doing things that scare you

finding my intuition, parsons class 001

first day of school pic !!

I’m never more grateful for living in new york than when I’m away from new york. I think about this tension in the 30 minute uber ride between my hotel and san francisco office to ward of the waves of motion sickness.

Before this trip I was dreaming of escape from the city— away from the crowds and loudness and the scenes. But for the weary traveler, san francisco can be incredibly stifling. Locals caution that I shouldn’t go for a run outside. A man lingers half a block behind me yelling when I try to take a walk. I wake up to a woman high and shrieking instead of drunk 22 years olds in the middle of the night. I take 400 steps all day, spend my time in ubers watching netflix and ordering doordash. The silicon valley dream.

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San franciscos’s only redeeming quality is that it’s consistently a city I feel young in. I’m always sitting between colleagues, trying to think of the appropriate responses to someone telling me a story about their kids.

My daughter is three, a woman says to me, and we’ve taught our daughter that when she has feelings that are bigger than what she can deal with, she runs to get her stuffed animal and yells ‘I have big feelings !!!’.

I have to suppress the urge to tell her that when I have big feelings I’ll watch stupid little videos on my phone until my mind forgets about them.

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girl in hotel bathroom

I’ve always liked traveling for work. I like staying in nice hotels, sitting in a robe on a plush king bed while eating local takeout. It makes me extremely aware of the fact that I’m an adult, with a job and a life that I’ve carved out for myself.

When I was younger, I couldn’t even fathom adult life. Sitting at a computer and getting paid cold, hard cash for just doing things. When I was in college, I couldn’t fathom being in my late 20s. And now here I am getting paid to think about things and meet people starting cool companies and occasionally tell people what to do.

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Maybe the vestiges of my childhood are the most obvious in the big feelings I have. When I was a kid, I was what you’d call, a huge scaredy cat. I was always scared of bad things happening to me. Scared of bad things happening to people I loved. Scared that I was inherently weirder or dumber than everyone else.

At the beginning of this year, I made 3 new years resolutions for things I would do every day: 1/ wake up at 6:30am, 2/ write 500 words and 3/ do things that scare me. But while I can measure progress with 1 and 2, 3 is the one where I find myself at a loss. It became very apparent to me that doing something that scares me every day becomes completely unrealistic, but at the same time not having a forcing function makes it much easier for me to avoid pushing myself.

I’ve been looking at taking a class at parson’s for a full year now. My bad habit is to procrastinate doing something when I’m scared and then let the decision be made for me by default. I balked at the cost one semester (1,000 beans!) and let the signup deadline pass me. Then spent so long wavering on whether this was what I truly wanted that the class filled up. The pattern of want, fear, and then beating myself up for not taking action is a cycle I’m all too familiar with. But eventually it’ll force me into action.

graduates college and begs to go back to school

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I’m writing from lyria watching the rain pour down outside. It’s what I’d imagine as a perfect sunday: nothing to do and all the time to do exactly what I want. It’s not my usual hangout, but there’s something about the consistency of a nolita scene that feels like the right type of homecoming. I’m checking my email and my fashion design professor has emailed 3 times.

<3

I wrote a post earlier this year grappling with a lack of intuition — I often feel directionless and lacking clarity in what I want. I still feel this way. But every once in awhile life won’t feel as effortful and I’ll feel something in my bones. When I was 12 I visited Australia for the first time and viscerally remember eating an ice cream cone and saying to myself that I’d move there one day. 12 years later, I was on a one way flight to Sydney. When I was in middle school, I watched gossip girl and the slick shots of the soaring buildings and lines of yellow cabs ingrained in me a desire to move to new york. And now sometimes I’ll walk around with my morning coffee and catch the smell of wet leaves in the fall and just feel this transcendent gratefulness to live here.

favorite place on earth

It’s funny because at 28, I feel like I have less intuition than what when I was a kid — I fear that as we get older, we become more set in our ways and limited in what we consider the realm of the possibilities for how our lives will play out. I know this fashion design class is the intuitive decision because reading my professors emails fills me with a steady euphoria, and thinking about doing my homework makes me genuinely giddy.

honestly great life advice

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I’m not sure I have found the ideal heuristic in how often you should be doing ‘things that scare you’. But I find that when I have big feelings about something it’s often good to sit with them rather than grabbing the proverbial stuffed animal. Spend time thinking about why they exist and what it means about what you want. A lot of self-help books talk about facing resistance once we’re on a path to getting what we really want.

The other week, I saw this tiktok about a girl talking about wanting to wake up early and finding resistance in doing hard things. Rather than seeing resistance as an unbearable obstacle, treat it as a sign that you’re doing something hard and a space to examine your intention. A reminder that worthwhile things are never easy. And every moment of resistance is an opportunity to prove that you can do scary things.

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class notes // week 1 @ parsons

• the first class was an overview to the tools (woodless graphite pencil, sketch notepads, oil pastels, gouache), and an extremely brief introduction to the human figure

• we start with an 8-head figure (the entire body is around 8 heads long) and fill in the rest of the figure with a series of shapes and angles — circles and oblongs that connect knees to ankles, mirrored trapezoids for chest and hips

• there’s an emphasis on putting lines on the page to make us less scared of the empty space

You can see the progression with my figures growing from awkward and stiff, slightly off kilter to a little more organic. I particularly like the first on the right page — the balance is still off but I like that she feels the most alive of all the models. more to come! ♠✭❁♥✹❊☂