My phone has officially run out of storage space. I’m not due for an upgrade until the end of September, so every few days I deal with my phone crapping out: apps shutting down mid-use, the camera’s refusal to take another photo, videos buffering endlessly, emails refusing to send, incoming texts stuck in limbo. My phone is full. It can handle no more.

Please don’t talk to me about the iCloud, because my cloud is already at capacity. I picture a perfect cartoon cumulus cloud, bursting at the seams with information, all my data, all my bullshit. In my mind, the cloud has a little face and it is contorted in a grimace as the cloud matter huffs and puffs and struggles to hold onto everything. The cloud is in pain. The cloud is disgusted by my excess. The cloud disapproves of my life choices.

After weeks of the phone barely functioning, I make an appointment at AT&T. The sales associate takes a look at my plan and writes a bunch of things down on a sheet of paper and reviews options in regard to buying more storage, erasing and then re-uploading all my digital things, replacing the phone altogether.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “If you were to lose your phone today, what would happen?”

He’s asking me about all my stuff, about losing all the things I cannot touch that live inside my iPhone.

“I’d probably have a good cry,” I say. “But then, honestly, I’d be relieved.”

He laughs. He’s in shock. This isn’t the answer you’re supposed to give. You’re supposed to say you’d be devastated without all your selfies and apps, as if these are personal belongings, objects of great meaning and importance.

“I have all our daughter’s baby photos printed in an album and we take mostly film photos for posterity,” I say, but the AT&T man doesn’t understand or care. He doesn’t want to hear about film cameras and posterity.

And it would be a relief to just not exist for a while in that way, I do not say aloud.

He tells me that unless I delete enough material from my phone, it will continue to freeze and glitch. If I can delete an appropriate amount of things from my digital realm, the phone will continue to chug along until my upgrade. He hands me the paper with his notes and I go home.

There is such a good feeling when I step out of the phone store and into the morning light. I type out a message to my husband that I didn’t do anything with the phone just yet, that I’m going to drive to a coffee shop and work for a few hours, but the blue line of text transmission fails to reach the other side of my device, the words scrambling to exist for eyes other than mine.

*

I have needed to take a break from social media for a while now. It feels long overdue. The last time I took a real break was when I did my Yoga Teacher Training last spring. It was easy then because I had the distraction of my group meetings, the constant thread of new anatomy and philosophy I was learning to keep me occupied and content. When I finished the training, it was nearly summer, and I found myself right back online without any kind of boundary or system in place for how to handle the Internet, how to consume or how to participate responsibly.

I went at it with reckless abandon. It did not feel good. But still, I did not stop.

In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Calypso tells Odysseus to stop eating the lotus flower. “But I love it,” he says.

But do I even like consuming all this stuff? Like the lotus flower, it clouds my mind, sure. But unlike in myth where the sweet-tasting flower creates a blissful apathy, my phone does not leave me in a state of euphoria. It leaves me agitated. Fragmented. Full of strange sensation that I have been somewhere without actually going anywhere. The lotus eaters forget what they were supposed to do. Yet, I seem to remember, reluctantly, everything. I scroll through other people’s lives and absorb their opinions, their anxieties, their wardrobes, their vacations, their children, their dinners, their bodies, their books, their bad news and good news, their carefully edited evidence of having a good life. Then I put down my phone and feel less connected to my own life. I feel detached, a sense of dread. I feel literally nauseous and dizzy. Seasick from the portal in my phone. Whatever the opposite of enchanted is. Replaced by a desire to do nothing.

So why do I keep eating the flower?

*

Elul is here, and the High Holidays are approaching. It’s a time of examining our actions, taking stock of the year behind us, and considering who we want to be in the year ahead. In ancient times, this was the month when Moses went up to Mount Sinai for a second time to receive the second set of tablets, after he’d shattered the first. Moses spent 40 day and 40 nights pleading for God’s forgiveness and asking for the people’s forgiveness as well. Only after this period of repentance and reconciliation did God give Moses the second set. In this way, Elul reminds us that renewal begins with taking responsibility for what we may have broken and making the effort in order to repair it.

During Elul, we hear the call of the shofar—a ram’s horn blown like a trumpet—it’s long, wavering notes meant to be a sort of wakeup call. Wake up! Pay Attention! Look closely at your life! it seems to say. We increase our giving tzedakah (charity), we increase our Torah study and prayer, and our efforts to love one another. We turn toward self-improvement, toward God.

And for me, that means getting away from my phone. I don’t want to spend these next few weeks (Months? Years?) staring down at a screen. If this is a time to return to my core self, I don’t want that self to be scrolling through other people’s lives, judging deal announcements and being jealous over vacations. I want to pay attention to the people in front of me, the people who matter, and to the places where I’ve fallen short and the places where I’ve grown.

On my way to Rosh Chodesh last week, I cried as I drove up the long, winding hill to get to the host’s home in Canyon Country. I was already running late, already spiritually knee-deep in the muck of my own bad thoughts. I know we aren’t supposed to measure ourselves against others— stay in your lane! —but I had been thinking about the space between last year and now, and how I don’t feel like I accomplished much. Not just on a surface level, but certainly not on a spiritual one. I still have so much more inner work to do. So much healing is needed.

But then I thought about losing my dad, and I realized that maybe I shouldn’t be measuring myself now against the person I was before I lost him. I think about what it took simply to make it through the year. Surviving a loss has got to change the scale by which we measure growth.

When I arrived at the gate, there were three cars in front of me, all women from the group who were also running behind. I pulled up next to the front car and got out to offer my help. The woman at the callbox had forgotten the # symbol. I punched the code into the keypad and the gate made a sound, a single, loud electronic beep, and then opened. We clapped and cheered and made our way in.

*

My phone is crapping out before yoga class. As I sit on top of a bolster and wait for the teacher to arrive, I take inventory of what I can delete. I first peruse all my home screen applications: Target app, you can stay. Starbucks, with pumpkin spice season upon us, you must remain. Spotify, I need you. Libby, please stick around, and thank you for your service.

I have not made a purchase from Free People since 2019, but still, I cling to the app like my life depends on it. In my virtual cart lives a sad white peasant dress that I will never likely purchase. I delete the Free People app and feel a rush of adrenaline. Urban Outfitters, goodbye to you! Jeni’s ice cream, there isn’t even a location near me. Sephora, this will be hard, but I’ll see you at the mall! I part from these apps and already feel my phone is lighter, more space available.

I merge duplicate photos. I empty the recently deleted folder to clear space. I delete old videos from before our daughter was born. I delete my Botox rewards app (I haven’t gone in over a year), a few more food establishments go bye-bye, a handful of shopping apps get the ax. I hover over Instagram and recognize my body’s pull toward it, my thumb’s insistence on opening the app to check…what? To check that I still hate everything I find? Sure thing!

The teacher enters the room and I slip my phone back into my bag. For the next hour, I will try my best to listen to my body. The more time I spend off my phone, the more I might be able to listen for what my body might be asking me to change.

*

The word Elul is thought to come from an ancient Akkadian word associated with the harvest, while some other traditions connect it to the Aramaic root meaning “to search” or “examine.” Both these meanings reflect the spirit of the month of Elul: a time to gather in the experiences of the past year and look inward—to take an account of the soul.

I sit next to our group leader at Rosh Chodesh, so I can see the notes she’s made in her notebook. Before the prompt, as a sort of title or heading, she’s written The Voice of the Soul. The group had chipped in to purchase her a new calendar, one that features a celestial tracker and a card where everyone had signed their names. I’d arrived too late to sign the card, but I hope she knows how much I appreciate this group and her leading it, leading us.

She shares a saying with us: “The King is in the field.” It’s a traditional Hasidic metaphor used to describe the Hebrew month we’re in and this period leading up to the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It illustrates that God is exceptionally close, accessible, and receptive to all people during this time.

“Your prayers and intentions are happening in real time,” she says. “God is here.”

“If your inner self could speak without judgment,” she says, “What would she ask for in this coming month?”

Someone shares about wanting a better relationship with her children who are now adults and have children of their own. “Everyone posts pictures at Disneyland all happy and together. It makes me feel so sad,” she says. “I just want things to be better.” The woman next to her takes her hand.

Someone shares about wanting to find a romantic partner. “I rarely leave the house though,” she says. “I work from home, so he’ll have to come find me.” Everyone laughs.

I raise my hand.

“I was at Disneyland last week,” I say and direct my gaze to the first woman who spoke. “And although I have some great family photos, it was also chaos and I cried three times, and not out of joy. Just so you feel a little better. The comparing myself to others is one of the reasons I’m on a social media break right now.”

“What is apparent is not always what is true,” our group leader says.

“Now, if I could ask for something without any judgment,” I say, “Which is hard because I still feel bad. I understand that my family is relatively healthy, for the most part, and we all love each other very much. But this past year was just so bad. Both our dads passed away, six months apart, and I’ve barely even started to deal with the grief. I mean, one of the main reasons I started coming to these groups and to temple services is to have a way to deal with the grief, and to not be alone in it, but yeah, anyway, I just feel like, what I want if I could ask for anything without judgment would be a win. I need a win. Me and my family need a win.”

“You know,” our group leader says, “You are allowed to demand this from God. I’ve worked hard. I’ve put in the time, the effort. I need this. Give me this. And you’re saying it because you know he can provide it.”

“Were you crying because the It’s a Small World song got stuck in your head?” The woman who desires a partner says.

“No,” I laugh. I wish that were the thing that’s stuck in my head, I think.

*

In temple the next night, the Rabbi talks about how on Shabbat, we receive a second soul. According to Jewish tradition, God grants us an extra soul on the eve of Shabbat and then withdraws it when Shabbat ends. This neshamah yeterah, or “additional soul,” gives us a heightened capacity for peace, joy, holiness, and rest—a way of experiencing the delight of Shabbat without the physical or emotional fatigue of the week. When Shabbat ends and we recite Havdalah, the additional soul departs. We smell sweet spices, as is custom, to revive and comfort the soul that remains we return to the consciousness of the ordinary week.

The Rabbi encourages us to look at Shabbat, and to look at life in general, the way children look at the world—with awe and wonder. I like the idea that Shabbat is not simply another ritual to perform, another set of rules to follow. It’s something to anticipate. The week asks us to hurry, to work, to accomplish. Shabbat says stop, slow down, rest. It creates a boundary between the life we’re always rushing through and the life we are actually living, to set aside time for ourselves, for our families, for meals and conversations that do not need to be hurried, that do not need to lead us anywhere.

To enter the weekend with the same sense of anticipation a child might feel when something special is about to begin—that’s the goal, the gift of Shabbat. For twenty-four hours, we are given permission to put down the ordinary demands of our lives and remember that there is more to living.

In a small, and much less sacred way, I want to quiet all the little portals of my electronic device that are constantly asking me to consume and make space. And maybe receiving an additional soul on Shabbat requires that we separate ourselves from all the noise, that we clear enough space to notice the self that was there all along.

*

In yoga, the teacher tells us to “tune into sensation.” I picture an old-fashioned radio at the helm of the room, the teacher turning a little knob until the music comes in loud and clear. But what she actually means is to turn our attention inward and notice what the body is telling us without immediately trying to change it. A stretch, a tightness, a warmth, a place where we might create space, room in our lungs for more air, how it feels to flex or point, how it feels to roll our shoulders back, lift our gaze, and open our hearts.

Grief has changed me, but I am learning not to measure myself against who I was before I lost my dad. I don’t have to apologize for that change or find my way back to the person I was before. That person is still a part of me, but she is not the only version of me that matters.

I can make room for who I am now. I do not need to become someone new.

The two latest editions of Mallcore are live at Zona Motel, where I spoke with about grunge kids, goths, girlfriends, rivals, cigs, and mixtapes, & about the mall as a place of temptation, possibility, and the universal search for connection.

So psyched to be leading my first ever fiction workshop with Stanford Continuing Studies! Beyond Chapter One: Novel Workshop meets virtually for 10 weeks starting at the end of September.

I’ll be teaching an 8-Week Nonfiction Incubator Workshop starting in mid-October at Lighthouse Writers for anyone working on a full-length collection of essays or memoir.

And Personal Essay I for UCLA Extension begins at the end of September, another 10-weeker for anyone who wants to dabble in essay writing.

***Advanced copies of The Style of Your Life are making their way into the world!! If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)

After pushing 2 for countertop appliances and 3 to be connected with a real person, I’m asked to locate and provide the model number and the serial number of the machine. This involves moving the machine to another spot in my kitchen, a place with a wider surface area, so I can turn the machine on its side and read the numbers off the bottom sticker that has remained intact over the last decade. But between lifting the contraption and carrying it elsewhere, the plastic water tank, still damp from being freshly filled, slips from my grip, sending the entire machine crashing to the floor.

“Oh no!” I say, my cellphone face-up on the countertop.

“What was that?” the KitchenAid representative says, his voice coming through the speakerphone. He sounds mildly concerned.

“Uhhh,” I say, unsure if I should admit that I just dropped the thing I’m trying to get them to fix. I pick it up and put all the silver parts back together. The metal frame is bent backward. A screw has become unscrewed. If I were to send this in to the manufacturer, would they know it had been dropped, or would they assume these details as normal wear and tear?

In the end, the representative tells me that KitchenAid no longer makes my model, so I can either send it in and hope for the best or use a 20% discount code to buy a new one. The discount doesn’t work on sale items. The lower-end models, the ones from which I’d be choosing, are all on summer sale. They are, even at the sale price, twice as much as the one I’d purchased a decade ago.

When I hang up the phone, I sit at my dining room table with my work-in-progress open before me. I look at my notes, and then at the clock, and then at the dying 4^th of July flowers that are wilted and brown in the vase. I throw them away and dump out the dirty water. I clean the vase and put it away. I shut my laptop and pack my things away for now. I book a yoga class and change into my workout clothes. I fill up my water bottle and leave.

I’m leaving out the hour-long spiral, the cryfest that took place after I realized I wouldn’t be able to make myself a latte this morning—or ever again—until I could afford a new machine. In the grand scheme of life, it’s not a catastrophe. What upset me wasn’t the broken appliance itself, but the feeling of helplessness, the realization that I couldn’t simply replace something I loved without thinking twice. Sure, I love my vanilla-colored espresso machine. Sure, I am nostalgic for oat milk lattes I’ve barista’d myself over the years. But I’m not mourning the machine. I’m mourning the illusion that I could easily absorb one more unexpected expense.

The therapy company that had improperly billed my insurance and now I owe them money for the entire month of April; losing a personal essay class (my only slated spring class!) in May due to low enrollment; the urgent dental work I needed in June; my husband’s car needing to be fixed not once, but twice in the same week; throw in a 3-year-old sleep regression.

And then there’s watching all the summer travel, the family vacations and reunions and aesthetically pleasing Airbnb rentals. There are the bad jokes about needing a vacation from the vacation, but I am inside of the joke that goes I need a vacation from my own life.

Because it seems that life has become one long exercise in catching up.

*

Tammuz is the tenth month of the civil Jewish calendar, falling between June and July. Arriving in the heat of summer, it marks the beginning of the Three Weeks, a period of mourning that culminates in Tisha B’Av, the day that remembers the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. The Fast of the 17^th of Tammuz commemorates the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls, and the month as a whole invites reflection on moments of loss, resilience, and spiritual transformation throughout Jewish history.

Among the tragedies associated with this season is when Moses shattered the tablets of the Ten Commandments after witnessing the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. During the Three Weeks, many Jews observe customs that reflect this solemn period by postponing weddings and other celebrations, avoiding haircuts and the purchase of new clothes, and fasting from sunrise to sunset on the 17^th of Tammuz. These practices build toward Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.

Tammuz has a mood of mourning. We don’t always mourn one thing, but rather we inhabit a season in which every small loss reverberates. But what remains when the thing you depend on no longer holds?

At our Rosh Chodesh group last month, I heard the story of the Golden Calf for the first time, how Moses went up to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and was gone for longer than everyone expected. Afraid he might never return, the Israelites asked Aaron to melt down their gold jewelry and make a calf for them to worship instead. When Moses finally came back and saw everyone celebrating around the Golden Calf, he was furious and smashed the stone tablets he had literally just received from God. Moses was pissed, how they all abandoned their faith so quickly. The story became a reminder of how easy it is to lose trust when we’re forced to sit with uncertainty.

“Think of an instance where you shifted your own way of seeing,” our group leader says.

I have been experiencing my own spiritual shift this past year. I’ve been coming to Rosh Chodesh for the last 6 months and have recently started going to temple services on Friday nights. I am seeking, as they say. I’m pretty lost during services, as I can’t read Hebrew and didn’t grow up with the songs and prayers. My Jewish upbringing included trips to Mother’s Bake Shop in Spuyten Duyvil for rainbow cookies. I never knew the actual words to the Hanukkah blessing, only the phonetics of the words, which I didn’t realize I had gotten mostly wrong until my 30s.

Jewish was always a state of mind rather than a destination. But the older I get, it’s a place I want to be more and more, one that requires more than the annual candle lighting and the occasional consumption of a black and white cookie from our local deli.

In seventh grade, my weekends were filled with Bar and Bat mitzvah parties, whole days booked up with morning services and evening celebrations, often two in one day, often having to choose between one or another to attend that were scheduled at the same time. The non-Jewish friends who came got a kick out of throwing candies at whoever was up at the bimah. It became a game to see how long we could stay quiet in the congregation. It was my dad who always reminded me to bring a pair of socks with me for when everyone would eventually take off their dress shoes and dance.

I was in a Jewish sorority in college. There were two on campus, two out of nineteen houses, and the one I ended up in the “cooler, yet less friendly,” of the two, according to Reddit. I met my best friend during the first week of pledgeship and we are still best friends almost 20 years later. Crazy. I chose the house because I vibed with the girls there better. I distinctly remember having a very delicious oatmeal cookie and a glass of lemonade during the final round of Rush. Maybe Judaism is somewhat based on the value of a good cookie. I had an in-depth conversation with the girl who would become my “mom” in the house about the evolution of female pop stars. In other words, I felt like I could be myself—eat the cookies and have a conversation at ease.

My brother had his Bar Mitzvah on top of Mount Masada in Israel, and that had felt like enough of a Jewish experience for the rest of a lifetime.

“I can get down with the Golden Calf,” I said to the group. The leader looked at me, puzzled at first, but then she laughed.

“No one has ever said that before,” she said. “That’s something I’m going to be thinking about for a while.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I have trouble with faith, like, the having faith part of faith, and so a literal, real, shiny object that I can see and put my trust in—that makes sense to me.”

“I appreciate your honesty,” the group leader says. “We’d all be there with you, is the thing. We must not confuse the tangible with the ultimate. We need to cling to life. L’chaim! It’s our reminder.”

My way of seeing is being shifted only now, after so many years of trying to carry the weight of all things on my shoulders. Doing it my way. Believing that if I organized my life carefully enough, I could keep disaster at bay and nothing could truly surprise me. My faith was never in God. It was in self-sufficiency, working myself to the bone, driving myself crazy. And that, too, is a kind of idol.

But I seem to have reached the edge of what my own effort can guarantee me.

*

I’ve been going to the same yoga studio for 2 years since we moved back to California. I found it online and booked a 5:45am class for the morning after our inbound flight. According to my app, I have a history of 372 visits, including 23 visits in the last 30 days alone, which averages out to 3-4 times per week. All this to say, I’ve been consistent.

It’s required consistency to heal my knee injury. I only missed technically 3 weeks of yoga while I was out of commission, but I knew (or rather, the physical therapist told me) that I needed the rest and restoration in order to go back.

The day I got my X-ray, I messaged my favorite yoga teacher to fill her in on the disappointing news:

Your class is a constant that keeps me sane (well, somewhat sane) and I will be delighted to come back when it’s time. If you know anything about knee injuries and feel inclined to comfort me that I won’t be bedridden forever, inspirational wisdom is appreciated.

She responded:

Gosh, I hate hearing this! Give it a second, but I would still get on your mat daily. Meditation, whatever physical therapy lets you do, no need to lose your entire practice, it’s just going to look different for a beat, which sucks because you are so stinkin’ consistent! You will be missed but sadly the body has to heal first and strength will return. Big hugs!

That was in April, and now, here at the end of July, I’d say I’m pretty much back to all my normal activity, including this teacher’s class. I have good days and bad days, and I do think the weather affects my joints! But I’m also stronger than I was before, more aware of the muscle groups and the biomechanics, and how to make something better if something hurts. I owe a lot of this to my yoga teacher training, too. I know how to modify, how to make a practice my own.

The morning my espresso machine broke (it was broken before I dropped it, okay!?), I went to yoga. I rolled out my mat and set up my things, and when the teacher came by to say hello, I told her, I’m not having fun. She smiled because she knows, we all know what it’s like, which is why we’re all here in the same room together, and she said, “Well, you’re here. So, let’s do it.”

Halfway through the class, she put us in Warrior II and I looked in the mirror to check my form.

Heel to back arch placement, collarbones wide, gaze over my middle finger, ribs down, knee tracking forward, front hip in external rotation, breathing in and out, filling up with air and letting it go.

“Nice alignment,” she said and it caught me off guard. Me? In alignment? I checked the mirror again. Yes, I was in alignment. I had proper form. And I noticed that my body, for this brief moment, felt good.

I don’t need to achieve some higher version of myself. I can find alignment with the person I already am, with the life I’m already living.

Yes, the hard work pays off. Yes, I feel better, stronger, and yes, I also understand that through tribulation, triumph can emerge. Yes, I can heal. But I can also be okay in the meantime. Alignment doesn’t mean that everything is perfect; it means I am honest about what I need and willing to make adjustments. It means I am rooted enough to move through whatever comes next, because there is always more, always some bullshit, always some sort of pain.

There is no island of the self where harmony awaits. Harmony is something I have to practice every single day.

*

At the next Rosh Chodesh meeting, we discuss the month of Av. The month, which falls between July and August, is traditionally called Menachem Av (Av the Comforter) and illuminates a divine promise of solace and the ultimate rebuilding following the tragedies of Tisha B’Av. We transition from grief to comfort. We shift our spiritual focus entirely toward healing and redemption.

During this time, it’s customary to read through Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, as a symbol of communal mourning that moves us into a season of consolation and hope.

In the middle of the book, after pages of grief, comes a surprising turn: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.

The world is in a consistent state of recreation. Suffering does not simply disappear. Every morning, we are asked to begin again. Jews have been able to overcome profound tragedy. We are all able to overcome profound tragedy. Our circumstances don’t have to change in order for us to find contentment. In fact, they won’t change; not all at once, not like magic. But our relationship to these things can and must change if we want to go on. And we do want to go on.

The prompts given at this month’s meeting hit very close to home.

“How has pain changed the way you understand God’s presence? What do you think God is trying to heal in you during this season?”

How has it been 9 months already since my dad passed away? The day after he passed, I went on a hike and listened to his favorite music. And then I did nothing else. I did not light candles or recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. It wasn’t until attending temple I even knew about these things. I met with the Rabbi and he told me to go to Ralph’s and buy a Yahrzeit candle, a memorial candle to honor a deceased loved one, to light it after sundown, that it would burn for 24-26 hours. The candle as a vessel that points beyond itself. The act of burning—to remember. The Rabbi suggested I get one for my husband’s father too, that we could light them together.

We lit our respective candles after sundown. They burned while we washed dishes and did laundry and watched an episode of Below Deck. We went to sleep, and when we woke up, the candles were still burning. They burned until after sundown, as promised.

It didn’t change the fact that my father was gone. It didn’t make me less sad. But the candle gave the grief somewhere to live besides my own body.

*

I was given a Siddur at temple last week so I could take time with the prayers, so I can become familiar, make it a part of my daily life and put it into practice.

I charge a new espresso machine to our credit card. I pick it up from Target and my husband assembles it for me. I like believing that I’ll wake up each morning and the machine will work. But I can’t really know that. There are no guarantees. But for now, it works, and I make myself a latte and sit down to write.

There is no practice that fixes grief, only practices to accompany it. Writing doesn’t fix me either. But I do it as a ritual that renews me, over and over again.

I text a friend and we catch up about personal things. I tell her how life has been challenging. She replies with support and encouragement. She ends the message with, Wishing you lots of peace!

And I think, yes, that’s it, that’s what I want—peace. Not just a smidgen, but a whole lot of peace. Except that peace is not a destination or a reward for getting everything right. Peace is also a practice. Something I can return to each day, the way I return to movement, to writing, to my coffee, to prayer.

I return with enough mercy to begin again tomorrow.

—

Very grateful for for giving me the space to write, “Reprise: and the fantasy versus reality of becoming a writer,” which was also featured in #MemoirMonday last week!

There’s still time to register for my late summer workshop: Interior Weather and the Exterior World: Rendering Inner Life, an 8-week generative class with a workshop component at Lighthouse Writers.

***Advanced copies of The Style of Your Life are making their way into the world!! If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)

I can’t relate to desperation / My give-a-fucks are on vacation played while I signed paperwork and waited under fluorescent lights to hear my name called, to enter an exam room and strip down to a paper gown. Brat Summer was upon us, but it didn’t feel very “brat” to be diagnosed with liver lesions.

Has my body not been through enough? Not a Sabrina Carpenter lyric, but my own thought that repeated on loop. Hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, an emergency cesarean section, postpartum psychosis— just to name a few things from the last calendar year.

Why couldn’t the random pain I felt in my side be nothing and not a cause for concern. Why did it have to be something?

I was told I needed to get off birth control in order to subdue the liver lesions, to completely change my diet (when I was already fifteen pounds down my pre-pregnancy weight), to quit smoking and drinking (I did neither), and to absolutely not get pregnant again anytime soon because hormones majorly affect the liver and could be the thing that caused the issue in the first place. I was told that my only option for birth control was a copper IUD, a non-hormonal device that would last 10-12 years.

On June 11^th, 2024, I went to my OB for the IUD to be placed. The procedure lasted all of ten minutes. I don’t remember leaving the office, or the car ride home, but I remember stopping for bagels with my husband and feeling a sudden ripping and tearing sensation in my abdomen, so severe that I couldn’t stand or support my own weight.

I knew something was wrong, but I pretended it wasn’t for another 6 hours.

*

Sivan is the third month of the Hebrew calendar that falls during May and June. It’s primarily known as the month the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai and celebrated the holiday of Shavuot. The Zodiac sign associated with Sivan is Gemini, the Twins, representing the integration of the spiritual and the physical. This momentous occasion is celebrated by eating dairy products and staying up all night studying scripture.

In Jewish tradition, Sivan represents alignment, divine instruction, and abundance. It serves as a transition from the deliverance of Passover to the spiritual empowerment of receiving God’s word.

The Torah is an oath, a promise, and the Jewish people accepted it without even knowing what was inside. It was an act of faith to make this sort of contract with G-d. It was, and continues to be, a collective experience for Jews.

Your soul was there.

Our souls were there.

Even though none of the women at my Rosh Chodesh group were actually there, we were all there in spirit.

Our group leader tells us that Shavuot, the day marking the giving of the Torah, is like renewing marriage vows. “Each year we fall more in love, we can enter the relationship with a new consciousness.” She talks about how we’re not the same person as last year, as ten years ago, and as we change, our awareness and perception grow. It’s a chance for us to identify what in our life needs rekindling.

“What in your life needs renewal, more trust, more presence, more intention?” she asks.

On Memorial Day of this year, Carl and I will have known each other for 10 years. On June 1^st, we will celebrate our 7-year marriage anniversary. So many couples get married in spring and summer, the perfect time of year for an outdoor wedding ceremony, for people to be off work on long-weekends and holidays, for good weather and good vibes. But on a deeper level, there must be some cultural intuition that this is the season of commitment and renewal.

I’ve been coming to the group for 6 months now. It’s not always easy to show up. Sometimes I feel like I’m dragging everybody down because I always have some crisis or complication happening in my life, or that I have nothing new to share because I’m still anxious, still listless.

But I show up regardless, and each time, I’m glad for it. I’m grateful that I don’t have to arrive with big news or something lovely to say. I just have to show up as myself—that commitment alone is enough.

*

I read Sweet Talk in the waiting room for the sports medicine doctor. My knee is in a brace that I panic-ordered from Amazon when I realized something was wrong. Overstretching in a yoga class led to a patellar subluxation, which led to a doctor’s visit and a series of x-rays, which led to a prescription for physical therapy and a referral to a sports medicine doctor. I wear the pink and gray brace from online and its cheap, thick straps cut into my upper thigh.

A friend had told me about Stephanie Vaughn’s work. She sent me a reading of “Dog Heaven” that I listened to on my podcast app, Tobias Wolff reading for The New Yorker back in 2008. The story is sharp, funny, tender. I cried hard at the end and knew I had to immediately order the whole book, and so I did. Sweet Talk was published in 1990. It’s a collection of interconnected stories that follow characters as they grapple with the lasting influence of family, of loss, and the search for belonging. At its center is Gemma, whose experiences growing up in an army family echo throughout the book, resurfacing in stories that revisit her adulthood. Together, the pieces chart the ways childhood shapes identity and how our understanding of ourselves evolves over time.

“Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” is the first story in the collection, and I finish it between the time I spend in the waiting room and the time it takes for the doctor to come in and see me. The story is about a father whose military career collapses and his daughter as witness to his flaws: he is charismatic, intelligent, and deeply influential, but also volatile and self-destructive.

At its core, the story is about how children come to understand their parents as complicated human beings, people who can be both admirable and deeply wounded. It’s also about memory, love, disappointment, and the struggle to preserve a fuller version of someone after they’re gone.

I’d looked up reviews of the sports medicine doctor online, and patients were unanimous on the fact that the doctor was extremely knowledgeable and helpful, but also brusque and curt. I found both to be true. He was in the room with me for under 5 minutes, and it was his nurse that spent more time with me and answered all my nervous questions. I wanted to know if I should not carry my daughter up the stairs, or carry her at all, and if I should wear the brace all the time, as in like every waking minute of the day. The nurse brought in a new brace, one that was much more comfortable and looked much more expensive.

“Is this going to cost 700 dollars?” I asked. “We bill insurance,” she said and laughed.

I wanted to know when I would get better, if I’d ever be back to normal. For this she had no real answer.

“We try the physical therapy,” she said. “We wear the brace. We do all the things. And then in a few months, we check back in and see how you’re doing.”

The physical therapist I’d been assigned to, who had the same name as my brother, said similar things in response to my same questions: you come here and do the exercises and then we see if you need to keep coming here and doing them.

I wanted a date on the calendar, a timeframe at least. I wanted a surefire answer. What I got was basically Listen to your body.

It’s probably not a surprise that I have a very hard time slowing down and taking a break. Rest is a word that simply just does not feel like it pertains to me. I feel like if I slow down, I’ll miss something, mess something up, and it’ll all go to shit.

But the knee injury, albeit minor, forced me to take it easy for a bit. And opposite of what I’d assumed would be the case, I actually got a lot done during that time. I read more, for one, and I didn’t fall off my writing schedule. I applied for more jobs and updated my teaching pool applications, which led to me getting an interview and securing something solid for the fall. It forced me to be more present with my husband and my daughter because I couldn’t be literally running around all over the house and instead, I’d park myself on the floor right in the middle of the action of whatever my toddler was doing. It made me more careful with my body. I am so often careless with it, throwing it around into different shapes in workout classes and accepting a forever-state of dehydration.

It wasn’t too long before I was able to walk long distances, before I could go back to yoga and carrying my daughter, even before the brace came off and I just had to “be mindful,” a concept I’d learned in yoga teacher training that hadn’t brought itself into practice in my life until now.

“Are you pushing against the river, or letting it push you,” a yoga teacher said in class almost a decade ago and it never left my brain. This concept of the river and how we are either resistant to it or we let it take us where it wants to go.

“The river fascinated me. I often stood between the yellow curtains of my bedroom and looked down upon it and thought about how deep and swift it was, how black under the glittering surface. The newspaper carried stories about people who jumped over the Falls, fourteen miles upriver from our house. I thought of their bodies pushed along the soft silt of the bottom, tumbling silently, huddled in upon themselves like fetuses—jilted brides, unemployed factory workers, old people who did not want to go to rest homes, teenagers who got bad grades, young women who fell in love with married men. They floated invisibly past my bedroom window, out into the lake.” – from “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” by Stephanie Vaughn

The river as a magnet for despair.

The river is a final, unifying destination for those overwhelmed with life’s burdens. A journey into oblivion. While Vaughn’s narrator, Gemma, means to be morbid here, I think most times we hear about going with the flow, it’s aimed at aligning us with a more peaceful existence, one that promises harmony.

If we let the river carry us, will we find peace?

I think of the “River of Dreams” by Billy Joel:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
From the mountains of faith
To the river so deep
I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And it’s too hard to cross

Even though I know the river is wide
I walk down every evening and I stand on the shore
I try to cross to the opposite side
So I can finally find out what I’ve been looking for

*

There is a bodywork and massage therapist at my yoga studio who specializes in the type of woo-woo that I ascribe to. She combines myofascial release and Reiki and whenever I have a session with her, I always leave feeling emotionally and physically sore, but in a good way.

“This is more than a massage,” as stated in her services description. “It’s a powerful opportunity to reconnect, reset, and experience lasting relief and renewal.”

I booked a session so she could take a look, and feel, at my leg. At one point while she was working on my lower back, she asked me to describe what I was seeing.

“I see a river, but it’s flowing in all different directions. It feels disjointed. Gray. Stuck in some places. Moving too fast in others.”

“What does that feel like?” she says.

“Chaotic.”

“What would it feel like if the river was moving all together?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “That feels really impossible.”

“Are you in the river?” she says.

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

“So, you’re not in the river, you’re just thinking about the river?”

“Whoa,” I say. “I feel like that’s literally the source of all my anxiety.”

We wrap up the session but I keep thinking about the chaotic river and how it’s all in my head. And how there is a version of my life that involves actually being in the river instead of just thinking about it, ruminating, obsessing. Just being in it and not trying to change or control it or even monitor it.

It feels impossible to let the river be the river, but it also feels entirely necessary, and like hey it’s about fucking time.

*

My husband, Carl, attends a service at a Serbian Orthodox Church for the Pentecost. It’s a Christian holiday celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary, the Apostles and followers of Christ. My husband’s boss is Serbian, and she’s been inviting him to the church for years. This time it felt important for him to go and see what it was all about. During the service, which was almost 3 hours long, the congregation read from Acts 2, which contains the story of the first Pentecost when Jesus’s disciples were gathered together when the Holy Spirit came upon them with the sound of a rushing wind and what looked like tongues of fire.

Filled with the Holy Spirit, they began speaking different languages, allowing people from many nations in Jerusalem to understand them. There is also a sermon from Peter who explains that these events fulfill the prophecy and proclaim Jesus’s resurrection. Carl was mesmerized by the traditional hymns sung by the choir, by the decorated sanctuary—all the red banners and flowers and vestments to symbolize the flames that appeared over the disciples. The service itself emphasizes spiritual renewal, unity, and the beginning of the church’s mission in the world.

“At some point during the service,” Carl told me, “There was a beam of light shining down on me and I felt what I can only describe as grace, just this pure, calm, grace for me, for you, for Elaine, for all of us.”

Later, I look up images of the church and see that it has an oculus, an opening at the center of the domed ceiling. Oculus comes from the Latin word for “eye,” and in a church, the oculus is designed to serve as the single source of natural light, acting like a celestial sundial while also symbolizing a spiritual connection to the heavens.

I imagine Carl standing in among the congregation, the beam of sunlight catching his face and holding it there, staying.

*

From “Cartographies of Silence” by Adrienne Rich:

3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

*

Two years ago on this day, I almost died. I told Carl to call an ambulance and within the hour I was being prepped for surgery to remove the IUD that had perforated my uterus and bled into my intestines. I had “Please Please Please” stuck in my head, and even then, I could see the irony.

I know I have good judgment, I know I have good taste

It’s funny and it’s ironic that only I feel that way

There is so much noise in my head all the time, but on this day, Sabrina Carpenter and her beautiful music was saving me. Her song felt like a prayer, which accompanied the actual prayer my husband said at my bedside before going into the OR.

The whole song is a plea against uncertainty, a request for something she can’t control. It’s funny because she can’t guarantee any of the things she’s asking for—the asking itself becomes the point.

I spent most of that year wanting certainty from doctors, from my body, from my future. But the bottom line is that there are no guarantees. There is only hope, prayer, and the willingness to love something anyway.

The 7-year marriage anniversary gift is copper or wool. Again, the irony is not lost on me.

Please, please, please don’t prove I’m right
And please, please, please
Don’t bring me to tears when I just did my makeup so nice

The gray river. Thrown right in.

*

One of my favorite stories in Sweet Talk is called “Snow Angel,” the story of Marguerite, a young mother who is trapped in the house during a snowstorm with her two kids. The storm, and the time alone, tests her patience, her sanity, her faith.

At the end of the story, she makes a snow angel outside:

“She moves with the slow rhythm of the moon moving across the sky. She moves with the slow beat of the stars pulsating their light to stars in other galaxies. She has a pair of white wings and a white skirt. She has white moonlight and the clean white frost of her own breath, and now, alone on the hillside in the white universe, with the shadow of her own footsteps reaching back to the house like a lifeline, Marguerite feels the calm of a great and voluptuous sigh.” – from “Snow Angel” by Stephanie Vaughn

Not certainty. Just grace, and a big ol’ sigh.

—

Thank you Burial Magazine for publishing “Blue Gatorade”— a poem about Miami and the infamous sports hydration drink.

I have 3 workshop offerings this summer:

Main Character Energy: Claiming Our Own Narrative Authority, a 4-week generative class with WritingWorkshops.com.

Interior Weather and the Exterior World: Rendering Inner Life, an 8-week generative class with a workshop component at Lighthouse Writers.

Personal Essay II, a 10-week generative class with a workshop component at UCLA Extension.

***Advanced copies of The Style of Your Life are making their way into the world!! If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)

INTERVIEWER

Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable?

ACKERMAN

Sure.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

ACKERMAN

Currently, my writing process is a bit of a mess. I’m not in a writing group. I haven’t taken a workshop in over a year. I lead multiple workshops online, but it’s not the same as having my own work read and critiqued. I am not taking any writing classes at the moment. I usually take one or two a year. I do not have a writing space or an office or even a desk. I write mostly at the kitchen table or on my husband’s side of the bed.

My daughter goes to preschool, but between the hours of dropping her off and picking her up, there are errands and phone calls and doctor’s appointments, there is class prep and the reading of workshop submissions, writing up feedback—thoughtful and detailed feedback. Occasionally I will meet a friend for lunch down in LA. And then there is, somehow, the crafting of my own work.

It’s a non-negotiable that I need to move my body in some sort of physical activity each day. It’s been difficult recently because I am rehabbing my knee from an injury, but normally I prefer to walk and listen to an audiobook or go to hot sculpt and flow and obliterate my mind and body in infrared heat projected from panels on the ceiling.

I need coffee, and lately it’s been an at-home vanilla oat latte situation. I get my beans from Prospect Coffee Roasters in Ventura and I use the “World Famous” vanilla syrup from Alfred. Oatly Barista is my preferred brand of alternative milk.

I also need to be in comfortable clothing. I like this one pair of very soft barrel jeans from American Eagle that I got for $29.99 on sale and I pair it with a t-shirt and sneakers. Always sneakers. I also like the OV Rec Ankle Socks from Outdoor Voices. They actually just got a bunch of new colors for spring and I fear I will have to order them all. I have about 20 pairs.

I don’t have a word count that I aim for when I write, but rather, I write until I feel full, until the scene or the moment of the writing feels like I’ve done enough to leave it alone until next time. It’s very important to me that I know where I’m starting each day and that I leave myself a place to begin when I finish. I write in a separate document and copy the day’s work over to the larger manuscript, and in that separate doc, I will type out notes for the next day. Throughout the day, I type ideas into my Notes App and then email them to myself and copy those over to the separate doc so I can revisit them when I sit down to work.

It’s more organized than it sounds, or maybe it doesn’t sound organized at all.

INTERVIEWER

Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from your laptop?

ACKERMAN

No, and I don’t really want to. I’m not like living inside the world of my book at all times, but I like to stay porous to the realm so reality can seep into it. I always have a playlist for what I’m working on and I’ll listen to that while I’m walking or driving and ideas will come to me and I can get them down and when I revisit them later it feels easier to access the book because I’m already kind of tonally inside of it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?

ACKERMAN

I don’t reread as I’m going along, but if something slipped through the cracks and I want to add anything to an earlier part of the manuscript, I will. It’s really difficult to hold the whole of my book in my head, so I take lots of notes, and if it’s not something that’s an easy fix, it must wait for revision.

INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?

ACKERMAN

It depends. I rewrote the ending to The Style of Your Life, my forthcoming novel with CLASH, about four different times.

INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

ACKERMAN

I had no idea what the twist of the book would be or that there would even be a twist in those first three drafts. I had a few beta readers and they all were like “something feels off about the ending,” and so I kept reworking it until it clicked.

INTERVIEWER

Are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?

ACKERMAN

I talk to my writers about this, a lot. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has a very eccentric habit of taking six to eight showers a day, and it’s not because he’s a germaphobe; it’s a physical reset, a way to clear his mind. If a scene isn’t working, he showers, puts on fresh clothes, and starts the writing process over again.

I don’t advocate for such a wasteful technique here, but I do encourage writers to find a way to hit the reset button. For me, I love my walks, sometimes I’ll go see a movie by myself or if it’s midday, I’ll take a nap. But the thing I do most often to reset my brain is go to the mall. It’s a great way to be alone while being around people. After months of quarantine during the pandemic, the first place I went in public was to the mall, The Shops at Santa Anita. Most of the stores were still closed, but just to walk into a space where other people were existing and where I didn’t need to communicate with them in order to commune, it felt refreshing. There is nothing like a new t-shirt and a Coke Zero to reset the soul.

INTERVIEWER

Where are some of the places you have found most advantageous to work? Or do surroundings have little effect on the work?

ACKERMAN

I think I tell myself, and maybe all writers tell ourselves, that we need an ideal situation in which to do the work. But really, the work can be done anywhere. I’m writing in bed right now at 8:22pm. I like going to coffee shops to work, which again satisfies the urge to be among people but keep to myself, aside from ordering my coffee and pastry.

I guess an absolutely ideal spot to do work is a beautiful café with lots of light and many tables and comfortable seats and a full menu of food and more than one bathroom. When I lived in Nashville, there were so many coffee shops, but each of them had a foil to another. One only had hard benches to sit on while another purposefully had no charging outlets. One was too long a drive to justify the gas money. One was always just a bit too crowded and too social, too many women laughing loudly.

Every time I go to the library, I wonder why I don’t go there more often. And every time I stay home and make a latte and sit at my kitchen table to work, I think that it’s really great. I drove down to Hollywood last week and sat outside at a coffee shop and drank an iced latte and worked for two hours and then went next door for tacos and drove 40 minutes home balancing a small cup of queso in my lap and eating the rest of the chips and all that was pretty fantastic.

As far as locations though, I wrote about Florida when I was in college in Indiana. When I went to grad school in Florida, I wrote about California. When I was in Nashville, I wrote, again, about Florida. When I moved back to California, I wrote about North Carolina. And now I’m actually working on a manuscript that takes place in the city I live in, so for the first time, I am writing about the exact place I’m in at the same time, and it’s very strange.

INTERVIEWER

Is emotional stability necessary to write well?

ACKERMAN

Here, Hemingway responds, “You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

I don’t think I’ve ever been emotionally stable, so I’d definitely say it’s not necessary for me to write well. Ha!

I have to create stability within the instability. I work despite the disorder.

INTERVIEWER

How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good writing?

ACKERMAN

I literally just accepted a position at a college to teach English. So yeah, it’s pretty important to have some financial security. Hemingway also says something here about how worrying destroys the ability to write. And he says, “Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves,” which is ironic because the thing I’m working on now is about a woman trying to identify the cause of her pain, and she is constantly worrying and suffering because of the worrying. And I would agree that it is attacking her subconscious.

INTERVIEWER

Can you recall an exact moment when you decided to become a writer?

ACKERMAN

In college, I thought I wanted to go into fashion (lol) or study psychology (even more lol, although maybe it would have helped?). I never excelled in English in high school and I was a slow reader and terrible at reading comprehension and I loathed writing papers. But I tested out of basic comp and was able to take a higher level first-year English course where we learned about comic books and graphic novels and my teacher rode a motorcycle and wore all leather to class and I saw that being a writer and teaching writing could look and feel so different and also our classroom was on a high floor of the business building and something about all of that was the perfect recipe for me declaring English as my major. I minored in Latin, by the way, but that’s a whole other story.

INTERVIEWER

What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?

ACKERMAN

I hate this question, although I’m going to answer it anyway, because I’ve spent a lot of time mourning that I am not intellectual enough because I write about malls and girlhood and sleepaway camp and influencers (not all in the same work, even though that would be quite the literary party), and that these things are not worthy enough topics to put to page. But my favorite writers are the ones who write slice of life, whose work isn’t trying to prove anything or stamp a provocative message on the timeline.

I’ve come to understand that being an intellectual means possessing a deep and active curiosity about the world, one that goes beyond raw intelligence or academic credentials (which I have anyway!) It’s a mindset that is committed to critical thinking and a love of lifelong learning.

INTERVIEWER

How about people who’ve gone into the academic career? Do you think the large numbers of writers who hold teaching positions have compromised their literary careers?

ACKERMAN

Again, I love what Hemingway says here, so I’ll just let him respond: A writer who can both write and teach should be able to do both. Many competent writers have proved it could be done…A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.”

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of writing as a type of self-destruction?

ACKERMAN

Yes, but I will not elaborate on that.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the intellectual stimulus of the company of other writers is of any value to an author?

ACKERMAN

I’m more in it for the emotional support and mutual respect, and the exchanging of gifs and memes. And yes, that is very valuable, to me at least.

INTERVIEWER

When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by what you’re reading at the time?

ACKERMAN

100%. Everything makes its way in. I start every class by asking students what they are reading, watching, or listening to and to try and identify what makes it readable, watchable, listen-to-able, or not. Be able to emulate that which is working well or be sure to avoid what isn’t working. Know why you like or dislike something. Take it apart and then put it together in your own work.

INTERVIEWER

Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?

ACKERMAN

Hemingway hated this question, but I like it and want to answer. I think everything is a symbol. In The Style of Your Life, the mall is a mall, but it also symbolizes modern consumerism, and beyond commerce it spans cultural and psychological layers. Wealth and the endless pursuit of material accumulation. Community and social hubs, especially in the late 20^th century where malls were represented a sort of “town square” and served as a meeting place for socialization, people-watching, and cultural gathering. There’s a liminality and nostalgia, particularly post-covid empty malls or malls in decline. A place of collective memory. Existential detachment. And then counter to all that, the American Dream, the postwar boom, suburban convenience, the vast accessibility of goods.

I really shouldn’t get started talking about malls here, so I digress, but in any case, the mall in my book is a setting, but it’s also emblematic of a state of transition of being on the threshold. The protagonist is on the brink in literary speak, and the mall serves as a higher-aim dressing room where she might try on a new Self.

But also, it’s a mall, and there are hot pretzels and candle stores.

INTERVIEWER

So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.

ACKERMAN

I think it’s more that things of use are constantly showing up. The Lord Byron quote, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” I’m not really sure how to put it, but it feels like picking the little letters out of the pouch for a game of Scrabble. Something is always there being made available to you. It’s about how you use the letters that counts.

INTERVIEWER

How detached must you be from an experience before you can write about it in fictional terms?

ACKERMAN

I don’t know that I’m ever detached from any experience, but I’ve let loads of time go by before writing about certain things and then others I am processing (or still living in it!) while writing. The woman trying to identify the cause of her pain—that’s me. I have written scenes while in the waiting room or even sitting on the exam table. I’ve taken photos of artwork in medical offices and transcribed conversations and re-purposed MyChart messages and lab work results (my own, of course). My psyche is truly all out in the open with this one, and so in this way, I am not detached at all from the experience, but instead I only slightly detach myself from it in order to write each day. I have said on multiple occasions to my husband, I am living inside of my book! Usually I’m not so close to the material. But this time, I’m pressed right up against it.

INTERVIEWER

It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two ideas?

ACKERMAN

I think writers can orbit the same ideas and with each rotation we can say something new. But I think as we age (sorry!) we grow and experience more and understand more, and then in some ways we understand even less, and that it is this level of presence and engagement with the world that is at play in the work, its ebbs and flows, and then the subject even becomes trivial because it’s about the human spirit, and now I’m really sounding like Hemingway, but also he said that the concept sounded “much too simple.”

INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

ACKERMAN

From Hemingway: “Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”

Yes. What he said.

But also, I’d like to dig into the “reasons that no one knows.” The reasons for creating art that are subconscious, mysterious, impossible to explain.

Call me crazy, but I feel compelled to write by a force greater than myself. I guess that’s why people say it’s a calling. I feel called, and I feel like I’m calling out at the same time, trying to reach something beyond myself. And to me, that’s what writing is, a long conversation, one where we answer the call and send it back out, channeling and carrying and giving voice to it.

—

I interviewed Jessica Danger about her memoir No Heroic Measures for Zona Motel, on the messy truths of family and self.

I have 3 workshop offerings lined up this summer!!

Main Character Energy: Claiming Our Own Narrative Authority, a 4-week generative class with WritingWorkshops.com.

Interior Weather and the Exterior World: Rendering Inner Life, an 8-week generative class with a workshop component at Lighthouse Writers.

Personal Essay II, a 10-week generative class with a workshop component at UCLA Extension.

***Advanced copies of The Style of Your Life are making their way into the world!! If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)

Schinus molle, or more commonly, the Peruvian pepper tree, was first introduced to California in 1830 when a sailor from Peru planted a seed at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in Oceanside.

The tree is a fast-growing evergreen known for its graceful, weeping branches and aromatic leaves. It’s wide, airy canopy is made up of feathery leaves. Cream-colored blossoms give way to clusters of peppercorn-like berries. The trunk often splits near the base into multiple twisting stems that form knotted burls, which add to the tree’s distinctive, sculptural beauty.

There is a Peruvian pepper tree at the center of our neighborhood. It blooms year-round, producing its small pink-red berries in the winter and yellow-white flowers in summer. It serves as a centerpiece, around which there is an actual roundabout.

I didn’t care about the Peruvian pepper tree in our neighborhood until I saw the landscapers trimming all its leaves the day after my dad died. I was coming home from dropping my daughter off at school and saw a team of landscapers performing what I’ve come to understand is an excessive pruning to remove a large amount of foliage as part of the rejuvenating process. I hadn’t been thinking about anything, hadn’t been feeling anything, as what I’ve come to understand is part of the grieving process, a numbness. But the tree-trimming struck something in me. It felt unfair, or like an intrusion, an interruption, but of what?

I hold reverence for the landscapers and the gardeners who work in our neighborhood. They are friendly and efficient, extremely hardworking. I didn’t doubt their expertise in trimming the tree. I guess I didn’t want to see the tree so bare. It immediately felt out of place, something that should be tucked away. I drove on and pulled into the garage and shut it behind me and sat in my car and sobbed.

*

A few months ago, we made the mistake of letting our daughter watch Frozen 2. She saw it on the Disney+ homepage and pointed to it. “I want that,” she said, and we had no idea, so we let her watch it. I will admit that the songs are good, catchy and perhaps less annoying than the original score. But the plot. I’ve watched Frozen 2 upwards of twenty times since our first viewing and I still have no idea what is going on. Maybe I’m ignorant. Maybe I’m tired. But I don’t get it.

Spoilers ahead: I know there is a mysterious voice calling Elsa to go north. I know that her, Anna, Olaf, Kristoff, and Sven travel to an enchanted forest. Anna and Elsa discover the truth about their parents’ past, Arendelle’s history, and the origin of Elsa’s powers. In this new understanding, Elsa is tasked with freeing the forest and bridging the human world with the realm of magic.

But the logistics of all this elude me. There are diamond-shaped symbols that speak to Elsa and only Elsa. The sisters are separated despite the entirety of their newfound trust depends on the strength of their bond by being together and not separated. Elsa being a “historical psychic” is never really explained. The whole nature of the enchanted forest is ambiguous, unexplored. Kristoff wants to propose to Anna while they are in the midst of this harrowing adventure. The wind is named Gale and she’s pretty sassy. There is also a water spirit who is a very horrifying shapeshifting horse (but maybe my fear of horses has something to do with this). There is a small, blue-purple salamander named Bruni who has the magic power of spewing flames, which I get is in opposition to Elsa’s ability to blast ice from her being. But Bruni’s character is never developed, and I wish it were because he is so cute and seems like an interesting little guy.

It becomes a story about colonialism and the mistakes of our ancestors, which sure, fine, but how are we getting from ice palaces and talking reindeer to that? Someone on reddit called the movie “overcooked.” Lol.

But there is one aspect of the movie that really resonated with me, and it comes from Olaf, character who provides the comedic relief. Leave it to the jester to hand deliver the most important message.

Olaf claims that “water has memory” in that it retains the history of everything it has passed through. While this is a central magical plot point in the film that is used for the purpose of uncovering the past, it is, of course, pseudoscience here in reality and probably what makes it even more charming. Olaf states that water remembers everything, i.e. water molecules retain a memory of substances previous dissolved in them. Since Olaf is a creation of Elsa’s, as seen in the original Frozen film, he has a psychic link to other objects of ice made by Elsa.

Earlier in the film, it is established that Elsa gives Olaf “permafrost,” a personal snow flurry to keep him from melting in the sun. But after Elsa uncovers the truth about the Enchanted Forest and her and Anna’s grandfather, she loses consciousness in the Ahtohallan, a mythical, sentient glacier (bear with me), she is disconnected from her magic. Since Olaf is a product of her magic, he disappears (quite dramatically) as he dissolves. And then later when Elisa is revived when Anna saves her (this part is too confusing to even attempt to replay here), Olaf is brought back to life by Elsa, proving his water form, and his memories, remain.

All this to say, I like the idea that perhaps our memories never truly die, or rather, melt away completely. They are held in love, even if we can’t see it or access it, or even feel it, the memories stay, suspended in an elsewhere. Whether it’s a loved one or some sentient cloud (not to be confused with an Apple iCloud), the chemistry of our souls is eternal. Or so I’d like to believe.

*

We have entered spring. Passover has come and passed (sorry, I couldn’t help it) and I feel the guilt of not having properly celebrated. Passover was always my favorite holiday growing up, one I looked forward to despite the proverbial longwinded dinner. I was always the youngest in my family until my cousin was born when I was a teenager, so I was the designated to find the afikomen during our family’s seder.

Passover is more than just a very long dinner with a matzah scavenger hunt. The eight-day festival commemorates the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. The seder is meant to share the story of freedom.

At Rosh Chodesh last month, I learned a lot of new things about Nisan, which spans from March-April. The energy of the month is one of bravery, a pioneering forward. The 21^st of Nisan is the day the Red Sea was parted. When the Jews got to the Red Sea, they were like, “Uhh, what did you bring us here for? To drown?” Until one brave person stepped in and the water split apart and made a way through.

When I was reading about this online, I misread “The Act of Faith” as “The Ace of Faith” when the price of the tribe of Judah was being described. Nachshon ben Aminadav, the one who took that first step into the water until it reached his neck, displaying immense faith and courage that prompted God to part the waters. When the Israelites were trapped between the Egyptian army and the sea, he jumped in while others hesitated.

It was an act of faith, but I kind of like The Ace of Faith better.

Aviv refers to the spring season that we’re in now, the time in which we (Jews!) were liberated. During this time each year, we remember how God took us out of Egypt and out of slavery. The door opens for redemption. Inside all of us is a narrowness, something constricting that keeps us stuck in patterns. Fear keeps us small. Sometimes it’s all in our heads. But we have the power to walk out of whatever is our own personal Egypt. This is why during Passover we share the story of Exodus aloud. Our mouths are a tool for redemption. I think that’s also why we drink four cups of wine (or grape juice!!) during the Seder.

But there is also a lesson in how we can stay stuck. Sometimes fear makes us comfortable; we fear the unknown and get used to the way things are and we become complacent. We come to a crossroads where we are either going to stay stuck or split our own sea.

We ask, How?

And then we step into the sea and hope that the water will know what to do.

*

When my daughter was born, I was split, a sea.

In therapy the other day, I talked about how I still compare myself to other moms and their birth stories. This feels akin to how I compare myself to other writers and their publishing journeys, but I digress. When I see or hear about moms who enter a state of eternal bliss in postpartum, I flinch and recoil. How someone didn’t need any medication for delivery, didn’t even need a delivery room, or else they loved being in the hospital because of all the round-the-clock help they received, how they DoorDashed sushi to their postpartum room and ate it with chopsticks as their newborn rested on their chest. I spent four nights and five days in a hospital that I wanted to leave as soon as I stepped into it. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything except for sucking on ice cubes. My first meal postpartum was a bagel that my husband got for me downstairs from the hospital food court Panera. A chocolate chip bagel that I gnawed on as the magnesium drip was removed from my IV and I slowly came back into consciousness.

I don’t wish a negative labor and delivery or postpartum experience upon anyone, but it’s hard for me to read or watch these types of stories and not compare my own. I couldn’t have given birth in a field of flowers. I would have had a stroke and died. I lost so much blood during my emergency C-Section, the hospital urged me to get a blood transfusion. I didn’t get one, against medical advice. I wanted the IV out of my arm, to be able to walk around the room after five days tethered to a bed.

My daughter latched immediately. I loved her instantly. But I think what upsets me the most is that I had no sense of self, no agency over my body, over my actions. I was a floating head, and these women with beautiful birth stories seem to have maintained their autonomy somehow through all of it. This is what I envy—the perceived mindfulness I did not possess.

It wasn’t until a week after birth that I started to feel my own body again. I remember talking to our baby nurse in our living room while my daughter slept in a bassinet right next to us, and I had an intense itch on my upper back. I clawed at myself until she came behind me to lift up my shirt and take a look.

“The tape from your IV,” she said. “We can wash this off.” She went to get some soapy water and proceeded to remove the sticky residue from just above my left shoulder blade.

“This is good,” she said as she scrubbed. “You’re back in your body.”

If I was just reentering myself, just now achieving autonomy, then where the hell had I been?

*

One of the opening numbers in Frozen II is called “Into the Unknown.” It becomes a central anthem for the film that represents Elsa’s temptation to follow a mysterious call. The song mirrors her internal struggle to accept the invitation. She sings, I can hear you but I won’t / Some look for trouble while others don’t / There’s a thousand reasons I should go about my day / And ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away, oh.

“Into unknown,” our daughter called it for a while, requested it in the car, at home, all the time. I think she loves it so much because it’s a powerful ballad. Elsa is scared, at first, of this voice that calls to her. She doesn’t want to go on yet another adventure, a journey that could mean life or death. But ultimately, she surrenders to the unknown and decides to take another leap of faith.

It’s a song you have to belt out loud. It’s meant to be bold and commanding. It’s a song about having faith and trusting the unfamiliar.

Our daughter asks for her bejeweled crown and her silver wand as she runs around the living room singing, I’ve had my adventure, I don’t need something new / I’m afraid of what I’m risking if I follow you / Into the unknown.

*

Our Rosh Chodesh group leader gives us three prompts for discussion:

1) Where do you feel your own personal Egypt?

2) Where do you recognize that growth feels impossible?

3) What is the story you tell about yourself?

Women share about past relationships, past careers, past states of being. I share about my birth trauma, how I compare and contrast. I share about anxiety, how it’s been a hellscape, much like ancient Egypt. The story I tell about myself is that the anxiety is a part of who I am, attached to me, or me attached to it. I want, so badly, to leave.

“Let me tell you something,” a group member says, “those other women, their vaginas hurt. No one leaves birth unscathed. Their vaginas all hurt, too!”

We all laugh.

“Something just popped into my mind,” our group leader says to me. “Something that helped me immensely when I was struggling. One word: TRUST. If you don’t have trust, you’re going to suffer.”

I write Trust down in my notebook.

And then someone starts talking about the Birkat Ha’llanot, the “Blessing on Blossoming Trees.” It’s a prayer recited during the month of Nisan when one sees blossoming fruit on a tree for the first time. It praises G-d for creating a world filled with beauty and “goodly trees” for the pleasure of mankind. Goodly. Ace of Faith.

The prayer highlights the responsibility of humans to act as stewards to care for the environment and appreciate nature’s bounty.

I write down Blessing of the trees.

*

On weekends, we like to go for “nature walks” on the path that winds behind our neighborhood. Sometimes we see a Red-tailed hawk, Desert cottontails, lots of beetles and birds, and sometimes even a chipmunk will run by. Our daughter loves to point out each creature. She loves to collect sticks and dandelions and rocks and put them in the undercarriage of her stroller.

One morning, as we reenter our neighborhood after a long walk, I notice the Peruvian Pepper Tree has bloomed again. It’s leaves are back, no longer bare. Green cascades over everything.

I can’t help but think of my dad, the way I thought of him when I saw the tree all those months ago, freshly pruned. The shock of it. And now, the delight. But all of it is part of the cycle.

I struggle to remember when or how I’m supposed to say the blessing, if I’m too late, too early, or if it even matters. I tell my husband to go ahead with our daughter. It’s almost time for breakfast. I stand with my palms on the handles of the stroller. I close my eyes.

Blessed are You, G-d, Lord our G-d, King of the Universe, who has left nothing lacking in His world and created within it good creatures and good trees to give pleasure to human beings.

I inhale the scent of honey, citrus, spicy pepper. When I open my eyes, the tree is glistening.

—

MY BOOK HAS A COVER!!

If you’d like to read and review, please send me a message :)

The latest edition of Mallcore is live at , where I spoke with about distance and desire, the strange theater of adolescence, and learning how to be alone in public.

I interviewed about his novel Sorry to Disturb the Peace for , on the writer as metaphysical investigator and the joy of puzzles.

Summer class offerings ahead:

Main Character Energy: Claiming Our Own Narrative Authority, a 4-week generative class with .

Interior Weather and the Exterior World: Rendering Inner Life, an 8-week generative class with a workshop component at Lighthouse Writers.

“I remember sitting on a rock in the middle of a stream one hot summer day. Girl Scout camp. On a hike, we had stopped to rest. I remember dipping a hand in the cold water and how it came to me—I don’t know whether it was something I’d heard before or something I’d arrived at just then on my own—that this was a way of describing time: a stream flowing swiftly along; it goes in one direction, it cannot be seized or stopped.”—Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

*

Honi HaMe’agel in Hebrew means “Circle Maker.” Honi’s reputation, and the origin of his nickname, is tied to a famous episode described in the Babylonian Talmud. During a severe drought, when rain had not come even late into the winter in Israel, Honi drew a circle in the dust and stood inside of it, declaring that he would not leave the circle until G-d sent rain. At first, a light drizzle began to fall, but Honi insisted that this was not the rain he’s asked for. The rain then intensified into a heavy downpour, prompting him to clarify that he sought a steady, gentle rainfall. After this request, the rain settled into a normal pattern.

Honi’s reputation—and the origin of his epithet—is tied to a famous episode described in the Babylonian Talmud. During a severe drought, when rain had not come even late into the winter (the rainy season in Israel typically occurs in winter), Honi drew a circle in the dust and stood inside it. He declared that he would not leave the circle until God sent rain. At first a light drizzle began to fall, but Honi insisted that this was not the rain he had asked for. The rain then intensified into a heavy downpour, prompting him to clarify that he sought a steady, gentle rainfall. After this request, the rain settled into a normal pattern.

Honi had a special relationship with G-d, the defining feature of which was his bold familiarity with which he speaks to G-d. In rabbinic tradition, Honi is an example of a person whose spiritual power comes from sincerity rather than scholarship. Sages in the Talmud are known for interpreting law, but Honi represents a different religious type: the tzaddik (righteous one) whose prayers move heaven. He was stubborn in his faith, but his humility and honesty allowed him to intercede directly with G-d. The circle symbolizes a boundary of faith, a place where the human and the divine meet through persistence and trust.

The narrative emphasizes that Honi’s prayer was not just a formula. He represented a bridge between the rational and the passionate piety of a wonderworker.

*

The month of Adar is the last month in the Jewish calendar. It falls between February and March, and is known as a time of immerse joy. “When Adar enters, we increase in joy” is the month’s famous phrase.

It also corresponds to Pisces, the sign of the fish, signifying blessings and hidden miracles. As a water sign, the two fish in Pisces represent the ability to live in the hidden realms of the spirit, thriving in the waters of the Torah. Fish are considered immune to the Evil Eye because they are submerged, representing protection, humility, and good fortune.

So many significant events happen in Adar: Taanit Esther (the Fast of Ester), the rain after the drought made possible by the Circle Maker, Zayin Adar—Moses’ yahrzeit (Yiddish for time of year), the day of his birthday which is also the day of his passing.

A person dying on their Hebrew birthday is considered a tzaddik, a righteous person. Dying on the same day that you were born signifies that the soul fully realized its purpose. I think of my dad, how he died on his birthday, and to learn that this is seen as a holy symbol, the sign of a “complete life,” gives me some sort of solace.

Adar was also the last month that the Jews spent in Egypt. Their salvation was coming. After generations of bondage, the promise of liberation was beginning to take shape. Hope was gathering, preparing to break open the story of the Jewish people.

I learn about all of this in another Rosh Chodesh meeting. This time, we are at the house of a woman who lives up high on a hill in a private neighborhood, guard-gate and all. It’s raining the night of the meeting. There has been a lot of rain this month, so much so that I finally caved and bought a pair of Sperry rain boots.

My dad wore Sperry Top-Siders, colloquially known as boat shoes, footwear that was good for “adventure on and off the water.”

As I had pulled up to the house for the meeting, the car parked right in front of me had a license plate that read 20 ADAR. It was the Rabbi’s wife’s car, the leader of our group. 20 Adar, the day of the Honi the Circle Maker.

The sage whose prayer for rain was answered on this day.

*

We take our daughter to the nature center for Nature Tots, a program held once a month for kids to learn about the environment. We’d been once before and learned about mountain lions, California’s largest predator. How they are essential keystone predators that regulate ecosystems and improve biodiversity. They are solitary, and highly adaptable.

Our daughter colored pictures of mountain lions and made a mask of one’s face to hold up to her own face with cut-out eyes so she could see. All the kids in their masks pretending to be predators. The guide took us all for a walk on the trail to “stalk prey.” One of the little boys in the group actually lunged at a paper printout of a rodent and stuffed it in his mouth.

But this time, lesson is about water. Water is essential for life, covering 71% of the earth, but less that 1% is drinkable. Water exists as liquid (water), solid (ice), and gas (vapor). We learn about the water cycle—evaporation, condensation, precipitation. The sun heats water in rivers, lakes, oceans, and turns it into vapor. The vapor cools in the air and forms clouds. Water falls back to the earth as rain or snow. We discuss the importance of conserving water, turning off the faucet while brushing our teeth or taking shorter showers.

One of the park rangers holds a bucket of water over a giant model of the Santa Clarita Valley. “Here comes the rain,” he says as he pours the water out and it fills the crevices and gaps making little streams.

The activity for the morning involves walking over to the creek and finding pictures of animals that live in the water, marking the ones we find with shiny star stickers. But our daughter is more interested in throwing rocks into the creek. She stands at water’s edge and throws one rock after another. Something about it is satisfying to her. The pitching of the object into a surface that is not solid, the way the water receives it and then closes again, leaving only a widening circle.

She wears sneakers, and I worry about her stepping in too deep and getting her feet all wet. I resolve to bring her rain boots next time we come so she can submerge without an issue.

The art project for all the kids is to place little raindrop stickers on white strings of “rain” that cascade down from puffy clouds. There’s a string to hang it up at home, to create the illusion of a steady rainfall.

“We don’t want to waste any water,” becomes our new catchphrase every time we wash our hands.

And our daughter seems to understand, rushing to turn off the faucet and end the flow for water’s sake.

*

I joke with a friend that when I look at my phone for too long, I get Internet poisoning. But really, that’s what it feels like. I get nausea and my eyes burn. I feel physically ill, like I’ve caught something bad from staring at my phone’s tiny screen. But knowing that I will feel bad, that I will have a negative reaction from the staring and the scrolling, doesn’t stop me.

Last year around this time, I took a social media break. It lasted for about a month and did absolutely nothing in the way of limiting my time afterward. The days I when I spend less time on my phone, I am happier. When I am posting less, it usually correlates with an increase in my happiness. So why can’t I just stop forever? This is not a new question for anyone to be asking.

Sometimes (always) I will complain to my husband about something I see online that bothers me. He hasn’t posted on social media in years, but he watches niche videos on TikTok and YouTube and is able to limit this video-watching to 15-20 minutes before bed to wind down. I, on the other hand, have no current limits or boundaries when it comes to my phone. I try not to be on it when I’m with my daughter, but otherwise, it’s a free-for-all.

“It’s like you’re going into the desert looking for water,” he says to me. “And there is no water in the desert.”

What am I looking for inside my phone? Am I even looking for anything, or am I just seeking a mindless experience? Why can’t I pick up a book and read instead of watching videos of people making tomato sauce with butter and onion or fixating on a Carolyn Bessette Kennedy wardrobe starter pack? Should I not be trying to come up with my own personal style? Should I not be looking at recipes I will actually want to make and eat? (I don’t do well with onions).

I like sharing memes with friends. I enjoy adding funny license plate photo to my stories. But is it really adding anything of value to my life? I want to feel joy, to embody joy in my life, but I keep searching for it in places that disappear as quickly as they arrive.

When things feel bleak and hopeless, I remind myself that all I really need in life is my husband and my daughter. They are the people who bring me joy, and not for anything they do, but simply because they are here and we are all together. After dinner, walking to the car, my daughter points to the sky. “It’s beautiful,” she says. She’s almost 3.

A wonderworker, I think to myself.

*

“Sitting on the rock that day, my hand starting to ache from the cold water, but I left it there because of the feeling I had, of being on the brink of some idea, not wanting to lose focus.

Time passing was life passing, I thought. It was life that flowed swiftly along in one direction and could not be seized or stopped. And this was something that weighed on grown-ups, an inexorable force that they feared. My life, like everyone else’s, was passing too.”

*

A yoga teacher I had many years ago used to ask the class, “Are you pushing against the river, or letting it push you?”

*

Our Rosh Chodesh leader gives us prompts at each session. I like her yellow legal pad with all her notes jotted down. The teacher me appreciates her organization. The writer me loves having a question to ruminate on and write about later. I write down all her questions.

How do we practice creating joy?

Where do you find you need to put up a boundary in your own life?

Where do you feel afraid and need to step into it anyway?

The boundary I need to make is one with myself. I would like to lessen the mental load of my own negativity, my own need to escape discomfort or stagnation and mistaking it for failure. I want to set a boundary around my impulse to fix everything that goes wrong, or even what only feels wrong.

I’m afraid that I might go on missing my own life, and I want to step into my inner strength and resilience to make the changes now.

I want to practice creating joy by staying in the river.

When the meeting is over, the rain is coming down hard. I forego my umbrella and run to the car.

*

We return to the nature center after a long bout of rain. The water in the creek is high, but this time, we are prepared. I wear my Sperry rain boots and our daughter wears her polka dot pair from Target. This time, she is able to stand in the water, to find her rocks and throw them as she pleases.

I watch her soak up this simple joy. Sometimes I want to draw a circle around my family and stay inside of it. Sometimes I want that circle to encompass my own heart, to feel that is enough to be alive with the loves of my life, to love my own life because it is mine and mine alone.

The water gets in her rain boots and soaks her socks anyway. I peel the socks off her feet in the car and go to replace them with a dry pair. But she wants her feet to be free as we drive home.

So I let them be free.

—

The latest edition of Mallcore is live Zona Motel, where I spoke with about about Abercrombie aspirations, the mystique of blooming desire, and losing her innocence at the T.O. Mall.

Spring class offerings ahead:

Voice as Compass: Finding the Center of the Story, a 4-week generative class with WritingWorkshops.com!

And for Lighthouse Writers, I’m leading two workshops—

8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop (one spot left!)

8-Week Nonfiction Incubator

And last but not least, Personal Essay I for UCLA Extension :)

“Those are beautiful,” I say from behind my laptop.

“Oh, thanks,” he says. “I’m trying.”

“Well, they’re great. Are you an artist?”

“I don’t make money off my drawings, but I love doing it.”

“Feed the soul,” I say and realize how cheesy and ridiculous I sound. I excuse myself to use the bathroom and ask if he’ll watch my things while I’m away. He nods.

Before Substack, I had a Blogspot. I wrote and posted nearly every single day for ten years. There were no subscribers, no email blasts or social media assets. No hashtags or links. I didn’t know who was reading it. I didn’t care. I was writing into an abyss.

The blog was called Daily Ackermations. I wrote mostly about heartbreak and boredom. I wasn’t trying to understand anything, only to document it. The blog felt like a secret clubhouse, hidden and unadvertised. It’s since been scrubbed from the internet, but sometimes I long for that time when there was less noise. I’ve got a pre-algorithm ache for the time before attention became a part of the work, when writing didn’t have to arrive anywhere or be received by anyone at all.

I return to my computer and open up an email with edits back from my publisher. The Style of Your Life will be published in just over a year. The book will take its physical form. It will become an object. I will travel to bookstores and give readings and do interviews. But now, I sit at a local coffee shop and draft my next novel. I do the work for free. I do the work in faith that it will become something, that it will arrive and be received.

But also, I do the work because I love it.

*

Our daughter plays a game she calls “the balance game.” My husband will pick her up and dangle her legs above the floor. It’s not much of a game, but I suppose the objective is to create the illusion that she is floating. She points her toes and kicks her legs and laughs, and when my husband puts her down, she asks to “do it again.”

We take her to Skyzone on a Saturday morning. All of our friends with kids have been telling us about this magical place where you pay to jump on trampolines and fling yourself into foam pits and supposedly it is fun for young children. For adults, it comes with a surefire backache and full-body soreness for 7-10 days following trampoline exposure.

The thing is, I used to be a gymnast. Not professionally, but I did gymnastics from when I was a toddler up until my early teens. So Skyzone is actually like a little piece of heaven for me. Our daughter loves it, too. She runs from trampoline to trampoline, dives into the foam pit, runs and throws herself onto the drop-zone, which is sort of blob-like and acts as a soft-landing stunt bag.

We stay for two whole hours. My phone stays secured away in a locker, and so the time at Skyzone feels different than normal time. I am present in a way that is not possible in my normal life. Skzyone is an elsewhere, a place where all I need to do is jump. When we leave, our daughter cries. She screams and runs back toward the sea of trampolines. I don’t blame her. I don’t really want to leave either. In the car, soothed with a snack, our daughter tells us she wants to go back to the “balance zone.”

I have become proficient in toddler-speak, so I know what she means. Skyzone was another level of the balance game. Inside the midair feeling, the pause between the polypropylene trampoline bed and the vaulted ceiling above, there is balance.

We promise her that we will return. Skyzone is only a ten-minute drive from our house, but it is a little pricey. We’ll go once in a while, especially on a rainy day, when we need a place where gravity loosens its grip on all of us.

*

Creation Lake was my favorite book of 2024. I’ve read it twice since it came out and listened to the audiobook as well. In the novel, the protagonist, Sadie Smith, contemplates “human salt” as the true, unyielding essence of a person. The salt symbolizes the raw, essential, and untainted core of human identity that exists beneath social constructs, personas, and ideological layers. It represents a hardened, persistent self.

Amidst the espionage, manipulation, and political performances of the anarchist commune she infiltrates, the “salt” represents what is real and enduring. It stands in opposition to the superficial, often pretentious, nature of contemporary life. The concept of human salt is central to the novel’s exploration of humanity’s deep, almost prehistoric, nature, reflecting on what remains when the polished self is stripped away.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away. What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being. — Kushner

This image of salt at the core of our existence brings up the question of how much of who we are is shaped by our unique makeup and the beliefs we carry? Is who we are simply the sum of our wiring and our beliefs? Are we formed by the particular mix of traits that we inherit or choose?

What is the quiet truth underneath all the noise?

*

The Jewish month that falls between January and February is called Shevat. It is the 11^th month of the Hebrew calendar year and often corresponds withTu B’Shvat, the “New Year for Trees.” It is known as a month of blessings and, according to Jewish tradition, a period focused on growth and renewal. It marks a season of receiving divine instruction as the sap begins to rise in the trees. Think winter-turning-toward-spring energy.

I now attend Rosh Chodesh gatherings each month. This month, our group leader shares key aspects of Shevat with us. Now is a time for hope and blessing. The phrase Shenishma Besurot Tovot expresses this sentiment, that “We should hear good news.” It was during this time that Moses began to deliver his final teachings to the Israelites, making it a month for studying scripture and preparing for future inheritance.

She explains the Seven Species (Shivat HaMinim)—two grains and five fruits listed in Deuteronomy 8:8 that symbolize the agricultural abundance of the Land of Israel. These staples of wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates are meant to be enjoyed during this time.

This time is also linked to the zodiac sign of Aquarius, the water bearer, represented by a vessel filled with water, symbolizing the filling of life with the water of the Torah. She says that we must pour our faith and enthusiasm like buckets overflowing with water.

This is how we connect with the Tree of Life. I’m not talking about the Terrance Malick film here, although I do love that movie. But in Judaism, the Tree of Life (Etz Chaim) refers to the tree in the Garden of Eden, a symbol of divine wisdom and the interconnectedness of all creation. It’s a metaphor for a righteous and grounded life.

Every human is a tree. Our inner sap is rising, our spirituality growing. Even when life looks like nothing is changing, things are working below the surface. Roots are thickening, layers of new wood are forming, we are becoming. This idea that trees bear fruit, that our fruit is the visible proof of all that hidden labor, water pulled up, light stored, rings molded, seasons survived—how do we step into that? How do we cultivate quietly what we will one day be able to offer?

The discussion circles back to Moses’ last days. His final message was to “be strong and courageous.” The group leader asks the women in the room, “What if you knew you were approaching the end of your life? What would your message be, and to whom would you address it to?”

The women share experiences of mothering and caretaking. We are relied on by so many. We nurture and bring together. We bring peace and light into our homes. We make a dwelling place, a sanctuary for the divine.

One woman shares about how difficult it is to balance it all.

Our group leader replies, “There is no balance! That’s why it’s called a balancing act.”

*

When I drive my daughter to school in the morning, she tells me that the trees are awake.

When she looks out the window at dinnertime, she tells us that the trees are asleep.

*

Sometimes the memory is so strong. I am still sitting on the exam table and my doctor hands me a pill and I have a bad feeling. She tells me that there is nothing to worry about. It’s the last time I will look her in the eyes. And then she leaves the room and I am alone again.

I wasn’t able to talk to my daughter before I went into emergency surgery. She was safe at home, asleep in her crib, my sister-in-law and her boyfriend watching over her. My husband rushed to the hospital just in time before I was taken back in the operating room. I could not say goodbye to my daughter, but luckily, I didn’t need to. I had survived.

I think if I knew my days were numbered, I would tell my daughter to be strong and courageous.

*

I sometimes trick myself into thinking that what I do is a waste. That I’m not doing anything important by writing. Another woman in the Rosh Chodesh group is studying to become a pilot. I’m editing a novel about a girl who works at the mall. I joke about this with the group, but no one laughs.

“You’re doing the most important job of all,” the group leader says. “You are raising your daughter. You are her whole world right now. And you are doing such an amazing job.”

So much of motherhood asks us to trust what’s happening beneath the surface. So much of writing, too.

I think about this on the drive home. It’s late. The trees are asleep, doing their slow, invisible work.

I am my daughter’s tree, holding steady, growing even when no one else can see it.

—

The latest edition of Mallcore is live Zona Motel, where I spoke with about malls as sanctuary and distraction, the psychology of American consumption, and how becoming a lifelong watcher of other people’s wanting shaped her work on desire, grief, and girlhood.

Spring class offerings ahead:

Voice as Compass: Finding the Center of the Story, a 4-week generative class with WritingWorkshops.com!

And for Lighthouse Writers, I’m leading two workshops—

8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop & an 8-Week Nonfiction Incubator !!

I’ll be leading Personal Essay I for UCLA Extension :)

I always tell my writing students that every essay has an access point, a place that fits as a natural beginning, and sometimes that opening comes to you right away, or sometimes it comes later. I do not want the access point of this essay to be the power outage. But here we are.

I wanted to write about the new year ahead, the promises and comforts and things to look forward to. I wanted to write about my goals and things I’m grateful for. Unfortunately, fear has taken over. I’m worried the power will not go back on today, ever. I’m worried that we won’t have a place to sleep, that all our food in the refrigerator will go bad, that this is all my fault because I have been a less than perfect person and so this is punishment for my badness.

At Urgent Care yesterday, my provider was also sick. He coughed from behind his mask as I held mucus saturated tissues in my lap. The winter break sickness is not unique to me, and logically, I know it’s not a punishment. I spent all day in bed. I took my prescribed medication. I watched an episode of Heated Rivalry, which I enjoyed, but the sinus headache was so intense that I had to rip a shot of Nyquil and pray for sleep to arrive.

I was slow to get out of bed this morning, but when I heard my husband and daughter playing in the living room, I joined them. And then, at 8:15am, the power went out.

*

My therapist does an exercise with me where we have a dialogue between my emotional self and my logical self. My emotional self (played by me) shares a thought and then my logical self (played by my therapist) retorts.

There is a recurring theme of fear, that I can’t handle this, that whatever is happening is too big. Under all the other emotions that crop up—anger, worry, sadness—it’s fear that reigns. This feeling that I am not capable, and it’s not true, as proven by the logical-self dialogue.

Anxiety is the disease of doubt. It makes us believe that certain feelings are unacceptable and must be escaped. The nature of panic is the fear that the panic will return, and that we won’t bel able to control our surroundings well enough to prevent it.

My therapist always says (at least once per session) that discomfort is not danger. Anxiety wires uncomfortable sensations to fear, and healing comes from slowly unhooking those wires untangling the reaction.

There is no cure for anxiety. Medication, sure; I’m on it. Tools and techniques to quell panic attacks, yes; they sometimes work and sometimes don’t. And the awareness of anxiety doesn’t seem to alleviate the having of the anxiety. I.e., knowing what’s happening in my body and mind doesn’t make it any easier to adapt and adjust accordingly. I want it to just disappear, go away! I want to cut it out of my life. But there is none of that. The harder I push it away, the more it comes back full force.

To acknowledge it is to stay with it.

*

My husband resolves to take our daughter to his mom’s house so that both grandmas can watch her. My own mom is in town, and I guess this is what family is for—when the power goes out and it’s freezing and raining outside, you rely on the grandmas.

I call the electric company, and I am somehow the first customer in our complex to report the outage. The power has only been out for twenty minutes, but I’m convinced it will be out forever. This sounds dramatic, but it’s truly how my brain works. I spiral into the absolute worst-case scenario and linger there, unable to think positively about the situation. I ruminate, worry, and dwell in the negative thoughts and feelings.

Part of the spiral includes wanting to do something about the problem, wanting to fix it, immediately. Being in a place of discomfort feels unacceptable. It feels like danger.

Aside from reporting the outage and keeping our daughter safe, there is nothing I can do. I sit in bed under the covers until my husband returns. When he does, he tells me that I should get out of the house, go somewhere that has power and bring my laptop, get some work done. He will hold down the fort and wait for the power to come back on.

I throw on sweatpants and a hoodie and leave.

*

I attend a Rosh Chodesh Women’s Study Group in late December. I know nothing about the group, not even what the name of it means. But I feel a lack in my life, a sense of being unanchored. Part of me hopes that simply showing up, sitting among other women, might begin to fill that empty space.

Later, I learn that Rosh Chodesh marks a new month, a small beginning, which feels fitting. It means “the head of the month” in Hebrew and is traditionally associated with renewal and reflection. Signaled by the new moon, it symbolizes a fresh start. It’s particularly significant for Jewish women, who often gather for study, spiritual connection, and to reflect on the feminine aspects of divinity.

Tevet (טֵבֵת) is the 10th month of the Hebrew calendar. It’s a month known for the fast of Asarah B’Tevet commemorating the start of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, which led to the First Temple’s destruction and exile; an important time for mourning and remembrance in Judaism. But this time is also linked to the joy of Esther becoming queen and the end of Hanukkah, which sets the stage for the miracle of Purim.

January is the heart of the winter. Think cold, dark, long nights, and a feeling of waiting. Winter as a period for introspection and rest—the quiet anticipation for spring’s return. January brings a super fun societal pressures for instant change, despite how in nature, this is the time when the world slows down. It’s a time for building inner strength for the renewal that always follows.

It’s also the month of my birthday. And that super fun societal pressure always kicks my ass. I am thinking of what the prior year has taught me, has shown me, has given me, has taken away from me. I am considering what I want to bring into the year ahead, what I want to accomplish, what I want to leave behind. When I consider the past year, I do believe that there has been a great deal of growth and transformation. I’m not, by any means, done growing and transforming, but I feel the seeds have been planted. I give them space and patience to break the surface, to bloom in their own time.

The group leader at the Rosh Chodesh speaks for a while about what the month ahead holds, what tangible things we can take away from our gathering and how we might implement these ideas and practices into our lives.

“Where in your life right now feels stuck?” she asks, “And what would a light look like in this space?”

She tells us it is our responsibility to bring light to the dark in our lives, and how the light must come from within.

*

At the coffee shop, two girls at the table behind me are exchanging passages from the Bible. They take turns reading to each other out loud. They pause, falling silent for a bit to reflect, and then resume to discuss their findings.

I can’t help but overhear when one of them shares, If I rise on the wings of the dawn/ if I settle on the far side of the sea/ even there your hand will guide me, / your right hand will hold me fast. / If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me / and the light become night around me,” / even the darkness will not be dark to you; / the night will shine like the day, / for darkness is as light to you.

I google the passage and find that it’s from Psalm 19. I turn around to the girls.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” I say, “But is there a reason you just read from this particular psalm?”

“It’s one of my favorites,” the blonde one says and the brunette nods in agreeance.

“Do you know about the power outage?” I say and they shake their heads. “Our power went out this morning, and it hasn’t come back yet. It’s a huge outage on the other side of town. Over 1,000 customers, probably more.”

I explain that I have a toddler, that I’m getting over a sinus infection, that I have horrible anxiety and that I worry the power will never come back on. These two girls listen and I tell them that I want, so badly, to be able to feel what is said in the psalm. I want to feel like there is a hand holding me through this. Not just the power outage, of course, but through all of it. I want to believe that faith is the light.

I thank them for listening and the blonde girl offers to pray with me. I say yes.

While she prays, I close my eyes and feel a warm glow, a peace that is not acceptance, but a feeling of calm, of contentment. I picture my daughter’s golden hair, a day at the beach with the sun in the sky.

I lift my face toward the sun.

*

The Year of the Horse comes from Chinese astrology. While my sign, Capricorn, belongs to the Western zodiac, astrologers often layer the two systems together to offer broader insight. Last year was the Year of the Snake for us Capricorns was a year of strategic growth, patience, and quiet determination. A Snake’s intuition with a Capricorn’s discipline makes way for judicious, purposeful movement.

The Horse year is fast, bold, and action-oriented. The year ahead can feel energizing but challenging, and there may be a push to move faster than usual or take risks that Caps might normally think through more carefully. Success comes from acting decisively and not overthinking. Caps who stay focused can turn the Horse’s drive into real progress.

The Horse also encourages independence and confidence. Capricorns may learn to trust themselves more and loosen rigid routines. We may learn flexibility, and that adapting beats resisting change.

But the Horse’s energy can feel impulsive, especially in contrast to our comfort zone of caution. We might feel torn between playing it safe vs. taking a leap. Burnout is possible if we try to control everything.

The Year of the Horse is about turning discipline into momentum. If we can balance our natural patience with the Horse’s boldness, it can be a powerful year for achievement and growth.

It is now 13 days later as I sit in the library and write this. I have been nonstop since January 1^st, and the burnout and brain fog is present, yes. But the drive is there, too. There is energy, momentum. There is a force at work, a light breaking through the haze of last year, guiding me as I forge ahead.

“Why not push yourself into discomfort?” I say to a new group of writers. “Why not get uncomfortable?”

Why not trust that you will find your way?

*

In a recent sermon at church, the pastor spoke about wisdom. He said that wisdom comes at the end of a long journey, that a person must walk a path to arrive at wisdom. He said that while there is order and elegance to the stars, true wisdom often grows in the quiet chaos of our own lives, through the unexpected and the unseen.

He shared a passage, Luke 3:22: And the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Clear confirmation.

*

I call my husband and he says the power is still out. The girls are packing up their things behind me, and I listen as my husband says he will pack up a bag of things to bring over to his mom’s house so our daughter can nap there, where it’s warm. I say it’s a good plan.

“Wait,” he says. “The power just came back on.”

“What?”

“It’s on. Let me go check everything and I’ll call you back.”

I stand and run toward the exit to find the girls.

“The power came back!” I say and they turn around and cheer.

Descended like a dove.

*

I find myself no longer subscribing to one way of being, but instead, pulling from any avenue that brings me comfort and peace. Maybe it’s not the right way to go about things, but it’s the way I’m doing it. For now, at least, it’s how I navigate and make sense of the path.

I recently reached out of one of my former students, who I now consider a friend, and she told me that she thinks in essays now.

“Something happened to me, and then right afterwards, I was like this would be great in an essay lol and I was going to email you and ask is this how writers think?”

“Yes, unfortunately, this is how we think,” I tell her.

She sends back a laughing emoji.

The access point is not the power outage. The access point is faith.

I was her once teacher, but even I am still learning.

—

The latest edition of Mallcore is live Zona Motel, where I spoke with about growing up inside the mall, learning identity through storefronts and food courts, and what it feels like to watch a formative world hollow out in real time.

And check out last month’s feature with here, on seeking taste in the stores of our youth, inconvenience as pleasure, and the mall as our first universe.

There are still a few spots left in my 4-Week Experimental Essays Generative Workshop starting next month with WritingWorkshops.com

And I’ve got 2 workshops that will be open for registration soon:

8-Week Advanced Nonfiction & an 8-Week Nonfiction Incubator !!

The video opens on a concert stage. A group of skeletons performs, each designed to look like a member of the band. The skeletons skillfully play their instruments, strumming guitars and beating the drums as they sing underneath the bright stage lights. The camera pans across the figures, their bones moving fluidly as if alive, their grins fixed in eerie delight. The drummer skeleton even smokes a joint. As the song goes on, the skeletons transform into the real band members—Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Brent Mydland, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart—who seamlessly take over the performance as they continue to play before the cheering audience. The crowd dances along while the stage glows red and blue and gold. The video concludes with the whole band onstage, smiling and playing together. In true Grateful Dead fashion, the performance blurs the line between humor and sincerity, between death and life.

The Grateful Dead were known for their counterculture identity. They were anti-authoritarian and free-spirited. They were experimental, and their creativity attracted and supported intelligent people in the ways they explored music, technology, art, and alternative lifestyles. Their music often touched on values of community, solidarity, and the divine encounter, while their artistry was symbolic of embracing life’s fleeting nature.

I was born two years after the song was released, but I grew up with it playing in the background of my childhood. My dad used to play the cassette in the car, its otherworldly cover etched into my memory. Against a black backdrop, the band members’ faces seem to float, their eyes catching the light as if emerging from the dark itself. The title In the Dark curves across the bottom of the cover in electric red and blue lettering, with “Grateful Dead” arched above in bold.

To this day, it remains my favorite Grateful Dead song. In my understanding, it’s a song about persevering through life’s challenges. The lyrics acknowledge the difficulties and imperfections of life while maintaining a sense of humor, grace, and a will to survive. The “touch of grey” is a metaphor for the reality of getting older and the “grey” that exists in every situation, good or bad.

My favorite line: It’s even worse than it appears, but it’s alright.

*

My dad passed away on his 72^nd birthday. I had texted him in the morning and he responded, Thank you. I sent him a picture of me and my husband and our daughter. I went about my day. A few hours later, he was gone. There is time unaccounted for, time when he was alone at home, time between his living and his dying. I was about to leave my house when I got the call. I was so confused because it didn’t seem possible. “What are you talking about?” I said, but it wouldn’t fix anything. My confusion wouldn’t make the truth less true.

I sat on the couch with my husband and told him, I don’t know what to do.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. His own dad had passed away almost six months ago to the day.

It makes me sad, all the things I don’t know. What was the last thing he ate? What was he wearing? Did he feel loved, everyone sending him birthday messages that morning? Did he feel it? Was he able to feel it?

I want to know. I need to know. I’ll never know.

*

Someone I think I love breaks up with me. I stay in bed and won’t eat, can’t sleep. My dad comes into my room and says he’s going to Chipotle, asks me what I want. I tell him nothing. “You can be sad, but you need to eat,” he tells me. “If you don’t tell me what you want, I’m going to get you chicken and rice and that will be boring, so let me know what you want.” When he gets back home with the food, we eat together at the kitchen table. I start to cry.

“It’s okay to be upset,” he says and eats his barbacoa bowl. “But you need to take care of yourself. I won’t let you do this to yourself.”

Summertime in Florida. The ocean outside the window of my parents’ condo. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for days. The light in the kitchen changes. Something in me feels like I can survive.

*

Time feels broken, I text my best friend. It feels like being in labor. I don’t know how to explain it.

It’s like you’re in a parallel universe, she writes back.

I tell her: Most of my memories of my dad are from when I was little. He was a good dad. We travelled all over the world and got to see so many cool places. He always put me on his shoulders at Disney World so I could see the parade. I just feel like I didn’t thank him enough or tell him I love him enough. But in my adulthood he was never emotional with me. And I didn’t hold that against him. He wasn’t capable of certain things, and I don’t fault him for it. I just wish I would have said more.

He knew, she writes. You had a unique relationship that worked for both of you. It wasn’t volatile or complicated. It was simple and based in love. That is beautiful.

*

My dad followed the Dead. I don’t know when or for how long, but I know he loved them and that the Grateful Dead was his favorite band. I know he loved their lyrics, their sound. I know his favorite song was “Touch of Grey” off the In the Dark album from 1987. I know that when I was born, he promised me a red sports car if I’d stop crying. I know he made good on that promise when I turned 16. I didn’t know my dad kept concert tickets from Dead shows until they were given to me a month after he passed away. From the tickets, I see that he attended four shows in less than a 6-month span of time. I know he used to love Pepsi. The refrigerator of my childhood was always fully stocked with electric blue cans of Pepsi, like looking out toward the horizon where the water folds into the sky. Rows and rows of blue.

*

Another song on In the Dark called “Throwing Stones.” A peaceful place, or so it looks from space / Closer look reveals the human race / Full of hope, full of grace is the human face.

*

“I don’t know what this is going to do to me,” I say to my husband in bed. It’s almost midnight.

“It will be good,” my husband says. “It changes you for the better. There’s no more separation between you and him. He’s always here now. He’s always with you.”

*

Death feels like an empty room with music playing and no one to hear it.

*

The day before my dad died, I was at the mall. It was the fancy mall about 40 minutes away. I went because I was overwhelmed, burned out, and needed to get out of the house, out of the city. I got to the mall before it opened. I carried my latte around with other early-arrivers, mall-walkers or sales associates waiting for the roller shutters to lift or for doors to be unlocked so they could take their places at registers and in stockrooms. I hung out in the seating area and took pictures of the ceiling. I felt safe and held because that’s how I always feel at the mall. I feel like I have a place, like I belong.

I did not think about trips to the mall with my dad, with my family, being young and driving from our apartment in Riverdale to Westchester in White Plains. Long drives where I would fall asleep in the back seat across my mom’s lap, my brother up front in the passenger seat, my dad drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel to a Grateful Dead song.

*

My friend sends me a poem, “Rain Light” by W.S. Merwin. “The line all the flowers are forms of water is probably one of my favorite lines of all time. Nothing and no one ever really ends. Everything is entangled and transforms and lives on. Not only does religion back that but also science. Energy can never die, only transform.”

*

To borrow an analogy from that same friend, death is like reaching a level boundary in a video game— you kick against the wall and wonder what comes next.

*

My dad says that if I should ever hurt myself when alone, say, stub my toe or bang my funny bone, that I should scream “FUCK!” as loud as I can to alleviate the pain.

*

I don’t know if I’m grieving properly. I guess I don’t know how to grieve. I just know I feel lost inside of it, unsure how to shape it. But some part of me insists I have to try, because writing has always been the only way through.

*

The day after my dad dies, I go for a hike. My husband takes our daughter to school so I can drive to Towsley Canyon early enough to beat the crowd. I put my headphones in and listen to In the Dark. I start with “Touch of Grey.” I’m crying before I even reach the trailhead. I’ve never cried while hiking, and it proves to be difficult, but difficult in the way that makes me want to push harder and move my body up the mountain with determination and force.

Fall in California. The cool early morning air. Sticky monkey flowers. Shrubs of sage and rosemary. I rub the rosemary between my fingers, woody and fresh, like evergreen and mint.

As the song winds down, the lyrics change from I will get by/ I will survive to We will get by / We will survive.

The survival is not something we do alone.

I walk toward the crease of a shadow on the mountain and step into its shade. There is quiet. I feel my dad here in this windless, still shadow.

*

“Jewish tradition suggests that the moment of death itself is peaceful and painless,” writes Rabbi Toba Spitzer. “In the Talmud, the rabbis speak of it being like ‘taking a hair out of milk’—simple and smooth.”

Judaism views death as a passage from one state of existence to another. The soul continues, even though the body returns to the earth. Many texts describe the soul as returning to its Source, often imagined as G-d’s presence, a place of clarity, peace and truth.

A Hebrew phrase, Tzror Hachaim, meaning “the bond of life” or “the bundle of life,” is commonly seen as the acronym T.N.Tz.B.H. on Jewish gravestones, signifying the hope that the deceased’s soul is eternally preserved with G-d. May his/her soul be bound up in the bond of life. This reflects the Jewish belief in the soul’s immortality, where a person’s legacy and essence live on beyond the physical body.

In the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), Rabbi Jacob writes, “This world is like a vestibule before the world to come; prepare yourself in the vestibule, so that you may enter the banqueting-hall…More precious is one hour in repentance and good deeds in this world, than all the life of the world to come; And more previous is one hour of the tranquility of the world to come, than all the life of this world.”

I try to understand these texts as best as I can.

This world = the only place where you can write your story.

The next world = the experience of reading it.

The soul is a piece of G-d above.

*

Someone at the coffee shop is talking about electronegativity. The younger people here are always talking about things I don’t understand, and I am always listening to them because I am always avoiding my work. I usually let their talk happen around me, but something compels me to look it up this time.

Electronegativity is the measure of how strongly an atom can pull on the shared electrons in a chemical bond. It determines how equally or unequally electrons are shared between atoms in a molecule. The Internet tells me to think of it as an atomic tug-of-war for the electrons.

A nonpolar covalent bond is when two atoms share electrons evenly, so neither side becomes more positive or negative. Because the pull is equal, the sharing is equal.

Everything in me leaned toward my dad, whether I meant it to or not.

Our shared love of music and movies and books, our appreciation for fashion and shopping, our desire to always learn something on our own, our determination, our keepsakes, our hard edges, our inner turmoil, our souls pulling toward each other.

The way I never see my own face in a mirror without seeing his face too.

*

When I reach the end of the trail, I listen again to “Touch of Grey.” I see my car in the lot in the distance and I walk toward it. By the time the song ends, I’ll reach my car and have to get in and fasten my seatbelt and drive home. I don’t want this to happen. I’m not ready.

I don’t want the song to end. But then I realize it doesn’t have to. I can play it again and again, whenever I want to hear it. Someday I will play it for my daughter and tell her this was Grandpa’s favorite song. I can go weeks without listening to it, and then upon hearing it, all the feelings return. My dad is with me again in a way he could never be before. The song is something guiding, a bridge through time. I feel him close, in my heart, the way my daughter is a part of me, the way my husband is now my blood, the way we are all bound together— the bond of life, the bundle of life.

*

Oh, well, a touch of grey, kinda suits you anyway / That was all I had to say and it’s alright

—

Works Cited

Jewish Views of the Afterlife, 3rd Edition, by Simcha Paull Raphael (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

“The Journey of the Soul,” Rabbi Toba Spitzer, Divrei Torah (Torah Talk)

But on Monday night in my Personal Essay class, a writer asks:

How do you know if something you write should stay in your notebook versus if you should continue working on it and see where it goes?

I tell her that it’s a great question, because it is, and that my response is to always follow the thread of an idea and see what it turns into. Of course, you might work on a piece for a while and then decide you no longer want to work on it. Regardless, the time you spend writing is never wasted. Every word brings you closer to your own voice. The page is a place to wander, to test out what you believe.

The word essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning, “to try.” In its original sense, an essay was an attempt to articulate one’s thoughts in writing through personal exploration and reflection.

“You’re all here because you want to take the words out of your notebook and see what you can do,” I tell my students.

It’s why I continue to teach writing. Because I, too, need to hear that even if it doesn’t turn out the way I want, even if it scares me, even if I’m not sure it’s good enough, there’s something I discover about myself when I write that I can’t get any other way.

I mean it when I tell my students that it’s always worth it to try.

*

For the last few months, we’ve been taking our daughter to church services on Sunday mornings. I am a very proud Jew, so I don’t get up to receive communion or even say aloud any of the prayers, but I enjoy listening to the sermons and seeing how I might apply them to my own life. Mostly, I’m there for the stories. I’ve always appreciated the Torah for its archetypal nature and I’m definitely interested in how the mysticism in the Old and New Testaments can find grounding in reality.

But then there are some things that remain transcendent, concepts that rise above culture, time, and circumstance. For me, one of those transcendent concepts has always been the idea of faith, a force recognized and honored across religions, philosophies, and spiritual methodologies alike.

Last weekend, the pastor read a passage from the Book of Matthew, an instance where Jesus admonished his disciples for their fear and doubt in a moment of crisis. This is the famous example of when Jesus calms a storm that the disciples feared would kill them.

Paraphrasing ahead…

“Come,” Jesus said, and so Peter got out of the boat and walked on water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was like no thanks. “Save me, plz,” Peter cried.

“O ye of little faith, why did you doubt?” Jesus reached out and took hold of Peter. And when Peter got into the boat, the wind ceased. “Why must thee crash out?”

This passage is used to encourage a greater trust in God’s power and presence, even when facing difficult, impossible-seeming circumstances.

The pastor referenced the song “Faith” by George Michael, as well as the cover of the same song by Limp Bizkit. “The Limp Bizkit version is better, because, it just is,” he said. The song doesn’t reference religion or even one’s faith in a spiritual sense, but rather a belief, or more so a hopefulness, in a partner who lacks devotion. The singer must “have faith” in moving forward and finding a more devoted love.

George Michael was asked if he followed any religion in an interview from 1988, to which he responded, “I do not have a religion, but I believe that one can influence’s one’s life, one’s future, through faith and decency toward others.”

Before this river becomes an ocean

Before you throw my heart back on the floor

…Because I gotta have faith, faith, faith

I gotta have faith, faith

*

References to water appear approximately 722 times in the Bible, and wind about 180 times. In the days of old, people saw water and wind as harbingers of danger and chaos, forces that could pull you under, drown you, or destroy what you thought was solid ground. Water and wind appear throughout scripture as both real and symbolic tests of faith.

Faith, in these moments, is where you come to the end of yourself, when your own strength fails and you have to look elsewhere, beyond yourself, for something greater to hold you steady.

Peter freaks out when he sees the wind. He thinks he will sink, and I don’t blame him. Anytime I see unruly waves ahead, I panic. I panic even when there’s nothing to be afraid of. I am ye of little faith.

Maybe faith isn’t about trusting that things will work out, but trusting that I will still be enough, even when they don’t.

Faith is annoying in the sense that it’s all out of my hands. It demands that I surrender and believe that the flow of life exists beyond me.

A yoga teacher once asked the class, “Are you pushing against the river or letting it push you?”

*

The lyrics of the Limp Bizkit cover are all the same except for one additional line: Gotta have faith, get the fuck up!

*

“You need to get out of the boat,” I tell my students. I’ve told them the story of the church service, the pastor and his sermon, George Michael and Limp Bizkit. I explain about the seed falling among the thorns, how the worries of this life can overtake us and make life an unfruitful endeavor.

“You need to have faith that what you start writing will be good, it will have value, that as you write you will grow, that all of it carries purpose and meaning beyond what you can yet see. You can all walk on water, metaphorically, of course. You just have to believe it.”

“Step out of the boat,” I say. “The wind is not your enemy. You are. And you don’t have to be.”

*

The choir takes the stage. Instead of singing, they play handbells. I’ve never heard them played before. The sound is clear, resonant, shimmering, as if the church is suddenly filled with light. Each note rings distinctly and hangs in the air, but somehow all the bells blend together in a symphony. It feels ethereal, sparkly, heavenly.

Patterns of sound roll and it creates a sense of movement. The song is gentle and soft, and the acoustics of the church sustain the richness of the melody. The music feels expansive and uplifting.

And of course I’m crying. My daughter sits on my lap and colors a picture of a pumpkin. She eats raisins that I packed for her, and when we get up to leave when the service is over, I will find squished raisins all over the pew. As the bells sound, my husband looks at me and we smile at each other, our bond transcendent. We both understand how utterly magical this moment is.

All three of us together, listening to the bells.

*

I have faith in my own writing, despite rejection, despite fear, despite the chaos of the world, despite it all. Maybe this is because I believe my writing is a gift, something supernatural that comes through me and not from me. In this, I have faith, and I trust that each word I write carries its own purpose, its own light, its own sound that rings beyond what I can yet understand.

*

On Wednesday night in a different writing workshop, one of my students calls writing a “paperweight to existence.” I write the phrase down. Writing, this thing that anchors amidst the swirling storms of life, like a weight holds down drifting papers, it gives stability to what otherwise might float away. It is a steady point of meaning in the middle of everything else.

Perhaps we can have faith while also embracing uncertainty, trusting that our art can hold something steady, something true, something that matters.

Our writing can be a small, yet deliberate, act of creation.

—

The latest edition of #mallcore is live , where I spoke with about her experience as a mall employee and what the mall teaches us about money, power, and performance.

New class alert: Interior Weather and the Exterior World—Rendering Inner Life for Lighthouse Writers, an 8-week workshop starting mid-January.

And speaking of personal essays, I’ll be teaching Personal Essay II also starting in January at UCLA Extension.

I’ll also be teaching a 4-Week Experimental Essays Generative Workshop in February, 2026

On weekend mornings, we take our daughter out for a hike on the trail that runs behind our neighborhood. The path leads from the tennis courts through the park and out to the mountainous terrain, albeit moderate, where we walk uphill and downhill, maneuvering the stroller through wooden beams meant to slow down cyclists. Our daughter eats pumpkin spiced Cheerios out of a Halloween melmac cup designed with Mickey Mouse mummified, arms stretched out like he’s possessed. Sometimes she’s content being pushed in the stroller. Other times she wants to get out and amble ahead of us.

The walk spits us out on the sidewalk and we head to the nearby Starbucks. We order, coffee for me and tea for my husband, and our daughter draws a picture with crayons or plays with her travel LEGO set. Inside the Starbucks, I listen to the hiss and whoosh of steam as the barista froths milk. Then comes the low, mechanical purr, the grinding of beans. And last, a faint chuff as pressure releases.

It’s like a meditation. And this, combined with the quick-service morning chatter, the dogs that shuffle in and out with their owners in tow, the other children running, people meeting for coffee, people talking and laughing, people typing on their laptops, making phone calls, people being people, all of it puts me at ease. For a moment, I am part of the machinery. I am folded into the beautiful rhythm of life.

*

I attend a virtual meditation. I sit at my kitchen table with my legs crossed on the chair. The guide tells us about an article he read on the Viking mission, how 50 years later, the search for extraterrestrial life continues.

“If we are searching for life,” he says, “Then we have to ask ‘What is life’ and ‘What isn’t life?’ Yogis define life as consciousness. In all of nature, we are made up of the same atoms and molecules, each form differing only in the density of its veil. Consciousness shines through everything, from mineral to plant to human.”

“Thought itself is a kind of veil, a clouding of clarity. The difference between a stone and a person is not one of substance, but of translucence. What we seek is to clear the veil.”

We are guided through a meditation where we envision ourselves as pyramids. We picture energy naturally rising up to the apex as we tend to the breath. The apex is spiritual connection, higher awareness, and enlightenment. But what does all this mean?

I used to dislike meditation because it felt so solitary. Writing is already an isolating endeavor, and having anxiety will certainly make you feel separate from society. I didn’t want more of this in my life. I didn’t want to sit alone in a room and close my eyes and be with myself. I didn’t want that at all.

But I listen intently as the guide speaks of a lake where our thoughts are the ripples, and awareness is the lake itself. We are quieting the water, bringing it to stillness. I feel the surface settle, the mind softening its grip. For a moment there is calm, silence.

The veil is thinning.

*

On September 1^st, I found myself alone. I woke up and was unable to get out of bed. The day went on without me and I felt so deeply in despair about everything. I couldn’t physically get out of bed, or out of my own head. My husband took our daughter to the park and I drove myself to the hospital.

I couldn’t believe I was back here again. It was like revisiting a place from a dream, a nightmare. As I went through triage, I remember thinking I would absolutely not be writing about this, this time. I would keep this mental breakdown a secret, unlike the last two. (Third time’s a charm!)

It was an unusually slow day in the hospital, but I still didn’t get a room. I got a bed in a hallway where nurses walked by carrying blood and urine samples and I saw someone whose lung had collapsed wait to be taken into surgery. All the while, I cried. I cried when I gave my insurance card to the receptionist. I cried when the nurse drew my blood. I cried when the doctor on staff came by to ask what was “going on.” It had been three years since I was here in this same hospital for the very same reason. I had so much guilt for leaving my husband and daughter, for packing a bag just in case they admitted me to the behavioral unit, for being so selfish because I was having a hard time, which is what I told the doctor who stared at me blankly and then said a psychiatrist would be by soon.

I cried when I put my photo album in my backpack, a collection of tiny Polaroid photos taken from the hipster-trendy camera everyone else my age has. I hadn’t been a mother the other times I broke down. I had been a wife, but there was no child at home asking for me. I wasn’t supposed to have these feelings anymore, these episodes. But I was unwell. I could no longer pretend that I wasn’t.

Right before we moved back to California, I’d gotten off all my medication, against medical advice. When I told this to the on-staff psychiatrist, he immediately replied, “That’s not good.”

I listened to Kevin Wilson’s latest audiobook while I waited to hear the verdict, if I would be admitted or released based on the psychiatrist’s exam. The book is about estranged family members finding each other on a cross-country road trip. I wasn’t offered any food, not that I would have eaten it. I couldn’t do anything except wait. Marin Ireland’s voice came through my headphones as I almost fell asleep on the makeshift bed.

The nurse startled me awake when she brought over the release papers for me to sign. I was free to go.

*

The psychiatrist put me back on my medication. I had been doing so well on it before, and it didn’t make sense to him, or anyone, why I’d chosen to go off it. I think I still feel lost. I know I do. When my life was almost robbed from me in June of 2024, there is a clear delineation—the me before and the me after. I will never be the same from that experience. I let my therapist read a piece of writing that I recently published about the ordeal.

“How can you ever trust a doctor again?” she asked.

“The thing is,” I tell her, “I can see now that I had such amazing help in the hospital that day, the whole surgery team and all the nurses and even the EMTs who showed up at my house, those people saved my life.”

But there was distrust. I was having nightmares and flashbacks to surgery, to the pain in my body, to being told to make phone calls to my loved ones, to my daughter who was asleep in her crib and I hadn’t had a chance to see her that night. I started doubting everything, and wondering if I wouldn’t just be better off getting all the medication out of my system and starting over.

Everyone had differing opinions. Was I suffering Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder? Was I depressed? Was I Bipolar? If so, I or II? Was I anxious? Was it just Generalized Anxiety Disorder?

In 2022 I was diagnosed with Disphoric Mania. This is defined as a profound state of unease or a general dissatisfaction with life, a disorder that shows up in literature describing bipolar disorder. From a clinical standpoint, dysphoria suggests a serious depressive episode accompanied by a manic psychosis, the loss of external reality. It is not considered a reasonable response to an event or stimulus, but rather a feature of an ever-changing cycle in moods that can lead to intense episodes of emotional dysfunction.

In other words, my mood was messed up.

And all I know now is that being on a mood stabilizer helps. It is, honestly, the only thing that’s ever consistently helped me.

It feels like having been on a long, meandering walk, ambling without purpose, without clarity, without destination. And then being released, the path taking shape again under my feet, finding my way home.

*

In my daughter’s dance class, I quickly open my phone and find an email from my agent. She’s given me notes on my manuscript. The email is long and I’m unsure of its tone, so I assume it’s negative. The feeling comes into my mind that I’ve made a big mistake, that everything is all wrong because I am all wrong.

But then something happens in my brain, in my body, and I put the phone away and resolve to look at the email again later. There is still that rush of heat and dizziness, the feeling I could be sick right there in the room. But, I tell myself logically that this is good, that notes are good, feedback is good, and that this book is going to take its best form because I am going to keep revising and working on it until it’s done.

To my surprise (and relief), I am able to read the email again later with a clear head and see that I actually agree with everything she’s saying. I find myself excited to get back to work.

I always thought myself weak for needing medication, for the fact that I may very well be on mood stabilizers for the rest of my life. But maybe we all need something to help us clear the veil. It doesn’t always come to us so easy. Everyone is struggling in their own way.

Let’s just say, the line at CVS is never short.

*

On my night walks, I think of my novel; I listen to music; I take notes; I watch for coyotes; I watch for desert cottontail; I watch for lizards and red ants and ground beetles; I respond to text messages; I ignore my emails; I open the baby monitor app and check on my sleeping daughter; I meal-plan for the week in a document that I share with my husband who is at home working on his computer; I write down an idea for an essay; I take pictures of the sky above me; I think of the people I love; I think of myself and my dreams; I think of nothing at all.

*

What is life, and what isn’t life?

Life is this feeling, sitting here typing, drinking coffee, getting to share my story with whoever will read it, a phone call from a friend, a text from across the country, the flowers my daughter picked out in the vase my husband made, the sun through the clouds, and the clouds as well, the living room filled with books and toys, the kitchen where I will cook dinner later, the dining room table where we will eat, a quote I have saved on my laptop from I don’t remember where. It reads:

Humility is perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble. It is never to be fretted, or vexed, or irritated, or sore, or disappointed.

It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed and despised.

It is to have a blessed home in myself, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and be at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is troubled.

— Canon T.T. Carter

*

The clocks will soon be changing, and with this new season, the evening arrives earlier each day. I can no longer go for my night walks. I have enjoyed very much the time and space these walks provide. Perhaps in spring, when the light lasts longer, I will return to this gentle routine again.

For now, I wait for all the seeds I’ve planted to grow. Maybe some won’t, and maybe some will. I seek to learn whatever this harvest can teach me.

This, too, is part of the cycle.

*All photos taken on The Paseos Trail System

—

I was really annoying this past month, so bear with me:

“To the Doctor Who Almost Killed Me” was published in , and then featured in !

“Mother Beach” was published in , and was also featured in !!

I interviewed on her stunning musical debut, “Belong to Nobody,” for

I’ve got two new interviews up at Write or Die: —On the Lingering Wounds of War, Exploring Mythic Voices and Medical Hell, Writing Amidst New Fatherhood, and His Debut Novel ‘Zone Rouge’ & — On Fanning the Flames of Purpose, Claustrophobic Seduction, the Malleability of Memory, and Their Novella ‘The Living god’

featured me on their blog, “Breaking Boundaries: How Brittany Ackerman Redefines What Essays Can Be,” as I’ll be teaching a 4-Week Experimental Essays Generative Workshop in February, 2026

I started a new column for —MALLCORE !! First and second features are up with , author of Girl on Girl, & Brendan McCauley, host of Tales From The Mall.

My essay, “Sugar Sand,” was nominated for #bestofthenet in nonfiction for New Delta Review <3

—

Advanced reader copies will soon be available for my novel, so let me know if you’d like a copy for review :)!!

On the first day of school, I always have my students write out their goals. I say, “Consider what you hope to explore, improve, or discover, whether it’s developing your own unique voice, building a writing routine, experimenting with new forms, or simply having fun with language!”

Most of the goals are always pretty standard; students want to write better, whatever that means, or they want to be creative because all their past writing has been so academic. Less often, they share that they want to find an outlet to express themselves.

Yesterday, I had 38 new writing students in a new classroom. The classroom itself was also brand new, having just been renovated over summer and fit with the latest technology. Everything was clean, too clean. The vibe was futuristic in a sad sort of way. I had joked that my new digs looked like a mall, very on brand, but in reality, the building felt more like an airport.

In June, I had accepted a position at a university I’ve been applying to for the last five years. In my emails to the department chair, I wrote about my experience in the classroom, my publication record, my aim to commit my time and skills to guiding student writers, to making them more confident thinkers. And each year, I was met with a response that there were no classes available. I filed away the rejections among all the other rejections and kept going. I worked elsewhere. We moved across the country.

But when we moved back, I started applying for more teaching jobs again. I worked a semester at a different university and hated it. I decided to take a break so I could get my Yoga Teaching Certificate and loved it. But as time went on, I knew I’d have to start applying if I wanted anything solid for the following year. Emails went out. And I got a response that was different than before. I was asked for an interview. And so I went.

I was offered the job just hours after the interview and I had the rest of the week to give my answer. Something in my gut told me not to take it, that I was done with academia, done teaching college, that part of my life was over and I needed to officially step into whatever was next. But the money, the promise of a salary, the consistency of a schedule and something steady, was enticing. I accepted the job.

In August, I went to campus and signed all my paperwork. I got my picture taken for my badge. I paid for a parking spot for the semester. I met the department coordinator and she walked me all around the building, helped me set up my laptop to connect to the printer, showed me the café room that housed a coffee maker and tea kettle and refrigerator for faculty use only.

Classes were set to begin the following week. The night before my first day, I dreamed a dream I often dream the night before something big is about to change in my life: I was boarding a plane to an unknown destination and there weren’t enough seats to accommodate me. I kept asking the flight attendants what I was supposed to do, where I should sit, where we were going. But they were all too busy to entertain my concerns, and so I was left to wander the aisles of the unusually large plane, until I felt the ground rumble underneath me, the aircraft began to ascend, and I looked out a window to see the earth become a map beneath me. And then I woke up.

At 6:00am I got in the car and drove the two-hour commute to my new job. I didn’t get to see my daughter that morning. I forgot my yogurt and granola that I meant to pack for breakfast. I left my anxiety ring in my jewelry dish. I had a very bad feeling for the entirety of the drive.

*

I’d been seeing Playworld everywhere, another book that was posted and shared and reposted and re-shared, its existence outdoing itself in the endless loop of the Internet. The cover is a royal yellow, not the ephemeral butter yellow we were all told would be the color of the summer, but something more enduring, indelible. I had no idea what to expect when I borrowed the book on Libby, only that I’d seen Adam Ross at random readings back in Nashville. The Internet told me the book was “A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan.”

I grew up in Riverdale, New York, outside the city. I didn’t come of age there, as we moved to Florida when I was eight-years-old. But I have a fondness for New York, my birthplace, and a hardcore devotion to coming-of-age novels. I also didn’t want to read another book about a woman going crazy and blowing up her life. Sorry!

Playworld, written by Adam Ross, is an intimate portrait of a boy’s passage through adolescence, where shifting family constellations and the demands of an adult world converge, illuminating questions of first love, identity, and the fragile border between life as it is lived and life as it is performed. I listened to the audiobook with a kind of urgent, unrelenting absorption, as if caught in its current. I absolutely loved it.

I listened to the book on my evening walks through the Paseo trails. I listened in the car after dropping my daughter off at day camp and between running errands, picking up where I left off seamlessly like the arc of life itself. I listened on my headphones while I sat in the back seat and our daughter slept on the way home from a family trip to San Diego. I took the full twenty-one days Libby had to offer to finish the book. On the final night, as I listened to the last pages, I sat at my dining room table and stared out the window as the words came to a stop.

If I had to tell you exactly what happens in the book, I'm not sure I could explain it. There’s no big hook. There is no gimmick. No talking animals or even any anthropomorphic devices. There’s no plot twist. No murder, no mystery, no genre-bending element of any sort. Things happened in story, and they continued to happen. I saw all of the characters, all of their lives. My attention was arrested by the grip of humanity itself. I did not want the book to end, but I also felt like the book deserved an ending, one where the characters would continue to live on without me as a witness. The book has a life of its own in this way, and it’s what I look for in fiction—for its world to live on.

I remember in college when I read The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard. I had the same feeling reading those essays as I did with Playworld, where the writing itself made me want to write, makes me feel like I can write, or rather, that what I write will be worthy, worth something, will make a difference. When I got to meet Jo Ann Beard in person during her week as Writer-in-Residence at my graduate school creative writing program, she was the most down to earth person. Her biggest concern was getting to play tennis every day at a nearby tennis court. This is to say, she didn’t seem like a person who was actively trying to change the world, but through her words, she changed mine.

For some reason she gave me her personal email address, and when I emailed her the following fall, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when she responded. I’d written to her about how miserable I was working at a high school teaching AP English Language and Composition. I was sending out my book, my grad school thesis project, and getting nowhere. I wrote, “I really want to be a writer, but I worry that I won't feel like one until I am recognized for it, by the public. I'm wondering if you have any advice for me at this point, and as weird as this is to say to someone, you truly are my writing idol. When I read your work I feel understood.”

Every so often, I return to the words she shared in reply. Even now, they feel like a lighthouse, like a beacon of hope from some other time, some other life calling back to me. It was one giant paragraph, a stream-of-consciousness, and it embraced me the way her work held me. Excerpted here is some of what she said:

“That feeling you are describing, of wanting to get on with it but having the door barred, is very familiar to me, and to all of my writing friends. Being a writer is really hard--I know that envy gets in the way, and not being picked when we know our work is good can be a huge disappointment. Just this morning I was reading the paper and came across a story about a woman who used to be a construction worker in NYC until her health was compromised by 9/11...just reading the few quotes from her was work-affirming, if not life-affirming. She loved her job and described herself as someone who could climb bridges like a cockroach. I was stalling by reading the paper, of course, not wanting to write, but somehow her article made me close the paper and start my work. It was something about her sadness over not being able to do what she loved. The thing is: you are in the game every bit as much as I am. Because the game is writing and agonizing over writing. We are in it together, even though we all have different sticking points: mine is getting the work done and yours, right now, is getting it published. I've been in your spot and you'll be in mine, if you can just trust and let the plan unfold. Not to sound woo-woo or anything. But in fact I'm old and you're young and as my mother used to say: I know some things. She did, too. Not about writing, but about life not cooperating. What she didn't know, of course, was that her narrative arc would stop just past the middle; she was escorted out before the end of the play, as it were. So there's that. Some people die before they expect to, some people inhale toxic construction dust and are sidelined from what they love, and some people just struggle along, and through, toward what they want even when they aren't getting it. The best option of those listed is the third one. That's the bad news. The good news is that writing is a holy art if we do it correctly, using words to make sense out of our lives and to explore the lives of others. I've seen your work and that's what you do. This is a long and winding-paragraph way of saying just keep doing it. Publication matters so much because it validates the work, but first and foremost the work has to validate something. And that's where the fun is (I mean that) and where the real struggle is. Creating meaning and emotion out of black marks on a white page. You are gifted and thoughtful and deeply want to have it mean something to be a writer. Therefore it does. Hang in there. Like the lady from her girders, wearing a tool belt. I believe in you.”

That I believe in you still gets me every time.

*

Friends are starting new teaching gigs all over the place. They post pictures of their new offices and badges and the plants that they will make sure get lots of light. I sit alone at a desk in my office and eat a microwaved cup of rice for lunch. I watch a video on YouTube where Emma Stone reviews all her past award show outfits and judges each one, lovingly. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get engaged.

My first class went okay, but I feel so out of place, like a day outside of time. I share a wall with the floor’s restroom, and at random intervals, I hear the whoosh of a toilet flushing. I take a yellow legal pad and write down everything on my mind:

WTF am I doing?

You cannot keep blowing up your life

Why, God? Why?

I go to the bathroom and take a picture of myself in the mirror. I think about leaving campus before my next class. I think about driving to the beach and sitting on the sand. I recall almost a decade ago when I lived in Westwood and would often go to the beach alone. I was always waiting for the guy I thought I loved to call me and make plans. I was always ready to go at his word, only half-enjoying myself because the other half of me was hoping and pining for him. That is what I feel like now, a half-self. I want to go home. I want to be whole.

In Yoga Teacher Training, we were asked to write a contract to ourselves on the very first day. We would think deeply about what would get in our way in completing the training; what would stop us from achieving our goal of becoming a yoga teacher. I loved the assignment so much, I wrote it into my syllabus for this new semester, an activity for the first day so we could all get to know each other, sure, but more so that my students would better get to know themselves.

How much do you really know yourself at 18? I thought I liked Dave Matthews Band because my high school boyfriend liked it. I thought I wanted to study fashion (lol). I wore leggings and V-neck t-shirts from American Apparel. I didn’t know how deep the river of anxiety ran inside me. Back then, life was opening up in front of me.

In my second class of the day, a student shares that she has severe OCD and struggles not to delete everything she writes. I tell her that I also have OCD and so I understand. She smiles when I tell her this. I’ve never told a student about any of my mental health issues before, and maybe I feel okay doing so because I know I’ll never see her again, at least in this capacity, me in front of a room where she is the student and I am the teacher.

Another student says she is a “bona fide quitter.” She quits everything she does, but she wants to take creative writing because she doesn’t want to quit on herself. I smile and nod, thinking about the email I will have to write the department chair later to quit this very job. I think about how I am quitting on her, on this girl, who is looking at me and expressing something difficult to express.

A girl in the middle of the room wears a flowy white dress. She has orange hair in a trendy style and has been listening intently to all her new peers as they speak. When it’s time for her to share her contract with the class, she says she wants to be able to recognize how far she’s come. “I’ve already gotten into such an amazing school, and I'm meeting really great people. I'm where I want to be. Now, it’s really just about keeping my stats up, like just maintaining what I already have.”

I write down the phrase on my legal pad below all the negative self-talk. Keeping my stats up. This is what I'm trying to do. This is why I'm here. On the baseball card that is my life’s list of accomplishments, I wanted to tack on another win—another esteemed university, another big advance in my career. I didn’t want to let my performance slip.

When I left the venerated writing conference a few years ago, I was embarrassed and ashamed of what happened. And while I really did have a psychotic break that summer, one that would lead to another episode the following spring, I think part of it was also that I wasn’t being to true to myself and what I wanted out of my writing life. I thought I needed to be there, to appear there, to uphold whatever constitutes as a proper fellow.

And it was the same for this new job—I thought I had to do it to prove something, to prove that I’m worthy of respect and love. I thought I wanted to be admired for this new title. I thought that if I could squeeze myself into this sort of life, I’d have it all.

A few months ago, during a text conversation with a friend who was ending our friendship, I was told that I hide behind my mental illness. It was one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me, and unfortunately, I think of it often. I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think I ever explain away my struggles by blaming my mental health. But I do admit to having flaws, to how these issues complicate my life and my relationships with others, my relationship with myself. But I don’t hide anything, because here I am.

I am the crazy woman blowing up her life, the one I'm tired of reading about because it’s too relatable and resonates too deep. And it’s also true that I want a different story, something fresh and hopeful with a happy ending. I want a metaphorical door to open, and to stay open wide.

*

In May, before the job offer, before my book announcement, before summer came and went and fall arrived too early with its pumpkin spiced lattes despite the heat waves, we spent a day at the beach. We stopped at a coffee shop along the way for pastries and a bathroom break. I sat in the booth next to my daughter and we shared a croissant. She stood up and looked out the window. She leaned on my shoulder and then looked up at me.

“I love you, Mommy,” she said, and it was the single greatest moment of my life.

It’s not something I can add to a resume or brag about on social media. I took a selfie of us to commemorate the moment, but I didn’t share it with anyone. I wanted it for myself.

Sometimes, like now, I write at night, after she’s down, the laundry going in the garage, my husband working upstairs on his film, a cup of tea turning cold on the table. The house is quiet and all my thoughts converge, a vision in my brain that comes alive through my fingertips. I forget about my legs, how they are numb because of how I sit on them in the chair. I forget about what I did today or what I have on the schedule for tomorrow. I sit and write and the words pour out, as annoying as that sounds. I feel I am a vessel for something greater than myself. I have so much to say, and I want to say it.

Things have been difficult, although maybe on paper they don’t seem so. I have a hard time in my head. I want to get better. I want my life to be a place I can sit down and truly rest.

This morning when I opened my planner, I found a sticky note from my husband inside:

I just wanted you to know that you have always inspired me. You are an amazing person, wife, and mother <3

*

I want to thank you sincerely for the opportunity to join the department and for the warm welcome I received. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen personal circumstances, I won’t be able to continue in this position. I deeply regret having to step away so soon and apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

*

Spoilers ahead: At the end of Playworld, Griffin rides his bike around the city. He is free, the wind at his back, the rest of his life ahead of him. All he has to do is keep going.

Earlier in the book, his family therapist gives a long monologue that ends with a sage piece of advice. He says, “So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”

Playworld is the name of a defunct toy store in New York. But Playworld, to me, represents the complex and often bewildering world a child navigates during adolescence. Innocence collides with the harsh truths of reality, and we are left to figure out the confusing rules in this game of life.

I guess I thought by now, I’d have it figured out. I have a child of my own, a daughter who will grow up and traverse the course of adulthood. Yet, in so many ways, I am Griffin, a new sense of freedom to behold, a bittersweet taste in my mouth of what’s past, of what’s to come.

I go on into the new day before me. Maybe we are all new at this, lucky to keep arriving at the world that waits within us.

—

Dreams do come true— I was a guest on Tales from the Mall for episode #199, which is now streaming free on Patreon, Apple, & Spotify :)!!

Just because I’m out the physical classroom doesn’t mean I’m fully done with the digital one— I’ll be teaching a few online creative writing courses this Fall, including:

Personal Essay I & III at UCLA Extension via Zoom (more info at the bottom of my profile page)

Personal Essay Workshop: Self as Story for Stanford Continuing Education also via Zoom

Check out my latest interview for Write or Die: Karleigh Frisbie Brogan on her book, Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts where we chat about memory, self-discovery, and the release that comes with inner-reflection.

And a recent GRWM with Cassie Mannes Murray for a special Back to School feature.

She started a Substack in the spring and one of her endeavors with this new outlet was to host a series of conversations that spawned from a tarot card spread: PAST PRESENT FUTURE—a mirror with which to share a moment of reflection to see ourselves, and our situations, more clearly.

I was eager to participate as her first guest. I had recently finished another draft of a manuscript, but I felt lost. I had been querying to no avail. The book felt like it was missing something, yet I had no direction or inclination on how to fix it. During our chat, Allyson pulled these cards: Past: Crossroads, Present: Ring, Future: Scythe, Theme: Child.

Our conversation around these symbols was illuminating and affirming. In short, my PAST card signifies that I made a choice to live a creative life; my PRESENT expresses peace and connectivity in my home life; my FUTURE denotes change, more specifically Allyson stated, “For instance, with your work, it makes me think of a lot of edits. There’s a cutting quality to it. But in a healing way, for a greater cause and purpose.” And my THEME overall was childhood, which makes so much sense to me, since all my work revolves around some sort of return to or reflection of childhood and adolescence.

Later that day, I texted Allyson, I'm going to start making this my developmental edit summer…which is a sort of less sexy version of brat summer lol.

And from there, I got back to work.

*

When I was six months pregnant and in for a routine ultrasound, the tech told me she’d be performing a startle test. Our daughter was having a “lazy day in the womb” according to the tech, and she needed to assess the baby’s neurological system. If I couldn’t get the baby to move on my own (tapping my own belly, repositioning, etc.), then a vibroacoustic stimulus would be used.

I got off the exam table and walked around a bit—nothing. I tapped my belly and talked to my daughter—nothing. I asked if we could do the test at the next visit, but the tech just looked at me blankly.

“Okay,” I said, finally. “What will happen now?”

“It’s just a little vibration that will get the baby to move,” she explained. “A healthy startle reflex indicates a normally developing nervous system. The test doesn’t cause any pain or harm.”

“Alright,” I said, and the tech moved a tiny buzzer on top of my abdomen. A little buzz erupted. On the sonogram screen, I saw my daughter jump, a rush of motion that looked alarming. I felt instantly awful.

I left the visit and cried the whole way home. I cried all afternoon, all night. I felt horrible for inflicting this experience on my daughter. Would it traumatize her? Did it cause her stress? Would she remember this, if not in her mind, then in her body, forever?

For days, no, honestly, for weeks, I felt bad about the startle test. It haunted me. And then one night, I brought it up to my husband and he consoled me. He said while he truly believed the test hadn’t harmed our daughter in any way, there would be so many times in her life that she might have to endure something uncomfortable, even painful—vaccinations, illness, scrapes on the knee and cavities filled. She would have to experience the misgivings of life as we all do. Discomfort was part of the deal, and somehow this helped me to realize that I didn’t do anything wrong, that she was okay.

How do our responses to painful situations define us? What do they reveal about our character? And what does it say about me that I still startle at every encounter with discomfort, every sharp edge of being, as if the world might cut too deep and I’ve yet to grow the skin to bear it?

*

I reach for a bag of avocados and see the doctor who almost killed me.

My husband gets into bed and I jump up, surprised.

The clang of a fallen water bottle mid vinyasa.

The sudden flicker of lights at the grocery store.

A red tailed hawk swoops by on an evening hike.

A leaf blower sounding to life.

I startle when a yoga teacher places the cold lavender towel over my eyes.

*

“You can’t create a new pattern,” I say to my mom. We’ve just returned from a trip to San Diego and my daughter is having trouble getting to sleep. Every time I try to leave her room, she jumps up in bed and cries. Separation anxiety, perhaps. And I have no idea what to do. My mom graciously suggests I go in and hold her until she calms, but I’ve heard horror stories of parents sleeping in their kids’ rooms all night this way, how bedtime becomes a never-ending battle.

My brain tells me to go back to our sleep training days, the rigidity of cry it out, but she was four months old then. She’s almost two and a half now. She’s more aware, more vocal with her feelings. My heart tells me to go to her. I go back into the room.

I kneel beside her crib and place my hand on her chest. She calms instantly, and I pat her body until her eyes grow heavy and close. It takes a few minutes, but then she’s asleep, and I go again to leave the room. Door opens, no problem. Door shuts, she wakes up and screams.

But this time she didn’t rise from her mattress. She resettles and pulls her blanket over her body. She hugs her lovey tight and begins to drift off again. I watch all this from the monitor downstairs. I sit on the couch, my heart pounding, my whole body in fear of what this is, what it could be, what it means, what will happen next.

And what did I mean by that, you can’t create a new pattern? The OCD spirals that reside in my mind have gotten completely out of control. All the “mental rules” and constant scanning and over-thinking; every parking space I pull into means something; every color I wear holds significance; every interaction I have, everything I consume—every day is a conflict.

My brain already has so many patterns and rituals, that I feared creating yet another one would do me in. But the thing with kids is, sometimes you actually want to create a pattern, a routine, rather. And sometimes changing up that routine, just for one night, or a few nights, or however long, won’t turn the whole thing to crap. Children are much more resilient than us adults. They’re able to adapt and move on. Going on that trip must have triggered something in her, a change in scenery that affected her, sleeping somewhere new, a fracture in her day to day.

The next night when I laid my daughter down in her crib, she said, Mommy stay here? It was a question. I said, Mommy and daddy are going to sleep in our bed and you’re going to sleep in your bed, and in the morning, we’ll all wake up and be together. I held my breath, and then she said, Go to sleep and then wake up. I smiled and kissed her again. I left the room and she stayed quiet. She fell asleep after a short while.

*

The term “startle test” primarily refers to the Moro reflex in infants, a basic reflex used to assess how their nervous system is developing. In infants, the Moro reflex involves a sudden extension of the arms and legs, followed by a return to the body, often accompanied by crying in response to a sudden loud noise or a feeling of falling.

Like jolting awake from a dream.

A return to the body. A return to the self. A return to the world.

*

I’ve spent the summer working on my developmental edits. It’s been substantive, structural changes, big-picture work that’s focusing on the content, assembly, and storytelling. I keep returning to my FUTURE card, the Scythe, a sharp quickness that will result in healing.

And while I’ve been revising my manuscript, I’ve also been working on myself. It’s been a little over a year since I weaned myself off all my medications. Looking back, I have no idea why I went off a medicine that was certainly helping me cope with my mental health issues. I think part of it was the PTSD from almost dying, and part of it was that I wanted to prove my postpartum therapist wrong. I had told her I wanted to get off everything and bring myself back to my baseline. “What if your baseline sucks?” she’d said to me. Yes, a medical professional can say that to you! And with no shame!!

Well, it turns out my baseline does suck. It’s been a difficult year, mentally. The negative spirals have returned—the rumination, the inability to stop the car of mind—a brain without any brakes.

After a particularly bad weekend, I talked to my therapist (a new one who doesn’t end each session asking what I'm going to do for self care lol) and she agreed that it might be best for me to get back on medication. I had to get blood work to make sure my liver would tolerate it (all good!). I had to review my entire medical history with a brand new psychiatrist. I had my mother-in-law come over after my daughter went to sleep so I could go to CVS and pick up the prescription. I felt the years fold as I stood in that line again. Last name. Date of birth. Do you have any questions for the pharmacist?

It feels strange and sort of sad to be starting all this over again. I didn’t think I’d ever be back here, but maybe it’s where I’m supposed to be. In this phase of change, it’s another step forward.

“All emotions are okay to feel, even if you don’t like them,” my therapist tells me in our most recent session. “And from parent to parent, we are teaching our kids how to survive in the world. Emotions are not something you have to fight or flee from. The connections you make are fiction.”

“Probably why I'm a writer,” I say and she nods.

*

I hold my daughter on my hip as I order our meals at Chick-fil-A. We find a table outdoors and I poke the straw through the hole of her juice box. She drinks happily and we enjoy the evening air. It’s a little hot, but it feels good to be outside.

A motorcycle zooms past, the sharp braaap as it approaches. The sound swells and then trails off, thinner, higher, until it’s gone.

Vroom Vroom! my daughter says and laughs. She wasn’t startled by it. Or she was, but it made her excited, filled her with a thrill. She reacted to it, had her own experience, and I had the joy of watching her as it played out before me.

—

Check out my latest interview with Cora Lewis on her debut, Information Age, for Write or Die. We chat about living in an online world, trying to stay present, and how to return to the natural world in order to heal.

And a recent GRWM with John Vurro, author of Play Rewind.

My husband just wrapped his first feature!! Check out the Wolfbiter IG account for updates.

My husband had been by my side through it all, and then, on a temperate winter’s night, we decided to go out for ice cream. We sat and talked and somehow the topic of conversation turned to my time working as a stockroom associate. I told him about my summer working alongside my mom at Macy’s department store; she worked in sales for the larger part of my adolescence, and I joined the company as part of the inventory and stock team. I’d interned for DKNY doing merchandizing during my sophomore year of college, and I’d had countless retail jobs all throughout young adulthood, but working in the stockroom was a world unto itself.

I told him stories about that summer: the customer who told my mom he was looking for his wife, and it turned out he came to the store because he thought he could purchase one; customers who tried to return used underwear without the tags and she had to let them because of company policy; the time she caught someone shoplifting and security tackled them and she got $500.00 for her services; the time a customer asked my mom to check out his ass in his pants; the time all the power went out in the store, or how I would unwrap hundreds of designer purses and steam evening gowns before they went out on the floor, or how on my breaks, I’d wander aimlessly, trying to reconnect to the rhythm of life, the fluorescent pulse of the mall. I walked in loops not to shop, but to feel like a person again.

And then the idea came to me, to write a book about that summer, a book about the mall. The concept came fully formed: a girl has a mental breakdown and has to return home to work alongside her mom at a department store in South Florida. I went home that night and wrote notes and outlined a bit, feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time about my work.

A few days later, my husband would receive notice of a job in Nashville, Tennessee and later that week we would make plans to move across the country. By the beginning of summer, I’d have a new fulltime job. At the end of summer, I’d find out I was pregnant. It was a season of change after so much waiting.

I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding on until life gave me something new to carry.

*

I once had a therapist tell me that jealousy is a smoothie, meaning it’s the end product of a lot of different ingredients (aka emotions). Throw in sadness, anger, guilt, shame, humiliation, disappointment, embarrassment, etc. Delicious!

Self-comparison is the telltale sign that jealousy is being evoked. When we feel a secure bond with something—a person, activity, hobby, passion, career, or any meaningful connection—it can feel deeply unsettling when that bond is disrupted. The intrusion triggers a rush of emotions: panic, anger, sadness, etc. and creates a complex emotional space where we perceive that secure connection as being under threat or attack.

For years, I asked, “What do I do with the jealousy?” If I know and understand this to be a major culprit of my own suffering, how do I eliminate it? But the problem is that to simply eliminate jealousy isn’t realistic, or even healthy. And to vow never to compare myself to anyone else ever again—lol.

Even with a third book on the way, I'm still navigating literary envy. But I think it’s less about eliminating jealousy altogether and more about stepping into the space of awareness and acceptance.

The jealousy smoothie therapist also told me about the Emotional Auditorium. Imagine a theater where each seat represents a different emotion. When you walk in, you get to pick where you sit. The full spectrum of emotions is all here under the same roof, where anxiety and excitement might sit side by side. Optimism might be only one row ahead of pessimism. It’s a powerful metaphor, this grand hall where all your feelings exist together, each with their own designated spot. You’re not exiled from any emotion, and none are more “right” or “wrong” than others. They’re all here.

When I walk into my own Emotional Auditorium, jealousy is always in attendance, usually a few seats over from shame, catty-corner from admiration. Just a tilt of the head and you might confuse the two. Jealousy isn’t loud or demanding anything of me, but it’s there. I don’t need to kick it out or ask it to leave. Instead, I take a seat beside it. Not because I want to indulge it, but because I want to understand it.

Jealousy shows up whenever something matters to me, when I fear there’s not enough, when I’ve told myself a story that someone else’s having means I cannot have.

But sitting next to the emotion, I don't feel swallowed by it. I feel curious. What is it pointing me toward or away from? What do I believe I’m missing? And is that story even true? The more I sit with it, the more I realize it’s just another seat in a much bigger room. And I always get to choose where I sit, even if it doesn’t seem that way. I'm not stuck. I have free will. I can decide for myself.

And maybe it will become easier for me to choose a different seat, perhaps compassion, who might even share her snacks or offer me her cardigan if I get cold. Together we can gently hush self-pity a few rows over. She really needs to get a grip.

*

When I hit the second trimester of my pregnancy, I was able to sit down again and write. I started the manuscript that would become The Style of Your Life and finished a draft before giving birth. I revised postpartum and queried and piled up the rejections, eventually putting the book on hold to work on something else. And then a whole year went by until I looked at the manuscript again, or rather, I had one of my writing mentors look at it.

I also had another writer pal read it and give me feedback. I used to be so superstitious about my work, not wanting to show anyone anything until it was completely done. But having two writers whose insight and craft I greatly valued was key in giving me the confidence to revise the book and take it out of the metaphorical drawer again.

My family and I moved back to California in the summer of 2024 and I continued revisions up until before the holiday season. I printed out the book and gave it to my mom to read when she was here visiting for the holidays. She read it in one night and told me she loved it. The book is a fictionalized version of our relationship and the summer I spent working alongside her at a department store, so her impression and her opinion was really important to me. I wanted to know if I had gotten it right by her, and I had. She also told me she felt like I just needed the right person to publish the book, the right editor who would understand Florida and mall culture and this failure to launch narrative, someone who could truly guide me and take me under their wing.

I agreed. But I wasn’t sure I could find that person. Who really wants to publish a book about some crazy girl working at the mall?

I daydreamed about the world of the book all the time. I made a playlist and listened to it when I drove; I created a folder on my phone with inspiration photos for the manuscript; I thought about what the teaser trailer would look like if I ever got the chance to film one.

In the Emotional Auditorium, I sat in the seat of trust. All in the same row sat delusion, excitement, hope, worry, and awe.

*

I have a general knowledge of how the ocean works. I know there are waves and currents. If I stand on the shore, most likely I will connect with those waves and currents. They exist, but the details of each don’t come to fruition until it breaks land. I don’t have access to knowing what each wave will be like; only the knowledge that it will come. And so I must allow each wave to pass and adjust to its strength, instead of charging toward each one in a fury.

This process teaches us perspective. Sometimes we need to take a few steps forward or back as the wave approaches. Sometimes we need to stay put, right where we already are. This is the part we have control over, learning the rhythm.

In this way, life can feel like being out in open water. We all have our ways of how we make sense of the world—maps we sketch, anchors we trust—and for me, it’s always been writing. Words have been my life vest, keeping me afloat when I’ve felt I was sinking beneath the weight of things. The act of writing itself has been my lighthouse, steadfast and glowing in the fog, reminding me that there’s land somewhere, that I'm not lost, just at sea for while. I have a purpose, and the purpose is not just survival, it’s a journey across emotional tides, a search to identify connections where others might only see chaos, to break apart the unspeakable and shape it into language, to swim toward understanding. To write is how I find my way back to shore.

The current changes without warning. The sky can flicker in an instant. We will always be navigating tumultuous currents, no matter how skilled we become, no matter how well we’ve learned to read the horizon.

In this way, I don’t believe there is such thing as a final destination; only waves.

*

March, 2025. I email CLASH books during their open call for submissions. This is the email I send:

Thank you for reading my novel, The Style of Your Life, and considering it for publication with CLASH books. I deeply, truly admire the work you do. As I am in between agents, between writing lives, between so many things, I submit this manuscript in hopes it finds a home. I've published indie and big 5 and I can honestly say that I just want my work out in the world and in the hands of a publisher who believes in me and my craft. I've toiled over this book for years and I'm ready to see what comes next.

The Style of Your Life--

Days from her college graduation, Stephanie Shiman finds herself back in her hometown of Delray Beach, Florida, recovering from a mental health crisis. Working in the stockroom of Dillard’s alongside her charismatic, sales-savvy mother, Robin, Stephanie navigates a turbulent mix of guilt, pressure, and her mother’s unfulfilled dreams. While Robin thrives on the showroom floor, Stephanie retreats into the quiet, still grappling with her own ambitions as a writer.

When Trevor, a charming but reckless drifter, enters her life, Stephanie is lured into a relationship that promises escape but threatens to derail her future. Haunted by the wounds of her parents’ divorce and Robin’s aging regrets, Stephanie must reckon with her own desires: Can she truly understand what love means, and can she break free from the inertia of obligation to claim the life she wants?

The Style of Your Life is a poignant coming-of-age story that captures the bittersweet dance between family ties and self-discovery, set against the backdrop of small-town struggles and quiet ambition. With vivid characters and emotionally rich prose, it examines what it means to take ownership of one’s story—and to write a life worth living.

Two weeks later, the Editor in Chief emails me back that the book will be published. After years of hard work, all it took was two weeks. I won’t include the full email because it contains spoilers, but here are some highlights:

Hi Brittany

I have sent out a lot of acceptances but this is quite special as I grew up in Boca Raton and just love this book on so many levels. The characters, style, story and setting had me…I see CLASH being a great press for the novel along with me being a caring editor and champion of the book…Congrats on writing an excellent novel.

*

Publishing a book only moves the goalposts once more. Now, I'm diving into another round of revisions on another manuscript and stepping back into the whirlwind of the writing industry, determined to get this next story out into the world. It’s a worthwhile pursuit that often feels like a lost cause, but I keep doing it because it’s in my heart, true and true, to express myself through writing.

My therapist congratulates me on the deal announcement. We talk about whether or not I'm able to fully embrace this success. I tell her that although I am extremely proud of myself and excited for this book to hit the shelves, I fear it might never be enough.

She asks me to think about something before our next meeting, the question of: What constitutes as a fulfilling and meaningful life?

I know the answer lies in the life I’ve already built, the one I’ve shaped for myself and continue to shape for my daughter and our family. I know that each success might never feel like enough, but instead of getting stuck in that feeling, maybe I can let it fuel me for whatever comes next.

Turns out, someone did want to read about that crazy girl at the mall after all.

—

The news is finally out!! CLASH Books will be publishing my forthcoming novel, The Style of Your Life, in 2027! I’m so honored and thrilled and can’t wait to share this book with the world <3

This Fall, I’ll be teaching Personal Essay I & III at UCLA’s Extension, and the beautiful news is that the courses will be remote— so anyone can register! More info coming soon, but check out my Instructor Profile video to learn more about me and my teaching style.

Just a few more weeks until my next 8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop begins with Lighthouse Writers! Click the link for a full course description :)

My students were ten years younger than me. They were brilliant and funny and brought me back to life after the heartbreak. But then I decided to move across the country and start over, again. I kept in touch with a handful of my students. I was twenty-seven, single, and ready to get serious about my writing.

My first stop in California was a two-week writing retreat in the Redwoods. I was working on what would become The Brittanys, but in truth, I spent most of my days hiking in the woods and crying. The owner of the property had a dog named Sally who accompanied me on these crying walks. I felt like I was finding my footing again after being involved with someone toxic for so long. This person threw things at me when he was angry. And I let him. The straw that had broken the camel’s back was when I told him I wanted to try stand-up comedy. “What’s my role in this?” he’d asked, his face glued to the Florida Seminoles as they ran a play across the screen. “To be supportive?” I said. “No, I'm good,” he’d responded. We broke up that night.

On my cry-walks, I imagined a new self emerging from the writing retreat, pristine and pure. There was even one day when I jumped into the pool, fully clothed, in what I suppose was a bout of anxiety that I was attempting to clear. A baptism of sorts. An immersion that served as a rite of passage.

I came home from the retreat with the opening chapters and a renewed sense of hope, a hope that my ex would have called delusional. I called it ambition.

*

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries chronicles a decade of feelings—the things that are fleeting, things that remain. Difficult friendships and dangerous loves. In an online workshop with Heti back in 2020, she shared her screen with our group and showed us the diary entries in a word document, how she’d shuffle them around and try to make sense of the structure, how this was her way, her form of play.

There is a palpable push/pull throughout the pages—of wanting to be known and wanting to live a quiet life, of wanting to write and wanting to love, a desire to go inward, a wish to move away from the self.

“A lack of values, a lack of privacy, and a lack of modesty, which is making me feel kind of sick,” Heti writes from an unspecified time. “A life in a new place for a while. A life which is beside the main current of life…A little distance between this energy and myself. A little nervous. A little too long, and it’s boring now.”

“Been thinking about authenticity, and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.”

“How long I wanted to be rid of myself—but couldn’t be.”

I wonder what the alphabetical diary is doing. What good does it do to document ourselves in the written word?

In essay writing, I guide my students to discover structure and shape, to illuminate what’s been hidden, and to use the page as a space for self-exploration and expression.

The alphabet offers structure; the dairy, a resting place for emotion. But the emotions don’t rest—they live. Each one pulses with urgency. Each one endures.

*

One of my former students from the Performing Arts school texts me when I'm writing at a coffee shop.

“I have this note you wrote me and S and C and N the summer before we all went to college and you were 27 when you wrote it and I'm 27 now which is crazy and I'm just dropping in to say that you were right right right and I hope you’re doing well.”

The note pops up an attachment and I hit download. Here is the note, syncopated for clarity:

“I'll be in the Redwoods for the next two weeks. I'm actually here now sitting at a wooden table in a very big house and three other writers are actually here also writing with me. I guess I'm telling you this because I won't be able to have our "workshop" time, as I'm setting my focus on this novel. I need to get a draft done before summer is over. I know some of you are already off to college, or packing, or leaving tomorrow. It's a very emotional time and I don't have the nine hours it would take to properly prepare any of you for it, but here is my two-minute advice--

You're not going to get it right. That may seem harsh, but it's the truth. You're not going to go be a perfect person. You're just not, and I know that because no one does that. Even the people who get jobs right out of college (that's a whole other essay) don't necessarily "get it right." They're just doing things. You're just going off to do another thing in the course of your life. As I was driving today, I thought about you all, packing and getting nervous and arguing with your parents, and it's funny because that shit never ends. I packed super haphazardly yesterday, argued with my mom about money, cried in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s. And I'm 27. I've been doing this shit for ten more years than you all. So trust me, you'll probably never get it right. But that's the good news. College is important, you are important, but college is not meant to be the end-all-be-all. Nothing's over until you're dead anyway.

The point is, you're going to get through it, and then have a new experience, and more, and many more, then fifteen more, then a hundred more. Don't look at your whole life though; just stay in today. Try very hard to just be a good person, tip well at restaurants, don't be on your phone in the Starbucks line, summarize the reading for someone in your class who didn't do it (they won't pass anyway), be on time, fuck, be EARLY (my mom used to send me the Wonder Word from the paper and I used to do it before class and eat Oreos), don't make college about guys (or girls) ((and I mean that romantically or in a friendship way)). First of all, college guys are DISGUSTING. I knew a guy who DID NOT shower. He literally sprayed AXE cologne instead of bathing and wore the same shirt every weekend and never washed it. This is what is out there. And girls are super clique-y too, because they're just like you (you guys are better…but still). They're new, lonely, and weird. They get jealous. So do you.

Just try, like I said, VERY HARD, to wake up every day and talk to yourself nicely, tell yourself you're worth a damn, that you are going to do something good for yourself, and then take a nap and eat a cookie. Try to go for walks like to class or go running or stay active somehow.

If you're sad, and you will get sad, call each other. Text. Send a dumb photo. Stay in touch. Call or text me. I literally have NO life. Reach out and don't just internalize everything. Call your parents and tell them you love them. Call a friend and tell them that. Call me and tell me my snaps are artistic.

Explore. Don't just sit in your dorm and get high. My roommate did that and she ended up getting that rare disease you get a shot for before college and dropped out of school. She literally never went to class.

GO TO CLASS. It's fun. College classes are actually enjoyable because the teachers want to hear your opinions.

Be careful. I somehow made it through college without getting pregnant, arrested, or getting an STD. SOMEHOW. If you can do the same, I’d say college was a success. Oh and get a diploma or something. The most important thing I learned in college was that I'm a hard worker and self-motivated. I respect that about myself. I also learned that I cannot pull off a belted dress of any kind, and that I shouldn't drink vodka.

I love you all and I hope this is helpful. You're going to worry and be upset and scared no matter what I say, but just know that you're going to be fine. I'm proud of all of you and even if you get pregnant, arrested, or an STD, I'll be there for you and I'll still love you and respect you and think you're awesome.

DO NOT stop writing. If you stop, in any capacity (even if you only do it for fun in a journal or on the back of your class notes), I will not love or respect you and I will unfollow you on social media.

Be well.
Britt

*

I procure a spring sinus infection and stay in bed to watch Interstellar. In the movie, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, leaves Earth to join the Endurance mission. He is 35 years old. His daughter, Murph, is 10 when he leaves. She sends him a video message after the crew has experienced time dilation, a traumatic scene to say the least, and she states that now she is the same age as her dad when he first departed.

When Cooper finally reunites with Murph at the end of the movie, his daughter is now elderly and on her deathbed, surrounded by family. The reunion is a poignant moment, with Murph acknowledging Cooper’s return and assuring him that she knew he would come back because he had promised her such. It’s a moment of immense emotion, especially for Cooper, as he has missed out on witnessing his daughter’s entire life and the events that have transpired on Earth. And Murph, despite her feelings of abandonment and betrayal, eventually accepts her father’s decisions and understands his motivations. He literally wanted to save the planet. His return is a testament to their love and his commitment to his daughter.

Murph has aged passed her father. The tables have turned. Time has become crooked.

This is sort of how it feels when my former student sends me that message. This student has gone on to be a teacher in their own way, traveling for drama work and acting and helping others.

After I read the note I’d written when I was twenty-seven, the note that this student has saved on their phone all these years, we continue chatting and it warms my heart.

“Omg are we having an Interstellar moment??? This is wild!!!” I say. “I still love all of you!”

“We still love you too,” they say.

I share pictures of my daughter and what I’ve been up to and we chat about how academia is crumbling and I congratulate them on following their passions and their heart.

It was all I wanted for myself when I was twenty-seven, to follow my heart.

I feel it in Sheila Heit’s writing. I can tell which entries were made in her twenties, which in her thirties. I can feel what sentiments were of youth and which were more grown up. There are moments of pure anger, of self-doubt, of excitement, of happiness, so many internal expeditions into the self. The thread that tied all those fragments, confessions, and reflections together was this: she endured. And through each experience, she emerged stronger, transformed by the very act of having lived through it.

Life is not a hill to conquer, but a season that keeps turning.

*

I’ve started walking alone in the evenings. I listen to whatever audiobook I have borrowed from Libby. I put on my hat and my sneakers and I set out on the trail that takes exactly thirty minutes to complete. Sometimes my mind drifts away from the book and I think of other things, some problem in my life, some mental or physical ailment, or I try to find my way in to a problem in my work. I see a lizard or a bunny and I take a picture on my phone.

I used to go on walks like this because I thought it would help me find myself. Whatever that means. But now I believe the walks help me remember myself. Oh, here I am. The walks remind me that I have survived many things and that I will survive a great deal more. I used to want answers from life, but now I just arrive at more and more questions.

For me, getting older is learning how to endure. I am growing in my ability to withstand hardship, stress, and pain, to persist through grief, trauma, anxiety, without giving up. I think my advice at twenty-seven still holds up: You’re not going to get it right, but you will endure. You will get better at it. You will become more at home in yourself, and you will soften to the rhythm of your own life.

But God help you if you stop writing.

—

I wrote about the complexities of how we all navigate the human experience and how yoga helped me cope with grief in “Human Again” for the latest issue of Clarity for Waiting Room Publishing.

My interview for Elizabeth Hall’s novel Season of the Rat is now live on Write or Die: On the Romance of Rat Life, Making it as a Twenty-Something, and the Excavation of Fantasy.

Registration is now open for my next 8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop with Lighthouse Writers!

Yoga Teacher Training has come to an end, but really it’s just the end of the beginning. Cliché, I know, but in truth, this whole last module has felt like sleepaway camp, like joining a sorority, like a kind of sisterhood. Ten women; we call ourselves the Perfect Ten.

Our instructor, Claire, reviews everything we’ve learned from the last twelve weeks, all of us taking notes like mad. She reminds us that yoga is the balance of holding the body and the mind, the physical and the psychological. Her personal forte, biomechanics explores the relationship we have with our own bodies, how we develop and shape ourselves through our experiences in the world. By cultivating a conscious awareness, we create the foundation for meaningful relationships with others. Through this connection, we can co-regulate with those around us, and in turn, with the world and beyond.

If not, we are in constant fight or flight. The world is against us. Everyone is our enemy. We are let down so often, it’s hard to find the nerve to keep trying. Instead, we need to ask ourselves: Do I have inner stability? How can I regulate myself?

In a discussion about hypervigilance, we talk about the state of being constantly alert and on guard, an excessive awareness of our surroundings and anticipating potential threats. On the surface, this is a good thing. It’s a protective mechanism that can help us detect threats quickly during abusive situations or emergencies, and can improve our chances of staying safe. On the other hand, remaining in a constant state of hypervigilance can manifest as heightened sensory sensitivity, where we might react to minor situations as if they were life-threatening. This can be a symptom of PTSD, anxiety, or a response to past trauma or physical or emotional violence.

“The path to a better relationship with this world is knowing that you are not a problem to be fixed. It’s not only a psychological journey—it’s about discovering a sense of regulation within yourself, starting from the beginning of movement,” says Claire, our trusty leader throughout this whole YTT journey.

What she means—we were all once babies learning to lift our heads, learning to push up on our hands and knees, learning to crawl, to walk, to move through the world with power and ease.

Future pain can be avoided if we take time for ourselves. We must recognize when we feel unstable. Slow down and pay attention.

Return to the self.

*

The summer before my senior year of college, I underwent laser eye surgery. I’d been wearing glasses and contacts since I was in the fourth grade, the same year I met the girl who would become my best friend. We had the same first name, so naturally our teacher sat us right next to each other. But we weren’t friends right off the bat. In fact, we didn’t get along at all.

This other Brittany loved sports and hated English class. She had blonde hair so light it was almost translucent. She never opted for the skirt choice of our elementary school uniforms, and instead wore shorts and a polo with her unbrushed hair and street-laced baby blue Etnies.

I was boy crazy and wore headbands color-coordinated to match my uniform polos. I loved my pleated skirts and penny loafers and English was my favorite subject.

We were polar opposites. That is, until we had a common enemy—a boy. A boy had begun to torment me with his incessant unwanted advances, which at eleven mostly looked like him trying to press his wet mouth against my cheek. It turned out that this same boy had also plagued the other Brittany the previous school year. One day at recess, she approached me while I stood by the monkey bars and asked if I wanted her to “take care of the situation.” It sounded like something a mafia boss would say, but still, I told her yes. She went right up to the boy and punched him in the stomach, granting her a suspension from school and giving me my freedom from his flirtations.

We stayed close after that—through middle school, high school, and well into college—even when she went to school nine hours north and I moved to the Midwest.

We made a pact to visit each other’s schools over summer breaks, and my visit happened to come first. Together, we drove nine hours up to her school to stay in her apartment for the weekend. She took me to all her favorite places and introduced me to all her college friends. There was one guy I wasn’t supposed to get close to, the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls in her friend group. It was like telling Belle not to go into the forbidden West Wing, the enchanted rose glowing in the middle of that dark room. I was still boy crazy. I carried the same nature of the girl I was in elementary school. And so I was magnetized to, let’s call him the Beast, and the weekend became more about our illicit romance rather than me getting to experience my best friend’s collegiate life.

I’ve never told this story before in writing. I think I wanted to keep it private, keep it close to me because in the end I had been wrong. The Beast was an asshole and strung me along for years. We dated on and off in secret, him always being the one to call it off. And I lied about the relationship that whole first summer we’d met. After that weekend up north, I promised my best friend that I had stopped talking to the Beast, that I respected our friendship more than anything else. But I wanted it both ways; I wanted the guy and I wanted my best friend. I respected the friendship, and yet I didn’t. And I suffered the consequences of his ways for years to come.

That same summer, I had the laser eye surgery. I was bedridden and in pain and couldn’t see, my vision literally taken from me (albeit temporarily) in order to make it stronger in the long run. And my best friend would call me from her study abroad in London and talk to me on the phone. She didn’t know I was pining over the Beast, waiting for his call, waiting for him. She even joked that I had dodged a bullet by stopping a relationship with him before one even started.

During my week of temporary blindness, it turned out that the Beast had gotten back together with his ex and they were trying to make it work. Or really, they had hooked up behind everyone’s backs and now he was the one trying to have it both ways: both girls would be his.

I cried silent tears and my eyes burned. I took the pain, all of it, because I knew I deserved it. Half a year later, she found out about us and stopped talking to me altogether. I missed her more than words can say.

*

Why is this all coming up now? Why am I remembering this awful, shitty feeling all these years later? Recently I endured the slow evaporation of another friendship, and I am sitting in deep reflection in order to see my part in it. In this situation, it seemed that there was a growing edge of resistance we kept brushing up against. There was love, but it never seemed to be enough.

The expectations of the friendship took me very far away from myself. I wasn’t able to meet this friend in the truth. I wish I could have met her at eleven, two of us on the playground finding a common adversary, rather than making each other the object of our own frustrations.

A few years ago when the other Brittany heard about a struggle that was plaguing our family, she reached out. I dropped what I was doing to FaceTime with her in a Starbucks. I logged into the Wifi and waited for her call. I just wanted to see her face. She appeared on my phone screen and then all our past was behind us.

When Brittany and me finally reconciled in person, we met at the mall. It’s the reason I wrote that scene at the end of The Brittanys—the two girls meeting up for a day of shopping and resolution. The ease and lightness of Sephora and a pair of cute boys in the food court setting the backdrop for their reunion. Their friendship remains intact despite the rocky road behind them.

The scene is a testament to how I am forever grateful for Brittany and how she was able to see me and accept me for who I am. True friendship really is so beautiful this way. I was allowed to be imperfect. And her anger toward me, the months of silence and then the months of talking behind my back and the pain and suffering I went through at her hands, that wasn’t easy either. A mutual friend had taken me out to dinner and told me, “She just feels like there’s more to you than finding a boyfriend and she doesn’t want to see you stoop so low for these guys who don’t deserve you.” I cried into our shared spinach and artichoke dip. Brittany wanted what was best for me, but didn’t know how to say it to my face.

And that day at the mall was a lot like how it reads on the page. Instead of high schoolers, we were young adults, and instead of petty friend-group drama, this felt bigger because it was a difference of values opening up, people learning how to be in the world, finding identity and self-worth and grasping onto each other in the dark night of coming-of-age and knowing that through all the shit of life, we still had each other.

I can’t remember the day exactly, but I'm pretty sure Brittany got a hot pretzel and still wouldn’t share it with me because she never liked to share. I chose to accept that fact.

*

As part of our YTT, we all wrote contracts with ourselves in order to address what would get in the way of us completing the program. I will get in my own way, I wrote. I am the obstacle that stands in my own way.

I call Daniel, our philosophy teacher, in a panic. I'm studying for our final exams and feel so unprepared and anxious. I start to imagine if another yogi gets all the questions right and then I spiral.

Daniel says, “How can you settle yourself right now? Have you been breathing?”

“No,” I laugh.

The obstacle is not the problem; it’s the path! I literally have this written down in my notes.

How can I do yoga in this moment? I ask myself. How can I be present? How can I just be with this?

I have to start believing what Claire told us, that we are not a problem to be fixed. I have to be able to regulate myself and know that the world is not against me. Just because I might not get a perfect score on the test, just because I might make a mistake, just because someone decides to walk another path that doesn’t involve me, I am still able to hold myself in confidence and truth and take responsibility for my own wellbeing.

The sticker on my phone case that says Just Breathe. When will I listen to it?

*

My daughter dances in a stream of bubbles at the Farmer’s Market and I receive a text that shakes me up inside. My husband can tell something is wrong, so he tells me to go sit down and take a break.

It reminds me of when Brittany sent me a long Facebook message, one that I read and re-read over and over again until it sunk in. I had replied an even longer message trying to apologize. But the damage was already done. She needed time. And took a while before we would return to each other, before we could meet each other in the truth.

I still have dreams that Brittany and me arrange a hangout. We are teenagers again. We wear a variation of the same outfit, jeans and lacy tank tops. Her hair is in a ponytail and mine is straight down my back. Our purses make indents on our bare shoulders. In the dreams, I am afraid to speak because I don’t want to ruin the moment. I let the scene play out, all cloudy-edged and ethereal. Sometimes I wonder if this is where our souls are able to meet, if we need an otherworldly glow to hold us.

We are both mothers now. We exchange messages about our children and our lives. We support each other from afar. There is love and I am so grateful that it has been enough.

*

I give a Dharma Talk on Santosha (contentment) and Stillness for my final exam. The studying has paid off, but there is still so much more to learn. I take a seat on a bolster so our instructors can share their feedback.

“You are a beautiful contradiction,” Claire says and tears well up in my eyes. “I can tell, as I’ve been able to this whole time, that you are pulled in so many directions. You want to be here; you don’t want to be here. You want to learn, but you want to be with your family. I can feel all of that. And so I think this training is just the seed for you, the beginning, and I'm so thrilled to see where it takes you next. I'm really proud of you.”

I think if there’s one solid thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that I don’t want to be perfect and get it all right. I just want to be myself and to have that be enough.

A few days later at the mall, I watch a mother push her newborn in a stroller. The new mom wears all black, a loose-fitting matching set. I had something similar in those first months, post-baby. The baby sleeps in the stroller and I give the mom a smile and a little audible sigh at the baby’s loveliness, something to tell her she’s doing great.

I walk away alone, no longer attached to the moment that came before. I approach my car and grasp the door handle. It’s warm from the sun. I look up to receive the light.

—

TY to for sharing this spicy lil essay, “The Starfucker’s Dilemma.” I’ve been asked to be a regular contributor, so more where that came from!!

My interview for Paula Bomer’s The Stalker, is now live on Write or Die, as well as the latest GRWM with Kerry Donoghue.

So excited to gear up for another 8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop with Lighthouse Writers! Registration is now open!!

My husband, , started a Substack, where he writes about grief and family and being an artist. Check it out here.

Pictures below are from our YTT graduation <3<3<3

April 1^st

Sometimes I find myself very happy for no reason at all. It has nothing to do with my inbox. It may slightly have to do with caffeine intake. The red carnations from Trader Joe’s bloom on the kitchen table, the blinds slatted open so a little bit of sun comes in. I look up why carnations are bad flowers. They’re considered “cheap filler flowers,” but also the Internet tells me this isn’t necessarily true. They’re long lasting and versatile. Their affordability doesn’t mean they lack quality or beauty. Reddit says they can be found at the grocery store, and that’s apparently a telltale sign of a less sophisticated aesthetic. Red carnations are a classic symbol of love and admiration, of passion and affection. An agent emails me that although she is passing on my query, she wants to assure me that she deeply considered the work, and that she will be cheering me on from the sidelines. Fuck off, I think and almost want to write back, but the email is from Query Tracker, and there’s no option to keep the conversation going.

April 2^nd

From my Yoga Teacher Training reading: Look at a situation in your life that is charged in some way. Write down your thoughts about it. Then, one by one, consider each thought and ask yourself, “What would I be without this thought? Notice how your breathing, your energy, and your mental experience shift. Consciously replace the thought with one that feels empowering and real-such as "I am free to choose my attitudes" or "There is another way to see this." Notice whether this new thought brings greater spaciousness to your mind.

April 3^rd

I'm back at the Christian coffee shop. It’s still lovely. There’s a free drink on my account from three years ago. “Hell yeah,” the barista says, and I raise an eyebrow. The décor is all blue and white. The company logo is have a nice day! all lowercase. The coffee shop is attached to a local university. I’ve applied here multiple times and never gotten called for an interview. One of the application questions asks, “What is your relationship to Christ?” and my answer was always something like, “He had a lot of wild ideas I’d like to unpack.” Maybe leading with being Jewish isn’t helping either. Another writer once told me that maybe agents keep rejecting me because I state that I'm Jewish in my query letter. “So maybe you should take that out?” she suggested. “Oh,” I’d said in response, but really what I meant was “Fuck you.”

April 4^th

For no real reason, it seems, I don’t feel like doing it today. Writing. I don’t want to do it. I'm sitting outside the coffee shop so I won’t smell like burned caramel. Three girls at the table next to me talk about what it’s really like to live in Christ. This isn’t even the Christian coffee shop. “I just need to go spend time with the Lord, like, time on my own, you know?” “I have thirteen roommates, and we’re actually looking for more.” “I’ve been working really hard on not having any unfinished business, and it’s really hard.”

I think about my to-do list, its never-ending nature. I’d really love to spend this afternoon at the mall. Sitting outside is nice. I should do this more often. The keys on my laptop are getting hot.

I need to write a monologue in the voice of a pet AI robot. I want to write an essay about writers who are starfuckers. I want a cookie. I sip my cold brew. It needs oat milk, but they charge extra. I miss the place in Nashville that had oat milk out on the counter, the place where I wrote so many essays, the place that’s since closed down and that makes it easier to miss. If it still existed, it might be unbearable to think about. At least now, no one can have the free oat milk, the paper straws, the zucchini muffins, the first table for two with the charging outlet right by your feet.

April 6^th

A white Mercedes flies down the 5 South. The driver looks like my brother. A glitch in the system.

April 7^th

Still working on the starfucker essay and feeling weary because it’s so provocative. But maybe that’s a sign I need to keep writing it. 3 rejections while I sit here. The book doesn’t feel like a good fit with the overall direction of the agent’s list. The book is funny and emotionally attuned, but it’s still a no. The book is too long.

Dizziness sends me to urgent care. They take my blood and tell me to rest. I am prescribed medicine for vertigo. I sleep at an angle or else I'm on a rollercoaster.

April 8^th

The Glendale Galleria has so many shuttered stores. There are many new ones, too, but mostly high-end luxury brands. The mall smells like cinnamon pretzels. I walk over to the Americana to see my novel and she’s faced out. I buy a pair of jeans from Abercrombie & Fitch. It feels like 2011 for some reason. I order a matcha latte from what used to be a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and is now a very yellow storefront that feels like an Instagram post. The straws are shaped like hearts. It tastes very good.

April 11^th

Happiness IS BY Choice NOT BY Chance, reads an inspirational poster in the bathroom of the sushi restaurant. And it’s not wrong.

April 12^th

My daughter eats a peach cobbler in the sun at a Cowboy Festival. She has a yellow bow in her hair. She pans for gemstones in the pioneer village and rides a small tractor. She falls asleep quickly for her afternoon nap. Sometimes the days feel like blessings from the great beyond. I tuck moments into my pockets and slow each second down like I'm moving through mud. I want to remember. I want to remember. I want to be here forever. This is my family. This is my life. I made this little girl. She is a part of me.

April 13^th

Argued with an Amazon bot for twenty-three minutes. Felt like something.

April 14^th

The defense mechanism is no longer serving you.

You’re not living life; you’re living in the mind.

What if the whole problem (read as opportunity) is the avoidance of being here?

Get in the now.

Know yourself; know you are present.

I am looking for ease, for a state of ease. The ego wants a better moment.

A pose is a gateway to discover who you are.

What happens if you close in a pose?

There is nothing other than the now.

“My ego/consciousness felt this.”

Module 1 of Yoga Teacher Training is complete. On to Module 2. I am still the obstacle.

I want to put strawberry cold foam all over my life. The lights flicker in Starbucks and I only have forty-five minutes to write. I take a picture of a giant fluffy dog and expect Apple to tell me what kind of dog it is, but that feature isn’t a thing yet. When my test results come in, they read as high risk because I’ve had abnormal results before. They should really title them something else, since in the end the findings were negative. A thought: I really do create most of my own suffering. A feeling: Cool.

April 15^th

While you have an interesting story here, I’ve found stories similar to this one to be difficult to sell and break out in the current market. I really hope you’re able to prove me wrong though.

We loved the energy in your writing and the nostalgia-steeped love story, but in the end, it leaned a little too coming-of-age for my list. It’s totally subjective, and while we’ll be stepping aside here we wish you all the best in finding representation. You’re certainly deserving!

Thank you so much for reaching out and sharing your work with me. This sounds like a worthwhile project but I’m afraid it’s not the right fit for my list at the moment.

April 16^th

My therapist asks if the intrusive thoughts can be classified into either helpful or not helpful. I answer not helpful for each one that pops up. “That’s what you should work on this week,” she tells me, “sorting the thoughts into those two categories.”

Is it helpful or not helpful that I think if I don’t consistently check in on my family that they will all hate me? Or that if something bad happens it will be my fault? Or that, just in general, their wellbeing is my responsibility?

Probably all going into the unhelpful bucket.

April 17^th

At Starbucks before my daughter’s Easter egg hunt at school. Two women talk about their lives at the table next to me. I'm supposed to be outlining the opening of my novel, but one of the women is a dancer and the other has a vicious cough. The dancer has been booked solid with work and this was the first chance she had to get away. She doesn’t feel guilty; she knows she’s not supposed to feel guilty. But she’s also angry with everyone in her life, resentful of their un-busyness, the space they have to be free. I eat a yogurt that I brought from home and an agent requests the first 50 pages of my manuscript. I send 53 or else they’d be in the middle of a scene.

I finished Journal of a Solitude last night and I think the moral is that the work is only meaningful if you have people to share it with—whatever that means to you. The woman at the other table keeps coughing, a dry cough. “Diva, step out!” the dancer says, but she’s in the middle of another story.

I have a few new followers on Substack. Who cares, lol? Not that I don’t appreciate it, but my thoughts drift to: is anyone actually reading this thing? My therapist asks to read something of mine, so I send her an essay that made people angry.

“Wow Brittany. I'm blown away. You're an amazing writer! That was moving, raw, and brilliant. Thank you for sharing.”—but is she only saying that because she’s my therapist? Is it even HIPPA compliant for her to read my work?—all these thoughts are going in the unhelpful bin.

April 18^th

Good Friday. The call that it’s time to say goodbye to my husband’s father. In Atwater Village at a photo shoot. I eat brisket tacos on the car ride home and feel nauseous. I cry when hospice is on speakerphone. I look out the window. How have I only known my husband for nine years? It seems I’ve known him all my life. I'm not hungry when I take my daughter to In-N-Out for dinner. I give her my hamburger and she eats most of it. “Mommy try ice cream, Elaine try ice cream,” she says when she wants a chocolate shake. After she goes down for bed, I eat cold noodles on a paper plate and stare at my computer. I query more agents. It’s a holiday. It’s a weekend. I don’t know what I'm doing anymore. I stare at the screen. My husband texts me from the hospital, Just helped my dad send a text to all his friends basically saying goodbye. How do you do this? How does anyone do this?

A friend publishes an essay about her house burning down. Someone avoids me at a reading. I pretend not to notice. I ask a question about croissants to the author. “Why aren’t you in Nashville?” she asks and we hug. “We live here now. My daughter is two.” My friend and I both parked in the same lot, and we stand there talking, trying to give each other hope about things. I feel very young for a moment, like before I came of age as teenager, the innocence of what the word friend meant then, like two tiny souls greeting each other in a hallway, curious and confused, and I feel held, I feel loved. And then I drive home and call my husband to debrief. He’s putting away dishes and there is so much clanging in the background, I start to laugh.

What is the point of keeping a journal? Of journaling? Every therapist I’ve ever had has told me to write one. I can never keep one though because I feel the art is wasted if no one else sees it. That’s probably a wrong thought to have, something about the inability to do something purely for myself. But writing and sharing feels like doing something for myself.

I text my brother and he doesn’t answer. Maybe writing makes things hurt less. It’s like cleaning up a wound. It still needs to heal, but at least there’s been a bandage applied.

My daughter sleeps soundly upstairs. A screen glows on my face. I am illuminated by high-energy visible blue light, the kind humans see during the day, the kind that can keep you up at night.

April 20^th

It’s really infuriating when park bathrooms don’t have changing tables.

April 21^st

I don’t want to do the work. But I have to do the work. Accepted to a conference I can’t afford. Even with a scholarship, I don’t think I can make it work. Another rejection sends me spiraling. I cry at the gas station before picking my daughter up from school. I wear electric blue to hot yoga. I have to return something to Target. My stomach hurts.

I enter part two of a new novel uncertain. Every day, I must try not to lose steam. Slowly inching back toward God, toward purpose, toward meaning, toward higher Self, higher esteem, higher Art. And yes, I say this as I write about the mall and sleepaway camp and influencers and Los Angeles and Florida and on and on. To me, this is Art.

Cold brew in the afternoon keeps me alert and focused. Not really though because then someone is reading The Iliad at the coffee shop and I just can’t understand why. The couple at the end of my table is staring into each other’s eyes, but they’re supposed to be doing math.

April 23^rd

Everyone goes on social media breaks and then they just come right back.

Praying on the living room couch and crying and thinking about how it was our last Christmas with his father and it gets darker in the room and our daughter is coughing upstairs in her crib from a cold. None of us will ever see him again. I feel so sick all the time. I should take a shower. I should do the laundry. I should read a book.

April 24^th

I dream I'm going to some faraway destination and I'm unprepared for travel. I can’t seem to get my things together in time. I pause on various items and forget their meaning. And then I'm at the airport and my bags are falling open on the floor. And it’s always a rush, very urgent, no more time to waste.

I argue with another bot, but this time, about a toddler pillow.

Large iced caramel coffee with oat milk. Extra ice. I forget to water the flowers. Or I just don’t want to.

This was a really tough decision for me. It’s obvious how strong of a writer you are, and these pages are engrossing. Even though this has all the marks of a stellar book, I simply don’t think I could place it. I am sure this is failing on my own part and I apologize!

I wish you great success, but I don’t think I’m your guy.

I scream FUCK at the computer.

The friend that checked in on me for a fire that was nowhere near me. The same friend says nothing now as my father-in-law vomits black on his deathbed.

I draft a text message and delete it. Draft and delete. Draft again, delete again. Then I finally hit send.

We gave it careful consideration but ultimately decided that it does not meet our current needs. We wish you the best of luck.

Our daughter asks to read the Children’s Bible before bed.

My father-in-law passes away peacefully at sunset, his two sons at his bedside.

April 25^th

I drink coffee and answer emails. The garbage truck comes. The mailman delivers mail. But we feel like ghosts.

My husband got Chick-fil-A and wondered if reality was what he had entered into, or if everyone else was real and he was not. Which experience was more true? Bubbles on the edge of my coffee mug because I heated it up in the microwave after it had gone cold.

I don’t think I’ve ever really understood exactly what salami is.

April 27^th

Eclipse season is over. I enter the next module of Yoga Teacher Training. I wake up sick, so I Zoom into class. My husband sends me a picture of our daughter at the park. I save it to my phone and then try to send it to his dad. The last of our texts was a string of photos of our family. He used to text us every morning with a nice little message. I knew that one day the texts would stop. I understood logically that would happen. But now it seems impossible that I can’t write to him, that I will never be able to write to him again.

Yesterday we went to breakfast at the same spot we always went with him. The hostess looked at us strange, only 3 of us now instead of 4. One of the servers is pregnant and showing. She’s having a boy, due in August.

New life, that old cliché. Life goes on.

—

We sit in a semicircle at YTT. It’s Sunday, which means we’re learning yoga philosophy. One of the other yogis brought her famous cookies and hands them out to everyone as we arrive. The neat little box with three heart-shaped oatmeal raisin cookies inside. One for me, one for my husband, one for my daughter. A small delight after a rough week. My husband’s father is very sick. It’s been painful for everyone, but I can’t explain this new brand of hurt when our daughter asks about her Pop Pop and when she will see him for breakfast like we’ve been doing since we moved back to California. Her face and the recognition of him in her eyes. The way she sings his name in her small voice.

As a group, we talk about thinking vs. observing; whether we are contracting or softening. We discuss how yoga allows us to create space in the mind. Our instructor draws a diagram on a white board, little figures rupturing and repairing, an illustration that we are all fighting our own conditioning.

I notice one of the women at the end of the semicircle is twirling a length of twine between her fingers. A nervous habit maybe, like how I pick my cuticles until they bleed, or how I need to use a certain color pen in certain books. Or maybe that’s just a me thing. But still, I notice her and then let it go. Until a few minutes later, I see another woman a few spots over doing the same thing—the twine, making shapes of it like a cat’s cradle.

Immediately, my mind jumps to the weekend prior when I had to miss class for my daughter’s 2^nd birthday party. Something must have happened, some kind of bonding experience with the string I wasn’t there for and missed and now I am not bonded to these women the way I thought I was. I am left out. No one mentioned any string play in our group chat. It was something you had to be there for, and I wasn’t. The spiral spirals.

I had wanted to bring up ideas for our graduation party in a few weeks. But now the excitement of planning such a thing feels like a mistake. These women don’t want me or need me. I'm an outsider in this group, the only one with a toddler, the only one who lives far, the only one who can’t get her shit together the way everyone else seems to.

“Turn off your mind,” our instructor says and leads a talk on consciousness. But there is no turning off my mind right now. I am being attacked! I am on the outs of this group, something I was afraid to confirm, something I was wearing of from the start and something I believed to be true but didn’t have enough reason to believe but now I do.

But then I scan the circle again and in front of yet another yoga there is an unopened cookie box still tied with its twine in a bow. The string doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t a symbol of anything elite. In fact, I have one on my box that I haven’t opened yet because I'm saving it to share with my family. The string is just a string.

*

I'm twelve the first year I attend sleepaway camp. I know no one except my best friend from high school who I have discovered on day one wants nothing to do with me while we’re at camp. On day two, our cabin goes to Arts and Crafts to make duct tape wallets. I had envisioned painting birdhouses or sewing headscarves, something more campy than silver and black duct tape stuck together to hold our change, but alas, so much of camp was not what I expected.

One of my cabinmates abandons her wallet-in-progress and goes over to a spool of leather cord. She measures it around her ankle five times, cuts, and then fashions it into an anklet. Another camper follows suit, and then another. I get up from the table and go toward the leather spool. I, too, want an anklet. Deeper, I want to belong.

“Enough of us already have it,” the first girl says and then asks one of the other leather-cord-girls to tighten her bow’s knot.

I don’t remember what I said, if anything, but I know I coveted those leather cords and the closeness of the girls all summer. I remember my counselor taking stock of the situation and telling me, in private, that I shouldn’t be jealous, how the ankle bracelets would give the girls a rash and they’d be cutting them off sooner than later. But even then I knew that wasn’t the point. The point was connection, being linked to the group. The point was I was new and wanted a way in. I didn’t care about the leather; I cared about the girls and not being one of them.

This is what it feels like when I see the women with their strings of twine. I am twelve again, the conditioning of something is wrong with me, I'm different in a bad way, I don’t belong.

I went back to camp for three summers trying to get it right and never did. The only clarity came when I stopped going and realized it wasn’t for me. I didn’t belong at camp, and that’s okay. I belonged elsewhere.

*

Language was the last developmental stage in human history. Vedic Sanskrit is believed to have originated in the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family around 1500-500 BCE. In YTT, our yoga philosophy instructor gives us a few words for the advent of consciousness.

Avidya in Sanskrit is translated as misunderstanding, misperception. Viveka means discernment. Vidya—clear-seeing. Discernment is the ability to distinguish what’s real and what’s not real in order to dispel ignorance and achieve true knowledge. Yoga is the quieting of the mind in order to reduce suffering and create more consciousness.

When I see the string, I have a misperception of the situation, and I take that into my psyche as truth, as what’s real. But Viveka allows me to take a different point of view, to understand what’s really happening, which is actually no harm at all. Then, at last, I see clearly—Vidya!

Carl Jung developed a technique called Active Imagination, a process of engaging with the unconscious mind through imagery and fantasy, allowing individuals to explore and integrate aspects of their psyche that might otherwise remain hidden. I.e. Writing!

I belong at the seat of my writer self. From here, I can rewrite the past, moments I want to make sense of, things I want to see more clearly or reimagine entirely into art for the purpose of…and here’s another Sanskrit word…Santosha, contentment. Being a writer allows me to rewrite what happened to me at sleepaway camp in a novel loosely based on my own teenage summer days, an endeavor I’ve been working on for the last two years. I don’t have to like the past or find something positive about it. I simply have to accept it as it is and then move on.

This is how I stop fighting with my own conditioning. I recognize it, say hello to it, and then make a change.

I quiet my mind with awareness.

*

On our second night in California, we met my husband’s father for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. Our daughter hadn’t seen her Pop Pop since she was only three months old. She wasn’t talking full sentences yet, only a word here or there, but we knew she had the awareness of what was happening day to day.

When she was finally face to face with her grandpa, the two shared no words. Instead, they blinked at each other with purpose, their own history of language.

The blinking thing, we called it. And she still does it a year later, even though now she can say so many words and string together thoughts and feelings and opinions. The blinking thing remains.

I'm glad for the time they’ve shared together. I hope there is more to come.

But for now, they recognize each other. The awareness is enough.

—

“Key Food” is now live in the Spring issue of Culterate— musings on my childhood grocery store and the faults of memory.

I wrote about leaving academia and embracing yoga as a lifestyle for Clarity Magazine in “Practice with Care.”

The GRWMs are still going strong, and it was great to chat with S. Tremaine Nelson for our latest issue. I’ve got slots open for summer if anyone is interested in being featured, or if you know someone who might be, send them my way!! :*

In August of 2016, I drove from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz, alone. I was on my way to a writing residency, my first. Two weeks in the Redwoods. I had twenty-five pages of material, fiction, short stories that bled into one another. My aim was to turn the pages into a novel, to craft a manuscript together from its pieces and bring the thing to life.

It had been a year since I graduated my MFA program. I spent that year working two jobs I loathed and enduring a breakup that would toss me across the country and spit me out in California. I would meet my husband on that first weekend in LA, at a party I almost didn’t go to because I was sad, but that I forced myself to attend anyway because something was pushing up from underneath the pain. I wore a silver silk blouse that tied up the front and black jeans. I had been staying at my cousin’s house in WeHo and I’d borrowed her purple NARS lip-gloss and worn it all night so I could feel like someone else.

But I was me; nothing could change that. I had a trip to France lined up, my first writer’s workshop, and then a residency up in the Redwoods. I had planned so many things to fill the void and now all I had to do was step into them and receive what they had to give.

I remember thinking on that drive up to Santa Cruz how incredible it all was. I was starting over. Or rather, my real life was beginning. My life as a writer.

I had thought I’d stay in Florida forever, marry my grad school ex and work at a high school until I died. I thought I would have to quit writing and get honest with myself about what I was capable of. The ex was often irritated by my “delusional” desires to be a successful writer. He once threw a camera tripod at me and my response was to tell him to go have a smoke on the balcony. I didn’t think it was possible to escape the trajectory I was on. I thought life was supposed to feel like grinning and bearing it.

But then I was exiting the Interstate 5 and turning onto State Route 46, passing the James Dean Memorial Junction, losing phone service and eating sliced challah bread out of a plastic bag.

I'm on my own, I remember thinking, completely terrified.

*

I spent two weeks in a remote alpine town called Chamonix, near the borders of Switzerland and Italy. The small town sat the foot of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Western Europe. It was a famous destination for skiing, mountaineering, and outdoor adventure. I was there for a writing workshop.

I knew no one. In France, I walked everywhere and ate vegetarian meals to save money. I was worried about my finances, the prospect of moving to Los Angeles on the horizon and no job lined up for when I’d arrive. I was living on a dream, as they say. I was hoping for the best. I knew my stories were good. I knew they would carry me.

*

Sunday, June 19^th 2016 8:50am

Mom,

I didn't sleep well at all. I'm really worried about everything. I'm not having second thoughts about moving; if anything this trip has made me realize I need to move, 100%, but I am worried about money. Everyone here in France is a teacher or still a student or just rich somehow and I want to continue doing stuff like this, traveling and doing cultural things and writing. It's hard to enjoy it when I have this looming thing of getting a real job and being on my own. But I want it. When I can stay in the moment, everything is fine. The glacier was amazing yesterday. We had to take a train to the top of the mountain and it was slow and beautiful and it felt like we were in old times or something. I climbed inside a glacier. I wasn't on my phone.

I know I go through this every so often, but I just want something to happen with my writing. These workshops make it clear that everyone is a writer, and can be, but I want to be successful for it. I guess all I can do is just keep going.

The glacier is melting, fast. I feel like that sometimes though. I'm melting away (financially at least) and pretending I’m fine, and I feel like people close to me can see how fast I'm melting, but from afar maybe it doesn't looks so bad. From far away it looks beautiful, like a place you'd like to go.

I'm going to go for a run soon and take a shower and start my day. I feel bad for writing this email and I’m reluctant now to hit send because I feel like I'm being so negative. I am having a great time here, and I think it was worth it.

I'm going to get out for a bit. I've been sitting here for 30 minutes. I love you and I hope you don't hate me for being an idiot.

Britt

*

In Sanskrit, sankalpa means the desire of the soul. In the context of yoga and spiritual practices, it refers to a soul-driven intention that arises from within. San = a connection with the highest truth; kalpa = vow.

A true sankalpa cannot be forced. It comes naturally, driving thoughts and actions with clarity and purpose. It allows one to develop trust in the self, as it aligns with your deepest desires and aspirations.

It was never clearer to me than it was in France that I was a writer. I was making it happen, no matter my circumstance. I wasn’t waiting for the right moment, the perfect opportunity. I was jobless and had no permanent address, heartbroken, and all I had was my writing. I had the intention of being a writer.

I didn’t know that the following spring I would receive a phone call that my memoir was going to be published by an indie press. I didn’t know that I’d find an agent to sell my debut novel. I didn't know all the struggle and chance that comes with being a writer, how success can suck the art out of you, how you will always be wondering how to top your previous act. I didn’t know that I would move across the country and have a baby, or that I’d write three manuscripts in three years and then move back to California, only to once again wonder happens next.

But in France, as I stared into the milky green waters of the Arve, I knew I was a writer. Same as I knew it in San Francisco—I was building my life so I could call myself a writer.

Sankalpa is having an intention. It means expanding your consciousness to the universe, to the infinite, anchoring the mind to the present moment and making a heartfelt wish.

Desire means it has to happen now.

*

The very first line of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras states: Atha Yoga Nusasanam, which translates roughly to, “Now is the time for Yoga.”

Patanjali is widely regarded as the father of modern yoga, with the Yoga Sutras serving as a testament to his wisdom. These sutras provide a framework for mindful living, giving valuable tools for self-awareness, emotional balance, and spiritual growth.

I like it because it’s simple and true. In our Yoga Teacher Training, we reflect on the sutras, “threads” or “strings” that can be understood as a guide, a collection of aphorisms on yoga and yogic life.

Its directness reminds me of what I have to do when I'm writing. I have to quiet the mind and say, Now is the time for writing! And then I have to just go write. I can’t be connected or concerned with the outcome of the writing; whether it’s good or whether it’ll be published or whether it’ll grant me access to some gatekept literary realm.

Non-attachment to the outcome is attachment to the higher self.

If yoga is noticing what I do, then writing is noticing what I think. I suffer when I avoid the truth. I suffer when I avoid the desire of my soul.

*

In the Redwoods, I took my pages from Chamonix and turned them into the beginning of a book. I set out to write a novel. I had no idea what I was doing. Every day I went into town and busied myself, avoiding the manuscript, and then every night I made tea and wrote. My ex still owed me money. I had started waitressing in Hollywood to make ends meet. I had a roommate and was making friends. I had a new boyfriend and I didn’t want to mess things up.

I knew I had to write the novel. It was vital that I started the story and finished it. My insecurity and self-doubt told me it was stupid to write about high school girls. It wasn’t a prestigious endeavor, perhaps, but I pushed beyond the resistance and kept going. It didn’t matter if it was important to anyone else. It was important to me.

*

Tuesday, August 16^th 2016 10:16pm

Mom,

We just finished a group reading. It was really nice. We had dinner and then sat in a circle and some local friends of the owner came and played music and we ate rhubarb pie. This place is very hippie dippie, minus the drugs. The hardest part is just being so far away. I know I was further away in France, but there's spiders here, like everywhere. I just went to my room to get my laptop and there was a huge spider above my sleeping area. So, that's horrifying. I killed it with a disinfecting wipe. I felt it die under my fingers. I miss Carl a lot. He's been calling and texting but also giving me space to work while I'm here. Everyone is really nice, very eager to be here. They all want to talk all the time. I kind of like to be more quiet and just actually do work. I'm reading a collection of short stories right now (Alan Heathcock's book- he was my instructor in France- VOLT is the title). It's really good so far. Carl said I can come home if I want, I'm not a prisoner, but I feel like I need to force myself to stay a little longer at least and crack into the novel some. I don't even know if you know what I'm working on, but it's a novel about my fictionalized high school experience. Alan loved it and wants me to get a draft done. There's a hike at 9am tomorrow, a group hike, that I'll be attending because it's exercise. Then one of the interns who's leaving Saturday asked if I could take her to town tomorrow to get ice cream. She actually knows one of my friends from grad school, this girl J who worked at the writing center. Small world. I'm in the main house right now on the couch. It's really beautiful- pictured below- and I can stay here as long as I want apparently to write. I might pretend I fell asleep here but actually just sleep here. The pool house is filled with spiders. I really miss Carl. I know I already said that like 4 times and I'm worried I'm being co-dependent. I don't know how I made it through France. I had more of a schedule there. Here it's literally NOTHING all day. I miss home, like Florida home. I miss my pho noodle soup and you and dad and the house and how clean everything was. I miss my bed and the pool and our fridge and our couch and the TV. There's NO TV here. I can watch stuff on my computer I guess, but that's kind of lame. I'm going to work on my writing now for a little and see how late I can stay up. I took a nap today so I'm not really tired. I love you and I miss you a lot.

Britt

*

In March of 2025, I drive from Los Angeles to Carmel Valley Village in the Santa Lucia Mountains. I head out for a writing retreat set in an unincorporated community in Monterey County, just east of California State Route 1. Almost ten years later. How did it happen?

In 2016 I had bleached blonde hair and a dream. Now, I am a mother and a wife with that same dream. Even though I drive away for the weekend, I am never on my own anymore. My husband and daughter are connected to me, the threads of my life, the strings that pull me, that hold me together. Every mile, I miss them more and more.

But still, I drive up the same route as all those years ago. I stop in Paso Robles for a chicken Caesar wrap with fries. It’s raining when I pull into the gas station to fill up my tank and purchase a Coke Zero. I listen to an audiobook and when my thoughts stray from the narration, I think, stop thinking and just listen.

I don’t write a word the entire long weekend, but I do revise parts of a work-in-progress. I receive workshop notes and listen to valuable lectures and I read in bed and do yoga at the retreat center and I spend a lot of time thinking about what I need in order to move forward and I come to realize that I did not go on the retreat to write, but to have the time to myself, to come back to my intention, my desire, the thing my soul wants and knows and needs. I come back to my writer self. I stand in the sun after a three-day rain spell. I go into town and eat an expensive meal at a restaurant that reminds me of Sideways. The chef takes my order at the bar and when I tell him I'm a writer here for a retreat, he tells me that writing is important. I think, he doesn't know I'm writing about girls at sleepaway camp, but whatever.

To be a woman who had a baby and then gave it all up—that was my fear. It’s so hard to do it all, and I often hate myself for trying. But I think I might hate myself more if I stifled the wish, the sankalpa, the truth in my heart.

When I arrive back at home, I'm just in time to see my daughter before bedtime. I give her a bath and she tells me all about her weekend, all the things her and Daddy did while I was gone. I don’t try to make sense of it, the way she strings words together in an attempt at early sentences. I only listen, and everything inside me opens.

*

I drive down into the Valley for my Yoga Teacher Training. I stop at Alfred’s for overpriced coffee, a weekly treat to cure whatever blues ails me. When I exit the storefront, a girl is just leaving the sauna next door. She must have just had an appointment there, a place called Pause Studio. It’s somewhere I’d have gone in my early twenties, a place to simply pause and sit in an infrared sauna and sweat out all my toxins, a time when I had money for that, or when I didn’t but I’d spend it there anyway.

The girl has wet hair, cropped to her shoulders, and we walk in the same direction to our respective cars. She gets into a white Mustang convertible and I get into my Hyundai Kona. I envy her, the ease I assume she lives with. I sip my ice oat vanilla latte and plot directions to the yoga studio on my phone. I'm still early. I have time to spare. I watch the girl as she pulls down the vanity mirror and inspects her face. She looks upset about something, but then changes her mind.

What does the rest of her day look like, I wonder? Where will she go next? What will she do? Is she relaxed from the sauna, from her pause? Do I envy her because I think that anything is possible in her trajectory?

But she doesn’t have what I have: my family, my husband and daughter who wait at home for me to return, the words in my heart that I write to express something from within. She doesn’t have so many things that I do. I think maybe I should cut my hair again, and then the girl looks up and smiles at me. I smile back. She drives off first and then I go the opposite way.

Now is the time for Yoga, I think.

I will not avoid myself.

We must enter the building with intention. There is sage smudging, the dried leaves burned to cleanse us, to release negative energy. A feather guides the fragrant smoke around each of us. We turn and bow and reenter the building anew.

I am terrified. In our semicircle, everyone speaks about perfect timing, how the stars have aligned for this occasion to occur. I feel so much resistance. I have a toddler at home. I work three jobs. I have family members who are sick and suffering. And yet, here I am at Yoga Teacher Training.

We are asked to write contracts to ourselves—what are we seeking from yoga, what will derail us, what will we say to ourselves to challenge these thoughts, these forces? I want to enjoy my life, I tell the others. I write down everything our instructor says word for word in my notebook. “You seem organized,” the studio manager says. It’s killing me, I tell her and everyone laughs.

*

The aim of yoga is to reduce pain. But our habits find a way into our practice. Pain in the body isn’t normal. But pain in the body is a common occurrence. Tightness can indicate a compensation pattern, a place we hold extra stability, an overreaction.

The body can also hold past trauma from an injury or an emotional wound. All of this strain has a physical response.

The body moves in a protective manner. We shift our skeletal posture.

*

Anxiety is an inner calling to find stability. Agency is achieved by your own ability to root, to lead. Yoga equates to stillness.

“You do not need to do more inner work,” our instructor raises her voice. “You are not a problem to be fixed. You are not broken. You just need to find consistent stability.”

A woman lies supine on her mat and we slide our fingers underneath her lumbar spine. Another woman stands and we listen to our instructor give a postural assessment. We must respect the spinal curves. In order to create stability, the body needs to breathe properly. The breath can build neurological strength. We keep our eyes open to re-program our bodies.

The brain responds to how much CO₂ is building. The primary driver of respiration is not oxygen, but rather the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood. Maintaining an optimal level of CO₂ can help regulate the nervous system.

You need to be calm in order to lead.

*

Bring the base of the neck long.

Let the chest be wide without pushing your shoulders back.

Ribs down.

Thighs back.

Relax your ribs.

Look straight ahead.

Mountain pose.

*

Are you contracting or expanding?

We sing together. Music as a language. None of us know the meaning of the words, but still, we sing. I want to be able to get it right. What’s more important is being open, staying open to the vibration. Are you open or closed? Yoga is balancing the opening and closing in a steady dance with focus.

As a yoga teacher, you create a container—energetically—you are a conduit for the material. You hold space. You balance energy. You allow for a new and vibrant understanding.

“What are you devoted to?” our teacher asks.

Being perfect. Doing it all. Suffering.

What is true? Why am I suffering? Fear and shame arise. We work around them to get back to play.

“The only thing we have is the ability to choose, and our ability is what makes us conscious,” our teacher says.

Suffering is a misperception, a misalignment. Suffering is an avoidance of or a rejection of what is true.

A list of what is causing my suffering: expectations, misperceptions and perceptions, control (the unfolding, but I don’t have any power, i.e. I am powerless), believing my own thoughts, the thoughts themselves, attachment, lack of understanding and clear seeing, agency, distraction, avoidance, disassociation, unconscious patterns and habits, conditioning, desire and cravings, aversions and the casting away or pushing against something, judgments, my narrative (the story I tell myself), the conditioning of loneliness out of being alone, money and societal pressures, lack of connection or interconnectivity to all beings.

If we are not in alignment with the truth, we will suffer.

*

Yoga can be a conscious repetitive pattern in order to change our neurobiology.

In meditation, we slow down, sit down, and watch the mind as we bring awareness to the moment. We are just noticing what is true. Observe the thoughts, and come back. We are focusing on the self.

“I am a mountain; that stuff is the storm,” our teacher says.

I’ve never been good at meditating, whatever that even means. To watch my thoughts makes me anxious. To focus on my breathing makes me feel like I can’t remember how to breathe. I am waiting to arrive at a place of no thought, at a place of silence. Sitting with my eyes closed makes me wildly uncomfortable. I start to think about dinner, about meals for the rest of the week, about emails I need to send and wondering if we need more Ziploc bags or if all my plans will go to shit because I'm stupid or if everyone is going to realize, very soon, that I'm actually bad and not meant to be here and then I will have to exit the room quietly with all my things and will probably drop something and be loud and create a fuss anyway. But I stay. I am learning. I am a wheel out of balance.

There is no growth without discomfort.

*

There are ten of us women in the room. How is it possible that I already love them? How is it that I feel so accepted here, so meant to be exactly in this place? Could I tell them that without sounding weird?

We eat lunch together in the main lobby, some of us on the couch, some on the floor, our Tupperwares spilling with foods brought from home, meals packed in one place and brought here in coolers or lunch boxes. I use my daughter’s old bottle cooler to hold my things, the one that used to carry her milk and keep it cold when we had to feed her on the go. I eat a salad and a dab of balsamic dressing clings to my white shirt.

Conversation swirls and reverberates. We are excited and tired and hungry and eager and so, so thankful. I want to be funny and make a joke, something self-deprecating, but instead I let the others speak as I release into the river of their words. I bite into a cherry tomato and then a forkful of arugula. Someone passes a bag of cuties around, the little oranges of our youth.

Today I learned the Sanskrit word sukha means sweetness. There is so much more to learn.

—

I got to speak with Cynthia Weiner about her debut, A Gorgeous Excitement, for Write or Die.

There are only two spots left in my 8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop with Lighthouse Writers (Wednesdays, March 19th-May 7th from 3-5pm PST)!!