7 Things Things I Romanticize (So I Don’t Fall Apart)

 

Soft Routines and Sacred Details: Finding Light in the Ordinary

Lately, I’ve been romanticizing everything, from the way I pour my morning coffee to the way sunlight streams through my gold velvet curtains. I’m surviving by turning ordinary moments into art: soft rituals, small details, moments I would otherwise miss or disregard.

Depression makes the world feel desaturated, like walking through a scene with all the color drained out. Depression also made me stagnant. I lost my ambition, my drive, sometimes even the sense of time passing. Building routines helps break through the fog; they became anchors that give my day direction. Somewhere along the way, they have become more than that.

They became rituals.

To me, calling my routines rituals makes them feel sacred. They become more something I have to do; they are small, intentional acts of care. They are the small sparks of joy that make my day more enjoyable even when its hard.

1. Romanticizing My Morning Routine: Skincare, Coffee, and Coming Back to Life

When I wake up in the morning, the first place I meet myself is at the bathroom sink. The first thing I feel is the cold splash of water to wake myself up. It’s also the beginning step to my morning skincare ritual.

The apartment is quiet, my neighbors are still half-asleep, and so am I. The water is like a baptism. It reminds me I am strong. It braces me for the day to come.

I cleanse my skin using my pink Foreo Luna Mini with a generous dollop of cleanser on top. It glides over my face in slow, circular motions, the cleanser blooming into a luxurious cloud, soft and fleeting. It’s like a moment of luxury carved into my morning.

Skincare has been good for my mental health. It feels like I’m choosing myself even when depression makes me want to give up.

After cleansing, I gently pat my face dry with my favorite towel: a soft purple one with pink trim and a unicorn print.

I move through the rest of my routine in a rhythm, two layers of toner pressed into my skin, followed by a few drops of Vitamin C serum, bright and golden like sunlight in a bottle.

I massage it in with my fingertips, letting it soak in. As I wait for the serum to absorb, I move on to the next part of my ritual. Making the bed.

Making the bed along with my skincare ritual have become a part of my healing. I never used to make my bed, but as I climb out of my depression, I’m starting to understand the quiet power of this small act. My bedroom is small, and making the bed somehow makes it feel bigger, airier, and brighter. I also love the feeling of easing into a made bed at night, like a small reward for surviving the day.

After I make my bed, I head to the kitchen to make my iced coffee.I’ve been drinking coffee since childhood; I can’t live without it. I grab my favorite mug, drop in a few ice cubes, and pour in cold coffee with a generous splash of cream. This is how I romanticize my life: a favorite mug and one soft moment at a time.

I make my way back into the bathroom to finish my skincare ritual, sipping the coffee like it’s a security blanket in a cup. I finish by massaging moisturizer into my skin and applying a generous layer of sunscreen, my final step, my daily protection.

As I move on with my day, I catch a subtle glow in the mirror. The consistency is starting to pay off, not just on my face, but in the calm I feel when I finish my morning ritual and know I didn’t give up on myself.

2. Dressing Up to Write: The Power of Beauty Rituals at Home

There are days when the ritual begins with words. And then, there are days when the ritual begins with beauty.

It doesn’t happen every time I sit down to write, but when I need a moment of beauty and when my energy feels limp or the words won’t come, I get started by getting dressed. Not for the world, but for myself.

I pull out my pink Ralph Lauren silk headscarf. It’s fraying at the hem now, fragile from love and wear, but I still tie it around my hair like a crown.

Then come the little rituals: lip gloss, face cream, a spritz of perfume. I massage Nivea cream into my neck and wrists to help the perfume cling to my skin. The tin reminds me of old Hollywood. It’s a beauty relic, glossy and cold to the touch, like a piece of vintage vanity left behind by a 1950s starlet.

I put on earrings, my favorite gold ring with a garnet gemstone and earrings. Jewelry, to me, is the finishing touch. It makes me feel grown up. It makes me feel polished and put together in a world that still feels messy.

I dress in nice lounge clothes, not pajamas, not throwaway outfits. Clothes I’d be proud to open the door in.

Sometimes, I make myself a little drink to match the vibe, iced coconut horchata with oat milk and honey, matcha with vanilla syrup and ice in a mason jar, or iced coffee with hazelnut creamer. It’s all part of the magic. It’s me building a world I can stand to live in.

3. Romanticizing the Bus Ride: Finding Peace in Public Transportation

I’m 30 and I’ve never learned how to drive.

I got my learner’s permit at 16 and drove with my uncle a few times, but the anxiety was too much. The idea of being behind the wheel felt like holding the world’s most fragile responsibility, and I wasn’t ready for it. So I just… didn’t. I built my life around other ways of getting from one place to another.

For a long time, I was ashamed of that. In America, independence is often tied to driving. But I find independence through riding the bus. I romanticize my bus rides by I noticing everything.

Sleepy New York suburbs with ties to the Revolutionary War. Colonial houses on sprawling lawns, the grass still dewy from an early April shower. Winding roads and strip malls with chain stores, a sea of parked cars. Towns as old as the United States itself, stitched together by roads lined with evergreens.

There’s a rhythm to it: mom-and-pop strips along the main road: car washes, smoke shops, halal joints. The hum of the bus’s engine as it treks up a hill. The blue velvet seats. The calm. The bus driver’s staticky radio humming soft Spanish songs in the background like a lullaby for the road.

I pass picturesque homes with perfect white fences and dogs that frolic on manicured lawns. I watch the fleet of yellow school buses weaving through town in the early morning, and again in the afternoon. Kids in hoodies and Crocs waiting with their friends on the roadside, half-asleep.

Sometimes I pick music that matches the mood outside my window. Sometimes I don’t. But either way, the bus becomes a little cocoon. A space in-between. Not home, not the gym, not a destination. Just a moving slice of peace in a world that often feels too still or too loud.

4. Walking Through the Mall: A Testimony on Grit and Determination

My gym is attached to a mall, and every time I go, I cut through it the same exact way. Past the glass storefronts, around the escalator, up the side hallway that always smells faintly like cinnamon and pretzels. It’s not about novelty. It’s about familiarity. Repetition. Healing through routines that anchor me when I feel unmoored.

The hardest part of going to the gym isn’t the workout: it’s showing up at all. Most days, everything in me wants to turn around, take the bus home, and crawl back into bed. But I walk through the mall anyway, because this is where the fight begins.

I don’t stop to browse. I don’t linger. I walk with purpose, even if my heart is heavy. This is one of my quietest rituals for mental health, a ritual no one sees, aprivate act of resilience.

There’s no soundtrack, no montage. Just me and the fluorescent lights, retracing the same steps over and over, trying to rebuild the confidence I lost after my breakup, after I left music photography, after the version of myself I thought I was lost for good.

But still, I walk.

And every time I do, it gets a little easier. Even when it doesn’t, I keep going. I’m stepping out of my comfort zone, the one where I was buried under blankets, staring at the ceiling in the dark, a mountain of used dishes piling up on my nightstand. The walk through the mall to the gym is one of the hardest parts of my workout days, but when I do it, it’s me choosing not to give up on myself.

5. Cooking Mediterranean Dinners: Fueling My Body and My Imagination

Now that Daylight Savings Time has begun, so have the evenings spent cooking for myself again. The light lingers just long enough to make the kitchen glow: soft, golden, forgiving.

I move through the space with quiet purpose, pulling eggs from the fridge to boil, sautéing spinach in olive oil and garlic, the pan hissing as I hit it with a squeeze of lemon juice. The pan is crackles as I cook veggies, releasing steam that smells like garlic and something bright.

I shred cooked chicken with my fingers over a glass cutting board. Sweet potatoes roast slowly in the oven, their honey glaze caramelizing at the edges, dusted with cinnamon and pepper. Creamy hummus on the side. A drizzle of olive oil. A pinch of red pepper flakes to finish.

These meals are Mediterranean inspired. They’re healthy and hearty, perfect for nourishing my body after gym days. But they’re also more than that. They’re daydreams I can eat.

Cooking like this has become a form of therapy and cooking to imagine myself somewhere else. When I cook Mediterranean meals, I’m not in my small New York apartment anymore. I’m in Santorini. I’m barefoot on a balcony in Italy. I’m seated at a seaside café in Greece, journaling between bites.

Cooking reminds me I don’t need a passport to romanticize my life. I can travel through flavor, through intention, through the beauty of a well-plated bowl at golden hour. I eat my meal with a side of blood orange soda. I savor each bite because I’m not just feeding myself, I’m choosing myself. Again and again, one dreamy dinner at a time.

6. Writing in Cafés Helps Me Feel Less Alone

There’s a café I go to sometimes that reminds me of Asheville. Rows of tables with mismatched chairs. A wooden bookcase filled with aold books, some with frayed edges and sun-faded spines. Afternoon sunlight spills through the windows, the windowsills cluttered with business cards and plants.

Sometimes, after the gym, I go there. I take the bus across town to write for my blog. There’s a Starbucks nearby, but sometimes I need to be in a place that feels like people are creating things. Even if I’m not talking to anyone, there’s something comforting about knowing that I’m sitting in a room full of strangers with dreams.

This past winter, I didn’t go outside at all. Not even to get groceries. Not even to get the mail; my mailbox remained untouched for two months. I stopped responding to texts. I didn’t see my family. The world felt far away and I let it stay that way. Depression makes you disappear without you noticing until you’re alone and spent days in bed.

But now, I try to write in public to force myself to be in the world. To keep myself visible, even if only to strangers passing by. I still feel alone most of the time. But being around people, hearing their laughter, the clink of mugs, the grind of espresso machines, makes me feel less blue.

There’s something sacred about opening my laptop in a room full of other lives in motion. Even if no one knows my name, I feel like I exist. Like I’m trying. Like maybe I’m coming back to life in quiet, steady ways.

7. Painting, Ritual, and the Rick Rubin Book That Guides Me

When I’m at my best, I treat my painting practice like worship, and my devotional is “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin. The book was a gift from my aunt and uncle when I first moved back to New York. It’s laid out in vignettes: short, quiet musings on the creative life, on what it means to make something from nothing, and to live as an artist.

To be honest, I haven’t painted much since moving into this apartment, but last summer, I spent most of my afternoons in my aunt and uncle’s backyard, painting with art supplies I found at a local tag sale while watching YouTube videos on Jean Michel-Basquiat, hoping for inspiration to strike like a squirrel stumbling upon an acorn. The midsummer heat was as sticky as the oil paint I squeezed from each tube before I thinned it down with paint thinner and splashed paint onto watercolor paper. I was in awe as pools of pigment sank into the page like memories I hadn’t known were still inside me, blooming into color before I could name them.

As I painted, I’d listen to songs that dragged me back into the hell I barely escaped: quitting music photography to get away from a toxic ex-boyfriend, and realizing, once everything fell apart, that I didn’t have any real friends. It was like the stage lights went out, the crowd cleared, and I was left standing alone, just me and my camera, which had quietly become my entire identity.

I created a ritual during my painting days last summer. I’d suit up in my uniform, rolling up the paint-stained sleeves like Superman about to take flight. I’d throw on a pair of earrings, swipe on some lip gloss, and slip into the old clogs I used to wear when I worked at Chipotle in Asheville, now splattered in paint, broken in by both labor and art.

Then, I’d whisk myself through the basement and out the door to the patio, where my Rick Rubin book waited for me, along with a mug of coffee splashed with heavy cream. I would open to a page, choose a passage at random, and let it set the intention for that day’s painting session, quietly guiding the energy of whatever needed to come through. It was less about what I created and more about the fact that I kept showing up, brush in hand, ready to meet whatever was waiting on the other side of the page.

This is how painting saved me. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t glamorous. It was slow and sacred. Creative healing, one painting at a time.

Noticing What’s Still Alive: Finding Beauty in the Darkness

These are the things I romanticize. Not because life is always beautiful, but because I need something to hold onto. Beauty, for me, is survival. In these quiet rituals, I find reasons to stay, reasons to keep going.

If your world feels dark right now, start small. Pick one ritual to anchor your day around. Pour your coffee slowly. Open a window and let the breeze touch your face. Choose one moment and treat it like it matters; because it does. Romanticizing your life isn’t about pretending it’s perfect. It’s about noticing the parts that still feel alive.