The Year I Stopped Trying to Be Interesting

There was a very specific moment last spring when I realized I had been performing for strangers my entire adult life.

I was sitting in a small cafe in Budapest, the kind with too many mismatched chairs and a menu written in chalk that I could not read. A woman across from me was reading a book. She had a pastry in front of her and she kept taking little bites between chapters. She was not on her phone. She was not looking around to see who was watching. She was not making the moment mean something.

She was just having a morning.

And I remember thinking, I forgot you were allowed to do that.

. . .

For most of my twenties, I treated every day like a scene I was supposed to narrate. If I traveled somewhere new, I was already composing the caption before I finished the sandwich. If I met a stranger on a train, I was half listening and half thinking about how the story would sound later. Even the quiet parts, the walking alone parts, the reading alone parts, I was quietly performing them, even if the only audience was the version of me I imagined looking back in five years.

I told myself this made me a thoughtful person. An observer. A writer. In reality, I think I was just a little bit scared of boredom. Of stillness. Of being the kind of person who does something with no plan to tell anyone about it later.

. . .

So here is the honest thing. Sometime last year, I got tired.

Not burned out in a dramatic way. Not sad, not spiraling. Just tired in a quiet way, the way you get tired when you have been holding your stomach in for too long. And I remember thinking, I do not want to be interesting anymore. Not to strangers on the internet. Not to people I meet at parties. Not to the version of me I imagine looking back.

I just wanted to be a person having a morning.

I wanted my life to stop feeling like a pitch.

. . .

The first thing I stopped doing was taking photos of my coffee. I know that sounds like nothing. It was not nothing. For a whole week, I sat with my cappuccino and I did not open my camera. I drank it warm. I noticed when it got to the sweet part at the bottom. I watched the woman at the counter fold napkins into small triangles and I did not reach for my phone to capture her.

She was not there for my feed. She was there because she worked a shift.

. . .

The second thing I stopped doing was trying to have opinions about everything. In tech especially, there is this pressure to have a take. A hot take. A nuanced take. A counter take. Every new tool, every launch, every small controversy, you are supposed to weigh in. I used to think being quiet made me seem less smart.

Now I think being quiet is one of the most honest things you can do when you genuinely do not know something yet.

Here is the weird part. The less I tried to be interesting, the more interested I became. In small things. In the way my friend laughs before the punchline. In the way bread smells in Lisbon at six in the morning. In the way a cat on a balcony will stare at you with the full weight of ancient judgment.

None of this is content. All of this is living.

. . .

I am not saying you should throw your phone in the sea. I am saying you should notice how often you reach for it to turn your life into proof.

Proof you were there. Proof it was beautiful. Proof you were the kind of girl who sits in cafes in Budapest and reads books. I promise you, you do not need the proof. The cafe will remember you were there. Your body will remember. The pastry will remember on your hips for about four days.

. . .

I still post. I still write. I still love capturing things. But I try to let the moment happen first. Fully. With no pen in my hand and no phone in my lap.

I let the morning be a morning.

I let the train ride be a train ride.

I let my life happen before I tell anyone about it.

And I promise you, once you start doing this, you will not want to go back. You will find out that the most interesting version of yourself is the one who forgot she was being watched.

. . .

If you are in the middle of a year like mine, the quiet one, the tired one, the one where you do not feel like posting, I hope you know this is not a slump. This might be the most important year you have.

Enjoy your morning. Do not narrate it.

You are allowed.