Y2K Shit.

Ultra-skinniness as a recession indicator.

Hullo, welcome to choitotheworld. I’m Mary H.K. Choi, a New York Times Bestselling Author, Essayist, screenwriter and AuDHD person living in New York (for some reason). I also identify as a person with a history of disordered eating. Join me each week (neurospiciness permitting) for a wee chat about brains and creativity.

Hi friends, woof. What a week. If you’re new here, thank you for subscribing.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not done talking about spindly arms and 12-pack torsos coming out of last post. I won’t talk about this subject exclusively but it is still on my mind. High-key maybe a blanket content warning for all of my posts for a while would be fitting.

Something like, trigger warning: post is reflective of the venal, harrowing society we live in because post is not riddled with seventeen links for extra shit to buy.

No shots on ‘buying-shit-stack.’ I do some of my best doomscrolling over there. Also, since we’re on the topic anyway, what consumer goods are you doom-harvesting ahead of the tariffs?

Personally, I’m on a buying embargo since I’m poor. But we did pick up extra bars of chocolate because they were on sale and my partner bought a particularly generous slice of cheese.

Anyway, this past week my mother came to stay with me from Texas and she also brought her best friend from Detroit which is to say that all week, my internet consumption was compromised by jaunts to the Met and the Botanical Gardens as well as the 9/11 memorial and Cafe Sabarsky with two shockingly agile 70-something-year-old women. This meant, only the very loudest bits of news delivered via social and text were getting to me which is to say that it was mostly 2837429394 memes about recession indicators.

I also compulsively checked up on The White Lotus post from last week since it was putting up shocking numbers and doom scrolled inside the hellscape of my FYP while my mother and her friend giggled like teens which was actually very endearing.

But then I figured out why I was so persistently sad.

Gather round, it’s story time.

(Content warning: This is some real, Let’s Get You To Bed Grandma, meme hours.)

I moved to New York the summer after 9/11.

(Hear me out.)

I was in my early twenties and it was the most precarious time of my life. I’d moved to New York knowing three people. One was my roommate who ended up moving back to Texas five months before our lease ran out that first year.

Later, I’d write about it for The New York Times.

My roommate was having a rough go of it. She ended up moving back to Texas. An intern for a bigwig fashion designer, it wasn’t work that had broken her but a daisy chain of troubling events that revealed her listless and cool social circle hadn’t transcended enthusiasm so much as become heroin addicts… I just watched as the city and its circumstances ate her alive. I may as well have been a photographer for National Geographic.