I remember the first time I learned about narcissism on the Internet, which prompted a cascading domino of fears. Specifically, when I learned that most narcissists have difficulty retaining friends. Want to spot a narcissist? Thought Catalog would beckon on a bright screen before urging readers to look through a list of red flags, including my affliction: difficulty maintaining long-term friendships. I remember when I went to therapy only for my therapist of several years to assure me that one thing narcissists don’t do, is actively worry that they are narcissists. Some might have found instant relief at that. But nope, not me. I just slurped up more psych-conspiracy soup and gained the newfound fear that not only was I a narcissist, but I was so good at it that I had manipulated my therapist over the years. Clearly my head is less of a Sandals resort and more stilettos from hell poking holes in my every attempt to self-soothe.

The Friend Fantasy

Ever since I was young, I aspired for my life to be like the movies, making and maintaining the same group of friends from grade school all the way to college, a beautiful co-ed mix where one of the guys and I would of course fall madly in love the moment I took off my glasses and healed my overbite. Instead, I transferred schools several times, one of which was shamefully and secretly prompted by the seventh-grade Queen Bee telling me I was no longer welcome at the lunch table. Think Regina George but as a Hollister-wearing, volley-ball-playing A-cup who goes on to become a CPA. This was a surreal experience in which my other friends followed her social orders, but would continue to speak with me elsewhere. It was one of the first moments I experienced feeling close, but not quite good enough to be accepted by peers. My closest friend in high school would end up being my eating disorder, as other friends moved out-of-state, transferred to other schools, or were preoccupied by partying with their cooler friends on weekends. I was the one who you lied to your parents about staying over at my house so that you could meet up with boys at house parties I wasn’t invited to.

Then came college, and I thought it’s show time. Too poor for liberal arts school in the North East, I thought maybe I would finally find my place in a sorority at a large state school. It was like staring at a child’s corset and lying to yourself that it will fit your 29-year-old body. I was Cinderella’s step-sister ready to cut off half of my foot to deceive myself that the glass slipper was a perfect fit. I imagined having a full calendar of date parties, pep rallies, and sisterhood. This is finally my moment, I had hoped. Spoiler alert, it was not. I lasted three days in sorority recruitment before being cut by nearly every house and quitting. It was not a main character moment, but more character building. My freshman year roommate and I, while initially close, lost touch the second year of school after she moved into her sorority house and continued to date a guy who treated her horribly that I could not stand. Fortunately, social media shows she went on to marry someone else, but unfortunately, their relationship put a strain in our friendship for the remaining three years.

I eventually found my footing, pledging one of two sororities that participated in spring recruitment, but I never quite fit in. I came to have three close roommates my last two years of college, but even we soon drifted apart as my persistent friends, depression and under-eating, came back into the picture. I recall coming back from spring semester abroad my junior year to learn that one of my roommates had moved on to a new faction within our sorority chapter. I was no longer included in outings as I was not dating a boy in the paired fraternity like the rest of her friends. Once graduation came, the four of us parted ways, relocating around the world. That was when I first discovered that some friendships don’t survive changing zip codes. The ‘out of Sight, out of Mind’ friends as I like to call them.

Friendship is a (Concrete) Jungle

After a short-stint teaching English in Spain, and a permanent move to NYC, I wish I could say that I had figured it out. But no matter the area code, I still seemed to stumble on every block of friendship I tried to build. Take for instance, the Covid Roommate Experiment not to be confused with the Stanford Prison Experiment (but equally problematic), in which I thought moving into an apartment with four other girls at the start of the pandemic would be a foolproof way to make friends. We literally couldn’t hang out with anyone else. What could go wrong? I thought. Clearly, a lot.

The girl whose lease I took over, stayed close friends with the remaining roommates who had known each other already, and I immediately felt like the odd man out. They would wait for me to leave the apartment before resuming shows we started together, and on Thanksgiving they left me alone while they wore matching shirts and took my cookware to a friend’s apartment to celebrate. Sorry, Covid is making the host keep it really small, they half-heartedly winced upon leaving.

I remember being so baffled that I could not get these girls to like me, and did embarrassing things to try, like buying a cardboard cutout of one of the heartthrob main characters from a TV drama that we would binge in the living room on the off-chance they were feeling kind. Most perplexing to the girl who was trying so hard to make fetch happen, and failing to get the point (it wasn’t going to happen), was that they would be friendly to me one-on-one, even seeking romantic advice when feeling insecure after another failed situationship, only to send passive aggressive group texts about my lunch time Nutribullet usage and pile on in succession. They didn’t realize that the 20-seconds of blender noise were to help my weight gain recovery.

When I got a new job and the financial freedom to move out early, I left. We’re sorry you feel that way, they said awkwardly on the couch when I told them that I didn’t feel comfortable living there anymore and was going to look for a new place. A few days later one asked if I had made up my mind on leaving yet, because they thought they had a friend who would take my room.

The Loneliest Social Butterfly

I thought I would only feel lonely in an empty apartment, but over the past several years in New York, I’ve learned crowded rooms and shallow conversation can leave one even lonelier. I’ve come out of my comfort zone and experienced the same seemingly inevitable cycles of meeting, making, and losing new friends: some slow fading into relationships, some moving, and others I purposely removed myself from their orbits. Friendship is kind of like dating in a way, vulnerable to the same afflictions like co-dependency and jealousy but without the kissing and making up part. As someone with an exclusion wound, I always want to take others under my wing, but have learned the hard way when introducing someone new to my other friends too early. When I left a toxic friendship in 2023, the friend in question clung onto friends I had previously introduced her to. Unfortunately, while I had many surface-level friends and acquaintances, I was stretched too thin to nourish any of them individually. This meant my former friend was able to find a small subset and adopt them with the time and care I had neglected. I am someone who will not try to tell anyone who to be friends with, so I resigned internally and quietly let that subset go.

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Now I am turning thirty with the ever-present confusion of where to begin when it comes to forging lasting friendships. This past year I parted ways with a friend of 15 years, and came to learn that in the same way one shouldn’t stay in an unhealthy relationship just because of time invested, we shouldn’t be afraid to let go of friendships that are no longer aligned. At the same time, I quietly saw social media photos of three high school friends, from who I was inseparable our freshman year, reuniting for graduation milestones and group vacations. Only I was looking on with a weird sensation of peace and understanding, able to acknowledge how little in common I have with them at thirty compared to fourteen.

I have found that while I am great at connecting others to their new best friend, proudly matchmaking several inseparable pairings, I have been unable to find my own platonic matches. Part of it has been undoubtedly my fault. You see, a hard part of finally chasing ones dreams outside of a 9 to 5 is that there is inevitably little time for much else. I find myself facing the dilemma of wanting a few quality friends, but being asked by a large quantity of acquaintances for my limited time which ultimately makes it hard for meaningful relationships to grow beyond infrequent catch-ups. Dating doesn’t even register in my hierarchy of needs when it comes to available time these days.

Core Friends

Ironically, I started a podcast last fall trying to explore the quest for friendship in adulthood. I wanted to stop talking about dating (I had a previous dating podcast) and instead focus the conversation on newfound friendships with women of all ages that I have met over the past year on train rides, international art retreats, and third spaces.

I keep meeting unexpected and wonderful people, I just don’t know who to hold space for and how to consistently show up without abandoning my personal goals. I may just be the first person to start a podcast about friendship only to realize they don’t really have any close friends. So I have paused the podcast for now until I have another story I am inspired to share. More importantly, I made a vow that I will not become the person who, when they finally have time to dedicate to friends, asks if the conversation can be recorded.

I do have hope, however. At risk of sounding like a LinkedIn asshat, if I apply the logic of successful people in any other area of life whether it be business, sports, or the arts, many of them will tell you about their many failures before eventually succeeding. And many of them don’t find their stride until later in life. So maybe the secret to life isn’t having the same 5 best friends all throughout it, but rather continually failing at making friends, so that when you do find those who you are truly aligned with, it’s something spectacular.

Or maybe it’s naive in the first place to hold onto this construct of friendship as a token group, a la Friends or Sex and the City.

What do you think? How has friendship taken root in your life?

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XOXO

Carly

aka the loneliest social butterfly, aka trapped renaissance woman, aka a woman of many names, not so many friends.

Perhaps this is best illustrated by my makeshift Barney/Princess Halloween costume. You said I can be anything I set my mind to, right?

As we grow up, pop culture reinforces narrow definitions of women, from the actresses unable to age out of the Disney Ingénue to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with no interests outside of making mens’ worldviews sparkle.

When we watch shows like Sex and the City, each character is an, albeit impeccably-dressed, flattened archetype designed to round out a group of best-friends:

Carrie, the male-centered writer.

Miranda, the bossy lawyer.

Charlotte, the sanctimonious gallerina.

Samantha, the sexaholic Girlboss.

Every time I would watch the show I would find facets of myself in each woman. Even Buzzfeed couldn’t give me a straight answer as to whether I was more of a Carrie or a Miranda. Or perhaps even a Charlotte!

My favorite women in real life were never satisfied being reduced to just one thing. Take Hedy Lamarr, an 1940s old Hollywood star who was also a skilled inventor. Behind the scenes, she worked at her drafting table as an inventor who developed ‘frequency hopping’ technology during WWII. Her invention laid the groundwork for instrumental facets of modern technology such as GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

If we hop to 2026, we have Dua Lipa, who in addition to being a global pop star, has a successful media venture, Service95 which features a bookclub, supper club, podcast and more. And this only scratches the surface of Dua’s skill rolodex.

While I am not a movie star, and I forgot the password to my 2014 sound cloud to wipe embarrassing covers off the internet forever, I felt we shared an innate quality.

The Manifesting Generation

The need to pick a lane has haunted me on the road to adulthood. My parents might have labeled me as chasing faeries, pursuing a million passion projects in no particular order and focusing on them during different seasons of life. In my late-20s, however, I ironically discovered a ‘type’ that didn’t feel like being boxed in a cage. I discovered I was something called a manifesting generator, according to Human Design. Not to be confused with this similarly shaped bad boy below.

The Manifesting Generator is one of five different Human Design types, and is above-all known for its multi-passionate nature, often juggling several pursuits at once. Picking up things only to just as quickly put them down, but ultimately, each thing serving as an important stepping-stone on the path to finding your purpose. Once I put a name to it, it felt more of a superpower than a character flaw…that is until I tried to build a presence online.

You wouldn’t have to scroll Tiktok or LinkedIn for long before coming across some form of content talking about the importance of building a ‘personal brand.’ We are no longer Jane or John Doe. We are ~Jane~ ‘the SEO Gal, $100MM ARR B2B Founder~ and ~John~ ‘the Real Estate King, Ruling Luxury Property Sales.’ This doesn’t just apply to content creators. Even my boring (sorry) finance job has offered trainings on personal brand building. We have moved from being people to being products, making me long for the days when Instagram was a collection of horribly filtered photos (Mayfair, I miss you) of seashells on the beach or a blurry #mcm screenshot from Google versus a visual resume of yourself as a human being.

The advice online for discovery always centers on one thing: a niche. An area of focus, for your one-track mind followers to pledge their attention allegiance to. Your content must be consistent and never stray from your niche in order for the Wizard of Algorithm to propel you forward. It is only after you gain a loyal audience that you can *gasp* show other facets of your humanity.

I understand that there are going to be people who have no interest in what a food blogger has to say about Abortion rights, and maybe I am just someone who simply cannot separate the art from the artist. But don’t the food bloggers ever get tired of let’s say, letting them eat cake content?

Ultimately, if I wanted to gain a following by only doing one thing, I’d be a cult leader.

Luckily for humanity, I look terrible in white.

The Origins of Trapped Renaissance Woman

I started calling myself Trapped Renaissance Woman online for two main reasons, 1. I felt like I had a royal scepter up my rear referring to myself as a ‘multi-hyphenate’ or ‘multi-disciplinarian.’ There were so many things I have been involved in including but not limited to: visual art, podcasting, comedy, survivors’ advocacy, singing, writing, and type-writer event poetry.

I had an aha moment when painting a version of Botticelli’s Venus last year, when I realized that they already had a word for men like me, but they just never thought to apply it to women.

Renaissance man (noun): a person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas. (Merriam Webster)

The second reason was simply that people kept telling me I visually reminded them of a renaissance painting. As someone who was never ‘instagram model’ hot, I took it and ran with it.

Now the trapped part is not forever, it’s where I am right now: between the life I have and the life I’m building. An artist still showing up to a 9-to-5. A woman who has spent too long being someone else’s muse, and has decided, finally, to become her own.

My substack houses it all. My paintings and my politics. My anecdotal lessons from friendships, the new, the old and those which have run cold. My creative journey and intertwined corporate escape. The art of an artist from which you cannot separate. Each piece ultimately forming my personal mosaic.

Could I gain a larger or faster following by picking and only writing about one thing for a year or more before ever branching out?

Maybe just maybe my niche is having no niche at all.

*Drops quill* (because they didn’t have mics in the Renaissance) :,)

The Renaissance Roll Call

Are you a manifesting generator? If so, tell me about how or what changed when you found out! I’d love to hear.

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You may be wondering, what the hell is an escape artist? Has AI forced Carly (that’s me) to go down the rabbit hole, now resorting to pulling rabbits out of hats as a magician? To that, dear reader I assure you the only thing I have in common with the average magician is an impeccable collection of scarves.

I call myself an escape artist, because I am trying to escape the corporate life to fulfill my childhood dream of being a full-time artist. The handcuffs may be golden, but they are still imprisonment for a girl who once dreamed of naming nail polish colors and drawing caricatures at theme parks. More on that down below…

And if my childhood nickname being Houdini has any influence on my ability to escape a dismal Outlook (courtesy of Microsoft) in exchange for a whimsical one, I’d like to think I have a pretty good shot!

So without further ado, I will stop MC-ing my own newsletter and get to the good stuff aka what artistic endeavors I’ve been up to lately.

Hanging out with Models

I’m just like most men in the bustling city that never sleeps, spending my Friday nights hanging out with models, some of them naked. And like a lot of these men, I too pay mine for their time. Allow me to clarify…

Since last December, I’ve been rounding out the end of my work week by rushing down to the Art Students League to paint models from life in three hour sittings. As an artist and 7 year, New York resident, I will admit that I am a bit embarrassed to have only discovered the League last fall when searching for a place to purchase art supplies on my lunch break (courtesy of Google). Founded in 1875, the League recently celebrated its 150th anniversary as a non-profit providing subsidized, atelier-style training. Some of the most renown artists in modern history have taken classes or taught at the League themselves such as Georgia O’Keefe, Mark Rothko, Man Ray, Norman Rockwell, and Roy Lichtenstein.

When I first started, I was dipping my feet back into the world of oil painting after a business-school inflicted divorce and subsequent 10-year affair with watercolors. Initially, I was super nervous and supremely unconfident in my ability to paint from life versus a photograph. But over the past several months I have grown to love my meditative Friday nights, even trudging through a couple snowstorms to make it to class. Now, I can see myself improving and loosening up, learning to trust each time that I will capture the likeness of the model, versus being surprised (disclaimer: I’m still surprised). This past week we had our annual student salon, which included two of my poses from the past five months. I can’t wait to see how my skills continue to build over the next year.

Finding ~my Type~

Last April, I picked up oils for the first time in over ten years at Art with Love, which you can read all about below. I haven’t put them down since.

I don’t recall where or how the inspiration struck, but sometime last summer I was inspired to set out on the ambitious project of painting myself as seven key female archetypes: the ingénue, the lover, the mother, the warrior, the queen, the high priestess, and the wise woman (or as society calls her, the crone—boo). My goal was to explore events and themes in my own life to illustrate that women cannot be boxed-in or ‘typed.’ We are every archetype at various stages of our lives and sometimes embodying multiple in a given day. Ironically, when I would tell people about this project, they would often ask me, No, but which one are you?

*Cue internal scream and ask Siri to play I’m Every Woman by Whitney Houston*

This seed of inspiration, quickly became a vine wrangling my thoughts and resulted in a full-fledged photoshoot, complete with props, flowers, fruit, and 6 outfit changes to get the perfect reference photos to later paint. Since last October, I have knocked out two of the 7, the ingénue and the high priestess, and have since begun my third: the mother. I hope to finish at least two more this year in between other projects and commissions. And even more, I intend to write articles dedicated to each one and the stories and meanings behind them.

Most excitingly, April marked the first month of me having my very own art studio in Brooklyn. Previously I was limited to around two hours of open studio time per week at Art with Love, but now I am able to come and go as I please. Although it is a hike to get there from where I live in Manhattan, I find myself there each weekend, even bringing my lovely, albeit lazy assistant.

Writing on the Wall

While my long-term goal is to make a living off of my art, it wouldn’t be called a passion without passion projects. That’s why I was thrilled when asked by Womankind, a non-profit dedicated to supporting survivors of gender-based violence, to paint a mural at one of their emergency residences.

I will be the first to admit that I have never painted a mural and arguably have very little idea what I am doing. But that has been the case for most things in my life, and it hasn’t stopped me yet.

As it stands, I will be leading the charge for an interior mural at a residence which provides emergency shelter to women who are escaping violence. I first joined the board for Womankind, because it reminded me of a similar non-profit that changed my life when I first relocated back to the United States in the aftermath of a sexual assault and ongoing legal proceedings. So I don’t want to just paint something “cute” and call it a day. I want to paint something meaningful. Something that offers hope.

This is the initial sketch of the design I made.

It is a Phoenix, Womankind’s mascot (for lack of a better word). Their motto is Rise Above Violence.

When brainstorming ideas, I immediately thought back to my visit to Alaska in 2021 where I witnessed an abundance of a pretty pink plant everywhere we went. I had asked my parents, who were living there at the time, what it was and learned its name: fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium if you’re feeling fancy). You see, it gets its name from the fact it is a resilient plant that is one of the first to emerge in areas scorched by wildfire.

The Jimmy Neutron thinking sequence went off in my brain, and I knew I wanted to make a Phoenix with feathers made of fireweed. This, I felt, would be the perfect symbol for the resilience of survivors who have walked through fire to show them they can not only survive but bloom.

Together We Rise appears across the body of the Phoenix to emphasize strength in community.

I also thought a Phoenix with big wings would be something for children in the residence to have fun with and pose for pictures. To allow them to have even the illusion of lightness during one of their life’s arguably heaviest moments.

All that sounds lovely, I know. But let’s just hope my paintbrush can live up to the vision. Stay tuned :)

Honestly I could keep going about other artistic happenings, but aware of the death of the attention span and this already being much longer than the average commercial break, I will save them for next month.

Here’s to Vol. I, and you are now free to place bets on how many volumes until I write of a resignation letter. And if you’re my current boss, just kidding!

Xo

Carly, your Trapped Renaissance Woman (for now)

And on November 19th, 2017, her life was stolen all too soon.

I still regret cancelling our plans to reunite a few months before.

My friend, Amanda

I met Amanda in 2013, when we were in the same Fashion Design class my senior year of high school. Her artistry impressed me, as she was making her own prom dress while I managed to butcher our one sewing project: a pillowcase. We quickly formed a tight-knit group of girls in class, often getting together for dinner and slumber parties. When I was dealing with mean-girl drama ahead of the senior prom, Amanda swooped in like a maternal Lioness, simply telling me to join her group instead. One of my favorite things about her was her low tolerance for exclusion and fierce protection of friends. We were the same age, but still I looked up to her, as whether it was confidence or wisdom, she projected a quiet, contained strength.

Amanda had always been interested in makeup, and by the time of her death had worked her way up the Bobbi Brown makeup counter at our local Nordstrom. I recall one time she let me do her makeup in high school, me proudly admiring my work and her smiling unconvincingly before kindly asking if she could take it immediately off. We both burst into laughter. A few years later, she would do my makeup at the Nordstrom’s counter before heading off for a night out when I was visiting our hometown from University. It felt like a scene in a coming of age movie, and I didn’t realize how sacred it had been at the time.

Do You Believe in Coincidences?

I won’t sit here and claim that Amanda was my very best friend. Tragedies tend to bring a lot of people out of the woodwork who like to position themselves as close as possible to the deceased, and I struggled a lot when Amanda passed wondering how entitled I was to grief. After all, it was my senior year of college, and I went to school out of state, only reuniting with Amanda on my holiday breaks when we could.

In fact, one of Amanda’s best friends towards the end of her life was Jack. I met Jack once in 2016, when visiting Amanda and she decided to host a party at her apartment. The special occasion? Me visiting. That’s the kind of friend Amanda was. Someone you could go months without seeing, who would invite all her close and cool college friends for a joyous night in your unofficial honor. The three of us went for brunch the next morning, and after her death, I thought that surely I would never see him again.

Flash-forward five years.

It’s October 2021, and I am out with a small group of friends at a karaoke bar to celebrate my 25th birthday. My best friend Elliot and I are waiting for an uber driver who is taking too long, so we decide to take the subway uptown. It must have been nearly 1 in the morning when we spontaneously decide to get off at Columbus Circle before ubering from there to our respective apartments. As I am walking up the stairs to exit into the midnight sun, I turn around to roll my eyes at what I think is a group of rowdy teenagers loudly repeating song lyrics and stop in my tracks.

It was Jack.

The same Jack who had apparently moved all the way from Denton, Texas to Brooklyn, New York exiting the subway right behind me on a night I didn’t even intend to take it.

We were both spooked, but hugged and later made plans to meet for brunch on the upcoming anniversary of Amanda’s death.

I should also note that the night of Karaoke I sang my go to song, You Know I’m No Good by Amy Winehouse. This is a song I would always sing when Amanda would (lovingly) put me on the spot to sing in front of friends over 4am pizza after a night out.

Although I have never seen a ghost, I’m not someone who believes in coincidences.

It felt like a wink from Amanda. I would wink back, but thankfully she knows I’m incapable and look like a malfunctioning Furbie.

Don’t Wait until It’s Too Late

A few months before Amanda’s death, I was back in our home town for a job interview. The two of us were texting about getting together that weekend, but I ended up cancelling because of inconvenient logistics. I thought that I would see her just two months later when home for Thanksgiving, but as we both know by this point in the story, I would never see her again.

Amanda was on my mind the day she died, because that same day she posted a photo of me she took in my childhood backyard. While I was not allowed to do her makeup, I was her eager model and guinea pig for looks, and our favorite past time was staging photoshoots everywhere from my backyard to the park in her housing development. As she was beginning to build a social media presence for her makeup artistry, she started posting pictures of past work. One of them being of me.

I remember commenting something, and checking the next morning to see if she replied, but being met with nothing. My stomach was unsettled, but not from an intuitive knowing that something was wrong, rather just thinking oh no, is she mad at me? Anxiety is self-centered and irrational, but how I desperately wish she hadn’t replied because she thought my comment was annoying, and not because she was no longer with us.

When I look back through my social media today, I am met with eerie reminders. A Happy Birthday comment on my 21st birthday post, with my next post in remembrance of her just a month later. Yesterday, April 25th, would have been her 30th birthday. She should be on top of the world right now, not under it.

The Continuing Fight

Her case has never been solved. I need you to know that.

I had high hopes when Amanda first made headlines. A beautiful, young woman with her whole life ahead of her is primed for the hearts of Americans, and her case first had national media coverage, even on my most hated, New York Post.

But that was 9 years ago, and while the blood of everyone demanding justice and answers continues to run hot, her case has seemingly gone cold.

As someone who listens to true crime, I never expected to one day be listening to the case of someone I knew and loved. That changed when the following podcast episode, released by Denton County: Unsolved, was shared by her sister on Amanda’s birthday. Listening to it, I learned things I never knew about Amanda’s life when she passed. Namely, that she was a victim of stalking. Her ex-boyfriend, whom she was awarded a protective order against, was in prison at the time and ruled out by investigators. Still, as someone familiar with the legal system as it pertains to survivors of gender-based violence, I can’t help but focus on how significant it is to be awarded a protective order, especially for stalking. Notoriously, law enforcement does not take victims of domestic violence seriously before it is too late. To be granted an order for an offense with a staggering standard of proof, speaks to the level of terrorization she experienced. My heart aches for my friend, not knowing the fear she was living with before and at the moment of her death. But mostly, I am angry. Angry for her family who deserves at the very least closure.

The podcast episode features not only insightful interviews with the detectives and forensic investigators on her case, but a devastating interview from her father in which he reads a letter from her younger sister Stephanie. They both brought me to tears, the pain in his voice that has not faded nine years later, and all of the milestones Stephanie has experienced without her big sister.

As noted by the detectives and show hosts, someone knows something. People don’t stay silent forever. Somewhere out there, a witness unaware of the significance of something they saw that night, or a confidant of the perpetrator, knows something and can step forward and do the right thing.

You too can help from anywhere in the world, by simply sharing the podcast episode to bring Amanda’s case back to the forefront of public attention to reach the people who can deliver closure to the Clairmonts.

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When getting down to basics, basic is a word that pits women against one another in the hopes of othering: othering women we perceive as threats as inadequate and othering ourselves as special. Basically, basic has become a way for women who feel different to turn their envy into superiority by brandishing other women with a scarlet B.

The truth of the matter is it does a disservice to us both.

The Basic Misogyny of it All

We’ve all done it, and if you somehow have magically escaped the shackles of internalized misogyny, then I gift you the highest horse in all of Barbie Land for your distinguished virtue.

Picture this:

It’s 1pm and you’re at a brunch table with friends passing around your phone to show your girlfriends the new girl your ex-beau is seeing’s instagram.

Whatever. She’s so basic. You’re way better…yada yada yada. Your friends say in between bites hoping to mop up your insecurities and your hangover in the same sitting.

And maybe for a moment you feel good. That he didn’t deserve you if this is his type. But eventually your friends leave, the sun sets, and you’re left sitting with yourself and all the feelings that no amount of hating another woman for her pilates-toned obliques and love of reality television will bury. And when you try to rationalize your hurt feelings by projecting them onto a woman who, despite her polished instagram, is an actual human being complete with hopes, dreams and traumas of her own, you end up sounding no better than red-pill incels reacting to rejection.

The irony is, we grow up spending our childhoods aching to be popular, only to grow up and have liking popular things wielded as a weapon.

Ultimately, it serves as a poor form of self-soothing rejection, whether it be platonically from other women or romantically from a crush. When a man we like ‘chooses’ another woman, the quickest way to feel better about it is reducing the other woman to ‘basic’ or boring. She has to be lacking in some area that we possess to come out on top in coping. But this isn’t coping, it’s copping (out).

Pop Goes the Basic Weasel

The beautifully sad thing about insecurity, is that it does not discriminate. Just as you and I are vulnerable, even female celebrities are not immune to othering women as an emotional crutch.

Particularly in music we see this trope played out over and over, whether it’s jealousy over an ex, the Madonna vs the Wh*re, or the She’s Boring—pick me!

The most straightforward example which comes to mind is Taylor Swift’s 2008 staple, You Belong with Me, in which Swift as the protagonist is under-looked as a relatable, girl-next-door who is special because she wears sneakers and T-shirts, in contrast to the villainized cheer captain who could not possibly understand a pubescent high school boy which, as we all know, are beacons of depth.

Swift goes straight for the jugular in 2010 in Better than Revenge, in which she reduces her ex-boyfriend Joe Jonas’ new girlfriend to her sexuality, and leans in to the trope of a woman weaponizing her sexuality to steal men away.

Flash-forward fifteen years, and the new generation of Popstars, who arguably grew up idolizing Swift, are leaning into their own insecurities on the microphone.

That’s So True by Gracie Abrams recounts a night of jealousy inflicted by a triangulating player making eyes and playing up his new love interest in front of her. The song’s lyrics imply that he’s doing this on purpose to torture her, and that the new girl is lacking “it,” a factor that Abram’s must possess to remark upon.

The humor is that the song was purportedly about Sabrina Carpenter, who (you guessed it), has her own contributions to the legacy in hits like Taste, a song written from the perspective of a scorned lover to her ex-lover’s ex-girlfriend that he has reunited with. The song implies that the ex-turned-current-girlfriend will be kissing her every time she kisses their shared love interest. Ironically, there’s a bit of kiss-inception here as the ex-girlfriend getting back together with the male love interest implies that actually she was there first. Moral of the story: it’s okay—we all brush our teeth. We just need to also wash our hands clean.

One could argue that many of these songs were written by girls in their teens and early 20s, when they are immature and more susceptible to society’s messaging. Maybe the problem isn’t the lyrics, but rather the environment that inspires them in the first place. It’s worth pausing to ask: Why are we aiming our bottled feelings towards men who disappoint us and weaponizing them against other women?

What is so bad about being basic?

If basic is simply liking things that are liked by the average individual, then many men are basic too. However, I don’t see anyone calling a man a basic b*tch for filling out a March Madness bracket and rating Guinness pours. Finance bro is supposed to be an insult, yet it’s associated with high-stress and high-earning jobs, with collegiate men aspiring to being initiated into the ranks of blue-vest-wearing, Bloomberg soldiers. On the other hand, the average basic trope hurled at women is associated with lazy lifestyles of drinking iced beverages, shopping and working out.

Average is used as an insult, when it fails to register that the inherent nature of a population requires most of it to be, well, average. The bell-curve exists for a reason, and when you’re an outlier, you will automatically be lonely if you turn the rest of the population into an imagined enemy instead of meeting at the middle.

It’s okay to be different. To not fit in, but perceiving oneself as not being ‘basic’ doesn’t make you better than everyone in the room you remain outside of.

For example, I always struggled to fit in growing up. Hell, I literally failed out of sorority recruitment (yes, you read that right).

The year is 2014, and I signed up to participate in rush at a large SEC school, not knowing fully what that entails. After three exhausting days of overwhelming small talk at 12 chapters, I was cut from nearly every single one. In the emotional whiplash, I dropped out of the entire process, starting the ‘best four years’ of one’s life’ in an all girls dorm filled to the brim with residents celebrating their initiation into sisterhood: pep-rallies, date nights, door decorating, matching t-shirts…the list goes on.

And do you want to know what people said to me to try to soften the emotional blow of rejection at a social try out that large? That it was okay, because I wasn’t basic like the rest of them.

But damnit, I would have given anything in that moment to be a carbon copy of the thousands of girls who seemed to have no problem fitting in.

I didn’t feel superior. I felt deficient.

Basic Conclusions

The older I’ve gotten, I’ve come to terms with my strengths and shortcomings.

Yes maybe I can paint a realistic oil portrait of someone from life, but will I ever be able to run a marathon, let alone make it through an entire core power class? Probably not.

But you know what I will not be doing? Calling girls walking out of a pilates class with a matcha in hand basic.

Because pumpkin spice is f*cking delicious, shopping is therapeutic, leggings are comfortable, and 90-day fiancé is artistry in my eyes.

The next time a man appears to be moving on, I’ll be tearing down my insecurities with my therapist, not tearing down another woman.

You probably wouldn’t know it after initially meeting me, but I grew up in suburban North Texas, and by the time I was 15 subscribed to the Pinterest board belief that I would be married by 26 and have three kids. One would be lonely, two would be too small, and three just made sense, right? After four years spent at a football stadium with a university attached, the vision changed. I grew repulsed by frat boy culture, and the idea of procreating with anyone I went to school with made my stomach sick. However, I had a new romanticized life adopted by reading one too many travel blogs during a dull summer internship following my semester abroad: moving to Spain to teach English, becoming an artist, falling in love and raising bilingual babies with a handsome Spaniard.

It wasn’t until I was living in New York, the Spanish daydream bubble having burst by a sexual assault four months into my “forever” that I realized I did not want to become a mother. It felt criminal and confusing. After all, I had always been the mom of the friend group, even nicknamed ‘carpool mom Carl’ by my college roommates who I often shuttled to campus in my white Hyundai crossover. I alway felt deeply maternal towards friends and my community, becoming involved in several mentorship programs with local high schools as well as joining the board for a gender-based violence nonprofit. I just didn’t feel any calling to make my own, feeling that if I wanted to see what a ‘mini-me’ looked like I could employ ChatGPT. I didn’t need to tack on 18 years of trying not to inflict childhood trauma out of curiosity.

Tick Tock on the Clock

The recognition that I didn’t feel a need to become a biological mother, afforded me another kind of freedom not experienced by most of my female peers: time. Even though 30 is often viewed as 20 in New York city, the influx of transplants and friends from other parts of the United States bring with them the anxiety of the ticking clock. I have had many conversations with friends and women around my age who are frantic that they are running out of time. The search for a partner becomes less of a romantic quest for someone to spend the rest of your life with and more of a panicked game of musical chairs, one in which women rush to settle for any chair thinking it is better than ending up the last woman standing when the music halts.

But Carly, if I want to have a kid by the time I am 32, then I need to be engaged by 31, which means I need to have met my person and started dating them two years ago…an acquaintance pleads out of breath over martinis after the latest man from Hinge stops responding to her texts.

The average age of first-time moms in Manhattan is 38, my friend who is a labor and delivery nurse said! is a line I find myself uttering often to try to console understandably upset friends.

As someone who is okay with never having kids of my own, happily resigned to the title of cool aunt, step-mom, or maybe even adoptive or foster parent one day should the calling strike, I will never be able to truly understand the pain of the strikes of the ticking biological clock. What I do know, is the desperation of wanting to find a partner so badly, and in turn asking for regurgitated breadcrumbs from pigeons, not knowing that every dove is a pigeon but not every pigeon is a dove.

I have no room to talk, and yet here I am, talking.

The Dream, The Man, & the Dream-man

I used to go on terrible online dates, and chase men which would make my optometrist second-guess himself and make ChatGPT want to override its own flattery algorithm to tell them to shut the f*ck up. It was easier to fail at dating to distract myself from the fact that I was too scared to go after what I really wanted and fail at that.

I built what I thought was a fantasy, not realizing there was one real part of the dream.

‘Moving to Spain to teach English, becoming an artist and falling in love and raising babies with a handsome Spaniard.’

I didn’t need to runaway from the US or tether myself to any man to become an artist.

I just needed to prioritize myself.

De-centering men over the past year has allowed me to get closer to the realization of my dreams than I ever thought possible (more to come on all the pros later).

Now I will never quiet the urge to shake a beautiful and accomplished friend who is clinging to the hope of a man who would not make a good boyfriend, should he reluctantly commit, let alone a father. While it may not be the life one daydreamed about at 15, modern medicine makes motherhood feasible in many ways and at later ages. The irony in chasing a timeline is that the quick choices made to beat the clock have lasting consequences one is left with forever.

When women become mothers, they deserve to ascend to a throne, not scramble for a folding chair.

Women spend so much time trying to beat the clock to become a mother, and then trying to turn it back to prevent aging.

True victory is won in the life lived losing track of time.

Bring a Folding Chair

Modern right-wing pundits will have you thinking feminism ruined everything, as though certain privileges and powers enjoyed by women were conned into creation in the 20th century. This is simply untrue. In the 500s A.D., during the Byzantine reign of Empress Theodora, the Empress herself pioneered legal changes which expanded women’s rights in the areas of divorce, property ownership, and imposed strict penalties for rape. Even one of history’s greatest considered enemies of women, Henry VIII, empowered his pregnant wife, Catherine of Aragon, to serve as his regent in the early 1500s. During this time while Henry was off picking fights with the French, Catherine successfully oversaw the English victory over the Scottish, killing King James IV at the Battle of Flodden.

Hundreds of years later, women still must fight to be taken seriously. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress, said on her 1972 campaign trail, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” Five decades later, women have continued her mission, going so far as to start building the damn tables ourselves.

Networking: a ‘serious’ problem

Something that the Coca-Cola lawsuit brings top of mind is the brokenness of networking in the 21st century. Mixed networking seems to skew in favor of men. Thus, women-only events are vital incubators for female talent, where we can be taken seriously in rooms of peers. Spaces where women can collectively repair our nervous systems from having to question whether the man who requested to connect on LinkedIn or asked for our number is truly interested in our resumes or if he’s deceptively using it as a shortcut to make a move.

I used to volunteer at a monthly private networking series and attend invite-only Founder dinners. I signed up initially seeking to network my way out of finance and into tech, at a time I was disillusioned and looking for more work-life balance. Soon, I became disillusioned with networking, as my hope was dimmed by an emerging pattern: most men I interacted with seemed to see me as just someone to try to flirt with in between their real business discussions. Despite my background and knowledge, my confidence in my own intelligence sank as I felt reduced to conversational eye-candy or ego validation. At one event, I was waiting alone on a dark street for my Uber home when I was cold-approached by an event attendee who held me hostage in conversation as I waited for my ride. He didn’t leave me alone until I reluctantly gave him my phone to follow his Instagram. I volunteered for over a year without one viable career lead.

I Don’t Want to Mix Business with Pleasure

Now it seems networking events are outright marketed as dating playgrounds. Earlier this year I attended a launch party for an app that described itself as a combination of LinkedIn and Raya and was met with the same shallow phenomenon I had grown accustomed to in New York City: a room full of successful, albeit often nerdy men, and women who are physically way out of their leagues, often literal models and influencers, mingling in the name ‘networking.’

Somewhere along the way, networking became an adventure for men and a discomfort for women. Some networking events even take place in saunas, where men get to enjoy ‘networking’ while women must be half-naked to get a seat at the table. I can’t help but feel the re-emerging rise in conservatism seep into the undercurrents of even these outwardly liberal spaces, as successful men are catered to with exclusive invite lists of attractive women whose jobs usually consist of modeling, content creation, or marketing. The networking feels like formalized objectification, a guise for the hunt for a trophy girlfriend. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say all women are uncomfortable at these events, as they offer exactly what some women are looking for. The issue lies when the romantic undertones overshadow women who are searching for pragmatic connections. Adding alcohol into the mix only further blurs professional boundaries.

Discomfort doesn’t stop at in-person events. I once had to block a grown man employed by a school district in a distant state after he messaged me on LinkedIn something suggestive with a winky face. I was in my early 20s at the time. And the app from above?—To little surprise, the only requests I’ve received have been from older foreign men, with home bases in popular tax havens.

Hold on to Your Seats, Ladies

There came a point when I hit peak hopelessness while volunteering, and gave in to jokes with my friend who ran the event series offering to make personal introductions with any men on the invite list that I might be romantically interested in. It felt like I wasn’t ever going to be taken seriously in these settings, and that the most I could hope for was to get a seat at the table as someone’s accessory. The cognitive dissonance was rich for a girl who grew up a loner and nerd, with the most male attention coming in the form of tutoring them to pass their failing classes. In the NYC tech ecosystem, it felt like my outfits negated my perceived ability to write an excel formula. It took time, but I came to realize I did not want a seat at that table.

Like every insufferable man in 2026, the Patriarchy seems to have bought a microphone, voicing two options to keep a seat at their table moving forward: Smile and Wave at whatever offensive dish they serve up or Carry the water pitcher and serve them (but never partake in the meat of discussion). They do not take us seriously—it’s serious.

I do have hope, however.

Just this week, I was invited to attend the presentation and reception for a Hackathon: AI for Social Good, organized by Ruth AI and Hearst Labs. Hearst Labs, related to the media conglomerate of the same name, “[works] to close the gap in VC funding for women by helping founders build sustainable and highly-scalable businesses,” while Ruth is working on using AI to help close the gender wage gap. I was amazed to see what five teams of women could build in just 8 hours to help shape the world for better, ranging from expanding civil engagement at the local level to facilitating patient after-care instructions for the immigrant community, and more. While the reception was not limited to women only, I am pretty sure the only ones there were on the arms of the women in attendance for once. I’m happy to report that I did not get hit on, and I did make an unexpected career connection.

Events like the hackathon remind me why it is so important for women to be able to organize female-centric spaces. They lead to hard-hitting impact, which angers the men who want women to stay soft and malleable.

Only men insecure in their merit feel threatened when we make space for ourselves. So they come for our chairs.

We can’t let them take our chairs.

It’s 2026, and discussions of AI feel like a safe-word is warranted. Where I can bring doomscrolling-fueled conversations about universal basic income and ‘technofuedalism’ to a screeching halt clacking my heels and muttering ‘Avocado Toast’ or ‘Purple Elephant.’

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was stealing my sister’s chunky Nokia cell phone to play snake when bored and being gifted burnt CDs of illegally downloaded music, each disc decorated with different colored sharpies. Not long ago the most revolutionary technology in my orbit were ‘Hitclips,’ a common HappyMeal toy which involved me plugging a stocky microchip into a mini plastic boombox to hear 20 seconds of Brittney Spears’, ‘Stronger.’ Time moves fast, however, and just last week I saw a video of the First Lady of the United States walking side-by-side with a humanoid robot at the White House. As more layoffs, spurred by corporate investment into AI ensue, I (like many of us) wonder what that means for our job security. And with that comes great irony.

Humbled Beginnings

Growing up, I had always been artistically inclined. My dream as a child was to be one of two things: a caricature artist at Six Flags or the person who cleverly named nail polishes things like ‘A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find’ (a pretty coral shade by OPI, if you’re curious). As I grew up, I graduated from fun craft classes to structured classical training in traditional fine art. While I eventually realized that my dream jobs did not have dream incomes, I still wanted to be an artist of sorts. That dream was dimmed when it came time to graduate high school and go off to college, for not only did I inherit the artistic genes from those who came before me, but I also inherited the generational trauma.

My parents were initially supportive, encouraging me to tour schools with arts programs and even apply for scholarships, but when it came down to decision time, anxiety overcame them, and they pushed for me to study business instead. The reasoning? It was safe. It was stable. (We’ll come back to those two words later). One might sigh and ask, Why didn’t you just take out student loans and study art anyway? And to that I say, I had more self-doubt than drive and thus was stalled on the autopilot of doing what I was told. It’s hard to believe you are talented enough to make a living as an artist and confident enough to go after that dream alone when your parents don’t see your talent as a good bet. In my early twenties, I will admit that carried a lot of resentment and a minor victim-complex, but I came to understand that they thought they were protecting me. That they were just doing the best they could with their life experiences and how they were raised. For instance, my dad is a fantastic writer and history buff, but you wouldn’t know it from his resume. I often wonder if he would have been a college professor or even a novelist in another life had he been raised in a household that recognized and encouraged his gifts. There’s a somberness seeing parts of him that likely sat dormant, only emerge later in life joined by a Stage IV cancer diagnosis.

As my journey continued, I went on to study Finance, and have worked in New York City doing everything from forecasting commodities prices to working on teams structuring billion dollar credit facilities. And I have been miserable the whole time, often fixating on dating as a distraction to the dissatisfaction with the confines of my 9-5. I’m embarrassed to admit the number of bad dates and relationships I dove into wanting to be emotionally rescued from my outlook in life and on my desktop.

The Great Escape

In 2025, I deleted dating apps, and instead, pledged to return to the part of myself I let sit dormant for too long. I took oil painting back up after a decade long hiatus with a renewed sense of discipline and vigor to escape the bell jar of the 9-5 for an artistic life. This time I am no longer 17 and lacking confidence, and luckily for me, my job in finance means I am finally able to bet on myself and invest in a studio space and nicer supplies.

The irony has not been lost upon me. As my lucrative finance job inches closer to being replaced by an AI agent within the coming years, I dare ask—was art the safest job all along? Had I spent the last thirteen years pursuing something out of the underlying fear that it would stop me from becoming a starving artist, when art may be the very thing that feeds my body and my soul in the end?

Although I used to work in futures (finance joke), sadly I can’t forecast mine, so we will just have to wait and see…

Sincerely,

Your Trapped Renaissance Woman

In 2026, we have reached a cross roads where the public is simultaneously outraged by the Epstein Files, but still calls the girl who says that a mutual friend assaulted her a motivated liar. Victim-blaming is as old as the crime in question, and like sexual assault, it doesn’t discriminate.

Even Feminists Fall Victim

Earlier this week, I spontaneously met a young woman at an art museum who was visiting New York City from overseas. Let’s call her Margaret. Margaret joined a personal tour I was being given by a remarkable woman (I hope to write about one day). The three of us hit it off, bonding over The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s infamous feminist art installation. As far as I was concerned, Margaret was a feminist herself. After all, she explained at the museum that the negative connotation for the number 13 has ties to the 13 menstrual cycles occurring in a given year, its ‘unluckiness’ another way femininity was viewed as shameful. The three of us took a group photo in front of a series of red ‘Handmaid’s' Tale’-esque dresses adorning an entire wall in the museum’s feminist art wing, and fawned over Gloria Steinem (who as fate would have it was touring the wing at the same time). TLDR- we were high on girl power and probably would have been wearing friendship bracelets while being burnt at the steak in Salem.

On Sunday, I met up with Margaret for an impromptu photo shoot at Grand Central Station’s main concourse where we took turns each having main character moments. I am not waiting for a text back, I am waiting for a letter, I professed, laughing in between poses. Having worked up an appetite, we stopped at a vegan cafe for a bite afterwards. I was riveted as I learned more of her story, which included a stint hitch-hiking alone across Southeast Asia when she was twenty (no public transportation included).

I admired her enthusiasm when she spoke to how the experience instilled in her a strong belief in the good in people after having to trust so many strangers along the way. Suddenly, my stomach sank as I recalled my own experience being assaulted by the friends of a Tinder date when living abroad in 2018, the betrayal by the witnesses I sought help from after, and the dissolution of trust in strangers which followed. I brought up my experience for contrast, but more importantly, to express how hearing incredible stories like hers helps me continue to affirm that sexual assault is no one’s fault except for the perpetrator. If she could cross the globe alone with strangers and emerge unharmed, then surely I should never have expected that a dinner party at a crowded apartment would result in being trafficked. Seven years on, I still needed reminders.

I wasn’t sure if it was due to native language differences, but I could see that she struggled with my comparison—not as though she doubted me, but as though my experience belonged to a different kind of woman than her. She did not go into details, but recalled a friend who had had an unfortunate experience once when staying with a male host during travels. While I do not want to misquote or project false meaning to what Margaret said, she expressed something along the lines of people (perhaps this friend) not expressing agency because of the way they were raised or personality differences. Though she was sympathetic for this friend, I couldn’t help but get the impression that she believed her being unscathed by sexual violence on her adventure was because of her grit rather than a matter of statistical luck. As though the right combination of personality and instinct could keep a woman safe.

I’ll never know exactly what Margaret meant, or whether something was lost in translation. But the conversation left me unsettled, because I recognized the logic. I had heard it before, probably coming from my own lips at some point. The quiet comfort of believing that what happened to someone else couldn’t happen to me, because I would have done something differently.

Margaret is a lovely person who I enjoyed getting to know, and I don’t think there is any malice in her views. The logic is quite simple: if I can find a reason to explain away sexual assault as being tied to something done (or not done) by the victim, or—my favorite excuse—‘a misunderstanding,’ then I can never be a victim myself. But this isn’t logic, it’s fallacy.

What We're Taught to Ignore

We live in a society where women are indoctrinated to ignore their intuition, then judged for not outmaneuvering violence when the threshold is crossed and the body’s reptilian survival response takes over. Every alarm in one’s body encouraged to be silenced slowly then all at once. Every let loose, you’re overreacting, or it’s just a joke as the locker room talk turns into doctor’s office discussions on how to heal from the consequences. After all, 85-90% of sexual assaults reported by college women are committed by someone they know (National Institute for Justice), making it harder for women to make sense of perpetrators being even the most well-liked members of a community.

Unfortunately, victim-blaming is also done by survivors of assault living in denial. It is much easier to self-soothe by denying one’s experience that mirrors your own if you aren’t ready to accept it. I recall returning to the United States in 2018 and a childhood friend, who knew me from before I had my first period and used to tease my prudishness, asked me if I had been eating enough on the night in question. ‘You know you’re such a lightweight’ burnt into my brain, as though the intoxication was another drop in the well which rose to reach an appropriate level of ‘asking for it.’ I later came to find out that this same friend once woke in the middle of the night to a trusted friend taking advantage of her after a night of heavy drinking. And it wasn’t the first or last friend with an eerily similar story.

A woman should be able to lay in bed next to a friend after a night out drinking and not have to worry about him assaulting her. A woman should also be able to travel around the globe in unfamiliar countries and not be harmed by anyone met along the way. The reality is what should happen is not always what does happen. There is no amount of agency that can save you from sexual assault, because it is the theft of agency.

Writing off a woman’s story as something you can avoid or outsmart will not diminish your risk of falling victim to a similar fate. What one can do to work to diminish the risk of assault is create the space to talk about it openly. To shift from policing women on how to avoid ‘asking for it,’ to arresting our attention on the perpetrators and making them ‘answer for it.’

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you are not alone. RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline offers free, confidential, 24/7 support in English and en Español.

Call 800.656.HOPE (4673)
Chat at RAINN.org/hotline
Text “HOPE” to 64673

My main issue with the community renaissance, however, is when it is seized by capitalism. I think every pure thing in life, a man sees (not all men, but always a man, sorry) and thinks to himself, how can I make money off of this? Or worse—how can I make this exclusive? Nothing makes my inner demons roll their eyes faster than seeing an advertisement or press release for an ‘invite-only’ community. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

I hit the jackpot last Spring when I discovered what I would say is a true Third-Space: Art with Love. Art with Love is a non-profit organization which provides free art classes each week, open to everyone regardless of age or ability. Started by an Australian couple in Brisbane, over the years it has expanded to Florence (Italy), Manhattan, and most recently, Ithaca (Greece). I arrived for their New York City opening in April 2025, thanks to the grace of the Instagram algorithm and a sponsored Ad for a free Botticelli painting workshop. Having just finished an art show featuring a giant take on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, it felt fated. Even more so, I was scheduled to travel to Florence, Italy for the first time just two months later.

Little did I know, when I showed up for that class, I had planted roots in the linoleum floors. For the next year, it became my weekly ritual to sit and paint in the company of strangers. Every Saturday morning, I would walk through Central Park and past the flashy designer flagships on Madison avenue in my questionable paint-safe outfits on my way to the studio (Security officers likely side-eyeing me behind their tinted sunglasses). Strangers soon became familiar faces, most namely, Amanda: the warm twenty-something art teacher who ran the studio three times a week patiently giving art demonstrations to all newcomers—my visiting mom and sister included.

Not only did Art with Love serve as a creative playground, it allowed me to rediscover my long-lost love for oil painting. I grew up classically trained by an eccentric Uzbek artist in his Texas home studio, trading church pews for toxic fumes as I worked on still lifes and master copies each Sunday morning. When the time finally arrived to go to college, I was not supported to study art, my parents still traumatized by the aftershocks of sending their first born to study dance during the global financial crisis. As a result, I said good-bye to oil paints at age 17 and hello to Principles of Accounting 101. I wouldn’t unroll my hog bristle brush set again until I turned 28, instead opting for watercolor paints. I grew fond of watercolors, but ultimately felt constrained by limitations in the size and scope of the art I could make.

What started as maybe I will just try to paint something in oil for fun? quickly took over my life. Though I had been short of oil painting experience for a decade, I had gained quite a bit of life experience and finally had a means to express the artist half of the ‘Tortured Artist’ trope. Sparing my ear, I set out on an ambitious Self-Portrait journey, involving a produced photoshoot featuring seven female archetypes through which I wanted to explore the confines of femininity within the context of my own life. (More writing on that to come later!)

Every Saturday I made my pilgrimage to Art with Love, making sure I could fit in my two hours of weekly ‘me’ time. I even committed to going to the studio when I traveled to Italy, and started a portrait of my chocolate dachshund, Linus, at their Florence location. Sitting at an intimidating table of laser-focused nonnas, I learned that the love of wiener dogs knows no bounds when one came over and commentied jovially on my sketch. I also noted that I should have studied more than just the word for dachshund in Italian—oops.

I love Art with Love, because it opens its doors to everyone in the community, from a French expat who I recall brought her visiting parents every week for an entire month, to Mila, the Russian woman in her 70s that I met on my unrelated art workshop that brought me to Florence that summer. She goes to the studio during the week and sends me text updates regarding my self portraits that never fail to make me smile from behind my work desk. Some of my favorite days this past year have been ‘staycations’ where I take the day off of work and meet Mila at the studio to paint together before grabbing lunch.

As firmly planted as my roots are in the paint-splattered floors of the Manhattan townhome which houses Art with Love, I noticed at the start of 2026 that my canvases have started to outgrow the space. As the weather ushers in Spring, the space continues to become more crowded (rightfully so!), and I have started to feel the air closing in around me (even if it is just from more paint fumes). Suddenly, somehow, the girl who hadn’t touched oil paints since before we had big fat liar in office and still had Pretty Little Liars at home, started browsing for studio spaces. Now almost one year to the day I walked through the door at Art with Love, I will be picking up the keys and walking through the door of my own art studio in Brooklyn.

One could say I am moving on to bigger and better things, but the truth is it feels like a loss, like mourning a chapter that you wish had more pages. How beautiful it is to sit and synergistically paint with people even in silence, parallel playing with your community.

But as I uproot myself from one concrete garden to another, part of me is at ease knowing that I don’t know what community awaits me. And in these fields of uncertainty—one can always sow hope.

You can find out more about Art with Love here.

Check Out The Original Article Here

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Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Join the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Listen for our real stories of friendship breakups, the emotional impact of mean-girl dynamics and experiences battling loneliness on the quest for authentic relationships.

Join the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Join the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

This week I explore: braving sub-zero temperatures for chosen family, the power of tiktok to forge new relationships, and being disillusioned with communities centered on exclusivity.

Join the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Follow the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Skip to 17:00 to get straight to the sorority talk.

Follow the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Note this episode was filmed in November, but we are getting closer to the present day!

Follow the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall

Follow the bunch on Instagram: @corefriendspod

Podcast Intro- 'if tears could dance (i'll be alright) by STELLA. & pedram

Cover photo- Meghan Marshall