The first time I noticed that “my holidays” were different from “the holidays” or “their holidays” was May 2003. It was my first Mother’s Day without my mom. In class, we were given the assignment to create Mother’s Day cards to give our moms that weekend. My mom’s death was fresh, she’d been gone 4 months at that point, and saying, “Hey, I don’t think I can do that,” didn’t fit into my 10-year-old lexicon, so I did it.
Read MoreI was only 11 years old my first holiday season without my mom. As a result of my family and the culture they were raised in, there was no real space made to help guide me through those first holidays. When I was 21 years old and lost my grandma, I had a deeper understanding under my belt of what grief was and what it demanded of me.
During that first holiday season without her in 2014, I tried my best to find solace in places that made sense for me. I’ve always loved to find myself in books. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series for that exact reason - it was life-changing to me to see someone whose grief actually made them both more human and more magical all at once.
While the below reads aren’t necessarily the ones that guided me during my go arounds at the first holidays, it is the list I wish I had.
Read MoreI thrive off of people watching. It’s one of the top reasons I love to travel. It’s why working for myself has always worked for me.
The ability to jump from one coffee shop to another has never felt rootless, quite the opposite. For me, my lifestyle has grounded me in what’s important — my ability to notice the world. The last time I sat at a coffeeshop to work without any worry of COVID was in February when we spent most of it in London.
The last few days I’ve been extremely melancholic and just very aware that not only did I miss people watching and the freedom of working from anywhere, but I was suffering as a result of it.
Read MoreTomorrow (November 19th) is our 6 month anniversary with Chauncey as our third wheel, third roommate, third member of our little family. He is vivacious, hilarious, and a handful.
Looking back at the last 6 months, the word I would most use to describe this time in our lives would be “dynamic.” Any time we think that we have our handle on puppy parenthood there’s a new twist or mountain or behavior we have to help him unlearn or learn.
The draw for a puppy is the love you know that will unconditionally come with the little one. Chauncey is the cuddliest puppy that has ever been mine. I grew up with a Maltese who made it clear that she loved you, but who appreciated her personal space more than she wanted cuddles. Chauncey is the exact opposite. He wants to be on top of you all.the.time.
Read MoreThe anxiety was sitting in my throat, in my stomach and in the back of my eyes. I was choking on the words that would speak into existence what I was thinking - I was anxious because I felt guilty for being happy. I had unshed tears that spoke to the stress of being pulled in opposite directions — I was overwhelmed by the anxiety and sad that I felt this way in the first place. The pit in my stomach, this spoke to the reality that old habits die hard and the strong ties between my anxiety and my body were still there for however faint they’d been recently.
I was a conglomeration of feelings. In my mind was a woman with a shield in front of her face trying her best to ward the worst of this off. I journaled. I spoke positive affirmations at every threat to my happiness. I sought out manageability in all that felt unmanageable. I did what I know helps and then I ran out of things to do.
So, I sat.
Read MoreRecently I realized that I tend to read books in pairs. The habit is helpful in making sure that I don’t get bored halfway through and abandon a book. It also helps lighten the mood if the book I am reading is heavier or more dense.
In the case of my latest pairing I was pretty intentional. Going in to starting The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, I knew that Brown’s writing style would be story-led but also have a layer of research in it that could feel dense to me if I was only reading that. Enter: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
Read MoreDuring a Q+A a few weeks back someone asked me what the difference was between mental health and mental wellness.
In an effort to have something tangible to answer, I shared that mental health is something we all have (same as we do our physical health), but mental wellness comes down to intention, routines, and trial and error. Mental wellness is everything we know to do on a bad day to help us cope but it’s also the routines we discover through therapy, reading, or getting to know ourselves better.
Read MoreWe’ve officially been in Portland for almost four weeks now. Since then we’ve managed to buy so much and forget even more. I was making macaroni and cheese during our second week here and spent most of it jotting down all the kitchen items I’d realized I didn’t have to make mac and cheese with.
Given that this move is the first time I’ve ever left my hometown of NYC, for me it’s made up of a lot of firsts. It’s been a unique experience that it’s all also happening under the umbrella of a global pandemic because not only do we want to create a space that screams “comfy home”, but we also want to make it functional as a workspace.
Read MoreA few days before our flight from NYC to Portland I had it on my calendar to pay a visit to the cemetery.
My family bought a plot of land in an empty cemetery decades ago. The first person to be buried there from our family was my grandpa, a man I only know by name, but whose death is felt across generations. At 27 years old, I’ve found myself staring at open-ended questions like, “What is death?” and “Why do we do this one thing after someone dies?” and answering them with statements like, “I don’t know, I’m just starting to define it for myself.”
There were traditions I inherited from my grandma and the generations that came before her that didn’t fit me like they had fit their conservative, Catholic upbringing. I’d outgrown them or never actually grown into them, depending on who you asked. The cemetery though was one that I’d taken up as my own.
Read MoreSitting down to record a What Happened After podcast episode with Sarah Galvez was like sitting down with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. We talked through the reality of what “day to day” looks like on a campaign, how rapid the rapid fire response moment around the fly in the Vice Presidential debate actually was, but most importantly, how to make sure you feel empowered to GOTV this November.
I’m a big believer, like Sarah, that everyone has a sphere of influence they can be tapping ahead of November. I’m a bigger believer that most times what stops us from reaching out is how little we may believe in ourselves, our voices, or our ability to use the tools at our disposal. Knowing this, I specifically wanted to have a conversation with Sarah Galvez because in her role as Director of Social and Audience Development for Biden 2020’s campaign, her expertise gives all of us a starting point and honestly encouragement.
Read MoreI’m a big believer that building a self-care routine that makes sense for your life is way more important than buying one-off items that are on trend or only have a one-time use. For instance, I find that having a humidifier in your home that makes it easier for you to breathe can actually help your quality of life exponentially. It may not be the sexiest product, but in a time when we’re spending most of our days indoors and especially as we get closer to the drier, colder months, added items like a humidifier can be the difference-makers between a good day and a dreadful one.
I spent some time on Amazon searching for Prime Day deals that would add more to your days than just the adrenaline rush of buying something new (although, I admit there were a few items that did just that for me).
My goal when compiling this list rested on a few factors — price, long-term use potential, and where and how it could incorporate into your existing self-care routine or help you start a new one.
Read MoreWhen someone dies, you learn to fill gaps quickly. You learn to put something, anything, in the place of where that person was. It’s like a plug that fills the bathtub up — the water rising is warm and wonderful at first, exactly what you need it to be, but after a while, when you’re sitting there long enough, it gets cold and it overflows and it becomes less of where you want to be.
That’s how I can best describe a good chunk of my life until now. I wanted and tried so badly to keep the tub from overflowing and to believe that I was enjoying the cold water because I’d filled it with my own persistence, but I couldn’t and I wasn’t. I was drowning in an adulthood I stepped into too soon. I was drowning in a career I constantly had to hustle for. I was brought under water time and time again by a city that made me anxious and a role as the “responsible” one that made it impossible to breathe life into who I am when I’m not serving someone else or something bigger than myself.
Read MoreOur decision to move to Portland happened in between seasons. The days were getting warmer in New York City and by the second our space was slowly losing square footage to breathe. I’ve written about it before, but even though I knew that leaving NYC for a bit was in our future, I didn’t think Portland or 2020 were the when and the where. This move took us by surprise, but it also set me straight.
I knew it the moment we touched down at PDX and I saw all the green. It felt refreshing and revitalizing. On our drive into downtown, the roads were lined with trees that were so much bigger than I will ever be. I visited Columbus, Ohio once and loved it because when I stood amidst pine trees I felt human. I felt the most myself I’d felt up until then. The last few days, it’s been like I’m revisiting that feeling and also like I’m learning to keep it. Where New York makes you strive to be the biggest, shiniest human to ever be encountered, Portland humbles you in understanding that while you’re meant to grow, it’s also true that there will always be a tree that’s bigger than you and that’s okay.
Read MoreLast week I was sitting on the floor with papers and pictures spread out around me. In my mind I could see the playpen my mom used to park in front of the TV just a few feet away from where I was sitting.
As a toddler, I’d bounce along to Barney. Outside of the playpen, I used the floor as my training ground for crawling and learning to walk.
As a kid, I learned about real estate and the importance of Park Place while playing Monopoly with my cousin and aunt on that floor.
Building piles and pushing memories around on this floor to make room for more has always felt normal and like home. Even though last week didn’t look much different, it was. I was trying to find my birth certificate and social security card because coming home here was no longer going to be an easy, viable option. I couldn’t keep splitting myself between two homes because in a few weeks, my boyfriend, my puppy, and I would be hopping on a plane and moving across the country.
Read MoreBack at the beginning of the summer my MacBook Pro’s screen randomly broke. I was in the middle of working on something when the screen went black, but I could still hear the computer itself running. I felt the anxiety, frustration, and stress work its way up from my chest straight to my throat.
I broke down in tears as my boyfriend tried to figure out what was wrong. Ultimately, there were solutions in place that would make it possible for me to not miss a beat when it came to work or life. I knew this and still I could not undo the spiral I was already stepping into.
Read MoreMy head was wrapped around writing something else to share today. It’s a list I’ll share tomorrow about all the financial resources I’m turning to in order to better understand my finances and my own money story. With that post it’s like I wanted to skip to the good stuff without giving you context of how I got there in the first place. I wanted to jump to the part where I tell you about all the ways I’m solving the reality without telling you first about the reality. This is a personal blog though and it warrants personal stories.
My stomach is turning because vulnerability on the internet is still hard no matter how many times you jump into the deep end.
I grew up surrounded by scarcity mindset and consistently being encouraged to embrace risk aversion because in my family’s eyes there was no reward at the end of risk, there was just pain and loss of what we did have, which as an immigrant family was always barely just enough.
Read MoreMy boyfriend and I both run our own businesses as content creators. We’ve always been close thought partners as creatives and bouncing ideas off of each other has always been fun but during quarantine we took our brainstorming partnership to the next level. Before February 2020, we would typically come to each other with ideas that were already half-baked, but now we start with empty post-it notes, sharpies, and a blank wall.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your journey with brainstorming or a seasoned expert, I hope this breakdown helps spark some new ideas or ways to approach ideas.
Read MorePlanning a big move in the middle of a pandemic is not how I had foreseen us moving. I always thought that if we left the city, it would be a moment for us. We would be able to have some version of a going away party. We would have a list of things to do in NYC and wouldn’t have to consider what was open for business and what wasn’t. But like most things in 2020, moving has required us to adjust to the reality we actually live in, instead of the one we wish we did.
While we don’t leave for a few more weeks, what has helped us not feel completely rattled by our circumstances is how much research we’ve been doing about big moves in general and big moves during a pandemic in specific.
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