notes on being here anyway

Kendra said I need to write more personal essays. I said no. But then I remembered that I genuinely have no choice but to listen to her so like. Here the fuck we go I guess:

The first quarter of 2025 felt like wandering through a fog I didn’t know how to escape. Not a damn thing lined up, everything was heavy and I felt like I was moving through someone else’s life in slow motion. Mornings bled into afternoons where I barely noticed the sunlight or the smell of my apartment. Days stretched long & monotonous and nothing seemed to fit. Very important plans fell through. Opportunities evaporated. I was in a misaligned relationship where the ending left me dazed as all hell, cautious and incredibly reluctant to let anyone near me ever again. And I carried the residue of the life-altering depression I’d fallen into the year before.

Life existed. But it didn’t feel like mine.

I moved through the months observing myself from a distance: muted, reluctant, waiting for something I couldn’t even name. I followed advice I didn’t remotely agree with. I kept moving because the world moves even if you don’t. And in those spaces between, I felt the absence of myself. The part of me that had once created, noticed, wrote for joy was nowhere to be found. They had gone quiet … buried under habit, survival and hesitation. I would watch myself from the other side of my own eyes. Scrolling through my phone, thinking about what I should do, what I should want, what I should become. And I would wonder if I’d ever feel like I belonged inside my own life again.

Fast forward to August & I’m deadass on a plane to start new in New York City. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise for anyone who had spent longer than twelve minutes with me over the last twenty plus years. I didn’t move for fireworks or dramatic reinvention. I moved because the stubborn part of me that had been quiet for too long refused to stay in half-life any longer.

I arrived in a city that didn’t give a fuck whether I sank or swam and I was immediately aware of how much weight I’d been carrying. The streets were crowded and loud as all hell. And for the first time in a very long time, I wanted to be part of that pulse. I just didn’t know how. I walked for hours on end … tracing the lines of buildings & pavement, noticing the way sunlight slanted through skyscraper gaps, how steam rolled out of subway grates, how people passed by like they were moving through their own fogs. I let the chaos remind me that I was finally awake. It was terrifying & necessary, exhilarating & disorienting … and it felt like I had arrived at the place where I could finally meet myself again. It wasn’t until those first weeks — navigating unfamiliar streets, sleeping in a room with no history — that I remembered wanting to create for the sake of creating, noticing for the sake of noticing, making for the sake of feeling. The thrill of starting over hit me like a jolt.

So now it’s 2026. Which feels fake in the way only time can — accelerated, bruised, unmanageable. The world is loud with collapse. Everything feels provisional. There’s no clean slate waiting for me, no promise that staying present will make anything easier. If anything, it will make it harder. Feeling tends to do that. Attention tends to do that. Staying costs something. I don’t think this year will “fix me”. I don’t think it will fix anything. The machinery will keep grinding. People will keep hurting each other, on purpose and by accident. Systems will continue to fail the most vulnerable while pretending that’s just how things are. There will be mornings where dread arrives before coffee, where the news presses its thumb into my chest, where my old instincts — distance, numbness, retreat — start whispering again. I know myself well enough to know that dissociation has always been an option. A tempting one. It’s efficient. It dulls the noise. It makes survival look tidy. But it also erases me in the process. And I don’t want to live above my life anymore, watching it play out like a story happening to someone else.

I want to be inside it. Even when it’s ugly. Especially then.

I want to feel the weight of my body moving through the city, the ache of caring when it would be easier not to, the embarrassment of wanting things I can’t guarantee I’ll get. I want to feel the vulnerability of being seen without armor, without irony, without an exit strategy already planned. I want to make things that don’t rescue me, only reveal me. Work that doesn’t prove anything, but tells the truth as cleanly as I know how. I want relationships that aren’t spectacular but are durable. Where care is practiced quietly. Where love isn’t a performance or a promise made in the heat of the moment … but a series of small, steady choices. Chosen again when it’s boring, chosen again when it’s inconvenient, chosen again when fear would rather rewrite the story & leave first.

The world is terrifying. That part isn’t changing. It’s unstable, unjust and increasingly indifferent to who gets crushed in the process. Staying awake inside it isn’t noble … it’s dangerous. It means accepting that to feel joy, I will also feel grief, fear, rage and longing without any guarantee they will be evenly distributed or neatly resolved. I don’t want to survive by shrinking, by floating, by keeping myself just out of reach of my own life. I don’t want to watch myself diminish in real time and call it resilience. I’ve done that already. It kept me alive. It also cost me years.

If this world is built to exhaust me into silence, then I will live loudly, visibly and without permission until it breaks its teeth on my staying.