Chloé Williams

Photo by Kitty Williams

“I'm always attracted to that sound of walking down the street of bars and hearing the chitter chatter,” Chloé Williams says. “It has always made me want to write, and I always wanted to be a part of it.”

We’re sitting inside The Grey Dog, embraced by the chitter chatter of New York City that she loves so much. My phone is propped mic-side-up against her water glass, threatening to topple it into her lap. “If it all spills on me… that’s life,” says Williams, without a hint of worry, even though the chances of its happening aren’t zero.

Williams is a writer living in New York City, balancing part-time copywriting and nannying jobs with her own personal writing: poetry and creative non-fiction, which she shares in her Substack newsletter, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Her writing tends to gravitate toward love. Reflecting on one particularly tumultuous relationship from her past, she realizes she was desperate for love, but wasn’t quite getting it. What she got instead was an intense rollercoaster of feeling so deeply understood one moment and then entirely forgotten the next. 

The relationship ended five years ago, but she still finds herself frequently returning to it in her writing. “It's almost like a cry: I can be loved! I can be loved! I can be loved!” says Williams. Notwithstanding her writing about a past relationship like this, she does draw boundaries with her work for her own well-being; she considers carefully what life experiences to share in her writing.

Though she’s always finding new ways to explore that relationship in her writing, she’s not immune to writer’s block. Whenever she finds herself in this familiar hole in the ground, her love languages send down rescue ropes. “I'm such a romantic at heart,” says Williams. “Any time I'm writing, it's a translation of love.”

Though there are five generally agreed upon love languages, Williams explores the more specific expressions of love that are unique to her. “They’re my obsessions that make me want to write.”

Since her love languages are many and mundane, she always has something to light a fire inside her. She lists handwritten notes, other people’s houses, and borrowed clothes as a few. “These love languages are places where I feel really connected to myself,” she says.

Another trick for writers block: New York City. When she is feeling uninspired, she’ll simply walk through the East and West Villages without headphones and wait for inspiration to emerge from the noise of the city she loves so much. 

But New York wasn’t always easy for Williams.

When she moved to New York for college, she found herself in a friend group that quickly fell apart when some of them transferred. She didn’t have money to spend on all the experiences the city had to offer, and her living situation wasn’t the greatest either. “My apartment had five mice,” Williams says. “And those were just the ones we caught.” She was lonely and fell into a depression.

Williams grew up in Connecticut. She excitedly notices the map that covers the table we’re seated at. It shows details of the eastern end of Long Island and Southern Connecticut; her own town, though a small one, is labeled clearly: East Lyme.

She found herself returning to East Lyme in those difficult moments, particularly during the summers when her depression would typically feel more intense. “I felt like when I would go home, it was even more ostracizing,” says Williams. “They could tell that I wasn't doing good.”

Williams began therapy, moved to Brooklyn (leaving behind the pain of the life she had in Manhattan), and made new friends. Slowly, New York started to reveal its small-town-ness to her in the form of running into old high school friends on the subway. And it was a comfort to her when she realized she could make her way around the city without Google Maps. New York began to feel like home.

She discovered an independence in New York that she never really had in Connecticut and a growth that she used to feel in Connecticut, but no longer does. The city has given her the freedom to grow up in every way. “I had the opportunity to be kind of dumb and independent,” she says, talking about how she has made mistakes when it comes to operating kitchen appliances and dating emotionally unavailable men.

She appreciates the mundane moments New York has to offer her, like sitting on the subway or getting dinner by herself. It gives her freedom to be introspective. “I just have a lot of time to myself to really kind of process my existence in the world,” she says.

Even though she has found her new home in New York, she appreciates her childhood home in a new way. “There's something that's so indescribable,” says Williams. “It feels almost sacred to go home.” 

She cherishes the nightly walks she takes with her family whenever she’s there, daydreaming about the homes they walk past. “In essence, everybody who lives there has grown up there, so there's a real community of people,” Williams says. “Their houses are the same as they've been since they were built.”

Whenever she comes back after a visit with her family and arrives at Grand Central, Williams is immediately reminded of her love for this city. “I look down Fifth Avenue and I'm like, ‘Yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be,’” she says. 

“There's a sense of my life moving forward. Whereas going home, it's like a pause,” says Williams. The pause of home allows her to notice things she normally wouldn’t. “I realize my dad, he cannot get up from a chair in our house without making another cup of tea,” she says. “He can't switch chairs or rooms without making a cup.”

Williams credits her family for a lot of the good in her life. “I grew up in a really wonderful family and I always joke that I'm probably the only person who goes to therapy and has nothing to talk about from their childhood,” she says with a grateful smile.

She excitedly shares a memory of being particularly giggly with her twin sister, Ava, one Christmas Eve. “We want to think that we’re like Jane and Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice, but we’re fully like Kitty and Lydia,” she laughs. 

Though she has always felt a closeness with her sister, that connection wasn’t always there with her older brother. “We were so different and so far apart that what were we going to talk about?” says Williams. “It put a silence between us until we were much older.”

Her mom felt frustrated with the lack of sibling embrace and one day helped Williams realize that sure, her brother doesn’t talk to her; but she also doesn’t talk to him. “That night, he was sitting on the computer and we just started telling stories about when we were young,” says Williams. Though she was 16 years old when this happened, she will always remember it as a favorite childhood memory. “It was a very moving experience for me.”

Now they are closer than ever, bonding frequently over that which can only be shared with siblings. She shares intoxicated giggles with her siblings when her mother descends from her bedroom for a late night snack (“We call it the Cheryl Shuffle,” says Williams, describing how her mother’s slippers make a specific noise as she walks down the stairs) and knowing glances when they hear their dad’s dresser make a certain noise in the morning as he’s getting ready to go golf. “We were belly laughing because it’s so specific,” says Williams. “ You can only talk about that with your siblings.”

Williams’s brother does cartooning and graphic design, and her sister is a photographer, so the fact that she embraced a similarly creative career path is no surprise. Her love of poetry began in elementary school; she looked forward to the poetry unit every year and fondly remembers being in second grade and getting a t-shirt with her poem printed on it. (Desperate for a particular answer, I ask if she still has it; she doesn’t.)

When she was deciding on an area of study for college, she knew it had to be creative writing. “My parents were very supportive, all things considered,” says Williams. “I took out loans to do a creative writing degree, which is, I would say, a risk.” 

In college she built upon the creative writing classes she took in high school, and when she was 21, she took a year off from school to enroll in the Gotham Writers' Workshop and work on a manuscript. Most of her peers in the workshop were decades older than she, and being let into the writing process of those much older than she gave her a healthy perspective on insecurity.

“You think, ‘Oh, I'm 20, of course I feel insecure that I'm not old enough to be writing.’ Then you find out 60-year-olds feel the same,” says Williams. “Nobody feels like they have the authority to say what life is like.” Williams has found value in feeling insecure in her writing at times, though the insecurity more often presents itself as an invitation to better her work.

Williams never gets so attached to her work that she isn’t able to workshop it effectively or kill her darlings, which she keeps in a now-15-page file she can return to when it feels right. “I want to grow more than I want to bolster my ego,” she says, noting that she frequently would volunteer to share her work first in these workshops. 

Williams has found that any time she’s feeling particularly sensitive to feedback on her work from her peers or writing instructors, that she needs time away from the piece and switches her focus to another. She remembers one poem she was writing that, while getting critiqued, she felt close to tears. She realized she needed space from it, took it, and returned to it when she felt ready. “I read it out loud at the end of the year and everyone let out a sigh,” she says, happy with how it turned out.

Authenticity is important to Williams, though not in the way it is sometimes packaged for social media as a way to achieve surface level relatability, but rather in the way where she is exactly herself online. She must be doing pretty well, because on one of her poetry videos on TikTok, somebody commented ‘Are you a Virgo moon?’ and she thought to herself ‘How do you know that?’ (When we stray toward a conversation on astrology, she reassures me that even though I’m a Cancer and we’re not supposed to get along, we do.)

She is grateful for her space on the internet and hopes her presence is a comforting one to those who stumble upon her. “I hope they feel very much so seen in a way that I always wished I was seen. It’s so, so, so important to me,” says Williams. “I hope people feel very comfortable and at home in my writing.”

Though social media has brought about wonderful connections in her life, and her space on the internet has almost entirely been an uplifting one, social media can often be one of the most frustrating parts of her writing process.

She recalls one instance of having her work being called fake, which was particularly painful for her to hear. “I’m not in the business of lying. That’s why I chose non-fiction,” she says. “I think it makes you connect to my writing more if you feel like you know me.”

To emphasize how serious she is about not lying, she confesses to me that she has never lied to her therapist. The only time she came close was when she answered “I don’t remember” to a question she and her therapist both knew she remembered. They shared a knowing laugh about it and moved on, so it doesn’t fully count.

Because her work is so personal to her experiences, it can be discouraging when she shares a piece of herself with the world and social media presents a speed bump. The algorithms of the social media platforms she uses to share her work are ever-changing, never clear, and always frustrating. 

She will follow certain ‘rules’ to stay on the algorithm’s good side because she knows the reach of her account will suffer if she doesn’t, but she sets certain boundaries, like not posting on weekends, to keep herself from burning out. “It's my art,” says Williams. “So to have to cater to algorithms and trends is really difficult.” 

She endures the frustration because she cares about her work. “I'm in a weird spot of, I don't necessarily have a career, but I don’t necessarily not have a career. I have people like reaching out to me,” she says, gesturing towards me, “which is so exciting for me, but I'm not making a living off writing yet.”

Even though it can be exhausting trying to get her work out there, the writing process will always be one she loves. “The act of writing itself is such a joy to me,” she shares.

She notes that finding time for writing can often be as simple as finding time for noticing. She frequently finds herself writing about moments in her mind as they’re happening as a way of meditating on the present. 

She also finds time for dreaming about the future. “When I think about my career, I feel like I want to do a million things. It’s hard for me to narrow it down,” she says. After a pause, she adds “For certain, a book.”

When listing off all of the work she’d love to do in her career, like profiles through observation alone or songwriting, she realizes that there is no one career that captures all she wants to do. “My dream career is just being someone who’s around,” she says with a laugh.

She has some exciting projects on the horizon, but for now she is focusing on her corner of the internet. “If I had to do copywriting for the rest of my life just to get this newsletter to stay where it is at this many people, I would absolutely have the time of my life. I’m very content with being where I am,” she says before stepping back out of The Grey Dog’s chitter chatter and back into the gentle hum of the city.