In November 2014, I left San Francisco the way you leave a house on fire: not because I’d stopped loving it, but because staying had stopped being a choice I got to make. I hadn't filed taxes in two years. My freelance work had thinned to almost nothing, and my landlord raised the rent like a final, indifferent shove. I was, of course, an active participant in my own unraveling, but I wasn't ready to look at that yet. Blaming the landlord was simpler.

Spokane was the sensible move: inexpensive, familiar, full of people who already knew me. It was also the last place I wanted to be. I told myself I was getting my life back on track, but I was really just bringing the same problem to a colder climate.

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That winter was dark in the specific way Spokane winters are dark: the sky goes the color of a bruise sometime in November and doesn't change much until March. I managed to make it to spring, but that didn’t feel like any kind of achievement. The sun would peek through the curtains in the morning and I’d stay in bed, doing the math on whether I had the nerve to get up, brush my teeth, be a person for the day.

By that point, the first buttercups had come up through the patches of snow along Latah Creek, small and stupidly bright against everything that was still brown and half-dead. Camera in hand, I found myself looking at those glossy little scraps of yellow and landing on something between an idea and a plan.

One good picture, I told myself. Just try to take one good picture today.

There's an essay by Cheryl Strayed (writing as Dear Sugar) that gets at something I didn't have the language for at the time. It’s a feeling I now recognize as central to everything my camera did for me:

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

For me, the antidote to my own misery — messy, compounding, not entirely of my own making, but not entirely separate from my choices either — wouldn't be learning to receive tiny beautiful things. It would be learning to make them.

Every day, usually just before sunset, I’d walk the trail down to Latah Creek and start taking pictures. I didn’t know anything about photography, which turned out to matter. I have an advanced degree in English. I’ve done the critical theory, read the greats, absorbed every reason to feel like fifty people had already done whatever I was about to attempt, only better. Ira Glass has this idea about taste, that your taste is what makes you good, and also the exact thing that convinces you you’re failing, because your taste outpaces your ability for a long time before the two catch up. Writing, for me, has always come with that shadow. Photography never did, because I didn’t know enough to feel embarrassed. It was pure play.

I began shooting close subjects at short range through a long lens, watching the backgrounds dissolve into color I didn’t know a camera could make. I learned to focus — both literally and in the other sense too. But underneath all of it, I was seriously questioning whether I wanted to be alive, and going out to find a single beautiful image kept me here for one more day, and then the day after that.

Around that time, I became friends with Kate Vita, a painter who'd spent two decades in commercial animation on shows like Ren & Stimpy and Duckman before setting a physical paintbrush aside almost entirely. In 2015 she decided to pick it back up with a simple discipline: painting what she called a “sketch” every day. Each one was the work of an hour or two, tossed off with what looked like total ease, though she'd later admit the hard part wasn't the painting. It was letting herself make a mess again, be imperfect and unpolished after years away from a physical canvas. One of her tricks was painting upside down, a way of tricking your hand out of drawing the eye or the nose you already think you know, so you're forced to actually look at what's in front of you instead of what you expect to find there.

I’d started posting my own photographs on Facebook by then, and people had started responding, and I remember telling her, a little sheepishly, that I was starting to notice I had an audience, small as it was. She waved it off. Don’t worry about them, she said. Just do it for you. Her point was that caring for its own sake is exactly what ends up drawing people in, not the reverse-engineered, focus-grouped version of a thing, built backward from what you think people want.

What draws me to other people’s work is never the part that’s been sanded down so it’s relatable to everyone. It’s the specific part, the personal part, the thing that could’ve only come from that one person’s actual life.

Kate died of cancer during the pandemic. Her last show was a series of about sixty small portraits of her female friends, unsmiling and makeup-free. She called the exhibit Naked. A lot of the women told her it had felt good just to be seen, unedited, exactly as they were.

I think that’s the same thing I was slow to learn in a completely different room. For a long time, I sat in meetings telling myself I couldn't relate to anyone because the specifics of my story were different from theirs. I was hiding behind armor and calling it discernment. I didn't start getting better until that flipped, until I could hear my story in every story — not because the details matched, but because I'd finally learned to hear past all that, to the shared ache underneath.

When I moved to LA, the camera came with me. Over time, as I got better, the pull of it started to fade. Photography belonged to a specific dark season, and once I didn’t need it to stay alive, I didn’t reach for it the same way.

There's a book called The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, that's mostly known as a kind of self-help bible for blocked artists. One line in particular has always stuck with me:

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain — the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection.

That's what photography taught me long before I understood it: the names of the plants along Latah Creek, what they look like when they’re leafing out and dying back, the exact place in the trail where the light does something worth stopping for. I can walk that trail now and know everything I'm looking at. That knowledge didn't leave when the camera did.

Knowing a trail is its own kind of relationship, and for a long time it was almost the only relationship I had left. What I was actually missing, what I’d actively cut myself off from, was connection to people. That’s what a lot of us do in active addiction: we isolate from those who love us most, and we fill the resulting silence with something that feels like intimacy but isn’t.

This Substack and the theater company have helped — they come from the same impulse the camera did, showing people how I see the world, just now in words and on a stage instead of through a lens. But neither one is a substitute for the thing I actually needed: building authentic, face-to-face relationships, and letting myself be known in them. That's been the actual way out, more than any creative practice on its own.

Carrie Fisher, who devoted much of her public life to turning her own addiction and mental illness into material rather than hiding from it, famously advised other artists to "take your broken heart [and] [m]ake it into art." I'd add one thing to that: for me, the harder and even more necessary part is bringing my broken heart to other people, and letting their brokenness sit alongside mine, and being imperfectly human together, out loud, instead of alone.

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Author’s note: I'm aware it's August. But I’m developing material for a Christmas show, and this story won't leave me alone, so here it is: out of season and a little frayed around the edges, like the better part of my wardrobe.

In the fall of 2019, just as Halloween rolled around, I was trying to string together a little clean time. I was still pretty fresh out of rehab, and I didn’t have much to my name: a bed in a shared room, a job I was barely hanging onto, and a few weeks’ worth of sobriety I’d managed to cobble together as if from spare parts. The thirty-day mark felt less like an achievement and more like a piece of glass I was carrying carefully across a room.

In West Hollywood, Halloween is not a minor holiday. It’s gay Christmas. Everybody’s out on Santa Monica Boulevard, dressed up and throwing down, the whole town lit to the tits. But that year, I stayed at home, sitting on the couch with a few other residents in the common area, watching Drew Barrymore answer a phone call she really should’ve let go to voicemail. I got the distinct sense that none of us were enjoying ourselves. We were white-knuckling it until bedtime, at which point we’d put our heads on our pillows and hope for a better Halloween next year.

It didn’t feel like sobriety so much as house arrest. Later that week, when I admitted as much at a meeting, a woman took me aside and patted me on the hand. She had turquoise jewelry stacked up both wrists, a perm that had seen better decades, and the flat, unbothered delivery of a woman who’d buried two husbands and outlived a casino. “That ain’t nothin’, honey,” she said. “Never forget that alcoholism is a three-part disease: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.”

I nodded like I understood. I did not understand.

That was L.A., thirty days in, tender as anything. Eight years earlier, it had been San Francisco in December, and nobody was taking me aside to prepare me for anything, because I wasn’t doing anything that would’ve let them. I wanted to be sober; I just wasn’t taking any of the actual steps that might’ve gotten me there. I guess I expected sobriety to arrive on its own steam just because the calendar said it was Christmas.

Most of my friends in San Francisco hailed from somewhere else — so when Christmas came around, they went home, back to their families and childhood bedrooms. The city emptied out. You could get a table anywhere. It felt, for a few days every December, like a secret version of the place, quiet and low-lit and entirely yours: the Island of Misfit Toys, if the island were a whole city and the toys were just whoever was still around.

As a kid, I loved Christmas without complication. I counted down the days, knew every word to every carol, believed with total sincerity that a bearded stranger loved me enough to break into my house. Somewhere between that kid and the man standing in a mostly-empty San Francisco in December 2011, the whole thing flipped. Christmas stopped being a thing I got to have and became something I had to get through.

That year, my survival plan was to throw a Christmas Eve dinner. This was not in addition to any of the standard countermeasures, like, say, going to a meeting or calling a sponsor. Those options were impractical, on account of my not going to meetings and not having a sponsor. My plan was better than that. My plan had a menu.

I decided to braise a pork shoulder. I dropped a fortune on the shoulder alone, then drove all over San Francisco for the rest of the ingredients. My shopping list included harissa, which at that point I’d never heard of, and which in 2011 was not the pantry staple it is now. When I finally found it, I remember feeling like I’d solved something, like locating a jar of Tunisian chili paste was the same as getting sober. Maybe by doing that one thing, nobody would notice I wasn’t doing the other thing at all.

I headed home, harissa in hand. I set the bags down on the kitchen counter and started unloading the groceries I’d spent hundreds of dollars and an entire day assembling. Then a thought arrived, and it didn’t even have the decency to sound like a bad idea. Look at everything you did today, I told myself. Don’t you deserve a little reward?

I didn’t even try to resist. I was on the phone with a dealer before I’d put all the food away, and some of the groceries spoiled right there on the counter.

That was December 23rd. I surfaced sometime the next day with the recognition that I had guests coming over and still had a pork shoulder to braise. It needed hours in the oven, not minutes. You can’t microwave your way out of something like that.

As people started arriving, I was still rushing around my kitchen, raising the temperature in the oven, trying to will things to be done, but nothing was done. An hour passed. By the time dinner was scheduled to start, everyone was standing on the other side of the kitchen island, drinks in hand, watching me finish something I should’ve finished hours earlier. I wasn’t playing any music, so the only sounds in the room were ice cubes shifting in glasses and someone’s polite, doomed attempt to make small talk about traffic.

When the pork finally emerged from the oven, it was even more overdone than I was. We tried to eat it anyway. I wasn’t hungry, of course, so I sat there at the head of the table, pushing food around and thinking to myself: I just want these people out of my fucking apartment.

They didn’t linger. I don’t blame them.

Once everyone was gone, I made my way to a familiar traphouse, then hopped across the Bay to a place of even less repute. I stumbled out a few hours later and found myself face-to-face with Christmas itself.

It was one of those impossibly clear, sunlit Bay Area mornings that made the place look like it had gotten the sleep I hadn't. As I drove back across the Bay Bridge, I looked out at the city, a city I loved and felt lucky to live in, and all I could think was that I just wanted to disappear forever.

When I think of that dinner now — the tension in the room, the pork overdone, the guests who didn’t know what to say or do with themselves — it helps to fast-forward nearly a decade, to 2020, a full year after I’d been warned about alcoholism being a three-part disease.

By that point, we were deep in the pandemic, and I was managing the sober living facility where, a year earlier, I’d been struggling to cobble thirty days together. I’d formed a little two-person pod with my friend Eddie, which mostly meant sitting on his couch watching The Crown or The Queen’s Gambit and not talking about how strange the world had become.

For Thanksgiving that year, I tried Melissa Clark’s one-pot, one-pan recipe from the New York Times, a streamlined feast for two. I made it in Eddie’s kitchen, and it was good, and that was the whole event. There was no harissa anywhere in sight.

The distance between those two dinners was more than just nine winters. One of them cost hundreds of dollars, took a full day of shopping across an entire city, and ended with people leaving early and me wanting to be dead by morning. The other one was something I got to enjoy instead of something I had to survive.

I used to think the way through Christmas was to make it big enough to hide inside. All that shopping, all that braising, all that effort — it wasn’t really for the people who showed up. It gave me something to manage instead of someone to be with. In L.A., with Eddie, I didn't need the noise: just the two of us, one pot, one tree, and each other.

On September 11, 2001, my friend Hector watched his hometown go up in smoke. Like any true New Yorker, he will always be a New Yorker, no matter where he lives. But when the towers fell, he wasn’t in New York anymore.

By then, he’d taken a job in Seattle, where he managed artists at a hipster-famous record label. He was in daily contact with some of the most notable indie-music heroes of the early aughts. Meanwhile, I was pulverizing mangos at Jamba Juice for seven bucks an hour, so Hector’s career seemed about as relevant to my life as steeplechase, or dressage, or whatever people do in jodhpurs.

In those first few weeks after the attacks, I spent a lot of time at Hector’s apartment. This suited both of us: I was new to town and still couchsurfing, and he didn’t want to be left alone with Anderson Cooper and George W. Bush. Besides, his couch was more comfortable than my twin bed back in Spokane, which wasn’t holding up due to my bottomless appetite for validation and near-total lack of standards.

My favorite thing about that apartment was Hector’s massive collection of obscure vinyl and out-of-print DVDs. We would stay up late watching Brief Encounter or The Innocents or The Sweet Smell of Success, and he would rhapsodize about The Umbrellas of Cherbourg the way people back in Spokane rhapsodized about The Olive Garden. Few things bored him more than conventional taste.

When I met Hector, key aspects of my adult life hadn’t really started yet. I was a twenty-five-year-old English major with a double-minor in History and Philosophy, which in practice meant that my responsibilities at Jamba Juice, like hitting the “puree” button or escalating to the “power puree” button, were a fair reflection of my marketable skills. Hector was twenty years ahead of me, so he’d had more time to settle into a career. He didn’t question his value, and he wasn’t looking for a place to land. He’d accrued enough experience in the world that he could proceed by instinct and inclination rather than trial and error.

Then 9/11 happened, which tore away whatever stability he thought he had. It violated all his well-honed notions. It proved, in a shower of steel and glass, that even his hometown, one of the greatest cities in the world, was not as indomitable as he imagined.

In those strange weeks after the towers fell, someone started mailing letters laced with anthrax to media organizations and congressional leaders. The envelope addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy included a letter that asked, in all-caps, ARE YOU AFRAID?

In a word, yes. “I can’t believe I’m even saying this out loud,” Hector told me one morning at a diner on Queen Anne Hill. “I’m having nightmares about being trapped in a silo like that guy in Witness,1 except I’m not drowning in corn. I’m drowning in anthrax spores. It’s gotten so bad that last night, I fell asleep listening to — ”

Here he paused, glancing around to see if anyone was listening. Then he lowered his voice.

“Last night,” he continued in a whisper, “I fell asleep listening to Enya.”

This was like Bob Dylan saying that his artistic hero was the drummer from Matchbox Twenty. Taste can be accounted for; comfort can’t.

These days, I live in Spokane, where residents are currently stuck indoors, smothered by smoke from wildfires across the Mountain West. Nearly 1,000 structures burned on the north side of town when a cluster of wildfires broke out on August 1. That’s the kind of event that changes a place forever, because so many people’s lives have shifted in a sudden, massive upheaval.

In that way, the Spokane Area Wildfires feel like an echo of the pandemic, which in turn felt like an echo of 9/11. Each of those events created a sense of confinement and contagion, leaving everyone a little unsure how everything could have gone so wrong so fast.

The current view from my balcony is of pine trees wreathed in smoke along Latah Creek. That brings me back to the summer of 2020 when, from my kitchen window in Los Feliz, I could monitor the progress of the fires burning in the foothills east of Pasadena.

All through that strange summer of quarantine, I was consumed by dread. I rarely slept well. When rewatching 30 Rock at 2 a.m. wasn’t enough to distract me from civil disarray and environmental collapse, I would climb into my rusty-white ‘94 Sentra2 and hop onto the 5.3

I was still new to Los Angeles, and those late-night drives helped me understand the city’s bloodstream, its bones, the way it all fit together. With all that sprawl for the sprawling, I could easily drive a hundred miles without ever touching the Grapevine. I could almost convince myself I was on a little road trip — albeit an eerily dystopian one, as if Harry and Tonto had been rewritten by Cormac McCarthy.

Much like Hector, who listened to Enya while his hometown burned, the only songs I wanted to hear on those late nights in the loneliest months of the pandemic were not from Ella Fitzgerald or Édith Piaf or Carole King. I didn’t do a deep dive into the Goldberg Variations. I didn’t even listen to Pink. The singer who rode shotgun on every one of those late-night drives, and the one I’ve been turning to on sleepless nights here in Spokane, is Carly Rae Jepsen.

You might remember Jepsen as the person responsible for “Call Me Maybe,” an infectious bop that was inescapable during the summer of 2012. She took those residuals and produced E•MO•TION, an album that failed to make a splash upon its release but gradually attracted a cult following. Now, eleven years later, it routinely shows up on lists of the greatest albums of the twenty-first century.

Jepsen has a particular talent for turning anxious attachment into immaculate pop songs. As Lindsay Zoladz observed in her gorgeous Ringer piece from 2019, “If catching feelings is a disease, Carly Rae Jepsen is like, ‘INFECT ME.’ She is Googling wedding dresses immediately after right-swiping on Tinder and she is not going to apologize for it.”

It’s no coincidence that I discovered E•MO•TION in the weeks after leaving rehab. I’d spent years attempting to selectively numb feelings I didn’t want to feel, and here was a person who pursued those same feelings with unguarded abandon. During my first few weeks in sober living, I would wear the AirPod knockoffs I bought at Walgreens and jog to the Micheltorena Steps in Silver Lake. The staircase consisted of 204 steps, many of them painted with giant hearts. I would spend at least 30 minutes running up and down those stairs, listening to lyrics that said over and over again, one way or another: My heart is open, no matter how much it hurts.

In a way, Carly Rae Jepsen prepared me for the pandemic, and there’s no question she helped me get through it. On those late-night drives, I kept returning to a song from 2016 called “Cut to the Feeling,” which I would call Jepsen at her Jepseniest: “I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling,” she tells us. “I wanna dance on the roof, you and me alone. I wanna cut to the feeling.”

If you ask me, this is what pop music does best. Sometimes, especially on the darker days, you can borrow someone else’s joy for three-and-a-half minutes, and if you’re lucky, some of it rubs off and becomes yours — even if it’s just a contact high from singing alone in your car at 3 a.m. somewhere near La Cañada.

That’s what Judy Garland’s “Get Happy” does for me. Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On” does, too. And right now, in the weeks after my hometown went up in flames, I’m turning once again to a singer-songwriter who began her career by placing third on Canadian Idol.

For all her mastery of pop conventions, there’s nothing conventional about Carly Rae Jepsen: she’s a little unlikely, a little uncool, and totally sincere. She’s not trying to make anything grand or profound. She gives her feelings a shimmer, even in sadness — turning her own contradictions over in her hands and finding them, somehow, fun to hold.

Author’s note: I’ve changed some names and identifying details. Everything else is rendered as faithfully as memory allows.

A friend just sent me a picture taken thirty-one years ago.

In the photo, captured in August 1995, our whole freshman class at Grove City College is arranged on the lawn, holding laptops over our heads like we’d just won something. Which, in a sense, we had. Tu…

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The sign was nailed to a post at the trailhead. Bright orange paper, a photo of two black bears, the text in block capitals underneath: MOTHER BEAR AND CUB SIGHTED IN AREA. Eric read it once and kept walking. I read it four times.

I couldn't tell you exactly where we were. Somewhere above Lolo, Montana, a trail that follow…

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I wasn’t sure I should buy the bowls.

It was my last night in San Francisco. I had just finished packing a moving pod and loading my car until there was no room left, and I was standing at a yard sale on my block in Hayes Valley asking myself what exactly I thought I was…

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Note to readers: This essay stands alone, but it’s part of a larger book project. It’s the connective tissue between two earlier pieces, both of which are for paid subscribers only (you can find them here and here).

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There’s a version of “I’m sorry” that’s really just a shower. You say the words, you feel the hot water, you’re clean again. The other person is essentially beside the point — a prop in your absolution.

I used to be very good at that v…

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Content note: This piece deals with domestic violence. Reader discretion advised, especially if you’ve ever made lunch for someone who didn’t deserve it.

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The first thing I felt when they handed me the urine sample cup was that someone had violated the spirit of our agreement.

It was 2012, and I was enrolled in Kaiser outpatient rehab in San Francisco. I had quit my job at an ad agency, cashed out my 401(k), and committed myself, at least in theory, to g…

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We started with the belt.

We found it in an evangelical church thrift store, which is either providence or irony, depending on your theology. Split leather, woven, a little too wide for it…

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“When you hear a name pronounced can’t you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you’ll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being c…

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The fall of 1995 was a great time to be eighteen, or so I’m told.

Alanis Morissette was everywhere — she was the entire emotional weat…

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The lemon tree is heavy with fruit. A brick path runs alongside it, then bends toward a small table with a blue mosaic top, flanked by stone urns full of thread-leaf coreopsis, commonly known as pot-of-gold. The roses along the fence are just starting. The sky above Bernal Heights is clear…

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I came home from Istanbul in June of 2016.

What I mean by “came home” is this: I left for what was supposed to be a six-week summer break. I had a full apartment waiting for me in Turkey — furniture, books, a life I’d spent a year building — and every intention of going back.

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When the Germans get scared, you know it’s bad.

Their embassy shut down on Friday — out of whatever is German for an abundance of caution. Emails from the U.S. State Department began dropping into my inbox, advising against Beyoğlu, against Sultanahmet, against the neighbo…

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When one door closes, another door opens — but it’s a bitch to be in the hallway.

It was February 2019. Within hours of relapsing out of McIntyre House, I was wandering around Los Angeles in a rain…

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Every night at McIntyre House, we lined up outside the office to get our meds.

It was one of the rituals that organized our days — meals, chores, meetings, meds — the scaffolding that kept everything from collapsing into itself. We’d shuffle down the hall in whatever state we were in, sign our names on …

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The woman across the table had my résumé in front of her. She studied it for a moment, then put it down and pushed it toward me.

“Okay,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

We were sitting at a two-top in the original Farmers Market on Fairfax — the old one, with the open-air stalls and the lunch counters that have been there since before the war.

She owned an ice cream shop. My résumé listed content strategy work for global brands, a stint managing an international metadata team at Netflix, years of being in rooms with important people, doing things that mattered, apparently, to someone. And now here I was, in month five of a nine-month stay at a rehab in East Hollywood, sitting across from a woman who needed someone to work a freezer case, trying to explain the gap.

I laid it out for her. She listened carefully. When I finished, she excused herself, went to find her partner, and came back a few minutes later. “I love that you’re taking care of yourself,” she said. “I’d like to offer you a position.”

I thanked her and said I had one more interview to get to.

McIntyre House had a rule about work: no career jobs. When you were ready to go out and find employment — usually around the four- or five-month mark — you were looking for something simple. Something with an apron, most likely. The idea, as it was explained to me, was that you needed to learn how to show up before you were allowed to save the industry you'd spent the last decade disgracing.

I understood the logic. I also, when I first heard it, wanted to put my fist through a wall.

I'd spent years building something — or at least enough of something to burn it back down. Now I was supposed to go trudge around with a little stack of résumés and ask someone to let me stand behind their counter? Didn't they know I used to have a direct report in Singapore?

Nobody, it turned out, cared about Singapore.

So we went out in pairs. We took the bus. We walked around Larchmont and WeHo and Little Saigon and ducked into shops and handed out résumés and thanked people for their time. It took me nearly two months to get a yes — and then, because that's how these things tend to work, I got two on the same day.

I left the ice cream shop and walked across the little plaza to the other side of the Farmers Market, where a small French grocery store occupied a corner spot — a boutique place, high-end, the kind of shop that carried dozens of varieties of olive oil, including one from Tunisia, with samples always out alongside chunks of fresh housemade baguette.

My interview was with the owner — I’ll call her Claire — and her general manager, Rich. Rich had worked with major brands, managed serious operations, and moved in a high-rolling professional world before it all came crashing down and he ended up at Van Ness House.

Van Ness, like McIntyre, was a place for people who no longer had 401ks or decent insurance or a partner willing to foot the bill. It was nothing like the shinier facilities with names like Breathe, where detox came with a welcome basket. Van Ness was rowdier than McIntyre by reputation: less writing, more process groups. But both places occupied the same world, where entitlement was treated like a toxin to be sweated out. (When Van Ness residents complained that something wasn’t fair, the woman who ran the place had a ready reply. "The fair,” she would say, “is in Pomona.")

Rich immediately saw me for what I was, because he was the same thing: a person who had once been very good at something, lost the thread completely, and was now figuring out how to be good at something more honest, on a more manageable scale.

Claire wanted to know about the kitchen at McIntyre House. It was a pressure cooker: two guys, a hard deadline, a meal for twelve men — and if you missed the serving time, you wrote a long essay about why. You worked with whatever food was available, solved problems on the fly, and often did it alongside an assistant who’d never diced an onion and regarded a measuring spoon with genuine puzzlement.

I told her about the day someone donated a crate of oranges and I’d gone upstairs to consult a 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook on how to make an orange meringue pie. I didn’t have graham crackers for the crust, but there was Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the cupboard, which turned out to be fine, actually better than fine.

“Tell me about the pie,” Claire said. “How did you make it?”

I walked her through it. First the curd: the orange juice reduced, the yolks tempered so they didn’t scramble. Then the meringue: the egg whites at room temperature, the cream of tartar to stabilize them, the point at which the peaks go from soft to stiff and you know you’ve got it.

When I finished, Claire glanced at Rich. Rich gave her a nod. She offered me the job.

I learned things at that store I had no reason to learn and have never stopped being glad I know. Claire could talk about olive oil the way a sommelier talks about wine — the grassiness, she would say, and a little heat at the back of your throat, that’s how you know the oil is alive. I came to realize that most of the olive oil I’d cooked with my entire life had been more or less rancid. I focused on the tea section, learned the inventory inside out, and eventually started placing the orders myself. Then the same with a growing list of other categories, until I was in charge of roughly half the inventory.

The store was emphatically not working from a minimalist playbook — the kind of retail aesthetic, ascendant everywhere at the time, that highlights three items and guides the eye with great deliberation and restraint. Instead, our philosophy was closer to: what if we put out everything, all at once, and just let people…deal with it? The general reaction of someone walking in for the first time was to stop in the doorway, blink rapidly, then whisper: “Oh. Wow.” There is apparently a medical term for the condition of being briefly incapacitated by an excess of beauty. In that case, inducing Stendahl syndrome was our store policy.

I learned how to build displays. They couldn’t just be pretty; they had to be structurally sound too, so that when someone reached in and pulled something from the middle, the whole thing didn't come down.

Rich had a formula for how to create the perfect display, three words he said like a liturgy: beauty, balance, abundance. Abundance was the word he delivered with the most feeling, the way Rosalind Russell might say it, having just tasted her first martini at Musso & Frank's and deciding, in that moment, that this was now her entire personality.

Just before I left, Claire and Rich took me to the Fancy Food Show in New York. We spent three days at the Javits Center — Claire and Rich working the floor with intention, me serving as the designated eater, which suited everyone, since I was still in that phase of early recovery where eating the world seemed like a reasonable vocation. Besides, there was an entire corridor of Italian men in fitted trousers urging things on me, and I was not about to disappoint them.

It was my first business trip since coming to Los Angeles. My first time back in Manhattan as a person who was, more or less, okay. One night, Rich and I went to see Tootsie on Broadway — the musical, the one that won the Tony for Best Actor that year. Rich snapped a selfie of us outside the theater. We’re both beaming in it, just lit up. You can see it: the particular brightness of people who know they’ve come from somewhere unspeakably dark, and this is what the other side looks like.

I left the store a few months after that. I’d been carrying a crushing amount of debt — to collectors, to the federal government — and there was simply no way to address it on what I was making. I went back to my old career, but showing up at that grocery store every day had reconnected me with the joy of doing good work, and leaving it was its own small grief.

Not long after, Rich was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.

By that point, I was leading a creative team at a fintech startup, going back and forth to New York every few months, making “good money,” as they say, but working from five-thirty in the morning until I couldn’t see straight, and feeling like it was never enough. The product was online account opening software, and I spent my days looking at PowerPoints full of marketing metrics and conversion funnels — nothing that came anywhere near the pleasure centers of any brain. It was punishing and isolating in the particular way that remote work can be, all of it abstract, none of it tactile. Nothing like standing at a counter helping someone decide whether they wanted that olive oil from the south of Spain, or setting out little samples of caponata alongside slices of fresh sourdough, the kind of work where you could see, right in front of you, whether you’d done it well.

Van Ness House — the place that had saved Rich’s life — let him come back there to die. I ducked out of work to pay him a visit. I’d heard he was in and out of consciousness, so I found a card and wrote down everything I wanted to say, just in case he wasn’t awake. But when I arrived, he was outside by the pool, his face tilted up toward the sun. Still. Just completely still and at peace with what was happening to him.

I got to say what I wanted to say: that he’d given me a chance when I had no particular right to one, that he had seen in me what he recognized from his own life, and that the dignity I found in that store, showing up every day and being depended on, being good at something again — that he’d given me something I thought I’d lost for good.

He wasn’t talking much at that point, but he heard me. He was beaming — same as in the photo outside the theater.

When I first came to Los Angeles, I had nothing that could be called beauty, or balance, or abundance. What I had was scarcity — of money, of trust, of anything resembling a future — and the particular terror of a person who has spent years burning through the goodwill of everyone who tried against their better judgment to love him. I was at war with myself in a way that made the ordinary textures of life — a good meal, a clean blanket, the smell of fresh bread — feel like they belonged to some other species of person.

There was a refrigerator in the back of the store stocked with tasting jars: samples you could offer a customer who was trying to decide whether the strawberry-rose jam was really worth the price tag.

On slow afternoons, when the store went quiet and you needed a little reset, you could take a small sampling spoon and decide which part of the world you wanted to try. Rich did this. I learned it from him. Sometimes it was a fig mustard we brought in every year on a French barge, the kind of thing that made you reconsider what mustard had been doing with itself all this time. Sometimes it was a sea-salted honey that left me wondering why I hadn’t been salting everything my entire life. Or a raw honey from Montreal as thick and pale and creamy as sweetened condensed milk.

That’s where I found my way back. Not all at once, and not in any way I could have named at the time. Nothing more than a little spoon, a small jar, and the particular abundance of a person who, in that moment, has just enough, and knows it.

Author’s note: I’ve changed some names and identifying details. Everything else is rendered as faithfully as memory allows.

I was sitting alone in the dining room at McIntyre House, writing one of the essays we were assigned whenever we broke a rule. The afternoon had gone quiet for once — that lull between the afternoon meeting and the start of dinner — and the ceiling fan pushed warm air slowly a…

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