Gotta End Somewhere.
That's a wrap!
That’s a wrap to the GSS 2025 season, but I have Somewhere for you to start 2026.
Readers told me about starting businesses, returning to art practices, or even launching their own Substacks after reading Gotta Start Somewhere this year. That an article nudged you into motion tells me I’m doing my job. Because this season wasn’t aimed at outcomes, you went above and beyond what I thought possible, which was just to have readers and me reconnect with an internal map through baby steps.
That’s why I keep returning to this image: you, headphones on, taking a baby step out your front door and into Somewhere. The air might be cold, outside or within yourself, but, as Albert Camus reminds us, try to find eternal summer. And listen to what you feel in the songs. Of course, you’ll feel different from me.
Just like you’ve felt a different story in Gotta Start Somewhere than I wrote:
The full body of work, starting in March with Thank You Very Much, Next, spans twenty-seven articles and follows a narrator reconnecting with and clarifying her values, intuition, tastes, and faith in something bigger than herself.
And as she did, you might’ve been happy for, rooting against, cheering on, or annoyed with her.
Maybe you imagined seeing Michael Phillip dance in the kitchen, tasting Tu Le’s gỏi cuốn, drinking a glass of Lily Geiger’s Figlia, browsing the shelves of Debra Gress Jansen’s booked., or scrunching your face to Dylan Sitts’s beats.
And you saw people through Marien Wilkinson’s photography.
You watched the narrator challenge her long-held assumptions. Talk to her past, present, and imagined futures through the profile conversations.
She moved through heartbreak. Took risks. Failed. Listened. And then tripped into her same old human pitfalls once again. Dusted herself off and tried again.
Although the narrator is me, as soon as you read her story, your reactions are your own: your memories, your longings, your frustration, your questions.
Reactions, like when goosebumps rose on my arms as I sat in the hot pink KidSuper screen-printing studio in Williamsburg and first thought of the idea for the Natural Habitats profiles on my thirtieth birthday in May.
My high school friend Ray Baker said, “I knew whatever came next would require some type of radical leap, and I needed to convince myself to take it.”
Forgotten high school memories resurfaced of times when the risks felt huge then: getting our noses pierced on South Street, kicking past competitors in the final straightaway of the track, or saying ten numbers to a crush. How small and inconsequential those risks feel today…
And just a year earlier, I thumbed through Carrie Bradshaw t-shirts on a Soho street corner, where Ray sold them during her day off from a corporate job.
Now, her shirts sell in stores across the country, funding her New York City life through art alone. How small and consequential that risk must feel to her now…
And with that conversation, the Natural Habitats profiles began.
Next, photographer Marien Wilkinson and I trudged through the new heat of June to Paley Park in Manhattan, where we met Architect Ethan Chan.
He told us that good architects must have three qualities: “Audacity, because you have to take a risk. You’re standing in an empty lot, imagining something that doesn’t exist yet. Intensity, because the best buildings are obsessed over. You can feel it in the drawings. And restraint, because not every idea needs to be chased. There are always clever flourishes that tempt you. But you have to say no to what doesn’t serve the core.”
Months later, as if in response to Ethan, I met an entrepreneur who stands in “empty lots,” and turns them into a city’s most beloved spaces: Teddy Sourias, the Philadelphia nightlife king.
When I asked him where he starts, he said, “I want my spaces to transport people out of reality. To do that, you have to engage all five senses. I start with the feeling I want to create.”
Teddy’s words echoed Goldsmith Lea Schneider. Sitting in her family’s 150-year-old studio as sunlight sparkeled across jewelry and Austrian alpine air, she said, “Jewelry encapsulates a feeling. When I’ve really worked through an emotion while making a piece, it resonates more. Even sadness can create lightness.”
And then Dylan Sitts said, “What I love most about making music is the flow state that I reach. And that’s the feeling I like to give to others listening to my music.”
And Michael told me, “And when you can make great food, it’s a great feeling. And you know you’ve made it because when tasting it, you get a cool breeze through your body and goosebumps on your arms.”
As each person spoke, I heard my dad quoting Maya Angelou to me when I was little, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Feelings.
They seem to be at the root of everything we offer each other. It’s what Ray Baker gives through her shirts, Dylan through his music, Tu through his food, and Lea through her jewelry.
All these conversations put words to something I’d been circling for a while: the real output of any line of work, even something as pragmatic as being a Chief of Staff at a tech company or investment banker, isn’t the object or the business outcome, but the feeling embedded inside it, the part that lingers long after an exchange is over.
Lea said that every piece of her jewelry “is filled with relationships. There’s always a triangle: the maker, the wearer, the piece. Customers come back and say, ‘I wear it all the time, it’s my talisman.’ That’s beautiful.”
Gotta Start Somewhere's material isn’t gold, instruments, or buildings, but life stories, mine and others’.
And you, the readers, are the “wearers.”
If a reader walks away feeling like they can take small, bold “risks,” to play around in their life bravely, and to trust that they can dust themselves off and get back up when something doesn’t work, then I’m doing my job.
Because after all, your life story is your greatest asset.
And as Educator, Dr. Pam Hart said to me and, through me, to all of you, “Sometimes everyone disagrees with you… But the moments I regret most are the ones when I went against my gut… Trust your gut. You’ve had enough experience to know what feels right and what doesn’t. And your commitment to being your authentic self takes courage. Most people never do it.”
With that, thank you to all the GSS readers. I’m so grateful for you, honored that you read what I write, and inspired by what you’ve started this year.
Thank you to Marien Wilkinson. You’re professional, persistent, compassionate, and the right kind of delusional, which is a fabulous combination for a creative collaborator. Gotta Start Somewhere wouldn’t be the same without you.
And, of course, thank you to everyone who participated in the Gotta Start Somewhere profile experience: Ray Baker, Ethan Chan, Debra Gress Jansen, Tamara Cohen, Lily Geiger, Carly Julia Spiro, Martina Rebecca Spiro, Lea Schneider, Tu Le, Michael Kenton Phillips, Dylan Sitts, Teddy Sourias, Dr. Pam Hart, and Chadd Cosse. I can’t wait to see where your lives take you from here.
Happy New Year to you, your family, and friends! We’ll be back in 2026 :)
With love,
Maria Papacostas
