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Before This All Happened
Content warning: This post includes talk of cancer and my mom’s very rough hospital stay. Before this all happened, I won a trip to Finland. I was standing in the living room when I swiped down on my phone’s email app and the subject “Helsinki Happiness Hacks Awaits!” appeared on my screen. The contest I’d…
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And Hey, the World Still Spins
I find it hard to believe that not all writers are secret catastrophists. I can’t be the only one who fears that the misused words and typos will come banging on my apartment door to haunt me like Jacob Marley. I’ve spent the past week throwing my causal daily dose of anxiety toward the upcoming…
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Losing Sleep Over It
An early draft of my memoir manuscript started with the sentence, “I come from a long line of women who don’t sleep.” It then stretched back to the prophetic dreams of my great-grandmother, my grandma sitting up all hours of the night, my mom feeding the cats at 2 AM, and eventually to my sister…
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Leaving 80th Street
The first time Ben and I visited our 80th Street apartment, we didn’t have a lot of hope for the place. The rent was just $50 more a month than an apartment we’d looked at in a much less expensive neighborhood uptown, so I said something like, “I’m sure it’ll be a dump,” as we…
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45 Days
It’s been a real minute since I last posted. So, hello. The only writing I’ve been doing since the start of the summer is the kind I get paid to do, which mostly involves explaining how to hire a moving truck (ironically, as you will soon read) and how much it costs to renovate your…
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A Note for the Hopeless
Around the end of June 2020, Ben and I heard a group of people singing “Happy Birthday” outside our window. We live at the top of a fifth-floor walkup on 80th Street in Manhattan, and our apartment looks out onto hundreds of stranger’s back patios and fire escapes. The first few nights we heard the…
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The Third Time I Walked Into Spain
When I woke up in Portugal for the last time as a hiker, the aroma of brewing coffee wafted in from the common room. Someone out there is my true hero, I thought. The rest of the albergue was starting to roll out of bed and the familiar sound of backpacks being packed and teeth…
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A Quick Rant About Socks and Toxic Masculinity
I stopped off at a gift shop on my way home this afternoon to look at something small for Ben. We don’t really make a huge deal out of Valentine’s Day, but I thought I’d grab a card or something else silly. There’s a company that makes these comedic socks — something Ben often wears…
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The Stories We Don’t Tell
When I was a teenager, my mom and I used to sit on the front porch as she’d tell me–usually with a touch of our family’s famous dark sense of humor–about her many brushes with danger. There was the time, while living in late-1970’s NYC, that a man followed her off the subway. When realizing…
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Finding Organic Structure
Two fellow writer friends recently inquired about how my book was going. It’s a legit question—eight months ago I flaunted online that I’d written 85 pages of said manuscript before going totally silent about it. Since then, I’ve barely been able to look at it. It actually took writing 85 pages about my Caminos and…
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Maybe There Will Be Cupcakes 