I was 23 and living with a girl who wanted to be, and eventually became, a model. I’d only met her a few months earlier when I toured the apartment. Afterwards, my friends asked what she was like, and I said the first thing that came to mind: she was pretty. She reminded me of Jan from The Office, for her elegant face and ability to glide between drunken giddiness and terrifying sternness. I was happy when she offered me the room: because I needed a place to live and because it was a sought-after listing, which meant I must have come off normal and likable. That must be who I was.

Our walls were thin, so I wasn’t being intentionally nosy when she talked on the phone about her modeling prospects. She’d recently flown to Florida for a shoot and was thinking about moving to New York.

“You know,” I heard her say, “When you grow up and you’re tall and naturally thin with a pretty face, everyone always just says to be a model.”

Oh, I thought. Oh!

At 23, I must have had a general sense of the world and my place within it, one that I’m flattening now. But the borders weren’t filled out. I still carried this childhood uncertainty: I was never sure what I looked like.

Sometimes, this had manifested literally. When I got glasses as a kid, the world appeared with violent sharpness. The moon! The leaves! But there was one weakness: I couldn’t see myself, only myself with glasses. My nearsightedness was such that my face was blurry in the bathroom mirror, and when I climbed on the counter and studied my reflection, the proximity was its own distortion.

Selfies didn’t meaningfully exist yet; photos were something that came in Kodak envelopes a few times a year. Plus, I was a child. I changed every day. I stood in the bathroom, reversing my glasses so the arms that typically went over my ears extended towards the mirror. I figured the lenses would be close enough to fix my vision, but my brain wouldn’t read the reflection as an image of me wearing glasses, just holding glasses in front of me.

But then I just got contacts. Mostly, of course, I mean I didn’t know how I looked to others. Like a lot of young people, my self-assessments were prone to horrible, almost nonsensical extremes. So that wasn’t a reliable gauge. It would be mortifying to ask anyone what my deal was, and I doubted they’d answer honestly.

For a long time, two possible worlds existed: one where I was beautiful, another where I was a repulsive monster. This sucked, and didn’t make me fun to be around, but it contained a pleasure: although the beautiful world wasn’t guaranteed, if it existed, there were no limits upon it. I might be beautiful to any degree. Seeing a photo of Winona Ryder, I wouldn’t always think: I wish I looked like that, but: I hope one day the world reveals I’ve looked like that all along.

I’m sure I had a separate, more grounded consciousness beneath this one. Still, I remember: when I heard my roommate through the wall, I knew she was only weighing the New York decision, releasing the pretense that she was blind to her own beauty.1 Set against her clarity, I realized I did know the answer.

It all came rushing into focus. I’d wanted to be undeniably pretty, to the eyes of the collective rather than the individual. I’d wanted beauty in a greedy way, wanted more than I knew what to do with. Like a looksmaxxer, minus the discipline. But the truth was this: some people would find me beautiful, others wouldn’t. My appearance wouldn’t make my life difficult. But, no, it didn’t look like I was beautiful in the way my roommate was. If that had been the case, someone would have told me.

Though I’d tried to scrub them from my mind, there’d been signs. When I was 15, for example, a guy rated me a 6. . To be clear, I’m fine with how I look. My teenage self feels so removed that I laugh about this now, like a terrible diary entry. But it once stung. It wasn’t just that he called me mid, though it was that too. I’d have been upset even if he’d said something higher — to be grabbed from the air like that, out of the realm of potential, into the quantifiable. I’d wanted so badly to see myself clearly, climbing on the bathroom sink, but I hadn’t considered how I’d make peace with it when I did.

Just now, I changed my icon to an old art project. It’s too easy to imagine a reader assessing my appearance or my understanding of it, perhaps involuntarily assigning me a new number. Or worse, reassuring me. This would embarrass me and miss the point. On the other side of that revelation was not only a greater understanding (and acceptance) of my own appearance, but also a sense that I had limits.

As a child, I felt like my identity could expand endlessly in any direction. If I was smart, maybe I’d be a genius. If I was a good writer, maybe I’d author masterpieces. Someone once said I had a nice voice, so I danced around my room imagining myself on American Idol.

I think this is how I want kids to relate to the world: to see possibility, to imagine themselves as potentially spectacular. There’s a magnificent egomania to childhood, but it’s all basically true. When I was nine, I could grow up to be exceptional at many things. I could have been president, had I fundamentally altered my personality. Who was to say? Maybe this is what a lot of the “former gifted kid” fuss is about. There’s natural disappointment that comes with discovering yourself as finite. Tragic to be a former kid at all.

When do we let go of the counterfactual self? I once said I felt like I could have been pretty good at math, had I not been so committed to being a little artist and exhibiting all associated traits when I was younger. My friend laughed and said you have to give up “things you could have been good at” once you’re over 25. When I was 24, I went on a big self-improvement spree: meditating, lifting weights, cleaning my room. I felt I had a short window to get myself in order before my brain hardened over.

Then again, I hated running and was terrible at it until 30. 12 years into adulthood, I thought: maybe that could be me — and now, I happily run half marathons at a very normal pace. Trying something new is different than fantasizing about an alternate self. But doesn’t the impetus to try start in the fantasy of another self whose talents surpass ours?

And what if the talent I fantasize about is just being cool? Recently, I’ve been getting reels on my algorithm from a sorority rush coach. She was rejected from every sorority her first year of college, then scurried off, worked hard on her chatting skills, and received bids from all her second try. She teaches girls to be good conversationalists. If someone asks about your summer, don’t say, “I went to the beach and we hung out.” Say, “We went to the beach and I thought it would be low-key, then my friend wanted to go on this midnight bike ride. I was exhausted, but it was so beautiful.”

You should also just have good vibes: if there’s music, make sure you’re laughing and clapping along, not freezing up like a deer in headlights. I look at her: is this a girl who used to freeze, but absolutely hammered charisma into her body?

I’m glad I didn’t go to a sorority school. It would’ve revealed me to myself before I was ready. That’s another disappointment: I’m not infinitely likable. I have friends; I don’t suffer. I was pleasant enough to get the apartment! But sometimes I spend the day with a particularly magnetic friend and think: if we meet anyone new, young or old, they’ll connect better with her. I’ve been stiff when I’m meant to clap. Then, once I’m comfortable, who knows? Maybe I’ll start evaluating my beauty in a public forum.

Sometimes this bums me out, and I try to remind myself to be grateful. I was never going to be without borders; I had to have a form. If I were a soul about to be placed into a new life at the baby factory and found out where I was going, I’d be very, very happy. By second grade, I’d meet one of my best friends, who I still talk to on the phone. I have long-lasting relationships, and it’s not because there’s nothing bad about me. This — being deeply known and loved — is the kind of consolation prize I would have turned my nose up at when I was younger, but that’s because I didn’t know anything.

The sorority coach offers one-on-one calls where high schoolers can practice chatting with her, but I’m 32. I may never take the advice or learn to talk with her hard won breeziness. The collective, broadly speaking, may always like me less. But I find her so, so comforting. When she’s on my screen, charm is a skill I can develop, a matter of learning a few tricks. It’d make life easier, but it isn’t core to my being.

Oh, how I love this young woman: for placing likability outside my body, for making its limits, the fact of them, more tolerable.

I skimmed a little but I didn’t want to read a 4,000+ piece insulting the stuff I like. If I engaged, it would go like this: Arn would pose solid arguments and I wouldn’t have a satisfying response. But it wouldn’t matter. Somebody could write a killer essay about why pizza tastes bad; I know pleasure when I see it. I’d feel defensive and frustrated; unconvinced, but unable to rhetorically keep up.

But a few weeks ago I was working on another piece about the hatred of creative nonfiction, so I opened it again. I don’t credit Arn with the decline of CNF’s reputation so much as mainstreaming contempt, but still: I haven’t seen the genre recover much in the years since. This is a shame. I know literary, first-person essays can move readers, because they move me. Obviously, bad personal writing is bad and the genre is attractive to self-indulgent bores — but I’m not interested in dwelling on the worst of it when the best parts are really good.

To argue against The Contemporary American Essay (both the name of the specific collection critiqued and a stand in for the personal essay tradition at large, and which Arn abbreviates to TCAE), Arn needs to position it as a genuinely powerful market force — dominant enough that you could see Arn, who was about a year from becoming a New Yorker art critic (but also two more years away from being fired for “inappropriate behavior”), write a screed largely focused on Ander Monson (an experimental poet and essayist who runs an indie journal) and say, Yes, that’s speaking truth to power. That’s the establishment! The essay’s alleged dominance is central to the whole piece’s framing, so let’s look at it.

The third paragraph begins:

“Since 2011, in any case, essays have outsold mainstream fiction and outranked it on best-of-the-year lists.”

Do you think he’s talking about Bossypants? Maybe he’s being deliberately vague — I’m actually not sure what he means when he says “essays have outsold mainstream fiction.”

I think this could be interpreted in three ways:

1. The very most successful essay collections outsold certain titles in mainstream fiction. This is true, but too obvious and irrelevant to comment on. The short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties has outsold various novels, but this offers little insight into the broader market conditions of fiction.

2. Literary essay collections (the sort represented in TCAE) as a genre outsold mainstream fiction as a genre. This is what Arn’s sentence seems like it’s saying, but if you think about it for two seconds, you will realize it sounds insane.

3. Nonfiction as a category outsells mainstream fiction as a category. This is my best bet. It’s interesting and true. But what it refers to is largely business books, diet books, Let Them, Why We Sleep, Hillbilly Elegy, Seriously…I’m Kidding by Ellen Degeneres, The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK, Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Not necessarily Meghan O’Gieblyn’s reflections on interior states.

I find this ambiguity aggravating: Arn’s argument largely hinges on conflating personal literary essays with nonfiction as a whole when it serves him, then differentiating them when it doesn’t.

First, we should establish what we’re actually talking about. The “literary essay,” “creative nonfiction” — whatever you want to call it — is an ill-defined category, and Arn is right about that. It’s poorly named, and many CNF writers will simply call it “essay” to avoid sounding pretentious (“literary”) or cringe (“creative”). It’s a category that’s risen in recent decades and takes up a large part of The Contemporary American Essay collection, a much smaller part of nonfiction publishing.

I’d define the literary essay/creative nonfiction as branch of nonfiction that’s more invested in how it can pursue artistic goals, similar to the ones sought through poetry or fiction, rather than argument. The rise of this type of essay has given us wonderful things, which I talk at length about here. It gave us Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” for instance: an account of the day her colleagues were killed in a school shooting that begins with a dying dog who wakes her from sleep. By the time Beard learns which of her colleagues has been killed, she leaves the room and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror: “I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires.” I thought this was beautiful. It’s a good form for things that aren’t reducible to argument, to a singular “point.”

Arn never makes this distinction — between literary nonfiction and otherwise — but I think it’s important to keep in mind as we look at Arn’s argument. There are other threads, but a streamlined version could be read like this:

1. Essays have gained market and institutional dominance (“thriving” as “other literary forms have wobbled”)

2. TCAE’s collection mostly features first-person, literary essays

3. These personal essays avoid argument and big ideas : “when you only write about what you’ve experienced personally, you miss a lot.” TCAE, Arn says, ignores “climate change, the surveillance state, the Great Recession, the internet and social media, and the War on Terror.”

4. Personal essays include a greater degree of hedging language which should be primarily read as a form of evasion. The essayists hide behind the first-person in lieu of analytical rigor, and are also disincentivized from approaching the world with analytical rigor, as it could make them unlikable. They resist conclusions, probably out of laziness or cowardice.

5. Therefore, nonfiction thinking has become weak. Essays (“the intellectual bellwether’) are trivial, representative of broader decline in thinking. TCAE is evidence that we are desperately short of “well-argued, logical essays” necessary for our chaotic times.

What he’s doing is switching what he means by essay depending on his need. He seems to use “essays” as a broad category to prove market dominance, he then switches to “essays” as a narrow category (literary personal essays) to prove hedging and narcissism. He behaves as though their overrepresentation in Lopate’s collection means they represent a larger portion of nonfiction than they do, suggesting they replaced big idea writing.

“Big idea” writing (about climate change! and WAR!) was and is still out there. When Dot dot dot dot dot came out in 2022, many publications (for example, The Drift itself) released exclusively argument-oriented essays. The top-selling nonfiction in 2021 was American Marxism — but high on the list was The Anthropocene Reviewed — essays about the very climate change that nobody writes essays about. Surely, the question of how argumentative nonfiction approaches war and climate change is best assessed by looking at the bountiful nonfiction written for that purpose — and not by looking at the mediations of an editor of an indie journal where staff photographs feature only the subject’s eyes. And yet.

You could say, correctly, that The Contemporary American Essay used too broad a label in the title. You could say that Lopate gave literary nonfiction too much space in the collection. You could say you just don’t like literary nonfiction and you think Leslie Jamison might be a bad hang. But I’d want Arn, or any critic, to at least assess a work’s goals honestly. Literary essays are the subgenre of nonfiction that is least interested in defining nonfiction’s merits only as a tool of argumentation and thought. But Arn uses a fragmented experimental essay as evidence of intellectual collapse, while largely ignoring both the writer’s goals and the argumentative nonfiction outside the book.

Technically, Arn acknowledges that the collection is not entirely representative of American essays. “The Contemporary American Essay is not the contemporary American essay. I hope not, anyway” he writes, which is an important caveat, but also makes it harder to justify his opening about how essays are the “face mask” of American literature, etc etc. If you know clear argumentation is happening elsewhere, what does it matter that another type of literary exploration is happening here? Why does this bear the responsibility of being that? What the collection may actually reflect is not a decline in thought, but an expanding concept of what the essay can do.

Anyway, all that stuff he says about how “thriving” the personal essay is — I don’t know. That has nothing to do with anything I’ve experienced. I know Dot dot dot dot dot was written at the tail end of a decade where literary essays received a brief flurry of attention, but I’d love for Arn to tell an agent he’s written a personal essay collection and see how excited they get.

Arn’s economic argument is that personal essays have taken over because they’re cheap. But from a writing perspective, I can find paying outlets for essays rooted in critical analysis or reporting far more easily than for first-person work, which is largely siloed to university journals that pay $150.

Instead, I could write more stuff like this. This piece doesn’t make me feel proud or whole or connected to our shared humanity; I don’t have any particular talent for argumentation; I don’t like fighting on the internet. I feel mortified knowing that this rant is how some people will encounter my writing, like this is the type of essay I’m defending. But it would be easier to sell. Whatever Arn says, I’ll tell you this: the only thing I’m financially incentivized to do as an essayist is leave the stuff I love behind.

You’ve already won, I want to scream sometimes. I’m literally not allowed to write from life unless I’m Emily Ratajkowski. What do you even want? — if not the pleasure of talking shit.

Actually, Arn is quite clear about what he wants. Although he acknowledges that good essays can be, and perhaps inherently are, personal, he writes more respectfully about “essayists who acknowledge themselves here and there but politely retreat behind their subject for long stretches.” The implication is that first-person restraint indicates rigor, that immersion in the personal correlates with evasion. When Arn writes of the essay as “the laboratory in which thinkers get to mess around, unfrazzled by plot and characterization and symbolism”— I think, okay, yes, you’re that kind of guy.

He attributes this concept to Lopate, but never addresses the possibility that this definition could be wrong. He doesn’t entertains the idea that many writers are not using the essay as an idea lab, that many writers are very interested in characterization, symbolism, and storytelling, and he makes little apparent effort to read the collection’s contents with that lens.

Like nearly every CNF writer I know, I began in a different genre. When I “discovered” the essay, I’d taken a few contemporary poetry classes, which I’d loved, and it was with this lens that I began writing essays. The intent didn’t changed; the attention to language didn’t vanish. I just started using slightly different tools to express the same stuff. When I read, again, the phrase “unfrazzled by plot and characterization and symbolism,” I feel frustrated in a way that alienates me from argument and articulation. I feel like I’m being trolled. If you can’t spot symbolic language in essays, maybe that’s a skill issue?

Much of the disconnect comes down to categorization and naming conventions. Arn and I use “essay” to describe different form expectations and become frustrated because of it.

Arn positions the essay’s “indefinability” problem as that of a genre infatuated with its own vagueness. To that I say: sure. It’s kind of a nerd thing to get caught up in the genre’s mutability imo, but some contingent likes it. Still, I don’t think the annoyingness of essayists (which seems to be Arn’s truest complaint) represents the whole story. Another explanation of why the question of “what the essay is” comes up so much is simply: the literary essay is a newer genre (as Arn says, it was for a long time a “non-genre”) and people (clearly) want different things from it. Personally, I would love to never talk about what “creative nonfiction” or “the essay” is ever again, but almost any time a normal person in my life asks about what I write or what I studied, I do “Do you ever listen to This American Life?” I might ask.

This fuzziness isn’t only a sin of category, but content. One of the issues Arn takes with essayists is their use of the word “maybe” and “perhaps” — he does ctrl-f to prove his point that essayists are relentlessly uncertain.

My thinking here splits, as I think two things are going on:

In some cases, I don’t mind this. I like the essay’s ability to explore an idea without commitment, to throw out thoughts speculatively, to think alongside the audience. I think it’s fun! Arn wants uncertainty to come from weighing “rival certainties,” but I think it’s fine just to label conjecture or describe an internal state.

And still: I do know about the defensive, put-on, and lazy uncertainty. I’ve been to creative nonfiction workshops! For three years straight! Nobody has to tell me about the ways in which essayists can be annoying. I was in my MFA from 2020-2023, a time in which moral urgency and confusion about responsibility was getting everyone to write like self-conscious weirdos.

There were tics of the era that transcended genre, but probably hit nonfiction the worst. If I were writing, say, about pigs living on a vegetarian farm, I might spiral about labor conditions and the class-implications of being vegetarian, but then who am I, an MFA student, to talk about the labor exploitation of factory farm workers? This leads to a socially-manufactured uncertainty: I had no business adding two paragraphs about industrial agriculture, and it came off anxious and weird. I’d figure this out in time. I didn’t delete the whole essay or abandon the genre; I simply took a section out. There was another related phenomenon: if you wrote an essay that asserted your views too definitively or cited too much empirical research, there was a risk you’d be accused of dismissing alternate ways of knowing. It was tough stuff.

It’s true that a way to get around that was by narrowing the scope to what was definitely your authoritative domain: yourself. I remember sitting on my best friend’s couch a little drunk, making fun of this aspect of workshop — “Personally, in my experience, to me,” I’d said— not a particularly different grievance than Arn’s.

Where we differed from Arn was not in the ability to notice when an essayist is being annoying. We didn’t even completely differ in the habits that annoyed us. But I never doubted or forgot what the essay was for, or what it could do. Arn makes enough caveats that he doesn’t technically write that the personal writing is indulgent or that contemporary essays are bad. But when you zoom out, that’s really the impression you get. So maybe I’m not technically contradicting him when I say: I didn’t have disdain for myself. I never saw nonfiction as a lesser genre; I knew it took as much craft and heart as any other pursuit and delivered as powerfully. I loved my friends’ writing, and I loved the work of other essayists, if not indiscriminately. I understood that the form was better than the most mealy-mouthed people within it, than the “middle class dinner party” etiquette. I would never define myself or my ambitions by their performance.

My friends and I talked constantly about how to deal with the modulation of the self — the degree to which we’re trying to get someone to like us, the inevitability of it. And so, again, in so many ways, our conversations resembled Arn’s. But if our points could be similar, there’s an incredibly different character of criticism that comes from a place of effort and love than that which comes from the desire to impress your friends by dunking on Ander Monson, describing his ellipses as “dirtying the page like mouse shit on the attic floor,” positioning yourself as “Against” an entire mode of expression. Perhaps Arn would say he writes from the same motivations that I do — to defend something he loves from its degradation. But why would anything written from love be so absent of warmth, so gleeful in its mockery? It’s bad for the soul to write like that.

When I try to make an affirmative argument on behalf of literary nonfiction, it gets dangerously close to “don’t yuck my yum.” But what can I say besides the fact that I love it? I’m not bored by the lives of others, fictional or not. We could argue all day about this stuff — whether pizza tastes good, whether a cat should block its eyes sleepily upon waking, whether it’s fun to stay up drinking and talking late into the night — but I know where I stand.

This is, of course, not only a matter of labeling. Everyone knows creative nonfiction is the genre of narcissists. Although in most forms of writing, I really think that over-concern with the self is fine, and basically inevitable. What’s actually bad is under-concern with the reader, which is only a failure of craft.

*

When I started thinking about this piece, I wrote a bunch of bullet point about all the unfairnesses levied against CNF, how very wrong my enemies were. Then I realized I was being both defensive and insane, and worse, I hadn’t said a single thing about its good.

I think I really became aware of the genre (nonfiction not written to inform or argue, but toward the artistic goals of poetry or fiction) around 2014. I would have been 20. I remember sitting on my front porch in Richmond with a collection of essays and feeling a bit rabid about the whole thing.

I hadn’t read much like it before, and maybe the best way to describe the excitement is analogous to when you meet someone you just get along with so well and your conversation keeps forking in different directions. My friend and I were doing a pen pal thing at the time, so I tore out a page I liked and mailed it to her. Then I bought a digital copy because I was trying to scan the essay for somebody else until I was apprehended by my own vandalism.

I'd found Kreider because he'd been a guest on Radiolab, where one of his essays was adapted into an audio segment. I remember that summer, after I'd heard the episode but before I bought the book, trying to repeat the whole thing to my friend as we drank one night: it was about his friend Skelly, a compulsive liar, and how only after Skelly's death did Kreider learn the extent of what he hadn't known. But it didn’t matter because what does information even mean? I wasn’t getting the point across, so I looked up the transcript of the podcast and made her read this passage, which isn’t the correct way to consume these paragraphs, for her nor you, but alas:

What I would say we fell for was the thousands of hours we spent in that guy’s company, which seems to me like a more direct and reliable form of knowing than hearing facts, either made up or real. There was a day when Skelly and I drove up to my cabin to check on the place because there had been a blizzard, and there was a grove of bamboo trees there, and the weight of all the snow had bent them over the driveway so that they formed a kind of continuous arch. And we parked and we walked down through that arcade and we would tug on every bamboo tree, and it would shake the snow off, and it would suddenly spring up into the air, and it would fling its load of snow 50 feet into the sky. We did that with every tree, walking all the way down the driveway, and it was so beautiful and so much fun that we cracked up like boys. And I’m the only one who remembers that now. That was a moment that only he and I were there for and he’s gone. He shared that with me and nobody else ever will. You’re imagining it because I’ve described it to you, but that’s not the same thing, and if you don’t know someone by having experiences like that and memories like that with them, then I would submit that you cannot ever know anybody at all.

Maybe you need the rest of the episode’s context for that to truly hit, and probably, you should actually listen to it. Maybe it will never do for you what it did for me in that exact moment. I don’t know what I’m trying to tell you by including that passage, except that it moved me and shifted the way I saw relationships a little bit. I guess it technically had a thesis, but I didn’t see it as advancing cultural argument. It gave me what I found in fiction and poetry, and it didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t either of those things. I wouldn’t have imagined that there was any dispute about whether or not this was as legitimate an art as anything else.

*

Why do I think people dislike creative nonfiction? Well, they tell me so. Regular people in my life are often unsure what CNF is; writerly people in my life sometimes share those discourse pieces about the lameness of the genre. When I applied to Iowa, I had no idea that creative nonfiction MFAs would be separate from the regular workshop: while the poets and fiction writers took their classes in the beautiful Dey House overlooking the river, we were shuffled around the smelly English-Philosophy Building. You could say this is because of institutional history, but, deep down, I knew it was because they saw us as lesser-genre losers.

We didn’t even have a good name. “Creative nonfiction” is, as stated, embarrassing; essay is too broad. I associate “personal essay” with Jia Tolentino announcing the boom is over. She and her peers had all the fun while I was still in school and now everyone’s sick of this shit. And then “memoir” is reserved for people with exceptional lives

To be fair, my enemies had some points. Creative nonfiction is often bad. There are market forces at work that might pay you $250 to expose yourself online. There are workshops in which students will not be dissuaded from turning in their greatest trauma — which I think is fine to write about generally, but obviously complicates feedback, and can also be a mean thing to do to yourself emotionally. But I don’t see this as the sole issue, or the greatest one. In grad school, my professor talked about the cardinal sin that makes so much creative nonfiction intolerable: believing something is interesting simply because it happened to you.

I was in her seminar reviewing the past year’s CNF releases, and we’d read a memoir by a generally respected novelist. I was disappointed when, at the beginning of class, she said she assumed we all understood the book was bad and self-indulgent and we couldn’t spend the whole time talking shit.

She articulated the situation a bit like this: the book was bad because the writer didn’t respect creative nonfiction. Clearly, he knew how to render a character and sustain a reader’s attention in fiction. But, she suspected, he belonged to a large group of people who believed that, because essayists work from the “real world,” they could offload craft and authorship.

After all, why wouldn’t he feel a sense of pre-existing expertise? We’re all writing about ourselves all the time. A poet I knew once said he’d never realized essays could be “hard,” since he’d written plenty for school.

I remember at Iowa when a fiction professor declared essays “couldn’t have unreliable narrators,” how my friends and I complained — not only are memoirists constantly musing upon the slipperiness of memory, thus inserting narrative doubt, but he spoke as if it were impossible to control the reveal of information for the sake of surprise and misdirection! Like the world was a singular, linear thing, and we just copied it down.

When people assume they already know how to do something, they don’t take the time to learn — by which I don’t mean “get an MFA” but to treat it with curiosity and humility. And so they write bad, self-indulgent creative nonfiction. And so people read bad, self-indulgent creative nonfiction, and assume this badness, this tediousness is a crime of the genre.

Or maybe I’m oversimplifying it. Maybe I’m so resistant to the idea that someone could dislike a genre I love that the only explanation I can imagine is they’ve read the bad versions of it. Maybe it sounds like I’m taking one memoir, which surely wasn’t bad on purpose, and extrapolating that, along with a poet’s thoughtless comment, into a theory that people hate creative nonfiction.

But I’m not, and they do, and what’s more, Jackson Arn, who wrote “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot | Against the Contemporary American Essay” for The Drift (which I’ve finally read four years after the fact and will be responding to next week) hates that I just said “maybe” three times in a row. Beyond the discourse, there are implicit category judgments in the submission criteria of literary outlets. The Drift, and many publications like it, publishes fiction and poetry that doesn’t need to be polemical, alongside nonfiction that can’t be motivated by storytelling or any of the regular drivers of literature, but must, instead, be grounded in critical argument, or maybe journalism. A proper essay should attach itself to an existing conversation or event or a review of someone else’s work, which is to say that nonfiction becomes an auxiliary form of writing.

*

I don’t really believe my lot is worse than that of a poet. The literary group that actually deserves grievance recognition is obviously translators, and I’m not even going to open the conversation about the perils of regular jobs because it would make this Substack impossible to continue.

Iowa opened a nonfiction building across from Dey House around the time I graduated. They’d wanted to relocate the oldest building in Iowa, but the process was too complicated so they constructed a new one. “Why can’t we just buy a frat house?” I kept asking. The new building was reddish brown on top, grey on the bottom, and I’m cracking up as I read this AI Overview description of its architecture:

“Playfully evoking facts ‘twisted slightly out of whack,’” god help us. New bio.

One afternoon, I had a student stick around after class because she wanted to ask me: How did I personally feel about the fact that the nonfiction building wasn’t so beautiful? I guess it doesn’t affect me, I said, I’m leaving. My MFA’s over, of course. I’m meeting you here, on Substack, where essays rule supreme.

I’m sure everyone feels the genre they love is maligned. While poets are allowed to publish in The Drift, my work is more legible to a friend from high school. It’s favored in terms of advances. I see fiction writers as “having it easy,” and envy them for being born with a more correct passion. But short story writers are punished for not being novelists; literary novelists are disdained by commercial readers for their unlikable narrators and lack of linear action; commercial novelists are called vapid and dumb. I’m simply attuned to the crimes against CNF because they’re inconvenient for me career-wise, and because I’m a normal person and I just don’t like when I’m left out from the party.

But when you peel back the layers of ego, I genuinely feel like: why? If you publish fiction and poetry, surely you understand the value of art for art’s sake, and not only for argument. Who cares that an essay is true and without line breaks? Why is this such a disqualifying sin?

I’ve realized that there’s a popular value among readers that I don’t share: a lot of people really, really care that a story is sufficiently invented. I came to understand this while reading Goodreads reviews of fiction, particularly for The Girls by Emma Cline. A lot of readers were annoyed that she had just “copied” the Manson murders, “ripping off” reality when she was supposed to make things up.

I was baffled. To me, it was clear that The Girls was a work of imagination: she had imagined the psychological reality of being a 14-year-old girl in the Manson family. But I was shocked that people held invention itself in such high esteem — higher, it seemed, than the sensitivity or articulation of the work, as if it cheapened the story to know it was inspired by life.

Is this the instinct that makes it difficult for nonfiction to be taken seriously as art? Of course, fiction promises readers some degree of nonreality, but I always took that as a description rather than a value you were meant to maximize. Was the key, to these readers, just to fabricate scenarios whole cloth? To say: no, this cult leader wasn’t in California... he lived in Antarctica! Instead of a long beard, a mohawk! There — now I’ve made stuff up. I can do it too.

I don’t know how to address this — the idea that invention should be uniquely prized — because it wouldn’t occur to me in the first place. To be clear, I enjoy and admire fiction, and I love it for providing what fiction can do best: hyperflexible narrative empathy, aliens. Invention is a great athletic feat on the part of the writer, but, as a reader, it’s mostly what invention does that I like. The actual fact that a scenario is imagined just doesn’t give me much. I don’t care if I’m reading a window into their imagination or attention; it’s all them.

And, as fascinating as fictional worlds can be, it’s a truism that the real one is no less weird — which is why CNF really shouldn’t be as self-centered as its reputation suggests, even when the content is personal. The self might be an irremovable mediating force, but the writer ought to be curious: about bat-monitoring initiatives and celebrity lookalikes, or why their friend of decades would consistently lie to them. It’s always struck me as bizarre how a standard answer to “what do you like to read” is “fiction” or “nonfiction.” Not mystery or humor or bold narrators or complicated mother-daughter relationships — just this blunt delineation between “I like when things are true,” “I like when things are not true.”

Years ago, I listened to a podcast interview with Elif Batuman that I hope I’m not misremembering. In the episode, she said something about how, in Turkish, the distinction isn’t so much “fiction” vs “nonfiction” as it is in English, but “literature” vs “documentary.” It was important for documentary to accurately document, as that was its purpose — but when you called something “literature,” what you were saying wasn’t that it was untrue, but that its truth didn’t matter. What envy I felt for that linguistic distinction. Why should I have to tell people whether or not I really had an abortion? she asked the interviewer. What difference does it make?

Although, it wouldn’t be right to say that a CNF essay is only defined by its relationship to truth: when someone calls something “essayistic,” they’re not saying, “That definitely happened!” Framing an essay as “fiction that happens to be true” positions it as fiction with less in the toolbox, rather than a form with its own character. I generally like John D’Agata’s definition of the essay: “an art form that tracks the evolution of consciousness as it rolls over the folds of a new idea, memory, or emotion.” When I try to pin down the essay’s nature, I think the phrase: “pulling on a string.”

In Kreider’s essay, I was moved by his description of his friend’s lies — I’m not sure I’d seen an adult liar understood with such warmth. Skelly would tell him about confronting strangers who mistreat animals, and Kreider writes: “Whether this was literally true is irrelevant; the fact that he told such stories was a measure of his hatred of cruelty.”

Skelly’s fictions were described as expressions of his innermost self, but it was in the realm of real life that Kreider knew him, flinging snow off all that bamboo together. It’s a knowledge that resists factual verification — half of what Kreider knew about Skelly was, after all, fake — and is fundamentally grounded in scene. But the fact that it really happened isn’t incidental to its meaning.

*

Naturally, it’s fraught to write a 2,800 word newsletter about the perils of self-indulgence. My mistakes can easily undercut my argument, even though this type of essay (thesis-driven, in response to cultural conversation) isn’t even the type of creative nonfiction I’m discussing.

But that’s neither here nor there. The successes and failures of my own craft don’t change the fact that there are essayists better than me out there. My summer in Richmond would have been different, and, I believe, worse, if constraints on nonfiction or disdain for the personal had kept the essay from reaching me or kept me from receiving it with openness.

A week of no-headphone tram diaries

I’ve always loved being a little nosy on the Melbourne tram. I like seeing who skips the fare. I like the tourists and the teenage couples who look a little emo. One evening, my boyfriend and I made up a whole story about the group of adolescent boys riding the tram with us — how they were up to no good, out to menace the town. But then they drew closer, and we realized they were debating which stop would take them closer to the Melbourne Museum. A bunch of guys on a Friday night, and all they wanted to do was get together and see some gd dinosaur bones.

So, it’s really a bit of a loss that I spend most tram rides with my headphones in and pay very little attention to what I claim to love.

Recently, I decided to do a week of no-headphones tram rides. I don’t actually take the tram every day, so I’m interpreting the idea of a “week” pretty loosely, but here are seven recent rides.

Sunday July 19, 8:16 AM:

I’m taking the tram to the train station, where I’ll take the V-Line to Bendigo to see the world’s biggest wool show.
The guy next to me is playing chess on his phone; the woman across from me is doing nothing at all. I see a bunch of people race bibs on the way to Run Melbourne, which I find a little confusing. I ran last year, but I remember it starting much earlier, while it was still dark out. I took the tram too, and I felt such a kinship with the other runners on board, as I feel again now.
I notice a woman a few rows away who sits with two friends: she appears to be wearing a finger puppet on one hand, texting with the other.

July 24, 6:14 PM:

I’m sitting across from a group of three students. The two girls are sitting down, and the boy leans against the tram pole. One girl wears a red jacket and ballet flats, and she’s telling the others about how some “she” (a grandmother? A dog?) is quite old and has lost her appetite.

“Aw nooo,” the other girl says. I think it must be a dog, because I don’t get the impression that either of them is actually sad. The one who said “noooo” said it less like an Australian would, and more like an American doing an impression of an Australian — “nauuurrr.”

On my lap, I hold the book I’ve just bought: The White Album. I wonder if a Joan Didion essay collection is too ambitious a birthday gift for even a bookish 16-year-old.

The students across the way — who, I think, are studying pharmacy — are now talking about a medication that either causes or treats “red wispy fluid.” Yuck. That’s what I get for eavesdropping.

July 25, no time listed:

A girl in her early 20s leaves the tram wearing a skirt over baggy jeans and a puffer jacket with fur lining the hood. So that’s what people are wearing right now.

July 25, 6:42:

As I board, I recognize a girl I matched with on Bumble BFF a year ago. We went on one friend date — a walk around the creek — but never followed up afterwards. I spend a moment too long looking over at her, and, unfortunately, she notices. We nod and smile, but don’t say hi. I’m very unkempt in old sweatpants right now. When we leave the tram, she starts walking toward the grocery store, which is also where I’m going. I manipulate my path to avoid her.

August 2nd, 5:28 PM:

It’s golden hour and I’m late to The Odyssey. My friends are already at the theater, and the first tram I wanted left right as I approached. I’m tired as hell and hungover after camping. I feel antsy. The group behind me is speaking a language I can’t understand; everyone else is quiet. A girl in a fur coat takes a selfie on Snapchat. As I look around, I notice a woman in lipstick and a full denim outfit looking back at me. She will see me in a big Italian soccer jacket, one my boyfriend’s sister’s ex-boyfriend left behind in a breakup, maybe 20 years ago.

August 3rd, 9:10 AM:

I wanted to run the whole way to yoga but left it too late, so here I am on the tram. There’s a baby beside me who’s extremely focused on a box of raisins. The baby sits upright, leaning against the back of the tram seat as a grown up would. The seat itself takes up the length of her legs, with just her shoes poking over the edge. Like me, she wears a white pair of New Balances.

On my way back — 12:46:

To my left, a man colors his backpack buckle purple with an acrylic paint pen. The guy ahead of him is flipping through Instagram stories rapidly, joylessly.

I imagine an inspector boarding the tram and discovering that I didn’t tap on. Then I imagine myself protesting: you can’t fine me today; it’s my birthday!

Which is true. Nobody on the tram knows this, but I’ve just turned 32.

My recs:

A while back, I wrote a post called “Stuff I loved by people who aren’t famous,” which I then unpublished because I decided it sounded condescending, and then republished because I thought, no, if someone put me on this list, I guess I’d just consider “not famous” to be an accurate description. It’s a pretty different quality than “not respected” or “not good.” Whatever. I haven’t landed on a better name, but that’s the general theme of the list.

1. Here There Ceramics: Pottery by one of my best friends! We grew up in a very straightened-haired, rolled-up-Soffe-shorts suburb, and Aiyana was perhaps the only genuinely cool person in our grade. In 9th grade, she told me she wanted to move to San Francisco and go to Burning Man; I have no idea how she heard of either of these things. We said we’d do every drug there was to do, but only once. I still consider her to be one of my most trusted authorities on matters of taste.
   

2. Fat Call by : Asha is my friend from grad school! But she has no idea that when I read this essay years ago, my brain glitched and latched onto this snippet the way it does with a song lyric. A slightly misremembered version of these lines still pops into my head all the time:

“They were fat and flesh and wobbled when I jumped in the pool, but I liked them. I knew that I shouldn’t. That I wasn’t supposed to like the way they filled my shorts, the way the smooth skin tanned soft roasted. I thought they looked sturdy and relevant to the rest of me.”

3. Elevator Operator by Courtney Barnett: Okay sorry this is cheating — after that whole little paragraph, I’ve added someone famous. But I used to always listen to Courtney Barnett back in 2016 or so. Recently, I put this on again — and you know what? — not only is she talking about Melbourne, but she’s talking about the 96 tram line! The exact line featured in this week’s journal.

I existed so outside of the literary world that I didn’t understand my distance. I read, but pretty randomly. I missed the things that were transmitted socially: I’d picked up Normal People because I liked the cover. I didn’t know I was supposed to have a “take” on Sally Rooney. I assumed anyone I’d heard of was famous and anyone I hadn’t wasn’t. My algorithm mostly featured images of Berlin interiors and pastel cakes with flowers pressed into the icing.

I could have kept my job and Googled my way out, but I guess I could be kind of a dummy. Plus, this will sound bad, but I didn’t entirely know how to. If you search, “writing,” “how to be a writer” “popular contemporary writers,” you’re just as likely to end up on a corny-ass website covered in illustrations of feathered quills and typewriters, advertising a course led by a writer whose bio declares that they like “words,” — just all of them, in general.

Anyway, I was sick of my life and work and vocational confusion. I didn’t want to go the slow route. I typed “Good MFAs” into the search bar and applied accordingly. When I got into Iowa, I wanted to throw up. My cohort began emailing, and I frantically called my local bookstore to demand all of their “Maggie Nelson,” whoever the hell that was. My first semester felt like a language immersion program.

There are other remedies for this kind of cluelessness, I know, but I found it enormously helpful to be in an environment full of writers in different stages of their careers — who spoke about money frankly; who had gone to fancier colleges than I had, but, I realized, were not necessarily smarter than I was, or if they were, not by that much. I had classmates who had accumulated impressive bylines, but were still mortals who listened when I spoke. I learned the difference between an agent and an editor. I learned to pitch my first pieces by reviewing niche books. I learned that I sometimes skimmed the surface of a question in a way readers found jarring. I ate crabapples in Hickory Hill and got in trouble for getting drunk and gossiping too openly. I taught literature to undergraduates and discovered that I loved it. I read for our journal and realized our assessments were mood-based and arbitrary. I gained a sense that writing was possible, and an idea of how to begin.

***

Something people often get wrong when they talk about writing programs is the idea that they exist to teach a single, unified style: minimal prose, plotless imagery, something like that. But our professors couldn’t tell us what to do, not really. I had specific ones I really liked and wanted approval from, but mostly, I looked to my classmates.

Their aesthetics weren’t unified at all — in fact, I think the cohort could have benefitted from being less varied in our goals. More content mill, I always say! As it was, some portion of my creative nonfiction cohort were mid-career journalists looking to develop a more ambitious project than they’d had time to pursue as a staff writer, another portion consisted of experimental-poets-cum-lyric-essayists. We were all shoved together in a room and told to give each other advice.

So, you chose whose input you listened to, as you would in any context. Many of the pitfalls of MFAs can be avoided by simply having some judgment. Each semester, I’d pick someone who seemed cool or smart or mean, and write to impress them.

This is when they were most useful for me, and when I learned the most — not necessarily when anyone was giving feedback, although that was helpful — but when I was imagining one person’s voice in my head, writing jokes I thought they might find funny, pushing my analysis where I thought they’d question it. It gave me clarity and direction.

***

Of course, the biggest way an MFA changed my writing was by providing it with time and structure. There’s never been another period in my life, before or after, when I was given that much permission (funding) to write however many pages I wanted about whatever subject I wanted.

You could criticize that freedom for being unrealistic, untethered to earthly concerns, a second childhood. But today, so much of what I write is guided by what I pitch, and so much of what I pitch is guided by what I think someone will buy, and if I’m interested in a subject that seems complicated, I just move on because I don’t have the time, or maybe, I draft something like this on an afternoon it sounds interesting to me and post it haphazardly on Substack. This can’t be the better way.

Often, I think what people mean about when they say writing can’t be taught is that having a soul can’t be taught. Being interesting can’t be taught. But you can have a soul and still not know what to do with it.

***

It’s hard to imagine what my life would look like without my MFA. I told myself I’d move to London or New York and just go for it if I didn’t get in anywhere, but truthfully, I might have just lost confidence and kept writing low-paid content. Now, I tutor, I freelance, I write SEO articles, I chip away at a long project and hope that it’ll go somewhere. I guess it doesn’t sound much different than my life before, but it feels different to me. My goals are much more concrete; I have a clearer idea of how to approach them. I’ve written more that I’m proud of, which, on some days, is enough.

It’s been three years since I graduated, and it’s hard to definitively say whether or not my MFA was a success. I don’t have a book out, or any following of note. Most people I went to school with are in the same boat, but a good number have broken through in some meaningful way. I’ve written for mid-sized publications that I once assumed indicated that someone was a famous, successful writer, yet here I am. Still, I feel pretty lucky when I’m working on an interesting assignment, talking to neuroscientists about whether or not people perceive blue the same way, interviewing farmers, stuff like that. Sometimes I get messages from strangers who’ve read my work, which means a lot. That’s actually how I met my boyfriend.

I hope to one day have better news to report on the whole career front, but I have to consider the possibility that I won’t. I think everyone thinking about an MFA has to consider this possibility and decide if it would still be worth it without material pay-off. I could have been making money during the years I spent floating around on a stipend; that’s an opportunity I lost. But I think that I wouldn’t have been able to stop wondering — if I could be a writer, how I could be a writer —and it would have been really hard to just yearn and yearn and never know if it was possible. I’m glad I’ve decided to find out, even if the answer ends up being no.

In high school, I bought booty short bottoms because I felt self-conscious about my thighs and then worried that the extra coverage only broadcasted my insecurity. One morning, I woke up and realized that I no longer needed to convince anyone that I had the biggest boobs in the world and that the extra padding actually made me feel sweaty. I’ve projected a general sense of dissatisfaction and ennui onto my pool wear and decided that I would only ever reach self actualization by wearing a simple black scoop neck bikini. I bought it and loved it and wore it into hot springs that stunk it up forever. I soaked it in white vinegar but it couldn’t be saved.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about buying well-constructed bikinis that should last us for years and years. I was trying to replace the black scoop bikini and we’d both been getting Instagram ads for a nicer brand. We liked the one that came in a multi-colored diamond pattern and cost 118 USD per set. She said that, of course that’s more expensive than we’re used to, but we should get it—if we buy cheap suits, they’ll end up in the landfills because the material will stretch and damage. It’s true: collectively, we need less stuff. An unthinkable amount of clothing is thrown away. The fast fashion industry is a massive contributor to both climate crises and labor exploitation, and if nobody ever made another article of fabric again, that might actually be fine. And still—I’m not sure I believe that the fancy bikini would help that much. All I could think was that for the many reasons that swimsuits have come in and out of my life—and, for the most part, dresses, sweaters, t-shirts, shorts, hats and scarves, too—it’s rarely because I’ve worn them so hard that they literally came apart at the seams. Spending 80 extra dollars wouldn’t have saved them.

I hear a lot about the virtue in buying garments that are made to last. The thinking goes that if you spend more on a quality item, it will take longer to disintegrate and you’ll buy less frequently. The idea that the material fraying of cheap fabrics drives our desire to shop and our culture of disposability, appears in publications like The Atlantic “The Power of Buying Less by Buying Better”) and The New York Times (“How to Buy Clothes That Are Built to Last”). It’s an idea reinforced by the fashion bloggers I follow, the Instagram infographics I scroll past, and the conversations I hear in real life. But something about this idea has always sat wrong with me, overemphasizing the role of material deterioration while understating a different problem, which is why we over consume to begin with.

When I think about my own shopping, it seems like a relatively small percentage of my purchases are fueled by the need to replace an item that has been worn into the ground. Actually I can only think of a handful of times I’ve worn through anything but high-use staple garments, like shoes, socks, and jeans. I’m still wearing tank tops I got at Forever 21 years ago and still shopping for cardigans even though the ones I own are undamaged. The vast majority of my clothing doesn’t get enough action to fall apart, at least not in a way that isn’t easily repairable, and not in a way I couldn’t ignore if I wanted to. As recently as the 1980s, people were estimated to own only 20% as many clothing articles as they do today.

Still, none of this stops brands from capitalizing on the idea that a garment for which you might have one party or one vacation or one date in mind should be “durable.” The Guardian wrote an article promoting $140 swimsuits that “are designed to last longer in a bid to reduce throwaway fashion,” but I keep thinking—how often does a typical person wear a given swimsuit annually? Eight-five percent of US adults are in the pool five times a year or less—are regular off-brand swimsuits literally dissolving in water within hours of try-on? For what it’s worth, I wore a pair of Walmart bikini bottoms for most of my adult life.

The clothing company Ivy Oak brands itself as “Timeless Styles, Made to Last” as it sells formal dresses for 650 dollars—even though these are garments that are, by definition, for special occasions and incredibly low-wear. A lot of the companies on the made-to-last marketing circuit use fibers that are at least partially recycled—but it’s hard to trust a corporation’s eco-friendly messaging. Brands like Reformation advertise their $300 dollar slip dresses by touting green practices and recycled fabrics, but critics argue that, even with reusable materials, the volume of new production is simply too high to be sustainable.

You can’t produce new clothing at the scale that Reformation does without contributing massive amounts of pollution and waste to the total tally. It’s hard for an average person to decipher green-washing versus genuine sustainability measures, and when there are large sums of money on the line, I can’t help thinking that there are more reliable ways to channel that passion than hoping that Reformation and similar brands live up to their mission statement. I’m not immune to the draw of scrolling through Ref’s wedding guest dresses, but always with a nagging suspicion that I might be better off just borrowing an outfit from a friend’s closet and sending the money to a climate activist group. When I see the high price-tag attached to sustainable purchases, I’m reminded of a criticism comparing airline carbon off-setting programs to Catholic indulgences. In both cases, we learn: ”you can live how you want as long as you have the money to buy off your sins.”

Anyway, most formal dresses, at all price points, will likely only be worn a handful of times. This isn’t necessarily because they fall apart, but because you only need to dress up so many times a year. Also once you’ve worn the same outfit to a few weddings and posted it on Instagram, it stops feeling exciting. When companies label their products as timeless, perhaps what they mean is: it’s possible to find an object that you won’t change your mind on. The problem is, we usually do. I once thought skinny jeans would never not be cool.

It’s hard to stop over-consuming tank tops if we’re not honest about what drives us to do it in the first place, and it’s often not that our clothes all need to be replaced lest we stand naked in the street. It’s because we’re bored, because we’re starting a new job, because there’s a costume party coming up, because it’s soothing, because we gained or lost weight, because we were in a particularly good mood or a particularly bad one, because we want to fit in, because we want to stand out, because a TikTokker made fun of cropped jackets and got in our head, because we didn’t predict the ways that our tastes would evolve, and most of all, because buying things is, unfortunately, really, really fun.

I talked to a friend who works in fashion and largely disagrees with my indictment of the $140 swimsuit. Fabric is genuinely getting worse: fiber lengths are shorter, items pill quickly, and people don’t know how to care for what they have. They pointed out that, even though fast fashion has trained me to expect lower prices, clothes really should cost more than they do. If you make a polyester dress while paying workers US minimum wage, it may actually have to cost $600. We went back and forth for a while: they agreed that fabric should be made less, but that when we make it, we should do it ethically and right—which is, of course, fair. I think there’s a lot of value to their approach, and I don’t want to discount that there’s other ways to think about this. I said, it’s not that I think we should all go out and buy lots of cheap dresses: I just think the language around made-to-last clothing allows us to focus on getting the right thing rather than asking ourselves whether we need a newly created thing at all.

I’m a little suspicious of the made-to-last messaging, which seems like an incomplete, but profitable narrative for elevated basics companies to promote: the way to stop buying so much clothing is to buy one more thing! The marketing often suggests a company wants you to find a product that will help you buy less—but it’s tough to reconcile this when their continued existence requires you to buy more. If durability and timelessness were, in practice, actually paired with the other slow fashion principles, if we all addressed and de-programmed the impulse to seek dopamine by pressing the “buy now” button, if we were only searching for clothing when we genuinely had something to replace, I’d feel less conflicted. But as it stands, I keep hearing myself use the rhetoric to legitimize new purchases. In our group chat, my friends and I send each other screenshots of moto boots, cigarette jeans, and linen sheets that we want, but don’t technically need.

“Ok, but if it’s really high quality, then you’ll wear it for years,” we tell each other, over and over.

Nominally, the goal is to get to a point where we—with our timeless, well-constructed items—don’t have to buy things as frequently. This should mean that our screenshots decrease over time, but they don’t. Our identity never stabilizes. We keep imagining new versions of ourselves, ones with ankle-length coats and platform loafers, who wear off-the-shoulder dresses on vacation, who look more writerly or professional or or adventurous. There’s no piece of clothing in the world crafted mindfully enough to stop this relentless churn of desire. “Get it!” we say, because discouraging a purchase feels vaguely mean. “Think of it as an investment.” Slow fashion messaging hasn’t slowed us down—only given us the language we needed to justify doing what we wanted to do anyway.

*

What’s the alternative? I’m working on learning to label the factors that make me want to buy things and address them for what they are. When Instagram serves me advertisements for clay-colored bramis, I tell it to stop showing me this content because I know it can suck me in. I personally like hard-and-fast boundaries around my habits, like no new purchases for the next two months. I’ve taken to wearing my late grandad’s scarf and knitting cardigans with thrift store yarn and forcing myself to style the items I already have. I swap my clothing and thrift it and bring it back to the thrift store when I’m done. When I find myself scrolling through ASOS, I try to name the feeling for what it is—usually boredom or procrastination—and find another way to deal with it. I borrow my friends’ clothes a lot. This isn’t the way for everyone to live, and there are many circumstances that would make this harder: if I wasn’t straight-sized, if I had sensitivities to certain materials, if I couldn’t get to thrift stores easily. But it’s a viable option for a lot of people, and I think it’s worthwhile to explore: not buying less by buying better, just buying less new stuff by buying less new stuff.

Very little of my clothing lasts, at least not in my possession. Every time I move—which, in recent years, is often—I get rid of at least half of my belongings, either by selling them or giving them away or returning them to the same thrift store river they came from. It’s pretty expensive to transport a ton of stuff long distance, and it also just feels freeing to hold onto things lightly. When I’m wearing from and contributing to a communal pile of clothes, there’s less pressure to be particular or timeless or flawless. I don’t have to find leather made out of algae; I can just sift through the clothing that already exists and treat it as something I pass through rather than something I own for life.

As I approach my thirties, I’m at an age where you’re meant to start investing in a few nice things, or at least that’s how it can feel. Recently, I watched a fashion vlogger talk about buying pieces you can see yourself wearing in ten years, and I found this concept so shocking—it’s incredible to me that anyone finds the future so accessible. There’s so much I don’t know about my life ten years from now: where I’ll live, what I’ll look like, whether I’ll still like rounded collars or golden ochre. I don’t know if I’ll have children, if I’ll want to blend in with office culture, or how my health will evolve.

The idea that I can predict whether I’ll like jeans that taper along my calf when I’m on the cusp of 40 feels daunting, if not impossible. If clothing is a way that people externalize who they think they are or wish they were, I don’t know how to plan for a sense of self that is, and will likely always be, in constant flux—and maybe my biggest problem with timelessness is the way that it stabilizing an identity can become constricting. A part of me loves the impermanence of clothing—outfits that place you squarely within time rather than beyond it. I love the joy and creativity that comes with reimagining yourself, creating new combinations, trying on a style for a little, passing it to the next wearer when you’re done—and letting go of the notion that you can buy an object that’s inoculated against change.

This was originally published in Channel Void

“Be popular! Just not quite as popular as me!”

As a child, I both coveted popularity and felt humiliated by that want. The tension meant it wasn’t something I could ask about directly, but I would pay l close attention if someone started to explain the mechanics. Because I woke up every day and suffered the indignities of middle school, I already knew that thinness and popularity were deeply connected, no matter what anyone said. Seeing a woman who looked like Ariana sing about her expertise in being socially beloved would have been codifying. When you cast the thinnest woman possible to portray a character who embodies the very concept of popularity, you codify something about what popularity is.1

I don’t think that Ariana Grande’s body is really my business, but I do think the collective consciousness is. So the territory gets dicey. She’s one of the most salient vessels for people to discuss their feelings about thinness, which is a sad thing for her. While I don’t accept the Ariana-Lizzo equivalency (as discussed in footnote 1), I don’t envy the way that either woman is reduced to her size. Ariana has had what seems to be a difficult life: like all child-stars, she’s been hyper-surveilled from a young age. Her concert was terrorized. Her ex died young. When she says she’s not sick — who knows, maybe it’s true. But it would be profoundly understandable if it wasn’t. It would also be profoundly understandable if she didn’t want to share the ins and outs of her body image with the public at large.

As we know, the public is split. Some say that commentary, even “concerned” commentary, is just another means of policing women’s bodies. Others say that opting into fame forfeits the usual claim to privacy, that you don’t get to be a product and also be off-limits. There’s Ariana the person, and Ariana the licensed image selling lunchboxes and backpacks. And it does matter, I think. Disordered eating travels through valorization and social contagion. When there’s profit to be made circulating images of extraordinary thinness at mass scale to young people, it matters.

I try to imagine how she appears to young girls now. When I was a pre-teen, Hilary Duff was the big thing, and I associate my developmental understanding of thinness with her. In The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Lizzie’s nemesis is a girl who’s a little bigger than her, but is obsessed with avoiding carbs, while Lizzie, who is thin and pure of heart, embraces them. In A Cinderella Story, Chad Michael Murray knows that Hilary is of good character because she’ll crush double cheeseburgers, but in a skinny way. Not to be all Gone Girl about it, but it really felt like I was constantly told that wanting thinness was a bad, shallow behavior that categorized you as a villain, but possessing it was a prerequisite of being a protagonist — of being beautiful or interesting or worthy of love. The taboo surrounding the subject verged on eroticism.

I think now about how common it is for women my age to identify with some degree of disordered eating: I know more who do than who don’t. The diagnostic framing points to individual pathology, but it doesn’t strike me as individual pathology at all. Becoming very weird and secretive about food was a nearly explicit instruction. It was only follow-through, a clear-eyed calibration to conflicting demands.

When I look at the two main camps (those who say it’s unethical to comment on her body and those who think it’s unethical to stay silent): I’m sympathetic to both. I’m skeptical of both.

I’ve covered my thoughts on the first camp, but there’s something about the second that sits wrong as well. It’s not that it’s incorrect, but I don’t think it’s fully honest about the range of emotions involved — about why, at a population-level, Ariana’s body fascinates and infuriates people. Although concern is a legitimate reaction, and one that I’m sure many really feel, it can also serve as a socially acceptable container for much weirder feelings. I guess people always have strong emotions about bodies: fat ones, thin ones, their own, other people’s, the ones that make them smug or horny or insecure.

Ariana is, of course, a cultural model of beauty and popularity, but she’s also a cultural model of eating disorders, a gauge to measure our collective temperature against. People with eating disorders can watch how the world talks about her and get a preview of how it might talk about them. What they might find is that there are two main emotional frames for thinking about a person who has, or is perceived to have, an eating disorder that makes them very thin.

One frame is sympathetic. I was just listening to a podcast that talked about Judy Garland’s childhood and how Hollywood executives called her a little piggie and made her do insane diets and take stimulants from a young age, which naturally fucked her up. Everyone agreed it was sad. There were the videos we watched in health class about eating disorders in the same units we learned about sexual assault: two violences afflicted upon women. In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison writes about disclosing her history of bulimia to a boyfriend, hoping this act of vulnerability would prevent him from leaving.

On The Bachelor, contestants who are expected to share depth (i.e. trauma), will sometimes tell the nation about their troubled relationship with their bodies. The lead commends them for bravery. We’re concerned about children looking up to Ariana Grande because we’re sad for them — not angry at them — when we imagine them hating their bodies.

And then the other frame is — what exactly is it? Scorn? Anger? Shame? Resentment?The word I keep coming to is: Gossip. The feeling that you’ve caught someone doing something they’re not supposed to do. On snark Reddit, people talk about a different former Bachelor contestant who, they say, obviously uses cooking content to distract from the fact that she’s anorexic. “Wtf yeah, she’s emaciated,” one user writes.

How could this be? They’re both just Bachelor contestants with eating disorders. Instinctively, I feel like this user wouldn’t have written this type of comment about the other contestant, the one who shared their story on national TV.

What’s that feeling there — what’s inside that “wtf”? I don’t think it’s concern. I remember years ago, I had a frenemy who moved to New York and posted a selfie to her story. I was with another friend when I saw it, and showed her my screen, whispering — She got lip filler, right? What did I care? I’ve had a little botox. And still, I remember, this feeling like I’d caught her. Caught her doing what? Cheating? Not liking her original mouth enough? Being vain, like Lizzie McGuire’s evil nemesis, who was denied beauty specifically because she sought it?

My reaction wasn’t nice, but I know I’m not the only one to have it. Why else would there be a tabloid industry around this type of speculation? Some days, it feels so alien, so bizarre, that it’s gossip to be like, do you think this person fucking hates themselves?

Sometimes, the algorithm sends me images of Ariana Grande that have clearly been edited to further exaggerate her thinness, to make her look unfathomably gaunt. When I look at these, I think of the person who might have made them. What reaction do they want from me?

I don’t think they want me to feel sad for her; I think they want to feel that she has become monstrous and ugly; that she’s gone too far and we should all tell her so. “she’s so smug about it too,” a user writes (43 upvotes), because mental illness itself is fine, except when it compels you to behave in mentally ill ways.

People, I think, are furious because thinness occupies an impossible moral position. When you look at Ariana, it’s hard to tell if you’re looking someone suffering or someone winning. There’s frustration at the vast sympathy she receives alongside the scrutiny and scorn. Sure, she probably struggles with her body — but so do most people. A larger person, an average-sized one, or someone just as thin but with no audience watching — all of them may lose their period, feel on the verge of passing out, feel trapped and miserable. But Ariana’s getting rich off it, while everyone else is just getting sick.

This is one of the issues with eating disorders, socially contagious as they are. To have one and to cause one are often identical actions. To suffer is to inflict; to be victim is to be vector. It feels good to blame the vector, but you can’t always do it. In my own childhood, the pressure for thinness came a bit from Hilary Duff, sure, but mostly it came from watching the social success of thin girls in my class, who were children too. They didn’t mock my body or profit from my angst. The cruelest thing they did was simply move about the world with apparent ease. They were neither famous nor powerful, and in retrospect, I realize that many of them were likely suffering themselves.

How do we divide these frames — sympathy and scorn? One of the delineating factors is agency: do we think the disorder was done to you by a clear external force (as with Judy Garland and the Hollywood executives— a situation that probably has some parallel in Ariana’s life), or are you the culpable actor? Children, of course, are inherently less culpable — but one of the risks of developing an eating disorder in childhood is carrying that baggage into adulthood. Is that when you transition from sad to what Redditors would call “flaunting” your “skeleton” — if you fail to recover by the right age? Does the change happen when you post photos of yourself looking sick — even when the desire to be seen as thin is itself one of the illness’s defining symptoms? And what if it did just come from you: what if you have no idea why you carry around this relentless dissatisfaction? What then?

In a related sense, I think the divide also has a lot to do with disclosure: has this been observed by the public or have you been the one to tell the story yourself? When we compare the two Bachelor contestants, of course, this is the difference between them: the one who came forward is off-limits, crass to comment on, the other one is fair game. Perhaps this is because disclosing means that you have at least “been honest about it” — the world will forgive almost all your flaws if you’re “real,” almost none if there’s a whiff of hypocrisy — but it’s bizarre to frame the act of keeping your medical and psychological history private as an act of dishonesty. But disclosing provides you with narrative control: it tells the story from the perspective of the sadness you received, that was done to you; it casts an acting agent who could be your cruel father or ex or friend or a celebrity or just society itself, but makes it clear that you were the receiver of the pain, not the aggressor. Without that telling, the audience will author the story for themselves, flickering between sympathy and judgment as they see fit.

That flickering doesn't stay confined to celebrities, of course, and it isn’t incidental to me that as I listened to Glinda sing in the car with my sister, I would watch my thighs squish against the seats and blame their width for whatever feeling of rejection permeated my adolescence.

The world was bigger than I knew. Although I didn’t understand how poorly it treated people who were actually fat and not simply “feeling” so, I also didn’t realize that all this stuff — my middle school, Lizzie McGuire — this was just one value system. It was a powerful one, but there were others. As I got older, I’d find that being being desired, being respected, being liked — everything I thought I had to seek through thinness — weren’t the exclusive domain of the small. You could be all this and be fat.

But the stuff you breathe in when you’re young sticks with you. I’d grow up to have whatever relationship to food I grew up to have, as we all did. I’d continue to be baffled by all this stuff: thinness and its pursuit of it, what I’m meant to feel about Ariana Grande. I forget, sometimes, that at the center of all of this, for most people, is probably hurt.

The fact that it wasn’t a fun way to live felt irrelevant. As I saw it, I was engaging in self-care. I was taking care of myself by trying to solve the problem as quickly as I knew how, sprinting in every direction until I was out of the woods. I still basically believe this: sometimes the kindest thing you can do for yourself is just lock in. But I might have taken it too far.

Maybe I should add that I don’t think any of this should be read as concerning. I just really wanted to devote my attention to a big project. If anything, I thought it was fine because I felt psychologically well enough to play that game. Still, I became glum — perhaps, so glum, that I could no longer call it productive.

A week ago, I decided it was time to stage an intervention. I’d pull every happiness trick in the book to see if I could get out of this rut.

My plan, which I decided through common sense, looked like this:

• Wake up around 7:30 every day

• Get sunlight right away

• Exercise in the morning, preserve free time after work

• Meditate, then name two things I’m grateful for and one goal for the day.

• Get dressed like a normal person. Work from the library, not bed

• Protect 7–10 p.m. No productivity!

• See friends at least twice a week. If everyone’s out of town, FaceTime people from home.

• Stay mostly offline, install stricter rules on screen-blocking app

• Log my mood every day.
  

Also omg I hope this doesn’t need to be said but in case it does: this obviously has no bearing on whether or not I think someone else can cure their mental illness with a screen-blocking app. I’m literally just having fun,.

Day 1: Wednesday

I had to delay my routine a bit because I forgot I had a work call at 8 am lol. But then I did it:

• 1 hr exercise

• 7 min meditation

• 1 hr of shower + lunch + walking to the library

• 1 hr “writing”

• 3.5 hrs of billable work, 1 hr of nonbillable work

If you do the math, you might think that adds up to 8.5 hours. Wrong! Foooool! It’s 11.5 hours. This — the mathematically impossible nature of time — is exactly why I always end up working into the evening, but probably my biggest priority of the week is to preserve three hours of a day of non-fractured leisure time. I can’t say I enjoyed my first evening off because we watched the final two thirds of No Other Choice, and it was too tense for me.

Mood: neutral

Day 2: Thursday

I checked off my entire anti-funk checklist, but it delayed my work start. That evening, I got ramen with a friend and listened to Olivia Rodrigo on the way home with mochi in my backpack. On the tram, I thought: I feel actively good right now.

Once home, I read. Uh ohhhh I guess two days of morning exercise fixes mental health!! Jk jk jk…unless…

Mood: pleasant

Day 3: Friday

All’s going to plan; I’m feeling better, generally, if not as productive as I was when I was a protein shake guzzling gremlin typing furiously in the dark.

Mood: pleasant

Day 4: Saturday

Awesome, because I didn’t work or do anything involving real life. Woke early, biked with a friend to the train station, loaded our bikes in the train, headed out to meet a friend in regional Victoria to go on a hike that we ended up skipping. Explored one of those small-town old-timey museums that are full of grim-reaper scythes and dingo traps. Check out this inexplicable photo of ducks we found in there!

Got sun, socialized, got exercise, forgot to meditate.

Mood: pleasant.

Day 5: Sunday

I started the day with a 10k through the woods, then went up to the roof to meditate in the hot tub and drink my famous Health Smoothie (banana, greek yogurt, half an orange, spinach, soaked chia, liquid of choice, protein powder if i feel inspired. Nobody likes this smoothie but me bc it’s kind of fucked up and grainy).

I know meditation is meant to distance the practitioner from attachment to the self, but it actually makes me an egomaniac. I basked in the sun thinking: I am Clean Girl. I am an influencer, if they weren’t pretend. I am running this ship. Then I showered and got Sunday roast with my run club, came home, and spent the rest of the day finishing Mrs. Dalloway (i am the best person in the world). Bizarrely, one of the doctors in the book keeps telling a character who is on the verge of suicide that he’s “in a bit of a funk,” which I had no idea was a part of vernacular in 1920s England?? Every time he says it, I want to laugh. Who taught them this word? What are they going to do next, groove at the disco?
The doctor — an incompetent character — keeps telling the man to just pick up a hobby; aka, get out of his funk by sheer force of will. I am my own incompetent doctor to the patient within myself.

Mood: slightly pleasant

Day 6: Monday

Didn’t feel like being the best person in the world anymore. I knew I wanted a day off exercise but then I just skipped my whole routine and went straight to work and got really frustrated with a client. At 3, I said, fine, I’ll go outside and walk a little. I meditated but only begrudgingly. Mood has plummeted to what I have recorded as neutral, but believe to be slightly below that.

I really do think that if the data says anything, it’s that I really respond well to cardio, which I do consider to be basically psychoactive. But then, you could just as easily say: I respond poorly to having to work. Or you could say: My experimental design is kind of bullshit this is all random lol.

I thought about how, whether by consequence or coincidence or placebo, the day I stopped doing my anti-glum routine was the day I started feeling worse. What effort, to do this whole fuss forever. It reminded me of that Bojack Horseman scene where Bojack is trying to go on a run, and the runner monkey tells him it gets better, but the hard part is he has to do it every day.

Mood: neutral, veering on slightly unpleasant.

Day 7, Tuesday:

That’s today! That’s right now! I woke up glum again. The moment I opened my eyes, I knew it was back. I guess this is the first time the process is being actually tested — on Saturday, for example, I was having a good day naturally, with or without any particular spells or potions. This is the first time a bad mood and a good schedule have faced off head-to-head.

Once I was up, I went through my entire routine, although today was focused on strength, which I find boring and not nearly as impactful as a run. I felt a bit better. I keep trying to visualize sunlight on my body, and the sunlight is a symbol for the warmth of the soul. I could feel worse. Maybe in another world, I would.

Mood: slightly unpleasant to neutral

Did I learn anything?

Throughout the week, I kept walking around imagining the takeaway. But then, I’d wake up again, and my last reflection had become wrong.

For the first few days, it seemed like doing the things I’m meant to do pretty much worked.
This was my takeaway then: my initial low mood wasn’t the first warning cough of something deeper; it was just a run of bad days. Still, it felt significant that I starting feeling great. Maybe that’s the lesson, I’d say: my actions aren’t irrelevant. I have some knobs to twist up and down. You can’t lock yourself in a dark room and ignore all your friends for a month and act like it won’t affect you.

But then, a few days passed and I changed my mind and my takeaway became: it was probably less that the routine improved my mood, and more that I was temporarily responding to the feeling that I had taken control over my happiness. But that isn’t fair either, and was mostly a reaction to the fact that the improvement, whatever there was, wasn’t total or permanent.

I guess my truest conclusion is: whether or not I can break myself out of a funk through sheer force of will takes longer than a week to observe, as well as, perhaps, insight into an alternate universe.

I feel best when I think about this: when I was about twenty, a doctor prescribed me a medication that, he said, would hopefully improve my mood in about eight weeks. I’d come back then and we’d evaluate.

The premise seemed absurd to me. I feel different every eight weeks. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became: I had never in my entire life experienced a two month interval in which my mood hadn’t changed in some significant way. Sitting there, I found it frustrating: I couldn’t find out if the drug worked or not. There would never be an accurate, empirical way to measure it, no way to isolate the medication from the confounding factors of love, work, seasons, or time.

But since then, I’ve changed my mind. I find the flux of it all extremely comforting. I don’t really know how I get out of funks, but I do get out of them.

It’s not like I think sports are stupid. I think the whole “sportsball go in net score points” thing is about as relevant as describing music as “make notes go up and down.” Obviously, the mechanics of either can be made to sound absurd if you want them to; obviously, the point of both is that they move people.

But it’s hard because I don’t see the stakes and the players look like those plastic guys on foosball tables so I don’t read them as real people. When my boyfriend watches a game, I make him tell me what the players are thinking: That guy’s really nervous, he might say, he was fine but then he looked to his left and it got in his head and now he’s going to mess up, he’s not even looking at the goal. It’s like watching a cat hiss at a ghost.

When I watch — like when I really concentrate — all I get is this: Now they have the ball. Now the other team has the ball. Now the first team has the ball again. Now they’re trying to score. Now they didn’t score. Now the referee is talking to them.

I can track the movement, but when you can’t read the logic attached to it, it’s like trying to get sustained entertainment out of one of those early 2000s screensavers. It’s like living in the world where half the population cheers and cries and commits their life to one of those early 2000s screensavers. You would feel alienated and confused.

I’ve always thought of this divide like the cilantro gene: some people experience sports viewing as a wonderful sensation, and I’m destined to only taste soap. But more recently, I’ve been imagining it as a kind of literacy — one that’s difficult, but not impossible to develop in adulthood.

Can I learn to like soccer, or is my brain too hardened in its loser form to ever get it? I spent the past few weeks trying to find out.

Invest in a favorite team

I’m a Socceroo girl! I could have reasonably supported the US (where I’m from) or Australia (where I live) but it was a pretty easy pick because:

1. It’s more fun to like the team the pub likes

2. I find it easier to feel pride over places I chose. I was just randomly one day born in the US, but it took a lot of effort to become an Australian resident (visa pending)

3. America…it’s crazy and scary… there’s still so much love in it… it’s complicated….. sad, stressful, not festive

4. All the other countries talk about how easy it’s going to be to beat Australia because they think we’re nothing but foolish beautiful surfers! This made me indignant

5. “Socceroos” lmao

Watch a video about how to watch soccer

This helped me think about defensive formations and so on. If I were more committed, I’d type the tips out. But…I don’t feel like it.

Then, I laid in bed alone and studied the 30 minute version of a Socceroo victory I’d seen earlier in the week. Every time I didn’t understand what had happened, I’d slow down and replay it. When someone made a pass that surprised me, I played it at least four times: to see when the passer decided to kick it, when the passee started running, how quickly the people around them figured out what was going on. I was probably at it for an hour. I imagined myself as a child trying to read a word by sounding out each phoneme.

One tip I found online was to choose one player and study their game rather than trying to take in everything at once. I decided to watch Nestory Irankunda, who I also decided would be my favorite player. He was a bit of an unknown quantity but he ended up scoring Australia’s first goal of the World Cup. He seemed like a good protagonist. When he scored, he slid around the field and punched the corner post. My boyfriend later told me this was an homage to a historic Socceroo, but when it happened, I just thought Irankunda was sooooo happy he couldn’t contain himself, literally couldn’t keep his body from punching and cheering and jumping all about.

@football360auSocceroos star Nestory Irankunda brought his viral MJ celebration to the Championship AND he combined it with his trademark backflip! 🕺🇦🇺🙌 The finish was brilliant. The celebration instantly memorable. You just have to love this guy. 🎥 beinsports_aus Watch the EFL Championship LIVE on beIN Sports.

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To cement my Irankunda allegiance, I read his Wikipedia page. He was born in 2006 which is fucked up. He was also born in a refugee camp in Tanzania and moved to Australia as a baby. His page said that he “is close friends with fellow professional footballer Mohamed Touré,” another Socceroo (you can see him in the the punch celebration), and I really liked that one of Irankunda’s soccer stats is his best friend. I watched a video where he says Toure wears the same underwear for days on end and then Toure says that Irankunda draws his hairline with sharpie to make it look straighter.

Watch with other fans

I did this three times. The first time was the best because we were in this sports bar that was as crowded as a frat party and Australia won and everyone started throwing their beers in the air and getting on each other’s shoulders and yelling aussie aussie aussie oi oi oi.

“I could do that,” I kept whispering to my boyfriend, “If I shouted aussie aussie aussie, everyone would have to say oi oi oi. They would have to do it.” The idea…it thrilled me.

Being at the sports bar was like entering a hive mind. I didn’t even have to know what was going on. If something good or bad or neutral happened, the group would change their pitch, making tentative hums or snorts or cheers or cries. I knew exactly what I was meant to feel. The guys around us would routinely stack everyone’s plastic beer cup as high as it would go before toppling over.

The next game was less fun, because we had to wake up at 3 am to head to the pub, and then we lost against America. Halfway through, I tried to see if I could convince myself that I was Team America, since it would make the experience more fun if I felt aligned to the winning team, and it seemed plausible that I would support my home country. But I just couldn’t reorient the reward center of my brain. This seemed like progress; I had successfully tied my emotional fate to Australian soccer success.

Put money on it

I had never placed a bet in my life, and I felt a little attached to the maintenance of this gambling virginity. But everyone says bets are how you make sports interesting, so I was obligated to try. I put 6 dollars on Australia beating Paraguay, and on Friday morning, my boyfriend and I headed over to a pub to watch the third Socceroo game.

I guess I did want the desired outcome a little more. But I didn’t want a payout of a few dollars more than I wanted the whole pub to be really happy and throw beers in the air and sing together. I’d practiced trying to understand soccer, and I was able to watch the whole thing without losing focus, which is a marked improvement.

I tried to will a positive outcome with my mind for a while but quickly realized that I wasn’t able to. My thoughts had no bearing on the screen, and this bummed me out.

We were standing in the corner of the bar and I kept having to bend back over a railing as people moved about. I got hit in the eye and started crying out of reflex. I wasn’t even in that much pain, but I guess eyes are designed to reject contact. Then, because my body was crying, I felt like I could really start crying, and I was momentarily tempted to ride the wave of emotion and just keep sobbing about any unexpressed pain I had lying around. I couldn’t do that; it wasn’t the right place. The bar was happy and cheering and throwing beers again, because even though the score ended up 0-0, Australia only needed a draw. We would be going through for the next round. But I felt cranky because I wanted to see a goal and I was a little drunk. I felt confused: more invested than I had been in soccer, certainly, but did I like it more? I guess being a fan is not only about joy.

Try playing

My boyfriend is able to empathize with players because he recognizes the emotions attached to each position — the hope, pride, anxiety, outrage that comes with actually playing. I can’t remember ever kicking a soccer ball into a goal, not even by myself, not even when I’m alone. When I watch matches, I have a completely disembodied understanding of what I’m looking at.

I asked him to take me to the field. I’ve said that he really likes soccer, but I don’t know if I’ve also explained that he’s very, very good at soccer. People joke about how all guys think they could have been a professional athlete if it weren’t for their one injury, but I actually think that it’s not crazy to think my specific boyfriend could have been, had he not required 7 leg surgeries. When the surgeries began, he was about a season or two away from being paid. It wouldn’t have been enough to live on, but still, paid to play soccer! He spent much of his childhood obsessively training his left leg. He can juggle a ball with feet hundred times, maybe more.

On the way over, I told him I was nervous. I hadn’t expected to be, but last time I went bowling with a group, my friend asked me if I was “doing it on purpose,” “it” being my badness, which was so great it seemed exaggerated for comic effect. I was the opposite of a soccer champion, and I had been profoundly nonathletic growing up. I’m pretty active now, but I haven’t gone near a ball sport since mandatory PE — and back then, I did my best to avoid it. It was embarrassing to be so bad at sports, so publicly. That was the biggest feeling I associated with soccer, I realized: confusion, yes, but also inadequacy and frustration and humiliation. And here I was, about to show my boyfriend that I fundamentally don’t understand the exact thing that he loves most.

We pulled up at the field in late afternoon, everything smelling grassy and fresh. He ran me through warm ups where I had to navigate around cones in strange ways, and I felt like I was doing the animal walk unit in elementary school gym class. We spent a long time passing the ball back and forth, and he told me I was a natural passer. I asked if he was pulling my leg and he said no, I had made the situation sound much worse than it was. Then I threw the ball at his head so he could practice headbutting it into the goal.

Did kicking a ball make me like soccer? Well, it definitely made me perceive soccer more. I was more able to see the ways in which my boyfriend is good at soccer — how he has a nearly hand-like control over his feet. I liked being able to appreciate the talents of someone I love.

I wanted to eat oranges after practice, and he drove us to the fancy grocery store to get a bunch, plus kiwi and a slice of melon too. When he was a kid and it was his turn to bring the orange slices to practice, his dad used to sprinkle them with white sugar, and nobody knew why their oranges were always uniquely good.

Fortunately, I know a million people who are both good and not Jia Tolentino or even a regular contributor at The Drift. I’m not recommending this list because they’re all my friends — only Gyasi is — but because I really like everything on it. Also, my definition of “famous” vs “not famous” is arbitrary and vibe based. But basically, I think you’re famous if you’ve ever had, for example, over 3000 followers on Twitter.

Here’s this week:

1. Alas Pour Fhoul by :
   We were all obsessed with Gyasi in grad school, and when this essay came out, my friends and I were camping in the woods without service. Somehow (?) we were alerted that this piece had gone live. We got in the car, drove until we could load it, returned to campsite, and read it around the fire.

2. This print by Kathryn Ireland:

   

   
   I bought it at Zine Fest in Richmond Virginia like… 8 years ago? Idk. I hung it in my room and have written about it at length as a symbol of the joy of messiness, a quality I almost never seen portrayed so fun. It hangs above my bed and I had to Google Reverse image searched it to find her again. I can’t find her on Instagram, but I also haven’t tried super hard.

3. Mitch Boessen’s lab experiment Substack post:

   I met at this Power of Success Seminar I went to for a Vice story that eventually got killed because by legal because halfway through the event, a “no media” print-out went up on the door and everyone was worried about the guy (a weird grifter type) suing. I ended up talking to a bunch of uni students (including Mitch) downstairs because they’d been kicked out for filming. Within months, Vice went under. I posted the killed story I’d already written on my Substack to like 7 followers after changing all relevant names, because I, too, was worried about being sued—an anxiety that now strikes me as very sweet and optimistic about my own readership prospects.
   When I read Mitch’s lab experiment piece, I just thought: damn, too bad digital youth media died a little too early for him. It seemed so unfair that he was born when he was born and not the early to mid-90s.

But when I was at home, exhausted — and frustrated by my own exhaustion, frustrated by the vague health problems a person accumulates in adulthood — I sometimes wondered whether it would help.

Our culture has gotten noticeably less vegetarian in the past few years, too. I haven’t seen definitive numbers beyond a flurry of anecdote-driven thinkpieces, but I also feel like — sure. People are really obsessed with their bodies, then and now. For a while, the foods we were told to eat were avocados and smoothie bowls; now it’s chicken breast protein-maxxing.

There’s also the ethical + environmental half of it. If vegetarianism was always, at least in part, a way of feeling that I could create a small amount of fairness in a wildly unfair world, the limits of that belief were becoming too visible to ignore. As bad for the environment as a single cheeseburger is, I remember sitting at home scrolling through images of military explosions on my phone and thinking about the scale of it all. Whatever carbon footprint a lifetime of diligently reading nutrition labels might save, it’s dwarfed by forces I have no control over. To be clear, I still actually believe that factory farming is like, bad. But I see how it becomes less compelling as the world becomes more frightening.

None of this would have mattered had I not moved to Australia. It isn’t hard for me to skip meat. I liked it as a child, but I don’t miss it now. But in Melbourne, my partner would see me half-asleep on the couch and suggest I try kangaroo — which, he said, was a fully ethical form of meat that many otherwise vegetarian and vegan people eat.

The argument was pretty convincing: there are no factory-farmed kangaroos because they can’t be farmed. In many parts of Australia, kangaroo numbers are managed through government culls because, in landscapes without large predators, populations can grow beyond what local ecosystems can sustain. They shouldn’t have built the dingo fence, which led to the absence of predators, but they did. Every year, millions of kangaroos are killed under these programs. Once an animal has been shot, it can either enter the food supply or be discarded.

A kangaroo would not be bred for me, nor, in any meaningful sense, would it be killed for me specifically. Its life would have been normal until the day it was shot. The hunters are told to go after the oldest ones. At the time, I was eating a lot of Greek yogurt, a choice I feel conflicted about. I had no particular reason to believe industrial dairy was morally cleaner than industrial meat production. If eating meat from an animal that would have been killed regardless meant funding less dairy, that began to seem like a net good.

There. Now you know why I’m personally allowed eat meat! I thought about it for a year and a half, and in January, I started eating kangaroo.

So the big question that remains is:

Did eating meat actually make me less tired?

Unfortunately, I didn’t really track my own perception of tiredness during the transition, so I’m mostly going off my smartwatch data.

One of my complaints about sleep is that (please don’t hate me) I get a lot of it. I know that’s a good problem to have, but I don’t know — I just want to be out doing stuff! It frustrates me because I spend all this time unconscious, take a heavy stimulant every morning, and still don’t feel especially energetic. So, one of the measures I’m interested in is duration, since I think needing less sleep to feel rested suggests that I’m getting what I need from it more efficiently.

Anyway, I went into my monthly sleep data and checked to see if there was a change around January and…

There kind of was. It’s not super dramatic, but you can see that I’m sleeping like, 15-20 minutes less a night than I used to. This is small enough that it might be random, and also, other factors have obviously impacted my energy in this period. The seasons changed, I ran a half marathon, work ebbed and flowed, I got slightly older. And yet, when I look at the months leading up to kangaroo — a time period that also included seasonal change, a different half marathon, fluctuations in work, and some aging…

it was freakishly consistent. For six months, my average monthly sleep varied by 6 minutes at most. And now, I sleep about 25 less — which I take to mean, slightly more efficiently. I can’t make any definitive claims, but I can say: my sleep appetite dropped when I started eating meat and didn’t come back up.

But…does this matter?

One thought I have is like: okay, yeah, I guess I probably should have taken my supplements more regularly before. Saying I needed to “eat meat” to feel more energetic isn’t really fair when there are other ways to get the nutrients I might have been missing, and I was just too lazy to do follow through.

I also keep thinking: even if there is something uniquely helpful in meat, maybe it’s actually fine to need an extra 20 minutes of sleep.

There have been periods in my life when I felt intensely committed to vegetarianism + veganism, and upset by factory farming. That's not the emotion I live in most of the time anymore, but I can still access it if I think about it. And when I channel that part of myself I’m like: okay, why do you have to be perfectly optimized? If not eating meat means you need to sleep for the length of a Simpsons episode, maybe you just watch one less episode of The Simpsons.

I’ve eaten fake meat for far more of my life than real meat, and I’ve realized I prefer it. My tastes are more adapted to what I’m used to. When I make kangaroo mince, sometimes I bite into a chewy bit of ligament and think: Impossible Beef would never.

I know eating kangaroo is technically something I feel fine about. But I also think about seeing them on hikes. Sometimes they’d pause and look back at us, seemingly deciding whether or not we were a threat. Whenever I find myself being observed by an animal, I always want to psychically transmit a message: you don’t have to worry about me. I wouldn’t eat you. I’m vegetarian! It bums me out that I don’t get to think that anymore.

The big joke in our house was that we all hated writing. I HATE WRITING, any one of us could stomp down the stairs bellowing. I was also going through a phase where I was telling everyone I was basically illiterate because I felt self-conscious about the fact that I had read so much less than my classmates and thought maybe it could be like, a fun, cute thing. I needed to be shot.

We were joking but we also weren’t. Writing can be frustrating. When you haven’t untangled a narrative or poetic solution, it feels like you never will. Often, it sounds more fun to do anything else: watch tv, drink, bake a cake, text your crush, play guitar, walk around. Writing was profoundly attached to feelings of dread, insecurity, anxiety, and fear. Getting into our program was validating, of course, but it didn’t really guarantee anything; we were still rejected from various things we wanted. The whole model of our school was this: you put your dumb little heart into your work that, in veiled or non-veiled ways, represents your loneliness or insecurity or dating woes or childhood trauma—and then your workshop gets together for a public humiliation ritual where you sit silently while everyone you know calls your prose “raw” (they think you overshared) or your speaker “unlikable” (they hate you). Or maybe they didn’t say anything bad about yours, but everyone obviously liked your classmate’s workshop submission way better. And then you go home and pretty soon you have to write again. But this time you’ve got that all in the back of your mind, and every time you try to approach the page, you’re self-conscious and overwhelmed.

At the same time, of course, it’s a joke to say you hate creative writing, because you can, and probably should, always just stop. It’s an enormous, enormous privilege to be given funding to move out to prairie to hang out and write - and I’m not even saying that because I have to check my privilege, I’m saying it because it’s true. It’s really hard to get paid for your writing, because the world is full of writers. Also, people hate reading. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances, but generally speaking, there’s no good reason to do pursue writing except because you really, really like it.

And sometimes we do like it, we’d say; or we did; or we thought we did. Did we? Did we just like when people told us that we were smart? Had that been it? Maybe we hate writing and love compliments. Maybe we hate writing and love winning. Maybe we had done something foolish by coming here.

With distance, I think the obvious answer is that writing is sometimes fun, and sometimes not fun. Writing is not one unified activity, but it took me a while to think about all of the different things it entails, that are all called writing. Of course, everyone knows the macro ways it gets split up (research, draft, revision)—but even those are pretty mixed terrain.

In trying to clarify my own relationship with writing + better understand why I live the life I do, I’ve been enjoying breaking down writing into lots a separate activities and then judging them like:

• realizing an idea on a walk = fun

• being 3-4 paragraphs into a draft = awful

• mid draft 1 confusion = very low. i believe the piece will fail AND that it represents my career/ambition/identity; sometimes I cry.

• tweaking the voice = fun

• restructuring = frustrating

• being 75% through a draft and “closing in on it” = the best, why people play sudoku.

• drafting a substack when you feel like it and posting it the second you get bored = :) :) :)
  

1. Woke around 7:20. I kept screaming in my sleep all night which is a bad habit, but one I feel like I fundamentally can’t control (the top tips are like, be relaxed, which is like go fuck yourself I’m trying.) I am my own baby waking myself up in the night, and, also, waking up my boyfriend, and also, waking myself up further by moving to the couch so I can stop waking up my boyfriend.

2. 8 am: ate this beautiful overnight oat/yogurt/blueberry/chia seed/cinnamon/vanilla/maple bowl my boyfriend prepped for me last night. Also he made coffee.

   

   
   

3. 8:50 am - took a tram to Fitzroy for pilates, read Agatha Christie on the tram. One important organizing principle for today is this: I have taken a few days to really lock in with writing, and so I’m trying to give myself the best shot to concentrate. I feel like that involves beginning with sunshine and movement, but not TOO much movement — there is a very thin line between exercise that supplies energy and that drains it. Also, on Substack, it might seem like this is what all of my days are like, but that is not true. Most days I do an early meeting, work in bed until like 2, walk to the library and do more work of some type or another, head home around 6, gym, dinner, tv, bed. I have more flexibility than a normal person, but there’s a loooot of typing in bed with unbrushed hair. But I am infinitely more likely to write a substack documenting my day when I have a beautiful morning.

   

   
   

4. 9:30 am - pilates in fitzroy! beautiful location, but every time i’ve gone here, i’ve had some slightly weird interaction with the teacher. It’s not one teacher; it’s all of them. Or it’s me. This time, I came in and said “Hi, I’m Ilana” to check in, and usually I feel like instructors say something like “Oh I’ve got you here,” and that’s it, but he didn’t react, so I was like “from classpass?” and he’s like, “Yeah I know?” and I’m like ok cool and then I ask to rent a mat and he was like ok. And then he was talking to someone else and he was like, “everyone is so like rushed today, they’re like, I’m here! I’m here! I need a mat!” — so I guess that was the energy I was giving lmao.

   

   
   

5. 10:20 - ran 2 miles home (brought the book in my running vest backpack which is just soooo handy). My knees have been a little funky recently so I’ve been pulling back on running, but I figured 3-4 km is fine.

   

   
   

6. 10:40- 12:30 window Showered obviously, lied down for a second, tried to tidy, the bathroom cabinet door broke :( Made a little bowl by microwaving whatever was in the fridge (rice, cheese, tofu) plus tomatos and carrots and some hummus. Ate sweet chili cream cheese on apple slices. Drank a bottle of protein coffee from the shop downstairs.

   

   
   

7. 12:40-2: walked to the library - stressed bc I’m a little behind already (I chose morning pilates, which I don’t usually, because I feel most productive from 11 am-6pm—naive about how long it takes me to go from pilates to working!). Wrote a bunch of emails, asked our property manager to send someone for our bathroom cabinet door, wrote everything on this substack up to this bullet.

8. Oh also I looked at the librarian recommended reads and I loove when I see people from Iowa on them :) Today it was Melissa Febos. But also, this library is displaying Shy Girl — the famous controversial AI novel that I thought was pulled from publication?? Due to the AI?? The front cover is blurbed by Sadie Hartman, which I initially thought was Wayward Lives/ critical fabulation Sadiya Hartman, and I was like, wow that’s crazy. That is the last person in the world who I would expect to blurb this AI YA horror novel??? But anyway, they’re two totally different people.

   

   
   

9. I worked on my own writing, which I wanted to do until like 7 but then I got a text that a friend from out of town was in town for that night only and her plans had changed so she was suddenly free and wanted to grab drinks at 4:30 so we went to a cute little wine bar and ate very expensive bread and also whipped butter sprinkled with a mysterious but probably fancy black dust. We then went to Carlton to meet up with a bigger group, but when they went to dinner me and my other local friend turned around to walk home together. We stopped to say hi to someone in a book shop, where we found a copy of Jacobin Teen by the register. “HASAN PIKER MOGS THE CAPITALISTS pg 20.” We thought that was pretty funny.

   

   
   

10. Got home around idk, 8? Said hi to my boyfriend, read Agatha Christie until I was too tired to continue.

Saturday

1. 8:47 am - woke up and discovered I’d slept for a shocking 9 hrs 40 minutes!! But I’ve been having very disrupted sleep this week so that’s good.

2. 9 am: Had a crumpet and coffee and then worked in bed until around 1 pm.

3. 1:00 Cleared out my bathroom cupboard to get photos to send our real estate about our dumb broken hinge.

4. 1:15: went on a run - did 6.5 km which is the longest I’ve done since my knee issues. Also did a strength work out after. Since pulling back on running has taken away the stabilizing goal of race training, I’m trying to learn to do pull ups. Going bad so far. Listened to a bad australian mystery novel set in America. One plot point is that an American was able to identify a character as Australian, which indicates they probably had prior knowledge of her. When her brother points out that this seems suspicious, the character naively says, could it not have been her accent? No, the brother says, that couldn’t be it. Americans can’t tell difference between Australian and British accents, and, also, Americans think Australians all look like blonde surfers.

5. 3:00: Got home, took a shower, realized I really hadn’t eaten properly today and made a banana clementine yogurt protein powder spinach smoothie. Wasn’t enough so I then got a banh mi.

6. 4:30: Only now do I have a second to chill. But not a very long one because my hair is still wet and blowdrying it takes forever and we’re about to head down to St Kilda for a friend’s house-cooling part.

7. 5:30 pm: We take an uber to the other side of town for the party. Our friend lives in a verrrry beautiful apartment but he’s moving out soon. I’m kind of hungry and keep gravitating to the chips and dip table. At some point, I’m in the kitchen eating the chips alone, when the host comes in and startles me. I feel immediately embarrassed and guilty, like a kid caught raiding the pantry for chocolate chips.

   A little before 10, I become extremely, extremely tired—I keep yawning and can’t keep up in conversation. On our way out, our friend gifts us a pair of roller skates we were admiring: they weren’t even his, really, but a few years ago his upstairs neighbor left them in a free box on the street.

   

8. 11:00 pm: my boyfriend orders mcdonalds and I eat fries and the rest of my banh mi. We fall asleep watching dragon ball, then move to bed at 1.

Sunday:

1. I wake at 7:30, feeling pretty tired. My watch says my recovery is 7%. I probably had like 2.5 beers last night. At most! And I mean cans, not pints or anything. I see my boss has asked if I can take a 9 am australia time meeting, and I say sure.

2. 9:00 am-11 am: regular work (meetings, notes, reports)

3. I write a bit. Make noodles and eggs. Behold our messy apartment; behold my own exhaustion. Think about going to the store for groceries + to stretch my legs but everything feels hard.

4. 12:30 ok fine I’m going to go to the grocery store and stretch my legs. The only other things on the schedule are 1. to read 2. to nap and 3. to plan my boyfriend’s birthday and finish his gift 4. to CLEAN. I don’t take a lot of full on rest days like this so I’m going to try to really luxuriate in it. I spend a few hours drawing him a little present while listening to the rest of the audiobook because I love him. Tomorrow, we will go on a bike ride.

One difference I draw between myself and the world at large is that “they” are tired for valid reasons—newborn children, physical or psychological disorders that prevent them from sleeping, iron deficiency. I sleep plenty and pass every blood test, even as a vegetarian, even when I was vegan, and I have no children and take a stimulant that is a first-line treatment for narcolepsy, although also, in my case, for ADHD, and I still feel like I’m fighting to stay awake. I argue that I have Schrodinger’s narcolepsy — if I have been receiving narcolepsy medication every day since I was a teenager, how would we know if I had it or not? We have to assume I both do and don’t. I've been told by a friend with true insomnia that it’s very annoying to hear me complain about how I get so much sleep and still feel tired, since she doesn’t get sleep at all. You don’t see! I insisted. I am pouring water into a bucket with a hole. Also, I felt that it’s all very unfair because I’m both tired all the time AND unconscious all the time, which means I get fewer hours being alive. Cumulatively, it shaves off years. She was diminishing the narcolepsy that I very plausibly might have! It was Schrodinger’s ablism!

She said it was I who didn’t see the situation clearly: she doesn’t get to pour any water into any bucket at all.

One time I was doing shrooms with another friend and sitting on the floor and I just started exclaiming, “I hate being tired! I just hate it!” It felt like it was always there, this veil tainting the fun of everything. My friend said I don’t seem tired; I seem like a person who has a lot of energy — I run and see friends and work and paint. At first, I protested that she couldn’t use exercise against me because I’d gotten into it largely to help regulate my energy, but when I was honest with myself, I realized that she had a point. When I thought about my routine, it wasn’t really tired girl behavior, even if I subjectively experienced it that way.

“Plus,” she said, “Doesn’t it kind of feel nice sometimes? To feel really sleepy?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all. It’s uncomfortable. It’s really, really awful.”

Feeling tired was not usually painful, but unpleasant in the same way it’s unpleasant to really need to pee when there’s no bathroom, or to always feel just a bit hungry, to never get relief — this little nagging weight that prevents you from ever focusing on anything else. She shrugged; to her, this was cozy.

“Oh god,” I said. What if the problem was not that I was more tired than the regular person, but simply that I disliked tiredness more than the regular person. Maybe this was just a regular daily sensation that I considered disproportionately unpleasant, like if I randomly found the sensation of sneezing to be excruciatingly violent. Maybe I was, as I always imagined my insomniac friend was insinuating, just kind of a baby about things. It was very possible.

Morning:

1. I woke up around 8, quite tired. This weekend was pretty social and I kept going to bed late. On both Friday and Saturday, I fell asleep on the couch, which I consider one of the coziest treats in the world — to be so sleepy, to consider the prospect of standing up and walking to bed, and say: no :). It’s a really pure moment of pleasure and comfort. But the downside of all this is that I’ve fucked up my sleep schedule and my Fitbit says my readiness is Low today and my heart rate variability is Poor.

2. I drink coffee and a mason jar full of smoothie that I made yesterday. The surface is oxidized and discolored and disgusting. I try to scoop the top layer off. The smoothie is grainy because I added too many powders and seeds.

3. I get on a few consecutive meetings for work, and then talk to clients about upcoming projects, and so on like that. In the 20 minutes between these meetings, I go outside to force my nervous system to recognize that the Sun is Out. Time to wake up!! Time!! to wake!! up!!

4. Also, I do my “Morning routine.” For the past week, I’ve been setting a 10 minute timer in the morning and evening where I clean and make sure my keys are in the bowl and that I haven’t left sneakers in the hall and I empty the dehumidifier and stuff like that. I’m really liking it!

   

5. I make lunch. My boyfriend ordered us a box of produce from a nice little farm I run past a lot, so I use those cherry tomatoes and basil and corn cobs to make a little salad + protein banana spinach pancakes.

   

6. I know people say NYT is bad but I’m just a normal girl and I just want to get a sense of things. I catch up on the Daily, but skip the weekend episodes about introspection and Rebecca Solnit. I’m also an idiot so I download a thriller where the narrator says things like “It’s so sad…he had that huge house, but, really, he was all alone,” after watching Citizen Kane.
   It’s one of those books where the Rich, Handsome husband is Too Good To Be True and probably going to lock his new bride in a dungeon as soon as they’re married. I’m always struck by how this genre of Husbands seem to be written by a child who has no conception of the way adults interact—that the seriousness and rule-adherence they perceive in strict adults (the principal at school, whatever) must follow them everywhere. These grown ups are very formal and call their wives “Sweetheart,” and express affection by gifting Cadillacs out of the blue. Neither spouse seems to know anything about each other.

7. It’s a little quiet at work rn, so I decide I should work on my own writing today. I go up to the roof to read for 20 minutes to remind myself what an essay looks like. I feel like if I see someone else writing essays I’ll get jealous that they get to have all the fun and it’ll make me want to write as well. I’m reading About a Mountain by John D’Agata because I’m currently in a phase of trying to catch up on all the books I just vaguely skimmed in grad school.

   There are always people sunbathing on our roof, which is bizarre to me in Australia, a country plastered in wheat pastes about how 50% of the population will develop skin cancer. One of the sunbathing girls is talking to the other about her ex. Recently, he contacted her to thank her because he learned so much in their relationship and has come out a better, neater person. “Ok, great, but what does that do for me?” she says to her friend, exasperated

   

8. I think about sending an invoice to a client but remember it’s a public holiday in Australia. I wish I had a normal job that had public holidays.

9. I procrastinate by starting this Substack.

10. I think about taking a nap. I’m so fucking tired all of the time.

11. I work on an essay. I am successful in that I spend time at the computer, continuously typing and deleting and moving around paragraphs and creating new tabs to try different structures. I am unsuccessful in that, by the end of the session, almost nothing in the official draft has changed.

12. My boyfriend needs quiet for a big call so I go to the gym, where I do speed intervals on the treadmill in our apartment gym. Speed training is my most dreaded work out of the week, but this one isn’t so bad. I probably made it too easy. I do some strength, including deadlifts, an exercise I always avoid because I think I do it wrong. Today will be the day I learn. My boyfriend’s call still isn’t over by the time I master the deadlift so, for once in my life, I stretch. It’s all very luxurious; I love being banished.

13. I go back upstairs and put broccoli in the oven so it will be ready by the time I’m out of the shower. I also make kangaroo steak. One big update in my life is that after 21 years of being vegetarian, and one year of debating whether or not I should eat kangaroo (a famously ethical meat), I’ve become a kangaroo eater. My boyfriend is very impressed that I make the steak itself, handling the raw, bloody meat. Because it’s in a red marinade, it looks unthinkably violent. But I have always been ok with viscera (dissections, feeding thawed quail to predator birds at the raptor center). I just feel like eating meat is a betrayal to one of the truest, oldest parts of my identity.

14. I do my nighttime cleaning routine and then we watch one episode of Dragon Ball (not Z, just regular). It’s such a pervert show and it really makes me laugh. We go to bed after but it takes me a long time to fall asleep.

It feels like a waste of time to even list why I think it’s such a good idea. The reasons are too obvious: these are extremely powerful, addictive technologies being given to children during their most formative years, and we don’t have comprehensive research on how they change developing brains. The research we do have basically says it’s bad, and some significant subset of adolescents are losing their minds. The second the algorithm figures out you’re a boy it’s serving you misogynistic content, and my feed reallllly wants me to develop a raging eating disorder? It’s so fucking freaky the way literacy rates have been declining and attention spans are fracturing, and I know education is being defunded, but come on—growing up with hours of daily TikTok scrolling doesn’t help.

Like anyone who’s ever done acid, I know in my bones that these phones contain a deep, insidious darkness that is not appropriate for childhood. Years ago someone asked why I was afraid of heights, as if it were some niche phobia requiring explanation. There are some things that are too self-evident to indulge with rigorous unpacking.

Anyway, here’s a list of anti-ban things I’ve seen online and whether I think they’re dumb or not:

• The ban won’t work because teenagers will just get fake IDs

  • Dumb. Even if a few 14- or 15-year-olds circumvent the ban, I have personally been asked by an elementary-school-aged child if she could “post me on TikTok,” and that alone should be illegal. But also, I don’t know—getting a fake ID isn’t that easy at 15, and if a critical mass of your friends are offline, getting a fake ID so you can watch 28-year-olds online sounds…insane and not that cool?

  • Also, wtf. Should we throw out all forms of age regulation because fake IDs exist? Alcohol wasn’t regulated, and then it was. Driving wasn’t regulated, and then it was.

• Teenagers use Snapchat to communicate so it’s mean to take away their main form of communication

  • Dumb. Omggg. I can’t believe how often I see this. Literally imagine a world where instead of figuring out how to send a text, all teen communication just stops.

• This will be bad for marginalized teens - there are gay kids in non-accepting areas who get a lot out of social media and will lose valuable community.

  • Not dumb! As polemical as I’m being, this is true and sad and a real loss. I personally don’t think this justifies devastating the attention spans of a full generation, but I think it’s something to take seriously - I think that if the government takes this mode of community, it’s even more important to invest in other forms of outreach and support. Idk, this one’s real.

• Paternalistic overreach/nanny state:

  • THIS IS FOR CHILDREN

• Teenagers are actually mentally unwell because of the impending climate crisis/xyz

  • that too but come on. you know it! deep inside, you know it! social media is bad for you. also, there’s obviously a compounding effect. have you never opened up your phone to scroll because you can’t sleep and immediately found yourself half-awake and confronted with flames consuming cities a thousand miles away from you?

• This is bad because the government will require your ID and then have that much more information on you

  • Idk, sure, but also:

    1. I have never been under the impression that my social media was something the government had no way to surveil.

    2. Certain goods and services just require identification. I can’t buy a car without it, and my car is always traceable to me. Social media is a commodity from a corporation that hasn’t existed for most of human history and isn’t actually necessary. Wanting unfettered access to it without any conditions strikes me as weirdly entitled.

• 12 year olds in Queensland can receive adult prison sentences but can’t go on instagram

  • the adult prison sentences are bad too

Anyway, this is the first time in years the news cycle has made me feel optimistic in a real way. Every time an election swings this way or that, I feel like—okay, we get this one, but the fundamental fact that we live in a society of disparate realities is still there. I love the idea of kids logging off and going outside, meeting new people, having unwieldy conversations, picking up a book and reading it. People did it before, and they can do it again. I think it will make a better world. I think it’s a better way to spend a life.

Yesterday was Saturday and I did my first run since the half marathon along the Merri creek for 7km. There was a festival in the park for fava beans and children were picking flowers and a woman and a man were playing guitar where they described different modes of transportation. I really liked the vibe, but it also made me sad and feel an intense longing I couldn’t quite place. I bought watermelon and purple cauliflower, plus on-sale bok choy and then I scooped chamomile tea into a little paper bag. The man at the counter told me about an enormous beet he’d made soup with the other day, a full kilo from a single beet. I couldn’t believe it, and, upon reflection, I actually still don’t. I took some flowers from the free stand because I was going on a picnic later and I thought they’d be a nice adornment.

At home, I dropped off the groceries and then went to our building’s gym to read in the sauna and then take an ice bath because I love to make my body uncomfortable and I hoped the suffering would wake me up and prevent me from needing more coffee. I returned and put the cauliflower in the oven so it’d be done when I got out of the shower, which it was, but upon tasting, I realized I hadn’t done a good enough job washing off the grit initially and so I rinsed my freshly roasted cauliflower, knowing full well I might be ruining the dish but figuring it was better than eating fucking sand.

I assembled a picnic and took it to princes park, where I was meeting a friend. I got there first so I laid down and read my book on the grass. There was a guy a few feet away reading while eating a sandwich and it reminded me you can just do that: it doesn’t have to be a whole event with purple cauliflower and brie, you can just go get subway and it’s still nice.

My friend and I drank a couple light beers and snacks and watched gymnasts contort their bodies, seemingly for hours.

We looked at a bird house in the trees above us and she talked about how she struggled to connect to her first boyfriend’s mom in England. The mom would take her on walks where she’d point out local birds, and my friend appreciated the kindness but had no idea how to respond. She had no bird facts to offer; she had grown up on the 14th floor of a skyscraper in Hong Kong. A bird fact was not something you could agree or disagree with.

I told her about the summer I psychotically became a licensed raptor handler in Iowa for three months, something I barely ever think about anymore. I suddenly remembered how I had to rip open the skin of thawed quail to feed the larger birds, just pressing with my two thumbs in the center and pulling it apart. It wasn’t for me. We wandered over to her house down the street because I had to use the bathroom, and we sat on her porch.

Then, I dropped off my picnic stuff at home and headed to a bar to meet up with my boyfriend and his old editor who gave him his first shot in media 10 years ago when he wandered into the office asking for a job. They were playing pool and I got a diet coke because I was still hoping I’d make it to run club this morning. We made our way to another bar to see the editor’s other friend, and only upon arrival did my boyfriend and I realize that actually we were at an engagement party for people we didn’t know. Everyone was nice; we had a good time.

Honestly, I could have made it to run club in the morning if I really wanted to, but decided that extra sleep was more valuable. I walked around the park instead for sunlight and made instant cheese tteokbokki and picked us up sandwiches from a little shop I like down the street. And now, I’m about to read until I’m ready to get back to work and make myself useful. I wish I could sleep for a thousand years.

It’s my 31st birthday this weekend, which is fine. My fantasy is just to proceed as normal, but a little more luxuriously: start the morning with run club in the park but get zucchini fritters at the bakery afterwards instead of an austere poached egg. Go to an art museum with my boyfriend, maybe see a couple friends. My only complaint about my life at this point is that I’d really like to finish writing a book.

When I turned 30, it didn’t feel weird because I’d spent all of 29 thinking that I was basically 30. I had done this before. During my first semester of teaching, I had one general literature class (mandatory for the university) and was very startled on my first day to realize that 80% of my students were boys. Most of them were in their first year of college, which meant they were 18. I had just turned 27, and had never really learned to present myself as an adult. I wore my grandpa’s old felt coat that had burrs stuck to the elbows from my backyard. I didn’t know how to use the projector and so I pretended it was broken and said that I’d call IT before our next class. I’m very shy.

I still didn’t want the boys to see me as a peer. But instead of buying a nice pair of trousers, I just kept trying to insert my age into conversation, and also, exaggerating it a little to imply that I was a neat 10 years older than them instead of just 9 and a bit.

I never lied, I just rounded up in vague terms that made me sound older. I’d say things like, “Well, when I was your age,” and then pause and go, “but that basically a decade ago so things were probably different.” It was so dumb. But it also got in my head and I began to earnestly see myself as a 28 year old, in a half-conscious vibe-y way.

When August came around, I celebrated in a backyard patio with friends in New York.

“Can you believe I’m 29 now?” I asked dreamily, so deep in my own bullshit. And my friends were like, literally no of course not

I think about that all the time now. We’ve entered my favorite time of year: the season where Australian media outlets begin publishing articles like: Winter In Australia Feels Colder Than Winter Everywhere Else, But Why? and Brits, Americans, And Canadians Are Struggling With Australia's Abysmal Winter, And I've Never Felt More Validated.

I guess I’m easily trolled because this stuff makes me lose my mind. It’s literally not true—everyone you talk to says it is, but it’s just not. Melbourne winters are like, 10 C / 50 F. You can live your whole life without snow. The summers are warm, but usually not uncomfortable — maybe 74 F / 23 C on a normal day, with a few hot spells around 90 F / 32 C (or hotter- hot as anywhere that gets heat waves) when you can go to the pool. I think it’s a dream: you can almost always walk around.

There’s one semi-legitimate point, and it’s the houses. Because Melbourne doesn’t get extreme cold, the buildings are poorly insulated and don’t retain heat well. Also, apparently, nobody grew up in a house where your mom tells you to just go put on a sweater? There’s UN data that goes around about how Australian houses really are too cold but I don’t know — I’ve lived in houses in Virginia, Iowa, Ireland, and Melbourne — and I just don’t buy the idea that everyone else’s homes are just so cozy in the winter.

In Iowa, the feels-like temperature could get down to like -32 F / -35 C pretty much annually. I’d wear my heavy duty coat with a ski mask, fleece lined leggings under big corduroy pants, undershirts, double socks. Going outside was still basically unbearable because my eye juice would freeze, my breath would crystallize on my glasses and in my hair. That was the worst of it, coldest days of the year temperatures, but there were months of icy sidewalks, using my credit card to scrape my windshield so that I could drive. I didn’t have enough dexterity with gloves, and my fingers would burn and turn red. It was painful and it was isolating. I moved there in the pandemic, so we couldn’t see each other inside, but we couldn’t go outside either. Iowa wasn’t a place I would have chosen for myself — I went for practical reasons — and I couldn’t believe the hell I’d entered.

I lived in a house built in 1860. Maybe it had better insulation than a Melbourne apartment - but it was a big space with tall windows and I lived in the coldest room (you felt a chill opening the door). In that kind of cold, how far do you think an inch or two of foam goes? Not far enough. I’d delay showering because I didn’t want to undress. My toes would turn white and my lips would turn blue. Even in Virginia, in Ireland, in Ireland in the summer, I’d wake up cold and with a sensation that a string was closing around my smallest toe. When I was 19, my college boyfriend explained that it was a little weird and maybe unsanitary that I sometimes went to bed in my outdoor jacket. So, I don’t know. The UN can say what it wants, but I just can’t believe that these houses trapped heat that well.

Here’s a photo of my lips indoors:

And outdoors: this isn’t snow, it’s breath!

Strangely, lifelong Iowans didn’t even seem to know that they lived somewhere unusually cold. Movies depict New England as frigid, and don’t depict the Midwest much at all, and so when I went to Boston for a weekend, my students all told me to bundle up. It’s worse here! I wanted to scream at them. On some days, the temperature would beat Siberia. I talked to an Iowan friend my own age and said I was relieved I’d be going back to Virginia for Christmas, out of the cold, and he was like: Oh, is it not that bad there? — as if what we endured was normal.

It’s one thing for Australians to say Melbourne is the coldest place in the world, but it really gets under my skin when Canadians, Minnesotans— people from places even colder than Iowa, who know better — agree. People really just say things. It shouldn’t bother me, but it makes me feel like they’re lying to my face, that they’re swearing to god that daytime is actually darker than nighttime. Up is down! Down is up! It makes me see them as people who acquiesce too easily, who don’t have a strong inner compass.

Some agree with me about Melbourne winters; others swear it really is worse, but nobody has seemed rattled by this in the same way—like it really stirs something in me. It makes me feel like I’m undergoing a test where I have to lie, to compromise my soul a little bit, to denounce reality in order to join society. It makes me very aware of my own stubbornness, my unseemly hunger to be right: at all costs and for no reason.

What really distinguishes Australian cold from more severe winters, I think, isn’t the houses or the wind, but just the fact it’s happening right now—and that the pain you endure in any moment is basically the worst kind.

I talked about this once with a girl from Toronto who said she used to object like I did at first, but really, she realized, nobody wants to be told the cold that they’re experiencing actually isn’t bad at all. They are saying that Melbourne cold is the worst to complain and to commiserate, not to find out if we have ever been anywhere colder and have their discomfort minimized. I admired her restraint; it is, I know, the more mature way to live.

Half my friends thought I was a psychopath for flying to Australia, half of them thought I was seizing the day—very eat pray love. I took comfort in this: the longer a friend had known me, the more likely they were to think it was a good idea. Worst case, they’d say, you just go see Australia.

It all made perfect sense to me. We’d have a three week date and then I would fly directly to Ireland, where I was moving after. I would use travel credit card rewards which meant the cost wasn’t too bad. If I didn’t go to Australia, I would probably lose my mind, and how would I be productive then? It was responsible to go! It wasn’t until I was in Reagan airport with my suitcase that I snapped out of the fugue for just a second, and thought: what the FUCK am I doing?

People ask if it was weird when we first saw each other. A little! Were we supposed to kiss right away, immediately after meeting? We did. I was very sweaty from travel. The line getting released to Australia took forever because they’re very protective about their ecology. My crush had asked for my coffee order so he’d have it ready for me at arrivals. I said iced coffee with cream no sugar, and neither him nor the barista understood that I just meant like, milk or half and half—they thought I was looking for ice cream or whipped cream and were sad to say it wasn’t available. My crush could see each suitcase come out of arrivals before he could see the person wheeling them, and he watched them saying: that wouldn’t be her bag, that doesn’t seem like her vibe. What bags didn’t seem right? I begged him to tell me, to articulate my essence, but he couldn’t describe it exactly—just an intuition. Everything was an intuition, most of all, my presence on the continent at all.

But here we are! Here I am! Two years later! With each day that passes, I am less and less a psychopath, and more and more a visionary.