimes, I’d ask my mom for help.

She was paler than me, her skin white against my tan hands when she held them across a street. Her name an Arabic one all the Americans could easily pronounce and hair straightened at the salon biannually (probably the Joe Jonas special). Only her accent gave her away, let the store clerks know we weren’t from here like they were from here, gave them free reign to follow us around the bedding department at Macy’s until my mother bared her teeth and unfurled her claws. HOW DARE YOU? I AM A PHYSICIAN IN THE COMMUNITY! YOU THINK I’D EVEN THINK TO STEAL SOMETHING SO UGLY? She was, sometimes still is, shy of the way some English comes out of her mouth, but never so when she’s been wronged. Never so when her children have been wronged. The words, in those moments, spill out loudly, freely, sharply. Anyway, you’ve heard this all before in the lines of someone else’s shitty diaspora poetry by now.

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Every Eid, at around 8:15 a.m., I’d wake up and try to make it to the 9:15 a.m. morning prayer with my family. I’d fry my hair with a flatiron until it was mostly straight, apart from a few crumpled pieces in the back I couldn’t quite reach and decided were bearable. Downstairs, yelling and agitated shuffling would, like clockwork, take place about 10 minutes before we were set to leave. My dad was taking too long in the shower, my brother didn’t want to wake up, my mom was annoyed because why not? It was never a holiday without someone getting into an argument, without a silent car ride to the convention center where prayer was held, without the drive to breakfast right after like nothing had ever happened.

As a teen, I’d meet up with my cousins, with our friends, and swish around in our glimmering dresses, in the outfits we’d been planning all month. We’d wander around the hundreds of people in the center, pointing out cute boys from across the room, devising plans to coyly get their attention. Our methods often proved successful. After I moved to New York, we mostly gave up the ruse — we were not, are not, a family unit capable of being on time together. Eid prayer would have to, unless a miracle occurred, be done at home. I miss my cousins, I miss my friends, I miss the adhan, I miss feeling tethered to something bigger on those mornings. But our holidays have been far happier ones since.

I’ve had a long, arduous, two-fisted fight with religion for as long as I can remember — religion as an entity and, also, specifically my religion. (Growing up post-9/11 blah blah blah). All it took for me to come to terms with how I wanted Islam to look in my life was realizing MANY of our fellow citizens are small-brained bigots who’ve never known the juicy loving of a shawarma wrap (I’m a vegetarian now but idc, I know that shit slaps) and that many of the sisters at the mosque who scolded me growing up were ALSO small-brained (one of them told me my dad was going to hell because I didn’t know the meaning of some Arabic word??? My mom and I have an undying grudge against her). I just needed about two decades of mulling over to understand that I loved parts of religion and didn’t love others and that’s literally fine! wrote a really lovely post on just that this week. I don’t care if the Imams tell me I’m going to hell! I actually think my soul is going to be sucked into some glob, some singular power source we all come from in some astral plane, and exist blissfully and it’ll smell like fresh strawberries and vanilla and I’ll be reunited with everyone I’ve ever loved all at once and infinitely until my life force gets briskly ejected and sucked back onto earth and into some baby giraffe’s new, warm and wet body or something. I only believe in hell when I meet/am made aware of someone who really deserves it! That said, just know if I ever see any of you being remotely Islamophobic in my presence, I will channel the power of my mother and her triple fire sign chart and unleash it willingly, gladly, unto you.

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Now that I’ve got everyone loosened up and in a good mood from talking about racism and religion, let’s do a roundup!!!!

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts and media rattling around in my mind.

1. I recently (three days ago) learned how to embroider, and it has somehow reconnected my body to my brain. It’s like the heavenly, celestial body controlling me and my fate decided to plug me back into a power source, as a treat. When I first learned, I literally texted my friends from across the room “I’m fucked,” but lo and behold, I have steadily improved and REALLY ENJOY stitching!!!!! A friend and I have been sending photos of our little creations back and forth. If you need yarn in Kansas City, highly recommend going to Yarn Social. I just popped in because I forgot my kit in New York and also bought my mom an embroidery kit. She used to stitch Palestinian tatreez when she was younger, and she’s been having so much fun with it today. I’m going to ask her to tatreez one of my plain white t-shirts.

   

   

2. I visited the New York Public Library to get a preview of their recently-acquired Joan Didion (and John Gregory Dunne) collection — a birth certificate, a high school essay, scrapped work, planners, recipes, party planning documents with bigwig names (would’ve killed to see Joyce Carol Oates maneuver a party). I think the collection warrants a longer post, but having a curator walk me through Didion’s belongings did for me what a kibble-forward enrichment puzzle does for a dog. I don’t really care if it’s basic to like Didion’s work and approach to it. I do.

   

3. I hate AI.

4. Unfortunately, the IOF’s bombardment of Gaza (and Lebanon) has resumed. Children died today in their Eid outfits. Watching footage come out of the strip (and the West Bank as settlers target Palestinians there under the protection of the IOF) throttles me into a very specific kind of distress — the kind that makes me want to crawl out of my skin, maybe rip it off, step out of the humanity we claim to share, go elsewhere, be elsewhere, away from this earth. How can an entire international “community” watch babies be pulled from rubble, lifeless or barely clinging on, and shrug their shoulders? Continue to sell weapons? Continue on supporting what’s objectively and outright a genocide? If you’d like to buy me an Eid present (or if you have a conscience, idk) consider donating to Healing Our Homeland. They’re a grassroots org who does amazing work across Palestine.

Eid Mubarak angels. Free Palestine. Xx

This past weekend, after dinner at a Soho establishment with a truly mid-bordering-atrocious ambiance (yeah, yeah, it’s Soho, what was I supposed to expect), I stumbled into Iconic Magazines for a palate cleanser and saw The Cut’s spring fashion issue (and thus my profile, duh) out in the wild. I’d seen it the week before at Casa Magazines, but this instance felt a little surreal, because next to The Cut’s issue was another cover story I wrote (Elyanna for Hommegirls). I kind of had one of those cliche “wait… I kind of am doing what I set out to do…” moments. I just felt a little overwhelmed, I guess, at the enormity of what this all would’ve meant to me at 19, when I was scared and confused about how life would unfold for me. I knew I wanted to leave Kansas — to move to New York, to become a writer, to try my hand at being somebody other than who I’d been. I didn’t really know anyone in the media or literary world, and my parents certainly had no connections to anyone here and no real money to make my transition a smooth one. But I tried. I tried really hard. I got a job as an assistant at The New York Times, I worked nights, I worked weeks straight without a day off, I commuted to freaking Times Square every day (imagine elbowing past a Mickey Mouse impersonator daily on your way to work), my hair fell out, my body attacked itself, I had mice eating my food and COHABITATING IN MY BED WITH ME (!!!!!!!), I pitched the stupidest stories to editors who I should not have been pitching stupid stories to (but I learned!), my bosses thought I was an idiot, and then they didn’t. One of my editors messaged me a tirade like I’d never seen at like 5 a.m. Another editor made jokes about me picking up his dry cleaning like in the good ole days. I know people have it way worse and are doing back-breaking labor and struggling just to live, but sometimes I’d go into a quiet meeting room, lie down on one of the couches, wait for the motion-sensing lights to go dark, and cry really hard for an allotted 15 minutes. Then I’d go back to my desk and build the front page of the newspaper before it was shipped across the country for almost a million people to see.

I’m not where I want to be just yet. I don’t feel like I’ve arrived per se, and wow do I have so much more to learn, but at one point, I wanted to do what I do now so badly. So very badly. And seeing two cover stories I wrote out in the world, at the same time, at a magazine shop in New York City made me tear up a little. It made me wonder if that’s a fraction of how my dad feels when looks at our safe, quiet home he bare-knuckled to make a reality.

Anyway, enough blabbing, the reason I’ve gathered you all here is because a few readers had questions about the writing process. Let’s get into it.

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You Ask, I Answer:

@maureenwelton: What did you have to leave out? Anything you wanted to ask but had to cut for time?

I would’ve loved to have more time to observe how she moves through the outside world. We touched on it a bit, but that’s the fun, nitty gritty that, to me, really reveals a person.

For space, we had to cut the bit about her foray into acting (she starred in Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama), but I’m sure there will be more on that front for Doechii in the future and maybe that’ll be a better time to get into that. She also told me she goes so hard in her music because she’s certain that she’s been reincarnated and that this life is a second chance — that in her past life, she didn’t live fearlessly, she didn’t make her dreams a reality, and feels compelled and called to do so in this iteration. We briefly mentioned it in the piece, but again had to cut it for space. To me, though, this was one of the most interesting things about her. It put her entire creative direction and ambition into context. How many people have near-death experiences and then dedicate their lives to living more intentionally? Now imagine actually feeling certain you did die.

@cassandraots: What’s something that surprised you about Doechii?

How inspired I was by her process as an artist. She is so sure of herself, her vision, her story and her trajectory. She really puts it all out there and trusts that her brain is going to guide her to a place or moment that feels both authentic and innovative. She’s a disciple of the Artist’s Way, and while I couldn’t get through it my first try and it’s gathering dust in a box somewhere, she's influenced me to crack it back open unfortunately.

She is also incredibly honest. If she has a thought, she says it. If she has a question, she asks it. She isn’t worried about how she’s perceived. She’s genuinely unbothered by your opinion of her. So refreshing.

@antoinettebefree: I can imagine the amount of material you had, and then when writing at such a high level of visibility for someone at the height of visibility (though there is more to come for Doechii) I would have no fingernails left after chewing them off. So, especially [curious about the] writing process for “high stakes” writing?

I love this question because my editor, Brooke Marine, who has the most amazing and patient brain, literally had to coax me into this editing process. I kept messaging her things like “my brain is mush” or “I don’t think I know how to write anymore” or “why is this so hard?” and honestly it was because I had stage fright. I knew people were going to read this, I knew the styling was amazing, I knew the photography was amazing, and if the writing fell flat, everyone would notice and whisper behind my back and throw eggs at my house or something. She and I went back and forth so many times on edits, big and small, and her gentle, guiding hand brought us to a place that feels like a solid profile (we only had 1900 words!!!!!) that digs deeper into an artist garnering global attention and on the precipice of becoming a generational icon. Like I said, in every piece of mine that goes to print, I will find a million things I’d like to change. I’ll always be like that. But I can hold all of my critiques and all of my pride in the same hand, no problem.

So, yes, I did chew my fingernails off, but the team I worked on this with at The Cut was so solid, they helped me glue those babies back on. I wish the general public knew how important good editors are to a story.

Thank you guys for reading this, for being so supportive and sending me such sweet messages. <3

Consumption Junction:

• During my field trip to Iconic Magazines I also spotted a few copies of Byline, an indie darling publication founded and run by two of my friends. I sent a picture to one of the co-founders and one of my bestie girls, Megan O’Sullivan, of her piece in their issue next to my piece in The Cut. Senti.

  

• One of my FAVORITE restaurant critics is a cat. I have no idea who this cat belongs to, I have no idea how he gets let into restaurants, I am only thankful that he exists. The human running the Pico Review is just so thoughtful and cheeky and obviously doing it for the love of the game. Who among us doesn’t relish in seeing a cat enjoy the wonders of the world?!?!

  

• I’m really, very close to getting a flip phone again. I know we’ve kind of exhausted the conversation about how to minimize screen time, and it seems, like a real iPad baby, that the only way I’m going to feel truly tethered and connected to myself is by eliminating the desire altogether. I’m pretty good about not being on my phone when I’m out, but when I’m just lounging at home, the desire to scroll latches onto my brain like a greedy little leech. I already know what the internet mush is going to look like: a video of Trump looking like a vintage leather bag left in the sun for 60 years followed by an AI-made video of cats set to meows to the tune of “What Was I Made For,” and YET! I keep going back for more! Honestly, Blackberry and Motorola (via the Razr) are missing a major cultural shift happening right now - people want LESS time on their phones in HOT ways. If they re-released their products, with 5G and a solid option for call and text forwarding, I feel like they’d do remarkably well.

• I finished The Bluest Eye and thus my first Toni Morrison novel. I put off reading her work for so long because I knew, in the wake of digesting her words, I would feel like the most inadequate writer to ever walk this earth. I did. It was beautiful.