Welcome to 360 seconds – or, 6 minutes – of me going to New York. Not my entire trip of the week I spent in New York, but literally me going from point A to point B. (Captions are available on this video btw! You can also go to 2:33 to skip the talk-y intro.)

I don't want to call this a travel diary necessarily, but it's more like a video letter of a chunk of time from something I was doing. (That's basically a vlog, I guess. I'm just bad at calling things "vlogs" because I'm not really a vlogger.)

Anyways, I decided to do this because I was chatting with Cortney the other week, who's in Ukraine right now with the Peace Corps. We've been friends for 14 years, and literally everywhere that we've lived in the U.S. or around the world, when she studied abroad, we've written letters to one another or sent care packages, and it's always nice to have something that's almost like a little package to send to someone when they're in another country. But snail mail hasn't been too affordable or efficient, we've noticed (Cortney sent me a postcard using the basic international postage and it took four months to get to me here in California...), so doing a little video might be easier, and if I don't think this is too much of a failure, maybe I'll do more of them.

So, I don't know, hopefully this is interesting. It doesn't get too deep or personal, and I left out actually quite a few things in between some of the clips you'll see. (For instance, I went to Chinatown to get dim sum with a bunch of my friends, but we were too excited to eat and catch up that I just did not take my camera out at all for it.)

On the deep/personal front, though, I do want to say: a lot of people ask me still why I left New York. There are some people who think they know, but I haven't really talked about it too much, I guess, and even now, I kind of don't really know what to say. I think I found myself becoming somebody I didn't really like. That wasn't really...me. But it was someone other people liked, and I wasn't sure what that said about me. Because I just felt myself being consumed more and more and more with this darkness, and when I would try and get real, it didn't seem to really make sense. I had a good job, a stable apartment, busy weekends - and I was so deeply unhappy. So I pulled away a lot from people. I tried to prioritize and draw boundaries. So much of that contributed to why I came back to California. I guess, honestly: I'm still trying to figure it out.