I am deserving of a good thing

And a Salmon Recipe

Hello hello hello hello.

I’m writing from a cafe in the West Village. NYU students are milling around with excitement and angst and fervor and life. I know there’s this condescending tone toward New York and the sentiment that everyone here is their own main character, and I get it, but I sort of love it and find it hilarious at the same time. Especially when I see people younger than myself, like this girl I was walking behind in Soho in the pouring rain, who was strutting. Building a character out of yourself can be liberating when you need distance to let yourself be who you want to be. Let yourself pivot. Discover.

I’ve had a lot of pivots lately. Pivoting in my perspective toward writing for one. I think this podcast episode really gets at the meat of it, but I’m writing and writing and writing and I’m ready to let some of the words go. That being said, you can purchase a short story titled Musca here, my first publicly available piece of fiction. If, for some reason you’d like a handwritten page (of something, anything, no promises), you can get one of those here. I write to write and I don’t need to hoard it to myself anymore. The words will always be there because the urge will always be there. I think reading The Art Spirit, really centered me in that notion.

“You have art,” he writes.

I’d never thought of it like that, like something that I just have, but it’s true, as I was saying, I write because I need to and that’s what makes me a writer. Especially fiction. The sort of writing I do here is processing and reflecting and sharing, but fiction is raw. Fiction is healing. Fiction is the sort of stuff that makes you go on when you don’t want to.

I’m 37k words into this draft of my novel. Working on it is really difficult and I don’t really want to get into it too much, but again and again I’m confronted with my own past and most recently my relationship to my own body. I’ve written about this a little bit before, but having grown up in ballet and pageants, as my favorite therapist once told me “You are the poster child for someone who would have an eating disorder.” And I did and I’m trying to work through it in fiction, but I think some of this is healing and some of it could be public processing that would maybe, hopefully be beneficial to some of you.

A big pivot recently for me is the readiness for love. For whole love. Partially through my encounter with a married man and my realization that marriage is extremely important to me. Partially through some chic chic couples and families I’ve seen around New York, like the one who just got out of a sexy black car with a driver in a crisp tux. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very woo woo, but I love Armani just as much as I enjoy praying on my knees. Taste! Taste is hot.

But, as a man I’m actually very smitten with said, that I can’t stop thinking about:

“Am I deserving of a good thing?”

You have to believe that you’re deserving of love to receive it. I think we all sort of know that at this point. But easier known than believed.

I just finished this book on the inner child and dream analysis and it says the following about one of her client’s dreams in connection to Rumplestiltskin:

“Naming something means knowing it and having power over it.” (74)

I think that in order to truly receive love, I have to heal my own relationship to my own body. But there’s a lot here. A lot in the novel. I can measure the way people have treated me throughout my life by the number on a scale (can i? is it in my head? is it how i was thinking of myself?). I think many women can.

Kasper also says the following about another client:

“In him lived the deeply embedded conviction that he had no right to his own life.” (86)

This book really brought me back to the fact that I am living life from an internal point, from my own point, from my own feelings. That’s how we all are living life in childhood, initially, and we should strive to get back to that as much as we can.

I’ve fallen into some strange habits with food lately. Like, asking Chat GPT about appetite fluctuations strange. But then I remembered that living internally out should be an exercise in listening to my own body, in enjoying things because I enjoy them. That’s why, for lover girl fall, I feel like I need to write about food and the body.

Learning to eat and move like a child, albeit a child who likes a Michelin starred something instead of chicken nuggets and a club in a basement in Brooklyn instead of a jungle gym.

My ex, even though we had our own tiffs, was really good about encouraging me to be better in this way. He held my hand through a lot of strange reactions to meals, most notably a tearful breakdown in the chic fil a drive through (because I wasn’t mentally prepared to be at a chic fil a) before I finally realized it was time to go to therapy.

But it’s something I have to do on my own. I’m healing a lot of the way way way back reasons for these things in fiction, but the real time processing, I’m hoping maybe we can do together. That’s what the internet is for, is good at. Real time.

Tonight, my close friend/publicist and I are going to go to a bunch of restaurants and bars owned by fashion houses. And then tonight and tomorrow, I’m going clubbing. To dance, to move. And sometime in between, I’m going to bake cookies and give them to my neighbors and not feel like I’m evil if I eat a little dough. Because that’s when I felt love as a kid. Licking the spoon. And now, as an adult, I feel love when I make food to share, when food is shared with me, and at the peak of nighttime early morning when I’m dancing, can’t stop dancing and a stranger offers me XTCY (don’t worry parents, I said no).

That’s when the love is the best. Is the strongest. When it’s all around you. When you close your eyes and feel it and believe.

HERE IS A RECOUNT OF A RECENT DINNER I MADE FOR MY ROOMMATE AND ONE OF MY NEIGHBORS + A COLLAGE WITH A SALMON RECIPE THAT MY MOTHER MADE FOR ME GROWING UP:

DINNER

XO, HAILO #4

HOW TO HAVE A DINNER PARTY

Today, I feel as if I have properly lived. I woke up on a sheet less bed, hungover & overstuffed on crackers (I refuse to DoorDash) and put on a Rachmaninoff record as I online shopped in bed. Tonight, was to have someone over for dinner. A neighbor — one of the owners of one of the stores on my block. I’m very active in my community. I talk to everyone. I go outside —

“Hailo!” They call to me. When something feels strange, I go outside & ask my neighbors instead of looking to an app. And tonight I was having my neighbor over for dinner because I wanted him to meet my roommate. And there’s something about cooking for people that is so intimate - so beautifully intimate. I planned my day — my grocery route out in my head, in my unmade bed as I paused to feel the piano trills at the top of Piano Concerto number 3, so delicious, so different on vinyl.

And I’ve just spilled an espresso martini on this page. I’m in a big phase of writing at bars — I love the energy in the room the hunger, the playground logic.

“What are you here for” they asked me as I walked up. “Upstairs or down?” They asked.

“I don’t care” I said. “Good for you” some man said. I’ve been here before. With my best friend and publicist. With my writers. Never this late. Every place in New York becomes a scene after 9:45. Throw some red light in the basement and add an extra stamp at the door. The girl to my left keeps flicking her hair into my arm. I would get angry, but I’m the one writing in a crowded bar like a psychopath. I am only here because I saw the host’s face in my dream last night. I take my dreams as very serious business. The dinner was so nice. So intimate. I felt so homemaker today, In a way I haven’t since my time in Europe with my now ex.

I was telling my roommate, as we waited on our guest, about our 4 year anniversary - we loved nachos and average American Bar/ Restaurants. I made the perfect nacho while he was at practice. From scratch. It was all I had to do. We lived next to a farm. I dog sat sometimes. He got home from practice and ducked off into our bedroom as I plated everything. He wrote a note about our relationship as I finished dinner. I have that note tacked up near my bed. It serves as a reminder for something but the “something” changes every day.

My roommate and our neighbor loved dinner. My roommate called it a “marry me” recipe. I had texted my mother asking for it that morning and she’d sent back a picture of the piece of paper she’d hold or I’d hold as she made the recipe or I finished it for her before or after ballet.

Marry me. Marry. Me. Me. Mary. Madonna.

Platonic dinner. Neighborly love.

Here is my guide to a perfect dinner. Dinner, not party, not party. Not party. That is something else. Something hungrier, something more brazen:

When I’d woken up hungover, there was an NBA player in my DMs and I was scared that it would be so easy to become a complacent, approved version of myself again.

Here is how to have a good dinner: