Winter Becomes Spring (and then I freak out)

Cue seasonal transition existentialism

Self Portrait in Hanoi

New York is entering the boundary of Winter/Spring where it’s perfect at noon in the sun on a bench in the park, and then much too cold at 6pm. The days are stretching, a sudden proliferation of people on the street when I leave my house (too many). I have to admit: I’m a little mad about it. I’ve lived in New York for over a decade now, and finally I have found my appreciation for the frozen expanse of January-March, three months where staying home and planning my dates with Cody around the release schedules of TV shows feels totally acceptable.

I have to leave my house at minimum three times a day because dog, so I have to see what is going on outside when the weather is nice and the people are enjoying it even when I’m locked in and really shouldn’t be exposed to that kind of thing. I saw a tweet about how winter is for seasonal depression and summer is for seasonal anxiety that we’re not doing as much as everyone else is doing. I am very easily manipulated by my imagination: what is everyone else doing, how much fun are they having, and shouldn’t I be having that much fun too? Haven’t I also suffered from perpetually ashy knees and a Vitamin D3 deficiency for the last few months and deserve the liberty to let loose a little? The problem with New York is that there are simply too many people. I’m sure there are many people sitting at home, like me, trying to drag out the keeping to yourself that winter allows, but I don’t see them, because they’re not on the street in mini skirts filling every available bench in McCarren Park in my direct field of vision. It gets so horny on these streets and I worry I am missing out.

I feel as though I am finally hitting some sort of creative stride; I have long cast aside the anxiety that I am not an artist, or that I’m not allowed to call myself one. I no longer concern myself with semantics, I just feel as though I am. It kind of just happened one day. One day you feel like an imposter and then you work hard enough at it and no longer do. I have worked too hard, learned too much, failed too many times. A tarot card reader at a spa influencer event at the Hoxton a few months ago told me that my cards said 2025 is my year, but 2026 was really when all my flowers would bloom. I can feel them blooming already, but strangely I am finding myself increasingly desperate for the cold and wintery hours I feel allowed to shut myself in my house, to stay up late into the night editing photos and writing. It is the first time in my life I have felt called to do a lot alone, to not reach for my phone on a Friday morning desperate to make plans for the weekend. These days I long for a gap, a reprieve from the constant plans, the Google calendar filled with hundreds of relentless colored boxes demanding I be one place or another.

The simple answer is that I should just do whatever feels right, but the problem is I want it all. I want to be a serious writer, I need to finish my book, and the only person who can do that is me. I want to finish this Viet Kieu photo project and make a book out of that, too. I also want to drink three glasses of orange wine at 4PM until I have a headache, or pull on a joint at my kitchen table and stare obsessively into the patterns of my dog’s fur. I want to kiki and dance and go shopping. I want to “be in Europe this summer”and consider a last minute flight to a warm and sunny place, but I also know that achieving my goals requires a dedication that I have personally never mustered up for anything in my life before for this extended amount of time. I feel I have it in me, finally, but I am so, so distracted.

I’m grateful for my creative practice, because to discover it so urgently in my early 30’s has cleared the stage for total devotion. No matter how young I know I am, it still feels urgent to make up for the lost time in my 20’s where I wasn’t creating. It’s baffling to me how strong the feeling is now given it was so undirected and unharnessed for my entire twenties. I’m grateful for my creative practice because it is a stepping stone to the life lesson I am eternally trying to learn: how to slow down, how to do less, how to reclaim all the energy I leak everywhere else, to claim it back for myself, keep it closer to my belly.

It is difficult to show up everyday and work on a book I’m not sure is any good, to spend hours and hours in a darkroom (literally devoid of light) on days where the sun stains the sky a pretty pink that a nagging voice asks me: should you not be frolicking under a sky that pink? It’s so difficult and I am addicted to it. At this point, the goal of completion seems so abstract. I exist purely in a liminal space of ongoing creation and revision, editing and reflecting, spiraling upwards towards a hazy finish line that feels fake because I’m literally the only person who is responsible for its existence. But still, I persevere, and I read the motivational creative books (I’m reading a particularly good writing motivation book called 1000 Words by Jami Attenberg).

Right now, as I write this, I am tipsy off four glasses of wine after an impromptu group pizza dinner because my friend Leah is back in town. There were many things I was meant to do today. I was meant to climb, to move my body, but there was no time for that. I didn’t really work today, but as Eunice said at dinner, does it matter when you’re a freelancer when you do the work as long as it’s done? I am here, sitting in a dark corner of my apartment, drunkenly typing out my thousand words for the day diligently, each word a step closer to the dreams that I am chasing, at my own pace, at my own time, in my own way. That alone is a beautiful thing, a thing to be grateful for.