I hadn’t seen Paige in years, and she flew out to Copenhagen to visit me last week before we gallivanted to Spain for a few days. The trip, despite bouts of rain and mostly cloudy conditions, was wonderful.

I brought my film camera, to no one’s surprise. I bring it nearly everywhere these days. I love how it forces me to slow down, examine my surroundings, and find beauty in the mundane.

For me, the trip was healing and regenerative at the same time. After leaving a job at the start of the year and beginning to recover from months of stress and anxiety, I felt my creative cup refilling as we wandered through Madrid and Seville, telling stories about Stephen, crying over welcome cava at the hotel, and laughing in crowded train stations.

Reconnecting with my friend, making new memories together, and walking through the cobblestone streets of Spain reminded me of a few life lessons I have been quick to forget lately. I thought I’d share them here in case maybe someone else needed to hear them, too.

Most great works of art took centuries to build (most great things don’t happen overnight).

You’ll find kind people everywhere. Some selling maps.

It may feel like the end of the world right now, but all across the world people are still laughing and crying and singing and dancing. And eating churros. Right now, someone in Seville is eating a churro.

Beauty is always all around. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder for it.

An endless well of peace and stillness lies within.

You can always start over and become a master of a new craft. It’s never too late.

Friendship is one of the greatest gifts.

Cherish the present moment. It’s the only one that truly exists.

Every great piece of art needs restoration and repair. What makes you think you would be any different?

I’ve been thinking about who benefits from it, that so-called matronly fear of aging, those so called empowered cuts, sucks, fills! Who wins when the ripples in the skin disappear, when the bags under the eyes tighten, when the signals of passing time are stripped away. Time eroding, quickly, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.

I read a critical thought piece a couple months ago called The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read. It’s an extensively researched thirty-minute read, and I nodded along to nearly every sentence.

The author writes, “I believe one of the biggest existential threats to modern women is the beauty-industrial complex, that is the vast network of corporations that manufactures and sells us an endless slew of products, services, images and ideologies intended to destroy our self-worth for the benefit of shareholders. Its inky tendrils have slithered into all corners of American culture and wrapped themselves around our minds and bodies.”

Reading the author’s critique, mostly of elective cosmetic surgery, I felt emboldened, justified, maybe even righteous. But when I signed onto my next work call on Zoom, I saw three little lines staring back at me on my screen.

It’s impossible to unsee them. These visible signs of aging, these labeled imperfections, they’re there and they’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing neutral about them, these jagged little lines. A constant reminder of something to correct, to mend, to fix. To work on.

It’s no surprise girls my age are getting cosmetic enhancements and surgeries – from botox to butt lifts. They have been for a decade. I’m thirty-three, for context. Actually, that’s what this essay is about: context. The important backdrop of disappearing lines and cosmetic surgery in a time when women are sold a beauty myth and an unachievable ideal.

I know a lot about this ideal. Every woman does.

I grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which meant all I wanted well into my teens was straight hair and a thigh gap. Diet culture was at the peak of its prime, and I spent many years counting points in a small journal, plagued by the caloric burden of a few carrots and a bowl of celery sticks. It was 2009, the same year Blake Lively was on the cover of Vogue in black and yellow chiffon. I remember spending hours online trying to figure out how much she weighed. I got my first iPhone in 2012 and promptly made my screensaver a picture of Kate Moss with her iconic quote, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I learned that peanut butter is high in calories, and being a fat woman is a moral failing.

Then I picked a major. And I think it saved me.

My major requirement included courses like Sociology of the Body and Sociology of Gender. We read essays like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women and I began a slow process of understanding and unlearning:

“During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the west’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.”

To be a woman is to be picked apart, watched, pricked, primed, prodded, teased. Most, if not all of us, live this reality. And yet everything on the internet feels so polarizing. If you get elective surgeries or enhancements, you’re a sellout; if you don’t, you’re deemed haggard, old, ugly. I think that’s what the Barbie movie got so right in 2023 – it doesn’t matter what you do. It’s either too much or not enough. Women can’t win.

But that’s also where the ethos of the film fell short for me. It does matter. Within the constructs of our choices, we must remember why those choices exist, what signal they send, and who benefits from our collective buy-in, one way or another.

I firmly believe every person, every woman, has a right to do whatever it is they want with their own body, but we need to examine why women are making the choices that they are. Because nothing happens in a vacuum, and calling a butt lift “an empowered choice” is naive at best and at worst, deceitful, causing irreparable harm to younger generations who are inherently vulnerable to the ethos of the times.

I’m a shameless TikTok addict, and for the last few days I’ve been seeing an ad from a popular San Francisco influencer promoting SkinSpirit. The text of her video reads: “Annual injection day vlog.” “I love a tasteful injection and I have no shame,” her caption reads. The comments include overwhelmingly positive sentiments like, “Injection day is an elite experience” and “I’m jealous you don’t bruise because I bruise terribly, but it’s worth it.”

I know people personally who feel more empowered after getting work done. My question is, but what is that empowerment towards? What does it signal? What does it signal about the way we as a society constantly seek to change, alter, fix women – to make us more digestible, pleasant, controllable.

And I’m all for people feeling empowered. I enjoy professionally manicured nails, I take a $600 hairdryer to my hair regularly without shame, and I love wearing lipstick. These rituals make me feel beautiful and powerful and I don’t think that’s something to condemn.

As Naomi Wolf writes, “The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.”

For women working in certain industries, it is a lack of choice. Women who must have their nails done, hair done, everything done to fit in and climb the corporate ladder or reach a celebrated level of success. In some circumstances, even just to dream of earning as much as their male counterparts.

But I’d argue that for all of us, regardless of who we are in the world, it’s often a perception of lack of choice.

When we think we have no other choice but to make our lips bigger, noses smaller, foreheads smooth if we want to fit in, be accepted, be loved, that’s the issue. And judging, mocking, shunning women who do these things on an individual level helps no one at all.

If you have anger about modern day beauty standards, know your anger is justified. But take it to the source:

“And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries – the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7-billion pornography industry– have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their influence on mass culture, to use, stimulate, and reinforce the hallucination in a rising economical spiral.” (Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth)

It’s a daily act of resistance to fight this hallucination, and I’m still working through my own stuff. I’m still figuring out how to feel beautiful in a world that constantly tells me I’m too tall, my eye bags too receded, the veins in my legs too visible.

Three things help.

First, when I see those jagged little lines staring back at me on my screen, I feel solace when I remember where they came from. That those lines are the marks of a life well lived, tragedies triumphed. A woman’s life in those lines – anguish and pain and sorrow, joy. Trips to the Mediterranean with my family, where sunscreen only goes so far. Smile lines in the edges of the eyes from deep belly laughs with friends. Forehead creases from the wicked kind of heartbreak that cracks you open.

Not to mention the divots in the skin that have nothing to do with age. Inherited waves, fanning out, spilling over, ripples of legacy and symbols of love. My face the product of many people who have loved before me. Varicose veins just like my mother’s. My best friend.

Second, defining beauty in my own terms. Deciding for myself what makes me feel beautiful. Lately, it’s freshly washed hair and cherry red lipstick. Ten years ago, when I had a face full of hormonal acne, it was a heavy slab of foundation.

And last, remembering the natural order of things. I think about how good I feel in nature, where, just like my body, everything is decaying. Everything changing as it should. Waves of ocean flowing outward, rings in trees circling in.

This, the natural order of things. Nothing to fear.

Crow’s feet the dancing kind.

soon the snow will melt
and gray skies will make way for
something brighter

bulbs shooting northwards
spring showers falling
birds flying west

I have decided to watch the rising tide
wish well the wayward drifter
and cherish the invitation
to begin again

Have you noticed how the sun doesn’t dull its shine just because sweat drips from naked shoulders? And the moon doesn’t weaken its pull —

even the oceans surrender.

Me, more powerful than the oceans?

So I breathe out

So I breathe.

passing, thinking, tenderest thoughts

what to do when words fail

fleeting, floating, featherlike hush

what to say when grief calls

rooted, sunken, caked in moss

swarm of bees

stripped of honey

bank of swans

hissing funny

buzzing, sinking, stinging, lost

dead of winter

thick like frost

I moved to Copenhagen just after Christmas, and on March 7th I stood on a stage in front of 100 people at LiteratureHaus, reading aloud a story called Strangers about my long-distance boyfriend.

I learned about Seanchoíche a few years ago, and when I saw the storytelling club was planning an event in Copenhagen, I knew I wanted to apply to read. After all, I had moved to Denmark first and foremost to create new experiences for myself.

I had never done a public reading. I had and still do have a very real phobia of public speaking, and while the anonymity of being in a foreign country helped, I was still very much afraid.

Like, shaking in my fleece-lined boots and sweating kind of afraid.

When you write you give away a piece of yourself. You hope your words will land in safe hands, upon safe ears, but you never really know.

The night before the event, I sat to write the piece in my new, near-empty apartment, eating a falafel sandwich from Kebabistan and sipping Sleepytime tea out of a glass mug I had borrowed from my local cafe.

My body faded into winter darkness; my face lit up from the warm light of my computer screen. I didn’t have lamps or kitchen supplies yet, but I had a story I wanted to tell. Sitting in a sofa chair, strumming the stiff blue corduroy with my fingers, I tried to focus more on being true than sounding good. It’s one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve heard: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Thank you, Hemingway.

And I tried to keep it short and sweet. I had and still have many thoughts about dating – the gamification of dating, its pervasiveness in our modern world, and the harm dating culture causes women. In fact, one of the hardest aspects of dating for me was the flood, the inundation, of dating advice, from friends’ experiences and opinions to TikTok videos and TV series. Nowadays it seems everywhere you turn, someone is telling you how to date and how to love and why it’s actually really embarrassing to have a boyfriend, so why even bother?

I’m no expert on love, I just know that I’m lucky. And it’s from this place that I wrote this short piece for my reading at Seanchoíche.

Strangers

August. You: tall, smiling from across the room. Me: eager, open, compelled. I knew after the first smile, and approached you after the second. I just wanted to say hi, I said. I liked your outfit. You told me later you were wearing sweats. I don’t remember sweats. I remember a sweet smile and kind eyes. You carried the conversation. I carried my heart in my hands.

Is it too heavy? I wanted to ask.

What are you drinking? I said instead.

When I asked for your number you told me you were moving to Los Angeles. That’s okay, I said. I’m probably moving to Denmark.

We spent every night together for the next three weeks. Nothing pre-planned, but you called me after work and I answered. And we sat. And we laughed. And we swam in the bay. And yes it was September, and yes it was freezing. And we told each other secrets and we went from strangers to friends. And I let you see me because it was safe, because you were leaving.

That’s what they’ve always done. Leave.

But I guess I let you in a little. I let you see some of the scars I’ve covered up with concealer and tried to heal with the passage of time.

And when you moved I tried to end things over sushi. Long distance doesn’t work, I said, like a caricature of myself, drowning my sashimi in soy sauce.

Let’s try it, you said.

So you left, but you stayed.

I didn’t know how I was supposed to be loved until I met you. I intellectualized love, like a book out of reach. I didn’t know how it would feel deep in my belly to sit in your arms as you wiped my tears away, to lay my head in your lap, to fall asleep next to you and wake up feeling rested.

I knew that love was patient and kind but I didn’t know that it was warm, like hot honey, that it was smooth, like river stones. That it was reliable, like ocean waves.

It rained on your 25th birthday. So I picked out something cheerful and blue. I wanted to write that I wasn’t sure I had ever been loved before you. But that felt too big a burden.

So instead, I handed you my little lemon heart.

And you placed it in a glass case.

And you’ve guarded it with your lion heart.

Nothing like a stranger.

After the reading, as I walked off the stage and back to my seat, I looked down at my feet, mostly to make sure I didn’t trip. I felt sweat emanate off my body and onto the plastic of the folding chair, and I was filled with a deep sense of cataclysmic dread. Had I really just shared something so personal with a room full of strangers?

I guzzled more wine and listened to the remaining readers. They were all supremely eloquent, funny, personable – nothing overly sentimental in their personal anecdotes and charming stories.

After the event organizer gave his final remarks, I beelined for the exit. I didn’t want to be in that room a moment longer! And then a woman stopped me. She was doe-eyed, about my age, and strikingly beautiful.

“Your reading was beautiful,” she said. “It made me realize, I don’t think I’ve ever been loved before.”

She said it with hope in her eyes. It was a moment of realisation, not a declaration of defeat. And I wanted to give her a hug, not only because of what she said, but also because of what her comment helped me remember: that sharing your truth matters. Being vulnerable matters. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, if your timing is right, your words will find someone right when they need them.

A couple years ago, one of my writing teachers commented in the margins of a story I was workshopping: “Go here. Go deep. Make it hurt. I want to see blood.”

Blood. Ugly, messy, best when pumping. Sticky when dry. Vital. Inconvenient. And when it surfaces, impossible to ignore.

These days, whether I’m writing a fictional short story or a personal essay, I try to remember that my words have the power to embarrass me into catatonic shock, but they also have the power to convince, to guide, to awaken. And that will always be worth it.

Because the more vulnerable we let ourselves be, the more we allow others to be seen in us, through us, among us. Less like strangers. That is something to cherish. To behold. To celebrate! Maybe vulnerability, then, is the most generous thing we can share.

Ah, birthdays. The annual purge of wistful tears. A yearly pause for contemplative reflection and overzealous goal setting. Unlike some who suddenly become resolute in the last week of the calendar year, I suddenly become resolute around my birthday.

Fall is a nice time to set resolutions. The turn of the seasons, cold weather setting in. Days get shorter, mittens come out. I’m not too steeped in holiday optimism to convince myself that this is the year I finally achieve financial freedom.

Mostly, the goals stay manageable and the motives sincere. And as I start looking forward, I can’t help but glance back. A lot changed for me in the last year: a new relationship, a new job, a cross-continent move. Friendships fizzled, friendships found. I started my Substack, began my application for MFA creative writing programs, and tried eating insects for the first time. Just like you’d expect: crunchy.

I put together a list of all I’ve learned in the past 33 years. It grew and grew until all of a sudden there were 13 personal truisms there on the page, a non-exhaustive list based on my experience as a daughter and a woman and a writer and a friend.

1. The older you get, the more you’ll remind yourself of your mother. The more grace you have for her, the more grace you’ll find for yourself.

2. Hobbies aren’t activities you’re skilled at, they’re activities you enjoy.

3. You’re not alone, you’re with little you. She’s always there. You always have company.

4. Calling your mom with a problem might actually make you feel worse. Love her anyway.

5. One of the hardest parts of a breakup is remembering how to be alone. But it’s the best practice there is in coming home to yourself.

6. Donate your lycra, ditch your skinny jeans. And anything else that’s designed to make you smaller.

7. You’re a writer, and all writers need writer friends. Find them, befriend them, cherish them.

8. Instead of thinking about all the ways they hurt you, remember all the ways they showed you love. You owe that to yourself.

9. You actually know what you want to wear and you don’t need to ask anybody else what they’re wearing.

10. Friendships only work if you actually like the other person. Otherwise, resentment will eat you alive.

11. If you’re a rockstar at work you’re probably not a rockstar in other areas of your life. Think: friend, partner, finisher of books.

12. You never know what anyone is thinking about you, so you might as well assume they’re thinking the very best things.

13. If you tell yourself you love your eye bags, you’ll start to love your eye bags*.

*replace with any of your own corporeal insecurities. & reuse & recycle.

I won’t pretend that I’m always successful in practicing these, or even that they are universal. My mom’s feedback on this essay was: “but I love my spandex!” and that’s fair.

But I will say, every time I remember one of them and act accordingly, I feel a little bit more me.

That’s got to count for something.

Luckily, I’ve found some solace in long walks in nature.

On a particular Thursday in July I was in a bit of a rut. Less “summertime sadness,” more “everything eats and is eaten time is fed.”

I threw my camera in my bag and biked over to the Frederiksberg Gardens to wander aimlessly on foot. Near the old palace, I buried my face in my viewfinder and crouched down to take a picture of some leaves. Then, all of a sudden, I saw four feet shift behind a bush and a man get down on one knee. I’ve never witnessed a proposal before, so it was all very exciting, and in a shaky thrill I managed to take a few photos of the couple through the trees.

I couldn’t help but to think of sonder: the idea that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. The term was coined in 2012 by U.S. writer John Koenig in his blog, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s easy for me to forget that in my low moments, life is happening all around me. My worst day is someone else’s best. We’re all just living our lives, orbiting around each other, on occasion interweaving, sometimes barely missing each other like ships in the night.

His proposition was short but successful, and the couple shared a long embrace. As they started making their way out of the garden, I ran up to them to explain the fortuitous timing. The bride-to-be was convinced her fiance had hired me and I had to assure her multiple times that no, I just happened to be squatting in a tree beside them during this most special moment.

As they walked off, I realized my mood had lifted eight octaves.

And I started thinking about “right place, right time,” and about what makes this phenomenon feel so special.

At once it seems delightfully simple, incredibly happenstance, and yet, also somehow preordained.

As someone who has struggled with their mental health on and off for a long time, sometimes I’m sad because of some tangible event or happening, but most often I can’t attribute my moods to anything particular. I’m just a melancholy person, maybe. Or maybe I need to up the Prozac. How is a girl supposed to know?

What I do know: right place, right time doesn’t happen in your room, staring at the off-white stucco texture of your bedroom wall.

Unfortunately, you usually do have to pick yourself up off the floor, practice boxed breathing or some other form of self-care hypnosis, and bike a few kilometers to a green space where trees are growing and birds are singing and random passerby are living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Most likely you’ll feel better right away. The fresh air will settle you, right place, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see something that will make you aware of your own existence. Even if it’s just a funny-looking rock. Or strangers laughing. Or something more spectacular, like a man getting down on one knee for the woman he loves. Right time.

Sometimes that’s all sadness is for me: forgetting I exist and forgetting the reasons why it matters.

I hope next time you’re feeling down you grab your shoes and your camera or whatever it is that makes you feel more alive. More here in the world.

We can try together.

Greed not even a word that captures it all.

The horror: I watch it in 4K on my iPhone 15.

A man sits on the ground with tears in his eyes because he can’t offer tea to a journalist who visits him, who puts his own life on the line searching for a truth to tell.

I imagine they have taken everything from him: his family, his home, his dignity.

Certainly his tea.

Tea as token, as offering, as prayer.

I sit with my arms in my lap in front of my TV and I watercolour because I need something to do with my hands to keep them from shaking and I wonder what makes a prayer a prayer.

I’ve never said amen, not in a serious way, but I mean it this time.

I need a word, something palpable to pray for the end of something so unspeakable and sickening and wrong. I need something steady and reliable and true and I don’t know anything as reliable and true as words and books, but I hear they’re burning those too.

How many times must we say it, must we utter the words from tired lips and march in unison only to quietly surrender to the night, knowing tomorrow we will wake up and have to do it all over again?

The air feels chillier in Copenhagen now, but the sun is shining and I take a break from work and go on a walk through the park.

I see a new mother sitting on a park bench holding her baby, his head swaddled tight in a bright blue knit bonnet.

I worry for her and for him and for us all.

The air feels chillier in Copenhagen now.

Maybe something is coming with the winter.

An icy slush of reckoning.

It’s taking all my energy not to fall into despair.

Amen, amen, amen.

Copenhagen cafe culture is so sublime that at least once a week I go to a cafe and sip on a cappuccino, revel in a milk mustache, and stare into space. Preferably outside, in the sun, on a slatted wooden bench. Better yet if my hair is freshly washed and I’ve put a bit of blush on my nose, and the barista is pacing behind the counter in fisherman sandals because the temps have hit twenty. He smiles sweetly behind horn-rimmed glasses as I botch the word for oat milk and I fold into myself as I grasp for it, for a language I’ve just begun to learn, in a country I’ve just moved to.

Since moving here a few months ago, I’ve become smitten with the cafe culture and other characteristics of Nordic life that make it easy to understand why it’s consistently ranked one of the best places to live.

Here, there are dads all around pushing prams. Dads, solo parenting, simultaneously wheeling strollers and soothing wails, doing both the physical and the emotional labor. Imagine that!

Here there are new mothers on a nine-month-long government-granted maternity leave, sipping hot coffee in cozy cafes with friends, while their babies nap in prams just outside on busy boulevards.

Here there are safe bike lanes and three metro stops within a ten-minute walk from my apartment, connecting me to the rest of the city.

Here I can walk home from a friend’s flat long after dark, past strangers who will never become strange men, who have done nothing to become strange.

When people ask me how I’m finding Copenhagen, I tell them it’s an easy place to make a home. That life makes sense here. That I wish, more than anything, that I could pick up all the people I love and move them to this tiny country one-tenth the size of California.

I moved here last December with a couple of suitcases, a job at a tech company that isn’t actively destroying the moral fabric of our lives, and a heavy duty puffer from Mads Norgaard that would put my California down jacket to shame.

I was eager to forge ahead, widen my horizons, and make new experiences in a new place.

And forge I did, right down a flight of stairs in the middle of winter, the day before moving to my new fifth floor walk-up.

One misstep, arms flailing, phone flying. I landed on my back with a thud at the bottom of the stairwell, looking up at the ceiling for God, a sign, some reassurance that my back wasn’t broken and that moving to a foreign country all alone wasn’t the silliest thing I’ve ever done.

It was there, laying on the marble floor in an apartment in Amagerbro, nervous sweat pooling beneath my calf-length down jacket, that I had my very first What Am I Doing Here moment.

I wasn’t free to wonder for long: a middle-aged man had “heard a big crash” and appeared from another unit to make sure everything was okay. Yes, I said, tears streaming down my face, blood running down my shin, a strange pain in my knee. I’m fine. Everything is fine!

I didn’t have a doctor yet, or even friends, not really, at least not the kind that will sit at urgent care with you. Instead I called my long-distance boyfriend and ran an orange crayon across the Finding Dory coloring book in the waiting room of a hospital in Frederiksberg.

When the nurse called my name a couple hours later and looked over at me, crouching all alone on a tiny chair with a Crayola between my thumb and forefinger, I felt the self doubt rising in my chest.

Who did I think I was, moving halfway across the world all alone?

When I left the hospital, the waning winter sun still in the sky, I wished for nothing more than a deep dish spinach and mushroom and the familiarity of my mother’s embrace. I wished her to tell me everything would be okay, even if it wouldn’t, even if she wasn’t sure.

I settled for a tomato-and-olive pie from a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria near my Airbnb, plopped on the couch and streamed Dune in an attempt to take my mind off it all.

My head was swirling with endless and unhelpful “what ifs” and worse-case scenarios – I wondered how I would carry my suitcases up five flights of stairs the next day (six, actually, because of course, in true comedic timing, I was moving to a loft). I wondered which of my new acquaintances – mostly work colleagues – I could ask for help without seeming like a terrible burden.

Perhaps it was the harrowing look of the Harkonnen but I could feel my blood pressure rising and emotionally I was transported back to senior year of high school, my childhood bed, two knee surgeries, a bottle of prescription painkillers, and a “best friend” who never visited.

I don’t remember the pain in my knee so much as the feeling of isolation and grief. Call it PTSD or an acute ability to jump to the worst-case scenario but I quickly imagined myself two months into Beginning Again locked up in my loft with a fresh ACL tear: bedridden, depressed, and all alone.

Luckily, I was blessed with wonderfully kind and international coworkers who had also moved to Copenhagen without close family and friends, and who were similarly navigating the trials and tribulations of attempting to make Denmark their home. To my relief, they offered to help without hesitation.

So, the next day, with a little help from my friends, we moved into my new flat.

And the whole thing took fifteen minutes.

And Levke did the heavy lifting.

And Mikkel brought his contagious, puppy-dog positive energy.

And not once did I feel like a burden or an inconvenience.

We went out for celebratory cardamom buns afterwards, and my scans came back clean, and it was a really fun time. And it reminded me that actually, as hard as it can be to do, asking for help from others is one of the best ways to make friends.

When you move to a foreign country, there will be many firsts. Firsts are fun and exhilarating but they can also be terrifying. In my experience, they’ll make you glad you moved and they’ll make you wish you’d never left.

The first time you fall and realize 911 is not 911. Even if 7-Eleven is still 7-Eleven. Don’t be fooled.

The first time, in true Scandi style, you wear a skirt over jeans.

The first time you accidentally leave your bike unlocked, and it doesn’t get stolen. And the second. And the third.

The first time you leave radiology and ask the receptionist where to pay and she laughs. Pay?

The first time you realize that what makes a place beautiful is often the people you experience it with. I adore Copenhagen, full stop. But lakes are just lakes without the people you love. I’m in love with a man who lives 5,600 miles away. And most of my family is on the other side of oceans. You miss things when you’re away: birthdays, graduations, the chance to say goodbye.

I miss my family. I miss the little flowers growing in the cracks between sidewalks on Jackson street. I miss the smell of redwoods and the warmth of strangers and the familiarity of “how’s it going?” asked in phatic communion.

And I love it here. I love the canals, the architectural beauty, the parks, the buns with butter-and-cheese. I love the person I’m becoming now that I have space and time to just be.

Maybe then, to be an expat is to make friends with duality, to live in limbo, torn between two places you love. Always missing someone, sometimes mourning a version of yourself you left behind.

In my experience, if you move to a new country, there will be setbacks, but there will also be coloring books and crayons and books and trees and lakes and there will be time.

Time to grow and time to become.

Time to remember: havre. Havre is the Danish word for oat milk.

Looking back, I think a part of me also hoped moving to the Marina would magically transform me into the woman I had grown up wanting to be – simple, fun, and American-girl-next-door pretty. Instead I’m mixed, unique-looking, almost-Brown, ostensibly latina. I’ve been asked if I’m Russian by lovers of the opera. Armenian, by a woman who drew etymological similarities between our surnames. The other genocide, I wanted to say.

No one has suspected that I may be Palestinian, not ever, and for a long time I lied about my ethnic background makeup anyway, telling people I was Greek and Egyptian though that was only partially true. I don’t think I was ashamed but frightened of the social repercussions of belonging to an ostracized ethnic and political minority. My father had Palestinian papers since his father grew up in the 1940s in a town called Ibdis – what is now Israel – and while he couldn’t visit his father’s homeland, many of my peers took trips there as their birthright.

But I digress, that’s an essay for another time.

I’m well into my early thirties now, and the past decade has been filled with ups, downs, spin-me-all-arounds. So many spirals! I’ve lived in four apartments, had nine roommates, tried three antidepressants, fostered four cats. In my twenties I experienced my first Mental Breakdown (to call it a ~menty b~ felt cute but insufficient), my first Big Girl job, my first quarter life crisis. I bought my first car, lived alone for the first time, and even tried to take up acting.

I had one relationship, one breakup, and two heartbreaks. Four if you count those among friends, which often hurt even more. I’ve cried on the Bay Bridge, at Golden Gate Park, on the Golden Gate Bridge, at Alta Plaza, Lafayette, Crissy Field, and Dolores. If you enjoy city parks, move to San Francisco.

There have been countless moments where I’ve wanted to escape the fog, the cold, the tyranny of San Francisco’s wind. From my couch on Fillmore street I’ve perused apartment listings in Barcelona, the South of France, Mexico City – places I’ve never been. At the end of 2019, I mentioned to a friend that I was thinking about moving to Copenhagen, though I thought it was in the Netherlands, and I’d never experienced a winter outside California. Her response has stuck with me since. She said, I support you whatever you do, but just make sure you’re running towards something, not away from something.

It took me years to realize I didn’t want an escape from San Francisco, I wanted respite from myself. There’s a quote that goes, “wherever you go, there you are.” That is to say, moving somewhere new won’t save you from yourself. That’s all fine and well but has confused me ever since Blair Waldorf famously remarked, “If you’re gonna be sad, you might as well be sad in Paris.”

I’ve always been a quote person and a croissant person, hence the conflict of interest!

Luckily Arsicault provided more or less the same experience, and I stayed put, over the years emptying my internal well of sadness and shame and filling it with dried flowers that would never die and books that gave me hope and friends who showed me the beauty of loving when there’s nothing much to gain.

My life in San Francisco, now, is good. I have a stable job I don’t hate and I make enough to support myself. I’m a regular at my local coffee shop where they know my order (extra-hot oat milk cappuccino), and my mom is a speed dial and a short drive away. I have a sweet and loving boyfriend who makes me feel seen and supported.

It’s not necessarily that things could be better, though I guess they could get better and of course they can always get worse. I acknowledge that I have more than most and am afforded a million privileges that many dream of, especially in today’s political climate.

It’s just that things could be different. I didn’t take any big risks in my twenties. I stayed close-by for college and moved back to the Bay Area shortly after graduating.

Big change has always been thrust upon me, and while I consider myself a brave person, there’s a difference between being brave in the face of adversity and having the courage to pursue your dreams.

When I visited Copenhagen last summer, I felt both re-energized and deeply content biking through the city, swimming in the pristine fresh water canals, and indulging in a daily cardamom bun. I could live here, I thought.

Turns out I’m moving from one windy city to another. And while it’s an appropriate response, I hate when I tell people I’m moving to a city a thousand miles away, where I once spent five days, and know three people tangentially, and they tell me, “Oh! So you’re starting over.”

I hate how “starting over” suggests leaving things behind. I am not leaving San Francisco behind, because she will always be a home to me and a home to many of the people I hold dearest. And, most importantly, the place where I grew up and into myself. Call it newfound confidence or late-to-develop brazen self-love, but now, at thirty-two, I don’t want to be anyone but myself.

Instead, this chapter is about Beginning Again – a few years older, all the wiser, and more wind-tolerant.

Nonetheless, there are things you inevitably must say goodbye to when you move to Denmark. Things like sunshine. Burritos. Privatized healthcare.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled about the latter, but when I met with my psychiatrist for the last time, I held back tears at the end of our session. I started seeing him at twenty-three, when my depression had once again reared its ugly head. I asked Dr. W if he had any advice for me on this new life chapter, psychiatrically or otherwise, and he said two words: forge ahead.

In a long struggle with depression I’ve found that good doctors have become like beacons of light. How clever, for someone to have had such a profound impact on your life, and to know next to nothing about them. I wondered whether Dr. W was speaking from personal experience or years of professional pedagogy. Either way, forge ahead was exactly what I needed to hear.

And that’s what I plan to do.

An ambulance passes by as I saunter down Pacific, taking in the signs of fall. I walk past a new dad jogging, a newborn in a stroller. At Arguello, I exit the park and make my way to Lake Street, where an elderly couple walk in the street holding hands, and a group of pre-teen boys ride banana bikes without helmets. I pull out my phone to check the time. 6:52pm.

At Ninth street, I turn to make my way to B Star. The sun sets heavy in the horizon, a golden hue cast over the city, quintessential fog nowhere to be found. 

Traffic speeds by as I approach California street. No stop sign, to my surprise. To my left, golden rays spring from moving steel and a black Volkswagen sedan slows to a stop. I take a few steps into the crosswalk and look to my right.

Then, confusion. I’m on top of something, then beside it. Beside steel, I realize, my wired headphones splayed on the road to my right, droplets of blood in front of me like splattered paint.

For a brief moment, it’s just me and my thoughts and cement. Me and the cement and a gnawing fear of paralysis. Legs heavy like bricks, I attempt to wiggle my toes. Relief as my sock rubs asphalt. 

Where’s the shoe? Where’s the shoe? I hear a man squawk above me. He’s petite, not from genetics but from old age and either he’s shaking or I am and he gets down on all fours to search for my missing sneaker and he finds it under the bumper of his car. He tries to slip it on my foot, twisting my leg this way and that as I lay on my stomach, hair in my face, tears heavy but muffled. Don’t touch me, I yell. He sets my shoe on the street, holds my hands to hoist me up on my feet. I said don’t fucking touch me.

A middle-aged woman in a bicycle helmet squats next to me. Where does it hurt she says and I want to say here and here and in my mind I point to my head and my heart. The shock hasn’t left my body and I haven’t felt the fracture.

There’s a call to my mom, there’s a cry of relief, there’s a man in a uniform with a notepad and a ballpoint pen. 

“Do you know what year it is? What city are we in?” 

I’m relieved to find I know the answers.

I’m released from San Francisco General fourteen hours later. Lucky, I’m told.

Lucky is: Just don’t shampoo for a few days.
Lucky is: Rest your brain. The headaches should ease.
Lucky is: The fracture will heal on its own in time.

The notion of luck.

I had spent the final year of my twenties questioning the point of it all. 

I was heartbroken, waiting for a guy to come back.

I was confused, questioning career choices.

I was lonely, outgrowing friendships forged out of convenience.

In October 2021 I created a photo album in my phone under an acronym, RTSA. 

When I lay in the middle of the road on September 12th, I just wanted to walk Lovers Lane at sunset. I wanted to watch my plant babies grow old. I wanted to breathe beside strangers in savasana and deep belly laugh with my best friend after another failed first date. I wanted to be lucky.  

In the early morning of September 13th, I added a new photo to the album. It’s a picture of the hospital ceiling above the gurney I spent the night in. A lucky sight. 

RTSA: Reasons to Stay Alive.

the barista asked me my name
Violet, I said
she paused and I held
my phone up to my face
and she said:
my name is Iris
I feel like Lilys don’t know
what it’s like to be an Iris
but Violets do

We sit and we swim and we talk about things that we like and things that we believe in. Boys, books, god. 

We cut up old magazines and make vision boards. I haven’t held a glue stick since fifth grade. Mine says change and congratulations and other tasteful superlatives. I add a sticker of a wiener dog and I preemptively name him Panini.

Later we make mushroom risotto. I dice, she stirs, we sing along to Joni Mitchell. 

The air smells like pine and timber and something else.

Like asking for seconds. 

Like coming back for more. 

Like serenity, like seasons changing, like a wistful prelude to fall.