How to feel alive again
Shaking the post-travel blues. Strasbourg and Colmar in photos.
June 1st and I think I’m finally climbing out of this week-long malaise. I was just telling my kid how I used to experience terrible post-trip depression but that I don’t anymore because I love coming home to the comfort of my own bed and our cat greeting us at the door.
Except I found myself slogging through our first week back in a funk, not ready to fully engage with life. I just wanted to disappear again.
Time is an endless enigma. We were only gone eight days, yet it felt much longer. I’ve been trying to figure out why the days seemed to linger. I don’t think it was solely from adapting a European lifestyle of leisurely, unrushed meals and siestas in the afternoons. After Paris, we took a train to Strasbourg and Colmar in the Alsace region located in northeastern France. We passed landscapes dotted with tiny villages and vast fields of wheat. We all wanted to go somewhere we’d never been. This is when we felt time slow to a crawl. The clock insisted on marking the time with numbers, but each day stretched like an ocean.
Can you be both a homebody who loves the sanctuary of your own space while craving the newness of places you've never been? Or am I just yearning for a version of myself who used to road trip around the country without a plan or a destination?
I missed this feeling. Paris still had ghosts of our former selves that I couldn’t escape, even as we were making new memories. Traveling to a new region was a chance to marvel at the novelty of ordinary things. Colored doors or a particular shade of blue we kept seeing on window shutters, for example. Curiosity replaces routine when you’re immersed somewhere new.
In smaller cities and towns, we saw less trappings of modern life. We were still connected on our phones, but only reached for them when we were searching for directions. Now, living life means an escape from the internet, not the other way around.
And perhaps my favorite thing about travel is the lightness that comes with anonymity. Moving through nature or a city like an observer collecting impressions.
But now, I come back feeling a bit lost, like I’m suddenly questioning everything. There’s an underlying restlessness that wasn’t really there before. How do I get back to that steady rhythm of creativity that I finally reached before I left?
And then suddenly, it’s June.
Despite my life no longer being ruled by a calendar to some degree, the first of the month rolls around and I feel the weirdness lift. It’s like a switch. Arbitrary, I know, but the first of the month is a fresh slate from the baggage of the last. Slowly, my body appreciates the comfort of routines.
We buy seedlings for our balcony garden and I sit out in the sun with my cat. The weather is perfect, not yet hot but cool enough in the shade to want a light jacket. A text comes in from a friend. Plans are made. Later in the week, a long overdue lunch with my mom, a comfort meal of Korean that embraces us from the inside out and softens the landing.
I step out into the city with my kids, go to The Met, and get a slice of greasy NYC pizza that hits the spot like nothing else can when you want to fall back in love with NYC again. We come home in time to feel the excitement of the Knicks in the NBA finals, ending a 27 year drought. We look forward to Game one.
Writing rarely comes easy for me and neither does art making. It’s been a slow ramp-up to where I left off so I hope you don’t mind this newsletter being mostly photos. I took nearly a thousand photos. Videos too.
Funny thing is, now that I don’t share them on social media, I don’t know what to do with all of them. I guess I take pictures to prove that I am still here, that I am alive.
Thank you for reading.
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Related reading
Link love and recommendations
To read:
The Sound of Imminence: Ruth Ozeki in Praise of the Typewriter (Literary Hub)
We’ve all read the studies that reading in print and writing notes by hand engages the brain more deeply and helps us remember and understand better. Author, Ruth Ozeki, uses a typewriter when she gets stuck.
"The typewriters help. They require a more visceral, muscular involvement in the writing process. They remind me to write deliberately, to slow my mind so that my fingers can keep up."At 101, the Chinese American Artist Ce Roser Is Finally Getting Her Big Break (Cultured)
I love a good story about women artists who are getting breaks later in life. At the age of 101, Roser, a NYC based artist, is still painting!
“It’s the culmination of 100 years,” Roser said of the exhibition. “It was really a fulfillment of a dream I never had. I didn’t think it would happen.”Lists, Damn Lists, and Critical Correctness. Love them or hate them, lists are now firmly established—along with cats and porn—among the apex predators of the modern internet. (Quillette)
Why do we gobble up listicles on the web when they’re so highly subjective? I guess like anything on the internet, for engagement.How JR Transformed Paris’s Oldest Bridge Into a Massive Grotto (Artnet)
We saw glimpses of this installation on Pont Neuf by French artist, JR, while we were in Paris, but it wasn’t open yet to walk through. Curiosity had me searching more info about the installation, and yes, it’s a nod to the 40th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of the same bridge.Moffat Takadiwa turns plastic waste across Zimbabwe into record of extraction and repair art (Designboom)
I love this kind of art. Art made from found waste. And in Takadiwa’s case, keyboard keys, toothbrush heads, buttons, and bottle caps. From afar, his pieces look like beautiful tapestries; up close, you can see each fragment of plastic.
"The reason Moffat Takadiwa uses discarded found materials is to show us how the colonial project ravaged through his people and their land."Andy Kim Wants Delaney Hall to Outrage You (NY Mag)
I’m sure you’ve seen that photo of NJ Senator Andy Kim in the crosshairs trying to ease tensions between protestors and ICE agents outside the NJ immigration detention center before he was pepper sprayed. Nothing much has changed since Minnesota. Here’s the senator’s account of what he saw in his own words.
An exhibition worth seeing if you’re in NYC:
“Costume Art” at the Met (through Jan 10, 2027)
The Met’s new Costume Institute show moves out of the basement and into a new permanent gallery adjacent the Great Hall where the gift shop used to be. “Costume Art” thankfully skips more contrived and expected connections between fashion and art and instead focuses on the exploration of the human body. Read more about it here. (NY Times gift link)
What we’ve been watching:
Beef Season 2 (Netflix). Reading Jae-Ha Kim’s review of how season 2 tackles a biracial character’s Korean identity grounded the series for me. I wasn’t quite sure what to think given that it felt like a bit of a departure from Season (felt a bit more White Lotus), but watched to the end because I had no idea where it would go. It was then I realized that Season 2 was more about the slow collapse of human morals and relationships compared to the physical chaos of Season 1.
Remarkably Bright Creatures (Netflix). Personally, I could’ve have more screen time with Marcello, the giant Pacific octopus! It’s a touching story and it’s great to see Sally Field on the screen again (plus Joan Chen!). And now I want to read the book.
Till next week – JP
If this post resonated, I would appreciate a share or restack. 🫶
Your posts make me feel so much comfort and relief Jenna. I suddenly feel less alone and like an aberrant part of society every time I read one. I think that is because you consistently write about words and thoughts I have in my head: the start of a new month as a release, the need to travel and float through places anonymously, the struggle to return to routine after, the desire for newness and comfort at the same time, and on and on and on.
Maybe this is just the age and stage at which we are both finding ourselves, or maybe we are both freaks on the sidelines together sharing similar experiences. Either way your words and images and stage of life mirrors mine profoundly and I’m grateful for the way you describe/express it. You bring a beauty to what is often difficult and confusing, and you make me cherish it. Thank you for validating me even if you didn’t know you were.
There may not be drawings, but I beg to differ you aren’t art-making. These photos! There’s an intimacy to them that is reinforced by you saying they aren’t made for social media. I especially love the one with the two blue shutters near the ground.
On the larger topic, I was re-reading some internal writing of my own from time in Tucson and there was an expansiveness to my thinking connected to being anonymous/away. Is it the untethering or the days in discovery? Both?