I still bleed, regularly, at 52. In some ways my body feels younger than ever. I feel my feelings immediately, almost as quickly as a toddler, an ability that took years of therapy to regain. I feel increasing sexual aliveness—I am aroused constantly, gratifying myself almost daily. And now in this sixth decade, I do what I want for the most part (perhaps with more grace than a toddler), after a lifetime of doing what I thought others wanted me to do. I set my work schedule, I write, I work with amazing young people, I have confidence in my professional expertise, I travel, I have more than one lover. But there are the markers of change and decay, those enervating badges none of us escape—the pains (especially in the morning), the lost flexibility, the afternoon exhaustion, and the foggy brain.

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But I still bleed, and I love it. I have always loved it. I love the smell of it, the way it looks, the way it feels when it’s dripping out of me. Newly divorced and dating ravenously, I feel giddy each time a new lover asks with surprise, “You still get your period?” One joked, “We talked about STDs, do we also need to talk about babies?”

The first time I felt like an anomaly about my period was in the 8th grade bathroom, facing the appalled looks the other girls gave when I rejoined their complaints about their periods with, “I like it.” I haven’t liked the cramps but have loved the intense pleasure from masturbating them away, feeling the contractions of my orgasm releasing some of the blood from my uterine walls.

At 48, my mother declared that she was “bleeding all over Western North Carolina.” I thought this would happen to me, like the way my hair is thinning as hers did. My period comes a little sooner than before—after 23 or 24 days instead of 28—but the flow is lighter. I have mostly avoided my mother’s regional deluge, but I did have a moment like hers recently, walking down a side street in the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo. I was on my way to treat said sparsely covered scalp when I felt a rush into my panties. With a mix of pleasure and panic, I chuckled, “Oh no, oh no.” Still blocks away from the spa and wearing light-colored trousers, I ducked into an alley and, standing next to the garbage cans just out of sight of the security camera, I unzipped and stuffed a tissue from my bag into my crotch.

I laughed, thinking how women the world over have to prepare for such surprises. I remembered working the lights from the catwalk in my high school summer acting program. I watched in powerless horror as one of the actors, wearing white pants during a performance, lay “dead” down center stage for the last ten minutes of the play, a red spot overtaking her groin. I wanted to help and I wanted to hide as her vulnerability oozed a few feet from the people in the front row. I cut the spotlight. But now I wonder why this commonplace occurrence is so universally shameful. It isn’t really; it’s rather amazing.

I’ve heard from friends ahead of me that things get easier after menopause. Hormones stabilize. Clarity comes, power arrives. I want that, but I also want my bleeding. I feel powerful when I bleed. Sexually powerful. Femininely powerful. I’ve also heard about the welcome departure of the sex drive, freeing up time and attention for self-empowering pursuits. To me, this sounds most unwelcome. The past couple of years have found me in an unexpected sexual awakening. With a mixture of gratitude and ruefulness at its late arrival, I have been exploring appetites that I never fully satisfied in past relationships, and discovered new ones.

And my body doesn’t want to let this amazing spectacle go. Literally, like today. My period officially ended five days ago, but it’s still here … sort of. There’s some blood, but it’s dried up. Mucousy. And the smell is ... not good. It’s old. Passed. Decaying. And today emerged a dark, black globule whose walnut size shocked me. The same shock I felt in the days of my first periods, trying to make sense of what was coming out of me and at what rate. I pulled the blob off the toilet paper and pressed it like a soap bead between my fingers. Smelled it. Considered it. I thought of Stanley, my dog who died some months ago. In his final days, his bowels a wreck, the cancer tearing up his insides, I found such a globule on the living room floor. Huge. Black. Spongy. Rank. Dried blood from his insides that had solidified enough for him to poop it out.

And now my vagina is doing the same. But is in it its final days?

I’ve heard from friends ahead of me that things get easier after menopause. Hormones stabilize. Clarity comes, power arrives. I want that, but I also want my bleeding. I feel powerful when I bleed. Sexually powerful. Femininely powerful. I’ve also heard about the welcome departure of the sex drive, freeing up time and attention for self-empowering pursuits. To me, this sounds most unwelcome. The past couple of years have found me in an unexpected sexual awakening. With a mixture of gratitude and ruefulness at its late arrival, I have been exploring appetites that I never fully satisfied in past relationships, and discovered new ones.

I’ve had lovers who are sensually skillful, if emotionally limited. Verbally enchanting yet physically absent. A playful and present fellow who masterfully rigged toys for mind-bending play, but was too large for penetrative sex. Another who delighted my body for hours only to send darts of emotional abuse in between our encounters. I met a man who set my mind on fire, laughed and riposted my jokes almost as well as my closest women friends, made lots of promises, but couldn’t make room for me in his life. I’ve had partners who are serious, attuned, disappointing, and surprising. High-demand seekers, some of whose minds are more open than mine. Men who have held me vulnerably while we’ve watched the world falling apart. Avoidants I’ve pursued in avoidance of my own decomposition. Although no one in what my therapist calls my “caseload of boyfriends” is fully meeting the mark, each has given me a different prism of a full view of myself. It is an overwhelming, stimulating, rich, gratifying, and confusing time. A time that’s hard for me to hold lightly because I know it will pass. But for now, I’m in a spiritual threesome with Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver. Tied up in the woods, waiting to suck the marrow out of my lovers with my one, precious life.

This precious life that still bleeds. Once, when having sex with a lover in the back of my car outside a car charging station (yes, this was not when I was a teenager, this was in my electric car just last year) I thought my period was done. My lover exclaimed, “Oh, Sweetie, you’re bleeding. There’s a lot of blood.” I felt my wet cunt. It was heavy wet. I looked at his blood-covered member and I loved it. I loved that I had marked him with the uncontrolled messiness. But being middle aged, of course I had tissues in the console. I wiped us both off. Then I cleaned him with my mouth, which allowed him to unfreeze and relax. We continued with our pleasure.

I don’t want to lose this bleeding. I am sitting above the charnel grounds of my fertility (about which I don’t care, no longer aspiring to be a mother.) But I’m watching the bleeding leave in this strange way. The vultures of toilet paper pluck the last of it from me. I wonder how my pussy will change when there’s no more heavy wetness. I wonder how I will change. Each time I open a new box of tampons, I muse, “Is this the last one? How many more times will I bleed? Two? Twelve?” And then what will happen? Will Henry David and Mary trot off into the woods together, leaving me with my vaginal dryness?

My friend Sarah was ten months out and then got another period. My gynecologist happily responded when I told her no, I don’t have any pain during sex. She said, “Well if you do, we’ll just get you a topical estrogen cream and that should take care of it.” My friend Rachel swore estrogen patches brought her boobs back to life. My friend Katie pointed me to an article on women taking testosterone to get their libidos back. Then, at a dinner party, my friend Margaret and her prescribing nurse practitioner regaled me with the life-giving benefits of T. My libido and my life are fine. They’re fantastic. For now. But I’m terrified that will change. The change. The change is, now I do what I want. But so does my changing body.

Amy Laird Webb is an educator, actor, and writer based in NYC and the Hudson Valley. Her essay, “Much Ado About Swimming,” will be published in the forthcoming anthology about Governors Island, Ferried Away, by Fordham University Press.

This essay was guest-edited by .

I was home with a stomach bug, scrolling through way too much Instagram, when it started. “Mom what were you like in the 90s?” the captions asked. Cute, I thought at first. Some girls in vintage dresses and the basic makeup we could access pre-Sephora. Then the celebrities joined in. Molly Ringwald, every Gen X girl’s dream, chic in vintage designer frocks, auburn hair curled just so; Jazmine Guy, her Southern Black belle charm (her character, Whitley, on A Different World taught me there were Black southern belles) playing peekaboo with her vigilant gaze. Then the trend jumped the Zima, starting with the Say Anything actress and former Beastie Boys spouse Ione Skye. Then there were the C-listers. Then there were the regular folks posting. Next, it went meta: Gen Z-ers posted montages as if they were Queen Latifah or Blossom rather than worrying about whether they’d ever get a job, as their generation has become more or less unhireable. All set to the deeply unhip Goo Goo Dolls song “Iris.”

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Which brings me to myself. I didn’t participate in the trend. Why? Because I had no cute reel to post. I didn’t take many photos in the 90s. The truth is: I didn’t think I was hot. Even back then, when I probably was. The thing was, I was not obviously sexually available to men, which made me all but invisible to them. And then to myself. I, born zaftig and suspicious, with a Philly loud mouth on me, did not fulfill my era’s hot girl mission. The 1990s were Peak Fucked Gamine, older sister of the Manic Pixie Dream girl, but without the laughs. The ideal was bony, frenetic, and self-deprecating, in Calvin Klein triangle underpants, smoking Parliaments in frequent Girl Interrupted-esque mental health spirals, with dark circles under her eyes like Prozac Nation’s author Lizzy Wurtzel (RIP to a still-under-sung genius). I had three friends who dated posh heroin addicts. The ethos was vivid, waifish melancholy. The one-hit-wonder singer Lisa Loeb was the version nicer guys could desire, begging them to “please stay.”

That wasn’t me, and it may not have been you, either. I was a strong person who said what I thought, which usually didn’t include whining for a guy to love me. Where are the women like me who were celebrating their lives in “Mom, What Were You Like in the 1990s?”

I dressed in thrifted clothes, wore matte red lipstick and black eyeliner, and had big curly hair, in which I affixed barrettes shaped like shooting stars or flowers. My boots were combat, and my sneakers crayon-color Adidas. I lived in a huge loft on 123rd Street in Manhattan and then in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, when people joked you could use frequent flier miles to get there. I went to clubs in the Meatpacking District when it still smelled like meat, smoking menthols in cabs on the way home.

There was another reason, though, why the 90s weren’t all baby barrettes, the ability to smoke in bars, and that first brilliant Fugees record. How about, instead of romanticizing the 90s, we discuss them? What did it feel like for a girl back then? Post # MeToo, I can tell you, it wasn’t great. My VH1 VP boss felt comfortable leeringly peeking into a shopping bag of bras I’d bought at Macy’s during my lunch break. I was 22; he was fifteen years older, married, with a kid. I didn’t know how to say no. My longtime boyfriend nagged me to lose weight. After I did, we broke up. My Oscar-nominated screenwriting teacher suggested the brunette teenager in my screenplay should “at least” have big breasts. I stopped writing screenplays.

This social media trend is part of a raft of 90s resurgences, sparked by the Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr romance pastiche Love Story, and centred around the fashion zeal for minimalism and monochrome. I feel like my mom when I used to buy fifties prom dresses, and she would protest, “We had to wear girdles with those and couldn’t go to a formal without some dumb date!”

Here’s an example to make you wonder, kids. Janine Garafolo was this uber-cool, ironic comedian and actress, starring in Reality Bites with Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder, the absolute icons of 90s hotness. But Janine, who had, you know, like, visible hips and who was less anguished than Winona, was known, and repeatedly cast, as the fat friend with a pretty face. The number of dudes who told me I reminded them of her… I knew what they meant: “I think you’re attractive, but we all know I’m not supposed to think so.”

Now I wonder, a la Carrie Bradshaw, how free did Molly, Jazmine, or Ione feel back then?

Nostalgia for the prior generation is business as usual today—and good for business—as the Gap revives its plain (to me, boring) hoodies, and a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tantalizes us. The 90s seem cool now. A time before phones and social media. It seems romantic to an alienated, siloed batch of Zoomers that we ran into people on the street instead of screens, made plans without endless text chains, or cozied up in authentic preppy vintage J. Crew roll-neck sweaters. And we didn’t have the current political wasteland, the rising seas, or the…

Wait. We did. Trump was in New York back then, on the covers of magazines, bragging about his avaricious bullshit. Mayor Giuliani was arresting homeless people and building the infrastructure for the mallification of New York City. Also, we all knew about climate change. Anyone who says differently didn’t read newspapers, which may have been plentiful and cheap, but also claimed objectivity, even though most of the people who wrote for them were white men.

Walking down a dark street at night was scarier without a phone. A friend of mine was sitting on a train at rush hour when a man inserted his penis in her ear. No one yelled at him, let alone filmed him. When I was a senior at the all-women Barnard College in 1996, I took a class called Feminist Theater. Most of the students refused to identify with that f-word—not me, never me. Our professor, horrified, told us about when she and fellow artists “barred the doors” to men in the 1970s. “We had to, to make art without their interference!” she yelled. My classmates shrugged.

How about, instead of romanticizing the 90s, we discuss them? What did it feel like for a girl back then? Post # MeToo, I can tell you, it wasn’t great. My VH1 VP boss felt comfortable leeringly peeking into a shopping bag of bras I’d bought at Macy’s during my lunch break. I was 22; he was fifteen years older, married, with a kid. I didn’t know how to say no. The boyfriend I had nagged me to lose weight. After I did, we broke up. My Oscar-nominated screenwriting teacher suggested the brunette teenager in my screenplay should “at least” have big breasts. I stopped writing screenplays.

Today, at age 51 in the spring of 2026, I’m realizing, or rather confirming, something I always knew: I may have been young and free in the 90s, but the dudes—even the nerdy, artsy ones—thought they had the right to actual nymphettes, or at least the girls who played them. And who gave them that permission? The guys who we now know to have been abusive, some associated with Epstein, like Woody Allen, some who have already been me-too-ed, and some who refused to grow up. Those men never deserved us. But they were everywhere, and they were loud.

The older women who’d cut their consciences to fit the era’s fashions weren’t great either. That VP’s boss was so scary, she went on to invent the Real Housewives franchise. The cool girls who looked past me because they dated indie band boys. The trust-fund baby women’s-mag freelancers who somehow had enough money to act as if they weren’t freelancers. That friend Jenny, who coaxed me into showing my boss the bras.

The women were the real betrayers because I’d expected more of them. I was a feminist, born and bred. I thought it would be easier for me than it had been for my mom. We could wear our cool vintage crinolines without girdles. We didn’t have to take friends to illegal abortions. We wouldn’t have to be married to get birth control. We could get our own credit cards.

How about, instead of romanticizing the 90s, we discuss them? What did it feel like for a girl back then? This is why I love the show Yellowjackets, now filming its fourth and final season. Yes, that series, about a high school girls’ soccer team from suburban New Jersey who crash-land in the Canadian Wilderness and resort to cannibalism. The show progresses in two timeframes: the teenagers trying to survive in the woods through winter and starvation, and the older women who did make it out alive, now, in the 2020s. The brilliant twist of the show is that the creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, don’t use aging techniques or CGI to jump between eras. Instead, they cast parallel teams of actresses, all appropriately aged for their characters. The young actresses are wonderful, incandescent, even when covered in each other’s blood.

But the older actresses reveal, via the long-form character building of a multi-season show, what the quick-glimpse Insta reels can’t. Melanie Lynsky, Lauren Ambrose, Hilary Swank, and Juliette Lewis. Christina Ricci! And this season, coming up, Molly fucking Ringwald. These women feel the trauma of that time in the woods, and, as Queen Tori Amos sang in 1992, their voices have “been here/Silent all these years.” In the first episode, Linsky as Shauna, guts and fricassees a veg-thieving bunny from her garden, and Misty, played by Ricci, chats with her parrot, Caligula. Ambrose’s Van runs a failing video rental store. Tawny Cypress as Taissa yearns for the relative simplicity of her first love with Van—before they came home to the real world. These women, now in their 50s, may be haunted by the past, but they know how to cut and bleed.

As do the actresses who play them. In an otherwise banal press video, a young interviewer asks whether the Gen X actresses have shared their experiences with the younger women. Ricci smirks and answers, “I don’t think we’ve terrified them with our stories.” She continues, “I find it wonderful to see how the attitudes have changed… to be involved in the choreography of sex scenes, set limits, say no to things, and feel safe and comfortable… You’d have to be a monster to want to see people suffer in the same way you did.”

You’d have to be a monster. But there are so many monsters still out here.

I have a 15-year-old child. Since her birth, I worried: Who would her role models be? Her mentors? Would she, too, feel the pains of a hypersexualized yet withholding culture for women and girls? Ha. Everything is weirder, worse, and also sometimes better than I could have imagined. August is obsessed with the show Yellowjackets. Not only does it have, at least by her exacting standards, the best sapphic romance on TV, but, passing the Bechdel Test with flying colors, the actresses don’t bounce off men. It’s the way she imagines the world should be; girls, all of us, with men as ancillary characters.

What was I like in the 90s? I was fucking mad about how much work we had to do to dodge predators, write stories, and find a decent partner. The misogyny is still in the water—Unlike RFK Jr.’s plans for fluoride. At least I can write this now without worrying someone will not want to fuck me after reading it.

One day in the early 1990s, I heard a colleague of mine in the English department at Marymount musing about Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers,” weighing the merits of teaching it to his seniors in conjunction with The Great Gatsby, both stories about strivers run amok.

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I was horrified. I had never talked about that essay—not in high school, not in college—with one exception: my best friend Jill Bickett, chair of our English department, to whom I immediately ran with this information. I feared some student might ask if the “Debbie” in the essay was me, as far-fetched as that would be given the time and distance I’d created from that fourteen-year-old girl. Still, what if an excited student passed on the news to her parents, who would then call the school demanding to know if one of their teachers had been hired without revealing her sullied and infamous past? I would be called in, excuses would be made; the school couldn’t be embarrassed this way, and I would lose everything.

I had always known that essay would one day ruin my life, and now it was happening. The situation worked itself out because the teacher ended up not teaching the essay, and I was off the hook, for the time being.

Then, in October 1991, I sat on my pink couch at home in Venice looking through my books on writing for a good descriptive essay describing a place that reflected the author’s feelings. I found myself once more reading Didion’s essay, and then I read it again. It had, for so many years, caused me to keep silent about my past. I read Didion’s descriptions of us, of my mother, and of where we lived through my adult eyes. I saw that what Didion saw and wrote were in fact spot-on.

I was an adult. My mother was dead. Didion was a genius. I was free to have my own opinions. I saw that my mother hadn’t fooled Didion. We were a modern-day Joad family. My burdens were lifted.

I decided to write to Didion. I wanted her to know what had become of us. Guy was a dentist. Ron was a high school English teacher. Kimi was dead.

My letter began:

Dear Joan Didion,

I am anxious, angry, and jealous as my fragile self-esteem evaporates. I just can’t seem to avoid

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It helped to make you famous, but it’s my life.

I anxiously awaited her reply, which arrived six months later. In it, she wrote:

Dear Debra Miller, I’ve begun this letter so many times, because there’s no real way to tell you how moved I was (am) by your letter.

Then, the letter moved away from me and talked about the weird relationship between an author and her subject.

She continued:

As a writer I tend to compartmentalize the people and events I’ve written about—the writer goes in, tries to understand the story, as if the act of writing it down completed the situation, became the truth. I guess I think writers need to do this, have to do this to maintain the nerve to write anything at all. But of course it’s an illusion.

I’m glad you wrote to me. Thank you.

Six years later, I had the occasion to meet Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. My husband’s daughter, Robin, was a Times columnist and would be interviewing Didion on stage about her latest novel, The Last Thing He Wanted.

Robin let me know that Didion could be aloof and not to expect anything from her. I thought she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. But that’s not what happened. When Robin introduced us backstage, Didion threw her arms around me, called her husband over to meet me, then tucked her arm in mine and escorted me into the auditorium and sat me down beside her. We sat in the audience together while C. Shelby Coffey III read an excerpt from “Some Dreamers,” focusing on the moment my father burned to death, and she grabbed my arm and gave it a hug. Years of mortification melted away.

Sometime after that, I told my colleagues at school the long-held secret—that Ms. Miller was “Debbie,” the fourteen-year-old who cried out for her mother when the judge read the guilty verdict. I told my story to each junior English class thereafter, inviting them to ask me anything they wanted. It was a giant relief to have this secret set free.

Today, I’m proud to be the subject of a Joan Didion essay. When I talk about “Some Dreamers,” people are usually fascinated. It’s part of the reason I wrote this book.

When I heard that Didion died, the loss felt personal. I called my brother Ron to talk about what she had meant in our lives.

If not for her essay, I would not be the woman I am today, a woman inspired to write her own story, a woman who survived and flourished rather than succumb to the darkness that once beckoned me and that consumed my mother.

From The Most Wonderful Terrible Person ©Debra Miller, with permission from She Writes.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been obsessed with the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni legal saga for the past year. I don’t recall the precise origin of the obsession, though I’m sure it was algorithmically-induced. I’d written about the incredible success of Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends With Us on my Substack. Then I read the book. Then I watched the movie on Netflix. Not long after, my news feed was filled with articles about the celebrities’ legal battle. I did not resist.

Theirs is a long and complicated saga for which it would take a few hours to fill in the uninitiated. TL;DR: Actress Blake Lively is suing her co-star and IEWU director, Justin Baldoni, for sexual harassment, breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, and more. Up until recently, he was countersuing Lively for defamation, extortion, and more. (His case against Lively was dismissed, though there are rumors he intends to appeal.) The lawsuits feature a web of other individuals—journalists, publicists, producers, agents, author Colleen Hoover, Blake Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, other celebrities, and even a crisis manager who is the former Deputy Chief of Staff at the CIA.

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Amidst the situation’s many intriguing contortions, one particular celebrity’s involvement has especially captured my attention. You might have heard of her. She is a singer named Taylor Swift.

According to the press, Taylor Swift and Blake Lively were best friends for a decade. Swift is the godmother of at least three of Lively’s four children. The internet is full of photos of the friends together—at football games, posing at clubs, walking and holding hands the way girlfriends do.

In the past year, however, Swift has kept her distance. She has claimed that she’s had nothing to do with the saga between Lively and Baldoni. She’s busy, the tabloids tell us—with touring, her upcoming wedding, baking sourdough bread. All she did was lend a song to be used in the film. She barely speaks to Lively anymore. The tabloids have made Swift’s position clear: not involved.

Why my own obsession with this case? Why should I care what happens to a bunch of entitled multi-millionaires and their high-strung publicists? I’ve never been one for celebrity gossip. I hadn’t even heard of Blake Lively until the day she appeared in my news feed. The truth is, for me this feels personal. I’ve lived this. A much smaller, cheaper version of it anyway.

Unfortunately for the singer, recently unsealed court documents tell a different story. The public has accessed pages of text messages between the friends. In these messages, Swift is revealed to have insulted Baldoni and egged on Lively’s effort to take over control of his film. Swift mocks and demeans the director, referring to his “tiny violin,” presumably after he opened up about his own sexual abuse on a podcast. Swift calls Baldoni “a doofus director” and “a bitch” who “knows something is coming,” ostensibly in reference to a New York Times article about his mistreatment of Lively. (Baldoni’s lawyer has denied the claims made in the article; they sued the paper for defamation.)

Far from being uninvolved in the legal saga, Swift’s texts reveal her to be a key player. More so, they reveal her to have been a conniving Mean Girl—the precise opposite of the sweet, girl-next-door persona she has cultivated throughout her career.

This case has struck a nerve with many. Citizen journalists have been busy this past year analyzing leaked voice memos, scrutinizing metadata, combing court documents, examining video footage, and consulting legal experts. Content creators and everyday truth-seekers have sought to attain the real story (which appears to exonerate Baldoni of any wrongdoing) in the face of pro-Lively media spin.

But why my own obsession with this case? Why should I care what happens to a bunch of entitled multi-millionaires and their high-strung publicists? I’ve never been one for celebrity gossip. I hadn’t even heard of Blake Lively until the day she appeared in my news feed.

The truth is, for me this feels personal. I’ve lived this. A much smaller, cheaper version of it anyway.

In 2021, the internet exploded with the story of “Bad Art Friend.” It was named such after a New York Times piece by Robert Kolker, titled “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” The 10,000-word article described an ongoing legal battle between two writers. Similar to Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson were both suing one another. Larson, who believed Dorland had falsely accused her of plagiarism, was suing Dorland for defamation and tortious interference. Dorland was countersuing for copyright infringement and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

At the heart of the lawsuits was “The Kindest,” Larson’s short story which appeared on Audible, in American Short Fiction, and was set to be featured by One City, One Story before publication was canceled. The story explored a woman’s complicated feelings about receiving an altruistic kidney donation. Dorland is a real-life altruistic kidney donor, and had posted about it on Facebook. The legal battle addressed, in part, the question of whether Larson had seen the donor letter Dorland had written and shared online, and plagiarized the letter in her story.

I will never know what it was about Kolker’s article that struck the nerve it did. But the piece lit a match. Within twenty-four hours, everyone began talking; everyone had an opinion. Were you Team Dawn or Team Sonya? Fellow writers seized on the piece, as did professors, legal experts, organ donors and recipients, psychologists, journalists, even political commentators. Blogs were written. Videos were made. Multiple Twitter accounts sprang up, including one called “Kidneygate,” which shared all available information about the case. (In 2023, the Court ruled in favor of both parties, concluding transformative fair use—not plagiarism—in Larson’s story, and no defamation or tortious interference from Dorland.)

Like others, I became obsessed with “Bad Art Friend.” But my own interest was not impartial. I had been an instructor at Grub Street, the Boston-based writing center where Larson and Dorland met. I had taken a writing workshop with Dorland many years prior. I was in the writing group where Larson’s short story was originally workshopped.

Oh, and one other thing: Sonya was my best friend.

We were kind of like Blake Lively and Taylor Swift. Minus a couple of mansions, international fame, and a few billion dollars.

Like others, I became obsessed with “Bad Art Friend.” But my own interest was not impartial. I had been an instructor at Grub Street, the Boston-based writing center where Larson and Dorland met. I had taken a writing workshop with Dorland many years prior. I was in the writing group where Larson’s short story was originally workshopped. Oh, and one other thing: Sonya was my best friend.

As with the Lively and Baldoni cases, once the saga caught public attention, everyday people accessed the public court documents and began sharing screenshots online. As with Lively and Swift, our private emails and messages were exposed. And just like Taylor Swift, my own words were reflected back to me for all the world to see.

In private emails that were now public, I’d mocked Dawn cruelly and egged on the publication of a story which I knew to be causing her distress. I made light of Dawn’s suffering and participated in nasty conversations which, because many of us in the writing group were instructors or staff members at Grub Street, had the potential to cause Dawn material and reputational damage.

Some of my behind-the-scenes Mean Girling was done in innocence. I had not been an active member of the writing group at the time the story was workshopped. Thus I never read original versions of the story in question, did not actually know if there was any reasonable basis for Dawn’s concerns. I also did not have a clear understanding of the legal case. My version of events was only what was related to me by my best friend and my writing group.

Nonetheless, there were steps I could have taken to learn more and to curtail the nastiness in our email exchanges, or at least in my own. I could have declined to participate. I could have sought the legal documents which, I learned later, were in the public record all along. I could have reached out to Dawn to hear her side of the story. I could have asked more questions.

But I didn’t. I took my friend’s side, supported my group unconditionally.

Is this what happened with Swift and Lively? Did Swift send her cruel text messages and help facilitate Baldoni’s downfall innocently, believing she was supporting her best friend? Did she leap to her friend’s side without hesitation, the way girlfriends so often do? Was there a small voice inside her that whispered this level of Mean Girling doesn’t feel right, and did she tamp it down, because joining in is so much easier, so much safer, than stepping away and speaking up?

“I’d do anything for you!” Swift is on record texting to Lively. This is in response to Lively asking her friend to come to her home, meet Baldoni, and help Lively wrest control of the director’s film.

Did Swift know that what she was doing was wrong? Did she care? I imagine she cares now, seeing her own words and actions reflected back to her on the world stage, knowing too that these words and deeds will echo when this case goes to trial later this spring.

It’s not over for Swift, though. I believe she has a choice.

Soon after Bad Art Friend went viral, I left my writing group. I apologized to Dawn both publicly and in private.

My apology was sincere. I was genuinely sorry. I was ashamed. What was revealed from my emails was a version of myself I was not proud of. It did not represent the person I am or want to be.

Did it cost me to speak up? I’ll put it this way: There is always a cost to speaking up. Taylor, girl, you have my sympathies.

But here’s the other thing: Remaining silent when you know you’ve done wrong has a cost too. Denying your own bad behavior and refusing to acknowledge harm you’ve caused will almost certainly force you into a state of hiding—forever in hiding, from yourself. Such a cost is the ultimate price.

Did it cost me to speak up? I’ll put it this way: There is always a cost to speaking up. Taylor, girl, you have my sympathies. But here’s the other thing: Remaining silent when you know you’ve done wrong has a cost too. Denying your own bad behavior and refusing to acknowledge harm you’ve caused will almost certainly force you into a state of hiding—forever in hiding, from yourself. Such a cost is the ultimate price.

Taylor Swift has not (yet) come to me asking for advice. But if she did, I would tell her exactly what I think: Now is the time to apologize. It’s okay. You fumbled. You lost the plot, dropped the ball. You believed you were supporting your bestie and you got caught up in the gal-pal-forever-yours-love-bombing of it all.

It happens.

Yet now you have an opportunity. Do not hide from your deeds. Fess up. Own it. Acknowledge the damage you caused Justin Baldoni. Apologize.

Do it for him. Do it for your fans. But most of all, do it for you.

You will survive. You may even thrive. Because honestly, Tay-Tay? As someone who’s been through a tiny version of what you’re going through? I can tell you, it is not easy. It may not be easy for a long time. Yet now is your moment. You have a chance to rise up. Stop living the life of a showgirl and start living the life of a human being.

I can think of no stronger foundation for a creative life, or any life, than this one.

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

My mother was adamantly against me going since I would be traveling solo; I only had one friend who was always game to hit up shows with me in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, but she was grounded. With my standard quiet defiance, I determined I was going no matter what. Life at home was difficult. My dad had died from cancer two years earlier. Mom was distracted by her loss and was in a state of full-blown avoidance, throwing herself into waitressing, picking up shifts that kept her away from home and the foundlings who remained there. I was never quite sure when she would parent me, so I was a little surprised by her refusal to let me take off to Santa Cruz on my own.

Grief was confusing for all of us; it was an unpredictable ghost around our home, an untranslatable word, that made us restless. I looked desperately around the house, laid eyes upon my 13-year old brother, Billie Joe, and threw him in the car before he or our mother could say a word of protest.

I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu. The destination? A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

A few days prior to the Santa Cruz show I had been at the Greek Theater in Berkeley to see R.E.M. They had become the only band that mattered to me. But a persistent summer rain caused the band to cancel. I was sickened. I had been carrying around a wild yellow mustard seed flower that I had picked outside the venue. I was at the front of the stage. When the band members came out to break the news to the audience, I reflexively crushed the flower in my fist. As the band turned to leave the stage, I threw away the weed and headed for home. No choice but to head to Santa Cruz.

* * *

I’d like to say that I discovered R.E.M. serendipitously but that wouldn’t be the truth. I had been quietly yet assuredly cultivating a new path for myself — a graveled, pot-holed road that might lead me out of Rodeo. It started the year I turned 16. I traded in my mall jeans for dresses from the thrift store that smelled of old lady and cat piss, white Reebok sneakers for funky black oxfords, the must-have puffy down jackets for moth-bitten cardigans. I switched off episodes of Family Ties and The Cosby Show to spend time alone in my room with poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, reading The Bell Jar as if it were an oracle. I skipped school dances to watch low-budget films in the dusty, dark independent theaters of Berkeley. Desperately Seeking Susan was one of those pictures; I identified with the female characters’ reckless desire for transformation. I was desperately seeking me, a singular expedition driven by awakening hope and aching naivety. What was missing from my private revolution was a killer soundtrack.

I obsessively read music magazines: Creem, BAM, Circus, and Hit Parader. R.E.M. was featured in Rolling Stone and I was struck by the photo that accompanied the article. They were the kind of boys who stirred up crushes in me and, unlike the hard boys at school, might think of me in some soft way too. Their second album, Reckoning, was out, and MTV’s “120 Minutes” was playing the video for the gorgeous single “So. Central Rain.” I hit up Music Land record store at the local mall but it wasn’t carrying any R.E.M records. I continued to search until I came upon Irregular Records, a tiny independent record store housed inside a trailer atop a long, dirt road in the neighboring, arcadian town of El Sobrante. I took it as proof of life there were others like me close by.

I came home with the albums Murmur and Reckoning. “Radio Free Europe” — the first track on Murmur — was chaotic, disruptive. So different from the Top 40 bands I listened to, and loved. By the third song I was hooked. “Laughing” was an absolute revelation. It uncoiled something inside me. The darkness surrounding me, the unnamed grief I had skipped around, was suddenly illuminated. The music didn’t make it go away, but rather heavy-lifted the confusion and gave me a glimmer of understanding. It was the combination of sound — vocals, guitars, drums, bass — that, for the first time, provided a sonic language of what it was like to be me at that very moment in time.

I sent a $10 money order to an address in Athens, GA, and in return I became an official member of the R.E.M. fan club. I received a bright pink “Little America” tour shirt and promptly began wearing it once a week to school. I wrote a review of the just released Fables of the Reconstruction for the school newspaper. My purple-prosed enthusiasm did little to win any new fans, for me or the band.

* * *

It was silent in the Black Flag as Billie Joe and I headed on our way. Soon we were cranking Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory and the Replacements’ Let it Be, and other bands discovered after I’d found R.E.M. I’d abandoned the commercial FM rock stations and tuned left of the dial to college radio stations KALX and KUSF. Billie was familiar with the music, having had it played throughout the house, blasting out of my bedroom via my cheap record player. He had been playing guitar for a couple of years. His favorite bands were every 13-year-old boy’s: AC/DC and Van Halen. That list would expand after our night in Santa Cruz.

Of all the kids in the family, Billie Joe and I look the most alike — same thick, dark hair, almond-shaped hazel eyes, chubby cheeks, and crooked teeth. That summer we were both at watershed moments: puberty (him) and quasi-adulthood (me). I was a watcher with plenty of thoughts and ideas and opinions, but I kept them to myself. And Billie was the same. But in the Black Flag, we talked to one another. We talked of our perceived weirdness, our otherness — real or imagined. We were young and unrooted in a world we were unceremoniously dropped into without our permission. We talked of music. Because we were both fanatical about rock ‘n’ roll. True believers in its simple and pure power. A loud, reverberating dog whistle only we could hear. And we craved more and more of it.

Life at home was difficult. My dad had died from cancer two years earlier. Mom was distracted by her loss and was in a state of full-blown avoidance, throwing herself into waitressing, picking up shifts that kept her away from home and the foundlings who remained there.

So we rose on Highway 17. It took us into the part of Santa Cruz that leads to the boardwalk, but how were we to find the venue? (This was 1985.) I pulled into a gas station to get directions. Once we found the place, we parked and started walking. I didn’t have tickets so I hit up the first scalper we encountered and paid the man what he was asking. No time for bargaining, my pace quickening with Billie behind trying to catch up. We queued up with the others and waited for the venue doors to open.

Billie Joe was freaking out on the inside. I recognized the look of alarm coupled with fascination on his face. I too had worn that same expression the first time I attended a small, indie rock show at one of the clubs I would start to call home every weekend: The Berkeley Square, The Farm, The Kabuki, The Stone. The kids there were so unlike the ones we grew up alongside. They wore their outlaw weirdness boldly and bravely. Billie accepted that his sister was dressing funny, but my wardrobe expressions were Natalie Merchant inspired — angsty, self-conscious bookworm. R.E.M. was becoming the biggest post-punk band, and their audience embraced the fashion and faculty of punk rock. Before us stood a skyscraper boy with bleach-blonde hair wearing a frayed denim vest, tight skinny pants, and big black boots. With him were two black-eyed sullen beauties with bright red lips on their death-pale, soft faces. I smiled down at my brother as I watched him fall in love.

I abandoned Billie at the door but not before nailing him with big sister instructions: Meet me here after the show, don’t leave the building, be good, have fun. I made my way to the front and pressed up against the stage. I would remain in that spot all night. The Three O’Clock and True West — bands from the Los Angeles Paisley Underground music scene — opened the show. But I really was of one mind tonight: Me and R.E.M. finally connecting. It was going to be personal, intimate — an experience all for myself. It was that and so much more. My brother and I, on opposite ends of the venue — and all those stranger-souls between us — would know deeply that this one night had altered all of our lives. A community born, a family found, a vocabulary defined.

The venue grew dark. I’d been holding my breath for hours — maybe for the last 17-years. Sounds of locomotives, sirens, feedback. The band quietly walked on stage, at first just shadows. Michael Stipe wore an old man’s overcoat too big for him and an abused, misshapen fedora. He carried a lighted lantern. Peter Buck was above me. My close proximity to him was unnerving enough that I reached out and impulsively touched his blue suede Creeper.

The beginning notes of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” from the new album filled the arena, shattering our collective anticipation. A signal that for the next 90 minutes I would be transported — not to a place outside of myself, but returned to me. A cracking joy that was authentically me.

Michael Stipe, a voice deep and rooted in the earth. Guttural howls wrapped in bright vulnerability. Peter Buck, a rubber band launched from the palms of your hands. Strange, awkward angles matched his guitar playing. Bassist Mike Mills, a school boy on his tippy-toes adding a familiar warmth with his backing vocals. Bill Berry, dictating a shared heartbeat for all of us with the pounding of his drums.

The in-between song banter was limited to a nearly inaudible “Hi,” and a bashful wave from Michael. The more up-tempo songs like the buoyant “Harborcoat” and the funky “Can’t Get There from Here” unleashed Michael from his visible shyness. His body shook and undulated. He assaulted his microphone, dragging it around the stage by its neck. He was a true dialectic, with Johnny Rotten’s violent physicality and Patti Smith’s tenderness. The deep, percussive “Driver 8,” with its childhood traveling memory lyricism (“Children look up, all they hear is sky-blue, bells ringing”) moved into a gentle cover of Creedence Clearwater’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (an obvious tip of that old battered fedora to those of us left outside in the rain in Berkeley). An ethereal cover of Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and the explosive “Radio Free Europe” bookended the two encores.

The movement from darkness to institutional lighting let us know the show was over. We looked around us and searched out faces that would confirm our suspicions that yes, we had just been lifted skyward and were finding ourselves back on earth. And what a fucking trip we’d had!

My mother was adamantly against me going since I would be traveling solo. I looked desperately around the house, laid eyes upon my 13-year old brother, Billie Joe, and threw him in the car before he or our mother could say a word of protest.

I easily found Billie Joe exactly where I told him to be. We were both sweaty and buzzing. We stopped at the merch table and I bought ourselves matching tour shirts — his white, mine black. Settled in the Black Flag for the long ride home, we were back in our bodies. Our shared adrenaline had us both speaking loud and fast.

Billie’s evening had begun in the farthest back reaches of the venue. I had recently taken him to a heavy metal concert at the cavernous Oakland Arena and his first rock show imprint was that of masculine aggression and sweaty violence. As much as he loved hard rock and the intensity of that crowd, he was wanting more emotion, more melody, more poetry. Billie remained reluctant to move from the safety of his seat as R.E.M. took the stage. He surveyed the crowd with uncertainty. But what unfolded before him — jubilant dancing, bright shining faces of boys and girls alike — compelled him to move a little closer. Then a little more. And a little more. He spotted the tall boy from the line outside, his bright yellow hair a beacon, drawing Billie Joe further and further into the crowd, and farther and farther away from any preconceived ideas of what a rock ‘n’ roll show was really meant to be. The tall boy must have sensed Billie staring at him because suddenly he was by his side, grabbing him by the shoulders, and carrying him into the pack. Come with me and I’ll tell you a secret. Freed by the information, Billie began to jump, dance, smile, laugh, sing, breathe.

* * *

A sleepy Billie crawled over into the back seat of the Black Flag, using our new T-shirts as a pillow. I kept the radio low. The miles home spread out before me. Now and again I’d leave my dreamy reverie and notice the familiar sign posts of Interstate 80. Ten miles from home I rested my eyes on the Black Flag’s dashboard and saw for the first time that the speedometer went to 120 miles per hour. With no emotion and little thought, I pressed down harder on the gas. The Black Flag was fast and strong. The warm June air rushed through the window and made a sound like the roar of hummingbird wings. I was wide awake.

I abandoned Billie at the door but not before nailing him with big sister instructions: Meet me here after the show, don’t leave the building, be good, have fun. I made my way to the front and pressed up against the stage. I would remain in that spot all night.

Minutes from our exit to home I heard sirens and the lights of a California Highway Patrol car filled the Black Flag with bright blues and reds. I took the Rodeo exit — the only one into town — and pulled into the Park & Ride lot. The officer approached the car and shined a flashlight at me, and then into to the backseat where Billie slumbered on. I dutifully handed my license and registration to the cop. I spoke only two words to the officer: No. (I didn’t know how fast I was going.) Yes. (We are going home.) I sat in the silence and darkness as the officer wrote me up a ticket for excessive speed.

Tonight would not be the last rock ‘n’ roll adventure for me and Billie. He would for a while be my partner for many shows — from the Replacements at the Fillmore to the Meat Puppets at the Berkeley Square (with Soundgarden opening). I supported his unabated love of hard rock with a Motley Crüe show at the Cow Palace. Soon, though, he would strike out on his own — finding a community of like-minded spirits at 924 Gilman where his young band would make its own joyful noise. And all the other stuff that would surely transpire over the next thirty years of living — love and loss, joy and despair, contentment and restlessness, rapture and disillusionment, faith and fear, peace and rage, substance and shadow, truth and fiction, clarity and confusion, hope and disappointment, blessings and curses, friends and enemies, babies and burials, triumphs and failures, sound and silence, youthful dreams and middle-aged reality — well, we would always have this. A fable made of 90 minutes and 90 miles.

The Black Flag navigated us safely home where everything and nothing would ever be the same again.

Anna Armstrong is a writer and mother living and working in Oakland. Previously she wrote “I’ve Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates” for Oldster Magazine. This essay was originally published in Longreads.

The year is 2011, it’s February in New Orleans, and my husband Kevin and I are enjoying a rare quiet moment in an outdoor Bourbon Street café. Across from us sits a pirate with a matted mess of beard and tattooed biceps courting an aging piratess, his treasure of gaudy plastic beads tossed on the floor beside him. But I barely notice the two of them, riveted as I am instead by the perfectly ordinary family at the next table, a middle-aged couple with their 30-something son.

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It’s my son Eric I see, though he’s been gone nearly twelve years. This has happened before—a sighting, I like to call it—but today’s is so strong. It’s his buzz-cut hair, the freckled, sun-kissed complexion, the clothing he wears. There’s the body, a soccer player’s build, those strong arms and tree-trunk legs sending shivers down my spine.

I need Kevin, whom I met after Eric died, to look, too. Now! There! You see? That’s him, that’s my son. See how he is, who he is in the world? That boy was mine. It’s who he would have been.

It’s my son Eric I see, though he’s been gone nearly twelve years. This has happened before—a sighting, I like to call it—but today’s is so strong.

He has to know how much this matters to me, this chance for him to see the boy he never knew, and in seeing him, see me.

I look again. He’s not spot-on Eric, but it’s his manner, conversing with a smirk, that shit-eating grin and the irreverent glint in his eye that draw me in and tug at my heart. It’s the boy who waved at everyone as he drove—too fast—down Main Street, whipping into the parking lot to leap from his car, in a hurry to share his latest adventure, to hear about yours. His approach to life was flat-out electric.

And like electricity, it could also be fatal.

Who it’s not is the frightened boy, overcome by the tornado of trouble that had shaken the world he thought he knew. I cringe, remembering the venom he spewed, a reaction to circumstances that for another boy may have been only a bump in the road, but that ultimately stole my boy’s tenuous life as, hope fading, he took every risk with abandon. He often hurled those harsh words at me, like a baseball through a window. I was far from shatterproof then, splintering into shards that flew everywhere, in all directions, ultimately slashing my own heart —a heart I would have ripped out of my chest to give to him, to save him, if only I could have.

That’s Eric I see, all right, past the anger, past the angst, past his need to make me the target, the outlet for all the very real pain that was his cruel companion throughout that last year of his life. It’s the Eric who so often said, growing up—and would have, again, I know it—I love you, Mom. There, with his parents, is the boy who had the chance to walk through it all, figure things out

He’s the Eric who lived.

Kevin’s a good man, and he loves me, so he tries. Casting sidelong glances at the object of my obsession as the waiter floats past with a tray of Hurricanes, he smiles knowingly. Yes, I see, I do. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

What do I really want from him? To look again, harder? To be there with me in that terrible, losing-everything time when I needed him desperately? To have known my now unknowable son? I ask myself this, and, in asking, understand I cannot make him pay a debt he does not owe.

Kevin’s a good man, and he loves me, so he tries. Casting sidelong glances at the object of my obsession as the waiter floats past with a tray of Hurricanes, he smiles knowingly. Yes, I see, I do.

I turn to my husband, who never tires of trying to fill in the gaps, to give me in pieces this nameless thing I need. This yearning comes in waves, a tide that ebbs and flows. I think of how, like the sea, he is constant, sometimes soothing, sometimes challenging, sometimes smoothing out the rough edges, always there. A treasure.

There’s a rustle next to us, and the family of three is standing now, about to leave. The young man looks my way.

He looks nothing like Eric.

Kevin watches me watch Eric-not-Eric walk away, and he rests his hand on my arm. It’s no small comfort, this. Only now, as my shoulders drop, do I realize I’ve been holding my breath and bracing my body, on high alert since the moment I spied that young man across the room.

These sightings cut, yet each fills me in a way that carries me through to the next. My heart, still broken, a little less splintered each time.

's work has appeared in The NY Times, HuffPost, Split Lip, WebMD, Modern Loss, and elsewhere. Her memoir, The Full Catastrophe (Motina Books), released in February 2025. Find Casey at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com. Previously she took The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

The Heartbreak Years is about more than the travesty that was dating in my 20s, it's also about the places I found love along the way. I close out my memoir by honoring the women who've stood by my side for years — some for decades — and the lessons in love I've learned from them by being cared for by them and by caring for them. I also felt like it was important to create a space to be real about being displeased about my single status while also showing how a life unpartnered is not a life devoid of love. - Minda Honey

I want a millennial Waiting to Exhale. Give me Keke Palmer changing the password to her billionaire boyfriend’s crypto wallet after she learns, ten years into their relationship, that his ethically nonmonogamous marriage isn’t so ethical after all. When he calls to rage at her, she drops her iPhone—no case, neon acrylics—from the rolled-down window of her Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon into traffic on the 405, and a motorcycle splicing lanes races over it, cracks the screen; the boyfriend’s screams dissolve into static. Give me Michaela Jaé Rodriguez behind the wheel of a bulldozer headed directly into the side of her husband’s love shack in the woods, a cabin he built by hand while she spent weekends ferrying the kids between relatives and extracurricular activities in an SUV crossover she’s hated since the day they bought it. Make certain the sound of the logs splintering, snapping, collapsing is distinct, that there is a shot of her stilettos sinking into a bed of russet pine needles when she leaps, light as can be, from the heavy machinery. Give me SZA in her acting debut. The quiet one. Put a tattoo gun in her hand. Show us how she covers up the looping letters of an ex-lover’s name, the curlicues that were meant to manifest forever love, and makes them into heartbreak art—a flower, a tree, a bird—something that would never hurt you. How she fills in faces, shades them into geometry, into analog Tetris pieces, into anything but a reminder that believing in forever and actually living it are rarely ever the same thing. As she sits on one of those tiny stools and crouches over a client, show the hem of her skirt rising, the tattoo on her thigh in homage to the One she never speaks of; then pan the camera, show that one entering the studio, the old-school door chimes shimmering in sound over their head. Give me Lizzo leading a sing-along of “Truth Hurts”; the girls on her yacht, weaves streaming in the breeze, backs as arched as full sails, like a remixed Titanic moment, are the queens of their own world. The women have decided to release their woes, spend the summer island-hopping. Dress Lizzo in a white captain’s hat that has more fabric than her string bikini, and the man who brings out the refreshments should have almost as much sparkle as the champagne he hands to each of the friends before whispering something in Lizzo’s ear that just makes her grin. Over his shoulder, she sees a yacht full of hotties approaching; her girls see it, too. Everything’s gonna be OK. At least for a little bit because even though it’s next to impossible to meet the right person, the next person who wants to waste your time will always be along shortly. A millennial Waiting to Exhale ends with new love on the horizon instead of self-actualization? Leave it alone. They’re setting us up for the sequel. I want that, too.

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I want to watch the millennial Waiting to Exhale alone, pressing the back of my head into the plush velvet of a classic movie theater seat, no vomit-colored leather, no automated reclining. I want a big bag of popcorn and the no-you-really-shouldn’t-believe-it’s-butter to glom beneath my nails. I want to regret not paying for an overpriced Sierra Mist. I want to wonder, when the movie hits a lull midway through, if I should have used the money I spent on a ticket to pay for Bumble premium instead because clearly, their free services are not going to help me move my love life along. I want to snack and space out to the millennial Waiting to Exhale as I nurse another micro-heartbreak bestowed upon me by a man who couldn’t do the basics, like ask you “what your interests are, who you be with, things that make you smile”—Biggie put it to a beat, and these motherfuckers still can’t remember the simplest shit. I want the feel-good reminder that even when these men fail me—again and again—I’ll always have my girls, just like Molly and Issa on a couch on the curb in Insecure.

I want to leave the theater and remember how smart I am for parking near the side door and exit into the sunlight, soothed and ready for another round of disappointing dating roulette. I want to pull out of the parking lot and pray that the millennial Waiting to Exhale has filled me with enough hopefulness to prop me up until the next heartbreak knocks me down.

I don’t want to drive home and worry that the millennial Waiting to Exhale isn’t enough to keep me going. That I need more than the love of good friends to be content. And I don’t want to wonder whether or not I should feel guilty about admitting it. That I fantasize about meeting the love of my life and disappearing into him, my default source of human interaction.

I’m done with heartbreak. Even the small ones. Micro-heartbreaks are like Skittles. They may appear different, but they’re all the same flavor. The man who goes ghost in the middle of the best banter you’ve had all year is the one who reveals he’s an anti-vaxxer three dates in, is the one who was already devastatingly cruel to a woman you know. These are not the major heartbreaks that trigger month-long crying jags. The ones your friends take you out for drinks over. No, these are the ones you only regret because you told your friends about them too soon. One more wrecked fantasy. These little tears are only enough to ruin your morning. To momentarily mistake the ding of a fully charged phone for the “sweet dreams, beautiful” text you’ve received for less than two weeks. The memory of these petites morts adds a dash of melancholy to your Tuesday.

I want to snack and space out to the millennial Waiting to Exhale as I nurse another micro-heartbreak bestowed upon me by a man who couldn’t do the basics, like ask you “what your interests are, who you be with, things that make you smile”—Biggie put it to a beat, and these motherfuckers still can’t remember the simplest shit. I want the feel-good reminder that even when these men fail me—again and again—I’ll always have my girls, just like Molly and Issa on a couch on the curb in Insecure.

A Skittle is a little thing, but have enough of them, an entire bag of them, and sugar becomes grit. Expect sweet; get decay. Your stomach churns. You won’t remember these inconsequential men in a few years, but you’re not quite as ready to forget them as you appear to your friends. You make a show of laughing off their small slights. You move on quickly because they expect you to, because what is three dates, really? But it’s not just three dates; it’s one date, two dates, three dates a dozen times. It’s disappointment scattered, covered, and smothered. But it’s not even like you want the compassion of your friends. You want to release these men, too. Be done with them just like that. You, too, are tired of your own minute heartbreaks. But what are you supposed to do with the minor aches? They resurface repeatedly, like pennies you keep forgetting to spend in your cup holder, sticky and pointless but still in rotation, still a physical object, still a reminder.

When you’re perpetually single, it’s easier to point to what’s missing than what you have. It’s my bed that’s filled with things that are not the body of a lover—books, clothes, laptop. The food packaged in twos and fours at the grocery store. It’s credit card companies pestering you to add a second person to your account—“Double your cashback rewards!”—the assumption being that you share your finances with someone instead of managing every bill, every month, on your own. How you smile when your dual-income friends announce they’ve bought a home. It’s the dinner parties, trips, and couples-only outings—not that anyone excludes their single pals directly; the absence of an invitation to the evening you watch in ten-second installments on your friends’ Instagram Stories speaks for itself. I don’t begrudge my loved ones the inherent satisfaction in even numbers, everyone tidily partnered, their human security blankets within arm’s reach. But being single is not just being the odd one out; you’re even less. An unpartnered person is like zero—the physical representation of nothing. Apparently, our solo presence is incapable of adding anything to certain occasions. Even in death, we aren’t granted a reprieve from our single status, soulmates certain they’ll be reunited in heaven, lovingly chattering about past lives spent together—get ready for third-wheeling in the afterlife. Or maybe not. Maybe your favorite duo will ask you to make them a trio.

Dating apps are overrun with couples looking for a third. Everyone’s some configuration or another of ethically nonmonogamous. I’m now expected to learn to share someone’s perfect somebody when I’ve yet to have my own. I describe myself as emotionally conservative, sexually liberal. I can’t imagine maintaining multiple emotional connections while simultaneously needing to manage my own jealousy and competitiveness. If I joined this wave of nonmonogamy, I’d have to figure out a new way of being in love when I’ve barely figured out one-to-one romantic relationships. It’s not fair that the world’s moving on without me. I’m trying not to be bitter about it, but I’m tired of being denied what I feel owed. Is this how white people who voted for Trump feel?

On the patio of a Mexican restaurant, a Corona-branded umbrella cast its shade over C and me. Occasionally, one of us would tip back in our chair and let the sun warm our face, kiss life into our soul. It was a farewell lunch. C has lived all over the world. Next up: Mumbai. She’d been home for a year—twelve straight months of disappointing dating. But that isn’t even close to being the record for a Black woman in the Bluegrass State. I’d already been let down in love for twice the amount of time she had. And while I pinned most of my romance woes on location, I knew from living in Cincinnati, LA, and Denver that lonely feels the same in any city.

But what C has on me is age. She’s already in her forties. Each decade a woman enters into without a committed life partner, the further people’s views shift from seeing her as someone unlucky in love to someone who is deeply flawed—it’s your choices, your standards, your looks. And it’s not just other people; you begin to do it, too, swapping unlucky with unloved, with unwanted, with un-fuck-wit-able. This ageism persists even though human beings are living longer. Even though the average marriage only lasts eight years. This means the odds of anyone spending a lifetime in love with the same person is unlikely (but obviously, there are relationships that stay the course). So, why can’t we normalize finding “your person” after you’ve found yourself? Your twenties are for floundering. Your thirties are for figuring it out. And your forties, your forties could be for falling in love. Having children does become more complicated on this timeline, but people have been making it work. Besides, I don’t want to have a baby, and neither does C.

Over lunch, I described the most recent episode of This Is Us. The one where Beth tells Randall she loves him and she has no regrets, but loving him and living inside his dream have come at the expense of living hers. She’s pushed her dance dreams to the side for his career aspirations and their children. I challenged C, and myself, to consider which stretch of our lives we’d exchange for steady love. It was hard for each of us to say.

C squeezed a wedge of lime over her tacos and contemplated my question. The tangy scent of the citrus lifted into the air briefly. Dark sunglasses concealed her eyes.

I tend to imagine that the partner I am missing out on is the partner who would have been the best possible match for me. The missing partner is not the partner who would have dragged me down into debt. Not the partner determined to decimate my self-esteem. Not the one who’d be reluctant to hold me in bed. I rarely imagine that my singleness has saved me from the misery that loves company. The worst possible partner wouldn’t be worth trading for any portion of my life—but they would garner me an invite to the next couples’ brunch.

Still, even when imagining the best possible partner, the question I asked C is hard to answer. How much would I wager for a never-ending love with the right man? I’ve believed I was ready for a relationship since I left my last serious one at twenty-three. Had I met my man at twenty-three, it’s likely nothing that’s happened to me beyond that age would have happened, or at least it would have looked drastically different. Would I be willing to never have made the friends I made that year? The women who held me together through heartbreak and my hair back in the aftermath of too much partying?

Maybe twenty-three would have been too soon. What about twenty-seven? I was living in LA then. If I’d met my man and he’d wanted to stay in that city forever—perhaps he had family nearby or his career was location specific—could I have spent the rest of my life as an Angeleno? The waifs, the traffic, life teetering on the verge of the Big One. I don’t know.

At twenty-eight, I was living in Denver. It’s a city I think I could have been happy in if I’d moved there already married. It wasn’t a city meant for meeting someone, at least not for me or any of the Black women I socialized with. But a husband and I could have had a happy little life at the base of a mountain. But is that really true? Am I a wife who’d participate in winter sports and hikes through tick-filled forests? Would I have even become a writer if I hadn’t been free to flee that city for an MFA program in the desert? I don’t know. Maybe my husband would have followed me, or maybe my life would have followed the This Is Us script, and like Beth and her dance dreams, mine would have been indefinitely deferred.

When I moved home to Louisville at thirty-one, I was ready to settle down, even if it meant settling. I found me a tall, good-looking man. I was patient with him, gently explaining how a story he’d told me was transphobic or how his take on some movie was misogynistic. Still, his feelings bruised. There was tension when he found out I’d only walked his dog for twenty minutes instead of an hour because it was dark out and the temperature was in the twenties. He didn’t read. I didn’t watch sports. But whatever, I was ready to shift my life into its final phase, for everything to be decided. Unfortunately, there was another girl. She waited until my birthday to comment on an Instagram photo of him and me. He’d been trying to convince me to move to Cleveland, where he planned to live with his mother and go to grad school. I refused to relocate, and he insisted we could make it work long distance. Loving that man would have meant spending vacation days and expendable income traveling back and forth to fucking Ohio. I DM’d her—she could have him. I’d learned over the years that I could survive heartbreak, but that was only because I always had my own life to return to. If I’d put my life on pause to settle for that man, I don’t know how I’d manage the disappointment when the relationship inevitably fell apart.

That man was a cheater, but now, I’m in my late thirties, and I’ve ended relationships with men who I believe would have remained faithful and intended to marry me. But they were asking me to live in their dreams with them at a time when my own dreams—like this book—were becoming more possible. One man dreamed of us in a renovated Victorian home with a pattern inset in the wood floors. But he was mid-divorce, and when I looked at him, I wondered if every moment we spent together was a rehash. Us standing in the kitchen together, side by side, following the lines of a recipe. That look, that touch. If that falling-too-fast feeling was a by-product of his rush to replace someone else. If when I spoke certain words, they rippled in his memory, made his heart ache for her. Whether I was trying to find love along the scar of his broken marriage.

Another one sat beside me near a firepit, and his facade of compromise fell away. “I want it all,” he said. Our all-inclusive life meant children, meant me leaving my city, meant me deprioritizing my career to support the family we’d have. I watched the flames of the fire lick the air and knew I would burn that relationship down before I made kindling of my dreams—and I did. I’ve never wanted children. I need a life I can fold up like an origami swan and float away with when necessary. Children are the opposite of that, forever unfolding.

I wanted so much of what these partners were offering, but I just couldn’t jump the rails and send my life down an entirely different track. When is a man your destiny, and when is he a distraction? Undecided.

By the end of lunch, our to-go boxes packed, C hadn’t offered an answer to my question, and neither had I. We hugged goodbye, then parted ways, headed in opposite directions, on our own as we navigated around couples holding hands, strolling down the sidewalk.

When I left Louisville in my early twenties, I didn’t know that my life would look so drastically different from the lives of my high school and college friends who’d stayed behind. Most people never step out of the life they were born into. Leaving broadens what’s possible; it’s cozying up to the unknown and welcoming the unpredictable.

I frequently question how this tragic love life could happen to me. Whyyy meeee? But did it happen to me, or did I choose it? At every moment of my life that asked me to choose, I chose the path that led me further from the marriage I claimed I wanted. I left the South, where the marriage rates (and the divorce rates) are higher. I ended a long-term relationship with a man whose love was most devout. I chose career. I chose grad school. I chose assholes. I say I was ready for another serious relationship at twenty-three, but I didn’t narrow my dating pool to serious men only. I dated the ones who lit up something inside me, men who detonated my heart. The slackers, the artists, the ones selfish about living out their dreams. The ones I wished I could be more like. If you insist on loving men who can’t commit, how committed are you to commitment? It’s possible to be perpetually single without being perpetually heartbroken, but that was not the path I chose.

None of those men ever asked me to marry them. I think they knew I couldn’t be trusted. That there was no way I could remain what I’d presented myself as, that at some point, I would stop acquiescing, stop holding my breath around them. I can’t fault them for recognizing the largeness of the life I wanted to live, my ambitions beyond playing the supporting cast in their dreams. I had to get honest with myself about wanting to be my own main character. And equally important, I wanted to be with a man who didn’t require that I lie to myself about who he was.

My best friend from high school, S, is divorced. It was difficult. Her children were young at the time. She’s remarried now. Her husband is open to adventure, kind, and cares about her happiness. I like him for her. I admire her for having the strength to choose the life she wanted.

For work, S was driving back and forth between Kentucky and Florida every few weeks. We shared hours-long phone calls with topics that spanned the length of our friendship. On one call, I was taking a rare—for me—hike through the woods in southern Indiana while we chatted about the “miserable women” literature we’d been assigned to read in high school. I told her, as the trail led me back toward the parking lot and my car, “I’ll never forget what a downer the end of The Awakening was.” I remember, as a teenager, being disgusted that the protagonist just straight up marches into the ocean.

Why were our syllabi filled with books about unfulfilled women? My bestie quipped, “This is our canon?”

It was early March. The trees were still bare. A narrow creek burbled, and a misplaced foot meant sliding a sneaker into fudgy mud. My Apple Watch dinged happily when my green exercise ring closed and then again when my magenta activity ring was completed.

We read the stories of centuries of women who could not find freedom within their marriages. But it wasn’t like there were counternarratives of women who were single and joyful, either. To be alone was to be destitute and ostracized. To be vulnerable. To be cast as a witch. To be branded unworthy. It’s not hard to see how women trapped by marriage on the page morphed into women springing their own marriage traps on the big screen. Propaganda to convince us we couldn’t be fulfilled without the same marriages that left our foremothers drowning in dissatisfaction. I grew up on movies with women losing men in ten days and winning them back over pickup games of basketball.

I detoured just before the parking lot and ventured a bit down another trail toward what looked like a man-made lake. It was small and unimpressive. I headed back to my car.

I want to leave the theater and remember how smart I am for parking near the side door and exit into the sunlight, soothed and ready for another round of disappointing dating roulette. I want to pull out of the parking lot and pray that the millennial Waiting to Exhale has filled me with enough hopefulness to prop me up until the next heartbreak knocks me down.

If I have to continue this life unpaired, is it too much to ask for some positive representation? Where are the women who see their aloneness as solitude? I want to see women who have actively chosen a life of one. Women who are still open to love but are passing their time pleasantly without desperation. Women who don’t scramble toward any bit of cast-off attention from a man, women who are choosing themselves without question. Always. What if instead of wading into a watery death, Kate Chopin’s heroine dove beneath the waves, grew gills, and swam through to a true awakening on the shore of an island of Amazons? What if her happily ever after became a good book; a warm mug of tea; and the wet, green scent of spring flowing through a nearby open window, her children gone for the weekend?

But women in the books we were assigned to read were very different from the women in the books I found on my own. Janie walking out of homes where love no longer resided. Sula opting out of the dull norms and drudgery expected of the women in her town. And the Black women writers behind these books who were equally emblematic of the life I could live. Instead of a life that swung back and forth between love found and love lost, my art could be my central passion, the community of women around me my most important love affair.

I stayed on the phone with my bestie my entire drive back across the river to Louisville and until I was inside, about to strip down for my shower. I wished S a safe rest of her road trip before I hung up. Sometimes, it’s as if her life is the path I didn’t choose. We’d both dated our high school sweethearts past college. While I moved to California with mine, she’d stayed in Louisville with hers. They were engaged at one point. When she called me about their breakup, I knew my own was soon to follow. I remember listening to her tell me why they were done for good this time while I lay on my back on the diving board in my ex’s grandparents’ backyard, staring straight up at Orange County blue skies, chlorine and orange blossoms in the air. Kentucky was so far away.

When she married her first husband, I flew home for her wedding on an Indiana farm. I missed her first pregnancy, but I felt the miracle of tiny feet kick her belly from within when she was pregnant with her second child. While I was in grad school on the West Coast, I’d come home from the bar and she’d call me, three time zones away, and we’d sit on the phone together, her breast pump whirring in the background of my drunk murmuring. Later, after grad school, I moved back home to Louisville. During her divorce, I was there for the texts and the calls, and the drinks and the nights spent out too late, as if we could snatch back a bit of the youth the years had taken from us. Now, she is married again, happy again.

And still, I’m single. No children. On what must be my fourth career. Why does a sense of inertia cling to that word? Single. As if I’ve not lived a life, too. As if, on those calls with my best friend, she wasn’t consoling and guiding me as well, through heartbreak and moves across states and big risks. She granted my narrative the same sovereignty as hers. And her life looking more conventional hadn’t insulated her from heartbreak or loneliness. Pain is pain, joy is joy, and you’re bound to encounter them both, no matter which series of life choices you make.

I am thankful all those men I dated were unanswered prayers. When I was a child, I loved catching lightning bugs. I’d put dozens in a single glass jar and place it on my dresser, watching the magical blinking all night until I fell asleep. Every morning, my father made me release the lightning bugs back into our yard. I’d plead with him to let me keep them, but he insisted that they belonged in their world, not mine. The men I’ve loved were like those lightning bugs; they flickered beautifully briefly, but once cupped in my hands, they dimmed and became nothing special. They were meant to light up moments of my life, then be released. It’s the women in my life who have held a steady glow for me.

The drive from my home to K’s home is the length of two moderately long pop songs. The year she tells me about the painful lump in her breast—so big she can see it through her skin, like a chunk of Kryptonite embedded in her chest, throbbing—I listen to Panic! at the Disco’s new song “High Hopes” on endless loop in my car. She is thirty-five.

The weekend between her biopsy and receiving the results from her doctor, she asks me to have a drink with her. We do that short-girl clamber onto two stools at the bar. It’s a crowded venue that was designed to look like a series of living rooms. “This may be my last drink for a while,” she says, raising her glass of bourbon in the air, tapping it against mine, then against the bar before bringing it to her lips.

It’s cancer.

But her husband is the exact husband you would want by your side during cancer. During lunch at a restaurant with a patio that overlooks the Ohio River, rolling murky and brown, K tells me about the women in her cancer Facebook groups who’ve discovered, over the course of their illnesses, that they do not have the husbands you would want by your side during cancer, not even close. Husbands who still expect their chemo-choked wives to solely manage the children and the home. Husbands who look at their wives’ changing bodies and the changes to come with disappointment. Husbands who check out and hope to check back in when their wives return to the right side of healthy. But K’s husband is pure love, pure patience, and his only want from any of this is for his wife not to die at fucking thirty-five years old—the state of her tits in “the After” is irrelevant.

She’s planned our lunch around her chemo schedule so she can enjoy her food without nausea and the delicate spring weather blooming all around us. We decide to treat ourselves to a few ounces of crab off the raw menu. As she talks, I am happy for her, happy that she married well. I am, but I am also something else. Something harder to admit. It’s bad form to be jealous of your friend battling cancer.

I couldn’t help but think about what it’d be like if I were the one stricken with breast cancer at an abnormally young age. Who would be there to care for me? I imagined myself alone in my gold-framed canopy bed, dehydrated, silently praying for someone to bring me a glass of water, gingerly lifting myself out of bed and creeping into the kitchen to pour my own. On that patio with K, I’m convinced that as a single person, I’d be just as in it by myself as one of those Facebook group wives.

We’ve been taught that a spouse is someone to care for you when you’re old. A husband as an illness contingency plan isn’t the most romantic thing, but when I catalog my fears around never finding my right partner, dealing with aging and poor health alone is a frightening future. But is it more frightening than being married to a man who refuses to honor the “in sickness and in health” portion of our vows? Do I really need to be frightened at all?

When my cousin gets their gender-affirming surgeries, their friends call and visit and feed them and stay with them until they are well enough to care for themselves. They are there, unlike the supposedly obligated husbands who are not. When that man stalked me through my neighborhood, my friends and family reached out immediately, sent cards and flowers and left baked goods on my steps, did what they could to care for me. Even with K, even with the exact husband you’d want by your side during cancer, there’s no way he could be all the things she needed without the support of her community. When he travels for work, we walk the dog; we stay with K; we are less than a phone call away. There is no point in our lives that our needs aren’t too much for one person to handle. Even love does not somehow make it possible for one person to be our everything. Maybe I’m a little more nonmonogamous than I thought—at least in my friendships.

K’s love is the sticky, grippy kind of love that isn’t afraid to make itself known. Once she is cancer-free, her hair grows back in layers of baby-soft curls that sweep over one another in brown waves, a tender ocean providing cover.

We cannot say whether our partner will stay if we become ill. Or if our health will return in full or at all. We cannot know if our community will be there for us, in the short term or the long. K and I have discussed how you can’t make the choices you make based on the outcomes you can’t predict. All we can do is love ourselves, love others, and hope to be loved in return.

It’s been more than a decade since my last long-term relationship. I consider myself to have mostly spent my adult life single, but I’m not sure that that’s actually true. I can’t just write off all those short-term, revolving-door relationships. It’s not a failure to leave a situation that is no longer working. Maybe my romantic relationships are so short because, in my experience, it’s been much easier to be happy without a man than it has been to be happy with a man. This isn’t a knock against men, not completely. Aside from compatibility issues, to love a man is to bring the patriarchy into your private life. I don’t want to be mansplained to at the office and in the bedroom. I don’t want to experience the gender wage gap at work and the gender labor gap over household chores. I gripe that I pay every bill by myself, but I’ve also been fortunate to be able to pay every bill by myself. I’ve never had to compromise on my feelings in the name of financial stability.

Maybe I’m foolish to be holding out for a relationship of true equals—In this patriarchy?—but at this point, there is too much at stake. In my twenties, it was easier to fall for men who weren’t right for me because so much of my life didn’t feel right for me. Those men were portals into alternate realities, potentially better realities. I was searching for a man to build a life around, but in my thirties, I’m waiting to find a man who fits the life I’ve built.

For proof I’m capable of longevity, again, I turn to my friendships. They span decades and multiple states. And for all the real estate I’ve given dating in my life’s story, my friendships are the relationships that taught me how to show care and tenderness, to forgive others and myself. One of my first and closest friends in Orange County was E. She was the first person I knew who saw a therapist, or at least the first one who spoke openly about it. Soon enough, “Well, what did Debbie say about it?” was a regular part of our conversations. Before E, I was the type of person who’d get upset and end a friendship to prove to someone just how much I didn’t need them. But these moments didn’t seem to register for her. She’d continue to show up at the same time to pick me up for the gym and would keep sending me five-thousand-word emails in the middle of the workday, until I was forced to explain that I was angry at her—tricked into talking about my feelings. After we talked it over, whatever issue I had no longer seemed that serious. In fact, nothing became too big or too small to share with her—or her with me. When I told her, over dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant, that I was leaving California for Colorado, she wept. Whenever I return to Los Angeles, I fly out of Orange County just so I can stay the night with E, curl up on her couch under her fluffy duvet, and sip mugs of tea while we reminisce over our drunk-on-the-dance-floor years.

Having the love of friends does not stop the wanting. And that doesn’t make the love from my friends any less valuable. I don’t know where a Black woman nearing forty should go to find romantic love. But I do know I don’t have to go it alone, that I’m not waiting by myself. I can both want more and appreciate that I already have more love than most in my life. A love that has yet to fail me.

In a millennial Waiting to Exhale, just like in the original, the people who choose you, who choose to be by your side, who choose you to be by theirs, are not a consolation prize. They are, and will always be, your greatest love story. The grandest gesture of love. The epilogue to my heartbreak years.

This in an excerpt of The Heartbreak Years published by Little A, ©. It was originally reprinted in October, 2023. Check out Minda’s newsletter, Writing for Fakers.

The onset of my pain was not actionable; that is, it did not result from a car crash, fall, or work injury—the kind of pain that occurs on assembly lines or in warehouses or even on movie and television sets. One of my students, a young artist named Neil Flowers, worked as a production assistant on television shows. The onset of his pain was specific. One day, from a raised truck, someone passed him a monitor that weighed two hundred pounds. His spine compressed and was damaged immediately. Neil can’t sit for longer than twenty minutes. In my class, he either stood or knelt at our conference table, his face pale and ridged. He told me that after his injury, the hardest thing was dealing with the clock: “I could no longer move along with normal time.” He made the decision to become an artist in part because it was one of the few jobs he felt he could do. His art is enlivened by his pain. A recent work shows identical images of him doing physical therapy exercises—shoulder retraction—on top of a desk in an empty office. The artwork, titled Exercise to Improve Workplace Productivity, questions what sort of productivity is possible in a broken body.

Unlike Neil’s, my moment of rupture was intimate. I was lying on my comforter in my attic bedroom in Brooklyn. It was dark out the window, just a streetlight reflecting in the windshield of a parked car below. Next to my bed, a small lamp threw a wobbly oval of gold up onto the slanted ceiling. My husband had come up to lie beside me on the bed to talk, and I was scooting over to make space for him when I felt a muffled snap, like a wet branch breaking.

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Odd that I injured my back not by falling, but in bed, a place I associate more with pleasure than with pain. But my pain is also a kind of passion, one that can be quieted somewhat by memories of bliss. I used to think that the afternoons I spent when I was young in bed having sex, while fun, were mostly a waste of time. Now I realize I was laying up ecstatic sensations for later. These reserves can’t block out pain, but they help to remind me that my body has many capabilities. “Pain,” wrote Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, “does not chase out pleasure.”

Kahlo, who is as recognizable as the Virgin Mary, is known as much for her art as for the story of her pain. A bus crash when she was eighteen bounced Kahlo’s body forward and a handrail pierced her abdomen, “the way a sword pierces a bull.” A ceremonial knife slicing into a sacrificial animal. The scene was surreal; time was “deaf, slow and dreadful.” The handrail severed Kahlo’s clothes, and a satchel of gold dust carried by a housepainter burst, covering her body. Her friend carried Kahlo’s glittery bloody body to a billiard table in a nearby shop window. All she could think about was her frilly umbrella, now lost in the wreckage.

Kahlo’s spinal column was cracked in three places; she shattered her collarbone and three ribs. Her right leg was fractured and her pelvis was broken. She spent three months in the hospital and eight months home in bed. “Death dances around my bed at night,” she wrote to a friend during this time. “At ten o’clock I was screaming until six . . . until they gave me cocaine and this is what made the pain go away.” She called death “la tía de las muchachas,” the aunt of the girls.

In this new reality, time moved sluggishly. There were elongated periods of screaming. Death showed up as the monstrous aunt of terrified little children. This world, as nightmarish as it is, is also liminal, containing eerie metaphysical information. “It’s as if I had learned everything at the same time,” Kahlo wrote in a letter, “in a matter of seconds.” It’s like the hallucinatory sequence in a horror movie, both slow and fast, that pretends to be about terror but is in actuality mimicking the perception of intense pain.

Pain is claustrophobic, not only because we are trapped in our damaged bodies, but also because our spiritual ideas are shaken, possibly even obliterated. “I know now that nothing lies behind,” Kahlo wrote on her realization that there was nothing beyond our material world. “If there was something, I would have seen it.”

Kahlo does not mention God in any of her letters, journals, or interviews. Besides art, she had a variety of strategies to live with her pain. After a later surgery, she wrote, “At least the baldy didn’t get me,” mocking the death skull. Each morning, when at home, she said “Hola, Mama” to the papier-mâché skeleton she kept beside her bed. Her friend Bertram Wolfe remarked that Kahlo had the richest vocabulary of obscenities of any women he had ever met. She called stuck-up people “Grande Cacas,” big shits. In letters, she even made up swear words in English, like fucbulous, a combination of fuckery and fabulous. And she could be bawdy—when her nephew showed her a scapular of the Virgin Mary that a nun had given him, Kahlo told him, “Go tell that little nun to screw her mother but not you.”

Vulgarity itself is a form of pain relief. A recent study showed that volunteers who swore as they held their hands in ice water had higher adrenaline-producing heart rates and less pain than those who made up swear words like twispin and fouch. Swearing, writes Richard Stephens, senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in England, “brings on emotional responses that produce natural analgesic, a pain reliever.” He goes on to point out that the final words of pilots killed in air crashes captured on black box recorders almost always feature swearing. “This emphasizes a crucial point,” Stephens writes, “that swearing must be important, given its prominence in matters of life and death.”

“Frida,” one friend remarked, “lived dying.” After Kahlo’s accident, her mother suspended a mirror on the underside of the top of her canopy bed so she could use herself as a model for her painting. Before the accident, she had hoped to be a doctor, but as with my student Neil, the onset of pain forced her to change her path. Kahlo’s first self-portrait was painted in 1926, and she continued to paint herself in every phase of her life. These works featured not only Kahlo’s face and upper torso, but also all manner of props: monkeys, parrots, butterflies, clocks, flowers, shells, bloody thorns, and white lace. In one painting, a skull and crossbones sits inside her head, death located just above her famous unibrow.

Many art critics claim that Kahlo’s self-portraits depict the artist as she wanted to be—beautiful, elegant, without pain. To them I ask, Have you looked closely at her eyes? Eyes that are distant with pain, as in Self-Portrait with Necklace, eyes that are bright with trauma, as in Self-Portrait with Monkey, eyes defeated by pain, as in Self-Portrait with Loose Hair. “The only good thing,” Kahlo wrote after one of her many operations, “is that I am getting used to suffering.”

Kahlo’s work is influenced by Mexican folk ex-votos, small paintings on tin that depict the suffering of saints as well as laypeople. An ex-voto evokes what happened in reality but also the supernatural intervention behind the event. A house falls on a family but kills no one. Soldiers come into a house and start firing, but the family successfully hides under a bed. A man on an unbroken mule falls off a cliff but does not die. A sick little girl nearly loses her eyes, but because God intervenes, her vision is saved.

Kahlo’s body, in many of her paintings, is in bloody disarray, but unlike an ex-voto, no easy supernatural salvation is available. She lies on a blood-soaked mattress; thorns bite into her neck, producing drops of blood; her heart, cut out of her chest, stains her white skirt; she lies on a gurney, two red wounds carved into her lower back. In a late painting, Kahlo sits in a wheelchair before an easel. Her heart is the palette; and her blood, the paint. These works hold on to the mystical energy of the ex-voto but also question why we have to suffer. Kahlo’s damaged body confronts the viewer, making clear that miracles, in our rational world, are not available.

I’ve always assumed Christianity was responsible for the idea that we should be grateful for, and quiet about, our suffering. But long before the beginning of Christianity, around 300 BCE, Stoics insisted that we suffer in silence. In her book The History of Pain, Roselyne Rey explains how early Stoic philosophers, while making it clear that pain was not evil, also encouraged devotees to bear their pain impassively. They were the first to argue that we could separate the sensation of pain from our emotional response to it. It was because of them and their highly deliberate system of denial, invented to preserve individual liberty and protect a person’s autonomy, that the idea of silence around pain became common.

“Suppose for a moment,” writes Anne Boyer in her book The Undying, “the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reasons that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.”

Kahlo’s work, which André Breton described as “a ribbon around a bomb,” is a direct assault on this silence. In paintings like The Broken Column, she places her broken body at the center. Her body is split in two, and a cracked column along with a corset made of leather braces holds her up. Her pain, like St. Sebastian’s, is personified by dozens of nails digging into her flesh. Tears flow out of her eyes. Kahlo is nude, but her body is not erotic, the typical way we’ve been trained to see female nakedness. She breaks the objectifying gaze, splinters it with her depiction of suffering so that her own spiritual struggle can pour out.

What can be learned from this struggle? What are the things Kahlo had faith in, that gave her some relief? The drive to make art, to express our unique suffering, to reach truth and beauty by daily labor, by ritual, is an affirmation of life; it is a form of faith. Or as Emily Rapp Black writes in her book about Kahlo, “Pain became somewhat silenced by the act of creation.” So Kahlo turned to art-making. Also, revolution. Kahlo considered revolution both a natural reality and a hoped-for utopia. During a later stay in the hospital, she insisted visitors sign a letter she had pinned to the wall in support of the Stockholm Peace Conference. In her journal, she affirmed her commitment to the struggle: “I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the revolution. The only true reason to live.”

Kahlo also had faith in medicine and in her doctors. She had friendships with many of her physicians. In one painting, she depicts Dr. Juan Farill as a saint. Some critics have suggested that Kahlo was a victim of failed back surgery syndrome, in which patients get caught in a loop of failed surgery after failed surgery. One article speculated that Kahlo may have had a form of self-directed Munchausen syndrome—that most of Kahlo’s surgeries were elective and that she may have wanted to harm herself because living in pain was the only way she knew how to live. Another article proposed that the artist may have been molested as a child, as early abuse is associated with nonspecific chronic pain. There is no proof of any of these claims. People tend to want to find answers for long-term anguish like Kahlo’s, to find a reason that might assuage and explain her suffering. Rather than retreat from it, Kahlo confronted her pain directly. Although she wanted to be healed, her idea of what that might mean was unique—pain not cured, but seen, shared, known.

In Kahlo’s day, besides surgery, another common method to combat back pain was the plaster “turtle shell” corset. From 1944 on, Kahlo would wear a corset made of leather, steel, or plaster of Paris. “Imagine,” Kahlo wrote in a letter, “they hung me by just my head for two and half hours, while the cast was dried with hot air, but when I got home, it was still completely wet.”

The plaster corset was developed in 1872 by Dr. Lewis Sayre, an orthopedic surgeon in New York City. Sayre was a debunker of medical oddities, showing, for instance, that a woman who claimed her body expelled only coal actually defecated and urinated like the rest of us. He also advised doctors in the West on how to bind gunshot wounds caused by gunslingers. But his most well-known contribution was the technique of stretching the spine with a harness and pulley and then applying a plaster corset.

He first tested the corset in 1874 on a four-year-old boy. The boy had Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis of the spine, and had come to Sayre because of his intense pain. He could not stand up without using his hands to balance the weight of his curved spine on his thighs. The child’s parents were poor and could afford neither a hospital stay nor an expensive medical device. Sayre nevertheless was committed to treating him. Suspending the boy in a harness, he stretched his spine and then applied the plaster “turtle shell.” The child was laid down on a sofa, covered with a sheet, and told to remain that way until the plaster set. “When I returned shortly afterward,” Sayre wrote, “I found to my surprise that the little fellow had got up from the sofa and walked across the room to the window”—something he had never been able to do before without supporting his back with his hands. He said he felt no pain.

Kahlo found the corsets “a frightful bore,” but they did relieve her pain. She painted flowers, fish, a cracked Doric column, and the Communist hammer and sickle onto her various casts. She complained that after months of wearing the cast day and night, it was “as filthy as a pigsty,” and after a later surgery when she developed an abscess, she let friends look into a hole cut into the cast, like a fenestral opening, and see her unhealed wound.

Plaster casts are used today only occasionally for initial immobilization of a back injury. The most common treatment for back pain now is steroid shots. I’m not sure why I agreed to a third steroid shot after the first two had not worked. A part of me felt maybe the failure was my fault. Certainly, my doctor, a physiatrist I will call Dr. S, implied it was my fault. Her displeasure during our office visits was marked. From my first visit with her, I understood she was not interested in hearing about my pain. Dr. S hardly let me say a sentence before interrupting to explain how I should spend as much time as possible on the elliptical at its most arduous setting. Exercise, according to her, would eventually relieve my pain. Dr. S is not only a physiatrist but also a sports medicine doctor, one who believes in quick recovery. I did everything she said, but each week the pain got worse. On one occasion, I started to cry and Dr. S grimaced; she jumped up and left the examining room without even finishing our conversation.

I started to write out pain notes before each appointment. Even I, who have spent my whole life as a writer, struggled to communicate with Dr. S. No matter how articulate I was, she could not hear me. She scowled and held her body away from mine, clearly repulsed by my descriptions. The typical pain-related words—aching, cramping, burning, throbbing—had been used so often they seemed to me to have no vigor or force. English has a limited number of words for pain and few bigger concepts. Germans can use Weltschmerz, a concept that implies world-weariness, and the Japanese have wabi-sabi, an acceptance of bodily imperfection. One study, “Descriptions of Pain, Metaphor, and Embodied Simulation,” by Elena Semino, showed that metaphors are the best way to describe pain. I would tell Dr. S that the pain felt like a nail was lodged in my hip socket, that a hot coal was smoldering inside my buttocks, and that a sparking electrical wire was running down my right leg.

The day of my third shot, I was waiting in one of a dozen curtained areas, holding pens filled with stricken people. In the one across from me, a teenage girl cried, and in the one beside me, a gray-haired man moaned. Nurses came around and drew on our backs with Magic Markers and asked us the same questions, over and over. I knew the shot would not work, but I did it anyway. A part of me had to believe I might get some relief, but I also knew, at least unconsciously, that something was wrong with the whole process: It felt soulless and mechanical, like a conveyor belt that led us one by one into the operating room.

When it was my turn, Dr. S asked what kind of music I liked; I said punk rock. Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” came on over the operating room speakers. While nurses prepped my body, positioning me face down on the table, washing my back, and giving me shots of Novocain, Dr. S took a call on her cell phone from her internet provider, berating them angrily about her service. I felt like a barnyard animal as the nurse motioned several times to Dr. S that they were ready to begin. My spine was more tender than during the first two procedures, and when the needle went in, I had to be held down.

Between four and six million Americans get steroid shots each year for back pain. Between 2000 and 2010, the use of epidurals rose 160 percent. Yet a 2014 study in the New England Journal of Medicine of sixteen different pain-management clinics found that nearly all of the patients had no less pain and no greater mobility after the procedure. One doctor I spoke to felt the shots work about half the time but only for radiculitis, where the nerve root in the spine is compressed or inflamed, not for other types of back conditions. A 2012 article in The New York Times noted, “Though doctors are still arguing, most academic researchers say there is no evidence that steroid injections are useful in easing straightforward chronic low back pain.” One back-pain sufferer I spoke with told me that even though a steroid shot had not worked and he was still in pain, his doctor kept insisting that it had worked. Dr. William Landau, a professor of neurobiology at Washington University in St. Louis, felt that epidural injections for back pain need a much tougher FDA label, because there is little to no evidence that the injections reduce pain. “There’s no positive excuse for injecting this stuff,” Landau told The New York Times in 2014, “except for the profits.”

Was Dr. S interested only in the money my steroid epidural brought her? Maybe. But her disgust with my pain, her conviction that my pain was my own fault, seemed bigger than any monetary gains. Pain brings the unknowable. All her education and medical expertise could not vanquish my suffering. This must have, on some level, frightened Dr. S and made her feel inconsequential and out of control.

Besides epidural steroid shots, back-pain sufferers can have surgeries for nerve decompression, discectomies, or laminectomy or fusion to stabilize the spine. In extreme cases, faulty discs can be replaced completely. There is also rhizotomy, a surgery that burns or otherwise damages or destroys the nerves around a decayed disc. These interventions work about half the time. Alternative treatments include acupuncture; various forms of bodywork, such as massage, Reiki, and Watsu; chiropractic adjustments; and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, or TENS. Some have found relief through meditation, hypnosis, and the bodywork known as Rolfing.

My frustration with Dr. S’s lack of empathy led me to try other treatments to mitigate my pain. I bought a variety of therapeutic belts that were supposed to hold my hips together tightly and support my spine. I tried every exercise for back pain I could find on YouTube. I used CBD and then THC gummies. I meditated and tried acupuncture. The only thing that gave me any hope was massage. It did not cure me, but at least while I was on the table, I had an hour of relief.

Charles, my masseuse, has a gray beard, a ponytail, and wire-rimmed glasses. His treatment room holds dozens of votive candles, as well as figurines of skulls, mermaids, and dragons. He keeps river rocks, which he collects on his canoe trips, in a vinyl pizza-box heater. Charles believes in science but is also open to the idea that pain, at least in part, is generated by emotions. He shows me a book, Does Your Body Lie?: Heal the Person, Not the Sickness, by Luís Martins Simões, that offers emotional answers to every variety of bodily pain.

Simões spouts a familiar New Age adage that pain is caused by emotional unrest. Under “Disc Hernia”: “We may say that the person’s structure was seemingly shaken up by some event in his life and that he lost all mobility in the spine.” And under “Vertebra S5–L1”: “They are linked to our connection with the partner . . . This is where our individual evolution and our relation with the world are kept.” I’ll admit I take these ideas more seriously than I should. Financial insecurity and a difficult mother made my childhood unstable, and the struggle between navigating my personal growth and unity with my partner is ongoing. I find the idea that pain comes from an emotional root as seductive as I do dangerous.

New Age therapies are often discounted as mumbo jumbo, but I’m convinced that faith in these rituals is an important part of healing. Dr. Frank T. Vertosick Jr. speculates in his book Why We Hurt that New Age therapies may actually work because they have a supernatural flavor. Healing is physical and metaphysical. “These therapies,” Vertosick writes, “may tap into a very ancient part of the imagination, a part dealing with mystic belief that is as ancient as the perception of pain itself.”

After my massage, Charles straightens the sheet over me and places crystals on my belly, chest, and forehead. He lights a sage bundle and whispers a prayer for my healing; then holding my skull gently, he makes his mind blank and tells me what my body communicates to him. His images are simple: I am wearing a new pair of shoes, I carry a tin of cookies, I have lost my cat. At first, his kitchen-sink prophecies embarrassed me, but now I find them hopeful. My body is broken, but, internally at least, I remain mysterious.

From This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith by Darcey Steinke, to be published on February 24, 2026, by HarperOne. Copyright © 2026 by Darcey Steinke.

I’ve had more vocations than decades on Earth. They all end with a telltale sign:

It’s 1997 and I’m 27. I’m interviewing a Broadway actor for an article. It was once such a thrill. But now, as I look into his dreamy eyes, my toes are limp. The boredom starts in my feet and radiates up my meridians to my temples. Shit, shit, shit. Working for a tired theater mag is how I pay my rent. But getting up in the mornings has become a full-time struggle. I feel a wave of dread and hear a clicking sound, like a combination lock turning: click-click-click.

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Or…

It’s 1994 and I’m 24. There’s a red-robed swami pacing at the head of a conference room overlooking an ashram courtyard. He’s trying to convince us that the deadly “rumors” of abuse and molestation about the gurus of our spiritual path are just gripes that were leaked to The New Yorker. I’ve dedicated years to this path, becoming a certified meditation teacher, and for a spell, even wanting to dress like him. But I sense the allegations are true. The wave of dread crests. The lock turns.

Or…

Now it’s 2012 and I’m 42. I’m sitting in a therapy session with my listening face on — soft, curious eyes — willing myself to listen harder. I’ve seen this client’s hair color change for as many years as I’ve known her — seven shades. It’s currently a washed-out pink. The joy in knowing her so intimately is betrayed by my foot, bobbing up and down at the end of my crossed legs. Foot, please stop. Click, click, wooooshhhhhhhhh. Oh, dear. No.

All my careers end with this wave of dread that literally has a sound, and a very inconvenient knowing: I’m done with this. And then, I gravitate, often clumsily, anxiously, towards a new way of earning a living that builds on what I’ve learned in the past careers and utilizes it in a new way.

I am a professional career reinventor, or, in my own parlance, a vocationalist; also referred to as a multipotentialite, Renaissance man (person?), and jack of all trades. In my 56 years I’ve made anywhere from mere dollars to a decent amount of dough as: an actress + singer + waitress; aspiring monk; online data manager + theater journalist; acting teacher; drama therapist + workshop leader + psychotherapist; and more recently, executive / career coach + organizational consultant.

If it sounds interesting, well, it does make for a rich and varied life. But also, it’s a total pain in the ass.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the late, great Jane Goodall, may she rest in peace. Jane landed in Tanzania at age 26 in 1960 and found her calling: primate ethology. When you think of Jane, you might think: elegant, wise, committed. But you always think: chimps.

I am a professional career reinventor, or, in my own parlance, a vocationalist; also referred to as a multipotentialite, Renaissance man (person?), and jack of all trades…If it sounds interesting, well, it does make for a rich and varied life. But also, it’s a total pain in the ass.

Now, in many ways I’ve loved the variety and challenges of my lily-pad career, the way it keeps me and my self-expression personally evolving. But I admit to feeling a little envious of Jane. Her one-pointed path led her to a level of mastery, which led to name recognition, which enabled her to make a living and a greater impact, something which has always been important to me. Consistency breeds more opportunity. Though I’ve basically worked in human development for thirty years, few people know what I do, rendering me less hireable. I was recently introduced to someone at a party who, recognizing me from social media, said, “Oh yeah, the therapist, but you’re like not really a therapist anymore?” Yep. Another person, a friend, recently referred to me as a motivational speaker, which I never was, though I did once give a TEDx talk that yielded the worst quality video on record.

My professional promiscuity has serious financial implications, especially as I age. It’s not a great set up for filling the retirement coffers. Or covering mounting medical expenses. Although I might coach a business client to stay true to a simple, uncluttered mission and brand so as not to confuse core customers, I haven’t been able to take my own advice. And this past year, it’s really caught up with me.

On January 2nd, I opened my laptop to face the void which, in the lazy folds of a long holiday spell, I had managed to ignore: a 2026 calendar with zero executive coaching clients on it. In the 2010s, I gained traction working with women of color leaders who ran nonprofits. But as that decade came to a close, my referrals stopped and were rightly being redirected to consultants of color. My efforts to gain the same traction in other sectors have yielded little fruit. My remaining nonprofit contracts began terminating after 2025’s government cuts.

The fallout did leave me with a lot of time for writing, which has been a constant pastime throughout most of these careers, but never a career in and of itself. Until, maybe…now?

Because what did show up on my 2026 calendar was several writing coaching clients, two editing projects, an essay due for an anthology, and a variety of non-direct income-generating promotional tasks for my debut memoir about the aspiring monk phase (This Incredible Longing, Heliotrope). According to my calendar, without really knowing it or trying very hard, I’d become a freelance writer + editor + coach through underground referrals. But let it be known: even though my career as an executive coach is on life support, I haven’t yet felt the wave or heard the clicks.

When I can quiet my financial concerns, I’ll admit to waking up thrilled to spend my days writing, working with my new clients, and tackling the editing. I’m in the midst of a transition, but no longer swirling in the despair-inducing void of wondering what comes next. My creative synapses are fueled by excitement, and I remember:

This is how my careers begin — with a burst of enthusiasm and a touch of magic.

At 7 years old, I sat in a musty, intimate theater in Greenwich Village, where the blonde lead of The Fantastiks gazed seemingly right into my soul and sang, “I want much more!” I felt sparkles circulating from the top of my head to my toes and back again. I thought: I want to make this kind of magic for a living.

When a new path opens up, it unfolds like a yellow brick road in my mind, and I know where I’m going. But then, as happens on yellow brick roads, it takes quite a bit of twisting, turning, and time to arrive at the destination.

Once, in my 20s, smack in the middle of a performance of a dreadful off-off Broadway show, I felt the dread and heard the clicks. Weeks later, I had the dead-toes interview with the Broadway actor, and I knew it was time to quit acting and the tired theater mag, Playbill Online. But what was next? I sat down, lit a candle, and surrounded myself with colored markers. I folded a piece of paper in thirds. One column header was: THINGS I LOVE TO DO. Another: THINGS I’M GOOD AT. A third: LOGISTICS, which included very specific details about what I wanted my work life to look like, including: compensation; neighborhoods I’d like to work in; the decor of my workspace; flexible hours; and quick access to cheap, healthy food.

At the end of the exercise, glancing at all the columns, which included a love for all things theater and psychotherapy, I thought, I’ll be a healer who uses theater techniques to help people grow, and mistakenly believed I invented “drama therapy.” It turned out it was already a profession, and I got my Master’s Degree in it, launching the longest part of my career, eighteen years, as a licensed therapist and workshop leader who traveled the country.

A couple of years ago, while my roster of executive clients was whittling down, I panicked. How could I be in my mid-50s with so much skill and so little work? It baffled and deflated me. I tried to remind myself that executive leadership coaching can seem like a luxury in an unstable economy — a leader or company really has to be in a certain amount of pain to retain my services. It appeared I wasn’t alone: a few people who’d lost jobs reached out for career coaching, but naturally had little funds to pay for it (something I’ve always found off about that aspect of my profession). I didn’t know how I was going to assemble my talents to keep making a living or serve the greater good. I reached out to an astrologer.

“You’re in a holding pattern, but 2026 is the year things really start cooking for you,” she said, without knowing I had a book coming out. “You’ll have lots of opportunities for writing and work.” I felt vastly relieved. “And then,” she added, “things will settle down again. But something new will emerge in your 60s … you might be working in hospitals, or institutions of some kind.”

Sounds about right, I thought. Oh, the comfort and curse of finding your fate in the stars.

Peggi’s voice comes muffled through the closed door to her office. Her words come in rapid bursts with long silences in between. In the dance studio, my 6-year-old brother races his tiny Hot Wheels car across the floor. On Peggi’s daybed, I curl over the open pages of a worn fairy tale book kept on a shelf just for me. I keep my eyes fixed on the pages of the book, even when Peggi comes in the room. I am trying to forget the last two days of my life; the guttural terror of Mommy’s screams, my grandmother’s pitiful moaning and my Uncle Stanley’s grim-faced silence as he drove us back to New York. Now, Peggi is standing over me, speaking.

“Your mother had a cerebral aneurysm,” she says. “A blood vessel exploded in her head. She might not survive the operation.”

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Peggi speaks in the flat tone of naked truth. One day, I will understand Peggi’s courage; her rare ability to look life straight in the eye. But at this moment, I hate her truthfulness, and I wish she would go away. I look back to my book to signal my lack of interest, but Peggi continues.

“Even if she does survive, the doctor says she might be a vegetable for the rest of her life.”

“When can I get my Halloween costume?” I ask when Peggi stops talking.

The slap comes as quick as lightning, scorching the side of my face.

“I hate you!” I shout, hurling my book into a corner.

One evening, a couple of weeks later, Peggi sits down on the edge of the daybed where, as usual, my 10-year-old face is buried in a book. “It’s impossible,” she begins, “for me to run this school and take care of you both.” I look up from my story. “I’ve found a place where you and your brother will stay for the time being.” Her voice is soft, asking me to understand. “It’ll only be for a little while,” she says. I look back down at my book. “Until your mother gets better…” she continues, but I let her words dissolve into the background rumble of distant traffic.

***

Greer School is a place for children with nowhere else to go. I see this on the faces of the kids who stand around the edge of the driveway, staring as Peggi hugs and kisses me and my brother goodbye, then climbs back into the car she hired for the trip. I see it on their faces and in the drab, ugly clothing that no one has carefully picked for them. Many years later, a friend will ask me why none of our relatives took us in at the time. The question gives me pause. I have no answer, and I’m startled by the anger that rears its head when I consider asking either of my two surviving, now elderly, uncles. Better to leave it alone.

On my first morning at Greer, a state-run home for children, a girl named Trina smacks my face, knocking my glasses onto the grass. I’m following my new housemates along a path that leads to the schoolhouse when Trina turns to confront me.

“Why’d you take my book,” she demands. “It wasn’t your book,” I say. I’m determined not to show my fear. We’ve already had this exchange three or four times since my arrival yesterday.

“I told you it was my book,” Trina insists. “I found it under the couch,” I say, refusing to turn and look at Trina, whose face is about six inches from mine.

That’s when she smacks me with her open palm and my glasses fly off my face and onto the grass alongside the path.

I bend down to retrieve them, feeling my face get hot and my eyes start to water. But I clamp down the tears because I am not going to show my feelings.

“See that’s what you get,” Trina taunts. I stay silent and continue walking.

“Your mother had a cerebral aneurysm,” my aunt says. “A blood vessel exploded in her head. She might not survive the operation.”

Later, sitting on my bed, a girl named Shelly laughs her big-bodied laugh that helps warm my chilled insides.

“Don’t pay Trina no mind, okay?” Shelly lowers her voice. “Trina think she bad,” she says, smiling, “but she ain’t.”

Her voice is dismissive, implying Trina might not be a person to be feared after all.

There’s also Missy, the joker, who makes me laugh with her sly disrespect of Trina’s alpha attitudes and Jackie, a large silent girl who one day attacks me for no reason I can understand at the time.

None of us want to be at Greer. We’ve all been washed up here by different family shipwrecks. But I know my situation is different. My situation is temporary. That’s what aunt Peggi promised us the day she brought me and my brother to this place. “As soon as your mother is better,” Peggi said, and I hold onto that promise as the rock-solid truth of my life.

It’s not that I’ve never seen black girls darker than me, from poor families, before. My neighborhood at the north end of Central Park is very mixed — racially and economically. One block over from our pre-war, doorman building on Central Park West, the Frederick Douglass housing project stretches across an entire avenue and four blocks from 100th to 104th street.

Those projects are occupied by low-income black and Puerto Rican families. I learn very early on that those blocks and those people are to be avoided.

Those people.

Everything about my upbringing teaches me that I’m a kind person who lives in a culturally inclusive world.

Yet.

I’d see these loud, gum-snapping girls, wiry or overweight and poorly dressed on the streets and supermarkets we share, and I’d feel an immediate judgment of their English filled with “dats” and “dose” in place of crisp t and th sounds spoken in my home, or the grinding down the two syllabic “asked” to a smooth, monosyllabic “axed.” I feel an immediate judgment of their speech, their bargain basement clothes, and their behavior and I know for sure that we have nothing in common.

But now I’m living with those girls (those people) sporting my own bundle of bargain basement hand-me-downs, drab clothes made from poor materials. All recognizable markers of my former identity are gone. The places, the people, even the food — all gone.

On my first night at Greer, they serve pickled pig’s feet in the dining hall where the whole school gathers for dinner. I’m thoroughly disgusted. A couple months earlier, I was ordering my dinner from the menu at our family’s restaurant in the Poconos. Pork chops and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy and South African lobster tails broiled in butter were my favorites. One week, I ate lobster tails for five days straight until the cook told on me and I was banned from ordering the dish again.

I’d heard about pig’s feet but never ever expected to confront one on my plate. “It’s good,” Shelly insists, so I try it and am disgusted. The slick greasy meat compounds the feeling that we are all throw-away children eating throw away food.

***

I spend ten months swimming in this sea of not belonging, claimed only by the state and its employees. Ten months is a long time when you’re 10 years old; it’s nearly one-tenth of your whole life.

Gradually, my ideas about the differences separating me from the girls in my house dissolve into an awareness of the sameness of our daily routines, breakfast at the round white table in our kitchen, getting dressed for school, walking the path to school each morning, returning home in the afternoon to homework, dinner and at the end of the evening, everyone gathered around the tv.

Everyone except for me. I’m alone in the single room the House Mother had assigned me, hidden inside my books.

Greer School is a place for children with nowhere else to go. I see this on the faces of the kids who stand around the edge of the driveway, staring as Aunt Peggi hugs and kisses me and my brother goodbye.

Until one night, one of the girls sticks her head in my room and asks if she can do my hair.

At the start of fourth grade, I convinced my mother to let me grow my hair long. She began a daily regimen of hard brushstrokes back from the hairline, training my curls to lie down. The daily brushing combined with generous amounts of a white crème called Vitapointe worked and my curls grew into long, flyaway strands of hair that were provisionally well-behaved.

It’s been a couple of months since my hair has been properly brushed or combed. I have a bad habit of only brushing the topmost layer, ignoring the thick mass of hair beneath. One morning, trying to comb out a tangled section of my hair, the comb gets completely stuck. I try yanking it out but it won’t budge. It’s trapped inside the bird’s nest that is my hair. I fly into a rage, ripping my hair to free the comb. The girl standing next to me at the bathroom mirror tells me to calm down, she will help me get the comb out. And she does, easing it through the tangled plaits of my hair with a patience I don’t possess.

That night, when Phyllis sticks her head in my doorway and asks if she can do my hair, I am beyond grateful.

I join the other girls in my house in front of the tv for the first time, sitting at Phyllis’s feet as she untangles the knots and clumps of matted hair working in grease and smoothing it into soft strands that she weaves into a neat latticework of cornrow braids. It’s a masterwork that everyone crowds around to admire.

The next morning, I ask Phyllis to take the braids out because they’re giving me a headache.

She looks at me for a moment saying nothing. I can see she isn’t happy about undoing her creation but she agrees. That night I’m back at Phyllis’ feet as she carefully unweaves the cornrows and combs out my hair which now lies in soft, obedient strands that she wraps around several large curlers that I have to keep on overnight.

The next morning, Phyllis arranges my hair in Shirley Temple ringlets that I now have to wear to school. I know better than to complain a second time but I feel pretty stupid. Still, it’s nice to feel my hair all soft and bouncy.

The styling of my hair becomes a regular event. There are arguments, sometimes, about whose turn it is, but they work themselves out, and each night, in the dark living room illuminated by the blue light of the TV, I lean against Missy or Shelly or Trina or Phyllis’ knees, giving myself over to the soothing, repetitive rhythms of the combing, oiling, and styling of my hair.

I’m grateful for all the expert attention to my hair. I don’t admit it to myself at the time, I’m grateful for having a simple way of being connected to the girls in my house.

***

My mother spends almost ten months in the intensive care unit of Bellevue hospital re-learning how to walk and talk. Peggi promised we’d only be at Greer long enough for her to recover, and I believe Peggi without question. I never consider the alternative; that I could lose my mother too. My father had promised me so much, but those promises vanished with him into thin air two years earlier, when he died of a heart attack (which he might have prevented if he’d stopped drinking). My mother had promised me nothing, but I feel sure she’ll come back. I know that she’s too angry and stubborn to let go of her whole life in the careless way my father had. Of course, I know nothing of the risks and intricacies of brain surgery. I don’t think in probabilities. That my mother will fully recover is a fixed certainty in my mind, the North Star of my belief.

None of us want to be at Greer. We’ve all been washed up here by different family shipwrecks. But I know my situation is different. My situation is temporary. That’s what aunt Peggi promised us.

Actually, it’s not true that my mother promised me nothing. She had promised me something. It was a generations-old promise, embedded in the belligerent pride, stubbornness and unexamined anger passed on in varying measure to each child of Stanley and Ida Facey. This unspoken information, transmitted in the silent language of mothers and daughters, assures me that my mother will fight for her survival and mine with every ounce of her strength.

Most of the kids who come to Greer will stay until they turn 18. Trina, who is 11, I learn from Shelly, has been there since she was 6. Over the years her mother has been in and out of drug rehabs and hasn’t visited Trina once in all that time. Missy doesn’t even know where her mother or father are. All anyone knows about Jackie is that both her parents are dead and her grandmother is too sick to keep her. There are some, like Shelly and Phyllis, who have relatives trying to get custody, but most of the kids have no one, or at least no one able to care for them any better than Greer.

I live at Greer like someone waiting at a bus station, expecting at any time to pick up and go. True to her word, Peggi comes to get us. It’s a warm summer afternoon and I’m playing Jacks with Missy and Phyllis in front of our house. I look up and Peggi is standing there with the same official-looking white lady who’d met us on the first day. In her crisp summer slacks and sleeveless blouse, Peggi looks like my mother, only thinner and sterner. When she smiles, the same radiant smile as my mother’s, I feel the whole ten months at Greer slip away like a dream.

“Is that your mother?” Missy whispers loudly in my ear.

“No, that’s my aunt.”

“She gonna take you home?”

“Yeah.”

One by one each of the girls comes to my doorway and stands watching me pack up my books and drawings. I’ve suddenly become an object of curiosity.

“Who you gonna live wit?” Shelly wants to know.

“How come they put you here?” Trina demands.

“Your mama got a husband?” Missy inquires.

I see my good fortune reflected in each hungry gaze and feel embarrassed to be leaving. It isn’t fair, like so many other things that aren’t fair. I haven’t even been there long enough to understand how lucky I am. Whenever I told someone that I’d be going home as soon as my mother got better they’d suck their teeth, cut their eyes, or look at me like I was stupid. Believing that I would go home was the part of me that refused to stay at Greer; it roamed in books and dreams and just plain wishing. It was the part of me that stubbornly clung to the belief that I wasn’t disposable and that sooner or later somebody would come back to get me.

Our house mother, Mrs. Leone, lines everyone up in front of the house. We barely look at each other as we mumble our goodbyes. Shelly is the only one who wishes me good luck and says maybe we’ll see each other back in New York since we’ve found out that one of her aunts lives in the building next door to mine.

I join the other girls in my house in front of the tv for the first time, sitting at Phyllis’s feet as she untangles the knots and clumps of matted hair working in grease and smoothing it into soft strands that she weaves into a neat latticework of cornrow braids.

Many years later, I meet someone in the neighborhood who’d known Shelly and her younger sister Stephanie. He tells me that Shelly had been shot in the Bronx while visiting a friend or cousin. The person who did it had been somebody’s friend. He doesn’t know if Shelly lived or not. I have no idea what happened to Trina, Missy, Phyllis or Jackie, who once beat me up in an unprovoked frenzy. Or maybe I had provoked her. Maybe my unflappable belief that I would return to my family, something Jackie no longer had, was enough to provoke her. Maybe it was my hair or my light, near-white complexion that made her mad. There were plenty of reasons for Jackie to be mad at me even though we’d never said two words to each other. She’d challenged me to a play fight one afternoon. I said no because I didn’t want to fight and because, at 10 years old, Jackie already weighed at least a hundred pounds. But she kept wheedling, saying “come on, come on” until I finally agreed. We locked hands, leaning into each other, until she threw her whole weight against me, knocking me to the ground. Then she dropped down on top of me, crushing me with her weight, smothering me with her hands over my mouth, and choking my neck. I was screaming for her to get off and she was screaming something too, not words, just unintelligible rage, until someone pulled her off me. It took more than one person; she was still fighting and screaming as they pulled her up.

For a few moments I lay still, feeling the rough concrete beneath me, breathing hard. I remember feeling more confused than angry — confused and terrified anyone could behave that way. Traveling inside myself to a hidden place where all things would one day be explained, I curled up and closed my eyes.

***

When I tell people about my experience at Greer they say “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” But I’m not sorry. I’m profoundly grateful for the year I spent as an orphan living in a state-run home, with black girls I never would never have known or been able to imagine in my previous life as a well-loved, well-fed and well-dressed child, riding in a private school bus to a private school with other kids like me. Before this, my own racism had been invisible to me. This was the first time I really saw my othering of people.

I will always feel profoundly grateful for Trina, Missy, Phyllis and especially Shelly. They showed me something important about the world and about myself that I needed to know.

Dara Lurie is an author, book-coach and workshop facilitator. She received her BA in Film & Theater from Vassar College and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hunter College. She works with ambitious dreamers to help them discover their passionate & original voice in writing. Dara’s first book, Great Space of Desire: Writing for Personal Evolution, is a memoir and creative guide for writers. She is also the Partnerships and Programs Manager, Black Stories Matter Co-Director, and a Workshop Leader for TMI Project.

This essay was originally published in Longreads in collaboration with TMI Project, a non-profit organization offering transformative memoir workshops and performances that invite storytellers and audience members to explore new perspectives. By bravely and candidly sharing their personal stories, storytellers become agents of change for social justice movement building. Dara told an abbreviated version of this story onstage at TMI Project’s inaugural Black Stories Matter show in March 2017. You can watch it here:

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I dunk my face into a pot of cooking water. Three months ago, I had visions that my ancestors, the ones at the bottom of the Atlantic, told me I should find them. I envisioned their faces mangled with cuttlefish tentacles and tangled in sunken ship hulls. 

With my head in a pot, I can feel the ancestors—I call them water spirits—peel the skin off my face like a ripe orange dangling from a tree in the spring sunlight. The water spirits shuck layers off my skin. 

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“Now, blow your bubbles,” Natalie, my swim instructor, says from the screen of the iPhone propped on the salt shaker. 

A Canada native, Natalie is a professional diver and singer. She and her Mexican husband Ivan are among the snowbirds, musicians, chefs, and yoga enthusiasts who travel to Akumal, Mexico, from November to April to escape the northern chill. 

Until 65 years ago, no one was “from” Akumal. Pablo Bush Romero, a Mexican businessman, historian, writer, and archeologist, founded the town in 1958 as an enclave for diving enthusiasts. Mexicans migrated to the small town between Cancun and Tulum to work at the resorts, restaurants, and tourist attractions popping up along the Caribbean coastline in subsequent decades. 

“People run to or away from something when they come to Mexico,” my friend Jen explained. 

In my case, it was both. I moved here less than a week after my mom died from stomach cancer. I had no immediate family except for Grandma Lula, who lived in a nursing home in Philadelphia. The rag-doll girl in me who mourned the loss of my family needed a way to remain connected to my lineage. Little did I realize I’d have to put my face in a pot to do it. 

Natalie graciously agreed to join the first leg of my journey to the ocean-bound ancestors as my swim and dive instructor. But then the pandemic hit. Natalie and Ivan joined her elderly parents in Canada to care for them. I remained in Mexico, with my head bobbing in and out of a kitchen pot I bought at Wal-Mart. 

“Are you blowing?” she asks. 

I remained in Mexico, with my head bobbing in and out of a kitchen pot I bought at Wal-Mart. 

I barely stick my nose in the pot when the water spirits return. This time they scale my sinews and muscles. Holding my legs firmly to the linoleum floor, the spirits scrape my body from my hair extensions to the heels of my feet, which could use a pedicure. In the pandemic, human touch is deadly. Shedding is survival. The spirits say shedding is essential if I want to reach them. They say diving to them requires me to forget the land’s lessons and remember my place among the water spirits. I inhale and blow bubbles until there’s almost no air left. 

*** 

Water wants me on its own terms, and I don’t want to surrender. Other Black women say their experience with swimming and open water is emotionally violent. Unlike some of our white friends, we don’t grow up with a patient YMCA instructor leading us through the paces with seven other squirmy, suburban children. 

Instead, an older brother, father, uncle, or neighborhood boy initiates us by throwing us in. Their guffaws are a laugh track to our terror, compounding our physical shock. We flail until the water spirits push us back to the surface. Our freshly permed and curled hair is now tightly coiled, springing out of our heads like haloes. 

A silence persists among many Black women when I talk to them about swimming and open water. My friend Regina boasts about her sexual conquests, but audibly curls into a ball when I ask her if she swims. Her booming voice grows soft and trails, “I can swim. I just don’t like the water.”

“Why?” I ask. 

Regina stares, says nothing. I know I went too far. We can brag to our friends about snagging tickets to Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, but some of us are emotionally stunted when sharing our deep fear of swimming and open water. 

A silence persists among many Black women when I talk to them about swimming and open water.

Other friends are more forthcoming about their fear of water. Like oyster shells, their stories pry open with only a few questions. Margaritas also help loosen the tongue. Dripping from their subconscious, my friends’ stories begin, “I never told anyone this before, but…” Their stories unravel their fears or tumble out as an offering, prayer, or request for forgiveness. I want to know why we are ashamed of being afraid of something that comes so naturally to white people but never, it seems, to some of us.

It isn’t our fault. Our grandmothers hushed us into shame and silence. 

“Who told that boy to go near the water?” Grandma Lula says when gossiping with Aunt Miriam about the latest drowning. 

“And what was his mother doing?” Aunt Miriam asks while stirring the ham hock into the collard greens to perfect its saltiness—as if there wasn’t enough saltiness in the room.

“The devil snatched him up,” grandma says. “Never go near the water, gal,” she says in her South Carolina drawl, despite living in Philadelphia for 30 years. “You hear me?”

*** 

“I can’t do this,” I say to Natalie after three dunks into the cooking pot during our next lesson. 

“You’re doing great.”

“I feel stupid.”

“This isn’t the most ideal situation,” Natalie says. “But this is the best we can do for now.”

I nod and stick my face back into the pot. The water spirits return. This time, they click in my ears like whales. The water spirits never use language because a simple “yes” or “no” could lead to rape or torture. Many enslaved Africans aboard the ships didn’t even speak the same language. Some historical accounts say they rocked their bodies in tandem, like Morse code and whale clicks, to communicate messages to other Africans on deck.

Fragmented images appear at the bottom of the cooking pot water. Crumpled white corpses in the corner of a slave ship. The white sailors’ muscles begin the march of decay. Black skin splinters open like a ripe mango. Its juice is my ancestors’ blood. A mother holds her infant. Her ashen, cracked feet step near the ship’s edge. 

I am not strong enough to remember their pain while facing my fear of submerging my head underwater. I pull my face out of the pot. Reassuring my central nervous system that my ancestors and I don’t share the same fate, I take in as much air as possible. 

“Are you okay?” Natalie’s voice cracks through the iPhone. “Remember, you’re not going to drown.”

My toes clutch the tiled kitchen floor. 

The water spirits will catch me I think to myself. 

I recall the story of the Igbo Landing. In 1803, a group of captured Nigerians from the Igbo tribe revolted during their voyage to the United States. The Igbo killed most of their white captors, threw them overboard, and seized the ship’s control. During their escape and anticipated trip home, the vessel was grounded at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast. No one knows what happened next. But generations of Black grandparents said the Igbo decided to drown rather than endure the slavery waiting for them onshore. The Igbo leaders decided everyone would walk into the water and wait for the water spirits to catch them. 

As the story was passed on, the Igbo sang in unison, “The Water Spirit brought us here; the Water Spirit will take us home.” 

The Igbo’s mass suicide was canonized in Black oral tradition, folklore, and literature as the first major act of resistance by captured Africans. In some stories, the Igbo walked on water and flew home. 

Salvation by suicide. Black bodies floating in water. Our bodies were always cargo, on land and in the sea. From the 16th-century Portuguese traders who extracted us as cheap labor to work the fields of the Americas to a Black man on the ground calling for his mama as a white police officer suffocated him with his knee, the Black body has always been perceived as disposable.

“I can’t do this,” I say, panting and coming up for air. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I start crying.

“We can stop now if you want,” Natalie says. Her voice crackles through the WiFi waves floating from Canada across the United States to Mexico. I take it as a sign. But now that the water spirits have ripped me raw, there’s no turning back. 

“Give me a minute,” I say. “I’ll try again.” 

*** 

We didn’t start out fearing swimming and open water. History and epigenetics transformed faith into fear. 

Historical evidence suggests that as far back as the 15^th century, coastal West Africans (those from Senegal, Gambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, and Nigeria), including women, knew how to swim as much as the Europeans of the same era. Members of West African communities even developed a breaststroke prototype that Europeans didn’t use until 1899.

We didn’t start out fearing swimming and open water. History and epigenetics transformed faith into fear.

If our ancestors were expert swimmers, why were some of their descendants afraid of swimming and open water? I think the answer must have something to do with what happened on the slave ships, passed down in oral histories like the Igbo landing and the gossip in grandma’s kitchen, and scientifically bolstered through epigenetics. 

By studying Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a veterans affairs neuroscientist in the Bronx, and her colleagues were the first to demonstrate that human trauma could be passed through DNA. Epigenetics, as it’s known, changes the expression of the gene without altering the DNA sequence. 

Epigenetics may explain why the descendants of expert swimmers, like me, are terrified of swimming and open water. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were taken and transported across the Atlantic Ocean from 1526 to 1867 (known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade). But only 10.7 million survived. 

Abolitionist William Hamilton described the treatment of captive Africans in his 1815 oration delivered in the Episcopal Asbury African Church in New York “O! Africa” as:

On shipboard in their passage from Africa, they were treated with the most horrible cruelty that the imagination can conceive of…An infant of 10 months old, had taken sulk on board of a slave ship, that is refused to eat; the savage captain with his knotted cat whipped it until its body and legs had much swollen…

Water was a co-conspirator in the terror of captured Africans. Hamilton continued in his oration: 

In a few hours after it (the infant) expired, he (the captain) then ordered the mother to throw her murdered infant overboard. She refused. He beat her until she took it up, turned her head aside, and dropped it into the sea.

This was only one of the daily atrocities recorded during the treacherous passage across the Atlantic. Greater terrors awaited once my ancestors from Sierra Leone landed on the shore, where they were bought, traded, bred, and enslaved. 

Once in the Americas, swimming was a form of labor, punishment, or a grim path to salvation for enslaved Africans. Excellent enslaved swimmers, for example, were deployed as pearl divers in the Caribbean. A few enslaved Africans were heralded for their bravery in saving their white “masters” from drowning. 

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) documented anecdotal stories in the 1930s saying that enslaved Blacks were forbidden to swim or used suicide by drowning to evade beatings, torture, capture, and rape. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, enslaved in Alabama, told the WPA about Lucy, a fellow slave who “drowned herself rather than let them beat her and mark her up.”

Closer to our time, Black audiences nodded along as Michael B. Jordan, playing Erik Kilmonger in the 2018 movie Black Panther, said, “Nah, bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. Because they knew death was better than bondage.”

I’m not sure dunking my head into a cooking pot could heal the overwhelming complexity I and other Black people have with swimming and open water. I feel their collective shame as I blow bubbles into the pot. I can’t hear the birds chirping or the soft whirring of cars outside. Fear races up and down my neurons like a roller coaster. 

“You will eventually become one of us because you cannot stay away from us,” the water spirits say. “Your water spirit ripples in your research and frequent walks to the wild beach near your house. We watch you whisper your secret hopes to the ocean and beg us for answers.”

The water spirits continue, “This is our answer: We choose you as one of our descendants to map the ships where we died and return to the surface to share our stories. You understand that this sacred journey isn’t about achieving a goal. It’s about who you become in the process.”

Gasping for air, I stand up. The fear remains, but a tiny flicker of resurrection sparkles and crackles like the new day sun dancing on the water. 

This essay was originally published in January, 2024. It was guest-edited by Katie Kosma. Previously an editor with Sari at Longreads, she now edits for The Rumpus, The Assembly, and UNC-Chapel Hill.  

I had forgotten how to dress. My go-to outfit while languishing for umpteen pandemic months in our cramped apartment was a T-shirt that said, “THERE IS NO PLANET B,” and a pair of grayish hand-me-down pants gone baggy in the seat. The events of my fall in 2021 included: Hurricane Ida, when eleven New Yorkers drowned in their basement apartments; the funeral of my beloved father; and Halloween, when one of my kids came down with the Delta variant while trick-or-treating dressed as a zombie cowboy.

Next, I fell ill with the virus. To keep from infecting the rest of our family, I checked my sick son and myself into a city-run COVID hotel near JFK Airport. In that purgatory, our bags were ransacked for guns and drugs. The doors didn’t lock. The nursing staff had to check our vitals at regular intervals to be sure we weren’t dead. I was too exhausted by the stack of calamities to recognize I was grieving.

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Before my father’s decline, he was a preeminent scholar of Black religious history. As brilliant as he’d been, I wasn’t sure, at the end of his life, that he recognized me. He had died of dementia, like his mother and sister before him. Now, here I was in quarantine, missing him while also working online and trying to get my picky kid to eat the wet fish sticks delivered to our room. I missed the smell of my dad’s pipe, the soft texture of his voice, and his handwriting on the index cards it was his habit to use for note-taking. The idea that the contents of his mind had vanished devastated me.

Keep it together, I told myself. My feverish brain rearranged itself in some way that had me quietly repeating the first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales.

And specially from every shires ende

Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

I was scaring my child. Maybe I reached for Chaucer because my father had memorized this passage, too, long before I did, and the poetry made me feel closer to him. Instead of praying to my father directly for protection, I sweated out the fever while coughing violently, fearing bedbugs and burglary or an internal cytokine storm, pretending equilibrium for my son’s sake.

Before my father’s decline, he was a preeminent scholar of Black religious history. As brilliant as he’d been, I wasn’t sure, at the end of his life, that he recognized me. He had died of dementia, like his mother and sister before him. Now, here I was in quarantine, missing him while also working online and trying to get my picky kid to eat the wet fish sticks delivered to our room.

For some other strange reason, I was offered a Coach bag as a parting gift upon checkout. It wasn’t a knockoff. It was real. I asked a disgruntled staff member to explain the connection between Coach and the COVID hotel. “Look, lady,” she asked, “do you want the bag or not?” I took the bag and promptly forgot I owned it. Then, on Thanksgiving, I tripped and broke my right foot. The podiatrist who dressed my injury in a cast was named, appropriately enough, Dr. Greif. The only accessory I wore that season was in the shower—if I showered: a plastic bag to protect the cast. I was a literal and figurative mess.

In early December, an invitation arrived. My friend Ayana and her wife were planning a Christmas party. Directions to their house upstate were included. Children were discouraged. Vaccine boosters were requested. Festive attire was required.

After so much isolation, the thought of a party felt almost illicit. I welcomed the invitation but doubted I’d make a charming guest. This would be my first Christmas without my dad.

“What are you going to wear?” asked my friend Angie, who was also invited.

Ayana was our epicurean friend, a gifted hostess who threw glittering dinner parties in the salad days before the shutdown sent us off the rails and out of each other’s company. On one of her birthdays, we dined at the Breslin, in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, where she’d special ordered a whole roasted suckling pig. How long had it been since we’d gone to a party indoors? In my case, a year and eight months. Angie, who was a gifted hostess herself and whose kitchen had been the heart of our former social life, thrived on parties and suffered their loss. She was giddy to attend.

“I have no idea what to wear,” I told her. I understood the assignment as a Black woman: I was to come correct, as my grandmother Mabel might have said. Here was an opportunity to indicate with our adornment, comportment, and style that we had overcome. We couldn’t show up at Ayana’s looking slovenly. My closet was full of fancy things. So was my jewelry box.

Yet, in my lingering brain fog, I couldn’t tell what went with what. A once favorite belted brown coat hung too loosely on my frame. The dresses I had previously had tailored to my body and delighted in wearing to readings, weddings, and conferences now looked strangely youthful, as if they belonged to a more colorful self. Nor, despite Ayana’s directions, could I easily understand how to get to the party. I’d been to the house before, but as a nondriver. The journey seemed farther now, more arduous to traverse, with multiple limping steps by subway or cab to train or bus, requiring decisions about schedules I struggled to read. What’s more, I wasn’t sure I remembered how to be fun. Maybe I shouldn’t go, I thought.

Angie was undaunted by my anomie. She lent me a red silk blouse and a sparkly hair clip; God bless her. Her enthusiasm lifted my spirits, as it had so many times before. She encouraged me to lower my face mask to apply lipstick and, in a boss move, called us an Uber Black to drive us the two hours up the Hudson River Valley in luxury. “I’m fifty,” she reasoned. “And you are my date.” I’d been living in a scarcity mindset for so many weeks on end that I forgot such decadence was possible. As Toni Morrison writes: “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.” I remembered the Coach bag and dug it out. We split the bill and enjoyed the ride.

“How are we supposed to orient ourselves to your suffering if we don’t know you’re in mourning?” She placed her napkin in her lap…Orient themselves to my suffering? I wasn’t sophisticated enough to answer. Obviously, this couple had something to teach me. “Tell me,” I said in a voice that sounded almost like begging, “how you mourn.”

Ayana and her wife, Christina, were still cooking when we arrived, dressed in aprons and oven mitts, stirring gravy and toasting pecans in pans. The kitchen smelled of roast chicken and potatoes. Their dog wore a bow tie. So much bounty crowded the counter, I didn’t know where to put the sweet potato pie and bottle of rich, creamy coquito I’d brought. In the living room, the other guests sat in their finery listening to Luther Vandross before a roaring fire, swapping stories about real estate, dogs, the plots of books. Their talk was lubricated by wine.

We applauded when our hosts called us to the dining room. The table was worthy of a magazine spread, dressed with fir boughs, a floral centerpiece, and fine china, the napkins folded into origami shapes. On the menu was slow-roasted pernil, garlic string beans, macaroni and cheese, stuffing, rolls, and a big salad with roasted acorn squash. At every setting lay a maroon-colored place card with a name written in silver script. We were eleven at a table meant for ten. I was surprised to find my seat at the head, squeezed right next to Ayana’s.

Ayana clinked her glass with her fork, and the room fell silent. She stood up to give a toast expressing gratitude for the vaccine, the food, and the gift of our company, ending by turning her attention toward me. “The reason Emily is seated here, in a place of honor,” she announced, “is that her father has recently died.”

I focused on a flickering candle and found myself flush with adrenaline, trembling like the flame. I felt stunned and slightly embarrassed. But more than that, I felt seen. I hadn’t understood I needed it said. A pause followed, so concentrated with pity, I thought I might cry. Ayana sat beside me and took my hand. I stopped shaking at her touch.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” offered a guest at our end whom I’d only just met. Bev was one half of a couple from South Africa, by way of Durham, where they ran an African diasporic book shop. “Why aren’t you dressed in mourning clothes?”

“Yes,” added Bev’s partner, Naledi, seated opposite. “How are we supposed to orient ourselves to your suffering if we don’t know you’re in mourning?” She placed her napkin in her lap.

Orient themselves to my suffering? I wasn’t sophisticated enough to answer. Obviously, this couple had something to teach me. “Tell me,” I said in a voice that sounded almost like begging, “how you mourn.”

Though Bev and Naledi came from different tribes with different rites around death, they shared their customs around grief. There was cloth worn by the bereaved to signify they were not in their right mind—they were to be treated differently, with more tenderness and, to a degree, to be let off the hook. In some cases, as with the loss of a significant other, the aggrieved might even shave their head. This showed their loss in the baldest way possible.

By the time their hair grew back in, the mourner was in a new phase of mourning, ready to celebrate the rebirth of the person they’d lost into their role as an ancestor. It was often said that when a person died, a seed had fallen. In a ceremony that might occur one year after burial, that ancestor could be asked for protection and guidance. In this way, the dead were not exactly dead. There were certain rituals to perform as the dead made this passage into spirit. For example, the ghost of that ancestor might be presented with a blanket because they would be cold upon reawakening. Or the dead might be buried with a blanket, for a similar reason.

My father’s death was nested among so many other losses, I hadn’t yet grasped its particular hold. He didn’t die of COVID. He died in devastating increments, swiftened by social distancing: He forgot how to drive, how to read, how to climb stairs. He forgot the names of his children and the names of the ancestors in the framed photos on his wall. Eventually, he forgot to eat. And I had to say goodbye through a mask, spooning his diminished frame in the rented hospital bed at his home.

It came as a great comfort to learn this. My father’s death was nested among so many other losses, I hadn’t yet grasped its particular hold. He didn’t die of COVID. He died in devastating increments, swiftened by social distancing: He forgot how to drive, how to read, how to climb stairs. He forgot the names of his children and the names of the ancestors in the framed photos on his wall. Eventually, he forgot to eat. And I had to say goodbye through a mask, spooning his diminished frame in the rented hospital bed at his home.

When he died, we dressed him under a quilt. We laid it over his body in the funeral casket. Somehow, we remembered that we should keep him warm. During my eulogy, I held up the photos of the ancestors, naming them each—because he had made me to know them, and so that his grandchildren would understand that he was become an ancestor, too. We made meaning out of scraps, connected to something deeper. Here was Ayana, doing the same. She understood how to make space at her table for grief, to let me find a ritual in the sweetness of community. Another word for that knowledge is “grace.” Only after that could we make space for hope.

Sadly, The Canterbury Tales is unfinished. The pilgrims never even reach their destination. Their return journey isn’t written. Not all of the pilgrims who appear in the general prologue get to tell a story. And so the point of the poem becomes the stories told in the collective, the mixing of social classes, and the pluralism behind the enterprise. To my mind, it is about community.

Someone passed the gravy. Someone else opened another bottle of wine. From the far end of the table, I caught flashes of wit. I took a bite of beans. Above us, the chandelier hung like a crown. Angie asked what everyone looked forward to in the new year. We took turns, going around. One guest looked forward to climbing a mountain. Another, to learning how to live alone after a bad breakup. Christina looked forward to the possibility of fostering a child. Ayana looked forward to resuming classes in person at seminary school. Angie looked forward to learning about her son’s high school placement and publishing her next book. I looked forward to seeing what would bloom in my garden come spring. Bev and Naledi looked forward to growing their bookshop, which they’d named Rofhiwa. I asked what that word meant, though in retrospect I might have guessed.

“It means,” said Bev, gently, “‘You have been given.’”

2022

Excerpted with permission from Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” by Emily Raboteau, published by Henry Holt & Co.

This essay originally appeared in Memoir Land in March, 2024. Emily Raboteau also took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. She also has an essay in the 2021 reissue of Goodbye to All That.

Readers,

The essay I had planned for today fell through, and so I thought that—given how many new subscribers there are—I’d rewind a little and show you some of the essays that have been published here before.

Below, you’ll find preview links to a handful older pieces by , , , , , , and . (I’ll do this now and then when I don’t have a new essay ready-to-go.)

It’s hard to choose—I love them all. But here’s a fairly random sampling, a diverse mix of voices. Hope you enjoy them…

Thanks as always for reading, and for all your support! 🙏 💝

- Sari

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Another new essay is coming soon…

Concern warning: suicidal ideation

Sissy Thompson and I played husband and wife every day after we got off the bus in kindergarten. I was the construction worker, off to some imaginary job site, while Sissy stayed home, cooking, cleaning, and waiting for me to return. It was a boring game—one I'd much rather have swapped for Legos or a Star Wars adventure with my brother—but there were two things that made it worthwhile.

The first was the kiss goodbye before I went to work. The second? The kiss hello when I came home. Those moments made my heart race, the rest of the game fading into the background. I never wanted it to end. But it always did, too soon, when Sissy had to go back to her house.

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One day, we were sitting on her pink canopy bed, and I was secretly hoping for another kiss. Instead, she asked, “You want me to show you what my parents do?”

Before I could even process the question, she got on top of me, moving her body in a way that sparked something intense and exciting I had never felt before. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with all of the overwhelming feelings that were stirring inside me. I lay there, frozen, unsure of what I was supposed to do or say and trying to appear calm. 

“Husband and Wife” with Sissy was a boring game—one I'd much rather have swapped for Legos or a Star Wars adventure with my brother—but there were two things that made it worthwhile. The first was the kiss goodbye before I went to work. The second? The kiss hello when I came home. Those moments made my heart race, the rest of the game fading into the background.

When she finally stopped, she asked, “Do you like it? It’s called Hump.”I didn’t know what to say. How was I supposed to feel? Was this a trick? While I contemplated my response I tried to play it cool. Appear nonchalant. But, inside, my thoughts were screaming, “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! HELL YES, I WANT YOU TO DO THAT AGAIN! I WANT US TO DO HUMP FOR THE REST OF OUR FUCKING LIVES!” 

But, I was too scared to say it. I settled for a neutral, “Um, I don't know,” like she’d just shown me her grandfather’s stamp collection. 

Sissy moved away after kindergarten, and without her, I felt lost. There was one mild kiss with another girl, Grace, in first grade, but it was nothing like what I'd felt with Sissy. As I grew older, it became clear this wasn't a phase. But it also became clear that being different was dangerous.

Sometimes, when my mom took me to McDonald's for lunch, I’d see a woman there. I sensed I had something in common with this lady. She wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit, which admittedly, I loved. But, she also let her upper lip hair grow wild. I didn’t want to look like that. Somehow I already knew that being her, that being me, it made people angry.

The first time I learned what a lesbian was, I was home sick from school, watching Donahue. The show featured lesbians. I watched in horror as people shouted with an untethered rage, “Why do you have to advertise it? It’s not natural!” The audience confirmed my instinct. We didn’t just make people mad, we made them ruthless. 

By fourth grade, I was hiding in daydreams. In one, I imagined Laura, my sister’s friend, watching me as I pulled off a slam dunk at the buzzer. In my fantasy, my teammates carried me on their shoulders, across the basketball court, all the way into Laura’s arms. “Julie Novak," she would say as we embraced and locked eyes, "you’re my hero!” I always wanted to be the hero.

But reality always had a way of yanking me back. One day, the doorbell rang. My mom called up to me from downstairs, “Julie, it’s for you! Remember your old friend Sissy?” Turns out she’d moved back to town. My heart leapt. Could it be that she remembered our secret? Was she different too?

We walked around the block, catching up, and I decided to test the waters. “You know,” I stammered, “I had a dream that I was kissing a girl.”

The first time I learned what a lesbian was, I was home sick from school, watching Donahue. The show featured lesbians. I watched in horror as people shouted with an untethered rage, “Why do you have to advertise it? It’s not natural!” The audience confirmed my instinct. We didn’t just make people mad, we made them ruthless. 

Her reaction hit me like a punch to the gut. “But you’re a girl! Gross!” The shame was immediate and crushing. I wished I could take it back, bury the words I had just revealed. I knew then I’d never be with a woman. I’d never find anyone like me.

In seventh grade, I hit a wall. I was exhausted from pretending to like boys, from trying to fit into a mold that never fit me. I stopped wearing makeup, dropped the jelly shoes and the Zinc Pink lipstick, and rejected the boys who were interested. 

That’s when the backlash began. Mike and Alex, boys I’d turned down, started calling me a “stupid bitch.” Dan Zagarro stuck his finger in my face and sneered, “Now that is ugly.” There was nowhere to turn, no place on Earth where I could be myself.

Music became a lifeline. The first time I heard The Smiths on the college radio station, and a melancholic voice crooned, “Will the world end in the nighttime? I really don’t know,” I felt seen. I wasn’t alone in my misery. Morissey was with me now.

In eighth grade, I found a new group of friends who loved the same music I did. Carissa McCloud was one of them. She was everything I wished I could be: confident, smart, with an asymmetrical haircut that screamed rebellion. I was in awe of her.

On our school trip to Williamsburg, I found a way into her circle, grabbed hold and did not let go. For the rest of the trip, Carissa and I were inseparable. We shared a bed, stayed up late talking about everything—our families, school, music. We held hands and sometimes just looked into each other’s eyes, the air between us electric.

I was sure I was falling in love.

There was nowhere to turn, no place on Earth where I could be myself. Music became a lifeline. The first time I heard The Smiths on the college radio station, and a melancholic voice crooned, “Will the world end in the nighttime? I really don’t know,” I felt seen. I wasn’t alone in my misery. Morissey was with me now.

On the bus ride home, I sat next to Carissa, our shoulders touching. I had never felt more content, more alive.  

And then, out of nowhere, she said it. “You know, I can’t wait to get home and see David. We started going together about a week ago. He would think you’re so funny.”

Another punch in the gut. Another blow that knocked the wind right out of me. All those late-night conversations, the hand-holding, the looks—they meant nothing to her. I turned to stare out the window. My eyes stung as I tried to hold back the tears. The lump in my throat felt suffocating. I had no future with her. I had no future with anyone who could ever truly love me back.

As the bus rolled on, I made a decision. That summer, when school was out, I’d end it all. There was no place in this world for someone like me.

I put on my headphones. Morissey was there for me. This time it felt like he channeled a message from God as he whispered in my ear:

My love, wherever you are

Whatever you are

Don't lose faith

I know it's gonna happen someday

To you

Please wait

Please wait

Oh

Wait

Don't lose faith

You say that the day just never arrives

And it's never seemed so far away

Still, I know it's gonna happen someday

To you

Please wait

Don't lose faith

It was a flicker of hope that kept me alive: a belief, however fragile, that somewhere, someone like me existed. 

This essay was originally written as a monologue and performed with TMI Project, a true storytelling organization Novak co-founder with her wife Eva Tenuto in 2010. 

On August 31, 2024 Julie passed away from Stage 4 breast cancer. December 2nd was her birthday. She would have been 53. Julie’s final project was producing the docushort, One Story at a Time: Celeste Lecesne, an award-winning short film that highlights the personal journey behind the creation of The Trevor Project, the largest suicide prevention lifeline for LGBTQIA+ youth. It was her hope that in 2025 this film, paired with impactful programming, would reach students and educators across the nation, to ensure no LGBTQIA+ child reaches the point of crisis where they need to make a life-saving call. 

TMI Project is currently fundraising for The Julie Novak Storytelling Club, a community hub where people can gather regularly to write, connect, and share the kinds of true stories that change lives. Help them reach their goal here:

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PS Julie Novak designed the Memoir Land logo.

My husband and I landed in Dallas two days before Thanksgiving not knowing what awaited us. As other passengers exchanged recipe tips and trip plans while we exited the plane, John and I hurried to passenger pick-up, preoccupied.

Once we were cloistered in my sister-in-law’s SUV, we learned the news was worse than we’d expected. A day before his 88^th birthday, my father-in-law had taken a turn. The man who’d kept repeating, “Come see me,” on a FaceTime call a few days before hadn’t gotten out of bed, wasn’t responding to questions, and had said few words during the past 48 hours.

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We hurried to the assisted living home where he’d lived for the past few weeks, the latest phase in a years-long battle with Alzheimer’s. His room was the first from the front entrance, and in the doorway, I froze at the sight. My father-in-law’s eyes were closed. His head lolled against the pillow. His skin had a white cast, pulled tight against his bones. My body jolted with familiarity, and I thought, Not this again.

John rushed to his dad’s side. “Hey, old man,” he said. He rubbed his dad’s head, then picked up his hand for their customary, three-step handshake. Though John forced his dad’s fingers through the process, my father-in-law squeezed back. “That’s good,” John said, his voice brightening.

I didn’t say what experience taught me. That no matter how hopeful these physical responses seemed, my father-in-law wasn’t going to wake up.

My mom had died five years before after more than a decade fighting a rare form of lymphoma. I’d arrived in St. Louis in September 2019 to find her in bed, her body slack and eyes closed. She murmured a few words but hovered between asleep and awake while we moved her to a hospice bed in the living room.

Though she staunchly refused my assistance during her chemotherapy treatments and doctor’s visits, once she was in hospice, I could finally help her. I fed her grapes and scrambled eggs. I filled syringes with morphine that I dripped into her mouth, knowing that keeping away the pain was more important than grieving. In those five days of caring for her, I staved off the overwhelming sadness about her life as I knew it ceasing to exist.

***

On Thanksgiving, we sang happy birthday to my father-in-law. We perched a birthday hat on his head and gave him sips of a margarita, his favorite drink. We played him his favorite music, Beethoven and Neil Diamond. When his eyes flickered open, we crouched around his bedside and took photographs with him.

John rushed to his dad’s side. “Hey, old man,” he said. He rubbed his dad’s head, then picked up his hand for their customary, three-step handshake. Though John forced his dad’s fingers through the process, my father-in-law squeezed back. “That’s good,” John said, his voice brightening.

I didn’t say what experience taught me. That no matter how hopeful these physical responses seemed, my father-in-law wasn’t going to wake up.

The hospice nurses told us they didn’t know how long it would take my father-in-law to transition through the phases of death, something we all knew but couldn’t say. We hovered around the bed with my mother-in-law and John’s sisters, and watched. Every one of my father-in-law’s movements was cause for a news-style update. I was accustomed to this part. We needed to stay vigilant and present. We made friends with the other residents of the home, who were in their own phases of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and came to check in on my father-in-law. “Where’s Mr. Emmett?” they kept asking.

The aides at the home reminded us to take care of our ourselves, too, and the day after Thanksgiving, John and I returned to my mother-in-law’s house for an afternoon nap. We had drifted off when her knocking awoke us. “We have to go quick,” she said.

We arrived at the assisted living home to hear John’s sister say, “He just took his last breath.”

Nothing prepares you for the grief that arrives when someone is really, truly gone. A hole opens inside you, your earthly connection severed. I held John’s hand as he kissed his dad’s head, tears flowing down his cheeks. Like every family member facing death, he’d thought he had more time.

Seeing John in pain brought up everything I didn’t want to feel. I couldn’t stop the memories from flooding my mind. My family, John, and I similarly gathered around my mom’s bed on the beautiful September day in 2019 when she died. The nurse telling me, “It’s going to happen soon,” and a chasm opening in my stomach. The unquiet silence that accompanied her death. The chirping birds, someone mowing their grass. How we prayed the Rosary, my aunt thrusting the crystal beads into my mom’s hands. My mom breathing, raspy and shallow, until she wasn’t. In the moments before, when I could anticipate this would be the last time I’d be with her alive, I tried to fit as much care and love into the hand that held hers.

Healthcare aides and our family crowded into my father-in-law’s room to say goodbye. With the attention off me, I ran from the room. I found a quiet hallway, and when I was certain I was alone, let my sobs escape. I cried for John, for our family, and for me. Losing a parent is more profound than losing a limb. Gone is the person you were with them that reaches back to your beginnings. I was no longer who I was when my mom was alive, and in that moment, I realized how much I had changed. I was stronger, tougher, surer of myself. But I still felt so alone. How could I support someone through grief when I was still entrenched in it myself?

We arrived at the assisted living home to hear John’s sister say, “He just took his last breath.”

Nothing prepares you for the grief that arrives when someone is really, truly gone. A hole opens inside you, your earthly connection severed. I held John’s hand as he kissed his dad’s head, tears flowing down his cheeks. Like every family member facing death, he’d thought he had more time.

One of the home’s residents rounded the corner of the hallway. She was the one my father-in-law spent the most time with, who had a hilarious sense of humor and no filter, and gave great hugs. “Hey, hey,” she said to me, unaffected by my tears. She pulled me by the hand to her room and patted the flowered quilt on her twin bed. “Come sit.” I leaned against her shoulder, grateful for her company. Though I wasn’t sure what she understood, it didn’t matter—emotions have a way of reaching across reality.

When I returned to my father-in-law’s room, someone had closed his eyes and shrouded him in blankets. Outside, the sky darkened, and a white truck from the mortuary pulled into the driveway. Two solemn men in suits wheeled out a metal stretcher.

The rest of our family departed, leaving John and me alone while the men pulled down the sides of the hospice bed and prepared to move my father-in-law’s body.

“Can I carry him?” John asked.

The men exchanged a glance, then one of them nodded. “I would want to do it if it was my father,” he said.

John looked at me. “Will you help me?” he asked.

For a moment, I wondered if I should convince him not to. If the emotional weight of the task would be too much for him to bear. But when I looked in John’s eyes, I saw strength and vulnerability. He wanted to do one last thing for his father, and he knew he couldn’t do it alone. I nodded.

We took places on each side of my father-in-law and wedged our arms underneath his body. His soft weight sank into my arms, heavier than I expected. I recalled what I loved about him. His vigorous, back-slapping hugs. How much he loved babies. His mischievous eyes. How he always wanted everyone to have everything they wanted, including the pair of cowboy boots I’d longed for the previous year.

John and I staggered through the steps to the stretcher. Once my father-in-law’s body was strapped in place, John pushed the stretcher through the doorway and out into the night. I followed close behind but gave him the space to say goodbye alone.

I remembered how, the night that my mom died, John and I squeezed into one twin bed, and he held me tight. How his arm remained solidly around my shoulders as I succumbed to sobs during the funeral. For months after her death, I caught him staring at me, reading my emotions with his eyes.

I had my own example of how to support my husband through this next phase of his life. John had showed me how.

The next day, as we looked through old photographs at my mother-in-law’s house, I said to John, “Show me your dad’s and your handshake.”

He smiled and guided me through the steps, our palms meeting, our fingers clenching and releasing.

“This can be ours now,” I said. I hoped he got my meaning. I wasn’t replacing what he and his father did, but allowing it to live on through us.

I knew he understood when he reached for my hand again, and we held each other through each step.

There are many ways to cook a turkey, all of which require heat. When I was 12, in 1974 my mother forgot to turn on the oven. Thanksgiving afternoon I idled through the rooms of our small bungalow, reading Jaws, playing with my toddler cousin while the adults, my uncle and aunt, and my mother, drank wine and tequila and laughed in the dining room. I’d already set the table for five with our bamboo placemats and the red gingham napkins my mom loved, tucked beneath our mismatched silverware. A pinecone and construction paper turkey which I’d made back in elementary school sat next to the ashtray. Their lit cigarettes, maybe a joint too, offered up tendrils of smoke.

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I don’t remember much happening in the kitchen. I peeled potatoes and dropped them in a pot of water on the back of our old enamel stove. But I do remember the absence of roasting turkey smells. When my mom decided it was time to baste, she discovered she’d forgotten to turn on the oven. Hilarity for the grown-ups, my mom laughing and rushing to the bathroom to pee. My tiny cousin fell asleep on the couch. Hungry, I scooped up bourbon yams, my uncle’s signature dish, straight from the casserole.

We did eat turkey, around midnight. The streetlight shone through the dining room windows, stubby candles flickered, and the ashtray had been moved. The grownups had coffee with their meal. We passed a small pitcher of my aunt’s ridiculously smooth gravy; her secret was cornstarch, lemon, and constant stirring. No one cared about the crater I’d made in the yam casserole or the late hour, and my little cousin, sitting on her mother’s lap, stabbed a fork into the canned cranberry sauce.

***

“Thanksgiving is a crap holiday. We should fast this year.” My mother repeatedly made this announcement in the fall of 1977 when I was 15. She’d be unloading groceries in the kitchen—plain yogurt, honey, coffee—and suggest we drive up the coast Santa Cruz to Año Nuevo Beach. The last time she took me “up the coast” she ate psylocibin and tripped while I watched the waves, too big to play in, read James Michener, and worried. This was during her Carlos Castañeda period, a time during which she was seeking insights.

Lucky for me my aunt and uncle put the kibosh on her fasting and beach plan. Next she suggested using the Weber grill to cook the turkey and everyone, remembering the cold oven and late meal, said absolutely not.

“I’ll make the turkey,”  I said.

The three adults turned to me, my mom allowing a closed smile, my uncle squinting and dropping a hand on my shoulder. My aunt asked, “Are you sure?”

Of course I was sure. No one is more certain than a 15-year-old who’s never done it before. I’d perfected chicken and dumplings from the back of the Bisquick box. How much harder could a turkey be? And so, the mantle was passed.

I studied the red and white checked Better Homes cookbook my grandmother had given me. I kept lifting and dropping the needle on Carol King’s Tapestry album while I chopped herbs with the Ginsu knives my mom and her boyfriend had ordered from an infomercial at two in the morning.

Morning glories climbed the fence just outside our kitchen window, shining their proud blue faces at competent me. I knew to thaw the turkey in the kitchen sink. We all did back then. I made stuffing with Pepperidge Farm mix, adding apples and onions, then jammed the cavity full. Once I’d smeared butter all over the skin, I slid the bird in a slow oven.

My best friend and I had been making cut-offs from our jeans, trying them on, slipping them off. Cutting them shorter. More leg, half-moons of butt flesh revealed, the white fabric of the pockets hanging down.

When I checked the turkey, the skin was bronzing too quickly. I’d read about tenting, placing a folded foil hat over the breast, to prevent burning.

“What’s this?” My mom, who’d been grading student papers most of the day, stood behind me with her sudden opinions. I described the tent and its function. Maybe it was her bad mood, or my know-it-all tone, but my mother was now in my business.

“No way.” She crumpled the foil and threw it aside.

“Mom! I’m doing this.” I smoothed the wrinkles.

“You think you know everything?” She leaned close. “How do you think I made it this far?” She swept her arm grandly around the kitchen.

I insisted, she refused. The tent became the most important issue of the day.

“It’s my turkey!” The tent ripped and I yanked a second, dramatic, overly long piece from the roll, relishing the small thunder clap of rattling foil.

“Over my dead body!” This from the woman who’d wanted to fast.

“Your choice.” I blocked the oven door with my body. It was my first turkey. It was Thanksgiving. A holiday about family and love, the most important turkey I could imagine. My mom stomped away, slamming her bedroom door. My friend and I hopped on our ten speeds and pedaled to the cliffs overlooking Seabright beach. Distant fog lumbered toward puny waves breaking near the shore. Soon we’d be wrapped in the gauze of it. We tipped our bikes onto the ice plant, sat in the dirt in our new cutoffs, and passed a joint. The shift in mood that came with the weed, the slight floaty sensation in my brain, made me laugh.

“Don’t you tent that turkey!” my friend said.

It was hilarious. We were hilarious, and young, with long, bare legs.

We stayed at the beach, high and hungry on Thanksgiving, just as my mother had initially suggested.

***

At 19 and married to my first husband, I was a student of all things Martha Stewart, trying for a new life.  Thanksgiving was decidedly not a crap holiday. For my new husband, I’d decided to double stuff this turkey, my fourth.  I’d make two stuffings, one without bread of any kind, just sausage and onions and herbs, which I would carefully spread between the skin and the flesh of the bird, as Martha had directed. The second stuffing included chestnuts and pears, hazelnuts and cornbread, and would fill the cavity.

Not only was I going to be reliable, I’d be stellar. I’d gone to Macy’s and bought a paisley red skirt and blouse, suitable for Nancy Reagan, along with kitten-heeled pumps. I pulled my hair into a chignon and tied a white apron around my waist. From a yard sale I bought someone else’s family heirloom, a silver platter I made my own. I planned on making an entrance.

And I did. Only the sausage stuffing had relocated like old pillow stuffing, misshaping the turkey, giving it lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. My aunt whisked her gravy at the stove, my mother set out the napkins, filled wine glasses. “That’s some turkey,” she said, grinning. Somewhere there is a picture of me, holding the platter in the doorway between my mother’s kitchen and dining room.

I am so young. I am so disappointed in myself.

***

In my 30s the Thanksgiving meal became a prelude to the main event. Our family was deeply committed to Mafia, a conceptual parlor game. We squished together on the plaid sofas in our living room, sat cross legged on the floor, balancing plates of apple pie on our knees.

“Night falls on the village,” the game began. “Day breaks and ____________ (a family member) is dead!”

We killed each other late into the night, trying to win, to discover who was Mafia and who was a mere villager. Cousins and boyfriends, my forever husband, our children, strays, my aunt and uncle, my mother, we all leaned in. We had leaves in the table, linen napkins, the turkey bought fresh from a farm. Bourbon yams, my aunt’s gravy, winter squash and laughter. We walked on the beach to catch the sunset, good pinot noir in our coffee cups, arranging ourselves on a log, snagging a stranger to snap a picture. These were the Thanksgivings I had dreamed of in my Martha Stewart days, only with a smidge of danger.

“Night falls on the village.”

One year, perhaps in my zeal to discover who was mafia, or to hide my own mafia connections, I killed my daughter, only 6. What kind of mother does that? Kills her girl? Her face went red, she stomped from the room. Everyone turned to me; even I turned to me, shocked.

***

After my bi-lateral mastectomy we were reeling, waiting to learn about oncotypes and tumor grades, about sentinel nodes and the future. My cousin hosted Thanksgiving while my immediate family fell apart. Our children, now in college, fought hard over things like who rode shotgun, who got the better room in the Airbnb. My mother, sullen, silent, and afraid, booked herself a massage.

My husband flitted from person to person, trying to assuage. I couldn’t roast a turkey, peel a potato, or lift my arms over my head. When my jittery husband ran a red light on the way to my cousin’s home for the meal, our 19-year-old son exploded, made a speech insisting that everyone but him was falling apart, and now he would have to be the patriarch of the family. Which was hilarious and somehow broke us up in the best way.

We did not get a family photo for the holiday card. Instead, before I slipped away to nap, I snapped a picture of heaped dirty dishes in the sink. It was the best we could do.

Wishing you joyous celebrations and happy messes, the card said. We sent it to 100 friends.

***

And isn’t that the way of it? Happy Messes should be perfect for Thanksgiving, family around the table, lumpy turkeys, dinner at midnight. Perhaps avoid fasting or killing our babies, but perfection is not what I seek.

Last year we declared Thanksgiving a crap holiday, a lie about imperialism and appropriation, extermination and forced migration. We switched up the whole tradition to a South Asian feast and a Tom Hanks movie binge. Butter turkey! Forest Gump!

I don’t know what this year will bring, other than a grilled turkey, stuffing on the side, roasted carrots with cumin, mashed yams, my aunt’s gravy, a pear cranberry pie, all the family together. My mother will repeat herself and remember little that’s said. My late uncle will still be gone. My aunt will nod and smile, hearing little but so happy to look down the table at all of our faces. There will be new babies. My cousin’s husband will lift the bird from the grill. I’ll toss a salad with a garlicky vinaigrette. We’ll walk on the beach, ask a stranger to take a picture of our happy-in-this-moment, messy family.

writes the weekly newsletter, bringing you a book, writing craft talks, and a recipe. She’s an editor and a writer with a couple of books under her belt (Shout Her Lovely Name and Community Chest)and she is seeking representation for her newest book, Must Be Nice.

This essay was originally published here in November, 2024.

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DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as the fellowship manager at Shenandoah.

Standing on the bathtub ledge in my grandmother’s bathroom, body statue-still as my toes gripped the cold porcelain, I craned my neck upward. Words floated through the high window above the tub to my perked ears. Grown folks’ conversation was happening on the backyard deck beneath the window, and as a girl of seven or eight, it wasn’t my place to listen.

My grandmother and her guest were sipping sun tea and enjoying the afternoon on my grandfather’s lounge chairs while they gossiped.

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“You know, he’s kinda funny,” my grandmother said. “Something’s wrong with his mind. Can’t talk to him the way that you want to.”

“And when you try to talk about it with them—” the guest said.

“—they don’t want to hear it,” my grandmother replied.

Their conversation faded in and out on the breeze, but I had heard enough to understand that the man they spoke about was different in a way that was embarrassing to him and his family, and to my grandmother and her guest as well.

That wouldn’t be the last time I stood on the bathtub eavesdropping on grown folks’ conversations about someone being “funny” or “not quite all there” or how “their mind ain’t right.” Shame and disgust pressed between the spoken words. There was frustration too, as the conversations scrutinized how a person was supposed to act or how they were supposed to be. Too often those supposed to’s were about other people’s minds.

Years later, I heard a different version of that afternoon conversation but with a similar intent. I don’t remember the exact context, except that I was talking to my big sister, and I was speaking about myself.

“Them is white girl problems, white people problems,” my sister said with her nose scrunched in distaste. “That typa shit don’t happen to us. We’re Black!” The unsaid part? That “typa shit” shouldn’t have been happening to me.

Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems.

“Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.

***

In Maya Angelou’s seminal 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she described how Mr. Freeman, her mother’s live-in boyfriend, repeatedly sexually assaulted her when she was eight years old. Angelou’s disclosure of the assaults led to Mr. Freeman’s arrest and trial. A judge sentenced him to one year and one day in prison but inexplicably released him from custody after the trial. Vigilantes beat Mr. Freeman to death that night.

Because of Mr. Freeman’s previous threats and the beliefs passed down in her family about how people were supposed to behave, Angelou’s understanding of the assaults became distorted. She believed that she had lied and her words led to his death. She wrote:

Them is white girl problems, white people problems. Not our problems. “Them” was depression, anxiety, and stress. “Them” was any issue that couldn’t be solved with a tablespoon of castor oil from the upper kitchen cabinet, fervent prayer to God, or lying down somewhere. “Them” were the things that made grown folks gossip on backyard decks.

[A] man was dead because I lied. Where was the balance in that?... Obviously I had forfeited my place in heaven forever, and I was as gutless as the doll I had ripped to pieces ages ago. Even Christ Himself turned His back on Satan. Would He turn His back on me? I could feel the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth. I clamped my teeth shut, I’d hold it in. If it escaped, wouldn’t it flood the world and all the innocent people?

Angelou vowed never to speak again. It didn’t help that her grandmother also demanded that their family never mention “the situation”—a pitiless euphemism for Angelou’s rape—or speak Freeman’s name again. Her grandmother’s shame-induced censure was a classic example of an enduring Black family narrative that we never talk about family business, that we only focus on the good things.

“In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction,” Angelou wrote. “They understood that I could talk to Bailey, but to no one else.” That grace was fleeting as her disability and psychological distress disconcerted them. Her family soon became offended by her mutism, which lasted nearly five years. They called her “impudent” and “sullen.” Angelou was sometimes punished and beaten for being “uppity.”

“There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child,” she wrote.

I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice.

“Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”

Whenever I appeared unhappy, my parents would say, just as my mother had in the car, “What do you have to be sad about? What do you have to worry about?” It was less a genuine question and more an insistence that I acquiesce to their perception of happiness. I had, according to them, everything. A roof over my head, food to eat in the kitchen, my own bedroom, and no bills to pay. I learned from other Black friends that these were common beliefs in many other Black households. What more could I—we, as Black children—want when we seemingly had everything? We were supposed to be happy. What I wanted was simple. I wanted peace. I wanted to be seen and heard. I wanted safety.

I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was in high school. It was around the time my mother had threatened to enroll me in charm school after she confronted me about my demeanor during a drive home from track practice. “Why do you look like that all the time,” she shouted, as she pounded her fists into the steering wheel. “Why are you always so sad? What do you have to be sad about?”

Instead, I hid from haints and avoided looking at shadows because looking at them would evoke creatures that wanted to harm me. I used special magic to free myself from rooms and whisperings of bad tidings. I laced my breath with prayers to the Almighty to ensure my salvation. I lived in chaos and doom and death.

Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.

The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.

***

My mental health became more erratic in my 20s and 30s. Obscene and violent images blotted my thoughts. Sometimes I “forgot” how to breathe or how to walk, as if that information had suddenly become erased from my DNA while sitting at my computer or walking down the street. I often lost time to never-ending cycles of walking in and out of rooms, flicking light switches, unlocking and locking doors, and checking that everything that could be opened was closed and everything that could be turned on was shut off.

If no one in my family suffered like I did and these were not Black people problems, then the only explanations left were from misguided church folks who proclaimed that mental health issues stemmed from unrepentant sins, demonic influences, and generational curses. So, for a time, I believed my bloodline was cursed and that curse came from my late biological father, a career criminal, who passed away when I was six.

Digging into my father’s past to uncover this supposed curse only encouraged me to write about him and my family. I cobbled together memories and stories to begin understanding how we came together and broke apart, and how what presented as curses were really the collision of consequences and redacted histories.

***

Urgency propelled me to begin writing my memoir in 2015. I was pregnant with my first child and thought, I still have so much to do, as if I had suddenly stumbled into a nine-month deadline for all that I would ever be capable of doing. I had written before, but my words had always been for other people. This was the first time that they truly would be for me.

I had always wanted to write my memoir because of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book left me with a profound sense of kinship. It was rife with possibilities and truths, and I recognized that I could write a book of my own possibilities and truths that, in turn, might resonate with someone else in need.

In those early book drafts, I wrote around the chaos that shaped my childhood and adolescence and how it was still affecting me. I didn’t have the language to completely define what I endured. I was also afraid of who would read my words (my family, my friends) and what they would discover (my mind was unstable). I was also afraid people would deem me unfit for motherhood, and I would lose my child before I had even had a chance to know what motherhood was.

Omission became my (a) form of truth telling in my writing. I continued to write around the fact that I refused to eat certain foods while I was pregnant because I believed they would poison my body and kill me and my unborn child. I didn’t write that I couldn’t handle knives because my mind told me that I would harm myself or others. Or that I couldn’t stop believing that every day would bring nuclear war. Every inhalation threaded contaminated air through my body that tainted the blood of the future life inside of me. I still lived in chaos and doom and death, only this time I had a child in my womb.

Angelou’s autobiography was a life raft on a turbulent sea. I was mentally struggling, and I couldn’t tell anyone because I was constrained by my own magical thinking and the rigid beliefs engrained in my family and community. Her words from a life nearly seventy years in the past, at the time, was where I found understanding and peace.

After I gave birth, I discovered that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. The diagnosis only confirmed what I had suspected for a few years. This uncovering of the truth encouraged me to be more honest in my writing. I wanted to show that “white people problems” were really our problems, collectively.

I crafted essays about the anxiety and catastrophizing that came after every news report detailing police brutality against unarmed Black men and women. I wrote about how troublesome it was to talk about my mental health to friends who only delved into passive explorations of our lives through text messages. I wrote about the terrors that plagued my nightmares and how our political and social landscape negatively influenced my hope for the future. I wrote about how racism agitated my anxiety and seeded some of my intrusive thoughts.

Then, in my memoir, I finally crafted language describing my beginnings—“The compulsions, as automatic as breathing, began in childhood.”

When it came to crafting my future, I read Bassey Ikpi’s memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying. In detailing her life living with anxiety and bipolar II disorder, Ikpi handed me a contemporary lens to view myself as a woman breaking free of silences that had hindered her self-understanding.

As Ikpi wrestled with her relationship with her mother, I saw the need to write more openly about how my obsessive-compulsive disorder shaped my own motherhood, especially since mothers too are hindered by responsibility and perfectionism discourses. Ikpi wrote, “My mother mistakes questions for attacks and accusations. She weaponizes her silences.” When I read those words, my daughter had already begun to ask me why I frequently washed my hands and about my behaviors around objects that I believed were dirty. I was reminded of Mrs. Bertha Flowers, the teacher who helped Maya Angelou gain the confidence to speak again. Mrs. Flowers told her, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

I could’ve reprimanded my daughter, told her not to talk about grown folks’ business or ignored her in the way that I had learned. Instead I chose to rewrite the narrative. I removed the sharp edge of silence. I removed the blade from how things were supposed to be.

***

Each sentence—spoken or written—restructured the boundaries around my mind, my life, and my personal truths.

The public and private responses to writing about my mental health have been wonderfully, and overwhelmingly positive. Instead of people calling me crazy or a bad mother, I’ve received messages from others who told me they had the same fears about speaking publicly about their mental health. Then came messages from other Black women who admitted that they had obsessive-compulsive disorder or felt in community with my words. We were no longer isolated by the falsehoods that once encircled us.

The act of not talking about the difficult and uncomfortable in our Black communities, the act of keeping family business to the family or erasing those events that cause shame, the act of not addressing what rattles our minds means that we have historically erased a catalogue of what makes us human. We have effectively created a superhuman lineage, deteriorating and unhealthy, that is impossible to live up to.

It’s also a strange gift to have a family elder tell me that they read my words and were finally able to understand a younger family member. They still fumbled over directly naming the disorder, but there was a seed of understanding, a building of respect. Some of my family members are still hesitant to admit that I have OCD. I am “particular” now, instead of “overly sensitive” and “having issues,” but they respect my journey. My truths are unfamiliar and difficult to acknowledge, but they don’t outright deny them.

The path to normalizing mental health issues in our community is still arduous, but so much progress is made by simple admission. I won’t stop talking or writing about my anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I won’t stop showing the vibrant ways we can live and thrive with turbulent mental health. I won’t stop revealing the complexity of our truths.

Learn more about this series and how to submit your writing for consideration.

In 2000, my friend and talented engineer, Richard, suggested that I come spend a week at his home recording studio in Boston. I could crash on his couch and record five songs, and he’d get to acquaint himself with ProTools, Version God-Knows-What. Lately, I’d been drifting; the band in which I’d invested all my creative energy had fallen apart because too many band members wanted to be the boss, and no one of us was willing to cede ground to any other. It was the typical ego tangle plaguing many quasi-professional rock outfits. After having put what money I had into said band’s recording, I was broke.

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Richard’s gift succeeded in its mission. He produced a beautiful sounding record, and the project lifted me up, steeping me in the creative process after a crushing disappointment. We went deep and added six more tunes to the original promised five. We had an album! It documented a handful of my songs, all written over a span of five years.

I loved—and twenty-five years later still love—this record. It serves, like all records of events, as a diary entry, and this one, a document of my youth. Like any diary, it now conjures a mixture of sheer embarrassment with some amount of nostalgic admiration. It’s rife with lush guitars, a kickin’ rockabilly solo, and of course, some super-powered female anger, which I can forever get behind, but can no longer reproduce. That’s simply a vitality issue.

When “29 1/2” came out, I celebrated its release at a local club called Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My friend Todd, who was the guitarist from my defunct previous band, joined me on stage. Todd had come to Boston to record with us for a few days, probably because he also had nothing better to do, post-band-breakup. His vocals and guitar tracks on the recording gave it a beautiful polish that I would not have achieved without him Together, we played a few regional shows in support of the record. Soon afterward, I planned a solo acoustic tour for the west coast. When I mentioned this to my mother, it appeared to concern her.

“But where will you stay?”

I loved—and twenty-five years later still love—this record. It serves, like all records of events, as a diary entry, and this one, a document of my youth. Like any diary, it now conjures a mixture of sheer embarrassment with some amount of nostalgic admiration. It’s rife with lush guitars, a kickin’ rockabilly solo, and of course, some super-powered female anger, which I can forever get behind, but can no longer reproduce. That’s simply a vitality issue.

When I reported that I had a network of friends-of-friends from San Diego to Seattle who’d said I could sleep on their couches, she either saw an opportunity for herself, or possibly wanted to protect me from this catch-as-catch-can, sleep-wherever-the-heck solo woman journey, or both.

“Ok, I’ll go with you,” she responded, as if I’d asked. “We can stay with my high school friend in southern California, and you have Jen in Santa Cruz, Chris in San Francisco, then we’ve got Christa in Portland….” As we proceeded to compile our list, we realized this was a viable plan, and within a few months the tour was booked.

I flew out first, meeting my mother after the first couple of shows. My initial show had me opening up for the mystical Tom Brousseau. It was the first time I’d ever heard him perform and I was appropriately blown away. Here I was, absolutely batting out of my league, but I didn’t care. I felt as if I were on a magical high, a career upswing; I studied and immersed myself in these powerful performances. I gave him a CD.

Following that kick-off, the mother-daughter road trip began at LAX, where I picked my mother up in the rental car and immediately told her all about this musician from North Dakota with a voice like Jimmy Scott. My mom, who was a singular mix of control freak and more of a rebel than you, me or anyone we know, pretended to listen to me while securing her place behind the wheel. I assume it was her anxiety about being in the passenger seat on winding 101 that propelled her to take the lead. Since this was pre-GPS and we had only AAA and the Texaco Road Maps to illustrate the route that we’d meticulously highlighted prior to our trip, I was responsible for navigating.

In the tight streets of Whittier, California, she asked, “Do we need to make a U-turn here?”

“I wouldn’t,” I said, implying that we might wait to make a right and then another, until we were back on track. But I barely had the words formed in my mind before she whipped the car around in the middle of the boulevard, running up over the curb.

“Well, I know you wouldn’t…” she said impatiently, hitting the accelerator.

Day by day, we made our way up the coast. On one of our long stretches to the next stop, and with a couple of days before the next show, we afforded ourselves the luxury of the scenic, coastal route. This evening, she suddenly pulled over to the side of the road along the California coast. Ah, I thought, she finally needs a break. Swiftly, she popped the trunk and stepped out, rounding to the rear of the car, from where she pulled out two bottles—one of vodka and the other of orange juice—and magically produced two plastic cups from her purse. She mixed the drink clumsily and handed one to me, before pouring the other for herself. We returned to the front seat, where we watched the sun descend brilliantly into the Pacific before moving on to a seaside restaurant and laughing until our sides practically split. I don’t remember what particularly set that in motion and it doesn’t matter; it was just a classic case of ‘the giggles’.

Each night, my mother diligently sat at the merch table, selling one or two CDs to whomever came out for these sparsely-attended shows, and running herself back and forth to the bar to get the appropriate amount of change for buyers. I had tee-shirts made for the “Where Can I Get A Good Bagel Around Here?” Tour, my west coast joke that wasn’t really funny, listing the stops in the cities on the tour, with the cliched SOLD OUT stamp across the back. I no longer have any of those, so I either sold them out or gave them all away.

The mother-daughter road trip began at LAX, where I picked my mother up in the rental car and immediately told her all about this musician from North Dakota with a voice like Jimmy Scott. My mom, who was a singular mix of control freak and more of a rebel than you, me or anyone we know, pretended to listen to me while securing her place behind the wheel. I assume it was her anxiety about being in the passenger seat on winding 101 that propelled her to take the lead.

In the eighteen years that followed, I stored the excess boxes of “29 1/2” CDs in my mother’s basement. On visits home, she’d occasionally ask when I’d be taking them, but of course, my New York City solo-closet, one-bedroom apartment didn’t afford me the space to store excess stuff. Meanwhile, I knew in that in today’s streaming music era, there was little chance I was ever going to unload those CDs.

Before my mother sold her house in South Jersey to move into an apartment six years ago, I traveled there for a long weekend to sort through my things. At 47 then, I was nearly two decades past that album’s release, and during that span, digital music subscriptions had long-eclipsed CD ownership. On my drive down, I brainstormed ideas about what to do with the CDs, at that point, mostly not wanting to throw that amount of plastic into a landfill. Other family members descended to help with the moving-out effort, and we all spent the weekend clearing and cleaning, yet carefully avoiding my three boxes of untouched, shrink-wrapped CDs. On Monday morning, when I heard the garbage crew approaching, I watched my mother dash outside, making a purposeful walk toward the truck.

“I struck a deal with the guys,” she said, wiping her feet and closing the front door behind her. “They said you can put all the CDs out and they’ll come back later when they’re picking up recycling.”

In the eighteen years that followed, I stored the excess boxes of “29 1/2” CDs in my mother’s basement. On visits home, she’d occasionally ask when I’d be taking them, but of course, my New York City solo-closet, one-bedroom apartment didn’t afford me the space to store excess stuff. Meanwhile, I knew in that in today’s streaming music era, there was little chance I was ever going to unload those CDs.

I wondered what actual “deal” my mom struck, but I didn’t ask, because almost twenty years later, this felt like a triumphant ending. Too afraid to press her for details on whether or not these records would actually be recycled, I kept my mouth shut; I couldn’t risk the possibly plan-thwarting truth. Instead, I nodded and hauled box after box of CDs to the curb. I plucked only two wrapped copies out of an open box, deciding those would be all I’d ever need.

Looking at the boxes that sat so innocently and intactly at the edge of my mother’s cul-de-sac, I stood, pointedly holding the moment. I realized how grateful I feel to all the people who helped out with this endeavor, for no money at all. That, in and of itself, spoke to our youth. It’s what we did then: played, sang, whatever-ed on each other’s records. And then there’s my mother; a good one supports your dream when it’s happening, and helps you close it up when it’s run its course. My own life is lighter without those plastic CDs, but do I hope that somewhere in a South Jersey dump, a sanitation worker is listening to “Long Day in a Short Skirt”? I really do.

is a songwriter and musician living in Hamden, CT, and is co-founder of the band Little Silver with her husband, Steve Curtis (Hem). She is currently writing a memoir; you can read more of her writing at substack.com/@erikasimonian, and hear her at littlesilvermusic.com. 29 & 1/2 has been given its digital wings for this essay and can be heard on the band’s Bandcamp page.

For years I’ve been a secret painter, telling no one of my feeble attempts to make pictures.

Or maybe not secret, but not intent on sharing, or being watched. Just doing it. Wasn’t it like running? No one questions running every day. It’s good for you—you strengthen your heart, breathe fresh air, take in the scenery. Drawing felt like that, opening a window when most of the time I kept my head down, shoulders hunched over my stories, my novel.

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I grew up in a dark house, literally and figuratively, and have been seeking ways of perceiving light ever since I left home. What I wanted from reading as a child was someone else’s story to live within, and for nobody in my house to know this world as I did. It was private. My family, not being readers, laughed at my retreat. But they didn’t mind it. It kept me quiet and out of trouble while my mother lay in her curtain-drawn room, resting.

There is a reaching I’ve felt twice in my life, when I’ve said, I want to do that. The first was hearing Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest read aloud in the fourth grade. I want to write. And the second was seeing the image of my friend Elika’s hands when she lay in a hospital, how they were crossed on her pelvis making a delicate arch, something like shelter, young and elegant, though she was only weeks away from dying. I want to draw.

***

Drawing is like writing—you hold a pencil and make a line, just like you do with a letter of the alphabet, give or take a few adjustments. Not much of a leap. Painting is something else. Painting is about color, and that requires a new sight. Trying to see color for the first time is very much like when the French teacher in Milkman by Anna Burns responds to her students’ cries of “Le ciel est bleu.” She “pointed through various panes at sections of sky that were not blue but instead lilac, purple, patches of pink—differing pinks—with one patch of green that had a yellow gold extending along it. And green? How come green was up there?” Pastels do a lot of the color work for you, but paint—only the Fauvists used paint straight out of a tube. You must mix it so that the viewer wonders: How did you make that color? It’s natural, but I’ve never quite seen it! I’ve made chart after chart, attempting mysterious combinations.

I got more serious about mark making—for the sake of writing. Studying a subject for a long time might help me notice everything. So much slips by. I’ll never forget my drive on city streets after I first learned how to discern negative shapes. Everything between the cars, buildings, trees, and people popped, not unlike a hallucination. Even now, after I work on something abstract, the world leans in and withdraws, organizing differently. And I would say that it’s true, I am more observant. But now I’m looking at how the light strikes the bark of a tree, thinking how I might convey that on canvas—not how I might use it in a story.

There is a reaching I’ve felt twice in my life, when I’ve said, I want to do that. The first was hearing Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest read aloud in the fourth grade. I want to write. And the second was seeing the image of my friend Elika’s hands when she lay in a hospital, how they were crossed on her pelvis making a delicate arch, something like shelter, young and elegant, though she was only weeks away from dying. I want to draw.

In Donald Friedman’s book The Writer’s Brush, William Gass offers this explanation of why writers might feel called to make visual art: “To have created a concrete image of the world, one which needs no translation…” describes perfectly my relief in creating a recognizable object. I draw a hand and people smile, saying, “That’s lovely,” meaning, that looks just like a hand. Well done! I create a domestic tragedy on the page, and people want to know: “Did that really happen to you? My mother never talked like that in our home.” Their story swirls with the one on the page. That’s the dynamism between writer and reader that I love. But sometimes it’s an achievement to hear someone say—“Ah, a face. Yes, very nice.”

Gass’s next point—and how he crams it in there with the bit about translation is a disservice, because this is the mother-lode analogy of all creativity: “to watch it swell as though it were in your body.” I have given birth, so I know this satisfaction. But then I was unable to give birth a second time, and was very dissatisfied at this, heartbroken, in fact. I went to a priest. A priest!—if that tells you where I was at the time, and I would do it again. He said words I still hold close: You will make other things. I put my hope—my love—into that.

***

I would never have formally come to drawing without the suggestion that it might improve my writing. My nose in a book all of childhood, I hadn’t the interest or aptitude. But I read Flannery O’Connor in college, and I taught her stories while I was a teaching assistant in graduate school. We could never ascertain from a film or a painting: “Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him,” in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” There can be voiceovers in movies, external clues, but nothing like what could be revealed with the invention of the novel. For decades, long after I forgot it came from O’Connor, I’ve carried this description around: “Each house had a narrow collar of dirt around it…” Her advice to writers was to draw, to stare, to look at a thing closely as a discipline for writing that sort of sentence.

After college I took my first watercolor class and a funny thing happened. The instructor, regarding my handful of brushstrokes that suggested a shoreline, said, “Stop! Don’t add anything.” How simple those strokes seemed compared to the endless drafts of stories I’d written. Soon after, a friend showed me how waterproof pens worked well with watercolors, and I sketched when I traveled. It helped me stay in the moment. It helped me remember how I felt when I was in a place—and the place itself, even if the reference was a salt shaker on a café table. After hours spent tapping plastic buttons on a keyboard, handling paper, ink, charcoal, and pigment was gratifyingly tactile. So there has always been a sensual, immediate pleasure whenever I turn to visual art.

Orhan Pamuk writes in his illustrated journals, Memories of Distant Mountains, about the likeness between drawing and sexual desire. Out of nowhere it comes, impulsively, even compulsively. I would add that as with desire, there’s something beautiful or interesting or full of contradiction. There’s a visual prompt, either internal or external, a trigger.

***

Because I’ve wanted to be an artist almost as long as I’ve been calling myself a writer, I created one at the center of my novel, If You Leave. It’s the prerogative of a writer to do that, put subjects in a story just because you want to learn more about them. For all my wanting, I knew very little, and one of my first pieces of research was Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by the sculptor Anne Truitt.

I got more serious about mark making—for the sake of writing. Studying a subject for a long time might help me notice everything. So much slips by. I’ll never forget my drive on city streets after I first learned how to discern negative shapes. Everything between the cars, buildings, trees, and people popped, not unlike a hallucination. Even now, after I work on something abstract, the world leans in and withdraws, organizing differently. And I would say that it’s true, I am more observant.

What I understood about Truitt was that the timeline of her life corresponded almost exactly with my fictional character’s. Born only a few years apart, they both moved to Washington, DC, in the 1940s, married, became mothers. That’s it. I’d never seen Truitt’s art, her expansive palette of painted, wooden, freestanding columns. I had no idea she was a major figure in the Minimalist movement. I simply thought the entries would reveal interesting period details of DC, enlighten me on the artistic struggle. But when I began reading Daybook, I was so taken with her sensibility on the page that I worried my character might become Truitt. I set it aside.

About a year later, my friend Alex and I approached Susan Shreve, who’d been my writing professor in graduate school. We knew she had a studio behind her house used by her late husband, the agent Tim Seldes. We sat at her kitchen table, as one does with Susan, and asked if we could rent the space, sight-unseen, and work there in a community. Susan loved the idea. The second sentence out of her mouth: “You know this was Anne Truitt’s studio.” I still hadn’t seen Truitt’s stunning planks, pieces named Mid Day and Spume, that invite you to walk around them and gaze upward. When a few minutes later we toured the studio behind Susan’s house, there it was, the wall of windows and shelves that backs Truitt on the cover of Daybook.

In early 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, I was able to see Truitt’s columns, the finished sculptures that she’d created in the space we used. A cabinetmaker would shape the wood, usually hollow it out. Truitt would first Gesso it, and then use up to 40 layers of acrylic paint, alternating between horizontal and vertical layers, sanding between each to remove any trace of brushstrokes. At a time when her peers relied on crews to create their installations, she was doing almost all the work by hand, alone. Only later would I learn about her concern with latitude and longitude, and again I would marvel that I’d found myself precisely on her coordinates.

When If You Leave was accepted for publication, I rewarded myself by reading Daybook from start to finish. Again, I discovered just how much our two books are in conversation. Hers is as much about being an artist as it is about being a mother. (I also learned that Truitt divorced around the same time as my artist-character, in the early 1970s.) Two-thirds of the way through Daybook, there’s a scene where Truitt feels overwhelmed with anxiety before visiting her adult daughter who’s pregnant. Truitt knows the agony ahead for a mother: when she witnesses her child in pain. She writes, “I brace myself to meet, once again, the knowledge that I cannot take the suffering of my children on myself. That is the essence of motherhood. Stabat Mater: Mothers can only stand.”

Stabat Mater is a Latin line from a medieval hymn about Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing at the foot of the cross in her grief. And now Truitt’s paraphrase is the epigraph to If You Leave. For me, the conviction was the perfect period on my novel of two unnatural mothers who fumble their way through the role, in many ways providing only the barest foundation, a mere plinth, like the base of one of Truitt’s columns.

In If You Leave, a character says, “A presence—I’ve decided that’s the most a mother can be. Maybe an example of how to live.”

***

When I finished writing If You Leave, I felt beaten down by time. It’s a novel centered on two women, Lucille and Audrey, who become friends at the end of World War II in Washington. The story opens in 1973, going back and forth to the war years and between Audrey’s and Lucille’s points of view. Prose, any kind of prose, really, has a leechlike obsession with time. Think about it: Every line has a verb that tells you exactly where we are in time. E.M. Forster knew this. For story or plot, the order of the king’s and queen’s deaths is crucial. And in If You Leave, spanning nearly 30 years, there are heaps of time to track. Making sure the correct flowers were blooming in the month in which the baby is born, or that the letter arrived in the requisite number of days for the character to react—details like this on every page—felt like shackling.

An essay I love is by George Saunders in which he encounters The Great Rose of Evening by Agnes Martin. He confesses to searching for a story, really wanting one, at the outset. But he’s soon stymied, deciding that Martin is up to something else in that painting. “She didn’t ‘mean’ anything. She was just ‘doing’ something.” He starts to make up a story about her: “The drawing is a record of Agnes Martin, on a certain day or days, ostensibly drawing straight lines contained by the shape of a triangle with its top truncated.” But in the end, his story-making quiets even more. He’s just perceiving, meditating, watching one part of his brain notice the other.

I kept seeing a piece of canvas, some brushstrokes, nothing definitive but a still image hanging outside the corner of my eye. A sensation, not a story. And that word, sensation, was what caught my eye in the philosopher Giles Deleuze’s book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. It turns out that Bacon was going against a story every time he painted. But he didn’t care for abstraction either, so he had to find a way to prevent the viewer from finding a narrative. The fact is, as soon as you have something recognizable, a figure, especially two figures, or a landscape, people bring their story to it—that person’s eyes look sad, or those two love each other but they’ve just argued, can’t you see, or I’ve been to a place like that field, it must be in Nebraska. To stop those instincts, Bacon sometimes isolated the figure with a circle or separated subjects with a triptych.

Bacon had to deter a narrative, because our brains are wired for it, like terriers to rats. In our heads, we are constantly narrating our thoughts about the world around us, making up story after story. “That person is scowling—they must be mad at me.” Most of the time we think a person’s actions are about us because, well, we have access only to our own minds. I exhaust myself, making up causes to perceived criticisms, lapsed communications, inconsistent affections. And I’m almost always wrong. “Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama,” Will Storr writes in The Science of Storytelling. The best corrective to my own error-riddled reading of other people’s motivations and actions is reading fiction, accessing another’s mind. To folks today who can’t fathom what “those people” are thinking, I’d like to offer them a stack of novels.

But when I’m writing, that storytelling tic in my brain—it never shuts down. It’s running double time.

***

An essay I love is by George Saunders in which he encounters The Great Rose of Evening by Agnes Martin. He confesses to searching for a story, really wanting one, at the outset. But he’s soon stymied, deciding that Martin is up to something else in that painting. “She didn’t ‘mean’ anything. She was just ‘doing’ something.” He starts to make up a story about her: “The drawing is a record of Agnes Martin, on a certain day or days, ostensibly drawing straight lines contained by the shape of a triangle with its top truncated.” But in the end, his story-making quiets even more. He’s just perceiving, meditating, watching one part of his brain notice the other.

So another way to shut down this trilling motor mouth is to stand in front of abstract art and just … sense it. We don’t bring narrative impulses to music when we actively listen. Without language, we don’t search for the story. Looking at abstract art has always been compared to the tonal, emotional qualities experienced while listening to music.

In my twenties, conversation centered on writers who drink—Lowry, Hemingway, Karr—with books such as Alcohol and the Writer by Donald Goodwin. So that’s one way to silence the voices, the way Faulkner and Cheever did it. You can also play—on a field with a ball, for instance. That keeps you more in your right-hemisphere network and out of storytelling mode.

My first “simple” watercolor—what a deception! Time is in the process of painting. There is nothing instantly gratifying about it. Watercolors require incredible patience. To work in oils, which I started only a couple of years ago, I must hammer the stretcher bars together, wrap the canvas, staple it, prime it, tint it, mix my color and plan how to order my creation—a labor bound to time as tightly as any plot. Background or figure first? What must be left light and at what point should I move on from the underpainting and lay down my darks, perhaps the shadows. How many layers of glazing will achieve the right color or edge?

For me, more sedentarily inclined, and perhaps for many who write, it’s a relief to shut off this constant yammering and do something completely nonverbal, such as draw. When I closely observe a tree, the voices calm. I focus on the shapes between the branches, and the shape of the shadows and lights on the trunk. I follow a line. I abstract the world even if I’m drawing something realistic.

***

That always reaching after something difficult, or nearly unattainable, is the link between my writing, something I’ve never given up, and drawing and painting, which I’ve looped back to again and again, the same way I shade graphite on paper. Yesterday, it was a series of waves and stones against a cerulean sea, the day before, it was the trunks of trees, horses running behind them against a backdrop of red. The former was an image I saw, the latter a vision that came to me.

My first “simple” watercolor—what a deception! Time is in the process of painting. There is nothing instantly gratifying about it. Watercolors require incredible patience. To work in oils, which I started only a couple of years ago, I must hammer the stretcher bars together, wrap the canvas, staple it, prime it, tint it, mix my color and plan how to order my creation—a labor bound to time as tightly as any plot. Background or figure first? What must be left light and at what point should I move on from the underpainting and lay down my darks, perhaps the shadows. How many layers of glazing will achieve the right color or edge?

And these oils, they must dry between layers (if they ever truly do on a muggy summer day in the lower levels of an old East Coast building). With patience—and especially with acrylics—a canvas can be worked over into eternity. Just rub or scrape and start again.

Sounds a lot like writing.

***

Constructing a scene in a novel can feel false: those doors that have to be opened and closed, and the wallpaper described. The decision about who is seeing that room—someone, or more than one person, inside the story, or just hovering above. All that time accounted for.

Here, it seems, I’ve drawn a circle from where I started. Because such artifice transports me to a world that isn’t mine. Writing or reading literature allows me to try on the concern and worry of another. This is the light I’ve always chased after. The lighted way that helps me see—us all see—into someone else’s heart.

When I started writing and drawing my second memoir, The Joy of Snacking, I had a completely different idea of what the book would be. I sold it after my first book, Murder Book, had just come out in 2021. I told my publishers this would be a sillier book and not nearly as long as Murder Book (Which ended up about 330 pages). It would be fun!! All about snacks and fun anecdotes from my life to go along with them. A year into the book everything had changed.

There was still the fun element and the snacks, but I was realizing this book had so much more to do with body trauma than I could have ever expected. It was about the painful relationship I’d had with myself for a very, very long time, but had been avoiding acknowledging. I was legitimately afraid of food when I was a kid, but I didn’t know how to explain that to anyone. I got labeled as picky and it followed me for seemingly forever, constantly being teased for my behavior. My days were scheduled around me avoiding food interactions with others and trying to keep myself “safe.”

Eventually it developed into a full blown eating disorder that I hid from everyone up until my mid 20s. I was never rail thin, I was never obese, I was living inside the secret hell of bulimia—oscillating between crazy restriction and binging—followed by gallons of self hate. Minus a few exceptions, movies and the media never talk about how quiet eating disorders can be, how they can go undetected for years, but that is of course the most common version of them. While part of me is still so nervous that this book is actually out now, I’m also so deeply proud of it. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s the most honest I think I’ve ever been on the page. Below is an excerpt from my years in Catholic middle school, which I hated, but will be forever grateful for because it’s where I met Elaine. -

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is a comedian, author and New Yorker cartoonist. Her first memoir Murder Book won the Midwest Publishing awards for best graphic novel. Her second graphic memoir The Joy of Snacking comes out this October. You can follow her on Substack and IG @cartoonsbyhilary. Previously she took The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.