Every day, I write in a journal, and I have for years. Some days I write pages and pages and others, it’s just a to-do list. I’m not following The Artist’s Way; they aren’t morning pages. If I just extend this process a bit more, and write here rather than scribble in my notebook, I think it might help.

When I was a kid, I used to love writing. I mostly wrote songs and poems, always trying to be more grown up than I actually was. I loved the storytelling aspect. As I got older, I stopped. Maybe it was the change in my media consumption, a diet that consisted of YouTube videos and TV shows featuring troubled high school students I badly wanted to relate to and never could. Now, I want to take that same feeling back, getting into a flow state.

I want to keep the lack of barriers for my writing practice, like I do in my journal, and I want to do it five days a week and not the weekends, so it can fit right into my routine. I try to touch my laptop as little as possible over the weekends and I just know if I open it to do this, I would never get off. I have a hold on my calendar right now from 9 to 10 am. The perks of working with a lot of west coast people is being able to ease into my day and this can be part of it. Today I was twenty minutes late to the desk because I had to pick up my dry cleaning, but even 40 minutes of writing could help. On Tuesdays, I will write my other newsletter, which is less of a brain dump and more of a corralling of news that I find interesting.

I think about people who are able to write books. Sure, anyone can write one but not everyone does. It requires mental tenacity and finding a throughline in it all, whether that be the theme of a medical textbook or the storyline of a romance novel. Sitting down and just doing it is what separates those who have written a book and those who have not. Of course, publishing it is a different story. I am sure that’s a difficult part that I’m not taking into account.

Where I lack in spoken clarity, I make up for in sitting down and doing the damn work. You would be surprised how many people sit down and say they are going to do something and then don’t. So many people have dreams and aspirations that are crushed, not due to the lack of time or resources, but the absolute distraction that they let themselves fall into. I hope that my ability to stick to a routine and do the work, even on days like today where writing doesn’t seem that interesting and my brain feels empty, carries me.

I don’t have an end goal. Maybe I’ll write 100 issues and see how my writing changes over time. That might be fun.

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Something in between contrasto (Italian for contrast, where something feels different through comparison) and nyans (Swedish for subtle nuance, the small details you suddenly notice). Nothing changed, but you’re seeing everything differently.

Over the weekend, I visited my sweet friends that just moved. They are the first of us to ditch city life for suburbs, and not just any suburbs, Greenwich Backcountry. Greenwich is a beautiful place, the homes are massive with long driveways lined by trees. If you’re lucky to see the houses from the street, you can see the lawns are sprawling and cut all the same, so you can’t really tell where one property starts and one ends. It is manicured and perfect. I am making a generalization about Greenwich, most of it is like that to me as an outside visitor, but I know it’s quite large and the areas differ.

Greenwich, to my knowledge, is split between three main sections: Back Country, Mid-Country, and In-Town or Coastal. Backcountry, which is closest to Westchester County in New York, is very private. There are large acreages with estates and stables full of horses. Bordering that is Mid-Country Greenwich, which is more suburban and includes Stanwich Club, where I’ve gone for Christmas dinner the past few years. This is my biggest understanding of the region and I’ve been told it’s a very “classic Greenwich” suburban place. This connects on the other side to In-Town or Coastal Greenwich, which sits along the Long Island Sound. This includes Downtown, Cos Cob, and Old Greenwich. Here, life can be a bit more walkable and you have easy access to the Metro North to get into New York and I-95 for commuting, whereas Back Country is furthest from the trains and is much more quiet, secluded, and resembling a countryside more than any type of suburb I’ve been to. Backcountry is peaceful, hidden, and removed from normal life. If Downtown Greenwich yells, Backcountry whispers.

Unlike many of the Backcountry homes, my friend’s house is not an estate and there are no signs of equestrian life. It’s in the woods and is almost all glass. Their driveway is hard to find and instead of sprawling lawns surrounding the path, there are low stone walls and gardens. From inside the house, you can see there is a drop off in the back, and the stonework continues down, creating a path to the woods. Every way you turn you’re surrounded by either deep woods or bamboo, planted by the original owner of the house. To say it is stunning feels insulting, it is more than that. My friends have taken great care in preserving the landscape, spending hours and hours cleaning out the ever-expansive acreage.

Inside, their home is full of carpets from their trip to Marrakesh and pieces of Japanese art. Their furniture is curated to perfection, they both have beautiful taste. One half of the couple grew up in New Mexico and the other in Paris, right in the city. Their styles blend beautifully, although unexpectedly, and you can see that in their home. It isn’t a beige box, it isn’t a movie set. It’s warm and inviting and is straight out of a magazine. I love them together and seeing how beautifully they were able to conjoin their life in this home together makes me happy for them.

It was hard for me to not notice there were no knickknacks in their home. They gave us a tour of the whole place, inside every spare bathroom and walk-in closet, even where they keep their vacuum, and not a single knickknack was to be seen. I thought of my own home, a cobbled together one-bedroom apartment that I cherish but is far from anything I would call beautiful. If it weren’t for all the knickknacks, the apartment itself would probably fall to the ground. From my couch alone, I see four different types of bird knickknacks. One is glass, holding matches, one is plush with bunny ears from leftover Easter decor, one is wrought iron that looks like a pigeon, and one is a plastic bird driving a peanut my old roommate got me. I don’t even like birds all that much.

My apartment’s offputting nature doesn’t stop with the knickknacks. I have a great couch but it is an unfortunate one. It is the most comfortable couch you’ll ever sleep on, and many have done so. I can’t have a sectional or a pullout couch because I am in what they call a railroad apartment, which just means it’s one full floor that is very long and skinny. My couch is eight feet long and fairly deep, which can become even deeper when we take the back pillows off. It would absolutely be perfect if it wasn’t chocolate brown corduroy and far too large for the space. To spare my apartment, I won’t be sharing any more details, but I will say my friends had a large sectional all six of us could sit on with lots of room in between, plus comfortable chairs if people wanted to face the couch. I do not have any chairs other than my dining chairs and some stools I stack under my desk in case we have any visitors and I run out of dining chairs, which happens to be every time I have people over. They aren’t very comfortable.

At the end of the trip to my friend’s house, when we were wrapping up dinner, they pulled me aside and pointed up to a beam close to their ceiling. There I saw it, I finally saw a knickknack. It was the miniature cat figurine holding a fishing pole I got them last year. It was a dot of unperfect in a sea of Greenwich perfection. I had no idea how they could have gotten it up there and the thought of them discussing where to put the silly plastic figurine made me laugh. The cat figurine sat there smiling, overlooking their beautiful space just like I did all evening.

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I carry a big bag to work, always looking stuffed, and I think people can tell I have too many shoes by seeing my stuffed bag on the subway. A big, stuffed bag is a clear sign of someone who owns too many shoes. A whole wardrobe sits in my bedroom with shoes neatly organized into baskets on every single shelf. I even have a pair of shoes I bought for my twenty-second birthday that anyone would think are fabulous (a beautiful pair of vintage silk mule kitten heels. Put all those words into eBay and you will be dropped into heaven on a screen) but I never wear them. They sit in a box on top of the wardrobe.

One internal war I’ve faced head-on in my adult life is my inability to be sure of anything and my collection of shoes is evidence of that. I’ve never understood how anyone is truly sure of anything. Growing up it would take me hours to figure out what to wear, mostly focusing on the shoes. I am so short, that to me the shoes make the biggest difference. There is a huge difference, in my deranged world at least, between an event that requires height in the shoe or not. I would consult others, look at photos from the venue to see what people wore in the past, and compulsively check the weather because the only thing worse than wearing shoes that don’t fit the theme of the venue is wearing shoes that don’t fit the state of the weather. Would wearing heels be too much? Would I feel too short if I didn’t wear them? Would I be uncomfortable not wearing socks? Is this an outing that requires a shoe to have a sock? What if I want to go on a walk after and there are cobblestone streets and it starts snowing?

My sureness expands past shoes too. I haven’t had a full time job in years, unable to be certain that one company is right for me. I went to an engagement party for my dear friends that have been together since high school and couldn’t stop wondering how they were so certain that they were each other’s life partners for eternity. Love at first sight has got to be a chemical reaction more than a sign that the person is surely the one for you. When I first adopted my cat, I admitted to my boyfriend while in bed late at night, back facing him and looking at a wall, that I was unsure if I chose the right one at the shelter and I also had no idea if I would love her as much as I loved my previous cat. (This was so silly and thinking about it now I can’t believe I would ever say that but I did. I love my sweet cat Bodega more than my shoe collection and I was being dramatic, but you get the point). It almost feels like I am lacking some magical female intuition that everyone else has. The worst phrase I’ve heard in my entire life is “when you know, you know” because I’ve never known anything to be one hundred percent true and factual, ever. We are constantly debunking things we thought were known in the scientific world, so how am I, someone who is not a scientist, supposed to sit here and say I know something and am sure of it?

This unsureness has engulfed reality until now and my shoes have helped me see a sliver of self growth, even if it is minuscule to the eye. I think self growth is a bit like going to the gym in this case. I see it, because I see myself every day, but others probably won’t see it for a very long time. I know my unsureness is getting a bit better because over the past two years, despite my collection, I’ve worn the same shoes almost every single day. They are old mule loafers and they’ve seen planes, offices, bars, and grocery stores. They sit by my front door, not to be mistaken as a part of the wardrobe full of my other shoes. They aren’t very fashionable, they aren’t expensive, and they are more similar to something you would see a grandpa wear than someone trying to make a statement or replicate someone with impeccable taste from the 90s, but I am still so sure of them. I am so sure of them, that even though they aren’t the best shoes in the universe, I would get them resoled because I am so sure I will love them in the future. I am sure of something and that feels good.

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