There is an elephant in the corner of my living room, and it is covered in dust.

I was running out of ideas for what to write to you this week when my eye landed on it: a red light therapy panel, expensive, bought three years ago with the best intentions. Twenty minutes a day, I told myself. Rejuvenate the skin. The cells. The mind. The soul. A little machine to make me new.

I had not turned it on in over a year. Maybe two. It had become furniture, the thing you stop seeing. So I dusted it off and plugged it in.

Every morning this past week, I have sat in front of it with an audiobook going. The book is Neurodharma by Rick Hanson, a psychologist whose work sits somewhere between neuroscience and Buddhist practice. One of its central ideas is that the qualities we tend to think of as personality, steadiness, warmth, the ability not to spiral, are not entirely fixed. They are capacities. They can be practiced.

That was the part I needed. I have spent a lot of my life wanting to be someone else, and you do not reach for a new self unless you have been hard on the old one. I get frustrated fast. I feel small fast. I learned self deprecation early, partly as a way of coping with being a dyslexic, ADHD, flamboyant, closeted kid. If I could get to the joke first, maybe nobody else could use it against me. The cruelest things I have said in my life were rarely aimed at other people. I kept the sharpest blade for myself.

What I am starting to understand, sitting in front of that red light, is that you do not get a new self. You get the same one, turned to face a different direction.

Take my hands. I used to bite my nails down to nothing. A compulsion, really. There were mornings I would find blood on my white sheets and feel sick with shame. For the past few months I have been letting them grow. I have not stopped fixating on them. I just changed what the fixation looks like. I trim my cuticles, file my nails, buff them, use cuticle cream. I keep a nail file beside my bed and another in the TV room.

The restlessness is still there. I just gave it somewhere better to go.

I think we are often told that changing means getting rid of the parts of ourselves we dislike, but I am not sure it works that way. Sometimes the thing that once hurt you becomes useful when you point it somewhere else. The person who once struggled with their health becomes devoted to fitness. The person who spent years feeling lost ends up helping people through the same place they once stood. The thing that consumed them did not necessarily disappear. It was redirected.

I once heard that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I have always liked that because love and hate both carry energy. Attention has to go somewhere. Some of my old habits may not need to disappear as much as they need a better destination.

That got me thinking about the senses, and how sometimes the mind needs a little help changing tracks.

For months I had been asking my uncle what cologne he wears. A few weeks ago, he gave me a bottle. Aramis, the same one he has worn for as long as I have known him. He is the oldest of my uncles, the one I think of as the patriarch of the family, the keeper of the Passover seders now, the way my grandfather was before him. He is also a very successful businessman, something I have always respected about him.

Aramis smells like 1975. Bergamot and herbs up top, oakmoss and leather underneath. To me, it smells like a successful businessman who is well respected. The kind of man people listen to when he walks into a room. I picture a leather briefcase, nice shoes, somewhere important to be, and the certainty that he belongs there.

I have been an artist most of my life. I have done landscaping, bartending, retail, serving, demolition. I do not think the man with the briefcase matters more than the man on the demolition crew. But I have never needed nice shoes, so I have never really walked in them.

The cologne came at the perfect time. I had to give my first quarterly report at work, presenting everything I had done over the previous few months. I spent a ridiculous amount of time preparing it. The new owners of the clinic would be there, people I only see a couple of times a year, and I wanted to make a good impression. The more I wanted to do well, the more anxious I became.

The presentation was over Zoom. Before I logged on, I sprayed on the Aramis.

There was something theatrical about it. I have spent enough of my life acting to know what a costume piece can do. Sometimes you put on the jacket, the shoes, the watch, and your body suddenly understands something your brain has been struggling to believe. You stand differently. You speak differently. The character was always coming from you. The costume just helps bring him forward.

That morning, the cologne became my costume piece.

I could smell it while I presented, and every so often it reminded me of the kind of man I associated with it. Competent. Respected. Certain he belonged in the room.

I did well. Actually, I did really well.

After I finished, the marketing report began, and my manager, who had been watching from his office, sent me a text saying I had done a good job. It was such a small thing, but I felt myself exhale.

The cologne did not give the presentation. I did. I had already done the work. But for that hour, it helped me access the part of myself that knew I was prepared.

If I think, therefore I am does not do the trick, why not try I smell, therefore I am?

My wedding is thirty-seven days away, and I’m starting to feel the butterflies. The closer it gets, the more it feels a little like a bar mitzvah. Not a ceremony where a different person suddenly appears, but an extraordinary day that asks you to stop and recognize something that has already been growing for a long time. A marker along the way. Proof not only of how far you have grown, but of the roots beneath you that no one else can see.

The red light reminds me to sit still. The nail file reminds me that the same restless energy can learn to care. The cologne reminds me that sometimes confidence needs a costume before it becomes your own. And soon there will be a ring on my finger, something I will probably stop noticing after a while, but something that will remind me of the man beside me and the man I want to keep becoming beside him.

Maybe that is what we celebrate. Not the finished building, but the foundation finally strong enough to hold a skyscraper.

What’s your love language? Words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, touch. I’ve always had trouble answering. It makes me uneasy, like it’s something I should know about myself, and not knowing it feels like an internal red flag. I usually reach for words of affirmation, maybe acts of service, but never with much confidence.

Lately, I’ve wondered if that’s because neither one is really mine. What if the love language you’d pick isn’t the original one? What if it’s an adaptation? A reciprocity answer, the one you learned because what you actually needed was too scarce, too risky, or just felt wrong? Underneath both of mine, before either of them, there was touch.

My mother used to check me for a fever by pressing her lips to my keppie (which is a cute Yiddish word that means "head") and seal it with a kiss. When I had night terrors as a kid, she would lay beside me in my bed and rub my back until I fell asleep. I understood that before I understood the words I love you.

For a while, touch was safe. Maybe that’s where all of us begin. The first thing any of us did after being born was cry. Not just to complain, but as a solution. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby described that cry as part of an attachment system that keeps caregivers close. Bowlby was pushing back against the idea that babies simply attached to whoever fed them. Though research showed something richer. Yes, food mattered. So did closeness, comfort, and contact.

Being cared for was never only about being fed. So I wonder if, before love gets divided into five neat categories on a quiz, we all began with something simpler. Hold me. Stay close. Let me know I’m safe. Then we grow up, and love gets translated. Love is inherited like an accent. It doesn’t always sound like ‘I love you’. Sometimes it sounds like, ‘Did you eat?’ or ‘You must be tired’, or ‘Here, I fixed the thing you were dreading.’ Same love, different dialect. A child raised inside one of those dialects learns to recognize love in that particular shape and can become a little deaf to the rest.

If love can have an accent, perhaps our love language isn’t simply discovered; it’s also learned. And anything learned was learned for a reason. Human beings are remarkably good at adapting. When one way of getting a need met becomes unreliable, we find another route. Eventually, the workaround stops feeling like a workaround. It just feels like our personality. Maybe that’s why our love languages seem to shift over time. New parents running on no sleep may crave acts of service more than words. Someone recovering from illness may long for physical closeness. Someone who once treasured gifts might later find they only want to hear, I still believe in you. What we need love to look like often follows whatever we’re running short on.

Even culture bends it. In some families, love is spoken loudly. In others, it arrives with its sleeves rolled up, the shoveled driveway, the repaired fence, the meal wrapped in foil before you leave. But I keep wondering whether underneath all those adaptations, an earlier need quietly waits. For me, the early need was touch. And then puberty crept in like a wandering spider as I came to realize I was gay. For many gay boys, touch becomes complicated long before sex enters the picture. You notice your knee brushing another boy’s in gym class. You realize your eyes linger in the change room a second too long. You start learning that some kinds of touch are safe and others are not. Not every gay man grows up this way. Not every childhood follows the same script, but for many of us, affection between boys was mocked, policed, or confused with something shameful. We learned certain kinds of touch were off-limits. So we adapted.

After five years working in HIV prevention and sexual health, I’ve had conversations with hundreds of gay and bisexual men. Different ages, different backgrounds, different stories. And still, a similar tension surfaced. Many describe no difficulty finding people who desired them. What felt harder was allowing themselves to be cared for. Those aren’t the same thing. Desire says, I want your body. Care says you don’t have to earn the right to be here. Being wanted and being held can look similar from afar, but psychologically they require different kinds of vulnerability. Working in sexual health also taught me that the body is often more honest than we are. Research has linked sexual difficulties for some gay and bisexual men to stress, performance anxiety, fear of rejection, and internalized shame. None of those experiences are universal, and they are far from the only reasons someone might struggle sexually. But together, they point to something larger. Our emotional history doesn’t stay neatly inside our thoughts. Sometimes it follows us right into our bodies. And so, we spend a lot of time treating sex as if it’s only physical when for many people it’s also carrying years of training. Be attractive, perform, don’t disappoint him, don’t look insecure, don’t need too much, don’t ask him to stay. Sometimes that looks like confidence, when really it’s practice. Sometimes the body keeps the receipt. That observation changed how I think about love languages. Maybe our deepest need isn’t always the one we’re best at asking for. Maybe the thing we’re most fluent in is simply the thing that was safest.

And maybe that’s why the love language quiz never quite fit. Words of affirmation, acts of service. Sure. But those answers never reached the bottom. Touch did. Not sex, necessarily. Touch. A hand on your back when you’re anxious. Someone reaching for your hand without thinking. A kiss on the forehead. The kind of touch that says you don’t have to earn this. You’re here. I’m here. You can stay. Maybe there is no original love language. Maybe the five categories were never meant to carry this much psychological weight, but I know there was a language I spoke before I learned to hide anything.

I was at Shoppers Drug Mart looking for something else entirely when I looked up at the top shelf. I never really look up. But there it was: an aisle of sexual wellness that has been quietly growing for years. Multiple dildos and vibrators, right there on the top shelf, visible to anyone walking past. I wasn’t embarrassed. But I was shocked. Genuinely struck by what I was seeing in a mainstream drugstore. A woman owns her sexuality now, visible and unapologetic.

You know the aisle. It used to be half a shelf, if it existed at all. Condoms in three varieties, maybe one bottle of lube, all placed so you could grab what you needed in one motion and get to the register before your face changed color. Now it’s a full aisle. Multiple lube brands and condoms. Multiple dildos and vibrators. The industry calls this sexual wellness now. And yet. Nearly half of these purchases still happen online, and the industry is honest about why: privacy. The plain box. The unmarked envelope. We built the aisle, we grew the aisle, we lit it nicely, and we still walk down it a little too fast, eyes forward, like we’re passing an ex at a wedding.

I’ve spent the last five years working in sexual health, which means I’ve spent five years standing on the other side of a wall most people never see past, the wall between what people do and what people will say out loud. My job is answering the questions and booking the appointments people have been putting off for months or even years. And in every one of those small conversations, I watch someone decide, in real time, how much of themselves to admit to.

But here’s the thing: most people won’t even show up.

We run pop-up clinics and do outreach specifically because people are too inhibited, too ashamed to walk into a clinic and risk being seen. Being labeled. Being marked as the kind of person who needs that help. My job is to bridge that gap, to remove the embarrassment barrier so people can actually take care of themselves. But the irony is this: my job is to bring education and prevention, but shame is what’s actually preventing people from getting it. Once shame is overcome, we make sure it’s accessible. But shame is the hard part.

I mention PrEP, a pill that lowers your risk of getting HIV through sex by about ninety-nine percent, and I watch a woman give me a polite little shrug. Oh, that’s not really for me. I watch people step back from the whole conversation because admitting risk feels like admitting something about themselves. And the numbers don’t care about our silence. Washington State reported a forty-six percent increase in new HIV diagnoses among cisgender women between twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-four, the highest on record.

But here’s what I’ve actually learned from this work: prevention alone isn’t enough. You can hand someone a pill, but if they’re drowning in shame, they won’t take it. Real healing means teaching people to understand themselves, to recognize their own needs, to stop believing the stories they were told about what they’re allowed to want. It means addressing the shame, not just the disease.

The shame runs deep because we were taught it early. Religion, teachers, the culture around us- they all taught us that certain desires were wrong. So we learned to kill them in ourselves. And then here’s the cruel part: we learned to police them in others. We became the judges. It’s like we’re all walking around pouring dish soap on the cakes we secretly want to eat, making our own desires undesirable so nobody else can have them either. That’s how we shape identity, against our own desires. And that’s how the cycle continues, generation after generation. The shame and judgment don’t discriminate. They affect closeted men, confused women, all communities, everyone trapped in the same cycle of silence. And that silence, that’s what’s dangerous.

As Brené Brown says, “Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.” That’s exactly what happens. People hide because of shame, and the shame grows. It infects everything.

My great-uncle, Robert, died of HIV before I was old enough to understand what that meant. When I took this job, he was a fact in the family, not a feeling in me. Every year, for work, I go to the AIDS Candlelight Vigil. Everyone gets a candle, and one flame lights the next, until the whole crowd is glowing. Then everyone is invited to say a name, out loud, into the dark, of someone lost to HIV.

The first time I said his name, my voice cracked. And it’s cracked every year since. Every year I’m surprised by the lump in my throat, but every year, I say it a little louder. Every year, I’m a little braver. Because that moment, when all your defenses crack, when you stop performing toughness, when you admit you’ve been touched by death, that’s when you’re finally human. That’s the moment we spend our whole lives running from.

And that’s why I do this work. Not just to prevent disease. But to help people get to that moment, where they can stop pretending, stop being tough, stop avoiding what it means to be alive. Where they can finally admit: I am human. I have needs. I deserve care.

I stay in this work because healing is actually possible now. And here’s the part that matters: that healing isn’t just for the vulnerable or the marginalized. That truth applies to everyone. The leaders. The people in suits. The people with degrees. The people on different sides of every political divide. We’re all walking down that aisle. We’re all carrying the shame we were taught. We’re all uncertain about the same things. And the closer you look, the more ordinary everyone turns out to be.

We spend our whole lives trying to avoid being human in order to survive. But even a flower in the shade will grow sideways to reach the sun.

There’s an old line that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes. The kind of thing your dad says, half-joking, while he opens the mail.

Lately, it doesn’t feel like a joke. If those really are the only two guarantees, then it matters who decides what the taxes become. They become the TTC. Police response times. Which corner gets a streetlight. Whether a festival on a Saturday night stays a festival, or turns into a crime scene.

When you’re a kid, you don’t know about any of this, and you’re not supposed to. You get to trust that the adults, your parents, your teachers, eventually your government, are handling it while you worry about smaller things. I held onto that longer than I should have, mostly out of not knowing better, and because I had the privilege of feeling like I didn’t have much skin in the game.

I’ve written before about growing up Jewish here. Hebrew school twice a week. A bar mitzvah. Twelve summers at Jewish sleepaway camp. I never thought much of it beyond a good time with the other Jewish kids. But all along I was being filled with hydrogen, something I couldn’t see or smell. On October 7th, 2023, I found out I was flammable.

Three years on, I feel like I’ve branched off a branch off a branch, and this one is very thin. A minority of a minority. Gay and Jewish.

At some point, you become the adult everyone was talking about. We were the kids they called the future. We’re the ones in the seats now.

A government is like anything else you tend. Left alone, it grows wild. You pull the weeds and trim the hedges before they take over the yard; you cut your hair to keep it tidy and styled the way you like it.

I used to know exactly where I stood. I was liberal. I showed up for Black Lives Matter, for Asian hate, for women’s rights, every fight that wasn’t mine but felt like something I needed and wanted to stand with. I still believe in it. That hasn’t moved.

What’s moved is my faith that it was mutual.

Since October 7th, I’ve watched people I trusted go quiet in a specific way. Not about everything, just about this. The quiet isn’t neutral. It’s a ranking. Your fear can wait its turn.

I saw the ranking said out loud when a clip of the comedian Robby Hoffman went around. A New York Times interview where she was asked about antisemitism and answered, more or less, that it wasn’t the worst thing happening right now, that other injustices deserved the urgency more. People shared it like it was clarifying honesty.

She isn’t wrong that other things are urgent. Plenty are. I have no interest in a hierarchy where my fear outranks anyone else’s. What got me was the reflex. Antisemitism is bad, but. As if caring about everyone else requires putting Jewish fear on the clock first.

And I noticed the question works on anyone. Is antisemitism the worst thing happening right now? No. Is homophobia? No. There’s always something worse somewhere. Ask it of any group, and the answer comes back the same, which is how you move a whole people to the back of the line without ever saying so.

Then it stopped being a question I could argue about. In March, three synagogues here were shot at in the span of a week. Temple Emanu-El in North York was shot at the night of a Purim celebration, with people still inside. Then, Shaarei Shomayim, and in Thornhill, the Beth Avraham Yoseph congregation, both were sprayed with gunfire twenty minutes apart on the same night. In May, visibly Jewish men were shot at with a replica gun outside a synagogue on Bathurst. Those are just the ones that made the news.

Toronto police found that Jews were the target of eighty-two percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in this city last year, and thirty-five percent of every reported hate crime, full stop. We are less than three percent of the population. A Jewish Torontonian is now fourteen times more likely to be targeted than anyone else here. Fourteen times.

And it often feels like the only voices asking anyone to care are Jewish ones. I don’t think that’s apathy. For a lot of people, it’s a fear that anything touching Israel or Jewish identity can cost them a friendship or a job before they’ve finished the sentence. I understand that fear. I’ve had it. I still don’t know what to do with the fact that understanding it doesn’t make the silence easier to sit with.

What gets me is narrower: people who aren’t Jewish deciding what being Jewish is allowed to mean. For me, Israel and my Judaism don’t come apart cleanly. My holidays, where my family comes from, all run through the same place. Other Jews draw that line elsewhere, and I’m not claiming mine is the only honest version. But I get to say what it means to me.

The day before I sat down to write this, two men were shot dead at Salsa on St. Clair, a street festival that became a crime scene in under a minute, with thirteen thousand people running for the side streets. Whatever caused it, whoever it was meant for, that’s the city I’m getting married in this fall. It’s the city I call home.

Public safety used to be a phrase I filed under people I disagreed with. Now it just sounds like a basic thing to want.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: I haven’t stopped caring about the people the system has already failed. Riding the TTC late, watching how many people are sleeping on it because they have nowhere else to be, I’m watching a system fail in two directions at once. The people with nowhere to go, and the riders and the drivers who just want to get home. I don’t know how to want both out loud without someone deciding which one I really meant.

I think about this with supervised injection sites more than I’d like to admit. I work in health care. My whole professional life runs on the premise of harm reduction: people are going to do the thing regardless, and my job is to make sure they stay safe and protected without making them feel like garbage while I do it. I believe that. I’ve watched it work.

So I don’t know what to do with the fact that I walk past a site and feel something else entirely. Not compassion. Something smaller and less flattering. I’ve thought about that reaction a lot, and I still can’t decide whether it’s a real observation about a system that keeps people alive without ever offering them a door out, or whether it’s just me, tired, in an expensive city, wanting the corner to be nicer. Some days I’m sure it’s the first. Then I catch myself, and I’m not sure at all.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for. Most of the time, you aren’t choosing between good and evil. You’re choosing between trade-offs, and no side is going to see all of you.

A couple of months ago, Brad Bradford came to a friend’s place, a gay couple who’d gathered fifteen of us, all gay Jews, and just talked. No stage, no press release. A living room. He took questions. It didn’t tell me how he’d run a city. But I noticed how it landed in the room, and I noticed how it landed in me, which was more than I expected and more than I wanted.

None of which means Olivia Chow has failed. She hasn’t. Homicides last year were fewer than half the year before. 911 calls get answered faster. The city’s credit rating went up after she inherited a genuine mess. She held transit fares and funded the police rather than gutting them. And she fought for Hanlan’s Point, one of the oldest queer public spaces in the country, which, as a gay man, lands. I’m not going to wave that away because it complicates the story I’m telling.

But the safety her numbers report and the safety I actually feel are not the same city. Both are true. She has results, and I still flinch on the platform. The spreadsheet doesn’t get to decide which city I’m allowed to believe.

And I’m not pretending the man I’m leaning toward arrives clean. Bradford has his own integrity questions. A fundraiser that drew a formal complaint, a reprimand out of his last campaign, and a habit of shifting where he stands depending on the season. If I’m holding her to a standard, I have to hold him to it. He isn’t a savior. Nobody on this ballot is.

What I know is that I want less noise. More restraint, from everyone, including the people I mostly agree with. I don’t love what that says about me. It’s the first thing I’ve believed in years that I didn’t inherit from the room I was standing in, and it’s the reason a more conservative instinct has started to make sense to me. A sentence I would not have been able to type three years ago without deleting it.

So here’s where I’ve landed, and I want to be honest that it surprised me. I’m voting for Brad Bradford.

I didn’t expect that. Three years ago, I would have found this essay embarrassing. There’s a version of me that would read this and decide something had gone wrong with me.

It cost me something to get here, and I’m not sure I’ve finished paying. There are people who won’t ask why. I keep coming back to the old line about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, and how it applies to the city and who we vote for. It also applies to me. Waiting for the room to say something, but all I hear is nothing.

I’ll be on my honeymoon when Toronto votes this October. I’ve already registered, so I can vote before I leave. It’s the most adult thing I’ve done all year that had nothing to do with a seating chart.

Becoming a mensch was never about being agreeable. It was about being honest enough to say what you actually believe, even when it refuses to sort into a side. I didn’t change. I just stopped waiting for permission to say where I stand.

It was Toronto Pride last weekend. Without really planning it, I found myself standing in the space between almost every part of my life.

Between Pride and my wedding. Between grief and gratitude. Between fear and courage. Between the man I’ve been and the man I’m still becoming. Today, on my fiancé's birthday, we officially sent out our wedding invitations. Not envelopes. Just an email. One click.

Somewhere, hundreds of inboxes now hold an invitation to witness one of the most important days of our lives. It made everything feel real. The day before, during Pride weekend, we had our wedding shower.

Instead of spending Saturday at a packed patio or dancing through the Village, we spent it in my parents’ backyard. There were about thirty people there. Our parents. Our friends. My best man came from Ottawa.

The barbecue was going. People were laughing. Gifts were being opened. Conversations overlapped the way they only can when everyone already knows one another. It wasn’t flashy. It was family. And for the first time, I caught a glimpse of what our wedding might actually feel like.

At some point, my dad quietly pulled me aside. “Are you going to say a toast?” The truth is, I’d already written one. I even had a lorazepam in my pocket. Public speaking still terrifies me. I had almost convinced myself not to do it. My fiancé, who has his own discomfort with being the center of attention, had gently encouraged me to skip it. I understood why.

I asked my dad what he thought. Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” It reminded me of standing on the end of a diving board as a kid. There comes a moment when thinking is no longer helpful. You don’t suddenly become brave. You just jump before your brain talks you out of it.

So I stood up. I read my speech from my phone. My hands shook. My voice trembled. But something unexpected happened. Nobody was judging me. Every single person in that backyard wanted me to succeed. It made me realize that gratitude sometimes deserves a few minutes of our discomfort.

Maybe courage isn’t the absence of fear. Maybe it’s deciding that saying thank you is more important than staying comfortable. And FYI, I did not end up taking the lorazepam.

The next day, we went to a Pride party. I danced with my shirt off beside the man I’m about to marry. Across my ribs is a tattoo written in Hebrew. At one point, I noticed two men looking in my direction. Immediately, my mind went to my tattoo.

Since October 7th, I’ve received messages calling me names. I’ve lost friendships. There are people I’ve crossed paths with who have made it clear they don’t think someone who believes Israel has a right to exist belongs in the same spaces they do.

Those experiences don’t disappear when you walk into a crowded room. They become the lens through which you read it. I leaned over to my fiancé. “I think they’re looking at my tattoo.” When one of them tried to say something, I instinctively replied, “Yeah... it’s Hebrew.”

I was already defending myself. As we were leaving, one of the men stopped my fiancé. He recognized me from years ago. The other simply wanted to tell him he thought I was attractive.

I laughed afterward. Not because my fear had been irrational. It wasn’t. It came from real experiences. But because I realized how quickly our minds fill empty spaces with the stories we’ve been carrying.

Around the same time, I finished reading Here All Along by Sarah Hurwitz, Michelle Obama’s former head speechwriter. I picked up the book because somewhere over the past couple of years, I’d become so consumed by the politics surrounding Judaism that I realized I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to simply be Jewish.

Not to defend it. Not to debate it. Just to love it. The book reminded me of something I’d forgotten. Judaism has never been the religion of easy answers. It’s the religion of questions.

One story in particular stayed with me. Jeff Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland, asks his students what the most important part of a page of Talmud is. Most people answer the Mishnah. Or the Gemara. Or the commentaries. His answer is different.

The most important part is the space surrounding the text. Because it reminds us that the conversation isn’t finished. There is still room for our voices. I haven’t stopped thinking about that. Maybe that’s what I love most about Judaism. Not certainty. Curiosity.

A chuppah isn’t simply something you stand under. It’s the home you’re promising to build together. The breaking of the glass reminds us that even at life’s happiest moments, the world is still imperfect.

A ketubah isn’t simply paperwork. It’s a promise of responsibility. Everything means something. Everything asks another question. As a gay man, that’s the Judaism I recognize. The one who has made room for me. The one that will welcome two men beneath a chuppah in just a few months.

This week, I also lit a yahrzeit candle for the two-year anniversary of my dog Billy’s passing. Some people might think it’s strange to include a dog in an essay about faith and marriage. I don’t. Love leaves its mark, whether it lasts fifteen years or fifty. Grief has a way of reminding us what mattered.

Looking back on this week, I don’t think Pride was really about Pride. It was about identity. About belonging. About learning that communities, like people, are imperfect. About realizing that courage isn’t found in one grand gesture, but in dozens of small ones. Standing up to give a speech. Sending wedding invitations. Walking into Pride with a Hebrew tattoo on your ribs.

Choosing gratitude over anxiety.

Choosing curiosity over certainty.

In a few months, my fiancé and I will stand beneath a chuppah, sign our ketubah, and begin a marriage that generations before us probably couldn’t have imagined. I don’t feel like we’re breaking tradition. I feel like we’re becoming part of it.

Maybe that’s what becoming a mensch has been teaching me all along. Not that life gets simpler. Not that identity becomes easier.

But that somewhere between fear and faith, between tradition and change, between the stories we’ve inherited and the ones we’re still writing...

...there is space.

And maybe that’s where we become who we’re meant to be.

Today, traffic came to a standstill while I was driving across the Danforth Bridge.

The kind of standstill that inevitably brings out the worst in people. Car horns. Sighs. The occasional creative use of profanity. Road rage disguised as impatience.

And yet, while everyone around me seemed desperate to move forward, my attention drifted elsewhere.

Standing at the lookout on the bridge was an elderly couple.

They weren’t taking photos. They weren’t speaking. They were simply looking.

The man gently attempted to wrap his arm around the woman, fumbling slightly as he searched for a comfortable position. He tried once, then again. Both attempts betrayed the quiet fragility that comes with age.

Then she took her turn.

She, too, struggled to find a comfortable way to wrap herself around him.

Eventually, they abandoned the effort altogether and simply shifted closer until their shoulders touched.

And for some reason, that stopped me.

Maybe it was because they looked old enough to have earned the right to reflect. Or maybe it was because I realized they represented a different kind of height.

We often think perspective comes from elevation. A mountain peak. A penthouse. An observation deck.

But perhaps age is its own summit.

Perhaps a life well lived is another kind of mountain.

And there they stood, high above the city and high above time, looking out at both.

I’ve noticed something about human beings. We’re obsessed with getting higher.

As children, we race to the top of the playground and declare ourselves king of the castle. Castles were built on hills. Athletes stand on podiums. We climb corporate ladders.

Even our language betrays us.

Up is good. Down is bad.

Everything seems organized around elevation, around the belief that somewhere above us lies a better view.

Today had been one of those days when I felt very far from the top. I know. Groundbreaking.

Work was frustrating.

I work in healthcare, and lately, it feels as though many of the people doing the actual work are exhausted. The people closest to the ground often seem unheard, while decisions are made by people so far removed from reality that they no longer have to live with the consequences.

It left me angry.

It left me feeling small.

So I went for a walk.

And because there are few problems a slice of pizza can’t temporarily soften, I stopped into Eataly.

I grabbed a pepperoni slice and sat upstairs by the window.

And there it was again.

A view.

Looking down onto Bloor Street.

Only this time, staring back at me was a large television production. Trucks lined the road. Crew members hurried around carrying equipment. Dreams were being made.

And suddenly I wasn’t looking at a film set.

I was looking at a dream I thought I’d left behind.

Because no matter how often I tell myself I’ve moved on from acting, I haven’t.

The truth is far less dramatic.

The dream never died.

It just got tired.

For years, I convinced myself I no longer cared. Yet every time I see a film set, every time I watch a story come to life, something inside me still stirs.

And here’s the strange thing.

A few weeks ago, I re-signed with the very first agent who signed me straight out of theatre school in 2013.

Twelve years later, our paths crossed again.

Not through acting classes or auditions, but through my work. My company ended up sponsoring events he was involved with. We reconnected. Conversations happened. Doors quietly opened.

And suddenly I found myself standing at the beginning of something that looked suspiciously like an ending I thought had already happened.

Part of me is excited.

Part of me is terrified.

But mostly, I find myself approaching it differently.

When I was younger, I needed acting to prove something.

Now I have a life.

I have a career that keeps me grounded.

People I love.

A stronger sense of who I am.

The dream hasn’t returned to save me.

It has returned to meet me.

And maybe that’s what perspective does.

It doesn’t change the mountain.

It changes the climber.

As I sat there, I found myself wondering if maybe my problem wasn’t that the dream was impossible.

Maybe it was that I was standing too close to it.

Maybe my perspective had become too narrow to see the path ahead.

I once heard that when we spend too much time staring at our phones, books, or computer screens, the muscles in our eyes remain contracted. Looking toward the horizon allows them to relax. It is one of the reasons staring out over a lake, a skyline, or an ocean can feel so restorative.

The horizon is relief.

A massage for the eyes.

Perhaps dreams work the same way.

Maybe I’ve spent so many years staring directly at mine that I’ve forgotten to step back and see it clearly.

That thought reminded me of another view.

A few years ago, I lived on the thirty-first floor of a condo overlooking a cemetery and a forest beyond it. Every morning, I watched the sunrise. Every season, I watched the trees change.

I’ve always loved sunsets.

Part of it is their impermanence. The fact that they only last a few fleeting moments forces us to stop what we’re doing and pay attention.

But that’s not why I love them.

I love sunsets because they’re beautiful.

They’re warm.

They’re vibrant.

They’re playful.

Nobody looks at a sunset and says it’s ugly.

For a few moments, regardless of who we are, we all stop and admire the same thing.

When I was younger, there were times I worried that who I was might not be something people liked. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too much.

And yet I was always drawn to sunsets.

Maybe because they never apologized for being bright.

Maybe because everyone seemed to love them for exactly the qualities they couldn’t hide.

There’s something comforting about that.

As though every evening, the sky reminds us that beauty doesn’t have to apologize for taking up space.

One autumn evening, while watching the forest beneath a setting sun, I noticed something I’d never seen before.

The leaves had become the same color as the sky.

As though the leaves and the sunset were participating in the same farewell.

That day I wrote my favorite line I’ve ever written:

“The leaves mocked the golden sun as they too took their final bow.”

I often joke that it’s the kind of line I’d want engraved on my tombstone.

Not because it’s morbid.

But because it captures something I believe.

That endings aren’t always tragedies.

Sometimes they’re curtain calls.

Sometimes they’re proof that something beautiful happened at all.

Which makes me wonder if we’ve misunderstood mountains altogether.

People risk their lives climbing Everest. They endure suffering, exhaustion, and sometimes death just to reach the summit.

And maybe life often feels the same way.

A constant climb toward some imagined peak.

A career.

A relationship.

A dream.

A version of ourselves.

Maslow’s hierarchy, if drawn differently, might look less like a pyramid and more like a mountain.

The question is whether the summit is actually the point.

Or whether the point is what happens when we finally stop long enough to appreciate the view.

Astronauts experience something called the Overview Effect. After seeing Earth from space, many describe a profound shift in perspective. Borders disappear. Politics disappear. The things that consume our daily lives suddenly seem much smaller.

Many return more reflective, more connected, and more aware of how fragile life really is.

Perhaps that’s what every lookout point offers us, just on a smaller scale.

A chance to zoom out.

A chance to remember that the thing we’ve been obsessing over might not be the thing that matters most.

Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to views.

Not because we want to see farther.

Because we want to see differently.

A view forces us to zoom out. To stop obsessing over the next rung of the ladder and acknowledge how far we’ve already climbed.

Maybe that’s what the elderly couple understood that I didn’t.

When I first saw them, I assumed they were looking out at the city.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe they were looking back.

Back at the mountain they had spent a lifetime climbing.

The victories.

The disappointments.

The dreams that came true.

The ones that didn’t.

The ordinary moments that somehow became a life.

Maybe that’s why an elderly couple standing quietly on a bridge could bring an entire day to a halt.

Because every now and then life gently grabs our chin, turns our head toward the horizon and says:

Look.

Look how far you’ve come.

Look how much there is to be grateful for.

Look how beautiful it all is from up here.

So I’ll leave you with a question.

When was the last time you stopped long enough to take in the view?

Not the scenery.

Your view.

The distance you’ve traveled.

The weight you’ve carried.

The dreams you’ve chased.

The life you’ve built.

And when you looked out at the horizon, did you see how far you still had to go?

Or did you finally notice how far you’ve already come?

I never really know where my essays are going when I start writing them. This time, I found myself thinking about relationships.

Maybe because one of my closest friends recently started dating someone and, only a few weeks in, was already questioning whether she should continue. Maybe because I’m getting married this year. Maybe because, despite no longer being single, I still find people endlessly fascinating.

So I did what I usually do when I’m curious about something: I asked people questions. What surprised you most about being in a long-term relationship?

What’s one thing nobody warned you about? What makes a relationship last? What ended yours? I expected answers about romance. Instead, people kept talking about communication, humor, transparency, compromise, friendship, curiosity, respect, and learning how to repair arguments.

One person wrote, “Remembering you’re a team.” Another said, “Love continues to grow.” One response that stuck with me simply said: “Getting the most happiness out of watching reruns on a Tuesday.”

Nobody talked about soulmates. Nobody talked about fireworks. Nobody talked about destiny.

The people who had actually lived relationships weren’t describing a feeling. They were describing a practice. And that surprised me, because we’re often taught that love is something you find.

These responses suggested it’s something you build. The more answers I read, the more I noticed another pattern. Nobody seemed disappointed by the reality of long-term love.

One person wrote, “How hard it is literally all the time.” Another said, “Relationships are constantly being negotiated as each person grows.” Someone else said, “How much compromise one is willing to make when you’ve found the right person.” Yet none of them sounded discouraged. If anything, they sounded grateful. Which got me thinking about connection itself.

As a gay man, I’ve often noticed that many of us start life as sensitive kids. Curious kids. Open kids. And somewhere along the way, many of us learn to protect those parts of ourselves.

Maybe it’s bullying. Maybe it’s rejection. Maybe it’s simply learning that being different comes with consequences. So we adapt. We become tougher. More guarded. We learn how not to care.

Or at least how to look like we don’t. The problem is that survival skills and relationship skills are often completely different things. The qualities that help us survive—guardedness, self-protection, emotional distance—are often the opposite of the qualities that help us connect.

A few years ago, during COVID, I participated in a group Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program. It was uncomfortable. Not because of the exercises, but because I had to sit and listen to strangers talk honestly about their fears, loneliness, relationships, and struggles.

What I took away from it wasn’t a coping mechanism. It was perspective. Everybody has something.

Everybody.

Hearing other people’s stories has a way of pulling you out of your own head. It reminds you that every person you pass is carrying something invisible. One of the smaller lessons from the program was to keep a slight curl in the corners of your mouth throughout the day.

Not a giant grin. Not fake happiness. Just enough to soften. It sounds silly. But I noticed that when I did it, I looked up more. I made more eye contact. People smiled back. The world felt a little less hostile. And maybe that’s part of what I’ve been thinking about ever since.

We spend so much time trying to look desirable, interesting, successful, or unbothered that we forget how important it is to be approachable. I’ve walked past people and assumed they were giving me a dirty look when they were probably just shy. I’ve done the same thing myself. Most of us have.

Particularly in a world dominated by apps and screens, we can become so focused on protecting ourselves that we accidentally stop inviting connection altogether.

Not just a romantic connection.

Human connection.

A smile.

A conversation.

A moment of curiosity.

A willingness to engage.

The phrase “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” has always sounded a little corny to me. But the older I get, the more truth I find in it. Not because smiling guarantees love. Not because kindness fixes loneliness. But because the energy we bring into the world matters.

When I look back at all the responses people sent me, what strikes me most is how ordinary their answers were. Communication. Friendship. Humour. Transparency. Teamwork. Reruns on a Tuesday. Not perfection. Not soulmates. Just people choosing to stay connected.

Maybe that’s what love really is. And maybe that’s true beyond relationships, too. Maybe the challenge isn’t finding the right people.

Maybe it’s staying soft enough to recognize them when they arrive.

The other week, I sat at a circular table in the middle of a big empty room and said nothing.

The chef stood before us, me, my fiancé, and both sets of our parents, presented with what would become the menu for our wedding. The chef stood while we sat, the six of us at one table in the center of the room, and brought dish after dish: the fish, the Soups, the chicken, the beef, and the desserts. Each one was plated beautifully and placed in front of us with quiet pride. The chicken and fish were a little bland. Not bad. Just underseasoned.

I ate it and said nothing.

Everyone else spoke up gently, professionally, the way adults do when they want to advocate for themselves without causing offense. And I sat there nodding and thinking: I could add salt. I’m fine. The chef worked so hard. I don’t want to make him feel bad. He’s standing up there, and we’re all sitting here like we’re judging him, and I know what that feels like, and I just... can’t.

So I said nothing.

This is me. I protect people from discomfort at the expense of my own voice, especially when I can feel their vulnerability, when I can see it in their posture, in the way they’re standing while I’m seated. I know what it’s like to be assessed. I’ve been assessing my own safety my entire life. You don’t grow up gay without developing an almost preternatural sensitivity to how a room is reading you.

A week later, I attended a wedding. A beautiful, extremely heterosexual wedding, Greek, Roman Catholic, and Italian, conducted in a church by a priest who spoke warmly about serving your husband, serving your bride. During the cocktail hour, the hors d’oeuvres were served on the most impractical plates I have ever encountered. No edge. No depth. Just a flat slab with a slight inconvenient wave in it. I overloaded mine with jumbo shrimp and calamari, because the food was genuinely delicious and I have no self-control, and a piece of calamari fell to the floor. There were three high tops, none available. No place to set the plate down. I looked at the calamari. I looked around the room.

I ate it off the floor.

This is also me.

My Substack, Becoming a Mensch, started as a way to document the journey to my wedding on October 3rd. To trace who I’m becoming as I move toward one of the biggest days of my life. And what I keep finding, in the small moments, is the same pattern: me disappearing into myself. Me making myself smaller. Me performing a version of myself designed to make everyone else comfortable.

I’ve been wearing a clown nose for most of my life. Not literally. But I learned early that if I was funny, the one making people laugh, they wouldn’t have to figure out what to do with me. I came out in grade 12. I was 16, charming, a face full of acne, self-deprecating, and easy to be around, and what I was actually doing was managing their discomfort with my existence. Making myself into something they could digest. A gay clown. Harmless. Entertaining. Not a whole person with a complicated interior who also happens to like the same sex.

You can’t sustain that forever. But you can sustain it for a very long time.

My fiancé and I are getting married in front of 170 people.

That number still catches in my chest a little. It became a big wedding organically. Family, friends, community, people we love, and I’m genuinely happy about it. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also aware of what a hundred and seventy people means. It means people I haven’t seen in years. It means the aunts and uncles and distant cousins and plus-ones who’ve never been to a gay wedding before, who I can already imagine telling their friends about it like it’s a novelty event. “I’m going to a gay wedding.”

I don’t want to be a spectacle. I want to be witnessed.

These are different things.

At the wedding last weekend, during the reception, the groom’s father compared marriage to a football game. I glanced at my fiancé and shared an eyeroll. I thought about how weddings are so entirely constructed around a particular script, bride, groom, masculine, feminine, the priest who tells you to serve each other in very specific, gendered terms, and how I’ve spent so many years watching that script play out like a puzzle in everyday life. A puzzle I was never supposed to solve, even though I tried. Those aren’t my pieces.

What my fiancé and I have been slowly, carefully building is a wedding that speaks our actual language. The dark mahogany chairs we chose. The clear glass chargers with black trim that, I said to him, look like tuxedos, against the off-white linen. Every detail was chosen intentionally, because design is a kind of language, and for the first time in my life, I get to speak it without translating it for someone else first.

We are not doing a sweetheart table. Neither of us wants to sit on display like an exhibit. We want to be in the room, not presiding over it. There’s a difference between intimacy and spectacle, and I’ve spent enough of my life performing that I know which one I actually need.

Here’s what scares me most: not the judgment. Not even the people who’ll treat it like a novelty. What scares me is that I won’t be able to take off the nose.

That I’ll stand there in front of a hundred and seventy people and default to the performance. The charm, the lightness, the Evan who makes everyone comfortable at his own expense. Because that’s what I know. That’s been the safest version of me for a very long time.

My wedding is me confronting a lifetime of hiding. All those years of managing my voice, my walk, my laugh. Of making myself invisible so that other people could feel comfortable around the fact of my existence. If this were a video game, the wedding is the final boss, and I mean that sincerely, even if it makes me sound like I’m complaining about my own happiest day. It’s the moment where I have to stand there with my fiancé and let myself be seen. Not managed. Not performed. Actually seen.

I want people to leave and think: oh. He’s just a person. A human being who loves someone and got married and cried and laughed and existed, fully, in a room, in front of me. Not a gay clown. Not a spectacle. A person.

I know trauma lives in the body. I know my body is going to carry all of it into that room, the fear, the history, the years of hiding, because that’s where it lives. I also have beta blockers in my drawer, which my fiancé and I may or may not use.

But when I look into his eyes, I feel safe. And that’s the thing about doing this in front of a hundred and seventy people: it’s not just for them. It’s for the version of me who spent years performing for rooms that didn’t even know he was performing. It’s for that person, finally getting to exist without the nose.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about “The Art of Bending” — how my rabbi told me to start yoga, to soften my edges physically and emotionally, to approach conflict differently. It stuck. I’ve gone back ten times now. Same teacher. Same room.

Every class, she moves through the bodies like she’s tuning them. And when her hands land on you, so gently, everything in your body goes quiet.

I wanted more of that. So I asked her.

She told me she works at a place called Tingles Bar. Sessions built entirely around gentle touch and sensation. Brushes, hands, textures. I booked thirty minutes. Paid the money. Lay down.

There’s something faintly embarrassing about wanting to be touched like that. Not sexually. Not romantically. Just… deliberately. Like a child, almost. I kept thinking: why do I need this?

Then she started.

A brush across my arm. Fingertips at my neck. A back scratcher tracing patterns I couldn’t predict. My body reacted before my mind could decide what it meant.

I lay on my side with my eyes closed, hugging a pillow. Her hand rested on my shoulder. The other moved through my hair.

A tear rolled down my face.

It didn’t feel dramatic. It felt obvious. Like something that had been waiting.

I walked outside afterward and started writing immediately.

What I didn’t expect was where it would take me. Not somewhere heavy, but somewhere earlier.

The camp mom who would tickle my back when I was homesick in my bunk. My mom running her fingers through my hair when I couldn’t sleep. Lice checks — that slow drag down your spine just to make you shiver. Cootie shots. Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk run down…

We knew how to touch each other before we knew what touch meant.

Before it carried signals. Before it had stakes. Before, it meant something about who you were, or what you wanted, or what was expected next.

There was just sensation.
You’re here. I’m here.
Look at this strange feeling.

Somewhere along the way, that disappeared.

Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just got buried under everything else. Desire. Performance. Interpretation. History. The quiet negotiations that come with being known by someone over time.

Hard to let your body react without translating it.

Hard to shiver without meaning.

But with a stranger, a professional, you don’t have to explain yourself. You’re not a partner, or a role, or a history. You’re just a body again. Just nerves and skin.

And maybe that’s what I was paying for.

Not just the touch itself, but permission to feel something without deciding what it meant.

And then I thought about my mom.

How much of her life was spent being the one who gives touch. The one who comforts, who steadies, who stays up with you when you’re scared. When was the last time anyone touched her like that? Without needing anything in return?

I’m getting her a session.

I walked out of Tingles Bar, and my body felt different. Not dramatically. Just… awake.

I’d had three or four real shivers, goosebumps moving, slowly, deliberately, across my skin.

I hadn’t felt that in a long time.

It felt familiar.

I was writing a scene recently for my pilot. A boy comes home from a birthday party at a water park. His mom asks which slide he liked best. She expects the tall one, the straight drop, the one he had been waiting two years to be tall enough for.

He thinks about it. Says it was boring. You can see the whole thing from the top. You already know how it ends.

His favorite was the other one. Black Magic. All these turns you could not see. A waterfall that came out of nowhere, shot you up, and then back down into a funnel, not knowing if you were going left or right.

“Was it scary?”

“Yeah. But like, good scary. I could not tell if it was scary or just exciting.”

There is something about knowing how something ends that flattens it.

I saw something recently about why time seems to speed up as we get older. When you are a kid, everything is new. Your brain is paying attention. But as an adult, routine takes over. The days flatten. Monday through Friday becomes something you move through to get to the weekend.

I recognized myself in that. Rushing through my actual life to get to the part that felt like living.

The hard truth is, we will never be this young again.

They say isolation is as hard on the body as smoking. I believe it.

There is a kind of loneliness that does not look like loneliness. You are surrounded by people. You have plans. You go out. And still, something feels just slightly out of reach, like everyone else got a manual you missed.

I sit across from someone new, and within seconds, I can feel it, the script kicking in. How is it going? What is new? How long have you been here?

I can do it. I just do not want to.

It feels like performing a version of connection instead of actually connecting.

So you start to avoid it, or numb it, or keep your world just small enough that you do not have to go through it again.

And it works, until it does not.

About ten years ago, I played volleyball in a league. I was good. It was part of my life in a way that did not require thinking. You just showed up and played.

Then I moved to Vancouver to pursue acting. Somewhere in that shift, the move, the change in direction, a back injury, volleyball quietly fell away.

When I came back a couple of years later, my life looked full on the outside. But I felt it, that low, constant loneliness that does not quite announce itself. And I never really found my way back to it.

Last year, through work, my company sponsored the same volleyball league I had played in almost a decade ago, TSVL. I am the outreach coordinator. Sponsorships are my job. But something about that one felt different. It did not feel like work. It felt like a tap on the shoulder.

I was already placed on a team. Wednesday night.

I remember standing just inside the gym that first night, holding the ball, scanning the room. People were warming up in clusters, easy, familiar. Passing like they had been doing it together for years.

And then I started recognizing faces I had not seen in almost a decade. Still there. Still playing.

That is when it hit me, this was not just a league people passed through. People stayed. They built something here.

I will not lie, for a moment, I felt out of place, like the first day of high school.

But it did not last long.

We stepped onto the court and started tossing the ball around. There is something timeless about that. You are never too old to throw a ball back and forth.

A few minutes later, the game started. I stood there, waiting to receive, quietly hoping I would not mess it up.

I missed the first ball.

And I felt it, that familiar flash of embarrassment.

But before it could stick, my teammates were already there, high fives, a quick “next play,” and we moved on.

Something shifted in me right there.

In a world where perfection feels like the goal, I was being encouraged just for trying.

I got better quickly. Confidence led to ability. The muscle memory came back faster than I expected.

But what stayed with me was not how I played, it was how it felt to be there.

Present. Clear. Part of something again.

My team spans the late twenties to the fifties, and across the league, there are people well into their sixties. Different levels, rec, intermediate, competitive, all moving alongside each other. And you would be surprised, some of the hardest serves come from the people you least expect.

We are mostly gay men, with allies who showed up and just fit.

Here’s how it happens. You keep showing up. Week after week, you learn each other, who sets up the play, who panics under pressure, and how to have your teammates’ backs when they go up for a block. And before you know it, you’re at dim sum on a Sunday afternoon, showing them post–hair transplant photos of your swollen face, laughing your head off.

It is a different kind of environment than most of the spaces we are told to invest in. At the gym, you can spend an hour improving your body and never speak to anyone.

Here, you are moving, sweating, competing, but the room is full of high fives. Encouragement. People who are just happy you showed up.

Trying is enough. Being there is enough.

I met two of my closest friends, brothers to me now, through a gay dodgeball league over a decade ago. Same thing. I signed up alone. Did not know anyone. And then suddenly, you are part of something. A team.

And then, without noticing exactly when it happened, a life.

I still struggle with losing. Something in me, the perfectionism, the part that learned early that performing well meant being valued, still tightens when the score is not going our way.

But I look around the court, and I see people who are just happy to be there, cheering each other on. I recognize the ones who struggle with losing, as I do, and I watch their teammates lift them up with high fives, reminding them it is just a game. Win or lose, they keep showing up for each other.

The mistake isn’t what lingers. It’s how quickly you get pulled back in.

My team holds me there.

Volleyball, in a way I did not expect, is re-parenting me. I am learning that I can show up and be liked, whether I am good or bad, sharp or rusty. That I do not have to earn my place every time.

Wednesday night is now my favorite night of the week.

My mom is almost seventy. She heard about pickleball from a friend and decided to try it, even though she was nervous about not being good.

Now they call her “the smasher.”

She recently had surgery on her hand and could not play for a few weeks. She was devastated, not just because she could not play, but because she missed her people. So she still showed up, just to watch, just to be with them.

She built a group, which they jokingly call the Junior Shvesters. They play mahjong, Mexican train, travel together, and laugh constantly.

She is the most social, most alive I have ever seen her.

She found her recess.

I asked my Instagram followers what their thing was, their sport, their club, their community. The responses came quickly. Hockey leagues. Book clubs. Softball teams. Mahjong.

Someone told me they had been in the same league for fifteen years and still loved meeting new people. Someone else joined as a substitute and is about to start their third season.

And then there was the message that stuck with me.

I wish I had something like this.

Recess used to be built into our lives. You did not have to think about it. You just ran outside and found your people.

No one tells you that, as an adult, you have to build it yourself.

That no one is coming to assign you a team.

So here is what I want to know: what is your thing, what is your Wednesday night?

A sport, a class, a choir, a table somewhere. Something you loved as a kid and quietly gave up. Something you have not tried yet.

Because the structures we build our lives around change. People move. Relationships shift. And when they do, you need somewhere to go.

Not because you are lonely.

Because you are human.

Because we are wired, in ways we do not always admit, to find our people and play.

The world feels heavy right now. I know. I am not saying volleyball fixes that.

I am saying, show up once. Not knowing anyone. Be bad at it. Be real.

Let the turns come.

You will not know if it is scary or exciting.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about having kids.

I’m getting older. Life is moving. And for the first time, this isn’t just an idea. It’s something that feels like it’s quietly shaping the direction of my future.

I wanted to do some mild research for this essay, so I posted two simple questions on Instagram: Why did you have kids? ” And why didn’t you have kids? As well as a bonus question: why did you have kids after 40?

Here is what people had to say;

No One Is Neutral About This

What struck me right away is that no one sits in the middle.

People either feel deeply hesitant or deeply certain.

Some responses were blunt:

“It looks exhausting.” “They annoy me.” “It’s expensive.” “With everything going on, I don’t even know where I’d raise a kid.”

There’s a realism to that. A kind of modern hesitation tied to more than just age. It’s about the world, stability, money, energy, and uncertainty.

But then, underneath that, something else started to come through.

Something quieter, but stronger.

The Why Behind It All

People kept coming back to the same ideas:

“I want a family.” “People to love and mentor.” “To pass down what I’ve learned.” “I’m afraid of being alone.”

That last one stayed with me.

Because it’s not something people always say out loud. But when they do, it cuts through everything else.

And then there’s the version people hope is true:

“Fulfillment.” “Unconditional love.” “Being the parent I wish I had.” “A sense of purpose.”

Two competing narratives:

This will drain me. This will complete me.

Maybe the truth is both.

What People Who’ve Done It Say

One response stood out. Someone who actually did it.

They had their first child at 39 and knew they wanted more. They talked about the physical toll: how exhausting it is, how hard it is on your body, how staying strong and healthy becomes essential even when you’re running on no sleep.

But what surprised me most was this: they said it wasn’t as hard as they expected.

That having lived their life already, going out and experiencing everything, made it easier to step into parenthood. They were calmer. More grounded. Less reactive.

And then they said something I haven’t been able to shake:

“I love and like my kids more than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s impossible to understand until you have them.”

The Reality of Timing

I’m 37.

And even saying that in this context feels different from how it used to.

Because this isn’t something that happens overnight, especially not for two wannabe dads. The process, whether it’s surrogacy or adoption, can take years. Realistically, we wouldn’t even begin until after our wedding in October. From there, it could easily be another two years or more before anything actually happens.

Which means I’m not just thinking about having a child.

I’m thinking about becoming a parent in my 40s.

And that’s where this all starts to feel very real. Not in a scary, spiraling way. In a grounding way. A clarifying way. Like time isn’t something I can ignore anymore. Like how I would be sixty as my kid graduates from high school. Maybe it’s not something I need to panic about, just something I need to be honest about.

And Then There’s Everything Else

Because this isn’t just about age for me.

It’s also about being gay, and that adds a layer that I don’t think people fully understand unless they’re in it.

It’s not just when to have a child. It’s how.

Surrogacy. Adoption. Legalities. Cost. Timing. Access. Uncertainty.

It’s complicated in a way that isn’t optional.

The Part That’s Hard to Admit

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a couple of videos I haven’t been able to shake.

One was a young far-right conservative kid approaching a gay couple holding their baby. Provoking them. Asking if they believed gay fathers were predators, pushing and pushing until it escalated into a fight. This then pushed a narrative that they were unfit to be dads.

And then I read the comments. There where hundereds.

“This should be illegal.” “He shouldn’t be allowed near children.” “This is buying a baby.” “Pray for that child.”

What struck me most wasn’t just the hate. It was the certainty. No curiosity. No nuance. Just complete confidence that people like me shouldn’t be parents.

And then I saw it again, from a place I didn’t expect.

From an Instagram account within my own Jewish community.

And that part made everything feel smaller.

Because it’s one thing to be judged by people who don’t understand you. It’s another to feel it from people you thought were yours.

The Question I Didn’t Want to Ask

I found myself thinking something I didn’t expect:

Am I wrong for wanting this?

Is it wrong for a child not to have a mother?

I’ve gone back and forth on that more times than I’d like to admit.

I understand where some of these reactions come from. Childbirth is real. It’s physical. It’s something I will never experience. I can see how certain things can feel confusing or even disrespectful to people.

But the conversation doesn’t stay there.

It becomes: You shouldn’t be a parent.

And that’s a very different thing to sit with.

What I Keep Coming Back To

But then I come back to reality. Not the internet. Actual life.

Children are raised in all kinds of circumstances: single-parent families, divorced families, loss, absence, and unexpected situations. And those children aren’t automatically broken.

What matters isn’t a perfect structure. It’s stability. Love. Presence. Intention.

And one thing I keep hearing from people who’ve done this later in life is that they chose it. They thought about it. They questioned it. They wanted it.

The Moment I Didn’t Realize Meant So Much

There was a moment, years ago, that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

A lesbian couple I knew asked if I would be their sperm donor.

I said yes immediately.

We had meetings. Conversations. It started becoming real. I was preparing for testing, ready to move forward.

And then they changed their minds. They decided it wasn’t a good idea to use someone they knew.

Which makes sense. But it hit me harder than I expected.

Because I didn’t realize how emotionally invested I had already become. Even without being the parent, something in me had already connected to the idea of creating life. Of being part of something bigger in that way.

When it didn’t happen, it felt like something was taken away.

What I Actually Want

I want my kid to watch two dads build a life and think: Oh, different is just another way of doing it right. Not as a lesson. As an example.

I want Christmas morning in pajamas, lighting our Shabbat candles as a family every Friday together, trick-or-treating, parent-teacher interviews, walking the hallway and seeing their artwork on the wall, their artwork on our fridge at home. Making them lunches the other kids are jealous of, forts, and homework that feels like a game. making sure they are not afraid of the dark when they go to bed. comforting them when they have scary feelings. I want to watch them have a bar or bat mitzvah and be proud to be Jewish and proud of where they come from.

I want my parents’ legacy and my fiancé’s parents’ legacy to live on in them. We can’t mix our genetics, but we’ll mix everything else. Our isms will stick. I have a cousin who was adopted, and he is such a Spergel. Of all the grandkids, he spent the most time with our grandparents, and every time I see him and talk to him, I feel like I’m with my grandpa in a way.

But underneath all of it, the reason that feels most true is this: I want them to see, every single day, that being different isn’t the obstacle.

It’s the whole point.

Where I’m Going

I don’t have everything figured out.

I don’t know exactly how we’ll navigate the cost, the process, the uncertainty of it all. Some days it feels completely overwhelming. Some days it feels out of reach.

But I do know this: it’s something my fiancé and I talk about. Something we come back to. Something that quietly shapes the direction of our lives, even when we’re not actively planning it. We want, we hope, to have two kids.

And maybe that’s what matters right now.

Not having all the answers. Not being completely certain. But knowing that the desire is real. That it’s not coming from pressure, or expectation, or some idea of what life is supposed to look like. It’s coming from something deeper. From wanting to build something. From wanting to love someone in that way.

The world can have its opinions. People will always have something to say.

But at the end of the day, this is something I have to live with. Not them.

When I imagine my life years from now, I don’t picture a perfect path or a clear timeline.

I just picture a child… or two.

It was Passover last week, and my mom asked me to make the matzah apple kugel for the seder. I was honestly not excited about it. When I first offered, I had imagined making a noodle kugel instead — the classic kind, with egg noodles, cottage cheese, sour cream, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and butter, topped with cinnamon and cornflakes. The comforting, crowd-pleasing kind.

My mom had other ideas. She wanted the Apple Matzo Kugel. Matzo farfel, apples, the whole thing. And look — if you know, you know. It’s essentially an apple crumble with crushed-up crackers (Matzo) in it. I wasn’t exactly thrilled.

But here’s the thing about me and baking and cooking: it has always been my love language. There is nothing more personal, nothing more intimate, than watching someone take a bite of something you made and seeing their whole chemistry change right there in front of you. So I said yes. Of course I said yes.

And then I threw the recipe out the window.

I had a baking pan twice the size of what the recipe called for, so I just improvised. Extra butter. An extra egg. I didn’t measure a single thing. I soaked the matzah carefully. I cut the apples into perfect little cubes — bite-sized, uniform, almost meditative in their precision. And I added my own crumble on top: almond flour, brown sugar, butter, and an almost irresponsible amount of cinnamon. You can never have too much cinnamon.

When it was served at passover dinner, my aunt — who has exquisite taste, who’s had culinary opportunities most of us only dream about, who usually never touches kugel because it’s always either too dry or too forgettable — told me it was the best kugel she had ever had in her entire life. She ate the whole portion.

She said it was one of the only things she ate all seder.

That’s when I understood something I’d been circling around for a long time: baking isn’t just about following a recipe. It’s about honoring where something comes from while making it entirely your own.

I’ve been listening to a lot of MasterClass lately — different topics, different instructors — but the baking one stuck with me. One of the instructors said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: most people have to eat. Dinner is a primary meal. It’s necessary. But dessert? Dessert is an addition. It’s a choice. It’s something people go out of their way to have, to make, to bake. And it often involves difficult products to handle, temperamental ingredients, precision, patience. Dessert is never a necessity.

That’s why it matters so much.

When my fiancé asked me why I love baking so much, I tried to explain it, and what came out was this: no matter the situation — no matter if it’s a funeral or a celebration or just a random Tuesday — when someone brings a dessert to the table, it’s always going to be the sweet moment. Literally and metaphorically. No one eats a dessert and feels sad. They might be reminded of something, moved to tears by a memory, but that’s not sadness. That’s connection. That’s being held by something bigger than the moment itself.

That’s tradition.

My bubby — my grandmother — made these chocolate chip oatmeal cookies that fundamentally altered something in my brain. They’re not just cookies. They’re an experience. They’re a comfort. They’re a memory. They’re a kiss on the head. They’re a hug. They’re a flash of every happy moment I ever had with my family.

I remember going to her kitchen. She always had these cookie tins sitting out — and you never knew which was which. Some held peanut butter cookies. Some held cheddar cookies, which I still haven’t made even though I promised myself I would. But there was one tin I could always identify by sound alone. When you lifted the lid, the air would suction out just a little, and you’d hear that specific pop. And then you’d be met with this gust of smell — chocolate chips and something else I could never quite place. Something that gave the cookies this perfect texture I always thought was just the oatmeal.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized: it was coconut. Shredded coconut, hidden in every bite.

Now my fiancé and I make these cookies together. And honestly, he makes them better than I do. He whips the butter — and I know it sounds like a small thing, but it’s not. These little steps, these techniques that seem insignificant because you think it all gets mixed together anyway — they matter. They’re everything. They’re the difference between a cookie and a memory.

My fiancé’s nana made chocolate chip muffins. They were always in a Ziploc bag, ready to go. They tasted almost undercooked in the best way possible — that was the secret, I think, though I don’t actually know the recipe. I only got to have three years with her, but every time we’d arrive at her house, it was the first thing we’d have after the long drive — sitting on a plate with saran wrap pressed right against the sticky muffin tops. So good. You can’t have a bite of them now without seeing her kitchen clear as day in your mind. The fridge covered in family photos. The backyard through the window above the sink. The smell of Christmas candles, faintly, all year round.

She was the sweetest lady.

Last week, his mom made those same muffins for Easter. We took a bite, and it took us right back to that kitchen. We didn’t have to say anything. We just knew. It’s an unspoken truth.

And when his sweet great aunt passed away, we kept one of her tins. the same kind my Bubby always had her cookies in. Now, whenever we bake cookies or any treats, we put them in that tin — and it just comes to life, like when Frosty the Snowman puts on the hat. Sometimes we forget it’s even there. It sits in the cabinet. But when we find it and fill it with something we’ve made together, it’s like she’s still at the table. It’s like we’re telling her: we remember. We’re keeping you alive.

That’s what food does. That’s what tradition does.

We only make those cookies maybe four times in five years. And yet every single time we do, something shifts in our house. We didn’t plan it. We didn’t talk about it. But there’s this soothing that happens — this quiet healing of something we didn’t even know needed healing.

I think about nostalgia a lot. We’re always chasing it. We’re always wishing we could go back, find that feeling again, live in that moment. But nostalgia is something you can almost never fully recapture.

Except through taste.

There’s one dish — maybe two — that probably just popped into your head as you read that. Maybe it seems insignificant. Maybe you’re thinking, that’s not really important, that’s just a random recipe. But the fact that it popped into your head right now? That’s significant. That’s your body remembering something your brain forgot. That’s tradition doing what tradition does best: keeping people alive.

The only real time machine we have — the only way to actually touch the past — is through food. Through taste. Through the decision to make something with our own hands and put it on the table.

So here’s my challenge to you, and I mean this gently: there’s a recipe you’ve been meaning to make. Maybe it belonged to someone you’ve lost. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s dish — the one that tastes like childhood and Sunday afternoons and the particular feeling of being held. Maybe it’s something from your own culture, something that feels like home, that you’ve been meaning to share with someone who’s never tasted it.

Stop putting it off. Make it this week.

Because in a world that feels more divided every single day — divided by culture, by religion, by everything — there is almost no faster way to close the distance between people than through food. Sharing a flavor from your table is a radical act of connection. It says: this is where I come from. This is who I am. Let me show you.

Food doesn’t argue. Food doesn’t divide. Food says: sit down, taste this, let me tell you something about myself through something I made for you.

And sometimes that one moment — that one bite of something true from your kitchen, from your family, from your culture — does more for human connection than a thousand conversations ever could.

That’s what this Mensch is trying to do. Tell a story that helps people taste something unfamiliar and recognize themselves in it anyway. To understand that tradition isn’t about doing things the way they’ve always been done. It’s about honoring where something comes from while making it entirely your own.

So go find that recipe. The one in your head right now. Make it in a pan that’s too big. Add an extra egg. Whip the butter. Cut the apples into perfect cubes. Make it yours.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll be keeping someone alive in the process.

There is a certain stereotype that persists, quietly but consistently: that the arts—whether theater, film, dance, or music—are disproportionately filled with gay men. It is often said jokingly, sometimes dismissively, occasionally with admiration. But beneath that observation is a more complicated question: not just if it is true, but why.

From my perspective, the answer begins with safety.

Growing up, the arts were the only place where being different wasn’t something to hide—it was something to lean into. At summer camp, the “cool” boys were not expected to be in the musical. That space was reserved for the rest of us—the ones who didn’t quite fit, or didn’t want to. But here’s what I noticed: the cool kids who showed up, who didn’t care, who were silly and made everyone laugh. Meanwhile, the gay kids like me, the ones who really cared, who were passionate, who poured everything into it—we overthought it. We choked under the weight of our own ambition. I tried hard, often unsuccessfully, to get good parts. But what I remember more clearly than any role was the feeling of being allowed to exist without correction.

The same was true in high school. Drama class was once a week, an elective, often dismissed as silly. But that “silliness” was precisely what made it safe. There were no rigid expectations of masculinity there. In fact, the opposite: exaggeration, emotional expression, and difference were rewarded. To be good at drama was, in some sense, to be different—or perhaps, to be more fully yourself. And for someone who was quietly navigating their identity, that mattered.

Before I came out, I was already living a kind of double life. I had a fake ID. I was sneaking into gay bars. But I wasn’t out in my day-to-day life, and I certainly wasn’t comfortable being seen. Around that time, I was assigned a project in drama class—something involving research on a teenage issue. I chose teen suicide.

Looking back, it’s hard not to see the connection. I spent lunches alone in the library, reading accounts and letters from queer teenagers. I don’t say this for sympathy, and I don’t remember the assignment itself particularly well. But I remember how it felt to read those words. It was like finding a playground full of people like me—and realizing they were gone. I found community in their absence. And the arts—through that project, through performance, through storytelling—became a way to process something I didn’t yet have the language to articulate. Not to solve it, but to sit with it. To feel it, safely.

But safety is only part of it.

The arts don’t just tolerate difference—they require it. To act, to write, to perform is to interpret the world through your own lens. And for many queer people, that process mirrors something much larger: the gradual uncovering of the self. The peeling away of expectation. The realization that who you are internally may not match what the world has assumed about you.

In that sense, the journey into the arts and the journey into queerness often run parallel. Both ask the same question: Who are you, really, when no one is watching?

But what begins as freedom can slowly become something else.

For a period, I tried to make acting my career. I landed small roles—a prisoner in 12 Monkeys, Bobby Moretti in The Flash, and an agent in Impulse. And with each one came a new relationship to the work, defined less by expression and more by survival. Auditions were no longer opportunities; they were necessities. Each one carried the weight of validation, income, and identity.

In 2018, I uprooted my life to Vancouver. My Bubby had passed away and left me some money. I threw every penny into trying to make it work. My siblings and cousins put theirs into smart investments. I became a drain. But I was chasing something I believed in. I worked as a bartender at night. During the day, I did landscape work. I was exhausted all the time. I drank the Kool-Aid on what it meant to be a gay bartender in that world—the parties, the nights out, the performance of it all. I thought: if I just push hard enough, exhaust myself enough, care hard enough, the reward will be worth the loneliness. I romanticized my acts of debotchery by thinking of this temporary time in Vancouver as a rollercoaster– I could either cling to the restraining bar or let go and embrace the thrill of it all.

I dated someone while I was there. We were together for a year and a half. But I was so lonely that I got myself into a relationship I wasn’t ready for, and I feel terrible about that. To make it worse, I was his first boyfriend. I didn’t have headspace. I didn’t have presence; I had guilt.

I knew one person there—a girl I met back home at Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts, where I’d graduated in 2013. Everyone else was a stranger. It was cold. My first two weeks there were a nightmare; within two weeks, I thought my roommate was dead, an angry psychopath, and the final straw was waking up to him standing above me in the middle of the night, watching me sleep naked. The next night, I moved out in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. I lost two months' rent. I found a nice house with five people living in it and sharing one bathroom. They were really nice, but the house was falling apart. There was a hole in my ceiling. I was so lonely. I was chasing the dream…

I was performing desperation. And desperation, it turns out, is the opposite of presence. When you’re panicking, when you care too much, when you’re overthinking—you can’t be emotionally available. You can’t listen. You can’t act.

The dream died in 2020. I was turning thirty. moved back home to Toronto to live with my parents (Thank God), and COVID was beginning. And I looked at my life—at friends who were married, who had kids, who had stability—and I realized I’d been so focused on becoming the actor I thought I should be that I’d forgotten to become myself. I moved back to Toronto. I got a job. I found stability. I stopped auditioning.

And then I discovered something unexpected: during the pandemic, I enrolled in the UCLA screenwriting program. And for the first time in years, I was creating without performing. I was writing characters I would never play, imagining worlds I didn’t need to fit into. I was being creative for the sake of creativity—not for validation, not for a paycheck, not to prove I was enough. Just because I loved it.

I realized I’d always loved this. I’d always loved cooking, always loved using my imagination, always loved the puzzle of bringing ideas to life. I just never recognized it while I was too busy trying to be someone else.

This week, an episode of Boston Blue aired—episode 13, “Beautiful Broken Things”—in which I had one line. I played a reporter. That one line was a confirmation: I went into it only as myself, and who I was is what they wanted.

I booked the morning off work to film it. In Vancouver, that same decision would have consumed my entire being. It would have meant everything. Now it’s just a morning.

What struck me most was not the nerves, or the excitement, or even the validation. It was the absence of desperation. It was the absence of overthinking. It was simply presence.

I showed up with a mustache I would never have allowed myself to wear during audition years. I’m two years away from forty. I’ve gained weight, muscle, presence. I’m different. And instead of apologizing for it, I inhabited it. I was just there.

For years, I was a soufflé—inflated, desperate, collapsing under pressure. Now I’m a quiche. And you can’t turn a quiche back into a soufflé. Once you stop performing and become real, you can’t unknow that.

I don’t know what the future holds. I get auditions, and I can say no if they don’t interest me. I can say yes if they do. Life isn’t a finished dish—it’s a constant seasoning, a constant awareness of what flavors are going in. But now I understand something I’d always known: I was never meant to be consumed. I was meant to cook.

Perhaps that is part of why the arts are so often filled with people like me. Not simply because we are different, but because we are practiced in the act of becoming. Of adjusting. Of performing versions of ourselves until, eventually, one of them feels true. And then, if we’re lucky, we stop performing altogether. We recognize what we’ve always been. We season our lives consciously. We cook.

“Set an intention.”
— the yoga teacher

There were four of us in the vinyasa class. Four people in a dim room with gentle music and a teacher who moved like water.

I arrived one minute late.

By the time I slipped inside, the lights were already off and everyone was lying on their mats. I never actually saw anyone’s face clearly. I just knew they were all women.

The room was colder than I expected. Luckily I had kept my sweatpants on.

I placed my mat near the wall. When the class started spreading our arms wide, I realized I had misjudged the space. My hand kept brushing the wall and I had to bend my elbows awkwardly to avoid hitting it.

I thought about moving my mat.

But my guilt about arriving late made me stay where I was. I didn’t want to disrupt the quiet rhythm of the room.

It’s strange how quickly the mind fills in stories.

Before class even began, I had already made several assumptions. I assumed the class would be intimidating. I assumed I would fail. I assumed everyone would notice me.

None of those things were true.

I also caught myself judging the teacher when I first walked in. She was a heavier woman, and some shallow voice in my head whispered what a yoga teacher should look like.

It was the same voice that undermines my own progress and self-acceptance.

In reality, she was wonderful—calm, grounded, deeply present. The class was called Mukti Yoga.

Once I settled onto my mat and took a few breaths, I was in.

She told us to set an intention.

Mine was to be proud of myself.

Standing on the yoga mat with my lower back already seizing, it felt like the hardest thing I’d tried to do in a long time.

Because I couldn’t do any of it.

Forward fold—couldn’t reach past my shins.
Downward dog—my hamstrings screamed.

I had to use the blocks. I had to modify everything.

And the whole time my inner saboteur was running its mouth.

What is wrong with you?
This is pathetic.
You’re so stiff.
Your body is broken.

I used to be a dancer.

I still tell people that.

I was a dancer.

And when I say it, people look at me like I still am.

But I’m not. I haven’t been for years.

We hold on to identities as if they’re permanent—as if who we were is still who we are. But time doesn’t work that way. It drifts. It grows. It changes everything it touches—including you.

If you’re not actively maintaining who you want to be, you slowly become someone else without realizing it.

I became someone stiff.

Someone rigid.

And I didn’t notice until I tried to bend.

• • •

I should back up.

I was in that yoga class because my rabbi told me to try it.

My fiancé and I had met with her the day before to talk about our fights. She mentioned that she struggles with back problems too and suggested something simple: try yoga—even five minutes a day.

But that meeting almost didn’t happen.

That morning, I threw my back out doing squats. Squats—for the first time in months—because I had finally felt brave enough to try them again.

I have degenerative disc disease, which means my body has a sense of humor I never asked for. I can throw my back out sneezing.

The first time it really happened—truly, devastatingly—I had sciatica shooting down my leg for six months.

I took so much Advil and Tylenol that I gave myself stomach ulcers, which felt like a punchline to a joke no one was laughing at.

I was depressed in the quiet way chronic pain makes you: not dramatic, just gray.

Just small.

I stopped moving almost entirely because I was afraid any movement would make things worse.

And then I learned something during those months.

Stillness isn’t safety.
It’s decay.

Doing nothing is the worst thing you can do. There’s a fine balance between protecting your body and abandoning it, and I had tipped too far toward abandonment.

Slowly, I started building back.

Weight training.
Volleyball.

A body I could begin to trust again—even knowing it might betray me.

So the squats that morning felt like a small betrayal.

And that same day, my fiancé and I met with our rabbi. We’re getting married.

We were already running late because of my back. I was limping, wincing with every step, and we were bickering in that low-grade way couples do when the day has already gone sideways.

Then we got a flat tire.

I don’t always read signs from the universe.

But when your back is out, your patience is gone, you’re fighting with the person you love most, and your car is leaning on the shoulder of the road—it’s hard not to feel like something is trying to get your attention.

Like the day itself was screaming:

Something here needs to be fixed.

And it’s not the tire.

We dropped the car at the nearest body shop and walked home.

The walk was only about ten minutes, but it was surprisingly beautiful. It was the first day we could be outside without jackets. The air felt like an invitation—to step out of the cold we’d been bracing against all winter, to unclench a little, to remember what warmth feels like.

At one point, I asked my fiancé if he thought the whole thing might be a sign, hinting that maybe the universe was trying to stop us from seeing the rabbi that day.

He said yes.

We walked in silence for about thirty seconds.

But it felt like three minutes.

“The car may have a flat tire,” he said, “but I’m not getting rid of the car.”

It took me a moment to realize he was using the car as a metaphor for our relationship.

Moments like that are exactly why he melts my heart. He knows how much I love a good metaphor.

It softened something in me immediately.

• • •

We ended up doing the meeting over Zoom.

I had wanted to come across as a perfect couple. After all, this meeting was supposed to be about the wedding.

When she asked how we were doing, the normal answer would have been easy.

“Good, thanks.”

Instead, we told the truth.

We had been bickering.

Saying it out loud cracked something open.

The conversation stretched past an hour.

She reminded us that arguing is human. Conflict itself isn’t the problem. Avoiding repair is.

Then she said something that surprised me.

Often it’s the couples who try the hardest to look perfect who are in the most danger. When everything has to appear smooth on the surface, the real problems never get a chance to breathe.

The couples who are willing to be honest—to disagree, reflect, repair—are often the healthiest ones. The work itself is a sign of commitment.

Then she asked us something simple.

Was this relationship something rare? Something meaningful and worth protecting?

The answer came immediately.

Of course it was. That had never really been the question.

Just hearing it out loud settled something between us. A quiet weight of stubbornness lifted.

The rabbi talked about flexibility.

Not giving in. Not surrendering who you are. But softening enough to let another person’s reality exist beside yours.

The word she kept returning to was repair.

Not avoiding rupture—you can’t—but repairing it afterward. Coming back. Reaching across the space you’ve created and saying:

I’m still here.

I want to be here.

At the end of the meeting I mentioned my back.

She nodded knowingly.

“Do yoga,” she said.

• • •

So that’s how I ended up in that vinyasa class the next morning, stiff as a board, staring at my own rigidity like it was a stranger.

But it wasn’t a stranger.

It was me.

The same rigidity I bring to arguments with my fiancé. The same need to control—to grip, to force, to hold my position until something breaks.

My body was showing me what my heart had been doing for years:

refusing to bend because bending felt like losing.

And then, in the middle of all that noise in my head, the teacher came around and placed her hands on my shoulders.

They were the gentlest hands I’ve ever felt.

Warm. Steady.

Like warmth spreading slowly through ice.

Not fast. Not forceful.

Just moving.

It felt like someone reaching through all the noise and whispering:

Not like that.

Like this.

That touch taught me something my brain couldn’t.

You cannot force flexibility. You will tear something.

You cannot force reconciliation. You will break something worse.

You cannot control flat tires, back injuries, or days that go wrong from the first hour.

But you can control your breath.

That’s where the real power is.

Not in the grip.

In the release.

That week, the same lesson kept showing up everywhere—through my fiancé, through the rabbi, and now through a pair of gentle hands on my shoulders.

• • •

Gentleness is the hardest lesson I know.

I keep forgetting it. And relearning it—like a breath I lose and find again.

Some part of me still lives like fire: urgent, impatient, gripping too hard.

I’m not trying to extinguish that fire completely.

Fire has its uses.

It keeps you warm.
It cooks the food.
It lights the way in the dark.

I’m just trying to learn when to let it burn—and when to let the air move through instead.

I’ve already signed up for next Sunday’s class.

My first thought was that it’s pointless—that I’m too stiff, too broken, too far gone.

But that voice is the same one that says don’t move, don’t try, don’t risk the pain.

So I’ll go back.

I’ll use the blocks.

I’ll breathe through the tightness.

And when my thoughts turn sharp—toward my body, toward my fiancé, toward the distance between who I was and who I am—I’ll try to remember those hands on my shoulders.

That warmth, traveling slowly.

Doing what force never could.

Everyone has their own tight place—the thing they’re gripping that makes everything else rigid.

Maybe it’s control.
Maybe it’s perfectionism.
Maybe it’s fear.

Whatever it is, it’s locking you up.

And the only question worth asking is this:

Are you willing to breathe into it?

Are you willing to soften?

Are you willing to bend before you break?

I’m trying.

One Sunday at a time.

Share Becoming a Mensch

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who take the photos, and the ones who are in them.

After a few drinks we’d tucked away in a bag and shared on the way up, we had just snowshoed to the top of an entire ski hill in Ellicottville, NY — feeling good, silly, and more than a little tipsy. The dogs were off leash, and we had the mountain completely to ourselves. The snow was so deep and fresh that every step sank almost to our knees. Eventually, we all collapsed into the powder and looked out over the quiet ski town glowing below us.

I remember feeling this sudden wave of gratitude — that rare awareness that this is a moment I’m going to want to remember.

So I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures. A few photos. A short video. Trying to capture the laughter, the dogs running through the snow, the feeling of being up there together.

That’s when someone called out: “Stop taking photos of everything and just live in the moment!”

It’s a familiar accusation — that taking photos means you aren’t present. That trying to capture a moment somehow means you’re missing it.

But for some of us, the opposite is true.

For some of us, taking the photo is how we become present.

Life moves fast. Moments can slip by almost before you notice them. Taking a photo forces you to slow down and actually see what’s happening.

The light. The people. The feeling.

It’s a way of telling yourself: Look at this. This matters.

Maybe it’s also because some of us have lived long enough to understand how fragile good moments are. Happiness can disappear quickly. People move. Relationships change. Loved ones die.

A photograph becomes proof that something beautiful existed for a little while.

It’s not about vanity or social media. It’s about preserving memory.

Of course, there’s a fine line between documenting life and performing it. We all know the person who wants to be in every photo, carefully curating each moment like a personal highlight reel.

But there’s another category that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much.

The people who take almost all the photos.

The unofficial historians of their friend groups.

The quiet archivists of relationships.

When you’re the one always taking the photos, something strange happens.

You end up with thousands of pictures of everyone else.

Friends laughing. Family dinners. Trips. Holidays. Partners.

But when you scroll back through your camera roll, you start to notice something else.

You’re barely in any of them.

Because the person taking the photo rarely ends up in the frame.

And very few people think to take the same photo of you.

Maybe becoming a mensch isn’t just about how we show up for people in big moments. Maybe it’s also about the smaller things — noticing who is always the one capturing everyone else’s joy, and remembering to turn the camera around once in a while.

I love capturing moments — not for Instagram, not for attention, but for memory. A dinner we cooked together. A walk with the dog. A fleeting sunset. A quiet moment that feels ordinary now but might feel enormous one day when we look back on it.

My partner is more private than I am — not about the moments themselves, but about being seen in them. He hates being in photos. Genuinely, constitutionally hates it.

And yet. Most of the time, when I turn the camera toward him, he lets me.

That’s its own kind of love language, I think. Allowing yourself to be documented by someone who is afraid to lose you.

Still, there are moments when I’m left with a feeling I don’t quite have a word for.

Not anger. Something quieter.

Like the person who cares most about preserving the memory is the only one who thinks to.

The irony is that photographs become most valuable when it’s too late to take them.

When someone dies, families gather around photographs like artifacts. They search through albums and camera rolls, looking for proof that the person existed as they remember them.

And very often they discover something strange.

The person who took most of the photos is barely in any of them.

Because they were always the ones behind the camera.

Taking photographs, I’ve realized, is a quiet act of love.

It’s a way of saying:

This mattered. You mattered. This moment was real.

But sometimes the people who document life also need someone else to turn the camera around.

To notice that they’re there too.

To capture them laughing. Standing in the snow. Alive inside the moment, just like everyone else.

I was seven years old when I first started going to Camp B’nai Brith — a Jewish sleepaway camp where the cabin walls are covered in signatures from generations past.

There’s a specific kind of fear and excitement that lives in a summer camp bunk. I can only speak from one perspective: a closeted gay boy trying to survive the savagery of boyhood. Counselors who snuck girls into the bunk for playtime when they thought we were sleeping. Rafter ball. Water gun fights. Real fights, as long as there was no bruising. Designated stalls with porn magazines and Vaseline hand cream, provided by the counselors themselves. John Mayer and Dave Matthews echoing through the trees at night, and the terrifying Pink Floyd they always saved for after dark. I remember crying to “Clocks.” Someone always brought up playing Dark Side of the Moon synced to The Wizard of Oz. “Quiet, please, quiet please, dedicated to” announcements in the mess hall were the original tweets of the nineties.

Sharing showers with the same boys you’ve known since single digits, dropped into the middle of the Algonquin forest in Quebec with barely an adult in sight. Going through puberty together, in real time, in close quarters — same food, same schedule, same gossip — until by the end of a summer, even your farts smell the same. There’s something primal about it. Something ancient. A pack of boys, largely unsupervised, learning the unwritten rules of who matters, who gets chosen, and who will be picked on so badly that the trauma stays with them for the rest of their lives. It was the Jewish version of Lord of the Flies. Eat or be eaten. Gay slurs got thrown around as casually as high fives and snot rockets — constantly, enthusiastically, and always with plausible deniability. The fear of being discovered felt primal. A need to belong to the tribe in these woods.

My older brother was four years ahead of me at camp. They called him Broadway. He was the Brad Pitt of high school and camp — and everybody fawned over him. What I found out much later was that before his summer glow-up, before he became Broadway, he’d had his own rough years. He was the kid who swam with his shirt on, picked on by his bunkmates. Boys will be boys, as they say. He’d been in the trenches. But by the time I arrived, the late nights and puberty had made him royalty. Back home, he’d jumped out of the loud nest the first chance he got, eager to find his own footing, his own survival. As the youngest, it sometimes felt like he ran without looking back at what he was leaving behind. He didn’t check on me much at camp. I always assumed that being around me — flamboyant, sensitive, clearly different — felt like a threat to everything he’d become.

But there was one moment. His final Color War as a camper, he was chosen as one of four CITs to be captain — the biggest honor you can have at camp. One of the last traditions of the week-long fiasco is the alma mater, where both teams rewrite the lyrics of a sappy song and the captains give a speech in front of the entire camp. At the peak of everything he’d worked so hard to become, he said my name. He said my sister’s name and told us he loved us, in front of everyone. He cracked his armor open and let us in. I cried — not from sadness, but from feeling seen and loved and recognized in a way I hadn’t known I needed. I never told him what that meant to me.

Years later, when word got out that I was gay, I had told my sister-in-law first — she’s a dancer and choreographer, and she felt safe. She told my brother. He didn’t make an announcement. He didn’t call a meeting. He just showed up at my bedroom door and handed me a book about photography. Inside it, he had written a message about how he would always love me and always be there for me. It is one of the softest memories I carry to this day.

He has become the highest example of what I will always aspire to be — an incredible husband and father who learned what empathy looks like not from a textbook, but from his own lived experience.

He is my first subscriber. He’ll read all of this here for the first time.

About four days into each summer, there would be auditions for the camp plays — and for all the times I hated being there, and there were many, getting cast felt like a hall pass out of the chaos. Theatre kids will understand. When I was seven, I was a bumblebee in The Lion King whose only line was “it’s the wheel of fortune,” delivered with total confidence and zero idea what it meant. The following summer, I was Chip in Beauty and the Beast, wearing a DIY hula hoop skirt that made me look like a teacup.

In the older camper years, the evening programs were the last scheduled event of the day and one of the only times we got to do something co-ed. Once a summer came Misfugly. The name stood for what it was — boys got paired with girls who dressed them up, then forced us to do a runway show in front of everyone while the camp judged. I won two years running. Not because I was the funniest, but because I genuinely sold it. I didn’t realize I was painting a giant bull’s-eye on my back. But some of the counselors did.

At the end of every summer, the counselors would write a last will and testament for each camper. In my personalized card, they gave me the nickname Molly Maid and wrote: “We leave you a big bundle of sticks — in French.” I didn’t get it at first. They were laughing, so I thought it was fine. Then I showed it to someone and watched the colour drain from her face as she translated it. That word. Hidden in French so it could be denied. Faggot… Everyone in that bunk knew exactly what it meant.

That was the year I stopped doing musicals.

Every night, the camp mom had to come to my bunk and rub my back until I fell asleep. Homesickness for me wasn’t a mood — it was a physical illness that lived in my chest. My dad didn’t give me a choice about going, but my mom, who understood what it cost me, did the kindest thing: she took me to Radio Shack and bought me a tiny handheld TV, the size of my palm. I’d hide under my blanket at night and watch static, the weather network, a shopping channel — glimpses of signal. It was enough to comfort me through the deafening dark nights. She also told me that whenever I felt lonely, I could look up at the moon at six o’clock, because she’d be looking at it too, and we’d be connected through it. I never forgot that.

Visiting day was its own kind of performance. Our parents would arrive to find us tanner, healthier, seemingly thriving — and the relief on their faces told you everything. They’d been afraid I wouldn’t make it. I felt the weight of that every time. I smiled, showed them around, and felt proud to prove I was surviving. And then I cried the moment their car disappeared down the long dirt road. The obligation to perform survival was sometimes heavier than the homesickness itself.

And still, I went back every summer. Because underneath all of it, I felt something I couldn’t name — a sense of pack, of needing to belong to something larger than myself. It’s like a runner’s high: the grind is brutal, but the moment it’s over, and you’re home, you already miss it.

In the evenings, we’d gather at the flagpole as the sun went down and sing Hatikvah — the Israeli national anthem — as the flag was lowered. It’s a beautiful and haunting song. It carries the full weight of Jewish longing and survival in every note. Standing there in the fading light, about to be swallowed by another lonely night, I felt something land in my chest that I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t religious. It wasn’t political. It was something older and deeper — a reminder that we had always been a people who needed to find each other.

I didn’t fully appreciate that then. I was too busy surviving. Too busy hiding my gayness to fit in. But looking back now, I realize we were all in it together — Jews just trying to belong in a world that keeps making that difficult.

In my final year as a CIT, I came out for the first time. On the dance stage, to a girl I trusted — a competitive dancer who had a gay friend back home. I whispered it like a secret I’d been carrying for years, because it was. And the world didn’t end. That moment lives in me still.

That same summer — 1999 — I became the Color War captain, just like my brother had.

Here’s what I want people to understand about Jewish summer camp, because I think there’s a misconception worth naming: it’s not Bible camp. We weren’t studying Torah all day or being drilled in religious doctrine. It was simply a place where Jewish kids got to be together — nothing more, nothing less. To be honest, most of our friends back home, who only knew of it through our stories, thought of it as sex ed camp. The way gay men have Church Street in Toronto — a place to exist among your own people without explanation or performance — we had camp. Two months a year in the Algonquin forest, where you didn’t have to be the Jewish kid. You were just a kid. Part of a tribe. That matters more than I knew then.

The last athletic event of Color War is the full-day relay race that ends with Burn Rope Burn. It’s only for the CITs — their final moments as campers.

Two ropes are hoisted high between metal poles in the darkness of the forest. Each rope has been soaking in the lake all summer. The CITs spend most of Color War in the forest together, collecting kindling, smoking joints, bonding as we gather branches — then bigger branches, then sticks as long as eight feet. When the baton arrives from the relay, night has fallen and the team kicks into gear. Starting with kindling, we build a fire — small tipis growing bigger and bigger as the flame climbs, moving on to larger and larger wood, like a life building in fast-forward. Each branch size representing a different chapter of adolescence at camp. The flames grow to ten, twelve feet in the air. Everyone wears a pit suit and rubs Vaseline on their faces against the heat. We take turns at the fire, then step out to dip our heads in buckets of water to cool off. The whole camp gathers in the darkness — no lights, no electricity, just two massive fires illuminating everyone’s faces. And they start to chant. Burn rope burn. Burn rope burn. Getting louder and louder as the thick rope begins to sizzle and catch.

Only now do I understand what that rope was. It had been soaking all summer — held in the safety of the lake, like a tadpole in its own pond. And the fire was always coming. That was never the tragedy. The tragedy would have been never being in the pond in the first place.

I remember standing there, watching the rope fray, and dreading the snap. Forgetting entirely that the snap was the point. Because when it came — and it always came — it felt like being freed and banished at the same time. Like an astronaut on a spacewalk, untethered, suddenly aware of the vast darkness on all sides. The camp bell would ring. Everyone would run to the pool — filthy, tearstained — and jump in. Tears are confused for splashes.

That was the end and the beginning of everything else. A violent birth.

All along, I was being filled with helium.

Not just at camp — but at home too. Through the Shabbat candles and the Passover dinners, the Hebrew school, the bar and bat mitzvahs, the Menorah lightings, the sound of the shofar, and the summers at camp singing Hatikvah at the flagpole as the sun went down — I was being quietly, invisibly filled with something I couldn’t see or smell or name. Jewish identity doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates. It becomes the air you breathe, the rituals you perform, the people you instinctively gather with in the middle of nowhere for no reason other than the fact that they are yours and you are theirs.

I didn’t know I was flammable until October seventh. That’s when I was ignited.

And suddenly I understood everything. The camps, the bunks, the flagpole, the rope. It was never just nostalgia. It was infrastructure. The invisible architecture of a people who have survived by finding each other, over and over, across centuries, because the alternative has always been unthinkable.

This year, at least seventeen Jewish summer camps in Canada have faced coordinated pressure from pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist groups — accreditation threats, public campaigns, and organized efforts to shut them down. Not military targets. Not political institutions. Summer camps. Places where Jewish kids go to be homesick, make friendship bracelets, and figure out who they are among people who understand them without explanation. The fact that anyone looked at that and decided this is what needs to be disrupted tells you everything about where we are right now.

And yet almost nobody is talking about it.

I’m gay and Jewish, living in Toronto, and I want to tell you that both of those things have become harder to be out loud at the same time. The queer community — my community, a community built on the promise of radical inclusion — has become one of the loudest places where Jewish hate gets a free pass. People have decided what Zionism means, spread their version of it like gospel, and if you push back, you’re shouted down. My friends — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — are going quiet. People are literally removing their Stars of David because it has become dangerous to wear one.

For a long time I thought my Jewishness and my gayness existed in separate compartments — that camp was one world and the gay community was another, and I moved between them feeling like a minority in both. October seventh collapsed that distance. I realized we were always in the same boat. Being gay had made me feel different from my Jewish brothers and sisters — but in contrast to the whole world, in contrast to a world that would prefer we didn’t exist at all, we were already on the same team. We always had been. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

It’s why I started @HebrosTO on Instagram — a space specifically for gay Jewish men in Toronto. We are a minority inside a minority, and if we don’t build the room ourselves, there isn’t one. Jews make up roughly 0.2% of the global population. We are vanishingly small. The impulse to gather — in a bunk, in a camp tucked into the forest, in an Instagram group — isn’t tribalism. It’s survival logic that goes back centuries.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be seen. Growing up gay, we form our sense of self by searching for our reflection in the world around us. But the world wasn’t reflecting us back. Boys looked at girls, girls looked at boys — in the streets, in class, in every movie. The gay kid finds himself only in the mirror, looking at himself. Maybe that’s why so many of us become so preoccupied with our appearance — not out of vanity, but out of a desperate need to be seen by someone, even if that someone is only ourselves. Building HebrosTO was, in part, an answer to that. A place where gay Jewish men could finally look out instead of in, and find each other looking back.

Camp wasn’t easy. It was a little Lord of the Flies — homesickness, social cruelty, the relentless performance of being okay. But it has also evolved, like society, toward greater inclusion and respect. It was a place where suffering, if you let it, could teach you empathy. Where a bumblebee who had no idea what the wheel of fortune meant could still bring down the house.

That is not a small thing. That is, it turns out, everything.

Which is precisely why targeting it is so chilling. These camps aren’t political organizations. They’re where Jewish kids learn that they belong somewhere. Where ropes soak in lakes all summer so they know what it feels like to be held before the fire comes. Disrupting that — threatening accreditation, running pressure campaigns against children’s summer programs — is not activism. It is telling Jewish kids that even their safest, most ordinary spaces are not allowed to exist. And the progressive world, which would be rightly outraged if this were happening to any other minority group, is largely silent.

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I’m still in it.

But I know that the scared kid hiding under a blanket watching static, looking up at the moon for his mom, deserved a safe place to figure himself out. And the adult he became deserves one too. We all do.

The rope soaks. The fire comes. And when it snaps — when it always snaps — you need people around you in the dark, chanting your name, so you know you’re not drifting alone.

I first felt bad in life in grade two.

We had basic math questions on a worksheet, and I copied the answers from the kid beside me. Not because I couldn’t understand them — but because my brain drifted. I was bored and restless at the same time.

I wasn’t learning math.

I was learning how to survive, feeling unequipped.

Soon after, I was removed from class during English and math and placed in a slower-learning room. I wasn’t disruptive. I wasn’t hyper. I was a good kid who wanted to please his teachers.

I just couldn’t focus.

At home, there was always yelling. Homework meant raised voices. If I didn’t understand something quickly, the volume rose. And when you’re a sensitive kid with a loud imagination, volume feels like danger.

So when I sat down to do math problems, I wasn’t focused on the numbers. I was focused on tone. On whether I was about to disappoint. On whether I was about to get it wrong.

The question became secondary.

That was my early experience of ADHD.

Not chaos.
Not rebellion.
Not laziness.

A wandering mind inside a bracing body.

In high school, I wrote an essay I was proud of. When it came back covered in red ink, it looked like a crime scene. Grammar circled. Spelling attacked. Margins invaded.

I internalized something simple: my way of thinking is wrong. I am so stupid.

When you’re graded on precision but wired for imagination, you start believing you’re broken.

So I adapted.

If I couldn’t win academically, I’d win socially. I became funny. Agreeable. A yes man. I tried to be cute. Then attractive. I learned to impress instead of excel.

By grade nine, the cool older boys offered me a joint on a ski trip.

I said yes.

Weed wasn’t rebellion for me.

It was a regulating. An upper and a seddative. To be honest, it even made me feel connected to my friends and valuable for making them laugh.

My brain lit up. Ideas collided. Patterns connected. It felt like stirring a pot and watching creativity boil over — a storm of imagination. For almost two decades, I thought that storm was brilliant.

And sometimes, it was.

But storms are unpredictable.

By day, weed made everything feel expansive and possible. At night, it turned dark. Intrusive thoughts sharpened. Doubt multiplied. Anxiety intensified.

ADHD brains already run hot. Add fuel to that, and sometimes you don’t get creativity — you get volatility.

I told myself it wasn’t addictive.

But anything that becomes your primary regulator becomes powerful.

On October 27th, 2025, I stopped. I had to write myself a contract and sign it.

Clarity was uncomfortable at first. Then it was steady. Then it was empowering.

The creativity didn’t disappear.

It stabilized.

And that’s when I understood something important:

It wasn’t the weed making me creative.

It was my wiring.

The real turning point, though, came during COVID when I enrolled in a screenwriting program at UCLA.

It wasn’t just the writing that changed me.

It was the deadlines.

People with ADHD don’t experience time the way others do. If something is due “soon,” it feels abstract. If something is due in half an hour, it feels like there’s still time. If life stretches out ahead of you, you assume there’s no urgency.

We don’t feel time.

We feel pressure.

For most of my childhood, pressure meant danger. Yelling. Correction. Embarrassment. So I avoided it.

But structured pressure is different. (I should add that I was doing something I cared about and found purposeful.)

A real deadline. A real expectation. A real room waiting for your contribution.

That kind of pressure doesn’t crush me.

It activates me.

For years, I thought I lacked discipline.

What I actually lacked was structure.

And something else.

A growth mindset.

For most of my life, I operated from a fixed one.

When you grow up feeling behind, effort feels dangerous. If I try and fail, it confirms what I already fear — that I’m not good enough. So you avoid the stretch. You protect your ego. You become stubborn.

So, you smoke some weed, and you tell yourself you don’t care.

I recently listened to a MasterClass about a growth mindset, and something clicked.

Success doesn’t come from ease.

It comes from struggle.

A fixed mindset is afraid of effort because effort exposes weakness.

A growth mindset understands that effort builds ability.

I didn’t invent this next analogy — I heard it years ago, and it stuck. And like most good ideas, it sounds much easier than it is.

Think about Mario.

When you play, and you die, you don’t spiral into shame. You hit restart.

Because you want to.

And when you play again, you’re sharper. You remember when to jump over the fireball rope or the menacing mushrooms. Failure wasn’t proof that you’re terrible at life. It was data for your next turn.

In theory, growth works like that.

In reality, it’s annoyingly hard to change yourself.

It’s uncomfortable to choose optimism when cynicism feels safer.

My best friend and I have known each other since kindergarten. We both struggled. We built our friendship on sarcasm and dark humor. We made fun of ourselves before anyone else could. If you can laugh at your own misery, you can control it.

Or at least that’s what we believed.

Cynicism felt intelligent. Optimism felt embarrassing. It was easier to roll our eyes than to risk wanting something deeply and not getting it.

If manifesting is real, we probably manifested the worst-case scenario for most of our lives to date.

But he is almost two years sober.

Two years.

I have never been more proud of anyone.

Watching someone confront themselves that honestly — that consistently — makes it harder to hide behind your own patterns.

Growth becomes less theoretical.

It becomes visible.

It becomes possible.

For most of my life, I thought I was the wrong utensil.

If you try to eat soup with a fork, you’ll think you’re incompetent. The fork isn’t broken. It’s just not built for soup.

ADHD can be overwhelming. It can derail momentum. It can amplify self-criticism until it feels like truth.

But it can also imagine worlds.
It can connect patterns quickly.
It can build systems and stories.
It can see what others overlook.

It isn’t only trauma.
It isn’t only chaos.
It isn’t only struggle.

It’s wiring.

And wiring works best when it’s understood.

The work isn’t to become the utensil the world prefers.

The work is to understand what you are — and build your life around it.

I am not fixed.

I am not finished.

I am a work in progress.

And sometimes growth doesn’t start with a breakthrough.

Sometimes it starts quietly,

with gentleness.

Confessions of a Nearly-Mensch

Entry #3

221 Days Until I Do

What Is Dying, and What Is Being Chosen

I grew up in a Jewish household where kvetching was practically a dialect.

Kvetching — a Yiddish word for complaining — but that translation flattens it. Kvetching is commentary. It’s an analysis. It’s noticing what’s off. It’s proof you’re paying attention. We were raised on men like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld — humor built on irritation, awkwardness, and relentless observation.

Sometimes I think kvetching is a love language.

If I’m complaining, it means I care.

But before kvetching, there was recess.

Recess was my first understanding of belonging — or not belonging. The boys played King of the Hill, loud and territorial. The girls played house and rarely let us near them. I floated somewhere in between. I found refuge at the edges — in trees, in imagination, in one or two other slightly misplaced kids who didn’t quite fit either.

I loved being in nature. Trees felt like forts. The grass felt like neutrality. It was the one place I didn’t feel evaluated.

Looking back, I realize something harder: I didn’t feel safe in the center of things. I felt safest when I was slightly outside of them.

That pattern follows you into adulthood if you’re not careful.

So when my fiancé read my first two posts and said, “It sounds like you’re scared and don’t want to get married,” something in me cracked.

Not because he was cruel. He wasn’t.
But because I felt misunderstood.

In my attempt to be honest — to write about fear, about transformation, about the parts of me that are shifting — it landed as doubt.

And that hurt.

Because I don’t want to build a life based on polish. I believe connection happens in rawness. In naming the uncomfortable thing. In saying, “This scares me,” without it meaning, “I don’t choose you.”

We met at the tail end of the COVID lockdowns, just as the bars were slowly reopening. The world was cautiously inhaling again.

Five days later, he moved in.

We didn’t slowly merge. We collided.

Five years later, we’re still here.

And in those five years, we’ve witnessed each other change.

And then there was Billy.

She wasn’t just a family dog.

I grew up with three dogs, but Billy was mine. I got her when I was 21. She moved with me through apartments, breakups, career pivots, identity shifts. She was there when I felt lost. She was there when I felt invincible. She was my dog — and my best friend.

She was sixteen years old. It was Canada Day.

We took her to the emergency vet at night while fireworks were exploding outside. The country was celebrating. People were cheering. And I was in a fluorescent hallway, red-eyed, holding my dog, waiting to find out if this was the end.

The dichotomy was unbearable.

I called my parents, and they dropped whatever they were doing and came to meet us.

When I was growing up, each time a dog got old, my dad took them to be put down. He shielded us from it. Even my mom never went. Death happened somewhere else. Behind a closed door.

But that night was different.

My mom.
My dad.
My fiancé.
All in the room with me.

We placed our hands on her. I pressed my forehead to hers.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

We stayed in the room after.

We didn’t rush out.

I breathed in her last breath in proximity.

And something in me shifted.

It felt like the end of being protected from endings.

You cannot experience the fullness of love without confronting the risk of losing it.

Joy doesn’t exist without contrast.
Happiness has weight because sadness exists.

It’s not mystical law. It’s human math.

The depth of grief measures the depth of love.

And if that’s true, then fear isn’t the opposite of commitment.

It’s evidence of its magnitude.

In tarot, the Death card terrifies people. They assume catastrophe. But it rarely means literal death. It means transformation. The end of an old way. A shedding.

A rebirth.

When I write about parts of me dying, I know it sounds dramatic.

But what’s dying isn’t love.

It’s the version of me that believed safety meant staying at the edge.
It’s the defensiveness I learned from watching my parents fight constantly.
It’s the temper I’m still working on — the one he has never treated me like a monster for having.

He grew up never seeing his parents fight. I grew up seeing mine do it all the time. We brought those blueprints to the table.

I grew up being pulled out of class for ADHD and dyslexia. I was removed from kindergarten onward. Slower room. Different expectations. I often felt like I was speaking a language no one else understood.

You either get louder or you shut down.

Writing is my attempt to do neither.

There’s something else about cold water that’s worth noting.

People step into ice baths not because it’s pleasant, but because it teaches the nervous system that discomfort isn’t death.

The shock hits.
You breathe anyway.
You learn you can stay.

Maybe that’s what long-term love is.

Not constant warmth.
But the willingness to regulate instead of retreat.

Many of us (gays) who grew up feeling outside of things learned early to brace for loss. When you sit in emotional cold long enough, it feels normal. So when real warmth arrives — steady, unglamorous, deeply mutual warmth — it can feel temporary.

But avoiding warmth because it might cool one day is just choosing permanent chill.

Honesty says:
“I am changing.”

Doubt says:
“I want out.”

Those are not the same.

And let me say this plainly, without metaphor:

I want to marry him.

Not because it’s expected.
Not because five years have passed.
Not because it’s the next box to check.

I want to marry him because I know who I am when I’m with him.

I am softer.
I am steadier.
I am more accountable.
I am less alone.

I no longer want to live at the edge of the playground.

With him, adulthood feels like recess done right.

We love watching The Traitors like it’s high drama, debating who’s lying. We fall asleep to Friends like it’s a lullaby we’ve memorized. We rewatch Stranger Things because nostalgia feels safe in our living room. Sometimes it’s Real Housewives, sometimes a MasterClass, sometimes jazz in the kitchen while something sweet bakes in the oven.

He eats what I cook like it matters... Faster than I've ever seen anyone eat before.

We walk our eight-month-old puppy and talk about nothing and everything. We sit with his family. Mine. We travel. We stay in. We try new restaurants. We try new versions of ourselves.

He loves me even though I still sleep with my childhood blanket.

Maybe even because of it.

None of it looks cinematic. None of it glitters.

But it feels like being chosen for recess — every day.

He is my person.

If something is dying in me, it is the fear that kept me guarded.

If something is being born, it is a version of me that can stay.

I don’t want to perform certainty.

I want to build something real — with him.

And I am choosing it. I love You D.A.B.

I pressed publish at 12:13 a.m. on Friday the 13th.

My first thought was immediate and unfiltered:

This is a sign.

I’ve always been vulnerable to meaningful numbers.

I was born at 11:11. Not according to my birth certificate — according to the handwritten card the nurse filled out with my name and time of delivery. My mother never made a big deal of it. I found it myself. And once I did, it became part of the mythology.

11:11 meant alignment. Destiny. Protection. Something special.

I’ve never been sure whether I believe in signs — or whether I just hate randomness.

When I was seven, I found a dead bird in our backyard.

It was small and light and completely still. I remember the shock of it — the first time I saw death face to face. Not on television. Not in theory. In my hands.

Around that same time, I was obsessed with The Indian in the Cupboard. There’s a line in it that lodged itself into me:

“People die here. We just never see it.”

That line felt like a secret being revealed.

In the movie, when a tiny action figure dies, the boy wraps him carefully and buries him. It’s solemn. Tender. Honorable. Death is handled with reverence.

So that’s what I did.

I dug a small hole. I placed a leaf over the bird to protect it from the cold soil. I buried it.

And then I dug it up.

I don’t know if I was hoping it would come back to life — like in the movie — or if I was checking to make sure I hadn’t buried it alive.

Probably both.

I buried and unearthed that bird five or six times. Each time expecting something to shift. Each time confused by the same result.

It was still there.

And it was still gone.

That was the part I couldn’t understand — how something could physically exist and yet be completely absent. It felt like saying a word over and over until it lost its meaning.

Tartelettes… Tartelettes… Tartelettes.

Death. Death. Death.

The concept became unreal, almost abstract. Like trying to imagine the edge of the universe. I couldn’t grasp how something could simply stop and not resume.

I think that’s when I started bargaining with meaning.

If numbers aligned.
If signs appeared.
If coincidences felt deliberate.
If 11:11 mattered.

Then maybe things weren’t random.
Maybe endings weren’t final.
Maybe I was protected.

So when I saw 12:13 on Friday the 13th after pressing publish, the old wiring sparked.

This is a sign.

But maybe what I felt wasn’t fate.

Maybe it was the familiar discomfort of doing something irreversible.

You can unbury a bird.
You can’t bring it back.

You can hesitate for years about writing.
You can’t unread the moment you publish.

Marriage feels similar.

At some point, you stop digging up the life you’ve buried to check if it’s still breathing.

At some point, you accept that choosing something means other versions of you won’t return.

12:13 wasn’t prophecy.

It was a timestamp.

And for the first time in my life, I’m trying not to dig it back up to make sure it’s still alive.

I just finished bingeing Girls in 2026, fourteen years after it first aired, and felt personally attacked by my own timing.

When Girls premiered on HBO in 2012, I was 23 and newly rerouting my life. I had done what my parents asked: I got a degree. OCAD. Art direction. Advertising. Something practical. Something respectable. They always told me I could do whatever I wanted — as long as I got a degree first.

So I did.

And then I did what felt both reckless and necessary: I went to musical theatre school.

At the exact cultural moment when Lena Dunham was writing about young people clinging to unfinished lives, I was trying to begin mine again.

I didn’t watch Girls back then. Maybe I wasn’t ready to see myself.

Now I’m 37. I’m getting married in 235 days. And I don’t know who I’m becoming.

That’s the part no one warns you about. Marriage isn’t just about choosing someone else. It’s about choosing a version of yourself — and quietly retiring the others.

For most of my life, I lived in what I can only describe as Neverland. Not in the Peter Pan cartoon sense, but in the psychological one. Neverland is potential. As long as you don’t commit fully — to a career, to a city, to a person — you remain infinite. You can still become the actor. The genius. The late bloomer who explodes at 40. The man who hasn’t peaked yet.

There’s comfort in being unfinished.

But unfinished things don’t build families.

I’ve always felt slightly late to the game. Late to confidence. Late to understanding my sexuality. Late to believing I was intelligent. ADHD and dyslexia trained me early to assume I was behind. Being gay added another timeline entirely. Jewish guilt added a soundtrack.

At 37, the timelines converge.

Some people call 37 young. Some call it middle-aged. Some quietly categorize it as the age where you should already know who you are. I feel like I’ve entered a room where everyone else received a manual I never got.

And yet, I also feel closer to myself than I ever have.

I want children. I want a family. I want a life that stretches beyond ambition. I still want ambition. I’m writing a half-hour comedy. I still chase the dream. But for the first time, I’m less interested in being impressive and more interested in being real.

Maslow talks about self-actualization like it’s the top of a pyramid. Something most people never reach. I used to think self-actualization meant becoming extraordinary.

Now I think it might mean becoming honest.

There’s a grief in leaving Neverland. Grief for the versions of me that could have been anything. Grief for the chaos that felt like freedom. Grief for the fantasy that brilliance would one day arrive without discipline.

But there’s also relief.

Relief in choosing.

Relief in saying: this is the man I am building. Not the man I’m imagining.

I don’t know exactly who I’m becoming.

But I know I’m done waiting to find out by accident.