Some days, your heart breaks incrementally; other days, all at once.

Today, I woke up to news that a former classmate was found dead. His name was Daniel. An accomplished musician, an asker of brilliant theological questions, only 27 years old.

The loss brought me back to this piece, which I have neglected to write, though it’s gnawed at my fingertips since the knockout stages of the World Cup.

Here is the story of South Africa National Team midfielder Jayden Adams, his alleged death by suicide after the World Cup, and why achievement can still end in loss.

It’s been my experience that people struggle to understand suicide. They are well-meaning, mostly, but not well-informed. It shows up when they ask questions like,

“How did he not show any signs?”

“What could we have done differently?”

“Didn’t she realize she was loved?”

These questions really piss me off. I’ll tell you why at the end of the piece. But despite having struggled with ideation myself, I’ve been guilty of asking a similarly obtuse one.

Before I get into the story of Jayden Adams, let me take you back to June 14, 2019.

It was a move-out day at Stanford University, distinguished by the bustle of shifting brown boxes, the elevators protected with tarps and bracing for impact, a thrum of excitement qua anxiety bouncing around rapidly emptying halls.

I’d never experienced anything like it. After all, it was my first time living in a dorm for a full year, my first year on campus completed. It was a weird mix of feeling. Pride marred by exhaustion, hangover, and concern over the commencement speech that I was supposed to give at the school I had transferred from, Foothill College, later that day.

In other words, a lack of presence that would soon come to crash into itself.

We were supposed to leave Kimball Hall by 8 am. At that point, our key cards would be rendered useless. So for procrastinators, night owls, and sentimental slow-movers like me, this very early deadline presented distinct logistical challenges. I’d go running up and down the stairs, propping the front door open with a book, praying nobody would close it, taking trips to and from my already too-small, and getting even smaller, car, buckling under the weight of the heavy California heat.

I was so caught up in my scurrying that I didn’t notice when the police arrived.

I must have registered the first car, then the second, but I wonder at what point I realized something was very off. It’s probably akin to a lobster getting boiled alive. You don’t realize you’re in it until it’s too late.

On one of my last trips outside, I saw a mass huddled at the base of the steps. A crew of uniformed cops, medical workers, and some administrator-looking people. Was there an RA there? This was definitely not normal. Were they kicking out the stragglers? No, there’s a signature to the air.

I hurried the final box to my car. I closed the door to my very first home away from home for the very last time. And I broke down, wailing, like a wounded animal, with rhyme, without reason.

Until I found it in my inbox.

“Sad news in our community.” From the Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs.

It’s 4:50 pm. I send a text. “I think someone in kimball killed themselves today.”

Her name was Norah Borus.

She was from Kenya, the daughter of highly educated parents, well-beloved in her community. She ran a coding camp in Nairobi, and she was working on a CS+ Social Good startup to connect people with sanitary products. She was a singer. She was quiet, sharp, kind.

She had graduated just a day earlier, with a bachelor’s and master’s in Computer Science, from the best Computer Science program in the world.

I remember her smile.

She was only 24.

Now, for the stupid question I asked:

“How could someone kill themselves after such a major accomplishment?”

We turn to Jayden Adams now.

Reports spread wildly on social media. You may have seen the infographic shared to Instagram stories or reposted to the feed. Police are investigating after finding 25-year-old South African midfielder Jayden Adams’ body in a house in central Cape Town on July 11. Died by suicide, they mainly claimed.

I asked myself the same stupid question, as above, and in the same breath, I recalled Norah Borus in Kimball Hall.

And despite how much I harp against believing what you read on Instagram, I filed that away in my brain as the official cause of death.

Until I started writing this essay.

It turns out that nothing has been revealed officially about how he died. Actually, hardly anything has been published since those initial reports, except for this Guardian article that discussed his leadership in the Cape Town footballing community. When you Google his name, you see a flurry of results from four weeks ago, all pointing to suicide, and then nothing at all.

It’s odd how viral “stories” really aren’t stories at all. They have no arc, no resolution. Just snapshots of public captivation, frozen in time. It’s looking without love.

So for Jayden, we can only look backward now. According to the single Guardian tribute posted after his death:

He was driven. Growing up in a less affluent, but not impoverished, Cape Town suburb, he would play football anywhere, anytime, often with a potato, an onion.

He was quiet. His smaller size often made him move “in the shadows.”

He was excellent. He was the first from his Stellenbosch academy to play in top-flight South African football, and he was called up a few years later to the national team.

He was resilient; he’d survived loss. Two of his teammates passed away tragically when he was a teenager. His grandmother, who raised him, had passed away a day before the tournament began.

And now we look at the present: he is so dearly missed.

Despite very little follow-up, and his story being relegated to a brief human-interest piece in a flurry of hundreds during this World Cup, it is clear Jayden is missed. His national team captain, coaches, family members, and even the minister of sport speak to his character in that Guardian article. It makes the loss all the more unfathomable.

I will not look for clues in his profile as to why he died, out of respect for his memory and his remaining family — stay with me until the end to see why I defend this move. But out of love for all those who have mental illness, I will now share the facts that I have discovered about suicide and sport.

When I started writing this piece, I thought the data would be a lot more concrete. But therein lies the problem. It appears that systematic, cross-league research at the top flight of football has yet to be undertaken. And it is likely symptomatic of the culture of silence around mental health in footballers. We cannot study and intervene on behavior that is made taboo, relegated to the sidelines.

Here is what some initial literature review reveals. A large-scale cohort study from 2023 amongst Swedish professional footballers shows that suicide accounts for 11% of deaths in active footballers, lower than the general population. Only one other large-scale cohort study from 2020 has been undertaken, of Scottish footballers, which echoed these results, finding 36% lower risk of diagnosed depression, 63% lower risk of a diagnosis for anxiety and stress-related disorders and 31% lower risk of suicide, compared to the general population. A Fifpro study from 2015 (eesh) suggests 35-38% of a sample of 600 retired footballers report depression symptoms. It’s hard to make satisfying takeaways from this data. But it has been theorized that this peak is driven by sudden identity loss, chronic pain, and the loss of daily team structure.

Anecdotally, we can look to former players for a glimpse into how detrimental this sport can be to mental health, even more so in its absence. Zlatan Ibrahimovic opens up about its withdrawal effects in his second memoir, Adrenaline, about how difficult it is to go from thunderous stadiums thumping with cortisol to the uneasy quiet of retirement. Thierry Henry has also been vocal about his struggles with depression, stemming from his desire to please his father from a young age, most recently framed in WhatsApp’s documentary Bukayo Saka: The Time is Now.

Certainly, these examples are more high-profile and therefore more salient, so we should be wary of a bias where we over-index on footballers having mental health issues, especially when limited data suggest otherwise and in the absence of larger longitudinal studies. But at the minimum, we can conclude timing: both fully realized the extent of their problems after exiting their illustrious careers.*

_{*In beautiful coincidence, these two figures were co-hosts on Fox for this year’s World Cup! There are many more stories; these are just two I’m very familiar with, having read Zlatan’s memoirs thrice each and watched the Bukayo doc twice. I wholeheartedly recommend both for further interest.}

When I started the draft for this essay, I’d only intended to discuss Jayden Adams and Norah Borus, because of a synchronicity between their deaths: both had achieved a major accomplishment, on some of the largest stages in their lane, then found dead immediately in the quiet of its aftermath.

Then Daniel died^*, and I realized there was another name I needed to mention, too.

Hers is Katie Meyer.

It is a regrettable fact about my alma mater that every year, a handful of students take their lives on its grounds. Every death shakes the student body. But Katie’s passing was probably the most destabilizing one during my tenure on campus. Actually, it was an earthquake that would rock Stanford to the highest levels of public scrutiny since the Chanel Miller-Brock Turner case.

A few reasons explain this fallout.

First, Katie was extremely well-connected on campus. She was the star goalkeeper of the women’s soccer team, captaining them to victory during the penalty shootout of the 2019 NCAA championships. She was an RA. She was applying to law school. And she was so blindingly bright. Though I was only briefly acquainted with her, she was the life of any party.

On March 1, 2022, she was found dead in her dorm room.

Second, Katie’s death was most likely linked to a disciplinary investigation that Stanford was undertaking. She had confronted a football player who had sexually assaulted an underage friend of hers, allegedly throwing hot coffee at him. Katie contested the football player’s accusation, but the administration had sent intimidating, ambiguous emails, threatening expulsion. One of them was found open on her computer when her body was recovered.

Her parents claim the university had acted “recklessly and negligently” in this communication with Katie. They settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the university earlier this year. But we will never really know what happened that night after she FaceTimed her family for the very last time.

We do know that her legacy continues to ripple.

And I miss her smile, too.

Perhaps as a consequence of these two factors, there was a lot more “resolution” in the wake of Katie’s death than than with Norah’s and Jayden’s. A foundation was created in her honor, Katie Saves. A law was passed in her name, too, enshrining student rights and safeguards during disciplinary action. An ESPN documentary captured the formation of both and sparked greater discussions about student athletes and mental health.

So while her death feels different than the others mentioned in this essay, it still brings us back to the same discussion, the never-ending question of why. Yet I propose that there’s another word that sometimes, coldly, comes up in conjunction: why them.

_{* Because this is an ongoing investigation, I will also not speculate on Daniel’s death. Still, I note the following facts: he had been baptized and confirmed in the Catholic faith at Easter, and four months later, he was found at rest in his apartment. Everyone in our OCIA class, Order of Catholic Initiation for Adults, spoke highly of this sophisticated, sensitive soul, who knew scripture inside and out. Biblical history catalyzed his conversion from Jehovah’s Witness to Catholicism. He sat in the front row at every 11:30 am Sunday Mass. He was the first to rise, to raise his hand. He could have been a group leader for OCIA. He was considering it. So it is easy for the mind to jump to suicide when an intelligent and ostensibly healthy young man suddenly passes alone in his room, especially my mind, given my background. And so it strongly influenced the undercurrent of this piece. But again, I do not make any claims about his cause of death.}

What do these deaths have in common?

All were under 30.

All were leaders in their community, often putting others ahead of themselves.

All had undergone a very intense, yet very self-actualizing experience, and, in the case of Norah and Jayden, days before their death.

All came as a surprise.

We will never know why. But we may begin to understand why them.

I think people really underestimate the scale and scope of ambition.

People who take their own lives are often exceptional, a cut above the rest, not because they are competing with each other, but perhaps because they are competing with themselves.

Of Daniel: “The guy was absolutely on another level on fire for the Lord.”

Of Jayden: “He knew what he had, but he never wanted to voice it. He was very competitive, but he would never brag,… You get many good footballers but you get few great footballers. Jayden was great.”

Of Norah: “She had a heart of giving, not just to the less fortunate in society, but to any and every person she could assist either morally, spiritually, materially or all the above.”

Of Katie: “If you could bottle her energy, the world would be a much better place. Through this project, her spirit, her warmth, and her legacy will live on."

As boundless as the human spirit and ambition can be, maybe “it” is never enough.

So for the stupid question of mine: “why at this time?”

Psychologists call this the “arrival fallacy,” a cognitive blind spot where a person thinks they will only achieve satisfaction after reaching an external milestone. It’s often accompanied by a neurochemical crash, where all the adrenaline and dopamine rush creates a sort of withdrawal effect. This can exacerbate a huge meaning vacuum created also by a loss of routine after the achievement.

(Here’s a reel I made discussing a related concept of the “hedonic treadmill” framed by Arsenal’s first league title win in 22 years!)

I am breaking my rule to speculate on their deaths, but I will not speculate on the deaths here; rather, the timing, and only inasmuch as it allows us to frame this knowledge. It is plausible that, in the cases of Norah and Jayden, leaving a system with clearly defined, hierarchical goals could be highly destabilizing and reveal underlying issues that overwhelm their coping mechanisms.

It seems to me the people most equipped to save the world are the ones who are hardest to tether to it.

I’m struggling with leaving the right call to action here.

I guess it’s more like cautioning against what not to do, rather than advocating what to do, which isn’t really satisfactory. Still, the issue of mental health at the highest echelons of competition is too complex to find one or two punchy takeaways. That’s the whole point. So, trying this on for size:

Let’s not use others’ stories as fodder for our own fantasy.

Let’s not remove the dignity of victims and survivors.

Let’s not ask stupid, self-serving questions.

Here’s the hot take I promised earlier:

When a tragedy such as suicide happens, we crawl over the details, searching for meaning. I wouldn’t say it’s all driven by a curiosity for the morbid. Maybe examining causative factors can prevent future loss. Given how quickly we ingested and digested the story of Jayden Adams, I’m not convinced either way.

While the World Cup brings out our humanity, it can turn us into hyper-consumers, bingers of human narrative. And our investigations, as participatory — and let’s face it, parasocial — observers, often sidestep the feelings we’re avoiding in ourselves. Grief, guilt, powerlessness, ennui.

One could say I’m guilty of the same, maybe, in writing this essay. But let me tell you, dear reader: I have cried a lot drafting this up. It’s been the most difficult piece of this series by far, and the last installment was on domestic violence.

I don’t think any of us are impervious to suicidal ideation, or at the very least, existential qualms. I’m certainly not, but that’s a story for another essay.

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So — scratch that. I suppose there’s more we can do.

As we move into a new season, let us pause, reflect, and check in. Let us thoroughly savor our victories. Let us examine our goalposts and how we shift them. Above all, let us remember that while questions have no end, we may honor the emotion generating them and the subject of them.

Let us look with love.

(And, if you’re so inclined, let us pray.)

We do this in memory of Jayden Adams, Norah Borus, Katie Meyer, Daniel Cousin, and all those gone too soon.

Those who need help can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — if in the US, at 1 (800) 273-8255. Or please play Tetris — seriously, it’s been studied as a means of preventing intrusive thoughts, specifically related to PTSD.

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Happy Monday! (One of my favorite oxymorons).

We’re officially two weeks out from the World Cup. We’ve had our first preseason friendly. The league now officially starts in 18 days.

Where did the time go?!

Some housekeeping notes: I think I’ve lost it.

How did we get here?

Recall the last post: “sports-induced violence against women doesn’t just come at the hands of men. It be our own fists, sometimes, too.”

Consider what I’m about to admit to you as a thematic extension of this idea. (But please keep in mind, the actual part 2 will come later this week).

I originally intended this to be a daily series.

For motivation, for accountability, for practice, for raw output.

But I also had a contrary aim.

Those who read my first essay may recall my repudiation of the algorithm. It was making me happy, but it was making me sick, too. It’s fast food for the brain. Now throw the World Cup into the mix, and it became an all-you-can-eat, hot-dog eating contest.

In other words, a recipe for disasterrrrrrr (allow me this pun).

Is the human brain meant to process a perpetual supply of narratives, of corruption allegations, tactical analyses, boy-love fanfic compilations? Yes, it’s all the stuff that makes life worth living. But too much of a good thing, too fast, in too short of a time span, makes life complicated, too.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know exactly what I’m talking about.

Enough, I had said, my belly swollen with regret. I am going to start slowing down, chewing my food thoroughly, digesting.

Cue the creation of this Substack.

Now, Alexa play, “Oops I did it again.”

Last night, I woke up. I was speaking with Gemini (I was using my free “Pro” credits for this, so you know it was VERY serious business). I asked it “Am I a failure?”

No, Gemini reassured me, I am not. (Btw I told it to not be sycophantic and to criticize me so yes we can suddenly trust this non-sentient probabilistic model designed to keep you spilling your secrets to give me solid life advice) But I am maybe out of balance. I’m spending about 90% of my time on input and 10% on output. I’m not failing, I’m just not optimizing for success.

If that sounds like failing, apparently it’s not. Haha!

It does sound like writing 1500 word essays with intense deep research every day while knee-deep in three other projects simultaneously may be contributing to the very problems these essays were meant to address: burnout, Payasofication of time, flattening of nuance. (Btw if you are new here or haven’t already, please go read those first three installments!)

But, my God, is it fun to do.

Where are we going?

I share this with you for two reasons: inspiration and information.

I hope I am inspiring you to not be like this.

This series is for the football curious in the creator economy. I know it’s not explicitly football related, and I feel kind of bad about it, but if we’re being honest, it’s never been just about the football right? It’s about how the beautiful game refracts existence. And relatedly, who among us haven’t blamed football for something going on in our personal lives? So I hope you’ll allow this admission of vulnerability in a football-adjacent context to reach you.

(I tried really hard to distill what I’m about to say next into a pithy lesson as above, but it feels obvious to the point of being a tautology. Can any self-help be truly profound if it’s got to be seven words or less? Yes, I may be looking at you, Mel Robbins.)

On the first day of this series, I imparted, “don’t make false idols out of the algorithm,” but this is its corollary. We wouldn’t have platformed something that we haven’t given power to, but why did we give it that power to begin with? We blame external systems for what we’ve internalized. Maybe it’s not our fault. Maybe it is. That’s what we need to interrogate.

Yes, I blamed the World Cup. I blamed the Instagram algorithm. Then I took back my power. Yet I’m still practicing the same habits, without these systems. Running amok, and to the cost of my own health. (Last week, I stayed up til 3 am on every night that I sent out my Substack essays, scheduled for 6 am). And I can wax poetic forever about why without changing a darn thing.

Dear reader, I ask you: what are you giving power to in your life, and what would it take for you to truly feel empowered again?

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Bonus points if your admission is about something that you really enjoy, and does empower you, it’s just tipped out of balance right now.

Like, yes, I wrote nearly 15,000 words last week because I wanted to. I was truly having fun writing, editing, soliciting feedback, sending seven-minute voice notes to my friend about it (hey girl! thanks for that by the way). But it was coming at a cost: neglecting my health and other projects.

Sure, maybe the algorithm has molded my behavior such that removing it still leaves an “algorithm shaped” constraint on my behavior. It’s almost like these systems are designed to hijack your reward systems, and thus your habits?

But I was like this even before I was a creator sucking on the teet of the algo. That’s why I’m such a football fanatic, right?

So truthfully, I also throw myself into projects/obsessions as a means of avoidance, too.

And, that’s okay.

We’re practicing forgiveness.

I hope I am informing of what’s to come.

I am going to try to stick to a consistent posting schedule, Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

I am going to try to schedule them out early in the morning so they’re in your inbox when most people are lucid, about 6 am PST for me, without messing up my sleep. If I don’t, I’ll be okay sending it out at 5 pm PST…. I think…

(Btw creators, marketers here: did you know this? “5-7 am PST is the window catches East Coast and Midwest US readers at the start of their day, European readers wrapping up their workday or in late afternoon, and avoids the middle of the night for most Western Hemisphere hubs.”)

I am going to try to keep it on the shorter side, fewer than 1500 words.

I am going to try this thing called boundaries.

I am going to try!

Roadmap this week:

• Releasing “The Call is Coming from Inside the House” Part 2 (pt 1)

• Club friendlies discussion, transfers (example reel)

• TED LASSO Season 5 Debuts this Wednesday !!!! (Did you enjoy the title y’all?)

• Tending to the Substack Insiders group chat (request to join — more explicitly about football than this series is)

• Maybe finally posting about my favorite media to consume in the off-season

• Posting a reel about my experience going to the Bay FC vs Gotham FC NWLS game (follow me on IG if you aren’t already!)

Stay tuned and COYG :)

Confession time!

I find it effortless to crash out when there’s no football on.

It turns out sports-induced violence against women doesn’t just come at the hands of men. It be our own fists, sometimes, too.

Let me explain.

Before I begin: thank you for joining my Substack. And with what I hope is an open mind. Because I’m not sure this discussion would bode well on Instagram (that’s what motivates this foray onto Substack). Well, in a way, it might perform well, algorithmically, but contrary to its purpose.

Short-form video, the great flattener of all nuance, could quickly trigger the internet mob. Most with very different takes but united in how very weird, and just how very bad, they are.

(Is Instagram the only domain where performance is so staggeringly inverse to quality? Or where how far something goes can be so detached from its intention?)

Let’s put a pin in this.

Near the end of the World Cup, my algorithm brought me this reel. A high soprano proclaims, “A woman killed her husband because her favorite couple didn’t win Love Island. Just kidding. Can you imagine that? Yet men do it all the time.”

She launches, in biting singsong, the statistic: domestic violence in England rises 38% after their team loses in the World Cup. Even when they don’t, violence still rises 24%.

I am very saddened to say that the shock factor was lost on me. Because I reckon most women football supporters, and I’d wager many women in the UK generally, know this already.

(How much are we as women expected to desensitize ourselves to endure this world?)

My English friend had first told me the correlation between football and gendered violence in 2023, when we were sitting together in her back garden. Cups of tea in hand, she told me that she used to work at a shelter, and so she witnessed the issue firsthand. Women would seek refuge there, especially around the time that the England National Team were playing. My friend told me that housing was offered preemptively, because this violence was such a persistent pattern that it was basically at the point of prediction.

It’s why she’d never been able to get into the sport herself. I had nodded, heavily, taking the weight of her words in. And man, they were heavy.

It was one of the first times I encountered the violence of the sport that I’d grown to love.

After all, I was there visiting her in Devon straight off the back of an Arsenal game, when I was actively planning to go to another. I was in the honeymoon period, but it seemed the mask was falling down.

The violin voice on my phone snaps me from reverie: “Men will literally hurt people when their pretend ball game when a team that they don’t even personally know loses.”

The light in my head switches. Oh, hell no. Did she really just say that? Doesn’t she know what this sport means to people? And that it’s more than a pretend ball game? She wants to cash in on the World Cup algorithm just to talk sh*t about it?! I swipe up, and I start to say as much in the comments. That should show her.

But, thank God for the stockpile of self-awareness I’ve stored away. Like a squirrel in midwinter, I sometimes find it when it’s most bleak. (Not like I’m moving to a tangent to avoid feeling uncomfortable with what I’m about to say, but, did you know that squirrels find about 85% of acorns they bury in urban areas and 40-80% in the wild?!)

I realized exactly what I was doing.

I was proving her point.

I was triggered by an attack on my identity. And I was feeling really uncomfortable from the cognitive dissonance. And, caught up in the moment, I reacted to take it out on someone else. In this case, that someone was a woman.

Maybe I am not so unlike the men in the statistics.*

I shuddered at the thought.

_{*My friend kindly suggested to me that this self-awareness and emotional regulation is admirable and perhaps the difference-maker between these violent men and me. I am keen to believe that if young boys and men were taught to use those tools to navigate discomfort, rather than externalizing it, we would live in a much less violent world. It is devastating to consider that these perpetrators were maybe once victims themselves and perhaps reliving their trauma, imposing it, onto others.}

_{Still, being an asshole is a choice. And we can empathize with their feelings — and it’s a learning exercise for me to experience this identification — but we should certainly still condemn them, the individual, and the system that shaped them. Being sensitive to justice is a choice, too. More on this theme in the next installment.}

My friend and I had sat in the garden for a while talking. I had told her I realized that maybe if I’d grown up in England, I wouldn’t have taken to football. After all, I was never into watching sports growing up in America, not American football nor basketball nor baseball (though my mom’s best friend is Jerry Rice, my local NBA team was launching a dynasty, and I loved going to the Giants stadium with my best friend’s family). The most I entertained was the World Cup. And thank God I did because that was the seed that bloomed my life-long Arsenal love affair. But it was not the dominant sport, so that’s not only what made it “safe,” but by extension, cool.

So yeah, NikitaDumpTruck’s words were a personal affront. But then it occurred to me: maybe we were more similar than I thought.

Honestly, growing up, I defined myself by my difference. Maybe some of you reading this, as international as we are yet mostly bound by our love for a club in North London, understand this. Being mixed-ethnicity, both Mexican and Persian in America, I was made to feel like an outsider in all my cultures. And being an outsider, I was wary about crowdthink. So I wore hipsterdom as armor. I flipped the script. I proudly, and I’m sure obnoxiously, proclaimed: actually, I hate the Office and the Warriors and Taylor Swift.

(Can you tell I came of age in the 2010s?)

_{(Also, I admit now, these assertions were not 100% true).}

To understand what’s going on here, we turn to Carl Jung and analytical psychology. The twin concepts of The Shadow and projection tell us that those who trigger us are often reflecting something back to us about ourselves. So yes, on the surface, Nikita’s words felt like an attack against my passion. But, peeling off a layer, Nikita’s words felt like an attack against my past. Her snarky, “sportsball” commentary is exactly what I would’ve echoed as a 2014 teen.

And, oh boy. It turns out that my 2014 shadow self still makes me cringe.

Not only did I see a version of myself in Nikita, but maybe she (or at least her online persona) is like this, political and contrarian and sardonic, because as a queer brown woman, she’s also found safety outside of hegemony. God knows; I can only speculate.

I return to the present. I want to thank Nikita for showing me that, after all the therapy, all the alphabet soup of EMDR and IFS and EFT, I still denigrate the girl that I was back then. Because of that, or as a consequence of that, I’m not sure, I haven’t unlearned all my internalized misogyny yet. And, so, I want to apologize too.

I was violent against the idea of this woman, and that girl, in my head. Nikita, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.

And also, I want to tell you what you said is far from the full-picture.

Stay tuned for the next part, in which I begin to investigate this 38% percent statistic, review the extant literature, examine philanthropic interventions, and assess whether NikitaDumpTruck did this conversation justice.

Spoiler: sadly, she fell short of handling this discussion with enough sensitivity. Here’s to hoping I can in the next essay. I invite you to be the judge of that.

Welcome back, y’all! A brief hiatus this weekend, because I turned a year older, and I had to crash out, bravely but privately (I know, I didn’t commodify it for content?!*)

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Wish me a happy birthday and tell me everything’s going to be okay?

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Anyways thanks for joining me again — last time, I had asked about the World Cup:

Question: How to sum up such an ecstasy?

Answer: a metaphor.

“Payaso de Rodeo” (Rodeo Clown) is a Mexican party staple. Dancing to it is as obligatory, reflexive, as it is pervasive, inescapable. Honestly, it is probably one of the better litmus tests to sus-out who grew up in the culture (in the vein of that Inglorious Basterds scene). It’s that deep!

The characteristic fiddle signals the start of a group choreography, existing in the space between line dancing, humiliation ritual, and extreme cardiovascular challenge. Accordingly, it comes on near the climax of the party, when we’ve all already had our fill of cumbia, merengue, salsa, bachata, tequila, cerveza, mezcal.

The choreography starts simple enough. Right, right, left left. Back, back, front, front. Turn counterclockwise 90 degrees. Repeat.

You coordinate your steps in line with the throng. Drunken uncles, the vibrant tias, cousins who are cool enough but not too cool to forgo the ritual, and the kids who just want to be part of it all.

The tempo is accessible, too. Sure, you’ve already had enough to drink, and enough to dance, but how hard can it be to catch every step? Then, the tempo increases with each iteration, and of course, the more you dance, the more you need to dance, until the necessity of the next step is only tied to the completion of the last, a finite state machine (FSM), empowered by the linear passing of its own tape, with no memory of anything but its current state.

(P.S. Finite state machines are abstract models of computation but implemented everywhere in our daily life, such as vending machines, elevators, even workflows can be conceptualized as FSMs… automata theory is very cool!!! Also honestly it’s up to interpretation if you want to model Payaso de Rodeo as a pushdown automaton, which has a higher level of computation because it implements a limited memory to keep track of previous and next state, in the form of a pushdown stack, as in last-in first-out, LIFO. Drawing this diagram I realized that FSM is a type of directed graph, both have nodes/states and edges/transitions but FSMs have a start state! Okay, I’m calm again, and ending the mixed metaphor now.)

But everyone has their limits. Some reach theirs sooner than others. The tempo is inexplicably fast now. How does it keep getting faster? People start falling off, out of breath. The army has dwindled to battalion. The minutes, which feel like hours, march on, but only a few soldiers remain, fighting against the forces of gravity, centripetal force, and entropy. In other words, a losing battle. But for those of us valiant enough to try to hold on to the very end, we know we are promised a manifest destiny, of decimated calf muscles yet reinforced egos.

The song ends. The war is over. We did it!

There is a smug satisfaction that is hard to admit, but even harder to hide. We saunter off with bow-legged braggadocio. What the body couldn’t endure, the mind did. We convince ourselves that is the mastery of the will. But the motives remain lost in the dark of the abandoned dance floor, waiting to be recovered by the next song.

That’s what World Cup 2026 has felt like to me. Especially the way that Mexico performed its best in years, with its best finish since 2014, ending the tournament a top 10 team. (Maybe a future installment will specifically discuss my experience being a Mexico fan this time around. But for now, I’ll say: it was tiring as hell!)

Does this feel true?

• The World Cup came at the climax of the party, for the club football watchers, especially the Arsenal fans among us, who were literally in the midst of a summer-long, title-winning celebration.

• Its choreography is deceptively simple: turn to the TV, watch it, rinse, repeat.

• The intergenerational pull that makes you want to be one among many (the sexual tension between the de-centering of the self in the age of the individual shall be discussed in a later installment; i.e. is the WC a rare and short-lived psycho-social experiment that makes fading into the background cool again?! And where elders replace the youth we normally pedestalize, their knowledge and lore offered for our collective veneration? See the positions of honor the retired OGs have sitting next to Infantino and handing out trophies, the gray-haired fans who educate the newly-initiated, etc).

• The bragging rights for having hung on so long, manifesting in “in-group” knowledge: photo-dumps from the stadiums, meme distribution, water-cooler talk, how little did we all sleep last night? (I feel like this is especially true if you’re a content creator, professional virtue signalers that we are… :P)

• The not-quite-knowing of why we did it all (like, the real underlying reasons, you know, the good stuff we talk about with our therapists or pastors, about what makes us crave this psycho-social experiment to begin with… you know what I’m talking about…)

But… what about the tempo?

A brief defense of the metaphor.

One could claim the World Cup is a reverse Payaso de Rodeo, in that the tempo is much faster at the beginning and quickly decelerates. Group stages had us watching up to 5 games a day, but as the tournament went on, that number dwindled to 2, 1, even 0 games a day.

However, I will say the Payasofication of the World Cup isn’t tethered to match frequency. Normally people don’t all sync up at the start neither (I’ve noticed it takes a few days for everyone to start watching most of the games). So, it’s not the fixtures themselves, but everything surrounding it: all the responsibilities we’ve neglected, whose consequences intensify exponentially the longer the tournament goes on. For an intuition of the math here: the difference between ignoring laundry between days 1 and 2 is marginal compared to between days 9 and 10, when you’re actively fighting for your life trying to decide which sock can be worn inside out (we’ve all been there).

I will even venture to say this Payasofication is a special feature of the 2026 World Cup, the first iteration to include 48 countries, rather than 32. Though it may not come down to the raw count or scheduling of the games, that more countries were included led to an increase in the “everything else” surrounding it: the world-building. Player profiles like Vozinha, Diamonde, captivated our collective consciousness. I wouldn’t say it added to the “clutter,” because that’s the stuff the makes the tournament peak. But the narratives add emotion, emotion adds stakes, and stakes add weight. And, oh, can’t it be tiring to hold it all?

Because as the World Cup goes on, so does life. You may quickly find yourself, as I did, not handling that balance very well at all.

A hot new bombshell enters the villa: burnout!

Tell me what you think about this metaphor. Did you experience something similar to this Payasofication? What contributes to this burnout?

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In future installments, I will:

• tell you exactly where the fallout of mishandled priorities led me (you can guess!)

• share more about my experience as a content creator adding an extra dimension of what the fuck-ery to all of this (I’m multidimensional, baby)

• reveal a business request to collaborate with a brand to “stop crying” (real)

• keep trying to answer the question at the top (how to sum up such an ecstasy?)

• start to raise more in advance of the club season (VINI TO ARSENAL?!)

  But here’s the next: will you subscribe and hold my hand through it?

_{*Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment, where I do indeed crash-out!}

It’s the day after the World Cup. Or, as I will refer to it from now on, the quad-annual societal restructuring and wealth redistribution experiment.

39 days, 48 countries, 104 games, 208 hours including stoppage time. (And, if you’re FIFA President Gianni Infantino, over 100+ hours flying in a private jet to take it all in). Millions of dollars spent on marketing campaigns ($870 million for television ads; over $10.5 billion in overall ad-spend), billions of dollars “wasted” in productivity (in other words, $17 billion in PTO, that employees are legally entitled to take).

Wallets are empty, livers are detoxing, sleep debt is far in the red.

It’s the hangover after the hangover for both creator and consumer.

Question: How to sum up such an ecstasy?

Part of me is nervous to try. But the whole of me says “do it anyway.”

This admission comes as I am running a public Instagram account, where my brand is centered on the football, theory, and vulnerability. I '‘should’ have already squashed the anxiety that comes with putting it all on the line, online. Embedded in that sentence lies a tension that many creatives are likely all-too-familiar with.

In many ways, I had been reflecting throughout the tournament. I spent the month subjecting my body to the cruelest of endurance tests (sitting in front of the TV for 6-8 hours a day) and then capturing them via short-form video. Memes, yaps, analysis, dances, tutorials: my page was active!

But if time was allocated for writing, it was mainly spent like this: selecting the right keyword, replying to comments with pithy aphorisms to “keep the conversation going,” sending the post to friends with an emoji-ladden plea for engagement, quoting brands my rates over email.

It’s true that drafting the copy for some of my videos is microstorytelling. But, I haven’t written a sentence with more than 7 words and outside of a text box or caption in longer than I would like to admit. Just taking out the laptop for this exercise feels... odd.

It’s an irony of the online world that we are surrounded by text yet distanced from the Word.

Our language, inasmuch as it structures thought, is capped at a 4-grade reading level, internet speak, and often half-baked form (e.g., “oh that’s not —”, “and i oop”). It’s also a delicious illusion. I’m stringing words together, and that makes me think I’m writing, but am I really?

Here’s some preliminary takeaways, and a sneak peak at what motivates this series:

*I’m not trying to suggest that what I do is not truly Content. It’s highly creative, when done right. But, on balance, time is mainly spent adjacent to creativity, in administrative work.

I’m also nervous to write about the World Cup now, for a more tender reason.

Truthfully, shame grabbed my wrists. I did want to open Substack, Lightpage. Yet, the stakes felt incredibly high, and that perception and emotion is hard to shake. This only happens every 4 years, I have to get it right. So my fingers, locked with fear of not living up, then regret at time lost, irrecoverable, didn’t type anything at all.

It’s freeing to be able to finally admit that here. And that, covering this World Cup for the first time as a creator, it’s been an enormously challenging balancing act.

After all, I LOVE this tournament as a fan. It’s what gave rise to the love of my life (my Arsenal fandom). And so, as a creator, I SHOULD love this tournament. This is exactly the opening I’ve been praying for to bring people into the fold, have them see what I see, cheer for what I cheer, yearn for what I yearn, grieve for what I grieve.

It’s the flipping World Cup, a fellow meme page admin told me. Lock in.

And, much to my chagrin, I did.

Hello, World!

Sure, I needed a break from the Premier League.

Being an Arsenal fan, we had an emotionally grueling 10-month season, filled with the highest highs (Premier League title parade) and lowest lows (Champion’s League final loss) to recover from. As a new Arsenal creator, I had my own 6-month sprint to recover from. I’d gained a humble 8,000 followers from over 300 posts, I’d started negotiated my first brand deals, I’d even attended an event with Saka and Eze; all while nearly escaping aura bankruptcy (going all-in on my metaphysical bet that Arsenal would win, and attaching my personal Instagram page and name to it).

And I almost did tap out, burnt out. I didn’t post for the first two days of the World Cup. (This may not sound like a lot if you’re a civilian, but for the chronically online, it’s borderline eternity, given the life cycle of a meme is essentially 24 hours.) When I finally did, with basically my very first World Cup post, my page was mass-reported by racists, nearly hacked, and disabled.

That could’ve been the end of the story. But, God had other plans, so I’ll have to tell you the middle at a later time:

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Instead, in the end, I walk away from the the World Cup a “better” creator. I tried a variety of formats. I doubled-downed on what works. I refined my style. I got my reps in. And it resonated!

I posted nearly 100 times (essentially 3x a day; basically what I was doing during the Premier League, but somehow less sustainable: with a left-tail distribution, the mean centered around Mexico’s exit from the tournament). I had 10 of those videos go viral (~100,000 views or more). The metrics tell me I am around 2.5k net followers and 11 million views richer, over that 39 day span.

I gave it my all, so why do I still feel like I didn’t give enough?

Therein lies the crux of this post-mortem.

If you’re reading this, it’s too late.

This series serves as a sandbox for topics connected to my brand, including football, philosophy, statistics, culture, in anticipation of projects I intend to launch soon. I’ll begin to unpack my learnings as a first-time creator, tethered by my perspective as a fifth-time World Cup Watcher, and how those two modalities influenced each other.

My hope is that other creators reading this — writers, reel-makers, Romans — may subsequently find solutions, or at the least, solace in those learnings. Ideally, I’ll hear from you, and learn from you, too:

Leave a comment

(Tell me who you are, what your experience of this World Cup has been, what you’ve learned!)

I’ll go first.

If I could go back in time, I would’ve prepared for this World Cup a lot differently. That feeling births this series, and I’ll elaborate in future articles (subscribe and stay tuned!). But, one thing I’ll mention now, as I mentioned earlier, is not having written about it sooner. Just like… what my hopes were as a fan, what my strategy was as a creator, and what I’d learned as both. Luckily, I still have a chance.

While the algorithm may move on from the World Cup, and disincentivize me from writing, I have accepted that I may not move on as fast, and that is more than okay. After all, trying to keep up with the algorithm’s pace is what brought me to this semi-dissatisfied state. I’m probably in good company. So here’s another takeaway:

It seems obvious until it’s not. In a future article, I’ll dissect what that means to me.

For now, I do kindly ask you, dear reader, to indulge my attempt to right my “wrongs” (born of innocence, inexperience, intimidation ). I ask for the gift of your attention.

We have 29 days until club season begins. This time, I hope I am not caught with weak fists. So here, I will try to loosen the grip, relax so I can regrow, and write something true. Will you hold my hand through it?

In this essay, I will be sharing three lessons I have learned from my abuelita that I would like to honor. I hope that, by the end, you will have learned more about my abuelita — at least how I had known her to be — an and how grief shapes our understanding of urgency.

Meet Consuelo

The overarching feeling I have for my grandmother is gratitude. It wasn’t always the primary sentiment, as I will explain later, but allow me some mercy to lead with that most holy of human sensations.

I am grateful for the times I was gifted to share with her, especially in the infinite present of childhood. I am grateful for the times when I was little, when I had little agency nor a concept of what taxes are, and my parents would take my sister and me to her house. These visits have crystallized into cherished keepsakes of memory I share with my sister now: the smell of caldito inviting us in, notes of tomato and potato mixing with unspoken love. And for dessert, manila wafers with milk.

I remember, with a little shame now, that sometimes I wished she could be the quintessential American grandmother. I wished she would make plain old tomato soup and baking chocolate chip cookies instead, just like on TV. But, I’m grateful she never did, because that’s not who she was, and I am grateful exactly for who she is.

My abuelita was born on September 8, 1929 and raised in La Hacienda La Sociedad in Los Altos de Jalisco. And so she was inextricably linked to the countryside’s strict norms and customs. Jalisco women are known to be as strong as the earth from which they come. My abuelita was no exception. Perhaps she was one of the original casts for that mold. (They are also known to be the most beautiful of Mexico; a genetic inheritance for which I am vainfully grateful.)

Despite not being educated formally, she taught herself to read at a young age. After she immigrated to Oakland in 1970, she also taught herself how to drive and received her license, and in 1980 passed her citizenship test without knowing much English. These endeavors testify to her intelligence, resourcefulness, determination.

In line with the expectation of Jalisco women of the time, my abuelita was a devout Catholic. Her name reveals as much: Consuelo means solace, and is a reference to Mary, mother of Jesus, Our Lady of Consolation. But grandma’s favorite saint was Santo Toribio. He was the patron saint of migrants, who was martyred for continuing to give mass in the countryside, despite government orders to only conduct it inside churches. Of course, as a young girl, I didn’t know any of this, I just kept thinking, who is that handsome man all over my grandma’s wall? She clearly had excellent taste.

I am also grateful for her imparting my first religious lessons. I remember, when I grew a little older, many nights at her house where we would recite the rosary together. Thumbing the beads, our voices would rise in unison: Padre nuestro, que esta el en cielo… These words were more incantation than meaning, flapping of vocal cord that gave way to sound wave. But I remember being especially proud when in sixth grade, during my brief six-week stint in Catholic school (all these 6s…), I went around telling people that I could say the Lord’s prayer in two languages. As if God were merely bilingual, and I had insider access. Well, all of that boasting was short lived, because I ended up talking back to a teacher, I wore the wrong colored white shoes to class, and I was bullied for having hairy legs. But already developing in line with my grandmother’s fiery and anti-authoritarian nature, an inheritance bequeathed through my mother to me, I stood my ground and took my leave.

Lesson #1: assimilation is a poor substitute for acceptance.

Caldito, rosario, Santo Toribio. These are the symbols which encapsulate this lesson for me. I encourage you to think of your own experiences of unbelonging and carry them as badges which tell people: I am here, hear me be. Take in my face, because my ancestors have my back. I know my abuelita certainly does.

I am grateful for her teaching me the core Mexican value of respect: for my elders, and for myself. I knew that she was always someone to be respected, and respected she was. The matriarch of the family, she would sit at the end of a long table at parties, hands folded in her lap, a regal look, chin up. I noticed that people always used the usted form with her. This is a Spanish pronoun for the second-person singular, similar to Farsi’s shoma, and something that is woefully missing from English. But she would allow me to tutear her — structure my language around my familiarity with her. This grace might have been extended because she knew that I didn’t really know how to conjugate usted, but she never once shamed me for fumbling around our native tongue, nor did she tease me for my butchering of a “Mexican” accent, my Americanized mouth too constrained to carry its expansiveness. For her, I was always enough. And for her, I always wanted to be more than enough.

This was the kind of force my abuelita embodied. One that commanded attention, but never demanded it. And she was generous with hers. The other day, I was reminded that she financially supported her aunt for as long as they both lived in California. It must not have been easy for my abuelita. She received a $4 hourly minimum wage from the assisted living center she worked at, and she had 9 kids to care for. But her work ethic was unparalleled. And I deeply appreciate that she willed that dedication to my mother, who has transferred it to me (though that is sometimes up for debate).

I am also grateful for the times, when most of my body did get a little older, because I’m still a baby at heart, that I did get to spend with her. We would bring groceries to her house, and I would tell her how school was going, take selfies, even show her pictures of my crushes (to which she would honestly reply “qué guapo” (how handsome) o “qué feo” (how ugly). You could always count on her honesty, and again, her good taste.)

Despite not having gone to school, she told me she was proud of my acceptance to Stanford. These congratulations were an emotional luxury that my mom was far from afforded, despite being the first in her family to receive higher education. That is to say, my grandma had actually kicked her out of the house for accepting her admission to U.C. Berkeley. It was a very sore point. So, I accepted gingerly on both our behalves.

And yet, despite the blossoming of girl talk, we were never able to fully form an adult relationship. Just as I was beginning to fill the contours of my life, life itself was receding outside of it. The pandemic unraveled, we all became more entangled in isolation, and then she was diagnosed with dementia and moved to a living facility. It’s a strange condition. The longer you live with it, the more you regress mentally. And so the older I got, in many ways, the younger she became.

My mom made me most aware of this, after one visit, she told me, “it seems like your abuelita is shedding some of her personality.” Personality is the term we use in my household for the hardened conditioning that your source or soul filters through, manifesting in semi-predictable patterns of behavior. And my mom had noticed how she was letting some of this go: my abuelita was more open with her affection, less rigid on some of her expectations, like that we should always look manicured and presentable, save we become the worst thing in the world to her: greñuda (unkempt) or floja (lazy).

All of this culminated in a particularly emotional visit. After the first time I had seen her at the assisted living center, I couldn’t return for a long time. I thought, maybe it was something about the smells, the fluorescent lights, the confrontations with mortality or my busy school schedule preventing me from fully showing up. These were somewhat easier reasons to point to, or excuses to make.

When I stepped into her room that day after the long hiatus, the air hot with static from three TVs playing simultaneously, something in my face conjured a memory for her. She started telling me about how there was this daughter that she had left behind in Mexico, a daughter of about four years old, and that she would miss this baby so much, that she would have to go out into the Oakland hills to cry for her. And she started to cry. So, of course, I started to cry. She cried for her lost daughter, my mother; I cried for both of them, and for all the time I had lost.

Because it hit me: I had been telling myself stories in my head about her, about her abandonment of my mother when she went to search for work and a (financially) better life for her*, and I was not courageous enough to admit the truth about that to myself, let alone to her. I had let my own judgements about her and how she had left my four-year-old mom behind in Mexico influence my own relationship with her — without even having the life experience to form any valid judgement on motherhood.

*To this day, we do not really know the reasons for her departure, because my grandparents were well off enough in Jalisco with the properties and businesses they owned

Lesson#2: Don’t let unspoken thoughts dictate the script until it’s too late to edit.

Bring them into the light, examine them, challenge them, rewrite them. Every interaction is an opportunity to get closer to character: with yourself, with another person, and with God.

After the burden of unknowing was lifted, I started to visit her more often. Especially in the last year of her life. Our girl talks of the past would resume. I would brush her hair and paint her lips, just as before. Except then, when I would show her a picture of my partner, she would both say “que guapo” in one moment and then the very next, “que feo!” She was always funny, but her dementia added extra comedic effect, of which she seemed somewhat aware, or at the very least, was a good sport about.

During the final few visits, my grandma had stopped eating. This cessation is of course as dire of a self-denial in Mexican culture as it is in Persian culture. True to the very end, she was strong willed, and this resistance was probably her last possible act of self-determination. And an indication that it was time for all of us to let go. Yet, she let me return the lifelong favor of her having fed me, by feeding her one last time. And she allowed my parents too to dance a polka for her once last time. Until she cried in distress saying “sí son buenas tardes” (this is a good afternoon) and fell asleep. And I thank God that he allowed us this one last rite.

Recompense

There is all this knowledge that is lost to time now. I am painfully aware of how many questions I still have for her: When she was little, what did she want to be when she grew up? Did she like her name, or did she ever wished to be called by another one? When did she realize she was no longer little? Did she always want to be a mom, or did she quietly resent the expectation? How did it feel to move to California in the 70s, and why did she really leave? What were the things she missed most about Jalisco? How did earning U.S. citizenship feel for her? What is a country she always wanted to visit but never could? What moments in her life tested her faith most in God? Who was her favorite grandchild, and why was it me? Just kidding. :P

I always thought I would have more time to get the answers. I thought: well surely if she is actually going to die, they would take her to the actual hospital? I thought I would have time to learn how to play “La Bicicleta” on the violin for her, dammit! But security is the illusion that enables sanity; we truly never really know when anyone will be taken from us. It’s above our pay grade, so to speak.

Lesson #3: “No one misses what they didn’t know they might have had; loss only hurts when there ever was a possibility.” (Tony Tulathumitte, Rejection).

We need to forgive ourselves for the behaviors which shunted possibility, because at least we cared enough to imagine. But what this quote doesn’t say, is that possibility doesn’t end at death, and so we can make loss hurt a little less.

Now I see her, in the shadow of the half moon, like the day I learned of her passing. I see her in bright pink: sunrises, sunsets, carnations, camellias. I see her etched in the lines of my mother’s face; I see her in the lines of my own. I hear her in the polkas she loved, in the phrases that I say without thinking with my mom: “el flojo trabaja doble”(the lazy one works twice as much). I feel her spirit when I’m cleaning the house, when I’m brushing my hair so I don’t look “greñuda.”

So while we can never go back in time and tell our younger selves off, I will take my most painful moment from that past year and turn it into that which that brings life, during and especially in the mundanities of living.

So I know what I will do moving forward: appreciating the family in my life, far before thoughts of “what if I’m too late?” or “what if I had done more?” begin to cast shadows. These days, I’m picking up the phone when the image of a loved one comes to mind. I am practicing a love rooted in divinity even if I’m feeling awkward or busy or quiet or lazy.

I encourage you to consider the loved ones in your life: in what ways can I show up for them, even if it’s a little uncomfortable? In what ways can I bend, just a bit, without breaking?

That is the legacy of a grandmother’s love that we should honor today, and the rest of days, while we still have the great fortune and opportunity to try.

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Dear Diary

This is how I began every journal I never finished. Unfortunately, it seems that I’ve sent more than a few leather bound books to their dusty demise, a collection of dear diaries whose entries get shorter with each iteration, until they cease to have length at all. Every time starts more optimistic than the last, however, because every time I stop writing, I’m beset by massive amounts of opportunity debt that I’m highly motivated to pay off. I have collected experiences worth remembering, and I actually don’t remember them as well as I thought I would, and this does feel really bad!

This is the curse of time: the pain that you think you’ll never forget loosens its grip, alongside the memory of the joy that you hope lives forever. (And most likely because of how we’re wired, at a faster rate than the pain).

Adios, abuela!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the passing of my grandmother last year. Actually, one year to this date. Writing her eulogy challenged me, because I realized, I really didn’t know that much about her, only how she made me feel, and that itself was mainly rooted in my childhood, the infertile earth of the past. It was also complicated because she had dementia for as long as I have been an adult, and so when I finally found the words to ask her, she had started losing hers. I dug deep and managed to conjure up something that I’m somewhat proud of (see my next post). But that’s where the case runs cold, and I need to start relying heavily on secondary sources like my mom and aunt. And then I’m realizing that we’re all going through the same decaying process, which I can’t even get into here without crying, and I’ve already cried a lot today, and we can’t risk dehydration right?

What’s next?

So I’m embarking on this memory project. Not calling it a writing project, because we know how those have gone, and it’s an archival work as much as it is a reconstructive one. I’m not really sure what it looks like or the scope of it. Maybe I’ll write about my latest heartbreak in the Premier League season (supporting Arsenal leaves you nothing short of content there, though I’d probably rather forget). Or I’ll share the little stories I unearth from my parents (each is a memory node with many outgoing edges). Reposting my book reviews seems like a nice thing to remember, too (is a book half remembered fully read?). I’ll probably edit this post later and try to pretend to myself I knew what I wanted all along.

But I hope that by having some record of my thoughts in long-form that exists outside of the corners of my room, that its life will span longer than my shame about sharing it. And I hope that dedicating this project to the memory of my abuelita will empower me, if not for wanting to avoid su castigo, for knowing that I have my ancestors to answer to and ask for help from. At the very least, I hope it’s the end of false starts.

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