Small Adventures

To move forward, it feels like I have to look back.
So I’ll start here:

New York City.

I was seventeen the first time I visited. A whirlwind weekend with my mom, newly single, who appeared surprisingly liberated and hopeful. I didn’t know it then, but that trip would shape me in ways I wouldn’t understand until much later.

New York City hits you in the face with its vibrancy. It shook me out of the fog I’d been living in after my parents’ sudden separation. I remember racing through the city in my “cool” Soho t-shirt, clutching my mom’s handwritten must-see list like a sacred map. Russian Tea Room. Greenwich Village. Fifth Avenue. We walked fast. We breathed fast. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive.

It’s funny to realize she was younger then than I am now. A woman with her whole life ahead of her, refusing to let regret shape her next chapter.

Flash forward to today. A similar pull of sadness, but for entirely different reasons. I thought I’d landed my dream job, only to have it yanked away in a parking lot in Costa Mesa. My much younger creative director asked if I wanted to “grab a coffee.” I thought it was a check-in, maybe even recognition. Instead, with a nervous tone and the slightest smirk, she told me I was done. Right there, feet from my coworkers, like an afterthought to the company I had given everything to.

Gut punch. Shock. Humiliation. The quiet grief of feeling unseen and discarded. I drove aimlessly not wanting to stop. Thinking I could outdrive the fog that wanted to take root in my brain.

Then came the deeper loss: Chloe.
My tiny Shipoo pup, my shadow, my comfort for nearly seventeen years. She carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life. Losing her two months after losing my job nearly broke me.

So when I landed in New York City again, this time with my daughter, I didn’t expect the city to do what it did when I was seventeen.

But somehow, it did.
It shook me awake again.

Cities don’t change. We return different. I’d visited New York many times in the years between. Grad school. Romantic trips. Birthdays. But this time gave me the same jolt I felt that first visit: open, receptive… alive.

This time, I was broken in a different way. Older, yes, but still vulnerable to the kind of sudden change that knocks you sideways. The kind that dulls your senses and slows your brain, leaving you unsure how to move forward.

Sometimes you lose things you thought you needed to find what you actually do.

So here I am. Starting over. Hopeful, a little scared, and awake again to what life has to offer.