May Recap

May felt like a month of showing up.

Showing up to the page. Showing up to dinner. Showing up to old friendships, new friendships, art exhibits, writing groups, children who wanted one more bedtime story, and the kinds of moments that don't seem important until you realize you've built an entire month around them.

If this month had a soundtrack, it wouldn’t be dramatic. No swelling orchestra. No climactic finale.

Just a steady collection of small moments that kept nudging me on the shoulder and saying, “Pay attention to this.”

What I Did

Met Leslie Jamison

A sentence that still feels a little strange to type.

I attended a reading for Immersions by Kyle McCarthy, moderated by Leslie Jamison, and afterward got the chance to speak with her. We talked about writing, community, and creating with intention rather than constantly chasing output. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how much of our creative lives are measured in metrics. Followers. Subscribers. Word counts. Productivity. It's easy to become so focused on measuring the work that you lose sight of why you started making it in the first place. Then she asked what I was working on. It’s funny how prepared you are to ask questions in moments like these and how completely unprepared you are to answer them. I said, “Nothing significant.”

I’ve thought about that answer almost every day since. Nothing significant. As though the essays I write aren’t significant. As though trying to understand grief, family, love, identity, loss, and the strange business of being alive isn’t significant. The conversation illuminated something uncomfortable about how quickly I diminish my own work and how often I assume significance belongs to other people. I also forgot to ask her something I’ve wondered for years: whether healing ever threatens creativity. Writing about grief has been one of the things that has kept me alive. Sometimes I wonder what happens when the grief loosens its grip. Does the work disappear too? Or do you simply discover new things worth writing about? A few days later, I started my book, which feels like its own kind of answer.

I Started My Book

I’ve spent years, maybe my entire life, talking about writing a book. These past few years I have started outlining it in notebooks, thinking about it in therapy, mentioning it in conversations, and imagining it while doing absolutely everything except sitting down to write it. This month I finally started. At the moment it’s somewhere between a memoir and a collection of linked essays, though memoir seems to be winning, which is unfortunate because memoir requires the deeply unsettling act of admitting things happened to you.

The emotional question underneath the project feels increasingly clear: what happened to my understanding of safety, love, identity, womanhood, family, and selfhood when everything I trusted became unstable? The process so far has largely consisted of alternating between excitement and self-doubt. One moment I'm convinced it's the most important thing I've ever written. The next, I'm staring at a blinking cursor wondering whether I've mistaken courage for delusion. But I’m writing it. And for now, that feels significant enough.

Writers Group

This month I attended a writers group, which felt fitting considering I had finally started the book. I've been craving dedicated creative space lately. Not just time to write, but environments where everyone has collectively agreed that making things matters. In a world that increasingly asks every hobby to become content and every interest to become a side hustle, there is something imperative about gathering simply to create.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve loved hosting my own workshops over the past year. Every few months, a wonderfully random collection of strangers gathers in a room to write together, and then somehow they stop being strangers. Every workshop leaves me feeling a little more hopeful about people. There is something deeply comforting about being reminded that so many of us are still trying to make sense of our lives through stories. I’m already looking forward to hosting the next one.

Reconnecting With Old Friends

This month I caught up with two friends who were visiting the city. We hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade, which is long enough to become entirely different people. Long enough to accumulate careers, heartbreaks, illnesses, kids, apartments, relationships, and enough life experience to fill several versions of yourself. I expected at least a little awkwardness. Instead, there was none.

We had dinner with their friends and a friend of one of their friends, and the conversation was seamless from the beginning. Just a table full of genuinely interesting people meeting and re-meeting one another. At one point someone asked how we all knew each other. The three of us paused before one of my friends finally said, “We were in a cult together.” Which sounds like a joke but is, unfortunately, true. Everyone laughed, but there was also something strangely moving about the moment. These were people who knew me before I knew who I was. Despite all the years between us, there was still recognition. Not nostalgia. Recognition. I left feeling grateful for the reminder that not everyone you lose touch with is gone forever. Sometimes they’re just living another chapter.

I Befriended a Bartender

One of my favorite things about New York is that a random conversation can still alter the trajectory of your week. This month I struck up a friendship with a bartender over a conversation about music. That friendship somehow evolved into a photoshoot.

I don’t have a grand takeaway from this beyond the fact that I love being reminded how much life still happens offline. Some of the most interesting people I’ve met arrived through chance encounters rather than algorithms. Sometimes talking to strangers still works.

Dinner With the Perez Family

One of the most meaningful things in my life right now is also one of the simplest.

My best friend and her husband have started cooking dinner for me on the days I work in the office. I bring baked goods from my favorite bakery near work. On my remote days, I cook for them. That’s the arrangement. What I didn’t anticipate was how much I would come to cherish it.

Growing up, dinner wasn’t really a ritual. It wasn’t something that happened around a table every night. It wasn’t a guaranteed gathering place. Now, at thirty-three, I find myself sitting across from people I love, hearing about their daughter’s day, discussing whatever we read online or absurd thing happened at work, and feeling a kind of gratitude that’s difficult to explain. Sometimes I think we assume healing always arrives through major breakthroughs. Sometimes it arrives through repeated experiences that gently challenge what you’ve always believed life could be. For me, lately, that has looked a lot like Tuesday night pasta.

The Sopranos Exhibit

I sprinted to the Sopranos exhibit after work because admission was free before six o’clock. Nothing motivates me quite like avoiding a ticket price.

The exhibit itself was wonderful, but what surprised me was how emotional I felt walking through it. The Sopranos will always remind me of my grandmother. Lately, it also reminds me of M. Grief is strange that way. It embeds itself in television shows and songs and restaurants and street corners. Suddenly a cultural artifact isn’t just a cultural artifact anymore. It’s a memory. A person. A version of yourself. I spent most of the exhibit oscillating between delight and nostalgia, which feels like a fairly accurate summary of adulthood.

Photoville

I spent a day wandering through Photoville in DUMBO this month. For anyone unfamiliar, it’s a photography festival that transforms shipping containers into galleries, and it was one of the first things I ever did during my first visit to New York.

Back then, it felt endless. Container after container. Entire afternoons disappearing into photographs and conversations and the feeling that art could be found almost anywhere. This year it felt noticeably smaller. Maybe that’s nostalgia distorting the scale of my memories. Maybe it reflects larger shifts in the creative world, from economic pressures and funding challenges to AI and the increasing difficulty of sustaining public arts spaces. Whatever the reason, I left feeling both grateful it still exists and a little sad for what feels lost. There’s something bittersweet about revisiting a place you love and realizing it has changed. Then again, maybe that’s true of cities. Maybe that’s true of people, too.

Thrifting

I got back into thrifting this month and have absolutely scored.

The older I get, the less interested I am in dressing like everyone else and the more interested I am in dressing like myself. The past year has felt like a genuine evolution in personal style, and the last six months especially have been full of experimentation. I’ve become much more willing to wear things simply because I like them rather than because they’re flattering, trendy, or approved by some imaginary panel of judges living in my head. There is satisfaction in finding something weird and perfect that nobody else is going to have. Every good thrift find feels like a little act of fate.

Childcare

I picked childcare back up this month. I mean, I haven’t really stopped since going back to work, but I definitely spent more time doing it this month. Once again I was reminded why it remains one of the things that grounds me most. Last week was particularly absurd. I worked more than forty hours and then nannied another twenty-nine. By the end of it, I was operating on caffeine, muscle memory, and whatever mysterious energy source allows women to continue functioning long after they should have gone to bed.

And yet, I desperately needed those hours. I needed the chalk flowers and puzzles. I needed to sing “You Are My Sunshine” and be asked to read the same book four consecutive times. Children are wonderfully indifferent to the things adults spend most of their time worrying about. They don’t care about productivity, achievement, personal branding, or whether you’ve answered your emails. They care whether you’ll look at the drawing they just made. Again. And honestly, I think they’re onto something.

What I Read

It was, admittedly, another slow reading month.

I finished Immersions by Kyle McCarthy after attending the reading moderated by Leslie Jamison, which made the experience feel unusually personal. One of my favorite things about author events is hearing about the invisible architecture underneath a book: the choices readers never see, the years of thinking that live beneath a finished sentence, and the paths not taken. Hearing Kyle discuss the creative process gave me a deeper appreciation for the novel itself and made me more committed to finishing it.

I’m also nearly finished with Found Wanting by Caroline Goldstein. It’s one of those books that keeps brushing up against memories I wasn’t expecting, including memories of M. Certain books seem to arrive carrying a flashlight. They illuminate corners of your own life that you’ve walked past a hundred times without really looking at.

What I Listened To

This month belonged largely to women with strong opinions and excellent lyricism.

Audrey Hobert’s “Sue Me” became my unofficial girl-summer anthem. I’ve danced around my apartment to it while diffusing my hair enough times that Spotify should probably stage an intervention.

Phantogram’s “When I’m Small” accompanied several train rides and moments of staring dramatically out windows as though I were the protagonist of a coming-of-age film.

I've been listening to "Stem the Flow" by Paris Paloma constantly. There's something about the tension between resistance and surrender in that song that feels familiar.

Phoebe Bridgers’ “Graceland Too” continued her long-standing commitment to emotionally ambushing me whenever possible.

I also spent a significant amount of time with Movements’ new album, which provided exactly the amount of yearning and existential devastation I require from alternative music.

Fiona Apple re-entered rotation after I found a dress printed with lyrics from “Oh Well,” one of my designated breakup songs, which felt like an act of divine intervention specifically designed for emotionally complicated women.

And after spending time with a very cool skateboarder, I found myself on a full Death Cab for Cutie deep dive. It’s one of his favorite bands, which meant every song felt slightly charged with association. By the time I am posting this, their new album is out and I am probably off on a walk listening to it.

What I Watched

The fashion in The Devil Wears Prada 2 nearly took me out. I came home and immediately googled approximately everything I saw on screen before remembering that I operate on a middle-class income. It did, however, inspire me to start DIY-ing more clothes, including a pair of safety-pin loafers that remain one of my proudest recent vision brought to life.

I also watched Off Campus, which I loved with the kind of enthusiasm that makes it difficult to explain coherently to other people. Every time someone asked what I liked about it, I found myself struggling to answer. Not because there wasn't anything to say, but because the appeal lived in the chemistry of it all. The writing, the humor, the relationships, the feeling that everyone involved understood exactly what story they were trying to tell. By the end, I wasn't interested in analyzing it. I just wanted more of it.

Parachute earned a rewatch and hit just as hard as it did the first time. As someone whose OCD spiraled after a breakup and whose relationship with her body became increasingly complicated after being cheated on, I continue to find it one of the most compassionate portrayals of how emotional pain migrates. How heartbreak rarely stays where it started.

And finally, The Love That Remains, which followed me around for days afterward. My favorite kind of film is one that quietly refuses to leave. I kept thinking about the way it portrayed grief, not as a singular event but as something woven into ordinary life. It captured the strange reality that love doesn't disappear when a relationship ends. Sometimes it simply changes shape and continues to exist alongside everything else.Closing Thoughts

If May had a theme, it was probably community.

Not the aspirational kind people post about online. The real kind. The dinner table kind. The writing group kind. The reconnecting-with-old-friends-after-a-decade kind. The chatting-with-a-stranger kind. The singing-to-a-child kind.

For a long time I thought building a life happened through major decisions. The big moves. The dramatic endings. The milestones that announce themselves while they’re happening. Lately, I’ve started to suspect it happens through accumulation. One dinner. One conversation. One friendship. One workshop. One page at a time.

And maybe that’s what I’ll remember about May. Not any single event, but the feeling of looking around and realizing that many of the things I’ve spent years hoping for, creative community, meaningful friendships, chosen family, a book in progress, work that feels purposeful, aren’t waiting somewhere in the future. They’re already here, imperfect and unfinished and wonderfully ordinary.

OH! And it was my sweet Penelope’s birthday. Easily the highlight of the month, and of everyday life.

X,

Steph

If my writing made you nod along, feel a little less alone, or just gave you something to overthink later, consider buying me a coffee. It’s a small way to say, “Hey, keep doing the thing,” and I’d really appreciate it.