It feels like a lot has happened since I last wrote (pre-birthday weekend), but in reality most of the month has been predictably normal, while some of it was not. I think sometimes it takes me weeks to really know what I have to say.
If I had to summarize, October felt like a month of honesty. With myself, with others. Whatever September numbness I had been feeling is now in the active process of defrosting. But let’s start back there, at the end of my birthday weekend.
On our last night upstate, we refilled our wine glasses, buzzed on that kind of warmth you wish you could bottle up inside you forever. I admitted how I hadn’t any idea yet about what I wanted out of the next year of life, but I felt this unspoken expectation of needing to know. My friend Felicia made a comment that her best advice about turning 29 was to not think about it through a lens of it’s the last year of my 20s and I’m running out of time to complete things before I’m 30, but to frame it through the question of how did I start this decade and how do I want to end it?
I ruminated on this for the next few days. Honestly, I’ve been ruminating on it since. Who was I at 21, and who am I at 29? What questions did I ask myself at 21 that I find myself still asking today? Everyone says you don’t know what you want or who you are in your 20s, and maybe that’s true in some regards. But I think a lot of what I held onto at 21 as true is still true for me today. My life might look different than I expected, but at the core, I want to believe not much has actually changed. I still want an abundant and generous life – I still want to believe that great love is possible.
At 29, I’m much less scared to vocalize what I want, and find it almost too easy to dismiss what I definitely don’t want. I’m better at not spiraling over the difference between who I see myself to be and who people think of me to be. If someone from my past met me today, would they recognize me? Would it be a good or a bad thing if they said I was exactly the same as all those years ago? Is there anything I would change about who I am today?
Well. These are some big questions to answer. And the path of understanding is ongoing. But I find myself answering the small questions in hopes they’ll illuminate the big answers, in hopes of being more and more honest with myself. This is what I’ve found true in my first month of 29:
I want to be a person who isn’t afraid to ask
Perspective is a magical thing. Once I learned about the little favor economy, all the small actions around me started to feel big. Note to reader: it’s worth romanticizing those unexpected human moments in your day. They make you appreciate being alive.
I was eating lunch at Acre one day with out-of-towners. The tables were tightly positioned, and I got up a few times, squeezing out between our table and the next. Mumbling an apology every time in hopes I didn’t knock anything over. The couple seated next to us didn’t say anything until I was getting up to leave for the last time. The woman stopped me, and at first I panicked internally, thinking she was going to voice her disgruntlement. Instead she asked, I’m sorry, this is a weird question – but where are your socks from? I’m looking for some for my daughter. I looked down and almost laughed because I literally didn’t know which socks I had on and still don’t know how she noticed them since my trousers covered my ankles. I told her, they’re pink ones from Outdoor Voices, but I bought them last year so I’m not sure what colors they have anymore.
I know it’s really not that deep, but it made me slightly regret all the times I’ve stood on the subway platform and didn’t ask someone where their jacket was from. Or when a stranger gives me a compliment and it literally makes my day. Small aspiration: make someone else’s day.
I miss getting dressed with somewhere to go
I showed up to the wrong address for a conference, which was annoying because I was already running late (I couldn’t decide on what shoes to wear). Had another girl not also shown up to the same wrong address, I would’ve just given up and gone home. We ended up walking 30 mins to the correct location together. I forget how fun it can be to learn about a stranger’s totally parallel life – it was a brief taste of that real-world-connection that that feels lacking in remote work lately.
Anyway, since I started working mostly from home, putting on normal clothes feels like a skill I’ve forgotten how to do on weekdays. I genuinely miss the creative exercise of putting together outfits and utilizing more of my wardrobe beyond t-shirts and jeans. So I’ve been mulling over my style must-haves, maybe with the intention of going into the office or coworking more regularly, or simply making my own reasons to leave the house. Revamping my closet also means obsessively researching different options…can you tell what I’ve been on the hunt for?
I’m okay with not always knowing what to say or do
A lot has felt out of my immediate control this month. That means I’ve been exercising my ability to find what I can be in control of when old patterns of anxiety start to creep back into my body.
In an ongoing practice of being more in tune with my body and in control of my wellbeing, I decided to book a yoga class with a friend. We spend a Thursday evening laying in a dimly lit room, listening to an instructor named Willow guide us into a final savasana. My body feels heavy with residual feeling as I try to shut out every lingering thought; try to relax my ever-tense shoulders and let them sink infinitely downwards into some force of gravity. I think of my mom, a million miles away in Taipei, telling me about her daily earthing practice of standing barefoot on the ground. I guess this is my own way of earthing. I text her to pray for a friend, and she responds pray for the heartbroken. We do not speak of the war.
When I get home, I write down: it’s funny how grief can seem so foreign until it suddenly isn’t.
I love a little bit of boring
I spent a weekend in Alabama visiting a dear friend, which was so restorative for my soul. There’s something so special about immersing yourself into someone’s home – visiting their locales and meeting people that make up their world there. It’s the same reason I love errand hangs or wasting time in Target. (In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you…sigh!)
She sent me back to Brooklyn with a new set of amber glass mugs, which I’ve nested them onto their new shelf home. They’ve become my go-to for coffee in the morning, and the addition has spurred me to finish another few apartment improvements I’ve been meaning to do for months, like attaching a headphone hanger to tuck under my crowded desk. When the day-to-day starts to feel mundane, it really is these small but satisfying changes that truly make a difference. I also added a smart plug for my corner lamp so I can turn it off from my phone when I’m already in bed…a major win for nesting season ahead.
I’m more open to trying things I might be bad at
I learned how to play mahjong this month, and by that I mean I watched 2 youtube videos before going to an event to play with strangers. (I’m notoriously not a game person, but weirdly, I’ve also been playing Connections lately?) I’m more hesitant than I’d like when it comes to picking up new things…in case I don’t enjoy it, I’m bad at said thing, I can’t stick through with it, etc. But giving up doesn’t equate failure! – I’ll be repeating that to myself until the day I die.
Even with this newsletter, I’ve been reflecting on how I put this unspoken pressure on myself to write some monthly longwinded essay (hence sending this out on the last day of the month, oops). That pressure doesn’t really serve my true intention of writing about my life, so I’m trying to spend less time neurotically editing these pieces and more time simply writing. And figuring out how I want to actually hone my craft. Allowing this part of me to change, iterate, shift in its own way.
How do I want to end this decade? Leaning into all of the above. I think what my 20s have taught me best is that life is art – and I’ll honestly spend my whole life trying to make art that reflects it. In many ways, I’d like to end this decade the same way I started it: still trying my best.
On repeat
New music has been such a highlight this month, so it gets a full shoutout today. Troye Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other has been an every day album, this 1989 vault track but the 3:01 bridge in particular. On moody fall days, Mitski’s My Love Mine All Mine and Sufjan Steven’s Will Anyone Ever Love Me (big tears when reading up on the album tribute, too).
Thanks to global warming, my big fall fashion aspirations may not come to light until next month!! On cooler days, I’ve been almost exclusively wearing this one brown Old Navy zipup that I picked up from the sale section last year. Everyone needs a lazy-day fit…I’m just working on making it not my every-day fit.
Cutting it close this month, but we made it. Happy Halloween and bye ‘til November!