Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
It’s officially my birthday week, and despite the lackluster lead-up this year due to the overwhelm and exhaustion...this birthday has been ABSOLUTELY fantastic so far.
Starting with a night out with my girlfriends last weekend, we had a lovely dinner at Lola’s in NoMad (side note: Chef Suzy Cupps is a dream & I was SO glad to celebrate at her spot, she’s a SC girl also & has made her mark on the NYC culinary scene for the past few years, Lola’s is her first solo venture and it’s incredible...Southern & Filipino fusion, the perfect blend of so many iconic dishes...pimento cheese, pork belly bbq, Carolina gold rice, and on and on...she even came by to wish me a happy birthday & sent little treats from the kitchen...southern hospitality at its very best…Thank you, Suzy!) and then walked a few blocks south to Baby Grand for Karaoke...I did my inner child well by belting out the likes of Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple & TLC...you know the one.
I had the most perfect lazy Sunday, venturing downtown to my facial spot in Chinatown, followed by a stop by From Lucie, the most adorable East Village Bakery that I’ve procured my birthday cake from since moving to the city in 2020. Then we met some dear friends from Charlotte that were visiting for a little sushi happy hour & walk through Lincoln Center.
My actual birthday (Tuesday) was nothing short of pure bliss...I had a sub cook for my clients so that I could have the whole day off...I started low and slow with coffee on my couch in the morning, and then Yas and I grabbed the ferry over to Governors Island to spend the day at QC spa (Birthday Hack: QC offers a special birthday entry, so basically 2 for the price of one!). We sauna’d, we steam’d, we laid around in the heated pool with the most epic views of the city....we literally just veg’d for 5 hours and it was glorious. We had a really amazing Thai dinner at ChaLong and then finished off the evening by cutting into the amazing mini cake from Lucie’s. I went to bed FULL...full of love, full of relaxation, full of joy and full of the kindest words from my friends and family that day.
I was so full that I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with my therapist yesterday. For the first time in a long time, I feel still...I feel settled and I feel satiated....not at all stagnant, though, I’m still hustling, I’m still moving forward and working my face off...but these days, it all feels in sync...it all feels like it’s moving in the same direction, in the same current, carried along by the same stream.
But don’t worry....five minutes into my therapy session and I had plenty to talk about, about 48 minutes worth, that is...but even that, it felt forward-thinking and future-focused vs. reactive to the world around me. And for the moment, I feel light.
That lifted weight, that lighter feeling...well, that just might be one of the greatest gifts I got this year. Here’s to 43, friends. Pull up a chair & join me for this week’s reads from around the stack’averse, there’s some really good ones this week!♥
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
there is so much i want to be, so much i want to do. so i end up doing nothing.
"I think I've been mourning the lives I'll never get to live before I've even started living this one." Such a good piece about standing at the threshold of every door you want to walk through and choosing none of them…the paralysis of wanting too many lives at once. She finds one small opening: "maybe she is simply the girl who stops standing at the doorway of her own life...and finally chooses somewhere to go."
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
Worth Repeating: Are You Accumulating Career Debt?
Steve writes about "Career Debt," the idea that staying comfortable accrues invisible interest against your future the same way financial debt does. His three categories are Comfort, Yes, and Silence…each distinct and each from actual experience rather than theory. "Bad news delivered early is just news. Bad news delivered late is terrible." Really interesting piece considering all the multitudes of women on Substack right now leaning into potential career-moves, pivots, etc. Worth the read, worth the considering.
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
When Did Healing Become a Performance?
“You were hoping for a little understanding. You have been given homework.” Aaliya writes about what happens to grief when everyone around you can’t hold still with it, when “look at everything you have” becomes the answer to a question you never asked. She pulls in Rumi’s Guest House and turns it: you can let grief into the house on its own terms, the loss still a loss. “You deserved tenderness before you had anything to show for your pain.”The Equinox Letter
Mia writes from Denmark, from the harvested fields behind her property, a baby wrapped in wool in the carrier on her chest and red kites sailing overhead in the northern wind. She writes about mørkning, a Danish practice of sitting together in darkening silence until the room is black and you light the one candle on the table. A way of not looking away when the dark comes, and five reflection questions to answer.the autumn equinox is a teacher
Summer navigating the Fall Equinox this week through Traditional Chinese Medicine… yin, yang, the 23.5-degree wobble of Earth’s axis that gives us seasons…and what it costs a body to live in a culture that prioritizes expansion and action while treating autumn and winter as things to push through rather than inhabit. “We cannot begin to build the world we dream about if we continue operating in systems that strip us of our divine connection to Earth and her seasons that help us evolve cyclically and intentionally.”
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
why some conversations rearrange your brain
A piece from last year, but I loved it so much, I’m throwing it in this week. Maja has a conversation with a friend who tells her people used to call him a robot, that for years he couldn’t identify his own feelings. From there she goes into Uri Hasson’s brain coupling research, the vagus nerve, polyvagal theory, and a collection of quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin, Ubuntu philosophy, Toni Morrison, Nick Cave, and David Eagleman that build into something bigger than any single one of them. Such a good read.Let’s Get Weird… with Emma Grede
Lena Dunham interviews Emma Grede, co-founder of Good American, in the format I wish interviews actually were in…she asks would have Emma eyeing the nearest exit at a party. Emma’s answer: “Excuse makers. Anyone who spends ten minutes explaining why they can’t do something before they’ve spent one minute thinking about how they might.” She asks when Emma’s personal aesthetic finally became hers, and where she compares and despairs. The grandmother inheritance question made me spit my coffee out…“I hope she gets my best jewellery and I hope she wears it on a Muther fucking Tuesday.”
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
A Slow Emergence into Day
Jeff watched a bud on his kitchen cactus for weeks, stood there the night before waiting to see it open, and then went to bed. Overnight it bloomed into a flower five times the size of the bud, all wide and pink, while nobody was looking. He writes about slow mornings and the violence of how we begin our days, but the cactus is the center of the whole thing. “Perhaps flowers are shy and can only come into expression in the dark, when no one is around to see them unveil their beauty.”everyone is a monster to someone
About the moment you realize someone has made you the villain in their story, painted horns on your memory, and you’ve exhausted every way to hand over context, reasons, the softest parts of your history, and none of it mattered. “The jury returned a verdict before you even took the stand.” It’s a piece about the permission to stop explaining, to let someone keep their distorted version of you, because “I cannot heal while standing in the courtroom of someone else’s judgment.”The Living Texture of Experience Before Interpretation
Amoda Maa is a retreat teacher asking what’s available in the space between an experience and the story the mind wants to make of it, before it has decided what just happened. “What is here before the naming, before the comparison, before the mind rushes in to establish its familiar ground?” Slow, patient writing, worth the read.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
43 Things I've Learned by 43
I started it on the floor of my first solo apartment on 82nd and Columbus, two days before I turned 40, at the highest and lowest point of my life at the same time. Three years later, I finally finished it. Number 43 will tell you why it took this long.
What would you add to the list?? ♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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