Making Relation

Happy New Year! Each of you is a gift in my life! Thank you for being here with me, for taking the time out of your busy lives to read, to be a part of Too Much. Substack has been a leap of faith and a journey of curiosity. I started this space to deposit so many of the swirling ideas I have around what it is to be human, how the world could look if we employed more magical thinking, more care, new frameworks and heartfelt reflection. I’m so grateful for your support, I always want to hear more of your thoughts and musings so please don’t hesitate to share.

2025 magnified human corruption and cruelty beyond the realm of my personal imagination. I’ve always believed humanity is inherently good, that it’s life that conditions us to become hard or dark. I still think that’s true (maybe?) but I question if that belief stems from the Pollyanna in me. My best rebellion in 2025 was to be kinder, to really listen when strangers talked, to tip more, to slow down and be as present as possible. The little and the mundane matter far more than we give them credit for.

I’ve just returned from Hong Kong where the energy of the year of the horse was visually everywhere, pulsing with meaning. For those less acquainted with Chinese astrology, we’re entering the year of the fire horse, where movement and momentum are inevitable. I want 2026 to be a year of redemption, of justice, of alchemy, of kindness and interdependence. It’s our year to create our own magic, to believe we are the architects of our realities and that we can gallop towards a more tender, connected, whole place (and if you have to slow down, that is okay!).

The Cutest Year of the Horse Goods

By design, I started the new year in a new place. As I’ve mentioned before, travel gives me a brain wipe, a chance to see things for the first time again. It’s my favorite portal to awe, to knowing absolutely nothing, to reclaiming my life force energy amidst a painful world.

I’ve been meaning to explore Asia beyond Japan (my happy place), so this year I chose Hong Kong. It felt doable in a week, which was all I could spare. I landed to the news of Maduro’s kidnapping, a reminder that not 24 hours in the U.S. news cycle can pass without chaos. Hong Kong offered something I didn’t know I was craving, a reprieve from the constant vigilance American life currently demands.

Hong Kong, or as the locals say Home Kong, because no one is really from here, is a multicultural, bilingual city full of people who left their countries behind. A place of fusion, still incredibly Chinese (the land returned to China from the United Kingdom in 1997) but also incredibly English. It’s wildly safe, clean, and full of delight. I’ve added it to my very short list of places where I feel absolutely free, where you don’t have to constantly look over your shoulder, where men let you breathe in peace. (10/10 recommend solo traveling here, it’s easy to meet people, there’s no language barrier, it’s simple to navigate, and the food is DNA-altering)

It’s a land that holds two things at once, at all times. It feels fitting to close out a year that demanded exactly this and enter into a new one with a poetic echo. This year will demand we continue to hold joy with sorrow, light with heavy, heart with logic. This trip itself embodied that duality. It wasn’t meant to be a solo one, but it somehow ended up that way, leaving me to hold two things at once as well…disappointment and possibility. Rather than judge that plot twist, I leaned in, trusting there would be an offering. And fantastically, there were multiple.

My first day in Hong Kong, I found myself in an all-white room standing knee-deep in white feathers. Seemingly simple. Awe-ful. Playful. This work, originally made by Judy Chicago in 1966, was her attempt “to ‘soften’ or ‘feminise’ the world.” In this soft landing, I took my first proper exhale of 2026. Entering this new year in a new place, in an intentionally soft space was what I needed, a hug and an exclamation point, two things at the same time.

Judy Chicago’s Feather Room

This piece was beautiful but also challenging. I kept wondering if humans are destined to circle the same questions for eternity. We round the same ideas, ad nauseam, lifetime over lifetime. Artists and writers mine the same themes decade over decade. Occasionally, that spiral creates a new bud, a new path of thinking, but will anything ever get solved? Will we as a species ever learn? Here we are, sixty years after Judy Chicago’s debut of the feather room, still trying to soften and feminize the world. To make something that still rings so true to a completely different generation of women is a triumph for an artist. Yet, something about that gnaws at my core. The mere fact that this piece is still so relevant, maybe more now than when first created in 1966. Being human, in a body, in this world, can feel endlessly futile but then I look down and see my feet afluff with feathers and say, “Ah yes, this is why we do this.” For these small moments of electricity. This makes it worth it. Chicago’s work will stay with me. It didn’t ask a lot, but it gave. Oh, how it gave.

That softness, that opening, set the tone for everything that followed. The feather room had been preparation, a reminder to stay receptive to what might find me. True to that sentiment, as the week unwound, I was connected with incredible local women and found myself imagining another timeline in which I lived here. From the magnetic former Israeli diplomat turned lounge singer to the dimensional, hilarious, creative mother of two who single-handedly changed the direction of my trip upon landing…they felt like people I’d known my whole life. They introduced me to their corner of Hong Kong, and I found myself so busy I didn’t have time to write until two hours before my flight home. I have a few cities I’ve dubbed “plug and play”: I land and have a built-in social life. Hong Kong is now added to this list, thanks to the generosity of these effervescent women.

But it didn’t stop there. There’s an energy here of curiosity and connection. Everywhere I went, I met people with fascinating backgrounds: my 23-year-old Filipino and Japanese waiter who had never tried Yuzuchu, my Nepalese bartender with an identical twin brother who told me about the Gen-Z revolution happening in Nepal, a Filipino woman on holiday for her brother’s birthday who wanted dating advice about an American soldier she had just met. Other than the United States, I don’t know if I’ve ever visited anywhere so global, so textured. Except, Hong Kong feels more true, where all are welcome, where nationality plays so little a part. I’m sure there are biases at play that I’m not aware of as a visitor but how refreshing to touch that feeling for a week.

Seeking to understand more of the city’s artistic consciousness, I made my way to a small gallery that had been recommended in the Kowloon area, the part of town closer to China. What I found there brought the week’s themes into sharp focus. The gallery featured Shahana Rajani, who documents the lives of everyday Pakistanis in Karachi and the Indus River Delta, whose environments are rapidly being eroded by extraction. The sand mining and dam construction create environmental and social consequences. They displace people, change the local fishing ecosystem, and alter how the water moves. The local people’s rebellion is to draw, to make visible what is slowly becoming invisible. “Mark-making connects the visible and invisible worlds, the zahir and batin. It is a divine pedagogy for navigating loss and separation. Each line is an invitation to love, to know, to remember.“ Maybe this is art’s job, to record, so we can remember. “While the coloniser’s map seeks to insert hard lines that divide and fix. Here, representation is the making of relation.“

And this is why art threatens, because it dares. It dares to ask the hard questions, to document, to preserve, to remind, to hold us accountable to the threads greater than ourselves.

This is why I travel, why I sought Hong Kong, why I stood in Rajani’s gallery, to be reminded that a woman in Karachi drawing the disappearing river and a woman in an all-white room knee-deep in feathers are doing the same work. Making relation. To make visible the invisible. Recording what we cannot afford to forget. We’re all fighting to keep something soft and human alive in a world determined to extract and harden. And that is exactly what I intend to do more of here, in this tiny corner on Substack.

Standing at the Intersection of Light and Dark