Hi friends. It’s been a minute. Many minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months since I last published anything here.
I have been doing a lot of writing and stopping and starting and stopping and rewriting and musing on what my first post back would be. I haven’t published anything personal that really speaks to what's going on with me in a while.
I feel almost paralyzed with anxiety every time I sit down to write to you. I’ve gotten teary more than once. I get a few paragraphs in, and then I stop and start again.
It feels like meeting an old friend for coffee and tripping over your words every time you try to fill them in on what’s going on in your life. The last time you saw them, you were a very different version of yourself. It’s like you’re trying to figure out how to introduce them to who you are now, inside the context of who you used to be.
I would love nothing more than to just tell you exactly what's going on with me. That would be the easiest thing to do. It would also be quite freeing.
I've meditated on authenticity, privacy, the truth, and the whole truth a lot over the last year; the messy middle that I find myself in is really hard to talk about.
But I think I finally found the language to explain what it feels like to be in my position, without going into all the details (which I will one day, not today.)
I am swimming for my life. I am swimming to shore. I am swimming like hell to get to shore.
I've always told myself that once I got to shore, I would talk about the journey I just went through. For those of you who have seen Moana — it would be the equivalent of Moana starting the story with her return to the island, after journeying to the heart of Te Fiti and back. It would be like starting from the end and saying, ‘Hey, I've reached the shore. And I'm going to tell you what happened in those waters and how I got here.’
But I am out in the waters right now. And they are choppy. And sometimes it's fine. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's awful. And I am treading and actively swimming for my life.
And part of me thought, “Okay, well, you could talk about what you're going through right now, as you're swimming, these waters.”
Maybe once people know what I'm carrying, what I’m doing, and what it’s like for me out here – maybe I’ll find out that there are people closer than I think who want to be like life buoys and boats and rafts. Maybe there’s more community and validation and solidarity and help, and support available to me than I think.
Maybe to get that support, I have to admit the raw truth of where I am and say “Hey I feel like I'm sinking and I'm doing my very damn best stay afloat”
But here’s the other part of the equation. This is the part that I’ve finally found the language for.
It's like I am swimming away* and doing my best to get away from sharks. But I don't want to scream out, “Hey, I'm trying to get away from these sharks!” because I don't want to piss off the sharks.
*(And I know someone is surely going to comment, and go “here's what to do if you really are in the ocean with sharks!” And to those people, I want to remind you that this is a metaphor! This is a very extended deep in my brain analogy/metaphor. I am not actually in the sea with sharks, and if I was, I would not be narrating the experience to you. I would absolutely be doing proper things to get help!)
So anyway in the metaphor, where I’m swimming away from the sharks, I don't want to scare the sharks and I don't want to annoy the sharks because yelling for help could get me help OR it could just piss off the goddamn sharks.
So that is the messy middle that I'm in. I want to be honest about what it’s like being in the middle of the sea here — but I am also not out of the woods, or out of the sea, far enough from the sharks. And I have got to make sure I’m physically and emotionally safe before I can talk about what I’m going through.
So I know this sounds scary. It is scary.
But... I was talking to my therapist* about this (and I haven't given this metaphor yet. I hope she loves it because her opinion matters most to me in this world.)
*I have now, since writing this, shared all this with my therapist and she not only LOVED it, but went on to make a reference to Bravo’s Winter House basically about what it’s like to watch a reality tv show with spoilers vs. not knowing what’s happening and getting hooked on the rush of tuning in to see what happens next. I’m so happy my therapist loves this metaphor. I’ve made it.
So I was talking to my therapist about silent suffering.
When someone is silently suffering — and I'm not totally silent, right? I am here writing to you, alluding to my suffering.
But... to the average person, I look fine.
I look like I am just having a fun day at the beach. I’m swimming past the line where you're supposed to go at the beach, when in the ocean. And I'm just kind of bopping around. That is what it looks like. But on the inside, that is not what's happening.
And so I think, I'm hopping on and sharing all this, in an attempt to call out to all of the people who are going through things they can’t talk about.
If you are smiling when you just want to scream, or are screaming inside….
If you’re fighting off a current in the ocean every single day, that feels relentless, but looks invisible…
If you find yourself thinking, “if I could just tell someone what's going on – I know so much of my life and so many of my struggles would make sense.”…
I am right here in the sea with you. I don't have a tangible buoy or float or life jacket to toss to you.. But I am here in the sea. And maybe that counts for something.
Maybe we don't have to wait until we get to the shore to connect.
Maybe we find each other here in the sea, and tread like hell to get to the other side together.
So yeah, maybe that's what I've been trying to say.
Like I said, I've written so many drafts. I've tried to talk about the logistics of my life so many different times; what I can and can't share and how I don't live in California anymore.
So there’s that news - I don't live in California anymore.
And here I am in New York. I’ve done a lot of reflecting and untangling about why I really went to California and why I came back. I finally figured out that I was indeed running from and towards something. I want to write about that eventually. But right now, I’m treading water.
I’m figuring out what this move means for my other Substack, New Yorker Goes West. I’ve been absent there for months, and every time I get a new subscriber email, I think to myself, “How am I going to tell them that I don’t live in California anymore??” I have so much more to say about California, and me in California, and this whole cross-country adventure. I feel like I owe all of the New Yorker Goes West subscribers an apology. Instead, I’m just going to ask for grace.
Here’s what I’ll say for now —
New York is the same and entirely different to me. I’ve loved the new song from Ariana Grande's deluxe album, Hampstead. It feels very connected to this part of my life. I think I probably would have had many an ocean walk and cry along the beach if I were still in California when this song came out.
I don't remember too much of the last year
But I knew who I was when I got here
'Cause I'm still the same but only entirely different
And my lover’s just some lines in some songs
I work at a bakery now.
I am still trying to find time for my creative stuff and figuring out what I want my life to be overall.
I took a very, very big step back from my business after launching the holiday survival kit party. I feel like it was a failure, even though I know it wasn't. But it also wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and what I told me that would be. I think that the problem with manifesting sometimes is that we just hold on so tightly to our version of what we want to happen, and then what we wanted to happen doesn't happen, we’re like ‘well what was that for??’
I think I'm honestly just trying to be a person in the world. That’s what I’m doing right now.
When I was still in California, my friend
(who I know a lot of you know!) made this beautiful shout-out to me on her blog and called me a woman on a big life adventure.I know that I still am, but mostly I just kind of feel like a woman… trying to get through the day right now.
Nobody has run further wearing flip-flops on a dirty railroad track than Alexa And she didn’t even tell anyone about it until she got there and went public with her online journal -
My life looks very much the same as it did this past April 2024. But it's entirely different, and that's also kind of a mindfuck; that my life looks the same, but it is so entirely different. And I’m entirely different.
And a lot of the things that I want for myself and the ways that I want to help people are the same, but also a little more evolved and simple yet different.
I think what made it really hard to connect with you guys and come back was the pressure that I put on myself to explain myself. I thought I owed you an explanation, and that I needed to make sense of it all and arrange it all in a polished way.
But it doesn't make sense. And I don't know when it will make sense.
I hope and do believe there will come a time when I can openly process what I'm going through when it's closer to ending and when it’s a little more in a rear view mirror.
But for now, I have to honor what's going on for me and honor that it's okay to talk about the sea and the sharks without talking about all the details.
Also — to anyone to anyone who finds this annoying, you don't have to be on this journey with me. It's fine. That might sound harsh, but I just dealt with my first real troll the other day on TikTok so I feel like being very open about the fact that it won’t hurt my feelings if you unsubscribe, and that you don’t have to tell me if you do. You can just make an Irish exit!
But if you’re still here, here’s what happened.
I posted this video on TikTok the other day, where I just went so off the hinges with my humor, as I often do in real life. It was something about the juxtaposition of having a bad day and then having a great day. “Yesterday I texted the group chat ‘it feels like God has forgotten about me’ and then texted a friend that I might pull a Virgina Woolf and stick my head in the oven. And today I am sitting in the park watching kids and babies dance to jazz in the sun.’
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So this woman on TikTok who I do not know, posts a comment that she has since deleted, which basically says –
I mean this with all the kindness in my heart, as someone who has it, I think you may want to get tested for bipolar disorder.
And I stared at my phone for like half an hour. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with having BPD. There is everything wrong with a stranger on the internet trying to diagnose me in the comments. (And also, that’s not my diagnosis — I have CPTSD thank you very much.)
A few hours before seeing this comment, I had just finished reading Dylan Mulvaney's iconic memoir, Paper Doll. And she was talking about how if you're a content creator, you should try to enjoy life before you go viral because there’s a really dark, cruel side to internet popularity.
So when I got this comment, my first thought was ‘is this vitriol a sign that my content is getting more popular??’ Or is it a sign that the world is so harsh and cruel?
So that's a bit of a tangent. But just a little peek into my mind lately. So, yeah.
Instead of giving you a further play-by-play of my life lately, or giving in to my need to give an explanation and make it all tidy – I think this is where I'm going to leave things.
Here I am, a girl in the world, trying to make it day-to-day.
Sometimes I wake up and California feels like a literal fever dream. Sometimes I feel like I'm still there. Most of the time, just going day to day and trying to, like, hang in there.
There's that lyric from Waitress from the song called She Used To Be Mine, and it goes,
She is messy but she’s kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of that, mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.
She is gone but she used to be mine.
I feel like that most of the time these days. I don't think I'm gone. I think that a certain version of me is gone. I think it's really easy to look back at the person who started this blog two years ago who thought she was messy then. And now I’m like, oh you want messy? I’ll show you MESSY.
What I have always done and what I hope I will always continue to do is show up in my messiness here. There have been so many beautiful moments where me showing up has done something really great for me, and also for somebody else. And I always, always say, if anything I put into the world can give someone that ‘me too’ moment of feeling seen – that’s all I want.
And I may never get to connect with that person, right? Let's say I put this out into the world and nobody comments, and nobody likes it, and nobody subscribes, and nobody becomes a paid subscriber. And I never make a single dollar from Substack again. There could still be somebody reading/listening to these words, like it’s their lifeline.
In one of my many, many previous drafts, I was talking about Ask Polly and
.
That column was my lifeline for years, before I ever knew what Substack was. And even when she switched from New York magazine to Substack, I never followed her Substack, or left a single like or comment until I became a fellow Substack writer. I would just read it and copy quotes into the notes app on my phone and tell everybody in the world how much I love this woman and her writing, and how she writes the things that make me feel like I am not a fuck up.
She makes me feel like I am not the only person in the world who feels like they are too big and too much and just like feeling everything so intensely. I am like right there in the ache, as Glennon Doyle would say.
But I never said anything. I never reposted. I never talked about it online. And so Heather would have no way of knowing any of that.
I know that there are a lot of people, thousands of people who follow and love her, and I'm so happy for her success. AND I know there are people like me who are just quietly like reading in their rooms and subway platforms and on their breaks at work and just feeling so quietly seen.
I write, speak, and show up in the world for both those kinds of people.
My friends and I were joking the other day about how great it would be to get paid to be yourself, which is often what writing feels like when it happens. It is still my absolute dream to have a thriving subscriber and community base here of people who want to support me through my work. I would be lying if I didn't admit the dire financial straits that I'm in.
But at the end of the day, regardless of the quote unquote commercial success or financial success of my writing and my creative stuff, there will never be any bigger impact than helping someone else feel seen because like feeling seen by other creatives in my darkest moments has saved my life time and again and again. I may never meet Heather, I may never meet Glennon Doyle i may never meet Brene Brown all these people who have impacted my life, who have literally saved my life.
And I am not presumptuous enough to think or to put myself among the greats in that way.
But you don't have to be great, and you don't have to be world-renowned and famous and popular to touch someone's soul and be that thread they hold on to.
You never know what you need sometimes until you need it. And it shows up on your page.
And like going back to TikTok, It could be a video you never see again. And you never can find again. But in that moment, it's exactly what you need.
And so if you're still reading, I hope that this is exactly what you need – or that you find what you need soon.
I think in a weird way, this draft is exactly what I needed.
After all the many drafts I attempted, here I am sharing the rawest one with you.
I’m gonna try to keep being brave and keep showing up and not going away and hiding when it gets way too messy because this is the place for my messy soul. And I wanna keep creating a home here for her. And for all of you. All the time.
As I write this, I'm realizing how much I missed it here.
I’ve always loved the story of the prodigal son.
I grew up as a Baptist Christian, and I’ve let go of a LOT of the teachings - and am more agnostic/I think there’s a higher power(s) and I also hope God is a woman but how could she be a woman if women are so oppressed and have PERIODS –
But anyway, I still like the story of the prodigal son. There are these two brothers. And one goes into the world. I don't remember the exact details. He basically spends a lot of money and goes broke, and does all of this stuff. In a modern-day version, I’m sure there would be some drug addiction and homelessness involved in the story. The other brother is very goody two shoes and stays home, and is a loyal son.
But then, when the brother who strayed comes back, the father is like so happy to see him.
And he just gets to come home. And he’s welcome, and it’s amazing, and there’s no judgment from the family. (except the goody two-shoes son.)
I hope that's what this is like.
I certainly dream of being that literal space for my kids one day, my future kids.
But back to the story and the metaphor of it all –
If one of my favorite writers or people popped back into my inbox after a long time away, I would be excited and ready to catch up with them.
I hope this post has felt like reconnecting with an old friend over coffee. I really have missed you guys.
I love it here. I'm not going anywhere. And I hope we can be out at sea together, making our wild, cozy, free way through the world.
That name I chose two years ago - Wild Cozy Free — now feels like a siren call, leading me home to my unfurled, messy, real self.
I hope this Substack can be the same for you. A dedicated place for us to honor the fullness of who we are, in a world that is constantly demanding so much of us (more labor, more curated versions of ourselves, more time, you pick) — this is the space where you can just be.
More soon.
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