Today feels like crawling into my dad’s minivan after field hockey practice, honeycrisp apple in hand from my teammate’s organized mom. She was the kind of mom who had a beautiful tote full of beautiful apples and a white smile and who made me feel, in some way, underserving of her apple. Like she meant them for the other girls but not me necessarily, I wasn’t close enough to her daughter to take a honeycrisp… View Post

I’ve spent the summer in a weird state of nostalgia. I like to think I’m the kind of person who doesn’t take major life events seriously — it’s just a ceremony, it’s just a piece of paper — but it turns out I am the opposite of that. I take them way too seriously! And now my days are dotted with flashbacks, some are familiar memories I play back often, some are completely new ones… View Post

When I saw the date at work this morning, I exclaimed, “wow it’s already mid-August!?” to my colleague, then followed up with, “Thank God, I’m over summer.” I told a friend I was over summer a few days ago too, saying that I’m not a summer person at all. It’s a different tune than the one I sing in March and April, which is shouts and cries of excitement that the sun is coming out… View Post

I want to paint gold stars on my bedroom walls. I painted them a dark navy when I moved into my new apartment in June. They had been gray. Or was it cream? I wanted them navy. I thought I wanted them to be white, like every apartment vision board algorithmically calculated for a young woman in her 20s told me I did, but then I saw a photo on Pinterest of deep navy walls… View Post

My anxiety is like a… Bull. Some days, I ride the bull flawlessly, like some Western bull-riding celebrity I’ll never be able to name because bull-riding celebrities don’t become famous in Buffalo, N.Y. I grip on, face every challenge like an expert and even find enjoyable exhilaration in the journey. That can’t be what riding a bull is like most of the time, though, and neither is that what anxiety is usually like for me.… View Post