Some of the best nights I’ve had in the dead of a New York winter were spent trudging through snow—boots soaked, cheeks flushed—to a quiet art café tucked behind a Chinatown alley near the East River.
Before the art resurgence, before it was trendy to paint in public or share stories of sketches, there was this little underground world: part avant-garde, part sweet art school daydream. A crew of nobodies who understood that winter needed heat—not just literal warmth, but something else. Seductive beats. Low amber lighting. Free wine. Nude models holding poses in increments: 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5, 15.
The only tools? A heavy art board. Kraft paper tied with bungee cords. Soft willow charcoal. A towel to wipe the dust from your fingers between frantic sketches—usually leaving with a few rouge marks on your face.
It was thrilling in the way only leaning into imperfection can be. You’re trying not to overthink it. The model shifts. Your angle is weird. If you chase realism too hard, the style falls flat. You draw what you feel, not what you know. Sometimes you get fed up and just sit there drawing something else from your brain.
After each round, we’d lay our favorite sketches across the floor. Dozens of interpretations of the same body. Some gestural. Some sharp. Some tentative and smudged.
I think about that a lot—what it means to be seen by so many eyes, and still never quite know what’s being taken in.
We worry so much about how we’re perceived. But if one pose can become thirty entirely different impressions, that’s the point: everyone is seeing you through their own lens.
Their version of you is probably kinder, cooler, and far less critical than the one you keep in your own mind.
That’s why summer feels like such a relief. The warmth is already there. The sky stretches wide and generous. Time slows down. You don’t have to be anywhere fast. There’s this shared understanding that good plans find you (if you want).
A rooftop movie. A lecture at an open-vaulted ceiling gallery. A burger you've both cobbled together in your kitchen at 10pm. Onigiri eaten on a park bench at the farthest pier. I’m always wandering—if you want to know where I am, I’m probably somewhere I didn’t plan to be. I’ve probably convinced a handful of people to meet me there. Or at least texted a few to source an ice cream stop on my walk home.
Like the two summers in a row when my friend and I walked to the grocery store and came back hauling a watermelon the size of our torsos—laughing the whole way home as we traded off carrying it like some insane weighted prize.
Last week, I wrote about leaders. This week, I’m thinking about shifts. The tiny ones.
I was asked to write something for Pride Month at work, and it reminded me to say this again, clearly: your life and your perspective matter. Your joy matters. Your little stories matter. The way you want to be seen matters. And people just want to hear the things that made you smile.
So don’t stop sharing them. Don’t stop showing up—in whatever shape you’re in. Celebrate your summer. Celebrate your joy. Celebrate having no clue what you're doing, literally no one does.
And go get a full sized watermelon. Let the juice drip down your wrists as you slice it. Sneak bites so it fits in the container. Smudge the lines on a few perfectly imperfect sketches (hell maybe add random color). Play a card game with your friends.
Let someone see you the way they see everything worth keeping: softly, briefly, through their own beautifully smudged lens.
