There’s mini-movies happening all around, opening paragraphs unfolding before me. A couple and their rambunctious dog blur together in a three-way wrestling match. Two shirtless men circle each other as they toss a frisbee to-and-fro. They’re literally on hoverboards - aren’t those extinct? There’s an octopus fluttering overhead. I blink and it’s gone. It’s 8 p.m. on a June night and I wonder how anyone could ever feel alone in New York City in summer.

Real New Yorkers love to hate on the city they swear they’ll never leave. This week the weather tipped into 90 and the complaints rose concurrently - it’s a swamp, it’s a dumpster, the crowds are out of control. When I first moved, they warned me that winter was rough, but June - August were the months I should really anticipate with dread. You know you’ve met a true local when they talk about fleeing upstate to get away from the summer buzz. Not me. I’m a phony. You can find me right here.

I landed in New York nearly two years ago, fresh off 27 years of dreaming that one day I’d call this place home. People say the initial moments of a romance are when the ardor is strongest. For the first months of me and NYC’s acquaintance, I was petrified of the place. I’d read news stories and spiral into anxiety. I could barely ride the subway alone. A weekend trip took me out of the city and I audibly exhaled relief when we left the airspace. The place I dreamed of calling home was my living nightmare. Some friends came to visit in December, ripe with city excitement and the joy of being back together - I wept on train platforms and snapped at them when they complained of tiredness. I couldn’t stand the city, but couldn’t bear anyone else uttering a word against it. Everyday felt like running a marathon without a course, exhausting myself with no end in sight. I stumbled through winter and told friends that Grant and I would move back home before our lease was up.

Looking back, I can’t tell you the moment when hope flared again, or when I felt the first crush of affection for our adopted home. All I know with assurance is that by mid-August my husband and I wandered through the park, fireflies lighting our path home, and promised New York another year.

My first summer saved me from my worst fear: that New York, the city of my hopes and dreams, was not for me. Nothing changed except the length of days. Calendar pages flipped over themselves and the season descended like oxygen to my joy-deprived mind. Ice-covered sidewalks were replaced by the ferry to Rockaway and a baby bump on the beach. I became a rabid fan of THE NEW YORK LIBERTY. Work events became the source of magic: sailboats around New York harbor, front-row seats to Shakespeare in the Park, spritzes at an underground magic show. I took daily walks to Sheep’s Meadow to watch the locals drape themselves across the lawn like some George Seurat painting. My baby paddled my stomach with delight as we watched Christopher Jackson serenade the Yankees fans with the national anthem, and kicked just as enthusiastically as I sang “It’s Quiet Uptown” all the way home.

New York is an impossible place to live. It’s frightfully expensive, overcrowded, and structured to keep you striving: no AC, no easy visits to the grocery store, no laundry in-unit. If you want an orderly life, you should not move to NYC.

But if you want to taste impossible, then come try New York City in the summer. On first glance, you’ll be blinded by sunlight refracting off the skyscrapers and heavy with summer heat. Let your eyes adjust, wipe the sweat from your brow, and focus. Magic floats in the air, crackling like a summer thunderstorm. Can you sense it? It’s close - lean in and take a bite.

Anything can happen during summer. Maggie Rogers makes hyper-meta t-shirts referencing her own song and her Knicks obsession, and sells them by herself out of a french restaurant in the West Village. The World Cup descends on the country and friends come to town. Olivia Rodrigo films her music video in my neighborhood; I’m so delighted by this that I force my boss to watch the video during our weekly call. My husband and I leave a concert at Madison Square Garden and, predictably, the entire crowd chants “Go New York, Go New York, Go”. I don’t have the heart to tell them that we can’t afford tickets to the game. I’ll invite them to the lawn outside Sheep’s Meadow instead. The projector is set up, chatter floats my way, and the neighbors have brought chips. Tip-off in ten.

In summer, the city gives us its magic and we offer our own in return. We write frequently, invite our family to visit, and host parties on rooftops, soaking in the June air. Our skin is slick with sweat, or hope, but we’re brimming over with it. Summer reminds us why we live here in the first place. It’s impossible, but beneath the distress is buried gold. So we solider through another winter - how could we ever leave? Another glorious summer is coming.

In the spirit of letting nothing go to waste, I present to you an I essay I started months ago when pregnancy was drawing to a close. Now my baby naps as I polish past words and second-guess every move I make on Canva. I need cross-training now more than ever to remind myself that creativity is a muscle like any other: it’ll atrophy if left untouched, but a little bit of exertion goes a long way.

Flash back. My mother-in-law keeps saying I’ll know the baby’s on the way when my energy comes back. If superstition holds, then she’s going to arrive any day now because I am ENERGIZED - more so than any 38-weeks pregnant person has the right to be. My physical limits are firmly in place - an 30-extra pounds will do that to you - but my mental energy is on a fixed upward trajectory.

I’m sure I could do a lot with this extra energy that would be deeply productive. I could prep my baby’s crib, read some parenting books, work on getting everything in place for work before I go on maternity leave. Instead I sit, hunched on the cold wooden floors of my apartment, and cut felt paper into tiny triangles. You see, I’m making a banner. It’ll look like pumpkin pie slices. I’m still debating if it should be two-tiered or just one, but it’ll be a banner, and it’ll be glorious. It’s pointless, and frivolous, and oh so fun. When I finish my banner, I’ll get to work on the ornaments I’m making my book club for Christmas. Hold on for just a second - I think my pumpkin cream cheese cinnamon rolls have finished proofing. Let me pop those in the oven and I’ll be right back. Five-month time jump.

Where was I? Oh yes, I’m still crafting. And baking. And making a collage of photos from a trip I took six months ago. And spending a lot of time on things that aren’t moving the needle forward in any discernible way. But like I said, I have energy. I feel creatively alive and awake and directed, and I am giving in to the impulse, less concerned with the output than the exercise itself.

Last year I ran a marathon, and I spent ample hours training for those infamous 26.2 miles. What I didn’t anticipate was the other practice hours needed if I wanted to avoid a pulled muscle on race day. I did yoga and lifted weights and practiced hill sprints, all in the name of holistically preparing my body for the run ahead.

My bursts of randomized creativity are reminiscent of the cross-training one does to be a better runner. If I want to be better at my primary medium, writing, then I need to cross-train my muscles of awe, inspiration, and creativity for them to function optimally when it’s go-time.

Shauna Niequst, my original personal essay hero, writes an excellent essay on inspiration in her book I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet. Her argument that “Inspiration is [her] responsibility. Inspiration is part of the job description” has stuck with me for years. My typical routine is to wait impatiently for inspiration to hit before I stumble groggily to my computer, hoping something profound will then emerge from hands that creak from lack of use. I’ll stare blankly at my computer wondering if I remember how to string sentences together. In this scenario, inspiration has not visited me recently, and I’m unsure how to interact with its new offering.

Instead of this familiar path, I’m trying to take Shauna’s advice, not just to heart, but also to my hands. I’m fervently seeking inspiration, flipping over couch cushions and turning my phone off and staring down the spring blooms, hopeful that in searching and beholding, I will put myself in the path of inspiration. Once found, what I do with this inspiration will not be linear - be inspired, write Substack essay, repeat - but delightfully chaotic. I’ll watercolor like nobody’s business and plan parties that no one asked me to, all in the name of cross-training creativity. When I sit down to write, I want my creative energy to be limber with frequent use, so my hands can take-off at a dead sprint.

Not everyone necessitates a creative training regimen. I have friends for whom ideating, and the corresponding production, is as compulsive as breathing. In any unoccupied moment they’re dreaming or designing their next undertaking. I’ve quizzed them endlessly about this: how do they find the time, why do they choose certain endeavors over others, how do they weigh the costs of their creativity upon their finances and energy, etc. They usually stare at me blankly when I ask. For them, these questions never come up. They dream because they want to. They experiment simply because it sounds fun. For me, whose brain craves rationale and justification for the ways I spend time, this is a wholly dissatisfying answer. I envy their proclivity to create without needing to justify its worthwhileness to themselves. This tendency to demand justification only increases as pulls on my time increase: a husband who deserves attention, a baby that can’t move from point A to point B without me, a job to which I will soon return post-maternity leave. The administration of life stays and creativity gets left behind, no room for it in the car.

It’s usually only on vacation that I can uncage my mind from this administrative bent. Here’s an excerpt of a journal entry I wrote in Portland, Oregon a few years back:

“I’m obsessed with traveling because of how I feel when I’m in a new place: open, perceptive, creative, a good listener. I linger over walks, take side streets, meander - so much meandering. I’ll tune my ears to the birds, explore concepts I’m curious about, and let my hands trail over plants - I can still smell the lambs’ ear whose scent clings to my left-hand fingers. There’s an alertness to being that I enter while traveling; what if this isn’t about Portland? Or New York, or Paris, or Maine? What if this is curiosity stoked, listened to, given space to graze? The Portland Japanese Garden was planned with such purpose; the walkways were built wobbly and helter-skelter to force a slow and attentive pace. What if my mindset at home was transformed from a highway to a Japanese garden? Throwing out efficiency to welcome in freedom of thought. I don’t want this version of my mind restricted to fifteen days of PTO. Its scent intoxicates me - I want more.”

For me, creativity takes obedience. It is not effortless, but it is worthwhile. As much as that graphic for my book club or two-tiered lemon cake can seem time-wasteful, the practice of creation shapes me into the person I want to be. It leaves me wide-eyed with appreciation, open to interruption, and grateful once again. Though I could be doing the dishes while my daughter sleeps, instead I come to the keyboard and let my collected thoughts spill over. Empty of ideas, I’m heavy with joy. When she awakes, I’ll be able to look at her with fresh eyes, eager to waste more time together.

For our sake, I’m committed to the training regimen that leaves my limbs shaking and muscles aching. I waste time on seemingly random pursuits that teach my brain to think not in terms of efficiency, but in terms of delight. This path of creativity is wobbly and helter-skelter, but the walk is something to behold.

I’m getting my hair cut on Tuesday. 9am to be exact. I’ll get it cut at the length I typically do, with a few more layers since my hair feels a little flat currently. I am moderately low-maintenance, so this will be the first time I’ve had it cut since November. All of this is mundane and a bit boring, except for one detail. This will be the first time getting my hair cut since my daughter was born in December. This means that my normal, run of-the-mill haircut, will be called “my mom haircut”.

People will see my 3-month-old in her carrier and smile, while waving a knowing hand at my shortened locks - “She’s just starting to grab, right?” I know this to be true because it is true of most other elements of my life right now: my backpack is now lovingly referred to as my mom bag. “Mom’s night out” is the new shorthand for cocktails with friends or a workout class. I recently celebrated my 29th birthday and 90% of texts wished me a happy year, while referencing my new status as a mother.

While I often grate against this typecasting, it’s comical in its truth. I think about my time as apportioning pie pieces to different things: the largest slice of pie to work, a slightly smaller section to family and friends, some slivers for church, working out, volunteering. Having a baby does not redivide the pie to accommodate a new piece; it completely changes the flavor. I cannot separate myself from my identity as her mother. Her and I are woven together in a lattice crust, the strands hopelessly tangled.

Back to that haircut: I’m going at 9am because that’s when my daughter’s schedule allows me to. She eats at 7am, 10:30am, 1:30pm, 4:30pm, and finally 7:30pm, before going to sleep. I repeat these numbers like a mantra and plan our lives accordingly. Since I’m on maternity leave, I constantly tell people “my schedule is wide-open. Let’s do whatever works for you!” This statement is a lie. My schedule is technically freer than it’s ever been, but she fills every moment of it with her tiny, perfect, all-encompassing presence. If she’s around, then I’m aware of her. Even as she sleeps in the other room, my hands type frantically to finish this essay, while my ears strain to hear any peep that say she might be stirring. Dust-mote thoughts of her swirl wildly in my "free as a bird” brain.

I started a Substack with the hopes of writing more weeks before I gave birth. Logging off my work computer on her due date, I rejoiced that I would have five free months ahead: ample time to dream and write and do and go. I made lists of everything I wanted to accomplish while I was ‘hopelessly bored’ on maternity leave. Instead, I rock, and soothe, and soak in the awe-inducing, and all-consuming moments of her life. When she was born, my brain shattered into a million pieces, captivating in its beauty when looked at as a stained-glass whole, but hopeless to make sense of when grasping a singular thought.

I’m trying to make sense of how to write with these fragments. Most of the interpersonal aspects of myself have returned after birth: I can connect with friends, have a date night with my husband where references to our daughter number in the single digits, and enjoy time with my girl. At the same time, I struggle to regain the parts of myself that rely on an idle mind and free time to make sense of it. I’ve started essay after essay over the last few months, but I feel like I only have my thoughts for a moment before they’re pulled away in the wind. No matter what spare moments I have, they never feel like enough consecutive time to accurately capture what I’m trying to say. And why write if I can’t be precise? What is a writer if not someone obsessed with semantics?

On the other hand, I recently read The Brothers Karamazov with my book club. While doing background research on Dostoevsky, I discovered that he was poor for most of his life, which necessitated him to be constantly publishing to stay afloat. His writing was urgent, often unpolished, and even his masterpieces were unperfected. While he sought excellence, the circumstances of life necessitated that he settle for good enough.

Writing anything in this current moment feels like proclaiming good enough over my fragmented words, trusting that something is better than nothing at all. Writing during the 1.5 hours - or hour, or 30-minutes - I have before my daughter wakes up is a move towards making beauty out of dusty glass. Dostoevsky I am not, but a mother I am, and mothers are exceptional at making beauty out of whatever scraps they have.

Though I chafe at how motherhood has a habit of engulfing, I also rejoice. My identity as a motherhood is only a fraction of me, but you cannot know me without knowing about her. Though I’ve cut my hair to this length many times before, for this season, it’s my mom haircut and that's a beautiful thing.

I think, at the dawn of a new endeavor, that you’re supposed to explain what you have to offer. In my college journalism courses, you’d get chided for not having a clear vision or perspective, for creating something too niche, or presenting a “good” that did not fit into the broader story you were selling. Better to whittle your offering down into something that could be summarized in the length of an elevator ride.

That’s part of what paralyzed me about starting a Substack. Last fall, my dear friend Courtney and I started meeting bi-weekly at the New York Public Library to work on our individual writing goals. Mine was, and continues to be, to create a Substack that both facilitated and encouraged my desire to fall back in love with writing. The problem emerged when I tried to pin down what I wanted to write about: I wanted to write about everything! Not only essays born out of my subway musings, but about books I loved, posts on how to curate the perfect New York itinerary, and meditations on the finiteness of the human experience. I wanted to cover every topic that inspired me; for both good and bad, that array was wide and oft-disconnected.

“No one wants to read that,” my mind decried. “A platform without theme is pointless,” the brain chimed in. “It sounds kind of fun” my heart thrummed, almost imperceptibly beneath the noise. My fingers tingled, thinking about the writerly joys I hadn’t allowed myself to experience since I was a kid . At that time, only child that I was, writing was my sacred companion, my best-kept secret, the facilitator that allowed my scattered mind to make sense of itself. Some people write because they crave world-building or character creation. I wrote for the love of language itself, the delicious feeling of perfectly encapsulating a feeling in a phrase, and of eeking beauty out of the ordinary. If we were talking, I was probably secretly dreaming about the ways I would distort our conversation into short-story dialogue. No one and nothing was safe from becoming literary inspiration. I filled countless journals, wrote novels for the sake of it, and labored over emails to friends as if my perfectly crafted sentences were being graded. I wrote for the joy of creating, nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

My dreams for a Substack were to recapture the lightning bug of creativity, the way of moving through the world that could turn mundanity into glory. I wasn’t trying to create a brand or platform or to advise others. I wanted to write as a return to myself, to rebuke the part of my brain that worshipped efficiency, and as a way to make sense of the thoughts that swirled through my brain, too chaotic to verbally express.

Because that’s what I’d been trying to do in the years since I’d stopped writing: turn the wild, chaotic, nuanced world we live in into something easily summarized. Something that can be processed in the ten minutes you have between work and seeing a friend, summed up in an Instagram caption, or explained in a quick text. As if deep understanding of the world God has given us, both the lightness and darkness it encompasses, can be something checked off a to-do list. I’d traded the winding road of creativity for the clearly marked, perfectly tidy, path of efficiency.

Efficiency can be a tyrant, reducing life to a series of tasks that can be easily checked off, and scoffing at anything that eludes quantification. The act of creating on the other hand, though messy and often murky, invigorates the mind and repays itself tenfold.

Take this essay: I’ve been sitting in my baby’s future rocking chair for hours, mulling over what words to piece together to bring clarity to this concept. It’s messy and I’ll need to edit it a bunch. When I finally post it, I doubt many will read it. There will be no noticeable change in my family’s life because of the labor I’ve put in. In contrast, there’s about six things on my to-do list that I could have gotten done during this time. But the time I’ve spent here has energized me in a way that calling my insurance about a refund never does. (Update: it’s been two weeks - I’m still working on the same post! Case in point)

That’s why I’ve named this space “Long-form”. As a reminder to myself that efficiency is not the purpose of this forum. That the goal is to have a reason to let the mind wander again, to nod with encouragement each time I trip forward into a reverie, to encourage expansion, rather than restriction. If I write to a narrow theme, designed to capture and keep the attention of others, this exercises loses all meaning for me. Writing something, anything, is the point in and of itself! It’s for pinning down the seemingly disconnected thoughts that swirl through my mind and proving that there is meaning there! That God is creating pathways of understanding out of seemingly random and inconsequential events! That the purpose of my buzzing brain is not to drive me mad, but to put voice to the ordinary and extraordinary nature of everyday life.

This journey to recapture my own creativity cannot be contained to a singular theme; the topics will vary because inspiration itself is unpredictable. Long-form is both quiet resistance and a promise to myself: to avoid living life as a list to be fulfilled and to embrace wringing every last drop of beauty and meaning out of the days I have. In this, I think I’m well on my way.

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