Senior Year

It’s hard to write when there’s nothing to complain about. And yes the dwarf sphinx drew blood when she bit me, but it was my fault for feeding her jamon serrano during my turn. The next day I got stung by blue jellyfish all down my thigh when I took my injured finger to the sea. Do you think it’s evil eye? I ask Marcello in the pool at the Viceroy. No I don’t think it’s evil eye. You’re right I think it’s just me.

Last month in Miami, I told the girls (lifelong friends (twenty plus years)) at our sleepover that I feel like I’m only justnow actually processing everything that happened four years ago. The baby. The move. The move more so than the baby. Because the baby was never hard, the move was. Mold poisoning was. Launching a magazine in another country was. I still feel guilty that the move made the baby seem hard.

We’ve had friends since we arrived because we live in Mexico and everyone is lovely beyond words. At first I didn’t have the space for it. Two years ago I had to uncomfortably vocalize that I wasn’t capable of being a friend while navigating motherhood, surgery, and trying to live on two coasts at the same time.

Friendship gets weird after pregnancy. Socializing in general is strange in your 20s. Stranger when there’s a pandemic then you have a baby then you move I think. Everything and everyone got a little weird. I for sure got super weird. I don’t feel guilty for that. I’m thirty now and life feels like senior year. It’s felt like this since March. March-graduation is always the best.

3/3/26

Let me set the scene. I was carried to bed last night after falling asleep during love story and continued sleeping until six forty am no alarm. I put a twenty minute timer and woke up to a cup of tea followed by a cup of coffee and didn’t lift a literal finger until Mateo came to give me hugs and get dressed for school. I’m going to miss you so much he tells me. Me too baby. If I have a bad day you’ll tell my teacher and get me? Yes baby. That’s our new routine he says. Yes baby.

Lay in bed. Pray. Take a long silent bath. Cut up fruit. Kefir. Medicine. Jump on the blue couch in our room with the big blue blanket to edit my novel. Marcello is back from drop off and presents me two itineraries. I choose.

Work out for twenty minutes at the gym. Make breakfast and gossip with our cleaning lady. Sit on terrace. Text Kristen back forth back forth back forth back forth. Yin. He pulls me up from the floor and we kiss and then he holds my body still because I’m seeing stars and he can tell. Slick back my hair. Stop at the beach and watch the whales.

We’ll pick up our son in a bit. I’ll make tacos tonight.

As part of my coursework with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) we frequently did an exercise called the Circle of Life check in. It was basically rating different aspects of life from 1-10 on a regular basis. Things like finances, joy, home cooking, relationships, spirituality, health, education.

In the year leading up to my tumor, for example, I would score a 2/10 on social life, a 1/10 in physical activity, 9/10 creativity, 9/10 career, 9/10 home cooking. The secret is they’re all equally important. Cutting out movement and community was detrimental to my Health.

Now I have everything I wanted a year ago (new home) (pilates studio(s)) and gained the thing I didn’t know I needed most, something I took for granted for twenty years. Socializing is different from friends. Socializing is what I needed a break from. Social life is easy and fun.

Now I have Friends the way it was in college. Un grupito. Two live across the hall, like the show. More come in and out. Between the four of us on the top floor there are eight cats and one tortoise and one child. We share food and tea and coffee and right now also a vacuum cleaner because ours broke. And unbeknownst to our four year old, we’ve been running an underground Catan ring almost every single night after bedtime since March.

There are potholes on the highway on my way to the ranch. I sit up tall and straight with my chest up to the steering wheel to try to anticipate the holes. I lower the music to see better. The ranch sits on the beach next to a cliff on the pacific. It’s a horse sanctuary which means the horses are very happy and very free. The horses seem like they have a perfect circle of life score. The ranch is owned by a Spaniard and ran by French girls and there’s bossanova playing on the speakers. They’re running it in exchange for food and housing. They’re young and sexy and super French. They drive us up the cliff on ATVs and don’t need saddles.

We break for lunch and I sit across from Sofia and Ines while our waiter makes out with a customer at the Koi in San Lucas. Cabo San Lucas is way more sexually charged than San José. I don’t come here for anything except Costco. The energy is kind of insane not in a good way. I steal a used book at the coffee shop and then another one. The inspo for the shoot was Thelma and Louise. I’m just trying to stay in character.

Sacred Scraps Campaign

And I didn’t want to tell you any of this because I’m still a little weird and paranoid. Because privacy. Because I’m happy and I don’t want you to take it. As my life gets so busy and finally full in the place where I physically live, it’s harder to show up so fully through the phone and two thousand miles away. Whatever. There’s always something to complain about.