Sunday blogs - on solo vacations

10:58am. Nothing screams me time quite like eating a Boston Creme, hungover and alone, outside the Montauk Bake Shop, while a group of teenagers born in 2003 only divert their eyes from their iPhone 11 screens to sip their massive iced coffees (aka “breakfast”) and a Lululemon mom looks discerningly at my fat rolls coming over my mid rise jeans. I shoot her an annoyed look back, Boston Creme in cheek. I did not have the patience in my hungover state, headache creeping around the back of my neck and behind my ears. The sun is something I had been looking forward to for a long time while being out here in Long Island. This morning it's a nuisance. It’s ironic because I remember going to the beach in the summers as a kid when all I had to do was get up, have someone else feed me, and spend all day in the water or the sand. It is the first time in a while that I have landed at the beach simply because of my job and the need to pay bills. Observing the Gen Z girls who’s greatest concern is getting a snapchat back from the boy working at the pizza parlor down the street and how much money they’re going to spend at the Cynthia Rowley store later, it hits me. At 23, I officially feel old.

It's also the first time in a long time I can't be bothered to put the effort in to looking hot. I usually go to the gym every day, and this week I had no motivation to do any exercise whatsoever. My hair is in the same bun I've left it in the past couple of days, and I have residual makeup sitting around my eye ducts. I was planning on getting my lashes done, my hair done, my nails done. I decided against the $500 improvement out of laziness and financial guilt. I had two days off in Montauk following a run of shows in Long Island, a NYC double bill, and Newport Jazz Festival, and I was going to spend that time doing absolutely nothing. This is so counterintuitive for me, the person who is constantly thinking of their next job, their next lesson to teach, the unanswered emails, the tasks awaiting me back at my NYC apartment.

Naturally, it was in this break that I realized my life had done a total 180 from what it usually is. For once, I was completely happy with my career – excited, even, and more motivated than ever – but it felt like everything else was failing. My time for my friendships felt few and far inbetween. I had been too busy to make time for my non musician friends, and my musician friends were out of town as soon as I got to see them. Dating prospects were non existent, which may be the subliminal reason why I had no energy to put in to being hot anymore. It was my own act of resistance against all the shitty men who have never had to work to make a woman happy in their lives, for all the women who I found out were straight too late in to the game. You won't put in work for me? Fine. I won't do it for you, either. You will get me in my unaltered, unspecial state, and you will like it – or you simply aren't for me. I don’t have the time or the energy anymore.

I remember doing an exercise from Julia Cameron where you organize your needs and desires into a circle and draw a web based on how high or low all of those needs have been met and connecting the dots. If I were to do that, my career would pose a giant spike, and everything else would be pretty low. In attempts to increase the other parts of the web (i.e. love, friendships, self care, family), I figured that I would spend these two days off in Montauk as a solo trip. Certain things would happen to perpetuate the state of the lower needs met. I found myself holding my own hand when no one else would, telling myself not to cry, not to give up hope, that I will one day deserve the best and I will get it. It feels as if it's finally happening in my career, something I prayed for for years and years of my life, and so it must happen everywhere else at some point.

Lying down at the beach, I tell myself to turn off the phone, to trust the universe's timing, and to bury myself in a good book as my own act of self love. I find myself more eager to dip into the cold ocean water because I know it can't burn worse than anything else I've gone through – and after all, it is only a temporary sensation. Korean shamans and the like use ultra hot and cold pools as a type of mental test for imposing mind over matter. This is water that would have normally made me flinch.

It's good to know I am so much stronger than I used to be, that I can successfully coax myself out of mental spiral and turmoil – I have come to recognize it as a form of self sabotage after the fact. I don't fall for it anymore. It doesn't mean that a solo vacation is still somewhat of a struggle for me, even as a fairly independent person. You want to feel like you have a rock in your life but you are just your own rock and there's nothing else to be done. So I said, fuck impressing anyone. What I can guarantee is the ability to impress myself daily. I have my Boston Creme - and eat it, too.