Happy belated birthday, Spinning Visions.

3 years?

3 years ago, I was finishing up undergrad in San Diego, writing—incessantly and uninhibitedly—and skateboarding through warm, sunken sunlight to work at the local coffee shop. I felt so out of place at the time, so sure that I belonged elsewhere. And I did. There was indeed a whole life waiting for me elsewhere.

But not yet.

That February, I was California through and through. It was in my hair and on my skin. It was the amber filter through which I saw the world. My love for it was the strongest I knew. It would be the last February where any of these things would be true.

BROOKLYN, 3 Years Later

3 years later, I am waking up to fresh snow falling outside my window, blanketing Brooklyn in white. I pour my coffee while watching my neighbors shovel their sidewalks and walk their kids to school in the tiniest snow boots you have ever seen.

Even after all of this time, even after the coldest and longest winter New York has seen in decades, winter still renders me a child.

I am still amazed by the concept of snow and how completely it fails to prevent life from continuing. I came here from a sun-drenched world where people stayed home in the rare event of a little rain. And here is this little girl, trudging through a foot of snow to go to school. And here I am, clacking away loudly as ever on my keyboard, barely realizing that I have made a little life around the thing I love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to love what you do without letting it consume you—what it means to love anything that way. Whether that’s smart, or foolish.

When you’re a teenager, everything is about identity. You were what you loved. The Marías, Joan Didion, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” stellar fusion, funky hats, history, art museums at closing, and acting older than you were.

You reach out and grab onto these random things like life savers that will keep you from drowning in the thrash of adolescence.

They lure you in with the promise of identity, which, in turn, promises seriousness. A real place in the world—which, when you are that young, you still believe you will randomly secure at any moment. As if belonging is a thing you get to step into like your first apartment and own forever.

I loved my things. My books, my artists, my museum pass. I loved to sit on desks and tell my best friend about this podcast or that article. I loved being the cliché of every kid in every coming-of-age movie ever made. Indulging that cliché felt like the only way to find your way in the world.

I remember taking ceramics my senior year of high school and thinking that selfhood was like a project.

You start with a lump of clay and you get to turn it into anything you want. Every day, we would come in and chisel and roll and trim away at that lump until it resembled something. And then, we would mist it with water and cover it up and there it would be the next day, waiting for us to define it further. To make it more our own.

I thought identity could be just like that.

I do still believe in that. I do still stand by the ongoing labor of excavating one’s identity as a teenager, like life depends on it. I remember feeling that it did.

But, as with most things these days, I’m rethinking it. For, as with most things those days, through no fault of their own, the ceramics theory was incomplete.

Adulthood—real, working, tax-paying, life-planning adulthood—has been a shock in just one way for me. Identity is not one project. It’s all of them.

You can work really hard on a ceramic piggy bank for weeks on end. You can smooth every edge, etch every detail, and plan what color it will be after it gets fired into permanence. You can mist it with that spray bottle and carefully place it under that tarp in your locker and then a pandemic can hit and keep you from ever getting to hold it in your hands again.

Someone else will come along and cut the lock off and throw it away and you will hold just the memory of what it looked like. Of what you wanted it to be.

And you’ll start again.

And again.

And again.

I wanted so badly for identity to be one thing back then. Like a piece of clay getting fired in a kiln, I wanted it to be something I could solidify. Something I could perfect and preserve forever. But it’s not.

And what a lovely shock that is.