Tonight I am sitting in bed, stubbornly refusing to allow defeat on my Friday writing streak. Just three weeks ago, I decided that I missed writing and was re-committing to posting something on this blog every single Friday. I am sitting in bed, overtired, trying to make that happen.
I didn't sleep enough last night, and my body is tired. My heart, though, feels almost unusually contented with the day. In my chest there is a distinct feeling of brimming. A persistent, if exhausted feeling of curiosity and the desire to mix things up and try something new.
I've been feeling burnt out--a little crispy. Spring is a busy work season that comes on the heels of the other busy work seasons, winter and the holidays. Tomorrow is my last Saturday of the summer working (!) and I could not be happier. I am teaching my typical Saturday mornings schedule, and then there are shows at both skating clubs I primarily teach at. It'll be a busy day involving two rinks and essentially being on from 8am to at least 5pm. But when we are done--oh! I'm finding a cute restaurant with Chris and having a drink and releasing myself into a bit more languidness.
Like seemingly the majority of younger-millennial women, my TikTok feed is filled with both *aesthetic* day in the life content and supposedly anti-aesthetic (bust still pretty cute...) lifestyle content. I eat it all up. I can't lie: I've been a lifestyle girlie from the beginning. When I first discovered blogs in late middle school, I would scroll to someone's first post and attempt to read the whole archive. In high school I wrote lengthy, existential emails to my favorite bloggers asking for advice that when boiled down came to: "how do I...live? Like, exist?" I do want to get ready with you. I do want to see what you eat in a day. I definitely want to see your 5-9 after your 9-5 and I love a dramatic anti-hustle culture audio over footage of your pretty productive day. I soak every bit of it in, and then I look around at my life and wonder how I could wrap this up in a bow.
I think I have a more positive view on all this than most. I tend to believe most people are simply creative and trying their best; that people are just as authentic online as they are in real life (a place I've find to be surprisingly inauthentic) and that everything is fake and posed and filtered and we need to accept that and move on. But the piece that does strike a chord, is the desperation of everyone to find a little more light, space, and joy amidst a day of fitting into all of the boxes.
A swipe of my thumb shows me younger and younger women buying flowers, making beautiful food, sitting on their apartment porches and reveling in the clink of ice against their metal straws. They pull their hair back and get to it, grinding through day jobs and side jobs while still pulling out their gratitude journals, taking a walk, making their beds. We can laugh at the pointlessness, the typical-ness, of a too-early morning routine that has you lighting the same candles as everybody else. We can wax poetic on how much of this we should believe, how they're too young to sound so war-worn and how maybe they would feel less overwhelmed if they put their phones down.
Or--in a world that was built without their voices; after a girlhood where their preferences and dreams were trivialized, then commodified, then sexualized; after the lie of "doing the right things" leading to any stability--we can honor the bravery in showing up with bells on any way. This is a fight for survival, and we're refusing to even look ruffled.
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