I’m so glad to be able to decompress about it all with all of you. 💜

PS—My god, I look like a Cylon in that cover photo.

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Enjoy—and thanks again, Shalah!!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.

Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.

Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.

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I wrote this essay the way I write many essays these days: dictating all my thoughts and feelings into Claude, the scattered diaspora of my brain on the go as I race from one obligation to another.

I was running very late for my day job because I’d gotten sucked into testing the new Pangram AI tool Substack had recently integrated into its publishing tools. I was of many minds about the launch, and I’d watched my community of writer friends go completely feral over the announcement.

So of course, I had to check out how it worked on my own essays. More on that soon.

Because right then I was in my car, commuting into work, still late, still dictating. The drive takes between twelve minutes and an hour each direction, depending on traffic. I’m not thrilled I have to commute into an office, but I’m grateful for the (relative) stability of my job and health insurance.

But my job is not who I am.

I am a writer. I am an essayist. I am a memoirist.

I didn’t really apply these terms to myself until recently. I’ve always been good at grammar rules — I was editor of my high school newspaper, and I was known in my college dorm as the one who could untangle any essay. But I didn’t identify as a writer, didn’t believe in my own creative power, until a few years ago when I started writing on Medium and came to realize I have stories to tell that are both unique and universal, even as those two things seem at odds.

The memoir writing process for me was — still is — a labor of love.

Writing is a late-night agony, immersed paragraph after paragraph in those stolen hours, or sometimes on my thumbs in the bathtub or on the bus, but always wrapping up at my desk in this very painstaking process of bringing complicated, threaded narratives into a whole arc of a story.

Then came the rise of all the AI tools. And then everything changed.

I was a skeptic at first. There’s no way AI could ever write anything worth reading, I laughed. But I’m curious about technology, so I downloaded ChatGPT and Claude. And frankly, that day job of mine is at a big tech company — I don’t have the luxury of saying I’m not going to use AI. It’s a skill I’ve had to learn fast and furious and on the fly.

My initial skepticism — these things will go away, they’ll never replace, they’ll never do X, Y, Z — that’s gone now. Those tools are here. They’re not going anywhere.

AI is quietly running through almost everything we do now — the searches, the software, the hardware — whether we asked for it or not. I found out my last relationship ended because I saw an iMessage text preview that read something like “this is hard, ending things.” I opened it in a hurry, thinking, oh my god, did I just get dumped by text? I did, sort of. But really, AI told me. Not Basil — the AI summary of Basil’s message. I didn’t ask for that. I just hadn’t bothered to dig in and figure out how to disable it. I have since.

None of us can opt out.

I don’t like it either.

We should be having adult conversations about how we use AI and how it should be regulated, not petulant ones about whether we like it.

It doesn’t matter if you like it. It’s here.

And by “here” I also mean literally, on Medium and Substack and every other platform like them, AI is part of our collective writing experience. To claim otherwise is naive at best.

I haven’t crafted an essay without AI since I started actively using it. Is AI writing my work? No, not my essays. Claude and ChatGPT can’t write like me, not yet. Believe me, I’ve tested and tried. I may use Claude as a writing assistant for all my essays, but Claude is only as good as I guide it to be.

Case in point: Claude helped me write this essay by taking dictation as I drove to work— though it fucked up and lost a big chunk of it. Thanks, Claude.

What Claude has enabled is a different process for writing. First, dictation. I could have used a traditional dictation tool, but it would produce a static transcription. Claude takes my dictated words and puts them into a semblance of order. It helps me by providing summaries of my thoughts, creating outlines, and identifying gaps. I don’t always take its suggestions. But it acts as my editorial eye in guiding the framework, language, and arc of the essay. Sometimes I ask it to write a first draft of a section, and it comes back with my ideas, crafted into a semblance of an essay, a draft from which I can launch into the craft of the essay — and that’s expedited that part of the process immensely for me.

For me, this isn’t AI writing.

This is simply my writing now.

To dismiss this as “AI writing” would be like arguing that writers who switched from typewriters to word processors were cheating because they could suddenly cut and paste. The tool changed. Technology merging with the creative process isn’t new. It’s a tale as old as time.

As a writer, it’s both fascinating and heartening to watch how hungry readers are to ensure stories actually came from a human.

I understand the revulsion with AI slop. As an editor and reader, I encounter AI drivel all day, every day, and it makes me angry, because I know it’s targeted at me. It’s slop, and sometimes it’s very well-crafted slop. But I can feel the void of a point of view through it, hollow and disquieting. If you have expertise in this kind of editorial voice, it screams when you read it.

But I’m also here to tell you: I’ve been praised by readers I respect for a turn of phrase and have graciously accepted the compliment with a wry grin and thought: Claude wrote that one.

While I edit the shit out of the essays drafts I get back from Claude, at times I’ll leave a line in because it’s actually great. The concept may be mine, but it gets processed through an AI agent and the language comes out sounding very… human. Very me. Sometimes it happens, where Claude can meet that bar. I’m surprised, too. But it can’t yet draft an essay without me deeply enmeshed in the process. Getting an AI-assist isn’t even necessarily faster, at least for me. I still spend hours at my desk in those final editing stages. It’s agonizing. It’s glorious. I love it. Claude helps me wrangle the chaos of my brain and bring it to life, so I can put my focus on the truly discerning pieces that make a story mine.

Claude helps me bring things to life in real time, in a way I could never do on my own — while also maintaining my day job, raising my children, taking care of my home, seeing friends, dating, and everything else.

Including this essay.

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So now we have Pangram, an AI tool that can tell you how AI-generated versus human a piece of writing is. Fine.

I had to test it.

I’m a perfect use case for this task: I spent two-plus years writing before I had the tools, and I’ve been writing with the tools since. So I tested six essays, three pre-AI and three post-AI, to see if Pangram could tell.

And you know what?

For this limited test, Pangram was 100% correct at identifying when an essay was 100% human-written.

The other three called out varying degrees of AI usage — and I honestly don’t know if those percentages were accurate, because I don’t know myself to what level where Claude influenced the writing versus what percent were fully mine. So that part of the test was hard for me to judge. But on the binary — human versus AI-assisted — Pangram was completely accurate for me. Your mileage may vary.

Color me surprised — and impressed.

But I’ve also heard from other writers since this rolled out, and most are displeased. Some are panicked. I’ve had writers reach out, genuinely rattled because their completely human-generated essay had been flagged as AI-generated. One told me she’d heard of publications that were considering taking down essays flagged as AI-written.

I don’t think this is a real worry at scale. But I understand why it feels like one, as reputationally, a false flag could cost a writer something real. It already has. I make no claims to being an authority in this space, but I have to think this question is going to matter less and less over time. Not because the tool will get worse, but because the binary itself is going to stop being the question anyone’s asking.

Because at some point the question will be: who cares?

I take that back, sort of. I know plenty of people do care — deeply, and for reasons I respect. But using AI as a writing assistant is simply how writing works for me (and many other) writers now, and it doesn’t make me less of a writer. I’ve written some of my best essays with Claude as a drafting partner. Every essay I publish from here on will have had an AI tool in the proverbial room. If you didn’t know, now you do.

Hiding behind a “no AI” purity test for writing is ineffectual gatekeeping. Using an AI tool to detect AI, when AI trained itself on countless writers in the first place? That’s like a tech-fueled dystopian editorial oroboros. It’s exhausting.

And does it need to matter?

If you think writing reads as AI-generated slop, don’t read it. No proof required. If you read an author and the words resonate, wonderful. If AI helped write it, fine.

Or simply put: it’s a question of discernment. If we need a tool to tell us if something is AI-generated, perhaps it no longer matters if it is.

AI is doing real damage in the world. I don’t need anyone to tell me that — trust me, I already know. But the fact that it’s also capable of helping me create something true and beautiful and mine doesn’t cancel that damage out, and it doesn’t require me to pretend the tool isn’t useful just to prove I take the damage seriously. Both things are true at once. That’s not a contradiction.

That’s just where we live now.

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My friend Libbie Grant is a bestselling novelist, and she’s a weirdo in the best of ways — her words, not mine, though I agree completely. She gave some advice during her recent visit to The Daily Whatever Show, and I’m paraphrasing it here: “Be a weirdo when you write,” she said, “because AI can already do mediocre human writing really, really well. If you’re not being a weirdo, you’re replaceable.”

You can use the tool. It’s not idiosyncratic. It doesn’t have unique thoughts, doesn’t make the same kinds of connections a person who’s lived a specific, strange, particular life makes.

Go be weird. Write your story.

The key to good memoir, or good storytelling in any form, is a unique point of view.

And at least for now, that’s still a uniquely human trait.

Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

If this story resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

At least Michelle Kinney and I got in some quality 1:1 time.

That’ll do, Substack. That’s do…

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Stay for the two spontaneous essays I crafted in the past 24 hours, and my resolution to try a bit less regimen and a bit more unhinging for the next month. Let’s see what happens!

My essays this week…

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in, and to for moderating. Love you all, mean it!

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Thanks for listening.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.

Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.

Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.

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’s text comes in around 3pm on Wednesday: “You weren’t kidding about how hard it is to find Estradiol patches. I called three pharmacies and sat on hold for over an hour just to get one month’s worth.”

Amy’s Facebook post arrives minutes later. “Menopause sucks enough on its own, there’s no need to add a shortage of estradiol patches to the mix. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of pissed off menopausal women walking around.”

And ’s Substack post lands literally seconds after that. “So fellow ladies of a certain age, HOW ABOUT THAT NATIONWIDE SHORTAGE OF TRANSDERMAL ESTROGEN???”

I sigh.

Then I laugh, the wrong kind of laugh — the knowing one that erupts when something is both absurd and completely, infuriatingly, painfully predictable.

I experienced Patch Rage when trying to fill my own prescription last month: pharmacy after pharmacy, each one apologetic and empty-handed, phone calls that dead-ended in hold music, a message to my naturopath that read some version of please, anything, help meeeeee…

I eventually landed a prescription for double-strength patches, which I now carefully cut in half with kitchen scissors like I’m rationing out of a wartime pantry. I don’t know what happens when this box runs out. I don’t know what I’ll cut in half then.

I’ve even debated quartering the patches to stretch out the meds, even at half my dosage.

Because I know what happens when I don’t have it at all. I found that out the hard way, during the two weeks I weaned off it while my doctor and I sorted out dosing. My joints ached like I’d aged a decade. My brain went soft around the edges — words I reach for daily just weren’t there. And I got irritable in a way that surprised even me, a low simmering static under everything, like someone had turned the volume up on my own nervous system and hidden the dial.

Then I went back on it, and sweet salvation was mine. The fog lifted, my ankles quit aching, and I remembered: oh, right. This is what me feels like.

Finally — after thirty years of being told estrogen would give us cancer, after an entire generation of women got talked out of a medication that helps them — there’s something that actually helps us manage our meno.

And now we can’t get it.

And we’re fucking furious.

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Here’s the part that should embarrass all of us, collectively, as a species with pharmacies: the reason so many of us went without estrogen for three decades traces back to one study. The Women’s Health Initiative launched in 1991, and when its early results dropped in 2002, headlines screamed that hormone therapy caused breast cancer. Doctors stopped prescribing it overnight. Millions of women stopped cold turkey. An entire clinical practice reversed itself in a matter of weeks.

What didn’t make the headlines, then or for years after: the study population was, on average, in their mid-sixties — more than a decade past the age most women start hormone therapy, and carrying risk factors that had nothing to do with the drug. The formulations tested were older, oral versions; most of what’s prescribed today is lower-dose and absorbed through the skin, bypassing the liver entirely. And when researchers went back and separated the data, women taking estrogen alone — no progestin — actually showed a reduced incidence of breast cancer. Not increased. Reduced.

It took until November of last year — 2025 — for the FDA to initiate removal of the black box warning. Twenty-three years. Twenty-three years of doctors flinching, insurers balking, and women white-knuckling their way through hot flashes, sleepless nights, and their own vanishing minds because somebody misread — or oversold — one study in 2002.

And now that the warning’s finally gone, now that women are asking for it in the numbers they should have been asking for it all along, there isn’t enough to go around.

I want to be honest about what estrogen does and doesn’t do, because I’ve read enough pieces that go straight from “the patch changed my life” to “science says it fixes everything,” and that’s not quite true either. The good, well-established stuff: starting hormone therapy within the first year or so of menopause meaningfully protects bone density — women who wait even a little longer show measurably higher rates of osteoporosis five years out. A recent analysis of more than a million women in The Lancet Healthy Longevity found no increased dementia risk, upending decades of quiet fear on that front too. There’s a real, if narrower, cardiovascular benefit — the “timing hypothesis” — for women who start within ten years of their final period.

The joint pain? That one’s messier than I want it to be. A massive meta-analysis — nearly four million women — found no significant effect of hormone therapy on generalized joint pain across the population. And yet. My joints know what they know. Maybe I’m the outlier, or maybe the studies aren’t measuring what women are actually describing, or maybe both things are true at once, the population data and my particular body. I’m not going to pretend the ambiguity away. I’m just going to tell you what happened when I went off it, and let you sit with the fact that science hasn’t fully caught up to what a lot of us are feeling in our own joints at 4am.

The body keeps score. And from where I sit, the patches keep me winning, by a long shot.

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So why can’t we get it? I went looking for an answer, half expecting to find one bad actor to point at — a factory fire, a recall, a single company’s fumble. Instead I found something duller and more infuriating: nobody built for this.

Estrogen patch prescriptions are up 86% over the past five years. Patch usage in the U.S. alone nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025 — from roughly 46 million units to 142 million. As of this July, twenty separate estrogen patch formulations were listed in shortage, double the number from earlier in the year. Nearly half the women surveyed by one telehealth company said they’d had trouble filling their prescription; only 6% felt confident they could refill within three months. Yet the FDA — the actual federal agency responsible for tracking this — still won’t officially call it a shortage, even as pharmacists across the country report empty shelves. Women are driving forty-five miles for a box of patches. Paying $300 out of pocket when insurance won’t cover the brand name.

It’s not just us in the U.S., either. The UK has been cycling through Oestrogel shortages since 2022, with fix-it deadlines that keep sliding — “things should improve by June,” a doctor there said, except that’s what they said in March, too. Canada has logged ninety-two separate estradiol shortages since 2017. Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia — all reporting the same gaps. This is not just a supply-chain hiccup. This is structural.

Turns out, only three or four companies make estrogen patches for the entire U.S. market. The raw hormone is derived from soybeans and converted into usable estradiol almost entirely in China and India, so a single supply disruption on the other side of the world becomes a shortage here. High regulatory barriers make it extremely hard to add a new manufacturer or switch suppliers quickly, even when the demand and the money are both there. And building an entirely new manufacturing line — the kind that could actually close the gap — takes eighteen to thirty-six months and tens of millions of dollars, with FDA approval on top of that. When a market that’s been ignored for three decades suddenly, correctly, wants what it should have had all along, there’s no slack anywhere in the system to absorb it.

Would this happen to Viagra?

Hahahahahah… yeah. I don’t think so.

I think if Viagra were on backorder, we’d know about it within a news cycle. We’d see a task force. We’d see a hearing. We’d see production ramped, priorities shuffled, some executive doing a mea culpa on a cable news set. I’m not the first woman to note this disparity. Women’s health research gets a fraction of the funding men’s does — one recent estimate put women’s share of global health funding at around 6%, despite carrying a dramatically larger share of the disease burden. Nobody’s proposing rationing Viagra to stretch supply.

“Here’s half a boner for you today, good sir!” Could you even imagine?

So why the fuck are we still driving to five pharmacies for a patch that costs less to make than the box it ships in? Why the fuck did it take twenty-three years to admit the study that scared us off estrogen was wrong? Why the fuck is a hormone that keeps women out of bone-loss hell, out of fog, out of their own worst irritable version of themselves, treated like a nice-to-have instead of infrastructure??

It’s because nobody built this for us.

Not the pharmaceutical companies who couldn’t patent their way to caring. Not the doctors who spent two decades afraid to prescribe it. Not the agency that still won’t say the word “shortage” out loud. Menopausal woman are an acceptable place to run lean.

Try to contain your shock about that one.

So here we are, ranting on social media, writing thoughtful-slash-graceful essays, and hoping our meager supply holds till the replenishment arrives. I’m still cutting my patch in half with kitchen scissors, doing the math on how many weeks I’ve got left.

None of us asked for this fight. We just want the thing that works.

But that’s the thing about a medication you finally, finally get right after thirty years of being told it might kill you: once you have it, you’re not giving it up quietly. Not the patch. Not the clarity. Not the version of ourselves we get to be on it.

We’ll keep calling the pharmacies. All of them, if we have to.

And we’re gonna keep yelling: Where the Fuck Is All the Estradiol?

You’ve been forewarned.

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Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

If this story resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

“I’m definitely left of center, and have voted the feminist way in every major election,” Dave commented. “But this is exactly why I date conservative women.”

“They still like men to be men.”

Uh, thanks Dave. No one asked you. In fact, no one asked any man.

Dave’s comment was in response to a silly essay I’d written called “10 Dating Green Flags for GenX Women,” about the things I’ve come to recognize as evidence that a man is actually good, not just good on paper.

And on top of the list — the thing I led with because it has to come first, especially now — his politics aren’t a maybe, and they don’t violate your rights.

I wrote it plainly, and unapologetically:

The essay has struck a nerve, mostly with women, mostly with some version of: yes, exactly, finally.

And then there was Dave.

Because of course there was.

He’d read the part about me wanting a man who calls himself a feminist and decided to opine how this was exactly why he dates conservative women. Not because he’s conservative, he was careful to clarify. He’s “definitely left of center.” He votes “the feminist way.”

But he prefers women who, in his words, “still like men to be men.”

An amusing aside: he’d edited the comment before he posted it. I keep thinking about that, how a draft of this existed even before the one he decided to leave up. Somewhere between “I’m definitely left of center” and “They still like men to be men,” he apparently had a chance to reconsider and thought: Yes, this is the point I want to make here.

So let’s actually count what happened here.

I wrote about what I want. This man scrolled past loads of comments agreeing with me, found the one line that could be read as being about him, and left a paragraph — edited, mind you, he had a draft of this — explaining why he’s opted out.

Nobody asked you, Dave.

But since you’re here: let’s actually talk about what makes a man a feminist, because you clearly think it’s a masculine moral failure.

It’s not.

So in the spirit of generosity, and because I have a feeling this is going to annoy you specifically, here’s the list. The hot, manly, undeniably masculine things that make a man a feminist — not despite being a man, but as one.

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He doesn’t need consent explained to him twice. Not because he’s soft. Because he’s paying attention the first time. A man who has to be told twice isn’t gentle — he’s not listening, and pretending otherwise is the opposite of masculine. It’s just inattentive.

He can be outvoted by a woman and not treat it as a referendum on his manhood. He has an opinion. She has a different one. Sometimes hers wins. He doesn’t need the room to remember he’s still in charge of something. Secure masculinity doesn’t need a scoreboard.

He reads the news and gets angry at the right things. Not performatively, and not for an audience. He reads about what’s happening to women’s rights in this country and it registers as wrong, the same instinctive way it registers for me — not as an abstraction he has to be walked through.

He believes in a woman’s right to choose. Her bodily autonomy, period.
No equivocation. Not a position he’s weighed and landed on. It’s not his body, so it was never his call — his own feelings on what he’d choose are irrelevant to the broader political issues of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. This is not your TED talk, Dave. This is not the moment for your nuanced position. Sometimes the correct response is “that’s not okay” and then silence, so the woman talking can keep talking.

He doesn’t confuse a woman’s certainty for aggression. A woman who knows what she wants and says so isn’t attacking him. He can sit in that without needing to manage her tone, soften her point, or explain that she’d get further “if she said it nicer.”

Her competence turns him on. Not despite it. Because of it. Certainty is hot. Brains are hot. A woman who can hold her own in an argument — or win it — is hot. He’s not looking for someone he can out-talk, out-earn, or out-think so he can feel settled. He wants a woman who’s his equal, or who bests him outright, because that’s the version of partnership that actually makes him learn and grow.

He calls other men out when nobody’s grading him for it. Not the performative kind — the quiet kind. The friend group text. The comment section. The moment where it would be so much easier to say nothing, and he says something anyway.

This one’s for you specifically, Dave. You didn’t leave that comment because you’re a manly masculine man who likes manly masculine things. You left it because you wanted to tell a woman who’d just described the kind of man she wants that you prefer women who won’t ask the same things of you. That’s not a preference for femininity. That’s a preference for not being challenged. And, frankly, that’s a much less impressive version of masculinity than you seem to think it is.

Being a feminist doesn’t make a man less masculine. It makes him a man I don’t have to raise, manage, or shrink myself around just to keep the peace. That’s not a lower bar. It’s a completely different sport, and the men who are playing it stand out immediately, without a single edited comment required.

I wasn’t writing about Dave, or men like him. My essay described the kind of man I actually want, the kind of man for whom a smart, certain woman isn’t a threat to manage but the whole appeal. That man wouldn’t have needed to comment. He’d have recognized himself, quietly, and moved on with his day. Maybe left a few likes.

Dave didn’t. And in trying so hard to tell me what he’s not, he told us all exactly who he is.

Unboyfriendable.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with my new feminist boyfriend. He’s going to fix me a cocktail, cook me dinner, and take care of my dog while I tell him about my tough work day.

And it’s going to be hot AF.

Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

If this story resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

From: hi@shuffle.dating
Subject: Shuffle Dating — what to expect tomorrow

Well, shoot.

Shuffle Dating is a lo-fi, high-speed dating service, a word-of-mouth* antidote to dating apps. You sign up, find a monthly event that aligns to your age group and preferences, pay $25, and just like that — you’re signed up for eight “dates.” When I got the email last month, I was delighted to see an age 40–55 event on a Saturday. Sure, I have my kids on Saturdays, and it was at a cafe on the other side of town, but pffft, details. I had time to sort things out.

Except I forgot about it.

And now it’s Friday evening. The event starts in about 18 hours.

My eldest daughter and I are lounging on my bed, watching Sex and the City, both of us mesmerized by how perfect Sarah Jessica Parker is. Netflix recently re-released the iconic series, and I’m surprised by how it resonates with her at just sixteen, 25+ years after the show originally aired.

“She reminds me of you,” says my child, reaching for another handful of popcorn.

I’m stunned. I’m sure I’ve received better compliments in my life, but in this moment, I can’t think of any.

I can recall back when every woman claimed to be a Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, or Charlotte. As a curly-haired, big-nosed, extroverted writer, I always identified most with SJP’s Carrie. But my teen seeing me in her new fashionista hero? Well, that’s amazing.

Carrie loved a deep question. Are men in their twenties the new designer drug? Is there a secret cold war between singles and marrieds? Then she’d dive into all sorts of romantic adventures to find answers, all in the name of research for her weekly column**.

Tonight I’m wrestling with my own question: How can I attend this speed dating event when I’ve got my kids?

What would Carrie Bradshaw do? I ask myself.

She’d bring them along.

Sex and the City was seismic because it put women’s desire at the forefront.

Carrie Bradshaw and crew had sex galore. As my teen and I binge our way through season one, I marvel at how many desirable, attractive, and well-dressed men surrounded Carrie and company, in the bar, at the club, or even chance encounters on the street (hello, Mr. Big). And the ladies indulged in their desires, reveling as they dated — or at least screwed — their way through all the handsome cads in town. And we, the audience, delighted in their naughty misadventures along the way.

Despite all the sex, the show seems almost quaint now, both in how controversial it was back then for women to pursue sex, as well as for the absence of how most of us date now: on dating apps.

How different would Sex and the City look if our protagonists endlessly scrolled through men in the palms of their hands? This seems like a question Ms. Bradshaw herself might’ve spent an episode pondering.

But I think I know the answer.

They would’ve had more choices, but far fewer viable options.

I’ve had multiple dating profiles for months. I’ve easily chatted up hundreds of men. Most conversations don’t make it past a low-value greeting. Some get vulgar quickly — and blocked. The infrequent interesting ones tend to lapse, and the few men I’ve met? Well, either mutual physical chemistry isn’t there, or it is, but he’s chasing too many other women to date me.

Samantha would’ve done well on dating apps, with her voracious sexual appetite and disdain for relationships. But Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and, well, me?

For people like us, dating apps are exhausting.

So the idea of speed dating is appealing. Despite the rush implied in the name, compared to zillions of millisecond swipes, the event seems almost indulgent in its pacing. Eight whole minutes, in real life? Luxury.

Carrie, of course, has the perfect words to describe it. From Sex and the City “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (Season 3, Episode 12):

“…seven mini-dates, each eight minutes long, which, incidentally, is about as long as most blind dates should be.”

Why not drink a delicious iced oat milk mocha and meet eight men who want the same experience? It’s a worthwhile investment for the potential of a Sex and the City-style romantic adventure, right?

Now that reads like a question Carrie Bradshaw would take on.

My daughter agrees.

Here’s how it works.

Eight men and eight women show up at a cafe. We’re instructed to arrive 15 minutes early to buy a beverage — it’s important to support the coffeehouse that hosts these shenanigans — and we each text our virtual host “Cassandra”*** to check in. She asks for a short self-description, so we can all find each other.

“Longish red hair, glasses, black and white polka-dot dress, black Converse,” I respond.

“You sound so cool!” says my eldest. I beam. I appreciate how this adventure has somehow converted my eye-rolling teen into my wing-child.

It’s 12:55 pm. At 1pm, I’ll get a text describing date one that includes a conversational prompt, and we’ll find each other and chat for eight minutes. Then another text indicates the round is over. We get a few minutes to enter notes, and then the next round begins. Later, each participant gets a post-event ballot, to vote yes or no for each person. The next day, Shuffle Dating will email each of us to share if we have any matches.

I leave my kids on one side of the cafe, their Greenlight debit cards flush with funds I transferred because I feel guilty for hijacking their Saturday. “Go explore downtown,” I tell them.

“No way!” they laugh. They want the spectacle.

I find a table by the front window just as my phone dings to begin. I take a deep breath. The light here is lovely, so I decide to stay put and let “Don G. glasses, blue shirt” find me.

As other couples pair off at tables, an elderly man ambles toward me with a slight limp and unilateral facial paralysis. Years ago, I used to work with stroke patients, so I have a soft spot for this sort of disability and am prepared to help him find whatever he needs.

“Are you Dana?” he asks, holding up his phone.

Shuffle Dating states it’s okay if you’re a year or so outside the age range, but this man is nowhere near 55. But the blue shirt and glasses confirm he is indeed my first date. Don lets me know he lives about 45 minutes outside the city, is retired, and likes to go to church.

I text my kids under the table.

Uh, I think this one had a stroke

FIREEE. GIVE HIM TO ME

r u texting during the date??

I check our prompt: What’s the number one thing on your bucket list? Oh god, he’s more likely to kick the bucket.

“How old are you?” I ask him.

“I’m 67 years old,” he slurs. Is he dysarthric, or missing teeth? Either way, I’m pretty sure he’s low-balling that number.

“You know this event is for 40–55 year olds?” I ask him.

He shrugs me off and we make small talk till I hear the sweet mercy of my text tone. I don’t think Don can hear it, so I have to tell him, loudly: “ROUND OVER.”

I decide Carrie would be thankful only eight minutes were wasted, and look ahead to round two. Then “Bob D, black shirt and pants” appears. Another geriatric man. He seems a bit more fit — or at least, less infirm — as he plops himself down and sizes me up like the early-bird fried chicken special.

Our prompt is apt, so I ask, What would your younger self not believe about your life today?

“Oh, my younger self wouldn’t believe the life I’m livin’ today!” he exclaims.

I can’t resist a segue. “Speaking of younger selves, how old are you, Bob?”

“I’m 69 years old,” he replies with a wink. I shudder inwardly and once again mention the intended age group, but Bob is unapologetic. “Well, I like ’em young,” he says, eyes drifting down toward my cleavage.

I avert my gaze back to my phone and text the kids again:

This guy is 69yo 😳😳😳

my little aged cheddar

And he has a flip phone

mom u need him

Reluctantly, I turn my attention back to my date. Turns out, Bob and Don are buddies. So 25% of my $25 has been wasted by their disregard for the rules. I’m relieved when round two ends.

Some of them look like they have a metal hip and a poopy diaper.

I nearly spew my mocha with laughter.

I wave to my kids, grateful for the comic relief, just as a tall, dark, and handsome man appears.

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Special thanks to my Founding Members—Laura Funk, Julie Roginsky, Amy Gabrielle, Linnea_at_large, Joyce J. Jordan, Pietra Shirley, Suzanne Whitaker, Karen Marie Shelton, Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙, Alan Wiley, Craig Weissman, and Shālah B Pookie

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So I was thrilled when she said she’d join me for the show.

We sat down and had a frank conversation about eating disorders, GLP-1s, beauty standards, and the impossible line between talking about women’s bodies and policing them.

Lindsay brought a decade of lived experience with eating disorders and a perspective I desperately wanted for this conversation about what we're teaching our daughters—and what so many of us carry from our own adolescence. I

Here’s the essay. I’d love if you’d read, comment, or restack it:

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.

Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.

Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.

If this conversation resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

Get more from Dana DuBois in the Substack app

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Sunday was a candid conversation about overload, losing your footing, getting your creative rhythm back, and why stability, discernment, and capacity matter more than ever.

It was strange too—but like, the good kind of strange.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in.

Special thanks to my Founding Members—Laura Funk, J…

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Listen to the podcast:

“That’s a whole lotta lip filler,” I mutter, mostly to myself but also to my daughters on the sofa next to me.

We’re three video deep into a YouTube bingefest — best Sephora bronzers or true ghost stories, or something equally riveting to my daughters and opaque to me — as I observe how the creator’s face was mostly done by someone else’s hands. Lips plumped with filler. Lashes with a wingspan. Eyebrows microbladed into a permanent state of pleasant surprise. She seems only a beat older than my girls, maybe 20 years old. I’m certain she’s earned more this year than I’ve made at my corporate job in the past five.

“Mom,” I can feel my younger daughter’s eyes roll with teenage exasperation. “Why are you commenting on her appearance?”

“It’s hard not to when she looks like that.”

“If it makes her feel good, what’s the big deal?”

I inwardly sigh, as she’s not wrong. I’ve explicitly preached for years how we don’t comment on women’s appearances and now here I am on the sofa next to her, doing exactly that. I taught her the rule. She’s just enforcing it. But also? It’s not quite right.

I look at the YouTuber again. Her face is beautiful, of course. If she likes how she looks, who am I to criticize her? Except it’s not a criticism of her. The lips, the lashes, the brows — I’m reacting to how they’re part of a beauty ideal women are sold, one enhancement at a time, until eventually the ideal starts to look less like a choice and more like an expectation.

An expensive, time-consuming, constant-vigilance expectation.

If everybody gets filler, suddenly a face without filler looks old. If everybody gets Botox, a normal forehead starts looking like a neglected one. If everybody gets veneers, ordinary teeth become something to apologize for.

And if everybody gets thinner, being the same size you were five years ago starts to feel like letting yourself go. And then the thing that was supposed to be optional becomes the price of admission.

It’s not a particularly liberating system, even when individual women are perfectly happy inside it.

I established that rule long before my daughters were old enough to enforce it on me, as a hard-won lesson. As a GenX woman, I came up in the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” era, in a home where “diet tomorrow” was a two-word mantra my mother and grandmother traded like a family recipe. I was never skinny; my body has veered between curvy and chubby ever since I hit puberty. Even still, I made it through adolescence and into 90s-waif-era adulthood without developing an eating disorder, unlike many of my peers.

But some days, I look back and am baffled by how.

My daughters were born during the body positivity movement of the 2010s, which, for all its flaws, was a course correction from something truly brutal. My daughters don’t narrate their thighs at the dinner table. They’ve never counted calories. They eat with relish. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole point, actually. It was an immense gift to me, as a mom of daughters — and a chubby one at that.

I built that rule about not discussing bodies on purpose, and it worked.

Except beauty standards don’t disappear because you stop talking about them. They move from the dinner table to their iPhones, from the magazine rack to TikTok, from “lose ten pounds” to Ozempic and Zepbound. And sometimes the new version is more expensive, more insidious, and even harder to avoid.

It’s been so disorienting to watch the rule run headlong — or perhaps, body-long? — into a situation where it doesn’t hold weight.

Pun absolutely intended.

I’ve never been a fan of Ariana Grande’s music, and have mostly ignored her meteoric rise to superstardom.

I knew of her world-class vocal prowess, her petite stature, her questionable dalliances crossing cultural lines where she perhaps didn’t belong, and of course, her BDE dalliances with Pete Davidson. But mostly, I’d categorized her as: talented, but not my thing.

Then Wicked released, and Ariana captured my full attention.

Like many of us, I was spellbound by her in Wicked. Her performance as Glinda was extraordinary, as she transcended her pop vocal origins to deliver a pitch-perfect performance loaded with empathy, humor, operatic high notes, and nuance I had no idea she could deliver. And she became Glinda. Ariana transformed: she had golden locks and an old world Hollywood glamour that seemed at once completely new but also, completely natural. Sure, she was thin — quite thin. But it looked like part of the Glinda transformation.

By the press tour for Wicked: For Good a year later, the change in Ariana was startling. Her appearance had shifted so dramatically, I could see my daughters noticing me, noticing Ariana.

“Don’t say it,” they warned, preemptively, like a spell to ward off my unsolicited opinions. And in my most diplomatic voice, I responded: “I hear you. But also: I’m not shaming her. I’m concerned.”

I didn’t push it. But I had to introduce the idea gently before letting it go, because I didn’t want her gaunt appearance normalized by ignoring it— and especially not in front of my daughters.

Then came the release of Petal. The album dropped in late July, with a retro-stylized music video for title track featuring an Ariana so skeletal, we couldn’t collectively not notice any longer.

The internet erupted with criticisms, hot takes, and — mostly, thankfully — concern.

Days later, her team announced Ariana was stepping back from public-facing work once her tour wraps, citing “ongoing public scrutiny.” She addressed it herself onstage in Chicago, told the crowd the decision wasn’t reactive or impulsive. Maybe it isn’t.

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This week we cold-opened with the Muppets teaching us how to grieve. We then wandered into Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, beauty standards, eating disorders, and the impossible expectations placed on women.

Mostly, we talked about what it means to care about women without policing them—and when speaking up is an act of care.

Thank you , , , , , and so many others for tuning in.

See all my Saturdays for Sanity appearances.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.

Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.

Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.

If this conversation resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

Get more from Dana DuBois in the Substack app

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Welcome to I Write Out Loud

I Write Out Loud is my home for cultural memoir and personal essays about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife.

I’m drawn to the nuanced edges where private life collides with shared cultural experience, and the conversations that emerge from that tension.

My writing explores relationships, feminism, parenting, media, music, modern dating, politics, beauty, and aging. Those may sound like disparate topics. But they’re all part of the same conversation—using personal stories to make sense of the larger cultural forces shaping the world around us.

I write to make sense of the things we’re all living through—and to give you something to recognize, question, laugh about, or see differently in your own life.

If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’re in the right place.

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Start with these five essays

1. DATING & RELATIONSHIPS

Midlife dating isn’t about finding someone without baggage. It’s about discovering whether two people’s losses can exist in the same room.

More Dating & Relationship essays

2. FEMINISM & POLITICS

The “online rape academy” story isn’t really about one website. It’s about what happens when contempt becomes community—and why so many men looked away.

More Feminism & Politics essays

3. PARENTING & FAMILY

Is teaching your daughters to endure difficult men resilience—or just another way of teaching them to tolerate misogyny?

More Parenting & Family essays

4. MUSIC & POP CULTURE

A soundtrack to growing up, becoming a mother, losing yourself, and discovering you never really disappeared.

More Music & Pop Culture essays

5. AGING & BEAUTY

A love letter to complicated feminism, complicated faces, and refusing to pretend either one is simple.

More Aging & Beauty essays

👉🏼 Or explore all my essays.

But that’s not all…

I write out loud all over.

My work has appeared in more than 20 publications, including TODAY.com, Business Insider, MSN, Your Tango, ParentMap, Seattle Weekly, Human Parts, Age of Empathy, Pink Hair & Pronouns, The Narrative Arc, , Another Thing, , , and more.

And yes, I podcast. A lot.

I Write Out Loud features two live conversations per week: a public live on Wednesdays and a Sunday Salon, where I offer a more intimate behind-the-scenes look at my work and life with my paid subscriber community, whom I’ve lovingly dubbed “The Outlouders.”

I’m also host of 🚩Red Flag Round Up 🚩, an ongoing feature where I give you a front-row seat to my online dating inbox. I offer hot takes and rhetorical analysis from the frontlines of attempting to date in mid-life—because if I have to live it, you get to laugh alongside me.

In summer 2026, I introduced the I Write Out Loud Academy, with writing trainings for my paid subscribers.

And of course, I co-host and Crone Cocktail Hour, and am a regular guest on Saturdays for Sanity on .

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Subscribe to keep up with my work. New essays land every Monday, with live conversation on Wednesdays and a Sunday Salon for paid subscribers.

Some essays and podcasts are free to everyone, while paid subscribers get access to the full archive of subscriber-only writing, plus Sunday Salon and other behind-the-scenes conversations, including trainings.

If you like what you’ve read, I’d love to have you here—whether as a free subscriber, a paid subscriber, or simply someone reading along and thinking out loud beside me.

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Red Flag Round Up is where I offer a view of my online dating inbox and a front-row seat to my rhetorical analysis of the messages I receive. It’s part humorous (if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry) and part cultural commentary on what it’s like out there for us single women—with an emphasis on helping others avoid red flags.

I have to hat-tip to and her amazing Burned Haystack Dating Method, as she’s the OG in this space and has helped countless women find love (and keep our sanity while in the process).

Today’s RFRU was extra special, because was in the audience and partway through offered up: “I had a man ask me if my breasts were real as an intro message.”

Then she joined me on the live so we could analyze a couple of the unsavory messages she received—to great hilarity.

I hope you enjoy, and again—huge thanks to everyone for showing up, and especially to paid subscribers of I Write Out Loud.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in and to for moderating. I love you all, mean it!

Thanks for listening.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.

Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.

Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.

If this conversation resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

Get more from Dana DuBois in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I hope you found it helpful.

The Writing Your Memoir Out Loud Handout PDF is attached below.

I’ve also started a paid subscriber chat where we can share our work, both finished and works in progress. You can find it he…

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Dearest readers,

A Letter From Dana is where to write to you directly—not inside an essay, but simply thoughts from my life: what I’m working on, what’s coming, random thoughts and ephemera from my creative world.

I’m so glad you’re here.

This week, out loud.

Well...Substack had other plans. After two failed attempts to record this week’s Letter from Dana, I ended up taking it live instead. If you missed it, here’s the quick version—and the important stuff:

✨ Memoir Writing 101 is Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET. It’s the first session of the I Write Out Loud Academy and it’s open to all paid subscribers. I’m leaving plenty of time for Q&A, so bring your questions. Here’s the link.

🎉 My birthday sale has been extended through Tuesday night. Annual subscriptions are 56% off ($44/year) as my 56th birthday gift to this community. That price is locked in for life. Subscribe here.

💛 Help me gift subscriptions. The Ko-fi campaign is at 69% of its goal (*giggle*), and every donation helps fund paid memberships for readers who might not otherwise be able to join. If you’d like to sponsor someone, even $5 makes a difference. Donate here!

🚨 Fucked-up Friday keeps getting better. If you missed last week's conversation with and , it's well worth the watch. The chemistry between them was electric, and I mostly got to sit back and enjoy the conversation. This Friday, is back at HQ and we’ll be welcoming —how amazing is that? Join us Friday at 10am ET.

📝 New writing this week: I published essays remembering Amy Winehouse and Sinéad O’Connor, and I’m beyond proud of my latest essay published by Another Jane Pratt Thing. It’s called IT HAPPENED TO ME: My Famous #MenToo Date “Victimized” Another Woman—And I Laughed, and I’m thrilled how help me bring it to life. I’d love if you’d read all three. Comments and restacks always mean the world to me.

🎙️ This week’s schedule*:

• Tues, 7/28 at 8pm: Memoir Writing 101

• Wed, 7/29 at 8pm: I Write Out Loud Live

• Fri, 7/31 10am: Fucked-up Friday with on

• Sat, 8/1 at 10am: Saturdays for Sanity with & Michelle Kinney on

• Sun, 1pm: Sunday Salon

*All times listed in Eastern Time.

It’s an unusually full week around here—in the very best way. Thank you for reading, listening, showing up, and helping me build this strange little creative corner of the internet.

Love you, mean it!

Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

If this story resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

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Dana’s note: Sinead OConnor died three years ago, on July 26, 2023. I wrote this essay two days later. I’m sharing it now, on the anniversary of her passing, as a remembrance for her and her (wildly underappreciated) work. If you have a memory of how Sinead’s music or actions impacted your life, please feel free to share them in the comments.

I will meet you later in somebody’s office

I was sitting outside at a cafe yesterday, having lunch with one of my favorite coworkers, when I got a text from my lifelong best friend, .

I gasped.

My coworker asked what was wrong and I showed her my phone….

She just stared at me blankly.

“Oh shit,” I said, quoting Lawrence, though for an entirely different reason. “You have no idea who she is, do you?”

She shook her head.

I work with many people 20 or so years my junior, and my lunch date was no exception. I’ve long gotten over myself that I have culture touch-points my colleagues don’t share. But this one, at that moment — well, that hit hard. It’s a bit devastating to hear one of your favorite artists, one who made a huge impact earlier in your life, has not only passed, but also had already passed out of relevance even before her death.

I didn’t want to believe that so I asked her, “Surely you’ve heard ‘Nothing Compares 2U?’ The Prince cover?”

Again, no.

“I know you’ve heard it. The video is the close up of her perfect face, with a shaved head, and she cries while staring into the camera? Women karaoke it all the time?”

My coworker promised to have a listen when we returned to our desks.

And I accepted what I already knew to be true: we GenX kids have our own unique set of influences — and they all either die tragically young (Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain), or end up with tragically reactionary views (Morrissey, Billy Corgan)*.

And the losses hit harder the older I get.

This one really, really hurt.

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Soon I can give you my heart

This record. My god, the impact of this record on me — and so many of my friends, including Lawrence— can not be overstated.

We’d never heard (or seen) anything like it (or her).

Sinéad released her debut record The Lion & the Cobra during my senior year in high school. She was only a few years older than I was, but she possessed a preternatural talent, an emotional complexity, a raw rage and passion — and the voice to fully express it — that made her seem timeless, ageless, nearly otherworldly.

Songs on the album careen stylistically from sea shanty (“Jackie”) to danceable pop (“Mandika”) to seduction (“I Want Your Hands on Me”) to… I don’t even know how to describe “Troy,” with its bombastic orchestration, thunderous proclamations, hushed pauses, nearly banshee-like shrieks, and epic storytelling. It’s singular in its glory.

It’s not hyperbolic to say I’ve never heard another album like it, and I doubt I ever will.

I was no musical sophisticate at 17, and came to Sinéad via MTV with her first release off the record, the danceable “I Want Your Hands on Me.”

Watch her in this video; watch as she sings her frank lyrics of sexual yearning with such insouciance, such a lack of grace and hips to her moments, nearly indifferent to the camera and yet with such an intense gaze when she finally makes eye contact.

1987 Dana was both confused and intrigued. This song was my Sinéad gateway.

2023 Dana — watching this video for the first time in years, possibly decades — sees a fierce, frail wisp of a genius and aches to protect her. I want to warn her of what’s to come, knowing now the price she paid for her ferocity, the hardships she faced and the toll they took on her career and life. She wanted to live an uncompromised life, to live by her own policies; I don’t believe the 19-year-old in that video could’ve known the price of admission to that life.

Would telling her how it all ended have changed the way she chose to live?

At 19, she couldn’t see the flame…

I don’t know no shame.
I feel no pain,
I can’t.
I don’t know no shame,
I feel no pain,
I can’t see the flame.

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Through their own words, they will be exposed

I remember somehow, improbably, watching the video for “The Emperors New Clothes” with my dad and stepmom when it first released in 1990. I have no idea how we came to be watching it — they were not music fans, and they certainly didn’t seek to know my interests, musical or otherwise — but I vividly recall sitting in their living room and watching it.

Sinéad softened her look a bit for this video, off her second release I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. She grew a bit of hair, softened her make-up, and donned ever-so-slightly more feminine attire. But still, she’s barefoot, she’s unsmiling, her dance moves, they’re awkward at best. She’s undeniably gorgeous but also, undeniably indifferent to what you see in her.

My father was perplexed by her, making dismissive grunts and uttering things like, “What is this noise? What’s she wearing? These lyrics don’t make sense” throughout.

I can’t recall his exact admonishments, years later. I just remember he was outraged this young female singer wasn’t trying to catch his eye or his ear.

How I relished watching his discomfort. I felt so seen in his unease.

I wasn’t one of the pretty ones. I wanted to lead with my brains and talents, to sleep with a clear conscious, as Sinéad did. I understood her lyrics perfectly.

And most of all, I understood how offputting her indifference was — to all men — via my sexist, irritable father.

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Nothing can take away these blues

Her sophomore release also contained “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the Prince cover that catapulted her from alternative artist to chart topper. Suddenly Sinéad was a household name.

And she wasn’t going to be famous and not make it count.

She made that stand on live TV, on Saturday Night Live in 1992, the famous moment when she sang Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella, and then held up a photo of the Pope and tore it to pieces.

Watch her face. She was fearless.

I watched her perform that live.

I recall my jaw hitting the ground. I watched with my two grad school roommates, one Jewish, one Catholic. We all looked to each other in disbelief. I was in a deeply anti-religious phase then — one I’ve never fully exited, to be honest — and I applauded her.

But even then, what did my applause mean?

I finished school and grew up. New music kept coming through the 90s and onward, and I moved along with it. I’ve always loved Sinéad’s music, but didn’t keep up with her career much, other than to hear of her mental health struggles.

I think many of us did this, just as she needed more support. We grew up and musically moved on.

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I am stretched on your grave

In 1988 we had no collective vocabulary for trauma, for self-care, for the sort of outspoken demonstrations that defined Sinéad’s career as much as her music did. The late 80s knew outrageous fashion and hairstyles, but we were still deeply normed, we young adults influenced by the heavy-handed morality of the Boomers who outnumbered and overpowered us.

We had no ability to defend the unyielding moral force that Sinéad was.

I’d say she was ahead of her time and surely there’s a nugget of truth there. But also, she transcended time. Her flavor of defiance and forthrightness would’ve made obsessive fans and enemies alike in any era.

And yet… I contemplate my young coworker. She messaged me once she watched the video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

“I have heard this song before. I am sure someone sang it on American Idol or something lol” she responded.

Sigh.

Sinead’s not even stretched on her grave yet and I’m certain she’d be rolling in it if she heard that as her legacy.

This coworker is young but an old soul, and a music fan. I consider sending her more, better Sinéad songs, and sharing her stories. But would either translate?

Or did you have to be young and hungry for authenticity in 1988 to first hear The Lion and the Cobra to feel its impact? I’m uncertain, but feel like the answer here may be yes. As timeless as I find the songs, I wonder if they’d get lost in generational translation.

This weekend I will play some Sinéad songs for my kids, and I usually have good instincts how new-to-them old music will hit. I’m unsure Sinéad will make the mark.

Her songs may simply be a unique GenX marker.

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It’s just like you said it would be

And her stories? Here I’m more certain Sinéad was ahead of her time.

Challenging the Pope for child abuse no longer seems radical, because hindsight shows that Sinéad was right. To people the same age as my coworkers or kids, this is old news. What was a collective, career-ending gasp in 1992 is a yawn in 2023.

This thought just makes me so sad.

Sinéad was right about so much, even if we all couldn’t — or wouldn’t — see it yet.

I was a fan of both Sinéad’s music and her political stances, and quietly cheered her on. I stood by, bemused a bit by her rage. I didn’t speak up. And really, speak up where? I had no platform in the 1990s, none of us did. I wonder, how would Sinéad’s rallying cries have resonated in a social media environment where everyone has a voice, versus the corporate news voices of the last century?

Sinéad might have gotten the support she clearly needed for her mental health if she’d been young and beautiful in 2023. Her directness probably would read as a form of neurodivergence now, and perhaps that’s what it was. Her history of trauma would have earned her sympathy. Her mental illness would be normalized, supported.

But as a young adult in the 1990s, she was a pariah for her views, her outbursts, her unprocessed trauma. And by the time the world caught up, she’d grown older and fatter, her formerly beautiful face, haggard. The press were merciless; fame came with no sympathies, and her strange behaviors and disappearances barely registered a blip on the news cycle.

Morrissey, as much as it pains me to say it, said it best.

It’s safe to feel sad now, to champion her legacy and lament her shortcomings, now that her final chapter is written.

I should’ve done better.

I should’ve kept up.

We all should have, all the alternative GenX kids who bought her two first absofuckinglutely brilliant albums, now tucked away in an old CD case, or burned down to our hard drives. We remember her fondly but never bothered to sustain her career into the next few decades.

We all popped in The Lion and the Cobra again, but not till she was gone.

I grieve that for her and for all of us.

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Everyone can see what’s going on

All that said, I’ve loved revisiting her early work this week. It’s been such a comfort.

I’m listening now as I type this.

“Whatever it may bring,
I will live by my own policies.
I will sleep with a clear conscience.
I will sleep in peace.”

Sleep in peace, Sinéad, and rest in power.

All of us who loved you, we’re immeasurably better off for having experienced the wonder of your music and the force of nature of your life.

Even if we never knew how to deserve you.

Maybe it sounds mean.

But I really don’t think so.

🖤

*Except for Robert Smith. He remains perfect.

{This story was originally published on Medium on July 28, 2023, two days after Sinead’s death.}

Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

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