If you know me, you know I don't like the snow. It's beautiful after it settles and I love sitting on my couch and watching the flakes fall through the giant living room windows, but I don't care to be outside in the gusty snowstorms that have come to define what "snow" has meant to me in New York.

I remember the first time I was in falling snow. It was junior retreat in high school, and it felt foreign and magical. It felt like anything was about to happen.

These days, I don't know how magical I find the snow. Perhaps I don't find anything in life too magical anymore. When I think back to high school, it feels carefree; when I think back to college, it feels filled with a love I've yet to discover again. I know it's easy to think back and see the past with rose-colored glasses, but even being back in Orange County last week, I felt like I was 22 again--only this time without the pressures of "the future."

I feel like I didn't learn a thing about myself until I moved to college. The person I was growing up in Sacramento feels like an entirely different being than who I am now. Orange County, then the brief period in DC--those feel like formative stages of my life. New York has been formative, in some ways, but it feels like I'm still searching for a foundation here so it isn't just another rocky transition period with an uncertain end.

But in the meantime, I've been enjoying solitude as I think about what comes next and how to find it. I took a walk today after work and watched Harlem unpack itself from the snow. It felt cathartic. It finally felt like the beginning of the new year.

Riverside Park playground

Steps down to the Hudson

Stairs

Along Riverside

Broadway

Friendship garden along Amsterdam