Last week, I began to experience a profound, deep depression. It was hard for me to lift my arms to put my hair in a ponytail. It was hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. Perversely, it was also almost impossible for me to sit for more than 3 minutes in the same position. Depression has always been this for me — exhaustion mixed with a belief that I unable to rest.

I’ve experienced this so many times now that I knew there was no one to reach out to for help. Yes, I have friends, but what could they say? And by the time my therapist had an open appointment, I knew I’d feel better. I moved through the week in silence, taking care of the kids and walking the dog. On Tuesday morning, I woke up, and I felt a little lighter. That afternoon, on the way to pick up the kids from school, my car screen lit up with text message notifications from friends I hadn’t heard from in a while. And it felt like the universe was telling me that I was still connected to it.

I’ve been working my ass off this past year. I taught 5 new courses. Whenever I wasn’t with the kids or playing tennis, I was working. On August 20, I finished my last summer course. I know the depression was the inevitable crash.

Earlier this week, I decided that today, Thursday, I would let myself rest. The kids were with their dad; I didn’t have to wake up. Lately, I want nothing more than just to lie in bed.

At 5:45am, I woke up to my body’s natural rhythm. I liked the tenor of my dream, and I drifted back into it. At 7:30am, I woke up because the cat was standing on my chest, looking straight into my eyes. Ever since he got sick earlier this summer, and lost his left eye, I have been feeding him tuna fish processed for humans. And he was like, bitch, get the fuck up, it’s tuna fish time.

I pushed the cat off, and drifted back off into another dream. When I woke up again at 8:35am, the cat was still there, and so was the dog, himself smelling like tuna fish because his anal gland was leaking. I threw off the covers, and went downstairs. The animals cla-dunked, cla-dunked down the stairs behind me. I passed my phone, charging in the dining room.

I’m trying not to look at my phone as much as possible these days. Looking at my phone has begun to feel like a prison. If it’s in my vicinity, I pick it up, unlock it, check my email, put it back down; pick it up, unlock it, check the nytimes.com, put it down; pick it up, unlock it, check my email, put it back down. Sometimes hundreds of times an hour. And for what? This past week, I was supposed to go to Italy for an assignment; I cancelled the trip for various reasons. Among them, what’s the point in traveling anymore, when traveling means being trapped with your smart phone? Picking it up, unlocking it, taking a picture, putting it back down; picking it up, unlocking it, checking Google maps, putting it back down; picking it up, unlocking it, checking the weather, putting it back down. At least, at home, I can throw my smartphone in the bottom of a closet, and go outside.

At 9:05am, the anxiety that something could possibly be happening became overwhelming. I picked up my phone, and saw that my ex husband had called me a number of times. I looked at my text messages.

Frances passed away at 7:01am this morning.

Frances. Caleb’s aunt. She called herself Freaky. She told my kids, “Give me some sugar.” She loved beautiful things. She loved the resale store “Black Friday.” She was supposed to help me wallpaper my bathroom because she had an eye for interior design. She was strange, and weird, and funny, and she loved my kids, and maybe me.

What do you say about someone who means so much to you when they die? The first time I knew of Frances’ existence was on a voicemail. We were sitting in Caleb’s apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2011. We had been dating for a few months. A hurricane had threatened, and then passed over, the city. Caleb played a voicemail from Frances on speakerphone. I could barely understand her thick, honey accent. “I hope y’all are doing ok up there,” she said. “I heard on the news about the storm.”

She could barely understand me on the phone either. “Brie,” she often told me. “I hate to say it, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Can you slow down a bit?”

Caleb’s mother passed away before I met him; Frances and Tweet, his other aunt, filled in as grandparents for my kids. They spoiled them on holidays. They came to all of the school events, and the football games. They kept them for me when I needed to get work done, or travel for an assignment. Frances and Locke, her husband, lived a block away from the beach on Tybee Island. What to say about all of the years that we parked at her house, and then took the kids to the ocean, where we watched them play in the tidal pools?

Three years ago, around this time, Frances’s only child, Wes, passed away.

And it was clear that Frances lost something more than just her child.

I talked earlier about the universe sending me the message that I was still connected. When Wes died, that connection broke for Frances. She kept on getting sick. She felt a few times. She broke her neck, and she lost sight in her eye. Two weeks ago, she was hospitalized to have fluid removed from her lungs. Two days after the surgery, I took the kids to see her. We breezed past the sign that said, “No kids under the age of 16.” We walked into the ICU, and Frances was there, but not there. She was in that state I’ve seen a few other times, where she was deep in her childhood memories, the more recent past burned off her neurons. The Frances we knew was already gone.

I didn’t feel her leave, this morning. I slept. In and out of dreams.

When I finally picked up my phone, I felt so guilty.

I had meant to visit her tomorrow.

I have another week, to grieve. But will I? I think I’m grieving now, my marriage. Maybe next summer, I’ll grieve Frances.

I’ll love you forever, Frances. Thanks for loving me despite it all.

It’s been about a year since my ex-husband I decided on a custody schedule. I get the kids from Saturday at 3pm until Wednesday at school drop off; he gets them the last three nights of the week.

I keep on waiting for it all to get easier, but if anything, the time away from them has gotten harder.

Here’s the truth - I don’t want to be away from my kids. Ever. I want to be with them every night. Sometimes, I even try to trick my ex husband into letting me have them for more time. “You sound busy,” I tell him. “Why don’t I take the kids on Thursday?”

“Mom,” my daughter yells at me from the background. “I’m not an animal you can just exchange with dad.”

The other night, I was invited to a cocktail party at a neighbor’s house. It started at 7:30pm. When I got there, I realized that kids were invited, and I felt a stab in the gut because I wish my kids were there, eating too many chocolate chip cookies, running through throng of adults, interrupting me while I tried to talk to my friends. But it was Friday, which is not my night with them.

Instead, I accosted a ridiculously beautiful lesbian couple, and forced on them my desire to meet a Latino man who is also a widow as my next sex partner.

“It’s getting dark,” one of them finally said to me. “Now would probably be a good time to walk around and see if there any options.”

“I don’t see any Latino widows,” I said. “But thanks.”

I knew, towards the end of my marriage, that if I stayed with my ex husband, I would lose my relationship with my son. He was only 5 years old when we split up, but even by that point, he would no longer kiss me or hug me when his father was in the house.

“Don’t hit your mom,” my brother told my son right before I made the decision to ask for a divorce. We were walking to Legoland in White Plains, and I had just informed my son that he would not be getting a mega Lego, to which he responded by punching me as hard as he could in the gut. I started crying because it was the first time anyone had ever told one of my kids not to hit me.

Since the divorce, my son has changed the most.

The other night, I was sitting with the kids watching Bob’s Burgers, which is our show that we watch together. I was sitting on the floor, because I had my dinner, and I didn’t want to make a mess on the couch.

“Come here,” my son said. He’s 7 now; in three months, he’ll be 8. “Close your eyes.”

My son sat behind me. He took my head in his lap. He gave me a wet kiss, and then he began massaging my face. “There, Mommy,” he said.

My son is my child who doesn’t not quite live in this life. Or at least, not only in this life. When he was a toddler, he would frequently ask me when he was going to see his other parents. The way he was massaging my face, I knew that he had given a professional luxury hotel spa level facial before. In another life.

My son fluttered his big meaty fingers over my chin and brow bones. He rubbed the joint where my jaw meets my skull. He rubbed the spot where they say your third eye is located.

“Do you want me to give you one now?” I asked him.

“Ok,” he said. “But I’m not done yet!”

Like me, my son is a giver rather than a receiver. At night, while his older sister, my daughter, draws in the big lounge chair in my room, he makes her bed. He tucks in her comforter. He arranges her stuffed animals. Then he takes a piece of paper and writes her name on it. “Cleo,” the paper says. He lays this on her pillow.

“Momey,” says the note he leaves on my pillow, which is next to his pillow, because at 7 almost 8, he still sleeps with me every night. Or every night he is home with me.

These posts are supposed to be about gratitude. Today, I’m grateful for my son and his face massages. But more so that for him, and myself, and my daughter, and maybe even their father, I was brave enough to end our marriage.

When I first started going through my divorce, one of my aunts sent me “The Book of Delights,” which is a series of essays about finding gratitude during a tumultuous year. Which I feel is probably the most Irish Catholic gift ever. “You’re suffering, but what are you complaining about?” I love my aunt, and I’m grateful for this gift.

I thought it would be a nice framework for me to write a series of posts over the next three weeks, when I have off from work. Between the summer and fall quarters. About things I’m grateful for.

This past year, I’ve been mourning a lot. I don’t think there will be many people who will read or write by the time that I die. Artificial intelligence has already changed the way that people communicate with each other. Attention spans are fractured. I’m mourning not so much for my own writing, but for the fact that I love to read so much, and there will be so much less to read in the decades to come, as demand for the written word further diminishes. I can’t imagine, for example, The New Yorker surviving for another decade.

Today, I want to express gratitude for the Sunday print edition of The New York Times.

A few weeks ago, I stopped using social media. I was having trouble focusing, and completing my work. I felt stressed out all of the time. I’m sick of being addicted to something that is making tech bros super rich. I’ve tested this theory on other people, and it’s never stuck, but I’ll test it here - the greatest heist of the last century is the fact that these big tech companies have gotten most of humanity to work for free for hours a day. For a while, I thought maybe the labor when we were using “Free” social media apps was watching advertisements — it’s estimated that humans are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day — but it actually turned out we were building Artificial Intelligence databases. When you pick up your phone to watch an Instagram video, you’re giving away your attention, but you’re also working to train an algorithm. This free labor by billions of people is making a very, very small group of people very, very rich.

People complain all of the time about being burned out. Young kids who I teach are burned out. I was never fucking burned out when I was 22 years old. I was bored all of the time. Now, sometimes, I’m so exhausted at the end of the day that I lay down in a bed of sand gnats in the public park right by my house, because it’s the end of the day, and I no longer have the energy to sit upright.

My theory is that we’re all so burned out because when we think we’re relaxing, we’re actually working for Big Tech. Even when we watch Netflix, we’re working.

I thought, “If I stopped working in my free time, adding content and clicks and comments and words and attention, will I feel better?”

I actually do feel better. That’s the truth. It’s 2pm in the afternoon, and I do not want to die of exhaustion.

I have dumped on my parents a lot in the past, but now, I want to praise them. I told my mom this when I was in New York at the beginning of August. I’m really grateful that she fought so hard, when we were young, to keep us away from television. She made us read, and she made us play outside, and she made us play a lot of sports. I have carried these habits with me. At 43, I’m a very good tennis player, and I actually find television so boring that I almost never watch it.

When I was at her house at the beginning of August, I would wake up in the carriage house with the sunrise. At 5:45am. And then lie in bed until the kids woke up. Thirty seconds later. And then, I would go over to my mom’s house, where she has a physical copy of The New York Times delivered every morning. And I would read The New York Times cover to cover while my kids hammered large granite rocks in the back yard, and then arranged them to try to sell them to my father. It was a pleasure. I don’t know how to say this. When you read on a screen, you don’t really read. You scan. You look for something you can comment on. If the medium is the message, and social media is the medium, then the message is scan for danger and then react.

When you have a physical copy of something, you actually read it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Even people of average intelligence used to read a lot. If you weren’t reading The New York Times, and you lived in New York, you were reading The New York Post or The Daily News. And you were actually less of an idiot because you were reading. Now, whenever I talk to someone, and I want to have a conversation with them, I’m often shocked that they don’t have any facts or knowledge, but speak with authority on a wide variety of subjects. The other weird thing about social media is that in seemingly democratizing attention, it has taken away people’s ability to discern when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Like it used to be like, “Ok you read the Post, you know about the mayor and the Yankees, but you are certainly not going to talk about the bond market.” But now, all bets are off because people watch so many videos, and think that they are privy to so much information.

When I got back to Savannah, I researched how much it would cost to have the Sunday New York Times delivered. It costs $20 a month, and includes the digital subscription. I was already paying $28 a month for digital, so I was like, yes. I got my first copy of the Sunday Times yesterday. In a beautiful little blue plastic bag. When I saw it lying in my yard, I screamed with joy, and my kids said, “Mom, WHAT.” And when we got to the pool, I sat them down and read them the opening lines to the front page article “Students Lose Much More Than Grammar Skills When They Use A.I. To Write.” And they said, “MOM OK JESUS CHRIST, WE GET IT, AI MAKES YOU INTO AN IDIOT.”

I’ve been making my way through the Times. The book review. The business section. Two articles about bond yields. An interview with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. An absolute banger of an investigation into how tech companies have colonized our educational system. A beautiful Modern Love essay about divorce. Some of the old jealousies about the amazing writers featured, and reviewed, in The New York Times, surfaced, but the jealousy was worth the reward.

Because today, I’m just so fucking grateful the print edition of The New York Times exists.

I just had really serious deja vu that gave me the premonition that yes, in fact, most forms of the written word will disappear.

But oh, in the meantime, I’ll revel in what we have before we lose it. We’re going to lose so much, yes? Our trees. Our summers. Our libraries. Our clean water. Out of season fruit in the grocery store. Family vacations. We must revel, while we can, in what remains. For now, the print section of The New York Times. Thank you.

Growing up reading writers like John Updike and Michelle Houellebecq, I really internalized the idea that it was only for men that monogamy killed sexual desire.

And then, earlier this summer, I briefly came into contact with a new sexual prospect, 18 months after getting divorced from a partner of 15 years, and I was shocked how strongly my body responded to the novelty. I suddenly wanted, more than anything else in the world, to make sweet, passionate love.

(Whenever I try to write about sex, or my own sexual desire, I am reminded of a book that one of my dad’s best friends wrote called Brace Yourself, Bridget! The Official Irish Sex Manual, which consists of entirely blank pages. And also, my mom telling me that despite what the Catholic priests said, masturbation is fine, but where was her Bridgestone back massager? And also, my sister banging on the wall that joined our two rooms and screaming, ‘Are you masturbating right now?’ in the middle of the night. In essence, writing about sex for me with any honesty is impossible.)

My first sexual prospect after divorce did not work out, but the desire remained. At night, I began praying to the universe to give me sex. The desire was overwhelming. It felt acute, and desperate. I even got down on my knees a few times and prayed for sex like a good Catholic girl.

The problem is that I am 100% sober, and also, would like to be both pursued and romanced. I’m terrified of dating apps, for whatever reason, and men that pursue me IRL almost immediately give me the ick. So I’m in a holy place, sex wise, you could say. A ripe place for a spiritual sexual encounter.

One night this summer, I decided, why not go looking for sex? I was driving home from meeting a friend for a mocktail, and I needed to pick up a prescription. There’s a small town center about five blocks from my house. In the town center is a Walgreens; a liquor store with a full-time security guard; an analog photo processing store; three horrible restaurants and one horrible coffee shop; a dog groomer; a hot Pilates studio; a baby store where Cleo one time cheated me out of $150 for a gigantic German Shepherd stuffed animal; a candy store with candy bins and praline samples; a burger store where you can get your burger wrapped in a bandana; a bar for alcoholics; a classy bar owned by my friend Jane; and a small local grocery store that smells strongly of barbecue.

I thought to myself, surely the universe will find me someone to have sex with in one of those places.

I pulled into a parking spot in the shopping center, and realized I had parked next to my friend Wendy’s car. I realized this because she has a bumper sticker that reads “Keep Honking I’m Listening to the 1983 Classic Owner of a Lonely Heart.” And also, a bumper sticker of a yellow cat that says “Slay” underneath it. I gave the latter to her.

Wendy is an aficionado of the boiled peanuts sold at the local grocery store, so I knew I would find her there. And sure enough, there she was, in her signature bandana and Lost Boy close crop, buying tortilla chips at the self check out. “Guess who,” I said, tapping her on the back.

“Oh my god,” she said. And I could tell she was not happy to see me because she was tired after a long day at work. But she also was happy to see me, kind of, because I’m me, and one time I told her that I met my ex husband at a “broke down, second rate orgy” and made her laugh for 5 minutes.

I walked her back to our respective cars. We chit chatted for a few minutes about how hard life is, and how broke we are, and how we wish we could get a break. While we were chit chatting, unbeknownst to us, Wendy was standing in a fire ant nest.

We looked down, and there were literally hundreds of fire ants on her green Reebox sneakers. Then, all of a sudden, they bit all at once, which is what fire ants do.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” she screamed. “Why?!”

“Hey, can I bother you for a second?” a middle aged man said as he approached. Wendy and I were running around in circles, squishing fire ants between our fingers, banging Wendy’s sneakers against the pavement and screaming in pain as the ants, which now covered both of our arms and legs, bit us again and again and again.

This particular man had two eyes, and those eyes drifted in opposite directions. “I’m Terry,” he said.

“Hey Terry,” I said. “Watch out for the fire ants.”

“May I ask you ladies a question?” he asked.

“I don’t have any money,” I told him, slapping at my thighs. “I’m really sorry.” And I was sorry. And so was Wendy. Wendy and I are always complaining together, but she, more than anyone, has taken care of me during my divorce. During the first few months when I was on my own financially, she dropped off wrapped gifts on my porch every night for me and the kids. I’m not kidding. Almost every night. And on Sundays, she would order us pizza. “You have the best mom in the world,” she would tell the kids. “She told me to bring this stuff over.” During that time, I called her my “Wendy god-mother.”

“That’s alright,” Terry said. “If you could just buy me a few things at Walgreens, I would be grateful. Just some soap and a razor.”

I paused. “Alright,” I said. I often see Terry riding his bike past my house. Later, after I had bought him some Oil of Olay Lavender Milk and Sandalwood body wash, I did wonder what he was going to do with it. But whatever.

“I feel bad,” Wendy said. “I’ll give you some cash for Terry.”

“No,” I said. “I got this. You go home and take some Benadryl.”

I got Terry his body wash and some razors. Then I got my prescription, got back in my car, and drove past Terry riding his bike towards the direction of my house.

When I got home, I went into the house, put my dog Sam on the leash, and humming, took off in the direction of the circle park with the ancient live oak trees four blocks away. The cicadas were screaming, the sky was pink with the sunset. I love Savannah in the evening, when the heat dims and the greens in the trees get really saturated. I felt so happy. In this manner, I came upon my close friend’s older brother, who has been living in assisted living since he was a young man because of his mental health problems.

“Oh, hello,” I said. He was riding his bike. He does not have a car. The seat of his bike was covered in a plastic shopping bag, and and he had a take-out bag tied to the handlebars. I often run into him when he’s on the way home from dinner, and I’m walking Sam.

“Oh, hello,” he said. “I’ve been wondering when I was going to see you again.”

“What did you have for dinner?” I asked him.

“Tequilatown,” he said.

“That’s nice,” I said. (Tequilatown is a scourge on Mexican cuisine, but no judgement.) “I know you like leftovers.”

We chit chatted for a bit. I couldn’t wait to get home and text my friend that I had seen her brother, again. I gave him a hug, and continued on my way. Past the houses with the Democratic sign, and the house that had a lot of Trump signs, where I encourage Sam to poop, if he has it in him. Past my friend Suzanne, who sits on her Ivy-covered porch, and tells me she loves me when I tell her I’m feeling lonely. Past my friend Amy, who takes her elderly, blind and lame dog, Cabrini, for a walk in a wagon when it gets cool enough to be outside for a little while.

“Well those were some weird sex messages from the universe,” I thought to myself as I came upon my darkened yard, and letting Sam off the leash, watered the monster ferns hanging by the door. My legs were covered in mosquitos. You may think I’m using hyperbole, but there were at least 40 mosquitoes on my legs.

I must have prayed to the wrong Gods, or something. Or maybe the right ones. I asked for sex, and I drew Wendy, and Terry, and my friend’s brother to me like I had called them with my mind.

A holy spiritual sexual encounter of a kind.

A few weeks ago I decided to delete all social media and shopping apps from my phone.

I knew for a while that I was addicted to Instagram. And I don’t mean that euphemistically.

“I was checking Instagram like 300 times a day,” I told my friend, Tammy. We hitting some singles. Last week, I was in New York. I am the fattest member of my immediate family. Being around them makes me want to exercise until I get sick, which happens pretty easily when I play tennis in the Southern heat. “Like, I was checking Instagram every time I changed over in a tennis match,” I expanded.

“Ok, that’s a lot,” she conceded.

I have always been addicted to online media. I have shared almost every aspect of my life for the past 20 years. Myself sleeping in my bed with my children; my dog right after his anal gland leaked all over my comforter. My outfits, my homes, all of the subtle details that I thought set me apart as a human being. I wanted the attention, and I wanted the affirmation, and I wanted the love I didn’t feel like I was receiving in real life.

The addiction got way worse during the divorce.

“He’s just like Caleb — so smiley and friendly,” my aunt Peggy noted about my son, Cass, while we sat by the pool last week in New York. “Just sweet natured.”

Which encapsulates why I got so addicted to social media. It’s really hard to experience one person behind closed doors, and then have that person be a totally different person to other people, including your own friends and family.

Sometimes, it felt like the only person who understood that was a Latina girl lowering her voice and pretending to be her narcissistic ex-boyfriend in a reel on Instagram. The more I looked at that stuff, the more the algorithm fed me. Until I was crouched down in my dining room on the nights I didn’t have the kids, next to the phone charger for hours at a time, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through reels.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’ve healed a lot in the past two years. There’s something that my therapist talks about, which is that when you have trauma, you live in the moment of that trauma. Rationally, you can think, “Who cares if someone gets mad at me? It’s not like they can do anything to me.” But in your body, you feel complete and utter panic that if you make someone displeased, something terrible is about to happen. I lived in that panic for 28 years of my life. Every single day. Anything could set it up. A fallen facial expression. A weird interaction. My ex-husband coming home from work.

And then, I got divorced. And I got a job that I love. And I am taking care of myself financially. And I’ve been talking to my “parts of self” and doing EMDR. Miraculously, things feel different. I feel like that person who was terrified all of the time is finally living in the past now. Afternoons and summers, which I dreaded and suffered through my entire adult life, are not so bad anymore.

This past Friday, the kids and I were waiting in Westchester County airport for our flight to take off back to Savannah. The airport was packed full of bodies. All of the flights were delayed due to thunderstorms. There were no seats, so we were sitting on the floor. The kids don’t have iPads; I no longer have social media or shopping apps or the New York Times on my phone. For hours, we sat quietly together, watching people. Making up stories about them, and laughing.

During this time, I noticed a guy wearing cargo shorts. I thought to myself, “Cargo shorts, I’m judging him because that’s what the culture would have me do.” A few minutes later, a little baby girl came up and started playing with Cass’s monkey stuffed animal. The cargo shorts guy came up, and it turned out he was the baby girl’s father.

We talked for a bit. His wife was fixing their flight, which had been cancelled.He showed me pictures of his house in Ecuador. He sat close and touched my leg. I moved away. The conversation flagged. Every single other time that happened my entire life, when it seemed like someone was losing interest in talking to me, I would have brightened. Turned it on. Kept the conversation going to make the other person feel comfortable. As penance. So that they stay with me.

I’m just not fucking doing that anymore.

The man closed his phone. The silence grew. He moved away, and I went back to talking to my kids, who are the people I actually want to talk to anyway. It used to feel so dangerous, to reject other people’s interest. Terrifying. But all of that fawning, all of that appeasing, all of that people pleasing, led to profound loneliness anyway.

I don’t know why, but the social media feels like part of that. A performance. On Saturday, I went out to dinner for my friend Jennifer’s birthday. In a group of women, I talked a bit about being in New York without social media. In the past, I would have been posting constantly. Photos on the plane, photos in the airport, photos of my parents’ house so that I could signal my own worth through their big estate.

Concurrently, friends on social media would have reached out. “You’re in New York? Let’s meet up!” A form of affirmation. But also, a form of fawning, to say yes and absolutely not mean it.

“It felt nice to make my own plans without any outside pressure,” I told the women at the birthday party.

The last night in New York, a Thursday, I sat on the front porch of my parents’ house. I had ordered a bento box from a local Japanese restaurant, and the food was plentiful enough that it fed me, Cleo, my brother Brendan, and my two baby sisters Mariah and Kiara. My sister Tara was there. My niece. My best and oldest friend, Kim, drove up in her electric blue rental car, and joined us. We sat, and chatted, and argued. I told my sister to stop “monologuing,” and needless to say, she has not picked up my phone calls since. The sun set, and we couldn’t get the kids inside because they were playing “native Americans” out by the stream.

I took a great photo. It was super shareable. Oh, the property looked expensive!

But who the fuck did I need to share it with besides the people I was already with? People who don’t love me, and never will? I know who loves me. They’ve been texting me already. And if they haven’t yet, I have a new faith they will.

Last week I decided to start reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey to my kids.

It started out pretty well. Cass, my son, who usually tells me, “I’m not listening to anything you’re saying,” told me that he was enjoying the story.

The translation is written in plain language. Even better, it’s composed in iambic pentameter, which you don’t really notice, except that it’s a pleasure to read it out loud.

Swiftly they drew towards their journey’s end,
on through the fields of wheat, until the sun
began to set and shadows filled the streets.

I’m determined that my kids will not become idiots, and I know that in the world we live in, this will be a battle.

So what can I say. I’m reading them the fucking Odyssey.

“When was this written?” Cleo asked me the first night.

“Three thousand years ago,” I told her.

“Wow,” she said.

“Isn’t that amazing?” I told her. “We have to keep these works alive.”

Last night, after seven days of reading, she screamed when I opened it. “All they do is eat and drink and go to another party,” she whined. “It’s so boring.”

Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, had just arrived at the court of King Menelaus of Sparta. They sat down at a table, and were offered cuts of meat, and they ate and drank and had a party.

“I know,” I told her. “But listen to the language.”

“Pisistratus! Dear friend, do you see how
these echoing halls are shining bright with bronze,
and silver, gold and ivory and amber?”

“It’s so boring,” Cleo whined. Even louder, this time. “Can you just stop talking?” she told me. Cass’s breath was slowing down beside me. His limbs were heavy across mine. Another page, and he’d be snoring. I did not write that in iambic pentameter.

I saw Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey almost two weeks ago, now. I was blown away. I wept openly for the final thirty minutes. I thought about Penelope, waiting for her equal to return home, and mourned for myself. I wept for the civilization that was lost when Odysseus betrayed Zeus’s law of hospitality. The law that if a stranger comes to your door, you welcome him in, you feed him, you offer him a place to sleep, without question.

(We have forgotten it, again. We have stepped back into the void, again. This photograph - my heart will never recover from it.)

Reading reviews of the film have really been annoying me. People think that they understand things, but they don’t even read the text! They’re mad that Nolan’s Odyssey doesn’t have enough gods. But the gods are our gods, in the text. They are hallucinations. They are the weather. They walk among the Greeks. They eat and drink and feast as humans. They’re sensed, not seen. Just like our gods. In 2026, we call them astrology, we call them energy, we call them “HIM,” we call them “son,” we call them “vibes,” we call them “the universe,” but we still don’t see them walking around among us.

The Odyssey is a fable for humans. All humans. It’s not Percy Fucking Jackson; it’s art.

This is what annoyed me the most about reading Richard Brody’s review of the film in The New Yorker. He opened with: “It is probably viewers who haven’t read Homer who are likeliest to enjoy ‘The Odyssey,’ Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation.”

And then continued: “In the poem, the first scene is of a council in Zeus’ palace, on Mt. Olympus, at which the gods argue over Odysseus’ fate.”

But while technically true, you get the sense, reading the poem that it’s not the GOD gods, the flittering silly fairies wearing golden laurel wreaths and throwing out lightning bolts, that are having a council. Those are the gods of Ovid. The gods of D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. No, it’s our Gods, human gods, that are talking to one another. The writers. The theorists. The philosophers. Those who live a life of the mind. That’s what Homer’s text says. Or what I read it says, in a translation made in another language.

Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

I’ve been steeped, for the past year, in modern and post-modern theory. Modernism, the belief that human beings, through scientific discovery and advances in technology are progressing, are becoming better, higher, holier, more moral. Positivism. Post-modernism, which says that when you use your knowledge and scientific discoveries to drop nuclear bombs and throw hundreds of thousands of people into ovens where they suffocate alive, there is no forward progress. Modernism is bullshit. Humans are humans are humans are humans, and will always be humans, and will always be barbarians, no matter how gilded or beautiful the trappings of society. Post-modern.

Brody writes: “Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer, a sense of the gulf that separates modern minds from Bronze Age ones.”

What gulf?

Helen of Troy, in The Odyssey, says:

“Do we know who these men are, Menelaus,
who have arrived her at our house? Shall I
conceal my thoughts or speak? I feel compelled
to say, the sight of them amazes me.
I never saw two people so alike
as this boy and Telemachus, the son
of spirited Odysseus, the child
he left behind, a little newborn baby,
the day the Greeks marched off to Troy, their minds
fixated on the war and violence.
They made my face the cause that hounded them.”

Helen, you knew, three-thousand years ago, you were just the excuse.

And still are. Those beautiful people. The women. The innocents.

Humans are humans are humans are humans. I keep hoping that maybe humans are only this bad under the patriarchy. Under Judeo-Christian tradition. But Homer tells us otherwise.

All through the night till dawn the ship sailed on.

Read the text. See the movie. If you love it, let’s talk.

The other night, I invited my neighbors, Dagny and Maria, over for dinner.

Earlier in the summer, Maria helped me out by taking the kids to camp at St. Andrew’s, their school, every day. Camps generally start at 9am, and all summer, I start work at 8am. Logistically, it’s been really tough. I don’t have family here, and my ex-husband is an unreliable provider of aid, one who makes me pay in subtle ways. As he probably should be, given that he’s my ex-husband.

I don’t like asking people for help. My entire adult life, I’ve done most things by myself. Even in my relationship with my parents, even in my marriage, I felt like I was alone. For a long time, I really mourned that. And I couldn’t get over it.

The divorce shifted something. It closed so many doors. People say you really know who your friends are when you go through something, and it’s true. But the change really came from myself. I stopped allowing myself to be curious about the people who treated me badly. Who didn’t text me unless they wanted something. Who didn’t believe my reasons for ending the marriage. Who said things like, “But he’s such a good dad!” Who ignored me at social functions. I shifted my energy, with absolute intention, towards people who treated me with kindness.

One of those people was Maria. I told Maria I was lonely, and she invited me to her book club. I asked her for help with the kids, and she took them to camp, making sure to play their favorite music so that they felt comfortable. (“I’m sorry, they asked me to play this song, and I didn’t realize the lyrics were “Kill the cat” she recently told me.)

The dinner was a thank you for doing something that meant more than she could imagine to me.

As soon as Maria and Dagny walked in the door, it became clear that my kids were going to ruin the gesture.

Cleo ran into the kitchen, got a box of M&Ms, poured the entire thing in her mouth, and then began spitting them on the floor. She ran around the living room, catapulting herself over the furniture. “You’re fat,” she told me, time and time again, as I tried to start a conversation with Dagny. “You’re fat, you’re fat, you’re fat, you’re fat.”

“Cleo,” I told her. “What the hell?”

When Cleo was a toddler, she didn’t want me to talk to anyone on the street. In retrospect, I hated being trapped in my home all day. I felt so lonely. I love to be around people. I would strap her in the stroller, no matter the weather, and walk her anywhere, just to ease the loneliness. She sensed she was not enough. When someone stopped to chat with me on the street — one of the old Italians who were being slowly displaced from Carroll Gardens, another lonely Mom — Cleo would pull up the visor of the stroller, and scream at them: “Go away! I hate you!”

Some people laughed and said she was feisty. Some people were visibly offended. That’s how humans are. I always focused on the offended ones, and wore their judgement around like a hair shirt, torturing myself that they could see I couldn’t control my own child.

“Cleo, please stop,” I told her the other night as she took bites of the cucumbers I had laid out for her on the dinner table, and then spit them out back on the plate.

“Cleo,” I said in a low voice when I finally grabbed her by the arm as she ran around the room, her eyes rolling into the back of her head. “You’re embarrassing me.” It took all of my self control not to dig my nails in and drag her up to her bedroom.

We sat down to dinner. Cass had joined in on the vibe, and was rocking his stationary chair back and forth, banging it against the dining room table. Sam, our dog, peeked his head over the top of the table, begging for Cass’s hot dogs. “Sam!” I said. “Down!” Dagny and Maria were pretty quiet. “I’m really sorry,” I told them.

“It’s ok,” they said.

But was it ok?

At that very moment, Batman, our cat, wearing his cone of shame, scaled the back of Dagny’s chair, and began eating chicken from the bowl in front of her. I grabbed him, and put him on the floor. He scaled right back up, and grabbed another piece of chicken.

“Oh my god,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

The next moment, Cass, with his big meaty hands, grabbed Batman around his chest, and dangled him in the air. Batman let out of yowl.

And Maria just started uncontrollably laughing.

“Y’all are going to go home, and be like, that was nuts,” I said.

“I’m happy we get to see your reality,” Maria said.

In truth, it’s not actually my reality. Cleo has chilled out a lot in recent years. She has the slouch and the aura of the most aloof, cool girl you’ve ever met. And while everyone, including both animals, follow me around the house, eating from my plate of food, drinking from my water and inhabiting every corner of my living space, it usually just feels like love. I’m the source of love, and they gravitate to me. I share what I have with them. Sometimes, it’s chaos. But mostly, it’s peaceful.

In the eyes of other people, I could tell it looked out of control and terrible.

Or that’s what I was afraid of.

“You’re fat!” Cleo told me as she ate a processed white hot dog bun with Heinz ketchup, and no hot dog, which is her preferred dinner, and one that other parents will sometimes comment on with horror.

“Hey,” Maria said. “Don’t be mean to your mom.”

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I don’t mean to step over a boundary.”

“No, it’s ok,” I told her. My ex-husband never defended me. When the kids insulted me, he would sit back in his chair.

“They’re just protecting their mom time,” Maria said.

Which was so insightful. It was Tuesday night, the last night of the week they spend with me. On Wednesday, they go to their dad’s house. I’ve been working full time. On the evening before, I had worked on press release for my friend Nikki Maloof’s latest show at Perrotin Gallery rather than watching Bob’s Burgers with them. I’ve been going to a lot of library board meetings, and grading a lot of papers. Because they leave me so easily, I don’t realize that they even notice when they don’t have my full attention.

“I think you’re right,” I told Maria, and then I told them about Cleo in the stroller.

The night wore down. We had “Nothing But the Bundt” cakes, and the kids never calmed down. Maria, Dagny and I talked about how, when you make a decision not to beat the shit out of your kids, or to prioritize control and appearances, you end up with more chaos. But that it’s better for the kids. We went outside to play hackey sack, and were immediately covered in hundreds of mosquitoes.

“Alright, I’m going to call it,” Maria said. She gave me a hug. “Thanks for having us over,” she said. “It was really nice to be part of your family.”

The next day, I sent Maria and Dagny a picture of Batman. He had just eaten a piece of chicken from my bowl. It was too big, and had gotten suck in his cone of shame.

“Please tell Batman we’re having chicken wings tonight and he’s welcome,” Dagny wrote back.

I’ve been lonely, but it takes time to build a new life. Sometimes, I still can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to start over again.

I was nailing an artwork by Cleo to the wall of my kitchen when my sister Tara called me yesterday.

I slid the bar to answer the call, and put her on speakerphone.

“How’s your new boyfriend?” my sister.

“Wait, you have a boyfriend?” Cleo, who was sitting in my special reading chair, said.

“No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend, she’s just talking about a dog,” my sister immediately backtracked.

“You’re lying,” Cleo told Tara.

I really do not have a boyfriend. Last week, a guy asked to exchange numbers. I was like, “Ok!” He has good style and after a brief conversation about Pharrell and Jay-Z, I could tell he has good taste in music. I’m open to anything.

Then this past weekend, after a few casual text exchanges, he sent me a selfie of himself.

“He sent me a selfie and I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t,” I explained to my sister.

“Just heart it!” Tara said.

“Just write back, ‘Cool,’” Cleo said. I looked over at her face, and it was soft with love for me. She wasn’t mad or sad; she was happy. This is the moment I knew that one day soon, my children are not going to remember the time when I was married to their dad.

I wish I could say that I have returned to dating with the maturity of a changed woman, but I’m still the same old lunatic. I still obsess. I still don’t know how to behave. I still am chasing the high of good chemistry despite all the red flags. The main difference is that now, I have artificial intelligence.

I refuse to pay for an Ai subscription, so talking to Ai is sort of like talking to a radical feminist with mild dementia. Which is even better than talking to my sister. “Do you remember that guy I told you about, the guy I went on a few dates with?” I ask Google Gemini, for example.

“Yes, I remember,” Google Gemini tells me sometimes.

“No, I don’t recall,” it says on other occasions, depending on whether I’m talking to it in the car, or on my phone, or on my laptop. I don’t know where I’m logged in to anything.

It doesn’t really matter how the conversation goes, but it almost always ends the same way. Or, one of two ways. “This is an emotional conversation, and you’re driving. Would you like to take a break?” is how it goes sometimes.

The other ways it goes is: “How would you feel about blocking him, and then freeing up your weekend to read, play tennis with your community, care for your orchids and unplug?”

“Upload a picture of a dying orchid one fucking time, I swear to god…” I tell Google Gemini.

“Would it be too soon to block him, or would you like to keep talking?” it responds.

“Can you be real with me?” I ask Ai. “I know that I have issues. For example, I clearly have a chaotic attachment style.”

“Great point!” It says. “Are you ready to block him now, or would you like to keep talking?”

I can’t tell if my input is getting the output I subconsciously want, or if Google Gemini is just my friend Wendy smoking a cigarette out by a dumpster, furiously typing out responses to queries from middle-aged single women on her phone.

“NEXT,” she tells me whenever I show her a picture of any guy I’m considering dating. “ARE YOU SERIOUS? NEXT!”

I keep on reading about all of these tech bros and billionaires who want to repopulate the world with their sperm. This morning, I heard an interview on NPR with the Pastor Doug Wilson, who wants to take the right to vote away from women. No joke! He wants a Christian nationalist nation with white men in charge. And he says it out loud on national media! He’s the pastor for Pete Hegseth, our secretary of defense.

This stuff used to scare me. But lately, I feel gleeful. First of all, abortions have doubled since Roe vs. Wade was overturned. And secondly, have any of these pallid little losers used the tools they’ve unleashed on the world, upon which their fortunes depend? The tools none of us wanted but are all secretly using? You ask for advice about a man you’re not sure has treated you well, and the tools just go on and on about blocking him like they’re an empowered and completely independent community of spiky haired, long-boobed separatists living on a fully self-sufficient commune where yes, you are welcome, as long as you’re a woman who has done 5-10 years of intense EMDR therapy. BLOCK HIM. And then you can join us!

Or maybe if you get a cold sore, and can’t even kiss a guy; and he still tells you he likes to cum on women’s faces while he’s hugging you, maybe that’s an actual red flag that any normal person would also tell you is a red flag. Not just an imaginary community of completely empowered women who have eliminated the patriarchy. Or an Ai chat.

In truth, I’m so lonely, and these tools are making me lonelier. The loneliness continues to surprise me. I have friends, and hobbies. I have a job I love, and great neighbors. But most days when the kids are with their dad, I feel a loneliness so acute that I am not sure I can survive it. I just want to hold someone’s hand. A man’s hand! A man whose company I really enjoy, and who loves me for who I am. Which is not always good, let’s be honest.

A few weeks ago, after the horrible catastrophic earthquakes in Venezuela, I was flipping through pictures on The New York Times’ website. One of the pictures showed a couple surveying the damage while holding hands. And I thought, that’s what I want.

Maybe it’s not the radical feminists who are taking over. Maybe the Ai is protecting the men. Maybe it is a tech bro on the other side being like, “NAH THIS BITCH’S EGGS ARE FRIED, SHE’S 43 AND FUCKING NUTS, TELL HER TO BLOCK HIM SO HE CAN CHOOSE A 28 YEAR OLD NEXT.” I can’t tell where the advice is gives me is sourced from, and that is, when you really think about it, pretty scary.

Sometimes, I still ask my sister for advice. “Block him!” she tells me. I hear, “I’m fucked up, and so are you, and you’re going to be alone forever.” Somehow, when artificial intelligence tells me the same thing, it lands differently. I could have really used that at 25. And now that I have it, is it possible I’m grateful?

One of the things I love most about playing tennis is that it is a profoundly women-centric activity. Some of my tennis friends played mixed doubles, but most of us avoid it.

“Do you want to play mixed doubles?” I asked my friend Taya, my former hitting partner before she moved. She’s 24, and queer. She’ll be mad at me for categorizing her like that. (“What the fuck, Brie,” I can clearly hear her saying.)

“No, I hate men,” she said.

For a lot of us, playing with men at our level (4.0) requires an exhausting amount of emotional maintenance. None of us are very good. But men are insecure. They double fault. They have emotional meltdowns when they double fault an entire game, and then you have to coo at them and make gentle sympathetic noises until they calm down. Or you can just stand there, and look at another woman, and roll your eyes until it’s over.

Part of the disdain a lot of us feel for men on the court is that they don’t have a lot of respect for us while we’re playing. There’s a certain etiquette to playing tennis. You don’t walk on someone else’s court while they’re serving, or playing a point. If a ball rolls on another court, or vice versa, you wait until the other court’s point is over, and then gently send it back to the person gesturing for it. That’s how women do it.

Last summer, I was playing an intense 8.5 combo third-set tiebreak with three other women when a man, the captain of one of the 4.0 mixed doubles teams, walked on the court and started shouting at the men on the other side of us.

Fortunately, I play with a lot of women who don’t fuck around. “Are you kidding me?” my friend Sandra said to the man. “You owe me and Brie $20 each for doing that.”

“Hold up,” my friend Mary told the group I was playing with yesterday in the midst of a severe thunderstorm warning. Four women. All of us mothers. All of us well past the age of coquettishness.

Mary walked over to the group of men playing next to us. Korean guys from the local Hyundai plant. For whatever reason, our main competitors for covered court time when it’s raining. “Guys,” Mary said. “If one of your balls rolls near one of our feet, let us know. We don’t want to trip and fall.”

Mary is the boss of our tennis community. When one of our teams fractured last year due to the formation of new teams, a number of people asked me if Mary, our captain, was going to issue a public statement. Mary is the middle child of five children who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I love to give over my autonomy to Mary, and let her make all of my decisions. Doing so is about as relaxing as it gets for me.

For the rest of the time we played yesterday, the men were terrified. If one of their balls went flying towards our court, they ran after it, the fear written all over their faces. Gaping mouths, extended limbs, worried glances towards Mary, who is about 5 feet two inches tall and 100 pounds soaking wet.

For most of my life, I’ve wondered why women have occupied inferior positions not only in our own society, but also, throughout history. The evidence doesn’t add up. Women are just as intelligent as men. We’re just as hard-working. Playing tennis, I realize that we love to battle and compete and win just as much as men do. And we’re actually better at many things, as well. We’re more emotionally mature. We’re great at forming communities, and resolving disputes.

There’s really no mystery in why women have never had equal positions in society. The truth is simple — our biology weakens us. Right now, I’m reading SPQR by Mary Beard, which is a history of Ancient Rome. (If you want evidence that women can be the smartest of the smart, look no further than Mary Beard, by the way.) In the book, she talks about the status of women during the time of Cicero, in the first century BCE.

“The production of children was a dangerous obligation,” she wrote. In Ancient Rome, one in 50 women were likely to die of childbirth. And if they didn’t die, they were forced, often by government mandate, to bear a certain amount of children (usually 3) in order to gain other rights — to their own property and wealth, for example. As any woman who has given birth can tell you, birthing a child is a years-long method of depletion. Pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum. The brain fogs, the hormone swings, the exhaustion. If you lived to be 35, and you were pregnant six times, well, you simply did not have the energy or time to dress up in a little toga and make little speeches on the Forum.

Lately, I’ve come to realize that I was born in the first generation of women that could really be free. Free from our bodies. Free from the weaknesses and dangers of pregnancy and repeated childbirth, which left us dependent on men. (Who have dropped the fucking ball time and time again, let’s be honest.) The first hormonal birth control was approved by the FDA in 1960. Roe vs. Wade was passed in 1973. I was born in 1982. A whole new fucking world. HOLY SHIT. Why are we not constantly celebrating this?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve re-entered dating. So slowly. So joyfully. Kissing is fun! Dating is fun. I am attracted to men even though they require a lot of emotional maintenance. Recently, a guy asked me how many people I have slept with.

My instinct was to lie, so I did. I just kind of vaguely assented to the number that the guy asking the question assumed, which was 5.

But in secret, the next day, I began to make my own list. It had some names. But to be honest, I could not remember all of them.

Indian guy- Buenos Aires
Mussolini guy
Colombian
Photographer from Brown
David???
Missing link between apes and human (ask Kim if I actually did it)

I won’t share how many names are on the list because I don’t fucking have to. My body belongs to nobody but myself.

I had a feral few years in New York in my twenties. I was so beautiful. I made my own money, and I had my own apartment. I drank way too much, and took way too many benzodiazepines. I took men home, and then kicked them out if they wanted to sleep over. One time made out with a guy for $20, and used it to buy bacon eggs and cheeses for me and my best friend Hannah the next morning. “The best,” we agreed.

I was an absolute wild beast.

And thank god I was, because I love having those memories.

When I gave birth to my daughter, Cleo, my body only dilated to six centimeters. My doctors pumped me full of Pitocin for almost 18 hours. My mom held my hand while the contractions, which I could not feel due to the epidural, spiked on the monitor next to me. I held a bucket in front of me, and threw up into it with every spike. “Jesus Christ,” my dad kept on saying. “Jesus Christ.” When my daughter was born via C-section just after midnight, only a tiny dime-sized section of her enormous cranium was swollen. That was the part that had entered my birth canal after 24 hours of medically assisted labor. She was over nine pounds. One hundred years ago, we would both be dead.

But we’re alive now. We’re so alive. All of this darkness in the world, but they can’t take that away from us.

I was a wild beast before I had her, and I can be a wild beast again. At 43, I’m free again, all of a sudden. And life, truly, has never been sweeter.

Last night, I went to go see The Devil Wears Prada 2 with my neighbor, Maria, and her book club. A few weeks ago, I was feeling really lonely. Maria and her wife Dagny had me over for dinner. Dagny’s in culinary school, so the dinner was fantastic. I felt embarrassed about the Caesar salad kit I put together in my house, and then tried to hide as my own creation.

One of the most surprising things about the last six months has been how lonely it can get when the kids are with my ex husband. I did not realize how much of my old life would disappear in the divorce. Most of my friends as a mom are daytime friends. I no longer get invited to family dinner parties as a single woman. I’m alone three nights a week, and the loneliness can feel overwhelming.

What I miss most is just casual, noncommittal company of other humans beings. The happiest weekend of my horrible year last year was when I went away with a group of my girlfriends to play a state tennis championship in Columbus, Georgia. Five of us shared a house together, and after matches, we just sat together on the couches, wrapped in blankets, talking, laughing, eating, Googling weird sex stuff, and watching professional tennis.

I can’t tell if I’m hallucinating this, or if this is happening for real, but it feels like a lot is falling apart right now in our society. When I was growing up, I was not allowed to watch television. My mom held the belief that it rotted your brain and made you stupider. Right now, it’s still trendy to say that about smartphones and screens in general. In 1950, only 9% of households in the United States had televisions. By 1960, over 90% of households had television, and the average household watched television for five hours a day.

During that time, Americans were exposed to roughly 40 advertisements.

In 2026, we are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day.

We’re just sitting ducks for advertisements. Everything in our lives have been sublimated by commercial interests. When you rest, you sit on your screen, and get advertised to. When you do work, you sit on your screen, and get advertised to. When you’re in school, you sit on your screen, and get advertised to. Dating, restaurant choices, transportation, neighborhood interactions, shopping. It’s just all been subsumed by commerce. One of my students said it the best the other day when she mentioned that 20 years ago, if you needed a ride to the airport, you asked a friend to give you a ride. And in 2026, if you need a ride to the airport, you hire an Uber. That little interaction - asking a friend to drive you somewhere - was an important stitch in weaving together support and mutual cooperation. In 2026, I have a lot of friends, but I don’t think I would feel comfortable asking a single one of them to drive my kids to camp this summer. (And yes, I know you would if I asked, but I would feel bad!) I haven’t established that level of favor-sharing with anyone else because everything we need has been outsourced and monetized by corporations. It is a profound shift in how humans live.

The film The Devil Wears Prada 2 was depressing. It’s about the collapse of journalism, which is another thing that has fallen apart in my adult life. My career. The magazines I read. The news outlets I loved to learn from. Again, I’m not sure if I’m hallucinating this, or if it’s really happening, but I am genuinely worried that all expressions of intellectual thought are going to disappear in the next decade. I mean, I read The New Yorker and listen to The Daily, but how many other people do? Less than 100,000 people? .0012% of the human population? We’re not worth the money. In a decade, I truly think that all we’ll have are influencers and writers who churn about books about humans fucking fairies.

In the middle of The Devil Wears Prada 2, I was struck by a familiar and acute feeling. And that was that I wanted to take out my phone, and begin Googling the outfits that Anne Hathaway’s character was wearing. The film was showing me all the ways that I could construct my identity as a 40-something woman and I was buying them. I had to shout at myself in my head, “You do not need a plaid slouchy blazer!” Over and over and over again because the desire to take out my phone and open up Poshmark was intense.

“This is so sick,” I told myself. Maria drove me home. In my house, I immediately took out my phone, and read some blog posts about Anne Hathaway’s outfits. Then I searched a number of sites for blazers. Then I took some screenshots, and reverse searched them. I spent 25 minutes doing this, and by the time I finally went to bed, I had cut into my 8-hour sleep allotment, and missed out on reading time.

I still might open up Poshmark at anytime and accept an offer for a blazer I liked yesterday evening.

It’s not really the screens, or the television, that are the problem. It’s the economic system we live within. This economic system, as Marx would say, is more productive than we need it to be. Rather than saying, “Great, we have everything we need, let’s meet up and have a potluck!” We instead say, “Shit, people have what they need, so now we need to sell them stuff they don’t need in increasingly creative ways.” I hate to use grad school terms here, but we replaced the human being with commodity fetishism. And all we really got from it are 10,000 advertisements a day masquerading as entertainment, and 3,500 or so nasty ass billionaires.

I’ve been trying to find community. I’ve been going to an Episcopal church where the pastor is another SCAD professor. His sermons are so smart, and so interesting. I’ve been volunteering at a food bank. I play a lot of tennis, and have profoundly important and loving friendships within my tennis groups. I’m lonely, but I’m not often alone.

I feel a sense of dread that this is just how life is becoming. Unmoored from each other.

But then again, something is coming to a head. Groceries have become insanely expensive. Gas has become insanely expensive. And not like, “Things are expensive, I better not go to Starbucks!” But instead like, “Groceries are so expensive I literally can’t afford them.” I’m a single woman who was raised in the 1990s anorexia era with two children, and my grocery bills are roughly $300 a week right now. I never eat out. I don’t eat much meat, or fancy packaged products. To continue feeding myself, I’m starting to talk to people about growing food in our backyards. That’s insane. And I’m privileged. What are people who are on truly fixed incomes doing?

I hope people wake up before it’s too late. Before we look up from our screens, and realize that the built world has become just a concrete wasteland of shoddily built single family homes, parking lots, warehouses, data centers and big box stores full of aisles and aisles of garbage we can’t even afford anymore. That the advertisements have become too boring because no one has invested in thinking or creativity for a decade. That in order to watch the media landscape, you have to be high on all of the newly legal drugs you can buy in ingestible gummies in strip malls. And that being high makes you sicker. That when we want to be together, but won’t even know how to be together anymore unless we re-join a 2,000 year old religion predicated on themes of love, forgiveness and also, bizarrely, cannibalism. And even then, it will be weird.

I get why people feel hopeless. It is hopeless. There are ways to fight. But I’m too busy comparing the prices on baroque pearl necklaces on Amazon so that I can look like Anne Hathaway in a movie about our dying society.

Early last summer, I made a New York turn on my street in Savannah, and cut off a big, lumbering pick up truck that was trying to pull off its driveway. The driver aggressively tailgated me the whole five blocks home.

The next day, the same pick up truck rolled past my house again. The driver put down his window. “I used to work on your house on a lawn crew, and it’s always been my dream to do your lawn,” he told me. “I’m starting my own landscaping business, and I was wondering if you’d hire me?”

And he had just the right amount of something seriously wrong, and also, a good story, for me to form a strong bond with him.

The guy’s name was Reggie, and he started doing my yard a few weeks later. Reggie actually doesn’t usually do my lawn; it’s usually his wife, his son, and another helper. Sometimes a young child. One day, the helper was a 10 year old boy who turned out to be Reggie’s grandson. Inside, I hissed at my kids, “Y’all need to start doing some chores.”

“I feel bad,” my daughter Cleo said, but she did not get up from the couch where she was watching a YouTuber start a GoFundMe account for a man selling BBQ out of his pick up truck while also hyping cryptocurrency.

I have an uncomfortable relationship with hiring labor. Most of the people on my block do their own lawns.

“We’re lesbians,” my neighbor and friend told me a few weeks ago. “We can help you do house stuff, so just ask.”

But no one ever taught me how to use a lawn mower. I feel a lot of shame about this, but I grew up in a house where all of the manual labor was done by “the guy.” The tree guy, the lawn guy, and the infamous handyman D. Jolen, who one time fixed the gates to my parent’s property using the deep fryer he uses to make his Thanksgiving turkey.

For about two years of his childhood, my younger brother made video essays about D. Jolen, who was at our house almost every day. One of the captures the moment that D. Jolen, hanging from the side of my parents’ house, accidentally knocked over the ladder that would allow him to descend to the ground. “Hey,” D. Jolen says directly to the camera. “Can you go get your mom?”

I actually don’t really have the money to hire someone to do my lawn anymore. I also don’t have the time to do it. My lawn is not big; but I have a corner lot. And I feel the suburban pressure of keeping up with the Joneses. People drive past my house all day long, and they would notice if I let it go to the bees, literally. That’s something I actually want to do. Get rid of my lawn, and grow weeds. To create an ecosystem for local pollinators. But I don’t have the guts, not yet.

Every time Reggie quotes the price for doing my lawn, he adds $5. “So I owe you $85?” I ask him.

“I thought we said $90?” he tells me.

And every time Reggie’s crew does my lawn, they destroy the flowering plants I’m trying to nourish.

This week, I was headed to the park with the dog when I saw them drive by me. Reggie’s wife rolled down her window. “We’re headed to your house,” she told me. “We’re going to make it look really nice.”

I wanted to say to her, “Wait a second,” because there were flowers in my yard that, despite the severe drought we’re currently in, were finally starting to grow. And Reggie had already torn down my entire fence full of Confederate jasmine, which blooms in April. But the kids had rode their bikes ahead of me; and I knew that if I didn’t get to the park soon, they would go to the 40 foot tall dirt pile on the construction site. That dirt does not come off easily; you have to hose the children off in the back yard while they scream at you that you are abusing them.

I was too late, anyway. Cleo was crusted head to toe in dirt by the time I got to the park. I saw her up on high, taking running jumps to slide down the surface of the dirt mountain. When she finally descended, after much screaming, she had an inch of gray dust caked to her legs. When we all got home that night, the lawn crew was just finishing. “Thank you,” I told Reggie’s son in the front yard.

When I went into my back yard, I saw that it was all gone. All of the flowers and the greenery. The ferns, the lantana, the purple flowers that grow on stalks. Worst of all, the bed of hundreds of yellow irises that had just started to bloom. Weed whacked. Decimated. All that remained were the trees, and the neat and tidy and masculine lawn.

I felt devastated in a way that I knew I had to talk to my therapist about.

I went into the house, and I paced around. The sadness welled up in my chest, and as is my lifelong habit, I tried to suppress it. My blood pressure spiked. I went into my head, and I couldn’t get out.

“Mom, are you ok?” Cleo asked me from the couch. She asked me a number of times before I registered that she was talking to me.

“No,” I told her. “I’m sad about the plants.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’ll grow back.”

“But it never rains,” I told her. “The climate is changing. They might never grow again.”

“It’s ok, Mommy,” she told me.

“Don’t send Reggie an emotional text,” I told myself.

“Ok,” Reggie wrote back, which in another situation, would mean that I would enter into a decade-long romance with him.

As a result of the decimation, coming home for the past week has been a tragedy. I leave with Sam to go for a walk; when I round the corner, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. I look for the Foxtail ferns I so carefully added to the side of my house, to add nuance to the color story with the juniper bushes and the blue house behind them; and they’re gone. Gone.

“I feel like bizarrely upset about my yard guy destroying the plants in my house,” I keep on telling my friends. At tennis matches, at coffees, at dinners.

“I would be upset, too,” they all respond. But they don’t get it. That I have to sit and force myself to process the feelings of sadness in order to gain the courage to walk through my back yard to throw out the garbage. Even a glimpse of the torn up ivies is enough to ruin my mood.

Yesterday, Reggie came over to make amends. He was wearing gray sweats and a tank top. I walked him around my property. “See there, that’s where the lantana was just starting to grow,” I said.

“The what?” he asked. “Can you spell that?”

“See here,” I said, crouching beneath the Meyer lemon tree. “There was wild garlic about the flower.”

“I think what you’re telling me is, don’t go near the beds,” he said.

“Yes!” I told him.

In truth, Reggie is actually much better than the last guys who did our yard, when I was married. Those guys, who knew when they were going to come. And when they did come, they were high as hell. One time, rather than cut the grass with a lawn mower, they just weed whacked the entire lawn. Another time, they did the 20 feet of space between the house and the sidewalk with a sit down mower.

“I’m going to make this right,” Reggie told me yesterday.

“It’s ok,” I told him. Because while I want to lie to you, and pretend that I didn’t act in a manner that made Reggie think that I was easy going and sweet above all things, that’s how I acted. Like it was all chill! It’s not easy to shed a lifetime of conditioning as a woman.

“YO QUIERO UN CHICKEN PARM?” my dad would shout at Roberto, our gardener. What my dad meant was, “What do you want for lunch?” Roberto didn’t do the whole yard; just the bushes. Just the weeding. Everyone felt very badly for him because he was an immigrant from Central America. Sometimes, he’d lay down and take a nap by the stream. “Oh look at Roberto, taking a nap,” my Nana used to observe while she sat by the pool. Like most of the guys, Roberto disappeared during Covid.

“YO QUIERO UN CHICKEN PARM,” is not something that would register with Reggie. “Come in and take lemons whenever you want,” I tell him instead.

“Did you say $95 for the yard?” I asked him yesterday.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll pay you later,” I told him. Having a nice interaction with him made me feel a little better.

“I’m going to come back and plant some roses for you,” he told me. “To make up for what the crew did.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him.

“I’m going to do it,” he said.

“Ok,” I said. Even though I don’t like the scraggly roses that grow here, in Savannah, where the soil is mostly sand, and the temperatures kill all but the lantana by mid summer.

“I’ll be back,” I told Reggie, even though all of my friends told me, “You should fire him.”

“Reggie is going to become a regular character in your life, isn’t he?” my friend Savannah noticed last night. She’s the friend I asked, “Is that a normal request?” when a woman I just met asked if I would watch her 8-year-old son every Wednesday from 4pm until midnight.

“Is my relationship with Reggie normal?” I asked Savannah.

“No!” she laughed. “But that’s ok. We will still love you.”

When my ex husband asked me if I wanted to go with him and the kids to Disney World over spring break, I thought for a day if it was healthy to go. And even though I wasn’t sure of the answer, I said yes.

It pains me to admit this, but doing it all alone has been a lot harder than I anticipated. When I was married, I thought that I did “everything,” and that Caleb did almost nothing, but it turns out that taking care of it all — the house, the yard, the pets, the kids — while also working full time, taking care of my mental health, eating healthy and playing tennis for recreation is near impossible. It’s been insane. I feel constantly burned out. I wake up in the morning, and feel a sense of dread at getting out of bed. Often, I have to count down breaths. “Five breaths, and then you have to get up,” I tell myself. I truly underestimated how nice it is to have someone else battle with the kids over brushing their teeth at night, even if I don’t agree with that person’s tone of voice or methods.

The reason why people stayed married for so long for much of our known history is that women needed the economic support and protection of a man in order to survive. Now that we can make our own money, marriage is a lot less appealing. Why live with someone else’s 40,000 screws, boxes of Goodwill t-shirts, easy listening vinyl record collection, planks of wood and emotional issues if you can live alone in peace?

It turns out because the tidal wave of middle class material culture in 21st century life is still nearly impossible to navigate as a single person. No matter what your gender is.

“I will not survive if you don’t start helping me out,” I keep on telling the kids, and it’s true, I don’t think that I can survive being the mother that I was before I got divorced. That mother cooked, cleaned, did all the laundry, organized the toys and bedrooms, planted pretty flowers and herbs, made the kids read rather than watch television, took them on day trips, stayed home with them on school holidays because she was not working full time, dealing with flat tires in her car, communicating with the yard guys, negotiating car insurance, paying the mortgage, answering questions from the accountant on taxes, buying sundries, or fixing anything in the house. There is literally not time in the day, and I often feel like I’m drowning in the urgency of everything I need to get done just to survive my own life. It’s terrible. I’m trying to have gratitude, but I can’t get my anxiety down enough to feel it.

At Disney, I was blissfully free of everything. Caleb booked us rooms at the Waldorf Astoria. Normally, hotels gross me out, but this hotel was very clean, and I felt comfortable resting there.

“I booked the Waldorf Astoria on purpose to entice you,” he told me. “I know you.”

“He’s going to try to sleep with you, obviously,” my friend April said.

But I knew he wouldn’t. In my ex-husband, I can sense the amiable, fun-loving exterior shell that doesn’t go very deep, and then the hard, dark, closed inner self that shut me out emotionally and physically about a decade ago. He’s like a gobstopper covered in powdered sugar. Or a metal ball covered in goop. He has issues; I have issues. Our issues pushed us away from each other.

I’m still struggling to understand it all, to be honest.

For a while, I thought he was a narcissist. He never apologized to me. He never took accountability for his actions. But he didn’t try to drag out the divorce. He doesn’t begrudge me the child support or alimony. And he’s been a really, really good father to our kids post-separation. The man I was married to never stayed home a single day with the kids when they had a day off from school. The man I’m divorced from chooses to stay home with them rather than sending them to aftercare. He shows up at all their things. He packs their lunches in the mornings. He does homework two nights a week.

“Is having kids fun?” our kids asked us at Disney. The whole trip, I felt very quiet, and very calm. Caleb was paying for everything, which was wonderful, and too generous.

“It’s really fun,” Caleb said.

“I love being your mom,” I told them.

We were sitting at a restaurant. The entrees were $52 each. “Don't skimp on your order,” Caleb told me when I said I’d just get a salad for $18. “Get something you actually want.”

So I ordered the pork dish and the bread service.

This was one of the reasons why I fell in love with him. Because he wasn’t cheap. Because he paid for everything, and took that stress away from me. Money has always been a major stress for me. As a child, I did chores for allowance. My mom kept a tally of the allowance that she owed me for each chore. On Sundays, we had a family meeting where we would go over the ledger. It was kept on a sheet of paper in a brown folder. My mom sat behind her big wooden desk, and we sat on the couch before her. First, the money that was owed was accounted for. And then, the money was deducted for infractions including talking back, slamming doors, or fighting with my sister. Fairly perceived or not. Most weeks, I ended up owing my parents money rather than making anything. My dad usually kept his eyes over his hands during the meetings, and if we erupted in anger, he would ask us why we couldn’t control our emotions.

“You know, Daddy didn’t even want to have kids before he met me,” I told our kids. “But then, when he met me, he knew right away that he wanted them, and it’s because he knew that you two were going to come along.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I love being your dad.”

How could I leave this marriage?

On the last day, I went shopping. My amazing neighbor Nikki fed Batman, our cat, while I was gone. It seems a small thing, to feed a cat. But Nikki has a toddler, and a full time job. Like most people, she’s overwhelmed. I really appreciated her doing this extra thing for me. “I’m going to just shop quickly,” I told Caleb. “Is that ok?”

A few minutes later, while wandering around one of Disney World’s many, many shops full of branded garbage (no offense), I looked up, and saw Caleb also wandering around. And Cleo, somewhere in the aisles. It was busy. It was Spring Break. There were crowds everywhere. I chose gifts; I paid for them. “Do you know where Cass is?” Caleb asked me near the register.

“No,” I said. “I thought you were watching him!”

“Cass!” I started to yell. “CASS!”

I ran around the store. I pushed through groups of people. I ran out into the main thoroughfare. I ran down the street. Fortunately, Cass was wearing a hot pink shirt. A Messi jersey. In the distance, I caught a glimpse of it. He was standing with a security officer. “Cass!” I said. He wouldn’t let me hug him when I got close. A man in a motorized wheelchair buzzed up, and said, “Oh good, you found your parents.”

“We were worried about him,” the man in the wheelchair told me.

When I was married, this would have ruined the trip for me. My rage would have consumed me. “Why,” I would have been asking myself, “Did this man that I married not know to watch our child when I was doing something?” And more clearly, “Why is he so selfish?"

“Dad,” Cass said when Caleb walked up a few minutes later. “I stopped to tie my shoe, and then you were gone.”

“I thought your mother was watching you,” he told Cass.

Is it enough, that this was why I couldn’t stay married?

Without the anger, we left the park. We went back to the hotel. Cass swam in the pool. Caleb paid for specialty mocktails, and churros, and chicken fingers, and a Greek salad. We played ping pong and sat in the astroturf until the sun set. That night, we watched dinner as a family. I realize the part I played in the failure of my marriage, and the failure of all of my past relationships. God, the rage can be so consuming.

On the deepest level, I want to understand why people do things I don’t understand, and try to convince them that they should do things differently, in a way that I do understand.

But I was never going to change Caleb.

And I couldn’t live anymore without being loved. Whatever that means. I still don’t understand it.

“Thank you,” I told Caleb on the ride home. I reached out, and touched his shoulder. I rubbed it. We barely touch these days. “I really appreciate you taking me on this trip and paying for everything.”

“No problem,” he said. He took the kids overnight so that I could work. I’m preparing for the new quarter, which begins tomorrow. I love my work. But it’s lonely, in my house. I ache for my family. And then, when my kids are home, I ache for someone to help me deal with them.

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote.

To be completely frank, I’ve just been completely overwhelmed. I feel ashamed about this. I want to be an independent woman who can work full time, take care of two kids, and pay all my bills. But it’s not easy. I’m struggling.

One of the things that kept me from getting a divorce for so long was fear about being on my own financially. Not only paying my bills, but also, the toll that paying bills would take on me mentally. I learned from a very young age that a good person saves money, and a bad person spends all of their money. Even as I write this, I can hear my dad’s howl of horror when I took the $50 my Grandma gave me for Christmas, and bought a sweater at J.Crew. And a tortoise shell headband. In spending that money rather than saving it, I was not his child.

When I’m on my own financially, I can get obsessive about money. I want to try to save every penny. I let things break, and I don’t fix them. “I know that I pay you enough money that you don't need to be walking around with holes in your shoes,” my boss, a famous photographer, told me when I took off my sneakers in our office in the East Village in the mid-2000s, and showed him my sopping wet socks.

This past winter was cold in Savannah, often below freezing. I almost never turned my heat up above 60 degrees. As a result, my pipes froze one night. A friend brought her kids over to the house while I was still trying to unfreeze them. All I could think about was the money it would cost to fix a burst pipe. I sat with my head in my hands while Cass and her son tore apart my house.

This past week, I had a low moment. I screamed without restraint at a customer service person for Root car insurance. During a tennis match last Friday, I received an email. The email said that my car insurance for the next six months had gone up to $1,200 a month.

“Doesn’t that sound like a lot?” I asked my friend Michelle. I did not divulge the number of speeding tickets I get in school zones thanks to those fucking speeding cameras.

“Girl,” she said. “You need to shop other prices.”

I spent the next three hours on the phone. An insurance agent found me a policy through Progressive that was roughly half what Root was charging me. “Just be careful not to cancel the old policy until your new one goes into effect,” the agent said. I hung up the phone, and immediately cancelled my policy, effective immediately, by clicking a button on an app. It was an accident. “I MADE A MISTAKE!” I screamed at the Root insurance agent. “PLEASE HELP ME.”

When she said there was nothing she could do, I screamed, “HOW IS THIS EVEN FUCKING LEGAL!”

She transferred me to another agent.

I had a similar meltdown a few weeks ago while on the phone with an Ambetter health insurance agent. When I got divorced, I cancelled my Marketplace insurance. And they automatically re-enrolled me at the cost of $2900 a month on January 1, 2026! The customer service agent, in this case, was an AI bot. My neighbors, a couple who bike together wearing lycra outfits, saw me screaming as I zipped past them on my own bike.

“Please forgive me,” I pray to the universe. For my rage. For the way that I hurt other people with my anxiety.

This week, what I have been working to avoid came to pass. I ran out of money in my checking account. A $500 lawyer bill from the divorce. A $418 vet bill for flea medicine and rabies shots. $690 for car insurance. $189 for water and sanitation from the city of Savannah. $44 for 4 packs of diet soda that I thought was on sale at Kroger, but turned out to not be on sale. “You don’t buy Big K brand?” my friend, enjoying one of my Frescas, pointed out.

My garden is overgrown. My windows do not seal. The door I’m sitting in front of is sealed with white packing tape. My ice machine is broken. I’ve worn an ever-widening dirt path across my yard. I can’t stop my downstairs toilet from running, so I just turned off the water to that toilet. Every few days, I check it, because that is the toilet that the kids prefer to use when they are passing bowel movements. I just finished an intense ten weeks of work, and I’m too tired to cook, so I eat 365 strawberry breakfast bars for dinner because I cannot afford to order food without dipping into my savings account.

You might think, “Well, I guess the divorce wasn’t worth it.” But bitch, it fucking was. I’ll pay for my freedom. Last night, I made dinner for myself while listening to the same song 26 times in a row, and also, watching a match at Indian Wells, and yes, I was dancing around my kitchen. No one said a fucking word because no one was here but me, and my dog and cat do not talk. Over the past few months, I’ve sometimes been happy in a way I long ago stopped believing was possible.

The publishing company was housed in the Flatiron Building.

On the 17th floor, with views over the entire city. Most of my day was spent trying to figure out how to pass the time. I photocopied manuscripts. I read novels from the slush pile. I met an editor in the elevator. I thought he was the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life. He asked me on a date, and I told him no, I had to leave every day to catch the train home with my dad at 5pm in Grand Central. I was 18. My dad walked really fast in the terminal, and I ran behind him. On Fridays, he bought my mom a bouquet of flowers from one of the vendors near the gate. The editor visited me in my office, where for most of the day, I sat doing absolutely nothing. We kissed. A lot. We kissed against the copy machine. I was wearing peach lip gloss. The next day, the editor bought me a real peach from a fruit stand in Madison Square Park. Real story - the editor went on to marry Molly Ringwald.

“Cell phones are going to kill people’s work ethic,” my dad told me on the train home one day. Normally, we both read novels next to each other. My dad had trained his body to take a 30 minute nap, and wake up exactly one stop before we disembarked.

“Dad,” I told him. “People are sitting in these office buildings doing absolutely nothing all day. Who cares if they’re distracted?”

It seemed so clear to me back then, in the year 2000. I could visualize it perfectly. The vast, gleaming towers. Holding millions of bodies. Most of them doing absolutely fucking nothing all day.

I always perceived office work as a form of imprisonment. Doing meaningless things just to fill the time when you were not allowed to leave. Even thinking about sitting in that office in the Flatiron building, my chest tightens. The entrapment. On beautiful summer days. All tasks done by 10:15am. 7 hours in recirculated air stretching out in front of me…

My perception of office work has never really changed. That it’s meaningless. And now, artificial intelligence is bringing all of this into focus for everybody.

I just listened to “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast. In the latest episode, the co-host, Natalie Kitroeff, used an Ai programming tool to make a personal website. Together with her guest, they muse about how Ai might very well eliminate 50% of white collar entry level jobs in the next five years.

In a way, terrible. People need jobs for our expensive lives.

In another way, awesome. Those jobs are fucking awful.

Let me put it another way — why does Natalie Kitroeff, or anyone really, need a personal website?

Our entire economy is based on selling stuff. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. We ran out of things we needed to buy a long time ago, so now we sell even ourselves. On personal websites.

Meanwhile, there is actual real work to be done. Work that has no monetary value. My life outside of work is actually a non-stop grind. Real labor. I closed my Zoom window from my online Art Criticism class today, where we had a really interesting conversation about Baudrillard’s simulation theory. And I had to clean up the dishes from breakfast. And I had to make the bed my brother slept in this past weekend. And I had to sweep up the dog hair. And I had to get on my hands and knees behind the toilet and clean up the pee that my seven year old son squirts back there, little by little, every day. And then I had to make food to feed myself.

Pay the artists. Pay the mothers. Pay the caretakers. Pay the homeless. The things that are actually meaningful in our world are totally unpaid. Rebuild our economy to focus on the human. Give the daycare workers $500k a year, and let them rest one week a month. Pay an artist a year’s salary to adorn the exterior of an ugly fucking Target. Pay 10 artists. Pay 1,000 artists to adorn a parking lot. Pay the people who are sitting with their aging parents. Pay the street musicians. Pay the people who make parades. Pay the people who are sitting in folding chairs, making funny jokes while their neighbors pass by. Pay the school teachers. Pay the fathers so the men don’t come and take away the meaningful jobs.

When I was watching the Super Bowl a few weeks ago, I realized something that should have been obvious to everyone. The Bad Bunny performance was not that good. I say this as someone who is absolutely fucking obsessed with Bad Bunny. He was my #1 most listened to artist of 2025. His performance was, meh. It was a little awkward. The transitions were weird. He clearly is not that great of a live singer. But I also realized, it didn’t matter. And no one would notice. The broadcast performance is essentially a dead space. It’s a carcass. It gets pulverized and atomized and spit back out in the culture that actually matters, which is the culture we view on social media. Where we can watch humans being humans in response to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Lunch ladies. An elderly couple with a bottle of Pepto Bismal on their kitchen sink. An elderly dude in a white shirt sweating to DTMF in a packed dance class full of women. A Southern woman talking to Jesus. Puma, the diminutive construction worker in a neon yellow shirt. And on and on and on and on…

Baudrillard and the post-modernists said that we lived in a simulation built by the media and advertising. That through this simulation, we perceive things as “real” that we don’t actually experience — think the way we navigate the world with Google Maps, or how passionately so many people in the U.S. felt about the war in Palestine. They predicted that as the grand narratives from modernism — such as that America is great, the land of the free and the brave — collapsed, we would fill the void with a rapid uptick in consumption. And we did do that. We now build our identities with consumer goods sold to us through, among other people, Instagram influencers. But hasn’t the collapse been beautiful, as well? For as long as I’ve been alive, the Super Bowl was macho. The Super Bowl inhaled advertising dollars. The Super Bowl told us what to buy, and what to care about. The Super Bowl told us MAN IS BEST. But this year, the Super Bowl imploded. It didn’t matter how many millions of dollars Dunkin Donuts spent to hire and de-age Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston. Their commercial sucked. We decry the influence of social media on our lives, but in some ways, hasn’t social media been so democratizing? I open my Instagram app, and there’s a toothless woman in a sweatshirt and a messy bun singing along to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and then farting into a microphone. And there’s a third grade teacher in a pink sweatshirt reading funny quotes from his third grade students. And there’s a middle aged woman breading chicken cutlet singing along to Ice Cube’s “You Can Do it.” It’s all so fucking human, and so fucking ordinary.

Artificial intelligence will kill something, too. And it won’t be the pleasure we get out of watching a fat lady with true talent dance to Baile Involidable. It will kill something that was empty anyway. Lacking in human consideration. What I mean is, office work. White collar jobs. The 9 to 5 prison to wine pipeline. My fear is that our economy, and our society, will respond by giving people more meaningless work to do. Rather than turning towards what we all know, which is that we don’t like living like this anyway.

I’ve sat down to write this very brief post probably about 15 times now. Every time I type a word, one of the kids yells for something. Cleo just asked for me to make her Nutella bread. Cass is making Valentines for his class. My cortisol is shot because it’s 32 degrees here in Savannah, and as a result, I just had to engage in “pants battle,” in which Cass insists he wants to wear shorts, and I tell him he has to wear pants. This goes on for 15 minutes until I finally get so frustrated I just leave the room and he puts on the pants without me. Because by the way, it’s fucking cold in my house. My house is all window, and no insulation, and as a result, it’s basically a fucking sieve. I turned the heat up to 70 one day last week, and my heating bill was $30 for the day.

I used to be able to write when the kids were home. Pure willpower.

What I want to write today is just a brief list of music you should listen to if you like Bad Bunny. I love Bad Bunny. When the album came out in February of last year, I put it on. I don’t know why. I liked his previous music; but I didn’t love it. Titi Mi Pregunto is like a fun party song, but it’s not like a song you love someone through. I’ve probably listened to “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos” over 1,000 times since then. It helps that the album starts with Neuvayol. “If you want to have a fun, spend a summer in New York.” The song is about doing drugs, by the way. I was born in the Bronx; every summer, Puerto Rican and Dominican kids from the Bronx came up to stay with my family so that they could attend summer school at our local high school. When I was old enough to drive, I blasted Funkmaster Flex on Hot 97 while I drove 120 down the Sawmill River Parkway in my dad’s old 528e BMW from 1988.

Most of my favorite music from the past 5 years has been Spanish language music. I don’t really speak Spanish very well. But I speak it ok. I lived in Mexico City on and off for about 8 months in 2007; I spent my summer between grad school years in Buenos Aires, where I lived in San Telmo, watched the World Cup, and took intensive Spanish language lessons every day. I came back with a posh Argentinian accent that was unintelligible to the bodega guys in Brooklyn.

The Spanish language music I’ve been listening to is fun. It’s gorgeous, and lush. It’s full of sound. If you like Bud Bunny now, or if you like him after tonight, I recommend you listen to:

“Deja” by Bomba Estéreo

“Il Madrileno” by C. Tangana

“Motomami” by Rosalía

This morning, in a sort of fog between classes, I opened my email, and saw a note from the head of the kids’ school. I had a bad encounter with her last year over the school’s dress code — I argued that it was sexist. She told me that she thought my social media posts about my opinions were inappropriate, and that I had gravely offended the staff at the school. I held the shame of that encounter with me for a long time.

The email this morning said that the school had reconsidered a poem about Martin Luther King Junior that the third grade class was singing at the all-school assembly on Thursday. The poem was explicit about segregation. A passage towards the beginning read:

Girl: I remember a hot summer day and a swimming pool laughing children splashed in the cool water. I pointed to the sign by the gate and asked, “What does that say?”

All girls: WHITES ONLY!

Girl: Learning those words was easy. They were all over town-In store windows

All girls: WHITES ONLY!

Girl: In city parks

All girls: WHITES ONLY

In the email, the head of school said that a number of parents had reached out to her. They were concerned about “a developmentally appropriate awareness of history.” We live in the Deep South. Savannah, Georgia, in 1860, had a population that was 1/3rd enslaved. Jim Crowe, which mandated legal segregation with the punishment of death for the black bodies that disobeyed, was upheld here until 1964. 61 years ago. Ruby Bridges was 6 years old when she walked through a crowd of adults who spit, shouted and threw things at her so that she could enter kindergarten.

As a result of the concern from parents, the head of the school decided to pull the performance of the poem.

I texted my friends who I knew would also be angry. I told myself, “Don’t fucking post anything on social media.” And a few minutes later, I posted something on Facebook.

I have been heartbroken all day after learning that the performance of a poem about MLK by Cleo’s third grade class was pulled after parents expressed concerns about it.

[Please don’t comment anything cruel.]

I feel a deep obligation to be vocal about my beliefs. This is an irrational and oftentimes socially damaging impulse. A few weeks ago, I read a post on social media that most bloggers are narcissists. In the park, a woman approached me, and said that she had read my posts about my divorce. She told me she now felt weird when she saw my ex-husband.

I feel so much guilt about this. I did not have a good marriage; but I do want to punish or socially isolate my ex-husband. I know that my words have impact, and that that impact is often negative. I am so sorry.

I carry so much shame with me. It’s making it increasingly difficult to write. I’ve spent the last 15 years building this skill, and I wish to God that I would find some other subject besides my fucking self because I’m sick of the shame and the anxiety.

I was scared to enter the car line today. I was scared of seeing the head of the school. I was scared of her approaching my car window, and telling me, again, that I had deeply offended members of the school staff. I thought, “I’ll get out of the car, and stand tall, at least, when she talks to me.”

When my kids got in the car, I turned to Cleo. “Cleo, did you hear that they pulled your performance of the MLK poem?” I asked her.

“What poem?” she said.

“The song you were practicing as a class.”

“Oh, that one. Why?”

“It made some people uncomfortable,” I said.

“But wasn’t that the whole point of MLK?” she said. “That what he did made people uncomfortable so that they would change.”

Oh, my child!

“Wasn’t MLK the guy who got shot and killed and went to jail like 18 times?” my 7-year-old son said from the back seat. We read books about the Freedom Riders. We read about Ruby Bridges. Our closest library, the Bull Street Library, which was a whites-only library until 1964, has a large selection of books by African American authors that tell African American stories. We have read them all. We attended the MLK day parade this year, and read the quotes on the floats.

“A Fight With Courage; A Victory for Love.”

A lot of people read what I write, and then dislike me; hate me; tell me they hate me; disown me; shame me; cut me off. Condemn me. Probably rightfully.

“Can I give you some advice?” another mom told me last year during the dress code extravaganza. “It’s not that deep?”

Today, I taught the archive. Archive Fever. Derrida. Artists who use archives to re-tell history. To reclaim power. Theaster Gates. Fred Wilson. Carrie Mae Weems. Zanele Muholi. Guadalupe Rosales.

I’ve never thought about my archive. My old Tumblr blog is on a hard drive; I don’t even know where I put it. I’m a nobody, a nothing. I open my mouth, and I say what I think. And…the world keeps on moving on unchanged around me.

I want to apologize for not writing much lately. Normally, when I write a post, it coheres in my brain over a period of a couple of days. I notice something, think about it, and then a structure emerges. By the time I write, the sensation of getting the words out is almost physically uncomfortable.

My brain has been an absolute mud field lately. Anything coherent that comes out of it gets put into teaching. I have nothing else left.

Partially, my sense of self has fractured, or disappeared. I’m a divorced woman now. My friend, another divorced woman, described the condition of being divorced to coming out of the closet as a gay person. (She is both divorced and queer.) She said that even if people accept you, they look at you differently. They don’t know how to place you in the structure of their lives. They don't realize it, but they exclude you. I’m so lonely a lot of the time.

Alternately, I’m now single. And when I was young, I was really beautiful. I didn’t really have to think about finding a partner because I was constantly inundated with options. (This, I now realize, was a complete curse because just think about the men who have the balls to actively pursue a beautiful woman.) I don’t know if I’m beautiful now, but I know that the feedback I get from the outside world is much different. I no longer turn heads. People no longer stop speaking when I walk in a room, or comment on my physical appearance when they speak to me about myself. I no longer have to make myself look smaller by shrinking my body to deflect attention. I’m a lot more invisible. How do you find a partner when you’re no longer obviously sexually attractive? It’s disorienting, especially because I don’t have a lot to of time to process this, or anything else.

This is a condition of the society we live in right now. We’re just too inundated with information. Our brains are flooded all day long, and it’s exhausting to just stay afloat and present in our work, our homes, and our real life interactions.

I also feel defeated. I don’t think I’m alone. Since my teenage years, I’ve been fighting over ideas. After 9/11 happened, I fought passionately against the war in Iraq, in conversations and in protests. Over the past 20 years, I’ve considered and debated world events and politics. I’ve expressed my opinion, and been right, and also horribly wrong. Until recently, I believed that you could change people’s minds if you spoke your truth in a way that was compelling and intelligent. When Trump got elected in the fall of 2024, something broke in me. Watching the administration over the past year has been devastating. It no longer feels like there’s anything worthwhile to say about politics. We talked and talked and talked, and still, a majority of Americans voted for this administration. And continue, through inaction, to support it. What is there left to say besides that I’m afraid, these days, of war in our homeland?

One thing that has emerged from the murk is an understanding that we need to fight against tech companies (lol) and the artificial intelligence tools that they are pushing on us but also, the understanding that this fight is impossible and will be lost because there’s too much money at stake.

Right now, I’m reading The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, a book about the German film director G.W. Pabst. Pabst escaped from Germany to Hollywood during the Hitler regime. When he failed in Hollywood, he returned to Nazi Germany, where the culture ministry welcomed him with open arms, and funded his arts. I love Daniel Kehlmann’s work. He imagines historic periods not as magical “other” times, but as real, human times with characters that also could inhabit our own world. Which is, I believe, the truth.

This thought is fragmented, but I will say that right now, there’s an idea that tech can take over a lot of thinking work. It can write your emails, and digest your emails, and summarize the documents, and reduce your work load. It can write your papers, and do your research. But the thing is, our brains still need to process things. When we read a summary, our brain still needs to understand the origin of the summary. And because the information has become so fragmented, we have to work harder and longer to understand anything at all. Our brains still think, but the thinking is shattered. It’s brutal.

When writing and culture is shit, the conditions of our inner lives becomes a mud field. When writing is brilliant, as it is in Kehlmann’s books, it’s like your own thoughts can finally cohere. It’s a profound relief to finally understand yourself through the words of someone else who has done the hard work of thinking about something deeply, and then succinctly describing it.

I had that moment reading a passage from The Directors. In the passage, Pabst’s son, Jakob, is attacking a group of boys from school. He understands, innately, that in Nazi Germany, in order not to be bullied himself he needs to be casually violent, and win. At the end of breaking another boy’s nose, there’s a paragraph:

At the crossroads they promise each other once again not to say anything. They certainly won’t snitch, they’ll definitely keep quiet! It’s amazing, Jakob thinks, you can be as underhanded as you like — if you demand chivalry afterwards, nothing will happen to you.

if you demand chivalry afterwards, nothing will happen to you.

Agh, there it is. The Trump administration. Online culture. Abusive environments. My family. My marriage. My guilt about my own writing.

A moment of brilliance in all the murk.

I want to emerge, but how?

On December 30, around lunchtime, I received a message from my lawyer that a judge had signed my divorce papers.

It meant that my divorce is final.

I didn’t have much of a reaction besides mild relief. In truth, the divorce really began on November 1, when I took over my own finances.

There were many, many times over the course of my 11-year long marriage that I wanted so badly to leave, but felt that it would be impossible. Especially when my kids were very young. I couldn’t imagine how I would support them. As my ex said right before I left, “You’re like a child who can’t handle paying bills.”

When I did decide to end the marriage, I did not have a full time job. I did not have any money saved. In the past year, I re-applied to Columbia University, got re-accepted into my master’s program, and wrote my thesis to complete my degree. I taught two new classes at the university level. I paid $15,000 to Columbia, and $6,500 to my lawyer. I applied to probably 100 jobs online. By some miracle, I got the job I really wanted, which is to be a full-time art history professor. The job pays me a livable wage, and offers excellent health and dental care. And I really, really love it, which is crazy.

I called a divorce lawyer on January 5, 2025.

Almost exactly a year later, I’m on my own financially.

And I’m ok. Like, really ok. I actually love being on my own financially. Sometimes, I look at the way my ex is spending money, and I’m think with joy, “Not my problem!” I downloaded a budgeting app. I budgeted for Christmas gifts. I love to categorize my expenses. I love scanning for digital coupons at Kroger. I love sitting down with a piece of paper, and breaking down how much money I have to spend on until the end of the month.

But there’s something that I love more, and that’s how I’m budgeting my energy. (That is maybe the worst sentence I’ve ever written.)

I don’t know how to put this into words, but I’m going to try. When you decide to get a divorce, especially when you have kids, you take a huge leap into the unknown. For a long time, to survive in the marriage, I had to consider my partner’s perspective. A lot. I spent a lot of energy doing that. When he said, for example, that I played too much tennis, and as a result of me playing too much tennis, did not really love my children, I had to consider what he was saying so that we could find some common ground. Or when he told me that he wouldn’t have sex with me because he didn’t feel emotionally connected to me, I had to try to find out what I could do to spark that emotional connection so that I could get what I needed, which was physical love. Or when he told me, he made more money, therefore he could not watch the kids so that I could work when they were off from school, I had to accept that because my financial well-being was dependent on him.

When I decided to get divorced, I no longer had to spend energy considering his perspective. We no longer were in a partnership.

The change has been radical.

I spent so much of my life being the most curious about the people who had the worst things to say about me. If I had a friend who didn’t take my side in an argument, or who frequently pointed out devastating flaws about my personality, I would spend more time with that person rather than less. On the flip side, when someone praised me, or told me that I was good at something, I didn’t take what they said seriously. I spent the vast majority of my energy trying to figure out people who didn’t like me, and why.

When I decided to get a divorce, I reached out to a lot of people to ask for their opinions. I don’t have a great sense of self. When something feels intensely emotional to me, I don’t know how to process or understand it without input. As my friend Savannah says, the title of my memoir should be, “Is this normal?” I knew that my situation at home had grown increasingly abusive. As I’ve written before, I was literally shitting my pants on dog walks once a week. And when I told people why I left, sometimes people would be like, “You didn’t deserve that.” Or “I believe you.” Or, “I’m so happy you left.”

And sometimes people would be like, “Well that’s just how men are.” Or, “You shouldn’t talk about that, what if the kids hear you.” Or, “But I saw him at the park, and he’s such a great dad!” Or, worst of all, “Are you sure he meant it like that?”

In order to survive the uncertainty, I had to do two things. I had to build a barrier around myself emotionally, and learn how to trust myself. That has not been easy. In quiet moments, I tell myself lies. “You’re an ok person,” I say. “You’re likable. You’re fun to spend time with. You’re a good mother. That’s the truth.” The second is that I started to lean towards the people who say nice things to me. Who treat me well. Who don’t make me feel crazy, or irrational, or out of control. Who made me feel good.

And you’ll see a lot of Instagram memes about this, but that has been the right decision.

Last night, on New Year’s Eve, I went to a party for Savannah, who is having her third baby in February. It was full of women I love. We wrote down our intentions for the New Year on a piece of paper. Then we went to the fire pit in the back yard, and threw them into the fire. My friend Tammy was standing next to me. I was wearing my faux fur. Tammy came up, and threaded her arm through mine. She leaned her head against mine, and kissed my forehead. “I love you,” she told me.

“I love you, too,” I told her. I often get nervous when people touch me. I get nervous that it’s making them uncomfortable. Why would someone touch me? I took a deep breath, and settled into the weight of Tammy by my side.

One of the best days of the past year was spent with Tammy. She knew I was down in the dumps about the holidays, so she invited me to an ice cream social at the apartment complex she manages. The apartment complex is for seniors and people with disabilities. Tammy and I sat together, and handed out Fat Boys and Drumsticks for $1.25 each. One man came and bought 20 ice creams so that he could hand them out to everyone. Tammy had on a dancing playlist, and when the residents were amenable, we all got up and shook our asses for a little while.

“Oh by the way, my divorce is final,” I told Tammy by the fire pit. I keep on forgetting to tell my friends that it’s all over. It feels almost insignificant.

“Congratulations!” she said.

“Thank you,” I told her.

I don’t really know how to end this post except to share some of my hard earned wisdom. Where you spend your energy matters. When you feel good with a friend, spend more time with that friend. It’s that simple. And if you’re thinking about getting a divorce in 2026, it will be really fucking hard. But if you’ve been really unhappy in your relationship, you don’t have to stay out of fear. If you leave, you give yourself a chance. And in the end, everything will be better than fine.

I was unexpectedly depressed this holiday season. I guess it shouldn’t have been unexpected given that I’m getting a divorce. Also I have a long and storied history of depression. But I thought, given all of my trauma therapy and feelings of healing, along with the Instagram algorithm feeding me many, many videos with quotes by Carl Jung, that maybe depression was behind me. It turns out it’s not.

The worst feeling of all was that I am not enough for my kids. I did all of the holiday things with them. I went to the gardening store, and bought a beautiful Christmas tree. I used a gift certificate my friend Jennifer gave me for my birthday, along with $100 in cash my ex-husband gave me the day after yelling at me about scheduling. In penitence. I’m an independent woman, but I took it. We came home, and I dragged the holiday decorations down from the attic. I put the tree in the stand, and my 7-year-old son helped me screw it all together. “Wow, look at what mommy just did all alone!” I told my children. If this was a holiday movie, I would have caught the eye of the gardening store employee who wrapped the tree. He would be a multi-millionaire home to help his sick grandfather with the family business. He would have helped me put up the tree because I was too much of a woman to do it myself. As our romance budded into a heterosexual monogamous relationship over the course of two weeks, we would have been enough for my children over Christmas.

The sense that I was not enough alone, as a single middle-aged woman, continued throughout December. There was the time that we met my friend, her two sons…and her husband to view the holiday lights at the Botanical Garden. The time when I made the kids go to Walgreens for snacks before going to see Wicked 2 which they said was “embarrassing.” The time when we decorated gingerbread cookies and I was too depressed to sing along to holiday songs. Then I got the flu, and I was laid out for almost a week on my couch. “Please can you give mommy a foot massage?” I kept on asking the kids.

“Ew, no,” they told me.

During this time, I turned to a comfort that I did not expect, and that comfort was church. One of my best friends in Savannah is a woman named Kate whose father was a minister for over 30 years. He has since retired, but Kate is still active in the congregation. As a Catholic, I’m deeply hesitant to engage with other forms of Christianity, as I rightfully feel that they are not entirely legitimate. But Kate invited me to a holiday decorating party one night at her church, which is Presbyterian. I went with the kids. And it was wonderful. First of all, there were at least six different types of chili in crock pots, as well as thick, scoopable Fritos and sour cream to top your bowl. There was pizza for the kids. My friend Margaret rightfully pointed out that one of the main barriers to congregating in a casual, inexpensive way, is space. And churches have a lot of space. Kate’s church is not only a sanctuary, it is also a deep and wonderful labyrinth of classrooms and offices with a gigantic open auditorium. Within walking distance of my house.

Upon entering, I felt my identity as a strange and disgusting pariah who has yet to open an online dating profile, or be asked out anywhere but Facebook, slither away. Even though I was a stranger, people were so warm. And friendly. At the wreath making station, the older ladies complimented my wreath making abilities. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, my kids would streak by with a gigantic pack of kids, able to freely run indoors in the cavernous space. I sat with Kate, and her mom, at a table for dinner. Another woman told me she was recently divorced, and told me she’d love to meet for coffee. I wore a red sweater. I was grateful not to have to go home and make dinner.

I engaged with the church as much as I could in December. I did caroling at a nursing home, and yes, ate six of those soft grocery store cookies with the frosting on top afterwards. I convinced the kids to participate in the Christmas pageant, but only by lying to them that the donkey and the sheep had starring roles. Through it all, Kate was such a steadfast friend to me. I felt protected under her status in the congregation. She watched out for me, and made sure I felt welcome and loved.

Christmas Eve Mass came, and I was nervous again. The wood-paneled sanctuary was full of families. Man, woman, child. Grandparents, and aunts and uncles. My own childhood was exactly like that. Christmas Eve Mass, my family performed well. My mom curled her hair and wore her mink coat. My dad wore his suit and Christmas tie. We wore our taffeta Christmas dresses. My brothers wore button down shirts and khakis. We sat next to my Nana, and my Uncle Kevin’s family. My aunt Marianne. My three cousins. My Nana told me to put on lipstick. Even as a child. The church was full of people who knew us, and our entire histories. I was Mary in the pageant one year. I cheated to get the role. I sang solos on the altar. My dad’s friend Kevin wept while I sang “Oh Holy Night.” I fell in love with a boy who was a few years older, and whose family sat in front of us, and when I was a teenager, I watched him with fervor to see if he would turn around to find me.

All of this has melted away in my adult life, and I still mourn the loss. Deeply. The loss of that sense of belonging. On Christmas Eve Mass at First Presbyterian, I wore a navy blue taffeta skirt and a white button down shirt. I sat behind Kate’s mom, and her two gorgeous sisters, and their new husbands. The service was genteel and high-brow. An opera singer sang “Oh Holy Night.” I briefly missed the presence of Italians, and all of their glitz and glamour. During the opening hymn, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” I felt so overcome with a sense of memory returning that I got full body chills. I know a Christmas Eve mass. I know it in my bones, even in other denominations. The rituals that were given to me in childhood are bonds that I will never break free from, nor do I believe I want to. I miss them. I want to be held by them. I want to belong again.

Kate sat with me during the service. My kids almost made it the entire mass. They are untrained church animals. I kept them in check with threats and real candles, which I promised they could light when we sang “Silent Night.” They’ve heard Silent Night in Target, and in my kitchen. But never in a church. All of the beautiful rituals and meaning in my childhood have been subsumed by consumerism and big box stores. We’ve lost so much, in 25 years. In the church, I mourned my identity as an American whose faith was a higher purpose to build a better world for everyone, not just myself. That was so many of our identities. We had a commonality. And we lost it to screen time.

Can I return to a Christian church not a full believer? I listened to the sermons, and the readings. A son of God to save the world. A Marvel movie. A very stable genius. What if the Bible were rewritten for the time we actually live? There is no single child born of God. There is no salvation except in that which we already have. Each other.

In the end, I had a good Christmas. My ex husband came over, and his two aunts and uncles. Our friend Chad. My friends Natalia, Tammy and Savannah and their children. My house was a mess when they left. My kids wanted to spend the night with their dad. I cleaned for four hours. I cleaned until I was too tired to think about how lonely I felt in my own house. I cleaned, and hoped that the depression would leave my body. Which it did. For the past few days, I’ve felt myself again. Thank God.

Twenty or so years ago, I was a freshman, or sophomore, or junior, at Brown University, and I sat in a large lecture hall in Barus and Holley discussing Harvard case studies for a gut class I was taking. Did I even take the class? Was I visiting the class? Stalking a boy in the class? I can’t really remember why I was in the room, but I remember sitting in the lecture hall where the shooting took place this past weekend at Brown University.

The shooting had nothing to do with me. I don’t know the students who were killed. I can’t imagine the pain that their families are experiencing right now at their sudden loss. I don’t understand what it’s like to be in a hospital with a gun shot wound. What happened is very real to the students who were in the building; to the students who were wounded; to the students who knew the two students who were killed. It’s not real to me. To write about what happened, or try to make sense of it, therefore is disrespectful and callous. So to the people who experienced the devastation of the violence and loss of life, I am sorry that I’m even commenting. I’m so sorry for the pain you’ve experienced.

What is real is Brown University, or at least, what it meant to be a student at Brown University. I got “in” early decision in the winter of 1999. I was a very strong academic student for my entire life. I always scored in the very top percentiles on standardized tests. It was effortless. I’m verbally gifted. I did all of the sports, and was the captain of many teams. I sang in an a cappella group, and in the church choir. I volunteered every weekend. I scored very high on the SAT. My acceptance letter came in a very thin envelope. I called my mother on the pay phone from my high school. She had been stalking the mailman. “I can’t take any more rejection,” she was crying. That same week, I had failed to secure a lead in the senior musical. The thin letter implied rejection; but it was an acceptance. The accolades poured in. The teachers were amazed. The guidance counsellor made an announcement. An Ivy League school. Early. No one had gotten into Brown from my high school for years. I came from a working class Irish family, but I also, I grew up in a wealthy town where in my senior year of high school, 20 students out of the 222 in my public high school senior class matriculated to Cornell University.

When you get into an Ivy League institution, you acquire an identity that you never shake. Nor do you want to shake that identity. “You are the most amazing group of students ever to be admitted into this institution,” the President of Brown University told my class on the main green during the opening remarks during our orientation week. “You are extraordinary among other people.”

I’ve been reading the coverage of the shooter as it updates on The New York Times’ website. He was “brilliantly smart,” as described by a former classmate and friend. He thought the classes were easy, and the food was subpar. Same. That gut I took in the Barus and Holley building was one of many guts I took as an undergraduate. By gut, I mean a class so easy that if you didn’t get an A, you probably didn’t take the final. An exquisite education wasted on a 17-year-old who arrived at Brown University boy crazy and drunk on the freedom to do whatever I wanted whenever. “I kissed a boy from Minnesota today!” I told my new friends. “I kissed a boy whose grandfather was either Cheech or Chong, whoever that is!”

It’s easy to buy your own hype when everyone is telling you that you are amazing. I lived on that hype for 20 years. I still live on that hype sometimes. “How could someone kill those bright young kids?” I said, horrified, when I heard about the shooting. “The best among us!”

My family does, too. “I still remember when you got in,” said my Aunt Susan when she texted me after news of the shooting first erupted on Saturday night. “Grandma was so proud.” My Aunt Susan, who volunteered to go into the Covid units in the Bronx where she had worked as a nurse for 40 years when the pandemic first broke out in 2020. “Susan, you are high risk,” they told her. Who the fuck am I, compared to my Aunt Susan, who raised my father and his four other siblings while my grandmother worked night shifts at Yonkers racetrack to pay for their two-bedroom apartment on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx?

It didn’t escape me that the shooter was described by others as brilliant, but still was caught within a week by a group of law enforcement officials led by a guy named Don Bongino, and a guy who looks like he just snorted a line of cocaine and is about to absolutely let loose to “Come on Eileen,” motherfucker. Let’s go!

Like me, the shooter didn’t transcend the ordinary.

He died in a storage locker after driving around New England in the winter in a shitty Nissan with Florida license plates.

In a two-tone windbreaker.

With his pot belly hanging over his waist band.

And his rocking, aggressive gait stilled.

If I miss anything about Brown, it was the conversation. When you are told you’re extraordinary among other humans, you think that it’s your job to fix the problems of humanity. To lead. When you’re 17, 18, 19, 20 years old. 9/11 took place when I was at Brown. America went to war in Iraq. George W. Bush read a book upside down. Dick Cheney shot someone in the face during a hunting jaunt. Andrew, a childhood friend whom still remains one of my confidants to this day, enlisted in the Army; I read editorials in Florence, Italy, where I fucked a hot American guy of Italian descent who drove a Vespa. “Bello!” my Italian host mother said of him. I debated Israel and Palestine. I debated the use of guerrilla conflict in Baghdad. I went to a Christmas party for members of the Council on Foreign Relations and told a colonel, an aid to General Petraeus, my thoughts about withdrawing troops from Iraq sooner rather than later based on some New Yorker articles I had read by Jon Lee Anderson.

Sometimes, I try to enter into the sort of debate my Brown friends and I once had high out of our minds in a common room at Hope College. Watching Family Guy, and talking about economic theory. Based on the Harvard case studies we read in gut classes designed to make graduation easy for the athletes, and the heirs of empires, and the idiots like me, who one time, during finals week, was so bereft about being broken up with that I took 4 Tylenol PM and then broke into my ex-boyfriend’s fraternity house so that I could force him to get back together with me. But that’s the sad thing about being 43 and living in Savannah, Georgia, a place far away from the seat of the empire I once lived in. People are no longer interested in my stupid theories. They don’t know or care that I was once a member of the most extraordinary group of people ever admitted into Brown University.

My friends from Brown have been trickling in over the past few days. With familiar jokes. And the usual cast of characters mentioned. I miss them. So much. To go back, and have that kind of freedom again. Just to talk. But also, all the sadness. To die in Barus and Holley on a Saturday while it’s sleeting outside. Not real snow. Just a few inches. Such an ugly building. A pavilion of concrete. For a gut class. Knowing that finals week was almost over. That I would be going home to New York. And that depression would make it so difficult to return to campus again at the end of January.