I burned down my social life and started again

3 lessons from remaking my entire group of friends in my late 30s.

If you enjoy this, consider hitting the like button. It feels good for me when you do, like seeing a smile or a head nod when you’re telling someone something, and it lets me know you’re here and I’m not just talking to myself.

The Tower is the moment one reality, one version of self comes crashing down. The whole world falls to pieces. But the next card in the deck, The Star, is pure, unformed creativity. When you finally let it all go you can reset, and in that space, creativity flourishes. This is the story below. Because every great story is a Tarot reading.

Part 1: Where I Hate New York

I moved to New York in 2017 after spending basically all my 20s in London and then a year in France & Singapore doing an MBA. Americans that live abroad for more than a couple years often adopt the mentality that America kinda sucks. This perspective goes: America is the home of consumerism, their tourists are loud and inconsiderate, their culture is Starbucks and Walmart and highways and celebrity endorsements. Ew.

I had jumped on this bandwagon.

And then there’s the age old chat: which city is better New York vs London. And since I was decidedly a Londoner, I could tell you all the reasons London was superior: more accessible high quality art, more widespread appreciation for independent music, the beautiful architecture, the canal, the green spaces, the incredible food scene, the accessibility to the rest of Europe.

I was on a very high horse.

So when I was recruited out of my MBA to an early-stage start-up in New York City, I didn’t land here with much excitement. I remember looking at the New York City skyline, which had once made my heart pound with excitement, and feeling dead inside. It’s pretty hard to build a life you love in a new city if your perspective is this city and country sucks.

We collect evidence for our beliefs and then tell ourselves they’re the truth and these ‘truths’ stack up on each other and color the way we move through the world. My life suffered as a result. I was only friends with Londoners in New York. I wasn’t really participating in the culture of the city. I was resisting my evolution. I was stuck.

Fast forward four years later to 2021. I was still stuck in that mindset, stuck in my personal life. I had just moved into the holy grail of New York City apartments: a huge duplex with a two-tiered garden on the edge of Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy priced below market rate and owned by a sweet English couple who lived in western Pennsylvania. The only snag: I didn’t have the social life or friendship group that would allow me to host the fabulous parties the space demanded.

Shortly after, I broke up with a boyfriend who was about to propose. Shortly after that, I had a profound psychedelic experience where two blue beings told me that the solution to my low-grade depression was to HAVE FUN.

Since I hadn’t found my New York tribe and since I had assumed it was because New York sucked (lol), I decided having fun would mean spending a month in Lisbon, scoping out the scene. Some friends had just moved there. They loved it. Maybe I needed to move back to Europe to feel at home…

So I went to Lisbon. It was sunny. It was pretty. The food was good. The beaches were nice. I didn’t feel at home. Something about the digital nomad community that had collected there felt off to me. Or maybe it was too small. Or too hilly. Who knows. But it was in that moment that I suddenly said to myself, Anne, pull your shit together. You have this beautiful, unicorn apartment and it’s New York City. Surely you can meet cool people you like in New York City.

This was the perspective shift that changed everything. If you want to change your life, change your mind.

I went all in. I stopped making plans with and accepting invitations from nearly every single person I was currently spending time with in New York.

I burned it all down and started again.

Part 2: Where I Have Fun Doing Things I Love

From the perspective of Surely you can meet cool people you like in New York City I decided I would be activities girl. I chose four activities that would be fun for me: music, surfing, psychedelics, and sailing. I reasoned that by having fun doing the things I genuinely enjoyed, I would meet other people like me. I wasn’t wrong.

2022 was a very active year. I was sailing on Friday nights in the New York harbor. PSA: there is nothing quite like the feeling of closing your laptop, biking through downtown Brooklyn, and then 20 minutes later being on the water, wind in your hair, sun setting behind the New York skyline.

When the conditions were right, I was taking the train down to Rockaway Beach for surf lessons. PSA: bobbing on the waves straddling a surfboard while you watch the planes fly into JFK with the New York skyline in the distance is kinda surreal. It’s insane that New York - with its intensity and grit and lights and skyscrapers and snowy winters - also has a beach and access to surfing and gives the city a lot of points in that New York vs London debate.

That New York skyline had started to make my heart beat with excitement again. Because I was embracing the city with an open heart.

When I wasn’t on the water, I was attending conversations about the legalization of psilocybin for medical use. I was going to see musicians I loved at 2am hoping to bump into someone interesting on the dance floor. I was doing what the blue beings told me to do: HAVE FUN.

When people I met invited me to hang out I said yes. I said yes to everything. I went to events that I thought looked cringe (like a dating event where you had to look into someone else’s eyes for 2 minutes). I said yes to parties where I didn’t think anyone I knew going would be a long-term friend.

But I was expanding my network. I wasn’t taking anything too seriously. I was HAVING FUN. I was finally embedding myself into the culture of the city. I was expressing myself. I was exploring myself. I was figuring out who I was. I felt alive.

To manifest what you want they say you need two things: clarity on what you want to call in and to be out in the world, playfully having fun while trusting it will come together in a way you can’t even imagine.

I didn’t know anything about manifesting at the time but that’s what I had been doing all year. I was manifesting.

Now I just needed to find that one person who clicked. I knew that would be my gateway to the crew I was searching for.

Part 3: Where I Find My People And Find Myself

I’ve come up with the thesis that you can bucket New Yorkers into two categories: those who consume the city, and those who create it. Both need each other. Neither is better than the other.

I had been in the consumption camp. And it turned out becoming a creator, creating something for the city, is what led me to my people. I had to start expressing my creativity to find my crew.

After attending an event, I got a survey from the organizers asking me if I had ideas for future events for their community. In an uncharacteristic move, I said yes: I could host a panel about using psychedelics to support your mental health.

I had never hosted a panel before. I didn’t have all the contacts I needed for the panel. But my summer of opening myself up and saying yes to everything had unlocked a new level of playfulness and ideation.

I was tapping into my creativity and self-expression.

A few weeks later I got an email back from their event manager Dianna saying: dope idea, let’s do this.

When I met her in person to organize the event, it was an immediate click. She was the vibe I’d been looking for. She ran an underground party and was plugged into the music scene I had left behind in London and had struggled to find a way into in New York.

We started hanging out and she introduced me to her amazing crew of creative souls she'd cultivated in the city - musicians, photographers, filmmakers, fashion folk, painters, sculptors, bartenders, perfume designers, event producers. The sense of belonging I felt in this group of people reframed my entire perspective on myself.

Everyone got my references. Like immediately, table stakes. Everyone shared my interests. And helped me go deeper on them. Everyone noticed and called out the little things about myself I had intentionally cultivated and secretly loved. I started to see myself more clearly, like a filter slowly sliding off that I hadn’t ever realized was there. I realized that if I fit in so naturally within this group of creative, alternative people, then that’s who I must truly be. All the years of not ever really fitting in finally made sense.

I felt like I had come home to myself.

My deep pool of under-utilized creativity started to wake up and come online. Because it had an audience. Because it was noticed, appreciated, and celebrated. The past three years of existing in this new group of people is a big part of what has inspired the professional evolution you’re seeing in this substack. I have so much new fun, creative, spiritual stuff to bring you this year…

So many of us are living on autopilot. Accepting our current reality without asking ourselves, what would be more fun? What would make my heart sing? What would blow my own mind? What version of my career and life would be unbelievably awesome?

This phase of my personal evolution required me to tune into myself and own what I wanted, even though I didn’t know exactly the path to get there. It required me to let go of the reality I was currently existing in so I could call in something brand new. Alignment requires stepping off of the familiar and walking your own unique path. How do you know you’re aligned? Because the path disappears.

The hardest thing is to let go of the safety and security of your current identity so the new one can come online. But this is what’s required.

You have to live in that in between phase when one identity is gone but the new one isn’t quite formed. It’s this phase that most people run away from back towards the safety and predictability of the well-worn path. But if you can allow the discomfort of this ambiguity long enough, while following and trusting what feels sparkly, your new self will emerge. It’s in this the mist and fog of this blank space that your unique form of creativity emerges. It’s here that you become the artist of your life.

PS. If you liked this essay you might also like I got fired (twice). It was the wake-up call I needed and How psychedelics taught me how to feel.

PPS. I’m currently running consultations to my Career Studio 1x1 program. If you’re feeling misaligned to your current work but not sure what comes next, this program was designed for you.