Exiliado: Things I No Longer Do That I Used To, & I Wish I Did Again…

Listen to albums in their entirety. Multiple times.

Lie on the bed and listen to music without doing anything else.

Read all day. One book. Not get distracted by other things.

Write with abandon by hand in a notebook and not care if it would ever see the light of day or who was going to publish it or the opinion of anyone else.

Take long walks just to think about things.

Sing along to live albums in my bedroom like I was playing Madison Square Garden.

Get hyper focused on something: Listen to every Madonna album from the beginning and watch her movies and documentaries about her and read biographies about her and think a lot about what it felt like to have $35 in your pocket and be left in Times Square in 1978.

Write poetry.

Watch movies and TV shows multiple times.

Get an obsession with an author not trending and eat, sleep, and breathe them inside my head. Ginsberg. Austen. Forster. Woolf.

Paint. Draw. Sketch.

Sit outside with a cup of tea and think about life.

Keep a journal.

Wake up and go for a run with the sunrise, whether it was raining, snowy, icy or whatever.

Learn all the lyrics to songs I liked.

Not spend the entire day stressed about productivity and to-do lists and whether I did enough today.

Read print magazines and have them cost much less than the price of a paperback novel.

Wear what I wanted. All-black. Mascara. Eyeshadow. Painted nails. Bold designs.

Write letters by hand to people and post them with little trinkets inside, then wait for the return letter every morning with the post.

Cry.