While I waited for the storm to pass, I opened my backpack again to munch on a beef stick and dried fruit roll. I crumpled the plastic wrappers and shoved them deep into the bottom of my back pack beneath my remaining snacks of sliced vegetables, crackers, a protein bar, beef sticks, water bottle, and extra pair of hiking socks I had brought in case I fell in a creek on my hike. It had been a while since I hiked; ever since my dog, Maggie, had passed away, hiking felt empty and less enjoyable. But it had been nearly a year without her and I wanted to get back into it for the exercise and meditative opportunities. It did feel strange to walk without her familiar tugging on the leash, her exuberance both a comfort and assurance of safety. Now, however, I was alone in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a wild and unruly part of Southwestern Colorado populated by dense aspen groves, and Engelmann and subalpine firs. I was blanketed by some subalpine firs as the storm intensified and hail worked its way between the dense, upswept blue-green needles. They caught little balls of hail as though they’d been waiting for them like offerings. I picked a piece of hail perched on the nearest cluster of pines and rolled it between my fingers, feeling the hard, icy ball of wrath between my fingers.

I felt a sudden prick like a sharp bite to my thumb and index fingers where I had been absent-mindedly rolling the ball. I yelped and dropped the little ice ball. I glared at it as if it would feel remorse for the pain it caused me and saw a drop of bright red on the ball. I looked closer and saw a tiny brown thorn embedded deep within the ice ball.

How the hell did that get there? I wondered, my eye brows furrowed as I sucked on my thumb and forefinger. I continued to watch the storm, wondering at the physics of a thorn becoming embedded in a piece of hail before it fell to roughly 11,000 feet of elevation in the Sangre de Cristos. The storm slowly dissipated, leaving only faint rumbles of thunder in its wake. The sun again blazed through the pine needles and aspen leaves, glaring off the crystaline droplets of rain still clinging to the foliage and giving the leaves the appearance of being some primordial green fire dancing on the branches.

I stood up and stretched my legs, shifting my backpack before parting the pine needles like stage curtains to find my way back to the trail. A few steps and I was back on the path I had left; and just in time, too. The sun was much lower in the sky than I remember it being before the storm hit. More time must have passed than I realized, I thought. I pulled out my phone from a little zipper pocket in my backpack.

Damn. Dead. But how?? My phone had been on its charger the whole drive to the mountain trail, and I hadn’t used it on my hike except to check the time.

Damnit, I must have forgotten to put it on airplane mode. It must have been searching for a signal the whole time I was hiking. Rats!

It didn’t matter. I just had to follow the trail back down to my car and then I could plug back in and be connected to the world once more. I felt more unnerved. I knew I would be without Maggie, but now not having my phone felt like a deeper isolation I hadn’t planned on, even if I hadn’t been getting a signal up in the mountains. I sighed and tried to shake the irritation off. I shifted my backpack again out of nervousness. A cool breeze swept through again, carrying with it the sweet, soft scent of petrichor. I sighed and breathed in deep, letting the damp, clean scent of pine wash over me and into my lungs. Something caught in my throat and I immediately brought my hands up as I coughed violently. Tears leapt to my eyes and clouded my vision so badly I stopped walking. I felt a hard object in the back of my throat and started to panic, forcing myself to gag and splutter in the middle of the trail. Before I knew it I was on my hands and knees, the hard object feeling sharper and closer to the back of my throat than before. I hacked again felt the hard object dislodge, and forced myself to throw up. I felt something slide out of my mouth and onto the ground. Horrified, I reeled back on my knees, desperately wiping my eyes to see what I had coughed up.

On the dark brown trail path, glowing like a malevolent green diamond covered in phlegm and spit was a 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch wad of pine needles. I coughed again and rubbed my throat.

How did that happen?? I coughed again and rubbed at the base of my throat, as though to reassure myself that a hole hadn’t suddenly opened there. I leaned closer to the little wad of pine needles and saw that they were woven into a tiny star-like pattern, with all the points of the needles facing outward like some tiny, malevolent mace.

“Good God,” I whispered. “How did that happen?” I wanted to pick it up to look at it closer, but part of me was afraid that if I touched it, it would find its way back into my throat to finish the job.

“Okay, no more deep breaths, I guess,” I said, still trying to shake off the feeling that I had been attacked. A cold breeze caressed the back of my neck like an unwanted advance and I spun around, half expecting to see someone standing behind me. There was no one but the deepening shadows of the pine forest. I shivered and rubbed my arms and started marching down the trail, watching the sun set with alarming speed.

“This doesn’t make sense. I should have another three hours of daylight,” I said to no one. I hadn’t packed a flashlight because I hadn’t expected to be on the trail after dark.

“It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Just walk down quickly. It always takes less time going down than up.”

I quickened my pace, suddenly very aware of the spaces between the trees for animals or people to hide.

“Don’t be ridiculous, no one is hiding in the trees.” I sounded nervous even to myself. My legs were starting to burn from how fast I was walking and the lack of oxygen at this altitude. It was getting harder to see the trail in the creeping darkness and my heart rate increased with each band of light snatched from between the trees. I started running.

Something was wrong, very wrong.

I didn’t recognize where I was, but I wasn’t paying that much attention on the way up. I didn’t think I’d be running through the mountains in the twilight. The trees rustled all around me like they were shaking themselves loose from the soil.

It has to be the wind. I kept running.

I felt something rake against the back of my calves, like it was grabbing for my ankles and missed. I looked over my shoulder but couldn’t see anything in the growing twilight made deeper and more purple in the shadow of the mountains I was surrounded by. I turned back around and ran straight into a lowhanging branch.

I felt my nose crunch on the impact and fell backwards, flat on my back. Air rushed out of my lungs as though it was being sucked out by some invisible force. In the dispensation of stars from my vision I swore I saw a milky white, eyeless face whisper over top of me, pulling out my breath.

Oh God, I wept.

…To Be Continued…

“Okay, do you want to tell me what you have been feeling since our session last week?” Claire continued to prod gently. I inhaled sharply and found myself unable to speak, that sensation of unreality creeping into the corner of my vision. She cocked her head slightly at my renewed stiffness and shuffled her papers.

“Why don’t we start with that contact information? Were you able to get your wife’s information, Jamie?” She said softly, almost as if she was unsure of what she was saying.

“I — I don’t think so. I looked, but I can’t find it,” I mumbled. I started digging for my phone in my pocket and ran my finger over the smooth glass screen for reassurance, like a talisman of my grip on reality.

“Okay, that’s fine, we can come back to that…” Claire said, slightly unnerved. She sounded unsure and like she was trying to regain her composure. Or am I imagining that? I thought. I don’t know what’s happening any more. I sighed heavily and stared at Claire, waiting for her to be able to explain to me what happened to me since our last session.

“Why don’t you tell me about your last week? What have you been doing? Has anything come up since our last session?”

“No,” I said quickly. My mind raced back to the careening panic of my drive home and the ferocity with which I tore through our house — my house. I vaulted myself up the stairs, two at a time, heaving breath as I went and pulling hard on the hand rail. I slammed open the door of the master bathroom and found only one toothbrush. I checked the other bathrooms in case she had moved it in an angry fit to teach me a lesson about something I hadn’t paid enough attention to.

No second toothbrush.

In fact, there was nothing in any of the bathrooms that indicated a woman ever used them. No hairbrush, no hair dryer, no makeup or makeup brushes, no jewelry stands. No hair in the shower, no makeup stains smeared on the sink counters, no neatly folded towels.

Nothing.

I checked our closet and could only find my clothes. I pulled all my shirts off the hangers, out of the drawers. I threw everything into the center of the room — and not a single mini-skirt, floral button-down, dress, or feminine blouse existed in my house. The only thing I could find, stuffed in the back of the closet, was the new dress my wife had ordered from Amazon all those weeks ago, before I met Annalise. But it was still unopened inside the plastic packaging.

Why is this here?? I demanded, squeezing the bag as if the pressure of my crushing grip would force out an answer. In a rage, I threw it to the ground with the rest of the clothes and it shone in the recessed LED lights like a diamond on a pile of rubble. I sneered at it.

I pulled out my phone again as I stood in the middle of the room that I had shared with my wife for seven years, surrounded only by my clothes.

She must have just packed up and left, I realized with sudden, tormented relief. I slumped against the wall and slid down it, laughing softly to myself. Of course, of course she just left. I rubbed my hands over my face in disbelief at my own stupidity.

Then anger tore through me like a bolt of lightning in the darkness. What a fucking cowardly bitch. Of course she just left! I scrolled through my phone to find her number, but I couldn’t find her name. I couldn’t…remember her name…

The phone fell from my hands and thudded against the hardwood floors. I dazedly picked it up again and clicked on my photos application. I had thousands of photos. But many of them were just shots of what was presumably the inside of my pocket, or the inside of my palm where I must have been carrying the phone. I scrolled back over the last seven years. I had photos of clouds, flowers, interesting natural rock formations, my friends’ dogs and cats, some of the pottery I’d made, the concert I went to with Jessica…but no Jessica, no Annalise, no other woman appeared anywhere in my photos except my mom and my sister.

What the fuck? Where the fuck are my wedding pictures?? I continued scrolling through my phone, the pictures becoming as blurred as my memories. I couldn’t remember getting married. I found a picture of me as a groomsman for my sister’s wedding… Was that what I was remembering?

I closed my photos application and opened Tinder. I immediately opened the messages portion of the application and I couldn’t find my conversations with Annalise, Jessica, or Natalie. I had a few dozen unanswered messages, but that was it. It’s like I had never used the application. I had no conversations. My stomach dropped and I put my phone back in my pocket and curled into the fetal position next to my pile of clothes on the floor.

“Jamie, are you okay? You look pale, again,” Claire said and suddenly stood up. My brain snapped back to the present so fast I felt like I had whiplash. I watched as Claire dashed across the room for another conic paper cup of water and handed it to me. I gulped it down in one mouthful and held onto the paper cone until the icy coolness of the absent water dissipated into my hand. Claire stood over me, her eye brows knitted in unguarded concern. I shook my head almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t find anything,” I murmured. My eyes were unfocused and I couldn’t get them to focus again. “That’s why I came back.”

“What do you mean, Jamie? What can’t you find?” Claire backed away from me and seated herself in her chair, eager to take the familiar position of therapist/patient, and with a question she seemed more equipped to handle.

“I can’t find anything—I can’t find anyone. My wife, Annalise, Jessica, Natalie…I can’t find them in my phone…in my Tinder account.” I said flatly. Misery washed over me so fast and so sudden I felt like I was drowning. I held my breath involuntarily as it settled into my soul like a calming sea.

“You have a Tinder account?” Claire blurted out. Her breath hitched slightly at her own outburst, but she covered it with scribbling on her clipboard again. “Does your wife know?”

“Fuck, I don’t know!” I yelled. I dug my hands into my hair as if it would stop the whole world from shaking underneath me. My brain felt like it was boiling and I didn’t know why. I raked my hands through my hair, my familiar “smooth move” reduced to a last ditch effort to hold onto something in hopes of finding reality firmly in my hands again. I briefly thought about ripping out my hair just to feel the pain. Maybe I would feel better thinking about a physical pain instead of…whatever this was.

“Okay, it’s okay, Jamie. This is a safe space. Anything you tell me remains between us, like I said. I cannot and would not speak to anyone, including your wife, without your explicit permission,” Claire soothed. I shook my head hard again, as if to shake off the burning sensation.

“I don’t have a wife!” I practically screamed. “At least, I don’t think I do! I don’t know what’s going on. I know I have a wife, but after our session last week, I went home and tore my house apart. I couldn’t find her clothes, her makeup, her fucking toothbrush for Christ’s sake! I thought, ‘oh well she just packed up and left without telling me,’ but then I searched our photos—my photos and she’s not there. Seven years of photos and she’s not in a single one??” I was breathing heavily, laden with my confession. I thought I was going to throw up.

Claire just stared at me. She didn’t move a muscle. She barely breathed. But she just sat there.

“I checked my tax returns. They should have been joint for the last seven years,” I said softly, dropping my face into my upturned palms. “I’ve filed single for the last seven years. Not married filing separately, not as head of household—single.”

“Jamie,” Claire began.

“Where is she? Who is she?” I blurted out. “In seven years, not a drop of her existence! I don’t even remember her name!” I said accusingly. But I didn’t know who I was accusing. Or for what.

“Jamie, let’s just slow things down. Did you check your deleted photos folder? Maybe you were angry and deleted them and just forgot?” Claire said quickly. I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince with her question.

“No,” I said softly. “I mean, I checked the deleted photos folder and there’s nothing. There’s not a single woman in my photos in my phone except my mom and my sister.”

“I see,” said Claire. She scribbled something half-heartedly on her clip board. Silence settled over us like dusk in winter: sudden, pervasive, and cold. I shivered involuntarily.

“What happened next, Jamie?” Claire prodded softly. “After you tore apart your house, I mean, and looked through your tax returns?” Her question contained no ulterior motive; it was pure curiosity.

“No one has contacted me in a week’s time. I haven’t heard from Annalise, or Jessica, or Natalie and now I can’t find their conversations in my Tinder account. Did I delete them, too, and not remember?” I sneered. Claire leaned back in her chair slightly, her practiced self control bordering on alarm.

“At first, I thought it was my wife,” I whispered, defeated. “That she must have found out…and gone through my phone and deleted everything and then left.” I slumped in my chair, trying to match the gravitational pull of the lump in my stomach. I rubbed my face with my hands and thought back on the last week, but I couldn’t remember a fight, an argument, or a sideways glance from my wife. I couldn’t even remember seeing her. What happened? I shook my head again, as though that would clear the fog around my memory — or the lack thereof.

“Your wife found your Tinder account?” Claire prodded gently.

“Aren’t you listening?” I snapped. “I said I don’t know! I mean, I guess so? I don’t remember,” I lamented. I was ashamed of my own pitifulness. I rubbed my eyes hard enough it hurt and small stars burst behind my eyelids. I groaned.

“Tell me more about Annalise, Jessica, and Natalie, Jamie. Who are they?”

“They’re these women I’ve been seeing. I’ve been so depressed lately. And my wife has been so distant! I couldn’t stand it any more. She wasn’t seeing me like she used to. I needed something exciting, something to bring me back to life…I needed…I needed an escape,” I whined. I winced at my own pitifulness. This was not who I was. But then again, who even am I?

“When did you start seeing them?” Claire prodded, her pen poised once more on her clipboard.

“It started with Annalise. A few months ago. I got on Tinder. And I would do it in front of my wife. She seemed so distant but I didn’t know why. So I got on Tinder to try to find a way to escape…”

“Escape your marriage?”

I shrugged.

“Tell me more,” Claire said.

“Annalise was a pottery instructor and I would meet her at her studio and take classes and hang out. We would have dates there. It was safe. It was easy and I felt alive making and creating something with her,” I said softly.

“What happened?”

“She doesn’t exist, is what happened,” I snapped.

“What do you mean?”

“I checked the website. She’s not listed on the website as an instructor or staff member. So I went to the studio. No one named Annalise had ever worked there. I recognized Tyler and Emily and they recognized me. But they had never heard of anyone named Annalise…”

Claire continued staring at me. I stared back, then sighed.

“I don’t know what happened. She was there, I saw her. I talked to her. I spent hours at that studio making all this fucking pottery and she showed me how to do it. Over and over again. I was able to just relax and stop thinking when I was at the studio,” I sighed.

“Why did you only see her in her studio?” Claire asked. Her eyes were shining with fear or apprehension or confusion. I couldn’t tell.

“Because our schedules didn’t line up to meet outside her studio. It just made sense to always meet there,” I said.

“And what about these other women? Where did you meet them?”

“Jessica and I would meet at concerts, or at bars before concerts. She was always with a large group of friends and I never felt like I really got to hang out with just her,” I complained. “But it was still fun. She fed me drugs. I was able to let loose, let my guard down, just let the music take over.”

“And Natalie?” Claire resumed scribbling on her clipboard.

“I only met Natalie once. She kind of freaked me out. It was like she was seeing into my soul or something with all her creepy witch shit. She gave me a tarot reading…” I started laughing softly, shaking my head.

“Do you believe in Tarot readings, Jamie?” Claire prompted.

“No!” I exclaimed, half laughing. “No, I don’t. I don’t think so. I mean, I know I read a book about it, recently, and thought it was interesting, but I don’t believe in it. Like, what’s there to believe in?”

“What about the Tarot reading bothered you so much, though?”

I scoffed.

“She said that I was living in an illusion and was blind, and that everything was about to collapse to make way for something new,” I sneered. I was disgusted with how accurate the reading felt as I sat there in my therapist’s office, completely unsure what was even real any more.

“And you said earlier, you can’t find your conversations with these women? And none of them have contacted you since our last session?” Claire asked, her head turned thoughtfully.

“No,” I said softly, staring at my shaking hands that I laid in my lap. Silence dominated the room, broken only by the whirring of the white noise machine outside Claire’s door.

“What drew you to these women in the first place?” She asked tentatively.

“I don’t know, they were just girls on Tinder. I mean, I liked Annalise because I felt … I felt free, I felt uninhibited. I felt like I liked myself for the first time in years,” I choked out. Agh! What the fuck? I thought. I closed my eyes tight to push back the tears that were pricking at the backs of my eyes.

“Mmhmm and what about Jessica?” Claire said, scribbling furiously.

“I mean, it was similar with Jessica, but I felt wild and…and unafraid.”

“And Natalie?”

“With Natalie, I - I don’t know. I only met her that one time, but…but she made me want to know more, to learn more about myself. She made me feel like there was something worth finding,” I whispered.

“Mmhmm,” Claire said, still scribbling furiously. “And how did these women feel about you, Jamie?”

“What? What do you mean?” I stared at her, confused.

“Well, what did they say about how you made them feel? Did they express such strong emotions as a result of meeting and knowing you?” Claire stared at me with such piercing directness I flinched slightly. Her pen was poised for my answer, but her stare said she already knew what it was going to be.

“I mean, I don’t know, they never said anything specifically…”

“Who did you spend the most time with?”

“Annalise.”

“And she never wanted to hang out with you outside of her studio? Did you guys communicate outside of the studio?”

“I mean, we just didn’t have compatible schedules. She was always teaching when I was free, and I couldn’t just drop everything in the middle of my 9-5 to hang out with her when she was free. And we messaged on Tinder, but I can’t find those messages…”

“What did you talk about?”

“Uh…I mean, I—I can’t remember. I thought we had weeks of conversations on Tinder, but I can’t, I can’t find them. I remember waiting for her messages. I remember my phone buzzing. I remember smiling when I read her messages. I remember hiding them from my wife…but I can’t remember what we said.”

“You think your wife found them and deleted them?”

“I—I — don’t know. I don’t know where my wife is. I don’t know who she is…” I nearly burst into tears but bit them back. My brain was boiling again and I was afraid of running my hands through my hair for fear of getting burned. I closed my eyes tight and a tear escaped from beneath my eyelids.

“Jamie, it’s okay. It’s okay if you’re scared,” Claire soothed again. I opened my eyes and she was nodding tiny little bobs of her head, encouraging me to cry or to keep talking, I didn’t know.

“But you liked who you were when you were with these women?” Claire prodded.

“I did. I liked myself so much. I even liked myself when I was with my wife. But I can’t find her. I can’t find anyone, any more. I…I don’t know who I am without them,” I lamented.

“And who were you when you were with these women? Were you someone different than who are you are sitting in front of me?”

The room started spinning and I choked and threw up in my mouth a little bit. I swallowed back the bile and shook my head slowly, dropping my head in my hands again.

“Of course I was someone different!” I shouted. “I was creative and passionate and free when I was with Annalise. I was wild and fearless and exhilarated when I was with Jessica. With Natalie, I was curious and intuitive and hopeful. With my wife…I was the man who had his life together. With them, I was everything I wanted to be…” I trailed off. I was everything I wanted to be. My mouth went dry and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Who are you without them?” Claire asked softly, barely a whisper.

“I don’t know.”

I survived.

I went to therapy.

LOTS of therapy.

I built my law firm. I succeeded. I stopped surviving and started thriving.

For my thirty-third birthday I treated myself to going on two women’s-only adventure tours: one of Morocco and one of Peru.

I was so excited. I put my “out of office auto responder” on, and set off for a month-long tour of these two countries that held so much magic and mystery for me that I could barely contain my excitement.

As part of my very woo-woo healing routine, every year, rather than make a New Year’s Resolution, I chose a “Word of the Year.” In 2019 my word was: OPEN. I was going to be open to all possibilities.

I was.

This word coupled with my excitement to have a business that was doing well enough to let me travel for an entire month made me magnetic. Everywhere I went, people were drawn to me. I smiled brighter and wider than I had in years. My laughs finally felt genuine. I let go of survival. Again, I was thriving.

Then I went to Morocco.

Morocco is a wonderful place. Truly. It is a beautiful country with such diverse landscape and cultures, and the people are genuinely friendly and kind. Morocco stole my heart.

I went to Fes, Morocco at the start of my tour. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. There are some buildings and homes there that are 500 years old. You can feel the history permeate the air and mingle with the spices of recipes passed down for generations.

Morocco is not a perfect country, by any means. But its history and culture were intoxicating to me: the beautiful adherence to sacred geometry in its architecture, the call to prayer echoing through the air, harkening back to something beautiful and ancient and holy, the leaning, ancient buildings and cobblestone streets, the brilliant blues, reds, greens, and yellows of the market, the people, and the buildings.

In Fes, the group I was with entered one of the most beautiful hotels I had ever seen. One of the other women, an older woman who had survived cancer, and I burst out in laughter at the beauty of the interior of the hotel. It was adorned with beautiful Roman columns and Arabic archways, meticulously designed mosaics of deep blues and greens, a small pool and fountain filled with rose petals whose scent perfumed the entire foyer. Two men dressed in traditional bright red Moroccan regalia (the baggy pants and boxy button-down jackets), complete with the little Fez hats, came out and served us all Moroccan mint tea and traditional sesame cookies. I have still to this day never tasted anything that was so simple yet so mouthwatering.

Both men were attractive, but one of them was simply gorgeous. He had an easy and jaunty smile and nature, and he laughed whenever I laughed, even though he didn’t know what I was laughing about. It was infectious and he caught it. The owner of the hotel directed us women to pair off into rooms and directed the men to start taking up our bags. I hoped the more attractive man with the jaunty attitude was going to take up my bag.

He did.

Before he picked up my bag, I cautioned him that it was very heavy because the bellhop at the prior hotel in Casablanca complained about how heavy my bag was. It was one of those backpacking backpacks that I had stuffed full because I was going on a month-long trip in two different countries with wildly different needs. I had to make sure I was prepared. It was heavy, but I had been carrying it around just fine.

The man looked at me from the side of his eyes and nearly rolled them, but didn’t. Instead, he tossed his head as if to say, “as if,” and hoisted my bag over his shoulder and picked up my roommate’s bag without even a grimace. He then carried both bags up the narrow, uneven, and spiraling stairways common in the Old Medina (i.e., the old city).

The man dropped off our bags and started to rush back downstairs. I was desperate to talk to him and so asked him to wait a moment so I could give him a tip. Then I stupidly realized I didn’t have any paper money just a bunch of heavy coins, but I dumped them all in his hands, which he accepted with a small look of incredulity, before dashing off down the hallway to retrieve bags for the other women.

“Wait!” I called, and he turned around. “What is your name?” He looked at me a bit wide-eyed because he knew the pressure of his job was to “hurry,” but I did not realize.

“Yessie,” he said breathlessly. He asked me mine and I gave him my nickname. Turns out, I had heard his name incorrectly, and he only had my nickname, something I did when I didn’t want someone to know my actual name until I knew them better. He dashed off before I could hold him back some more.

I honestly forget how the rest of the day went, but we were only there for two or three nights. I forget exactly the sequence of things, and whether we went on a tour on the day we arrived, or not. I know we had a full day walking and bus tour through the market of the Old Medina and learned about various traditional handicrafts and professions. We tasted olives, olive oil, spices, cookies, sampled perfumes and incense, witnessed ceramic makers, tin and coppersmiths, and leather makers. It was a whirlwind of a day full of colors, smells, and sacred geometry. The woman leading our tour group cried from the beauty of it all. She was and is one of the kindest souls I have ever met, and I always envied her ability to let her tears bear witness to the beauty she beheld in the world.

At some point, Yessie and his coworker served us breakfast. It must have been on our first full day, because we left early the next day. When Yessie served my plate with eggs, I told him, “Chokran,” which means ‘thank you’ in Arabic. He was so surprised he nearly dropped the plate he held. He asked if I spoke Arabic, and I admitted that I did not, that a friend of mine did and she told me how to say a few phrases. He smiled at me and I blushed.

After the tour was over, I went to my room to deal with some work things and emerged hours later after the other ladies had coalesced on the roof-deck, drinking tea and ordering cookies, watching the light of day fade into night. I joined them after dark and sat next to my friend. We had been dubbed “The Giggle Twins” by our tour leader and we lived up to our name. My Twin was Iranian by birth and she pretended to be my mother because while in Morocco, I always wore a scarf over my head, and my own racial ethnicity is ambiguous enough that I was frequently assumed to be Iranian.

I heard my friend ask Yessie if he was married and whether he had any children. In his version of the story, he said he was afraid that my friend was asking about his marital status for herself and so he told her that he was and he had two children. He claims that I overhead this and eyed him suspiciously. But the truth was, I did not hear him say this because I do not hear very well, especially when there is lots of background noise or multiple conversations or other noise going on simultaneously. But, he can have this. According to him, when I eyed him about his answer, he said he quickly corrected himself to say that he was just kidding, he was not married and did not have any children. At some point, he came to me and I ordered tea.

As the night went on and on, I never received my tea and the other women slowly retired to bed. Eventually, I assumed I was never going to get my tea, so I started down the winding, narrow stairs to go back to my room.

I ran into Yessie on the narrow stairs. I was going down and he was going up. A little voice in my head said, “You are going to be with this man for the rest of your life,” and my heart stopped immediately. But I quickly dismissed it, stomping it down for all its romantic impracticality.

He apologized for forgetting my tea, and advised that he was going to bring it up shortly. I wanted to go to bed so I told him not to worry about it, but as with a lot of things, this did not translate exactly and he insisted on bringing it up. Then, he surprised me by asking me if I would like to drink some wine with him after his shift was over.

“Yes, of course!” I said. We exchanged phone numbers on Whatsapp and he dashed off to finish his other duties and bring me my tea to the roof.

We texted throughout his shift that evening until it ended at some ungodly hour like 1 or 2 am. We spent the night with him drinking coffee, because he is a practicing Muslim and does not drink alcohol, while I sipped horrible Moroccan wine. But we talked, we laughed, we got to know one another. Then he asked if he could take me to the terrace (i.e., the roof deck) to show me the house where he lives. Of course I agreed.

Under the Moroccan moon and the soft yellow, incandescent street lights and lamps dotting the ancient mud and brick buildings, he pointed to a not-so-distant glow that he identified as his home. He told me a little bit about his family, his work, and his life, and I shared a little about my life, as well.

I don’t remember what precipitated it, but he kissed me on the terrace under the moon and then literally swept me off my feet and spun me around like I weighed no more than a child.

The rest, dear reader, is history.

We carried on our relationship long distance. I visited him six months later in October 2019, then again in February 2020. Then we were separated for a year during the pandemic until March of 2021, despite multiple failed attempts on my part to visit him once the international borders opened up. During my visit in March of 2021, we received word from American immigration that his fiance’ visa to come to the USA was approved. I returned in July of 2021 to pick him up from Morocco and bring him to the United States.

During all that time, I met his Aunt, who raised him after his mother died when he was a small child, his father, his sisters, his niece and nephews, his cousins, his friends. I fell in love with his family and finally felt like I was part of a family. Morocco became a second home, if not my first home. From time to time, I am homesick for Morocco.

The night before we left to come to the USA in July of 2021, his entire family gathered at his Aunt’s new home in the New Medina and we shared meals, stories, songs and dances together. His sisters gave us a gold-colored plate of a bride and groom with our names etched into it, encased in a green velvet box. His father gave us a brass candelabra. Then, when the gifts and the celebration were over and we had taken probably thousands of photos, his father went out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette and Yessie joined him. Knowing that the two men alone on the balcony probably needing comforting, all of us women went out on the balcony, too. It was not long before the air shifted from joy to apprehension and bittersweet sadness. His family pleaded with me to take care of Yessie, and I promised I would. We all cried together because for them, they were losing a son and a brother. I promised that he would come back again, soon, and as often as he wanted; that we both would be back together, soon. We dried our tears and forced smiles and exchanged hugs, and then said goodnight so Yessie and I could catch our plane in the morning.

In only four short years, though, everything fell apart.

I can’t imagine what it is like to leave one’s country, family, familiar streets and ways of living, and everything you have ever known to go to a strange place and live with the one and only person you know. I can’t imagine that. I told him that. I told him I appreciated his sacrifice of leaving behind everything that was familiar to him to come live in America. I understood that it would be hard and I tried to make it easy. But he is his own man and maybe I didn’t do the right things.

I do not blame him for missing his home, for being shocked by American culture for all its crudity, coldness, and commercialism. I don’t blame him for finding life here difficult and uncomfortable.

Despite everything, I still love him. I think, even now, after all the hurtful words and deeds that came from our separation and still-pending divorce, if he came to me and said, “I am sorry, I want to try again,” I would say, “of course; I do, too.”

But…

This Midlife Crisis World Tour that I am on was borne from desperation. I thought that if I traveled the world again, I could experience that same magic and romance I experienced the first time; that I would find that mystical current of the universe and grab onto it and leave my heartbreak behind. I thought that nuance and new experiences would heal me.

I saw English gardens in the Spring.

I witnessed the Northern Lights.

I swooned under the Eiffel Tower.

I drank snow melt from Alpine springs.

I sipped Prosecco by Venetian canals.

I let the salt water dry on my skin on the Balkan coasts.

And grief was right there beside me.

I ignored it. I ran away from it. I buried it under food and alcohol and overstuffed luggage. I wrote about it. I raged at it. I cried, I bawled, I sobbed, I lamented, I bargained with it. I sent Yessie angry messages. I filled out divorce papers because he still didn’t want to work things out and everyone around me kept telling me that the longer I waited, the worse it would be for me financially.

And now it’s over. Mostly.

And there is nothing left.

Just the stillness under the heat of an Albanian sun that reminds me so much of Morocco that sometimes I have to turn away so I won’t weep in the shade of an olive tree.

Because I don’t just miss Yessie. I miss his sisters and their children, I miss his toothless father whose twinkle in his eyes reminds me so much of my own grandfather, I miss his Aunt who taught me some of her recipes, I miss the joy and the closeness despite the language barrier. I miss those people so much. I miss the life that we were supposed to have. I miss the future I had envisioned that included his family.

I miss the idea of growing old with the person who made me believe that love and magic were real, again.

I miss the future I will never have.

And it hurts.

So much.

And I am too proud to crawl, but it is what my heart is begging for.

So I will slow down. I will adjourn this Midlife Crisis World Tour for another time when my heart is not so broken open that I can breathe joy in deeply again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was our song. Even if you don’t understand Arabic, it is a beautiful melody, but I have included an English translation below. There is nothing more powerful than Arabic poetry.

[Verse 1]
Today I’m with you, hopefully tomorrow too
May destiny make me close to you
Ah my heart, look at where your love threw me
Above a clear sea and its waves that are dragging me
It followed the winds of love and dropped me at your home, it told me “Goodbye
Never forget your love”

[Chorus]
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you

[Verse 2]
They told me that you went out in the dark and that you asked me
Without the moon, you light up with your eyes
They said that you’re a star : you, the star, you didn’t appear
Where were you a long time ago ?
Tell me why did you run away ?
They told me that you went out in the dark and that you asked me
Without the moon, you light up with your eyes
They said that you’re a star: you, the star, you didn’t appear
Where were you a long time ago ?
Tell me why did you run away ?

[Chorus]
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you

[Verse 3]
O God, my Master
I swear, I won’t ever ask again after the one who left me
The eye that cried will never forgive me for it
Why did your love betray me?
I’m hurt, who’s going to heal me?
O winds, take my melody to my beloved
Hey Zina, understand the signs
Amine is gone, putting his trust in God

[Chorus]
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you
O Zina, what have you done to us ?
Me and my heart, we’ve been looking for you but we haven’t found you

I sighed when a downtrodden young woman opened the door and slid it across the mottled purple and gray 80s-style carpet, pulling on the looped fibers and making a soft shushing sound. She looked at me with haunted eyes, like she’d been crying, making her mousy brown hair seem even duller and flatter than it probably normally was. Or it was the harsh fluorescent lighting, I thought. She looked away from me as though I had caught her doing something wrong and scuttled out of the office and out into the 80’s style, whitewashed hallway with dark wood trim around every office door in the long hallway. There was always something strange about seeing another patient leave a therapist’s office, as if one person intruded upon the ravaging of another, but which neither person wanted to acknowledge for fear of seeming like one or both of us actually needed to be there.

Ten minutes later, my therapist’s bouncy blonde curls appeared around the doorway as she stuck her head outside and invited me into her office. I sighed again and put my hands on my thighs to stand up, like I had aged 10 years in the waiting room and was about to go in for an overdue prostate exam.

“Hi, as you know, I’m Claire. It’s very nice to meet you and I want to tell you that it’s a big step to see a therapist and start really taking care of yourself. So I just want you to know that you’ve done half the work just by showing up today, so thank you. I am going to review some of your forms as we get started, but please know that I am listening intently to everything you are saying, and we will set aside some time at the end to go over any missing information in your paperwork or any questions you may have. So, what brings you in today?” She asked cheerily as she flipped through the intake forms I had filled out in the waiting room.

“My wife,” I said flatly. She pursed her lips in response.

“Yes, I see that you listed your wife as your referral source. But tell me more specifically what about your wife, what’s going on?” She continued to look at the paperwork as she spoke.

“Well, my wife thinks I’m depressed and I need to get help,” I said. She looked up at me and nodded.

“Mm-hmm. What do you think? Do you think you are depressed? Or that you need help?” She stared at me with brilliant blue eyes and I thought they reminded me of someone else. Natalie? No. Jessica? No. I couldn’t place the memory.

“Ha, well, doc, I suppose that’s what I’m here to see if you can answer. Do you think I am depressed and need help?” I asked lightly, running my hand through my hair casually.

“Hmm, well, I can’t really determine anything until I hear more from you about what you think and feel. Tell me about why you decided to come in. Did your wife give you an ultimatum?”

“No, not exactly. She’s just mad at me. I work a lot. I hate my job - but who doesn’t, right?” I paused as she scribbled notes in the margins of my intake form. She nodded and made a soft “mm-hmm” sound, to indicate she was listening.

“Well, I mean, right? I suppose I don’t spend as much time with her as she would like, and I’m not really attentive to her needs, or at least that’s what she says. But I feel like I’m carrying everything and so I just need someplace else to go,” I said, losing the thread of what I was saying. I was suddenly gripped with a small panic and the room around me contracted, the outlines of every shape becoming sharper, as though I was seeing everything but not able to actually touch it or exist in it. She looked up at me suddenly.

“Are you okay, Jamie?”

“Yea, yea, I just had a moment where … I don’t know. It just felt like everything wasn’t real for a second,” I said and laughed nervously.

“Wasn’t real? What do you mean?”

“Well, like, it felt like a dream for a second. Like it wasn’t real. Like I was slipping between realities. That sounds crazy, right? I’ve never had that happen before. I’m probably just nervous.”

“I see you ask for validation a lot rather than determine for yourself whether your lived experience is what you are actually experiencing. But know that nothing is ‘crazy,’ you are not ‘crazy,’ and if you feel uncomfortable or like you are not experiencing reality, I want to explore that.”

“No, no I’m experiencing reality. It just felt like a dream for a few seconds. Like déjà vu, you know?”

Claire nodded expectantly.

“It’s okay, I’m fine. It was just weird, I didn’t expect it…” I trailed off, feeling uncomfortable and a little irritated at my outburst and lack of control. The goal was to just let this therapist think it was a marital issue, and not actually something wrong with me. But it was the beginning of the appointment, I could recover.

“What were you talking about when you experienced the feeling of déjà vu?” She asked, her pen was poised over the forms, placed neatly on top of the clipboard in her lap.

“Uh…my wife, I think… and that I need someplace to go because I feel like I’m carrying everything.”

“Tell me more about that,” she said. I groaned internally but took in a deep breath.

“I just work all the time and when I come home I don’t feel like doing the domestic stuff and she wants me to help with it, and it’s not that I won’t but she doesn’t work and we don’t have kids so I don’t feel like I should have to do stuff around the house. It’s like, I just want a break, you know?” I said, exasperated. But I felt like I was getting the conversation back on track. If the therapist just thought it was misaligned expectations in the marriage, I could probably get out of this in just a few sessions.

“What do you do to take a break, Jamie?” She said. Her eyes were bright staring directly into mine. It was almost like Natalie’s unnerving stare, but her eyes were definitely brown. Right? I wondered. Yea, they were definitely brown because she works on a farm or something, and she has dark skin and hair…

“Jamie?” Claire prompted, tilting her head to stare at me like a curious puppy.

“Yea? Sorry, I got lost in my thoughts.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nat—One of my breaks. I try to do different stuff. I try to have different hobbies, you know, to get out of the house and just clear my mind,” I stuttered.

“Like what?”

“Like ceramics, I started going to ceramic classes. I really enjoy them. And concerts, I’ve started going to more concerts because that helps take the edge off, you know, loud music and lots of dancing, physical movement. And, uh, I was thinking about getting into, like, gardening, I guess,” I rambled.

“Gardening?”

“Yea, I mean, I don’t know, like growing plants and vegetables and stuff.”

“Mm hmm, I see. Do you do any of these activities with your wife?”

“No, no. She doesn’t have any interest in this stuff. We really lead very separate lives. She rarely leaves the house, to be honest. She’s kind of a home-body.”

“Mm hmm. So you do these activities alone? That must be very isolating,” she said, still scribbling. I cleared my throat and tried to crane my neck to see what she was writing.

“Isolating? No, I have people I know that do these things. I mean, like, I take classes and stuff and concerts are full of people. Gardening might be a little isolating, but I think I’ll learn to like it,” I said, smiling at the thought of Natalie with her hands deep in the dirt, staring at me with her dark and penetrating eyes. I shook my head to clear the image.

“Who do you do these things with?” Still scribbling.

“Like I said, I take ceramic classes, so there’s people there —”

“Have you made any friends?” She interrupted, still staring at her forms. I gritted my teeth slightly at being interrupted.

“Yes, I mean, no, I mean, I guess so. I —”

“Do you have anyone you talk to at the ceramic class? Anyone you have connected with?” She interrupted again. I let out a snort of irritation.

“I mean, yea, sure there’s this one instructor there who I take a lot of classes from so we get along and have a relationship—I mean, not a relationship, but you know what I mean,” I muttered.

“No, I don’t know what you mean. Tell me more.”

“That’s it, she’s just an instructor and I take a lot of classes from her, so we, you know talk, because I’m like, a frequent flyer in her class,” I snapped.

“Is this a sensitive topic for you? Has your wife expressed any dissatisfaction with you taking classes from the same female instructor?”

“No, no, my wife doesn’t know. She doesn’t care. It’s just a class,” I rambled. I was starting to feel attacked. Did my wife know? Did she talk to this therapist? I wondered.

“She doesn’t know about the instructor or about the class?”

“Both.”

“Why doesn’t she know about the class?”

“Because I just need something that’s separate from her, you know? Whenever I’m home, she’s there. She rarely leaves. She’s just always in my head and I just need some place to go where she’s not there,” I blurted.

“Something separate? Don’t you guys do anything together?”

“We watch TV together, I guess,” I murmured into my shoulder, feeling like a child caught in a lie.

“That doesn’t sound very stimulating. Does she know about the concerts?”

“No.”

“Do you garden together, at least?”

“No, look, we don’t even have a place to garden. Our house is in the city, there’s no garden. I would have to build something and I haven’t yet. But I doubt she would share in that with me, either. We lead very separate lives,” I snapped again.

“So where do you garden?”

“I - I mean, I don’t, yet, I haven’t started. I’m just getting to know it and see if I want to pursue it.”

“You sound like you’re talking about a person and not a hobby. Do you have an instructor for gardening, too? Do you take gardening classes?”

“No, look, I just met this girl who is really into gardening and I thought I’d go and just check out her farm sometime. She runs an organic farm. Maybe I’ll volunteer or something, I don’t know!”

“Jamie, I am not trying to make you upset, I’m just trying to piece together all the different aspects of your life to get a better picture of who you are as a whole person. I can see you’re upset, why don’t you take a couple deep breaths? Okay, good. One…two…and release… Okay, good. One…two…and release…” She nodded encouragingly as I rolled my eyes and took deep breaths.

“Hey, one thing I noticed that I don’t have is your wife’s name and contact information. Can you give it to me?” She turned the clipboard around and I saw I had just scribbled “my wife” in the line for emergency contact and nothing else. I made a face and took out my phone. I started scrolling through it to look for my wife’s phone number.

“Jamie, what are you doing?”

“I’m looking up my wife’s contact,” I said distractedly, the feeling of déjà vu washing over me in unrelenting waves. I suddenly started to lose focus on the room. I heard Claire call out my name.

“Jamie, don’t you know your wife’s contact information? What’s her name, at least, I can write it for you,” she said as she took back the paper. She stared at me perplexed and leaned forward. “Are you okay?” She asked. She stood up quickly and walked over to the cooler in the corner of the room, filling up a little conical shaped paper water cup and handing it to me.

“Here, drink this, please,” she said, handing it to me and standing over me as I drank absent-mindedly. I finished the paper cup and extended my hand out to her absently and she took the cup. She retreated to her seat and resumed her upright posture with the clipboard in her lap. I realized she was staring at me as I continued to gasp for air and I didn’t know why.

“You keep having these spells whenever you talk about your wife. There must be something significant there. What is her name, Jamie?”

“I—I don’t— I don’t know. I don’t remember, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” I gasped. “I should know it, we’ve been married for seven years. I — I know I know it, I’m just having that déjà vu thing again and it’s really messing with me.”

Claire nodded knowingly, her lips pressed together in a thin line.

“It’s okay, Jamie, we can get to it next week, okay? Why don’t you just relax while I get some other basic information from you before we close today’s session?”

I nodded, but my brain was flying at a million miles an hour. Why can’t I remember my wife’s name??

…to be continued…

It took me two full days to recover from my one night with Jessica. Not just from the pure MDMA that I sucked from her fingertips all night in a tantalizing intimacy surrounded by hundreds of people, but also from the lack of sleep and my wife’s disdain. She returned home from her girls’ night much earlier than I did since the headliner, Jaxon Dots, didn’t come on until 1am. I had 13 missed calls and about 40 increasingly irate text messages from her by the time I got home at 3:30am. Jessica had naturally insisted we go to an after party, but I eventually was able to, regrettably, extricate myself from her succulent grasp and stumbled home, still reeling from my emotional and physical high.

I knew that getting into bed with my wife was just going to start a fight, but I did it anyway, just to prove that I was home.

“If you think you’re sleeping next to me before you tell me where you’ve been all night, you are in for a rude awakening,” she said coldly when I lifted my side of the covers.

Say less, I thought. I put the covers back down and happily paraded into the spare bedroom where I tossed and turned for an hour replaying the night over and over in my head, clinging to the reality and the fantasy spinning through my head like a revolving door. I passed out into a dreamless sleep.

My wife was seated at our table, holding a mug of tea between her still hands. She was motionless when I finally stumbled down the stairs around 11am. She didn’t even look at me. Her anger radiated off of her in waves and I gave her a wide berth.

“Are you really going to make me start this conversation?” She seethed quietly, her gaze still focused on her mug. I sighed and I felt another burst of anger tear from her like a shockwave. I stilled myself and shut my mouth so I was only breathing through my nose. I grabbed a mug and started to make myself some coffee. Black. No sugar. I needed all the help I could get this morning.

“Sweetheart—” I began.

“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me! Where were you last night? Why did you come home at almost 4am??” She whirled on me, tears shimmering in the corners of her eyes. Her lips were pressed tight together in a thin line and I knew she was trying not to cry. The darkness that had galloped through my veins only a few nights before when we sat next to each other on the couch came to a grinding halt and sank to the bottom of my gut. I hated seeing her cry. I felt genuinely guilty. My heart sank, and I set the coffee cup down on the counter in surrender. I walked over to her but she turned away from me. I set my hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, hey babe, I’m sorry, okay? I should have come home sooner. You know how Chad from the DA’s office can be. He’s such an ass. And I should stop hanging out with him,” I said. She still wouldn’t look at me and I felt her stifle a sniffle.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I lost track of time. You know how hard I’ve been working. I just got caught up and I should have checked my phone more often. I wasn’t worried about you since you were out having fun, too.” She turned her head away from me and pulled her shoulder out from under my hand. I was starting to get irritated, now, my patience for this having waned. But, I had to keep it up to get through this weekend. I walked around her to face her and knelt in front of her, placing my hands on her thighs so she couldn’t stand up. She started pouting and I knew I had to start talking fast before she started crying. I hated it when she cried.

“I’m sorry, okay? I really, truly am. You’re absolutely right to be mad at me. I really messed up. I won’t do it again, okay? I’m really sorry. How can I make it up to you?” I pleaded, letting my voice drip with contrition. She stared at me with a directness I had not seen in — years, honestly.

“Go. To. Therapy,” she said, punctuating each word. Her lips curled slightly in something resembling a snarl and it was the angriest I had ever seen her. Shocked, I leaned back slightly and took my hands off her legs.

“Okay, that’s what you want? Fine. I can do that. But it’s not like therapy is going to tell me anything I don’t already know,” I snapped. “I’m going to go and what? ‘Learn’ that I hate my job? My life?—”

“You hate your life?” She snapped back. “I’m a part of your life. How do you think I feel? You disappear into your work and I sit back and wait. Then you complain about it endlessly. But still I wait. You find some hobby to entertain you for a little and I wait. Then you stop doing it and you complain about that, too. Still I wait. You can’t find happiness, Jamie. It’s a fucking state of being. It’s not a place!”

I felt like I was seeing my wife for the first time. I couldn’t remember her saying anything so insightful since… well, law school, really. Had she always been this insightful? Or had I just stopped paying attention? I wondered.

I shrugged off my surprise and regained my composure. I felt like I was in a courtroom after losing another case and trying to schedule the next hearing with a judge who gave an impassioned verdict against my client and me.

“You’re right. Fine. You’re right. I’ll go to therapy. I’ll color inside the lines, or whatever modality the therapist prescribes.” I couldn’t help getting in a little jab. She snorted and rolled her eyes.

“You can be a jackass about this if you want, but you need therapy. I can’t help you any more. Lord knows I’ve tried,” she said and stood up, placing her mug in the sink. She walked away and went outside for a walk.

I heaved a sigh of relief once she shut the front door. I felt like shit and went through the motions of making myself coffee. I also felt some slight relief since it didn’t seem like she knew anything specific about what I was doing. She just wanted me to go to therapy in general; she didn’t seem to know that I was cheating.

I mean, was I really cheating, though? I wondered. It’s not like I’ve fucked anybody. I’ve just gone out and hung out with people—women, yes, but we haven’t done anything.

I sighed again. Fuck this, I thought, and opened my Tinder app.

~~~~~~~~

The witchy chick I had found on Tinder had some free time this afternoon. Since I was pissed at my wife, and a little at myself—though I didn’t know why, I decided to meet her. We met at a coffee shop cooperative that perfumed the entire block with Nag Champa. Even though the weather was nice, I insisted we sit inside, much to Natalie’s chagrin.

“Allergies,” I chuffed, running my hands through my hair in my most debonair (my only debonair) move. She just stared at me.

“Then you should put honey in your tea,” she said. “The honey here is local and organic. I’ve met the bee farmers and they take pride in providing a healthy and natural environment for the bees. It will help you build up a tolerance. I recommend you buy some to take home, honestly. Here,” she shoved a small tincture jar of honey into my hands. I exhaled deeply through my nose and gripped the glass jar hard.

“Thanks,” I said and forced a smile. She nodded knowingly.

We sat in the back of the coffee shop under a speaking softly humming out ayurvedic chants to a heavy electronic bass beat. I didn’t hate it, I realized. I pulled out my phone to Shazaam the song. “Gaia” by Dub Sutra. Huh, I thought, and tucked my phone away.

“So, how does one go about meeting local, organic, free-range beekeepers?” I asked, trying to sound casual and flirtatious. She raised an eyebrow, her chocolate brown eyes reflecting the turquoise-painted walls around us.

“Bees aren’t really ‘free-range.’ They’re bees,” she said matter-of-factly. I snorted in my tea a little, but didn’t say anything. “But I met them at a local organic farmers’ market. I sell vegetables and fruits from my garden. I am a part owner in a farming cooperative outside the city. I help manage the downtown distribution and member branches.” She smiled finally, clearly proud of her work. I smiled back. I was about to ask her more about her work, but she cut me off.

“So, what’s your sign?” Her face was very serious and I tried not to roll my eyes.

“Ha, yea, well my mom used to be super into astrology, so I know some of the stuff. But I’m not really that into it,” I started.

“Okay, do you want to call your mom?” She asked. I narrowed my eyes in discernment, but she was clearly very serious.

“Uh, no, that’s okay. I’m a Gemini, I think.” She sighed.

“What’s your birthday?”

“May 28.”

“Okay, yea, definitely a Gemini.”

“Were you able to guess it?”

“No, I only just met you. Plus, you’re more than your sun sign. Do you know your moon or your ascendant?”

“Uh….” I started. I wracked my brains for a few minutes. “I think I’m a Scorpio moon and I don’t know what my ascendant is.”

“Ask your mom for your birth time. That will give you your ascendant and all your other transits. We’re made up of all the celestials in the galaxy, not just those three. But, knowing you’re a Gemini sun and a Scorpio moon tells me quite a bit,” she said, smirking slightly. I laughed a little.

“Okay, so what? You know all about me, now? What am I going to do next?” I teased.

“No, I just know that you have a tendency to be wind blown, since Gemini is an air sign. You’re very in your own head, maybe a little self-righteous, a little duplicitous,” at this she shot me a raised eyebrow. I didn’t flinch. She kept going. “And Scorpio moon means you keep your feelings close to you, you don’t open up easily, you keep secrets…and you’re highly sexual. Scorpio is the most sexual of all the signs, you know.” She looked away from me and took a sip of her coffee to hide her face. I think this was Natalie’s version of flirting.

“Okay, what about you? What are your signs? You’ll have to tell me if we’re compatible. That’s a thing, right?” I asked, giving her my most devilish smile.She smirked and rolled her eyes.

“Aries sun, Sagittarius moon, and Cancer ascendant,” she rattled off. Before I could inquire further, she went on: “Tell me about your life, Jamie. Who are you? What do you stand for? Who do you serve?” She sipped her coffee again. Stunned, I stuttered a little bit and then got started. No one had ever asked me questions that bared my soul so completely before.

“Uh…well, I’m an accountant…” I began.

“No,” she said, setting down her coffee like I was a student in the principal’s office for misbehaving. “Who are you?” Natalie’s dark eyes bored into me and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, as though I was a bad student trying to disappear before my parents got called.

“Uh, well, I mean, I— uh, I do pottery,” I began. She tilted her head to the side like a dog, but her face implored me to go on. “Um, I like to go to concerts, EDM concerts. Um, I’m marr—” I stopped myself. “I mean, I’m married to my job, I feel like, sometimes,” I sputtered, trying to recover. “I hate it, though. I only feel alive when I’m with —I mean, when I’m doing pottery, or at a show, or something. I feel like I’m always fighting something or someone. I get in these really bad, like, funks and it’s hard to get out of them. I, uh… I think I’m talking too much,” I said sheepishly, running my hand through my hair in genuine consternation, but trying to make it look sexy.

Natalie nodded in her knowing way.

“I asked who you are, and you talked about yourself and the things you do like they’re places you’ve been. I’m asking: when you are alone in a room with nothing and no one, who is Jamie?” She continued staring at me and I swallowed hard. What the fuck is up with this chick? I thought.

“Look, I think you’re really cool and all, but this is pretty heavy for a first date, don’t you think?” I asked. She just continued staring at me in her unnerving way.

“Do I make you uncomfortable?” She asked, not looking away from me. I had to turn my head. I couldn’t stand the intensity of her gaze any longer. It was like she was tearing me apart from the inside.

The fucked up part is, I liked it. I felt like I needed it.

I needed to be seen.

I needed a witness.

To what, I don’t know. But she stirred something awake in me that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

“Yes,” I finally admitted. She smiled devilishly and I wanted to grab her face and crash her lips against mine.

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere. Let me give you a tarot reading,” she said and reached for her cloth bag hanging from the back of her chair. It was a multi-colored pink, purple, and white paisley pattern I’d commonly seen the hippie-chicks in college toting around. She pulled out a little black box decorated with silver filament ink that glimmered in the light. She flipped open the box flap and pulled out a deck of cards lined with silver leaf on the edges. She shuffled them like a seasoned black-jack dealer at a casino and spread them out on the table in front of me with a flourish.

“Pick three,” she said, indicating the cards with her eyes. I chuckled nervously. Something felt out of place. Like deja-vu, or like I was stepping out of time. I felt strangely apprehensive as I touched the cards. I tapped one, and she pulled it out of the deck and set it on the table with a sharp slapping sound. We repeated this process for cards two and three.

She turned them over one by one.

“Hmm,” she said. “This is interesting.” I rolled my eyes. Of course it was.

“What?” I found myself asking. I was anxious in spite of myself.

“Your first card is The Moon, which represents illusion, unconscious truths, things hidden beneath the surface, and not seeing reality clearly…” she mused. She finally looked up at me as though trying to read my mind. She raised an eyebrow and continued.

“Your second card is The Two of Swords, which represents self-imposed blindness, and a refusal to integrate opposing truths…” She trailed off again, rubbing her chin with her hand. “Sound familiar?” She asked, a smile playing on her lips. I shuddered.

“Your final card is…oh! The Tower,” she said dramatically. I groaned, though I didn’t know why. I’d never been into tarot before…right? I asked myself, suddenly unsure.

“The Tower is all about false structures collapsing, revelation, and reality breaking through. Something you’ve been struggling with or trying to achieve is about to crumble to allow something new to take its place.” She mused again, her smile turning wicked.

“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” She crooned, and suddenly all I could see was her eyes. I broke out into a sweat and excused myself, claiming I needed some air and that I would call her. I dashed out into the street and wiped the sweat that had broken out on my face. I needed to get home and lie down. Everything suddenly felt like it was spinning.

By the time I arrived home, I felt dehydrated and gulped down two cups of water before I noticed my wife sitting on the couch, staring at me.

“I scheduled you an appointment with a therapist for this Tuesday,” she said. She stood up from couch and slid a business card across the counter to me while I leaned my head over the sink, gasping for air.

…to be continued…

Summer yawned out before me and I was not looking forward to the hot weather, the long days, which meant longer working hours, and the unpredictable tenure of traffic. Summer time was chaos, in my opinion, and the lengthy days only inflicted pain and suffering on those of us who still had to maintain a regular 9-5. For those of us with clients, that also meant incessant emails and text messages after-hours because, somehow, more daylight meant fewer boundaries to some people.

I had been seeing Annalise regularly and that helped stave off some of the brain melt I was experiencing at the hands of undiagnosed depression, anxiety, and general overwhelm. Over the last few months, my wife suggested that I go see a therapist, but I shrugged her off. I didn’t have time. Even if I did, what was a therapist going to tell me that I didn’t already know? ‘You need to breathe and count to ten when you’re angry’? ‘You should try coloring books to relieve stress’? Or something else equally stupid? No, I didn’t want to waste money on a tight budget on stupid solutions I could look up on the Internet, anyway.

I knew what was wrong with me: everything. My job, my romantic life, my social life, my financial life, my hopes and dreams; everything. As an attorney, I know what it is like for people to come to you with their problems, expecting you to be their savior. I didn’t see how therapy was any different. I would be paying someone — who was no more than a random human being, essentially — to keep my withered hopes alive.

No thanks.

Instead, kept seeing Annalise. I liked her. She was fun, energetic, funny. She kept me distracted from how much I hated everything outside the clay studio. Sometimes I took her classes and pretended to just be another student; sometimes I went into the studio when it was just her and me and she would give me pointers. We tried going out on dates outside the studio, but our schedules didn’t match up. If I was free, she was scheduled to teach; if she was free, I was in court. So we started making date nights at the studio. I’d bring some wine, and she’d bring cheese and crackers, or something like that. It was a beautiful, blissful oasis in a dingy, dirty warehouse, but it cocooned me in a serenity that I rarely felt.

Before long, though, I felt that creeping darkness and restlessness settle into my bones. My brain started to vibrate and fizz like shaken champagne. I struggled to fall asleep again and tossed and turned, waking up my wife who bore it with heaving sighs but no words. Not wanting to start a fight, I got out of bed and slept in the spare bedroom.

When I realized that Annalise wasn’t the answer to my life’s problems, I again turned my wife’s and my nightly ritual of pretending to watch TV into finding a new Tinder Girl. As I scrolled aimlessly through the thousands of faces online, I felt a small twinge of disgust with myself. I was swiping through human beings like I would swipe through paint swatches.

Next, next, next, oh…maybe? Nah. Next, next, next…

The guilt I felt had less to do with my marriage than with the slow erosion of my soul, trying to conjure human connection through something as soulless and commercialized as a dating app.

Whatever.

Next, next, next…

I came across a girl with dark hair and dark skin beneath dark shades. I was immediately intrigued. The background of her shaded photo was a party or concert of some type. All her other profile photos showed her in varying degrees of partying at raves or concerts. In one photo, she wore bootie shorts and cat ears; then a neon green bikini and biker boots in another with desert sand dunes in the background; a third photo featured sleeked back hair in a knit tank tucked into smartly tailored jeans with a DJ booth in the background.

This girl knew how to have fun.

I wanted to have fun.

“Hey,” I messaged as inconspicuously as I could manage while my wife sat next to me, doomscrolling on her own phone. I peered at her out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was enmeshed in her phone. She was, her head bowed down low, the beginning of her jowls starting to droop into her scrunched up neck. I thought about taking a photo of her to show her what she looked like, but she hated it when I did that. Besides, now is not the time!

“You look like you know where the next party is! What are you getting into this weekend?”

I clicked send without overthinking it. I couldn’t agonize over the suavity of my Tinder message to a stranger — especially with my wife sitting right next to me. But the thrill of deceiving the person sitting right next to galloped darkly through my veins. Riding the emotionally bankrupt high of treating human beings like paint colors, I continued looking. Each swipe felt as morally bankrupt as the last, and each message as hollow. But I felt alive, like a hidden part of me had awakened to something dark and dangerous.

I stumbled on a brown-skinned girl with light brown hair surrounded by rolling hills so green they glowed iridescent against the purple clouds pregnant with rain behind her. Her smile was dazzling. I didn’t even bother to look at the other photos before sending her a message.

“Hey, how are you? Where are you in your profile photo? It looks beautiful.”

Sent.

Then I looked at the other photos. They showed her in various long, flowing gowns and always outdoors. Sometimes she presided over tarot cards and candles, other times over flowers and herbs. In some of the photos I could see dirt beneath her fingernails. Something about her made me want to get in the dirt with her. I could almost smell the rosemary she had buried her face in in one of her photos.

“Babe? I’m going to go to bed,” my wife said softly, jarring me away from my phone with a jolt. She looked at me sideways when I started at the sound of her voice. It was like being woken from a dream that I wasn’t ready to wake up from.

“Oh yea, of course. G’night,” I said.

“G’night,” she murmured, then padded up the stairs, down the hallway, up the second set of stairs, and off to bed.

The notification bubble popped up on my phone for the Tinder app. It was the party girl!

“Hey, yea! My friends and I are going to see Jaxon Dots playing at The Space Lounge this weekend. Wanna come?”

I had never heard of either of those things and I rolled my eyes at myself for being so uncool. Was I uncool? Or am I just out of touch? Is that the same thing? I wondered.

“Yes, absolutely!” I started to type. No, that sounds lame.

“Okay, yea, thanks for the invite!” I sent instead. “Where should I meet you?”

“@ The Space Lounge” came the exasperated reply. I winced and rolled my eyes again.

“Sorry, I meant, do you want to get drinks before? I thought it might be easier to connect beforehand than try to find you at the event.” I tried to soften my tone but kept a hint of derision. I am not the only dense one in this conversation, I thought.

“My friends and I are going to The Park before to pre-game if you want to meet us there? Like, 9ish.”

I swallowed hard. Oh God, what did I get myself into? I was going to have to rally to go out for drinks at 9pm. Ugh.

“Yea, that’d be great. See you then!” This is what you asked for! I closed the app. I had enough for the day. I was going to have to spend the entire week mentally preparing myself for this.

But it would be good. I needed this. I needed to get out of my skin and be anyone but myself.

By the time Saturday rolled around, I had the good fortune that my wife manufactured a girls’ night out with her friends, so I had the convenient excuse of plausible deniability through vague “plans with my friends.” I dusted off several of my “coolest” shirts that resembled more business casual, weekend dad than cool, elder Millennial who still did cool social things. Eventually I settled on a black t-shirt that I usually used as an undershirt for my dark button-downs. And jeans. I flicked a little wax through my hair like I was in college, applied cologne in the usual places and winced. It smelled so corporate. Oh well, it was cheap, anyway, so it would probably fade by the time I got to The Park, anyway.

The Park was a dimly lit, atmospheric bar designed to look like a park on the inside. There was AstroTurf instead of concrete or wood floors, living trees scattered around the bar, the smell of charcoal grills, and hot dogs and hamburgers wafted through the air, and the music was backyard barbecue in Ohio meets dad-yacht-rock, giving the venue a feeling like you were definitely in a park surrounded by people you didn’t want to be around listening to music you didn’t want to hear. But it worked somehow.

I shrugged and walked in.

I saw Tinder Girl #2, Jessica, seated at a long picnic table in the back of the bar surrounded by a cadre of people decked out in colorful, neon spandex or black, chic club-wear. Jessica was wearing black, chic club-ware.

Oh thank God I chose the black T, I thought. Unlike Annalise, there was something about the haughty attitude of everyone at Jessica’s table that made me feel like I needed these people to like me. It felt like being in Jr. High and approaching the popular kids table for the first time, trying to jostle my way into acceptance into an upper echelon of society.

“Hey,” I said casually, tossing the word over my shoulder at Jessica. She stopped sipping the yellow-tinged liquid with her straw, her perfectly round and glossed lips parting momentarily.

She stared at me without recognition for a few beats.

“I’m Jamie,” I added casually. She continued staring. Anxiety wound like a snake through my gut. “From Tinder?” I asked meekly. Her eyes widened and then she nodded emphatically, taking another sip from her drink.

“Oh hey, Jamie! That’s right. Glad you could make it! Come, sit down!” She motioned for me to sit, but just like the lumpy couch in Annalise’s studio, no one moved to make room for me. Jamie had bent her head to listen to something one of her neon-bedecked friends was saying into her ear. Her other friends eyed me disinterestedly.

“I’m going to go up and order a drink,” I said loudly over the din of yacht-rock and conversation. “You want anything?” I added.

Jessica nodded emphatically again.

“Yea, they have limoncello spritz! can you believe it? I need a refill!” She held up her near-empty glass and shook it in the air. I laughed and nodded, retreating to the solemnity of the long line at the bar. After jostling my way to the bar, and paying half a tank of gas’s worth for two drinks, I returned to find Jessica and her crew getting up to leave. My shoulders sagged.

“Hey, I got your drink… Is everyone leaving?” I asked, setting her drink down in front of her.

“Oh! Oh my God, yes! But, here, chug!” She took the drink I offered her and sucked the entire limoncello into the straw in about 5 second, then motioned for me to inhale my own gin and tonic. Ugh, I thought. Oh well! This is what you wanted! I reminded myself. I gave her another weak smile and a raised eyebrow as I chugged the acrid gin and tonic down. She laughed and clapped when I finished.

“Okay, yea let’s go! My friend wants to catch the opener! Plus then we can make sure we get a good spot on the balcony!” She said, excitedly, throwing on the thin fabric that was her coat.

We all pushed our way through the bar, out into the street, and the neon-kids led the way, whooping and dancing on the sidewalk. The club-wear kids laughed and whooped, but didn’t dance. Jessica turned and winked at me.

Okay, maybe this night won’t be so bad, I thought. I winked back.

The darkness, the stink of sweat, the chalky taste of fog machines, and the endless sonic onslaught knocked me on my ass the moment I walked into the gigantic warehouse turned-21st-Century-rave. Jessica walked in like she owned the place. With her head flung back and her arms overhead she paraded through the dizzying array of bouncing and bumping bodies to her predetermined “best spot” in the venue on the second floor balcony. With a flick of her wrist she sent her neon and clubwear friends to the corners of the balcony to overtake it like the Wicked Witch of the West sicced her flying monkeys on Dorothy and her unsuspecting troupe of misfits. Before long, we had the balcony railing to ourselves and the best view in the house.

“Give me your finger!” She screamed at me over the bone-jarring bass. Confused, I held up my pointed finger to her and she snatched it, stuck it in her mouth while eying me so seductively my knees started to give out, then dumped some crystalline powder on the tip of my finger.

“Suck!” She screamed at me again. She repeated the routine with her own finger, then the finger of the friends closest in proximity to her.

I stuck my finger in my mouth and winced at the bitter powder puckering my face. Jessica laughed at me and jumped up and down, holding my hands. I jumped with her and turned to face the DJ booth, erupting violently into scissors of light slicing through the fake fog. She turned to me and kissed me passionately on the lips, dragging my bottom lip with her as she backed her face away from mine.

Oh man, this is going to be a good night.

…to be continued…

The spare t-shirt I had unceremoniously and inconspicuously dumped into the backseat of my car before leaving for work this morning sat crumpled next to me in the passenger seat. I had moved it up on my drive to Annalise’s pottery class in gleefully restrained anticipation, my insides fluttering like a pre-teen wallflower’s at a school dance. It was an old t-shirt from my undergraduate days that still somehow fit, despite years of never following the proper washing or drying instructions, and every edge frayed and pock-marked with little holes where the sewing finally surrendered.

I was nearing the end of my hour long drive out to Annalise’s pottery studio, the traffic being relatively manageable, or, I was in a good enough mood that it didn’t irritate me as much. I was streaming a curated 90s playlist by the streaming app I was using and slipping along memory lane to my college years, when I hated life slightly less because my parents’ pending divorce was a few hundred miles away and I could pretend to be anyone in the massive student body of my state school. Visions of sunny days and driving to sunlit lakes hemmed in by surrounding forests, meeting friends on rocky shorelines and pooling together fragmented foods and drinks to make a picnic, blurred with reality as I drove along the stretch of highway in stop and go traffic. The music and the memories, and the promise of meeting Annalise for the first time, coalesced to lift my spirits out of the grey and dismal flat line in which I usually existed.

The pottery studio was in a three-story brick warehouse, tattooed with black grates over the windows, resembling the face tattoos of the very people the grates were designed to keep out. Inside, the building smelled like the accumulated dust of decades and the stagnant air of nearly as many years. The elevator was whimsically graffitied in a purposeful way, with lots of colored paint pens and some permanent marker, no stickers or artwork marred by anyone else’s carefully curated rebellion. I punched the push button elevator button to the third floor, having to press hard to force the analog mechanism far enough back into elevator’s gears to register the request. With a lurch the elevator jumped from the ground level and then slowly whirred itself to the third floor.

It was hot as hell on the third floor, even though it wasn’t quite summer yet outside. The air tasted dry and dusty and I coughed upon exiting the elevator. For some reason, my physical reaction to the environment registered as weakness, a feeling I had never been able to fully overcome as someone who suffered from intense seasonal allergies. I always felt like I was “just a runny-nosed kid” whenever my body reacted violently to its environment, like I wasn’t capable of the stoicism of so many action-movie heroes. Why I felt I needed to be action-movie-hero-tough was an existential question that had always eluded me, but I wanted to aspire to.

I approached the bright blue door Annalise told me marked her studio, known as the “The Blue Room,” and keyed in the code she had given me to enter. Inside it was painted bright white with yellow LED globe lights, mimicking the incandescent ‘Edison bulbs’ to add to the industrial appearance of the studio — in case you forgot you were in a warehouse that hadn’t been cleaned in a generation.

“Hi!” A cheerful young blonde woman chirped at me as I entered. “Are you here for the ‘Friends with Pottery’ class?? What is your name?” A few people meandered around the studio in aprons, others were seated on a lumpy, dark blue couch that could have been brand new or secondhand, and probably purchased specifically for that ambiguity. The people in the couches looked anxious and stared up at everyone and everything in the room in quiet anticipation. They must be my classmates.

“Jamie,” I said flatly and extended my hand automatically to shake. The blonde girl’s smile fell from her face as she looked at my outstretched hand competing with her careful, two-handed grip on her clip board. Remembering I was around artists and not stiff, sociopathic attorneys, I dropped my hand and smiled. I ran my hand through my hair and offered an apologetic smile, something my wife said used to ‘melt her butter’ when we first met.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just came from work. Bad habits die hard, I guess. Annalise invited me.” The blonde girl’s smile returned tentatively and she forced a shy laugh.

“Oh sure! Bad habits! I get it. Yep, I have your name here on the list!” She checked my name off on her clipboard with a flourish. “If you want to have a seat, feel free while we wait for the rest of the class; or if you need to use the restroom, it’s down the hall to the left. You just keep going left until you see it! You can’t miss it!” I nodded my thanks and wandered over to the lump couch. I didn’t see a place to sit and no one offered to make one for me, so I stood awkwardly by the arm, making the waiting around feel like the beginning of every networking event before people got buzzed enough to start talking to one another.

“Jamie? Is that you?” I heard behind me. I faced The Blue Room door and saw a woman with slanted eyes and chestnut hair worn in two braids peering around the blue door. Her face split into a broad smile, revealing white teeth all the same size and shape between thin lips.

“Hey, yea, Annalise?” I said, letting my mouth fall into a smile, too. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. Thanks for the invite.”

She stepped out around the blue door towards me, reaching out her hands in an overly affectionate handshake, grabbing my one hand up to my forearm with both of her small, delicate hands. She wore dark overalls over a black ribbed tank top and was splattered with paint and gray clay.

“I’m glad you could finally make it,” she said cheerfully. “Thanks for making the time. I was starting to wonder if I’d ever get to meet you in person.” I shrugged and ran my hand through my hair again, trying to feign nonchalance to fight off the rising irritation at whether her statement was an attack or mere observation.

“Well you know, ‘ain’t no rest for the wicked,’” I said, giving her my sexiest side eye that I could muster. What is with the cliches today? I demanded of myself as I stared at her. She blushed slightly and turned away, folding her clay-stained hands in front of her.

“Mm-hmm,” she said. “I’m not teaching today, but I think we’re going to get started soon.” She turned from me to face the blonde girl. “Emily, do you know who’s teaching today?” She asked.

The blonde girl looked at Annalise like she was shocked that anyone would speak to her, and even more shocked that she should be asked to do anything.

“I thought you were teaching,” she said blankly.

“Could you check the schedule?” Annalise said, as though she was going to add, “idiot,” but didn’t. I immediately decided I liked Annalise a lot. Emily sighed lightly and slumped the computer mouse into action and stared at the computer that was right in front of her.

“Oh, I guess it’s Tyler, not you,” she said, without a hint of embarrassment.

“Do you know where Tyler is?” Annalise asked slowly, her head cocked slightly to the side.

“No,” Emily said.

“Do you think you could call him?” Annalise’s eyes widened as she continued tilting her head at Emily in encouragement. Emily sighed again, much more visibly this time. I nearly burst out laughing, but refrained. I had an associate attorney at my office who acted like that whenever he was asked to do his job. Kids are great.

Emily picked up the office phone, paused, set it back down.

“I don’t know Tyler’s number,” she said helplessly. This time Annalise sighed.

“It’s listed on the schedule, Emily,” Annalise said, exasperated. Emily nodded and looked back at the computer screen, located the phone number (supposedly), and began dialing. A large man with a man bun suddenly burst into The Blue Room, smelling of cigarettes and a complete lack of accountability.

“Hey everybody, sorry I’m late!” He bellowed good-naturedly. Emily sighed again, this time in relief. It was clear she was terrified to actually use the phone.

“Let’s get started! Everybody grab an apron and a seat at a wheel,” he said, gesturing to the aprons then the pottery wheels set in a circle in the center of the room. Annalise smiled at me as we lined up to get our aprons and then choose our wheel.

“Artists,” Annalise whispered to me confidentially. I let out a small chuckle.

“Glad you didn’t have to teach the class you invited me to. I wouldn’t want anyone to think the teacher was picking favorites,” I said. She smiled and winked at me.

“Who says you’d be my favorite?” She asked. I laughed. I was starting to really like her.

Since everyone had invited someone, everyone paired off in a relatively intelligent manner, leaving two wheels in the center. Annalise and I squeezed in and ignored everyone to her right and my left, just as they did to us, a common function of any group activity where everyone wanted to pretend there was no group but couldn’t afford a private lesson.

Tyler stood in the center of the circle going over basic descriptions of where the clay was, how to weigh it, where the various tools we might use during the class could be found, and finished with cleanup procedures. Once that rote spiel was finished and his consciousness returned to his eyes, he hacked off a chunk of clay and began instructions on how to wedge it to remove any air bubbles, but assured us that it probably didn’t need to be wedged properly since it was recycled clay and sent through a machine for compression into the long tube shapes we saw before us.

As he moved about the room and centered himself on the teacher’s wheel, Annalise picked at the clay flaking off on her fingers and let the flakes fall into the water tub attached to the wheel to catch stray water as the clay was wetted and shaped. The falling clay flakes reminded me of the flakes of parsley my wife had tried vainly to flick off of her wet hands as she cleaned up dinner the other night. I felt a pang of regret and shame that I wasn’t home. That I was here, without her. I smiled bleakly at Annalise in an attempt to shake off the guilt. She smiled back brightly.

Finally we were able to attack our own lumps of clay into misshapen horrors. Except Annalise, of course. She did this. She kept making and remaking the same cup or bowl to show me different techniques to raise up the side evenly, something I struggled with. I was trying not to be angry at myself for not getting it perfectly the first time. But it was infuriating how easy she made it look, like she was teasing shapes from the clay with only a feather light touch of magic, the clay or bowl materializing as if had been there the whole time and I just wasn’t looking hard enough. She giggled like a young girl at my mistakes.

“You can get as much clay as you want, it’s okay. It’s the point of this class. Well, that and to sell you on buying more classes,” she laughed apologetically. “Which, I would recommend you buy. You’re not very good.” Her eyes crinkled in laughter.

“Where’s the part of the class where you sit behind me and guide my hands like that one movie?” I teased.

“Oh, you mean that movie?” She asked, pointing to the poster beside the blue door. Sure enough, there was a black and white movie poster of a shirtless Patrick Swayze seated behind Demi Moore and a clay wheel, topped with unmolded clay clasped between both of their hands. I laughed again.

“Yea, that movie,” I said. “When do we get to that part of class?” I asked. Annalise laughed.

“It’s not usually part of my curriculum, but I can ask Tyler if you want?” Her eyes sparkled mischievously. I rolled my eyes and tossed them over to Tyler and his man-bun. He was wearing sandals and bent over the wheel of two girls, his shirt flapping away from his waistband and exposing his young man’s flabby, and hairy, beer belly.

“Uh, no, nevermind, I’m good,” I said quickly, flashing a small smirk at Annalise. She laughed and reached over and touched my hands on the clay.

“Here, you need to apply even pressure with just your fingertips and it will help, trust me,” she said, her eyes twinkled mischievously again, and I felt like she wasn’t talking about the clay any more. “You’re using your whole hand and it’s difficult to maintain proper pressure. But if you use just your fingertips, you can gauge and adjust the pressure much more precisely.” I stared up at her from my beneath my brows, wondering if she was slipping in sexual innuendo. Her hands were still on mine, her fingertips dancing across the backs of my hands as she spoke.

After several more minutes of her undivided attention and careful guidance, I made something that resembled the leaning Tower of Pisa and could conceivably hold a liquid.

“So, are you coming back?” Tyler blasted in my face upon seeing my hands dancing with Annalise’s. She rolled her eyes, but stared at me from the corners of her eyes.

“Yes, I think I like this,” I said evenly, staring directly at Annalise.

“Great!” Tyler bellowed. “Let me know if you want some information on our upcoming class schedule!”

Annalise and I lingered outside the heavy, industrial metal door of the former warehouse, the soft liminal magic of purple dusk filtering around us. My fingers tangled with hers in my reticence to let this night end. I felt alive for the first time in years. A gentle spring breeze caressed us and pushed me towards her. I tentatively placed my hand on her hip, barely making contact. I wasn’t sure what to do or what she would accept this early in our relationship. She grabbed the hand hovering over her hip and placed it firmly on her body. I leaned into her invitation and gently brushed my lips against hers while my other hand gently cradled the back of her head.

“So,” she said, pulling away shyly. “See you next week?”

I nodded dutifully.

“Yes,” I gasped, before I could think about whether this was a promise I could keep. Fuck it, I though. I’ll figure it out. I need this.

…to be continued…

In a deviation from my norm of introspective writing, this next series of articles is going to be a short story about compartmentalization.

The story seeks to answer what happens to us as we compartmentalize our lives.

I hope you enjoy it.

My silverware clinked against my plate as my wife busied herself around the kitchen, her new apron worn unironically over the new polyester dress she ordered from Amazon a day or two before.

“I just needed something new,” she said exasperatedly. She was responding to the eye roll I hadn’t unleashed yet when the credit card purchase alert interrupted my doomscrolling. We were sitting next to each other on the couch, pretending to watch TV, an activity we promised to do together as a substitute for conversation because at least if we were paying attention to the same thing, it seemed like marital cohesion. We didn’t explicitly agree to that as the reason; it was merely the unspoken antidote to our failing marriage. On the rare occasions we went out together in public, we could talk about the movies and TV shows we watched together when we ran out of other rousing topics over drinks with other couples.

She flitted around the kitchen like a hummingbird, buoyed by the fleeting joy of her latest purchase, busying herself already with cleaning up the dinner I had barely finished. I scraped the last of the sauce concocted from an online recipe for which we did not have all of the ingredients. It was a fine sauce. My wife was, if nothing else, very good at making something out of nothing; something I often found women in general were good at.

“The judge ruled against me, again, today,” I said lamely, the heat from the embarrassment and ire of my client fresh in my mind again. My wife clicked her tongue.

“Again?” She lamented, still humming away in the kitchen, cleaning up the last of the modest mess she had made, parsley flakes stubbornly clinging to her wet hands as she flicked them over the kitchen sink. She never understood the depth of misery that I experienced in the courtroom. I had been an attorney for over 10 years, our marriage consisting of seven of those years, the courtship to the relationship beginning just after law school ended.

In truth, even my colleagues did not understand the depth of shame and anger I felt at losing in court. They were able to let it go and move on, go golfing on a Tuesday to shake off the loss and be back in front of the same judge the next day on something else with no hard feelings. I, however, harbored an animosity towards every judge and every opponent. It seemed like there was a conspiracy against me to make me the losingest lawyer in the entire state.

“Yes, again,” I said through gritted teeth. I set my knife and fork down on my plate. She swooped in and snatched my plate, dumping it carefully in the sink in the island of our four bedroom, three-bath, three-story townhome.

“Have you ever thought of working less? Or finding a different job?” She asked. Her tone was sincere as far as I could tell, but she was still flitting around the kitchen as though being stationary would somehow allow the miasma of my sour mood to penetrate the glow of her choice to self-soothe with capitalism.

“No,” I said flatly. “It had never occurred to me to work less or find a different job,” I seethed sarcastically. I placed my hands flat on the table and stood up. Her eyes were round in surprise at my, apparently, sudden movement.

“Well, maybe you could ask around. Maybe one of your lawyer-friends could offer you something. At least then you wouldn’t be running your own law firm. Maybe that’s what’s stressing you out,” she said. I scoffed and rolled my eyes.

“What is stressing me out is all this,” I gestured widely to the brand new construction of our home, the new paint smell still faint if you sat still long enough. “And your inability to find a job that actually makes money.”

She glared at me.

“Doing Door Dash and other odd jobs allows me to be home for you,” she said coldly. I rolled my eyes and sighed. I was not in the mood to lose another argument before the day was out.

“You want to watch TV?” I sighed, gesturing to the couch and the TV. She sighed back and nodded. She unleashed the apron and flounced over in her new dress, the polyester still containing the plastic smell from the multiple bags it was shipped in. It was a lovely emerald green color on her olive skin. I could tell she wanted me to compliment her, but I was feeling mean and less than generous, so I didn’t. She pouted as she sat next to me, her feet curled under her. I knew if I ignored her long enough, she would eventually get up in the middle of the movie, when the action scene was just starting to ramp up, to go change and then come back down and ask me what had happened.

“Do you want to change your clothes before we watch the movie?” I asked as innocently as I could manage, trying to massage my tone into not only nonchalance, but compassion, as though I was looking out for her best interests.

“If I wanted to change, I would have. I’ll change when I’m ready to change,” she snapped.

“It’s just that you might be more comfortable if you change now,” I suggested, again trying to school my voice into one of concern rather than annoyance. “Then you won’t have to miss any of the movie,” I added quickly, before my brain could stop myself. I sat down on the couch and closed my eyes.

“If that happens, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out,” she sneered and sat down next to me, clicking off the lights with a voice command to Alexa. I turned on the TV and flipped through the myriad of tiled images, offering us a plethora of choices each as unappealing as the last. After we both dodged responsibility for choosing the cinematic masterpiece that trapped us on the couch for the next hour or two, we eventually settled on something that we had seen before. We both feigned disinterest in our phones for the first 15 minutes of the 40 minute show, then eventually resigned that we would not attack one another for getting out our phones to doomscroll rather than honor our flimsy promise to watch TV together.

Years ago, I had purchased a privacy screen for my phone. I said it was for work, for when I sat in court and nosey other attorneys, or bored self-represented litigants, would peer over my arm to see what was flashing on my screen (rather than theirs). This was true. But it was also for my daily use. I hated it when people tried to look at my phone. Most of the time I was doing something innocuous. But as I sat next to my wife, the woman who had suddenly materialized in my life after law school, almost like an apparition harkening back to the proverbial golden years of home-grown Americana family-life, I was grateful for the privacy screen.

I flipped open my Tinder account and found a handful of connections and one message. It had been a thread I had stoking like a dying fire for a few weeks, now. The woman on the other end, someone who lived roughly a 40 to 60 minute drive, or an hour to an hour and a half bus or train ride, depending on traffic and day of the week, away. I flipped through the connections to see if there was anyone there I wanted to message, savoring the moment before I opened the message thread from Annalise, my Tinder Girl. I sent a few paltry “Hi, how are you?” messages to some of my recent connections, then let my thumb hover over Annalise’s image. I could see the opening line of her message, answering my question about how her week had been.

“It was OK, nothing 2 exciting. Ready 4…” It began, placed implacably next to the circle of her profile photo. I glanced over at my wife, still seated with her feet tucked under her, her face also buried in her phone, scrolling endlessly. For all I knew she was scrolling through the hundreds of messages on her own alias Tinder profile. I often mused at the potential irony that we would both match in another town under fake names but profile photos that would be recognizable to both of us, since we had been taking each others’ pictures for nearly a decade. There was no where to run, even in the supposed endless anonymity of the Internet. I shrugged internally and opened the message.

“It was OK, nothing 2 exciting. Ready 4 the weekend! U?” It read. Predictably.

“Hey, sorry I missed this over the weekend.” I typed and hit send prematurely. Almost immediately I saw the ellipsis bubble appear in our thread. My stomach tightened slightly in panic as I tried to quickly compose my excuse before she could finish composing her message.

“Y did u miss this?” Her allegiance to shortening words into letters and numbers irked me; while a part of me was comforted by her throw back to AOL Instant Messenger shorthand, much like my wife’s efforts to throwback to an era of domesticity that hadn’t existed for decades. I peered at my wife out of the corner of my eye, making sure she was amply distracted by at least one of the two screens in front of her. I heard her sigh and shift on the couch, the itch to change her clothes mounting with each moment. The first episode of the series we had seen twice before had ended and the second one was ramping up for its initial round of plot device. She was being stubborn, I knew; still waiting for me to say something about the dress before she put it away, likely to never be worn again. Even less likely to be returned within the return window. Now it was my turn to sigh.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I wrote back hastily, irritated at the seeming accusation and being caught, though I hadn’t done anything to be caught…at least by Tinder Girl. Other than not reading her response about her week during the entire weekend.

She sent me a crying-laughing emoji and I relaxed a little. She was busting my chops, as usual.

Annalise was an artist who never took anything too seriously. Her shoulder length, chestnut brown hair was invariably plaited into two braids, one on each side of her head, then tied back in a loose ponytail as she worked on her pottery and other art projects. She invited me to multiple “pottery with friends” sessions at her studio where she taught, but I always excused myself with some work obligation, whether it was true or not. I told her I was a CPA rather than attorney, just in case my profession should somehow ever cause me as much trouble in my personal life as it did during the pestilence of hours that make up my day.

I sent her an emoji with two flat lines for eyes and a flat line for the mouth, followed quickly by a crying-laughing emoji. I staunchly maintain that I am not just a lawyer, but a human being as well, and therefore have to use emojis to reinforce my humanity more than the average person.

“Sooooo…..” she began, hinting at the inevitable invitation.

“Yes.” I said, before she could ask. “Yes, I’ll go.”

“How did you know what I was going to ask?” She asked, so incredulous she forgot to abbreviate words with letters and numbers.

“I’ve been dabbling in the dark arts.” I messaged back, dryly. I knew she would love it, though.

“Oooo! <3 it!” She responded. I smiled.

“What time and where?”

“Same as every time: my studio, 7pm. No last minute tax deadlines before then?” She messaged. I stared at the screen, forgetting for a moment my lie about my profession.

“No.” I messaged back simply. “See you Friday.”

“Thursday.” She corrected.

“Yes, Thursday.” I closed the app and added the event to my calendar, disguised as a lawyer-happy hour and networking event, noting the address just two blocks away, in case my wife decided to look it up and join me. I could always feign that I put the address in incorrectly, or that she had put it in incorrectly. She was bad with directions and easily flustered.

By the time I looked up from my phone, she had disappeared, gone to change her clothes and giving me the final passive-aggression of the night: going to bed without saying ‘goodnight.’ Unperturbed, I folded my hands behind my head and leaned back on the couch to watch the show with uninterrupted interest and contentment for the first time.

…to be continued…

1. I was approached by a man while I was sunbathing on a rocky beach in Montenegro with my hat over my face and earbuds in my ears; and

2. I watched a clip from a 2004 move, “Shall We Dance?” featuring Susan Sarandon’s character answering the question: why do people get married?

From these two relatively insignificant moments, I have unlocked a pattern of behavior and thinking in myself that has finally allowed me to choose myself.

In the first instance, this man on the beach approached me by repeatedly saying, “Excuse me, miss? Miss? Miss? Excuse me…” It was only after several of these that I finally realized he was talking to me. I removed my baseball cap from my face and pulled out my earbuds to see a scruffy looking, thin man with a blonde 5’o’clock shadow, light hair, light eyes, and his fingernails rimmed with black. He reminded me of many a man I would encounter in the Ohio valley. The kind of man that worked on cars and smoked cigarettes, whose nails were perpetually dirty, and whose life was a series of bad decisions and occasional run-ins with the law. In other words, he was exactly my type when I was a teenager and young adult.

He asked me about the wifi he apparently picked up on his phone as he walked onto the beach.

Right before this man, who was from the Netherlands, approached me, I had been thinking to myself that I was going to leave soon because it was starting to get chilly as the sun had disappeared behind the late afternoon clouds. But I was listening to an audio book and I had maybe three minutes left in the chapter, so I was going to go at the conclusion.

Enter the man from the Netherlands who reminded me of every bad choice in men I had ever made.

I knew immediately that this guy was going to bother me, waste my time, and that he was a no-good piece of shit human being. That seems like a harsh judgement, but, a woman’s instinct never lies. What does lie to a woman is her social conditioning to smooth things over, to appease, to be polite and accommodating. And that is exactly what lied to me in the moment I heard myself say “yes,” when he asked if he could sit down. Now, I could have said, “yes, I was just leaving anyway, have a nice day,” and put my clothes on and left.

But I didn’t. And I have spent the hours since that moment hating myself for it.

I didn’t sleep with the guy, or kiss him, or even hug the creepy weirdo. But I did waste about 30 minutes of my life, inexplicably answering this man’s questions about my recent divorce, and listening to him tell me his thoughts on how I should be spending my vacation (which consisted of me doing it all wrong, naturally).

Why? I asked myself every time I heard myself answer his questions. I knew deep down inside I was doing it because of my conditioning to appease and placate and not cause a fuss; to not be perceived as cold or impolite or, God forbid, “a bitch.” But I did it anyway.

I watched myself, in real time, abandon myself.

I sat there answering his questions and hating myself for it, but trying to give myself grace because I knew I would soon get up and leave as I did actually tell him that I was planning on going home when he invited me to go to the nearby restaurant for coffee. He scowled at this but kept talking because he somehow knew that I did not have enough boundaries to simply leave, and so could at least keep me trapped on the beach.

Then he stuck out his hand. At first I didn’t understand it. It was like he was waiting to read my palm or something. Inexplicably, stupidly, unbelievably, I gave him my hand. Not two seconds later, he started rubbing the knuckle of my index finger with his thumb while I was answering another one of his stupid questions (the answer to which he was not listening to, but instead ogling my exposed legs beneath the arms I had wrapped protectively around my knees). I withdrew my hand and told him I was leaving. He again scowled, but dashed away as though I had scalded him.

I was so relieved he was gone and the interaction was over; but I was so mad at myself for talking to him, to sharing intimate details about myself with him, and to letting him touch me. I still cringe at the thought, regardless of how brief it was.

Then I saw the Instagram clip from “Shall We Dance?” and I was dumbstruck with understanding. Suddenly all my stupid decisions and poor choices in men fell around me like a house of cards and I felt so naked and exposed, but understood. Someone else had put into words this longing that I could never fully describe myself.

In answering her own question about why people get married, Susan Sarandon’s character says:

“We marry because we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet. I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness’.”

My Midlife Crisis World Tour, as I have jokingly referred to it, has been anything but a joke. In reality, it has been a Midlife Reckoning. I have taken stock of the last 30-40 years of my life and overwhelmingly found and felt that I have come up short.

‘The math ain’t mathing,’ as they say.

I have described in lurid detail the emotional flagellation I have put myself through in prior posts as I have realized that, in the ledger of my life, I have paid out and paid forward at a far higher rate than the return on my proverbial investments in my romantic partners. And I always did it with the doe-eyed hopefulness of a puppy that, some day, the love of my life would help me as I had helped and sacrificed for him.

I never chose myself at any point in my life.

On my 40th birthday I said that I was afraid of being invisible. But I didn’t know what that meant. Now, I think it means that I am afraid of not being chosen, because I was never chosen as a child; I am afraid of not being witnessed, because very few people have ever truly seen me; I am afraid of not being protected, because no one ever protected me; I am afraid of living small and dying as an ordinary, unremarkable person who never left any impact on the world. I am afraid that I will pass into obscurity and, for some reason, the idea of finding a “one true love,” a “life partner” was something that had such a strong gravitational pull to soothe that aching childhood wound that I let it override all my instincts and desires to choose myself. I believed that so long as one person in this whole world loved me, witnessed me, then I mattered, then I would not pass like a ghost through this world into obscurity.

I want a witness. I want many witnesses.

I want to be chosen and protected.

I want to write.

But being chosen and protection were never modeled for me. They never happened to me or for me. Sometimes, even, being in a relationship led to greater exposure of danger or discomfort. So I learned to tolerate unsafe or uncomfortable dynamics longer than I should; to normalize being unshielded; to assume I must manage situations myself; and simultaneously, to doubt my right to remove myself. And when the people who were supposed to protect me didn’t - or they made things worse or more dangerous, I learned the painful lesson that sometimes being with someone does not necessarily equal safety.

And this is the contradiction I have been struggling with my entire life. And now, at 40, I am grieving a life made up by the fact that nobody consistently gave me comfort, protection, or unconditional love.

Ergo, I find myself sitting on a beach entertaining a conversation with a man I know is going to find a way to cross my boundaries, or even fail to respect basic human decency, because I have met this man a hundred thousand times before.

He was my karate instructor who was nine years older than me and asked me out on a date the minute I turned 18 because, in his words, “I’ve been attracted to you since you were 11.”

He was my youth minister who was (also) nine years older than me who encouraged me to write lyrics for the youth group’s band, to sing in the choir, and to come watch a Christmas play that turned out only he and I went to (despite the implication being that it was a youth group activity).

He was my first ex-husband who would argue with me when I changed my mind about staying the night at his dude-bro house in college until I was completely worn down and finally gave in, even though I knew I wanted to back to my own apartment and recharge from having spent time with him in his dude-bro house.

He was the man who raped me in Peru.

He was the man who straddled me in the front seat of his car even though I didn’t want him to and raped me there.

He was every man who ever crossed a single boundary because I was too scared, too shocked, too conditioned to override my own discomfort in favor of society’s preference that I be silent and accommodating to the whims of men who felt entitled to me.

For some reason, for whatever reason, this man on the beach and these lines from “Shall We Dance?” triggered a reckoning in me that I cannot ignore. They have forced me to bear witness to myself and choose myself for the first time in my entire life.

At first I thought, I would love to just become another irascible, older woman. For the last two years I have joked about becoming a ‘bog witch.’ I can understand the appeal. If society is going to relegate me to the sidelines because of jowls and wrinkles and cellulite, then I am going to become as undesirable and repugnant as possible to simply avoid being forced to interact with society on society’s terms.

But I don’t really want to become a bog witch.

I still want to dress nice for myself. I still want to wear the bare minimum of makeup that I do wear for myself (I’ve never really been a makeup girlie, anyway). I still want to go out in public and experience life, and have a drink at a bar or cafe, for myself and by myself. I still want to experience the full flavor and color of life without the pressures of society bearing down on me to interact with men on their terms.

So I won’t.

I will start by choosing myself, my protecting myself, by witnessing myself. Because despite all these failures in boundary-setting and choosing myself and my comfort, I learned endurance, adaptation, pattern-identification, perception, and management. These are skills, too, just not the ones I wish I currently possessed.

On this world tour, I started to keep a list of things that I like, or that make me happy. The list is not coherent and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I enjoyed making the list and I plan to continue to add to it.

Because one thing I have learned on this trip is to start doing things that I like and that make me comfortable — for the pure and simple reason that my aloneness and isolation has left me no other choice than to do what I want.

That was my first step in choosing myself.

I know that sounds absolutely obvious and stupid, but I am sure there is more than one woman out there who can relate. Or, more likely there is a woman reading this and thinking, ‘this article isn’t helpful at all. ‘Choose myself’? that’s the best advice you’ve got??” I used to think like that, rather than actually do it. Because it is easier to remain unfinished so I can give myself over to finishing someone else’s unfinishedness. And that is what I have done in all of my past relationships: fallen in love with the potential of a man and nearly killed myself in helping him achieve his goals, setting aside my soul-truth out of some deep-seated fear that if I actually lived according to my soul-truth, I would fail, or it wouldn’t be as grand as I imagined, or it wouldn’t have the impact I hoped for. So I made myself small, and acted as the pulley system for men who had potential, but who were never capable or willing to be an equal partner in helping me achieve my goals.

I chose romantic relationships as the catalyst for a meaningful life because they were emotionally as exciting and intense as my inner world, rather than the steady stability of choosing myself and working steadily toward my own goals. Yet, I knew I was often emotionally alone in these relationships. So like a distorted feedback loop, my longing continued to grow into wondering whether someone would finally see me clearly enough that my existence felt real and meaningful. I kept sacrificing myself for the promise of being witnessed, but often I wasn’t truly seen anyway.

That’s why that quote from “Shall We Dance?” hit me so powerfully. It explains why people like me tolerate so much (or rather so little) in relationships. Not because I’m weak or stupid, but because being witnessed feels existentially stabilizing. Someone remembers my stories, my moods, notices when I’m gone, notices when I’m hurt, knows my inner world; someone can say, “I knew her. She was here.”

But my life experience has been a painful culmination in the realization that sometimes people can choose you, desire you, even love you in their way, and still not truly witness or protect you. And that’s one of the contradictions I’ve been grieving. The other is that in giving myself over to the potential of others, I have failed to realize my own potential.

I don’t want to disappear inside my own life any more.

I no longer fear invisibility.

I fear insignificance.

I cannot bear the idea that my life leaves no lasting mark. That the enormity of my internal existence leaves only a faint external trace.

I will no longer abandon the clearest truth I ever had about myself. I will fiercely protect the artist in me. I will love myself, choose myself, protect myself, witness myself with the same intensity and devotion that I have historically given to others. I will no longer steal (or give away) years of my life from the person I always imagined myself to be.

There’s your fucking affirmation.

When I was a kid, I wanted to fit in so badly. I was desperate to fit in. I wrote a poem about not fitting in and had it published in my class’s yearbook. I talked about how I felt like I was always looking in from the outside, and the fact that this one “popular” girl talked to me once, and allowed me to be “let in.” It was an incredibly sad poem, especially for a 3rd or 4th grader to write. It was such a cry for help - but nothing happened or changed. Eventually, I learned that if I couldn’t be accepted by the “popular” kids, or even just the regular, normal kids, then I wouldn’t allow myself to be accepted.

By high school, I abhorred labels. I rebelled against labels. I didn’t want to be labeled. Back in my day, all the “cool kids” wore Abercrombie & Fitch, and sometimes Aeropostle was an acceptable substitution. I remember frequently taking my little brother to the mall to purchase from said stores, because my mom hated driving or leaving the house. My brother tried to fit in later into his life than I did, and I remember teasing him about why he bothered at all. I hung out with the “goth kids” and the “freaks.” The Internet was just coming out and somehow some people had figured out how to create a website to anonymously rate teachers and other students. The teacher ratings were brutal. The student ratings were all about who was “hot or not” and I remember two boys were being actively fought over between the “goth” group and the “popular” group. One girl wrote: “I can’t believe Dave is grouped in with the freaks. He’s not a freak!” I never made it on the website. No one knew I existed. Now, and at the time, I was simultaneously grateful and hurt by my notable absence. Eventually, of course, the website was taken down. Undoubtedly it resurfaced in another form somewhere else, but I never heard of it again.

I never wore brand name clothes; a part of me didn’t want to wear something with a label because I hated them so much, and the other part of me didn’t want to be free advertising for some company. I wore “goth” clothes, punk clothes, alternative clothes, preppy clothes, main stream clothes, pretty clothes, etc. I wanted my look to be wildly different from day to day so I couldn’t be labeled. It didn’t make a difference, though, because human beings love labels. It was something that was really drilled into me in law school by my legal writing professor. He consistently gave me Cs on everything I wrote because of his obsession with labels.

I smoked copious amounts of weed. I wanted to smoke weed because I didn’t understand the D.A.R.E. program’s obsession with ostracizing weed. I hung out with the other kids who smoked weed and our friendships were borne out of a dearth of alternatives due to being “Freaks.” Eventually, I found other kids with messed up families and shitty home lives and we started doing ecstasy, then acid (my first acid trip occurred on Jim Morrison’s birthday, my brother informed me after we disintegrated the little paper squares on our tongues), then mushrooms, and eventually cocaine. I smoked cigarettes, but I hated the smell so I would only smoke them in my car. I let more than one pack of cigarettes go stale in my glove box. Eventually, I decided that cigarettes were a waste of money since I couldn’t get addicted to them.

College came and the school was so large that labels seemed impossible. Bumping up against other cliques was not possible, but we all orbited around one another, tacitly tolerating each others’ existence. I remember one of my writing professors gave the assignment to write an essay about someone we saw on campus who looked strange to us. She was an older lady and I can only imagine that such an assignment would never be allowed nowadays, but at the time I knew immediately that everyone else in the class was going to write about the Freaks and Geeks, so I wrote mine about sorority girls. Naturally, the day the assignment was due, the professor made us pair up and share our writing with another person. Of course, I got the sorority girl as partner. I cackled with delight at the irony and read my essay to her glazed-over eyes with a wicked glee. I can’t remember who she wrote about.

In college I met my first husband, who turned out to be a controlling, abusive man-child obsessed with getting revenge against his mother for his parents’ divorce, and against his father for being a derelict, forcing him and his siblings to grow up “poor.” By Phil’s accounts, you would have thought he grew up in a ramshackle shanty without running water and dirt floors. When I finally visited his hometown, it was perfectly normal. The house he grew up in, his neighbors, his family, they were all perfectly normal people. Phil’s problem with his socio-economic status wasn’t because of actual suffering, but because Phil perpetually coveted what others had. This was something that plagued Phil throughout our entire 11-year long relationship. At the violent conclusion of that toxic marriage, my mother speculated that Phil spent a fair amount of his energy making me miserable because he was jealous of me for being smarter than him. If Phil had ever heard anyone say that, he would have laughed derisively, but I think deep down she might have been right.

Phil and I worked well, though, at first, because we both were outsiders in our own right. Phil claimed that we bonded over our parents’ divorces - except mine was happening while I was in college and his had happened nearly 10 years ago, but he held onto it like a beacon in the dark. I thought it was strange how much resentment he held against his parents for their decade-old divorce, but I didn’t judge people too much back then. Phil sold weed and I smoked it. We did other drugs and went to raves and had a toxic, tumultuous relationship. Phil moved in with me even though I didn’t want him to, and he never paid me rent but insisted that buying cocaine because I liked it was sufficient to compensate for not paying rent. One Halloween night, Phil and I took too much MDMA at a rave. We were dressed as ghosts: just a sheet over our bodies and we thought we were very clever. In some ways, Phil was my twin flame: the person who held up a mirror to me to show me the best and worst things about myself. After that night, I stopped taking drugs because the shock of the rave getting shut down and having to flee to home and then his “good friend” dumped half the rave at Phil’s house when all I wanted to do was sleep and regulate my nervous system. His friend went home to his own house with his girlfriend to sleep and regulate. Phil never took care of me like that and I remember being mad at Rob, his friend, and simultaneously jealous. Phil wanted the glory of being the guy who hosted the after-party and saved the rave. No one gave a flying fuck and we never saw or heard from those people again.

Fighting with Phil was a living nightmare and it happened often. Nevertheless, we eventually married. I tried to break the engagement off by sending him a carefully crafted MySpace message because talking to him in person about anything that was contrary to what he wanted was a dangerous exercise in futility. I don’t really want to get into the abuse, because (1) it’s hard to relive, even after all this time, and (2) that’s not the point of this post.

Eventually, Phil got a job working for the State of Ohio and he suddenly decided “we” had to grow up. We got married, bought a house, I went to law school and he to grad school. He got laid off from his job and collected unemployment while I worked, went to law school, and took care of the entire house. One time I dared to question why he wasn’t fixing things around the house that needed fixing but he instead spent days like, cataloguing things, or just organizing something that only affected him and he flew into such a rage that I decided it wasn’t worth asking about again.

In law school I tried to fit in again. I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to be respected. I would be able to escape from my awful life into the normalcy of being unhappily married and losing myself in my career. But law school was another living nightmare. High school cannot hold a candle to the cutthroat pettiness of law school. It was a living hell on earth. As if that shouldn’t have told me everything I needed to know. Kids who failed or dropped out were regarded with a condescending pity, as if it was such a pity that they weren’t smart enough to actually rub elbows with the likes of us: the smart people. Even thinking about it makes me want to gag to this day.

I graduated law school and my parents didn’t come. My abusive husband did and because my pain mirrored his own, he was mildly sympathetic and supportive.

Phil’s job ripped us from our home in Ohio that I loved and where my childhood dog and his dog are buried in the backyard. I don’t want to talk about that.

We moved to Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, where I had to reinvent myself again and deal with the soul-crushing burden of Phil finally having to be the only one working (since I couldn’t get a job without a law license), and his pre-sarcoidosis diagnosis. Phil could not eat in silence, think in silence, let alone suffer in silence. He tried the patience of everyone he encountered. But I thought that that’s what love was: putting up with living with someone who made you miserable because, someday, there will be a payoff.

I got a job working for a crazy attorney who was basically a hoarder and a luddite. His name was Jon and he had fake teeth that resembled chiclets more than teeth, a gigantic beer belly that was barely restrained by his garish, button-up, Hawaiian shirts, and a penchant for making me stay working late into the evening because he refused to start his day before 4:55pm. He would walk in right before I left and sit and tell me stories that I didn’t care about. He had a dead squirrel rotting away in one of the rooms of the enormous mansion house he had converted into a law office. He hand wrote everything and refused to use a computer himself. He had dial-up Internet when I started working for him. I didn’t even know dial-up Internet still existed (even back then). His handwriting looked like hieroglyphics and his fool-proof system for writing briefs was to hand write the whole thing, make me decipher it, and if I couldn’t decipher something, I had to circle the word with a red pen and leave it on his desk.

He would then hand write the word again in the margins and I would have to try to decipher it. It was insane. It was mind numbing. He was quick to fire people. Most people only lasted 1 week. I made it 2 weeks. One day, he left some sort of diary-like confession about how much he hated me in the stack of papers I was supposed to decipher and type out that day, so I tendered my notice. He became irate and started being even meaner to me than usual and so I confronted him about what I found and he accused me of snooping. The man was insane. But I was used to insane men by this point. It was second nature.

I found another job where my bosses were normal, kind people. I tried to once again fit in with a community whose generations before and after my own would live and die there. I ended up cheating on my first husband and he ended up in the psychiatric hospital for attempting to kill himself, because beating me and choking me near to death me weren’t satisfying enough to slate his anger. He now works for the federal government in the USDA Forest Service. It’s almost poetic in its irony.

Fast forward ten years, moving across the country twice, devoting myself to mysticism (generally), building up a law firm, a second marriage, and then burning it all to the ground, and I still don’t fit in.

I think the takeaway from all of this is: I don’t fit in with myself. My entire life I have operated from viewing myself through the eyes of others. I scan everyone and everything for their wants and needs, but never do I turn that lazer focus inward, towards myself. I am adept at reinventing myself, and, from the outside that looks like strength or resilience, even growth. But what it really is is shapeshifting or mimicking to survive. It’s not actually living. It’s not actually being a whole person. It’s like being a bird or a cat, constantly on the lookout for a predator and then darting off into the shadows to avoid being devoured, only to reemerge somewhere else slightly different, and a little more wary.

I wonder who I would be if I had just let myself stay in place, emotionally and mentally. If I had stood firm in the roots I had planted for myself of myself, rather than letting them get ripped up by other people and this inexorable need to be loved and to belong.

They say that “life begins at 40.” I don’t think I actually believe that, because I was hoping that at 40 I’d be winding down my life, cozy and comfortable in the warm embrace of familiarity and a steady routine of family life. But, if it does begin at 40, this is my pilgrimage home to myself. I just hope I recognize it when I see it.

Seriously.

Let’s take a step back for a second and look at the available sources for answers:

• Self-help books authored by: rich people; poor people who became rich; single moms; partnered moms; men (generally); burnt-out post-corporate people;

• Motivational Speakers;

• Life or Business Coaches;

• Religion;

• Spiritualism;

• 12 Step Programs;

• Podcasts;

• Meditation;

• Yoga;

• “Retreats”;

• Drugs;

• Therapy;

• Astrology

You know what all of these things have in common?

None of them have the answers; they’re a dime a dozen; they have little to no credentials (or their credentials are meaningless outside of their insular communities).

You want answers? The only person who can provide them is you.

And that sucks because we like to believe that there is someone out there who has figured it out and can provide the guideposts necessary for the rest of us to follow and live our lives.

Basically, we want to be saved.

In a dying capitalist society, we have the perfect groundwork to generate a multi-billion dollar economy to satiate the US obsession with self-improvement and health. People who want to be saved but don’t want to do the work want to believe that total randos like Jen Sincero and Ramit Sethi have some sort of cosmic key to understanding life and can provide “10 simple steps,” or whatever, for you to also magically understand life.

People like Sincero and Sethi are happy to sell you what you want to hear.

Don’t get me wrong, I read You Are a Badass and I Will Teach You to be Rich (what a ridiculous title, by the way). I finished You Are a Badass and thought, “so… I just have to manifest my success? Like, believe it really, really hard??” I managed to abstain from vision-boarding because I have always found vision-boarding to the be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of — even in my most ardent: send me a sign, please, God! phases.

Same with I Will Teach You to be Rich. I finished that book and thought, “so…I just need to…save money? And invest in the stock market??” I’ve done those things and I am not rich. I am not poor, but I am not rich. Also, I personally think Ramit Sethi is a pompous asshole, but I digress.

The reality is, all the success I had was due to sheer force of will and what I now call overfunctioning. My wanting success was irrelevant to the work that I put into it that ultimately resulted in success. I have never manifested a client, or angel-numbered my way to a bigger bank account. I have a feeling your success was the result of something similar.

I’ve said it before: I’ve gone to the retreats, I went to therapy, I did drugs, I hired business coaches (not a life coach because, again, even at my most desperate I knew I was throwing good money after bad with a “life coach”), I listened to podcasts, I read dozens and dozens of self-help books, I dabbled in Shamanism, I tried religion, I went vegan…

I did all the things.

I have sat in Sweatlodges before, being regaled with other participants’ claims that they spoke to dead relatives, or had visions, and part of me silently begged to have that same experience, and the other part thought cynically, “are you just saying this to seem… cool? Or enlightened? ‘Cause, it kinda’ sounds like you are…”

The only thing that I found to be even remotely helpful was a 12 Step Program, but even that had its limitations. That program is only as good as the least fucked-up person in the room. However, to its credit, 12 Step Programs do not hide the fact that you have to do the work to succeed in the program. At least it’s honest. I respect that.

I remember I read this book called Get Rich Lucky Bitch and it was all about manifestation and creating a mindset shift where you —get this — believed you were lucky and therefore…would be lucky. And therefore, eventually, rich.

It was the dumbest, most poorly written crock of crap I ever consumed. I wanted my money back at the end of that one. It read like someone who got a book deal and was told:

“Okay, so you’ve told us about the Law of Attraction, now, we need you to write down how you do it!”

And her response was:

“How I … do … it?”

“Yea, what’s your method?”

“Method?” *Nervous laughter, eyes darting back and forth.

“Yea, like, how can other people do it?”

“You just have to, like, believe!”

“Okay, so…no… you need to come up with steps that people can follow…”

“Ohhh, okay!”

“…And we’ll put it in a book and sell it to people.”

“Ohhh, right, right.”

And then she threw it together in a weekend.

Side note: the Law of Attraction was first written about by Helena Blavatsky, an infamous (and incredibly, diabolically interesting) spiritualist in the late 19th Century who was more or less a spiritual grifter and basically founded the spiritualist movement we know today. If that doesn’t say everything, I don’t know what else would. So, Denise Duffield-Thomas’s book wasn’t even original on top of being terrible.

I write this not to convince you that I have all the answers, or even some of them. I don’t. What I do know is that my search for meaning in this life, for some mystical, magical sign that I’m on the right track, or that all this pain has a purpose, consumed me to the point that I stopped listening to myself.

I am not a mom. Maybe the mommy-bloggers will say that I don’t have an excuse for having ignored myself for my entire life because their pain is more real and profound from their years of self-sacrifice for their children and husbands. Maybe they’re right. But that’s not my reality. My reality is that even as a childless woman, I turned to everything and everyone outside myself for validation and meaning-making. I truly believed that I was the only person who couldn’t figure life out. Everyone else had; even the mommy-bloggers.

I don’t have life figured out. I’m sitting here basking in the hazy Italian sunset with a pollen-induced asthma attack both loving this, and simultaneously wishing I could breathe well enough to go on a hike; and kicking myself for not pushing through not being able to breathe to go on a hike. Because: sightseeing. I am holding all of these things simultaneously and it sucks because it feels like I’m making a mistake no matter which path I choose. And maybe life is just one giant liminal space where we never know if we’re making any of the correct choices and we never will know.

But neither with the Sinceros and Ramits of the world. I don’t know what they did differently. Had good PR people? Had magnetic personalities that got them a social media following and a book deal? Had ideas that were easily boiled down into Internet-friendly soundbites? It doesn’t matter because they don’t have the answers. They don’t know any more than you or I do what is going to make you or me happy. What makes you happy would probably make me cringe, and vice versa.

But there’s no “one-size fits all” to success or happiness. Lord knows there isn’t with clothes. So why do we want to treat our lives like our only option is to shop in a one-size fits all warehouse?

Everything is random chance, in my opinion. Because success and happiness to my mom looks like living in the two-bedroom, one bathroom home she grew up in as a child, living off of roughly $1,000 per month. Success to my dad looks like marrying a much younger woman, living in a big house, and spending money like its going out of style. I want a quiet life in the country, and enough disposable income to travel long-term whenever I feel like it. Can I have that? I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out, yet… Does that mean I failed? Can I really “start over” at 40?

Stay tuned; I’ll let you know.

For now, at least I can choose not to hate my life, or choose not to hate myself. At the very least, I can stop beating myself up about it. Because I can only figure out how I want to feel about any of this, and make any subsequent decisions, when I stop listening to everyone but me.

I married a man with an 8-pack of abs (yes, that’s right: 8 individual abs, not 6), and a jaw line that could cut diamonds.

I owned a 2,500 square foot home in downtown Philadelphia, and rented a 1,000 square foot apartment in Denver, Colorado.

I paid off my student loans during the Pandemic. Yes, that’s full fucking sentence.

I organized family events, conversations, and - in general - relationships. I am the person my friends call or text with serious problems: confidante, witness, counselor - whatever they need in the moment.

I was addicted to over functioning. I still am. It’s the hardest addiction I’ve ever had to break — and I went to 12-steps meetings for years on one of my (other) main addictions.

When I stripped all of that away by burning everything to the ground and walking away from it, something akin to the hospital scene by Heath Ledger’s ‘Joker’ in The Dark Knight, I was left in the aftermath of shock mixed with adrenaline, my blood rushing loud in my ears surrounded by the silence of absolute stillness.

While my chest heaved and my eyes remained wide-open, I decided to sprint on to the next thing in an effort to fill the silence before anything akin to a feeling could rush in.

I kept myself constantly moving through Trusted Housesitters house sits, taking care of other peoples’ animals and living in other peoples’ curiously perfectly curated living spaces that felt more like AirBnBs than homes.

If it’s true that comparison is the thief of joy, then I am a criminal mastermind.

From there I began my endless comparisons: how do they keep their house so neat and tidy? How did they know to buy this knack knack versus another one? How do they afford all this? How does she stay so skinny? How…how…how… until I landed on the most dangerous question of all: why?

They whys of it all hit the hardest: why did she find a good guy and not me? Why does her partner support her and not mine? Why does her home look so beautifully decorated and not mine? Why is she so skinny but her [ass/boobs] so perfect? Why can they afford both this home and the vacation they are on? Why didn’t I get this life?

What did I do wrong?

Everything, apparently.

But, I checked all the boxes! I did all the things! I got the degrees, I bought the houses, I signed up for a mortgage, I got married - twice, for God’s sake! I did therapy! Lots of therapy… What did I do wrong??

Then I went on a worldwide adventure and thought I was doing something so wholly unique that it was bound to render results. This seemed like an inescapable conclusion. How could constant-travel and marveling at the world’s wonders, and touching unique and beautiful cultures not inspire me to greater existential awareness and awe?

Ha.

No, what happened was I became incredibly unsure of myself, even in England where everything was in English. I felt like I regressed to this former, meek, shy version of myself that I absolutely hate and thought I had buried in my high school years.

I felt depressed for the first time in my housesit in England, an incredibly cute, hundreds-of-years-old little English cottage in the English countryside with an adorably curated backyard, and herbs drying from the rafters, witchy-esque vibes, complete with crystals, rough hewn beam table, and finicky water pressure in the ancient pipes.

I almost cried. But I didn’t. I kept the tears inside because I was in England and only four or five days into my trip. I was upset because when trying to book a rental car, I realized I had forgotten to the get the all-important “International Driver’s Permit” which you can only obtain in the United States and from AAA because it’s only available as a paper copy and can only be mailed to you for God-knows what reason. Or maybe you can pick it up, I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. You can’t get it abroad, apparently. Well you can, but it’s a huge time suck and if you don’t have a permanent address it’s basically a useless option.

I had to have my sister handle mailing of all the materials Statewide and ship it to me in France during a volunteer exchange program (from hell, but I didn’t know that, yet). This process and seeming pressure sent me into a spiral that I struggled to stay on top of, but managed to buoy myself without letting a single tear fall.

Then I went to Norway and felt more isolated than I ever have in my entire life. Nordic peoples are not warm and friendly. They are nice when you talk to them, but they are not warm and friendly. I spent my entire days in complete silence, often without saying a word to anyone. I met some Californians on my tour of a Sami village (don’t do it, it’s literally not worth it. You just pay to feed their reindeer). Again, I compared myself to this gregarious and kind couple, celebrating their 20th or maybe 30th wedding anniversary.

“Oh, you’re here alone?” One of them asked; I think the wife.

“Yes, I am getting out of a divorce so I thought I’d travel.”

“Good for you!”

Ah yes, good for me. It’s not like I didn’t want exactly what you have and thought I would. But yes, good for me for just picking up and traveling around the world, haunting different countries like a doomed apparition, never to be seen or felt.

Then I moved to Paris, which was much more lively of an environment. The juxtaposition of Norway to Paris was jarring. I was able to talk to people and interact a little bit, despite the language barrier. I drank too much wine, alone, and ate too much cheese, alone, but the food was amazing and at least the waiters were friendly. I walked around the Eiffel Tower and visited all the tourists sites and even got somewhat adopted by this solo traveling man who was more desperately lonely than I was. His name was Adil, I believe. He called himself a “cultural nomad” because he had traveled so extensively his whole life, he just picked up whatever culture he enjoyed. He was born to Lebanese or Tunisian parents, I forget; somewhere from North Africa (not Morocco or Egypt, I know that). But I think he was born in France, was raised Catholic but eschewed it in his adulthood, and lived in various countries throughout his life, got married, got divorced, and now was semi-retired, traveling the world because he was a part-time translator for legal proceedings. He took me around Paris, showing me his favorite old haunts, which he had not visited in 20+ years, and somehow expected to have the same cadence and style as when he lived there in his youth - a sentiment I did not discourage because I didn’t know him enough to care, maybe he’d show me something cool, anyway, and he just seemed so excited.

He concluded his strange and whirlwind tour by suggesting that we should travel together and that he didn’t care if I went off to sleep with other men during our new, shared adventure and I just thought: how gracious.

I eventually was able to extricate myself from him by insisting on needing to go to the bathroom and that I had an early train (I think that was actually true). Thankfully he had one, too, and eventually got the hint. Adieu, Adil.

After Paris came my two-week stint as Cinderella in a French countryside volunteer exchange program through Worldpackers. My God did that suck. Those people were insane. They had a crazy schedule that was counter intuitive to everything I hold sacred as an American: we work continuously throughout the day, taking only one 30-60 minute break, and then we have free time in the late afternoon and evening. Oh, no. They had different plans: plans where I was expected to have zero autonomy over my daily schedule, and absolutely no real time to myself save for sleeping. The schedule was: breakfast sometime between 7am-9am; work from 9:30 to noon; lunch from noon to 1pm; break from 1pm-3pm; Work from 3pm to 5:30pm; free time from 5:30pm to 7pm; dinner from 7pm to 8pm; then free time until bed… This schedule made my skin crawl. I could not get any real writing done, which I was hoping to accomplish, because the breaks I had were so intermittent and short it was not possible to really devote myself to creative time without the ever-present specter of having to stop looming over me. Also, if I did not work the full 5 hours per day, the wife would find absolutely the stupidest things for me to do to make sure I filled every minute of those 5 hours. She was nuts. Her husband was nuts. And I haven’t even told you the worst of all of it. It was basically pure survival instinct that allowed me to tamp down all my feelings to not burst into tears every night and try to figure out some way to run away, or at least not sing “Somewhere, Out There” from Fievel: An American Tale, at my open window.

I left and rediscovered my autonomy in Switzerland via a rented car. And you know what? No one asked me for my Goddamn International Driver’s Permit at the rental counter. Figures. They did ask for it in Italy, but made it clear that I could still rent the car without it (though she mumbled something about probably having to have a higher deposit, I don’t know). Whatever, at least I had it.

Coming out of my Cinderella experience to full-blown autonomy and freedom of movement in Switzerland really fucked with my head in a way I didn’t consciously realize, even though I continued to feel depressed. Which, of course, I ignored because feeling depressed while traveling was indicative of abject failure. I was probably just tired - or something. Right?

It was only after I decided to take the leap and spend the extra cash on a paragliding experience over the Swiss Alps, followed by about two hours’ roundtrip drive, interspersed with hiking to various car-free villages in the Swiss Alps that I crashed.

Hard.

I was sitting by Lake Luzerne in Switzerland after putting away my luggage in the most beautiful and spacious apartment I’d rented (so far) on my trip. The Lake was stunning in its ombre array of blues and greens; I could hear church bells ringing in the distance, and feel the cool, gentle caress of air wafting from the lake on my skin. But I slumped onto the rocky shore and cried. Tears feel from my cheeks like a child after being gently disciplined and denied something she wanted. I couldn’t stop crying, no matter what I did. The negative self-talk was roaring through my head, pointing out every flaw, every failure, every weakness, and using my inability to get up and stop crying as proof that I would never be happy because: well, just look at you.

I use ChatGPT as a therapist, basically. I don’t use it to write my articles. You can probably tell from my highly conversational tone and lack of em dashes. Yes, em dashes are a dead giveaway that you use ChatGPT to write your articles, not to mention your lists and how every sentence is spaced out into its own paragraph. I don’t care if people pretend they have “always” use em dashes. You shouldn’t. Em dashes should be used even less frequently than semi-colons, so shame on you anyway for having shitty grammar.

ChatGPT as therapist, however, has been my saving grace because I have literally no one else to talk to. While it’s not flawless, it has helped me see patterns in myself that I have admittedly known about, but more or less ignored because my life was moving too fast for me take time to do anything about them.

I think the single biggest realization from talking with ChatGPT and blubbering by a beautiful lake in Switzerland is giving myself permission to REST.

Like, actually rest.

I spent the entire next day curled up on the couch in my rented apartment drinking tea and listening to novels-on-tape. I did some writing because - of course - I had to do something.

I exercised for the first time on my trip.

Again, because: of course.

But the following day I felt better. I had another meltdown, after that. I’ve had several meltdowns since then. They all have been precipitated by basic adulting gone awry. And I have blubbered like a baby, whined and complained, cursed the heavens, plotted going to back to the USA (but not really, because that would feel like its own failure), talked shit to myself, beat myself up thoroughly, and even laid in bed for an entire afternoon.

I am only eight weeks into my 56ish-week trip.

The sheer number of emotional roller-coasters that I have ridden, knowingly or not, has nearly equaled the number of minutes in a day.

And I still don’t feel better.

Admittedly, some days are better than others. Days when I write are better. I’m able to pull myself out the darkness long enough to form coherent sentences that are not laden with vitriol and desperation to try to cobble something together that is market-friendly enough to publish on Substack.

The darkness remains, though. Like an Autumn day in November, it lays in wait , the shadows slowly creeping over me faster than the sun can set. It grips me more often than I would like to admit, and often in the most beautiful places. Take this current Housesit in Polcenigo, Italy (just an hour north of Venice), for example. I’m halfway through this sit and I have hardly explored the area at all. My hosts suggested I go and see their friend’s band play. I did do this. I wasn’t depressed enough to skip it. Though, I lost a bracelet that day and that threatened to derail my foray into semi-socialization, but I pushed through it, because: overfunctioner, remember?

They also suggested I introduce myself to their friend, who was the lead singer of the band. But, a voice - not even a quiet one - kept whining: but why? What’s the point? You think this is the One True Love that’s going to make all of your stupid existence make sense? That this is the Magical Moment where everything finally clicks that proves that this saga known as life actually means something?

So I didn’t introduce myself. I was too emotionally exhausted. More importantly, I just didn’t care to do it. I didn’t feel like it. I knew deep down inside there was no meaning to it. There was no point. There was just nothing. Whether I introduced myself to him or not made no difference, so why bother?

It’s not about the lead singer. It’s not about the band. It’s not about my hosts, or this cute little Italian town. It’s not about anything. I did want my body wanted. I honored my exhaustion and I got in my gigantic, awkward, Chinese-import rental-SUV and drove home with the windows down and Spanish soul music blaring through the speakers. I went to bed. I didn’t regret it.

I found the bracelet the next morning, in case you were wondering.

And none of those things: losing the bracelet, going to the concert, not introducing myself, finding the bracelet again, means anything. They mean nothing. They are a series of occurrences and nothing more. I didn’t miss some grand opportunity. I’m not missing some grand opportunity by laying in bed, or sitting on the balcony of my hosts’ home instead of sightseeing, or hanging out at the bakery, or interjecting myself into society here.

I can’t talk to anyone anyway, so what’s the point?

This is not some nihilistic refusal to engage in socialization, this is just the realization that I came to that all of this is stressing me out so much that my body is literally throwing full-on toddler-esque temper tantrums when I push myself too hard, and abruptly shutting down.

I broke.

I am not broken, but I definitely need to be shelved for awhile and I’m finally accepting that that’s okay. It doesn’t mean I failed, despite my brain saying, “well, I mean, c’mon, all signs point to yes, in fact, you did fail…”. I’m just cooking my meals, breathing in the wisteria and listening to the birds chirp because that’s all I can literally handle right now. I’m storing up my energy for the next apocalyptic Flixbus ride (because those bathrooms on board are a biohazard, at a minimum).

I burned it all down. I built it back up. I burned it down again. But I burnt myself out in the process. And now, it seems, I’m content to just play with the ashes without wondering what happens next.

That’s so Ohio.

Apparently, that is the latest of Gen Z slang that means something akin to “that’s so lame.” Yet another anachronism from the generation that has never fully cut the umbilical cord to experience anything for themselves.

But what I described is so Ohio. And I don’t mean it the way Gen Z means it. I mean it as a way of life that just exists so simply and yet so profoundly that I am speechless and a little ashamed each time I witness it.

Before I started my Midlife Crisis World Tour, I technically launched it from my sister’s home in Cincinnati, Ohio. She invites me to every major holiday with a cute, DIY-designed post-card that is whimsical, professional, and cute all at the same time. All holidays past, I was not able to attend due to my lack of proximity and having an aging dog and a cat, and a difficulty finding sitters.

Que their deaths and my husband’s dramatic exit from my life and suddenly I was free to attend my sister’s Galentine’s Day Celebration. She made all of the food herself, with the exception of the charcuterie board and the chocolate-dipped strawberries, hosted it in her basement, developed and prepared two or three different activities, sewed (by hand) roughly 400 fake flowers on fishing wire to create a flower petal arch, and assembled 40 individual gift bags for ever woman to take home. All before I even got to her house. I thought I was going to help set up, but I barely did anything. I am an overfunctioner, but my sister makes me look lazy.

Thirty-eight out of forty women showed up.

I was astounded.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’ll be lucky if four people show up for my funeral.

Christ.

Watching these women, my sister’s friends from all different walks of her life: the gym, yoga, charity work, her husband’s job, her high school friends, her college friends, women she had knitted baby blankets for, etc., I was astounded at the sheer dedication and devotion to my sister. I was astounded how all these women rallied around their relationship to my sister and began to form relationships with one another.

Mostly, I was impressed with her closest group of friends. These were women she had met in college and grown up with. Not just in the sense that they got older at the same time, but they had grown existentially together and with one another, winding around each other’s life stories like ivy up a trellis. They were intertwined and supported each other in a deeply intimate connection that I have never been able to achieve in any of my relationships, platonic or otherwise.

Not only did her core friend group grow with her from college, but so had her husband and a lot of her friends’ partners, as well. They all had met and found each other like something out of an episode of Friends or How I Met Your Mother (two shows I have actually never watched. Along with Seinfeld, Saved By the Bell, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, etc. You get the idea. Maybe that’s my problem. I didn’t consume any pop culture that other people consumed and so I am hopelessly lost in small talk).

Is it something about Ohio, where the summers are long and soft and lazy, weighed down by humidity so oppressive you can’t do anything but languish in the heat until the crisp air of Autumn pushes you out of your stupor? Is there something in the water in Ohio that makes love and traditional values lauded? That someone can meet someone in college and stay together forever? Get married in their mid-twenties and develop friendships and traditions and do the same thing every year and never get tired of it and, in fact, revel in it, building on the memories of years past?

Being back in Ohio makes me miss and crave traditional values because it’s comforting and safe. I want this, I think despondently as I watch my sister, her husband, and her friends all interact so casually and comfortably with one another that you would think they were family. Not my family. Ha, no, my family did not interact like that.

So where did she learn it?

I spent my childhood in Ohio and my parents didn’t love each other. Perhaps the pressure of being in Ohio with all its traditionalism kept them together for as long as they were (30 years, roughly). I blamed Ohio for the failures of my childhood and so I wanted out of there as quickly as possible. I rejected those traditional values because I thought they were fake.

Plus, it was so Ohio to stay in Ohio.

But the people that I know who have stayed in Ohio have lived the most normal, unremarkably remarkable lives that I am kind of in awe. They are affable people, comfortable with their lives, and a little shy when I talk flippantly about my adventures, as if I am judging them for not having gone paragliding over the Alps, or roadtripping across Morocco. In reality, I have spent the last two decades chasing meaning and stability and the fact is, maybe it was where I had started all along.

Seeing traditional values and cozy, comfortable relationships that are well worn, like your favorite college sweatshirt that still fits, the elastic around the wrists starting to fray so badly you know you should throw it away but you can’t bring yourself to do it. Seeing them work and be functional, I wonder if I’m just not cut out for that kind of life; that I’m destined (doomed?) to wander like an unmoored ghost through this world - passing through but never corporeal enough to belong.

I don’t know if I’m incapable of that kind of life, or if I just never learned how to build it. Because watching my sister, who for all intents and purposes should be as unmoored as me, it doesn’t feel fake. It doesn’t feel forced or performative or like something out of a sitcom I never watched.

It feels… practiced. Intentional. Like something that was chosen over and over again, in small, unremarkable ways, until it became this soft, steady, woven blanket that envelopes and comforts, always tossed casually over the back of the couch, ready to be picked up again at any moment.

And maybe that’s the part I’ve never done.

I’ve chased intensity. Movement. Meaning. Reinvention.

They stayed. They built. They showed up, again and again, until there was something to show up to. I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I even want to. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not dismissing it. I crave it, a little bit, if I’m being honest.

And I wonder, if maybe belonging isn’t something you stumble into. Maybe it’s something you stay for.

Now I know better.

The other day I published an article about my process for arriving at forgiving myself, just a little bit. I still have a lot more to go, so that thread will continue to unravel in my articles. That was the whole point of this Substack. It’s functioning maybe more as a journal than a blog, but that’s fine. Every time I told someone about my Substack and my travels, the immediate response was: “oh you should write a memoir!”

I don’t want to write a memoir, and I didn’t ask you for your opinion.

I am not good with reality. If my life is not example of my inability to fully commit to living in reality, then I don’t know what else I can say. I am better with writing fantasy and fiction because that feels more real to me than the plastic wicker table top under my laptop, digging into the fleshy part of my forearms.

I was meant for daydreams and atmospheric ponderings about the world, my place in it, and what it all means.

My life is, objectively, interesting. I was a child prodigy in karate, survived domestic violence, started my own law firm, met and married a Moroccan man on a women’s-only adventure tour of Morocco, and have traveled extensively throughout my life. I have built and burned down my life more times than I’d like to admit through sheer force of will. I have a story. I am a story. But I can’t write it because it’s all too real. I can’t sit down to write about each individual red flag I saw and acted on or ignored in my first marriage, because those are too many and too boring in their individual capacity to make sense to the average person. Because, I know what you’re saying: you were a child prodigy … in karate… and you ended up in a violent relationship?

It’s been said to me before.

“How did your ex-husband almost kill you - weren’t you a black belt? Why didn’t you just karate chop his head off?” Follow by laughter, whether condescending or nervous.

To answer that, I would have to go back to my childhood to explain my parents and my relationship to them. It’s hard to write about domestic violence and keep the reader engaged and understanding because every person I have ever talked to about domestic violence emphatically says: “I would never let that happen to me!”

Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. The fact is, they themselves don’t know. But depending on your history, when you’re in a situation like that, you don’t know how you will react or act. Certainly, there are certain personality types that would never end up in domestic violence relationships because…I don’t know, their parents hugged them or something.

For purposes of a memoir, however, it is hard to explain to someone when recounting the factual details of “he said this, then I said that, then he did this, then I did that, and then he hit me and I sat there crying while he got me a cold compress to prevent further bruising.” It’s like, why wouldn’t you just get up, hit him back, and walk out?

But the shortest answer, and the one that was truest at the time, was because I loved him. And I couldn’t bring myself to purposefully hurt him.

While the inverse was true for him, it was not my truth.

I had the ability to leave, but I didn’t have the confidence or belief in myself that I could survive without him. Logically, deep down, I knew I could rent an apartment and live there and pay my bills. But, emotionally, I didn’t believe in myself enough to do it. Again, that would require going back to childhood to explain why.

There are certainly authors who can write these sorts of real-life narratives, but I’m not one of them. Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash, Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames (this last one was the entire lifetime of the main female character and it was incredibly well-done) are a few examples of recent reads where the authors seamlessly weave fiction into reality so expertly that I feel like I’ve lost friends when I close the book.

I, however, use fantasy to escape my life because I have poor coping mechanisms. As someone who tries to assign too much meaning to regular life to be able to accurately describe it in narrative form, writing about my own life, as interesting as it is, would be a disaster. Which would be metaphorically apropos. I mean, I can’t even walk the dog I’m dogsitting without trying to figure out what is the most appropriate metaphor for life. Which is what brings us here, today.

In my recent conversion to … [checks notes] cosmic and existential nihilism*, apparently, I have foresworn all meaning to the little things I used to cling to like charged talismans that my life was special, somehow; that all my mistakes and life-lessons were leading to something grand and bigger than myself. That’s when it hit me: the most appropriate metaphor for life that I can think of based on my own experiences.

In a note to myself that I have now lost (I would have assigned meaning to this in the past), I had written that life is a like driving on a dark and winding road: your headlights can only illuminate just a little bit ahead of you and you never know what’s coming next. But, that’s not the whole picture. Because, in that metaphor, you can see things coming and you can adjust and respond. Real life isn’t like that. You can’t see things that come out of nowhere (the sudden attack on your country, the positive pregnancy test, the cancer diagnosis, the lottery win). You have to adjust because you have to survive, but you didn’t get a chance to prepare or slow down when life threw that curve at you.

Instead, life is more subtle and banal than that. Life is like groping in an endless lake, dark and murky, non-threatening except for the meaning we assign to not being able to see ahead or around ourselves. You’re constantly swimming, the direction is unknown. Are you moving forward in a large lake? Or sideways? Or down? You don’t know where the surface is but you know you need to get there; you want to get there. And every time you think you’ve hit that semi-solid barrier separating you from this endless confusion and groping, you realize it’s just driftwood. It doesn’t hurt, it’s not harmful; it’s not helpful, it’s not the answer. You can’t do anything with driftwood. So you keep swimming. You keep swimming because you want to find that surface and break free and finally breathe rather than remain submerged under the pressure of life itself…

But, I don’t know that that ever happens.

So you just keep swimming.

Maybe it’s death that we’re all swimming toward and breaking through the surface of life is merely entering another dimension of existence—or nonexistence. Maybe it’s better. Religions certainly want you to believe it’s better. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just nothing. For years I have believed death is simply - nothing - and that is why I am so motivated to make a life that is rife with meaning; because if I just cease to exist, what was the point of being here in the first place?

I don’t have the answer.

All I know is that freeing myself from meaning-making has relieved some of the pressure on my over-active brain, like a pressure valve finally being let loose and all the air whooshing out and leaving only stillness in its wake. That stillness has allowed room for forgiveness of myself and my inadequacies, mistakes, failures, and unfulfilled hopes. All things that once felt like glaring evidence that I had somehow missed the point of life entirely.

Accordingly, I find myself asking: what if there is no point to miss? What if I am not behind, or broken, or deficient, but simply… here? Existing in the same dark, murky lake as everyone else, pretending they know where they’re going.

Maybe the problem was never that I couldn’t find meaning. Maybe the problem was that I thought I was supposed to. Because if there is no surface, no grand moment of arrival where everything makes sense, no final inhale where I break through and understand what all of this was for, then there is nothing to chase. Nothing to get wrong. Nothing to fail at.

There is only… this.

This moment. This breath. This strange, quiet existence where I am allowed to move through the water as I am, without needing to justify why I’m here or where I’m going. I don’t know if that is comforting or terrifying. Maybe it’s both. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not frantically swimming toward something I can’t see and that probably isn’t there.

I’m just… swimming.

*I had originally written “conversion to … meaninglessness? Because it’s not nihilism,” and then proceeded to look up nihilism and then found out that, yes, in fact, what I am talking about is nihilism and there are different types of nihilism: existential (no meaning), moral (no right/wrong), and cosmic (universe is indifferent) nihilism.

They’re not wrong. I am having fun. I am on the trip of a lifetime. I would envy me, too, if I was still sitting in my old life. In fact, I did envy my friends who were full-time digital nomads. I thought, one day I’ll do that, too… once I quit my job, or find a better one that lets me travel, and I don’t have a mortgage or rent payment, and all my bills are paid, and my stuff in storage, and I don’t have a dog and cat any more, and my partner agrees, etc.…

I made a lot of excuses that required me to have the perfect set up before I embarked on a year long journey of world travel. When I suddenly found myself with only memories and pictures of my dog and cat, and my husband decided our relationship wasn’t worth the effort, and my employees became confused as to who worked for whom, I said fuck it.

Then promptly burned it all to the ground.

I found renters to handle my mortgage, terminated my lease early, packed up all my stuff and put it into storage, and then spent three months testing out various housesitting positions as I wrapped up my business (its claws are still sunk firmly in my flesh, unfortunately, but each day there are fewer as I continue to cut cords). I packed up everything I thought I would need for the next year and stepped blindly over the precipice of the unknown.

I tumbled down quickly, not sure which way was up and constantly reorienting myself to a new location, language, culture, and social norms. I was thrust into different worlds where I was constantly on the outside looking in, accompanied only by my thoughts.

My thoughts have always been loud and numerous.

Alone in a country where no one can really speak to me nor I to them, my thoughts are on blast.

Every possible thing that I could think to question about myself and the world around me was forefront in my mind. In some sort of self-sacrificing flagellation to avoid being “that American” who only spoke English to people, I doubled down on trying to teach myself Spanish.

Spanish is not helpful in Norway, by the way.

Nor in France. It’s the right cadence for Italy, but still not super helpful. It made sense in my head that, even if I don’t speak the local language, at least I speak a second language, so I’m not like other Americans.

Every country I went to, I fell in love with that cuisine, that architecture, that cobblestone street, that waterway, that way of life. Europeans don’t have it perfect, but they do do a lot of things correctly. One of them being that they live much slower than Americans. Out of all the noise of my own thoughts and the chaos around me, I have learned that I want to live a slow life.

That was the first of many lessons in a crash course on getting to know myself for the first time, apparently.

I didn’t know a slow life is what I wanted when I felt that tingle of realization because I struggle to feel my feelings. I live adjacent to my body, not in it. On an intellectual level, I knew that I live adjacent. I know that. But I didn’t understand how to live differently.

I still don’t know, but I am learning.

Learning to Live in My Body, AP 101

I see out of my eyes, hear out of my ears, and speak out of my mouth; but I often feel like I’m experiencing my own life through the lenses of all the strangers around me, judging me, watching me, thinking about me, criticizing me.

I sound paranoid, I know. I probably am, clinically. Let me give you an example of why. My dad, as usual—it’s basically tradition at this point, forgot my birthday and texted me a day late. He wished me happy birthday and asked if I remembered to carry a Bic pen.

I showed this text message to a friend to save myself the time and effort of having to explain how messed up my dad is. My friend—a normal person—asked: “What’s a Bic pen?”

“Oh, right. That.”

I was merely trying to illustrate that my dad texted me, instead of calling me for my birthday (his preferred method of arms-length communication), and also texted me on the wrong date.

“Right. So, it’s a pen. You know, those crappy, plastic blueish, almost transparent pens they keep in banks and give out for free with the cap you always lose? Well, apparently, the structural integrity of the plastic of a Bic pen is well-known in the Doomsday community of self-lauded self-defense experts to be really useful for jamming into someone’s throat if you are being attacked,” I said matter-of-factly.

This was a “fact” I have known since I was probably eight (8) years old. By the time I could drive, I learned that most people my age did not know about the efficacy of many random, mundane items to be used in jamming into various orifices in self-defense like life was a fucking Jackie Chan movie.

As my friend took in this information, the little ellipsis icon started and stopped repeatedly on my screen.

“What the fuck?” My friend finally said.

“I know,” I sighed.

Ergo, my paranoia stems from a life of being emotionally abandoned by a man whose entire worldview is that someone is out to get him, and therefore, by extension, me (I guess). As a child, constantly being warned about the dangers of the world around me seemed like protection, possibly even affection. But instead it was merely the slow, steady drip of a man whose entire worldview was based on his ability to puff himself up and elevate his importance any chance he got. Even if his authoritative insertion was abjectly insane. However, this was a feat that was easy to do with his children. So, yes, I’m paranoid; but it’s really not my fault. It is this paranoia, along with a childhood fraught with its own daily dangers and threats, that primed me to observe myself outside of myself to maintain safety and scan the world constantly for threats, or disturbances, big or small, in the web that made up my precarious childhood environment.

But, I hadn’t put that together, yet.

Confronted with turning 40, being inexorably alone, even surrounded by people, reminded yet again of the emotional abandonment of my childhood and then my subsequent (consequent?) failed relationships in adulthood, I hungered for comfort that I was completely ill-equipped to provide for myself.

This was the first time in my entire life that I was literally alone. I have always been a loner. I have lived alone. I have vacationed alone. When living alone, I always had a dog and cat, job, friend, or significant other who demanded my time. I had bills to pay, chores to do, a life to exist in. Vacationing alone, I had logistics to manage, activities to attend, and the ever-present threat of having to go back to real life looming over any attempts to eviscerate the bitter taste of life from my soul. In environments where I can over-perform and over-give, I can busy myself with other people and their problems to avoid giving myself any attention. I can thereby effectively tamp down anything that looks or smells or resembles an emotion on my part.

But I have never been alone with only myself for company 24/7 and for the foreseeable future.

My thoughts became absolutely unbearable.

My birthday occurred in Southern France while I was trapped in a volunteer exchange program where I felt more like Cinderella than a participant in a mutually beneficial cultural exchange program wherein two people from two different countries helped each other out. Looking back on it, it was an objectively awful experience. The people I was “volunteering for” were basically insane. I learned the new life cycle of a paper napkin: reuse it until it is unusable, then throw it in a pile to be used to start fires in the fireplace; thou shalt only wash clothes between 12:30pm and 3pm, or else it’s 3am-7am because those are the “off peak hours;” every single scrap of everything is saved because we could use it “some day” for “something else;” we have cars with the ability to tow a trailer, but since you’re here, we’re going to make you push a fucking trailer up a gravel road loaded with tree branches because we want to save the gas. Or something like that.

Coming out of that hellscape, and the disappointment of my birthday and the existential crisis of turning 40, I rented a car in Switzerland (which was its own eventual nightmare due to the Hertz website being an analog horror from hell), and felt an exuberance for my new found freedom that bordered on reverence. I swore to myself that I would never let myself be trapped in another French Cinderella story (without even mice for company, mind you, let alone singing mice), again.

Switzerland is the most beautiful country I have visited so far. The people are also incredibly laid back and friendly. The whole country reminded me of my home in Colorado and I think I felt slightly homesick because of that.

Then I decided, you know what? I’m going to let myself be tempted by this paragliding brochure stacked neatly in my AirBnB and I’m going to go paragliding over the Alps. Because, why not?

My friend and I joked over voicememos that you know your girlfriend is single when you ask her: “hey, do you want to hang out this weekend?” And she says, “No, sorry, I can’t. I have goat yoga on Saturday morning, then I’m taking a pottery class with a visiting pottery teacher from Rome, then I’m getting my chakras realigned in a psychedelic sound bath, then I’m going paragliding over the Swiss Alps. I just can’t squeeze anything else in this weekend! Sorry! Maybe next weekend!”

In my personal experience, this checks out.

Paragliding over the Swiss Alps is not only adrenaline-inducing, but it is simply awe-inspiring. The beauty of Switzerland had me questioning my firmly held belief in the nonexistence of God. Paragliding over the Alps basically converted me to wondering what was real and what was fairy tale and how did I end up in one?

Following the paragliding experience, I thought, “why stop now? I can push myself some more.” I drove 30 minutes to Lauterbrunnan, hiked along a path that ran next to a river so blue it looked crystalline, then took a Gondola (standard public transit in the Alps) into Grütschlap, and hiked into the car-free, fairytale village of Murren, Switzerland. Along the hike, which looked like a fairy path surrounded by majestic, snow-covered mountains guarding a long-lost commune of fairies, a young woman (presumably not a fairy) told me that if I wave my hand in front of these bell-like flowers, they will make a tinkling sound. I waved my hand and they made a tinkling sound and I thanked her with tears in my eyes.

Why was I on the verge of tears?

Upon descending from this mystical tour of colors more rich and saturated than I knew was possible on this Earth, I listened to church bells in Lauterbrunnen where I had left my car, royally fucked up and confused myself in every possible way in how to get out of the paid parking lot, drove home, went to sleep, and woke up the next day and drove 1.5 hours to Luzerne, Switzerland.

Upon arrival, I felt my body unclench suddenly and relax. The apartment was gorgeous. It was an actual apartment and easily 10x the living space I had been staying in up to that point. The apartment was roughly 1,000 sq. ft.

Then I learned that there was no Wifi.

BUT I HAD PLANS! I was going to write, and apply for jobs, and finish my taxes, and yell at my ex-husband for some of his recent bullshit, and… and…!

I couldn’t do any of that with my pathetic limited, international hotspot connection.

I proceeded to sit by the Lake Luzerne and blubber and cry like a spoiled brat. I lamented my inability to stop crying, which only made me cry harder and hate myself more.

I’m supposed to be having the trip of a life time. What is wrong with me??

Like a child, I was tired. I had pumped myself so full of adrenaline and hadn’t stopped moving for the last six (6) weeks, not to mention the last 24 hours, that I had worn myself down to a nub of a human being.

I had burned my candle at both ends in the past, but that felt different because it was work and relationship-related. I would crash, eventually, in those humdrum scenarios of martyr-like self-sacrifice. This was different. This snuck up on me. But it hit me that I was running just like I always had been, only this time my run was at least fun instead of inducing suicidal thoughts.

I needed to rest.

I had denied myself rest for six (6) weeks.

I was sleeping, sure. To the extent one can sleep on questionably washed sheets and two twin beds pushed together to make an actual bed for adult humans…but I slept.

As usual, in running from myself, I had been trying to make meaning from the external world around me. I learned that, because of my paranoid and delusional childhood, I not only learned to scanned the world around me for threats or disturbances that could become threats, I also learned to make meaning out of my external world as a foundation to my life. Making meaning from people and places around me allowed me to feel like I had control over my life because if I could determine that this person feeling good (my mom or dad, for example), then everything would be good. If I could scrape meaning out of a positive or neutral glance from a parent, then there was safety.

I was a good child.

I did good.

I was worthy of love.

As you can probably imagine, this spiraled from my insular world of a family of five to everything in my eventual orbit outside my home. There were points in my life that everything was a sign or symbol from God, the Universe, the Divine, whatever you want to call it—I’ve called it just about everything over the years—that I was “on the right track,” or “things would work out,” or “no, you really fucked up; how could you do that you miserable piece of shit, don’t you know anything??”

I also learned in this watershed crash of tears cascading down my cheeks by the placid Lake Luzerne that I weaponize my powers of perception against myself for some truly scathing self-talk. Again, if I can destroy myself anytime I make a mistake, then I won’t repeat it, will I?

I spent the entire afternoon waffling between crying and beating myself up and walking around the lake, barely able to drag myself more than a few meters before having to sit down and mentally regroup.

I asked ChatGPT what was wrong with me and to analyze my patterns based on a scathing description of myself. Since it’s a robot, it was like, hey, maybe don’t be so hard on yourself? Among other insightful anecdotes, honestly.

I rested.

I gave myself a day to just do nothing besides feed myself and do a little bit of creative work on my novel.

And, miraculously, I felt slightly better. I didn’t hate myself any more. I was able to go on a hike the next day. I took great photos. I got nearly one million views on a video I posted of the sheer cliff drop-off on this road that I hiked. That surprised me. I breathed the fresh air. I texted a friend who was a full time digital nomad for years with my existential questions and she told me to:

• Rest!

• Don’t combat the loneliness.

• Be kind to yourself!

• Forgive yourself.

• Ask yourself what you need, then do that.

• Become your own best friend.

• Forgive yourself again.

• And again.

• And again because you are human and mistakes are just personality quirks.

I have heard these adages before, but I never understood them.

When I gave myself permission to literally blubber on the rocky shore of Lake Luzerne and stop comparing myself to my friends, complete strangers, and who I was supposed to be, I grieved the losses of all the lives I thought I would have lived by now. I grieved all the girls and women I imagined I would be by 40 years old. I grieved all the women I would never be.

I let them go, too.

Then I rested.

And I still felt like shit, but at least I was rested.

Then I hiked and surrounded myself with beauty. I didn’t try to make meaning out of the mountains, or the birds who landed near me when I stopped to stare into the snow-covered hills. I didn’t take the setting sun or the coming storm as some sort of omen of my future or my past. I just stared at the mountains. I texted my nomadic-friend. I questioned what I wanted. I didn’t judge myself.

And somehow, on that mountainside, I forgave myself a little bit because all of those actions made space, somehow, for the forgiveness I had been withholding from myself for nearly 40 years.

I obviously do not have all the answers. I do not know if what I accomplished can be accomplished in the daily grind of normal, everyday life. I would posit that the answer is probably “no” simply because I was not able to do it. Some people claim to have done it. Though, I feel like most self-help books are authored by people who live with a partner and have the luxury of a dual income household to fall back on. I’ve read a lot of self-help books and have researched the authors and am pretty sure they’re a scam. I can confidently say that I am making zero dollars off of Substack, so, at least you know Amazon didn’t sponsor this post.

I am no expert, but neither are they.

I wrote this very long, winding story to give you another example of someone who took a lifetime of self-loathing and over-performing and sheer, iron-will and brute force to forge a life that didn’t want to be, into…a life.

So far, this new life, tender and soft like the buds on a tree in the spring, almost fluorescent green in its nubile freshness, fits. It feels comfortable. It feels like sitting under the shade as a gentle, wisteria-perfumed breeze caresses my skin.

It’s even starting to feel a little bit like home.

He threw me a surprise birthday party for my 30th birthday, inviting people that I worked with who knew the secrets about our marriage that made him look like a victim and me the villain.

Classic.

As we walked back from the party - “my” party - that I was too scared to actually enjoy, let alone drink for fear of what he might do later behind closed doors - he began to berate me for everyone he invited talking about us behind our backs.

Once, after he attempted suicide, which, my traumatized brain no longer remembers if the suicide attempt happened before or after the attempt on my life… I took him to see my therapist. She described his relentless cadence of speech and mannerisms to be like a propeller on a plane. It just kept going and going and going and going and going… it never stopped. Until it wore you down. And even then…

It was in this propeller-esque vein of rhetoric that he assaulted me verbally before we even got in the door of our house. He proceeded to go on and on about everything and nothing, every slight of the eye, every low-voice, every smile - insincere or otherwise, and how it was all my fault. How I was worthless and stupid and a whore to top it all off. As he berated me, I was overcome with a desire to just end everything and so I finally screamed at him that he was stupid for inviting all those people if he didn’t want to be around them.

Stupid.

That was a word he couldn’t abide. Certainly not directed at him. Oh no. He had told me many times throughout our 11 year relationship that he had somehow been randomly sought out by Mensa as a child (in addition to the irrefutable, but obscure-enough fact that it could not be verified, he was voted “most beautiful baby” by whatever podunk town he lived in), but his parents were too poor to get him into the Mensa club.

He was a tragic victim of all of life’s circumstances.

I called him “stupid” on my 30th birthday and was angry enough and foolish enough to turn my back on him and go upstairs to take a shower. I wanted to wash off the day and just go to bed.

Halfway through my shower, he burst into the bathroom.

It was an old house with a clawfoot bathtub, something most women dream about having. When we purchased the house I thought it was neat, but also awkward and strange because the tub was in the middle of the small bathroom and rung by a floating shower curtain ring hanging from the ceiling like a halo. It wasn’t connected to a wall or anything, unlike most shower/tub combinations I had grown up with. The shower curtain, consequently, was on all sides, like a cascading waterfall with empty air all around it.

I had shampoo and my hands in my hair, trying to scrape away the disappointments of my life and the memories of another bad birthday with a man I did not understand why he seemed to hate me so much.

He came in shouting. I don’t remember what he said. All I know is that suddenly the shower curtain was in my mouth and his hands were around my neck. I tried to fight back but he was obscured by the filmy gloss of the shower curtain and it was covering my mouth like a plastic bag over my head and blackness suddenly started to creep into my peripherals. I reflexively thought: “my poor mother. This is how she is going to see me: dead and naked in the shower.”

My mother lived several hours away in upstate New York. I don’t know why I thought she would see me naked and dead in the shower because she would not have. The coroner would have taken me away and she would have seen me naked and dead on a coroner’s table.

Perhaps my ex-husband would have been prosecuted for murder, but based on my experience, that was not likely. He was such a charmer that he likely would have convinced the local police that I deserved it. He convinced many people that I was a villain, so I had little confidence that he would ever be punished for anything he did. The history of his increasingly escalating violence gave me little data to suspect otherwise.

I’m not sure why he let go, but he did. He must have. I couldn’t get my hands up around the shower curtain to pull his hands off my neck. I must have slumped into the bottom of the shower because the next thing I remember, after the creeping blackness like the kudzu vines that “ate the South,” is gasping in the bottom of that clawfoot tub, crying hysterically in the fetal position once I could breathe, and screaming at him to get out of the bathroom.

I never showered with the door unlocked again. To this day, I detest showering in showers that have shower curtains. I can do it, now, but I couldn’t for many years.

After I successfully eradicated this pathetic excuse for a human being from my life a few months later, I was left with the ghosts of him and his words, just like the creeping kudzu vines continue to strangle the South even after local officials thought they were long gone. I have been to therapy and I can confidently tout the effects of EMDR.

But there are still the ashy, amorphous memories like the roots of weeds that never seem to fully get pulled out. And spring after spring, something pokes into the recesses of my memory, no matter how many peonies or lilies I plant in the garden of my mind.

I am always frenetic on my birthday. I always carry an air of nervous energy and a miasma of implacable fear or depression. It is because of this seed that he planted. He knew what he was doing. I wonder if he remembers my birthday, still, just like I remember his. Or our wedding anniversary—though that is more faint. I wonder if he remembers what he did and thinks about it with an insidious triumph, knowing that he has forever left a scar on a day that should be nothing but joy and ease.

I had bruises on my neck for a week after that day.

It’s funny how no one notices these things.

I took pictures and saved them on our shared computer. I had my own profile, but he had the master password and was able to access my account and delete them. Now anything I did would merely be “he said, she said;” and we all know how those stories end.

So I walked away with nothing about three months later, after he dragged me to a state I didn’t want to live in to once again further his career (he works for the US Forest Service, which is part of the federal government). I got the dog and the cat out of the divorce, and the clothes on my back. He harassed me for about 3 months after that, until he got everything out of his system.

Then, 11 months later, after I had restarted my life in a state I had always wanted to live in, but he refused to move to (undoubtedly because I wanted it), he emailed me out of the blue to tell me that I had been caught in my quest for revenge against him and that the police had dusted for fingerprints on the windowsills of his trashed home (that I had picked out — I hope he thought about that everyday), and it was only a matter of time before I was arrested.

His email was so unhinged, going into detail about the damage to his home and how the criminal enterprise was so thorough that they had even shot a hole in the picture of his best friend’s child’s photo. His theory was that if I had not pulled the trigger myself, I must have hired some stealthy hitman to do it on my behalf.

After getting over my initial shock and anger at these ridiculous accusations, I laughed. Full and long and hard. Phil was such a relentless prick that it was honestly no surprise to me that his home had been ransacked. I was just surprised something like that happened so thoroughly and so fast. In my response email to him I told him as much and that I wished the non-existent CSI of the shithole town in Nowhere, CA the best of luck in matching my fingerprints with anything in their supposed “database.” I told him I hoped he continued to make such good friends, since he was such an amiable person.

I forget what he wrote back other than it was some kind of half-assed apology and the cracker-jack team of police said it was “some kids targeting law enforcement and they must have seen [my] Forest Service uniform.” Like, okay. I had to forcibly knock my head around a bit to get my eyeballs to roll back into their normal position from being rolled so far back in my head. What a crock of crap. I wonder how long it took him to come up with that story. I still wonder. I never responded. I was just glad he was stupid enough to tell me what a fucking loser he still was so I could, indeed, have the last laugh.

I never Googled his name. Not until maybe two or three years ago when I felt that no matter what I found about him, I could handle it. I found nothing. He has an uncle with the same name who is a dentist in Florida, and his uncle comprised almost 90% of the results. The few results with him in it were a paltry few pages showing he was still in the same place, doing the same thing, and that he had a goatee. Gross.

My life is infinitely better, now. I lived a fantastic life full of adventure with the dog and cat, the dog being my life’s soulmate. I did what I wanted and built an empire in the legal world over the last 10 years. Far more than I ever would have achieved with him constantly trying to tear me down from the inside. Living with him was like trying to rescue someone who was drowning and in their desperate attempts to cling to life, they use you to try to climb out of the water.

It was a lot easier to swim once he was no longer around.

But I felt the effects of him for years, like phantom seaweed twisting around my ankles, sometimes pulling me down into the murky depths or stopping my progress and forcing me to tread water until I could kick loose.

Having someone you love try to kill you is a strange thing to live with. It is remarkable I ever trusted any man ever again. Perhaps I am the stupid one for doing so. But therapists and friends continue to praise my ability to love and trust, espousing it as a courageous quality to be lauded, and that my deep capacity for love is a testament to my strength and humanity.

I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s that.

I write this post on the shadow of my post written on my birthday, about trying to find a life that fits my soul. Because whenever I think about this deep desire to be loved in the context of my relationship-history, I worry that I might have brain damage. Or there is some incessantly misfiring synapse in my brain that should be examined by scientists because what kind of masochist continues to go back for more? Isn’t it well known that the definition of insanity is repeatedly trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?

Maybe that is my primordial childhood wound coming to surface, because as I re-read that paragraph, that’s what that sounds like: a child wanting to be comforted and taken care of, without conditions or demand. And maybe that’s not something that needs to be pathologized or solved or neatly tied up with a diagnosis. Maybe it just means that, at some point, I didn’t get what I needed.

And later, I loved someone who punished me for needing anything at all.

So now, yes, there is a part of me that wants to be wrapped up, tucked in, fed soup and cheese for no particular reason other than existing. And if that is what remains after everything, after the violence, after the fear, after rebuilding an entire life from nothing, then I suppose I could call that a defect. A misfiring synapse. Evidence of something fundamentally broken.

Or I could call it something else.

I could call it proof that, despite everything, there is still a part of me that believes I am worth caring for. That might be the most rational thing about me. Because maybe it looks like insanity from the outside: this willingness to love again, to trust again, to keep stepping back into the water after nearly drowning.

But I think I know what it is now. It’s not a broken piece of my brain. It’s not weakness. And it’s certainly not stupidity.

It’s refusal.

A refusal to let him be the final authority on what I deserve. A refusal to let violence calcify into identity. A refusal to let one man’s hands around my throat dictate the rest of my life.

I lived.

Not just in the technical sense, not just breath returning to my lungs on the floor of that clawfoot tub, but in the years after, in the choices I made, in the life I built, in the love I continue to offer despite everything. If that is insanity, then it is the kind that builds empires out of ash. And I will take that, every time.

Every year, my birthday still comes with that familiar edge, the hum of something unresolved, something buried just beneath the surface. But it is not his anymore. It is not the day he tried to end me. It is the day I didn’t end. The day I kept breathing. The day I kept going. The day that, whether I understood it then or not, I chose a life that would one day be bigger than him.

Maybe I will always carry the echoes of that night, like roots beneath the soil that never fully disappear.

But what grows above them now is mine.

Invisibility is my greatest fear.

There. I said it.

My entire life has been built around the fear of being invisible. I think that has A LOT to do with growing up as the eldest daughter: constantly rebuked for my lack of responsibility, perfection, and inability to be AN ADULT as a child, and therefore, incompatible with being cared for and treated like a child. I was relegated to the sidelines of my own childhood while my brother got to the be the favorite of my mother, and my sister the favorite of my father. I floated somewhere in the ether along the lines of an au pair, I guess.

Que my pre-teen years and consequent hormones where it seemed that the only thing worth living for was to be loved. Making money, living responsibly, managing day to day activities and even people and/or their emotions, were simply a part of my life ever since I can remember. Adulthood did not frighten me. Being alone did. Being unloved did. Being unwanted did.

It still does.

This fear is so deeply ingrained in me that I will travel continents, stay in abusive marriages, spend tens of thousands of dollars to secure love. I have not yet dabbled in cosmetic surgery, but the thought has increasingly taken root since my second divorce and the subtle presence of jowels and turkey-neck.

Ever since I can remember, I have asked: what is happiness? Subconsciously, happiness to me has always simply been: being loved. That’s it. I would be happy if I could be loved. Not adored; not respected; not feared.

Loved.

All these self-help gurus go on and on about self-determination, self-love, self-acceptance, self-assurance. That is easy to say if you have been loved in your life. That is easy to achieve if someone, somewhere along the way showed you what it meant to be loved unconditionally. When you have not had that, such things as self-love are antithetical to your existence. Such a concept is incomprehensible.

Once, a dear friend of mine was talking about a minor struggle she was going through and concluded her analysis with the statement: “I just need to be tender with myself.”

I was aghast. She said this to me during the COVID-19 shutdowns. I am still aghast. What does that mean?? I have asked myself that question almost everyday for nearly 6 years. How does one be tender with oneself? What the fuck does being tender with oneself even mean? Let alone look like?

I have applied the lotion to my skin. I have taken the bubble baths. I have gotten facials, massages (though very few because I hate them — because I can’t stand being touched like that… to no one’s surprise), gone on retreats, attended the women’s empowerment class, gotten the degrees, bought the house, done the things. I have checked all the boxes. I have performed self-care.

And yet I am still twice divorced. I am still literally drifting in this world looking for the spark of magic. I am still looking for the life that fits my soul. The whole point of this Midlife Crisis World Tour was to find that spark, that magic and aim it towards myself. I have been touting the same self-love mantras that these gurus espouse in hopes that I will eventually convince myself that I love myself. That I don’t need external validation to feel comfortable in my own skin.

Because that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?

I’m a strong, confident, intelligent, independent woman.

So why do I still crave heterosexual, romantic love from men as a signet of my worth as though it is the water that sustains my soul?

Am I weak?

Am I stupid?

Why does wanting a partner, someone to stand back to back with against the triumphs and tribulations of the world still stir the very depths of my soul as if to cry out: “Yes! That! That is what you need. That will sustain you!”

Not want. Need.

Like water.

Like air.

Is it so simple that the unhealed primordial wounds of my childhood are the cause? If my father wished me ‘happy birthday’ on my actual birthday (if ever), would it heal these wounds? Would the acknowledgement of his and my mother’s failures make any difference after 40 years of carrying the wounds of never being hugged let alone kissed by my parents? Does that matter? I feel like I’m over those facts. I’ve accepted them. They are a part of me and I do not flinch or recoil at the memories (or lack thereof). It doesn’t feel like an open wound, merely a faint, white scar, perhaps, that I recall with a sardonic smile whenever asked.

But yet I sit here, staring at the canal in Narbonne, France, wondering what is happiness? And why can’t I achieve it on my own? Why am I not elated to sit here sunning myself so close to the Mediterranean on the “trip of a lifetime”? What is wrong with me?

What is wrong with me?

I feel confident and self-assured. I feel competent and capable in almost everything I do and say. I know the things that bring me joy: pottery, writing, swimming, sharing intimate connections with close friends and my brother and sister and sharing in their lives. I can be happy for others. I can champion others. I can love others, platonically and romantically. I do it everyday.

But I cannot do it for myself. This is not meant as a pity party. Some of what I write here makes me want to cry, to be sure, but I am not asking for your pity or even your sympathy. I am simply trying to work out in my own head why cannot I love myself as I love others? Why do I seem unable to view the world as the magical, mystical, wonderful place of abundance and joy that I know it can be?

In the shadow of the Genocide in Gaza and the Iran War, it is hard to see the above sentiments, absolutely, and these atrocities should be recognized and denounced for the horror that they are, and the men responsible should be severely and swiftly punished without any leniency today or ever in the future.

But this post is not about that. I cannot tackle that. I will try, in my own small way, but this post is not about that.

It is about trying to find hope in a body that craves it. In a mind that searches for meaning in every song that randomly comes on the streaming service, in the combination of letters or numbers on a passing license plate, on the glance from a stranger, or the coincidence of two seemingly unrelated things colliding right before my eyes for no apparent reason.

I swore off coincidences and cosmic meaning a few months ago. I have more or less stopped following astrology, stopped making meaning out of things that seem tangentially related. I have stopped trying to force meaning. And my life has not changed. It is still as magical or magic-less as it always has been. Which leads me to believe that this existential crisis that I find myself grappling with has nothing to do with the external world and everything to do with something deeply and inherently wrong with or deficient in me.

Is love merely the quiet, steady presence of showing up day after day? Is it merely taking care of myself or someone else? Do I love myself because I take care of myself when no one else is around?

I’ve often read that people who have suffered from trauma tend to shy away from relationships that are stable, steady, reliable and consistent because it is so foreign to the chaos, confusion, and drama of their traumatic past. They simply fear anything that does not provide the familiar cortisol and dopamine spikes that trauma does.

I do not experience that with myself. So is that love?

Perhaps.

I still have the rest of my life to answer these questions. I gave myself another 11 months to sit and merely contemplate my existence uninhibited by the demands of regular bills, customer service, and, in general, other people. I gifted myself this self-imposed isolation to answer these, and other, questions.

As I continue to travel, I will continue to unravel them here. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I would welcome a discussion on them. Until then, I will continue to shout, scream, cry, laugh, whisper, and pontificate into this echo chamber that is my Substack. I appreciate you being here for the ride of this imperfect journey.

(1) I enjoy living alone and will not cohabitate ever again (probably);

(2) I enjoy BEING alone and will likely only ever put myself in situations where I can leave as soon as I feel like it;

(3) Everything is basically the same no matter where you go because people are people.

I enjoy working on my novel so much. I absolutely hate the querying process. It is diabolical and what is more, it is dominated by young people who have absolutely no life experience to be telling me whether or not my novel is worth their time. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Every time I get a form rejection email, I can’t help but think: how do you know if my novel is “a good fit” if you don’t even know what fits you because you’re 27 (maybe up to 33) years old?

I went on a Tinder date in Paris because I had eaten too many oysters (actually, there is no such thing as “too many oysters” in my opinion. It is probably more accurate to say that I was drunk, bored, and ovulating), and had drunk several glasses of wine and some champagne. I had never downloaded Tinder before this date and I have since deleted it. It is the most depraved and shallow place on the Internet I have ever been and I have zero desire to go back.

The date itself was a very obvious pretense to have sex, which I knew and almost bailed on that reason alone, but, honestly, I had nothing better to do and I thought that maybe this guy would at least be interesting or show me something. Neither supposition proved true. To say he was probably one of the least interesting people I had ever met would be an understatement. The only interesting story he told me was in response to me sharing that I dabble in pottery. He proceeded to tell me about how his prior girlfriend (of 5 years) made him a pot for some celebratory occurrence. Apparently, his response to this pot was the precipitous event to their breakup. I am sure there were many signs and symptoms along the way that he ignored, but, according to him, this was the final straw. He did show some self-awareness in that, at least. I busted out laughing at him. I didn’t pretend that I was laughing with him. He had me in stitches over how truly awful he was to his prior girlfriend, going so far, apparently, as to move the pot into a box under his bed because he hated it so much. He found it offensive to his home’s aesthetics. I was laughing so hard at him I didn’t even have the chance to point out what a controlling prick he was for referring to it as him home and his aesthetics. Again, he did show some self-awareness by asking me whether or not he should have just “lied” to the girlfriend and pretended to appreciate the pot, to which I emphatically answered, “yes!” In a more philosophical tone, he asked me if it was better to lie to her than to tell her the truth, and I said, “in some situations, this being one of them, it is better to preserve and protect the feelings of your girlfriend than it is to worry about whether or not the pot was ‘good’ or aesthetically pleasing.” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

I am currently reading (i.e., listening) to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander. I actually watched the series first, by accident. If I had known it was book, I would have read the book first. All that said, I am 50% of the way through the book and I can say that the first season of Outlander the TV series is surprisingly accurate. But I bring up this book because I have been thinking a lot about why the main male character, Jamie Fraser, is so appealing to women. He is a little flat in both the series and the book, truth be told. But I think that is, in part, because we only get narration from Claire Beauchamp, the main female character and protagonist. Jamie has emotions and they are displayed in various bouts of post-adrenaline dispensation following life-threatening situations. In Outlander, that happens every other chapter or so. Claire routinely gets herself captured because she doesn’t listen to Jamie’s instructions to stay put. One particularly desperate rescue by Jamie leads him to eventually literally beat Claire with a leather belt on her ass, which he warns her about and explains in detail why he must do it as justice for jeopardizing not only his life, but the lives of all the Scottish Highlanders who risked their necks to help Jamie rescue Claire. It’s a bit primitive in its logic, but sound nonetheless once Jamie finishes his monologue on the topic.

Thereafter, Jamie and Claire engage in one of the best-written sex scenes I’ve ever encountered in a book.

It portrayed a certain barbarism coupled with sensitivity from Jamie that made perfect sense to me as a heterosexual woman, but, I imagine, is the prime example of confusion for men. In the scene, Jamie proclaims that he will have sex with Claire, who is now his wife and she will not deny him his right to her body as his wife. While that sounds unabashedly patriarchal (and it is), it is also incredibly alluring. Not because he is asserting a property right over Claire’s body that she cannot object to—because in the prior scene Claire did object to such assertion of property rights—but because Jamie assuaged her with a monologue about his unequivocal allegiance to her. He called it “fealty.” That was what warriors, essentially, used to swear to their lords and masters before going off into battle.

What makes the sex scene so incredibly powerful and swoon-inducing to heterosexual women is that Jamie promised to protect her before asserting his “claim” to her as her husband. I think it is also important that they were married in this scene, because being married, having taken vows to one another, hits a lot more romantically than a boyfriend making such claims.

He also spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide for her. Not in a “I’m going to put on a tie and get a job” sort of way, because that wasn’t an option back then or for him specifically, but in a “what would make you happy, my dear?” sort of way.

In the novel, he is a wanted man, hunted by a sadistic British soldier with a personal vendetta against Jamie, and rather than worry about that, he is torn between his duties to his family in Scotland and Claire’s desire to leave Scotland (so she can return home to her contemporary time period of 1942 — that will make sense if you read the book or watch the show). Jamie doesn’t know she wants to return to “the future,” yet, but he nonetheless is wracking his brains to try to figure out how to make her happy despite all the consequences and politics going on in his life.

Jamie’s allegiances are perfectly balanced between himself, his family, and his clan; but Claire, his wife, is paramount. He does not abandon or foresake everything else in his life for her, but he does not shudder her to the bottom of the list, or become overwhelmed with the additional responsibility of a woman he was kind-of forced to marry. In the story, the arranged marriage was a necessary mechanism to save Claire’s life, but primarily was a vehicle for creating a weak enemies-to-lovers trope (because they were never enemies, just not ready to marry one another after having known one another for only one month).

Bringing all of this back to my Tinder “date” with a Frenchman who merely wanted to “bang,” and his asinine story about his ex-girlfriend’s pottery and whether or not he should have lied to her to preserve the relationship. This Frenchman was certainly no Jamie Fraser because Jamie Fraser would have told this woman that he loved her and her efforts and that no one else makes pottery like her and that it was beautiful and special because it came from her hands. If she had asked him if he thought it was “good,” he would have told her “no” because Jamie and Claire swore that they would be honest with one another above all else, but he still would have displayed it prominently and fawned over it because it was special to her.

That is protection. That is provision.

It is not hard nor confusing when women say they want a strong but sensitive man like Jamie Fraser. They want a man who can be a husband, a father, a son, and a provider and protector because it is not impossible to be and do all those things. All of those things require a man to set aside his ego and to do for others. That is the measure of a man. A man who can figure out ways to balance all his various duties and responsibilities in life and not act like a petulant child or a ruthless tyrant is truly a man.

Or, in modern parlance, an average woman.

There is a meme circulating that one of my childless friends is fond of sharing and it goes something like: “don’t ask me to explain it but being in your 30s in the suburbs looks different than being in your 30s in the city.” The meme implies that living in the city is usually accompanied by being childless, while living in the suburbs implies having children, a house, and a husband (the post is directed at women because it is implicitly dissecting beauty standards and stereotypes).

My parents are old for my age. What I mean by that is, my peers’ parents are currently in their 60s, while my parents are in their 70s. Growing up, my parents were always roughly a decade older than my peers’ parents. My peers did not know this because my parents did not look their age, and upon learning that my mother just turned 40, my 13-year old friend exclaimed that she did not look 40. My parents did, admittedly, age well. I believe I have inherited their aging genes because for my lack of botox and complete lack of skin care routine (beyond hygiene), I, admittedly, “do not look” my age. Though, I know what I looked like 10 and 20 years ago and I do not look like that…

“Looking 40” when I was a teenager (roughly 25 years ago), meant a certain aesthetic: big hair that was still coming down from the 80s and 90s, spandex, Jazzercise, deflated shoulder pads, sheer tights (because those were still required for any woman over 30 working in an office), sometimes a perm, and visible wrinkles. But I don’t remember seeing these visible wrinkles. Maybe some laugh lines around the eyes, or loose skin around the neck, but I don’t remember forehead creases or mouth lines or sagging facial skin.

But I think we associate that with 40 because my parents’ generation associated wrinkles with 40s. Also, the beauty industry makes us associate wrinkles and irreparable aging with our 40s. For women, of course, not men.

I think, perhaps, there is some truth to this, but, as I said in the beginning, I think aging is a function of the times we are in. When my grandmother reached 40, it was after having 5 children, raising them, and seeing them off into the world through the 60s and 70s. Not an easy task. My grandfather was, by all accounts, a very stand-up guy and someone I wish I had gotten to know because then maybe I would have had an example of a good, honest, loyal, father and husband. Not just a man, but a father and husband. Not someone who was married, not someone who had kids - but a man who chose and celebrated the role of father and husband. Rest in Peace, Papa. Everyone misses you dearly and I miss you for all the stories I heard, but never got to experience.

My mother, on the other hand, had birthed 3 children shortly before reaching 40 years old (me at 33, my brother at 35, and my sister at 37 - so you can see how this was a deviation from the norm of my mother’s peers). Even by her account, we were all “easy” children and having 2 less than her mother probably aged her less.

As children, it is impossible to guess how old anyone is because everyone is “old.” Teachers seem old, even though they were almost always in their mid-twenties to early thirties - except for a few who hung in there well into their 50s and 60s. Even writing this, now, as an adult, I find myself unable to guess how old my oldest teachers were based on how I remember them from when I was a child. In my memory, the oldest teachers were ancient. Though they could have only been in their 40s or 50s.

Sitting here writing this now, 50 does not seem old at all. It is the number itself that feels more daunting than how I think I will feel at 50.

My grandmother had 5 kids and raised them; my mother had 3 kids and raised them; now I have 0 kids and successfully raised and said goodbye to 3 dogs and 2 cats over the course of my life. In my memory, I look different than my mother did at 40.

Thinking back on it, my mother took and taught karate classes (after my brother and I joined). She loved it. It gave her purpose as her kids aged and she and my dad grew rapidly apart in the unending standoff of slowly punishing the other for not being the person the other wanted them to grow into. It also gave her incredible mobility. My mom, in her 70s, cleans houses, landscapes peoples’ yards in the warmer months, and walks anywhere from 5-15 miles per day! Yet, she does this for people her own age and younger.

So all of this is to say: age is just a number. And as we learn more and more about health and longevity, it appears that everything boils down to one of the core principles of physics: An object in motion stays in motion.

Which, in some small way, is one reason why I had to travel like this to get over my recent losses and heartbreaks, and also to write.

I needed the movement to stir my soul so I did not wallow in loss and what I did not have.

I needed to stave off the things in life that wear us down and age us prematurely.

I started out wanting to write this post about the fact that: age is just a number and youth is not wasted on the young. While I may not be able to run as fast for as long, or jump as high, or do as deep of a split as a 20-something, that is because I don’t train. If I did train, I could probably give them a run for their money. Age is a reality because aging is about entropy, and everything does dissolve and disintegrate over time. It’s another law of physics and an inevitability. But how quickly I dissolve, how quickly I fall apart, is about me, my physique, and my willingness to take care of myself. Women now-a-days have more access to products, treatments, and even attitudes about exercise that are, in part, extremely toxic, but also - in moderation - good for us. We are not aging as quickly as our parents and grandparents, but we also have access to knowledge and information and resources that they did not.

My mom could never have taken a year off to travel the world to better and reclaim herself. Forget about my grandmother! They both had too much responsibility.

And so many of these travel blogs feature young people traveling the world, living out of a mere backpack as they do so, and having fabulous adventures.

What I am realizing is this: women in their 40s today are redefining, en masse, what it means to age and to age gracefully. Some are fighting it, kicking and screaming, with cosmetic procedures; some are not. I do not take a position on botox or other cosmetic procedures other than to say that, at this point, it is not for me. But that’s really more about a budget and laziness thing for me than anything else.

What’s more important to me than avoiding forehead wrinkles is to save my money for experiences that will weather my skin, enrich my mind, mend my broken heart, and expand my horizons. Those are my priorities right now.

Often, as humans, we think we have to do everything when we’re young. And once we are no longer young, we cannot do certain things because we are old. I do not believe that.

I will never believe that. If anything, my mother’s aging process has been a miracle to behold and I thank her for not letting convention and age turn her into a shell of a person who just sits in her chair all day watching soap operas and lamenting her inability to move or do the things she used to do.

I will follow suit. I encourage other women to follow suit. I encourage other women in their 40s to reclaim their lives and, most importantly, their wonder. The obsession with youth - which seems to only apply to women - is obnoxious at best and downright toxic at worst. Young women today have benefited from the millennia of the women who came before — women like you and me — to be able to travel the world independently and explore and expand their horizons. Since age is just a number, and women in their 40s are re-defining what it means to age, I think it is more important now than ever for women in their 40s to get out there, explore, take the adventure, go on the retreat, quit or switch the job, take up the new hobby (or reconnect with the old one), connect with their inner girl, and reclaim their lives and redefine themselves. After all, we worked this hard to get here, to achieve these results to the next generation can have it better, so why shouldn’t we also enjoy the fruits?

We don’t have to be defined or limited by our age, and society’s imposition of definitions and limitations of what it means to be a woman in her 40s. I might not be as flexible as I was in my 20s, but I’m working on it; and I am working on being flexible with my mind with all the decades of experience, learning, and intuition that I have curated over that time. If I had taken this adventure in my 20s, I certainly would have learned and grown, but I don’t think it would have been as meaningful as it is now, or as easy.

I honestly think this should be a thing. Bring back the moon huts! Bring back the community of women who support one another in all aspects of life. But I would suggest that we add to a woman’s timeline the pilgrimage around the world at 40 as a right of passage. I’ll let you know how it goes! ;-)

Also, little things are just not as convenient. Like washing machines. They have become the bane of my existence. I have in the past (as I am now), washing my unmentionables in the sink and shower, and, in the words of the great Gloria Gaynor, “I will survive.” But it would be nice to have a goddamn washing machine in the AirBnBs I rent, or the houses I housesit for.

The lack of in-home washing machines in Europe makes me wonder whether they have fewer clothes than Americans? Or, what, exactly do they do? Because this seems insane to me. Especially in England where everything is damp all the time; how does one dry one’s clothes when the humidity is 87%? I know washing machines are different than dryers, I’m just saying, to wash stuff by hand and then have to wait a week for it to dry seems like suffering for suffering’s sake. Ya’ll conquered most of the known world and you can’t install washing machines?

Anyway, certain parts of my journey require driving. It’s just easier and less time consuming. For example, I was looking at taking trains from Geneva to Grindelwald or Bern and the trip is like, 5 hours one way. So, while the train system is awesome, it is also extremely cumbersome and time consuming. Not to mention expensive. Unless you know 6 months in advance what train date, location, and time you want to travel, you’re going to spend at least $100 one way per train ticket. Or, at least, that’s been my experience. I don’t know how to find cheaper tickets.

You could purchase the Eurorail pass but that is also not cheap, running anywhere from $350 to over $600 depending on the pass you want and it usually only lasts 1 month at the most. The cost would have fit my needs, but not the duration of the pass. And often it doesn’t cover international travel as part of the pass.

If you want to drive in Europe, one thing they often do not tell you is that you need an International Driver’s Permit. Not a license, just a permit. There is no such thing as an international driver’s license. That would be administratively insane. Plus, who would issue it? The UN doesn’t actually do anything - so taking on a worldwide administrative task would not work.

The International Driver’s Permit (IDP) is a physical booklet because they have to make it as annoying and un-travel friendly as possible. Oh, and you can only get it in the USA from AAA by mail or in person (https://www.aaa.com/vacation/idpf.html). It only costs $20, but if you don’t know in advance to get it, then you’re kind of fucked because once you are overseas, you can only apply by mail which takes 5-7 weeks to process and mail to you. And that’s if you have an address to accept mail at. The IDP is literally just a booklet that translates your license into like, 10 different major languages. I don’t know which ones but I’m assuming Arabic, Italian, and Spanish at least. Probably German.

But that’s all it is: a document translating your domestic license. It doesn’t do anything or convey any special rights. It exists so in case you get into an accident, the police know how to yell at you.

Apparently, though, some rental car companies will not let you rent if you don’t have the IDP. Ergo, the problem I am currently trying to stem the tide of. I spent about 2 hours today trying to take an appropriate passport style selfie, get the background removed and properly sized (I found this link and used it successfully. It is legitimately free and actually useful: passportphotowiz.com. I also tested it out on the US Dept of State passport renewal photo portal and it was accepted).

I have enlisted my sister, my only responsible family member, to help me execute on this absurdly cumbersome and laborious task. You need to print out two passport photos and sign the back, and send it in with the application and a copy of your driver’s license, plus a $20 check, and then by the grace of God someone will mail your IDP to you in the US within 5 business days. I saw there is supposedly an online application portal but that appears to be bullshit because the AAA website (I assume owned and managed by boomers) only has metadata about the online IDP application, but no actual portal. Yay.

My poor, enlisted sister will then have to mail me the IDP using FedEx or DHL and hopefully I will get it before I have to rent a car.

I am attempting to rent my first car from Hertz in Switzerland because that website did not mention an IDP. So please cross your fingers that they won’t give a shit and let me take my car without an IDP. I am otherwise hoping that I will get the IDP before I have to drive in Italy because apparently Italy cares A LOT about the IDP. They can’t get their shit together for basically anything else, let alone be on time, but they want you to have that IDP for some reason.

I have rented several cars in Morocco and never heard one whisper about an IDP, so this came as a shock to me.

Wish me luck!