For the past few years, Wendy C. Ortiz has graced us with a year-long interview with another writer every January. She decided to take a year off, and I said I would do a year-long interview with another writer in her place.

The thing is, doing a proper year-long interview is actually really hard. Wendy’s were always well-demarcated, timely, split by correct month, organized. I found myself always falling behind, trying to catch up later, and generally not being as good of a correspondent as I’d once considered myself to be.

My co-correspondent, however, Marlowe Granados, took all of my bad habits in stride and was totally willing to bend the form with me. Looking back on our year and change of words, I’m thrilled to see how it encompasses so much of what has preoccupied me for these months, and I hope she feels the same.

Even though I am, per usual, embarrassed by how long the interview ended up taking, I am also happy to view the dispatches from our lives over this period of time. it‘s reminiscent of the way I look at my own life as an adult in this fast-paced, weird timeline world.

As two women in our thirties, we have a specific vantage point on experiencing time – it’s the transitional period between seeing yourself as a young person and seeing yourself as someone with real-life experience. You start to look at younger people as young and see older people as not really that old after all. You start to realize how much money you need to actually survive and build a life, and change the way you’re willing to hustle to get there.

Writing is itself an exercise in understanding the passage of time. As Marlowe says in this conversation, “I approach writing fiction as an incremental obsession...you find the theory and the lineage, the line through history that puts your story within a larger context.”

As I was thinking about how to introduce this conversation, I had a few memories of anecdotes involving me and the passage of time…only to read through the interview again and find that I’d already mentioned most of them through the course of the year and a half of talking with Marlowe. That’s time, too – folding in on itself, repeating phrases and ideas until they become ingrained in our brains.

*****

Becca: Do you have any big plans (writing or otherwise) for 2022? What are your instincts telling you about this year? Do you have any trend predictions? Hopes and dreams?

Marlowe: I’m sorry for the wait, for some reason, I was in demand for Valentine's Day. A romance expert! I just wrote a long screed about love letters and writing them, so this is perfect timing. Our year of love letters! I was thinking about when we met at Rachel Rabbit White's party where I arrived alone. I personally love to gossip and it was so fun to do it with you, Daisy, and Helen. It’s so funny, but ever since the book came out, I feel such a shift in my life. The novel had so much of my twenties and now that I am thirty, I feel like I’m embarking on a new era. I joke with my friends that turning thirty means forgetting all the suitors I had and starting completely fresh (that’s a long list of names...some of which I cannot remember.)

Everyone is talking about things changing, but from what I can tell, it’s just an acceptance of MESS. I love real mess. I think for a while, New York was getting so uptight, and now there are all these young kids who have spent years indoors and finally turn twenty-one and run amok in the streets. Of course, I find some of the aesthetics young people are churning out not to my taste and I wish some of the trends would stay in the past...but I don't blame them. I really believe only the worst parts of culture can be bred online and it's terribly important to LIVE and go out.

We don't have real subcultures anymore, it feels like everything is an impersonation. A copy of a copy of a copy. Anyway, if kids are going out and being naughty without fear of embarrassment, I’m absolutely for it. When I was young, my friend cemented a car door shut for no reason at all...it was stupid, but boy did it make her feel ALIVE.

This year I would like some money...I keep wanting to tweet out, “I would never write for $250, I’d rather babysit.” People still email me with those kinds of rates, and I think it’s actually quite rude. When I was young, I always had three jobs, plus I was in school but I managed to write. Now I am too exhausted for that kind of thing. What’s the point of all this if I can’t have time to go at my own pace? I approach writing fiction as an incremental obsession...you find the theory and the lineage, the line through history that puts your story within a larger context. It takes time! I want that time, which of course always costs money. I really get livid when I hear about large advances going out to bad writers. It’s truly outrageous. Anyway, I mostly want money to go to Paris for a few months and fly my cats with me. All a girl ever wants!

I’m looking forward to spring and playing tennis with my friends. Genuinely I feel like every time I go back to New York now, it feels like work. I’m perfectly happy getting my nails done and playing tennis, and getting my clothes dry-cleaned, living in my little Single Girl apartment with my two cats. I don’t have the anxiety of trying to keep up with a scene. I do have a shopping addiction, though. What are you buying right now? I always want to know what everyone's buying.

Becca: I do think that being in your thirties is such a shift from being in your twenties — one that I LOVE. I felt like everyone told me it was going to be this big tragic closure, but idk, I’ve had the opposite experience. I lived the life out of my twenties! I’m not a different person now by any means, but I am content to say, do less. Or only do things when I really want to.

I read this thing in a book a while ago — it was someone recounting advice their father gave them, I think — which was, “Your twenties are for having fun, your thirties are for working hard, and your forties are for enjoying the fruits of the hard work.” I love that, because I love interesting demarcations of time, and I love feeling like I’m not too late for my working hard era, rather I’m right on time.

I personally love watching the generations change, the young kids come up with their new ideas and scenes, watching everything interact, and yes, the mess! Of course, sometimes it can get grating — I stopped reading the articles dissecting dimes square long ago — but I find generally it’s just much easier to sit back and watch everything with a glint of humor in your eye than to get up in arms about it.

I suppose it has much to do with the fact that I’ve finally learned to love the passage of time. That was a big sticking point for me when I was younger — I wanted every day to go by so slowly, I got upset at weeks passing, everything felt so fleeting and like it was never enough. Now I really do believe the James Taylor lyric — “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” Once I was able to really, truly let go and just take each day for what it was instead of wishing for more, I became a much more relaxed and content person.

I also need money this year. Sigh. I made the classic mistake where I thought, I have plenty of gigs, I don’t need to look for more (and paused the full-time job hunt.) then, of course, a bunch of them ended at once — some by surprise, and some by design, but I definitely did not plan for so many to cease at once. So now I’m really trying to go sicko mode on income. I hate worrying about money, I find it so boring and unseemly, and if I have to work harder for that to happen…that’s fine. I hate worrying about money more than I hate working.

I hope that we both come into money at the same moment and can go to Paris at overlapping times. I’ve had to cancel and or postpone two trips to Paris during the pandemic and although I know that’s the least of anyone’s problems, it still makes me sad. I was in Paris right before the pandemic — flew back the day Trump said no more flights from Europe — and idk; I’m obviously being over dramatic, but in some sense, it feels like time has stopped since then and it’ll only pick up for real when I go back to Paris. Of course, I know that time is indeed passing, but given that I don’t really believe in time or money, there isn’t much stopping me from this fantasy that real life will resume when I take another trip to Paris.

How did your spring turn out? What was different than you wanted, what was the same?

How would you describe your relationship to your cats? I’m very into talking about our relationships to animals lately — I’ve always been a big animal person, I rode horses growing up and looked to them as a lifeline when I didn’t connect to the world around me. It’s funny now, I’m SO connected to the world around me, so adopting a dog has been a big shift for me in terms of returning to the necessity of keeping a stable home and being responsible for another living being.

Marlowe: I actually find writing these emails very fun. I think I’m a bit too young for this kind of heavy exchange that I would see older writers do via email. Long letters as though they were collecting some form of 2009 epistolary capsule. Do you remember that time? I prefer talking on the phone. It’s kind of why I can’t start the newest Rooney book, I can’t imagine people writing emails to each other like that...without some overarching conceit.

My spring has been kind of sabotaged by breaking my ankle playing tennis. I love how in my last letter I was so excited to play! It was my first ever surgery and before they put me to sleep and gave me a little dose of medical fentanyl they let me request music in my operating room. Disco, of course! By the time I was going under, the first few notes of “Yes Sir I Can Boogie” came on. I like hospital humor...I’ve never loved hospitals but I like the people that work there. They have such a funny sense of having seen it all...they’re a little unflappable and I admire that. They can really play if you’re in that kind of mood. I’m taking the injury in stride. Everyone says I’m in good spirits. I think that’s my usual mode, even in neutral, I’m a little peppy!

I actually have a weird principle I always think about. If someone dislikes me I always think...well, at least animals and children love me. I think there’s a very particular type of person that they are drawn to. Maybe that means they see something in me that is essentially good? Is this my Catholicism shining through? I hear being Catholic is in vogue at the moment. I’ve always loved animals growing up. I actually wanted to be a zoologist or something when I was young. I think that’s so funny now.

I grew up with cats and I always say if I was an animal that’s what I’d be. Sometimes feral, sometimes house-bound (like this very moment with my injury). I want to read something in a novel where they really talk about their relationship with their pet. It’s such an intimate bond. I had a cat that I rescued when I was 25, much like you... to kind of stabilize my home life. To care for something that was outside of myself. His name was Bear, and was a total mess. Completely docile and sweet, with little thumbs but cursed with an immune disorder so constantly sneezing and having a runny nose. He died last year in such a visceral way with a tumor that grew over the course of six weeks. It really was affecting! Unexpectedly so. It was such a personal grief because no one else had this kind of relationship with him except me. My mother died when I was 19, and I felt like grief seems to creep up on you from the past when confronted with grief in the present.

Anyway, I was really in nurse mode those last few weeks. It got bloody sometimes and I would wrap his little leg as best as I could. I got Bruce (a white British shorthair) as Bear’s emotional support animal, a friend for the end. After Bear died, Bruce was alone for about six months until one day after I came back from New York for my press tour I said, “I’m getting another one.” I saw a listing for this little cat that was being retired from a breeder and knew I’d name her Claude. Having two cats has been the best thing for my home life, honestly! I love the way they have such distinct personalities and have their own interior lives separate from me because they have to interact with each other. I love how people can wax lyrical about their pets, their idiosyncrasies, and their habits. One thing about all the cats I’ve had is that I am so sure that they love me! Whenever I travel, I have friends catsit them and it’s so funny to hear about another person's experience of what they’re like. It kind of affirms all the things you think are their little personalities, like “Oh, you noticed that too!” My friends who are less interested in animals always say when they come over that it's like I’m surrounded by two toddlers.

I’m going to LA at the end of the month and I’m so excited! I’ll still probably have my ankle cast on but I don’t mind. I haven't been over there since I was a teen, and everyone says I’ll love it. I actually expect that one day I’ll write a Hollywood novel... Imagine! What would my version of Day of the Locust look like?

Becca: More apologies for the scarcity of my emails ... I do think it has something to do with the tenor of my year though — I’ve basically been applying to jobs all year, with only intermittent success — like I’ll get new gigs or part-time jobs, but nothing on the full-time job front, which puts me in a state of both perpetual anxiety and perpetual ‘middleness.’ Every month feels the same, but also progressively scarier because my financial position grows steadily worse, and I lose more and more faith in the employment process generally! Le sigh.

Long emails are also a strange project for me — I’m just so used to short consistent communication now that I rarely find the need to be writing longer missives. Plus, I think that the exercise of having so much of our lives online for our friends makes it so that emails are less necessary. I don’t have to tell people plenty of things about my life, because they see them on social media. Most people seem to criticize that aspect of social media, but I think it’s kind of nice, a good way to keep people in your thoughts even if they can't be present all the time. I had to skip a friend’s wedding earlier this year for money reasons, and rather than being sad when the photos came out, I was just like aww! Beautiful! So glad that I got to catch up on this in spite of not being there!

I actually had a party this weekend, the theme was ~obama era basic~ (LCD soundsystem, Girls on HBO, 4loko, American Apparel...), and one of my friends ended up bringing ***the guy who invented FOMO*** (very 2012!) It was funny because he REALLY kept talking about it, and I was like...hmm...but I also got to thinking, I don’t have that much FOMO anymore. Obviously, I don’t like to miss things, but I feel much more able than I did when I was younger to just be like ‘ah, okay, there will be more things later, I will just try to enjoy whatever I’m doing’ (even if it's sitting at home.)

But to your point about phone calls, maybe we can talk on the phone sometime at the end of the year and include a partial transcript with the emails we’ve completed. I think it would be an interesting exercise to compare the two types of communication...

I like what you said about ‘at least animals and children love me.’ I think about my relationship with animals all the time now that I have a dog. I’m definitely a people person, but there’s an ease to the way I interact with animals that I forgot about in the years I wasn’t with them much. I actually think that I’m much better with animals than I am with children...I don’t find it easy to talk to children, I’m always thinking like ‘Is this too infantilizing? is this too complicated?’ and probably erring stupidly in either direction. I don’t have a natural knack for how to spend time with children, but as my friends have them, I do find myself appreciating them more. I used to be like OMG, kids so annoying, but I know now that I was just annoyed by overprotective parents, kids themselves are kind of a moral neutral — they just exist, the things that a person finds good or bad about them are usually due to their surroundings.

I guess the same is true for pets — everyone says that your pet starts to mirror you. People always make fun of me because my dog has awful separation anxiety, and when I describe it they’re like .... “So how are YOU without HER?” And I’m like, “I’m FINE!” Which I do think is true for the most part — I can be away from my dog for several hours without worrying about her, especially now that I have roommates so she has more consistent company. I think the consistent company is actually good for me, too — I lived alone last year, and though I thought I liked it at the time, I can see how it’s actually healthier for me to be around people more. I think there’s a big fetishization of living alone that people in NYC have because it seems like such an unattainable ideal, and then when people do live alone they make this big production of “Oh I could NEVER go back,” but, I don’t know, I see a lot of benefits, I think it’s nice. What’s your living situation like these days?

I’m so sorry to hear about both your cat and your mom dying when you were 19. Those are both such different kinds of grief, but I can see how they’d start to commingle when one flashes up. I have a low-simmering constant anxiety about death, but then when it actually happens around me I usually feel basically paralyzed/confused — like I can’t actually understand how it’s happening, or what it means for a person/animal to not exist anymore. I still don’t really, and at this point, I don’t know if it’s something that a person can really understand, or if it's just ineffable.

I’ve heard that these days it'‘s actually very challenging to adopt only one cat — a ton of shelters are asking people to only adopt in ‘bonded pairs.’ It’s nice that you unintentionally created your own bonded pair. My dog, unfortunately, is far too much of an only princess — she has a few dogs that she enjoys spending time with, but she’s been too mean to other dogs generally for me to trust her with the idea of having one in the house all the time. She’s also very possessive of me — I think a lot of her rudeness to other dogs stems from ‘resource guarding’ me, in that she’s afraid my attention going elsewhere will take it away from her. Which bizarrely reminds me of me as a child ... lol. But again, she’s so lovely with people, and so excited that I have housemates now. Unlike her, I am HAPPY when she shows love for them, it makes me feel much better to know that she feels safe around multiple people.

How has your ~~literary life~~ been this year? I have published fully 0 things, so hopefully, you've done some cool stuff to be excited about. Have you been focusing more on short-term projects or long-term?

It’s wild that this year is now nearly over. I’ve finally had to accept that the years simply go by too fast, and I need to actually get my shit together in like, January or February if I want to feel like I’ve had a productive year. Then again, I wish I didn't care about even the IDEA of having a ~productive~ year. I feel obligated to care now because I have no money, but it is definitely more my vibe to just ... exist and not worry about how much I’ve ~done~. How do you measure your years?

Are you reading anything inspiring? I’ve been so off the literary book train — I’m literally reading a big spy thriller series and have been for WEEKS, and have no plans on stopping until the entire series is done.

Marlowe: I would love to do a phone call to wrap the year up. Writing-wise I have been publishing, I guess fairly regularly. It’s not something I love to do, it’s just now I am freelancing a bit more. I find it difficult because I am just absolutely not a journalist, and I really am not dying to write anything for anyone so when people treat me like a content mill, I get VERY angry. I wish I could command some respect in that way that feels proportionate to the reach of the novel. I hate when editors rewrite me and lately, I’ll write something and then they’ll rewrite my specific voice out of it and I can feel my interest in the piece just float away. I find it embarrassing. I am mostly interested in challenging my abilities as opposed to getting published or seeing my name in print, I just don’t care very much. As I noted, I am so practical about getting paid properly that I don’t find anything about what I do like a very lucky position to be in. Often I get really amped up when I think of how people take advantage of me or my name. It sometimes feels like people treat me like a circus animal who should perform when they say go. It’s my biggest pet peeve.

Oh, and I got a puppy! I now have a full menagerie at home. I have been thinking about how I am slowly but surely making sure I am completely undateable. It’s like I’m building up a wall to make it extremely difficult to see me as an option. Alas, I am not single so I think it’s a way of also reining myself in. I had all this energy that I had to put somewhere, and training a puppy really is a time-consuming way to spend a lot of that energy.

I read here and there, it’s often a stop-and-start for me. I get in frantic modes where I feel too absorbed in screens and my brain feels like it’s subsisting on taffy. Those weeks I’ll read a book or two in a few sittings. I love to find out-of-print books and read bizarre things that I found in a glossary of some other obscure book. I never usually know what book people are talking about, I keep my reading world very niche. I think this is better for my outlook and for my work.

I don't know how I measure my years now! I also feel like time moves too fast but also too slow... I guess this year will be the year I broke my ankle. I have spent like $2,000 on physiotherapy and my ankle still clicks. I have to say that this fall in Toronto has been the most vibrant in recent memory... It’s just been more and more common in the last month where I stop and really look around and am like, wow this truly is beautiful. It feels rare to have those moments. I try to be gentle about how productive I am or can be. Because my work is so tethered to myself, I have to give myself some room to sit in thoughts or obsessions. I never want to feel like whatever I think has to be monetized in some way, really I have all these obsessions for my own selfish reasons. I have my own curiosity in figuring things out, sometimes those things just end up in public.

Tell me about your recent nights out...I have been really good because of the puppy but I am curious to know! The last time I was in New York I was there for forty-eight hours and my friends left Winnie’s before I got there and my song they put down with me was still in the queue. It’s a very me moment but I stayed there for a drink alone and waited for my song to go on, sang it and left.

Becca: When you’re writing, how much of an influence do you feel the past is on your work versus the present?

Marlowe: Quite a lot of influence – I need a lot of distance. If you’re writing about something that happened to you recently, I find it’s clouded by the wrong emotions. You get a little bit overwrought and whatever. I need some amount of time after which it’s easier to be clear-headed, and then I can approach it like more of an artist than a diarist.

Becca: I agree. I remember once, I think it was right before the pandemic, I was working on a piece about how taking SSRIs helped me become less dysfunctional about dating. But then something dysfunctional happened with the person I was dating, and trying to continue to write the piece didn’t work. The piece collapsed in on itself because things were happening concurrently to me writing about them. My mentor who I was working with at the time said, gently, “You maybe just want to put this one in the drawer for a while.” And she was right.

Marlowe: I always find it really interesting when readers think that things just happened. Or they’re like, is that how you still feel about something? Or, you’re still going through this, right this second? I always find that very funny because I’m always like, no, this has been years in the making.

Becca: Absolutely, you know, I’ve found in the past couple of years that that dynamic has actually made me want to publish less writing. I’m like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to have opinions and words on the internet that people are going to associate with me forever.” I want to make sure that the things I’m putting out there are things I can stand behind. Even if it’s not how I feel forever, it’s something that I won’t be embarrassed by.

Marlowe: I feel that too. A lot of what we talked about in our emails– a lot of this last year was sorting through my feelings about publishing and it being a main source of my income, and that bringing me to a place of disillusionment.

Now I just don’t to work that much. For you, living in New York, it’s one thing — but my cost of living in Toronto is just so much less. When I’m in New York I always feel like I’m about to get a stomach ulcer. The cycle is really untenable.

I feel like if I actually tell anyone about my finances, they’ll get really stressed out. I kind of live beyond my means.

Becca: Oh my god, I’m the exact same way. I told a friend within the past year or so, some slightly more accurate numbers than I usually tell people about credit card debt, et cetera. And from the look on her face, I was like oh god, I can’t tell anyone again.

Marlowe: I’m not as stressed as I should be about any of it. I’m so used to living off the very last dollar in my account. For other people, it’s unbelievable. I always think though, you can’t hoard money. If you have money, you should always just spend it, because it will come back. When you feel you’re almost out of money, that’s when something comes up.

Becca: As freelancers, creatives, etc, it really is — I forget the exact phrase…follow and flush? No, feast and famine.

Marlowe: Yes, feast or famine. My partner always says “It’s always feast or famine with you, isn’t it?” and I’m like, yes, indeed.

I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to realize that I’m more like my grandmother every day. I go to an antique store, I really want this collectible. Tchotchkes that don’t do anything. I want to surround myself with little collectibles.

Becca: Cut from the same cloth! My dad lives in his parent’s house, they died right before the pandemic, and I went to visit maybe a year and a half ago. I was like oh, I can start to help you get some stuff out of the house. I threw away a couple of trash bags. But then the amount of items I put into bins like nope, this is mine now…more than I anticipated.

I didn’t know that my grandma had the same affinity for candlesticks and water carafes that are really just more for decoration. I don’t regret it at all though. I like having it all around my house. It makes me feel connected — I wasn’t very close with those grandparents but it makes me feel connected to my roots in a way I didn’t have before. Are your grandparents still alive?

Marlowe: Yes, but you know, they’re barely hanging.

Becca: I have one left. It’s interesting to be our age and still have a grandparent. It makes you realize how long life is. If it’s going to be that long, I’m only a third of the way through my life, my parents still have tons of time left. I think sometimes life is actually a lot longer than we act like it is, versus shorter.

Marlowe: We’re also at an age where you start to look at aging and realize how much we haven’t solved. I don’t know why we haven’t solved anything about elder care. Even in Canada where there are a lot of public services, it’s still impossible to figure out, and I can’t imagine actually handling it myself when I’m older. It’s very convoluted. Trying to be my grandparents’ secretary feels like a full-time job.

When I broke my ankle, I kept thinking about how if I had been in New York, it would have been so crazy. Just horrible. It would have put me in so much debt. I don’t know how people freelance in America.

Becca: Until I got this recent job, and for that the health coverage hasn’t even kicked in yet, but you know I was always freelancing or waitressing. I was actually able to get a decently priced Obamacare plan, but it seemed like everyone else’s was so expensive that I was like…am I cheating? You just log onto these programs and press buttons — it’s like doing your taxes. I don’t have any idea if I’m doing this correctly but hopefully the outcome won’t ruin me.

Marlowe: I’m kind of a hypochondriac, so I always go to the doctor. I’m constantly there. But whenever I was in New York, I couldn’t do that, so I always had this sense of ‘I can’t get hurt. I can’t get sick while I’m here.’ When you’re young, that feels like nothing, but I don’t know, again, I’m accident-prone. My body’s made of bird bones.

Becca: We’re at an age where we’re starting to understand that we’re not invincible. I rode horses when I was younger, and I very clearly remember the moment I started to get scared. And then I started to get worse, because it’s one of the things that to be good, you need to reject fear. And then I was 17 and something scary happened with a horse, and it was never the same.

Marlowe: I wasn’t really outside as a child. I didn’t get to hang out or do things and learn about physicality. I was thinking about how I’ve never known how to do a cartwheel. That sucks! I feel like it’s a fun thing to do! It’s too late now.

I just don’t think I have that kind of control over my body where I can just flip myself over in the air. Confidence is a huge part of it. If you have any sense of wait, this might not work, then that’s when you fall.

I haven’t been able to read your waitressing piece yet, but I want to talk to you about that type of work. I worked as a hostess for years, and honestly it was my favorite thing ever. It really taught me how to pull myself out of moods. I was on autopilot for hours, and it was sometimes a relief. I could just do it without any sort of inner turmoil. And then afterwards, you had that body tiredness, which I enjoy.

Becca: Oh absolutely. Of course I hated going to work hungover, but I actually liked it, it was the best hangover cure. After an hour I would just stomp out the hangover. Same with emotions. I remember — I mean this happened to me 100 times, but one specific time — I was having this very bizarre experience where someone I’d recently stopped dating was acting very sketchy online. They were seeing this other woman, and then one day on my way into work, that woman followed me on Twitter at the exact same time as he or she posted something weird on another platform — and I was just feeling very panicked, watched, surveilled, scared.

I went into work and my manger saw me and was like ah, you don’t look great. Do you want a pretzel? And I ate the pretzel and clocked in and started taking my orders and carrying my beers and I realized, it was the only thing that was a surefire way to take me out of my brain and make me function. I’ll miss that, I don’t have a replacement for that in regular life. Walking in circles on autopilot felt like it was a failsafe. And the money, too. You have money in your hand and it’s very tangible. With writing, it’s never like that. Everything is a battle, you can’t count the money until it’s in your account six months later or whatever.

Marlowe: I remember when I worked in fashion for a consignment boutique, it was almost like a 9-to-5, and I could understand where my money was coming from. And then when I wrote the book, and did writing more for my money, I was like oh my god. I don’t understand why people want this. This is not enviable in any way. I think it’s really funny if people are jealous or something, because I got like name recognition. In actuality, my material life didn’t change at all. I was watched and I gave up privacy. And I realized to make anything out of it, I’d have to capitalize on my personality, buy into the cult of personality. I find it kind of icky but what are you supposed to do?

There’s always this sense where people are like oh, but you don’t have to write! But that’s so strange. This is what I’ve been working for, why would I stop now. And then I’d have to start from scratch somewhere else? It’s very disheartening.

I’ve had to try and create boundaries. I don’t want people to think I’m mean. I want to respond to everyone, everyone is really nice, but then I have to remind myself: you have to do everything. If someone younger is asking me to go out for a drink, I don’t have to go.

Becca: I think when you’re young you think that those meetings will like, change your life. But when I look back on my younger years in New York, of course, people I met who I really built relationships with or became friends with changed my life, but that just kind of like, cool older person you get a drink with — it doesn’t really go anywhere. So if it’s not actually meaningful for either person…why bother?