Return of the Girl Loss

Mama, we are TURNING to face the strange!!!

Jul 18, 2023

Unfortunately, this post is too long to appear in full in your inbox. I don’t know where it will cut off in the email version, but it will be available online. See you there!!!

I make a big deal out of a lot of small things, but I feel entitled to make a big thing about 100 installments of Emily For President. This silly little bird started out of a slight rebellion against an old boss’s suggestion to write investigative journalism pieces that would require me to go undercover and expose hate groups on Facebook.

Not wanting to get doxxed while still living in my parent's house—and not able to be serious enough for that style of writing anyway—I launched this instead. It’s true that E4P started as a vanity project to fill in the gaps of my employment but quickly (as in: by the third week), I realized that I’m not very interesting to write about so consistently.

And that’s how we’ve ended up here: a corner of the world where I ask people if I can be nosy and they let me.

Though my name may be at the top of the page and in the URL and email sender line and logo, Emily For President has really never been and—Oprah-willing—will never be all about me. It’s a place where brilliant and incredible and honest people set me straight and tell me their thoughts and let me—and, ostensibly, all of you—into their lives.

That’s the secret sauce: I probably would have jumped this ship at least a year ago had it not been so much fucking fun having an excuse to ask people to talk to me, to make me laugh and think and get angry, somehow always at the Supreme Court and Ben Affleck.

I am so over the moon grateful for anyone who shows up here at all. Thank you for taking the time to engage with people I love, to read words I take such care to write. Thank you for hate reading it, love reading it, reading it because you’re my mom and are contractually obligated to show your eldest daughter constant attention.

I love Emily For President and all of you more than I can explain, and I hope that by now, I can count on your vote.

That’s the end of the sappy stuff, but I did want to build off of all this to introduce today’s topic and guest. When I think about what makes E4P so special to me, I keep returning to the never-ending potential for connection and the way we relate to others. Of the past 99 pieces, one has exemplified that ideal so completely: Sara Delgado’s interview on loss and change from last November. I don’t need to tell you all that Sara is a special human—the woman literally just exudes effervescence—but that conversation felt remarkable in the midst of having it, and even more so after the fact when countless people reached out to both of us to say how deeply it resonated with them.

TLDR; Sara was going through a season of immense change and, as someone who joined her there, we talked about the fears and thoughts and hopes we were having. The whole thing brought me so much comfort and, gratefully, it did the same for Sara and a lot of you, too.

I feel now like I’m in a completely different season of my life than I was when we talked seven months ago, but I’ve come to recognize I’m not a completely different person. Some parts of me are harder and sharper than they were a year ago, but others are much lighter. I’m confident and sure of myself now in a way I wasn’t before because I didn’t have to be. Change forces you to grow in ways you hadn’t expected to and in ways you might not have known you could or even needed to—this felt like a fact Sara and I somewhat recognized but had not fully reached yet last year.

It’s on this train of thought coupled with the inspiration Sara offered of Billie Eilish’s annual Vanity Fair interview that this week’s piece came to be. Today, to celebrate E4P 100, Sara and I talked about what has changed since our last interview, how we now approach the inevitability of change, and what makes us happy.

Sara Delgado is an ~~Atlanta-based~~ Brooklyn-based writer, product marketer, and in the words of Thorgy Thor (circa RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 2), "she's actually not a witch, just an eccentric Gemini." Hailing from San Francisco but raised in Atlanta, Sara is a self-proclaimed city girl with a soft spot for southern hospitality. Despite having eaten at nearly 500 ~~450~~ restaurants ~~in Atlanta~~ around the world, Sara doesn't see herself as a foodie but more so just as a really good eater.
When Sara isn't writing or launching features, you can find her sipping martinis, enjoying her “1989 era” ~~plotting out her next chapter of life in New York City~~, and wondering, "What's for dinner?"

Mysterious as the Dark Side of the Cancer New Moon

It’s only fitting, I think, that today marks the new moon in Cancer. The last time Sara and I talked, we had just completed the eclipse season which correlated with both of our pivots. This new astrological development, occurring amongst a sky’s worth of other significant transitions, heralds a powerful moment for envisioning, planning for, and manifesting your future.1

I can’t think of a better lunar placement to talk about how far we’ve come and where we’re going next.

With that, I wanted to kick things off by asking:

Emily: How has your life changed since we last talked? What are some of your favorite highlights?
Sara: Since November last year…whew! Well, I actually made the move to Brooklyn, so that would be the headline. There are so many highlights (and lowlights) but a few of my favorites are walks along the Brooklyn promenade, sitting streetside sipping martinis with my roommate, and the burger at Pastis.
Emily: How has the change you experienced over the past year and a half brought you to this point?
Sara: The last year and a half have felt like a portal where I’m finally on the other side of a very challenging chapter in life. I set the first domino in motion but nothing could’ve prepared me for the waterfall of events that would follow. A year ago, I felt loss for the first time in a really big way that I hadn’t experienced in quite some time. It was a wake-up call.

One thing I’ve thought a lot about recently is how I visualize myself going through changes. Like I started saying before, the statement, “I wouldn’t recognize the person I was last fall,” doesn’t feel quite right to me because I was the same person I was then that I am now. I’m the same person I was 13 years ago when I pre-ordered the original version of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now and just ten days ago when I full-body ugly sobbed in my big girl apartment to “Never Grow Up (Taylor’s Version).”

What I’m trying to say is that I know I’ve changed, but the core of who I am is pretty stubbornly planted. Still, I know other people see their growth and development differently, sometimes as if they have become a separate persona from the one that existed before they evolved. That’s such a poignant, melancholic image, and thinking about it led me to ask Sara:

Emily: Is there anything you miss about the life you had or the person you were before you underwent such significant change?
Sara: Of course! In a very strange and I’m sure vain, narcissistic way, I think about her all the time. It’s sort of like the multiverse or the epilogue of La La Land—I imagine she got everything she thought she wanted. She has the house, the dog, the family, and the career that she thought would make her feel whole and happy.
Over the last year, I’ve been doing my best to let go of the white-picket-fence Sara little by little. I thought I could detach all at once but it always found a way of creeping up on me. Nostalgia is incredibly potent and I am highly susceptible to daydreaming about the past. If there’s anything I miss about that life it was the privilege of sharing the little things with someone else.

A huge facet of our conversation last fall was about the uncertainty that waited on the other side of the changes we were going through. For Sara, a lot of that was about moving to New York after living the bulk of her adult life in Atlanta. As someone whose move to Manhattan was all of an hour-long drive, I was in awe of Sara’s commitment to picking up her roots and starting over again thousands of miles from home.

I asked Sara to send me photos of moments in which she was truly happy since we last spoke, and she did not disappoint...

I learned after our conversation last year to be better about making assumptions about people’s well-being based on their Instagram presence, so I know Sara’s life in NYC—like anyone’s—hasn’t always been perfect in terms of ease, but it’s been perfect for her journey. I asked:

Emily: How has your relationship with yourself changed since moving to New York?
Sara: It’s so much stronger and validates what I had been building in Atlanta. There were a lot of jokes about living like the “main character” flung my way last year that it’s honestly made the adjustment of moving to NYC quite seamless.
Every time I fly and get an aerial view of the city or ride the subway and look at all of the rooftops, I think about how everyone here gets their own little rooftop (well, technically shared), but it really adds to that main character mentality of living here where we get to collectively exist and kings and queens of our own castles.
Emily: What is the kindest thing you can say about yourself that you wouldn't have been able to believe six months ago?
Sara: “I love spending time with her.” I’m finally in a place where I love my own company more than anybody else’s. Thanks for that, New York.

Long Live the Girl Loss (Taylor’s Version)

It might seem like I’m really upselling the response to Sara’s interview from last year but I mean everything I say literally: the number of messages that came in from others connecting with her vulnerability was so heartening and beautiful, as well as incredibly plentiful.

I know how I felt about it all (in awe for a long time), but I wanted to ask Sara:

Emily: How did you approach our last interview, and how did you feel about the incredible response it received?
Sara: For the last interview, I wasn’t in the best shape. A few things had happened in the weeks prior where I felt like a soldier coming home half her weight (let’s just go ahead and start a count of all the Taylor Swift references now), so I needed that conversation more than either of us realized going into it. Which is so funny to me now because you initially reached out wanting to talk about food and restaurants and it all just came pouring out of me.
I still get overwhelmed when I think about the response to the interview. Heartbreak and grief are very universal experiences. I’m so grateful knowing that people had something to take away or felt a little bit of catharsis reading it.

Our last conversation came at a time when wounds were still raw before any healing could start to take place. Now, what feels like 51 years later, I wanted to call upon Sara’s hindsight and, really leaning into the Billie Eilish of it all, reflect together on what has changed and how we got here.

I asked:

Emily: When we last talked, you had this amazing revelation: "I think as soon as we start divorcing our idea of success from what was laid out for us or paved previously by men, we’ll find that we never really needed to bend, pluck, and shape ourselves to meet some ideal. I think it’ll be really freeing."
Have you begun to practice this mentality shift, or is it a lesson you still need to learn?
Sara: Yes in the sense that I’m so much more confident now than I was a year ago, but I also still have a lot of internalized misogyny that I’ve yet to untangle. That’s just one slice of the pie, though.
Success can be evaluated in every arena of life from relationships, beauty, material possessions, experiences, and our careers. Defining my “ideal” is a vicious cycle where I just end up finding new ways to grade myself.
That said, I do think I show myself a lot more grace than before, and I’m gentler with myself and the people around me. I try to be my own cheerleader whenever possible, and I’m trying to put up better boundaries in relationships. Men are not really the enemy—it’s the entire system and it’s held up by men, women, corporations, political parties, you name it. So yeah, there’s my progress report on that.

I’ve only recently started telling others about the best coping mechanism I’ve developed over the past nine months not because I was gatekeeping it (I would never), but because I truly just realized that it actually is a coping mechanism.

My life has taken on a far different outline than I had always assumed it would at 25 which I’ve always kind of known would look different compared to most other 25-year-olds. There have been an embarrassing number of times in the past year when I’ve grown so frustrated comparing myself to others that I’ve thrown my hands up and shouted, “Whatever!!! This is just my timeline, I guess!!” At first, I was saying it with a kind of resignation, a weird shade of FOMO that convinced me I was bad at living my life and would continue fucking it all up.

But slowly, it’s become a comfort to me: sure, yes, I was and have continued to fuck things up, but I’m the one ruining it. I’m also the one building myself back up. I’m the one learning lessons about friendships and careers and self-love because those are the things I’ve chosen to prioritize. My milestones are going to look different than everyone else’s because I’m not everyone else.

I will credit Sara with kicking off this thought journey with the above comment because, in the midst of my angst and shouting about timelines like that damn clock on Loki, I’ve inadvertently redefined what success looks like to me. I’ve shifted my focus away from the races others are winning and honed in on the fact that I don’t like running in life or in metaphors.

That’s a bigger conversation for another day, though, so for now, I wanted to pull on a thread from a more recent chat Sara and I had that has stuck with me:

Emily: In a recent conversation, you said, "Change is inevitable, growing is the choice." Do you think you're still in a period of inevitable change or are you choosing to grow now?
Sara: Now that I’ve had a minute to marinate on that conversation—which took place largely over voice notes—I think that expression is an intense coping mechanism.
Change and control are two sides of the same coin. I stand by my original statement in that change is very much inevitable and the actions you take as a result have to be very conscientious decisions. You can’t afford to fall asleep at the wheel when you’re driving through a hurricane.
But also I see that grasp for control as a way to cope with the “what the fuck do I do now” of it all. Maybe I’m not driving through a hurricane right now, perhaps it’s just a light drizzle? I’m definitely choosing growth where I can.
I mean, that has to be a huge perk of getting older is that you endure hardship, make mistakes and ideally learn from them so that the next time you find yourself in (sorry to drag this analogy out even further) a shit storm, you know how to pump the brakes.

Talking with Sara has validated the mentality I’ve adopted in response to my own aforementioned coping mechanism. It’s one I started to unpack a few weeks ago when I talked with Ellie Haney, about how we all seem to think everyone else is better off or succeeding more than we are.

We are, as both Sara and I reveal, all coping in our own ways. Maybe some of us don’t have things we need to cope with, maybe some have not found their own best mechanisms for getting by. But we’re all just learning how to be people at the same time, wondering when we’re going to reach the finish line and finally get to be Who We Are.

Sara and I circled around this point for a while, the idea of being on the other side of something and what it feels like to move past a major event. I really hate to be the Devil’s advocate in a liberal arts discussion course about it, but I think the goal shouldn’t be to focus on moving on—it should be on how to get comfortable with the things that make us uncomfortable.

Someone call Brené Brown!!!!! Get Elizabeth Gilbert on the line, too!!! She’s preaching the gospel of eating, praying, and loving!!!!!!!

And Scene!

Sara and I have been having conversations for this piece on and off for over a month and, if you haven’t been able to tell by now, finally putting it all together and reflecting on what we’ve covered has left me wistful and nostalgic. In therapy and in person, I’ve been talking a lot about where I’ve been and who I want to be next. I’m trying to extend the swelling gratitude I have for others like Sara to myself, and I’m patching up holes left by people who never truly knew me at all.

It’s dramatic!!! It’s cathartic!!! It’s a lot and nothing too major at once, and I’ve been allowing myself to feel it all. For so many years, I hoped for a life that looked like the one I have now, but I still don’t think I would hold the same reverence for it without shedding the things I lost to get here.

My anxiety about the future during the early waves of the pandemic was debilitating, then I began to take time for granted. Now, I may not be planning too far in advance but it’s comforting to know that regardless of what changes next, I have proof that I’ll land back on my feet in the end.

Projecting a bit, I asked Sara:

Emily: What shape are you hoping your life takes in the near and distant futures? Are you thinking that far or trying to live more in the moment?
Sara: This is such a well-timed question. My parents, who recently retired, just told me that they’re thinking of moving to France or Italy once they’re done with their travels. They asked for my opinion and I sort of realized that I didn’t have one. I’ve always been a relatively decisive person so it was weird not having an immediate answer, like “Paris!” or “Somewhere in Tuscany!”
It’s hard for me to think of what I want life to look like a year from now. I was so hellbent on getting out of Atlanta that I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants since. After years and years of trying to execute a vision of what I thought I wanted life to look like, it doesn’t make sense to fixate on a new shape, but I know I have to.
As corny as this might sound, I hope I’m open to falling in love again one day. It’s been a long year of healing and wondering why I still feel the way I do and if all of this will make sense one day.
Emily: What's a facet of who you are today that you wouldn't have been able to believe a year ago?
Sara: Not to take a morbid turn but I recently lost one of the great loves of my life—my dog Gus. No one likes thinking about the day they’ll lose a pet, even in a situation where you know the day will come at some point. He was my rock in so many ways and the last remaining relic of my former life. Sara from a year ago probably would’ve tried to jump off a cliff if she lost Gus.

Last year, Sara shared that she had realized she needed to make a change in her life when she stopped asking, “What makes Sara happy?” It’s a question I think a lot of people (myself included) neglect when we try to make a situation fit when we’ve outgrown it.

It’s hard to get back to that point of self-prioritizing after being away for so long, like taking a hard workout class and feeling it all over your body the next morning. But, also like taking a hard workout class, you keep returning to the practice for the serotonin boost.

With hope, I asked Sara:

Emily: Have you started asking yourself, "What makes Sara happy?"
Sara: Yes! And you know what? She’s so much easier to please than you’d think.
Emily: What makes Sara happy?
Sara: The kouign-amann at L’Appartement 4F, the theatrics that go into preparing the Old King Cole martini at Maison Premiere, a bottle of really good champagne—to name a few.
But I’m happiest when I’m surrounded by the people I love. Preferably gathered around the table, passing plates, sharing stories, pouring wine, and laughing—lots and lots of laughter.

I got chills when I read Sara’s answer here and immediately knew why. Back in February when I talked with my dad about how my life hadn’t gotten the record-low unemployment memo, I shared my own version of happiness:

I hope that I’ll one day reflect on this period as the time I detached myself from my job. Yes, I am still working to live as I think a lot of people reading this are but recently, the living part has come to mean so much more to me without the work there, too. I’m happiest when I get handwritten cards and skip up the street singing Grease songs poorly and have four people cooking a single pasta dish in my kitchen.

I’m pleased to report that one day came a lot sooner than I expected it to.

This past year has been stupid hard and I’ve learned things about myself that I genuinely never wanted to know—I don’t mean to say everything is rosy all of the time. But the happiness I now feel more often than not is one I’ve fought hard for and is not something I’ll ever let go of easily again.

I can’t thank Sara enough for doing this, for rosé prosecco, and for lasting past the colleague stage to become a friend. Please subscribe to her own lovely Substack, word of mouth, and take her dining advice ultra-seriously.

THANK YOU ALL FOR 100 EPISODES!!!!!! Let’s see what insanity we can create in the next hundred!!! I’ll see you right back here on Monday friends.