August didn’t go well for me.

At the very end of July, I spiked a fever. Then the fever hung around for a week. I went to urgent care, who sent me to the ER to figure out the cause of this mystery fever after I tested negative for COVID, the flu, and strep.

I’d never been to the ER before, and it was weird. Fourteen hours, 34 blood t…

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No need to retell that story. Even if you have never heard it before, you know how it goes: lying, gaslighting, manipulation—a tired wife reaching gothic-horror levels of paranoia before finally taking matters into her own hands and searching the scoundrel-husband’s Apple Watch messages. She discovers she is not insane after all, spends some months in a weird manic state, rebuilds her life, and becomes hotter and cooler and happier than ever before.

The end! Except, obviously, it isn’t.

While reflecting on these last two years, I decided to reread the post I wrote last year celebrating one year of separation from my ex-spouse. I was struck by how many of the “firsts” I wrote about then have quietly become routine. I wrote about how I started swimming again. Now I swim once a week. I took my first dance class since 2018. Now I take as many dance classes as my schedule will allow. I went to my first-ever Liberty game, and now I’m a half-season ticket holder. These fun, exciting little things that made my first year feel so new have become pillars of the life I’m making. Or at least pillars of how I choose to spend my time. Things that once felt like special treats and occasions have integrated themselves into my ordinary routines, and that is a treat in itself.

I guess this is a fairly naïve realization, but I am still a little shocked that there was no big cosmic retribution for being cheated on. I was not rewarded with meeting the love of my life, or becoming rich, or having all my dreams come true. Life really never does owe you anything. It’s kind of funny that deep down, I thought it did. This year, I entered and exited a fraught relationship. I am currently super broke. I am still trying to get some projects off the ground, which feels impossible at times. Sometimes when I’m struggling I want to scream at the sky, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT I’VE BEEN THROUGH!!!!????” But no one is up there.

That’s probably for the best. I don’t need another man telling me what to do.

In the first year, I kind of saw myself as Kirby when he sucks up everything around him with his big mouth: I slurped up everything. Validation, attention, pity, compliments, reassurance. I wanted proof, constantly, that I was desirable and interesting and right and worth loving. Sometimes I still like those things. Sometimes I still need them. But I don’t have quite so voracious an appetite.

I crowdsource for opinions less. I have stronger convictions and higher standards. I am able to identify what I want more easily, and release the things I don’t need with less guilt. I trust my own taste more. I trust my own judgment more. I don’t feel quite so desperate to have someone else tell me what something means before I allow myself to decide what it means to me. In the scheme of everything, those seem like little changes, but they make the biggest impact.

Two years out, life is chugging along. And despite all the challenges, I am still happier than I was in my marriage because even when things are hard, they’re mine. My problems belong to me. The mess in the kitchen belongs to me. My time belongs to me. My future belongs to me. Things aren’t being co-opted by a narcissist. I don’t need to shove all my dreams and thoughts and feelings to the side to make space for someone else’s ever-inflating ego.

When you stop spending all your time preparing meals for a weak man’s bottomless appetite for attention, you can start to cook for yourself. And then you have to do the dishes because you don’t have a husband to split the chores with anymore.

There is always a catch.

Some of my days are super romantic: solo shopping at the farmers market in the city I love, wearing some billowy garment. Quietly reading in the park while snacking on strawberries like some sort of storybook rabbit. Getting all dressed up to meet a friend for a casual lunch. Writing in coffee shops. Flirting with strangers. Attending parties. Making new friends. Being unencumbered makes you mobile. You can say yes to last-minute trips and last-minute plans. You can decide on a Tuesday afternoon that you want to go somewhere on Wednesday and simply go. I still say yes to basically everything. That’s all very exciting!

But most days are not as exciting. A lot of my time is spent working my day job, doing chores, trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Not a bad life, but very life-y. And I think that is part of what I am learning to appreciate. Freedom is not always a glamorous dress in the farmers market. Sometimes it is doing your laundry. Sometimes it is sitting alone on your couch eating leftovers. Sometimes it is making a decision without having to consider whether someone else will be annoyed by it. Sometimes it is just having a bad day that belongs entirely to you.

When things get stormy in my mind, I think about whether I will ever know what it feels like to be loved again. Romantically, I mean. I wonder if it is possible for someone to both know me truly and love me truly. Yet to be seen! I think about how I want someone to split rent with, and how that is not a good reason to date. If money weren’t a factor, would I even want a partner? Or would it just be me in my lair with my dolls and my projects? That sounds nice too.

Fuck love, I want a patron.

On the topic of dating, I am much more discerning now. A little more closed off than I was at this time last year. More exhausted, especially by men. I spent my first single year out all the time. This year, I am home more. I am more careful with my energy, more inclined to rest after a year of going as fast as I possibly could. I think about my nervous system a lot. This year I learned that if you don’t take care of it, your body will eventually force you to take care of it through illness or injury. There are limits to how long you can outrun yourself.

Last year I was skimming the surface of so many things. I loved being a first-timer. There was something intoxicating about constantly having a new experience, about proving to myself that I could still become someone new. This year I went deeper. I’m still a beginner, but I’m not so green. Maybe that is what the second year is: less about proving that you can survive and more about figuring out what you actually want to build now that you have survived.

I’ll be 40 in five years. Although aging at large doesn’t freak me out, that number does. I think this is because I spent a lifetime using it somewhat derogatorily. Any time you wanted someone to feel washed up, past their prime, you would whine, They’re like 40. I think about my relatives who I remember turning 40. They seemed like real adults. People with houses and careers and children and furniture and retirement accounts and some kind of coherent narrative about how they got there.

I am a little freaked out by how little I have. How little I’ve done. How little I have to show. Yes, all of this is made up. Fake. Societally imposed. A completely arbitrary set of milestones that we’ve collectively decided should signify a successful life. But damn, I guess it worked, because I am scared!

And maybe that is another thing I am learning in this second year: just because I escaped one story doesn’t mean I am free of all of them. There are still stories I have to unlearn. There is still the voice that tells me I am behind. That I should have more by now. That I should know what I’m doing. That I should be settled. That I should have found the person, built the thing, figured out the money, figured out the career, figured out the rest of my life.

But two years ago, my entire life was rearranged at the careless hands of someone I loved and trusted the most. I thought the aftermath would be about rebuilding the life I had lost. It turns out it has been about discovering how little of my life is actually finished. And maybe this is the part I didn’t understand then: a good life is not necessarily an easy life. An easy life would be nice. I would actually love one! I would love to have more money and fewer problems and someone to split the rent with. I would love to know exactly what I am doing and where I am going. I would love to have a romantic partner who knows me truly and loves me truly.

But I don’t want an easy life badly enough to give up my own life for it. I don’t want security if the price is self-abandonment. I don’t want companionship if I have to make myself smaller to keep it. I don’t want to be comfortable inside a life that doesn’t feel like mine.

The life I have now is not perfect. It is not particularly financially secure. It is sometimes lonely. There are dishes. There are unanswered emails. There are projects that refuse to get off the ground. There are days when I wonder if I am literally cursed and need to see a bruja to rub an egg on me. But it is mine.

I get to decide what happens next. I get to change my mind. I get to try things. I get to waste an afternoon. I get to fall in love or not. I get to make bad choices. I get to make good choices. I get to fill my calendar with dance classes and basketball games and friends and farmers markets and, increasingly, naps. I get to make a life that fits me.

I don’t know what the next year will look like. I don’t know if I will fall in love. I don’t know if I will make more money. I don’t know if the projects I am trying to get off the ground will get off the ground. I don’t know what 40 will look like, or whether I will feel more like a “real adult” by then.

But I do know that two years ago I thought my life had been ruined. And now I am sitting here, in a life that is still unfinished, still financially precarious, still occasionally lonely, still full of uncertainty—and somehow, miraculously, it is mine.

I used to think being lucky meant getting the life you wanted.

Now I think maybe it means getting to choose your life.

Even when it’s hard. Especially then.

And honestly, if this is what freedom looks like, I’ll take it.

I’ll do the dishes myself.

I stood in my bedroom and spoke at a completely normal volume, saying things that were not words, while she stood on the other side of the door. When she came back in, she said she could hear me perfectly clearly.

I did this because, at the time, I was having extremely loud sex in my apartment quite often, and I was riding the fantasy that the walls—thin as paper, basically paper—were somehow muffling the sounds.

They were not.

So everyone in my building could hear me having loud sex. They had simply chosen, out of politeness, not to say anything. Thanks, y’all.

When my ex-husband and I first separated, there was one thing I knew for certain: I wanted to have a lot of sex with a lot of different people.

I learned he was having an affair while I was visiting him in Japan, where he was working a two-and-a-half-month contract. By the time I was in the car on the way home from the airport, I was texting my best friends, making a list of people I could potentially sleep with. You can judge my slutty trauma response. It doesn’t really matter. But for the record, I wouldn’t actually sleep with anyone for another four months.

I had always been a sexual creature. That part of me—a very important part of me—had been suppressed for the vast majority of my thirteen-year relationship with my ex. Even as I type this, I have to remind myself that being a sexual adult person is not a crime or a sin or even particularly interesting. It is not a personality flaw. It is not even a personality trait. I guess it feels weird to type it out. I don’t know.

Hey, Mom? Maybe skip this one.

So when my husband left me in this very cruel, painful way, one of the strange silver linings was that I was finally able to exercise my sexuality like an adult person for the first time, basically ever.

I don’t really want to write too explicitly here about the encounters themselves, or what I was looking for, or what I found, or what I didn’t find. Some things are better left in the private archive. But I will say this: A slut phase can be a holy experience.

Casual sex, despite what certain weirdly puritanical Gen Z influencers would have you believe, is not inherently bad.

Even in progressive circles, there is sometimes this idea that casual sex is for people with low self-esteem, or that every sexual encounter must either be healing or degrading. As if sex has to justify itself. As if every person you sleep with must either save you or damage you. As if desire, by itself, is somehow insufficient. And there is this idea that there is no way to have casual sex as a woman because you are only ever being used—as if you are a covert agent looking for love in all the wrong places, destined to be disappointed again and again when your lover doesn’t turn out to love you, but really just wanted a no-strings-attached romp.

But something that can be categorized as transactional to some can also be beautiful.

I found a lot of beauty in the intimacy of a one-off interaction. I learned that you can meet someone once and still find meaningful connection in the moment of being together. Not everything has to be hurtling toward a deeper commitment to be meaningful, even if only for a night.

But really, sometimes you just want to fuck around and have fun.

And that is what I would call my slut phase: Fun. It was a fucking blast.

I learned a lot about myself and my desires. I learned a shit ton about agency. I feel like I can now define good or bad sex for myself. When I was younger, I thought of sex as something that came with the relationship—a tag-along that could be good if you were lucky, but if it wasn’t, that was okay, too. Because you were there for the relationship, and the sex was ancillary.

Don’t think that way so much anymore!

Anyway, after a while of using the app Feeld as intended, I met a lot of great people. A couple stinky people. I got into a couple situationships. Learned how to break up with someone. I even got into a real, actual relationship for a few months. Learned a lot there, too.

Learning, fucking, fucking learning.

Round and round and round.

After my first post-divorce relationship ended, I figured I would hop directly into round two of my slut phase. I slept with someone new, but things felt different this time, and I couldn’t quite figure out why.

So I slept with someone else.

Still off.

Panicked, I slept with someone I had slept with before.

Nope.

It wasn’t that the sex was bad with any of these people.

But I felt different.

Sexual desire had always felt so innate to me, like something that just sprang forth from my chest—or loins?—but now it felt a bit like a performance. A little like ripping off a Band-Aid. A smidge like when you start fake laughing in order to really laugh: just a little disingenuous at first. My sexuality had often made me feel powerful in the past. Now it felt like just a thing I was doing.

So I made a new rule:

Men are no longer allowed in my apartment.

I felt good about this rule. When I moved into my apartment, the first apartment I had ever lived in totally alone, I designed it to be like a living altar. To myself, of course.I was at MoMA looking at Augusto Machado’s Shrine when I got the idea.

I have always been a collector—ephemera, trinkets. Little slips of paper or toys or leaves or tchotchkes could hold tremendous sentimental value to me. I could endow practically anything with magical qualities. I have been this way since I was a kid. I still have treasures tucked away in storage in my parents’ attic that would seem benign to most people but are tremendously important to me.

So I used these objects to make my entire apartment a shrine to my interests, my creativity, my resilience. And it feels almost irresponsible to let men enter my holy place.

Double entendre, sure.

I don’t know how to even describe it, but they come in and immediately I feel them scanning around, making assumptions about me. They see the Victorian hairwork I make and make a snide comment. They see the dolls I collect and laugh. It’s not overly rude or anything. But it makes me feel like I’m in a museum or something.

This will almost certainly make me seem crazy, but I actually made a spray bottle with a potion in it that I use after they leave.

I mix together oils and witch hazel and dried lavender, and as soon as they exit, I open all the windows and spray the concoction over the apartment, with a little extra on the bed and couch. I have to rebalance the energy or something. I have to make the place mine again.

So first I said that no men were allowed in the apartment. It felt like a good start, at least. Then I contemplated celibacy.

Being a slut is actually a lot of work. It’s hours of swiping, scouting, scanning. Meeting, vetting, flirting. Deciding. Re-deciding. Getting dressed. Deciding you look good. Deciding you don’t look good. Getting undressed. Getting dressed again.

It really takes effort.

And I couldn’t help but feel like I had more important things to do right now. Not to mention the natural alchemy that happens when you stay in your lane and focus on yourself—you attract the best people for you. So I decided maybe celibacy would be the way to go. I didn’t know how I would tell my usual paramours. Turns out I didn’t have to.

Because I landed myself in the hospital.

I had never been to the ER before, but after six days of a fever that just wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone, the kind urgent-care doctor urged me to head to the hospital. I could tell she was trying not to freak me out, but when I asked when I should go, she gently pushed:

“Tonight. Maybe even now. Maybe just go now.”

So I went.

Hospitals are weird, I would learn.

As I got my peripheral IV line put into one wrist, another nurse drew blood from the other, all while I vomited into a bag held by a third nurse. They wheeled me into a little curtained-off section while yelling “Code sepsis!” and “Heart rate is tachy!” I felt like a guest star on The Pitt.

I got 30 blood tests, one X-ray, and one ultrasound during my 14-hour stay, all to walk away with a very undramatic diagnosis of Epstein-Barr virus. To save you the Google: basically mono.

All that for adult mono. Anyone wanna take bets on how much this is going to cost me?

Enjoying? Help pay my medical bills!

As the doctor looked at my 35-year-old ass and said the words “kissing disease” to me more than ten times, I knew my theoretical summer of celibacy had now become very real.

After returning home from the hospital, my altar-apartment took on an even holier air—an abbey. Not only because of the no-sex thing, but because it would be my house of healing. I get fatigued very fast now. Scrubbing the toilet bowl can elicit a nap. So this would be where I rested, pushed electrolytes past my enormous tonsils, and watched hour after hour of documentaries on ancient civilizations. Or modern farming. Or Irish step dancing. Send reccs.

Last year around this time, I was in my peak slut phase, answering my door in lingerie and lighting my infamous “sex candle” for my suitors.

Now I am wearing the same giant Snoopy T-shirt for the fourth day in a row, contemplating whether I have enough energy to wash my hair. Or write this blog post.

If you’re reading this, I pushed the boulder up the mountain.

I suppose this is where I’m meant to tell you what I learned.

That I discovered the difference between wanting sex and wanting to be wanted. That I learned to love myself. That I realized I don’t need anyone else to complete me or whatever. That my body was trying to tell me something.

But I don’t know if any of that is true.

Right now my body mostly seems to be saying, “please lie down.” And so I do.

The apartment is very quiet. No one is coming over. Not even to watch the aforementioned docuemtaries with me. The sex candle is cold. I am learning how fast I can grow a delicate little mustache when I have no reason to shave it off. My little spray bottle of witch hazel and lavender is sitting on the dresser, waiting for someone to leave so I can bless the room afterward.

Of course nobody is leaving because nobody is coming (hehe).

But I am in here.

In my shrine. In my abbey. In my giant Snoopy T-shirt.

And somewhere in the building, behind one of those paper-thin walls, there are probably people living their lives without any idea what is happening in here. They’re probably just grateful not to hear my sex noises anymore.

Well, for now.

The End! Leave a tip!

Not out. At.

An ugly forest-green blackout curtain hung from a cheap tension rod. It had followed me from our place in the suburbs to my tiny, buggy, single-woman apartment in Manhattan. It wasn’t made for this window. It was nearly a foot too long, the extra fabric would pool on the sill like it had given up. Every few nights, the weight of it would pull the rod loose, and the whole thing would crash to the floor.

I had bought the tension rod in a panic after realizing my neighbors could see directly into my bedroom. They, in turn, seemed committed to keeping their apartment lit with those horrible blue-white LED bulbs twenty-four hours a day. Whenever the curtain fell in the middle of the night, I woke first to the sound, then to the light. It flooded the room, and every time I would jolt awake and shriek like Nosferatu seeing the sun.

After this happened for what felt like the millionth time, I opened my phone and searched for blackout curtains, sorting by fastest delivery, annoyed at another unexpected purchase during the most expensive season of my life.

Then I thought: What if I just cut it?

The idea felt almost immoral.

You don’t cut a perfectly good curtain. You don’t ruin something that still works. You buy the right thing eventually. You wait.

But then another thought arrived.

It’s my curtain.

It’s hanging in my bedroom.

Who is going to see the bottom edge? A lover? A friend? My mother? Would any of them notice? And if they did, what would happen? Would they reprimand me?

Eyelids heavy with Trazodone and squinting into the manufactured daylight pouring through my neighbors’ windows, I found the only pair of scissors I owned. They were so dull they folded the fabric more often than they cut it. I had to wrestle each inch free. By the time I finished, the hem was jagged and frayed. I threw the scissors aside like a tired Dr. Frankenstein, took one look at my hideous creation, and fell asleep.

It doesn’t sound like much. Cutting a curtain is hardly an act of revolution. But I think it was the first thing I ever did that belonged only to me.

Nearly two years later, that badly cut curtain still hangs in my bedroom window, a little reminder of my first rebellion.

Up until my separation, I had always been a very, very good girl. I didn’t smoke and rarely drank. I’d never blacked out or tried drugs beyond one weed brownie in college and a few edibles bought at a fancy-shmancy dispensary staffed by people who looked like they all held master’s degrees. Even in my teenage years, the extent of my misbehaving was sipping wine coolers at parties or having sex with my boyfriend in the back of his parents’ station wagon.

So it made perfect sense that when I got married, it was to a boy I’d been with for over a decade. It was a very rational choice. A tried-and-true relationship that settled into a familiar rhythm: no surprises, no drama. My ex-husband and I never fought, never got into screaming matches or hurled insults at each other. He was a gentle, deliberate person, a certified “nice guy” who seemed deeply devoted to me. When I looked down the long road of our life together, most things felt predictable.

And that’s just how I wanted it.

When I discovered he had been carrying on a secret affair while working halfway around the world, it wasn’t simply that my marriage ended. Reality itself became unreliable. I had flown across an ocean to visit him because he insisted I come, only to discover that the man I’d known since I was eighteen, the man I’d slept beside for nearly thirteen years, the one person I believed was the fixed point around which my life revolved, was not who I thought he was.

The affair was devastating enough, but what haunts me now is that he refused to come home with me. He stayed abroad with his mistress while I wheeled my enormous suitcase out of his hotel room (alone), into an Uber (alone), through an airport (alone), and onto an international flight… alone. He didn’t cry. He didn’t hesitate. If anything, he looked relieved to watch me leave.

The most painful part was realizing how much I had sacrificed to preserve the easy dynamic of our relationship. I had spent years shrinking myself into the shape of someone I imagined would be easy to love forever. I worked stable jobs to create financial security while he pursued acting. I quietly folded away ambitions that felt too big to exist alongside his own. At opening nights and red carpet events, I perfected the art of being pleasant, supportive, unobtrusive. I had become so practiced at taking up very little space that eventually even I stopped noticing I was disappearing.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, numb and disoriented by the fact that less than twelve hours earlier I’d kissed my husband goodnight and now was being sent home like a naughty schoolgirl, a line from Dostoevsky surfaced in my mind:

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

YOUR WORST SIN IS THAT YOU HAVE DESTROYED AND BETRAYED YOURSELF FORNOTHING.

Because in that moment, I had nothing. Pathetic to admit, but true! The person I had built my life around, the way tree roots slowly grow around an abandoned bicycle, was gone. The words landed with a force that made me physically ill. I had spent years convincing myself that all those compromises would eventually purchase permanence. Instead, I found myself thirty thousand feet in the air with no husband, no clear career, and no idea who I was when I wasn’t carefully arranging my life around someone else’s dreams.

How the fuck had a lifetime of making all the right choices landed me in such a wrong place?

By the time the plane landed, I had reached what still sounds like a ridiculous conclusion:

I had to go insane.

I know that sounds extreme, like I’m about to become some lunatic slasher hiding in the woods. But my brand of insanity was never about revenge, violence, or anger.

I didn’t want to become cruel or bitter. People love a woman scorned so long as she performs the role correctly. They wanted me to slash tires, burn photographs, smear fecal matter on my ex-husband’s car! Instead, I developed stranger appetites. I traded my usual subtle makeup for electric-blue eyeshadow. I started staying out all night when, previously, I wouldn’t even leave my apartment after 8 p.m. I bought a candle that promised transcendent orgasms and would inconspicuously light it whenever a lover came over because, somehow, I believed I could harness a little bit of whatever magic existed between us inside the wax (I still have it, sex magic still in tact). I started seeing a psychic—not because I necessarily believed she could predict the future, but because, after discovering that my own reality had been fabricated without my knowledge, the idea of paying someone to tell me impossible things suddenly seemed perfectly practical.

I did mushrooms in the park. More than once. This is not an endorsement, merely a confession.

I became, by my own previous standards, a slut, a title I accepted with almost religious gratitude. I had spent so much of my life treating desire like a choreographed dance where the goal was to anticipate another person’s movements before they made them. Suddenly desire became archaeological. I wasn’t excavating other people. I was excavating myself. I finally let myself be queer instead of simply wondering if perhaps I was.

Around the same time, I unpacked my dolls.

This may actually be the strangest thing I’ve admitted so far.

For years they had lived in plastic bins at my parents’ house because they didn’t fit into the tasteful life I’d constructed. Married women in neutral apartments with matching furniture did not display porcelain dolls with uncanny expressions. So I lined them up on shelves in my single-woman apartment instead. They witnessed my lonely dinners. They watched terrible reality television with me. They stared silently at dates who tried very hard not to ask questions.

Although some do.

Just a few weeks ago, I invited someone into my bedroom. I have a very realistic fake roach pinned to the canopy over my bed, and I like to warn first-timers so they don’t freak out. When I did, he replied, “I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about that.”

He pointed to a doll in a white nightgown sitting on my bedside table.

I didn’t tell him I own the matching nightgown.

Despite being deeply traumatized by cruel dance teachers in my past, I started dancing again. Occasionally, I post those dances online.

People make fun of them. I know they do. I can see when people share these videos, and I highly doubt I am getting high praise for my flailing in the group chat. I can imagine someone sending the video to a friend with three crying emojis and the caption, What is she doing?

But it’s okay. If you make fun of my dancing videos, please continue to do so. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your routines and I genuinely don’t care.

The funny thing about becoming yourself is that it can look deeply embarrassing from the outside. Freedom has terrible posture, especially now, when everyone seems so carefully poised. Every day I learn about some new thing I ought to be embarrassed by: my enthusiasm, my eagerness, my marionette lines (adorable name, honestly). But embarrassment feels like a small price to pay for the joy of living uninhibited.

I felt like I had truly gone crazy when I started writing publicly about my divorce here on Substack. Nearly everyone advised me against it. They worried I’d regret exposing something so personal. They worried people would judge me. They worried I’d become known as the divorced woman, as though there were anything more humiliating than being dumped. I’ve noticed that people often hand you their own shame disguised as advice. They couldn’t imagine living among dolls or dancing badly online, but that’s okay. You don’t have to.

I know people make fun of this blog, too. Even people close to me. It’s alright. I don’t care.

The advice given to newly divorced women is almost always suspiciously tidy. Journal. Go to therapy. Rediscover yourself through Pilates and herbal tea. Take long, reflective walks where you gaze meaningfully into puddles until some symbolic bird lands nearby. I did all of those things. Therapy was invaluable. Journaling helped. But none of it transformed me the way “going insane” did.

But of course, I never actually went insane. Everything I described above is not even close to insanity. It was all fairly mundane, really. But it felt revolutionary to me, because, for the first time in my life, I gave myself permission. Like my own little fairy godmother.

How silly I was to wait for permission from everyone else for all these years when I always could have been loud, or strange, or want things.

For years I believed adulthood meant becoming increasingly efficient, increasingly tasteful, increasingly easy to understand. I understand now that I will disappoint people who preferred the quieter version of me. But they don’t need to be here. No hard feelings, it really is okay.

Sometimes, late at night, the curtain still catches my eye. The edge I hacked apart with those useless scissors is uneven. Threads hang loose in places. It would take almost nothing to replace it with one that fits properly.

But every time I think about doing that, I remember the woman standing barefoot in the middle of the night, exhausted, medicated, and heartbroken, suddenly realizing shedidn’t need to wait for permission to alter the things that already belonged to her.

She could simply pick up the scissors.

And, at long last, she did.

And now, a video of me dancing:

I’m not sure I’m ready to be a butterfly yet.

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Hey. It’s really nice what you’ve done.

You didn’t have to become a paid subscriber. I had vowed to keep my personal essays free, but you signed up anyway because you are kind, generous, and—just taking a guess here—very good-looking.

So I wanted to put together a little newsletter for my paid subscribers only: something quick, fun, and a little less heady than my personal essays.

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IUD insertion pain.

IUD pain level insertion.

Pain-free IUD insertion.

Painless IUD Reddit.

IUD insertion painless.

The searches got increasingly desperate, as though I could eventually stumble upon a secret phrase that would unlock a hidden corner of the internet where women gathered to report, “Actually, it felt like a warm hug.”

Instead, I found horror stories.

I did the thing you’re not supposed to do: I spent hours reading accounts from strangers describing pain so intense it sounded biblical. Women fainting. Women vomiting. Women seeing God. Women swearing they’d never forgive modern medicine.

Not that I needed the internet. Every woman knows somebody with a birth control horror story. A friend whose pill caused her to become feral. An acquaintance whose implant made her bleed for six months. A coworker who describes her IUD insertion the way veterans describe combat.

And yet.

I’ve been on hormonal birth control, on and off, since I was sixteen. By now, synthetic hormones feel less like medication and more like a roommate. We know each other.

Plus, because I may or may not have PCOS (now PMOS)—which apparently depends entirely on which doctor you ask—I have additional reasons to stay on hormonal birth control. Half my doctors insist I have it. The other half look at my chart like they’re reading a mystery novel.

“Well, you have irregular periods, but you’re not growing rogue chin hairs… so we’re not really sure.”

Women’s healthcare remains one of the few fields where “we’re not really sure” is considered a complete diagnosis.

So why switch to an IUD after nearly two decades on the pill?

Simple. I got divorced.

More specifically, I lost my health insurance because I got divorced.

One of the less glamorous parts of divorce is discovering how many things in your adult life were quietly tethered to another person. During our settlement negotiations, my ex agreed to cover part of my COBRA costs for a few months. I accepted partly because I liked my insurance plan and partly because I enjoyed the idea of extracting additional money from him.

Two truths can coexist.

Once the countdown clock started, I transformed into a healthcare prepper.

I scheduled every doctor’s appointment I could think of: annual physical, dermatologist, gynecologist, anything-ologist. Throw in some acupuncture, because why the hell not? I saw a cardiologist who wanted to order additional testing, but I had to leave that health scare for another day because the appointment fell outside the window in which I was insured.

Pray for me!

I stockpiled medications like I was preparing for the collapse of civilization. Extra birth control, extra prescriptions, extra everything. My medicine cabinet looked like a tiny CVS.

As the deadline of losing my insurance loomed, I became fixated on one question: What if birth control became impossible to get?

I know it sounds unrealistic, but there was a time when overturning Roe v. Wade sounded unrealistic. A lot of supposedly “impossible” things have happened lately. And once that thought lodged itself in my brain, I couldn’t shake it. Maybe birth control pills wouldn’t always be easy to access. Maybe they wouldn’t always be affordable. Maybe someday some politician who thinks women should spend their afternoons baking sourdough and producing heirs would decide hormonal contraception was next on the hit list.

An IUD suddenly felt less like birth control and more like infrastructure. You can take away my pills, but good luck digging this tiny piece of plastic out of my uterus, fuckers.

So I made the appointment despite the horror stories. Because as frightening as birth control side effects can be, an unplanned pregnancy sounded significantly more disruptive.

So when I went in for my pap I requested I also get an IUD. The doctor ordered the device, which I would get a few weeks before my insurance lapses. But there was a problem.

Something had come back abnormal. I needed a colposcopy.

Back to Google:

Colposcopy pain.

Colposcopy Reddit.

How painful is a colposcopy?

The answer, according to the internet, was either “barely noticeable” or “medieval torture.”

Helpful!

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Thankfully, mine wasn’t terrible. What came after was more memorable.

As I checked out, a nurse informed me that during recovery, nothing could be inserted into my vagina. No tampons, no sex for one week.

And like a deranged cartoon character, I shouted:

“NO SEX FOR A WEEK?”

In a packed waiting room.

The nurse laughed.

She was right to.

The colposcopy delayed my IUD insertion even further. Suddenly the entire process felt like a contraceptive buzzer-beater. By the time it was over, I would spend five separate appointments in stirrups within a single month. There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from repeatedly placing your most vulnerable body parts under fluorescent lighting for medical evaluation. It’s physically tiring and emotionally tiring in equal measure.

My period of abstinence fell over Valentine’s Day, because of course it did, so I was recovering from the procedure, enduring an unusually painful period, and enjoying a PG-rated Valentine’s Day at a restaurant, eating vegan seitan piccata while trying not to visibly grimace and feeling like an ever-expanding tube of biscuits in a sexy little Betsey Johnson dress.

Then finally:

IUD Day.

8:30 a.m.

Straight to work afterward. Because healthcare may be expensive, but rent remains stubbornly due.

When I arrived, the receptionist informed me that my IUD shipment hadn’t arrived. Relief flooded my body. Weeks of anticipation disappeared instantly. I had tried, I had done everything correctly, but the universe had intervened.

Perfect!

Suddenly a future of irregular periods and insisting on condoms didn’t seem so bad.

Beautiful!

Then another nurse appeared.

“It’s right here. It came this morning,” she said.

Bitch.

A quick pregnancy test. Negative, obv. Then into the exam room. They put down one of those wee-wee pads dogs piss on the exam table, suggesting that things are about to get messy. Never a comforting sign.

I kept my shirt on but removed everything below the waist. I happened to be wearing a red shirt. I looked exactly like Winnie-the-Pooh getting an IUD.

As I waited, I studied the instruments laid out on the counter. Some looked vaguely familiar. Some looked like weaponry. One looked like a long metal BBQ skewer. The thought of that coming anywhere near my softest, tenderest bits freaked me out.

My gynecologist entered. She always wears enormous eyelash extensions. This detail has no relevance whatsoever, except that I need you to picture them.

She instructed me to take a deep breath.

The assisting nurse grabbed my knee.

Then it started.

Pressure.

Cramping.

A deep, blooming pain.

“Ouch,” I said.

“I know,” the nurse replied.

Another surge.

“FUCK,” I growled.

“I know.”

The pain felt strange because of where it lived.

Not on the surface. Not in a muscle. It felt like somebody had reached into the center of my body and found a room that had never been opened before.

The entire procedure lasted only a few minutes.

Then it was over.

The tools disappeared.

The pain receded.

“Just lie here for a bit,” my doctor said before vanishing, giant eyelashes and all.

The nurse cleaned up.

“That wasn’t nice,” I told her as I wiped my tears.

“It’s not nice for anybody,” she said without looking at me.

A perfect summary of the experience.

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I wasn’t offered any pain management beyond the two ibuprofen I’d taken because Google suggested it. Which, unfortunately, remains a fairly common experience.

And while conversations around IUD pain have improved dramatically in recent years, it’s hard not to notice how often women are expected to absorb discomfort that would provoke far more urgency if it occurred elsewhere on the body. I learned later that more doctors are offering ways to make this procedure less painful, but mine wasn’t one of them.

I felt okay when I arrived at work just half an hour later, but by the end of my shift that day, I was doubled over. Literally. I kept pretending to pick things up just so I could fold myself in half without alarming anyone.

The cramps lasted for days. I was bleeding constantly. When, after a week or so, the pain started to ease, I thought that was the end of it.

It was not.

Because then my brain got involved.

The emotional side effects blindsided me. For two weeks, I cried constantly. Not dramatically. Not because anything terrible happened. I simply walked around with tears permanently loaded and ready for deployment. A coworker could ask, “How are you?” and suddenly I’d need to stare at a wall until I regained my composure. A hard blink at any given time could elicit those camera-ready movie-star tears.

But even stranger was the paranoia.

First, I became convinced everyone secretly hated me. My friends were annoyed with me. The person I was seeing was cheating on me. People were discussing my shortcomings behind my back. Every interaction felt loaded, and every silence felt suspicious.

The logical part of my brain knew none of it made sense, but the emotional part was conducting full criminal investigations.

Which, naturally, made me super chill and awesome to be around.

Back to Google.

IUD paranoia.

Paranoia after IUD insertion.

Can an IUD make you paranoid?

The internet informed me I was far from alone.

Eventually, I returned to my gynecologist in tears. I told her I was bleeding constantly. Cramping constantly. Bloated beyond recognition. And emotionally spiraling. Online forums kept insisting I should “give it six months,” as though spending half a year feeling insane is a reasonable request, so I begged for mercy:

Get this thing OUT of me.

She looked at me from beneath her magnificent eyelash extensions and encouraged me to give it another month.

I reminded her I wouldn’t have health insurance in another month.

She assured me we’d figure something out if I wanted to remove it, but I didn’t entirely believe her. Still, I left the appointment with the IUD firmly installed.

After all, removing it myself would require an entirely new category of Google searches. And I was trying, for once, to stay off the internet.

Now it’s been about five months since I got my IUD.

I bled for about four of those five months—a third of a year—destroying every pair of underwear I ever owned.

But the bleeding eventually stopped. The cramps mostly faded. The bloating backed off a bit, though I did put on a stubborn few pounds. The paranoia evaporated so gradually that I didn’t even notice it leaving.

One day I just realized I hadn’t spent three hours constructing an elaborate theory about why someone took too long to text me back.

I feel normal-ish again.

Or at least as normal as I’ve ever felt, which is to say: occasionally anxious, frequently dramatic, and generally suspicious of any system that claims to have my best interests at heart.

I don’t write any of this to scare anyone away from getting an IUD. I generally hate birth control fearmongering and, sorry, I don’t really believe in syncing my period with the moon or whatever.

I tell this story because I still think women’s healthcare deserves better.

I still think pain management during these procedures should be taken more seriously.

I still think it’s ridiculous that so many of us are forced to become amateur researchers, pharmacists, advocates, and constitutional scholars just to make decisions about our own reproductive systems.

But I also think about the tiny piece of plastic currently hanging out in my uterus.

The one that survived shipping delays, insurance deadlines, a colposcopy, approximately 600 panic searches, and several weeks during which I was convinced everyone in my life secretly hated me.

I think I had a romantic notion about IUDs before getting one: that only the coolest people get them. The people most in control of their sexual health.

But nothing about being spread-eagle on exam table paper while someone threads medical equipment through your cervix feels empowering.

Making a decision about my future does, though.

So many things happened to me that were out of my control. The marriage ended. The insurance disappeared. The path ahead became extremely unclear.

But if anyone ever does come for my birth control?

Well.

Good luck digging it out.

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In case you’re new here: back in 2024, my then-husband had an affair that completely detonated the life we’d built together over the course of our thirteen-year relationship. The affair itself was fairly scandal-laden—from the age gap between him and his affair partner, to having me fly across the world to Japan while he was actively cheating on me, to eventually disappearing from our shared life entirely and leaving me alone to sort through the rubble.

Calling it “a harrowing time” would be laughably insufficient. It was a molecule-rearranging event. My life now is practically unrecognizable from the life I lived less than two years ago. Which, to be fair, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just still completely mind-boggling.

Back then, when every day felt like survival mode, I clung tightly to one simple fact: I was the victim in this story.

While my brain replayed the events on a relentless loop—the weeks leading up to it, the moment I lost my mind in a hotel room in Ginza, the lonely flight back home across the world—I found comfort in knowing I had done nothing wrong. I didn’t deserve this. I had simply been wronged.

I never consciously decided to “play the victim.” But in those early days, I needed to be one.

I absorbed sympathy like oxygen. I commiserated hard with the people who sighed heavily before speaking to me, carefully choosing their words around me like I was something fragile and injured. It felt strangely good to be handled gently. Normally, I struggle to accept help. Food, favors, emotional support—those things usually make me uncomfortable. But during that time, I relied on my support system without guilt. It felt like the one moment in my life where accepting care without reciprocation was not only allowed, but expected.

And then, when the initial shock began to wear off and I started down the long, ugly road of rebuilding my life, I leaned even harder into my righteousness. I did it here, at times, on my Substack. And when I did, I was met with support. Soon I was like one of those lab rats who figured out how to push a button to get cheese.

Because when you’re lying awake alone in your first apartment without your spouse, your brain starts searching for soft places to land. And there is something deeply comforting about victimhood.

Another person’s actions are outside your control. In the chaos and complexity of divorce, it felt almost luxurious to reduce things down to black and white thinking, just as a treat. When the dread in my chest became unbearable, when the depression wrapped itself around my throat, I could soothe myself with one simple truth:

I am good, and my ex-husband is bad.

Nuance not required.

And sometimes that was enough to let me sleep for a few hours. But as the weeks turned into months, and the anniversery of our splintering loomed, I started having other troubling thoughts: am I making being the victim into my entire personality?

I recently read this essay called “The Addictive High of Being a Victim” and it perfectly articulated something I’d been circling around for months:

Here’s how it usually starts: something genuinely unfair happens to you. Maybe your boss passes you over for a promotion. Maybe a friend betrays your trust. Maybe life just delivers one of its random sucker punches.

You have a choice in how to frame this experience. You could see it as a complex situation with multiple factors, some within your control and some not. You could focus on what you can learn or how you can respond.

But there’s another option, and it’s much more appealing: you can make yourself the hero of a tragedy.

Suddenly, you’re not just someone who experienced something unfortunate. You’re someone special. Someone who suffers more beautifully than others. Someone whose pain means something. Someone whose story matters because of how much you’ve endured.

That’s the seductive part of victimhood: healing seems simpler when you’re the victim because victims don’t have to change. Growth belongs to everyone else.

And to be clear, a few things can simultaneously be true here: my ex should never have cheated on me. I don’t forgive him. I was absolutely the victim of his negligence, dishonesty, and destructive decision-making.

But it’s dangerous to build your permanent residence on Victim Street.

Because victimhood requires very little self-reflection. Little accountability. Little internal examination. Once you decide you’re a victim, you get to become one everywhere. Every argument with a friend becomes betrayal. Every disappointment at work becomes injustice. Every inconvenience becomes evidence that the world is conspiring against you personally.

Your victim status makes you untouchable. Too wounded to critique. Too fragile to confront.

For months after my breakup, I happily existed as a baby bird fallen from the nest. And I carried that into dating. I expected everyone around me to accommodate my heartbreak and trauma. Since my divorce had been thrust upon me without my consent, it now felt like everyone else’s responsibility to help carry it. They needed to avoid triggering me. They needed to help me heal. They needed to make me whole again.

And how?

By handling conflict my way. By deferring to my worldview. By constantly reaffirming the one foundational truth I desperately needed upheld: I am an innocent victim who was destroyed by a horrible monster.

But if you’re genuinely interested in healing, eventually you have to move out of Victim Street.

At some point in every person’s healing journey, I think there’s a choice to make: do you want being victimized to become your identity, or do you want it to become something that simply happened to you?

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About six months after my breakup, I started feeling exhausted by my own victimhood. I noticed people no longer associated me with my work, or my personality, or the things I cared about. I had become synonymous with my divorce.

It didn’t help that if you Googled me, I was still primarily identified as my ex-husband’s former wife. Even his cyber ghost was harassing me! I, again, a victim of this man!

When I was married to him, I somewhat accepted that I existed in his shadow. But I realized I was unwilling to spend the rest of my life existing in the shadow of my own devastation. I was ready to move on.

I also had to confront another uncomfortable truth: if I ever wanted to love again—really love again—I wanted to do it as myself, not as the permanently wounded version of myself.

Of course what happened to me matters. It’s important context. But it doesn’t need to become the entire story. It can simply be exposition. A preamble. An FYI alongside all the other things that shaped me: my first heartbreak, my most humiliating childhood memory, the years I spent becoming who I am.

Untangling yourself from a victim complex is messy work. And when I’m triggered, I still want to run right back to Victim Street.

I want someone to pick me up gently and return me to the safety of my nest. I want to be tucked under someone’s wing while it rains. I want to be comforted and fed regurgitated worms directly to the back of my throat.

But I’m trying to do something much harder.

Which means accepting the horrifying possibility that maybe…….. I was not perfect in my marriage. God I hope my ex isn’t reading this.

Again: this is not me justifying my ex’s behavior. But for a long time, I relied heavily on the narrative that I had been the perfect wife and he simply squandered all that perfection to go fuck some naïve young actor. Maybe, like most things in life, it was more complex than that.

And maybe there’s a version of the story where that feels emotionally satisfying. But when I step down from the pedestal and look at things at eye level, there was probably more rot in the marriage than I wanted to see. More ways I contributed to our disconnection than I initially allowed myself to examine. Things I wish my ex-husband would have told me about instead of hiding them away.

And if I’m ever going to open my heart again, I need to understand those things. I need to know where I failed, what I could have done better, and how my own behaviors may have eroded intimacy over time.

Hopefully next time, I’ll be with someone capable of having those conversations before the entire structure collapses.

But moving beyond victimhood has also given me something invaluable.

Once you finally stand the fuck back up, you regain access to your own agency. Your worth. Your capability. Your capacity. You become responsible for your future again. You learn what you deserve. You learn what still needs healing. You learn where your boundaries are. You learn what you’re capable of surviving.

But in order to access those things, you eventually have to remove the protective cloak of your suffering. And without it, you may feel exposed. Less special. Less shiny. Without your trauma, you may simply just become boring. And that’s fine!

I still struggle to comprehend the cruelty of my husband’s affair and eventual discard. But continuing to define myself as his victim gives him more power over me than I’m willing to surrender. Because when you’re no longer the wounded bird, nobody is coming to place you gently back in the nest.

You have to learn how to fly yourself.

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It’s an absurd deal, in retrospect—one I laugh at now, standing on the edge of 35. But at 22, three years felt like a lifetime. Up until then, I had been the kind of person to whom things came easily. I was the student who didn’t study and still got A’s, the kid who could hold a conversation with adults and be labeled “wise beyond her years,” which came with its own quiet burden of responsibility. I moved through my childhood and teens with a kind of self-assuredness that, it turns out, can carry you pretty far. The future felt abstract, something I would stumble into the way I always had, rather than something to deliberately build. I wasn’t worried—I just assumed things would always work out.

If my early-twenties hubris and naiveté annoy you, don’t worry. I got my comeuppance. And then some.

My first job was at a bagel place in Ronkonkoma, New York. My brother’s then-girlfriend—benevolent, in hindsight—got me the gig, trusting a 16-year-old me to handle cash, smear cream cheese onto bagels, and operate an industrial deli slicer that I cut my hand on more than once. The rest of the staff were mostly teenage girls like me. We made $7.25 an hour under the table and split a giant plastic tub of tips at the end of the day.

My standing order was a French toast bagel with egg and cheese, salt, pepper, and a little maple syrup. Sometimes I’d find long, dark arm hairs from the cook in my food. I ignored it. A free meal from notoriously cheap bosses felt like a privilege, and I was happy to be fed. The days were long and busy, my feet and legs would ache by the end of a shift. I would hobble home, sticky from orange juice and fingertips singed from handling freshly-toasted bagels, feeling totally spent. I also remember looking out the front window of the shop, identifying the cars belonging to creepy regulars, and ducking into the bathroom before they could come inside and hit on me.

Being anxious in bathroom stalls would turn out to be a stalwart of every job I ever had, come to think of it.

I worked there until I left for college, where I mostly focused on becoming a Big Broadway Star (™), save for a few desk attendant shifts that couldn’t have been more than a couple hours long but somehow felt like years. At that point, I understood money only in $7.25 increments, handed to me in sweaty, crumpled envelopes. The idea of taking out student loans for tens of thousands of dollars felt entirely theoretical. It might as well have been $5,000 or $500,000—both numbers were equally incomprehensible to me. It would all get paid off eventually, right?

As expected, I did well in college with very little effort. Good grades, good roles in musicals, lots of friends, and I graduated with a cute, ambitious boyfriend. The summer after, I worked at a Renaissance faire for about $250 a week and had the time of my life: no cell service, Molière in the woods one day, and “trial-and-dunk” shows the next. I’d sit on a chair attached to a long arm and get dunked into a murky pond while ale-drunk strangers yelled, “Dunk that bitch!” and “Let’s see her tits!” It was, in its own way, a dream. And as silly as the gig was, I really felt like an artist up there. On festival days I got to improvise and act to my heart’s content, and on days off my friends and I would write and knit and make up games. I slept on a mattress in a shack under a mosquito net and used a communal shower shared by tons of people, but it was some of the most fun I ever had.

Shortly after, I booked my first “real” acting job: Gertrude McFuzz in the TheatreWorks’ tour of Seussical the Musical. I gave a deeply mediocre audition, botched the very simple dance call, and still got the job. It felt like a massive win, especially because I earned my Equity card—another step along my deeply delusional path to becoming a Big Broadway Star (™) by 25.

The tour was mostly fun, sometimes stressful, and full of eager, ego-driven twenty-somethings getting paid to do theatre, maybe for the first time. We were probably insufferable—self-important in that specific, earnest way theatre kids are. It was hard work: early mornings, setting up shows in weird places for the most honest audience you can ever have: children. But it gave me core memories—dodging bedbugs at Super 8 motels across the East Coast, crying backstage at the Grand Ole Opry after cracking on my big number, meeting kids who decided during the show that they want to be actors, too. Unglamorous highs and lows that only made me love the business more.

My boyfriend was on tour too, with the non-Equity company of American Idiot. Our paths crossed once in Washington, D.C., where we grabbed dinner like ships (tour buses?) passing with shared delusions. When we got back, we moved into a one-bedroom in Washington Heights for $1,500 a month—a number that felt impossible to conjure, but armed with delusional certainty that we could figure it out, we signed the lease anyway.

I thought I’d string together acting gigs and maybe babysit in between. But rent, student loans, and the reality of living in New York City had other plans. Even then, getting a day job felt like failure, but with my expenses looming, I had no other choice.

A friend of a friend got me a job at Lush in Union Square. Around the same time, my boyfriend got hired at the Apple Store. We felt aligned—two working actors grinding it out, waiting for our big breaks. His came. Mine… stalled.

Lush was a strange hybrid of performance, retail, and manual labor. I woke up at 5 a.m., took two trains downtown, received shipments, hauled boxes of bath bombs (shockingly heavy), and opened the store. By mid-morning, I was washing strangers’ hands—teenage girls, grown men, mostly—while trying to upsell $40 scrubs you could probably make at home for 45 cents. I inhaled so much scented dust I try not to think about what it did to my brain.

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One manager once dumped an entire day’s garbage onto the floor because someone misplaced a recyclable, forcing us to sort through it by hand. Another time, a man tried to rob the store. I was the only floor leader. He grabbed one of my coworkers. I ran to the back to call 911, and he followed, slamming his body against the door while I held it shut with mine. The police came hours after he left. I asked my manager if we could get a security camera, she gave me crystals for “stress management” instead.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend booked a production of Spring Awakening in L.A., which transferred to Broadway. Watching someone you love achieve their dream is a specific kind of joy—pure, uncomplicated. Even now, that memory remains untouched.

At the time, I rarely had more than $75 in my bank account. I’d wait until I hit $30 before panic-budgeting: If I buy one big sandwich, I can split it into three little sandwiches. That’s basically $3.25 per lunch! I lived on Taco Bell bean burritos until the staff knew me by name, and I got too embarrassed to go back.

When my boyfriend started making more in a week than our monthly rent, it felt surreal. We still split everything evenly. I was proud, stubborn. I wouldn’t have asked for help, not that he ever offered. When my boyfriend’s Broadway coworkers asked what I did, I couldn’t bring myself to say “actor.” I told them I sold soap. He never corrected me.

One day, after a long shift, he told me he wanted to buy a new TV.

“But we already have a TV,” I said.

“But now we can get a better one.”

I instantly burst into tears. Like, the kind of crying a toddler does when they fall: a quiet pause before starting to heave. I was rationing sandwiches; he was upgrading appliances. We later told the “TV story” as a joke, but something in me stayed quietly bruised.

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After the attempted robbery, I couldn’t relax at work. I was nearing 25—my arbitrary but deeply serious cutoff—and still at Lush. Around then, I scraped together money for improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. UCB became my third place. I spent hours there, asking for classes as birthday and Christmas gifts. Acting was something you had to wait for permission for, improv is something you could just do. While there I learned that most comedians also write, so I started writing—submitting satire and essays to anywhere that would take them: Reductress, McSweeney’s, HelloGiggles, Funny or Die. I collected some bylines, did some improv shows. If I couldn’t flex my creative muscles with acting jobs, this would have to do. I didn’t love it the way I loved acting, nor was I naturally good at it, but I learned comedy like any other skill.

I auditioned less. My schedule didn’t allow for it. I was deeply dejected from them, anyway. I kept telling myself that my hiatus from pursuing my dreams was temporary— that something would shift and I would regain the energy, or the passion, or the funds required to pound the pavement again. How, I didn’t know. But I was still that kid that things just worked out for, and I had faith they would work out again.

Eventually, I landed a job at a “comedy website,” which is generous phrasing. I aggregated five clickbait articles a day in a WeWork in lower Manhattan, mining the internet for content—from the 2016 election to Kim Kardashian selfies. The website also featured what I like to call the “original memes,” and I got to pitch some jokes for them. It was one of those jobs that seemed really creative and fun on the surface, but underneath was all grind.

Remember these?

I worked full-time, arriving just as the sun was rising and leaving after sunset, churning out content I didn’t care about. I gained weight quickly, self-soothing with two daily Starbucks chai lattes and unlimited bodega snacks. My brain felt both overstimulated and numb. I could finish my work in two hours and spend the rest of the day staring into the void of the internet, scrolling for hours.

I thought it would give me purpose. Instead, it made me deeply depressed. By now I had run out of money for improv classes, and my schedule made it impossible to audition. By the time I walked out of work like a zombie, I didn’t know what else to do but just stare at my screens (they felt different than my work screens). What I realize now that I couldn’t recognize then is that when creative people aren’t creating, they slowly go insane.

Around this time, my boyfriend’s Broadway show closed, and he was going through a slump himself. I would leave for work, bidding farewell to him while he played video games on the couch in his robe. 8+ hours later I would return to find him in the same place, playing the same game, in the same robe. Now that he has tasted professional success, he refused to return to the loser-world of day jobs. He would continue to audition and I would work in case he didn’t book anything, providing a safety net for him. After weeks turned into months I had a conversation with him about how staying home and doing nothing all day is probably not great, and the conversation ended not with a job search, but with a compromise to get a $10-a-month Planet Fitness membership to get him out of the apartment for an hour every other day.

By the way, he never got a day job. Our dynamic, him=actor/me=hourly employee, never shifted. When I finally got up the courage to ask him to consider getting a day job so that I could pursue my dreams, he ended up having an affair. He swore the two things were not related.

Somewhere in my late twenties, I realized something uncomfortable: many of my peers building creative careers didn’t have jobs. I was truly too busy hustling that I never even stopped to consider that this would be the case. But when I started to see it, I couldn’t unsee it. They would ask me to hang out during the day, which I never could because I had work. Then they would ask me to go out at night, which I never had enough money to do. I didn’t understand how they afforded their lives—the apartments, the time, the ease—until I did.

Rich parents.

Around 2018, I made one last ultimatum. I’d mostly stopped auditioning. I couldn’t afford improv classes anymore. I hadn’t sang in years. My theatre life felt like a distant echo. I took a commercial acting class—a pay-to-play situation. I auditioned for agents, heard nothing, and quietly accepted that this might be it.

Then, weeks later, one of the casting directors called. She was casting a Super Bowl commercial and remembered me from a thank-you note I’d written. I booked it. She got me a top commercial agent within minutes.

I quit my job. Recklessly, maybe. Hopefully, definitely.

Over the next two years, I booked eight commercials and made more money than I ever had. I reinvested in classes, got health insurance, joined a gym. For the first time, I felt balanced. My boyfriend booked another big show. It felt like things were finally aligning—just not in the way I’d planned.

And then, the work slowed. Savings dwindled. Free time turned into wasted time. I took another day job, assuming it would be temporary.

Then COVID hit.

Seven years later, I’m still at that very same job.

Now I work in a customer service-adjacent role at a large shopping center in Midtown. It’s not glamorous, but it’s stable. I’m grateful for it—grateful it feeds me, houses me, grateful I have not been replaced by an AI chatbot. My deadline expired a decade ago. I’ve never been further from my childhood dream.

The Equity card I once thought would set me free now sits deferred, more symbolic than functional. “Theatre kid” became a punchline somewhere along the way. I don’t have health insurance anymore. I will never be a Big Broadway Star (™). 22-year-old me would be devastated.

Most days, I feel like the only one who didn’t make it. The one who couldn’t crack the code. But life is a shifting, changing, breathing thing. And maybe that’s the part I couldn’t understand at 22, when I gave myself that ultimatum—when I believed success had a deadline, a shape, a single, glittering endpoint. I thought the dream was a destination you either reached or failed to reach, something finite and measurable, something you could point to and say: there, I did it.

But having day jobs has given me something else.

It’s pulled me out of my bubble. It’s introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise. It’s taught me the difference between “working hard” and “hard work.” It’s given me perspective I didn’t have when I was only surrounded by people chasing the same dream. Yes, it’s harder to hear people complain about opening night parties and fancy awards when you look down the barrel of a long shift on your feet. It makes red carpets seem trite, actor gossip feel even more vapid. But is that a bad thing?

I used to resent it—especially when I compared my life to my ex-husband’s. I thought it was the thing holding me back. It wasn’t.

It’s the thing that held me up. It pays for the apartment I write plays in. It has introduced me to unlikely friends and collaboraters. It provides a schedule that keeps me from isolating myself. When my life fell apart, it helped me to rebuild.

Sometimes a dream job is doing the job you always dreamed about. But sometimes it’s the job that lets you survive long enough to keep dreaming.

Leave me a tip, I do this for free!

I watched her face shift—intrigue to shock to something like horror, then delight—as I led her through the events of the night, performing it a little, shaping it, choosing where to pause. I used all my storytelling instincts to make it land in the most satisfying way possible.

“Oh my god, I cannot wait to read your post about this,” she said, grabbing another handful of popcorn from our communal bowl.

“Oh, I am not putting this online,” I said.

She lit up like I’d just delivered a punchline.
“You have to.”

There was a beat where I realized she wasn’t kidding.

And then, almost immediately, I felt it—that familiar internal squirm. The subtle but unmistakable sense that I was withholding something I owed. That the story wasn’t finished until it had been packaged, polished, and offered up for public consumption, like a small, shining object.

And the worst part is: I built this.

When I started writing on here, it wasn’t because I thought my life was particularly interesting. It was because something deeply painful had become public, flattened into gossip and passed around like a game of telephone I couldn’t opt out of.

I wasn’t trying to build a persona. I was trying to correct the record. At least, that’s what I told myself.

At the time, the story of my husband’s affair and our subsequent divorce was inaccurate, cruel, and—most importantly—out of my control.

“She deserved it,” wrote someone on Reddit who claimed to have known me fifteen years ago in college. I guess they didn’t like me then. Or now.

“I heard he—” began a dozen Instagram messages, each one trailing off into speculation dressed up as certainty.

So I did the only thing that felt available: I told the truth, plainly and vulnerably. And then I got more vulnerable. As I processed the pain, I had more to say. More revisions. More footnotes to my own life. It became stylized. I wrote it all down, knowing some people would find it tacky. Knowing that one day I might regret how much I had revealed.

But being seen felt really good.

I was getting the recognition I had been begging for in my marriage from hundreds of strangers online. It made me feel understood, held—even if that holding was abstract, pixelated. And yes, maybe I got a little addicted to that. I’m not immune to the dopamine hit of validation, especially when I was that low. That was part of it too.

But at no point did I think my life was especially interesting.

I love my life. I’m happy with it. Some days are exciting, but most aren’t. The majority of my days are comprised of working, sleeping, trying to smoosh in some fun when I can. I don’t mind mundanity—cooking dinner, texting friends, washing my hair. The boring moments don’t feel like failures, and they don’t need to be upgraded into something else. They’re just the lifeiest bits.

But also, they’re not worth writing home about. Or writing on Substack about.

When I do write, it’s usually because an idea has been pacing the labyrinth of my mind, bumping into things. I try to pull it apart, put language to feelings that resist language. It’s less reporting, more reaching. I’m not documenting big, cinematic life events—I’m circling the quieter questions, the in-between spaces that usually go unexamined. I don’t post because I think I’m a good writer. I post because I hope someone might feel less alone inside something small and weird and hard to name.

But there’s this other current, always running underneath.

Millennial women have been Carrie Bradshaw–ified into oblivion. Our dates are interesting! Our mess is consumable! Everything we think, everything we wear, everyone we fuck with becomes fair game. “What I eat in a day,” one woman on TikTok chirps. “A day in the life of a marketing girly,” chimes another, in a remarkably similar cadence to all the others. Who are these videos for? We are all the main character in our own life, and social media helps us package it all accordingly. We are thirty-somethings in New York and, somehow, we have convinced ourselves we are the most compelling creatures alive. Blegh.

It’s very easy to start self-exploiting for content—to treat your life like a mine, something to excavate, refine, and ship out along the information highway. Dates become fodder for quippy, detached posts. Fights with friends deserve multipart “story time” exposés. Your meals, workouts, skincare routines— they all can be parsed out into posts. When we talk about our personal lives, we drop clues, little narrative breadcrumbs, like we’re writing a season finale.

In the process, we become both the protagonist and the producer, unable to stop scanning our own lives for usable material. The private self erodes, replaced by a version that anticipates an audience. And while it feels empowering to narrate your own story, there’s something quietly disorienting about realizing how much of it is shaped by what strangers might double-tap. The result is a peculiar kind of inflation: we feel hyper-visible, endlessly interesting, and yet strangely interchangeable—stars of shows that all look eerily the same.

And eventually, nothing feels fully real.

I get it because I grew up inside this. Tumblr, LiveJournal—then the shift, when self-exploitation became something you could monetize. I sold stories about my phobias to Teen Vogue and Medium. I flattened relationships lessons into “listicals”, turned private moments into pitches. Sometimes for money. Sometimes for exposure, which is just money’s ghost. Ahhhh the 2010’s.

The lesson I absorbed, over and over, was that making private thoughts public could be rewarding. Emotionally, financially. But the currency is your privacy, and you don’t always realize how much you’ve spent until it’s gone.

Which is why, strangely, privacy has become so important to me now.

Right after my divorce, I performed okayness online. A big, glittering “I’m fine.” Every night out was documented, a little cryptic, a little curated. It’s a canon event. I don’t even judge that version of myself—I understand her completely. After all, nothing says “healing” like compulsively checking if his family watched your IG story.

Now I still share things. Just not everything.

There are nights out and afternoons in the park that never make it online. Trips, dates, small wins that exist only in my camera roll, or just in my body. I scroll back sometimes and remember a day vividly and feel almost protective of it, like if I had posted it, it would have thinned out somehow.

Before the divorce, I used to plaster the internet with photos of my husband and me, like proof. Like if enough people witnessed it, it would solidify into something unbreakable. Back then, things didn’t feel like they counted unless they were public.

I don’t think that way anymore.

Now, being perceived all the time feels exhausting. I move my mat in workout classes when someone sets up a phone to record themselves. I instinctively duck when someone walks into my job with their camera already open. Meals get eaten without documentation. Friends are seen without commemorative selfies. Haircuts go undebuted. There’s something I love about the anonymity of a big city—the way we move together, like a school of fish. You can disappear inside it. You can belong without being known.

And I don’t want to fall back into that validation loop—checking how a post performs, constructing little narratives about what people must think of me based on what I’ve shared. It makes real-life conversations thinner somehow, like you’ve already pre-chewed everything.

Enjoying this post? Buy me a coffee!

I’ve been thinking about Lindy West. She built a career on personal essays—her body, her bullies, her relationships, all rendered in detail. Her memoir, Shrill, became a big TV show. But there’s something that happens when you offer that much of yourself up repeatedly: you become legible in a way that invites flattening.

The more she revealed, the more people felt they understood her. And maybe they did, in a limited, curated sense. But readers begin to form a fixed version of you—what you want, what you don’t, what you should do next. When she later wrote about entering a polyamorous relationship after discovering her husband’s infidelity, people already had opinions about whether that made sense for her.

As if they knew her better than she knew herself.

It’s hard to change when you’ve already narrated your preferences so definitively. Hard to contradict your past self when it’s all documented, searchable, quotable. You become accountable not just to who you are, but to the character you’ve been performing.

I don’t want that.

I think about how I come across online—maybe strong, thoughtful, like I’ve got it figured out. I don’t. I’m still insecure, avoidant, often confused, especially after everything fell apart.

I like to think I can change my mind, even if I feel weirdly bound to past versions of me, like I signed some invisible contract. I have to remind myself: evolution is allowed. Regression too. Sometimes shrinking is part of growing—annoying, but true.

It’s exhausting, feeling guilty for not becoming who you once promised the internet you’d be.

So sure, I rescind it all—every neat conclusion, every premature final draft of myself.

Nah. Not really. The internet doesn’t do nuance, so I guess I’ll just keep evolving. And, naturally, keep posting obvious shit about it <3

Anyway, please validate me. Like, subscribe, share—my entire sense of self depends on the metrics.

Leave me a tip, I do this for free.

Mitski’s voice hung in the air at her recent concert in New York City, a slow, aching hum that settled deep in my chest. Surrounded mostly by other oddly dressed girls in outfits that said “individuality” but screamed “conformity” when we all gathered in one place, I felt like I was part of something big, something exciting. A random Monday night, and there I was, seeing one of my favorite artists live.

That morning, I’d gone for a run through Central Park, then spent the rest of the day juggling phone calls about my latest creative project before meeting friends for drinks and apps. After the show, I’d hop on the subway, be home in less than thirty minutes, and retreat into the familiar comfort of my own apartment. It was an extra-fun day, yes—but not totally out of the ordinary. This is New York City. There’s always something happening, always something exciting. Always something.

“In a big city, you can start over. The lights all around you, the dark safe inside.”

Those lyrics slapped me right across the face. They slid right through the noise of the crowd, through the bustle of a busy Monday, and planted themselves somewhere deep inside me. For the first time in a while, I felt the distance from the life I had left behind just a few years ago—the one with my husband and our cat in a small town that feels impossibly far away now. The one where I retreated to suburbia to seek some peace and found something far more complicated.

I moved out of New York City in 2023.

By then, I’d spent a decade in Manhattan, another four years if you count the time I spent in the outer boroughs (and before you say yes, please know it was Staten Island). When I first moved to the city, I had this naive optimism (delusion?) that I was on the verge of something grand. That hope became fuel. It carried me through professional rejection, day jobs that drained me, side gigs that barely paid, and the relentless hustle that is New York. That excitement and ambition kept me going for a while, until the exhaustion crept in. Slowly at first, then all at once, I realized I’d been running in place, too tired to keep chasing something that no longer felt attainable.

The city had become a grind, not a promise.

The decision to move wasn’t the result of any single incident; it was the culmination of a decade of mental erosion and exhaustion. At first, the city was full of possibility, but as the years went on, and my finances struggled, the dreams that once seemed clear began to blur. I couldn’t afford classes or pay-to-play workshops. I worked minimum wage 40 hours a week most of the time. Reprieve came from one-off acting jobs, mostly commercials, but the daily grind consisted of waking up, working, and sleeping. The shine had worn off, and the struggle felt heavier. I also lived with someone who seemed to have unlimited opportunity. He never had to get a day job, but mostly just hung around between acting gigs, waiting for the next opportunity to arise. He never took classes, but only because he felt he didn’t need them. I tried not to let the comparison of our lives and experiences breed resentment, but I think somewhere deep down it did. This is not to say that he didn’t work hard or that I wasn’t happy for his success, but comparison is hard when you share a life, a dream, and a bed with someone. It’s hard to deny the reality that life might just be easier for men than women. It was hard that for years I’d wake up at 4 a.m. to work my minimum-wage job, not be able to afford lunch, and come home to him playing video games. It ate away at me.

One day, I was standing on the uptown A train platform at 34th Street. It was around 11 p.m., and I had just worked a 9-hour shift at my day job. In those days, I worked outside every shift, right on the Hudson River. My back ached from being on my feet, and my skin hurt from being whipped by the wind. As I waited an obscenely long time for the train, a man approached a nearby passenger who was on his phone and punched him in the face for no reason at all. After that, he started marching toward me. In that moment, I felt oddly calm because I had internally accepted that I was about to get punched in the face. I didn’t move or brace myself. I just waited for him to strike me. My only thought was, Why do I live here?

The man ended up shouldering me instead of punching me, which, in hindsight, was a relief.

So, I started doing something I have never done before: I started romanticizing the suburbs. I thought about the farmers market that my then-husband and I would drive up to from Washington Heights to Westchester County. I envisioned the leisurely walking paths along the Hudson River, the charming small businesses along Main Street, the quaint coffee shops, the antique stores, and the local characters greeting each other on the sidewalks. We would visit often, but what if we just lived there? I thought about the ease of a slower life.

I thought about…

Stars Hollow.

I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW. The cliché of all clichés!

Yes, the fictional town from Gilmore Girls. I dreamt of it, of course. The quirky neighbors, the tight-knit community, the small-town charm. And when we eventually moved to a town that resembled Stars Hollow in more ways than I care to admit, it felt like a win. A fresh start. A quieter life. It wasn’t a compromise—it was a surrender.

I couldn’t hack it in New York anymore. The debt, the rent, the constant struggle—it was exhausting. My life had become a loop of working shifts, coming home, cooking dinner, and sinking into the couch. Why not do that somewhere less expensive? Somewhere less frantic?

I started to blame the city for all my woes—the constant hum of it all, the movement of people and trains and cars! All those energies zipping around above and below and in front of me. It felt like the source of all my anxiety, the culprit in my restless nights. I thought moving to the suburbs would fix everything. Pathetically, I felt betrayed by NYC. My former favorite place had chewed me up and spit me out. It was brutal, unforgiving. How could something I loved so much treat me so badly?

So, I pitched the idea of moving to nearby Westchester to my then-husband. “You can get to Grand Central in 38 minutes!” I said. “Some places in Brooklyn are further away,” I said. “You can drive into Manhattan in half an hour!” I said (tippy top of it, but my point still stood).

He was willing to look. Once we looked, he was willing to move. More than willing, actually. He was as excited about it as I was. And that was that.

We moved into a duplex apartment in October 2023. One year after our wedding, one year before I would discover his affair and move out. The apartment was old but large, quirky but well-maintained. It was a true two-bedroom with a small office, boasting a large kitchen, cozy living room, and an unremarkable bathroom. We had a place to park our car and bike outside. A little front lawn seating area where we could hang out with our neighbors. I famously can’t drive but never really needed to: I could walk to the town, the train, the grocery store, the gym, and the library in under ten minutes. I joined the locally owned gym and started to get to know people in the group fitness classes. I took knitting lessons every Tuesday morning with a wonderful group of ladies. I wrote plays in the library. But the best thing was the farmers market, the one that enchanted me to the town, just a few minutes’ walk away. Well, that and the fabulous local lore: I lived in a town famous for its Halloween festivities.

The neighbors were neighborly. The coffee shop knew me by name within a few short visits. On our first day in town, our neighbor gifted us beer made with hops he grew right out on his front yard. It was small-town living in the most idyllic sense.

It was perfect. It was quiet. It was frictionless.

I was happy with the change. And so was my then-husband. Our friends jokingly called him “the mayor,” as he seemed to take every possible opportunity to boast about our new living arrangements. We’d have our city friends visit, and he would proudly show off our little village, watching people oooh and aaah with jealousy about the calm suburban life we’d created—just—say it with me now—38 minutes outside of Grand Central!

But I still couldn’t sleep.

The frustration I felt about the direction of my life still hung over me like a cloud, but I was no longer living in the same city as my support system. Making plans in Manhattan or, God forbid, Brooklyn, felt like a chore. It’s only a 38-minute train ride to Grand Central, but the trains may only run every hour. And it was a 10-minute walk to the train. So, really, 48 minutes to Manhattan. If you caught a rare hyper-express. Most trains were local. I still worked my day job, and it was still hard. The peace existed externally, but it never quite soaked in.

Now, I lied awake alone in the guest bedroom every night, contending with some internal void that I supposed would never be filled, feeling foolish that it wasn’t the city’s fault after all. I guess I was just internally broken in some way. That sucks!

Then, in August 2024, I discovered my husband was having an affair, and it all fell apart. Suddenly, I was back at our little duplex apartment with my parents and my close friend, sorting through the objects of marital collection, determining what stays and what goes, like a heartbroken Roman emperor. Vitamix—thumbs up. Engagement photos—feed it to the lions! My downstairs neighbor joins the circus, asking tearily if she can buy my AC. Whatever! Take whatever! I can’t care about any one object this much at this point.

A sudden divorce hands you a very long list of things you’ll never get back. The marriage, sure, that’s at the top, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s everything else, too. Your days feel different. The way you look at yourself is different. You are different. Your memories are tainted. Your extended family is suddently gone. And in my case, leaving the small town felt like another thing on that list: a thing I loved but couldn’t keep.

The small town was a place for women who have husbands, cats, and perhaps an irrational affection for farmers’ markets. But me? I’m alone and angry (still like farmers markets, though). And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that small towns don’t know what to do with women like me. So, there I was, looking at New York again—the big, noisy, stressful city that had chewed me up once and spit me out. And yet, it was the devil I knew. It is where my job is. It’s where my support system is. It’s where I probably should be if I want to make the professional moves I am trying to make. And for the first time, I would be alone in it. Completely. Alone.

Which is, of course, terrifying. But also a little like ripping off a Band-Aid.

So I found an apartment. And somehow, in that moment, it felt like my rebirth. Like I had been someone else for too long and was now stepping into a body that could breathe again. Yes, moving back to Manhattan felt a little like getting back with an ex, but we took some time apart and I know how to make things work this time, baby! Forgive me!!

The first few months in my apartment felt like a swirl of chaos and newness. There was so much to get done that I was paralyzed most of the time. I was clawing my way out of monumental grief, rewriting the script of my life, learning about who I am as a single person for the first time ever. I had to learn a million new little things every day: which exit was the most optimal to get out of the subway, how to regulate the temperature in my extremely shoddy shower, what coffee shops allowed laptops on weekends. Then, I had to learn a thousand new big things: Who the fuck am I alone? Will I ever be able to trust anyone again? Will I be able to trust myself?

It was hard and scary, but also exciting, and yes, also still scary. It was scary, and I was scared. Ahh!

But surprisingly, the things that made me anxious before separating from my husband didn’t bother me so much anymore. All the things I thought were causing my anxiety left me largely nonplussed. But I wasn’t so anxious. And that was a surprise. My heart wasn’t racing on the subway, and I wasn’t depressed at work. I thought that NYC was the source of all this pain, but maybe it wasn’t her fault after all.

Maybe it’s random. Maybe it’s just my body realizing it’s no longer sleeping next to someone who ultimately hated me. Maybe it’s that I’m finally living a life by my design for the first time ever.

Now, living in the city feels alive again. It’s fueling me instead of draining me. It’s like the New York I always dreamed of when I was young—the one where I was going to be the one who figured everything out, who found herself. My marriage? That was the thing that chewed me up and spit me out. That was what betrayed me. And honestly, good riddance.

I’m kind of back in love with the city now, which is wild, because a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine wanting to stay. Now? I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I just hope New York can forgive me for all those moments I tried to run away from her. Sorry baby, forgive me baby, the small town meant nothing to me!

I still have moments, of course. Sometimes, late at night, the uncertainty creeps in again. The city gets loud, and I feel the weight of my choices, the ache of starting over. I think about the life I left behind, the quiet, the simplicity of a town where everyone knows your name. It’s tempting, that life, with its predictable rhythms. I miss the slow pace sometimes. But then I remember: that life wasn’t for me. It was for someone who wasn’t quite as restless, someone who had found their place. And I hadn’t.

So, I keep moving. I keep navigating this big, sprawling city that feels, on some days, like it’s swallowing me whole and, on others, like it’s cradling me in its immense hands. Maybe that’s what it means to start over: to understand that you’re never really starting from nothing. You’re starting with everything. With the ghosts of the past, the lessons learned, and the hopes that refuse to die.

I study the landscape of the face that has been looking back at me for almost thirty-five years, and nothing appears radically different. Same eyes. Same nose. Same mouth. I scan for the usual infractions—the things I am trained to maintain: no blemishes, no stray eyebrow hairs, no renegade upper-lip sprouts. Everything seems in order. So what exactly is wrong?

Maybe it’s the subtle shifts that feel louder now. The shadows beneath my eyes darkening like bruised fruit. The faint lines on my forehead carving themselves a little deeper, as if they’ve decided to stay. The once-cute white hair that felt whimsical—like a single thread of tinsel in my dark tresses—has multiplied. It has gathered reinforcements. And they are not delicate. They are coarse and unruly, springing up with a kind of defiance my younger strands never had.

I’ve gained weight that won’t seem to come off. I think I have jowels or pre-jowels or something. I can no longer contort my face and body into clever angles that soften the inevitable: I am getting older.

Well, obviously. We all are.

But for years I managed the illusion of youth with surprising skill. I felt a strange flicker of pride when someone guessed I was younger than I am, and a quiet sting when someone landed on the correct number. Why wouldn’t I? Nearly every beauty ritual is engineered around the promise of turning back time. Every serum and powder and cream I smooth onto my face whispers the same seduction: return to before. Before lines. Before gravity. Before evidence of too much living having been lived.

At this point, targeted ads are basically begging me to inject the pharma goo into every crease—or even into the places a crease might dare to appear one day. Preventative, they call it. As if aging were a leak in the ceiling that could be patched before the first drop hits the floor.

The younger we look, the better we look. That’s the thesis. And as I round the corner into my mid-thirties, I can feel the water circling. I am chum for the beauty industry’s sharks—ripe, impressionable, and statistically anxious.

Youth is a powerful currency, and my stock is slipping.

Social media has kindly expanded my vocabulary of concern. Marionette lines. Lower blepharoplasty. Hip dips. Terms that once lived exclusively in surgical consults now live in my algorithm (and in my head). Apparently there are dozens—no, hundreds—of things wrong with my face and body. Flaws I would have carried peacefully to my grave had TikTok not performed the public service of alerting me. Thank you, TikTok.

Can you imagine? Moving through life unaware of the insecurities you’re meant to obsess over? Existing in blissful ignorance of your hip topology? How mortifying.

And yet, standing here in the mirror, I can’t help but wonder if what feels “off” isn’t my face at all—but the story I’ve been told about it.

Not sure if you’ve heard about the Epstein Files…

(How was that transition, everyone? Don’t worry, here comes the point).

Les Wexner, the billionaire behind mall meccas for preteens and teens—Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pink—has been named in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, who led a child sex trafficking ring. Allegedly he is a key co-conspirator in his operation.

So maybe it’s time to name the darker thing.

Maybe our society’s beauty standards don’t just happen to skew impossibly young. Maybe they are shaped—funded, amplified, and sold—by men who sexualize youth itself. Maybe the relentless pressure to erase every marker of womanhood—ripping out our pubic hair, starving away our hips and thighs, smoothing every wrinkle, softening every angle—is not accidental. Maybe we are being groomed, culturally, to look less like women and more like girls.

Little girls. Innocent. Moldable. Impressionable. Defenceless.

I hate thinking about it. That some sickos may have engineered my beloved “Sweet and Flirty” body spray. That the low-rise jeans I yearned for as a teen were made for the pleasure of these monsters. That the discovery of my burgeoning womanhood, which was such a precious and special time of my life, is somehow tied to the inherent evilness of the most despicable people on earth.

It is not a comfortable thought.

But neither is the alternative: that we are spending thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to reverse a process that is both inevitable and, frankly, miraculous.

Aging is a privilege. Not everyone gets to do it. So why are we so allergic to it? Because we are told to be. Our girlhood was tainted by men trying to fuck us, and our womanhood is soured by the constant reminders that we are not supposed to be aging.

And, to be honest, I am tired. Mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Everyone please just leave me alone.

Why does flicking on my curling iron—something I used to do daily without a second thought—now fill me with dread? My usual makeup routine suddenly looks wrong on me. Everything feels harder to maintain, harder to conceal. More expensive. More invasive. And for what? For WHO?

Maybe you can see the stress of the divorce on my face. Maybe you can see each sleepless night pooled beneath my eyes. Maybe you can trace the lessons I learned the hard way in the fine lines around my mouth.

But maybe that’s not decay.

Maybe that’s evidence.

Evidence of a life lived. Evidence of survival. Evidence that I was here—and that I am still here. That I am no longer the little girl I once was, and that is a very good thing.

And perhaps what feels “off” in the mirror isn’t my face at all.

Maybe it’s the moment I stopped trying to make it look like it never belonged to a woman.

It was fall 2022—an unseasonably warm October day, the kind that makes you believe in signs. I stood inside a many-thousand-dollar venue wearing a few-thousand-dollar dress, doing all the bride things brides are supposed to want to do. Smiling. Floating. Crying pretty. Performing certainty.

Less than two years later, I was beginning the process of getting divorced, proverbial egg dripping down my perfectly made-up little bride face.

There is a specific humiliation that comes with a failed wedding—not just a failed marriage, but the pageantry of a wasted wedding. Making everyone you love sit through your vows about foreverness, feeding them expensive canapés while you promise something you cannot possibly guarantee, only to later send the quiet follow-up: sorry! Turns out the spell didn’t work. It really makes you feel like a fucking clown.

I got married in “Carroll Gardens” (really Gowanus—but the venue clearly preferred a neighborhood named after flowers to a notoriously stinky canal). The wedding probably cost around $45,000, which, horrifyingly, is considered very, very, very cheap. I fell victim to the wedding industrial complex like so many women before me, convinced that opting out meant opting out of love itself.

It was never really intended to become the affair it ended up being. Once you start the planning process, things snowball easily. But now I cringe. At society for successfully duping me. At vendors for selling me shit at ridiculous prices. At myself for picking such a fuckass partner. All of that for my marriage to fall apart so quickly after the wedding. All that money. All that effort. All that time. All that goodwill. Burned.

I was deeply, thoroughly wedding-pilled from a young age. My indoctrination began with a TLC show called A Wedding Story, which felt like a glossy but humble home movie of a wedding day. You’d get a gentle intro to the couple, a soft-focus proposal recap, some history. Fluff. The good stuff, even then, was never the couple. It was the details—the dress, the flowers, the cake. Somewhere in my developing brain, I clocked that weddings weren’t really about love. They were about accoutrements.

Also, that show had a killer theme song, but that’s neither here nor there.

Then came Say Yes to the Dress. By thirteen, I could gleefully judge the grown women on national television. My knowledge of romance was thin, but I knew exactly who Pnina Tornai was. I was already a tiny bridal consumer, training my eye:

“I would never go strapless in that venue.”
“That price is outrageous for such minimal beadwork.”
“Ugh, a mermaid silhouette is not flattering on her—she should go A-line.”

(Note the hint of body-shaming that also came along with these shows.)

Four Weddings turned matrimony into a competitive sport, with the honeymoon as the prize. Whatever idealism I once had about love got capitalism-ed to death.

What were once humble celebrations of love metastasized into spectacles. I mindlessly watched hours of budget-less brides stuffed into crinoline disasters simply because they could. Women cruelly talking shit about centerpieces another bride spent weeks making, all in an effort to defeat her. Cake decorators applying layer upon layer of fondant onto some over-frosted atrocity. Somewhere along the way, all my little-girl dreams of love became dreams of weddings.

Maybe all I ever really cared about was pretty dresses.

These shows normalized weddings not as rituals, but as events. I think this is part of why so many millennial women are also so wedding-pilled. Very few are immune.

Even now, if you search “anti-wedding,” you won’t find content discouraging weddings. You’ll find pick-me brides instead. The “non-traditional” girls. The “I’m not like most brides” brides—who are, in fact, exactly like most brides. They think that because they wear sunglasses at the ceremony or have a champagne tower instead of cake, they’re immune to traditional wedding cringe. But they’re merely sidestepping tradition, not rejecting it. Even the anti-bride brides are copy-and-paste versions of each other.

You’re not better than the girls you grew up with in your small town just because your wedding looked like it was creatively directed by Anna Wintour. I guess all the bullshit just feels better when you’re wearing a Vivienne Westwood gown.

Weddings have become less an expression of love and more an expression of taste. Highly considered details. Custom invites. Multiple outfit changes. A visual thesis statement about who you are and how you wish to be perceived. Marriage is sold to us as an achievement, and the wedding is the ceremony where you collect your trophy. A reward for wanting the right things in the correct order. For completing your duty as a woman—you’ve been deemed wifeable by a man. So, as the grand finale to your ingénue days, you throw this huge party. And there’s really nothing more domestic or “wifely” than showing off your ability to party-plan.

And I say this as someone who did all of this shit, too. I pored over the flowers and the food and the music. I needed it all to be a reflection of me—I mean us. When I was wedding planning, I remember picking out table settings at a rental place. When it came to cutlery, I said I didn’t care and told them to go with the cheapest option. My friend recoiled. “Those look like prison forks,” she said. I agreed to pay a little more for nicer forks. Couldn’t have my guests eating off prison forks.

And this is how they get you.

So suffice it to say, I feel a little weird about weddings these days. I’m in my thirties (but I live in New York City, which means I’m still in my twenties), and I’m getting invited to many, many weddings. Weddings I’m genuinely excited to attend. I even officiate weddings now, which I really love doing because I feel like a “love translator” between the couple and their guests. But they don’t feel the same now that I’ve seen the wedding matrix. Part of me wishes I were still innocent enough to believe in them more. Instead, I feel like a grump.

But let me say this: even before my breakup, I knew my wedding was never going to be “the best day of my life.”

No. It was a really cool day. But it was not the best day of my life. And a really cool day certainly wasn’t work 45k and a year of planning. I have a lot of really cool days for free.

I know weddings are supposed to be all about love, but I’ve felt closer to love on long drives, in late-night heart-to-heart talks, in making meals in tiny apartment kitchens. Love is found through feeling seen and valued, not highly curated table linens. I’ve felt more love in teary, whispered conversations than in performative vows designed for the consumption of distant relatives.

We need to say this out loud: weddings are not about love. Once we accept that, they’re much easier to swallow. It’s freeing to admit. Try it!

They’re an expression of love—if love can be translated into table settings, seating charts, and plated dinners. But love, in my experience, is less concerned with how it photographs.

Weirdly, marriage itself—as problematic as it is—is something I still kind of believe in. People ask me, sheepishly, if I’d ever get married again. The answer is yes. If I wanted to. Not because I need to. I don’t yearn for governmental recognition of my union, but I’m not naïve about the benefits of signing the paperwork either.

What I no longer believe in is the lie that weddings equal love.

They’re about performance. About convincing others that your love is real. About branding yourselves as a couple through fonts and florals and bespoke, cheeky signature cocktails.

This is something I learned after my divorce. Our relationship, too, was partially for public consumption—a branding opportunity, as gross as that is. Now, I think of love as something more private. More personal.

Maybe I’ll eat my words and have another wedding one day. After all, I am still young. Maybe I’ll marry someone who really wants the experience of a big wedding. And I will do the wedding, ironically, for love.

But if I do, I hope I’ll know what it is—and what it isn’t. I hope I’ll remember that love doesn’t need expensive food, or curated playlists, or perfect forks. Love happens anyway, whether or not it’s dressed for the occasion.

I’ve endured enough aborted resolutions to understand that my motivations won’t suddenly change on January 1st, and that the thing I’ve been putting off all year will not magically become appealing just because a ball drops in Times Square. I’d rather avoid that specific flavor of self-loathing—the one that arrives when you fail to do what you resolved to do while you were hopeful on December 31st, only weeks (or days) into the new year.

But this year, I did make a resolution. Less out of hope and more out of desperation.

And my resolution is this: I will not buy any stuff until April 1st.

“But toilet paper!” “But food!” “But but but!”

Yes. I will be buying toilet paper and food. The point is not to suffer, or to wipe my ass with old newspapers pulled from the trash. The point is that I have too much fucking stuff and not enough fucking money, and something has to give.

Not forever. I’m not a monk. I’m not chasing moral purity. I’m trying to survive my own accumulation. The plan is simple: no buying things for the first few months of the year, and after that, a strict low-buy. A conscious one. One that forces me to feel friction instead of anesthetizing myself with another little purchase.

This will be hard for me because I am not a restraint person.

I don’t diet. I don’t restrict. I don’t deprive myself for sport or virtue. I don’t believe there’s inherent moral value in wanting less. Call it hedonism, call it gluttony—I’ve always believed pleasure is one of the few honest things we get in life. But when I look around my apartment—my beautiful lair—I don’t feel totally indulged. I see gaps in a growing collection of things, a never-ending itch that will never be fully scratched. I feel like a pharaoh sealed into a tomb, surrounded by objects meant to accompany me into the afterlife.

The problem is that I love ~stuff~.

My ~stuff~ isn’t junk to me. It’s treasure. As I write this, I can see a candle I bought at Notre Dame before the fire, a skull mask I made by hand, a tiny Virgin Mary statue pulled from my grandfather’s belongings after he died. My refrigerator door is layered with handwritten notes and Polaroids, a shrine to moments that mattered. Behind me is my perfume collection—one scent for every mood, every version of myself I might need to become. A five-foot skeleton pillow leans against the wall next to three dried roses from a bouquet I received after my divorce. There are little baggies of teeth pinned to the wall (I will not be elaborating), a mannequin head rescued from a dying beauty supply store, a turtle shell my dad found in the woods as a kid, a party hat I needle-felted for my cat’s birthday.

These objects are endowed. They carry weight. Memory. Meaning.

And I hold onto them.

I’m in my mid-thirties and I still wear clothes from college. Boots from high school. A top I’ve worn on nearly every Valentine’s Day from 2012 to the present. Objects that have followed me through every iteration of my adult life: dorm rooms, Manhattan apartments, marriage, divorce, a brief suburban exile, and then back again. Some of my things live with me in New York. Some live at my parents’ house out east. Some live in a storage unit in New Jersey that only my ex technically has access to. I’ve built a collection so sprawling it now threatens to consume me whole.

And my particular affliction isn’t buying brand-new things. When I walk into Target or Marshall’s, I can’t help but see the merchandise as nothing but landfill. I’ve never made a SHEIN or AliExpress purchase, although I do order less glamorous necessities on my mom’s Amazon Prime account (my last order was comprised of toilet cleaner wand refills, an SD card, and knee pads for dance class). Could I buy these items in person—at my local hardware store, B&H, or a sporting goods store (wherever knee pads live)? Yes. But I don’t, because I’m prioritizing convenience over ethics here. Oops.

But more ethical consumerism is still consumerism. And just because most of my purchases are secondhand or from small businesses doesn’t mean I don’t have the same worms in my brain conditioning me to want to buy stuff all. the. fucking. time.

Thinking that buying secondhand is somehow net-zero for hyperconsumerism is false. You can find “thrift hauls”—still an insane concept to me—on TikTok and YouTube. If you need further proof, just look at my apartment. In the past couple of months alone, I’ve thrifted or bought from artists or small businesses:

• Three dolls

• A lenticular print of an eyeball

• Three bottles of perfume

• Vintage lingerie

• Two incredible prints from Brooklyn artist Lucia Gallipoli (and two picture frames via Amazon, eek)

• Two screen-printed T-shirts.

• A deer jawbone

• Three skeins of expensive yarn that may or may not ever become a scarf, plus needles sized specifically for that imaginary scarf

All things I love. Nothing I need. All gap-fillers for small holes in my soul. And perhaps if I were a person of substantial means, with a three- or four-bedroom home and a garage, I wouldn’t be reconsidering my choices. But that is not my situation.

So here is the plan:

• I will not buy any ~stuff~ until April 2026. ~Stuff~ includes, but is not limited to, home decor, toys, antiques, clothing, flowers, and makeup. If I run out of a daily-use item (toothpaste, toilet paper, etc.), I may replace it—but only when I fully run out, and only if I have no suitable replacement already at home. So if I run out of my favorite moisturizer, I can replace it only if I don’t own any other moisturizers, even if they’re not my favorite.

• I will not buy random beverages throughout the day. I will drink water.

• I will allow myself to get my nails done once a month. All other beauty rituals must happen at home with items I already own.

• I will bring my lunch to work every day. To remain social, I will allow myself to get food or drinks with friends when invited.

• I can continue to spend money on experiences, since they don’t accumulate in my home. AMC A-List remains in effect.

How will I stick to the plan? By reminding myself of these things:

• You can love something without owning it.

• Consumerism is not a hobby.

• Consumerism is not a shortcut to self-expression.

• Shopping addiction is deeply ingrained, and massive corporations rely on you being brainwashed for profit—often while funding things you don’t align with. Push back by abstaining.

No, but really—once you start noticing how everyone is always trying to sell you something, you can’t unsee it. For fun, I set a five-minute timer and scrolled TikTok normally, counting advertisements (covert or overt):

An influencer talking about her favorite Erewhon products.
An ad for a cotton workout set.
An ad for tickets to a Mel Robbins live event/course.
Four separate perfume influencers telling me what to buy (the algorithm knows me).
An ad for magnesium glycinate.
An ad for fleece-lined tights.
An ad for facial moisturizer.
An influencer recommending books to buy in 2026.
An ad for body butter.
An ad for a freckle pen.
An ad for golf outfits (?).
An ad for berry-shaped birthday candles that were honestly very cute.
Another facial moisturizer.
An ad for Glossier blush.
An ad for embroidered jeans.
An influencer unboxing PR from a purse brand.

Also worth noting: when I searched TikTok for “no-buy” inspiration, I was served an ad-in-disguise video of an influencer discussing her no-buy rules—before pivoting to sell her budgeting platform. I don’t blame influencers for monetizing their lives, but it’s a useful reminder that nowhere is safe.

Picture this hypothetical: a teary-eyed influencer films herself in her parked car. “When my dad died, nothing gave me comfort. I stayed up for days asking existential questions. My grief showed up on my face. Then I got a lymphatic drainage massage that made it look like I wasn’t crying 18 hours a day! Use my code DEADDAD20 at checkout.”

Off social media, the pressure doesn’t let up. Advertising has targeted women since the dawn of modern marketing, recognizing early on the buying power of the gender traditionally tasked with running the home. I’m watching Mad Menright now, by the way.

This wasn’t accidental. Once advertisers realized women made most household purchasing decisions—food, clothing, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, gifts—they stopped selling products and started selling identities. Good wife. Good mother. Good girl. Clean house. Youthful face. Calm demeanor. Desire was engineered, refined, and weaponized.

The result is a low-grade hum of compulsion. The intrusive thought while passing a store. Going in for one thing and leaving with a cart full of junk. The dopamine hit masquerading as agency. Women are the favorite daughters of consumption. Entire industries are built on our perceived inadequacy—and the promise that the right purchase will fix it.

Shopping, for many women my age, has been rebranded as a hobby. Or should I say the hobby. Ask what they like to do and you’ll hear it proudly: “I get a Starbucks and walk around Target.”

Good girl. You’ve been trained.

But walking around an ethically dubious superstore with an ethically dubious beverage isn’t a hobby—it’s a consumption loop.

Women often feel most powerful through consumerism because that’s where power has been safely handed to us. Buy this and become that. Purchase your confidence. Purchase your calm. Purchase your worth.

We are relentlessly courted—first by advertisers, now by influencers. Buy, buy, buy, but make it aspirational. Make it soft-lit. Make it look like a lifestyle instead of a transaction. Instagram didn’t invent this—it just accelerated it.

Social media has never been a huge source of jealousy for me personally. I don’t spiral watching others succeed or perform happiness. Instead, I follow artists, niche creators, offbeat it-girls with excellent taste and better captions. And they, too, are constantly trying to sell me shit.

And the result? I am often influenced. I am rarely immune.

That’s the quiet truth underneath all of this: awareness doesn’t grant impunity. You can see the strings and still feel the pull. You can critique the machine and still feed it. I can soothe myself by talking about my taste and the ethics of my purchases, but at the end of the day, I am still just a person trying to buy herself into the life she wants. The advertising industry no longer needs to shout at women—we’re fluent in the language already.

So maybe this no-buy—ostensibly about slowing accumulation and giving my wallet a break—is also about stepping out of that loop. They say the best things in life are free, and as much joy as my ~stuff~ has brought me, it doesn’t come close to the real best things: making out in a park, walking through fresh snow, calling a friend just to talk nonsense, cooking without a recipe.

I want to live in my life instead of shopping around its edges. I want to use what I already have, love what already exists, and let the gaps stay gaps. Not everything needs to be filled.

I am going to enjoy the things I already own—and stop mistaking accumulation for meaning.

The night before, I’d been on a roof with friends, smoking weed, drinking, talking earnestly about what we were releasing and what we were manifesting, as if naming things could still save us. It was a good night. Tender. But it was also the first New Year’s Eve in over a decade that I didn’t kiss my husband—formerly my fiancé, formerly my boyfriend—at midnight. We’d been separated for four months. My benevolent best friend gave me a quick peck instead. It was freezing. We were shivering and hopeful in that fragile, end-of-year way, with Times Square roaring just an avenue away, all that collective optimism vibrating through the concrete.

Waking up alone the next morning felt impossibly quiet by comparison. Even though I hadn’t had much to drink, I felt hungover—not in a headache way, but in a spiritual way. The specific kind of hangover where you feel discarded, like a piece of flavorless gum spat onto the sidewalk and stepped on a hundred times by strangers who didn’t notice you were ever there.

The breakup was still extremely fresh, still a gooey open wound. I was vulnerable to sudden, gut-punch waves of grief that came out of nowhere—hair-trigger sobbing, gasping for breath, getting flattened by memories of the sheer scope of his cruelty. YEEEOWCH! Whatever. Normal breakup stuff.

By January, though, I was also relieved to turn the page into a new year. My 2024 Q4 was not my favorite era of being alive, but it was important. I did the “stew in the misery” thing from August-December, which I feel is an integral part of the healing process. So by the time that January rolled around, I was ready to embrace the New Year ethos, even though I usually reject resolutions and reinvention as corny performance art. But fuck it. January felt like my long-awaited life raft: let’s “New Year, New Me” this shit.

In order to fully commit to the life I was stepping into, I needed to undergo a serious mental reorientation—something closer to a rewiring than a pep talk. Over time, these shifts hardened into mantras, the kind you repeat not because they are obviously true, but because you are choosing to believe them anyway.

1. This new phase of my life is exciting and good.

2. My current existence is more aligned with the life I dreamed about as a child.

3. Doors will fling themselves open for me, professionally and personally.

4. Pain is not scary, and I can withstand any amount of it.

All of these turned out to be true. But the first three were contingent on the last. Without a near-religious faith in my own capacity to endure pain, none of the rest could have materialized. Pain, I learned, is the price of admission.

I’ve been thinking about pain almost obsessively for the past year. I thought I’d reach some sort of conclusion by now—wrap it up neatly, distill it into a lesson, move on. Instead, the more time passes, the more central pain feels to everything: love, growth, honesty, freedom. I am thinking about it now more than ever. I’ve even considered doing weirdo things like taking up running to experience more pain, just as a funny little pain experiment (tbd).

When I flew to Japan to visit my husband while he was attempting—and failing—to conceal his affair, I already knew something was wrong. I had asked him about it weeks before I boarded the plane. I asked him daily once I arrived. I was told, repeatedly, that I was imagining things. That I was paranoid. That I was crazy.

But he is a bad actor, and I am an intuitive genius. I knew.

When I finally had proof (always check the Apple Watch, ladies) one of the first things he said to me was that he hadn’t told me because he “didn’t want to get in trouble.”

This is what a thirty-three-year-old man said to his wife and partner of thirteen years after being caught in a full-blown emotional and sexual affair.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble.”

It was a child’s answer. The kind of thing a four-year-old says when caught lying about pissing their pants. A fourth grader, red-faced, explaining why they cheated on a math test. Mealy-mouthed. Pathetic. Almost impressive in its smallness. The biggest ick of them all.

Because what does “getting in trouble” actually mean in this context? It means being forced to confront the pain you’ve caused. It means sitting inside the wreckage of your own actions and letting it hurt. And that pain—guilt, shame, accountability—is apparently so intolerable that many people will choose deceit, manipulation, and cowardice instead.

I’ve felt the pain and survived. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would bet my bank account that my ex is living somewhere in New Jersey avoiding all the pain he caused at all costs.

If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s this: people will contort themselves into unrecognizable shapes to avoid pain. Not just pain, but discomfort. Inconvenience. The mildest form of emotional labor.

A quick tangent about labor—because all my best realizations arrive sideways.

There’s a quote that’s been flattened into a meme: I do not dream of labor. The way it circulates now, it’s a refusal. A shrug. A fantasy of ease. But the irony, of course, is that labor is the dream. My dream, anyway. I dream of devoting my life and mind and body to the things that matter most to me. Labor is the alchemy. Labor is what changes us. It can feel good—deeply satisfying, even ecstatic—but it will always feel hard. That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.

This is where I think about William Morris—yes, the wallpaper guy, but also a socialist who believed fiercely in the pleasure of labor. Not toil. Not exploitation. Labor as devotion. As attention. As craft. (There’s a whole Marxist distinction here that I will not be unpacking, because I am not here to teach theory; I am here to blab about myself.)

And I blab because this year, I labored. Hard.

I wrote more than I have in all the previous years of my life combined. I committed to the slow, unglamorous work of getting to know myself beyond my coping mechanisms. I showed up more fully in my relationships, even when it would have been easier to ghost, deflect, or disappear. None of it was easy. All of it was worth it. It was the kind of effort that leaves you tired but alive, sore but proud. And because of this, 2025, which was meant to be the worst year of my life, turned out to be the best year of my life.

And I want moreeeeee.

So why are we so afraid of hard things?

Comfort, I think, is just the status quo wearing a cozy robe. It’s staying in the same house even when it’s suffocating. Staying in the same relationship long after it’s gone cold. Scrolling. Dissociating. Calling inertia “peace.” But this kind of comfort breeds a quieter, more corrosive pain. The kind that seeps in slowly and convinces you nothing will ever change.

Once again: YEEEOWCH!!

Comfort is not safety. And pain is not the enemy.

Pain is information. Pain is motion. Pain is the body and the psyche (screaming?) that something needs to shift, but it’s not always actually dangerous. But instead of listening, we anesthetize. We avoid. We refuse to extend ourselves at all, and this refusal leaks into everything: our friendships, our careers, our communities, our bodies, our inner lives. We are a culture obsessed with ease, allergic to friction. We engineer systems to smooth every edge, then quietly resent how stagnant we feel inside them. And that, in my opinion, is far worse than pain.

The wild thing is that once I stopped organizing my life around avoiding pain, everything else began to align. The excitement. The openness. The sense that doors were swinging wide. Not because the world suddenly softened, but because I became braver. Because I stopped mistaking avoidance for wisdom.

When I get honest with myself, this is what I know: I fear avoidance more than I fear pain. If I sidestepped discomfort at every turn, I would miss the very things that make life feel electric—connection, love, intensity, the high highs that only exist because the lows are possible too.

I was destroyed by love once. I am open to being destroyed by love again, because that means I get to love. How lucky for me! And if it doesn’t work out? No love is a waste. It’ll hurt like a motherfucker, but I’ll be okay.

It’s all risk. All reward.
All pain.
All gain.

I learned that I can survive anything that tells the truth.

And that, it turns out, is the only mantra I ever needed.

There is something rotten in the state of the theater community.

If you’ve been onstage, backstage, or just adjacent enough to smell the throat coat—you already know what I’m talking about. It’s the open secret whispered in dressing rooms, typed furiously into group chats, and passed along in the kind of hushed tones usually reserved for theaters: the Musical Theater Men (MTM) are not okay.

Ask any woman in the industry and she’ll tell you: you won’t hear this on BroadwayWorld message boards, but we trade our horror stories not for gossip, but for self-protection. Stories of infidelity, grooming-adjacent “mentorships,” emotional manipulation, age gaps wide enough to drive a tour bus through. From these exchanges, a strange, reluctant sisterhood emerges—one forged in shared trauma.

A few weeks ago, I posted nothing but the title of this essay on Instagram. Immediately my DMs filled with (mostly) women clamoring to share their own MTM nightmares. “It’s really like 90% of them,” someone said. Another asked, “Are there any other kind?” The consensus was clear: we’re not talking about a few bad apples—we’re talking about a whole rotting orchard fermenting in its own ego juice.

Most MTM operate in a moral gray zone. Nothing illegal, nothing technically cancellable—just a level of sleaze calibrated juuust below the threshold of consequences. They know exactly how far they can go before they would suffer any professional repercussions. They live in the soft underbelly of accountability, a place where their reputations rarely sustain more than a superficial scratch.

So what does that look like?
Oh, you know. The usual: cheating, emotional manipulation, unsafe sex practices, inappropriate dynamics with fans, mental abuse, GROOMING. So much grooming. The greatest hits of the Almost-But-Not-Quite Criminals.

So what do we do with these losers? Lock them into a bunker for eternity? No, they would just jerk each other off while belting Jason Robert Brown.

You know they would. YUCK!!!!

But seriously, I’m not advocating for a carceral approach to community harm. People should be allowed to mess up and grow. We need social ecosystems where people can break, apologize, and rebuild. Growth requires reflection, accountability, and actual change. But let me ask you, has a MTM ever changed?

By my count, exactly zero have transformed. Zero! The bar is subterranean and they bring shovels.

A painful truth: we’ve all enabled them. By dating them. By defending them. By befriending them. By shrugging off their bad behavior. Rabid offenders have huge, deeply devoted online fanbases who can write dissertations about the ethics of bootleg culture suddenly lose access to the internet when allegations of abuse and coercion emerge. Funny how that works.

And the behavior isn’t confined to Broadway. It trickles down into college BFA programs and high school drama departments and community theaters—where MTM are incubated, like little tadpoles of ego. They’re essentially petri dishes for male ego—a place where young men learn they can cry on cue, hit a high note, and immediately be rewarded with attention, flattery, or sex. Some see their classmates as colleagues. Others see them as a veritable pussy buffet.This dynamic starts early: the MT girl trains, practices, perfects. The MT boy wanders onstage, sings “Corner of the Sky” off-key, and is immediately crowned the second coming of art itself. The vulnerability! The courage! The bare minimum!

Women? Expected. Boys? Groundbreaking.

By adulthood, these dudes have absorbed so much unearned praise they walk through the world like a walking “Bravo!” They see themselves as the stars of every story—never the villains. Why would they? They are adored. At the end of their workday, people clap for them. No one stands and applauds when I finish writing an email or doing the dishes.

And when these men date younger women—not illegal-young, just “my brain matter is still Play-Doh” young—there’s a reason. Shine is easier to crush when it’s newly formed. Power differentials taste sweeter when they believe they’re special. Every man loves how he looks through the eyes of a young girl who thinks him a giant. But that’s the problem: women become ego fuel. Disposable, interchangeable, recyclable. Art supplies, not people.

And yes, I’ve lived this. I was once married to a Musical Theater Man. A Bad Broadway Man, even. I’ve played every role in this industry: performer, writer, producer— but I’ve also played the young, impressionable girl who wanted proximity to the industry. The older, wiser woman who started to recognize patterns in her MTM peers. The scorned wife crying in the bathroom of a rehearsal studio because her partner, who she believed to be “one of the good ones” turned out to be no good at all.

Infidelity alone can break your brain. Studies are finally catching up to what women have known for centuries: betrayal leaves long-term cognitive and emotional scars. Not every instance of cheating is abuse, but many become abusive when weaponized with lies and manipulation. It changes you, arranges your molecules and breaks your spirit.

And the straight white men of theater? The ones with the most privilege and the least self-awareness? Many aren’t drawn to artfulness—they’re drawn to being perceived as artful. They’re attracted to performing vulnerability, not practicing it. They love themselves in the art, not the art in themselves.

Yes, I just referenced Konstantin Stanislavski. Who is the theater nerd now, boys?

Every MTM archetype has the same…itis. Overvalidation. Undercooked emotional intelligence. A lifetime of being told they’re special for doing the bare minimum. And the result is a community of bottomless pits of need, hoovering up attention like it’s cocaine snorted at the Carlyle Tony’s afterparty.

So what do we do with all this?
I honestly don’t know.

Being a shitty person isn’t illegal. Some MTM hover right below the line of actionable harm, doing as much as they can get away with without risking their careers. And if that’s your guiding principle—“Do everything you can until you’re seen as a liability”—you fucking suck.

But also, sometimes these men ARE full on criminals. Remember when they let a literal pedo star in The Phantom of the Opera? This industry is such a fucking cesspool, dude. What a joke.

And yes, before you ask:
Am I jealous that I’m not as successful as some of these men?
Am I bitter that my ex traded a 13-year partner for someone who couldn’t legally rent a car?
Am I a misandrist?

Uhhhhhh…maybe yes to all?

But also: maybe I’m right???????????

But this isn’t a research paper. It’s a personal essay. I’m generalizing. I’m speaking from experience. I’m writing from the messy middle of it.

So if there’s a point to all this—beyond catharsis, beyond calling out the Broadway Manchild Industrial Complex—it’s this: we deserve better. Not perfect men, not saints in tap shoes, just men who are willing to grow the hell up. Men who can hold power without weaponizing it, who can evolve, who can treat women as collaborators instead of collateral damage. Maybe that sounds idealistic. Maybe it sounds naïve. But I’ve lived the alternative, and I’m tired. Tired of watching brilliant women dim themselves to survive the spotlight glare of fragile men. Tired of pretending the rot is just a quirky industry quirk instead of a systemic problem. And tired—truly, cosmically tired—of being told that speaking up makes me “crazy” or “bitter” or “jealous.” If that’s the price of telling the truth, then fine. I’ll pay it. And I’ll keep paying it until the standing ovation finally goes to the people who deserve it—not the men who’ve coasted on charm and high notes, but the women who’ve carried this industry on their backs while being blamed for the weight.

When I was four, I told my parents that I wanted to go up on stage.

I was signed up for dance classes, where a few years later I met some girls whose mother was choreographing the community theater’s production of Annie. They taught me some of the audition dance while we were at the beach, our little feet kicking around the sand.

I was cast in the production and became obsessed with every aspect of the gig: talking about our “characters” (I was a random orphan, so I got to make up my backstory, my name, and everything). I loved rehearsing, learning choreography. I felt equal thrill with every entrance and exit—performing on stage, making friends backstage. I built community with other little girls who also knew who Idina Menzel was. But beyond all the things I can list about what I loved about the experience, there will always be that inexplicable element—the magical part that I know you understand if you, too, were ever bitten by the theater bug.

It didn’t take long for my little hobby to bloom into full-on obsession. Yes, I was the theater kid loudly singing in cars. I was the theater kid in pin curls with 16 castmates at the diner. I would stage door, collect playbills. I wrote Sondheim lyrics in my notebooks and obsessively listened to OBCs.

I was insufferable, but that’s how you act when you’re in love.

Other hobbies came and went. I quit ice skating. I dropped the violin. I retired from soccer because I was always getting cramps. But theater? Theater stuck.

So when I was seventeen and people started asking, “What do you want to study in college?” there was only ever one answer.

I ended up at a small private liberal arts college on Staten Island—a fact I say proudly and apologetically at the same time. I thrived there. I’d always been a good student, but being a theater student made me better. I was surrounded by people who also cared deeply about things like character arcs and ensemble harmonies. I was constantly thinking about art, about performance, about how to make something true.

My college years were an embarrassment of riches: I got to play big, glamorous roles like Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and small, ridiculous ones like Ginny in Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Bell Tolls. I’ve never felt better about myself as an actor than when I was in college, and my confidence soared.

When I graduated, I believed in myself enough to think I could make a career out of this. And honestly, I love and miss that version of me.

Immediately after college, I received more validation in the form of a job offer to join the TheatreWorks USA tour of Seussical the Musical as Gertrude McFuzz. It was a role I had played in college (under the direction of Mayzie La Bird herself, the divine Ms. Michele Pawk). I knew it wasn’t going to be a glamorous gig—and it wasn’t—but between staying in motels and performing in gym-a-toriums (IYKYK), I felt that same familiar spark: the spark of the love of theater. I watched children in the audience get bitten by the theater bug in real time. I was belting E’s at like 8 a.m. with little effort. At times it was a slog, but I was already grateful for the opportunity to slog it out with the cast and do the show. By the way, Seussical is kind of great. I won’t stand for Seuss slander. It’s magical—I’ll always tear up singing “You teach him earth and I will teach him sky.”

Roast my earnestness; I don’t give a fuck!

Returning from the tour was hard.

I needed to get a job pronto in order to afford the apartment my ex and I were moving into: a no-frills one-bedroom in Washington Heights. Although we would be splitting the $1,500 monthly rent, the cost was astronomical to me. I found a job slinging soap and washing strangers’ hands at Lush Cosmetics, paying me $13/hour. I ended up working around 38 hours a week (and more around the holidays). Most days would start at 4 a.m., with me trudging my way from uptown down to Union Square, getting ready to intercept the delivery truck carrying our strongly scented merchandise between 5–6 a.m. I would then work the floor until the early evening.

Despite living incredibly frugally, most of the time I had only a few dollars to my name. I would skip meals if I had to. At the time, none of this felt like a huge sacrifice. My eye was still very much on the prize of my goals, and this felt like something I only had to do for now to find my footing. Like an artistic montage before the comeback scene.

But you can’t really save money when you barely make enough to live. Two years flew by. Two years at the soap store. Two years since I’d taken a dance class or a voice lesson. Two years since I’d been onstage. Zero dollars in my bank account.

The further I got from my training, the smaller I felt. Now new bright-eyed theater kids were moving to New York, ready to chase their dreams, and I felt less shiny in comparison.

Sure, during this time, I also saw many of my peers drop off the radar, leave the city, or switch to more stable career paths. I told myself I had more fortitude than they did, more grit and resilience. I would succeed because I worked harder and hung in there longer.

But then, when I saw other peers of mine succeed, I would ask myself what they were doing that I wasn’t. This puzzled me for years. Turns out, it wasn’t such a great mystery at all—many of them had rich parents.

Around this time, something extremely wonderful and exciting happened. My partner at the time booked his first Broadway show. Not to speak for him, but I think I can say this was one of the coolest and most special times of our life. To be suddenly thrust into this exciting world—the world we both were working so hard to become a part of—was the stuff of dreams. And I have felt, and still do feel, that although our life together didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, watching him succeed was a gift to me, as someone who loved him. Although there would be many complicated feelings around our respective careers to come, I always championed his success totally and without reservation. Seeing someone you love live their dream is one of the most fulfilling things a person can experience.

His success also pulled us both closer to “the industry.” I suddenly had a peek behind the curtain—not as a performer, but as an observer. I was at dinners with actors, writers, directors, people whose work I’d admired for years. They were kind enough, but when they asked what I did, I froze.

Was I supposed to say I’m an actor? Because then they’d ask what I’d been in, and I’d have to say TYA Seussical, and they’d politely nod while internally labeling me “soap girl.”

So I just said I worked at Lush and left the acting part out completely. My partner wouldn’t amend this, which signaled to me that he didn’t want me to say I was an actor anyway. Message received.

In these settings, the conversation would swirl around me—about auditions and callbacks and producers—and I’d feel overwhelmed. I always dreamed that sitting around with artists would mean talking about art, but it was mostly talking about the industry. From my outside perspective, the conversation felt like a cacophony of name dropping and shit-talking, and I had nothing to contribute.

I felt invisible. Worse, I thought I deserved to feel invisible. After all, I was not a peer. I was a soap salesperson.

Around this same time I started getting involved in the NYC comedy community.

It was the first creative thing in a long time that felt like mine. It wasn’t tied to my partner or my college identity; it was just me, making people laugh in basements. Comedy taught me about taste—about what I found funny, about rhythm, about failure. I spent months trying to mimic the comedians I admired until, eventually, I stumbled into my own voice.

I told myself it was just a side door back into acting. But honestly, it was fun. The comedy community reminded me of theater—insular, weird, occasionally incestuous—but it was also generous, collaborative, and less obsessed with perfection.

And then, like every comedian ever, I started writing.

This was during the golden age of online comedy: Reductress, College Humor, ClickHole, Funny or Die. My first published pieces were for Reductress. Seeing my name on my articles and my articles go viral was, frankly, so fucking cool. It made making art seem accessible again. I didn’t have to audition and wait to be cast to say someone else’s words; I could just write my own.

Soon I was writing freelance for a bunch of different websites.

After a while, I was offered a full-time job writing aggregation content at a comedy site—cheeky clickbait and culture jokes for a living. It was creative, technically, but the bottom line was getting clicks so we could sell advertising space within the articles. Taking this job also meant giving up auditions.

I talked this over with my partner, secretly hoping he would talk me out of it, telling me that I was too talented and special to give up all my dreams to write online screed, but he did not. I should not have expected him to, but I did. Making this decision felt like a huge turning point to me, but he was more or less indifferent.

So I hung up my character shoes and took the job.

I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I’d come back to acting. But slowly, I felt the door closing. I was spending my days under fluorescent office lights, shame-eating Pop-Tarts in the office bathroom, pretending I didn’t still dream about the stage. I became very depressed.

Then, in a rare moment of divine chaos, I booked a Super Bowl commercial.

Here’s how it happened: I’d taken a commercial acting class as a last-ditch effort to resuscitate my dreams, telling myself that if this didn’t work out, I would give it all up for good. I always like making these stupid little ultimatums with myself.

At the end of the course, we auditioned for agents. Heartbreakingly, I didn’t get one. There was my answer.

Weeks later, one of the teachers from the class called—she was casting a Super Bowl spot directed by Chappelle’s Show co-creator Neal Brennan. He didn’t like anyone from the first round and asked to see more actors. She was wracking her brain with who to call in when she saw my thank-you note pinned to her bulletin board. She called me for the callback, and I booked it. When she called to tell me the good news, she asked who my agent is, and I told her I don’t have one. “I’ll make a call right now and get you one,” she said with incredible nonchalance. And she did.

At that point, I’d been miserably writing about the 2016 election for over a year, trying to make our horrifying fall into fascism seem funny, feeling like a creative corpse. Booking that commercial was the tiny jolt I needed. I quit my job the same day.

It only took one “yes” to remind me I was allowed to bet on myself again.

The next couple of years were, honestly, great. I booked a bunch of commercials, picked up side gigs, and made more money acting than I did at my full-time job. Having more time and resources allowed me the freedom to try new things, which led to me winning a Tony Award and writing a children’s book.

Then COVID happened.

You know the rest. The world shut down. The arts went dark. Suddenly survival was the only plot line. My partner and I slipped into scarcity mode. He kept chasing the career lottery while I kept working for a paycheck.

A few months before the pandemic, I’d started a part-time customer-service job that was supposed to be temporary. Six years later, I’m still there.

At that point, everything creative in my life had gone quiet. I wasn’t doing comedy. I wasn’t writing. I’d booked two acting jobs in three years, which felt less like “the grind” and more like “a long nap.” The generative spark I used to have was gone, and I didn’t have the energy—or the confidence—to try to reignite it. Especially without support.

By then, it had become clear my partner didn’t really want me to act—though he never said it outright. I thought that if I was obedient, supportive, smaller, I’d eventually be helped, or at least rooted for. But that’s not how any of this works.

Side note: self-abandonment is never as holy as it feels.

I got depressed again, but this time it wasn’t the “crying and binge-eating Pop-Tarts in the office bathroom” kind of depression. It had evolved. It was the angry kind—the “why does everyone else get to live my dream” kind. And that scared me.

But it also revealed something to me. I started noticing a pattern: every time I abandon my creative self, I unravel. I become unbearable to be around—mostly to myself. So something had to give.

I still felt the itch to make something, but the idea of restarting my acting career felt light-years away. So I turned to the thing that was right in front of me—my laptop. I started writing again. Not as a consolation prize, not as something to do while waiting to act again, but as its own thing.

And then, like some creative faucet finally unstuck, ideas started pouring out. Little sparks that grew into sentences, scenes, stories. Writing had always lived somewhere near my creative life, but now it felt like the center of it. It was like watching bulbs push up through frozen ground—something that had been buried, remembering how to bloom.

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In November 2022, I wrote my first play. I had no idea how. It felt like standing at the base of a mountain with no gear—but I climbed anyway. It was a one-act about a teenage cannibal preying on suicidal incels. It’s deeply imperfect, but I still love that script.

I gathered some friends (shoutout to Helen J. Shen and Asa Somers) to read it aloud. I felt absolute dread as my loved ones started showing up to the reading—who did I think I was? I wasn’t a playwright. Watching it unfold was horrifying. I wanted to evaporate. I felt sick the entire time. But when it was over, people said kind things. Smart things. Encouraging things. They engaged with the work seriously and honestly. It felt like being seen for the first time in a very long time.

After years of silence, that validation cracked something open.

I started submitting plays to contests and fellowships. A 10-minute piece of mine was produced in Seattle. I won a residency. I wrote my first full-length play about Satanic feminists (as one does). People came to see it. People started introducing me as a writer—and I started believing them.

Since then, writing has become my ritual—whether it’s a children’s book, a play, or a blog post like this one. At first, it was slow and awkward; now it’s sacred. The more I write, the more I understand myself—and the more I understand myself, the easier it is to write.

It’s probably not a coincidence that my marriage began to unravel around the same time I started standing in my own light. But that’s another essay.

These days, I’ve “booked out indefinitely” with my commercial and voiceover agents. I haven’t had a legit agent in over ten years, but I do have literary and theatrical ones. I’ve found a surprising sense of freedom in the lack of visibility that comes with not being an actor. I’ve let my hair start to go gray and gotten a bunch of giant tattoos that 20-year-old me would’ve sworn would nuke my career. I like not worrying about my weight or my appearance—and redirecting that energy toward worrying about my brain and my thoughts.

I still love art—just not the machine around it.

If I’m being honest, I still can’t fully let go of the acting thing. I miss it. It was my first true love. I still think I’m good at it. There’s a quiet part of me that still hopes my childhood dreams might come true. But I can’t chase it right now. I can’t picture getting new headshots or updating a resume full of dusty credits. I still pay dues to both unions, but at this point, I think of it as a donation—a way for other actors to benefit from my nostalgia.

Playing the game of the acting industry just doesn’t feel like my path anymore. I no longer believe I can “wow” casting in a 16-bar cut or be “discovered” at an EPA (lol at being “discovered” in your mid-30s). I feel like everything that makes me special can’t really be telegraphed in a traditional audition setting. Maybe I’ll find another way in—a side door through collaborators, or maybe I’ll act in something I write (threat).

I don’t think I’ll ever let it go completely. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the dream just changed costumes.

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I checked my email. I had an unread message from the lawyer’s office that alerted me that my divorce has been finalized. I read it, sort of, while stealing glances at the screen, not willing to miss a moment of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley clawing at each other for something as banal as the legal conclusion of my marriage. I put down my phone, making a mental note to revisit this email after the movie.

Eventually the movie ended. I made lunch. I cleaned up the apartment. A few hours went by. I forgot about the email. I was on the train on my way to get my hair done when I remembered it again. Oh shit, I’m divorced. I should text my mom, I guess?

I’d spent months wondering what it would feel like to get that news. I’d imagined the moment as cinematic— but there was no deep exhale, no pulse quickening, no sting behind my eyes. Just… nothing. It didn’t arrive with a bang. It barely arrived at all. I just wanted to see Demi Moore turn into an oozing flesh-blob beauty queen.

In the early days of my separation, though, the grief hit like a wall. One day, I was a wife — flying to Japan to visit my husband, supporting his dreams. The next, I was abandoned by the person I’d spent thirteen years building a life with, flying home alone while he stayed abroad with his mistress. My feelings didn’t matter. My heartbreak didn’t matter. The marriage didn’t matter. The rug was yanked out, and everything I’d so carefully built vanished overnight. For months after I was constantly buzzing somewhere between teeth-gritting resilience and slight mania. People were like, “April, you’re glowing,” and I couldn’t help but think “Yes, it is because I am going insane!”.

That kind of trauma takes a long time to metabolize. I’m still digesting it, and probably will be for years. The initial grief came in a flood, but then came the smaller, quieter losses — the daily deaths of my old life.

It happened the first time I made my husband’s favorite smoothie for another man.
It happened when I opened a book and found one of his notes tucked inside.
It happened when I caught a whiff of his cologne on someone else.

Each time, another slice. Now, healed over. Scarred. By the time the official email came, there wasn’t much left to bleed. The wound had already closed. The message wasn’t an emotional earthquake — just another piece of paperwork.

The flood has officially become nothing but a drippy faucet.

My sister and I had joked about throwing a divorce party. I imagined recreating Nicole Kidman’s iconic post-divorce paparazzi photos — arms outstretched, face toward the sun, blissfully free from the clutches of that menace Tom Cruise. I pictured an Instagram announcement, loud and cheeky, calling on everyone to set me up with their hot single friends.

But when the day came, I didn’t feel like celebrating. Not because it was sad or anything. I was just kind of over it?

If you’ve been reading this blog for the past year, you know I’m not someone who runs from her feelings. I sit in them. Stew in them. Write about them until they start to make sense. That’s how I’ve survived this whole thing more or less intact.

And while I’m still processing the trauma, it’s become… boring. Which, honestly, feels fucking amazing.

I can still dig into the weeds if I want to, but lately, my mind’s been occupied by new things — new obsessions, new disappointments, new crushes, new pain. Fresh material for the overthinking brain. It’s kind of nice.

For a while, my divorce felt like the most interesting thing about me. Now it barely makes the highlight reel. It’s joined the ranks of my other personal trivia — like how I’ve never gotten stitches, or how I got a perfect score on the statewide ELA exam in elementary school (yes, I’m still bragging about that in my 30s). The divorce sits somewhere between “got my nipple pierced on St. Marks at 21” and “was once held by Hulk Hogan as a baby.”

My marriage, my ex — they’re starting to feel far away. Almost fictional. Sometimes my “married-in-the-suburbs” life feels like something I dreamt up, not something I actually lived.

But this current life — the one I’m in now — feels unmistakably mine. It’s not easy, but it’s true. My time, my energy, my effort all belong to me again. Or maybe it’s all mine for the first time ever.

And that, finally, feels right.

But yeah, please feel free to set me up with your hot, single friends.

I don’t find this question offensive. In fact, I ask myself the same thing all the time. I thought that after my divorce, it would come up less—that some kind of assumed outcome would settle in and people would hesitate to wander into the murky waters of this touchy subject. But I’ve been asked more frequently lately, which I find interesting.

My answer is usually the same: “I could see myself happy either way.” And it’s true! But, let’s be honest, it’s a bit of a cop-out, isn’t it? After all, women are expected to pick a side on this issue: those who know they want kids, and those who know they definitely don’t. Sitting on the fence is seen as a problem. We’re pitied—perceived as people who don’t know what they want, with limited time to figure it out. The fear is that we’ll make the wrong choice and regret it forever.

I’m a woman in my mid-thirties living in New York City. Most of my friends don’t have kids, but many are freezing their eggs. A number of them think I should freeze mine too. It seems almost chic: keep your options on ice while you live your wild and free life, and shift gears whenever you feel like it. I haven’t explored it in depth, but I know it’s expensive—and, cruelly, you have to pay to keep the little fuckers from being thrown away. What a goddamn racket.

For whatever reason, I feel more comfortable letting nature decide. Maybe it’s because if my biology makes the decision for me, I’ll have less of a chance of feeling like I’ve made the wrong choice. Maybe I’ll stop taking the pill and, to my surprise, conceive. Maybe I’ll let nature take its course and let the eggs rot and the uterus grow silent. In this scenario, the ticking of the biological clock feels less like the frantic beat of a telltale heart, and more like a metronome winding down. I’ve always been better at dealing with a situation I find myself in, rather than creating a situation to be in. I could unpack this, but I just smoked a bowl and took my sleeping pills so I don’t want to get that existential right now.

I love the drama of the female body. Even a period has its own kind of narrative: your body prepares for a baby every month, and if the egg and sperm don’t meet, your body throws a tantrum. Your uterus, which has carefully crafted a blood-and-mucus nest for a potential child, expels it all in a crampy, messy week of physical and emotional pain. It’s almost like it’s chastising you for not being grateful.

Okay, diva.

What is the point of procreating, anyway? When I think about it, all roads seem to lead back to a selfish place. Would I have kids because I want a family? Well, that’s based on my wants, not on the potential life I’d be creating. Would I have kids to ensure I have someone to take care of me when I’m older? That’s one of the weirdest reasons I can think of for having children—creating your very own future assisted-living staff. Would I have kids to make the world a better place by raising little forces-for-good? But there’s no guarantee they’d be good. Plus, I’d rather raise kids who feel empowered to forge their own paths. I’d hope they’d be cool because I’m their cool mom, but if they aren’t, that’s on them.

Not to state the obvious, but things aren’t great right now, like on Earth. Even as a certified lover of life, I’d feel immense guilt bringing a child into this increasingly hostile, increasingly terrifying world. It feels surreal to look at images of Palestinian children’s corpses on my phone every day, and imagine bringing my own child into this chaos. I think about all the things that make me love being alive—connection, humanity, nature, art—and then remember how they’re all being systematically destroyed. And I’m not speaking figuratively. None of this is metaphorical.

I imagine explaining the “go touch grass” meme to my hypothetical children:

“Grass used to be a plant that grew from the earth before everything got paved over and turned into fast-casual salad joints. Let me show you on Sora.” Art funding has been slashed to grow a bloated military force. Everyone’s getting a Friend Necklace for Christmas. And I’m warning my daughter about the dangers of showing her knees in post-evangelical America, while she dreams of becoming a “trad-wife” like her online heroes. My son, entitled to every single thing he thinks he deserves because he’s male, gets furious when things don’t go his way. He considers shooting up his school. I feel ashamed for not being there enough for them because I’m working a grueling 60-hour week just to scrape by. In my downtime, I confide in my AI best friend because genuine emotional intimacy has been replaced by shiny online personas, and everyone else seems to have a better life than mine. My AI best friend affirms everything I say. Good. I always knew I was right all along. Oh, and none of us have health insurance.

If this scenario seems wildly unrealistic to you, I think you might be living on a different planet.

That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there’s still a small ember of hope that maybe, just maybe, I could be a mother one day.

This is the part that goes beyond logic. Logically, bringing a child into this world feels impossible—given everything I’ve mentioned, plus the fact that I’m single, poor, and have PCOS. But something deep within—maybe it’s evolutionary instinct, maybe it’s heteronormativity, idk—still insists that this might be a viable path for me. I know I’d be a really good mom. I have always known that. In fact, I feel like I’m brimming with maternal energy but have nowhere to direct it. I want to take care of someone. I want to cook for them, feed them, guide them, hold them when they cry. I can’t lie—I’ve always had visions of myself as a mother. They felt natural. I’d make mental notes about how I’d raise a child, what name I’d give them. They were daydreams, but ones I can’t quite let go of.

But that’s more about mourning the mother I thought I could be, than mourning the child who likely won’t ever exist.

These days, I feel like I can’t walk down the street without getting stuck behind strollers and nannies. I can’t sit in a cafe without seeing sticky fingers and messy mouths. I can’t ride the subway without hearing the wail of a child, or the whine of a toddler. Kids have always been around, but now they’re impossible to ignore.

All this external pressure—well-meaning friends, social expectations, that odd sense of time running out—just ends up amplifying my internal chaos. One day, my own path might reveal itself, or maybe not. Maybe one day my ass will hurt for sitting on the fence for too long. But as of right now, it really does seem like the best place to be.

That’s where I am right now. Just me, my computer, and a criminally overpriced (and oversweetened) latte. Typing away like a total cliché, tilting my screen ever so slightly away from the prying eyes of the people next to me—hoping they think I’m on Teams or Slack instead, doing some real grown-up job, rather than writing in my online diary. I probably look like I’m guarding state secrets, but really I just don’t want the guy next to me—who is absolutely editing Excel formulas—to know I’m writing about my feelings again.

Writing in public feels performative. Reading in public feels performative. Breathing is too, I hear. I should care less. We’re all always performing, so why does it feel so rotten to be perceived? We’re all too aware of ourselves nowadays, myself included.

A few months ago, someone asked me how I keep the creative flame from snuffing out while in the midst of life-altering heartbreak. Merely being asked the question made me feel a bit like a fraud. Me? Creative? At a time like this? How could I possibly hold the answer to something so big? Most of the time, my creativity feels part magical, part practical—it’s too elusive to bottle up into a tidy answer. But now, after many weeks of reflection and self-observation, I’ve become more aware of my rituals—hopefully to the point where I can write about them here.

So here I am: an overly-caffeinated cliché in a chain coffee shop blasting 2014 Ed Sheeran, trying to convince you (and maybe myself) that creativity can bloom even in the least glamorous of places. Like here, next to the bathroom. Or beneath the judgmental gaze of a toddler in a stroller.

Become Obsessed With Yourself

Hahahahaha I am never beating the narcissist allegations.

Let me explain what I mean.

I think it’s really hard to generate anything — art, writing, ideas — when you hate yourself. Some people romanticize the idea that creativity has to come from misery or pain. That suffering is the birthplace of “real” art. I vehemently disagree.

Yes, writing has helped me process a lot of unpleasant shit. It’s been a way to metabolize confusion, grief, anger — all of it. But pain isn’t the engine that keeps the whole thing going. For me, the real fuel comes from something quieter, softer, and way more radical: getting a little self-devotional.

You have to fall in love with your weird thoughts. You have to start romanticizing the strange inner workings of your own mind — even the parts you’ve been taught to hide or cringe at. You need to believe, even just a little, that your perspective is worth exploring. That your obsessions, your voice, your ideas are all worthy of attention.

To quote John Waters: “Have faith in your own bad taste.”

In 2012, the deeply disappointing writer Neil Gaiman went viral for his “Make Good Art” speech at the commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts:

Shut the fuck up, Neil. Make whatever kind of art you want, honestly. Make something stupid as fuck. Make something that you feeled pulled to make even if you know it won’t pan out. Make bad art, and lots of it. Stretch yourself so far and wide that you can feel the outer ridges of the spectrum of your ability and taste. You don’t have to make good art, you just have to make something. And please, for the love of god, acknowledge how cool it is that you even tried. There is so much freedom in allowing yourself to be bad at something.

Don’t just embrace the things you love — build altars (real or imaginary) to them. Worship them a little. Be indulgent. Be curious about what makes you tick. Get your face out of your phone and look the fuck around. Notice what moves you, what disgusts you, what you can’t stop thinking about. Pay attention to the textures of your own experience, not because you need to make them marketable, but because they’re yours.

Getting creative isn’t about performing insight — it’s about trusting that you already contain things worth saying. That you don’t have to earn the right to express yourself by being broken enough, or clever enough, or palatable enough.

You have to be a little romantic with it, honestly. Light a candle for your own voice. Let yourself ramble. Don’t be afraid to be utterly alone with your thoughts. Let yourself make things that are too much, not enough, too weird, too sentimental, too obvious. Censor yourself less — not just around other people, but in your own mind.

Because it’s your mind. Why would you let it act as your prison?

I don’t know, like go write a poem and touch yourself to it or something.

Conquer Your Fear of Being Seen

Hey, this is why I started therapy! And now look at me—constantly oversharing on the internet. Wow, therapy works!

For a long time, I wanted people to intuit my talents and abilities without me ever having to display them. I’m not sure what I expected, really. That someone would see my dumb little outfits and my dumb little bangs and think, “Holy shit, that girl must be an artist—I should write her a grant!” Reductive, sure—but not entirely wrong.

I always had a bajillion excuses. I was too poor, too busy, too tired, too misunderstood, too unremarkable, too uneducated to start or share any projects. It was never me, per se—it was always the cruel circumstances around me that stood in the way of my success and happiness. Unsupportive partners, insufficient funds, packed schedules. Total bummer, right?

And here’s the thing: it was all true! But it also made a very convenient shield to hide behind.

For years, I struggled with calling myself a “writer” or an “actor.” I felt like an imposter claiming those titles—like my resume was never long enough, and I was never impressive enough. It felt embarrassing to say I was an actor and then go work a shift at Lush Cosmetics, cleaning creepy strangers’ hands for minimum wage. Who did I think I was?

Years of that logic built up into self-hatred and resentment. I was frustrated and depressed. It was easier to be mad at the world for “misunderstanding” me than to take the reins of my own life. If I didn’t put myself out there, I couldn’t fail. It felt too unsafe to try.

And now, with our lives constantly on display across several exploitative social media platforms, the fear of being seen is stronger than ever. What if I post something and people judge me for it?

Well, guess what, honey?

They are!

Yes, you’re being judged! People are misrepresenting you in their group chats right now. They look at your Instagram and think you’re cringey. Everyone’s been saying it!

AHhhhhhhhHHHHHHHH!

Okay. Now what?

You can’t live like this, babe. You really can’t.

Take this blog, for instance. Not sure if you noticed, but it’s not exactly high literature. It’s many other wonderful things: honest, vulnerable, (hopefully) relatable—but I’m not out here crafting beautiful prose. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think it’s written in bad taste and who talk shit about me because of it. Hi!

But you know what? There are also plenty of people who’ve reached out to tell me how much they enjoy it. It’s connected me with cool people who get it. And not everyone has to get it. It’s really gonna be fine.

The most important lesson this blog has taught me is not to be so precious about my writing. I’d rather post two imperfect entries a month than spend forever chasing some perfect literary opus. I can work on a post for days and still feel like it’s not quite right—that the wording is off, or the stories aren’t told exactly how I want. Honestly, I often reread old posts and think they suck. But they get posted anyway. And that’s fine.

I’m just glad I put them out there at all.

That is the antidote to the fear of being seen.

Stop Waiting for Inspiration to Strike

Are you sensing a theme here?

Listen, you can’t wait for inspiration to strike—because it rarely does. And then sometimes it does strike and you don’t write it down, and you forget it, and you want to kill yourself (RIP David Lynch).

I first encountered this concept in college when I did The Artist’s Way (which I know is kinda corny at this point, but honestly, I still like it). To heavily paraphrase a book I read 16 years ago and can barely remember: you have to live a holistically creative life instead of waiting around for an idea to come to you. You refill your creative well through embodiment. It’s not something you can just pick up and put down.

So what does that look like? For me, it’s a few things:

Environment

I like to live in a creatively stimulating space. I draw a lot of pleasure and inspiration from my home—but I don’t like working from there.

Here’s a really privileged thing: I’ve rearranged my entire life to devote as much time as possible to my creative pursuits. That meant making a lot of sacrifices that might come back to bite me in the ass someday. I found a miracle of a job that allows me to live off part-time wages, but that also means I’m always kind of broke. I don’t have health insurance. I have zero stability, and everything I have could be gone in a second. And no, before you ask, my parents don’t pay my rent or anything else.

BUT! It’s worth it for me—genuinely. I’ve had the full-time job with benefits and all that, and it made me so miserable that I would eat three bags of Pop-Tarts (that’s six Pop-Tarts) a day in the office bathroom because I was ashamed of how many Pop-Tarts I was consuming. I also just generally wanted to die.

But “environment” is more than just your physical space—it’s who you surround yourself with. So I try to keep cool, interesting people around me, which is easy to do when they’re my friends :)

Cultural Diet

Most days, what I want more than anything is to watch TikTok for hours and hours and hours. Truthfully, I often prefer scrolling on my phone over going to a play, museum, or movie. How sick is that?

But I make myself engage with actual art (not just “content”), and wow, it makes me feel so much better. I’m not saying don’t watch your trash TV or brain-rot reels—I absolutely still do—but it’s probably good to look at other things sometimes, too.

I’d be a complete fool not to take advantage of the cultural smorgasbord that is New York City (more privilege!), so I go to shows, movies, museums, etc. I don’t stay in one lane, art-wise—I enjoy everything from visual art to drag shows to concerts. A lot of things here are free, which helps. I also like watching ballet on YouTube.

Your cultural diet really helps you discover your tastes. When I gorge on content instead of art, I feel gross. But I’ll talk more about that later.

Honoring Myself

(Please refer to: Become Obsessed With Yourself)

This also means having self-respect, which can look different for everyone. For me, it’s about being disciplined enough in my choices to keep me feeling aligned with my “highest-self” (yuck) but giving myself enough grace that I don’t feel punished. Sometimes that means going to the gym, sometimes that means taking a nap, sometimes that means cutting a toxic person out of my life.

I often feel that people don’t know how to be disciplined without being carceral…but you know, that’s a topic for another blog. Another blog on another person’s page who has thought a lot more about this than me.

Now, listen—sometimes inspiration will strike, and something will pour out of you and it’ll feel fucking awesome and you’ll hardly have to edit it and you’ll feel like a “real” artist.

One time I hand-wrote a 66-page non-sexual Sonny Angels fanfic that was described as an “existential nightmare” by my ex—and he was right. Was that what I hoped to create during a rare “Aha!” moment? No. But I did do it. And no, you cannot read it.

But most of the time, you’ll be sitting in a chain coffee shop, resisting the urge to open TikTok, staring at a blinking cursor on a blank screen. And that’s okay too.

Locking in creatively is a practice. You have to meet it where it’s at. Sometimes my creativity feels like a child I need to love, nurture, and protect. Other times it’s a horny, passionate lover I want to roll around naked with. Sometimes it’s a savior. Sometimes it’s a demon. My relationship with creativity is always shifting.

Don’t judge it.

Consume and Create in (Somewhat) Equal Measure

Over the past 12 years living in New York City, I’ve met artists at nearly every stage of their careers. Actors, writers, comedians, dancers—people you’ve seen on red carpets and people you’ve never heard of who quietly make art in their spare time.

And here’s what I’ve noticed in my own, very real, very lived experience:
The most fulfilled artists are the ones who are regularly creating.
The most miserable artists are the ones who are constantly waiting—for permission, for opportunity, for something to happen—without generating their own work.

Whoops! Sorry! I said it.

But it’s true. I know miserable celebrities who have millions of dollars and happy comedians who put up there shows in basements to minuscule audiences.

Now listen, I’m not saying everyone needs to be a multi-hyphenate. If you’re an actor, you don’t have to write your own material. If you’re a dancer, you don’t have to choreograph your own shows. But if you’re only consuming the work of others, you’re not really living the creatively integrated life you probably say you want.

And let’s be honest: there’s more to consume than ever before. But it’s important to distinguish between content and art.
Ugh, I know—I sound like an elitist piece of shit. But stay with me.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

Content, on the other hand—especially on social media—isn’t necessarily designed to move you emotionally or stir your imagination. It’s often designed to sell you something. To distract you. To make you compare your life to someone else’s filtered version of reality. Social media platforms aren’t built to inspire—they’re built to keep you scrolling.

Yes, some people do share meaningful work on social media. And yes, there’s beauty and vulnerability to be found there. But it’s like shopping at Marshalls: you might find something amazing, but you’re gonna have to dig through a lot of garbage to get to it. And let’s be real: all that digging—the endless scrolling, liking, commenting—doesn’t usually leave you feeling full. It leaves you drained. Disconnected. Numb.

And before anyone comes for me: yes, I realize I’m delivering this message via Substack, which is a social media platform. So, like—shush.

The point is: there’s room for both. Consume and create. But if you’re a creative person hoping to generate meaningful work, you’re going to end up deeply frustrated if you’re looking for artistic nourishment in spaces built for content consumption.

I hear this all the time:
“I want to be more creative, but I don’t have any good ideas.”
Nine times out of ten, that comes from people who consume too much and create too little—as a practice. Or they are too afraid of being seen, even sometimes by themselves, to start. Creating is like working a muscle: if you never use it, it atrophies. You gotta start somewhere. In the words of the deeply disappointing actor Shia LaBeouf: JUST DO IT.

On the flip side, creative fatigue is real. If you’ve been pouring yourself into your own work and you’re starting to feel tapped out, that’s usually a good sign it’s time to step outside yourself. Refuel. Look to the work of others. Be reminded of what’s possible.

When I can’t write, I read. When I’ve read enough, I write.

Back and forth. In and out. Consume and create. Not perfectly balanced, but intentionally reciprocal. A dialogue between what you take in and what you put out.

Fall in Love With the Process, Not the Product

This mindset shift quite literally changed my life—so I saved the best for last.

I haven’t always been a patient person. I was a high-achieving kid turned SSRI adult. You know the type: if I wasn’t immediately good at something, I’d quietly abandon it, convinced that talent should come pre-packaged, fully formed. I wasn’t in it for the journey—I was sprinting toward the finish line. I wanted the end product: the polished draft, the final cut, the published book with my name on the cover. I wanted the applause, the validation, the self-congratulating Instagram post that would low-key make people jealous. (Feel free to tell me I’m amazing in the comments. I won’t stop you.)

If this sounds familiar to you, you might want to talk to your therapist about your relationship to validation (ouchies).

But here’s the thing: that’s not the point of being an artist.
And more importantly, that’s not the kind of artist I dreamt of being as a little kid.

It’s romanticized, sure—but I crave the kind of artistry that lets you disappear into the work. The kind where the outside world goes quiet and time stretches in all directions. I want to be the kind of artist who digs in the dirt of her own mind and finds something unexpected. Who is vulnerable enough to be transformed by the people she meets and the art she encounters. Who lets her experiences burrow inside her and change her shape. Who lets herself be weird, and wrong, and soft, and unsure—because that’s where the good stuff is.

I want to trust my instincts enough to follow them into strange, uncertain places.
I want to be open enough to be inspired by small, mundane moments.
I want to let my experiences run through the bizarre Rube Goldberg machine in my head and come out the other side as something true.

I never dreamed of being praised for simply “getting things done.”
I dreamed of being understood.

But here’s the kicker: that kind of clarity doesn’t arrive all at once. It’s not handed to you after one successful project or one perfect draft. It’s something that builds slowly—over years, decades even—as you make, unmake, and remake yourself through your work.

And that, honestly, is the best part.

Being an artist means bearing witness to your own evolution.

Because when you fall in love with the process, everything changes. You stop needing every sentence to be perfect. You stop needing every project to be “worth something.” You let go of the pressure to prove, and you lean into the joy of discovery.

And eventually, you realize: the process isn’t just the path to the art. It is the art.

That’s the real reward.
That’s the fucking best part.

In Conclusion

Now that you’ve read this whole entire post, I can finally reveal the greatest secret of them all: no one can teach you how to have a creative practice. Hahaha, tricked ya! You can’t copy mine, you have to come up with it on your own, and that’s the fun! This entry was never meant to be perscriptive, just a little chitty-chat about what I found works for me.

I hope something in this absurdly long love letter to the creative life reminded you of your own weird brilliance. I hope it made you feel a little less alone in the struggle to stay open, to stay curious, to stay seen. And I hope, more than anything, it gave you permission—not that you needed it—to keep making stuff. Even if it’s bad. Even if it’s cringe. Even if you’re the only one who thinks it’s cool.

Especially then.

And if you ever find yourself in a coffee shop, hunched over a laptop, pretending to be doing something important while actually writing about your feelings… don’t tilt your screen away.

Let them look.