Something to chew on
Friends often ask if I’d move back to Canada, where I spent much of the summer, and I usually answer with a half-answer: “Only if it gets really bad here.”
Lately I’ve been wondering what that means. Last night, someone said to me point-blank: “It is really bad. This is it.” Hours later, a breaking news alert landed on my phone that Trump had removed Kamala Harris’s Secret Service protection. It’s hard to see that as anything other than permission for violence.
As a green card holder, my position here has never felt particularly precarious, and I was always the stable one amongst friends with O-1 or student visas. But this election has invigorated a sense of unease, and watching ICE and its impact on Los Angeles has made that unease more palpable. I’ve invested in this country, built a life and a community here, and yet it feels as if the rug could be pulled out from under me at any moment, without warning. I watched friends with privilege and passports use their escape hatches during the last Trump term, though I felt the opposite pull. I felt it necessary to double down, to fight for the friends, family, customers, community that had supported me here. I’m realizing the choice might not be mine to make this time, though, and I’ve been feeling quite politically adrift in a way I haven’t before.
I’m writing this note from Paris, where I’d originally planned to share a lighthearted shopping recommendation. I’ll save that for next week. It does feel dissonant, for me personally, to talk about handbags or boutiques when I can’t stop thinking about what it means to belong somewhere. (Importantly: I don’t mean that fashion or pop culture etcetera are frivolous, I think they are a temperature check on larger politics at hand, it’s just hard for me to wrap my head around those topics at the moment.)
And so I sit here, in another country, wondering what “home” means when the ground beneath you seems to be shifting toward a landscape that will benefit a very minuscule few.
Food for thought
First They Came for John Bolton. Pod Saves America.
Trump’s FBI has raided the home of John Bolton, the advisor-turned-critic who once stood at his side. State power is being deployed not just against political opponents but against anyone who dares to dissent: Chris Christie, Wes Moore, ABC, NBC. Layer onto that the arming of the National Guard in D.C., planned troop deployments to Chicago, and ICE maneuvering to deport a man they wrongly sent abroad.
In my basket
Chloe suede peep-toe pumps. Gianvito Rossi alt on The Real Real, then there’s these Louboutins for $340. Jeans: Levi’s ribcage with a 34” inseam, great for heels. Chloe top: lace Etsy find for $55, a very good $52 Isabel Marant find on TRR, fun $50 crochet halter.
Sneak peek from Paris on the left. A little Chloe trio: suede peep-toe pumps, white leather pumps with a subtle heel, and suede flats in bone and peachy pink. Chloe metal shell purse, here’s the leather shoulder bag version, Simkhai metal clutch in the shape of an oyster. On right: a Tabayer white gold Oera ring.
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Paris has a way of sharpening the question of belonging, doesn’t it? For me, France always feels like the future—where I’m 99% sure we’ll end up.
Travel makes the ground shift too, but in a different way: it’s destabilizing, yes, but also clarifying. Thank you for such a thoughtful note. It’s a reminder that where we choose to land is as political as it is personal.
Obsessed with the large stone pinky ring! Is it blue ish?