Merry Christmas to those of you who are celebrating today! As of Thursday morning, I was looking forward to a quiet Christmas with my mom. As of today, I’m enjoying a quarantine Christmas in my apartment with a case of Covid. I had gotten a rapid test on Monday afternoon, before seeing my best friend and her two little kids. It was negative, and I felt fine. I continued to feel fine through Thursday morning; the rapid PCR I got was just a…

This week, I scrolled past an Instagram post that really touched me. The post shows before and after kitchen photos. In the first photo, the kitchen is covered in dirty dishes. In the second, the dishes have been cleaned and put away. The caption reads, This is what depression looks like. First time doing my dishes in over 4 months. First new breaths of many. It made me want to cry. I think most people who have depression can relate to the insurmountable…

This week felt like a blur. I was trying to get to the end of a work project that had been weighing me down for weeks. On top of that, I was dealing with the holiday season and end-of-year commotion that consumes so many of us in December. At one point toward the end of the week, after a day of agitation that included subway delays, slow-moving crowds, and being late for everything thanks to my own silly overcommitting, I got to thinking…

Yesterday morning, I told a friend of mine that I’d probably forgo getting a Christmas tree this year. For context, my mom and I made a big deal of Christmas when I was growing up. That included getting and decorating the tree. I kept up with the ritual through my twenties and early thirties, skipped a year or two in my mid-thirties when I was going through a rough time, and have tried to honor the tradition since then. But I haven’t been…

Hope that those of you who observed Thanksgiving in some way had a meaningful day. My day was nice and quiet; it was also a little melancholy. I have a feeling that this holiday season will be a tough one, but I’m trying not to turn that feeling into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I went to a mid-morning yoga class on Thanksgiving. This is basically a tradition of mine, but there are some years when I need it more badly than others. This was…

This is my second consecutive Sunday away from home. A few weeks ago, sort of spontaneously, I decided to make good on two trips I had been hoping to take for some time now. The first was to Washington, D.C., where I lived for part of grad school. The second, a one-on-one trip with my oldest friend, could have been to anywhere. But we chose Nashville, which was easy for me to fly to from D.C. and driving distance for her, from New…

In the past few days I’ve been reminded of how powerful it is to step away from things. I’m just back from Denver, where I was earlier this summer. I’m working with Ashley on cookbook photography, and we had a few big pieces of the project to finish this week. To shoot the food, we needed to cook the food. I hadn’t eaten some of the dishes in over a year, thanks to the time it has taken me to work on the…