Perhaps you wonder why I continue with tasks like clutter clearing and putting outfits together, and writing navel-gazing journal entries like this one while our world burns. I am aware of the questioning, critical voice speaking in the background of every moment of my life, and yet I do continue. I make coffee in the morning, keep a moment of silence for dead butterflies, and sit down with the boxes of photos I find in the back of the closet because I am alive, and this is how I navigate life. I live it by sometimes crying about it, and sometimes screaming at it, and sometimes loving it so intensely I dissolve into the air around me. I live it by writing about it.
I’ve been cleaning and clearing and bagging things for donation, and in doing so, I find carefully curated albums and haphazard boxes of photographs, and more often than not, I sit down with them and look at them and remember who I was and where I was when these pictures were taken.
Mostly, they were taken in the 90s when I was in my 20s. I frequently think and write about that decade of my life. It is not out of nostalgic longing. It is more like flattening a paper map on the table and retracing my steps. It is there, in 90s New York, where so much of my inspiration lives. It is there that I left little sparkling crumbs of my essential self so that my current self could return to retrieve them.
Read the entire essay on Creative LIving Diaires.