In this episode of Note 2 Self, Saskia is thinking about New York. After J.Lo’s Subway Takes claim that you have to be born in New York to be a New Yorker, Saskia reflects on moving to the city in 2015 with one suitcase, no job, and no idea what life here would become.

What starts as a New York take turns into something much bigger: belonging, identity, and who gets to decide where we are allowed to feel at home. Saskia talks about the energy in the city right now, dancing under the K Bridge at Chris Lake, the joy of connection, and why New York has always been a place for people who arrive, rebuild, and become.

She also reflects on Lena Dunham’s memoir Fame Sick, the complicated relationship between a city that makes you and a city that can also break you, and what it means to leave behind an old version of yourself. From creative failure and grief around acting to redefining success in your 30s, this episode is about reinvention, changing your mind, and learning that the versions of you that came before do not disappear. They become another layer of who you are.

Because maybe belonging is not about where you were born. Maybe it is about what changes you, what holds you, and who makes room for the person you are becoming.