Howdy.

It’s been a while, I know. I hope that you are all well! I am sitting in the glow of my laptop as fall leaves dance through the streets and a pumpkin candle flickers. There is soup on the stove and a chilling wind howling in the distance. It’s autumn in New York and I have waited my whole life for it. But more on that later.

Here is a rambling personal update, some notes from studying life, some thoughts on love, and a humble ask for all of you.

STUBBORN DREAMS

Where to start.

There was a chilling sensation creeping through my bones.

It would blow through my body like an occasional breeze, reminding me that there had been something else.

Something I had wanted more than anything that I could feel myself slowly, almost imperceptibly, letting go of. I was working a great, albeit temporary, job as a teacher and meeting the love of my life. There was not time enough to worry about the hundreds of editorial job rejections filling up my inbox. I had had enough of rejection. Over a year of sending qualified applications into what began to feel like a void made me want to give up. It did not seem like it was meant to be and what was more heartbreaking was that I was slowly beginning to be okay with that. I was getting comfortable.

And then I got laid off.

My company let me go and there I was, face to face with going after that stubborn dream again. I remember hearing once that you will keep not getting what you think you want until you go after what is truly meant for you. That there is something you are meant to do and that, if you pay attention, the world will push you right towards it. It will lead you to the water.

Maybe they had to make budget cuts and maybe I was getting dangerously comfortable in a position that I never dreamed of. Maybe it was a bad break and maybe it was the best one. Maybe all of these things can be true.

Regardless, this experience has made something so clear to me. Something that someone else pointed out.

TO STUDY LIFE

You study life.

My boyfriend recently told me this and it hit me in the kind of way that only someone else’s observations about you can.

He explained that I go out and observe the world, really paying attention to it, and then I come home and think about it and see what I can learn. That I do that with everything.

I realize in the wake of occurrences such as these that he is right. For by all means, this lay off is quite catastrophically terrible. I am 22 and unemployed in New York City. My 4.0 and college degree seem to do nothing for me here and that is disillusioning to say the least.

But I am so fascinated by the whole thing. I am so intrigued. How does it feel? How does it feel to have your one of your biggest fears materialize in the palm of your hand? This lay off is a wound and all I want to do is probe it. I want to learn everything I can from it. I want to measure the impact and weigh out the loss. I want to feel everything and see how okay it will all be anyway. I want to see how I am going to do this, anyway.

TAKING NOTES

I believe that there is meaning to everything.

I was told a lot of rather cliché things as a child but that is the one that stuck. I believed it before I had any reason to and now, after collecting years of proof, I believe it all the more. It is no less than a fact to me that if I were to fold the dimensions of time onto a single plane, I could walk across it, into the future, and see so clearly why this happened. I can’t do that. But the strange surety of it brings me small offerings of peace. Whether or not I can see it yet, there is meaning here. So much of it. And more than anything, I just want to study it.

Here is what I have found so far:

For one, much like getting out of a relationship you knew was never fully right for you, I feel completely myself again. I am no longer contorting myself into a position that was slowly allowing me to give up on what I really want.

Second, I am oddly excited. As drained and disillusioned and frustrated as I am with my pretty impressive resume repeatedly failing me, the dreamer in my can’t help but simultaneously harbor a shred of anticipation. One door closing and all that.

Third, I understand what matters. I didn’t so much lose my job as I did a job. There are a million more. But there aren’t a million more people like the ones I have in my life and there certainly is not another city like this one. After losing that job, I spent the weekend with my boyfriend, strolling through Central Park and making dinner and listening to jazz. I would look at him and feel the world moving around us and everything else would just fall away. I understood so clearly in those moments what mattered and what didn’t.

And finally, that something good is already happening. I am writing prolifically again. I remembered that I started this blog as nothing more than a hopeless endeavor to study life. I wanted to document my experience of the world and use prose as a means of excavating and preserving everything I could from it. I have stopped doing that publicly recently.

Some of you have reached out, asking if I am okay, asking how I am liking fall in NYC, asking if I will post again. And to all of this I say yes. If anything, I am more than okay. I’m happy. I am living my life in real time and not being hard on myself if I don’t write about every moment of it.

Yet to be fair, I have been writing. A lot. I just haven’t been posting. Truthfully, life has felt too sweet to share. Everything I write is either about how much I love New York or how much I love this person that I have met and all of the beautiful things we do. That makes for some pretty nauseatingly sweet prose and that has never been my style. I suppose it makes sense then that a post about something terrible happening has seemed to write itself in the immediate wake of it’s occurrence.

But I suppose, given the circumstances, now might be the time to tell you those sweet things too. Balance and what not.

THE SWEET THINGS

Aside from needing a new job, life has never felt so drenched in honey.

I never thought I would feel the kind of love that I do now. It is everything that anyone ever told me love would be and a million more things that extend beyond the realms of what can be logically explained.

My life changed in a instant. I met this person and just knew that nothing would ever be the same. There was a strange sensation of grief somewhere within those first few days and weeks. A letting go of life as it has always been and a stepping into life as I somehow just knew it would always now be.

You spend twenty-two years dreaming, getting rudely awoken all the time by the wrong people, mistaking them for reality and your dreams for delusions. And then one day you meet the right one. You meet on a corner in Brooklyn and none of that matters anymore. It just doesn’t.

I never thought I would fall in love like this. I thought I would fall for someone slowly, over time, only to realize it abruptly one day like all the movies taught me.

But it was simply right there. I walked right into it and immediately found home.

And that is where I have been.

AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

As for fall, yes.

Yes, I am visibly awestruck by the absolute beauty that is fall in New York. I spent my whole life in California, dreaming every October of the day I would finally be here to see all of this. It has not let me down. The world is cranberry-red and burnt-orange and banana-yellow. A cacophony of color crunches under each foot everywhere you go. There is a chill to the air instead of a sweltering heat and that is not even to mention the poetry of the whole thing. The poetry of arriving here in the dead of winter and having watched the world cycle itself three times over since then, perpetually changing in motions so graceful that it has all appeared to be nothing short of an effortless dance.

I get to wear sweaters without dying of heat and the pumpkins are not rotting. Kids will come out in their costumes tomorrow night and it will all look like how I always thought Halloween should but never quite did in California.

So yes, I am, to say the least, enjoying my first autumn in New York.

DEAR READER

Lastly, and I cannot explain to you how sweet it feels to finally have written all of this, I am asking something of you. A few of you have been very kindly sponsoring this blog since I first introduced the option last year. Your contributions are never lost on me and I am so grateful to each of you.

In light of not just getting laid off, but really in the endless pursuit of one day turning this space into a much larger community, I am asking again for you support. If all of my regular readers signed up for a monthly subscription of just three or four dollars, it would go a long way in keeping the site up and running, and the dream of the whole thing alive. Below I have attached an easy way to sign up. Simply select what works for you if you wish to become a supporter.

Regardless, I am so grateful for and in awe of the community that has formed around the idea I had one day to create this blog. Whether you sign up or not, I feel so lucky to have all of you as readers. Your comments and emails always always make my day. I value this community deeply.

That being said, thank you for being a part of it. I am, as always, excited to see what will come next.

Love, M.

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