Paris, I'm home.
Things I'm looking forward to in the city & why we could all benefit from them
I landed in New York on September 3 on something of a high, after a very unusual but very fun/very much once-in-a-lifetime in-flight book signing I got to do on my journey to the States (awesome idea, La Compagnie!). That feeling continued through an enriching book discussion at Albertine, moderated by
, with a turnout that made my heart swell. On top of that, I spent time with my dearest friends, had meaningful conversations about life and work (and the threads by which our sanities are hanging), and shared some excellent meals. The added benefit to this early September trip was getting to duck out of the rentrée hamster wheel in Paris—design week, holiday pastry, meetings, presentations, and too many emails—which exhausts me more and more each year.
But I’ve returned to Paris this weekend feeling frayed and rather hollowed out by the political events of the week. Less from the news of Prime Minister Bayrou resigning and Macron naming yet another Prime Minister, undoubtedly because I expected it, and more from the assassination of conservative podcaster and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk. It was a graphic act that I unwittingly caught in all its gruesome detail moments after it happened because we live in a post-content-moderation world where videos autoplay without warning and reach millions of eyeballs in milliseconds. Studies have shown that regular exposure to explicit images and videos can lead to psychological distress and I’m fairly certain the carnage we’ve witnessed in the last several years, following a pandemic we haven’t fully processed, is eroding our mental barrier. I know from the sinking feeling in my gut and lack of focus that it’s all getting to me.
The internet doesn’t need another opinion about what happened, the blame game that followed, or the political climate that allows gun violence to endure, so my commentary on it ends here. I mention it because for more than an hour, in that beautiful room at Albertine, with more than a hundred deeply curious, engaged, and thoughtful readers, I felt the joy of community and connection and empathy. And then, as has come to define our timeline, the energy shifted less than 24 hours later.
As I waited to board my flight, with televisions running news segments and “expert” commentary on the shooting everywhere I looked, my chest tightened. Was I the only one losing it? If someone had taken a photo of me in that moment, I fear my face would’ve given worry-induced paralysis.
And then, six and a half hours later, I stepped off the plane at Orly and felt lighter. I felt lighter still when my taxi turned onto Place de la Nation, zipping past slender trees with red-orange leaves and commuters on bicycles, whose early fall jackets whipped in the wind. I had stepped into another frequency and back into my body.
This is what my home does for me: it calms the unrelenting mental spin and reminds me, right when I need it, that the beauty of my everyday environment (and my cats, let’s be honest) can untether me from the wretched.
Given this mess of emotions, I wasn’t sure how to approach this week’s Dispatch. But then I thought about the reader who came up to me during the book signing and encouraged me to share more personal writing, that she looked forward to the voicey newsletters, but even more to the ones where I cracked open a little bit.