Yesterday I tasked my Creative Writing students with the a little snooping. Purposeful snooping, of course. Peer into lives and find the story hiding.

Sometimes I use their in class writing time as a time to just sit and process how my activities are going that day. I “circulate,” a fancy teaching term for making sure everyone is on task, but if I’m honest, sometimes it’s more of a perambulation than a circulation. My brain coasts a little. I’ve realized I need these brain breaks during the school year; my days are so jam-packed lately that I crave the autopilot a little more than I’m proud of.

A few days ago, we were out to dinner with some friends, and the conversation turned to the topic of New York. A year ago, almost precisely, this conversation would have been a frank declaration about my love affair with the city. A year in, I still love the city, but the conversation has changed.

“Have you ever noticed that New York is not a convenient place to live, but—like—New Yorkers take some kind of pride in that? Like the struggle’s part of it,” our friend said.

Everyone, and anyone who had classes with me in high school, has seen me have anxiety, but there are only eight or nine people in my life that have seen me have a full on panic attack. The person who saw my worst panic attack lives in New York, and surprisingly, it wasn’t Jeremy. Jeremy has helped me develop some of the most helpful coping mechanisms, so he’s never seen me at my worst, my freshmen year–a year where everyone writes off anxiety for hormones so it’s impossible to understand what is happening inside your body, inside your brain, and inside your soul. My anxiety became a punch line for jokes about puberty.

“Darling, be a dear and grab me a beer.”

She never knew what to say, so she went to the word hose looking for some inspiration.

I’ve been carrying a stranger’s phone number around in my pocket all week. I doubt that I will ever call it, but it’s presence is comforting—like a foldup map to the subway when your cellphone dies.

The phone number belongs to one Ms. Desiree Jeffers. I met her during a brief foray into Brooklyn, my first real individual endeavor into a new borough. Brooklyn is beautiful, but the part of town that I was in was difficult to navigate. It didn’t have street names on every corner, leaving me constantly wondering if I was as lost as the little blue dot on Google Maps seemed to think that I was.