THE (new) NEW NEW

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I was raised by the media gals of the ‘90s and early 2000s, splashy loudmouthed women with cool jobs and cooler wardrobes. Women like Jenna Rink of 13 going on 30, who told me that thirty would bring me what my twenties could never, and of course, the OG, Khadija James of Living Single, a New Yorker like me who owned her own magazine, stayed with her hair laid, and always kept a fine man on her. With heroes such as these, what could I do beyond imagining myself one day joining their ranks, climbing the masthead of some glossy until Editor in Chief followed my name.

What I couldn’t have foretold was the diminishing influence of print media, the disappearance of all the mags I grew up loving (RIP Seventeen and YM – gone but never forgotten), and the explosion of the digital world that so many of us spend most of our time in. I also didn’t anticipate how utterly frightening an editorial assistant salary is in New York City, so instead of pursuing my dream, I opted to pursue the bag, as Tauruses are wont to do, getting a corporate job straight out of college, quitting it when it became clear my sanity could not withstand the daily onslaught of beige, and meandering about until life eventually brought me to TikTok, which has ultimately brought me here, writing for all of you.

When I started this newsletter a little over a year ago, I had no real idea of what I wanted to do with this space, just that it needed to exist. I’ve always been a writer – it is my greatest compulsion; I can conceive of no other way to make sense of this world. It is the way that the Universal Consciousness wants to be expressed through me, and to enjoy my life, I have no choice but to honor its wishes. Though I am a collaborator with this Consciousness, I still have my own needs. Putting out weekly essays that reached my personal standard of quality began to feel impossible. There were also other things I wanted to share – like graphics exploring pop culture phenomena like the Scammer Approval Matrix I made for an earlier newsletter and works of fiction – that never seemed to have a place in the weekly format. They felt like a “waste” of a weekly dispatch, which I felt needed to include the more profoundish breakthroughs I experience as I embrace my Weird Bitch Season – which is to say, a life of embracing myself wholly and unapologetically. As the months passed, I realized something needed to change, for me personally, and for this newsletter to reach its full potential.

So I decided to take a break, releasing fear to rest in the full faith that the inner voice that has always guided me, that led me to start scripting my life before I knew what I was doing, would not let me down. Some people would call this voice intuition, and others the voice of God. I’m sure that my mention of “God” has scared some of you off, but I hope you stick around to the next section to understand what I mean. But regarding what to do with this space, I knew something would come to me; of course I would figure something out. Inspiration, I knew, would find me, as it has many times over the course of my life. And now it’s here. Welcome to The (new) New New, a bi-monthly magazine – and a place where being brand new remains the goal.

New editions will drop on the first and third Sunday of every month, and each issue will include two-to-three essays of the ilk you’ve come to expect from me, an interview with an influential figure about self growth and personal development from a spiritual perspective, and other features I’m still developing. I’m always exploring and changing things up, as you guys know (that is allowed, btw, in case you needed a reminder for your own life), so the exact mix will change month to month, but it’ll always be a long read that I hope mimics the feel of diving into a magazine from back in the day. The intended vibe is a grown-up cosmic Cosmogirl! (RIP to another fallen soldier), with the aim of imparting some fundamental truths. The first of these is that you, dear reader, are far more than what this material world has led you to believe. You are a spiritual being having a physical experience, and you have the power to create your reality in the way that you see fit. To be clear, I mean that literally, not figuratively. Every month, we will explore different facets of what I call “cosmic girl activities” – things like manifestation, quantum jumping, astrology, and more. In the last year or so, I have completely transformed myself and my life by applying the principles I will be writing about going forward, and my goal with this publication is for everyone who comes across it to be able to do the same.

In addition to subscribing to The New New, you can hang out with me elsewhere online: on my TikTok and Instagram, or by listening to my podcast, which returns tomorrow for Season 2. On the pod, we’re starting the year with a 12-week program I’ve developed called The Cosmic Girl Curriculum, which is designed to equip listeners with the tools and knowledge they need to create their own realities and actually become brand new. In addition to weekly podcast episodes, I’ve also created a free Skool community filled with journaling prompts, guided meditations, and other resources to assist on this journey. But to be completely honest with you, you will always get the best of me here — I’m a writer first, can’t help it. Regardless of what you decide, may 2025 bring you everything you desire and more.

This month I wrote about my flop of a Socialite Summer (that I loved every minute of) and the spiritual benefits of becoming a jock in my thirties, and I had the great privilege of interviewing Chrissy Rutherford, a fashion and social media expert, former fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, and certified cosmic girl. We’re writing things up this first month with a special feature: the first chapter of Yankee Girl, a novel I’ve been working on for a while. I’m defying convention a little bit by sharing it here, but it occurred to me recently that I can do whatever I want, so I’m doing precisely that!

Thank you for being here. Whether or not you choose to subscribe, I feel very honored that you’ve read even up to this point. Thank you for giving me the space to reinvent myself and try new things in front of you. I don’t take it for granted.

Lola xx

Before we continue, I want to talk about God, a concept that I will be writing about freely and frequently going forward. My introduction to this idea came from the Pentecostal church, an institution I grew up in – and which I’ve always had issues with. It is no secret that many churches house abusers and protect them to the detriment of the very people the Bible urges us to protect the most: the oppressed, the poor, those who we would call immigrants today – everyone who exists at the margins of society and is vulnerable to mistreatment and injustice.

To speak plainly, I don’t care about the church as an institution. The majority of them fundamentally misconstrue the gospel, using it to harm rather than encourage growth. They teach division and hate, tell us to burden ourselves with shame and guilt as a mark of piety, and obscure the real “good news”: that we are one with God and have full access to His creative power – though, of course, what I’m actually referring to is a genderless being. These churches hide the truth that through tuning into this power we all have, attuning ourselves to the generative power of love of self, others, and the world around us, we can create our own realities. By now, I suspect this clarification isn’t necessary, but yes, we are officially deep in the cosmic girl celestial soup and no, we are not going back to Earth.

But let’s get back to the matter at hand. “God” is merely the term that I’m most familiar with to describe this unlimited power, which, as the Three Initiates wrote in The Kybalion, “transcends names and terms.” When we surrender completely to this immeasurable power in full faith, it makes the way for the Divine Design of our lives to be made manifest. This pure energy works with, through, and for us to create the lives we want, and wants to be expressed through each of us in a particular fashion. We need only do the work of finding out who we truly are so we can discover what that is. Had I been born into a Nigerian family from slightly further north, I would call this power Allah; if I was from a different part of the world I might call it Brahman, Gitche Manitou, Infinite Spirit, or simply Source. The point is that we are all talking about the same power, the same Infinite Intelligence, and what we call it doesn’t particularly matter. In fact, I will be referring to it with all manner of different names based on what feels right to me in the moment and what I feel a given piece demands.

All the divisions we observe in religions are superfluous perversions created by human beings, and the violence enacted in the name of “God” has nothing to do with this power, and certainly not love. It instead has everything to do with the unchecked human ego and the desire of those in power to divide, control, and subjugate. What really matters is to know that this power exists everywhere, in equal degree, accessible to us all to use freely as we like. Call it what you wish.

Early last summer I declared I was having a “Socialite Summer,” a little challenge to keep me active and outside (in the streets, I mean). One of the rules was that I would make myself socialize three times a week, no excuses, in hopes of adding some spice into my bland little life. By then, I had been in a rut for months. My Groundhog Day existence of gym + work + events-for-work + sleep had me feeling stale and uninspired; I needed some new energy to jolt me back to life. At the time, I was operating under the assumption that “new energy” meant “new people;” I assumed that the only way to get out of a particularly meh season of my existence was a new cast of characters.

But it only took a week of forced socialization for me to realize that I had correctly diagnosed the problem but not yet discovered the cure. Socialite Summer wasn’t quite what I needed, but I was certain I needed something. There is something amazing about being grown, which is that I’m more concerned with how things make me feel than how they look, so when I felt the pull to go dark online in July, it was easier than expected to allow myself to actually do it. I wrote at the time about the anxiety I felt over the decision, but looking back now it’s easy to see how much I’ve grown: I did what I knew to be best for me without apology, which any recovering people-pleaser will tell you is a triumph above all triumphs. Once I decided to stem my flow of offerings to the algorithm gods, the heat of my Socialite Summer quickly petered out.

Though I’ve been on this journey for a little while now, I used my newly free time to engage in a more focused study on the nature of consciousness, the New Thought movement of the early 19th century, and modern texts on manifestation. I realized where I’d gotten mixed up when I started reading the work of David R. Hawkins, the late psychiatrist and consciousness researcher. Hawkins’s work provides scientific reasoning to explain the most basic tenet of manifestation and the law of assumption: we get what we are, not what we want. Which is to say, our outer worlds are a reflection of our inner worlds – they present us with evidence to confirm what we already believe to be true about ourselves, what we’re capable of, and what we deserve.

In Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender, Hawkins writes on what I’ve since learned is often referred to as the delayed mirror principle, an idea that expands on the idea that the internal creates the external, nothing the delay between the changes we make to our beliefs and worldview and the corresponding physical changes in our lives. “The universe is extremely just, but it works on its own time table,” writes Hawkins. “...The law of karma—reaping what we sow—plays out in ways that often escape immediate detection. The wisest stance is patience and trust, knowing that even if events don’t appear favorable now, they may be leading to something greater that is yet unseen.”

While reading this, three things occurred to me, in the following order:

1. I was focused on the wrong things. Through Socialite Summer, I intended to change the reflection I saw in the mirror and not the self I presented before it. By that I mean, I expected my life to reflect an internal environment I had yet to cultivate within, and that’s just not how this works.

2. New energy was needed, but it didn’t need to come from other people. Realizing that I, like everything else in the universe, am made of vibrating particles of energy, made me understand that what I needed was to raise my vibration, shedding yet another layer of the old self to reveal a new one underneath.

3. To accomplish #2, I needed to stay my ass inside.

And so my Socialite Summer became more of a 6AM meditation and bedtime visualization summer, with long stretches of time spent reading spiritual texts, experimenting with consciousness-raising techniques, and diving into weird, esoteric corners of YouTube (said with love, of course.) The four workouts a week, per the Socialite Summer rules, were implemented regardless because I’m becoming a jock, I fear – but that’s a topic for another essay (coming later this issue, so stick around!). I’ve written before on how external methods can never fix what needs to be reconciled from within, and yet I couldn’t recognize when I was trying to do exactly that, forcing myself to go out and attract something new without changing myself. What I wrote when I first conceived of Socialite Summer still stands – “if things in my life need shaking up, I will have to be the one to do the shaking.” But in the light of a new year, I can see that the “thing” that needs to be shaken up will always be me.

Imagine the senselessness of trying to fight your reflection in a mirror, attacking the glass in hopes of it showing you anything other than the object presented before it. Trying to coerce your external reality into taking a new shape without changing who you are is much the same. This is why the old saying persists: wherever you go, there you are. You carry your beliefs, emotions, and corresponding self-image with you everywhere, inescapable unless you do the work – the real work of seeking out the tools and knowledge to bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be. There’s also the serious janitorial effort of cleaning out the muck of the world to understand who you truly are and what you genuinely desire, which is not easy – but is absolutely essential.

My summer in monk mode was probably, without exaggeration, one of the most enjoyable and memorable experiences I’ve ever had in my life. And yet it looked essentially identical to the months that preceded it, months that felt long and dull, leaving me bored and restless. What changed? Well, to be succinct, quite literally everything about me. Brick by brick, I reconstructed my mindset and self-image from scratch. Daily, constantly, I reminded myself that nothing is wasted, just as energy is neither created nor destroyed; that there is no competition, just creation; and that I am exactly who I know myself to be: a Divine Being with access to the full creative power of the universe. This is true of all of us, and if you take anything from this essay let it be this: you are a deeply powerful creator, so powerful, in fact, that your body cannot contain it all. There is an invisible electromagnetic field of energy around you, waiting to be used, waiting to be harnessed and directed with your intention. This is what we typically call a person’s aura – and it’s also a key factor in getting what the fuck you want out of life.

I learned this for myself when, toward the end of the summer, something interesting happened. A nonprofit I’d been working with reached out: I’d been selected to attend the Democratic National Convention as a member of the press. A message from an impact-driven pharmaceutical company soon followed: did I want to go to the music festival All Things Go and make content for the brand? Let me be clear – I’m not saying this as a humblebrag, or to share a professional highlights reel. I’m saying this because by tapping into my power – cultivating a positive internal environment, choosing faith over fear, and taking aligned action – I started to pull the images of the life I wanted out of my head and into my reality. Just months of turning away from the mirror of physical reality to focus on changing my internal reality created the life I’d tried to force into existence through the rules of Socialite Summer. Seeing this happen so quickly confirmed a truth I’d encountered in another one of Hawkins’ books: power trumps force, and we simply need to master the use of ours to get the lives we want. Whenever this world is trying you, remember your power, and go within.

To be a young girl in possession of a body in the early 2000s was a particular kind of hell. At every turn, there was a new diet plan, always tied to some corporation that wanted to convince you the only path to happiness (in the form of fitting into an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini) was to buy their yogurt, or shakes, or cereal, or whatever the fuck. This is to say nothing of the noxious tabloid culture that alternately maligned women for being too fat and too thin, leaving a generation with the sense that the only appropriate way to have a body was to live in perpetual disappointment with it. All this to say: I’ve dealt with my fair share of body image junk over the years and, toward the end of my twenties, pretty much made my peace with things. By then, I’d adopted a sense of body neutrality: I have this body which is neither good nor bad, and I’m grateful for it.

But in late 2023, as I embraced my Weird Bitch Season and began to meditate on what I wanted my thirties to look like, I realized this stance was no longer sufficient. To experience the all-encompassing self-love I envisioned for this new decade of my life, I would have to move beyond mostly tolerating my body to actually enjoying the experience of existing in it. For me, this meant taking my ass to the gym with some regularity after years of inconsistency. To be clear, this is not a weight loss story, though I have experienced some of that. This is about a new understanding that my body is my soul’s home, the dwelling of the piece of the divinity that makes me me, and so I should care for it in the same way I look after my apartment. With this in mind, I’ve spent the last year and a half or so working through the last vestiges of my Millennial Body Trauma^TM to care for the vessel Spirit has given me.

I wrote on the mentally transformative power of fitness briefly last year, but I wasn’t so deep in the Spirit then, so my understanding of what I was actually talking about was more limited. What I was grasping for then was the knowledge that a fitness journey is a perfect analogy for our spiritual pursuits. When you build physical strength, you’re not drawing on anything beyond or outside of you. You are instead drawing on power you already have, which has laid dormant, waiting to be accessed and developed through training. Our spiritual journey functions in exactly the same way. When we do what the Bible calls “drawing near to God”– digging deep into our spiritual capabilities, learning who we are, and becoming aware of all the power we have in the Divine – we are not pulling from any external entity. We are instead drawing from the one true Source, the Infinite Intelligence, what science would call the quantum field.

I have become a gym girl, I fear – my expanding wardrobe of athleisure confirms this – and I do think that we should all strive to include some kind of regular movement in our lives. But, as ever, the external, the mirror, is not the point. As I’ve learned more about the nature of consciousness, I’ve had to reorganize my understanding of my body and its relationship to energy. While we typically think of our bodies housing our energy, the reality is actually the opposite: our bodies are in our energy, the visible core anchoring an immaterial cloud of energy we can make larger and more powerful by making our physical bodies healthier and stronger. This is probably the most compelling argument I’ve ever heard for building a consistent exercise habit, outside of my eternal pursuit for a fatter ass. By having a healthier body, we can better harness the energy around us and use it to influence outer events in our favor.

This happens through the creation of a state of harmony called Heart-Mind Coherence, as described in the work of researcher Dr. Joe Dispenza. When we achieve Heart-Mind Coherence, the electromagnetic signals produced by the heart and brain become synchronized, balancing the energy field in, and more importantly, around our bodies. This organized energy can now interact with the energy of the quantum field – a nonphysical space of infinite possibilities – in a newly focused way, amplifying our intentions and setting into motion the events necessary to shift into a new reality where those intentions are realized. We can all achieve Heart-Mind Coherence by cultivating positive emotions like joy, love, and gratitude (heart) and combining them with a clear intention (mind) – a defined goal that we want to achieve or become. You’ve likely experienced this sensation before: think of the feeling of ease and contentment that settles in when you get “in the zone” of a task you enjoy, what may also be described as a “flow state.”

Exercise contributes to our ability to reach this state because, at the end of the day, the heart is still a muscle. When our hearts are physically strong from regular exercise, we have better heart rate variability, which measures the variation in time between heartbeats – which is also a measure of how well our bodies can respond to and recover from stress. Improved heart rate variability indicates a more flexible and resilient heart, and a flexible and resilient heart is better at catching the brain’s vibe and syncing up with it. For the brain, exercise supports neurogenesis, or the growth of new neurons, similarly increasing cognitive flexibility by aiding in the process of creating new pathways that can strengthen the connections between the heart and the brain. Basically, working out is that girl.

Learning to harness your energy through exercise is a supremely different experience than forcing yourself to work out to fit some arbitrary beauty standard. As the culture swings away from the body positive ethos of the 2010s to spooky “thin is in” propaganda, I want to offer an alternative perspective on exercise and the notion of taking care of yourself. At the end of the day, your energy is all you have – indeed, it’s all you are – and working out will teach you, in a visceral way, just how powerful you really are. To conclude, I will leave you with the words of a great icon of the aughts, Ms. Britney Jean Spears: You want a hot body an expanded energy field to manifest all your dreams? You better work, bitch.

Chrissy Rutherford is as cool as her impressive resume and curated social media profiles suggest. Some quick highlights: covering Fashion Week in New York and London as a fashion editor; combining beauty and mental health advocacy as the host of Maybelline’s podcast, “I’m Fine, You?;” and professionally serving looks for brands like J.Crew, Reformation, and Quince. When we meet in Nomad to talk all things cosmic girl, she’s in head-to-toe black and an ankle-length fur, just to give you a sense of the vibe.

Read on to get some of Chrissy’s insights on spiritual surrender, letting go of the late bloomer label, and refusing to settle.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Lola (LK): First of all, thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. I really appreciate it. To start, can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing and what messages you got about faith and spirituality when you were growing up?

Chrissy Rutherford (CR): I grew up in Westchester, New York, which everyone calls upstate, but it's a New York city suburb and it was a very predominantly white area. I'm born to Jamaican immigrant parents, I’m first-generation, and Jamaica is a pretty religious country. So my mother was raised Catholic and my dad was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, but was not interested in religion whatsoever. I jokingly call him a heathen. But yeah, my mom is quite religious and so I was brought up going to church and I went through the CCD [Confraternity of Christian Doctrine] system and getting confirmed and all of that. But even with that, I think spirituality is not something that was ever talked about or acknowledged.

Obviously spirituality can be very broad, but the messaging I got was definitely more religious – messaging around God and being good and being blessed and that kind of stuff. I really rebelled against my Catholicism by the time I got to college. I actually went to a Jesuit college in Connecticut, Fairfield University, and you have to take religion classes. The first year I took Intro to Christianity and Judaism, and I remember I wrote an essay about why I feel that going to church doesn't mean you're a better person, or going to be more favored or whatever people like to believe. I just think that everyone is capable of having their own relationship to God that suits them, and it’s not an issue just because you don't like going to church.

Because I hated going to church. I absolutely hated it. Although I will say it was more like, who wants to get up early on a Sunday morning to go to church? You know? But I did always feel that when I was there, and I heard the stories, I did find that there was a lot to take away from it. But not enough to make me religious whatsoever. I think by the time that I was an adult and I felt like, okay, I get to make my own decisions, I really started pushing against my mom and being like, I'm not going to church with you. So now she doesn't even ask me.

LK: You kind of touched on this a little bit, but as a follow up: how has your sense of a spiritual practice evolved and developed over time? Where are you now after that initial rebellion in college?

CR: I feel like everything is so intertwined because when I was growing up, I was really interested in astrology, without even understanding that that can be a connection to spirituality as well. I knew that there were these other systems that I was very interested in, like tarot – I got my first tarot deck when I was in high school and I had no idea what to do with it, but there was just something about it that really resonated with me. And I wore crystal bracelets, with the amethyst and the rose quartz and all of those things. So there was some connection there for me, even though I didn't have a deeper understanding of it. I would say that it was really in my late twenties, going through my Saturn return into my 30th year of life that I think I really started to develop a deeper understanding of what spirituality means to me and what that really looks like.

Things really changed when I met this tarot reader in the Lower East Side very randomly one day and I got a reading from him. I was going through this horrible situationship and all of these things, and he made some book suggestions. I'm a book nerd, so of course, I went home and ordered them right away. That just really opened up such a whole different world to me and an understanding of my place in the world and being connected to myself and trusting that the universe is looking out for me, something that I think I'd always felt but didn't know how to really verbalize.

So now I'm in this place – I mean, the last eight years, I've just gone through such a massive transformation in my relationship to myself and my place in the world and spirituality. I feel really proud of where I am right now, especially this [past] year and the last couple of months. I'm just in a complete place of surrender to the universe. I mean, I know what I want for myself, but I'm also gonna trust that the universe knows what's best and is gonna make it happen. [It’ll] just put all those things in place for me that I want out of life. And of course, it requires me showing up every day and putting in the work. And I am, I'm not just waiting for things to fall into my lap. But I really trust that I'm on a journey and I don't necessarily know what's best for me at all times.

LK: It’s like you're pulling the words out of my brain. That’s exactly where I am right now. You touched a little bit on what I wanted to talk about next, which is that, in other interviews, you've mentioned that this tarot reading played a role in you starting your newsletter, Forward Joy. Could you talk a little bit more about how your spirituality has impacted your career decisions?

CR: Something that was really interesting in my very first tarot reading was that my tarot reader told me that I was going to be a teacher. And I didn't understand that at all, because I was like, sure, I'm interested in going back to school and learning and being a student, but I can't understand any world in which I would be a teacher. I was a fashion editor and still in the throes of enjoying my job, [so] it just didn't make sense to me.

And he also said something about me putting together a guide for people. I just kind of put a pin in that until I came to understand it much later in life.Then I had my birth chart read for the first time around 27, 28. And again, that really gave me such a deeper understanding of myself and my motivations. I think that really gave me permission to own the parts of myself that I felt good about and that I knew were my strengths, and also helped to reframe my perceived weaknesses as the challenges that I am here to work through if I'm willing to do the work.

But it wasn't until I left my job at the top of 2020, and I was in this state of complete limbo because I left my job wanting to work for myself, but then the pandemic hit, so there was just nothing going on. So then I was like, okay, what do I want to do with my life next? I spent a lot of time, of course, alone in my studio apartment in the East Village, thinking about my life and what I really loved and what would make me happy even if I wasn't making money from it. And I listened to my old birth chart recording and I remembered that there was a piece [about how] my moon is conjunct my midheaven.

And so the moon represents our emotions, the midheaven is basically how the public sees us. So the message was essentially that I'm meant to put my emotions out there for people. And I really thought about how much I always loved having really deep conversations with people, and even if it's a complete stranger, we always somehow end up unpacking our traumatic childhoods and things like that. So originally I developed my idea for my newsletter as a podcast, but then I was like, that's too technical. And then I switched to a newsletter because I've always loved to write.

I feel like it really helped inform what the path is for me and I really leaned into it. I could also just tell by how people resonated with my content. Like yes, of course, I'm a fashion person. I've always worked in the industry and getting dressed is always going to be fun for me, and I love making that content. But it just doesn't do as well for me as when I write really heartfelt posts about what's going on in my life. And now I'm navigating my life through the principles of spirituality that are important to me.

LK: This also relates to something you just talked about: on Instagram, you had a post that really resonated with me about being a late bloomer and all the different choices you've made in your life and your thirties. What was the process of coming to terms with the unique timing of your life?

CR: Oh my God, it's been such a fight. It's been such a struggle. And I think that's why having this newsletter has been so, so hugely transformative for me. It has set me free in so many ways because one of my biggest insecurities throughout my twenties into my early thirties was the fact that I had never been in a serious, long term relationship before.

Yes, of course I've dated, I've had sex. But it just felt like I always had these little relationships that felt like blips and ended as quickly as they started. Out of most of my friends, it felt like I was the only one. So of course, then you sort of internalize that – oh, I'm the only person that's never been in a long term relationship. That's what ends up happening to so many people, and I think it happens to men as well. It wasn't until I made the decision to write an essay about it that I was able to come to terms. Because I had really – I blamed myself, because I believed that there was something wrong with me.

It took a lot of therapy, as well as spiritual counseling, to understand that it wasn't because something was wrong with me and this is just part of my path, and part of my conditioning and the generational trauma that I'm feeling. I think people never really consider how much that affects them, and impacts how you date and how you get into relationships with people. I got to this place where I was like, okay I'm ready to write about this because I do think that other people will be able to relate. And,of course, the morning that I was publishing it, I’m like, why am I telling people this? Do I really want to tell people this? But then I read the responses that I get from people who feel seen by what I say and that's really what makes it worth it.

LK: Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you for sharing. I have a similar experience, so seeing you talk about the way that your thirties have been so transformative for you has been really helpful for me.

CR: Exactly. Also, I'll tell you when I was in my twenties, the most terrifying thing to me was ending up 30 and single. I truly thought that was going to be the worst thing to ever happen to me. And then I turned 30, and I was single, and then you're kind of just forced to get over it. And, yes, it was still hard, but what you do is double down on loving yourself and creating a life that's really fulfilling.

I was even having a conversation with someone earlier about this today. You know how people always say, “you have to love yourself until you can love other people.” That saying always confused me because I always felt like I loved myself. I never hated myself, but I think I can recognize now that I really loved myself in superficial ways, and now I'm in a place where I feel like I am so connected to my purpose and what I'm on this planet to do. That is truly what sustains me and I feel so grateful for all that I have in my life right now that there's no way in hell that I’m gonna let not having a man make me feel bad about my life. I just can't and I won't. I have so much going for me that it's insane to think just because I don't have this one thing – that I do legitimately want and believe is still there for me – that my life is shit. I won’t do it.

LK: Yeah, the messaging is so crazy, especially for women. I feel like I've had to go through a similar journey of being like, wait, you're doing all these amazing things, you're not a piece of garbage because you're not in a relationship right now.

CR: I know, but a lot of people will want you to believe that. Or believe that your life doesn't really begin until [you’re in a relationship], or you're not really whole until you find that other person and I just think that's complete garbage. There's also this narrative about how our hyper-independent ways are terrible for us, and I agree we all need connection. But that's why you should also spend time cultivating a life outside of yourself, having family and friends that you care about – all that is important too. There are other types of relationships to have beyond a romantic relationship. And yeah, I feel really, really content about where I am in life. I don't know that I ever really imagined that I could get to this place and not be in a relationship and still be okay.

LK: This is a perfect segue to what I wanted to talk about next, which is how has your experience of getting to know yourself better and developing a deeper understanding of what relationships mean to you affected the relationships that you do have in your life?

CR: It's really interesting. I think I've been sort of going through something in the last year about how my relationship with myself affects how I relate to other people. I think it starts with the role I played within my family where I was the peacemaker, and I was the translator and always feeling like I had to save everybody from themselves. I think I have played that role a lot in my relationships and that was definitely connected to romantic pursuits as well, feeling like you can save or fix someone.

I think I'm finally in a place where I realize I'm actually only responsible for myself. I'm not here to save anybody. I have put in a lot, a lot of work on myself. I just don't have that energy to give to someone else, especially not someone who is not interested in doing the work because you see that a lot. That's like my situation with my parents. They're not interested in therapy or really doing anything like that. But I understand that that's their journey and their path to walk and I'm on a different journey, and that's okay. I think there's this part of me that's always wanted to show them there's a different way but I can't. I can't keep showing them or trying to explain to them. It's really just accepting that everybody is on their own journey. And making peace with that.

LK: Yeah, that's real. I'm also the only daughter in an immigrant household, so I feel like that peacemaker role is definitely something I've experienced and had to break out of. Switching gears a bit, what would you say is the most important belief that you've unlearned during this process?

CR: I think the biggest one is just that there's nothing wrong with me. That was my belief of why I couldn't be in a relationship. There was something wrong with me. It was also kind of connected to this idea that men don't want to be in relationships. That was also a very deep belief that I held and I've been able to let go of both of them. It's so funny. I'm trying to almost put myself back in that headspace and I'm even finding it hard too.

LK: That's a real win.

CR: I know. ‘Cause I'm just like, what? I thought there was something wrong with me, but like, what exactly? I don’t know but it just felt like men didn't want to be in relationships with me because there was something wrong with me. I think it was also a combination of feeling like you're too much or you're too this or too that. I had a little bit of perfectionism of like, well, maybe I said the wrong thing and would overanalyze my behavior and oh my God, it’s so exhausting. I don't do that anymore. My mind is so free.

LK: Amazing. What does the idea of a spiritual practice mean to you? And as a follow up, what does that look like for you?

CR: I think it's things that just keep you connected to yourself. For me, it's been a lot of self- regulation. That's something I really struggled with. And it's not like I couldn't be still. I think I've always been very good at being still or being alone, but, it was just always still linked to that feeling of I'm alone, but I wish I wasn't. Or I wish that someone cared – those kinds of feelings.

I'm very sensitive. I'm a Pisces, and I did not have any self-regulation skills at all.That's something that I think has also really changed my life in the past couple of years. I’m really dedicated to how I take care of myself and how I self-regulate and being able to show up for myself and not abandon myself. That takes a lot of talking to myself, like quite literally talking to myself. I literally will take myself on a walk and I will be talking to myself the whole time, telling myself, “I'm not going anywhere. You're safe. I've got you. You're not going anywhere.”

I think about the younger version of myself a lot, because when we're in emotional distress, that's who's in emotional distress. It's that younger part of us. I also journal a lot. I have a meditation practice, but I'm not regular with it anymore. But it is really powerful for me when I am. I get a lot of downloads from it. I also feel like getting good sleep is also a spiritual practice for me because I have a very, very overactive subconscious and I dream a lot, very vividly. I don't really necessarily have prophetic dreams, but I write them down and I bring them to my therapy sessions. We talk about them and do dream work. It's just another layer of being able to analyze my own emotions.

LK: What advice would you give to someone who has reached that crisis point and knows they need to start a healing or spiritual journey?

CR: Number one, go to therapy for sure. And I think journaling is so powerful. I think people don't truly understand how important it can be to process your emotions through writing. I think people also put a lot of pressure on journaling, like it has to be perfect or something. When I journal, I just write and I don't look back. I'm lucky if I can even read what I wrote because I'm scribbling so furiously I can't read my handwriting. I don't edit myself. I just have to do it to get all my thoughts out of my head.

I'm an overthinker. I'm always stewing and thinking about things, and journaling is the only way I can clear out my mind and make sense of what I'm feeling. I can even tell sometimes when I'm avoiding journaling because I'm afraid of what is gonna come out on the paper. Sometimes it feels safer to leave it just ruminating in your brain.

My other suggestions would be to read books by Alan Watts, Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh. And also Eckhart Tolle. All of their books have had such a profound impact on my life without a doubt. I know The Power of Now [by Eckhart Tolle] sounds like we've all heard it a million times, but it's a really powerful book. Even when I have read those books, I also buy the audiobooks. Whenever I’m going through a difficult time, I like to pop them on and listen, even if it's just a chapter. It always makes me feel better. I think those books are so essential in giving you perspective, because when we're going through a hard time, I feel like we become so focused on ourselves and what's going on in our lives. You need someone that can just pull you out of that bubble and that's what those books do for me.

1. The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, 2. Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön, 3. The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh, 4. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. These are not affiliate links and I earn no commission from them.

LK: We’ve touched on a lot of this already, but if you can narrow it down to one thing, what was the catalyst for your spiritual journey?

CR: The catalyst for my spiritual journey was this situationship that I was involved in for…I don't even know. Sometimes when I think back on it, I don't even know what to call it. But it was just this on and off thing that went on for three years. Sometimes it was bordering on limerence. It was a guy that I really liked and he liked me, but he was very adamant about not wanting to be in a relationship, which meant that he didn't want to be in a relationship with me.

When it all finally blew up in my face, as it always does, I was just confronted with the question of like, how did I let myself get involved in this? It was so clear that my sense of self worth was not there and I really had some self-examining to do. One of the first books I ever read [on this journey] was How to Love Yourself. And that kind of jump started things and then I met this tarot reader, like I mentioned before, and the reading he gave me was just so spot on. He talked a lot about my approach to relationships and how I was abandoning myself in them. I felt like I had a lot of love to give, but I was trying to give it to the wrong people. I was really forced to examine what was going on with me. I think it's one thing to know that my shitty outlook on relationships is because of my dysfunctional family, but I really had to take ownership of that and think about how to course correct.

LK: Can you talk a bit more about that, the decision to take ownership and how it felt? I know for me, learning to take accountability in this way was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

CR: I think there's been different waves of that for me. In the beginning, my motivation was I need to fix what's going on with me so I can be in a relationship. My thinking was I can't get the relationship that I want unless I fix this, because I always felt that there was a missing piece to the puzzle of why I couldn't get the relationship. So it was still acting from this place of there's something wrong with me.

To a certain extent, there were things that I had to work on, but of course, there's nothing wrong with me. It was just me having to work through my conditioning. And I got to this place where I was reading all these books and I'm doing the therapy and I'm doing all these tarot readings and working with spiritual mentors while I take a break from dating for a while. When I got back into it, I was like, I feel like I know a lot, but I'm still getting very, very triggered by relationships. When I really got back into dating in 2021, it was like, okay, I'm in my mid-thirties now, and I'm an adult, and I want to find my person and blah blah blah. I was so confused why I knew all these things, but dating wasn’t easier for me.

It felt like I could feel everything more intensely and my therapist was like, well, that's what happens when you have more awareness. You're able to feel things more intensely, but that surrender piece was really missing for me. I still felt like when I found someone, I had to hold on for dear life because I didn't know when I was going to find someone again. Again, I'm a Pisces, not only Pisces sun, but Venus and Jupiter. So, I feel like, in a lot of ways, my entire existence is about finding a partner. That's also really hard to contend with, when it literally feels like every fiber of my being is about being in a relationship, but I can't be in one for some reason. I really felt like the universe was blocking me in many ways, because I would find these guys and it felt great and I could see as I was healing that the quality of the men would improve. It was getting better, but still just missing the mark a little bit.

It wasn't until – honestly this past year, that I was in my first long term relationship, [it lasted] like nine, ten months. And I broke up with him [last] April. That was the first time I ever made the decision to really walk away from something even though it was actually a great relationship in many ways. I just knew that there was something that just wasn't right. I think through that process I finally came to realize how I've been a participant in my own suffering in relationships because sometimes to fix these things – especially if you have attachment issues, and you have abandonment issues, which I did – you have to go against what feels normal and what feels natural and what you're inclined to do. But that's a really, really hard thing to do when you’re locked in a pattern. It is so hard and it feels completely counterintuitive. You feel like, why would I walk away from this guy when everything feels so great but there's still something I know is missing.

LK: I feel like that's a situation when the universe is testing you.

CR: Yes. For sure.

LK: Because I've had situations like that and where I've been like, oh, but it's good enough. And when I make the decision in myself that I'm gonna settle for this, that’s when other forces intervene to end things. So I feel like you put out a massive wave of positive energy for yourself when you decided to leave that relationship, because the signal you put out is that you’re willing to wait for exactly what you want.

CR: Yeah. And I think, honestly as women, and especially right now in the dating world, I don't think enough women are taking responsibility for the role they play in their own suffering. But it's a journey.

LK: That was a word.

CR: Controversial, I know, but yeah. But listen, it's a journey for all of us. I had to examine, why did I keep trying to make these things happen that clearly weren't right for me? I look back at some experiences I’ve had, and none of these guys could ever give me what I truly needed, yet I was still trying to turn them into someone that would.

LK: I think the expiration date mentality that women grow up with makes it very tough to make those decisions.

CR: True. But I think going through with something that I knew wasn't right…I think that scares me more than the fact that I'm 38 and single. I think we're all on this earth to learn specific lessons and no amount of advice is going to stop us from learning the lessons that we’re here to learn. Because we’re gonna learn that in one way or another. So it’s better to take ownership sooner rather than later.

LK: It's kind of scary when you hear it that way. But it's true. I had a similar realization when I was struggling during the pandemic, and it was like – either I take control of this journey and make myself learn the lessons or life is going to keep kicking the shit out of me and teach me the lessons that way. Feeling like I could take control of this journey kicked me into action for sure.

CR: Yeah. I'm in this peaceful place now where I'm like, I have no control over who I'm gonna end up with or when or where or what is gonna happen, but I just know that I don't wanna force anything. There's no point in it. The person that's meant for me is going to come into my life when they come into my life, and there's no amount of worrying about it that's gonna make them show up sooner.

LK: And that worrying frequency is gonna repel them.

CR: It's absolutely gonna repel them. Which is why my only true advice is you have to, you really have to go inward and learn about yourself to create a life that you truly love. That's the only way. Create a life that you love and that can sustain you regardless of whether you are with someone or not.

There’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for years: a Nigerian-American woman in her twenties gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend, impulsively quits her job in the turmoil that follows, then accidentally crashes his wedding to another woman weeks later in Lagos. As you can imagine, chaos ensues, but in a fun, slightly raunchy way – you know, my vibe. It started out as a screenplay but has since morphed into a novel I’m having a lot of fun writing in between all the other things I’m working on. Projects like this always have such a long lead time, which is exhilarating and exhausting in its own way, but I’m in a sharing mood. Here’s the first chapter of Yankee Girl – I wanna know what the cosmic girls think.

Like many of my problems, it started with my legs spread. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, back against the foot of my bed, maneuvering my vanity mirror between my legs in order to carefully spread Nair on my lips. You know — the ones down there. I’d tried rushing this process before, on impromptu beach days or nights out when I felt hot enough to rock an especially pussy-precarious pair of low rise jeans. But I’d also nearly scorched my clit clean off in the process, so I’d learned my lesson: slow and steady was the way to go.

The issue was I didn’t have enough time to go slowly. I was already very late to my job as a professional spreadsheet filler-outer at Excelis Capital, where I usually spent my days luxuriously decaying in designer clothes in my cubicle. I’d recently developed a habit of impulse buying in lieu of developing something that resembled a normal twenty-something social life. Sure, it was barely seven in the morning and normally I’d already be settling in at my desk by now…but there were worse ways to bank a six-figure salary as a twenty-six-year-old. But then again, there were also better ones.

Outside, New York City was already wide awake, buzzing despite the snow that blanketed the city overnight, the first in what had so far been a weirdly warm winter. The garbage trucks had rumbled by while I was trimming my mons, and I’d already seen the guy who lived opposite me, get ready for his morning workout, head out, then strip in full view of his broad windows — as was his custom — before a shower. He’d already left for the day too, which let me know I was really quite late — I was never usually home for that. Inside, things were blissfully quiet, so quiet I could pretend I lived alone: the benefit of having a roommate that used our kind-of-shitty-but-could-be-way-worse Yorkville apartment as a sophisticated storage locker, choosing instead to spend most nights at her boyfriend’s sooooo spacious townhouse in Hoboken.

I reached for my phone beside me and checked the screen. A little over four minutes before I could wipe myself down and start my day. I wiggled my knees, careful to keep my thighs open. My legs were starting to fall asleep, spread wide before the mirror.Normally, I wouldn’t embark on the delicate, time-consuming task of Nairing my coochie on a weekday morning. It was something I liked to leave to Sundays, the one day a week I could (mostly) be sure that I wouldn’t be called back into the office to accelerate my atrophy into a very stylish fossil. On Sunday mornings, the task became almost meditative, a reflection on the virtues of bald pum pum.

Still, there were things worth abandoning my routine for, like the fact that my boyfriend Dapo was back in town, after almost a month away in Nigeria. He’d been there officially in a professional capacity, to establish the Lagos office for the microfinance startup where he worked. But the professional and pleasurable bled together whenever Dapo was in Lagos, if the tequila-shot-and-hookah-filled stories that frequently popped up on his Instagram were any indication. I’d woken up with a text from him that morning, alongside a pic he’d snapped of the wing of his connecting flight from London to New York: dinner tomorrow? He was picking me up from the office, so I wouldn’t have time to come home and change — or perform the depilation required for maximum enjoyment of our evening together.

I glanced at my phone again, squirming. Fifty-six seconds to go. I was about to call it and tap the timer off when my phone began to ring in a series of vaguely traumatizing tones that also served as my alarm clock. “Mom Naij” flashed on the screen. I paused, my thumb hovering over ‘decline.’ I could cancel, finishing the task at hand, and finally get my ass to work. But I also knew my mom. She’d follow up that call from her MTN number, then from the 9Mobile, switching between her many phones — one for each major cell service carrier in Nigeria — because she assumed the issue was the spotty cell service. Then would come the text messages. An hour or so without a response to any of those, and then she’d start by calling my roommate — who would, of course, decline. Then she’d move on to the few of my friends she knew of. If none of them picked up, she would call the police, just like she’d done my junior year of college when I’d gone on a bender (read: a single big night out after passing my microecon final). And then I would be forced to endure an NYPD wellness check just in the name of a smooth bikini line. So I answered the call, my mom’s flawlessly painted face filling the screen.

“Hi mommy.” I reached for a washcloth on the ground near me and carefully began to wipe, holding up my phone in my other hand. Intimate, sure, but this woman had wiped my ass for a few years, so it wasn’t any worse than that.

“Karo, Olukemi, how are you? Just wanted to see my very active, very lovely beautiful daughter’s face.” I glanced up from where I was maneuvering between my legs to look at my mother’s face on the screen. My mom, very thankfully, was always free and effusive with compliments, but this was overdoing it even for her. This screen-to-eye-contact was apparently a mistake, because my mom’s jaw immediately fell open.

“Ah-ah! Is this how you’re going to work as a vice president at a very prestigious investment bank in New York?” My eyebrows shot up. Ok. So something was definitely up.

“I’m running a little bit late.” My eyes flit between my phone and the quickly burning situation between my legs. It had definitely been over ten minutes now, and that was supposed to be the absolute max.“And I’m still only an associate.”

“And they will promote you in Jesus’s name.”

“Amen,” I said automatically with a yawn. “Mom, can I call you la—”

“How has your volunteer work been?” Mom asked loudly, interrupting. “You’re still going there every week, right?”

“Um.” I hesitated, struggling to wipe myself down without depositing a mass of creamy chemicals into my ass crack. “What?

“The soup kitchen, Kemi,” Mom replied, a touch impatient. “You’re a regular volunteer there, no?”

“That’s just a once-a-year thing, remember? With work.” Excelis made analysts and associates volunteer at a soup kitchen in the Bronx on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, as if to offset any potential joy derived from volunteer work with the utter annoyance of having to go to a work-mandated event before a holiday weekend.

“But you’ve been meaning to get back to it,” Mom said. Her tone took on a leading, insistent edge. “It’s just that you’ve been so busy with all of your responsibilities and your robust, very healthy and dynamic social life, right?” I looked up at my phone, where Mom was giving me a very stern, meaningful look. The vibe was very much, agree with me, bitch, or else.

“I mean, I haven’t really thought about it. I guess it would be a good way for me to spend some of my time outside of the office.”

“Eh-hehn, exactly! See, I told you! She’s very selfless, very smart. Good brain, good heart, good teeth.”

I paused, holding the washcloth suspended between my legs. “Mom.” A note of warning crept into my voice. “Mom, who are you—

“One minute,” Mom said. The image on the phone shook for a moment before settling on the face of a guy probably a little older than me, wearing scrubs and a thin pair of wire glasses. I jumped, my legs slamming closed in my surprise. Shit.

“Ho-ly fuck,” I hissed as Nair got into all kinds of places it shouldn’t be. My phone clattered to the ground as I hopped around in pain. The delicate skin between my legs began to sear. The pain was a cross between a root canal and the dress you’d been online stalking for weeks being sold out when you finally decided to pull the trigger and buy it. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Watch your mouth!” My mom’s voice rang out from the ground, where my phone had landed face down on the rug.

I hobbled over to the washcloth, picked it up from the floor, and quickly finished wiping myself down. Then I picked up my phone, my radiating anger enough to momentarily douse the burn between my legs.

“You said you weren’t going to this anymore,” I said without looking at the screen. Then I looked, and saw the rando staring back at me. I could feel the venom heating up at the back of my throat.

“Um,” he said, blinking.

“Um, what? Give the phone back to my mom, you fucking weirdo!” I paused, then took a deep breath to calm myself. “Sorry. I’m sure you’re very nice.”

“It’s true, I am.” He squinted at the screen, then grinned. “You are fine, sha. So you stay abroad?”

“Give the phone to my mom!” I screeched. My earlier regret at being mean to him dissipated. I should have doubled down and dragged him for having a patchy beard. The picture on the phone shook for a moment before settling on my mom.

“Mom. Daddy said he talked to you and we all agreed you weren’t going to do this anymore,” I said, summoning the scraps of calm I had at my disposal.

“Ah, is it a crime to want to see my daughter married?” Mom asked. “How can God give me a smart, beautiful daughter with no husband? Olorun maje, the enemy will not prosper in our lives.”

“Amen,” I said automatically, just as the guy did the same, off-camera.

“See, he loves the Lord,” said my mom. “Michael has a first from King’s, by the way. And he’s the best dentist I’ve ever had.” I finally noticed the dental bib covering my mom’s bright kaftan.

“Actually, I got a two-one,” the guy—Michael, apparently—corrected.

“I don’t need you to set me up with people,” I said, ignoring them both. “Especially since I already have a boyfriend.”

Mom kissed her teeth. “Olukemi, please, that boy is not serious.” I bristled, my shoulders tensing. But my mom didn’t give me the space to interrupt. “Unlike Michael, who has his very own practice in VI.”

“Well,” began Michael. “I work with my brother.”

Mom let out an annoyed sigh. “Jesus. You kids who studied abroad don’t know how to sell yourself at all.”

“What was that?” I said. I shook my phone to mimic a bad connection. “You’re going in and out.”

“I SAID—”

“The network is bad,” I added. Then I ended the call and quickly turned off my phone before my mom could call back. If she was pissed off later, when we undoubtedly would talk again, I would just say my phone died, or that I didn’t have service in the subway, or any of the other excuses I turned to when my mom’s attempts to collect my bride price grated on my nerves too much for me to deal.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a moment, shaking off my agitation and trying to will myself to get ready for work. I usually got up so early that I made all my moves on autopilot, still half asleep, only to come-to suddenly at my desk and neck-deep in some deal I was on. I caught sight of my cooch in the mirror and ran a contemplative finger over the newly smooth skin.

“I need to get piped immediately,” I said aloud, then I stood to go about my day.

The streets of Midtown were bloated with business people in black and gray, ducking in and out of their beige offices to do their beige work. I was among them, off to do the same. I sidestepped a family taking pictures of the holiday displays in the windows, almost bumping into a lithe model-type in head-to-toe Lululemon. The model (I was sure of it now; I recognized her from my lunch break shopping scrolls) looked me up and down from behind the slim lenses of her designer sunglasses, then ducked into a black car that honked loudly as soon as she closed the door, as though the noise would cause the uptown traffic to dissolve. Damn, I wish that were me, I thought, same as whenever I saw a baby being pushed in a stroller.

I stepped into the revolving door that led into the building where I worked and entered the lobby. The heels of my boots clicked against the damp marble floor. A huge Christmas tree stood in the center of the lobby, decorated in a decadent explosion of red, silver, and gold. I tapped my ID for entry, but the glass panels at the doorway didn’t slide open to let me in. I sighed loudly, hoping the dreadlocked security guard would spare me a look and tap me in, but his eyes stayed glued to his phone. I tried my card again, and again, but it didn’t work.

“Hi,” I said, raising my voice to get his attention. “Could you let me in? Excelis Capital, 38th floor.” I gave him my sweetest smile, hoping pretty privilege could do the job if racial solidarity didn’t.

“You’ll have to go around to the guest entrance on 44th. They’ll process you there.” Ouch. So a flop on both counts.

“Could you let it slide just for today? I’m running late, and obviously I work here.” I flashed the card in his direction, so he could see the gorgeous, sultry expression that I could easily trot out for ID cards and passport photos and never for the selfies where I actually needed it.

He shrugged. “Nothing I can do.” He turned his attention back to his phone as if I wasn’t even there. I was just about to slink away in defeat when I heard a voice behind me.

“Hey, don’t you work at Excelis?” I turned to see Mark, another associate from my analyst class, who insisted upon acting like I was a new hire every time he saw me. During training, before we started work that first summer after college, Mark had been the catch of the class: pretty boy hot, with a strong-jawed face that looked like it belonged in one of those old-school vaguely homoerotic Abercrombie ads. But he’d never really done it for me, maybe because I’d grown up exclusively around lax bros who gave off the same off vibe, or maybe because I could tell he definitely said the n-word when he rapped along to Drake.

“Yeah,” I said, with a pointed look to the security guard. “Yeah, I do.”

“I thought so,” Mark said. He swiped his card and breezed by me. “Daphne, right?”

“Kemi…but those words do sound similar, I guess.”

“Right, yeah.” He smiled, then turned to look at the security guard. “Hey man, we’re running to a meeting. Do you think you could —” He mimed tapping a card against the reader. The security guard hesitated as Mark charged on.

“Come on, just for today,” he said. “And she’ll head to the security office to get her badge fixed sometime later.” He looked to me for confirmation, but it took a second for it to register. I was too busy staring daggers at the security guard for even considering obliging him to notice. “Kemi?”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” I said, looking at Mark at last.

The security guard gave me a skeptical look, then relented. “Alright, just for today,” he said. He tapped a card and the glass panels in front of me slid open with a cheerful ding, granting me entry into the building.

“Nice. We owe you one, brother,” Mark said with a nod. He headed toward the elevators, and I followed closely behind, stepping inside as he held the door for me.

“Thank you, I said, which Mark waved away so graciously it kind of annoyed me.

After a swift ride up to the 38th floor, the elevators slid open to reveal the Excelis offices, which looked positively prehistoric compared to all the campuses my friends at tech companies went to two-to-three times a week, all done up in bright-colors and outfitted with foosball and Friday afternoon rosé like a daycare for grown ups. Taupe carpet stretched from wall to wall, and a bullpen of cubicles took up the center of the room. Partners’ offices lined the perimeter of the floor, along with the large conference room where the weekly meeting was held. It was the only thing in the office that inspired any kind of creativity: its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the greenery of Bryant Park, and the bottom half of Manhattan stretched endlessly after it.

“Hey, don’t forget about your ID,” Mark said as I stepped out of the elevator. He gave me a stern look. “I’m gonna find you and check,” he added, lapsing into a playful grin. Oh. That was new. And interesting—though I wasn’t actually interested. Still, a series of flirty-if-you-squint responses flitted through my mind, a holdover from when I was still out there, out there. I was still sifting through replies when I heard my name.

There was a beat, and then I smelled Karl, the partner whose desk I was on: a heavy cloud of Dior Sauvage preceded him in every room, for worse or worse. I faced him, my sterile corporate smile snapping into place.

“Karl! Good morning.”

“You’re late.” He motioned for me to walk with him as he barreled through the office, and I obliged, opening the Notes app on my work phone in preparation for his usual morning barrage of tasks.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had…a family thing.”

“Get rid of it,” he replied. “The family, I mean.”

“Uh—” I attempted, but I broke off when his face split into a smile that showed off the veneers he’d debuted in the office over the summer, after a deal took him to Istanbul.

“Kidding,” he said, then switched gears immediately. “Where are we with LaurCap?” he asked, bringing up the biggest pain in my ass at the moment. LaurCap was another financial institution we were partnering with for a potential acquisition, a chain of plastic surgery centers stretching down the East Coast. The numbers were amazing, revenue compounding year over year like crazy, but the CEO was a real wildcard, prone to mood swings and mind games. Karl was on edge about getting the deal closed before the end of the year, which meant he was micromanaging me more than usual.

“Deck’s in your inbox, waiting for your notes,” I said, matching his briskness. We passed another partner-associate pair, Karl’s eyes sliding over the associate’s slim figure so quickly you could almost miss it — but I never did. I was on the lookout for it, in fact, ever since he told me he had a “thing” for brunettes one year at the office Christmas party.

“Great. And what about—”

“All set for the Suprato IPO. There’s some last minute due diligence we’re waiting on for Medelin, but it should be in by this afternoon.” I replied as Karl stopped in front of his office door. Overall I knew I’d lucked out with him. He was never creepy with me (since I didn’t count as a brunette), and he didn’t delight in making junior employees squirm, unlike other partners who boasted about how many analysts and associates didn’t last a year on their desks. Yet I could tell he was never impressed with me. I wasn’t sure if he even liked me. These morning walk-and-talks often felt like I was sprinting the 400, and he was throwing up hurdles in real time, waiting for me to trip.

“Nice,” he said, then he opened the door and moved to step into his office.

“Karl?” He stopped to look at me.

“I just wanted to remind you that I’m going to be out on Friday,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

“I put it on your calendar a few weeks ago,” I said. “And everything for Medelin will be in before then, so it should be all good. Plus the LaurCap pitch is next week, so I’ll have plenty of time to clean up the deck before the meeting.”

He regarded me for a moment, then nodded. “What has you taking a day off? Weekend away?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely curious or accusing me of something.

“I have to get my passport renewed.”

“Can’t you do that by mail?”

“My Nigerian passport,” I clarified. “I have to go to the consulate in person, get all my documents cleared. It’s a whole thing…” An ordeal was more accurate, but I had decided to be positive, focusing on the fact that I would be in New York and not standing in the hot, open-air office I’d had to go to in Lagos the last time my passport expired, the way it did seemingly every week.

“Right, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Karl said quickly. “I always forget you’re…remind me, were you born over there?”

I shook my head. “Just a few blocks uptown.”

Karl nodded. “You know,” he began, and from the lilt in his voice I already knew things were about to go left. The only question was just how far. “My daughter’s old nanny was from Cameroon…maybe Congo…she was great. We had to let her go because my wife thought she was stealing, but Izzie just loved her.”

My lips thinned into a closed-mouth smile. I was getting ready to ask Karl if there was anything else on the docket when his eyes fixed on a spot over my shoulder.

“Stetler!” He called. I turned as Mark broke away from a trio of other associates making their way down the hall.

“What can I do for ya?” he asked as he joined us.

“LaurCap. We could use some hands,” Karl said, as if I had not just made it profoundly clear that I had everything under control. “You have some extra room on your plate?”

“Of course,” said Mark brightly.

“Perfect. Kemi, get him up to speed?”

I nodded.

“Great,” said Karl, then he opened the door to his office. I moved to turn away, but then he called out to me.

“Wait, Kemi.” I looked back to see him fishing his wallet out of his pocket.

“Run down and get me a cold brew and avocado toast, will you?” He handed me his company card, then he closed the door behind him, right in my face.