Midnight Musings
Every night as I fall asleep to the cacophony that is Manhattan street noise, I find myself writing an entire Substack post in my head. The lines pour out of me in spurts and hiccups of prose and though I hope that I’ll remember them the next morning, I know I won’t. So I reach over to the nightstand where my phone rests charging dangerously close to the table’s edge and open the Notes app, a girl’s best friend. I write down a few key words that piece together the spiraling theories and world-building that seems to strike only when it’s past my bedtime. Without fail, I’ll then trip and fall into the endless scroll that is TikTok on a good day, Hinge on a bad one, and find myself 45 minutes later nursing my eighteenth existential crisis of the day and wondering if everyone else has had a lobotomy after college and perhaps I somehow missed the memo?
Anyone else? Just me? No yeah, that’s awesome.
The problem with this practice (though I can assure you, it’s deeply creative) is that everything feels positively half-baked. So I don’t end up publishing any of the nearly finished sentences or the messy 400-word paragraphs because perhaps the Notes app is where ideas go to die. My negative self-talk picks up and I find myself crippled by one single thought: no one wants to read your diary, and that’s all this is.
Though lately, I’m not even sure that’s true. Because here’s the thing, I would LOVE to read someone’s diary… and we kind of do it all day long. Memoirs and TikTok vlogs and ‘what I ate in a days,’ 2023 photo dumps and ins and out lists— we are truly desperate for access to each other’s inner world. Privacy, be damned. So here’s mine.
Confessions of My Crush-less Existence:
I spent November and December what I’ve been lovingly calling ‘Hinge-sober.’ It’s a catch-all term not just for dating apps, but for the hyper-fixation that’s only swelled as we’ve exited the pandemic (mostly) and found that we’re still, well, how do I put this… lonely. We really weren’t built to live this way, in isolated apartments and cubicles, spending 8 hours at a desk and exchanging not so much as a smile with your neighbors. We were supposed to live communally, and the times I’ve always felt the most fulfilled is when I’m doing just that. When I graduated from the fairy-pixie dreamworld tulip garden that was my 4 years at a historic women’s college in Southern California, I also left behind communities and third places I didn’t realize I held so dear: the woman working at the omelette bar at the dining hall who knew my breakfast order by heart, the courtyards where friends and acquaintances fluttered in and out all day, class-friends and club-friends and friends of friends. It wasn’t just that you were never alone, because you could be if you wanted to. It was that the promise of connection was just a smile away.
My world was saturated by connection, until of course, it wasn’t. Months after the worst of the pandemic had passed, I moved to New York City to begin my ‘life.’ Gone were not just my best friends as roommates but our neighbors we also went to college with and the ease of accessing your entire community by foot alone. I consider myself lucky, moving to New York with a large social circle from my years growing up on the East Coast, and still somehow, I felt alone. So I fired up dating apps because, there, much like on Amazon, you could download a boyfriend with 2-day delivery.
I’m only kidding of course, but that’s how it grew to feel. Whenever I felt lonely, there was the promise of connection accessible by my gel-manicured fingertips. I’m sure that wasn’t the app’s original intention, but by design, that’s what it delivered. Companionship for download; love on demand. Whatever you want to call it, I knew it wasn’t good for me. It could have been my dopamine deficiency, a fear of being alone, or perhaps just a desire to fulfill romance of my fantasies, but I realized in the midst of all this swiping, matching, chatting, dating, that my energy and creativity was depleted. When you’re looking for connection, it seems that anyone will do. So, as women are taught to do, I squeezed and prodded and shape-shifted myself into one day I woke up after my 9 month relationship ended and felt tremendous grief. Not just for the relationship, though of course I felt that, but also for the version of myself I was before him. Before dating apps, before all of it. Perhaps our girl Taylor said it best: Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.
These days, I’m reconnecting with my girlhood. That doesn’t mean I’m not dating or even swiping (or wearing far too many bows and copious amounts of blush, though those things are honestly fun too). It just means that my relationship status is not a headline. Well, except in this essay (and probably more after that). Reconnecting with my girlhood means pulling back the layers of ice crusted on growing my own garden, and letting it all melt away. Instead, I’m nourishing my own joy, investing in my passions, and rediscovering myself. I’ve found over the last 2 months that I feel wildly more creative, present, and energized. All the time I was pouring into nursing a chorus of boys in my phone wasn’t actually getting me any closer to any of the dreams I had for myself: romantic or otherwise.
I was going to open up Hinge this morning, just as something to do between the meetings that fill my day. But I paused for a moment, and I wrote this instead. I’m so glad that I did. 🌷
Why would you block me on insta?!?! I followed you and thought you were cool and hella talented. Consider me unsubscribed!!