I don’t particularly care for the “memories” feature on the iPhone. Whether on my phone—or even worse, my partner’s—it’s a source of constant avoidance. Each time it’s accidentally accessed, it ruins my day in one way or another. Nothing good can be found in it. Why does it exist? This morning, not even one full cup of coffee in, I made the mistake of accidentally swiping a little too enthusiastically and found myself staring into the millennial abyss (the “on this day” widget). I was confronted by a pre-blonde, pre-West Virginia, even a pre-New York photo of myself posing in front of the hip hole-in-the-wall taqueria a few row homes down from my house in Fishtown. (Philadelphia, for those unacquainted.)
Ruddy cheeks, round face, robust muffin top—it could be the alcohol bloat or the fact what I weighed a whopping 25+ pounds more then than I do now—I forgot how fat I was. For a moment, I felt good about myself in my current state. To look better at 32 28 than you did at 27 is something to hang your hat on—at least, that’s what the incels who send my images of empty egg cartons on Twitter would like to think. I could have left it at that, but I—to my perpetual detriment—have a compulsive need to pull every thread.
With life moving lately at a breakneck pace, I rationalized that it wouldn’t be too bad to indulge the occasional masochistic streak and take a peek into my life five years ago. I so often (misguidedly) romanticize this era. I miss being a city girl, I miss the distractions and the relative anonymity. I miss being known in a curated sense, being an up-and-coming tastemaker with magazine features, podcast and TV appearances, event invites nearly every night, the freedom and funds to jetset to distant lands when I needed some time away from it all. My camera roll is full of memories of unmemorable brunches, excessive drinking, mostly-conservative black clothes with the occasional cutout or gratuitous cleavage as an act of over-compensation for my persistent BDD, and other assorted slices of life. I remember it all as being very fun, but looking back, I’m struck by my Xanax-heavy-lidded-dead-eyed-stare. I can’t help but notice the caked-on foundation, the overdone spray tans, all done in an effort to feign some joie de vivre. I wasn’t just “fat,” I was also miserable. But still, a part of me wants to lean into the guise-of-freedom of it all.
There’s something so quintessentially cosmopolitan about being carefree in a self-destructive way. City girls love doing things “for the plot.” A commonality between all of my friends who were once twenty-somethings in the city is that they can all recall at least a dozen cocktail conversations with girlfriends that were entirely centered around bizarre and disaffected men met on “the apps.” The kinds of men you know within the first 30 seconds of meeting irl that you should probably make an excuse and leave, but you stay and have a few drinks because “something funny might happen.” (That “something funny” often tends to be the kind of thing that would make even Carrie Bradshaw blush, but my goodness, these stories make for good drunken conversation.)
No wonder we all drank to excess.
A few summers ago—roughly a month and a half before I met my sweetheart—I planned a staycation in Philadelphia with my best friend. We booked a $400-a-night boutique hotel in the heart of the Gayborhood (they’re trying to rebrand this as “Midtown Village now?) overlooking the now rainbow-painted intersection where Mumia Abu-Jamal once either did or did not murder Daniel Faulkner. We were excited to live the glory days once more—to reprise this circa spring 2019 era in which the city was our oyster, we were utterly unserious, we had neither mortgages, nor high-pressure careers, nor responsibilities. To say that it was a disaster would be to put it lightly. All I wanted was to get hit on and even in a red linen dress with a plunging neckline, I couldn’t manage. Not in Rittenhouse bar full of mafiosos looking for goomars, not in a sports bar full of sports bros looking to numb the pain of yet another Phillies defeat, not even in an Irish pub full of Temple students looking to soothe their latent mommy issues. I ended the night with my confidence shattered and my red linen dress stinking of olive juice after the manager at the first bar bumped into me and spilled my filthy dirty gin martini all over me.
It was a moment of reckoning. We woke up the next morning and headed off to work. Feeling defeated, feeling “old,” and accepting that I am now “boring,” I resigned myself to life as a shut-in and decided that I couldn’t wait to get back to my silk robe and TV in West Virginia. I grabbed what I thought was a kombucha with juice from the mini bar and headed to a WeWork to work on a project with my team. In the middle of a conference call, I felt buzzed. I realized that I was not drinking a kombucha, I was drinking the equivalent of two and a half glasses of sparkling wine on an empty stomach. This was the March 2019 moment I’d been waiting for—drunk on the job after a night of heavy drinking, with happy hour looming in the near future. It wasn’t as “fun” as it used to be. In fact, it made me appreciate my relatively-newfound “resoluteness.” I let go of “the way things were” in that moment. Without that, I wouldn’t be where I am now: captured by the throes of life’s chaos, no doubt, but so happy to be stable and to have found the love of my life. He hits on me even when I’m not in a red linen dress with a plunging neckline, and his advances are the only ones I will desire for the rest of my life.
It’s maybe not as exciting as day drinking with the girls and exchanging sordid stories of dates gone wrong, but it’s even better than I could have ever imagined. That’s growth, baby. And without it, life would be pretty damn dull.
xo, e.m.
P.S., please enjoy this playlist that I made in March of 2019. (I’ve made a playlist similar to this one every month for the last ten years or more.)