Photo Diary

I deactivated Instagram in a fit of anger with myself a few weeks ago, but while I feel free from my feed and stories and posting, I wasn’t free from the guilt of renewing my blog domain and not posting here.

So I thought I’d just share a few photos of the nicer memories I have from the past few months, a bunch of moments that I considered writing entire blog posts about but was honestly a bit too out of it to follow through. Depending on how I feel, I might go back and do belated posts, but I’ve been blogging for 2 decades now so it seems unlikely unless something is specifically requested.

An anniversary outing to the Museum of Modern Art – my first ever museum visit in New York City, if you can believe it

I dyed my hair purple! And visited a flower show

“Clear skies” obstructed by wildfire smoke from the other side of the continent

Visiting Jersey City and saying hello to Lady Liberty

A spontaneous picnic in Bryant Park because we had some unseasonably mild weather and I truly love picnicking, despite how much of a mosquito magnet I am

Serene views from a picnic in Central Park (on the hottest day of the year but still so lovely in the shade)

Truly a perfect beach day, and now I finally feel like I experienced *summer* this year and peace for the first time all year

I have still been dutifully making playlists of songs that get stuck in my head every month so here is the backlog of those:

If I can be real with you all for a minute here… I’ve been struggling a lot lately. The delta variant has triggered so much of my anxiety just as I was starting to hope to be able to see my friends and family, to make plans for the future rather than living in fear one day at a time… Lately, I feel myself regressing to Spring 2020 thought patterns, guarding for risk in a much more conservative way than perhaps is necessary given that I am vaccinated. Eating indoors, which I’ve only done a small handful of times, feels too risky again. I visited the office one time and don’t feel comfortable trying it again. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about weddings we have committed to attending in the coming months.

It just feels too easy to slip back into this state of mind. I’ve been getting ads for mooncakes and Halloween, and I just feel like it’s another festive season that will be spent in isolation, and I’ve mentally begun attempting to prepare for another Mid-Autumn Festival without family, another Thanksgiving on our own, another birthday cake weighing on me.

There is other stuff on my mind that might not even be directly related to the pandemic: burning myself out at work, some very unhealthy weight/body image stuff happening over the past few months, a failed attempt at finally finding a therapist.

But we keep moving forward, and we keep stopping to appreciate beautiful moments where we can. I hope that by sharing some of them above, these serve as a reminder that despite this entire pandemic period feeling like a fog where I haven’t felt true joy, I still experienced really wonderful moments that I can still hold on to and cherish. Much like when I visited Europe 3 years ago in the midst of a burnout-induced depressive episode and couldn’t enjoy anything, I can still look back on objectively pleasant memories and feel grateful.

How have you been lately? Have you done anything nice this summer?