Part I: Considerations on Context
On missing New York, employment and the converse of it, chickpea crepes and Plathian platitudes
In wintertime I developed a fleeting obsession with famed Italian-American singer Dion DiMucci. I could tell you about his initial vocal group, Dion and the Belmonts, his struggle with sobriety, his return to Catholicism and my propensity to insert myself into every one of his song’s crooning narratives. I played “Only You Know” over and over again in December between baking biscotti, on walks over ice in shoes with no traction, and in my bedroom where I’d ritually smoke one cigarette-a-week out the window.
When DiMucci sings, “I want to see something that used to be in your eyes again,” I think he was talking about the way I look in New York when I’m standing on Delancey, wide-eyed, facing the Williamsburg Bridge, one ballet flat over the other, performing for an audience of near perfect strangers. This is the place I want to languidly acquiesce, to come undone to the hour’s discomforts, to feel a stretch of familiar blocks make my maudlin heart unspool, soupy and warm, to be just 25. Sometimes I wonder if the way I feel here could happen anywhere for me, but anywhere is not New York.
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I managed to romanticize getting lost on these same Lower East Side blocks on a Friday, four months ago when my phone died and I — refusing to solicit a charger from any of the hundreds of businesses surrounding me — went wandering. I remember my bangs blowing off my forehead like window blinds dancing in AC, blisters like bulk fermentation bubbles forming under the backs of my Sambas and my tear ducts red in the reflections of the worn-in Canal storefronts. I wondered what kind of a person gets lost in a city they’ve already lived in, writing tweets in my head as I cried to the crossing guard and the Joe’s Shanghai worker, the equally confused tourists and the NYPD, but I wouldn’t stop walking. Two hours later, I arrived back at my friend Reilly's apartment, eating papaya in his Ingmar Relling siesta chair and vowed I would not be coming back to New York for a long, long time.
Four years of college in the city, three wet hot Bronx summers, two bedrooms and one nondescript Chicago boyfriend led me to this time last year. When Nora Ephron said everything is copy, she failed to consider some things are better kept as memories.
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In October I sobbed to a friend who had been a lover, who’s now a friend again, about quitting my reporting job. He made me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as my legs dangled from the counter of his Wicker Park kitchen in the summer that I dropped to 96 pounds, ate microwaved Amy’s soup and worked through midnight to get ahead on stories, but I never cried. At the expense of my health, I did everything to prove a job I secretly had no interest in was a job I loved — I befriended the sales guys in office, rubbed shoulders with prominent real estate moguls, built a rolodex of connections and worked tirelessly to keep up with a team of older reporters, all while knowing the role was not for me. I still think about my editor telling me I could always come back, that she thought the position was deserving of a “way higher salary,” that she would have given me less work had she known the job was technically freelance. I think about her saying that she had no idea I hadn’t been interested in what I’d been poring over for months and that she couldn’t imagine the future work I’d produce when I began writing about things I actually care about. I hung onto this last part indefinitely, carrying her mentorship on the footnotes of my heart in the subsequent months. She was effusive and motherly, the kind of woman who made you feel like every borrowed thought you had, no matter how rudimentary, was somehow novel.
“I want you to find what you love,” she said on our send-off Zoom, her words unfurling, saccharine and warm.
Last week I saw the role posted on LinkedIn for the second time since my absence — no salary hike and a similarly false job description remain.
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At 18, journalism seemed the closest I’d come to a lucrative career as an aspiring writer. If I was going to go to New York, I would enter on a pre-law track, align myself only with hard news, minor in marketing, never put shit up my nose, intern on Wall Street, and work to unearth truths that made people whose lives looked very different from my own, better. I did each of these things, and I did them really well.
I wish I wasn’t so easy to turn off though. I’m like this with jobs, friends, men — I always want too much and when it isn’t breakneck speed, stillpoint-of-the-turning-world-intense, when it doesn’t disrupt me, exhume revelations untapped or drive me to the point of exhaustion, it’s doomed to feel like nothing. Sometimes I can’t decide if this makes me decisive, the right kind of passionate, or something of a brat.
“You want too much Erica.”
“You should slow down Erica.”
A head-on collision on the turnpike probably feels better than a spin-out into nothingness.
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October: “I am carving cracks in the simulation that was once my life. I am siphoning off stability. I am starting anew. I will attend a dinner party and life, like an abstraction, will reveal itself, again and again to me.”
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November: “I need to go on a date with a man who understands so I can tell him that the inside of my mind looks like M.C. Escher’s 1953, legendary surrealist image, “Relativity.” I will say something like: ‘Some days I feel I am outside of the artwork, introspecting on the human condition, journeying through the untamed elements, while others, I feel I am trapped in the drawing itself, a cog-like woman in the wheel, indistinguishably etched in black and white, never fully landing in gravitational stasis.’ And then I will ask: ‘Do you ever feel like that?’ to which he’ll respond, ‘Yes, all of the time.’”
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In the first month of unemployment, I flippantly scrolled LinkedIn, dodging any well-intentioned questions, dismissing concerns and muting stressors made obvious by those around me. Confident I’d bury my past role under a newly perfect one, I underestimated, considerably, the drudgery of a precarious job market, the work it’d take to find a role I actually liked, and the sheer vastness of my self-inflicted limitations.
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I’ve been feeling jaded toward media for a long time, wanting nothing more than to escape the blue-checks, the try-hards, the self-indulgent do-gooders, the “some personal news” folks, those three-years deep and still social distancing.
Illimitable time and a lingering bitterness gave way to a period marked increasingly by apathetic passivity. Enthralling a web of sweet girls, stalker men and shitposters alike, I cloaked my natural inclination toward sincerity, in irony; I began apologizing less, saying things like “I’m sourhoe” more and growing further from the earnest reporter I knew I couldn’t be.
In March I wrote: “I have been so many women so many times over, but this is a rendering I can’t quite recognize. I feel I am someone different entirely.”
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In 2020 I provoked and prodded, I corrected and I apologized. I fell insufferable to a season of symptoms, not causes and operated under the guise of whatever socialist compendium I’d managed to convince myself, guided me at the time. Incapable of coping with the loss of New York and my college graduation, I jumped down throats of older family members, strained relationships with friends close, reopened dialogue with those distant, and watched time move like wet sand in a warm hourglass. On election day, I corrected a former high school classmate about the way she worded something on an Instagram infographic and I think about saying sorry to her still, telling her how different I am now, but I know this is all inconsequential and I don’t know that I’m anyone better.
In an effort to become someone who no longer cared deeply about everything, I slowly became someone who cared deeply about nothing.
Some days I scoff at people doing things in advance of a better society — one I often feel the 24/7 news cycle conditioned me not to believe in. I tell myself I no longer care if people think that I am good. I denounce new-wave feminism and I smoke and I don’t have an answer for why I do the latter or why one should or shouldn’t and I wonder “what is the point?” about so many things. I continually welcome nuance into my life, but the contradictions wrought from this murkiness — an unintelligible morality of sorts — often trouble me. When my ardent love for beauty and truth, my family and the possibility of hope counter any of this, I remind myself of a version of me I deemed worse — one who secretly wanted a pat on the back for affecting no real change. I do things like re-read “Play It As It Lays” to affirm that I know what nothing means and allow myself to feel swaddled by this notion, but I remain afraid nonetheless. Of what? — Conceivably, that I don’t know why terrible things happen and I don’t feel that I can change them. Perhaps, that I don’t understand a nature at odds with itself and that I don’t understand myself also.
In March I wrote: “I care the least I ever have about everything concretely real and everyone outside of my little orbit and I’m not having a bad time doing it and I wish I felt more sorry.”
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Back in October, I was not really this way. In the first few weeks of quitting my job, I found joy in small things I’d been unknowingly shut off to for so long. I remember the warm jittering in my bones when I realized I’d had my first night of restorative sleep in months. I regained the possibility of an evening, falling in love with the way the light stalks pavement just before the sky gives birth to a blue night, how a conversation with a friend seemed to temporarily contain all of life’s unanswered questions, how a world unrecognizable, somehow void of the eve’s previous dilemmas, might swallow itself whole and return washed up, entirely new again.
There was also the inherited ephemera of the time — movie tickets, receipts, vintage Ferragamos and butter-stained pastry bags all lined along my bedroom floor like tokens of frivolity, functions of a time I felt repleted, totems of a little life lived. With unemployment came the possibility of newness in a city that had long-since grown stale, allowing me to forget, even if only for a couple of months, how much I missed New York. For the first time in a long time, I would come to diagnose myself as happy.
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“I’m taking some time off to pursue the things I like,” I told a friend over tea following an unexpected job rejection in December. I began selling linzer tarts by the dozens.
“I’m not aimless. I have a plan,” I told my father in January, tracing my fingers over the soft cheeses in the Flatiron Eataly. I applied to media jobs I didn’t want and poured my heart into the possibility of a springtime move.
For fear of winding up miserable and having to quit prematurely, I decided I’d only apply to positions I genuinely saw myself interested in in February. In the interim I freelanced, went on dates that troubled my psyche, and coped with potential love lost by a man who held me like hot water in his hands.
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“I am crippled by an unremitting fear that people think I’m stupid,” I wrote in March. I took a job working at a farm-to-table restaurant, romanticizing the misstep in an effort to subvert any lingering embarrassment that I’d made another seemingly aimless pivot in attempts to expedite a New York move. I worked at the restaurant four, sometimes five days a week, becoming unwillingly absorbed in the heartbeat of a community — of what it looks like when everyday, hard-working people endure, interminably, over a shared belief in something greater than themselves — and when they need to make a living also, and there is nothing ironic about that.
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May: “I tell everyone I want to open a bakery someday and I actually mean it and I think that they take me seriously and I feel good about this. I imagine it must be difficult to trust what I say sometimes — to separate all that’s fact from fiction.”
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“I’m a journalist,” I tell a University of Chicago professor dining in one night. “I actually used to work at the radio on —”
The corners of her mouth upturn as if to signify consolation.
“Well what are you doing here now?” she asks, laughter hanging on her last syllable.
“Well I —”
Guttural sadness spread through my body like ice cubes losing shape in heat. That night, like every other night, I answered Instagram DMs in the restaurant bathroom, walked home in the dark and mourned for a time I felt overworked by a desk job, my body vibrating in bed from constant standing. I’d awake at 4 a.m. to eat peanut butter out of the jar, put myself into a Benadryl-induced haze and scroll Depop until I fell asleep. I slowed applying to jobs and felt myself giving into physical exhaustion. In time, I’d become a voyeur of my own life, privy to my rich inner world, watching myself memorize the contents of farm dinner menus where I once stored fact-checking skills and FOIA guidelines.
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With each passing month, I thought exceedingly about my limitations, those legitimate (few) and those self-imposed (many). I think about a text exchange I had when I stood at the post office in February, boxes of Valentine’s Day linzers between my legs, and under my arms, struggling to balance my phone with sixteen people ahead of me.
Sylvia Plath writes, “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
“first of all i love that quote,” I wrote.
“Ofc u do. Imagine fretting over all the things you’ll never be able to do instead of just doing them. Couldn’t be me.”
“obviously you have never felt the wind knocked out of u as u try and fight off life’s daily trials and tribulations as an esoteric Woman”
“Sounds exhausting.”
He thinks I’m stupid I say to myself, sealing the final priority mail package in my arms. He doesn’t love me and he thinks I am stupid.
“i’m like a really well-intentioned, real ass girl and i might still be figuring some things out, but i know myself and i like myself also and i’m not going to be made to feel stupid so if this isn’t what you want then…” I type and I backspace.
“it’s not even that it’s more like recognizing your limitations and smallness. it’s kind of beautiful also”
“Sounds terrible . . . Sylvia is poisoning your mind.”
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May: “What we have here is a brie and gruyère confit green garlic chickpea crepe with a béarnaise sauce, microgreens, asparagus, and charred radicchio. And don’t forget, the chickpeas are sourced directly from a chickpea farm in Rancho Gordo, California.”
“There is so much I want to do,” I tell my mom on the phone.
This is the first year I stopped viewing our extreme closeness as a detriment — the first time I think I finally allowed her to unravel to me, absolutely and in full. I always knew my mother was a person before she was a parent, but in the time I spent considering this, marveling over photos of her in the ‘80s and stories of old boyfriends long-since past, I failed to consider, she had always been one after too.
One night on the phone she signaled to me that she heard my acrylics hitting the phone screen, questioning if I’d really been listening to her, which prompted a conversation about losing respect for someone you see and talk to everyday — ostensibly, taking someone for granted, conversely, just being comfortable, simply knowing someone too well. My friend Cameron expressed this same worry to me at a diner this past winter — that he feels he sometimes treats his girlfriend like he would his parents. I hate to think of this sometimes, all of it — of my sadness, my limitedness, about how we hurt the ones we love the most. These days, I only want to think of New York, of all that’s to come, of the “better things [I’m] gonna get into.”
“There is so much I want to do,” I repeat.
“And you will,” she says.
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**This essay is part of a three-part series. I will be back here with part two next week, followed by part three, behind a paywall. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider subscribing. Thank you. <3
lovely lovely lovely <3 unravel, unspool, unfurl, undone, unearth, untame
Very honest, very excellent. Can't wait for part 2.