On their website, The Guardian Study describes itself as “a free study that screens newborns for additional genetic conditions not currently included in standard newborn screening.” When I consented to participate, I did not understand that this study is also funded and orchestrated by three biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies (GeneDx, Illumina, and Sanofi). They are partnered with the hospital rather than part of it.

5 weeks later, a genetic counselor called me as I left a coffee shop in my neighborhood. I was informed that my son, Harmony, had a mutation on his RAI1 gene.

“Mutations on this gene can cause a rare, severe neurological and developmental disease called Smith-Magenis Syndrome. Symptoms include neurological and developmental delays, trouble latching, swallowing, building muscle tone, and in some cases, seizure disorders.”

I was told there was a 50% chance this would be a “false positive” result, and that additional testing would take 1 month. In the meantime, they said, I could “look [the syndrome] up online.”

When we hung up, the counselor emailed me Harmony’s results. “Increased risk of having a genetic condition” was written in bold. I didn’t understand the scientific language in his results, attached as a 7-page PDF.

As the counselor from The Guardian Study suggested, we Googled SMS. And like Google does when you ask it about a medical syndrome (or symptoms), Google returned the worst-case scenario: images of children suffering from severe cases of SMS, which altered their facial features and caused problems with neurological development, muscle growth, and cognition. Because I had no concerns about Harmony’s health or development prior to the phone call, I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing online and the child in front of me.

I called her back.

Why hadn’t The Guardian Study seen this mutation before? She didn’t know. Had anyone else? She didn’t know. Harmony was not having any symptoms. She said that was reassuring, but that he could develop them later. Or not. They didn’t know.

To contextualize his results, DNA from each of his parents (Sean and me) would be tested for the same RAI1 abnormality. The logic was: if either of us had the same mutation, but neither of us had the syndrome, Harmony’s mutation was inherited and harmless. They could dismiss the mutation as a “false positive” — the best outcome. Because they’d “never seen it before,” if the gene mutation happened spontaneously and on its own (not from us), they wouldn’t know whether or not to be concerned, and we would be advised to “monitor him indefinitely for signs.”

The Guardian Study would mail us DNA swab kits. We would complete the kits ourselves and mail them back. I thought this was a casual solution to what I found to be a terrifying potentiality.

Groping for control in a situation that felt volatile, I spent the weekend engaged in magical thinking, afraid to jinx myself by talking about it too much or too little, looking for signs in what other people said, in the patterns on my houseplants. Imagining every instance I’d been rude or condescending, I feared karmic punishment. I wasn’t eating or sleeping much. My milk supply decreased.

“Like God has a loaded gun held to his head and I’m waiting to see whether or not he feels like blowing it off,” I told my friend when he asked how I was doing.

I reached out to a pathologist friend of mine, whom I met on Instagram and bonded with over our shared love for antiques. During an hour-long phone call, he explained genetics, then contextualized Harmony’s results. I learned that 90% of the recorded cases of SMS were caused by gene deletions (an entire part of the DNA gone missing). Harmony had what was essentially a typo on a different part of his gene:

“If I misspelled antique as antigue, you would still understand what I’m saying. And hopefully this is just that: a meaningless mutation that doesn’t affect the way the gene functions.”

When a person is diagnosed with SMS, he explained, their specific genetic mutation is recorded and published in a searchable international medical database. Harmony’s mutation had “never been seen before” because it had not been recorded or linked to SMS.

Without a reason — like symptoms — to test this gene, RAI1 is typically unexamined. Examining genes linked to rare syndromes without a known cause presented a problem: like conducting a detailed building inspection, one might discover a variety of abnormalities, imperfections, and details that were “not up to code.”

All of us have hundreds of often harmless mutations in our DNA that we never know or think about. Without nuanced interpretation, these mutations can appear malignant and threatening.

Over the weekend, I also learned that The Guardian Study was not part of the hospital, but a privately run study fueled by corporate investors (specifically, three publicly traded biotech companies: GeneDx, Illumina, and Sanofi).

SMS has been studied since 1982, when it was first referred to as “17p Deletion Syndrome.” Since then, no recorded case of SMS shared the same mutation—or even the same class of mutation — as Harmony’s. Was it possible he could be the first case in the world to have this specific mutation? Yes, though statistically unlikely. Was it more likely that his mutation did not cause any symptoms, and was never recorded for that reason? Yes.

My friend texted me a link. In 2024, The Guardian Study acknowledged what they called their “limitations” in a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA: “[unknown] negative impact of unnecessary assessments and interventions.” The paper, written by many of the employees and shareholders of GeneDx and Illumina, claimed that screening results would be delivered by a geneticist, with “particular attention paid to providing families [...] with sufficient information.” Finally, the paper noted that The Guardian Study had “longer-than-normal” wait times for results. Mailing us DNA swabs, asking us to mail them back, and waiting a few additional weeks for the lab to process them seemed unusually casual for a study whose own private investors performed the lab work.

Without a geneticist or doctor from The Guardian Study to contextualize his screening results, I was like an animal left in a too-small cage, etching a circular path in the earth as I ran through the circular logic of possible outcomes over and over.

I suspected that the genetic counselor who delivered our screening results was The Guardian Study’s budget-friendly messenger, sent to fall on the proverbial sword of delivering harrowing and possibly devastating news to confused parents.

“50% of my job is terrorizing families only to later tell them it was nothing,” she told me.

On Tuesday, I attended my 6-week postpartum follow-up with my OB. I was stressed out, I confessed, and filled her in. She frowned a deep, wide frown of disapproval.

“He’s not in the literature,” she said, “and he’s thriving.” She was angry about the way the results were communicated to us.

The following day, the genetic counselor called to offer us a Zoom meeting with a geneticist at The Guardian Study. Though I knew the odds were in our favor, the order of events and lack of information from The Guardian Study traumatized me. I declined to attend the call, allowing Sean to speak with the geneticist from The Guardian Study on his own.

The geneticist began their 8 a.m. Saturday morning Zoom call by informing him: I have the same RAI1 mutation as Harmony, rendering his abnormal result “a false positive.”

“We don’t want to overwhelm parents with too much information,” she said about the lack of context provided with his initial screening results. Sean reminded her that the counselor had told us to “Google it.”

She grimaced.

“50% of families who receive false positive results never answer our follow-up surveys,” she said, “so we don’t know how they feel or how we can improve.”

“There’s your data. They’re probably traumatized and never want to think about this again.”

Relieved, I reviewed the past week and my tendency to fixate on negative potential outcomes when I feel out of control. No matter how many reassuring statistics I discovered and repeated, I kept returning to the same ominous question: what if?

I thought about the hospital room on the high-risk floor, where I stayed for a week after Harmony was born. Stir-crazy from shuffling up and down the same fluorescent-lit halls twice a day, I eagerly awaited the next time my blood pressure would be taken (every four hours), hoping the numbers would decrease.

Though I yearned to sit in the oversized, fluffy outdoor chair I’d purchased for my backyard and watch the springtime flowers blooming, I found the hospital’s predictable monotony comforting. The insular bubble of scheduled medical monitoring, IV drips, and bandage changes provided me with a sense of security. Tucked away on the 14th floor, we were hidden and protected from the outside world. Once we passed through the large glass doors, we would be on our own.

I recalled the woman who asked me if I wanted to participate in The Guardian Study, one of the many medical staff who came and went throughout the day. She wore a lab coat. I assumed she was a doctor working at the hospital.

“Why would someone say no to this?” I asked. Because I wanted to take advantage of anything that could help me care for Harmony, I assumed participation would only be beneficial.

“I have no idea,” she said.

CONTENT ADVISORY/TRIGGER WARNING: This is a horror story. It contains violence, depictions of self-harm, depression, suicide, and animal abuse. If you're not in a space to read disturbing content, this is not for you.

Like always, the hall outside his room was dark. It funneled him through its dim beige innards to the bathroom, the matte walls static and grainy, like he could reach his arm inside and get trapped there. Darren made wide strides back to his room, hips twinging and strained, and closed the hollow-core door behind him. He dropped back into his chair, the stained fabric time-worn and cradling his shape.

Enshrouded by the blue light of his laptop, he faced away from the door. Darren liked to imagine himself in a room with no exit; beyond the glow, the outside world was foreboding. Nights like these, when no one was home, or worse, when someone was, but he couldn’t be sure, made him think of that experiment where the cat didn’t really exist trapped in the box if no one was there to acknowledge it. Where was the cat during the moments of its nonexistence?

He clicked a link in his inbox. A headline in tall black letters declared: Online Cult Convinces Teen to Kill Himself in Just 1 Hour. His bleary eyes skimmed the words biblical levels of evil.

He recognized the dead boy’s photos: Caleb’s chalky crooked teeth, close-cropped hair likely hacked into clumsy shape by Mall Cuts for $15. The article memorialized his fondness for animals and art, especially watercolor painting. It accused a nihilistic Satanic cult of preying on unsuspecting Caleb, luring him into their dark web chat room with false promises of friendship and camaraderie. Caleb, the article stated, was posting about watercolor techniques on a painting forum when he fell victim to this biblically sinister chat room -- proof that his demise was unpredictable and inevitable, like a rare degenerative disease.

One hour.

Darren and the few dozen others who populated the chat room he’d created were in contact with Caleb for nine full months before he killed himself. Each night after midnight, Caleb snuck online when his parents were in bed to commiserate about his existential loneliness and self-loathing. Darren believed Caleb’s decision to engage with the chat was an expression of Caleb’s autonomy. Like picking up a shit-stained dollar on the street, Darren knew that most people wasted their precious free will on frivolous and self-destructive indulgences.

If Caleb were to hang himself in the parking lot of a nearby thrift store, Darren reasoned, he should at least livestream it -- inspo for ppl scared to end the bullshit misery that is life, it’s p much the only meaningful thing u can leave behind.

If anyone was to blame, he thought, it was Caleb’s parents, dreaming while their son wept and typed. Wasn’t their blind trust a form of abandonment? To alleviate their guilt, they mystified the slow unfurling of Caleb’s final months with sensationalistic buzzwords like evil and unspeakable.

In spite of himself, he laughed. Darren felt a pang; he understood what it was like to hope someone would open your door, knowing they would not. If his parents were irresponsible enough to think Caleb’s suicide was the result of a one-hour conversation, he would take credit for it. He would gloat about it.

Darren File>saved the article into the same folder where he’d stored Calebdeth.mov and x’d out of it.

Someone commented, I feel bad for his dad.

Why are you moralfagging in a harm chat? He replied.

Hardly having moved except for his clammy hands shooting fingers out over the keyboard, the sun forged razor-thin lines around the cracks in his blinds. He clicked on a video link.

A montage of thin white girls cutting themselves, set to house music. The one who opened her thigh didn’t mean to go so deep, he thought. A thin black line appeared beneath her trembling hand. Then the flesh parted, a marbled yellow of fat glowing and limned in red, the opened chasm bisecting a forest of partially healed red and green scars.

A gentle knock at his door that he couldn’t be sure was in his house or in his video. He ignored it.

The video cut to the next clip, no context: a girl with long, straight brown hair wearing a neon pantsuit sat on a concrete floor, staring down at her right arm. She made fast hand motions with her left, the way one might rip off a band-aid, each motion sending a new rivulet of blood cascading onto her concrete floor.

He could tell how experienced they were by the number of scars they had. Some were surely institutionalized once before and would be again, if they lived that long. A limb that seemed constructed of scars, stiff with thick skin. The precise movement of a girl’s delicate hand opening a vein, the blood arcing out in a forceful stream.

His name was called, full of trepidation, contaminated by hope.

Darren?

He ignored it.

The girl drew spirals on the bathroom floor with herself. Some clips showed blood pulsing like music, blood moving in time to a heartbeat.

Listen — we’re doing a family trip to the shore tomorrow, with dad and your sister. Just for the weekend. Shower and pack a bag. Shower.

They peeled back their layers, searching for the next, then the next. Like something would surprise or enlighten them. But it was just more of the same blood. The video ended and offered him options: replay, comment, or forward to a friend.

That was such a good one, he wrote.

Darren would not admit that the beach terrified him. The dark, undulating waters, its hidden slimes and spiny organisms writhing in the dark. Taking his shirt off was out of the question.

He flipped through his chats. A girl calling herself Dolly had sent him twenty messages, imploring him to respond. He’d ignored her all day, but now lit up her inbox, sending her $40 on Cashapp. Apology gift, he wrote, selecting the gift emoji, then the smiling emoji with one tear dripping from its remorseful eye. Hi bb, he wrote, sorry I was kinda depressed today...I no u understand.

He flipped back to videos; a man sawing through his dick with a serrated kitchen knife.

Why are some retards so obsessed with violating their own dick and balls? He snapped his laptop shut and stuffed it in a bag with some balled-up shorts and unwashed t-shirts.

The three-hour drive down to the beach was hot and bright. Darren squinted at his phone, ignoring the creeping nausea of car sickness as his parents punctured the silence with benign observations about roadside businesses that had changed or remained the same. When they arrived, his family checked into what his mother called a skank rat hotel. His parents took one bed, his sister the other, and Darren flung a sleeping bag onto the floor in the corner of the room. He unpacked his laptop and slipped it between the rustling polyester leaves.

At dinner at a chain restaurant with bright red signage depicting dancing lobsters and crabs, Darren pushed away a half-finished plate of sea critters chopped into unidentifiable segments and fried golden-brown. He wandered onto the boardwalk, squinting against daylight, passing through gift shops and under amusement park rides, glancing up at the gaping mouths of smiling and screaming passengers. He remembered a compilation of amusement park accidents: roller coaster cars flinging themselves off-track into an unforgiving blue sky; unstable videos of small figures bouncing off hard surfaces, thought impossible to bounce from.

When he made his way back to his parents and listless sister, his mother was drinking Crown and Coke, her swollen eyes swelling. She never seemed drunk to him. She only got quiet, said something at almost a whisper to him, patted him on the leg. There was nothing on the floor, but they looked at it a lot.

In the morning, his parents sat on the sagging balcony at 10 am, chain-smoking cigarettes. His mother poured herself a Crown and Coke.

We’re going to the beach, his father announced after another cigarette. It wasn’t an invitation but a command. His father’s skin was tough all over, like jerky. It was light pink in spots and brownish in others, thick and flaking. He refused sunscreen. Darren watched him pick at a scab on his arm. He thought about the palette hidden beneath -- reds, yellows. His father was like a slowly crumbling statue: remote, regal, and dignified despite his mild decrepitude. Knowing that refusal would be seen as defiance, and defiance an invitation for consequences worse than getting sunburned at some shitty beach, Darren slunk behind his family. They ambled toward the wide, hot boulevard separating their hotel from the beach.

Darren’s shirt clung to his soft, pillowy nipples as he waded into the frigid water, swirling with caps of grimy yellow foam. He forced himself further, feeling the waterline creep up his belly like an unwanted touch. He turned toward shore to see if he could identify their hotel room from a distance. The hotel was an enormous hive of identical squares, balconies dotted with rickety plastic lawn chairs and thinning towels drying in the wind.

The force of the world slammed into his back. The wave knocked him off pale, unstable feet. Submerged and gripped by animal panic, Darren inhaled seawater as sand grated first against his ass, then ground the skin from one knee. Unsure which direction promised oxygen, he thrashed his legs, his unclipped toenails clawing at water and foam. Seconds seemed like an eternity, the purgatory of anticipating a certain death but not the moment it would arrive. Darren rolled onto one knee and pushed his head out of the water.

The salt burned his eyes as he coughed. Darren squinted through the glare and glimpsed his father’s hand hanging by his leathered side, him standing three feet deep in the surf. Darren lurched forward and grabbed at the hand for leverage to pull himself up.

Darren’s father swung his arm back as if away from a lunging dog. He folded his arms.

Stand up. You don’t need my help.

He was right. Darren didn’t need his father’s help. He spat out the bitter water and pushed himself to his feet, looking away to hide an expression he knew would be seen as weak.

They went to a comedy show in the evening. The bar had high ceilings and harsh overhead lighting. A stage, two feet high, faced the room full of high chairs and bar seating. Hardly anyone laughed. One meandering set of lackluster jokes after another, it seemed that the comedians knew each other’s routines. They reinterpreted one another’s jokes, or said I stole this joke from so-and-so, so some jokes were told several times throughout the evening. Was this what people meant when they said they were living ‘real life’ in the ‘real world’? They stayed until the end, hungry for the company of everyone else in the room, even if they’d never speak to them. His mother ordered another Crown and Coke at last call and watched Darren’s sister stare at a lanky comedian in the corner of the bar, laughing with his comedian friends.

A man is not going to empower you with anything. He is going to enslave you, Darren’s mother said to her. Her boyfriend had broken up with her two days earlier, avoiding the trip. She smiled, more like a grimace, the tolerant face of someone biting their tongue.

That night, after everyone went to bed, Darren locked himself in the hotel bathroom. He balanced his laptop on the sink edge, butting up against the faucet’s calcium-encrusted mouth. He entered his chat. There were 23 people logged on, including Dolly.

yo i was thinking, someone said. u should make a sacrifice for us. u should get ur kitten and bite its little head fucking head off rn and let us all watch.

The little ellipses, signaling her typing, appeared, then disappeared. He imagined her parsing a response, trying to figure out whether they were joking.

ok well if not i’ll jus send this shit to ur school and also print it out n mail it to ur fam.

Darren knew she’d seen his name appear. He imagined her watching his name as he waited on her to respond, pushing his lips together into a thin line.

Pictures appeared — a closeup of her asshole between spread cheeks, her easily identifiable room in the background, a poorly focused full body picture which included half of her face — ones she’d sent exclusively, privately, to him, after promises of secrecy and love, intermittent gifts, long conversations about television shows and existential ennui.

The pictures were no different from dozens he’d received before. It was Dolly who seemed different, an acknowledgement that annoyed as much as it enticed him. Because he wanted someone to share the images with, he’d sent them to an older guy who called himself Bobby. Bobby was the one who taught Darren how to blackmail. He’d promised to let Darren do this one alone. Darren messaged him.

? why

u r so obvious taking sooo fukin long. u want everyone to know ur a cuck? i can tell them if u want lol

The message stung, even though he knew he’d asked for it.

Darren was 8 years old when he witnessed his first murder. It was in a video, sent to him unsolicited by an unknown player in a farming simulator game he played online. The audio, like a song played in an empty room, sounded so close the event could have taken place in his room instead of in some nowhere barren field.

The video nestled inside him like a memory of his own. The first time, Darren hadn’t known how to close out of it until the video finished, only ten seconds long. Had he known, maybe he would have watched anyway. He looped it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times.

The dull flash of a fat blade. The POV of a man’s hairy, coarse hand like his own might be if he were grown, reaching down to saw the flesh of another man’s neck like cutting open an uncooked sausage, sloppy but with little resistance. Funky Town played in the background off a dented, blown-out speaker. The dying man grimaced. Darren wasn’t sure if the grimace was from pain, or the body’s involuntary reaction, or maybe it was just the emotion one thinks they should express. The anticipation of pain, he knew, could be worse than the experience of it.

This false memory replayed itself over and over, punctuating the trajectory of his unfolding days. The question of who sent it and why was backstory and context that would never be filled in.

Darren sought out more videos. They stung and jarred him with a revulsion and adrenaline he craved. His fitful sleep was marred and indistinguishable from waking moments when he remembered flashes of carnage, felt transported to rooms and open spaces he’d never visited. Captivated, he watched unluckier versions of himself endure great bodily injury or death. Glimpsing those inflicting the pain, he felt nauseous with envy.

He knew he had to pick a side and yearned to be the one meting out pain rather than the one enduring it.

It was appropriate, Darren told himself now, to be the one who taught Dolly about betrayal, an act almost indistinguishable from love. He thought of his father, how omniscient and unforgiving his face looked when he glanced down at him with mild embarrassment in the wide gray sea.

Ten minutes later, Dolly was streaming. 23 viewers were audience to her poorly lit image. She hunched over, slouched and cross-legged in what looked like a closet. The ends of cheap polyester dresses hung down around the crown of her head. She clutched a small writhing animal by its black homunculus body. Darren activated his microphone.

Are you crying? He laughed. If she was too stupid to realize her reputation was the least valuable thing in her life, she deserved to continue this circle, which never seemed to close. There was always someone next in line. His throat tightened. The adrenaline made him hard, resulting in an anger at his unpredictable moods and pathetic desires that were somehow both weak and impossible to kill.

Dolly hesitated. Her uncertainty communicated trust, despite the words coming from his mouth. What would it be like to comfort a girl, her soft skin clammy and trembling under his hands? When he’d confessed to her that he locked himself in his room for weeks at a time, avoiding the barbed words and punishing stares from other people that made him so anxious he’d hide in the bathroom and vomit, she hadn’t acted surprised. He usually made up some bullshit to sound less extreme but still relatable — I hate going to school so I just sit in the back. But something about her stoic, curious demeanor inspired him to be honest, just this once. She’d nodded and said you just want to feel safe. Like a reflex, he put his lips against his microphone and spoke.

Hurry up retard.

She sobbed and, in one swift motion, brought the squirming thing to her mouth, bit and twisted, pulled until its body was a tiny headless horseman, flailing as she dropped it into the triangle between her crossed legs, her gaping mouth dropping the bulbous little head after it.

When he fell asleep at dawn, he dreamed he was inside a house on a too-steep hill surrounded by smaller hills. In the distance, a sprawling factory ground slabs of rock into dust, the tiny grains heaped into piles big as buildings. The machines emitted an unceasing grinding, as if they were devouring the earth itself. His friends were inside the house with him. He didn’t question that.

A storm descended, raining in enormous frigid sheets. He looked out of the window at the dips between the hills, filling with dark water, and knew he had to leave. The landscape was horrible. Unsure he had a home of his own, he was compelled to find out. Darren’s friends, the only thing he would miss (and he would miss them terribly), reclined on couches and chairs in the expansive living room. They waved as he headed out, the rain giving no sign of abating, ever.

He slept until two in the afternoon. When his parents woke him up, they’d already had lunch. He stumbled after them to a western-themed photoshoot booth for tourists where everyone dressed up in itchy, heavy costumes that smelled like the skin of a thousand strangers -- hats with feathers, garter belts, buttoned vests, fake oversized revolvers. When the photographer raised his camera, Darren put the gun to his head and smiled. His mother gasped. Cut it out, would you? Her displeasure elicited unexpected laughter. Like always, he thought, upset about the dumbest shit.

It was their last day there. In the evening, they sat at a seafood restaurant on the beach, the air filled with cigarette smoke and the rank stench of overused frying oil.

The water ebbed towards low tide under a bruised, mottled blue sky.

Darren folded his arms, staring across the water. There was so much of it. He tried to appreciate its infinite, unknowable depths. Was he doing it? He couldn’t tell.

Children stumbled after their mothers on the shore, windmilling their arms in dumb circles. A woman in a black bikini stood in the waves, speaking to a man, his hairy belly hanging over the waistband of his swim shorts. If he could get them alone, he knew, he could change their lives. False memories rose and receded inside of him like the tide; he imagined what the children would look like, gripped by fear, or vacant, glassy, and dead, their skin yellowing. He imagined the woman, now smiling and gesticulating, pinched and restrained by hard leather straps and rough plastic zip ties.

He thought of The Land Before Time, one of the few movies he remembered watching as a little kid in front of a fat gray television. A group of orphaned toddler dinosaurs searched for a promised land they were unaware had been scorched off their planet, a home that was still their home, but worse. The landscape, stripped of comforting qualities and replaced with nature’s indifference, promised only doom. He always thought it would have been better if they had died along with their mothers.

These are the same plastics as last year; we should have gone to another beach to experience different plastics.

Repetitive and endless, I could collect for hours each day without making a dent in the plastics washed up by high tide. I found fresh pieces with bright colors and clearly defined shapes, and brittle shards sun-bleached and sanded smooth like sea glass. Some disintegrated when I picked them up.

Patterns emerged, categories grew: toothbrushes, bottle caps, tiny plastic forks, the occasional vial of blood.

Infinity made me claustrophobic

.

In 11 years of traveling, I have never seen a plastic-free beach.

I found the same Colgate toothbrush in 12 different colors.

Articles from NPR and ScienceDirect about tracking the origins of beach plastic indicated that cruise ships often provide free toothbrushes in each room. Since 2000, multiple cruise lines have been fined tens of millions of dollars for illegally dumping garbage into the ocean -- Princess Cruises was fined $40 million in 2017, and Carnival Cruises $20 million in 2019, to name a few.

Every day, approximately 30 cruise ships pass through the Panama Canal.

Since the mass production of plastics began in the 1950s, global plastic production has only decreased due to the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 in 2020. According to Statista, 225 million metric tons of plastic were produced globally in 2004. In 2023, the number was 415 million metric tons.

I spent hours jotting down statistics, then reviewed my list of numbers, telling me the problem was worsening and unstoppable. I felt like I learned nothing.

Sisyphus faced tangible consequences: he had to roll that shit up his hill forever. The consequences of microplastics inside my body, the body of my unborn son, are yet unknown.

One day during our three-week vacation, we returned to our Airbnb with two grocery bags full of plastic.

The next, we spent the morning climbing over jagged rocks during low tide. We peered into tide pools: tiny octopi escaped under the cover of their silky black ink, spotted sharpnose puffers stared back with curious eyes, brittle starfish reached spiny arms from narrow crevices between the rocks.

We only picked up one piece today, I complained.

Some days are just tide pool days, Sean said.

(Full album of pics/videos here)

A few months after reconnecting, we sat on a blanket in the grass in Central Park and talked. Don’s Brooklyn accent and smart-ass witticisms made me feel at home. With each meeting, I shared more about my life--details about my friends, ambitions for my writing, desires to create art and make new connections. He told me stories about my late mother. When Don regarded me as a fierce and independent person, telling me he respected the life I built, I beamed.

Hoping to deepen our bond, I shared a recent concern of mine: a friend of mine was struggling, his business was in a lull, and he was stressed about paying his bills. I didn’t know what I could do, if anything, to support him or alleviate his stress.

You’re just like your mother, Don responded through laughter, always taking in strays.

To a person passing by us on the grass, we embodied the relationship I craved: a parent and child enjoying the mild spring weather, spending quality time together as the world passed by. I thought about all the times I’d been on the outside of this interaction, looking on at smiling families with bittersweet envy.

His comment curdled inside me. I didn’t ask questions. I laughed with him.

My refusal to question his statement denied him the opportunity to reveal more about his character. Telling myself he was “only joking,” I came to regard our lunches and meetups after which I didn’t feel hurt in some way as victories.

When I relapsed in 2018, I visited Don at his family home with my then-alcoholic boyfriend. Don knew I was, at least up until recently, several years clean from drug and alcohol addiction. He opened an expensive bottle of whiskey at the table, which we finished over dinner. He opened another. I drove for over an hour home. Several months later, I broke up with my boyfriend and cut alcohol out of my life.

Sometime that same year, Don stopped taking his medications for depression and PTSD. He told me therapy “didn’t work,” and his best course of action was “self-medicating” with alcohol. Avoiding accepting who he was or what he was telling me, I focused on creating boundaries I could set for our time together that I hoped would manipulate him into becoming a version of himself I enjoyed being around, at least while we were in the same room.

When I asked Don not to drink at our lunches, he laughed.

I won’t have my one little beer if it bothers you so much.

At holidays in his family home, Don popped his first bottle of wine at 11 AM and disappeared to his bedroom by 7 PM. I cringed when I learned a family gathering was scheduled in a public place, like a restaurant; he repeated the same homophobic slurs and racist jokes in an announcer’s voice, lamenting that he wasn’t allowed to make a joke anymore when nobody laughed.

I was coming to understand that I was no longer the girl who needed her father in her life at any cost. I still yearned for a father, so acutely that looking at happy families often brought tears to my eyes.

“I can be your father now,” Don had told me during our first lunch together, knowing both of my parents who raised me had died.

“I had a father, but I would like to be companions,” I’d responded.

Over sandwiches at a diner in lower Manhattan during one of our first meetings together, Don grabbed my hands across the table. Though I’d asked him not to, he tightened his grip, his rings digging into my skin. He told me how much he loved me, how badly he’d fucked up by not being in my life during my formative years. I regarded him as a stranger, and his intensity frightened me.

Out of fear and insecurity, I chose to conceal myself from him, suppressing my questions and thoughts until they piled up inside me like discarded items of clothing mildewing in a cramped, unventilated room.

After several months of a silence that was becoming more common between Don and I, he sent me a text to celebrate International Daughter’s Day. Beneath one of the few pictures of us together, he signed it: your absent father.

Why would you sign it like that? I wrote back.

Like what? He asked.

I revised my goodbye message a dozen times.

With each draft, I inched closer to an honesty I previously prevented myself from expressing:

Beneath my anger, I’m hurt and disappointed. I hoped we could be companions, but I feel alienated by your drinking and abusive behavior. I grew up convinced you did not love me, but found a man who did not love himself. I hope you will get help and quit drinking. I am asking you, with sadness and remorse, to please not contact me again.

Though I’d asked him not to, I can now see that I subconsciously hoped he would respond.

Respecting my request, he never did.

Joey Cleanup is an old Brooklyn guy in his 70s, a staple in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood for decades. He wears thick-rimmed glasses and has a snaggletooth that sticks out when he speaks or habitually smacks his lips in thought. I’ve known him for so long that I no longer remember how I met him, but we were likely first acquainted through his job: people pay him to pull up in a graffiti-smothered box truck and haul away whatever they consider garbage, junk.

Knowing I opened a seasonal vintage store out of my garage this summer, Joey Cleanup called me at the end of August, asking if I could come by and look at some things he wanted to get rid of.

The morning of our meeting, Joey Cleanup unlocked a battered wooden door and led me down 30 steep, wide steps past rusted car fenders and old machinery. We arrived in a wide basement with low ceilings. The room was packed with open metal shelving, like an old evidence locker, but instead of neatly organized protective boxes lining the shelves, there was a random assortment of what typically fills basements nationwide: stuff. Rusted car parts, snowglobes, stacks of moldering loose records, miscellaneous kitchenware, a porno mag from 2007 that promised to be “packed with raw and uncensored acts of sexual depravity.”

Picking through the aisles, I searched for items to resell in my store. He looked at the small pile I had accrued.

That’s all you want?

I paid for my items and carted them home.

The first thing I planned to sort through was a sun-bleached plastic Coleman cooler full of jewelry; maybe I’d find an errant gold piece. Opening the lid, a nostalgic sensation crept over me. I scooped up a tangled mass of necklaces, earrings, and baubles. A green powder disintegrating from the tarnished metal rubbed off on my hand. Spotting a small paper label at the bottom of the cooler, I recognized the handwriting as my mother’s.

Almost ten years ago, upon inheriting a mass of hoarded housewares, trinkets, furniture, and vintage jewelry from my mother after her death, I called Joey Cleanup. He’d taken items I considered irredeemable: mold-damaged or corroded by the salty water that flooded her storage during Hurricane Sandy.

Now the jewelry ran between my fingers. I recognized the noxious greenish tint of saltwater damage, the corroded chalkiness filming over the gold tone and glass jewels. After sitting untouched in Joey’s basement for ten years, I’d purchased my own discarded items back.

Noticing the stillness and quiet of my living room, I felt myself on the precipice of several different reactions. I could be resentful towards myself for overlooking my connection to this stuff while in his basement, angry at my perceived failure to be a discerning buyer. I could feel disturbed facing these items again. But I remembered a million moments since getting rid of all that stuff when I wished I could look through it again, from my perspective now, instead of when my eyes were clouded by grief and an urgent need to divest myself of it.

Nostalgic in a way I hadn’t been when my grief was fresh, I sorted through the jewelry one more time: there was an old Tiffany’s anchor charm I wore in high school, a choker necklace I’d loved in middle school during my goth phase. With patience, I picked out a handful of sterling silver items, separated the few undamaged pieces that would still sell, and put the rest out on the street in a clean fabric tote bag. In the morning, it was gone.

This diorama is a 9.5x7.75 wooden box constructed using a grey picture frame, reinforced by four unequal, rough-hewn 2x4s nailed together at the joints. The backing is a piece of pressboard nailed onto the 2x4s. Inside the box, a man made out of air-dry clay clutches a suitcase and stoops to pet his clay dog. Both figures are attached to the background with two two-inch drywall screws, whose sharp ends jut out from the pressboard. Behind the man and his dog, a background is painted: two thin trees guard the pathway to a small white house, the entire scene bisected by a golden field and deep blue sky. The trees are so thickly painted on as to become sculptural, standing up from the board. Smears of color-- sky blue, shirt red -- are stamped in haphazard blotches along the sides and back of the diorama.

Purchased from an upstate junk store with no known provenance, this piece is unsigned.

Its raw materials are sharp and crude, leading me to believe this was built by adult hands. While this may be a fictional scene, I imagine the maker as the little clay man, petting what was his own dog. Maybe he made a map of his own life, cementing his daily ritual in time, creating a small shrine to the conduits of his joy: an homage to his companionship with his dog, to a certain time of day when the afternoon is cresting but the work day has ended, to a certain time of year in late summer when the switchgrass has yellowed but the trees resist fall, standing green and lush.

Maybe this person was rallying against the fragility of memory, a sentiment that now hangs above my desk, open to my interpretation.

“Soon after the death of his lover Stephen Earabino from AIDS, Los Angeles conceptual artist [John] Boskovich discovered that Earabino’s family had completely cleared out his apartment, including the artist’s possessions, save for the electric box fan in this work. An entire person, existence, and relationship had been erased, like so many were during the AIDS crisis. Boskovich encased the fan in Plexiglas as a kind of evidence and added cutouts to allow its circulated air to escape and be felt by the viewer, almost like an exhalation. In a sense restoring Earabino’s breath, at least as a facsimile in memoriam, Boskovich makes a tender and brokenhearted gesture toward some form of eternal life.”

For most of my twenties, I used a secret code to communicate with the men I dated--expecting that if they truly knew me, if we truly shared a connection, they should be capable of understanding the world from my perspective and therefore predict what I wanted or how I was feeling in any given situation. Because no one I interacted with possessed this impossible psychic quality, I was often accused of being aloof and indifferent. Reading the above caption reminded me of one of my favorite books at the time, Dennis Cooper’s My Loose Thread.

In My Loose Thread, a depressed, sexually confused high school boy named Larry is hired to kill another depressed high school boy, Bill, and retrieve his journal for $500. Because it’s implied that the journal contains confessions of Bill’s gay, possibly non-consensual encounters with the guy paying Larry, Larry is instructed to destroy the journal without reading it. But Larry does read Bill’s journal before killing him, and its contents drive Larry insane with conflicting desires and remorse.

To Larry, reading Bill’s journal symbolizes an impassable form of intimacy. Before his death, Larry watches Bill scribble in his journal—he often writes in the presence of others—and locks it with a tiny padlock: a reminder to those watching that he is both himself and a second, secret person, the version recorded and stored away in his notebook.

Excerpts from the journal are referenced like religious texts; like something too holy to repeat, the journal is never cited. Larry carries it around with him for days after the murder, then burns it. The weight of his intimacy with Bill as he reads his private thoughts--an intimacy he’s never known, having grown up in an emotionally distant and frigid family--threatens to unglue him. Bill functions as a funhouse mirror of Larry, confronting him with his repressed desires suddenly laid bare. Bill understands Larry when Larry struggles to understand himself. Seeing himself in Bill ignites Larry’s bitter resentment.

After reading My Loose Thread, I imagined a different outcome: one in which Larry doesn’t murder Bill. Because I concealed my emotions behind stoic behavior I believed would protect me from possible rejection, I understood Larry and Bill’s opaque, codified relationship as the same kind I expected from men I dated. I thought the most intimate thing you could do for someone was allow them to read your journal, to see the world the way you understood it when you thought no one else was watching, when you were stripped of all performative inclinations. I imagined them in love.

Fuck that, I said.

Never fuck with someone who has control over the rest of your day, she told me.

Though I never apologized to the guard, this event marked the moment I began crafting a cloying and saccharine personality to use with police and other authority figures.

My first arrest was a thinly veiled retaliation for my shitty attitude.

One night in 2013, after all the local bars closed in Austin, Texas, I returned with some friends to an apartment complex to swim in the community pool. I had no swimsuit and it was 3 AM, so I stripped my clothes off and entered the pool naked.

When the police arrived to address a noise complaint, they told me to get out and get dressed. Climbing out of the pool, I rolled my eyes and laughed. I pulled clothes over my wet body.

Turn around and place your hands behind your back, one said.

The cop looked at my ID.

Brooklyn, huh? Do all you New York people think you can come down here and do whatever you want?

No sir, I said, trying to do damage control.

Had I made an embarrassed spectacle of myself, I’d probably be heading back to my friend’s apartment to sleep off my hangover on her sagging couch.

When I flew back to New York, I ignored my summons until it turned into a warrant, then ignored the warrant. At that time in my life, consequences were not real to me. Self-employed as a ghostwriter, I had ample money to throw at the problem and make it go away--even if I were eventually faced with extradition, which I doubted due to the minor nature of the charges. I was proud of being a high-functioning addict, someone with a steady job and income.

After quitting hard drugs and binge drinking two years later, I hired a lawyer to represent me so I didn’t have to fly back to Texas to appear in court. I paid to make it go away.

Growing up, I witnessed my mother’s contradicting attitude towards the police: taking its existence for granted, she viewed authority with arbitrary deference and defiance. She chose rules to abide by and endeavored to figure out how she could break others with the smallest amount of consequences possible. From her, I learned that I could get away with a lot of shit if I played the game correctly. I adopted her gamified view of the law.

Unlike my mother’s neutral but fearful view of the police, my sugary affect was secretly venomous and bitter. I grew up listening to punk music with politically charged lyrics criticizing the government and calling out injustice and the absurdities of societal norms in the USA, with sardonic lyrics like Lagwagon’s Lullaby (Big brother isn’t watching anymore/he knows we are distracted and absorbed) and Propaghandi (I carried their anthem/convinced it was mine).

I knew that being an attractive white girl with a pretty smile made it easier for me to skirt consequences by playing dumb, smiling and apologizing while making prolonged eye contact as a display of transparency. Looking back on the times I avoided arrest--and the drawn-out court cases to follow, stamps on my record, money lost to the judicial system--I’m relieved. I don’t wish I had paid more fines and spent time in jail. At the same time, being arrested may have encouraged me to seek help for my addictions sooner. Real consequences--losing clients because I was locked up for too long to meet deadlines, lifestyle-disrupting fines--could have been sobering. Instead, every time I was overlooked or let go was considered a victory. Affirmation that I’d played the game well.

A year or so before getting clean, my old roommate and I spent a stint of several weeks watching every single season of COPS, which I downloaded onto my laptop in one enormous ZIP file, for a few hours each evening. We played a drinking game based on the show. The rules changed based on how many we were, how drunk we wanted to get, and how quickly—a police chase, someone being tased, drug use on camera, any instance of child abuse or neglect.

COPS showed me what I’d not yet become: sloppy, pathetic, broadcasted on television as I stared wild-eyed into the wide black camera lens like a trapped animal, slurring my feeble defense or playing dumb despite the drugs being pulled from my purse and laid across the hood of my car, a tiny museum of my illicit activities. I looked at the people on COPS and said I’m not that bad, or I would know better than to do that.

On a random freezing January weeknight, I finished a candlelit dinner at June, an upscale tapas restaurant and natural wine bar in Brooklyn, with my friend, Tasha. We paid, left, and shuffled through the cold to my car so I could drive her home. I turned the key, and almost like my ignition started up their car too, a nearby cop car lit up in its parking spot. It pulled in behind me.

Hello sir, good evening sir, of course sir.

The cop informed me I had a warrant in Austin, Texas. Like I’d seen so many people do on COPS, I protested my feeble protest: but sir, I swear I’ve paid it already.

The computer system said otherwise.

He arrested me. I laughed as they snapped cuffs on; the irony of being arrested on what seemed like the most benign night of my life struck me as comical.

In a cell at the 76th precinct, the officer confirmed the computer system had made an error: I no longer had pending charges in Texas.

However, he’d discovered a second warrant: a $20 unpaid “dog off-leash” ticket I’d gotten in 2010.

I was led to the back of a white police van and driven to the jail on Atlantic Avenue, where I shared a cell with 20 other women.

When I stood in front of the judge the next morning, he flicked his eyes towards and away from me.

Who wasted my time with this? Six months good behavior and your record is expunged, he announced.

I’d been caught in the tide of a bureaucratic system operating largely on chance: the chance of a computer error, the chance of being pulled over by an officer in a good or bad mood, the officer’s arbitrary decision--a decision that had less to do with the law than it had to do with what he felt like dealing with that evening.

At the 76th precinct, the other cops had laughed at the rookie cop who arrested me.

Why did you waste your time with this, bro?

Watching COPS no longer feels like looking into a funhouse mirror. Because I find the monotonous churn of one dysfunctional vignette after another boring and depressing, I don’t actively watch the show anymore. But sometimes, if I’m at a hotel flipping through the hotel television channels, I pause if I stumble across COPS to see what the police officers deem worth their time these days.

I recently rediscovered a journal entry I wrote in 2011, torn from my old diary and stuffed in a shoebox full of loose papers and photographs. It resonated with me like a poem written by someone I once knew, full of grief and hope: mournful for what’s passed, looking toward an unknown future. Since writing the entry in 2011, high-rise apartment buildings have been constructed over the spot I reference below, once my secret spot: a deserted dead end by the Gowanus Canal, where I visited on evenings I wanted to be by myself, sometimes crawling through a hole in the chain-link fence to sit on a concrete ledge and dangle my legs over the sludgy water and write in my journal. Nostalgia is like an old song, unheard for years: more than a memory emerges--a hologram of my past self in time and space. Here is a time capsule from my past.

11/14/11

I’ll show you a place I used to go, I said.

He sort of laughed, like I didn’t give him a choice. Okay, he said.

It was different than I remembered: no longer dark and populated with garbage. It had been a great dumping ground, tucked away in a dead end overlooking the poisoned Gowanus canal, surrounded by nothing.

Now, a looming beige building speckled with harsh LED cone lights towered above. The lights clung to the wall like flowers on an invisible vine, projecting unforgiving light.

The garbage was gone.

Where I once stood atop a tiny mountain of black trash bags and broken glass, I was now on the swept-clean pavement.

I noticed this out loud. He made an indifferent noise; I felt embarrassed that he didn’t seem to like it there.

As we turned to leave, I spotted a shoe in the dark. It was nothing like my previous finds—office supplies, a perfectly good label maker.

Beside the shoe, a swollen notebook.

I picked up the notebook and he said, ew.

The notebook was caked with black dirt, like it had floated in a filthy puddle and later dried. It was open to a middle page—a letter. I read it out loud. The writer was lonely, maybe lamenting a dramatic breakup. When I reached the last sentence, I realized it was a kid talking about his brother’s death: You were my twin brother.

I wanted to take a picture of the book in my hands, to capture the caked dirt, the runny ink, the abandoned shoe, the chainlink fence and the canal and the smell and the soft wind which could be summer coming or going. I didn’t have my camera.

I tore out the page, folded it and put it in my pocket.

And that’s it. Things change.

You go away and when you come back the garbage mound is gone and the floors are swept.

Or maybe you don’t go away, you just fail to notice the gradual change until it comes at you all at once, barreling through your denial.

It starts with a strange letter, and you laugh. In the end, it turns somber and sad in a single sentence. The garbage is gone, the other is gone, the harsh lights are gleaming, and your new friend isn’t interested in any of it.

The paintings I preferred were endearing. They were clumsy and sincere. Expressions in portraits were optimistic or afraid, vulnerable in a way I loathed and envied and felt unable to express myself.

When I inherited my mother’s collection, I hired an art appraiser--a short, bald British man with tiny round glasses. In his portrait, he posed against a fake bookcase background. Though I didn’t know what the letters tacked onto his name meant, his list of abbreviated accolades and titles impressed me.

I showed him stacks of paintings leaning against a dusty brick wall. He flipped through them and laughed.

“It’s all so ugly,” he said.

Worrying that worthless art reflected something about me, I carried the smiling clown and his smiling dog to the curb. I propped him at the bottom of my stoop for a stranger to take when I wasn’t looking. My neighbor and good friend, Jim, was passing by. He held the painting at arm’s length, beholding something I couldn’t see.

“This is amazing.”

Over the next four years, the clown painting was a constant in my friendship with Jim. I entered his apartment and the clown confronted me, sitting on the mantle in Jim’s kitchen. Its grotesque, misshapen head, the blank and innocent eyes of its electrocuted dog. Over time, I bonded with him. I admired how he held fast to a friend who rendered life more meaningful. I adored his optimism, his unapologetic glee.

At some point, Jim propped the painting up outside. He leaned it against the windowsill of his ground-floor apartment. Its beady eyes gazed at passersby on the sidewalk. In a neighborhood where every errant “free” object is snatched off the curb within hours, no one stole the painting for over a year.

The residue of my friendship with Jim shellacked the painting with sentimental patina. When I arrived at Jim’s apartment and beheld the clown propped against the windowsill, safe for another day, I was relieved.

When Jim moved last year, he offered me the clown painting back. I framed it in an antique wooden frame with carved scrollwork corners, and hung it above my dining room table. It keeps us company at every dinner we share.

“Moving forward, while there will be essays that take longer than a month to complete, I want to deliver a monthly essay to your inbox. You can expect some shorter essays.”

Five months into 2025, I’ve already missed March and April. Watching the last Sunday of the month (my usual publishing date) come and go without anything published stresses me out. I fear disappointing those of you who look forward to a new essay.

Sometimes you message me asking when the next essay will be out.

Soon, I respond.

Because I felt irresponsible sending out the same notice twice, I avoided writing this. I told myself that because most people’s inboxes are inundated with spam, work emails, and other substacks, I shouldn’t bother people with another “update.” In honesty, I didn’t want to accept that my old schedule didn’t work for me. I feared making a change might also not work for me. And then what? Sending a third message saying oops, sorry, I’m changing again, seemed embarrassing.

Trying something new, learning it doesn’t work (or once worked and no longer does), and changing course, is part of the creative process. But while I kept my insecurities about meeting self-imposed deadlines to myself, this process took on the shape of “failure.”

Moving forward, I’m accepting that longer essays will often take longer than a month to complete. In the interim, you can expect something shorter--around 500 words--in your inbox monthly. I love to feel claustrophobic within a rule: there’s always more I want to say.

Though there’s always more I could write, and often want to, this latest pivot will help hone my focus and present a challenge.

The conversation typically unfolds in a way that leads me to see this question as two separate questions collapsed together. After many of these conversations, I now understand this question as two separate questions collapsed together.

‘When did you know you wanted to get sober?’ seeks an anecdotal moment I credit as definitive and pivotal: the exact moment I knew I wanted to quit. This moment is often referred to in recovery lingo as “rock bottom,” a revelatory scene splitting one’s life into before and after--not the before and after of addiction itself, but before acknowledging sobriety as an option and after realizing it as a need.

The second part of their question asks: what actions did I take to enter and protect my sobriety?

This essay focuses on the first question:

The short answer is that there was no single moment I can point to as a metaphorical fork in the road of my life. Instead, I look back on a multitude of moments and realizations which remain illuminated in my otherwise blurry, marred memory. Together, these memories form a map: small landmarks signaling the possibility of uncharted territory--a life outside my addict routines and impulses. Scattered throughout the last year of my 8-year addiction, none of those moments are wholly responsible for my decision to stop using on their own.

I spent the first four years of my Xanax addiction using with my friend Sam. We met in college and were inseparable after our first month of friendship.

Life was better with Sam. He made me laugh harder and more spontaneously than anyone I’d ever met. Though I hated Christmas and never got him anything, he bought me a Christmas gift every year. The people we dated were bitter and resentful of our closeness, but we were proud of their jealousy and smug about sharing a guarded and enviable bond.

A few months after we met, Sam and I tried Xanax around the same time--him for reasons I’m unsure of, me because I wanted to understand why everyone in the room seemed so quick to laugh when I felt tense and tied up inside myself. Sam graduated; I dropped out.

We moved in together and became on-again-off-again roommates for the following six years. We took long road trips together. Hungover and shitting my brains out on the side of a rural backroad at 9 in the morning, Sam called out through the open passenger side door: this is how you know we’ll be friends forever. After the trip, for reasons unknown to me, Sam quit using Xanax.

Eight months after our trip, Sam told me he was worried about me. In the wake of her cancer diagnosis, three separate doctors prescribed my mother Xanax to combat her worsening death-anxiety. I filled her prescriptions at different pharmacies in our neighborhood to avoid being flagged by suspicious pharmacists. Delighted by her (and now my) unlimited supply, I took Xanax from the moment I woke up until I passed out. Sometimes I added other shit like Valium or Oxycontin or Vicodin to refresh or mix the sensations of profound indifference with the pleasant notion my brain had been replaced with soft, thick clouds.

In my addiction, I believed Xanax kept me calm enough to face the horrors of my life but lucid enough to do the paperwork -- I worked as a ghostwriter and handled my mother’s medical affairs. The moment I felt the chemical effects waning, my frustration, grief and rage punched holes through the fog. The more I took, the more my tolerance increased, and the more pills I needed to stave off my emotions. Eager to temporarily escape reality, I consumed almost anything that came my way.

Sam confessed he’d been avoiding me due to my erratic mood swings. I felt bitter he expected me to change just because he did, to revert into a bubblier version of myself. I saw Sam’s life as full of adventure and surprises--he had a new girlfriend and was building his sound recording business--while mine was a purgatory of medical bills and hospital visits. Drugs weren’t my problem, I said: my fucked up life was.

A few weeks later, Sam moved out. I believed friends should endure each other’s hardships, and I thought Sam had abandoned me during one of the hardest times of my life. Six months later, my mother died. I quit all drugs cold.

A year into my sobriety, I received an email from Sam.

I hope you are well. Even though things didn't work out with us, when I think of you, I hope the best for you always. How are you doing? We had a great run. Sending love.

In the months following Sam’s move, I hung onto his words during moments that stick out in my mind as crucial and accumulative. In one, I stood in an industrial bathroom--the doctor’s office or Home Depot--under harsh fluorescent lighting. In the mirror, the swollen bags under my eyes seemed to weigh my puffy cheeks down. I regarded myself with surprise, like I’d woken up to find my face disfigured. I didn’t know what day of the week it was. I looked at myself the way my few friends looked at me during lunches and dinners I nodded out at: with a mixture of pity, irritation, and concern. I looked forward to nothing.

I remembered what Sam said. I thought I saw what he saw.

Several months later, I sat with my mother on her hospital bed during her last few days. She looked at me with a glassy expression. I watched her dying twice, the essence of herself lost beneath white clumps of anxiety medication tossed onto her in handfuls like sand onto an extinguishing fire. I was afraid that when she died I would die too, like by magical force I would stop existing along with her. I knew this sense of synchronicity stemmed from the insatiable manner in which I took my mother’s medication, without concern either of us would ever run out.

I remembered what Sam said. I remembered us sitting across the wobbly wooden table on my balcony.

Sam was looking out for me at the expense of his comfort. Our conversation wasn’t about wishing I would be fun for his entertainment, but about watching someone he loved recede further into a sloppy and unhinged spiral that threatened my life.

Revisiting our conversation highlighted how little control I had over my life and myself.

I responded to Sam’s email and we made lunch plans. We met at a local Thai restaurant. I told Sam I quit using Xanax a little over a year prior.

That’s great! How’d you do it?

I thought a lot about the time you told me you were worried about me.

Sam laughed. Do you remember how you responded?

No.

You told me to “go fuck myself.”

As Sam recalled, I told him he didn’t understand shit about my life. I villainized him for his honesty and accused him of being selfish for challenging my behavior.

At lunch together, I was forced to confront how painful it must have been for Sam to watch his best friend self-destruct and, when he couldn’t stop her, walk away to protect himself. I imagined him watching me bury myself deeper beneath the chemicals and hangovers and their layered effects on my mood and body. Unable to help pull me out, with no other recourse, Sam left his friend without knowing whether or not I’d survive.

During the brief moment we spent on the sun-bleached balcony overlooking my weedy yard, Sam gave me something precious.

When Sam confronted me, I didn’t want to hear what he said. I believed--and feared--drugs were fundamentally a part of my being.

For a year after getting sober, I became obsessed with 1000-piece puzzles. I ordered them on Amazon: The Neighborhood, Flower Market, American Diner. Staring down at the box bottom filled with jumbled pieces, my hands were simple machines tasked with locating the next piece. One male part and three female parts. Four female parts. Two male parts and two female parts. I spaced out for five and ten minutes, rustling the tray of unlinked pieces. My open palm swept back and forth across the pieces. I stared blankly into the tiny sea of interlocking cardboard shapes until I chose one piece and slipped it into its proper place.

The drawing, done completely in graphite pencil, showed a woman hunched over an invisible table. Pensive, she held a dull black orb near her face. The crook of her elbow was impossibly rounded, like a children’s jointless doll. A wiry nest of hair encroached over her left eye. Giving the appearance of being seated in a dark room, the background was shaded in broad pencil strokes. The once-white 8x11 paper was brittle and time-oxidized into a gradient of browns. Neat script curled across the bottom in a cramped line that leaned back on itself towards the edge of the page: Audrey Emery Anson by Mrs W Roth Jan 10th 1921.

“Audrey” was the first of 200 drawings by Louise Roth. I lifted the stack and carefully leafed through it. Startled, wide-eyed portraits of bejeweled women and male political figures stared at me as if I had opened a long-closed door to their hiding place. Most drawings were marked with a year between 1918 and 1921. Considering the careless way Roth’s drawings rested beneath a pile of miscellaneous crap, I was surprised to find them in almost perfect condition.

I leafed past Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and women whose names I didn’t recognize: Dorothy South, Marjorie Rambeau, Jane Gray. A feathered hat encircled the crown of one woman’s head. On another, a ruffled dress collar waved past an anonymous woman’s collarbones like strange lettuce. Hands appeared like worn tools, utilitarian and awkward, sharp pointed fingers like small carrots. Some figures were plunged in a smudged, contoured darkness or enclosed in a thin frame in bolder pencil. They floated off-center in negative space.

Intuiting that this collection was someone’s life’s work, I purchased the entire sheaf of over 200 drawings for $20. I wanted to pore over them in the silence and privacy of my home--examining details in each face and outfit, researching names, searching for the images they were sketched from.

Lettering printed on the back of each page was faintly visible through each thin page:

OFFICE OF WILLIAM ROTH

Collector and Receiver of Taxes

OF THE BOROUGH OF MOONACHIE

Borough of Moonachie, NJ.,___________19__

Dear Sir:

Louise Roth’s portfolio was completed on the back of her husband’s stationery. Many of Roth’s drawings are embossed with the outlines of an office stamp: block letters declaring BOND evidence of his affairs as a tax collector. His name looms over her portraits like a reminder: the single most defining factor of her identity was her marriage.

Louise Roth was born Louisa Manger in Newark, New Jersey, to German-born parents around 1870. She married William Roth in 1888. By 1910, they lived in Moonachie, New Jersey, where she drew her portraits.

In many ways, Roth is a permanently unknowable woman. Survived by the accident of her portfolio’s preservation (the junk store purchased the drawings in a large acquisition from another closing junk store), she’s like billions of anonymous others--casualties of poor record-keeping. Having lived an unremarkable life (at least by recorded history’s standards), the nuances of her fears and desires are forever erased unless they can somehow be read in her artwork.

In French philosopher and historian Michael Foucault’s essay, The Lives Of Infamous Men, Foucault discusses ways structures of power memorialize the otherwise forgotten lives of “mediocre” existences. Foucault reads between the lines of crime dockets and court records from the 1700s to understand how “a whole political web comes to interlace itself with the web of everyday life.”

Louise Roth was “[one of] those billions of existences which are destined to pass away without a trace” that interested Foucault. Tracing the recorded trajectory of Roth’s life opens small, foggy windows into her life: evidence of lonely winters spent sketching in what was possibly her husband’s office. I imagined Louise Roth--most productive in winters when she was around 59 years old--opening the bottom drawer of a heavy wood desk, adding each new drawing to a growing pile, constructing a secret stash of her burgeoning interest in art. In December 1921, she completed two and sometimes three portraits a day.

Roth’s minutes and hours are encoded in the shapes and repeating patterns of her meticulous frames, in fingerprint-ridden graphite backdrops enshrouding the faces of Margaret D Kahn and Dellora Angell.

The raw intimacy of Roth’s drawings enchant me. Created in privacy, free from judgment or criticism, her art reflects a candid version of herself. Her portraits construct a commemorative shrine to her admirations--besides celebrity and socialite women, Roth drew unnamed children (the lack of names leads me to think some are her own children), dressed in elaborate outfits. She sometimes drew animals: a puppy pushing a kitten in a baby carriage, a serene sleeping dog. Her thick pencil lines are precise and a little audacious, reaching and swooping and embedding life into elongated, pensive eyes.

As a stranger, Roth’s mind—her desires and anxieties—are inaccessible. But her practice was one I relate to: I spend long hours in what I consider a precious and holy solitude, writing and window-gazing, embedded in but hidden from the world.

I’m projecting a narrative onto Roth that I can’t verify: that maybe she, like me, in turns treasured and felt trapped by her solitude.

As a white woman with a greater amount of privilege and mobility than Roth had in her life, I keep journals hidden in my drawers by choice instead of necessity. My solitude is voluntary. But our shared yearning to create a tangible body of work appears as a spark of connection over the space and time between us.

Census records trace William Roth’s career: vegetable farmer, truck farmer, proprietor, farm owner, tool maker. The same records oscillate between Louise’s two occupations: housewife, none, housewife, none.

The statistical residue of Roth’s life reveals more about systems of power governing and recording her than her personality: facts of her gender, occupation, age, whether she could read/write (yes), if she spoke English (yes) are ticked off a list. Reduced to crude facts, census reports form a skeleton of her identity.

Roth’s self-portrait is her only work drawn on a different piece of tax stationary--a tax bill with blank spaces provided for addresses and names of property buyers and sellers. Embossed through the opposite side of the page, her husband’s affairs lord over her: typewritten words strike faint lines over her image, like a faded poem of his authority. She wears dark pearls around her neck, each irregular bead clinging to a collarbone she erased and reconstructed, the second time with a plunging neckline. The corner above her left shoulder is dark: gray rays descend on her like shade cast by someone standing nearby. Roth is not smiling; her small mouth is pulled taut. As if examining something--maybe on the desk at which she sat--she casts an impenetrable gaze slightly downwards.

During her most active years (1919-1921), most women in the US were near-compulsory domestic laborers. In the early 1900s, women were restricted from entering into many professions, but refusing to abide by these arbitrary rules with increasing success during what was a pivotal period for women’s rights.

In England, the Slade School of Fine Art taught an art program that was 2/3rds women in 1890. Suffrage meetings were held weekly in London. Paris and New York were popular cities for female artists, musicians, and performers to live and work. About halfway through Roth’s body of work, in 1920, women were nationally granted the right to vote.

It was an inspiring time for women who quietly wished to become artists but were restricted--by fear, familial obligations, or lack of resources--to being a “well-behaved woman” defined by marriage and motherhood.

Roth drew many celebrities and socialites. Copying images from fashion newspapers, regional magazines, movie posters, and wedding announcements, Roth drew the ‘influencers’ of her time--a pensive image of Elva Diestelhorst, whose mother required her husband sign a prenup promising Elva three daily hours of uninterrupted dancing and leisure activities. A somber portrait of Billie Carleton, an actress and friend to fashion designers who died of a cocaine overdose at 22. An unlabeled woman with a collar cut just above her breasts, standing with her head tilted back and eyes closed, mouth pulled slightly open in an expression of ecstasy or revelry.

One of Roth’s most unusual drawings is “Queen Margaret of Tyrol, The Ugliest Woman in the World”. The woman is deformed as to be almost inhuman. Her head is inflated and rectangular. An upturned nose bares two gaping nostrils above her thin, wide mouth, the corners pulled up in what seems more like a permanent state of confusion than a smile. Long ears jut out at odd angles as if leaning away from the ugliness of the face they frame. Like the skin of an elephant, her face and neck are set with deep, calloused wrinkles.

A newspaper clipping accompanies the “Ugliest Woman” portrait. The top of the torn page reads ..st Woman’s Portrait Sold; Men Fought Over Her. An incomplete bottom caption declares the portrait was sold at Christie’s (no price listed). It reasserts: The ugliest woman in history.

Queen Margaret was actually “Countess of Tyrol” in the mid-1300s. The last heir to her family’s castle during a time when women were prohibited from owning property, Margaret was married to John Henry when they were both 12 years old. Remembered by historical accounts as “haughty and incompetent,” Henry was a 1300s-era fuckboy. Margaret endured this marriage for 9 years. At age 21, John Henry went on a hunting trip and returned to find that Margaret had locked him out of the castle for good.

Recorded as “playing social rivalries off one another” to distract those competing to supplant her, Margaret quickly remarried without getting a divorce. This generated drama and some outrage, which Margaret ameliorated by having her first marriage nullified on the premise that they never banged. Without consummation, Margaret claimed, the marriage technically never existed. When Margaret’s second husband and then son died in unexpected and rapid succession, she was finally exiled to Austria where she died.

Many historical accounts record Margaret of Tyrol as a beautiful woman with a minor facial deformity. Around the time of her marriage annulment--a symbol of her defiance against men seeking to dominate her--Margaret was nicknamed “bagmouth,” the period moniker for “whore” or “vicious woman.” Cunning and assertive, Margaret strained against the rigid mold of her assigned female role. As punishment, she’s remembered as the ugliest woman in the world.

It’s unlikely that Roth knew Margaret’s story. The newspaper article she used and saved doesn’t provide historical information about Margaret. But Roth’s amusement is ironic. Mocking Margaret’s ‘ugliness’ is Roth’s way of alienating herself from it. Roth’s ridicule defines and asserts herself as Margaret’s opposite--appropriately behaved, subservient, quiet, predictable and domesticated; everything a woman ought to be. As a good woman, Roth was awarded the same recognition that condemned her to obscurity.

I think of objects (where an object is any noun or verb) beginning with the first letter of my chosen word. In the greatest detail I can, I visualize each object.

I typically skip repeat letters. To maintain momentum, when my mind snags on any letter, I skip to the next one.

Moments of hesitation clear vulnerable empty space. If I linger on any individual image or orbit a letter, asking why can’t you think of another word when there are so many? My mind wanders.

This holiday season, I’ve experienced nightmares three or four times a week. I wake up wide-eyed and vigilant, the holographic outlines of a dream lingering in my room’s darkest corners. I look sidelong at my apartment door. Moments earlier, I dreamed some menacing entity lay waiting on the other side. I stare at the ceiling and then roll over and pick up where I left off.

I’m drawn to places that exist when I am not looking at them. The existence of a forest or empty office in the middle of the night suggests magic. Like Schrodinger’s cat, I can’t be sure what exists in a place where I do not.

Since my mother died ten years ago, I swore I’d never look at a Christmas tree without suppressing the urge to vomit or cry or scream. Being asked “What are you doing for Christmas?” felt like a threat. “Nothing,” I’d say, cringing as they frowned. Other people’s dissatisfaction is worse than my own discomfort. “You can make the holiday your own!” I was told. Maybe, I thought, “making it my own” meant hating it, forever.

This past November, I discovered a bunch of dented junk ornaments priced at $2 per small bag in a local thrift store. I purchased a bag containing a demented felt cat with an obnoxious smile, two foil-wrapped cardboard candies, and a cross-eyed snowman painted onto the face of a fragile glass bauble. I hung the ornaments on a small potted tree in the corner of my living room.

I stroll through throngs of tourists on 5th Avenue. Straining and pushing, they raise their cameras higher for pictures in front of Saks Fifth and the Rockefeller tree. I’m nagged by muted guilt: I worry that by finding Christmas endearing, or participating in any holiday shenanigan whatsoever, I betray my most-grieving self.

5th Avenue is submerged in the glowing yellow thrown from Christmas lights framing store windows. Raising a pleading cardboard side at its crinkled edges, a homeless man with a runny nose crouches beneath the wide bay windows of University Club. Through the windows seven feet above him, two people sit across a small table covered with a white tablecloth and set with a tiny glowing touch lamp. Their faces are obscured by garlands hung on the building’s stone facade. Their pale wrinkled hands eclipse the short distance between them, clink champagne glasses. All my fantasies represent some manifestation of surety, where the thing I’m sure of is that I am safe from “not having” something.

Some unknown force compels me downtown. As people jostle past me and sigh to express frustration at my slow pace, I think about a meme that says don’t come to New York to chase your dreams unless you can walk fuckin fast, son. I wait for someone to comment on my slowness so I can tell them to fuck off. No one says anything. I tell myself I will walk 2 miles, then can’t stop until I’ve wandered over 8.

“You always gotta push the envelope,” my father used to tell me. He said it when I was in high school, when he discovered I wore jeans under my short skirt not because I liked the style, as I claimed, but so I could peel them off on the G train and wear the outfit he forbade me from leaving the house in. When I was sent to the principal’s office for dressing up as White Trash for heritage day. When I begged my mom to get my navel pierced and returned home with it done three times, a blinking triangle of steel and fake jewels gleaming from the reddened skin surrounding six puncture marks.

When I’m inspired or discouraged or asking myself why I chose writing instead of interior design or something more fun, I return to writing. In response to a sudden desire to abandon writing forever, I return to writing. I silently repeat a mantra to myself — you can and you will. Grappling towards new knowledge there’s no guarantee I’ll discover, my envelope-pushing drives me forward.

“I used to think it gets better, but it never gets better,” my mother once told me. Crying and smiling at the same time, I found her discordance alarming. I can’t be sure, but I think she was referring to life, to her depression. I once believed her. Because I thought I could be closer to her if I felt what she felt and believed what she believed, part of me wanted her to be right.

Having once been in a place of believing nothing ever got better, I can see where she was coming from even though I now disagree. Pushing the limits of my imagination made room for my thoughts to unstick themselves from the walls of my mind.

I once felt a loyalty to my sadness, my loneliness. I believed--maybe sometimes still do believe--being sad and dejected made me a better writer, a more sensitive artist, a more honest person, a more accurate seer of the world. Disagreeing with my mother’s statement meant noticing and reconciling with other things I disagreed with her about. I find this challenging; I feel tasked with finding compassion for her despite what I see as her mistakes, her wrong-ness. I struggle to balance, to abstain from the wild swinging from one extreme to another I was once so accustomed to.

I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what she meant.

“Magicians, like poets and lovers, engage our mind in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect.”

Adam Gopnik says this in The Real Work, his study of how extremely skilled individuals master their pursuits. In the book’s first section, Gopnik studies the world of magic and magicians, analyzing the psychological dance between magician and audience--and how each trick’s success depends on the participation of both parties.

Magic tricks can be separated into magic and trick. The trick is the optical illusion, sleight of hand, or bait-and-switch, requiring mechanics and technical know-how. Magic is the sense of wonderment the audience gets from engaging in fantasy—the "what if that were possible" suggestion that beyond our mundane reality lie thrilling possibilities.

Many articles analyzing the popularity of Hallmark’s holiday movies follow a formula: The writer notes Hallmark’s increasing viewership. They criticize their films for being “awful” (Vice), “corny,” (NBC News), and “bland” (Salon). Then they admit to enjoying them, adding a self-conscious footnote--an article in Vancouver magazine calls them “guilty pleasures.” Vice and Salon are known for being tastemakers. They pander to audiences who trust them to recommend innovative, sophisticated content. By reducing their enjoyment of Hallmark movies to an embarrassing impulse, these writers reassure the reader of their authority as curators, avoiding being labeled as unreliable for enjoying something widely perceived as “low-brow.”

Coinciding with the release of their annual holiday films (around 40 each year), Hallmark was the third-watched cable network channel in November 2024 (second to only ESPN and FOX). Despite the number of cable TV subscribers decreasing by 20 million since 2019, Hallmark’s audience continues to grow.

These writers don’t realize that disparaging Hallmark’s holiday movies, or apologizing for enjoying them, is an obstacle to answering the question of what audiences find alluring about them. They reduce Hallmark movies to an empty-calorie treat, satisfying a base human desire for comfort, predictable storylines, and happy resolutions.

Of all the ‘bad’ content on YouTube, cable TV, Netflix, and other streaming services, why do millions of viewers choose Hallmark’s holiday movies? A loyal fan base seeks them out, returning annually to see what holiday shenanigans are afoot. They are built into viewers’ holiday rituals.

Hallmark’s 2021 movie, Pumpkin Everything, dissects issues of career and family. As always, there’s a romantic storyline, but the love aspect of Pumpkin Everything features less prominently than the conflict between Amy, who left her small town to pursue her career, and Tom, her grandfather who hoped she would take over his fall-themed home goods store, Pumpkin Everything. Pumpkin Everything asks: Can a daughter redeem herself in the eyes of her father figure after failing to fulfill the dream he once had for her future? How can an estranged family accept one another’s differences?

Pumpkin Everything weaves a story of redemption, reconciliation, and the classic American dream of reinvention. Hallmark provides holiday magic in the form of seasonally relevant symbolism, and wonderment in the form of hope.

Pumpkin Everything opens on Amy, a writer living in a large, unnamed city and currently catching her big break: the third book in her vampire novel series, Vampire Rising, is blowing up. She’s already booked a national book tour and, as her agent informs her in the opening scene, has just been asked to appear on one of the nation’s most popular daytime television shows. Amy hardly believes it: that one’s passion can lead to wild financial success in a way so unexpected to be almost accidental, allowing you to quit your day job forever.

But Amy’s radiant mood is disrupted by a phone call from her mother: Amy’s grandfather, Tom, has been in a car accident. Though he’s only suffered a sprained wrist, Amy’s mother worries about his ability to care for himself and run his business.

Here’s where the movie starts: it’s formulaic, but the formula--the magic trick of unresolved conflict--is performed with a polished, clever style. It’s as if each Hallmark movie believes in its ability to convince the audience they can’t be sure what will happen next.

A good Hallmark movie, like a good magic trick, conceals the mechanics of its drama. Amy’s humility in the face of success makes her endearing, and her vampire novels give her a spunky, quirky appeal. The film’s ability to balance somber themes with a comforting, uplifting energy lies in Amy’s effervescent personality.

Tom doesn’t need surgery, or even PT. But his simple mistake—hitting the gas instead of the brake in a truck he’s been driving for possibly decades--guarantees there will be a “next time.” Tom’s minor injury reflects his flagging cognitive abilities, implying that he’s a little closer to death. This unspoken mortal threat to Tom’s life is the catalyst for Amy’s return to Autumboro--a place she’s avoided for the past 15 years.

When Tom discovered that Amy decided to pursue writing instead of taking over Pumpkin Everything, he revoked his offer to pay her college tuition. Now she’s returning home in a position of power: she no longer needs his money.

In Autumnboro, Amy gives Tom a ride home from the hospital. They banter about past years spent celebrating Foliage Fest together, whose 20th anniversary is fast approaching. Their shared nostalgia reanimates their enduring bond, but the upbeat mood is extinguished when Tom bristles at the mention of Amy’s book tour, shutting their conversation down.

This dilemma reflects a common family dynamic: a parent’s love conflicts with their refusal to recognize their adult child’s autonomy, even during a role reversal which positions the parent as weakened and needing care, and the child as the adult caretaker.

When Gopnik refers to the ‘imperfection’ of a trick, he’s talking about idiosyncrasies that make a classic, retold, otherwise predictable performance unique and captivating. You select a card from the deck, and your card appears under the magician’s hat. A crease or tear in the card makes the trick imperfect, or seem exceptional and renewed.

Pumpkin Everything’s “imperfections” lie in its characters and their unique histories; Amy’s vampire books seem silly and wild in stark contrast to the curated, predictable pumpkin life Tom wanted for her. Kit’s unique trauma--losing his mother at a young age and becoming erratic and volatile under the weight of his grief--adds depth and sensitivity to his character.

Kit is Amy’s estranged high school best friend and quintessential love interest. Coincidentally, he’s now the manager of Pumpkin Everything. Because the conflict in this movie focuses on family dynamics, Amy and Kit are quick to reconcile over a cup of cider. Their relationship plays on the “one that got away” trope; picking up where they left off, we know they’ll end up together, creating the shared future they once imagined before drifting apart. They’re already on the same page about Tom: Pumpkin Everything is depleting his increasingly limited energy as he ages.

New questions are raised as Amy extends her visit to hang out with Kit and participate in Foliage Fest: Will she jeopardize her book tour or career to remain in Autumnboro for her family, her love interest? She’s torn between two worlds: her independence and financial success in the big, emotionally vacant city, and the spiritual fulfillment of family life and community in her small, familiar hometown.

The fate of Pumpkin Everything hangs in the balance. When Amy outright begs Tom to sell the store he’s worked his entire adult life to create and nurture, Tom is pissed. Tom accuses Amy of being utterly incapable of understanding the horrors of growing old and feeble. We suddenly see that he feels abandoned by her, afraid of being alone. This moment makes him a more sympathetic character, his grumpiness peeled back to reveal vulnerability.

In a situation that might be messier in real life, Amy nods and frowns with angelic patience, sympathetic to Tom’s fears. In their somber conversation, Amy’s reaction is a wink to the audience: everything is going to work out--Hallmark’s signature.

During all the drama, the audience is treated to what they arrived for: the visual splendor of fall. Hallmark movies rely heavily on symbolism to act as their magician’s elaborate costume. We’re here for the leaf peeping, and the settings are crucial scaffolding for the script.

Autumnboro is a leafy, bucolic town. Wide, walkable sidewalks are lined with trees suspended in perfect autumn foliage. Arrangements of pumpkins and squash are piled in the background of almost every shot. Outside the cafe where Amy and her mother grab pumpkin spice lattes, haybales lie stacked beneath hanging baskets of yellow and red mums. Kit has decorated his apartment like he has Pumpkin Everything: fired stoneware jugs stuffed with ears of corn and wheat, orange foliage framing his expansive bay windows.

Hallmark movies offer an escape into an alternate universe in the same way obvious sci-fi and fantasy genre films do. Lord Of The Rings, Dune, and other fantasy stories are set in worlds governed by rules so different from our day-to-day reality, these rules must be set up and explained using expository information in order for the viewer to understand them. The parallel universe of Pumpkin Everything is so similar to our own that its differences need no explanation.

In the world of Autumnboro, the holiday season is guaranteed to be resplendent. This world is free from advertisements, billboards, or newspapers brandishing bleak headlines in tall, bold capital letters. No one is starving, homeless, or dying of an illness they cannot treat because they cannot afford healthcare. Understanding, empathy, and kindness are innate qualities all people possess. There aren’t even any lines to wait in or dense crowds to navigate. In Autumnboro, your spacious house is always clean, and you can always get a table at your favorite restaurant. The near-constant external stressors of the real world, capable of exacerbating a bad mood or further complicating fraught situations--simply do not exist. Closeups of Amy and other characters are bright with softened backgrounds, like a Zoloft commercial: nonthreatening, serene, lobotomized.

Midway through the movie, Amy conducts her anticipated daytime television interview in front of Pumpkin Everything to help Tom promote the store. As she speaks into the microphone, Tom gapes.

“This is more than just writing,” Tom says to Amy’s mother, “It’s like she’s managing her own business.”

After the interview, Tom tells Amy he wants to read Vampire Rising and sell copies in Pumpkin Everything. Amy is thrilled, and it seems like all is well in Autumnboro. But there are still 20 minutes left in the movie, so you know some other shit is about to go down.

Tom falls off a ladder while trying to change a lightbulb. Amy discovers him face down on the porch like a marooned Santa Claus. He finally agrees to sell Pumpkin Everything, surprising--who else?---Kit with the first down payment in the form of a bonus.

In the final scene of Pumpkin Everything, the town gathers at Night Cap, Fall Foliage week’s closing celebration. Tom has arranged for Amy’s first stop on her book tour to coincide with Night Cap, and makes an announcement commemorating Vampire Rising:

“When Amy told me she wanted to write vampire stories, those who know me can only imagine how I bristled. But once I cracked open ‘Vampire Rising,’ I realized it was the story of a family man, and how his want for the very best for his family had blinded him to the passions and the desires of the very people he cherished.”

Tom did more than read Amy’s book; he reflected on and found meaning in its plot. He used Vampire Rising to understand her, and see himself through her eyes.

I teared up at this scene.

Now both dead, my parents never read my writing--my father because he died before I took my talents seriously, and my mother for reasons I can’t account for. Sometimes I sent her samples of my work, and she told me she would read them later. Eventually, I stopped sending them.

My first thought after wiping away my tears was cynical: you got me, Hallmark, you motherfuckers. I spent most of my childhood and early adult life believing I could protect myself from emotional pain by cultivating a steely outer shell, stoic and aloof. I squinted my eyes at Pumpkin Everything, suspecting Hallmark tricked me into experiencing emotions I related to events within my own family, tapping into my unanswered wish for my mother to read my work.

In reality, my emotions disturbed me. Because I find it painful, I don’t often contemplate how I wish my parents could see my Substack, which has almost 2,000 monthly subscribers, or what they might say in response to my essays. Their reconciliation comforted me, like I could imagine that kind of interaction happening for myself. At the least, seeing their reconciliation provided me with the hope that it was possible.

After Tom’s speech, Amy stands with Kit on the sidelines, watching the festivities, having just learned he’s purchasing Pumpkin Everything.

“Here,” Amy says. Kit hits her with a confused look.

“Right now. This is where I want to be.” They link hands.

“I’ll never get in the way of your writing,” he promises. Amy realizes that she can have it all: her writing career, a loving relationship, a close bond with her family, and Pumpkin Everything. She doesn’t have to sacrifice her personal goals to achieve the total life she wants. This is often not true of real life. In Pumpkin Everything, conflict is resolved in the closed circuit of Hallmark’s signature world. As they kiss, a blinding ray of sunshine beams between their faces, illuminating them in a heavenly light. The credits roll.

In the real world, fall foliage can seem like the background to a world on fire. Relationships have no guaranteed positive outcomes, despite how badly each person may crave resolution. Picking up your phone seems to promise a jump-scare of bad news: suffering, injustice, corporations destroying the environment without consequence, an uncertain future in a time of political unrest.

Hallmark creates its “maze of infinite possibilities” with films that reinvent classic stories set against nostalgic and seasonal imagery. Characters with unique circumstances engage the audience in refurbished experiences of wonder and hope.

Pumpkin Everything offers viewers an escape into a world where the answer to the question, “Could it really be that easy?” Is a resounding “yes.”

I get a coffee on 55th and Madison at Black Fox, which is just a walk-up window with metal chairs circling struggling trees under a glass canopy, an outdoor space recreated indoors. I find myself in another world. A long line of men and women in crisp, dark suits and pristine business casual sneakers. I try to listen to what they’re saying, tap into their world of business jargon and business deals, but they speak in hushed tones. 

I discover a public restroom behind the cafe: a gliding, automatic glass door opens to an arced, tiled hallway, like the snaking intestine of the immense office building towering above. It terminates in a flat, round room like another organ; a communal slop sink and a row of bathroom stalls. The bathroom is neither gleaming nor piss soaked.

I take my iced coffee and pass the Public Library. The guy with cropped hair and a squarish face who is almost always sitting on a little ledge separating the small strip of grass from the sidewalk is sitting there, as usual. He has a black rolling suitcase beside him. Sometimes I see him wiping it down with a wet wipe. A cardboard sign propped against the suitcase says “I might as well be invisible.” Pigeons sit on his shoulders. 

On 5th and 50th, a slouched man with watery blue eyes holds a sign that says “god help us god help us all.” He sits next to a Tommy Bahama which also has a sign: “have your party with us here and relax.” Lonely old men remind me of my father. Not the one that's dead, but the alive one I no longer talk to.

Across the street, a hispanic woman sits on the street with a cardboard sign: “sorry for making you uncomfortable.” Twenty feet away from her, a swaying drunk man vomits onto the cornerstone of a monolithic brown church. It’s noon and no one notices him. Tourists step in the vomit stream that snakes down the sidewalk and dribbles over the edge of the curb. Shoppers shuffle from store to store with their shopping bags. Men lie face down on flattened cardboard sheets. It’s unclear if they are alive but no one checks because they are going shopping. 

I read a daughter’s face embedded in her mother’s. They squint up at the tallest buildings, the arrangement of their bones making the same shape. Seeing a man scratch his wife’s back, gazing upon the way we need one another, their intimacy frightens me; I imagine her dead skin chipping off in invisible flakes, flying off when she removes her shirt at home and forming dust motes in the beams of light in her living room. 

In the portal to hell which is Times Square, I watch tourists with small backpacks strapped to the front of their bodies like precious children. They eat burgers from a take-out shack adorned with stamped metal letters: BEER GARDEN. The tourists sit on wiry red metal chairs, talking with their hands and laughing. A few feet away stretches a low, curving slab of scuffed black stone forming an invincible bench, the piss and gum and filth destined to be periodically power washed off onto the street. 

Not ten feet from the tourists, a shirtless guy lies on the stone. He seems mid-50s, rail thin. Lying on his side like a Roman statue, he sleeps with his head in the crook of his arm. A colostomy bag pokes up from the back of his soiled khaki shorts and hangs freely over the edge of the stone, dripping. The leaking piss polishes rivulets of gleaming obsidian black down the stone.

Between the skyscrapers and flashing billboards, bars of sky declare themselves like advertisements themselves: a promise of escape. Electronic billboards stacked six high flash clothing, Broadway musicals, television shows, cars. One billboard sells itself: space available for rent. It declares its own measurements, the confines inside which one can declare something else for a fee. 

Several squat staircase lead to nowhere--resting points for tourists or whoever wants to sit. A guy with a pocked face and an old colorblock windbreaker is camped out on one set of stairs. He squints against the sun. A girl stands in front of him in an oversized men’s jacket, army green and spotless. Her hands don’t reach the ends of her sleeves. She looks new to the life. Her skin is clear and her eyes are clear and her dirty blonde hair is shiny, untangled, framing her face in a floppy bob. The guy has piles of blankets and water bottles and trash staking claim to the steps, plus his shopping cart beside it. I should rob a bank, he says to her, his scarred hands hanging over his propped-up knees. She smiles and shrugs: embarrassed by the man she likes, stopping at no red flag, she persists in her adoration. 

Someone in a filthy red Elmo suit hangs out by a steel road barrier with a Mickey and Minnie Mouse. There’s a bad posture Spiderman, a tottering eight foot tall mech-suit guy and a paunchy Batman. Naked Cowboy is still around, now in the company of a Naked Cowgirl. A jaunty, stocky man in a child’s Hulk costume solicits people for photographs, waving his arms. They shy away from him. A grinning Luigi is live on Twitch, doing little choreographed movements every time he receives a small donation. He doesn’t get many.

Wearing two anklets and ballerina flats, a woman marches by. Despite her crisp designer skirt and suit jacket, her bruised knees and her burnt hair and the vacant look in her eye give her away; she’s on drugs. Her mouth hangs open and her blue canvas bag is streaked with dirt on the bottom like she often sets it down on the filthy sidewalk. 

NYC seems to me the purgatory of the world, a million writhing bodies doing a lateral climb against or with the current to arrive somewhere else. Everyone’s lives swirling and dragging past one another, snagging one another in brief interactions — an excuse me or a thank you or a fuck you or a do you know where is the PATH station from here? 

Snippets of conversations from people shooting out on different trajectories like arrows headed for unrelated targets: 

“Can we pull the money from the account today?”

“I fucked up, but you know what? Everyone fucks up.”

“His English is not that good and sometimes it makes me cringe.” 

“He was joking though, right? I was sure he was joking.” 

Sometimes, a woman crying (almost never a man).

I pause in front of Bloomingdale’s. I see families going in — a father and what seems to be his daughters, then a husband and wife with their child. I imagine shopping with a parent there, losing my patience at an imaginary father’s slow meandering or the way they suddenly halt to stare down at their phone, taking them for granted a little bit, because taking someone you love for granted represents the belief that they will be alive for a while. 

The perfume section at Bloomingdale’s is is a perversion of aromatherapy. One nebulous, cloying chemical-alcohol-herbacious scent like cleaning spray hangs in the air. The overhead lights burn like a million white fires and they are razor sharp. LED lights from all angles force the perfume bottles to glitter. The bottles are made of thick glass, trapped in display cases and set on suggestive, tiered pedestals, arranged on shelves like they’re waiting for the bus. I don’t understand the liquid inside the bottles. They command my attention, triggering some lizard desire for sparkling things and mysterious colored potions. Or the ritual of spraying myself with something resembling magic, the alchemizing power of a chemical that promises to enrich my life and enhance my intrigue--to cast a spell over others. There are no windows. I leave without buying anything. 

Macy’s, near Penn Station, is more depressing. The lights wash out the products and the faces of the shoppers and illuminate the filth caked on the corners of the escalator and on the cracked tile flooring, a tired beige color like a high school basement. It’s reminiscent of a 90s mall: haphazard, outdated, forgotten. Every hoodie and pair of sweatpants on the ground floor is strung through with a thick metal cable tethering and bolting it to a rack or table. 

There is too much negative space, a lack of ads assaulting my senses and suggesting all the different people I might become depending on which product I select. One lonely screen hanging above the entire section displays a short commercial on repeat:

A gaunt Katy Perry cycles through a series of quick-cut scenes: she’s in a sparkling dress. She’s strolling on a dock. She’s shouting for joy in a speeding boat. She’s shrugging and laughing at a crowded party thrown for her, a cake rising towards her on disembodied hands. She smiles at an old woman. In each scene, a man creeps in the corner of the frame, following her. Finally, she arrives in a stone courtyard to find him sitting there, waiting. Because he’s hot, she’s okay with his stalking, and she looks at him with her mouth hanging open as he throws a flower or something at her. She sways back and forth a little bit, signaling some kind of ritual mating movement with her body, lobotomized and ready. 

Inside the glass window of a luxury lingerie store in Soho, a tall blonde buys two hundred dollar tights. Next to the store, a skinny guy with a buzzcut stands in a piss soaked corner, his face two inches from the building, like the Blair Witch put him there and demanded he smoke crack. He can’t be older than 20. Him and the lingerie lady were both kids once. 

A woman so thin I can see her fragile skeleton straining against her pale skin clenches and unclenches her hands as we wait at the corner for the light to turn green. She is tall and the dramatic angles of the bones in her face suggests she was once a model or an actress, but now she is a woman in her 50s on speed. She flicks her dry, bleached hair over her shoulder, frowns and un-frowns and frowns again. She clenches her jaw, strains the ruined muscles in her face. The logos on her clothing declare their value: $400 pants, a $300 shirt. She is wearing Golden Goose sneakers. They are designed to look dirty, scuffed, worn in, and retail for almost $600. Now that she’s older, I wonder if she feels discarded by the world. 

I look down at my Gucci jelly sandals. They are made from hard, molded black plastic. They are a clumsy, awkward shape, and rip small red holes in the sides of my feet. They were $750. Studded with pink-and-silver rhinestones which, having gotten wet, are chipped and faded. They are my favorite pair of shoes. 

“How are you similar to the things you criticize?” Was a question in The Book Of Beautiful Questions. 

In Tompkins square park, an enduring group of crust punks, recycled variations of an avatar cycling out and back in every few years, drink tall boys and yell at their dogs and at one another. Two teenage boys on the bench next to me list animals they would and wouldn’t kill:

I’d kill a squirrel

I wouldn’t kill an owl

I’d kill a duck 

“I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it. Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death.

“If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.” hooks asserts that indoctrinating males into a patriarchal role requires abuse and produces ‘emotionally crippled’ men: angry, confused, full of shame.

She provides hope in her belief that every person possesses ‘the will to change,’ and quotes fellow writer Harriet Lerner in the beginning of the book: “the two things that will never change in our rapidly changing society are the will to change and the fear of change.” Our fear of discomfort often holds us back from realizing the changes necessary for growth. hooks defines patriarchy as “a social-political system that insists males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” 

Throughout the book, hooks illustrates the ways in which patriarchy creates cycles of abuse, and reflects on her own role in upholding patriarchal ideals.

By inflicting what she calls “the normal traumatization of boys,” patriarchal thinking shapes men’s lives from childhood: 

“Boys are traumatized by [forcing them] to feel pain and to deny their emotions. [...] ”Much of the anger boys express is itself a response to the demand that they not show any other emotions. Anger feels better than numbness because it often leads to instrumental action. Anger can be, and often is, the hiding place for fear and pain.”

After being taught to perform as a version of themselves or face humiliation, adult men are expected to express emotions in careful, limited ways that reinforce patriarchal ideals about what a man ”should” be: hardened, resolute, stoic. Relationships under patriarchy are often set up to fail:

“When males are required to wear the mask of a false self, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished. [...] People who learn to lie to themselves and others cannot love because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth and therefore unable to trust.”

hooks reflects on a time she herself was responsible for rejecting her ex-boyfriend’s vulnerable display of emotion, “freaking out” to shut him down when he attempted to share his feelings with her:

“It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.” 

She realized her dismissal reinforced the patriarchal notion that expressions of pain or sadness were undesirable in a man, and would be punished instead of heard. 

Six months after my ex moved from Ohio to live with me in Brooklyn, he expressed feelings of loneliness and isolation adjusting to a large city where he knew no one, far from his small town where his family and friends lived. I offended when he said, I only have you here; I twisted his comment to mean I wasn’t “good enough” for him to be happy. 

At the time, I did not see expressing my own emotions as an option -- vulnerability terrified me. Our relationship was built on mutual respect for the other person’s stoicism in the face of trauma. Because seeing him in a vulnerable state conflicted with my idealized version of him as a self possessed, unaffected man, I dismissed the conversation by making it about me instead of listening to him. He never brought it up again.

Looking back, it seems obvious that moving to a new location, leaving family and friends behind, would produce some amount of loneliness and longing. A single person, regardless of their role, cannot fulfill all companionship needs in another’s life. But because I couldn’t imagine changing our dynamic from one of mutual silence to mutual openness, I drove the conversation into the ground. 

Though I am a woman, I endured similar rites of passage to be accepted in a patriarchal system. “Most of us,” hooks writes, “learned patriarchal attitudes in our family of origin, and they were usually taught to us by our mothers.” 

If I wanted to thrive in a world dominated by unfeeling men, my mother taught me not to “whine,” or express pain -- I had to be tough. Afraid of the humiliation I’d face if I cried, I became proficient at hiding my pain -- be it from a breakup, the death of my father, or physical wounds. I joked about being sexually assaulted on the subway, calling it ‘part of being a girl in NYC.’ I repeated a stunted mantra about my father’s early death: it is what it is.

hooks goes on to discuss the role mothers have in perpetuating patriarchy, reinforcing gender roles and accepting abuse as natural male behavior:

“In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men towards the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females. Like its male counterpart, much female violence towards children takes the form of emotional abuse, especially verbal abuse and shaming.”

I remember my mother’s friend, Anna, and her son, Al, who my mother and I frequently spent time with. I despised them both -- Al because he bullied me, and Anna because she failed to intervene. He pushed me into a cactus, he held my head underwater in the pool. When I complained or cried, his mother shrugged Al’s behavior off: that’s just how he is. 

One afternoon, when we were around ten years old, I retaliated by hitting Al in the face as hard as I could. I remember feeling surprised when he burst out crying and ran to his mother for consolation. She laughed at him. 

You deserved it, Anna said. 

I was confused; I was being praised for something I was explicitly taught was wrong. Even as a child, I remember knowing it must have hurt Al to run to his mother for help only to face her humiliating laughter. I wondered why Anna didn’t intervene before that moment, stopping his cruelty before it escalated.

Instead, Anna’s behavior communicated a patriarchal ideal that, as a male, he was naturally violent and therefore deserving of further violence to deter or control him. After that, Al seemed to realize I was capable of defending myself and turned his meanness on smaller kids, sometimes animals. 

I learned a lesson then: I was responsible for protecting myself, and inflicting pain on others to prevent them from inflicting pain on me was acceptable and expected. It wasn’t the outcome I wanted -- I hoped someone would stop him or allow me to stop hanging out with him. Instead I accepted that my own anger was a weapon I could wield to protect me. 

hooks says: “most young women fear that if they call themselves feminist, they will lose male favor, they will not be loved by men.” 

By high school, the tenderness I saw in female friendships frightened me. If a friend hugged or complimented me, I froze like an animal suddenly under spotlight. I gendered ‘loving’ qualities: sensitivity and compassion were female, resilience and stoicism were male. These ideas led me to consider myself “like a boy” when really I was just a person, like myself. I struggled to connect with other girls. Though I had female friends, I mostly hung out with boys and told myself I simply “didn’t relate” to girls as much.

Due to my stoicism in the face of abuse, my high pain tolerance, and my independence, men labeled me as ‘bad ass.’ I rejected feminism as one long complaint about inequalities of yesteryear -- women could vote, own property, work, join a band, travel the world alone if they pleased. Because I harbored a subconscious fear that claiming to be a feminist would alienate men, leaving me unloved, I refused to examine feminism beyond reductive patriarchal dismissals by men that it was obsolete. 

In early July, I invited my friend, Emma, and her new boyfriend, George, to spend a weekend at my house upstate, along with myself, my boyfriend, Sean, and my friend, Jim. She’s bubbly, sardonic, witty, charming -- when we met, I was impressed with how easily she held a conversation with anyone, almost always making other people laugh. 

Emma could make a dress from Target look like Gucci. She inspired me to dress with care and intention, even if I were just mailing a package or walking my dog. Highly esteemed at her demanding, specialized job, she somehow still made time to be a sensitive and compassionate friend. At the same time, I noticed how Emma struggled to stand up for herself. She often erased herself in friendships and intimate relationships: venting about times she felt dismissed or undervalued, she resisted communicating her concerns or setting boundaries.

When we first met seven years ago, I related to this struggle. Though I was angry reflecting on previous abusive relationships I’d been in -- at myself for tolerating the abuse and at the other person for inflicting it -- I didn’t know how to be honest with other people without lashing out. If a man condescended to me, I typically took this interaction as proof he identified some inherent flaw in my personality which separated me, forever, from truly valuable people. After years of suppressing my emotions, anger was the easiest way to respond to my feelings of insecurity. 

When George and Emma arrived, we sat by the lake together, making small talk. After a few minutes, George turned the conversation towards his friend’s girlfriend: she was annoying, he said, and he couldn’t stand her. George is white and in his early 50s. He’s a high ranking professional at a prestigious institution, and on his off time, jet sets between his houses scattered across the globe. His deep, resonating voice carries across any room. I’m providing these details because I believe they help illustrate the dynamic between us during the following conversation. As my friend’s chosen partner, I wanted to give George a chance. He turned to me. 

You’re a wordsmith, aren’t you? Give me a word for a type of woman who thinks she deserves everything. Who thinks life should be like a Disney movie. 

I’m not sure what you mean.

 You know, an annoying woman who thinks she can have what she wants in life. Like a Jane Austen character — Pride and Prejudice?

I’ve never read Jane Austen. 

I’m surprised you haven’t. 

Why are you surprised by that? 

Because she’s a woman, and she’s a writer. She was progressive for her time, you know. 

Because I found his response condescending and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of defending myself, I let his comment hang in the air. In the silence that followed, his face tensed and darkened. 

I’m allowed to say I’m surprised you haven’t read Jane Austen, he snapped. What about Russian literature?

Yes, I love Dostoevsky. I mentioned Humiliated and Insulted. One of multiple narratives in the novel follows Natasha, a poor girl with two suitors: Vanya, quiet, reliable, and gentle, and Alyosha, a hot fuckboy from a rich family. Alyosha ghosts Natasha for several days on end, only to reappear shrugging, his attitude like the quintessential fuckboy text: hey, are you up? Natasha’s infatuation with Alyosha exhausts both herself and Vanya, always waiting to pick her broken ass up once the cycle restarts. When Natasha and Vanya finally marry, their love is threadbare, damaged by all the shenanigans. It’s like a Dostoevsky soap opera -- the drama sucks the reader in.

I thought the story might relate to this woman’s situation, at least the skeleton of it -- someone throwing reliable, boring love aside for the self destructive, thrilling drama of impossible fantasy. 

You mean The Idiot. 

No, I mean Humiliated and Insulted. 

I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve read all of Dostoevsky. I’m pretty sure you’re talking about The Idiot.  

Googling the book, he frowned when he discovered he was wrong.

I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before. It’s not even listed as one of his most prominent works on Wikipedia.

Who’s surprised now?

He didn’t laugh.  

Over the next two days, our conversations revolved around George’s whims. He steamrolled over whoever else was speaking — including Emma — by increasing his volume to comment or change the subject when the topic bored him. If George disagreed, he loudly reasserted his opinion and became visibly agitated if the topic of conversation did not pivot to something else. 

George fielded questions about himself with curt answers and didn’t engage or reciprocate. He mostly wanted to talk about trivia, television shows from the 80s, and things or people he disliked. In private, he asked Emma if Jim, Sean and I were “a weird throuple.”

Sean and Jim entertained George, taking the burden of responsibility off me in moments they noticed I was struggling to maintain my composure. When the weekend was over, I asked Sean for his perspective on the experience. He told me his former career as an artist was rife with similar interactions. 

“The best part about people like him is that they don't realize you’re treating them like they’re a child and will eventually get tired of listening to themselves speak and leave you alone for a few minutes." This was one of many moments in my relationship with Sean where I appreciate him as a person who is more secure in his identity than I am in mine. While I was basically foaming at the mouth, resisting the urge to blurt out a rude remark, Sean was shrugging the whole thing off.

When Emma and George left, Sean and Jim told me they were proud of me for “showing restraint.” My initial reaction was annoyance. Did they think of me as an unruly asshole? But when I paused to think about it, I realized they appreciated progress in my behavior that I hadn’t recognized. 

In my 20s, I would have taken George’s behavior personally, allowing his condescending attitude to trigger my old insecurity that maybe I really was disagreeable for refusing to bash this other woman, or stupid for not caring about the books he mentioned. I would have wanted to convince him to treat me like a person so I could see myself as one. 

Freeing myself from the burden of convincing George to treat me with respect, or see things ‘my way,’ I showed up as myself and made room for his reactions. I didn’t try to control or manipulate his responses through anger or by performing a version of myself I thought would be more acceptable to him. Because I wanted to make the weekend as enjoyable as possible -- for everyone, including myself -- I at least tried to enter every new interaction with him in line with a section I read from hooks that I’ll end this essay with: 

“I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live. If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved. If I am willing to recognize that choices and decisions are crucial when values are adopted, then I can take a fresh look at my values, question them, and if necessary revise them. Again, it is taking responsibility that sets me free.”

I stocked my fridge with water and opened the door to the backyard, welcoming the summer breeze. Constructing an inviting atmosphere for the people -- some friends, mostly acquaintances -- who would arrive and trip all night, laughing or crying, daubing rosewater on themselves in their costumes, I laid out hats and junk jewelry I collected from thrift stores.

During one such party, around 10 people showed up. I didn’t know most of them, but I knew Paula, the girl carrying the acid in a little brown glass bottle with a glass dropper. As we sat cross legged in a circle on the floor, she approached each person and rationed a drop or two onto their tongues. She turned on my TV and put on a six hours long Youtube video called “DNA Unlocking Sounds.” 

A low, droning hum filled the room, apparently the sound that would encourage our DNA to “unlock.” As the minutes passed and we waited for the acid to kick in, Paula took her place in the circle. Her boyfriend, Coby, laid a full length mirror on the floor in the center between us. He raised his right hand and traced circles over the mirror in the air, slowly and then so fast he was sweating. His long brown hair stuck to his face. I’m opening the portal, he panted, over and over. 

Except for the changing colors cast on our faces from the television and a few dim lamps, the room was dark. As Coby chanted and the Youtube video progressed to a deeper tonal hum, one guy rocked back and forth with his knees to his chest. Another girl sobbed. The attendees moaned and gasped. 

The portal is opened! he shouted. 

Paula’s eyes rolled back in her head. Coby called her name, come back! I had thought we were going to dance and laugh, and felt mildly annoyed that I invited these people over to cast fake spells and freak out in my living room. I stood up and snuck away, escaping into the backyard.

The leaves were a deep, radiant green and moonlight traced rivulets of light down the crooked wooden fence. My dog followed me and as we sat together, the sound of crying drifted from the doorway. One by one, the guests emerged, their faces pale, damp with sweat and tears. 

I appreciated the crystals I put out for their radiant or subdued colors, the way they sent light splintering through the room when held up against a flashlight. I held them close to my face and peered inside -- each one seemed to contain an endless labyrinth of fractured crystalline rooms. I enjoyed the cool sensation of the rosewater on my wrists; as a white woman who grew up without religion or spiritual practices, the solemn and serious movements soothed me.

The crystals I used were almost certainly hand-dug out of a mine by a child or severely underpaid worker toiling in a far away country, separated from my life by oceans, cultural and class differences. Sterilized by the eBay ads I perused, each crystal was photographed against a stark white background, all context omitted. If crystals were truly magic conduits of energy, as many claimed, we were in trouble.

At that time in my life, I also realized taking acid with a bunch of other people in their mid 20s who routinely abused hard drugs and alcohol was not therapy. I didn’t want to be in therapy, self-reflect, or do anything that resembled labor to examine my life, addiction, or choices. 

In the HBO cult documentary Love Has Won, a woman who calls herself ‘Mother God’ establishes a following as a spiritual ‘healer’ claiming to be God, creator of the universe. Amy Carlson appropriates various indigenous cultures to reify this claim during her livestreams, which she records daily: she is the Native American spirit, White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Hawaiians’ Tepu deity Pele, goddess of volcanoes. 

A caricature of the ‘white healer’ stereotype,  Amy Carlson registers as a tax-exempt non profit organization, though she is the only one profiting from the sale of products on her website: a ‘Custom Gift From God’ for $111.11 -- comprised of various crystals purchased on Amazon -- hair and skin care kits, and colloids -- platinum, gold, and silver. 

Colloidal silver is a chemical ingested as an alternative medicine‘cure all’ -- a magic potion apparently able to cure cancer, strengthen your immune system, and treat a spectrum of ailments from diabetes to skin rashes. Taken over time, colloidal silver causes organ damage, and turns the user’s skin an irreversible blue color, like a downtrodden smurf. 

Carlson’s profits fund her consumerist lifestyle: her followers recall her obsession with Amazon, where she shopped for cheap jewelry and costumes. She rents luxury Airbnbs in Oregon, Hawaii, and Colorado, buys a go-kart, and drinks copious amounts of alcohol. 

Carlson was part of what’s now referred to as the “wellness industrial complex,” or the business of healing. 

The Love Has Won documentary captures Carlson’s final months: her followers spoon-feed her over 20 vials of colloidal silver a day as she succumbs to alcoholism, unable to walk due to organ failure. In moments of weakness or clarity, Carlson admits she is not God and requests medical care. Her followers refuse, insisting that she is. Carlson dies under their care, her skin a deep steely blue.

The documentary ends with clips of each member overlaid with text updating the viewer on their lives after Love Has Won. Faith, Carlson’s closest ‘oracle,’ relocated and continues charging clients to perform energy healing sessions.

According to statistics website Statista.org, the wellness industry was “estimated at over 4.3 trillion dollars in 2020.” In an interview with Variety, Love Has Won director Hannah Olsen said:

“[...]The thing that is especially American about Love Has Won is the way that the lack of our social safety net creates the desire to look for ways online to heal your mind and body for free. Much the way that consumerism and the celebrity worship are part of the Americanness of the cult, so too is the lack of healthcare and the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ [mentality] — find[ing] a way to heal your mind and body through a feeling, rather than a set of social resources.”

The wellness industry is bootstrap mentality with a tan and a mandala tattoo. 

In one Instagram video posted by an account called @whi.texicans, a group of thin, tanned white people stand around a cauldron of boiling soup, softly chanting. A long hair guy sits behind them, his flowy shirt unbuttoned, strumming a guitar. Women make delicate, poetic movements in the air with their thin fingers, as if moved by an unseen spirit. Another image circulated among meme accounts shows shows a woman ‘cleansing’ her iPhone with sage smoke. In another series, a white 20-something blonde guy with a mandala-printed bandana speaks ‘light language’ at the camera; a ‘healing tongue’ he claims to have channeled from a higher power to soothe your spirit, cure anxiety, or encourage financial success -- depending on the video’s theme. In all these videos and images, the practices of various indigenous populations are co-opted and, floating through the void of the internet, stripped of context with vague labels of “spirituality” and “healing.”  

Wanting to escape from NYC’s miserable gray winter, I visited Costa Rica for a two-month trip. My desire to experience another culture was sometimes at odds with my desire to be comfortable, so before I drove inland to stay in ungentrified farmland, I chose to spend a week in a touristy beach location.

From the moment I arrived in Nosara, a small beach town on the Guanacaste peninsula, I planned to write about the phenomenon of ‘white healer culture’. Though I wasn’t yet sure what form my writing would take, I scribbled notes in my journal and screenshotted a closeup of Google Maps with a search for “yoga” showing dozens of red dots, each reflecting a different yoga studio on the same two mile strip of land.

In Nosara, I expected an experience similar to other tourist towns I’d been to — a breakfast place that sold cold brew and avocado toast, a restaurant with dim, edison bulb pendant lights that looked like it could be in Brooklyn. I didn’t know anything about Nosara, but from scrolling around the map feature on Airbnb, I noticed the rentals looked sleek and modern, open-concept living rooms with wide doors opening out into the jungle, concrete floors and countertops in the kitchen. 

When I arrived, I found a town that seemed almost entirely under construction. Multiple people referred to Nosara as “a portal.”

Over the main road, dust hung in thick beige clouds. On every corner, in every enclave, The sound of power tools ground through the air, condos and hotels in progress. Cafes, restaurants, and telephone poles in Nosara were plastered with posters advertising healing services: sound baths, the sale of medicinal plants, cacao ceremonies, energetic dance, drum circles, classes to ‘unlock your power,’ divine femininity consultations, crystal workshops, voice work, breath work, chanting, and of course, yoga. Small yellow signs pleading for donations to build ‘monkey bridges’ -- tiny wire bridges hanging above the new condos, allowing passage for monkeys crossing what used to be a dense jungle -- were posted on every road. 

My first Airbnb in Nosara was a hotel advertised as being an ‘off the beaten track, nature lover’s paradise’ hidden in the jungle. When I arrived, a woman who looked like me -- thin, white, with brown hair and middling tattoos stamped along her arms -- showed me to a noisy room between a construction site and the hotel’s parking lot. As I placed my bag down, she extolled the benefits of a $400 juice cleanse she hoped I’d purchase from her, which promised to help me “detoxify, look and feel my best” while “rapidly losing 5-8 pounds.” Annoyed by the overpriced and self-contradictory sales pitch, and uncomfortable in a bedroom the parking lot looked directly into, I declined, canceled my reservation and booked a last-minute place down the road. 

30 minutes later, I arrived at a concrete complex painted Pepto-Bismol pink and topped with barbed wire along its seven foot walls. After an uneventful night, I prepared to check out. As I packed, a tall, thin blonde woman appeared in the doorway with a short, bald man standing behind her, inviting me to the deck outside their room two doors down, to chat while they smoked weed. 

Before building the hotel, the host, Sarah, told me, the area was a mangrove of mango trees locals used as a food source. Sarah and her husband -- the short man -- bulldozed it to build the property. 

I couldn’t live in the 3D matrix, Sarah told me, and Nosara is a magic portal. When I asked what she meant, she told me she ‘downloaded information from the galaxy’ informing her of Nosara’s special properties as a place of rapid healing, and encouraging her to move there.

“There are so many ways to tell a lie,” Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay collection, Call Them By Their True Names. “You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that white kids are ‘hanging out’ but the Black kids are ‘loitering’ or ‘lurking’. Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.”

The wellness industry depends on the fantasy of healing. Fantastical language encourages you to enter a portal to an enlightened realm where you can become your higher self. Pretending there is some manifest destiny commanding gentrifiers to places like Nosara distracts from the colonization required to realize this dream, and ‘buries the bodies’ of those who make these healing tools available with their labor or exclusion, who live in the path of a new yoga studio.

What Solnit observes as falsified information appears in alluring claims “anyone” can access what is actually exclusive. The fantasy of bootstrap self-healing omits crucial information: money and mobility are the bar to entry. Indigenous practices are co-opted, commodified and renamed simply, “healing.”

Sarah told me about Envision, a spiritual and music festival advertised as “a utopian jungle experience” scheduled to happen nearby in the following weeks. She expressed surprise that I had no interest in going. If I didn’t care about the abundance of healing ceremonies and services available to me, her surprise seemed to ask, why was I even there?

Like many others who arrived in Nosara, I wanted to escape the place from which I came, to purchase a sense of peace by walking along a quiet beach that was, in my mind, free of context, like a screensaver. And there we stood, in a complex where Sarah hosted ayahuasca ‘healing retreats.’ She’d learned to conduct them from her own shaman -- another white woman, French instead of Canadian, who spent several years “training” in an unspecified jungle in Brazil. 

Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea traditionally used in ceremonies by indigenous populations in the jungles of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, has exploded in popularity with the ‘healer’ crowd. Each ayahuasca retreat at the pink compound spanned five days and cost between $7,000-$14,000.

Halfway through writing this piece, my editor recommended I reread James Baldwin’s essay, Letter From A Region In My Mind, in which Baldwin recounts his childhood involvement with the church as a youth preacher, and mirrors this formative experience with his recent interactions with the Nation of Islam, specifically during a dinner at leader Elijah Muhammad’s house. 

Baldwin observed parallels between the Nation of Islam and Christianity -- and his disillusionment with both. Referring to the reason Baldwin left the church and later refused to join the Nation of Islam, he writes: 

“People always seem to band together according to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”  

If whiteness is a construct, its scaffolding is denial and delusion -- the wishful belief that I am pasted into the world with no history, free of context and responsibility. I’m free to fill my spiritual void with whatever “resonates” with me -- another term obscuring my ability to select rituals I enjoy like picking a genre of music to listen to. I went through my crystal phase, my alchemy phase, and my yoga phase. In each one, I discovered a mess of details and muddled history I was asked to ignore in order to participate. 

When I arrived in Nosara, I found alternate versions of myself -- my inescapable position within systems where I am complicit both as a white person and a person with money, who loves a good massage at a quiet spa, who relishes the serenity of an exclusive beach many people can’t afford. In a world where so much is out of my control, I am often tempted to turn away from the world’s collective and endless suffering, to pretend it doesn’t exist, and focus solely on my own happiness.

Traveling alone, I’m often lauded as ‘brave;’ a word suggesting that as a white woman, my status is as an adventurer and potential victim -- never an aggressor. 

Nosara fulfilled many of the same criteria for me that it did for the spiritual colonizer crowd -- safe to travel alone, with abundant nature, warm weather, and removed from our lives and therefore freed from confronting questions about our positions in this world. It was easy to slip into a beach setting and, faced with no opposition, convince ourselves we were meant to remain there, walking barefoot under the sun indefinitely. During my time in Nosara, I enjoyed myself in the ways I arrived to do -- I explored the beach, I had coffee and avocado toast, I looked for tiny creatures in tide pools. In that way, I imagine, we led similar lives. 

Six months after my trip to Nosara, I went to Italy to visit a friend. The cab driver who picked me up from the train station in Tuscany was a tall white man with white hair and a neatly combed white beard, like a Wes Anderson character. 

Unprompted, he told me he regularly traveled to Brazil to do Ayahuasca, but his ceremonies differed from most since he expected each user to be their own shaman. He used keywords like 3D and 5D, the veil, the portal. A tiny brass Om was glued to his dashboard.

My conversation with the driver had the trappings of conversations I’d had with many older white men — vaguely condescending. When I chose to stay quiet, he asked me a question to revive the conversation, then steamrolled my answer with his own lengthy response.

I admitted I’d never taken ayahuasca. 

Mmhmm, I see. 

While I agreed that hallucinogens could help change one’s world view or perspective on past experiences, I also saw overuse as an easy path to shirking responsibilities to the people directly around them, shrugging off agency as “an illusion.” 

The conversation tapered off. We still had an hour left to drive. Through the window, I watched the rolling Tuscan hills dotted with ancient farmhouses and grazing herds of sheep and cows. This must be one of the most beautiful places on earth, I thought.

I’m very unhappy with the way things are going in this world. 

I didn’t respond.

Yep, he sighed, I’m excited for the future, for everything about to happen. 

The spiteful part of me took the bait. 

What do you mean? 

The apocalypse is coming. Something huge will reveal itself, and expose everything wrong with the world, all the evil stuff going on. Our oppressors will be exposed. 

The car dipped into a valley, following the gentle curve of the road. Wildflowers sprung from the hillside in spring bloom. Swallows and blackbirds dipped down from the sky.

Our higher purpose will be revealed, he continued. Maybe the world is one big chemical fart. But I don’t think so. I think there is a deeper purpose. What do you think our deeper purpose is? What do you think it all means? 

Writing this, I’m again reminded of Letter From A Region In My Mind, where Baldwin reflects on his feelings at dinner with Elijah Muhammad.

“I had the stifling feeling that [he] knew I belonged to them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unready, and that they were simply waiting [...] for me to discover the truth for myself.”

I already accepted that there was no answer I could provide that would satisfy him, so I instead opted to provide an answer that satisfied me.

Twenty years from now, someone might read the essay I write this month. Reading changed my perspective on the world -- I remember the way my favorite books changed my life, the before and after of reading them. Maybe, sitting in their room alone, they’ll feel seen or spoken to by what they read of mine, and it will change something for them. In that way, we’re connected through space and time. Creating those connections is my purpose. That’s a portal to me.  

He frowned. 

Maybe you need to take more mushrooms, and then you’ll come around. You’ll see. 

Hello friends :3

Sorry I left you hanging last month. I’ve been working on a piece I’m excited to share with you tomorrow. 

Moving forward, while there will be essays that take longer than one month to complete, I want to make sure I’m delivering a monthly essay to your inbox. You can expect some shorter essays, thoughts on books I’m reading, albums I’m listening to and films I’m watching.  

If you have ideas/suggestions/something you’d like to see me write about, please leave a comment or send me a dm on Instagram: @drew11111111111111111111111111 (there are 26 1s).

Drew

In my 20s, I had a habit of ending sex, often kicking guys out of my apartment, immediately after I came. 

Because those instances were so long ago, and because of my past addictions to xanax, cocaine, and alcohol, only a collage of moments remain in my memory: the hurt look on a friend’s face as I dressed in the dark while he sat on his bed. Placing my hand on someone’s chest to stop them, saying, I’m tired, we should stop. Pushing someone’s hand away from between my legs after I got what I wanted, rolling over to drop into sleep, indifferent to whether they stayed or not. Their reaction was almost universal. Surprised by my sudden coldness, they quietly complied.  

On one date, I met up with a guy I exchanged numbers with when I briefly met him at his job. We planned to have dinner and a drink nearby. When we met, he had deep bags under his eyes and appeared disheveled, unlike the collected person I remembered from when we met.

My shoe is broken. Can I drive your car to the restaurant?

He peeled the bottom of his shoe away from his foot as proof. 

I looked at him hunched over on the pavement, losing his balance as he pulled the leather bottom away from his shoe. I thought his choice of footwear meant he imagined our date as a stationary one -- drinking at a bar -- where I imagined a long stroll in the late spring weather.

In that moment, I decided I didn’t give a shit if we were incompatible, if he were hungover or if I found his request to drive my car obnoxious. I told myself he probably knew how to fuck well, and quickly switched my fantasy from one based around the stimulating conversations I hoped for, to one centered on the sex we might have. 

At the bar after dinner, her downed four drinks while I sipped one. He rambled about himself at length. To obtain my coveted nut, I would tolerate whatever stupid shit lie in the several hours ahead. 

This will be our only date, I told him. 

Come on, give me a chance. 

When we entered my bedroom, I forged ahead. After a few clumsy minutes, I rolled away and went to sleep. I pushed his approaching face away early the next morning, said I was busy that day, that I had to get started. 

But when we were texting you said you were free all day today. 

I jumped out of bed and got dressed as a signal that he should do the same. 

Moving into my 30s, I let people stay a little longer, sometimes the entire night. But recoiling in shame and ghosting them afterwards remained. 

Since my late teens and into my 20s, I wrote detailed journals which I hoped to one day turn into a memoir. It wasn’t until I was sober and working with an editor, that I looked back on everything I wrote and noticed the passive voice I used in my journals. 

I let him kiss me, I wrote of my first date with an ex boyfriend. 

Distancing myself from my role in large parties or intimate dates by choosing only to record my attendance, I observed everything around me in a detached, aloof tone. Instead of writing what I thought or felt, I found it easier to observe details about who else was there, what they did, what other people said. I alluded to times I’d spoken, rather than writing what I’d said. Because I was afraid to acknowledge my desires, fears, and hopes, I focused on observing the world outside of me. Crafting myself as a passive, backseat character in my own life allowed me to keep what I then saw as a safe distance from the vulnerable act of doing. 

Because I acknowledged my emotions so rarely, when some latent desire or fear forced its way to the surface for air, I hardly recognized it. Unable to recognize what I wanted, let alone express those desires, sex was often a losing gamble. I didn’t tell the other person what brought me pleasure or discomfort, and later resented them for not knowing. I imagined the quality of casual sex I sought to be satisfying in every detail, the soft and careful way I imagined they kissed me, the intuitive way I wanted them to fuck me without telling them what I enjoyed. I imagined our bodies communicating in a language without words -- a deep biological knowledge activated. I imagined this connection, though temporary, would fulfill the desire for affection I couldn’t articulate. 

I hoped to erase myself in sex — I didn’t want to perceive myself or the other person, only our bodies locked in furious struggle for pleasure. But the thinning fog of post nut clarity revealed myself unchanged: lonely, dissatisfied, confused about why I thought this interaction would benefit me at all. 

To justify having sex with someone I had no interest in dating, whether a friend or stranger, I told myself another person would please me in a way I couldn’t do for myself, physically filling a void my hand or a bloodless piece of dick-shaped plastic could not. Masturbating bored me before it depressed me. Despite telling myself I was better off alone, I longed for human warmth. I imagined dick would temporarily stave off my loneliness. 

Impatient to skip the performance of goodbyes and be alone, my body tensed as they dressed, willing them out, like if I strained hard enough they might disappear and save me the awkwardness of three more minutes together. I waited for the door to close behind them, for the relief of solitude to wash over me. 

Like a drug addict telling myself this time it’ll be different, I struggled to recognize the cycle I placed myself in. 

Despite the enormous walls I constructed, I blamed the other person for failing to connect with me. 

I recently found my diary from 9/11, which records the day over five pages in a clinical tone. One week into my freshman year at Brooklyn Tech High School, the Twin Towers were attacked. 

Standing with my classmates by my classroom window, I watched them burn. When a friend returned from the bathroom and whispered there was a better view from the bathroom window, I quickly asked for the pass, then hurried to see for myself. 

I document the car ride home with my parents: sitting in traffic, spotting a cute guy on the street. Over two long paragraphs, I described making eye contact with him, about the smile he directed at me -- a slow, warm smile, not a fake corny one.

Now I have something else to remember from this day, I wrote.  

Not documented in my journal was waiting in a long line of cars being directed by police at every corner, or my father’s shallow, hurried breathing. Frightened by his failure to catch his breath, my father’s panic created a self perpetuating loop of shorter and shorter gasps for air. He was hyperventilating. 

Hyperventilating was a routine part of my father’s emphysema. His bedroom was lined with oxygen tanks, nebulizers, medicine boxes and drawers full of inhalers, for different times of the day and evening, some specifically for moments like this. From the backseat, I watched him fumble with the shirt pocket of his signature flannel, pull out an inhaler. He took a puff. Because he was stressed about the traffic, about the distance between himself and his medication, the unknown amount of time lying ahead before he reached them, his medicine was ineffective. 

Cops at the intersection allowed cars to pass one row at a time with no regard for the light. My father wheezed as he pushed our car forward in line. When we pulled up beside the cop, my father rolled his window down. My mother spoke for him, asking could we please go ahead? 

You can go ahead in an ambulance directly to the hospital or you can wait your turn. 

The hospital promised chaos, not relief. On an average day, a day that was not 9/11, intake could take hours. Seeing a doctor, who would give my father the medication he already had at home, several more. 

I didn’t personally know anyone who died on 9/11, but watching my father die during that time emotionally spent and cauterized me. I was an already-burnt match, incapable of sparking with new grief or shock. 

That same year, I discovered and read Letters To A Young Poet, a compilation of ten letters poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young fan of his work. Rilke provides insight and advice on life, creating art, and love. In one letter, Rilke writes:

“A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

At the time, I wielded the quote as a promise I’d always be alone. But in the back of my mind, it sparked hope: someday, someone might make eye contact with me across the great gulf of our solitudes, would see me for everything I didn’t know how to express but which I wished would be obvious to someone who loved me. 

I wanted someone who saw I was flawed -- at times hypocritical and flighty, insecure and confused -- and who decided to stay. 

During sex, I was hypersensitive. The guy didn’t even have to find my clit -- he could just fumble around close to it -- and the friction would make me cum, at which point I drowned in disgust. I often felt ashamed of myself for sleeping with someone I didn’t want to spend time with. My remorse intensified my resentment towards myself and, because I didn’t know where else to direct it, their presence. 

A few months before I turned 18, in December of 2004, my father’s illness was so severe he struggled to walk across his bedroom. On an evening before he planned to visit his parents for a week, saving himself the drive back and forth, I went into his room to say goodbye. 

See you when you get back. 

When I turned to leave, he called my name.

Are you mad at me? 

Why would I be mad at you?

For being sick. 

His eyes filling with tears, my father looked at me. I’d never seen him cry. 

Of course not. 

That was the last time I saw him. 

A year later, I met up with one of my closest friends to watch a movie in his room. I knew he had a crush on me when we were in high school, and, comfortable in his company, I felt in control. In his bedroom, some radar turned on. I wanted to be attracted to him; he was sensitive and kind. We appreciated the same music in the same way, laughing at the melodramatic lyrics and whiny vocals of emo bands like The Lindsay Diaries while unironically enjoying their music. We both understood there to be a little-appreciated but undulating magic in life, and walked around Brooklyn at night watching people’s apartment lights flicker off, sharing wonderment at the vast unknowable interiors of parallel lives. 

I told myself fucking him might awaken deeper and stronger romantic feelings, like the dopamine release would compel me to date him. Being sad made me horny as fuck. Sex being the warm solution to my grief, everything I ever pushed down struggled to the surface of my being and reared its head as horniness. 

Afterwards I felt only the desire to escape. 

After I came, I remember leaving in the middle of the night as he sat confused and hurt on his bed. I was ashamed of myself for hurting him, for making our friendship a casualty. I knew fucking him was cruel, that subconsciously I had known it to be cruel even when convincing myself otherwise. I used him to temporarily alleviate my pain, to provide me with the illusion I was not alone. 

I believed he knew me as a performance I put on, the “cool girl,” the easygoing girl -- the girl I learned to be in the hospital, watching my father die, where I learned expressing desire or fear ended in humiliation. Because I tried so hard to smother my own emotions, I didn’t realize I desperately wanted to be comforted. I could only reenact the end of a relationship I hadn’t wanted to lose, making myself the person who leaves before I was left. 

In a 2018 article for The Washington Post, writer Anjali Pinto wrote about the way her grief manifested as a desire to engage in casual sex with multiple partners. 

In the depths of my grief, I wanted sex and intimacy without having to date, compromise or be emotionally available to anyone new. I did not want to make small talk about my life as it was falling apart. 

Anjali was 29 at the time of her husband’s death, with more lived experience than I had in high school and in my early 20s, and more in touch with herself. 

Though I shared similar desires, I was unable to articulate them. I didn’t have language for “emotional availability,” or how I might become emotionally available -- the idea appeared to me as a threat of injury via abandonment. By fleeing or kicking someone out of my apartment, I remained in control, ending interactions in a predictable, reliable manner. I found the remorse or disgust washing over me post-casual-nut a preferable alternative to the sheer terror that someone I wanted to be around might not reciprocate.

Anjali writes that her “need for intimacy felt dire, like a big weight. The rush of feel-good chemicals created an overwhelming sense of happiness, even amid my loneliness.”

With every evening I spent pulling someone in just to push them away, I performed a small ritual that reasserted I would not be caught unprepared again. Though I saved myself from the risk of losing someone by being the one who leaves, I now recognize the pain I sought to avoid is the pain I may have created for men who could be grieving losses of their own.