Year in Review: 2023

This year was my worst ever. The propensity might be to put the pedal to the metal, break off that rearview mirror, continue on. But in doing so, a time to reflect would be lost, and also all those good things that happened this year — and there were plenty — would be lost. So let the record show: I did live another year on this Earth and that year wasn’t wasted.

January

We rang in 2023 in Montgomery Alabama with old friends and it was very low-key. Adam and I drove to Nashville shortly after and what should have been a fun few days in the vibrant and party-forward music town was actually pretty terrible. We fought over how we didn’t have fun together on vacations anymore. We cried. I was up all night. Then we zoned out with a podcast on the very long drive to DC and then only spoke of our fight again in couple’s therapy. Still, I enjoyed the DC visit – a fun cocktail party with my best friends, a run on the National Mall – and I started to really get excited for our move from Princeton to DC in June. There was a jaunt to New York City to stay with a good old friend and he and I took a visit to the Whitney Museum for an Edward Hopper exhibition, and a nude painting Hopper did of his wife when she was old, yet he painted her when he was young, caused me to tear up and I’ve thought about it a lot this year. That ability to hold all versions of a beloved person at once, the past version and the present version, moves me deeply. That was also the month where a trip to Philadelphia, ostensibly for a Matisse exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, opened my eyes to my new favorite museum in the world: (and later, the inspiration for my attic apartment in DC) The Barnes Foundation.

February

In the beginning of February our beloved cat Boj died at the age of 15. It was a hard loss and I miss her constantly – her social personality, curious nature and beautiful little face. The following day, I felt desperate to engage with the world, to make connections, and I had a positively euphoric day of visiting an estate sale, and then going to a town called Lambertville, New Jersey, which is right over the Delaware river from an equally beautiful town called New Hope, Pennsylvania. When I walked into the estate sale, a young man who’d helped me carry a piece of furniture home from a different estate sale a few months said, “Oh, hi, it’s you. How’s your cat?” the moment I walked in. I teared up, put my hand to my heart and said “Actually, she died yesterday.” I was so touched that this guy remembered Boj as the adorable curious being she was. She had made an impression in the brief time he met her. I bought a painting at that estate sale, a bucolic country scene that I think especially spoke to me in that moment because my life in Princeton, despite its imposing gothic university structures, was actually quite quaint. During my jaunt to Lambertville, later on that same day, I delighted in speaking with antique shop and gallery owners, most of whom were older gay men who’d left New York City for a charming small town life. I returned to Lambertville later that month. And several times after that. Similarly, the following week I went into Manhattan for a solo “design inspo day.” It was rejuvenating and lonely. I had a handful of design clients in February and really started to find my footing with digital design.

March

In early March, buds were starting to form on the trees around Princeton and a rather gray winter during which I listened to a “Dark Academic Classical” Spotify playlist daily, started to get sunnier. I really took advantage of Princeton’s proximity to New York City during March, and stayed at my friend’s Manhattan apartment for over a week, seeing plays, eating great food, going to museums. I bought a 4×6 foot painting (okay, really it’s a print that has been painted on top of) at a design store in Soho. I had taken the train in from Princeton so it wasn’t exactly the most practical purchase, but I stored it at my friend’s apartment for a few months and eventually came to get it with my car. I was drawn to this painting in part because I knew it would look stunning hung over my blue couch but when a woman on the elevator to my friend’s apartment declared “What a sense of movement that painting has!” I realized it was that too. A trip to DC in late March was superb timing for the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms, and I spent a glorious afternoon under the trees in the DC suburbs with my best friends and their families, another lovely day paddling around the trees from a kayak in the Potomac, and a tense photo-taking walk around the tidal basin with Adam.

April

Spring was beautiful in Princeton and it made me remember how glorious the changing of the seasons is in the Northeast, each one so punctuated and felt. The blooms in Spring felt as if they were nature’s sigh of relief. I resumed my jogs along the canal where the turtles had resumed sunning themselves atop logs, and I visited a nearby tulip farm and took photos of myself amongst the rows of technicolor flowers. I started going to an adult education painting class and felt excited about painting being another creative outlet for me, and I started on two (still unfinished) paintings inspired by my number one, Henri Matisse. In mid-April, Adam I went to a yoga retreat in upstate New York, led by Gemma, my favorite yoga teacher of all time. It was a wonderful, meditative few days where I felt very happy and very connected. Shortly after, I went to North Carolina to attend Highpoint Market, the biggest furniture/design trade show in the country. In addition to being inspired about the potential for my design business, I learned a lot about the industry. But it also made me realize if I ever want to make money in my new business, it’s all about selling furniture to clients, which is difficult with my “virtual design” model mostly for clients who live abroad. My parents came to Princeton for a rainy visit at the end of the month, and we drove to Philly for an afternoon because I wanted to show them the Barnes. It stunned.

May

In May, I took another trip to Lambertville, this time with friends who were visiting and I spotted large oil painting of a somber-looking woman draped in a beautiful blue robe. It could easily be a painting of an Algerian or Moroccan woman, which drew me to it, but I was also drawn to it because of its Picasso blue period vibes. I turned 39 in May, and celebrated with oysters at Blue Point Grill in Princeton. A few days later, we drove down to DC for a Princeton event, that was capped off by a very fun karaoke night. My DC friends threw me a birthday party at a friend’s house and I really couldn’t wait to move the following month, when I’d be a local friend rather than a visitor. Late in the month, Adam and I went to New York and I spent most of that trip on my own, visiting a decorator show room that continues to inspire me, and visiting the MOMA where I was mesmerized by a self portrait of Frieda Kahlo in which she painted herself as her husband, Diego Rivera, with shorn locks of her own long dark hair littering the ground around her.

June

This month is hard to write about as I now see all the signs of what was coming. On the first day of June, we packed up all our belongings, put our remaining cat, Gus, in the carrier, and drove to our new place in Washington DC. There was none of “we’re so excited to embark on this new chapter together!” energy between Adam and myself like we’d had when I arrived to Yemen, when we’d moved to Madrid together, when we landed in Jerusalem, then in Morocco, then in Algeria. I got to work setting up the one-bedroom attic apartment in a large old house. The deal was we’d essentially be housesitting for a year and when the owners were home for a few months a year, we’d confine ourselves to the attic apartment. The attic is dated but bright and I decided I’d hang all of our art floor to ceiling, just like Barnes did. It created a really dramatic and stunning vista, I have to say, and I love to see all of my art on display. We met up with a ton of friends, attended a concert by an Algerian band we both love, I went on hikes, including to Great Falls National Park and Teddy Roosevelt Island, said farewell to DC’s beloved pandas at the National Zoo. Adam and I went on a road trip, first to Michigan and then to Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. He was a million miles away. It would be our last trip as a couple.

July

Oof, this month. The moment my ex walked out on our lives together, I opened up a document on my computer, titled it “The End” and started to write. I haven’t stopped writing since that day and I realize what for a time felt like a journal is actually a memoir. I’m about 150 pages in and not only has my writing helped me make sense of things and process my grief, but I actually feel like it’s a compelling story others would like to read. I write each day with the woman in blue hung on the wall next to my desk, and when I look at it – which I do many times during the day – it reminds me that it’s okay that I’m in a sad time now. Something about the way the woman holds her robe closed with her crossed arms makes me feel assured the sad time is temporary and I can envision her opening up and lifting her face to the sun. Aside from finding solace in my writing in the month of June, I found solace in the arms of my best friends, in listening to a few songs on repeat, especially Florence and the Machine’s “Free” and First Aid Kit’s “A Long Time Ago.” I tried to put on a brave face for a few celebrations in the month of July, including a 40th birthday for one of my besties, Colby, and a birthday surprise in coastal Maryland for another bestie, Jess, but it was practically impossible to obscure my pain and despair. Late in the month, I boarded a plane to Denver and it was the worst flight of my life – feeling like I couldn’t openly cry in my seat, crying openly anyway, an extra hour flying circles around Wyoming, wretched turbulence, a poopy baby who couldn’t be changed owing to the wretched turbulence, the mother of the poopy baby, my best friend, going through her own grief right beside me. When I arrived at my best friends house in Denver, I fell to the floor of her guest bedroom and sobbed and sobbed. The prospect of never again traveling with him, after 12 years of travel together, felt crushing.

August

I think I may have stayed in just one night during the month of August. I scheduled some sort of meetup – a walk, drinks, dinner (not that I was eating much of anything) – nearly every single night. By the end of the month, I wasn’t sure recounting the story of my marriage ending over and over to friends whom I was reconnecting with was actually serving me. A good friend from my Morocco days, with whom I’d recently reconnected, was going through something eerily similar and she moved into my house for a few weeks in August. It was powerful to grieve together, it made us both less lonely to be in a house with someone else. We still see each other all the time. Let me tell you, people come into your life, or back into your life, for a reason. Mid-month, I visited the Phillips Collection, a private museum in a beautiful old house, and snapped a photo next to Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” a painting I’ve always adored (so much so that I use it as the banner for this here blog) but it was actually Pierre Bonnard’s “Woods in Summer” that unleashed in me an epiphany: That this can be both a desperately sad time and a time of immense growth. That sadness provides depth and rootedness while happiness gives branches and a sense of growth and both things can exist at the same time.

September

In early September, I flew to Texas for a yoga retreat that one of my best friends, Hana, had booked for us. I knew I was showing up for this trip as a different, diminished, version of myself. I apologized to the group of yogis with whom we spent the week and tried to explain I was normally livelier, more engaging, funnier, and that version of me might have enjoyed the very arty town of Marfa a touch more than sad Emily did. What turned out to be most inspiring about that trip wasn’t the yoga or the wide open desert though: It was the couple who ran the retreat and seeing how they’d combined many of their creative interests, left their corporate jobs, and created a life of yoga, curating retreats, fixing up and/or building unique houses. Their story made me think it’s possible to not choose just one thing, to mesh together a myriad creative interests, to truly decide what you want your life to look like on your own terms. At the end of the month, I went to Princeton for an appointment and cried walking by the yellow clapboard Victorian house where we’d live for a year. Also cried in Gemma’s yoga class. When I returned home, I took down all the art of him and me: The illustrations, the paper cutout, the Arabic letter tile with his name on it, the massive and vibrant watercolor he’d commissioned from Algerian artist Mounia Lazali of us and our cats behind the bar I’d designed.

October

In October my love of art and interior design really melded when a painting that a client loved, along with a Matisse nude that is peach, dark blue, and emerald green all became the inspiration for a bedroom I designed for a client. I was very inspired by interior design this month, and this was when I finally went to the Washington Design Center along with a local designer who inspires me, got a few new design books I really enjoyed, got massive inspo from George Washington’s house, Mount Vernon, and submitted a few client projects I’m pleased with. I started to get my appetite back in October; had a much-needed dalliance with a sexy man; went to a lot of concerts, including one by myself which was where I discovered the band Frenship, and they’ve pretty much been my soundtrack for the past few months. My mom and aunts came to visit me at the end of the month, and I felt more like my old self than I had in a long time, touring the monuments, shopping in Georgetown, eating at Le Diplomat, my Aunt Patty and I rearranging my living room together, just as she used to do a decade ago in DC.

November

In November, I found a great deal of solace in live music and dancing in crowds. I realized although DC is lacking in overt vibrancy (it’s no New York City!), there is a vibrant and intimate music scene here and I vowed to go to at least one concert a week, whether I know the band or not, and I generally do not. There was a yoga retreat in the Shenandoah Mountains, and is always the case with these things, it was less about the yoga for me and more about other realizations: This time, it was the concept of “retreat”, which actually I prefer the word “refresh” or “realign”, but that these things are always available to us and not as far away as we think. I know getting out in nature, seeing a sunrise, or, more realistically for this night owl, a sunset, seeing an animal in the wild, hiking until my legs and ankles are tired — these things always refresh me and can shift my perspective so I need to do them more often. I took a long trip to Michigan for Thanksgiving, my parent’s 45th anniversary, and my cousin’s wedding and although there were so many nourishing and loving things about this visit, it was also the first major holiday without this person whom I’d spent 12 Thanksgivings with. Back home in DC, there was a visit to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to see all the presidential portraits, which is educational, although not particular inspiring. More inspiring: The Smithsonian American Art Museums’ Edward Hopper painting “People in the Sun” which is a group of people in chairs on a concrete deck, presumably doing nothing more than looking at a sunset on the plains, while a man in the back row is just paying attention to his book. I find this painting remarkable for its perspective, and it’s a good reminder than in any given circumstance, there is more than one perspective.

December

In early December, I decided I’d not decorate my apartment for Christmas, in fact, could I just take a pass on Christmas, just for this year? While I only put up one decoration – my Scotsman nutcracker – I ended up attending a good number of cozy holiday parties and intimate dinners. My biggest cry of the month was realizing that first time in many years, there would be no Annual Holiday Spirit Cocktail Contest Party. I theoretically could have hosted a party on my own (although by this point I had been sharing the house with its octogenarian owners for months, so the feasibility of hosting a party in my probably 550 square foot space seemed unrealistic). But the truth is I haven’t had the desire to host any sort of party since July and that is truly a bummer for someone who has a blog and a business predicated on her love for hosting dinner parties. Still, plenty of Christmas celebration both back in Michigan and here in DC, where I got to tour the White House, all decked out in its holiday finery. Perhaps what delighted me the most at the White House is Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama where she’s depicted in a pale blue gown, sitting on a pink couch with a coral background. The colors are stunning but what I love most about this portrait is the set of Michelle’s mouth – it’s assured, she’s soft, beautiful, motherly, and she cares, but she will take no shit. It was shortly after that visit that I hung up a painting I had of a glamorous woman that I’d bought long ago, probably from an antique store in Michigan. It’s dated 1932 and the artist signature says Zee. It’s not a particularly good painting. And I don’t think the artist quite achieved the same expression that Sherald captured, but I’ve always seen a glimmer of resolve in the woman’s face that I connect with.

I often say “pay attention to what you pay attention to” as a way to home in on what your passions and interests are, and then to more fully incorporate those things into your life. I had thought my look back at my year – which I began in my attic apartment on the last day of 2023 and finished on the second day of 2024 – would be an especially sad one in which clues signaling the demise of my marriage would be revealed month by month, photo by photo. And it was that! What was also revealed: My growing passion for art, my love of experiencing art, of thinking about art, and finally trying my hand at it this year. The art element is there in how I’m approaching my new business, how I flip through art books and scroll Pinterest and Instagram for visual inspiration, how I design those rooms in my 3D program, how I take renders of those rooms and how I create beautiful mood boards to represent the room. And it’s there in my daily writing practice. I’m doing the best writing of my life right now, experimenting with forms like poetry and lyrics and essays. I suppose in a way this artistic growth was only possible because I’m so exposed and cracked open and raw, and so I can access all the feelings: the pain and the joy, the grief and the celebration.

I’ve always had a dream to live an “artists life.” I chased this dream in the cafes of Paris during my two years of traveling to Paris every six months while studying creative writing at NYU’s Paris Writers Program. I chased this dream when I went to a writing retreat in mountains of southern France. But I didn’t ever fully commit. There were always other things – jobs at embassies, my own lack of discipline – that got in way. It occurs to me that now, living alone in an art-filled attic apartment, writing daily, designing beautiful rooms, that I am actually living the artist’s life.