My stepmother, sister, and I spent a weekend in one of my favorite places in the world: Mendocino County. I haven’t been there since 2018. I wonder how long it will be before I go again. It’s a rather arduous five-hour drive from Sacramento, where I usually hang out when I go home, so a rare occurrence even when I’m “in the area.”

I visited Fort Bragg every year as a young child. My earliest memories are there. My mom lived between Mendocino and Fort Bragg when I was a teenager, so I have some pretty wild memories there, too. It’s a land of the mighty Pacific Ocean, jagged coastlines, giant, crashing waves, fog, and redwood groves. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, I am wholly convinced.

It is where my mother and I went after my grandmother was killed by my cousin. It was like answering a beacon call; it pulled us there and we never questioned.

Mac and I spent some of our most wild and tragic and beautiful times in the area — young and drunk and making excellent decisions. We had planned on getting married there, and even went once to plan our wedding while I was pregnant with our first child. We visited venues, met with caterers., but ended up getting married on a cold December day at the county courthouse one month after that first child was born.
We had always planned on heading back, but sometimes life turns out a little different. This year is our 25th wedding anniversary. We keep saying we’re going to have a vow renewal, some sort of wedding, but then again, we are actually happy together, and closer than we’ve ever been, so maybe we should just ride the no-wedding/no-glamour thing all the way to the end.

It’s worked out so far.

I guess what I mean is that I see my whole life when I visit certain places. Every stage. A child, before the world touched me. A teenager, when it all seemed possible. A young, budding alcoholic with my young, budding alcoholic lover — and then with my family, restored. Sober. My parents, four children and husband. Myself at age 47, living in another country. My sister, my stepmother, my father now gone.

It’s funny how places become touchstones, hold every story without even knowing it.

But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about one thing how every time I go back to the USA, I am reminded of the misunderstandings, of the things I wish more Europeans understood about us. Sure, there’s the normal shit of “no, we don’t all have guns,” or, as a Californian, “No, I do not surf.” No, we do not all live on white sand beaches. I have met very few movie stars.

Oh, and let’s just not play the game where we pretend nobody knows who I’m talking about when I say “Europeans.” This is not a dumb word dumb Americans use because we don’t know geography — although, I’ll give it to ya, we kinda don’t — but y’all, people all over Europe use that word pretty much all the time, and they also say “Europe this” or “Europe that,” and 99% of the time they basically mean the EU. Contextually we know if we mean something other than that. And yes, Norway and Sweden and Eastern and Central Europe are often left out, even if they are part of the 27 EU member states. I get it. We all get it. It’s a strange thing that Americans do on social media where they act like saying “Europeans” is some sort of incomprehensible sign of American ignorance. That has not been my experience.

Alright, so the misunderstandings.

That we all eat shit food because we have no taste, class, or decency.

Look, I get it. You’ve seen one hundred TikToks of a woman “making dinner” for her kids and it involves ten variations of cans, bags, and bottles but not one of actual fresh food. The Spanish stare wide-eyed. The Greeks turn away. The French actually vomit. But this is misunderstood and I never fail to correct it.

This is not about a people devoid of all decency: This is about poverty. This is about poverty that you, as a person living in a country with education and a social welfare system, has probably never seen. This is about food deserts and an exploitative system sending the worst food imaginable to the people because it’s more profitable for the monopolies making “food.”

This is about crap education that ends in the fifth grade. This is about the gradual and systematic devaluation of the working classes until Walmart does, in fact, become the place where “good things are bought,” a site of culture, and the trailer park the central square.

Also, this is entirely regional. I was poor as a child (not in the poverty I describe above) but ate tons of fresh food, because I was in California, where our food is quite literally grown in the fields next to us. And my mother was a Californian, decently educated. It’s just so much more complicated than “look at those trashy Americans.”

Does the existence of chemical-laden meals of non-food mean we are without class, without taste, without culture? Maybe. Maybe those things have been destroyed in America. But I would argue this isn’t true, and as a member of rather long line of folks who could be considered “white trash adjacent” — meaning, we lived in some of the most rural and poorest areas of California (yes they exist), we have plenty of culture. But no, it isn’t a thousand years old and it doesn’t involve a fresh baguette on the way home from work each day because the French government has regulated the price of baguettes.

It involves many things you wouldn’t understand, and probably wouldn’t find impressive.

Which brings me to the second misunderstanding: That Americans are fake.

Oh, the Dutch love this one. Americans are so fake with their smiles and greetings and “How are you?” questions that don’t actually desire an answer. And you know what, of course some of us are “fake.” Look, there is nothing more jarring to me than a perky fucking server in a restaurant who keeps asking stupid cheerful comments as if my family is the most delightful thing they’ve ever encountered. I, too, tire quickly when faced with a perkiness so vapid I’m immediately disarmed and wonder if this person burns kittens in her free time. “Settle down,” I want to say. “You’re making me nervous.” And I am an American.

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It felt worth speaking about. It helped that I’ve always viewed motherhood as inherently political, and my own path through motherhood as an active then recovering alcoholic further expanded the boundaries of discourse, but really, the topics of pregnancy, early motherhood and child-rearing felt worthy of discussion, attention, debate. And quite clearly, we mothers sought camaraderie.

Setting aside the parents who clung for dear life to the idea that they had it all figured out through sufficient education, adherence to some groundbreaking parenting plan, or perhaps just innate superiority in general, most of us felt we were doing our best in an ever-changing, vaguely impossible world. And we needed each other. We weren’t particularly afraid to talk of the trials of infants and toddlers, the poorly distributed domestic loads, the forever fleeting illusion of “work life balance” in a country like the United States. We talked of all of it, and showed up for each other. Parenting groups, play groups, meetings with other mothers. Emails, calls, texts, all on the topic of this wild, precarious, frenetic stage of life.

Now I am 47, my kids are 24, 20, 15, and 12, and as I’ve written previously, those frenetic years are gone. Nobody needs me to help them get dressed, make their meals, or even get them to school and back. I am not needed the way I was before, and this largely brings pure relief. I do not miss the chaos and mayhem, although every day I miss having little ones around. I look back and feel some relief that most of the time, no matter how crazy it got, I recognized the beauty of a child playing on our couch, lost in imagination — ah, the way they used to talk to themselves! That I miss all the way to my bones. The simplicity of it, picking them up and holding them against me, a simple gesture of affection able to soothe just about every tragedy in a little one’s life.

Now my children face alienation, challenging classes, bullying, broken hearts, and rapidly changing bodies. They face social media, a mother who only allows Snapchat, pressures of conformity, the delight of new love, the fluttering, the let downs and rekindling of it all. New independence, a struggle against boundaries, and the utter unfairness of regular chores.

It’s kind of less fun to parent them, frankly. No, that’s not entirely true. There’s less immediate return. Babies and kids just love you so damn much, get excited when you offer to make cookies with them. Going to the park is the most exciting real of the day. There is so much giving but so much coming right back at you. That was my experience, at least.

Teenagers, well, they’re different. But when we’re all sitting in a cafe in Spain, talking and laughing, and I think to myself well shit this adult/almost adult kid thing is also pretty great. I love watching them connect with one another as adults. I love watching us all find new ground together. It is a different type of “return.”

What strikes me, though, about these particular years is the silence that seems to have descended into my life, a sort of veil between the world and me. I’ve never had much of a clue how all of this is supposed to work — life, I mean — but now I am rather ashamed of it. It seemed acceptable to have no clue how to manage the mania of small children; it seems by now I should have more figured out.

I feel quite alone. Yes, I live in a country that is not my own. I have no family around. I have very few friends and no community to speak of. I work in the home. My life is tiny. So maybe this is all a result of my particular situation. Maybe if I were back in California I would be easily creating a life outside my children that would feel grounded, stable, like a step into what’s coming rather than a half-hearted circling around what used to be.

I feel I am in a liminal place, stuck between knowing how much my children still need me — and they fucking do — and my own feeling that I’m sort of over it, really, and ready to move on. Mac and I looked at each other the other day after some sort of half-assed parenting move and one of us asked, “Have we just, like, stopped parenting?” It was a joke, but part of me really does seem to think I’ve served my time and deserve the next 30 years to rest. I mean, 25 years of parenting is a pretty solid run, no? I’m ready for our retirement in Greece. And old age and death, I guess? Wait.

Look, I know we don’t get to stop parenting because the needs of teenagers are not those of five-year-olds. In many ways I think I’m more needed now than ever. But I try to let some complexity into this topic, because the truth is, we parents should be pulling away a bit, backing off, letting them live. I try to listen to the part of me that’s “over this,” because it may be indicating something important.

My job is to make my own life now, is it not?

Do I have a job?

I know I could create a very busy life for myself still centered on my children if I parented differently. But I don’t. And I have mostly accepted that I am not a mother who will micromanage children into success as she sees it. I tend to match the child’s efforts rather than force them into what’s called for, even if this means they fail. As in, I will not force them to do what’s required to pass a class, but I will provide every resource they ask for and give of myself just about every moment they request, but I really believe it must come from them.

I’ve heard of parents sitting down for hours each day with their teenagers to walk them through their homework, studies, etc. I will not do this, but I’ve never been entirely clear if this is an actual parenting ethic or I’m just lazy.

Am I driven by a personal sense of what’s right or mere self-centeredness? Time will tell I guess.

Anyway, what I feel lately goes beyond lack of community or a weird shift in daily responsibilities. There is something profoundly unstable about this time of life, isn’t there? I lost my father suddenly in 2023, which I wrote about here, and felt a shattering of at least 80% of the defenses I had created against existential reality. As in, I grew up, fast, in ways I had been neatly avoiding. And was rather enjoying if I’m being honest. Next in line, life half over, gonna die, that sort of thing.

But that isn’t totally it either. I think what I want to say is that where my earlier life’s struggles and mayhem felt they were somehow leading somewhere — the maturation of my children if nothing else— these years feel potentially stagnant, like they may or may not lead anywhere at all, as if I could just as easily end up shuffling around my living room watching TV and waiting for Christmas when my grandkids will visit.

And I really wish I could speak of all this the way we used to.

My life before “wasn’t working” because it was full of kids and babies and jobs and all of that seemed rather hellbent on destroying calm and my autonomy. Or at least I could pretend that was the reason. Now I should have the calm, and I certainly have fewer all-consuming kid days, but much of my life remains out of control — and I seem to have only myself to blame.

For example, it has become apparent to Mac and me that we did not instill in our children whatever is required for them to, like, clean up after themselves, do regular chores, or even really feel that they need to take seriously the “rules” of their parents. Please, for the love of god, do not offer advice here. I believe I have proven I am immune to that sort of helpfulness. I am fully aware that we failed in this department, that we should have been more consistent, made better rules we actually reinforced, bit more authoritarian in a few ways, perhaps. But we are here now, and this is just the thing I’m talking about. This is the time when we face the reality of our choices, half a life’s worth - and some of them are not that great.

And it’s the sort of thing I don’t really want to talk about with the larger world. Why? Because it’s boring. It’s dry. It’s failure as parents shit. I’m rather embarrassed about it. I often wonder if other adults live like this. Where my new motherhood struggles felt universal and understandable, this all feels acutely private, self-created, isolated!

What if we’re all wondering where the hell we went wrong while gazing at our teenagers but don’t know it because we’re too busy pretending we’re in a stable middle age era!

Take, for instance, laundry. I recently told a friend who doesn’t have children that I couldn’t meet her for coffee that day because “I had to do laundry.” (There were other things but that was one of the things I listed.) I probably should have explained what I meant by that because she may have been under the impression I am functioning adult. If I had explained what I meant by “do laundry,” I would have said the following:

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As in, you’re doing something you know to be weird, vaguely unhinged, probably childish and definitely unproductive, and yet you can’t stop?

Entirely unrelated, and for absolutely no reason in particular, today we’re going to focus on my entirely normal reaction to receiving a single negative Airbnb review from a host. As in, my family and I stayed in a house in Spain for nine nights, then we left, then received a negative review.

Thirteen years on the site, 59 trips, and I’ve never received a single negative comment, let alone referred to as “disgusting” and “disrespectful.”

This trip was in April. We are in mid-June. I still think about it occasionally, but I was properly obsessed for a surprising number of weeks. Why?

BECAUSE IT WAS UNFAIR.

Look, I’m sure every disrespectful and disgusting Airbnb guest stamps her feet while screaming life is unfair, but hear me out.

I have another definitely healthy attachment to leaving Airbnbs nicer than we found them. I am deeply committed to this practice. I do not know why. I clean everything. My family of course joins this process if they are present.

We sweep patios, clean all table surfaces, the stovetop, wipe down counters. We don’t just do the dishes, we dry and put them away, preferably in their exact original locations, including which pile of dishes precisely — which of course I am tracking while we’re there. I pile towels neatly, get rid of all trash, of course, and only leave unopened food in the fridge and freezer if explicitly told this is okay. Other tasks as required by location. You get the picture.

I did all of this at the Airbnb in Spain — actually, more.

First, a bit more context. This particular Airbnb host was the threatening, note-leaving type. You know them: Everywhere you look there’s a threat posted, probably laminated, letting you know what happens if you break whatever rule that section of the house evidently requires. For example, on the outdoor BBQ: “Clean the grill after use or you will be charged €50 upon check-out.” Or, by the bed: “If you rip the mosquito net you will be charged €100. Do not let your kids touch it.” That sort of thing.

Excellent vibes. Very relaxing.

Also, to be clear, not that it matters and yet it sort of does, this was a rather low-to low/mid grade quality Airbnb. It did not have a single knife sharp enough to cut anything; lots of appliances were missing knobs, etc. — the stove was a sort of slanted, theoretical situation with two settings of Burn All or Cook None.

The “couch” was two pallets with a futon (?) folded over it. This is fine. It was clean and usable! The beds were decently comfortable, which is all I really care about, and it had a beautiful outdoor area, which is really why we were there. To be outside in Spain!

I’ll just say it: It was a last-minute vacation so I rented what was available and in our budget. Choices were slim.

I say that because I was struck by the threatening notes everywhere pertaining to cheap, heavily used, pretty much destroyed belongings. Like if you’re going to wield your power over me at every moment, at least provide a knife that actually cuts stuff.

Upon check-in, we had to sign a two-page contract agreeing to all of the rules and acknowledging the energy use policy. We had a certain amount of electricity we could use and if we went past that, we’d be charged. The woman who checked us in, an employee of the owners, rolled her eyes at the contract and said, “The owners are very, um, controlling.”

You can imagine what this environment did to my codependent Airbnb relationship. I was on quadruple alert. Then I found out the owners were French! Just kidding. No but they really were French. This came up when the neighbors warned us that the [French] people who owned the Airbnb were, well, unhinged, really.

So I was nervous.

But no worries because I will just increase my efforts and rise to the occasion! If I put enough heart into it, I will impress them!

There is no stopping the capacity of a woman cleaning a house for the approval of others. Did I just say that out loud?

I meant to say something more feminist.

I checked the energy usage every three days, told the kids they can’t use the AC at all. Obsessively locked the front gate every time we left (another rule). For check-out, the rules were as follows: take out all your trash, stack up the towels. That was it.

Surprisingly light, I thought. Weird.

So what did I do? Everything I mentioned above, friends, but with the fear of god in me. The kids, Mac, and I swept the kitchen floor, cleaned every table surface, straightened couch pillows, emptied every trash can in the house, swept the patio and wiped outdoor chairs, wiped the cupboards and every counter, cleaned the bbq OBVIOUSLY, returned every pool item we used, cleaned the stove and backsplashes, made sure nothing was left anywhere - stray receipts, a puff of cotton, that sort of thing.

We did approximately twenty more tasks than the checkout instructions requested. This was how I would conquer the authoritarian note hosts!

That last morning, the woman who checked us out nodded her approval at the condition of the house and confirmed we did not go over the energy limit. Success Number ONE!

She confirmed that the beach chairs we couldn’t take home would be a welcome addition to the house for other guests (we didn’t want to foist our stuff on them). She confirmed that the unopened food was welcome as well. We drove away feeling we had done well. There was no doubt in my mind it would go as all the other trips had gone.

And then I got that negative review.

I’ll paraphrase what the hosts wrote:

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Rather quaint, really.

I had professors who could recite Chaucer from memory. My favorite Shakespeare professor used to reserve a back room at a local brewery once a week, and if we showed up and recited the Bard from memory, he’d buy us beer. Well, if we were 21 years old. We read Dante, Faulkner, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, who we also read in grad school, but for entirely different reasons.

In other words, I had what one may call a “traditional” literature education. We spoke little of feminism, and nothing of the white cishetero patriarchy, although we studied racism, Jim Crow, and women’s liberation. If you asked me what “othering” was, I would have taken a long drag of my clove cigarette and shrugged ironically.

You can imagine the explosion in my innocent little brain when I began grad school in 2007 and my whole world became theory. This is partly the result of the normal difference in focus between undergraduate and graduate education: Grad students delve deeper into theory. But the focus of my undergraduate education, even in an extremely liberal California town, was largely a result of the era. As in, the theories I studied in grad school — queer, feminist, critical race, Marxist, postcolonial, etc. — had not yet made their way into undergraduate education. If my professor friends are telling the truth, this is no longer the case.

This was a pretty effective way to learn, actually, because when I got to grad school I had four years of experience with the very canon we were now deconstructing.

I’ll be frank: These theories blew open my brain and solidified my politics. After a relatively conservative upbringing involving Mormonism, rural California, learning to shoot guns at age 8, and a Dad with a full-size Clint Eastwood cardboard stand-up doll, I was not particularly accustomed to the ideas my grad-school professors offered.

My upbringing was not as simple, however, as these anecdotes may suggest. I was raised rather poor by a single mother, and while we attended the Mormon church, my mom was something of a maverick. She was married to a non-Mormon, and all three of my parents (Dad, Mom, Stepmother) took me to concerts – Bob Dylan, Santana, the Dead. Not exactly standard Mormon behavior.

But again, I grew up in what would probably be categorized as lower middle class with some dabbling in the working poor. Not middle, that’s for sure. My family never owned a house, and we moved at least a dozen times by the time I was 14. I understand now that this is “housing insecurity.” I thought it was normal to leave rentals every 3-6 months for no discernable reason.

While I was never hungry, we had powdered milk and toothpaste delivered to us by Deseret Industries, the community aid nonprofit of the Mormon church. I believe I went to the dentist once. I experienced questionable “childcare” that was a direct result of not being able to afford safer options. We struggled to cover basic expenses. Our minivan had a duct-taped window and spewed black smoke. Sometimes my paternal grandmother would take me to Wet Seal to buy three new outfits for school, and this was the fanciest moment of my life.

Things changed after middle school. We moved from Central to Northern California, where I attended a Catholic girls’ school on partial scholarship, and my incredible mother worked in the lunch room to reduce my tuition further. I had moved in with my dad and stepmother, who were decidedly better off, so I had a nice little car to drive, lived in a tree-filled neighborhood, and attended private school. Sure, I had two jobs, but also a gym membership, and all my friends were rich. I could almost pretend I came from one of those winery families.

This is no sob story and I do not intend to frame it as such. I was in no way destitute. I would have never faced homelessness.

My point here is that I did not have a life that encouraged particularly rigid ideas about our country and I did not grow up in a uniformly comfortable bubble. I parroted the patriotism of my parents, but the moment I was presented with an alternative to that “best country on earth/we are very free/please ignore the meth addicts dying in the streets” narrative, I saw my own experience reflected back to me.

I had experienced firsthand the country where a single mother could not find stable housing or access sufficient healthcare. I knew the relief I felt when my mom finally got health insurance because Obama removed the preexisting conditions restrictions, so the whiplash she got from a car accident back in the 1980s no longer jacked up her premium past what she could afford. I remember where I was standing when she told me that news (by the photocopy machine at the office where I was a receptionist).

I remember how a very old, deep worry for my favorite person on earth seemed to lift out of my body. Finally, finally my mom will have health insurance. I knew the country that left families with little to no healthcare so corporations could make more billions.

When I learned of the inequality of this country, of the top 1% controlling 40% of the economy, of the neoliberal order rooted in whiteness, racism, exploitation of the working classes — well, I understood it. I had experienced part of it, and saw how I benefited from other parts of it.

Even more transformative was that I felt I had been sold a lie. I had been given a false story of my own country, one of bootstraps, equality, and the “American dream.”

But now, here in this classroom discussing all these new ideas, I had the Truth. (It had not yet occurred to me that these people also told me there is no Truth but I digress.)

This is a particularly exciting moment in a young person’s life. If you haven’t experienced it, it feels like being let in on an edgy, forbidden secret. I know things I’m not supposed to know. There’s a certain wildness to buying Marx at the school bookstore and reading it.

As you may have guessed, I was most interested in Marxist theory. But I also inhaled gender, critical race, and postcolonial theories. I read Said, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Halbersam, hooks, Lacan, and Benjamin. Among many others. I wrote, studied them all, and taught writing to undergrads through four modules: gender, labor, race, power.

Writing. That’s how I taught writing. As in, first-year composition courses. Okay, moving on.

It wasn’t until I moved to The Netherlands that many of the ideas I formed in grad school were directly challenged, reshaped, given some context and nuance. I wrote about that here if you’re curious.

My point now, however, is to say the following: I understood in graduate school that we studied obscure theorists and their radical, complex ideas to push back on mainstream narratives of the world, to see things in a new way. It was to complicate neat framings of why society is as it is, teach us to think more critically, and interrogate that which is portrayed as inalienable cultural fact. We were challenging the stories written by the victors of history.

I did not think concepts like “all truth claims are socially constructed” or “human interactions should be understood as negotiations of power” – or, you know, Judith Butler’s entire canon – were offering literal instructions for organizing society. I understood them as analytical frameworks, lenses to examine literature and the world through different angles, not as blueprints for existence.

For example, contemplating the nature of truth and cultural relativism pushed back on what came before: That there is one single Truth, western cultures have it, and everyone else should learn it so they, too, can be civilized. It complicated ethnocentrism and asked us to understand other cultures within their own contexts rather than blanketing them with ours and judging accordingly.

It did not mean, for example, that female genital mutilation cannot be critiqued as a harmful practice because we aren’t part of that culture and therefore we must accept it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Much of what we studied, of course, applied directly to “real life.” Questions of privilege, class dynamics, and gender inequalities.

For example, studying the history of redlining and white flight reframed and deepened my understanding of how American “ghettos” were formed, how our society ended up segregated, even today, with white folks largely in the suburbs and people of color in more urban areas. This of course pushes hard against narratives of laziness, of poverty as a matter of not trying hard enough. As a Gen X kid, I grew up with deep devotion to bootstraps. Complicating that “American dream” story allowed me to understand the country better, and question for whom these stories were actually true.

In short, grad school helped extricate me from powerful narratives I had uncritically adopted through a process of cultural osmosis.

Perhaps it was my mistake to believe we weren’t supposed to apply all of these theories directly to our lives, but no professor ever asked us, for example, to envision a society organized around postmodernism’s most fundamental implications. We studied Foucault’s arguments about the relationship between power and knowledge, and Derrida’s critiques of language and meaning, and these ideas taught us to interrogate assumptions long treated as neutral or obvious.

We learned to ask: “Who benefits from this truth? Who is harmed? Who is left out? Which assumptions exist that reflect a particular space and time?”

But we stopped there. We did not discuss what may happen if these ideas truly formed the basis for our analyses, or even if they formed the primary basis. If we cannot reach a “neutral” truth due to the inherent fallibility and subjectivity of the person making the claim, how do we determine if one truth is more accurate than another?

If we are not using material reality as the measure of a claim’s validity (e.g. Is there evidence of this? Does reality reflect this?), what exactly do we use? How do we create a common understanding of what’s true?

If our understanding of truth is always shaped by subjective social power, how do we defend science, the law, or any shared reality at all? I mean, on some level, don’t we need to agree that there is some truth “out there” to study and find?

And would the ultimate extension of Foucault’s assertions likely be a shift from the material world to the social positions of those making truth claims? Would it not make sense that we spend our time analyzing the social position and identity of the speaker rather than the quality of the claim itself?

And do we not see evidence of this happening now?

We played, we dreamed, we tossed these theories around endlessly, our brains lit up with the potential of it all.

But we never asked: Does this actually work?

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Imagine my surprise when all that forbidden knowledge began popping up everywhere, all wily-nily in the mainstream. Cultural appropriation, whiteness, intersectionality, gender as performance, systemic racism, etc. — everywhere!

First of all: Rude. I was having a hard enough time being a radical marxist in my minivan with Starbucks and four kids, but to hijack our sacred subversive secrets? Back off, Teen Vogue.

Second, part of what made these ideas so transformative and powerful was precisely that they subverted that which “they” were all saying. And yet it was stolen by these hegemonic institutions? (Ah, hegemonic. A word I used at least four times a week and 7-9 times in every essay.)

Yes, the words were everywhere, and still are, but certainly not as I learned them. The versions floating around the mainstream are deeply oversimplified, one-dimensional, and largely stripped of context. Some have strayed so far from their origins they now signify the opposite of what they originally meant.

This should not have surprised me. For again, we never discussed implications for society of literal application (thus we were not “warned,” so to speak, of potential drawbacks), and beneath every classroom discussion was the understanding that we were trying to improve a deeply broken world. A vein of activism pulsed through every literary deconstruction. It was all a social project, for what is the point of critiquing a nation ad nauseum if not to improve it?

It should also not be surprising that the most superficial versions of these ideas would be what flourished in the mainstream. Nuance is difficult to sell, confuses algorithms, and generally involves more words than Twitter allows, or once allowed. We all know this, right?

The problem is that now we’re stuck with this bullshit.

Now that I’m 47 and a Republican — JUST KIDDING — thirteen years out of grad school, I can safely argue that this is our fault and it’s our job to deal with it. We let the theory out of the bag, unleashed it onto the world, and now some truly inane ideas have planted themselves into leftist identity, lexicon, and ontology.

I just felt like saying “ontology.”

I recognize this is all sounding a bit elitist. As if the world can’t handle the genius of cultural theory. As if academics alone have what it takes to apply complex ideas. No, what I’m saying is, the mainstreaming of a thing requires a simplifying process so it can be digested easily by masses of people, travel fast, and apply everywhere.

The ideas become mainstream through the process of simplification, and most people have only encountered these concepts in the simplified version.

Complex, useful ideas become caricatures of themselves until eventually, the caricature is all that exists.

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Why should we care? Well, I have a hypothesis, and I’m going to test it. I believe these terms have morphed into largely unhelpful oversimplifications that are often used more as badges of social merit than as productive analytical lenses.

While surely many of us truly use these concepts to understand the world more deeply, they have also become cultural and social capital. I’m using the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, a 1970s French sociologist, who argued that just like economic capital is passed through generations (money), there are elements of cultural and social capital that function in similar ways in terms of power, but it’s a power earned through who and what you know.

Bourdieu defined “cultural capital” as “familiarity with the legitimate culture within a society” (source).

We might call it “high culture,” – you know, the difference between growing up in New York City with two professor parents versus growing up in a rural California town where Wet Seal was the height of culture in your life. Broadway musicals, art, theater, trips to Europe versus rented movies, football games at the local high school, and marathon camping trips up and down the west coast (god, mom, that was so damn cool and so fun).

This is not about a genuine superiority of the former, but rather a recognition that we gain and transfer cultural power in more ways than just money and property. It also complicates the idea that a person born into poverty can simply get a bunch of cash and immediately join the cultural hegemony (whee I said it again!).

Bourdieu defined “social capital” as: “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a “credential” which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (The Forms of Capital, Bourdieu, 1986, pp. 248-249).

Holy shit, right?

I’m arguing that these concepts largely function as social and cultural capital by signalling “legitimate” and “high” culture in powerful institutions of business, education, and politics.

They function as markers of legitimacy and are believed to reflect the most enlightened, progressive, kind, and fair politics, as well as sufficient education level to join the group. Without the education, though, we can simply adopt the language to gain inclusion, and this is the phenomenon I wish to address because I think it’s where a lot of the weird morphing has occurred. As in, we don’t actually have to know what these words mean. Simply using them is sufficient to gain us inclusion, status, and protection among particular social groups, and we cannot pretend these are not extremely powerful groups.

And we all know how these concepts are used online. Let’s not get into it, but it’s rather evident that they’re largely meaningless and repeated in a sort of rote, almost religious or sacred speech act that serves as signals of allegiance and a buffer from critique.

So, what am I going to do?

Well, I’m going to test my hypotheses by going back to my grad school roots and research these concepts: Where they came from, who they came from, and, perhaps most importantly, what they’ve turned into. As in, what they mean now. I’ll use primary sources and do my best to trace their evolutions in a balanced way and open discussion in a non-academic way. Let’s just talk about this stuff.

Maybe society has improved these concepts over the years. Maybe I learned sad, archaic versions and the ones currently on Bluesky are better.

Who knows. But let’s find out.

Here are the terms I’ll begin with, publishing one or two essays a month. (Some will be available to everyone, some for paid only, but as usual, there are free trial paid subscriptions available to read it all free.)

1. Cultural appropriation

2. Identity politics

3. Whiteness/white privilege

4. Intersectionality

5. Gender as a social construct/performance — sex vs. gender (I may not write this one as I’m not yet ready to be called whatever I’ll be called for even gently tapping this subject with a 10-foot pole)

6. Standpoint epistemology — okay nobody talks about this but it’s too relevant to ignore

7. Cultural relativism

8. Colonization/Decolonization

9. Emotional labor (this isn’t something we talked about in grad school but it’s an interesting one to trace because it has a truly interesting history)

10. It really annoys me that I don’t yet have a tenth, so I’m writing this to make myself feel better (ten feels balanced, nine feels weird — I swear I’m fine).

Fun fact, this essay was supposed to be a short and simple intro to this series I’ll be writing. That seemed to go well.

Anyway, which terms should I add to the list? Anything you’d like to know more about?

And finally, I am fully aware that this is the most dangerous ground I’ve tread, and I have been very afraid to “go there.” That’s a separate conversation but one worth having at some point, I think. Why are we so afraid to say something deemed heretical? Why are we afraid to do anything other than smile, nod, repeat the mantras and keep our questions buried deep in our souls?

This cannot possibly help us. As I’ve said a thousand times before, good ideas should withstand critique. And the thing is, I believe these are mostly good ideas, or were at one point. I believe they have a lot to offer us.

Plus, it’s fun to learn shit.

I am not a staunch supporter of Mother’s Day. Do not actually know what that would look like. I do not care if a person likes Mother’s Day or hates it. In fact, it’s difficult to think of a more irrelevant aspect of my existence.

And yet, it bothers me.

I admit this is a flaw on my part. I am a woman, a writer, and a mother, but a foolish one, because I have always insisted on allowing all three of those identities to inform my work. Of course I didn’t know it was a foolish choice when I began writing about motherhood. I didn’t know it was frumpy, anti-intellectual, boring, base, and pedestrian. I didn’t know it was a thousand things I didn’t see or feel as a mother, but rarely that which I did feel: That motherhood is a complex, central part of my existence as a human, and thus worthy of analysis.

If we write to explore the human condition, why not this?

Because it is not literary, Janelle. It is not elevated. You will not “make it” doing such things. And yet here I am, still caring about it, still feeling the urge to defend its validity as a real topic worthy of respect and inquiry, insisting I can be a feminist and defend it, that I can be an intellectual with four kids, and that I will probably never reconcile the tensions between those roles.

You see, my situation can force a person to talk about dumb shit like Mother’s Day. My opinion on Mother’s Day is why the hell would I have an opinion on Mother’s Day? Just like Father’s Day, Veteran’s Day, Labor Day, or any other day claiming to recognize the contributions of a certain group of people, if it means anything at all it’s only through whatever we have or have not created around the moment.

But clearly I do have an opinion on Mother’s Day, or I would not be here writing this. Better said, I have an opinion on the way we depict motherhood as a concept, in ways that contradict reality, denigrate the women performing the role, and reinforce old tropes of what it means to raise children, or hold the identity of “mother.”

Living in The Netherlands, I have seen certain days mean something real on a societal level. Every May 4, which is the Day of Remembrance in honor of all those who lost their lives in the Second World War, everything stops at 8pm in The Netherlands and there is silence in the whole country for two minutes. Trains, ferries, trams, and buses stop running for those two minutes. No planes land or take off. Our first year here during that time, we were in a packed, modern, Amsterdam restaurant, and the servers went around to each table to warn us what was happening. They were extremely stern. It was not negotiable. And when the clock struck 8pm, everyone was silent. It was powerful.

Right. Mother’s Day is not that.

Perhaps it once had potential to offer a meaningful reflection on mothers, but since America simply cannot help but suck all depth from a thing, even the woman who “created” Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, wanted it abolished because she grew so disgusted with the commercialized travesty it had become.

A little more on the topic:

“After Ann Jarvis’ death, her daughter, Anna Jarvis (1864–1948), set out to honor her mother’s legacy by establishing a national Mothers’ Day on the second Sunday in May, the day her mother had died. Anna, who never married or had children of her own, did not focus the holiday on peace activism but on the idea of honoring one’s own mother. She chose white carnations as an emblem and urged people to write heartfelt letters of gratitude to their mothers (in Anna Jarvis’ eyes, sending a pre-printed card didn’t count). Anna succeeded in her quest for official recognition, and President Wilson issued a proclamation of the first national Mother’s Day just before the start of World War I in 1914.  

Anna Jarvis, however, soon grew discontented as she noted increasing commercialization of the celebration. What she had wanted to be an earnest ‘holy day’ had become, in her eyes, a crass holiday benefitting florists and greeting card companies more than honoring the mothering work done by women. Anna was so distraught over the way Americans observed the holiday she had worked hard to establish that she started a petition to have it recalled in 1943. Five years later she died penniless in a sanitarium where her bills were paid by the same greeting card companies and florists she despised.”   (https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/history-mothers-day-global-peace-greeting-cards)

Yes, the day “honoring mothers” has been masticated by American consumerism and spat out into grocery story aisles in the form of hot pink teddy bears with “I LOVE U” balloons made in India by children paid 3 cents a day.

Don’t we all know this?

And just like every other day ruined by materialistic drivel - Christmas, Easter, etc. — we have or have not formed our own traditions around the day, in our homes, with our families, creating something meaningful outside the glittering vomit of American materialism threatening to drown us all.

Wow, should have worked a little harder on that. Drowning in glittering vomit is a rough one.

But the annual Mother’s Day experience disturbs me, every year, and finally I’ve taken the time to figure out why. Am I “gatekeeping” motherhood? Am I being mean? What about me is disturbed by the endless memes in pastel colors listing ten different identities who need to be included in the Mother’s Day greetings? Why would it matter?

On a superficial level, the whole thing exemplifies an ever-expanding division I feel between myself and a certain section of the liberal left. There seems to be this contingent of scolds, of performance artists, of the ones who always have the best, most enlightened, “progressive” way to see a thing. What it invokes in me is an eye-roll so dramatic I fear I’ll damage my brain.

Is this why they say people become more “conservative” as they grow older? I am not a conservative. But there is a deep sense in me of “Oh, come on,” as if I’m just tired of their posturing.

But let’s get back to Mother’s Day. A few years ago, I wrote a rather scathing critique of Anne Lamott’s famous screed on the day, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized that while everything I said was true — that I can’t understand how a writer can publish something so self-righteous and full of unsupported claims every year without ever noticing it as such — what I really want to talk about is greater than her or any individual messaging around the topic. However, her piece does an excellent job encapsulating the mess.

So, I will engage Lamott’s piece as demonstrative of the larger conversation because it really does hit all the main points. It illustrates the uncritical repetition of narratives around motherhood that I believe contribute to the larger societal devaluation of the role.

Lamott’s main argument is that Mother’s Day reinforces the narrative that mothers are better than everyone else, that it perpetuates sanctity of motherhood tropes. But she never bothers to explain how a day of recognition and alleged gratitude necessarily implies that the people being celebrated are better than everyone else.

Does she make the same critique of Veteran’s Day, or is she somehow able to stretch her mind into the idea that we can say “Good morning, society thanks you for your contributions” without saying, “You are better than all other people.”

She also manages to claim that the day is nothing but an empty Hallmark holiday - complete with ample self-congratulation for not forcing her son to engage in such empty gestures — while simultaneously arguing the day causes deep emotional pain.

Which one is it? Meaningless, or a weapon of profound emotional harm?

No, she means the entire concept of mothers, does she not? A day shining a spotlight on motherhood is what’s causing the pain, even if all that surrounds that day is bullshit. It is mothers who cause the pain. It is mothers who are capable of the deep and profound emotional harm.

I’m not arguing this isn’t true, but damn, Anne, define your terms and own what you’re saying. I’m guessing that’s a lot more difficult, though, because then she’s edging dangerously close to the very assumption she claims to be discrediting: That motherhood itself is endowed with a deep, sacred importance, and thus when a woman sucks at it, she causes profound harm.

For if mothers cause unique and special pain, it seems we thus occupy a unique and special place, but she just got done saying we shouldn’t “elevate” motherhood to any unique importance at all.

In other news, have you ever seen classes and workshops and retreats offering to help “heal the father wound?” I haven’t. Anybody find it interesting that if a person ends up a murderer or sociopath or bottom-dwelling internet troll or any other nondescript failure, everyone concludes he must have had a horrid mother?

Look, I’m not sure where I stand on that. I do believe a person’s mother is profoundly important and a bad one can really, really damage a person. I believe this relationship is different from that which we have with a father. I believe there is something primally relevant to the mother-child relationship, past intellect and reason, and I understand that I occupy an irreplaceable role in my children’s lives.

But all I’m really asking is that we treat motherhood as significant and thus worthy of, oh, I don’t know, basic social support if we are going to blame it for the ills of the world.

Instead, we blame it for everything wrong with humankind while simultaneously claiming it’s the same as “raising” a “fur baby.”

As in, if we accept the premise that motherhood is that important, surely we should be critiquing the vapidity of Mother’s Day, but even more critically, the hypocrisy of the gesture as a whole in a country like the USA, where we get brunch deals but no paid maternity leave, flowers and a $5 card but a rising maternal death rate, no childcare assistance, abysmal labor rights, and the vast majority of the mental load.

Critique that, friends. Now that’s a damn argument.

But Lamott does not make any such claims. She states that the day unnecessarily elevates mothers while causing deep emotional pain and she, being a better person than the muppets running around getting preschool pottery from their kids or having mimosas with their friends, is the one who has risen above that mess in recognition of the sufferers.

According to Lamott, the day hurts because some people have bad mothers, or their mothers have died, or they wish to become mothers, or have lost children, or their kids are assholes. No really. She really mentions bad children as a reason the holiday could hurt. You can read this on Facebook. It’s on her profile, published, you guessed it, this Mother’s Day. And every Mother’s Day for the past decade.

I can only imagine the pain a woman would feel the first Mother’s Day without her mother, or, my god, a miscarriage or lost child. I can only imagine the sting of this day each year to a woman facing infertility. And I find it wildly dismissive of the depth of that pain to assert that it can be seen, recognized, held, healed, or helped by a thing as superficial and nonsensical as a person “recognizing” their suffering.

A woman facing that pain can’t possibly desire recognition or feel soothed by the thought of it. She wants her baby back. She wants to call her Mom. She wants a newborn in her arms.

Maybe I’m just allergic to superficial gestures in the face of existential agony, but I find it wildly insulting to assume we can ever meet the pain of a woman who has lost her child.

And look, call me a Dutch Republican all you want, but the fact is, if you get old enough, holidays cause pain. Every single one of them. I learn this more with every passing year, but never more than the past three years since losing my father.

On every holiday morning, I feel his hand grab mine as I rise from my bed to go celebrate and be joyful or whatever with my family. He’s with me now, all day, every time. I feel the ghost of his big, calloused hand patting the back of mine, the way he used to as we watched my kids open the gifts he brought for Christmas, or handing me a beer a long, long time ago at our annual Father’s Day lunch.

Now my Christmases echo the sound of my toddlers’ feet a decade or two ago, my own face in my 20s with so much life to live. I see my dead uncles, cousins, and grandmothers around the tree. I watch my Dad dancing to Stevie Nicks in my grandmother’s kitchen, three sheets to the wind, eventually dropping the Thanksgiving turkey. He used the 5-second rule. It was fine.

I see them all now, and I understand why old folks cry when we sing Auld Lang Syne.

Now that he’s gone, Father’s Day sits in me like a tomb, but I don’t need you to see me, to hide your dad who’s still around. Enjoy him. Damn. I’d like mine back. I don’t “feel better” by the idea that some writer on the internet “sees me.”

At 47 years old, I understand life is a steady march to increasing isolation and pain until we lie alone in a coffin getting eaten by maggots. Stop sheltering me from reality!

Oh come on, this is me being positive.

I seek it out, though, sometimes. The pain. When nobody is home. I turn on a song I know will really hurt and I talk to him. I hear the songs of my childhood I knew with him, sitting in the back of his Mustang while he drove on Hwy 101, up and down California to pick up my brother and me for our visits.

In my living room, my dog rests his head on my knee while I cry. After my father died, I used to wail, sob, and then my dog would stand on his back legs and rest his paws on my shoulders if I was sitting, trying to get to my face. He’d push his nose into my chest, under my neck. He knows all he can do is come close. He knows there is no repair.

Some of us understand this, and prefer respect for the full weight of that reality.

***

Every year, I see people extending Mother’s Day wishes to “plant moms,” “dog moms,” and, my personal favorite, “women who chose not to become mothers.”

To recap, what we’re working with here is the underlying argument that motherhood causes a “mother wound,” can ruin actual lives, is so powerful a mere email or mention of mothers, mothering, or motherhood can send a person spiraling into deep personal suffering, but also it’s the same as watering a ficus.

Hold your seat here, but implying that being a mother is the same as taking care of a dog — well, it’s not great, guys. It’s what you might call a bit “dismissive.” And I’d die for my dog I swear to god.

The idea that a “woman who chooses not to become a mother” should be celebrated on Mother’s Day is degrading and condescending. How little do people think of women who choose not to become mothers? Do they imagine them all sitting around going, “Gee I wish I could receive a participation trophy for playing on a team I purposely didn’t join?” As if they’re begging for our approval, a little pat on the head that they, too, are special.

Further, I offer: “On this Veteran’s Day, we also celebrate people who are not veterans.”

Wouldn’t want them to feel left out, less than! They too have value, guys. Has nobody considered the feelings of every possible person with an experience or opinion on veterans or war?

My point is this: Being a mother — which of course I extend to any woman raising children, for whatever reason — is a lived, material reality. It is a specific role with massive material ramifications. It has a literal, real cost on the lives of the women doing it. It is also, may I remind folks, how we continue as a species but let’s not get caught up in the details.

It is not the same as not raising children. It is not the same as having a dog. And yes, I have really seen the plant thing.

I know, we’re just being “nice.” We’re “seeing everyone.” But perhaps we could take a look, for a moment, at the way this particular category collapse is reserved for mothers, and ask ourselves why that may be.

I have not seen demands that we include “dog dads” on Father’s Day. Have not seen demands that we extend recognition to “all people fathering anyone.” What does that even mean? Nothing, because fatherhood is seen as an actual, specific role in society with discrete boundaries, and men are not expected to shoulder the emotional wellbeing of the entire planet.

It is also apparently assumed that men have the emotional stamina to manage their feelings if they desire to become fathers but cannot. If they have lost children. If they have lost their fathers. Anybody want to clear up for me why women are not extended this basic respect? Why it’s assumed we’re all too fragile to face a day bringing to mind complex relationships, grief, or deep desire? Is this not perpetuating the very stereotypes we aim to deconstruct?

Beneath all of this, though, is a single fact: People are able to do this because the material, complex reality of motherhood is reduced to a one-dimensional concept of “nurturing.” Of caring for a thing. And of course, we can care for anything: a plant, a student in a classroom, a pet.

Therefore, “motherhood” is open to anyone with a desire to keep a thing alive or care for it lovingly.

In a nation that does not even offer paid federal maternity leave, why are we defining motherhood as a mere mentality of nurturing, as nothing more than the offering of kindness and care?

Why are we furthering the idea that motherhood is a mere state of mind anyone can have?

Mothers have unique needs because they occupy a specific role in society, precisely because this role is not universal. We advocate for the category of mothers based on the reality of that position, not a personality of nurturing.

Indeed, if raising a child is the same as “dog momming,” watering a plant, or not having children, on what grounds exactly can we fight for maternity leave? For childcare assistance? If we are not doing anything of note in the world, if we are just like everyone else out there “being nice,” why the hell would they acknowledge our pleas for them to provide what we need?

As usual, material reality is usurped by superficial discussions of identity and feelings. This is not progressive. It’s not even leftist. There is no revolution to be televised.

We aren’t all nurturers, friends. And it is not my job to make myself applicable or palatable to everyone on earth. Why are we asking women who raise kids, whether by blood, marriage, or circumstance, to make themselves smaller — disappear, actually, preferably — because they hurt people’s feelings?

We all know the answer. Because motherhood is degraded, diminished, and ground down into the fluffy realm of disposable femininity.

You want to talk about the complexity of motherhood and the concept of “nurturing?” Go read Beloved by Toni Morrison.

****

I am acutely aware of the narratives surrounding motherhood, one of the most destructive of which being the sanctimony. I wrote an irreverent “mommy blog” for ten years largely devoted to complicating ideas of motherhood and questioning societal assumptions surrounding it.

But this apparently was not enough. I then wrote a whole book about it. I quite consciously wrote an entire book questioning the concept of motherhood turning us into better versions of ourselves, as if the love of our children washes us clean of our personalities — our individuality, history, defects, and normal, selfish desires. I did it by sharing my story of late-stage alcoholism and addiction after having children.

You see, I was not a mother who gazed at the two pink lines on that pregnancy test, fell so in love I never drank again. I made that promise a thousand times, pummeled by addiction counselors at rehabs and mental institutions asking me, “But don’t you love your children?” The idea being of course that my love for them should be enough to stop me from doing 4-day cocaine runs and drinking whiskey alone in my car.

I would nod. I would cry. I would hold my children’s photos and weep. I would feel so much love for those kids I could have died. And the shame, the self-loathing, the horror of what I had done. I thought surely it would be enough this time to keep me sober. And yet, I always drank again.

I eventually concluded I was defective, incapable of love, born without some necessary trait that makes people able to act on their devotion, their deepest feelings.

What I didn’t understand, and what those counselors would have understood had they used science instead of tired tropes about a mother’s love, is that addiction doesn’t care who we love. Once it’s passed a certain point, once the brain is rewired for addiction, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that weighs options, pulls up the past, performs cost/benefit analyses, goes dead in the face of the “drug of choice.”

What’s activated is the primal brain, the part wired for survival. In other words, I had no ability to pull into my mind my own morals and desire to be a good mother, the consequences of my actions, in the critical moments when I needed it. That’s why when an addict says they are using “against their will,” while it sounds insane, they mean it. That’s how it feels. And we are as confused as you.

This is not an excuse. It’s the biology of addiction. It needs treatment, not misogynistic guilt-tripping.

(Anybody want to ask how many times my husband was asked BUT DON’T YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN when he went to rehab? Zero times. The answer is zero times.)

Yes, I know, you’re thinking “What if there was a gun held to your head and the trigger would be pulled if you used. Would you do it then?” Well, no, friend, because the brain is able to process “immediate death” vs “drug in front of me” and in that case the primal brain says “Best not to do it right now.” Only problem with this helpful little scenario is that at no time in my decade of addiction was there a gun to my head. Rather happy about that, actually.

There were only sanctimonious pleadings from people who meant well, and probably knew better, but just could not fathom a mother’s love not being strong enough to cure addiction.

I wrote my book because there’s a chance a person’s mother both loved them and couldn’t get sober — although I have no idea whose mothers loved them or not. I wanted the children of alcoholic mothers to understand it was not that they weren’t good enough, and that they could not have loved their mother out of addiction, either. To me, the hardest thing about people who harm us is that they may also love us. That is, at least, true in my experience.

A “mother’s love” takes place in a person. A broken, standard, human. It’s nothing more or less than any other love and it’s no less vulnerable to all that’s broken and harmful within me.

I was not improved when I gave birth. I was simply expected to erase my defects, washed clean by some miraculous process of my child’s birth, and my own rebirth.

When I went into a recovery group and it was explained to me that my alcoholism does not care who I love, will never care about that, does not care how I want my life, and that I could not rely on my thoughts to make good decisions — as in, I needed to not trust my own addicted brain — my life started changing. I have now been sober for over 17 years.

So you do not need to talk to me about narratives of the sanctimony of motherhood, and I’m disgusted by the way women who do not have children are treated as deficient, unfulfilled, or missing out on “the deepest love” — or whatever nonsense hyperbole they say.

What I want is for mothers to be understood in all the complexity afforded to standard human beings. Nothing more, nothing less. I want society to stop defining us based on whatever serves their purpose at the moment. I would like our role in American society to be recognized as worthy of basic social support.

I want everyone, including mothers, to stop perpetuating narratives of perfection. We’re all a bunch of assholes just trying to survive. I imagine we’ll find a lot of freedom there, if we ever make it.

***

For me, Mother’s Day was a day when my preschoolers proudly handed me the little pottery mug they made at school, the barely legible note they’d written with a drawing. It was a day when we’d have a barbecue at my grandmother’s house, when all the aunts would get together and all twenty cousins, and the men and children would cook — the mothers, for once, doing nothing. We did that every year until my mentally ill cousin killed my grandmother by stabbing her in the neck with a Kershaw hunting knife in November 2016. The Mother’s Day event did not happen again.

Sorry to be so “no trigger warning” about that, but I told you, you won’t find any sweet narratives of maternal nurturing coming out of me. My maternal grandmother was killed because my cousin went off his psych meds, because, in the words of my aunt, “They were making him fat. He’s going to try golf instead.”

Turns out golf does not treat severe mental illness involving paranoid delusions. Who knew. And my grandmother paid for it with her life. She had four daughters. She spent her whole life never going to Thai restaurants because even though it was her favorite, my grandfather didn’t like it. Five weeks after he died, she told me all the things she was going to do with her life. She was 86 but vibrant, healthy, so fully alive. But instead she bled out on a kitchen floor, her life taken by a beloved grandson.

Isn’t that precious?

There’s my story of maternal lineage. How nurturing and beautiful, no?

My paternal grandmother was a stoic, stern, staunch intellectual who wore red velvet to her wedding in the late 1930s. She was the first female editor of her college newspaper. She had five children and worked her whole life running her newspapers. She fought issues in Washington D.C. She was a Christian Scientist who sent my dad to school with easily treatable but very painful and humiliating skin conditions. She occasionally “took to her bed.” Her cousin would come over and nurse her back to functionality by doing paint-by-number art projects.

These are the mothers I come from. Not sure how they fit into neat delineations of nurturing and tender care, but perhaps I’m not “nice” enough to see it myself.

***

I once wrote a piece called, “This Mother’s Day, Celebrate Somebody Else.” I was newly sober, and the memories of my years away from my children sat on my chest like granite boulders. The shame, the regret, the nightmare memories. It wasn’t so much self-pity or self-loathing, but rather sitting with the reality of the pain I had caused. The truth of what I was. Who I was. As these children’s mother.

When I wrote that, I wasn’t far enough from the time my daughter had a kindergarten graduation and I wasn’t there, when she walked across a little podium with a flower in her hand, scanning the crowd for her mother’s face, and she did not find it.

I was not far enough away from my toddler son, who lived with my mother when I could not take care of him, ran to me one day and said, “Mama, home,” when I came to visit for a few hours, and I got on my knees and held his sweaty little head against me, knowing full well I would not stay for long, and I was not home. That home was not a thing I could provide.

During those early years of sobriety I felt the full weight of my abandonment of my most beloved creatures on this earth. I could not look away. I could not deny, minimize, or fix it. It simply was. I got through those years because the man who helped me get sober used to say, “Someday maybe you will help other mothers get sober. Maybe your experience will help them.” I tried to believe him, though I couldn’t see it. It was all I had. And I used to tell myself, Janelle, if you really feel so bad about that, then all you can do is live every day for the rest of your life sober. Show up today. Show up again and again.

I cannot regain those years, but I can spend the rest of my life creating something new.

Now, 17 years later, those thoughts don’t come so often anymore, although every now and then I’ll see an old photo, or a memory will run across my mind, and I’ll shudder. But now I have 17 years between me and those years, seventeen Mother’s Days of pottery mugs, desserts, flowers, my 20-year-old son, the one who was a toddler way back then, making me dinner on Mother’s Day, writing a note that said, “Mama, we need to have our regular lunches again. The little kids may not see all you do, but I do.”

Nobody made the day mean a single thing to me, but I crawled through hell to make my way back to the Hallmark day when my kids say, Mama, what do you want today? And I think for a moment, who cares.

And realize, perhaps, I do.

We were asked to write about a moment, story, hero, idea, metaphor, whatever - real or imagined - that hit us deeply, like right in the soul, then lodged itself there permanently. That’s my paraphrase, of course. I knew almost immediately what mine would be.

Here is what I wrote I response. I thought some of you, particularly those trying to balance creative work and “real life,” or even dreams and reality, the “soul’s calling” versus the calls of surviving in this world — well, anyway. Here it is. It is rough and unedited, but some things are best that way.

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Frankly I am way too self-centered for that sort thing. And too lazy. That’s a level of work I am unwilling to invest in my offspring. And it sounds truly boring.

While that sort of parenting may have found a place in my very liberal town in California, I wouldn’t survive ten minutes in The Netherlands. Here, minor to mid-range kid-to-kid fights (even lightly physical ones) are still considered normal. An adult’s first approach to such moments is “Meh, they’ll figure it out.” I have experienced countless moments here that would be considered a really big deal in the California schools we attended, yet are seen as standard kid behavior here, and treated as such. Teachers only engage when it’s clear the kids have not sorted it out themselves, and when they do engage, it’s as a mediator more than a director or authority.

That said, for some godforsaken reason, all three of my children who have attended school in The Netherlands have experienced overt and significant bullying. I am not going to go into details on account of my kids’ privacy, but I will tell you it involved physical aggression and assault, online and in-person harassment, threats, shaming and name-calling, and coordinated, lasting campaigns of social ostracism enacted online and in person.

And no, it is not lost on me that the “they’ll figure it out” mentality may contribute to the reality I’ve experienced here of bullying. Seventeen years of schooling over three children in the USA and my kids never once experienced what I would consider actual bullying as opposed to normal kids-are-assholes moments. Six years here and all three of my kids have faced it? Hmmmm. Makes a person wonder, no?

Perhaps the leniency and autonomy can go a bit too far? It’s all so damn complicated.

It also occurs to me that there is potential for me to bring my Americanness into what I consider bullying and unacceptable behavior, although in all three of the instances here, the schools have agreed and also defined the behavior as bullying — although their responses varied greatly and none of them have been particularly promising. I will admit that California schools, in my experience, took bullying more seriously.

Alright, here’s what I have to say: The first time the bullying began I did not respond well. I did not take action quickly enough. I did not fully understand our legal rights.

The result? It escalated to incredible heights and went on for nearly an entire school year. My child stopped eating, withdrew from the world, and had to repeat that year of education. There were times we feared they would take their own life (I am using a singular “they” pronoun to obscure the child’s identity).

I have never spoken publicly of this before. We are still facing the psychological and emotional harm caused by that year.

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One morning I listened to an episode of a podcast called “On Point” about on-the-ground responses to the ICE situation by folks living in Minneapolis.

They interviewed a pastor of a local church, a Latino man who was helping folks in his area who were scared to go outside. He had set up a grocery delivery program online through his small church, and the next day had received thousands of requests, but had expected a couple of hundred. Rather than turn people away, he focused on organizing people in his congregation and neighborhood who were willing to donate, coordinate, and drive food to those who had asked for help.

The pastor had voted for Donald Trump, and the interviewer pushed him on this, asking why he voted for Trump but now disapproved of the very thing Trump had said he was going to do. The pastor said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I thought he was going to go after criminals, not regular neighborhood families.”

They then interviewed a local woman who, after dropping her kids off at school, spent her day helping in her own neighborhood. She and other mothers in the community had set up driving assistance, getting people to appointments, school events, etc., and also delivering groceries.

She mentioned their focus on pregnant women afraid to go to appointments, and how they were connecting doulas and midwives willing to work for free with women who needed prenatal or delivery care at home.

At the end of the podcast I sat thinking about those people, regular people doing what they think needs to be done in a very hands-on, thoughtful, material way.

Then I opened Instagram.

The first post I saw was a slideshow of at least fifteen tweets, memes, and screenshots of other social media posts making fun of white women for not doing anything of value, calling out the futility of things like “making bundt cakes” and “knitting hats.” It was a searing, sarcastic critique of that sort of “pussy hat” “activism” we saw in 2016 — performative, self-aggrandizing, largely useless — which I also ridiculed when it was happening ten years ago. (How the hell has it been ten years?)

The next post I saw was an assertion that the United States only cared about the two murdered protestors because they were white, arguing that nobody would have cared had they been people of color. And then I got off Instagram.

This essay is not about the content of those posts. Frankly, I’m too old to care what people post on social media. Not sure how my age is related but it feels true.

I am not offended, hurt, sad, or defensive about the sentiments, either, nor am I arguing they shouldn’t be posted or that those posts serve no purpose.

What struck me was the juxtaposition of what I had just experienced, the two vastly distinct impressions I was given about the exact same situation. And the potential effects those two impressions could have had on my brain had I only seen one or the other, or the algorithm decided I only got posts like the ones I saw on Instagram.

What I want to address is how different the experience of nuance, discussion, thought, time, substance is from the experience of standard social media hot takes.

One depiction of the situation told me about people, even those ideologically opposed to “the left,” working alongside the left and anyone else willing to help, on behalf of people they feel were being treated unfairly. It was interesting to hear a Trump supporter, particularly Latino, explain why he voted as he did, and I admired his willingness to decide for himself where he was needed, what service looked like in this moment, and how he could help his community. Rather than clinging to his "tribe,” uncritically accepting his side’s actions solely because they are “his side,” he responded to reality as he saw it.

That’s a humble, courageous, and critically thinking stance. And wildly rare. Seeing evidence of it is hopeful in itself.

He could have done what most seem to do: planted himself more firmly where his voting indicated he “should” stand, proclaiming in a sort of dissociated fugue state “I SUPPORT TRUMP AND TRUMP DID THIS, THEREFORE, GOOD,” which of course is not exclusive to conservatives. It seems most people’s first response to any situation is an ideologically aligned one largely uninterested in nuance, facts, or balance. The right is happy if it hurts the left, and vice versa.

I admire and respect anyone willing to see what’s wrong with “their side,” as even the most basic critique feels like something of a miracle in the war zone and simmering stupidity of American politics.

I was also struck by the everyday suburban mother working with other stay-at-home-moms to help community members. They organized on Signal, communicating their daily availability to help, whether it was four hours or twenty minutes, and then they gave what they could. That’s what she claimed, at least. Maybe she’s a closeted bundt-cake knitter.

Sorry, I have to make jokes or I really will lose it.

The podcast gave me a feeling of Americans coming together, acting quickly, organizing, doing real work, and I considered the possibility that we may be a basically intelligent, responsive, decent group of humans after all.

Obviously I banished that thought immediately from my mind.

What did I get from the Instagram posts? Well, what I get from most social media posts: not much. I was reminded that performative activism is bad and that some people are doing what others consider performative activism, and that there is a disproportionate reaction to the deaths of white people versus people of color.

In other words, I was offered the articulation of two problems. Social media is excellent at pointing out problems. What’s less clear is what we’re supposed to do about them.

I used social media like this for years, offering quick thoughts, jabs, sarcasm, satire, and clever insults in pithy little bites, which is probably why I’m so disillusioned with it now. I tried it. I did it. I saw what it offers. Really, though, when my politics became more nuanced I found myself unable to do it anymore simply because everything became more complicated than a single Facebook post could handle.

I no longer felt qualified to pontificate on complex political situations simply because I possessed an opinion, and I felt it was my responsibility to do my own homework before demanding your attention. I wanted to read, learn, research, listen to all sides before forming a stance. And only then would I ask myself if that opinion is even worth putting into the world. Do I actually have something to offer this conversation? Have I done enough work to offer something new? Or am I just stroking my own ego, seeking the attention and accolades of my friends? Am I cathartically venting anger or frustration? What good does that do? Can’t I just do that on the phone to my friends?

Look, every social media post doesn’t need to change lives. And to some extent, who cares? Then again, we cannot pretend social media doesn’t have the potential to build our understanding of the world, that it isn’t designed specifically for that. It seeks to hammer away at our brains into the shapes it desires. It is quite literally made to do so.

Engaging in social media as I once did is like taking a problem and just lobbing it at the world, over and over again. And then other people consume it. It feels vaguely productive when the comments pour in, all these people agreeing, or disagreeing, as if highlighting a problem and walking away is a real act of resistance and useful activism.

And maybe it is. Surely drawing attention to formerly unaddressed or unknown issues is a useful activity. But when it’s a problem we’ve been hearing about for at least a decade, one perhaps begins to crave more. At least I do.

If all we consume in a day are the quick thoughts of hundreds of people on a platform that prioritizes, and in some case only allows, underdeveloped hot takes that are often extreme, one-sided, and lacking in complexity, we can end up with a skewed understanding of the world and very, very dark feelings.

Yes, I know, two things can be true. I am capable of comprehending that performative and non-performative activism can both occur. And surely they do. My point is that if all I saw that day were posts talking about dummies making cakes, I would have an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the situation.

That is why it matters. Because so much of what we consume is erasing complexity, not inviting us into it. Its priority is to activate our emotions, not get us thinking. We know that “algorithms amplify emotionally stimulating content—such as sensational news or idealized lifestyle posts—often leading to “doomscrolling, (source)” because that doomscrolling keeps us engaged and keeps them earning money.

Algorithms promote extremes through their “engagement‑driven models [that] may unintentionally favor extreme or sensational content, reinforcing negative emotional states (source).” I’m highly suspicious of that “unintentional” claim, but the point stands.

What matters is that we are not given the whole story. We aren’t even given part of the story. And if I had only scrolled Threads, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, I probably would have walked away from my morning “ICE research” with a sense of futility, anger, resignation, and not one glimmer of hope.

***

As it happened, it was all pretty okay. You’ll be glad to know I survived my media consumption for the day.

The whole experience though reminded me how thoughtful I need to be about what I consume. That I must discern, over and over again, what I choose to allow to influence my thinking. That this is my responsibility: I’m either passively consuming what’s fed to me or I am actively engaging in the formation of my own critical thinking and understanding of the world. It will not be delivered to me. In fact, I probably have to work hard for it.

It also reminded me of the way I behaved during the last Trump presidency. In short, I lost my ever-loving mind. Panicked. Spent four hours a day doomscrolling then any extra time reading Timothy Snyder and listening to interviews with people like Jason Stanley or Ruth Ben-Ghiat — really anyone who spoke of the dismantling of democracies by “strongmen” and how we were facing the end of everything we knew of freedom. It’s surprising my kids got fed.

I may be exaggerating, but am I?

I sought out these narratives. I admit it. I was sort of breathlessly seeking information on the end of America the way a person might stare at a car accident while wondering why they’re staring at a car accident. There was exhilaration in the panic, in the fear. Some kind of frantic electricity it offered my day. Mac would come home from work and I’d recount to him the most current danger we faced, the most recent signs of the end of our country.

This did not help me. I understand how it happened but maintain it was not an effective approach in the formation of my opinions, plans, or central nervous system.

The media I consumed shot panic, terror, and a wrenching fear right into my guts. But not much else. It did not offer balance, perspective, ideas, solutions. And I did not seek that out.

I was largely worried about things that weren’t happening, and because I only heard one side by a select group of people, these worries were not challenged, tempered, or complicated in any way. I made sure that only one narrative flooded my brain, the one I agreed with, and the one that gave me that weird shot of doom heroin. Almost like a weird addiction.

Please understand I am not saying Americans don’t have a reason or right to be concerned, as if that could ever be my business since I don’t even live there anymore - or, as if that’s my business at all. And as if what’s happening there is not genuinely concerning.

What I’m asking is: Does one-sided analysis by the same cohort of talking heads give us an accurate understanding? How much energy will we waste on misinformation, skewed narratives, and incomplete stories?

Does chronically elevated adrenaline help us figure out what to do and make us more functional in our daily lives?

I think we need to panic about the right things as opposed to every damn thing.

When we moved here in 2019, it was not a result of the aforementioned panic IV I had implanted into my jugular. It was more complicated than that, and you can read old essays here on Substack addressing our myriad reasons. But yes, a rather urgent sense that our country was moving in the wrong direction did light a fire under us, and I can’t imagine my fear didn’t play a part in my willingness to take such drastic action (e.g. applying for a visa in a country I had never visited).

Suffice it to say I am not judging people for losing their shit or staying up at night wondering what’s next for the great City on a Hill. What I’m suggesting is that the worse things get, the higher the stakes, the more attention we should to pay to what we consume. It’s not about being good or moral and it’s definitely not arbitrary: It’s about conserving one’s energy rather than haphazardly depositing it into the arms of whatever fabricated emergency they invented today to get me to click and scroll.

If I had only encountered algorithmic selections that day, perhaps I would have believed that all that’s happening in Minneapolis is a bunch of performative, vacuous nonsense.

Most likely I would not have been invited to think, consider the thoughts of a Trump supporter, grapple with the reality of why people vote the way they do, and examine my own assumptions about all of that.

The pastor was not a monster. Yes, he voted for immigration crackdown. No, he doesn’t like how that actually played out. Yes, he’s doing what he can about it now. Yes, he is still a Trump supporter.

This is much more difficult to understand than “All Trump supporters are deplorable humans,” but it’s more real. And don’t we need to get square with reality before we can change it? Pretty sure James Baldwin said something along those lines.

The world is a much more complicated place than social media would have us believe.

I have experienced what it feels like to truly believe America is a vapid, hopelessly divided cesspool of evil and division, the source of most evil in the world with very little potential for improvement. If one can effectively create change from that place, I truly do not know how.

What is worth fighting for if it’s all already gone?

**

When Dutch Disney Villain Geert Wilders’s party won the election in The Netherlands, I woke up to at least a dozen messages from Americans in a low-key panic on my behalf. My DMs were really something. I googled American news on the subject and found all the headlines reading “DUTCH TRUMP ELECTED PRIME MINISTER” and “FAR RIGHT POPULIST WINS DUTCH ELECTION.” They made it sound like The Netherlands had just found out Stalin was its new boss.

People asked if I was going to move back. They asked “What will you do? Is your family safe?” They were genuinely concerned!

Funny thing was that nobody here was particularly concerned. While perhaps surprised by the win, people were largely unconcerned because they knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to actually become prime minister. You see, it’s a different system. Wilders’s party received the most votes, yes, and normally the prime minister comes from the winning party. But if a party wins but does not have a majority of government seats it has to “form a government” (coalition) with the other parties that won the most votes. This happens through compromise and discussion. Everyone knew Wilders had way too many batshit opinions, wouldn’t budge, and thus, the coalition would not succeed unless he stepped down.

Sure enough, he was never Prime Minister.

And yet, the impression my American friends and acquaintances had was that we were now facing the exact situation they were in. Huge vibe of the end of Dutch democracy. I was so startled by the American freakout so deeply contrasting reality that I forced myself to read tons of coverage of the election by various mainstream American news outlets. The majority of them wrote the most sensationalist, dramatic, and limited version of the situation, and almost none of them bothered to mention he was not yet the Prime Minister and had very little chance of becoming one.

That’s not dramatic and fun at all!

I have seen this countless times among my American friends over the six years I’ve been here — the boring, pragmatic, bland Dutch news coverage contrasting the sensationalist American versions.

This also reminds me of past trips to Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee, where I, a Californian, was confronted by genuinely concerned people truly believing California streets were overrun by roving gangs of armed Mexican drug lords. They were really worried for me! I remember asking them where they got this information, and trying to explain that my town was 50% Hispanic and yet it was a lovely, peaceful place.

They had seen the street horrors on the news and “all over Facebook.”

I told them the most significant street consequences were excellent taco trucks, roasted corn carts, and a lot of bandera or mariachi.

Between American news and social media I’m not sure how we get a clear picture of anything and I’m not surprised I lost my mind in 2016. All I got was death and destruction and panic and worry.

I knew algorithms could manipulate my world, and that media skews everything to benefit from those algorithms, turning online existence into an echo chamber of voices, the same ideas bouncing from brain to brain in endless rotation.

But I knew this intellectually. It was much harder to see it happening in real time, how it affected my perception right now. Without my notice, narratives formed and planted themselves as the One True Reality. It all reflected the binary that sells so well. Us and them. Right and wrong. MAGA vs Dems.

But it was just a mirage made especially for me.

**

I think I figured out the “too old” comment. First, I’m too tired for this much freak out. I can sense the drama at this point and I’m over it.

Second, I think there’s a bit of “maturity” involved, which is pretty impressive considering I turn 47 this month and have already figured out that I am responsible for who and what I allow in my brain. Be proud, Mom.

I am making a choice every time I seek out the breathless hysteria that gets my heart beating and adrenalin rushing. I am the one who reads the rage bait, again and again, or feeds my deep-seated car-wreck fascination. I am either discerning this shit like an adult or I am not. I’m handing over my agency of mind or I’m managing it with care.

In other words, I think times are too serious for the uncritical consumption of bullshit.

I’ve spent a lot of my writing life criticizing, critiquing, trying to tear down. I spent less time asking myself if I was offering any actual service to the world. I must have known it on some level, though, because when I really cared about something, I dropped the ranting and raving. I tried to write it in a way that addressed all sides, with data and evidence that backed up my claims. I thought about opposing arguments and addressed the best versions of them. I put myself in the shoes of those who disagreed with me, and tried to give them a fair hearing.

It’s harder, for sure, but if we want more than empty performance, perhaps it’s worth the effort.

Share Janelle Hanchett

My daughter is 15 and in her third year of high school. Well, sort of. Kids in The Netherlands start “middelbare” school at age 12 (sometimes 13, like my daughter), and continue there until age 16, 18, or 19 depending on which type of high school they’re in, so it’s a bit misleading to call it all “high school.” In reality, it’s middle school and high school in one.

The point is my daughter is in the 2nd half of her 3rd year of secondary education and I just learned a couple of weeks ago how many classes she has. In my defense, she really seems to have her act together.

Autonomy and independence? Let’s go with that.

OKAY. Friends, you could have knocked me over with a feather. She told me she has 15 classes plus two electives.

I did not believe her. There’s no way. How the hell does a person have seventeen classes? So she pulled up her schedule and read them aloud to me. I took notes.

They are as follows:

1. Dutch

2. English

3. French

4. German

5. History

6. Math

7. “Other math” (I think geometry?)

8. Theater

9. Art

10. Economics

11. Geology

12. Physics

13. Biology

14. Chemistry

15. Gym

16. Elective one: Historical interior design & architecture (!!)

17. Elective two: French history

Good lord almighty.

First of all, a high school schedule like this would have really put a damper on my early developmental acid trips. I learned a lot rolling around in redwood forests and down sunny dunes in Bodega Bay. Thank you, Sonoma County, for that northern California education. (For the record, I went to an excellent all-girls high Catholic high school called Ursuline, and I still think fondly of it. I did not, however, have 17 classes.)

Secondly, no wonder Americans often look at Europeans as strange masters of language, history, geography, and, somehow, American politics. I remember going to my sister-in-law’s wedding in France in 2017 and answering questions from her French, Belgian, and Spanish friends that actually challenged my understanding of my own government. It was humbling. They didn’t just know names. They knew history. They knew how our government worked. The branches of government, but also the philosophical underpinnings of our system, the flaws, current and past leaders, and not just Trump. How. HOW.

Americans still ask me with some regularity how things are going in Denmark. To which I respond, “I wouldn’t know, because I live in The Netherlands.” I think the whole “Dutch” word confuses folks. As in, Dutch starts with a D and so does Denmark therefore…let’s move on.

I wasn’t any better. I had to google “The Netherlands” when we were researching moving here. That’s not at all embarrassing.

I did not have a clear understanding of where it was. I can think of many reasons why Americans don’t know much about other continents and Europeans know a lot about theirs. America is massive and deeply isolated. Presumably Americans know that Canada is above us and Mexico is below us - right? THEY DO RIGHT?

Western Europe is tiny. Something like 30 countries fit in the amount of space Texas takes up. I just made that up but you get my point.

My husband used to drive 2.5 hours to get to work every day in California. Here if you drive 2.5 hours you’re in Germany. An entirely different country. Kids grow up here surrounded by many languages, foods, cultures. Kids here summer in southern France, ski in Austria or Italy, camp with grandparents in Spain. School trips regularly go to Belgium, Germany, France.

But this doesn’t matter, because what I want to talk about is the fact that my daughter attends a regular Dutch public school and not the highest level and yet this is what’s expected of her. She is the most common level, known as HAVO.

If you hate yourself, feel free to check out the Dutch high school acronym system. There is a full level of high school above the one she’s in.

Fifteen classes plus two electives. And all of those classes require testing, essays, homework. Even PE. She clarified. She has test periods that last all week and absolutely resemble in intensity my finals weeks in university. It is really, really hard.

Can you imagine asking standard students to study that many topics as a matter of course? I mean, imagine that in American high schools.

I have thought hard about what’s going on here. And here’s my theory: Kids have the brains, energy, and capacity to handle this sort of thing, so why not have them do it? What the hell else are they doing?

This is what I think the Dutch are doing.

They simply expect the kids to do it.

And they do.

And there it is. The expectation is that yes, you can come here to this high school and you can learn to organize your time, study for 17 classes, take exams in all of them, plus behave.

And wow do they make them behave. There are rules. Phones are not allowed. The kids may not wear flip-flops or open-toed shoes. No hats are allowed in classrooms and neither are coats. They must be hung up outside. Kids are told to “sit with attentively” (“aandachtig zitten") and “sit straight” (“recht zitten”) — meaning they are not allowed to slouch, put their feet up, lean over, etc. Wearing pajamas or sweats to school is unheard of. In fact, my teenager’s American friends back home often ask her “why she’s so dressed up” to go to school but she’s just in her regular clothes. And they are regular clothes. Nothing dressy. But for sure not pajamas or leisure wear.

Maybe this is old school and archaic and utter bullshit, or maybe I’m old and vaguely republican now so have the opinion that this is decidedly okay. In fact, it’s good. Imagine what these kids are learning. They are learning that they can wake up, dress nicely, be on time, sit up straight, respect their classmates and teachers, and work really, really hard.

They are learning that they can do this, that the world is a place they can master, even a world that expects them to come to school on time, in clean clothes, acting engaged, without a phone, and yes, learn 17 different topics.

What they’re hearing is: The world will ask a lot of you, but we know you can do it.

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I remember that one well. I had never known a low like that, although externally I was not in the worst shape I’d ever been in. I had a room to stay in at my mom’s house. My employer had taken me back for one more chance. I was seeing my kids occasionally.

But internally, for the first time in my life, something truly broke. On a morning that was like so many others, coming down off three days of drinking, shaking, shivering, sweating, I laid in that bed and saw my life roll out ahead of me like a long carpet might unroll. I saw the end of my life. And I knew I would die an alcoholic, and that there was nothing I could do about it. That was the real change. I always had a next move, a new gimmick, and new reason, solution, approach. That morning, though, I had not one idea left, and I felt I would give anything in the world to live one day free from the chains of alcoholism that had bound my body, brain, and soul for over a decade.

There’s a lot of talk about “battling addiction,” and I certainly did that, but my life changed when I realized it was a battle I would always lose. It was when I stopped fighting, when I had no ideas left, that I was able to hear what other people were telling me. I became willing to listen. I knew I needed help. I had lost faith in my schemes and designs. I would have done anything, and thankfully I encountered other folks in recovery who told me how they had gotten sober.

I don’t know how to explain this and it’s not very fun to hear, I imagine, if folks are reading this in hopes I’ll share exactly how I got sober, thinking perhaps of a loved one struggling with addiction. Or maybe themselves. But I refuse to invent things because it makes the story more pleasant or palatable. When I was writing my book I knew people would be waiting for the “big reveal sobriety moment,” the clear recounting of what I did, exactly, to get sober and stay sober. And I knew I couldn’t offer that. It would have required my lying.

For what happened to me remains something of a mystery. I don’t understand it and I doubt I ever will. I can say with clarity that the bottle killed me, and in that death I became a person who could listen, and thank god the people around me knew what to say. I can tell you it was in surrender that I found the “power” to get sober. And I got sober on spiritual grounds through 12-step recovery. Other than that, I don’t know what to say, and I certainly don’t claim to have a clue how anybody else can get sober. This is what happened to me.

I took my last drink March 4, 2009, and thus March 5, 2009 is the date marking the start of my sobriety. I have not had a drink since then. But none of this is really my point, which makes it a little odd that I’m writing about it, but whatever.

My point is I am a fucking depressed during this time of year and it isn’t just the dark, freezing, windy, wet, endlessly gray days of The Netherlands. I got seasonal depression in California where the sun never stops shining. This does not strike me as a vitamin D issue. Although admittedly, it’s much, much worse here.

After I got sober I reminded myself every year that I went “whacky” in January and February, that the world becomes heavy and strange, empty and foreign. That I become that way, too. I would expect it, wait for it. Sort of nod along when it came, ah, you again, hello. Knowing what it was, and most importantly, that it would pass, allowed me to get through it without any particular freak out or action. I’d try to eat healthier foods and exercise more. I’d go to more recovery meetings. Maybe I’d pray or meditate more often. But mostly, I would remember that “the darkness” happens every year. I am not broken, this is just my winter routine.

And it will pass.

This year I’m the lowest I’ve been in a long, long time. I don’t want to use words like “depression” because they tend to imply some sort of disorder that I should do something about. Get medicated or something. Even “seasonal depression” leaves me wanting, although it’s quite obviously the exact thing that’s going on. Lots of folks seem very interested in diagnosing themselves and then it sort of becomes their whole identity. I get that. My experience makes me wonder, though, if everything needs a name.

I have a long and sordid relationship with mental health diagnoses. I won’t do a whole run-down here but I think it’s an interesting discussion. Is it better to name everything? Does it all need a diagnosis? If we have a diagnosis, are we then able to actually do something about it?

DO ANY OF THESE ASSHOLES ACTUALLY TREAT MENTAL ILLNESS OR DO THEY JUST GIVE US WEIRD BANDAID OPTIONS INVENTED AT RANDOM?

Sorry for yelling.

I have mixed experience with this, as you may have guessed.

I have been immensely helped and immensely not helped through mental health diagnoses and subsequent medical treatments. After giving birth to my first child at 22 years old, staying in a room in my in-laws’ house with my 20-year-old husband, I had no idea what postpartum depression was, but I knew there was something very, very wrong with me.

The nurse who put her hand on my leg when I told her about how I felt, through tears, because I truly thought they were going to take my baby away, saying to me, “Oh, honey, you’ve got a bit of postpartum depression. We’ll get you fixed right up,” — well she saved my life, I think. She gave me Zoloft. It was like somebody lifted me out of a deep abyss I had been living in. In just a few months I had gotten myself a job, moved us out of the house (it was perfectly fine there, we just needed our own space), and felt returned to sanity, myself, and life.

I was on it for a year and went off. It was great. That was a fabulous experience with a diagnosis and medication.

During the peak years of my alcoholism and drug addiction, I was diagnosed with a whole plethora of illnesses: Bipolar II, Borderline Personality Disorder, Chronic Depression, PTSD, cocaine-induced schizophrenia. My norm was taking seven different psychotropic medications at the same time, although it went up to 11 at one point. They ranged from benzodiazepines like Xanax to antipsychotics like Seroquel to mood stabilizers like Lamictal. Effexor remains the hardest drug I have ever kicked, legal or street. I had Ambien, a major plus for folks like me back then. I even had a standing monthly Vicodin prescription for migraine. (Why the hell didn’t they give me triptans? Anyway.)

In fact, after I got sober and told my psychiatrist I couldn’t stay awake at work, he prescribed me Adderall. He literally gave me the equivalent of speed to just add on to my drug collection. I never took it. Even I, a literal drug addict, knew that was absolutely crazy. Speed instead of looking at the severe side effects of 7 different medicines? Wild.

For many years I used those diagnoses as a “excuse,” or, more gently, an explanation, for the way I lived: You see, I was deeply broken. I was damaged. My brain was faulty. And it made some logical sense. It seemed to explain why I, a reasonably intelligent person from a decent family, was a low-bottom drug addict and alcoholic: I was using drugs and alcohol to “treat” my mental illnesses. If all went well, the medicines would at some point straighten out my brain chemistry and actually treat my mental illnesses, and then I wouldn’t need alcohol and drugs anymore.

Problem was this never worked.

I just did drugs and drank a ton on top of all those meds which then left me really, really fucking crazy.

Every now and then I’d wonder if my drug and alcohol use were causing personality patterns that psychiatrists read as mental illnesses. For example, I distinctly remember answering my psychiatrist’s question about mood swings with the words, “Yes, I have mood swings. I am a cocaine addict,” but he still gave me the bipolar diagnosis. I was unsure about that, and privately suspected I was not bipolar, but I thought maybe I’d get some good new meds out of it, to make me differently high. Healthy!

When I got sober I immediately went off all medications other than Zoloft, the antidepressant, but was off that within a year. This isn’t everyone’s story and I don’t claim to know a damn thing about other stories. For me, personally, I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and while I clearly had some mental health issues, none of them would be addressed until I got sober. It really is a chicken and egg situation, you know?

After ten years sober, I hit the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced, and received the mental health care I now believe was what I always needed, but it took ten years of sober life to get me ready for it, and a move to The Netherlands where they actually have longterm mental healthcare. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD and spent 9 days in an inpatient trauma treatment center in 2022. I don’t know about the C-PTSD diagnosis, and frankly, I don’t care. All I know is the treatment I received for it was nearly impossible to endure but resulted in changes to my behavior that I had never been able to accomplish. Major, major changes. I am infinitely grateful. It really, really helped me.

In the center we did EMDR, exposure therapy, art, and psychosomatic activities from 9am until 6pm. It was excruciating. Absolutely miserable and I was certain those doctors were just sadists. If you’ve been through “exposure” trauma treatment, you know what I mean.

Fun fact, I came out of there more mentally unstable than perhaps I’d ever been but had no words for what was happening to me and no drugs to blame it on. I remember my children coming home from school and trying to tell me about their day but I couldn’t follow their sentences. I literally could not understand what they were saying. I felt a strange fog descend between the world and me. I can only explain it by saying it felt like I was living in a video game. Nothing was real. I would stare at my hands and try to make them feel like mine, but I couldn’t figure out IF they were mine. I realize this sounds insane. It was.

I couldn’t access my own thoughts. My head would fall backwards, literally, in this strange sort of heaviness. I would just sort of black out randomly.

I stopped leaving the house because I grew so terrified for the video game world and could not figure out when it was safe to cross the street. I would watch the cars and could see that they were “far away,” but I couldn’t figure out if that meant it was safe to walk. I stopped leaving the house. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t follow conversations. I told my husband I thought I had dementia or some brain disease, and if I had that, he had to let me die through euthanasia. I could not stay like that. It was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had.

My psychologist, who I saw weekly, and my psychiatrist, who I saw monthly, did not tell me what I had. They gave it no name, diagnosis, or form. They said the trauma center was “too much” and my brain had started shutting down but “it would come back.” Meanwhile I got sicker, more withdrawn, terrified, and nonfunctional.

Eventually I ended up so desperate for answers I began scouring the internet at random day and night. I’d just input my symptoms into google in great detail and hit “enter.” I was desperate to find someone talking about this, anyone. Anything. What was wrong with me?! I came across a Reddit thread discussing exactly what I had. Oh my god. Then I googled that and it was clearly what I had.

I excitedly told my therapist at our next appointment, “I think I know what’s wrong with me! I have a thing called depersonalization and derealization.” She just sort of looked at me.

I figured she’d be blown away by the power of my discovery, but she only said, “Yes, that is what you have.” All nonchalant.

I stared at her. SHE KNEW?

I asked her about this. She said, “Yes, we’ve known what it is, but we didn’t give it a name because it may stigmatize and scare you. We were worried that by giving it attention it would entrench you in it further.” My god, the rage I felt. The depth of her condescension. They knew how scared I was, how desperate. They left me to wallow alone in abject terror with no answers, no guide, no name for any of what I was experiencing. Just darkness, confusion, a sort of dissociated robotic hell. What loneliness!

In that case, I would have benefited greatly from a name for my condition. Indeed, once I knew what it was and learned about why the brain does it, I could come up with ways to nurse myself slowly back into functioning and sanity, which is exactly what I did. That’s another, much longer story. But first, I needed a name.

I needed a fucking diagnosis. If it had a name it could be understood. If it could be understood it could be treated. If it can be treated, I can have some hope.

It took a year and a half for my brain to fully recover, for the dissociative episodes to stop completely, for the world to begin feeling connected and fluid again. But I got there eventually, and the path to healing began the moment I could put some form to what I was living through.

So I have lived worlds where diagnoses were thrown at me, seemingly at random, and did absolutely nothing to help the core of my problem, and I have had diagnoses withheld from me when I desperately needed them.

My cousin had a mental illness, a very serious one, and stopped taking his medication. In November 2016, he stabbed our grandmother in the jugular vein after eating dinner with her, killing her instantly. He was in the fury of a paranoid delusion, a victim of a mental illness none of us knew he had, and a family that let him “try golf” instead of his medications because “they were making him fat.”

So we have paid the ultimate price for neglected mental illness, for families that prefer to shove things under the rug and pretend a bit of healthy exercise can do the work of complex medications warding off full blown psychosis. I would have liked to know what he had. I would have told my grandmother not to go there. My own mother and son were in that house with my cousin just a few weeks before he killed my grandmother. It could have been my boy. My Mom.

So now I sit, 2026, thinking about the darkness of my days, writing to you this story of naming and not naming, healing and dying and almost dying, of living again. And I wonder what it would mean for a darkness to just have a place in me a few months out of the year, when it seems the gray will never end. I recall how the hardest part of that dissociative era was that I could not find myself. I would look within and find no self. No person. Nothing at all. What does a person fight for if they can’t find the one alive? When there is no sense of person behind the diagnoses, the darkness, what exactly does a person pull from?

Back then I simply had to believe she was in there somewhere. I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t feel her. I could barely remember the woman I was even a year or two before, the one who wrote a book, and spoke at events, or raised kids and had friends or made love or read books. I had not one recollection of that woman.

But there was no real choice, was there? I had to believe in a thing I couldn’t see. I had to act as if she were there, buried, and would come out again when it was safe enough or the time was right or whatever it is that governs this sort of thing.

I came across Saint John of the Cross at some point in that darkness. He spoke of a “dark night of the soul,” a time when everything that once brought you meaning is gone, and even your god has deserted you. When nothing, absolutely not one thing, brings even the remotest sense of meaning, and you are truly, truly alone in an eternal dark night.

Only what John of the Cross offered was that the darkness had a purpose. He said maybe it strips away all that we rely on to ultimately bring us closer to God. I didn’t know about any of that, but I do know he was the one person I found in all those years who offered a bit of meaning behind the darkness, a bit of purpose to my suffering, and I clung to him for dear life.

What if it meant something? What if it would make me more human, more real? What it were transforming me into the woman I needed to become? Could I ride it out then? Could I trust it? Just enough to keep going, go all the way in — no running, no relapses (for I really did consider it), no numbing. What if I went straight to the heart of my pain, stayed in the darkest night, over and over again, trusting there was some mystical meaning occurring here. Sounds dumb, sort of, but desperation knows no bounds. I needed to believe the darkness meant something, and he gave me a way to do that.

He told me a new woman would emerge, one more time. Even from this. And she would have been wrung out and wrung dry, closer to the source, perhaps, however I may define that.

Because that was always the piece the medicine and the doctors couldn’t give me, and they aren’t supposed to. They couldn’t help me when I was in bed, alone, when nobody was looking, my life rolling out in my mind like a carpet would unroll. And not one damn person to tell me what the point is. What it could mean. What it might mean. This is my night, and mine alone. Always has been.

And there’s only one more week of February.

Want to write with me next month? I’m teaching a workshop called “From Memory to Memoir” and one called “Write Anyway.” The memoir workshop is for anyone with a shitty first draft or a vague first idea. We’ll talk about how to turn a collection of memories and experiences into something people actually want to read. It’s a craft-focused workshop but we also talk about process, and the ever-fascinating subject of writing about other people, including family, friends, enemies. Lol.

Write Anyway is about fear, speaking truth anyway, and developing a sustainable writing practice based on authenticity and genuine voice rather than validation, praise, or censure. It’s for the person who wants to write more honestly, or write at all, really. It’s also about speaking truth in the strange online context we’re in these days. We don’t shirk from the real conversations.

Both workshops are online, six weeks, and quite intimate. Come hang out with me. Let’s do some writing.

Share Janelle Hanchett

I thought I was joking. Or, more accurately, should be joking.

But things are apparently just bad enough that quite a few people said “Yes! Write about those!”, so here we are.

I have always had a few plants in my house, and I have always been bad at caring for them. Really a survival-of-the-fittest situation. I wasn’t a plant murderer, per se, but more somebody who had to work extremely hard to not murder them. It’s more manslaughter than murder, though. Unplanned, I mean. Circumstantial.

I had a lot of kids, a job, a husband who worked full time in a city 2 hours away, and poor organizational skills. I’ve never been the type of person who should have four children, a job, and a husband who worked full time in a city 2 hours away. Apparently they still let you have children even if you lack the skills necessary to keep plants alive.

I think I did okay in the big areas, if you know what I mean. Our house was chaotic and messy but not filthy. I didn’t read the daily deluge of emails the schools sent about this or that dress up day or activity, but I always threw something together the night before. We pulled it off, barely.

We ate every dinner together, and they were pretty balanced, mostly unprocessed, fresh foods, because I grew up in a family where you ate meat, a starch, and a vegetable every night for dinner, with a big glass of milk. Took me a long time to learn you could actually just eat vegetables, or vegetables and meat. Or, in a pinch, meat and “a starch,” as my mom called it.

We ate highly processed pizza takeout on Fridays, watched movies together on the couch, let our babies sleep in our bed as long as they wanted, whenever they wanted, and all four of our kids still want to hang out with us on holidays.

But I watered the plants when I noticed them wilting.

I’d look over with a baby on my hip or a toddler on my heel and see the awful droop. I’d kick into gear. No option now. Whatever I was doing I’d stop, run to water it and hope it wasn’t too late.

Sometimes it was too late, and I’d throw the plant away with a resigned sigh, reminding myself I am not the type of person to have plants and children or children and plants, and cursing that man I’m married to for never watering the fucking plants. DOES HE LIVE HERE?

Now one of those kids lives in Madrid, and another is 20 and lives here. The third is 15 and I see her more often. The littlest, my “baby,” is 11.

And I have found the plants I had long forgotten. I’ve found them in the wide open spaces of my days, the quiet afternoons when nobody comes home from school because friends and activities, and the man I’m married to is still gone working, but nearby, and for fewer hours. I found my plants in the mornings after the two remaining school-aged children have gotten on their bikes to get themselves to school.

Now my plants surround me and they almost never wilt. I have a monstera that’s massive, but the leaves weren’t splitting, so I learned where to put her to give her more light, and why the branches are so long and leggy, and how to wrap the strange tendrils in a beautiful spiral around the base of the plant, then tuck them into the dirt.

Every day I do a little wander around my plants, pinch the brown leaves off, check the rest for bugs, stick my finger in the soil. I learned how all of my plants seem to love a particular lamp I have, so now, when somebody’s leaves aren’t green enough, or a plant isn’t growing, I announce to whoever’s around, “Well, this one’s going to the plant hospital!” as if they care and I tuck her with the other needy plants on the table with the lamp. Over the coming weeks I watch the lamp doing its magic — the leaves turn a deeper green, new ones form. It is difficult to explain my delight at all that.

I have yet to have a plant the hospital has not healed.

But I did have a plant who didn’t fit.

When I was a girl, my stepfather gave me a baby Norfolk pine. I must have been 9 or 10 years old. We moved approximately three times a year but I brought that little plant with me everywhere, and when I was 14 and moved to northern California from central California, he was somehow still alive. At one point while in high school I lived in a house where I had a little balcony off my room, and I distinctly remember sticking him out there as if he wouldn’t die alone and abandoned on a balcony. Luckily we only lived there a month so I was forced to reengage with him.

When I moved in with my Dad at age 17, I brought that Norfolk pine with me because at that point it was simply what I did. I packed the pine and I brought the pine.

By then she was a few sticks and really, really seemed dead. I definitely thought it was dead. My Dad, though, said let me have that plant, and I guess he had a plant hospital too because that pine grew. And it grew. Eventually we named him Norfy. My Dad and stepmother turned him into a giant, soaring thing that refused to calm down under any circumstances, until they had to move him to their office a decade or so later, where my family printed the town’s newspaper and the ceilings were higher.

Just a few years ago I saw where Norfy lives now, after the “shop” is long sold and my grandmother dead and my father, too, but Norfy, clearly not. He lives in the atrium of a home of a friend of theirs, like a wild, forest tree, as beautiful as any you’ve ever seen.

Later, I thought about the way I showed up at my Dad’s with an almost dead pot of wiry sticks, carried with me through a childhood with too little of my Dad, walked into that house of an almost stranger, and he turned my sticks into sprawling green, the most beautiful scent carrying through the room.

Maybe like him and me, I used to think. He seemed to be caring for me, is what I’m saying. Kept it alive against all odds. Made it beautiful when I could not.

I have a special feeling toward Norfolk pines, is the other thing I’m saying.

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So a year ago, I figured it was a sign from God when I walked into my neighborhood florist shop and there was a Norfolk pine. Had never seen one there before and have not seen once since. It was a bit expensive, €40, but of course I brought her home with excitement and not a small amount of nostalgic emotion, and the whole family knew what it represented, and offered the oohs and aaahs I am not even remotely ashamed to receive. This is who I am now. Get excited about my plants or pretend you are.

I put her in just the right spot, having read many hours about just the right spot.

She did very well. I watched that baby bright green push out from the darker branches and I felt alive and mature like a real plant owner.

Then I decided to repot her. I thought she would like it better. She did not like it better. Norfolk pines hate that. They want small pots with good drainage; they do not want big pots with good drainage. I did not read anything on that. I just trusted my murderous instincts.

Almost immediately she started dropping needles. The brown spread from the bottom, up, and up, while I watched and googled and panicked. I moved her near the plant hospital lamp, but I read they hate being moved. I feared there was too much cold draft from the window, and not enough humidity. But she needed the light! So I bought a lamp just for her and a humidifier and got the best, custom made soil just for Norfolk pines. I put her in a spot in my room that seemed to provide what I read they like best. I spritzed her. Every day I examined her.

No matter what I did, her needles browned. Whole branches died and I cut them off, not too many at once to avoid shocking the plant. I worked for weeks to save her. I read everything, tried it all, and waited for just one thing to help her.

In the end, she died completely. I let her go.

There’s nothing metaphorical to say here and the story ends without drama. It was a dead plant. She went into the garden waste. I put so much meaning into that pine, though, felt my Dad’s memory through her, a thousand Saturday mornings waking up to the smell of frying bacon and the sound of live Grateful Dead as my Dad cooked and my stepmother, Neena, walked around dusting and watering the plants and singing along to her old bootleg tapes.

And Norfy, tall and soaring, in the middle of it all, this thrown together family where bare branches turn green.

I thought I would have a pine, just like my dad and me, but I killed it.

So I got another one, because sometimes that’s the only thing to do. Just fix the damn problem with money. I tried, hard. I failed. Try again. I put her in the same special spot in my room with the humidifier and lamp. I have not changed her pot and probably never will no matter what they say or how many years pass although I am absolutely sure that’s also not correct.

Norfolk pines like it cozy, humid, warm and consistent. I can give her that, having learned my lesson, and now I watch the green burst from her crown and think maybe I’ll be just the person she needs if I have no more good ideas.

I doubt I’ll ever have a life again where watering once a week is unfathomably difficult, and the days stream by in frenetic chaos, pots overturned by a racing child and paint dumped into another one, just because. Plants earning my attention only when they’ve lost all will to live.

I think perhaps I’ll have a lot of years to wander around and look at each plant, notice when one needs a bit of extra care, and face that sometimes, we aren’t quite enough, or they simply must go. All we can do is remember what they taught us.

Or the way they once grew.

When did we become such groveling pawns? What ever happened to those fuck authority tea party vibes? That boss of myself freedom thing I thought we were about? That ol’ revolutionary spirit?

You know what I’m talking about: The shockingly high number of Americans who, every time a person is killed by police or ICE or whatever authority, launch into their They Should Have Complied diatribes. “If they had followed orders,” they scream to their god and every comment thread, “they wouldn’t be dead.”

And that may be true. What’s troubling is that their analysis ends there.

Friends, this is weird. It is not normal to think the state has a right to end the life of a human being because that person did not do what they were told. We’re talking about arbitrary actors, not Gods. Cops and ICE agents are not necessarily good people or smart people or better people or even deserving of the power they hold; they are just people with guns in a uniform signaling state-bestowed power.

And these macho tough guys are telling us to get on our knees for them unquestioningly?

This is not brave, free, or independent. It is nothing to be proud of and it flies in the face of so many alleged Proud American narratives.

We are evidently obsessed with autonomy, freedom, and independence while simultaneously arguing that people should never, ever, assert autonomy, freedom, or independence if the state doesn’t want them to.

Perhaps we’re using Stalin’s definition of freedom.

Over six years living in The Netherlands and traveling around Europe, I have yet to meet a person who believes that whether or not you make it out of an interaction alive should depend on whether or not you followed directions.

The baseline understanding here is that people first and foremost have a right to LIVE, pretty much no matter what they’re doing, and the state does not have a right to shoot people in the face or head or chest or kneel on their necks or end their lives in any other manner unless it’s absolutely clear more people will die if they do not take violent action and there is no alternative.

How did so much of America come to see compliance and unquestioned deference to authority as strength? An unquestioned responsibility of every citizen at risk of death?

The superficially baffling part of this is that it’s almost always conservative tough-guy types (and that “guy” holds women as well) saying this. I don’t understand how they square their promotion of perfect deference with that DON’T TREAD ON ME flag they’ve got waving from their very large truck.

Is unchecked state power and an acquiescing body politic not the very opposite of bravery, autonomy, resistance, independence, freedom?

And look, I grew up with this in my own family. I had many family members who held armed authorities of any type in deep regard and dismissed most state violence as resulting from the antics of stupid people who insisted on being stupid in the face of good, righteous, not stupid police people.

I admit there are some extremely bad choices being made by people on a regular basis, and the USA is 300 million people, and The Netherlands is a snow globe. However, there is something seriously off about an adoration of authority, violence, weapons and power so profound that compliance becomes more important than a human life. That doing what you’re told is so elevated, so vital, that folks really believe a person deserves to DIE for failing to do so.

We do remember death is permanent, right?

We could go further into this on a few fronts. We could go into how perhaps this is an easier perspective to have if you are in a community and situation where police have been your pals, where they are your friends and protectors as opposed to harassers. We could talk about the way our cops function with their guns and batons and tasers and strut, showing up to every call with all those weapons — and how different this is from cops here, who do not carry guns.

We could simply admit that Americans are, as whole, “extraordinarily violent.” Bit ruthless and inhumane in our own special way. There is something terribly wrong with our culture, and I’m guessing it has to do with forgetting what happens when everyone starts “obeying” a governing body so powerful it can shoot people for disobedience.

Maybe because we were too busy running around on this new land we stole we forgot our histories, the way many of us were fleeing aristocracies, oppressive regimes, states that shoot people for disobedience. Maybe over time the story of America became a story of posturing, or bravado, of bluster, and the cops came to embody that. Maybe there is no revolutionary spirit — only a spirit of control. You got the gun? You win.

I like the guy with the gun.

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I’ve never said, “I love it here.” Or “This place feels like home.” We remain focused on our exit plan, trying to figure out how to move to a country that’s more in line with who we are as people. The vibes, I guess you could say.

But there are times when I’m so grateful to be here I can hardly find words to describe it.

On New Year’s Day, my husband had another episode like the one he experienced in Greece. This time, though, all of our kids were present. It was terrifying, and we are all still a bit shaken, but he is okay. We all are. But the experience of receiving emergency and hospital care here convinced me to write about a very specific aspect of the healthcare here that I never even knew could be an aspect of healthcare.

Namely, the ease.

Let’s look at the definition of “ease.” I liked the Collins Dictionary’s version: “freedom from discomfort, worry, or anxiety; 2. lack of difficulty, labour, or awkwardness.”

Yes. That is exactly what I mean: ease in terms of easygoing, mellow, and “ease” in the sense of easy and comfortable.

I am struck often by this experience of healthcare here because in all my life previously, I never associated healthcare or health insurance with even the remotest concept of “ease.” Quite the opposite actually. It was difficult to acquire, tenuously maintained, impossible to understand. It was precariously offered. Indeed, the entire system seemed built on insecurity, incomprehensibility, stunning complexity, and a permeating sense of impending doom.

Maybe I’m being dramatic. However, after experiencing this, I don’t think I am. The element of difficulty in American healthcare is so normal, so expected, I think we failed to register that it even exists. No matter what’s happening, the underlying awareness of RISK — financial, or even if you’ll be “approved” for what you need — becomes just a normal part of American “healthcare.”

We never knew if a procedure or medication would be covered by insurance or not, but we definitely knew that if it wasn’t covered, we couldn’t afford it. Thus our medical lives hinged on the whims of a for-profit, predatory, monstrous company with a vested interest in me NOT getting heaslthcvhare. To say it out loud sounds so utterly insane. And yet, where’s the lie?

We never knew exactly what our copay would be. Seems there were always unexpected costs. We waited to find out if we actually got to have something our doctor wanted us to have, or if the exact procedure was approved by these distant strangers determining our lives.

We waited for bills to roll in. We waited, waited, waited, prepared for the hit, prepared for the bad news.

On New Year’s morning, I called 112 when my husband was unresponsive and within four minutes there were four police officers at our house. One or two minutes later, four paramedics and two firemen filed into the bedroom. Yes, I live in an urban area, but judging from the image that’s often created in the USA of those “commie countries” where nothing actually works, I feel compelled to clarify that emergency services work, at least where I am.

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It would have made sense. We were 14 women, plus him, at a writers’ retreat I was leading, enjoying a day out, eating at a seaside restaurant on the Aegean Sea, on the island of Samos, in Greece. We joked, “Mac! Are you so disgusted by what we’re saying you can’t sit up?” And he rose for a moment, as if he had heard, but dropped again, slumped in a slow, steady fall — graceful, almost, like a summer waterfall, like a baby nodding to sleep, like an old, felled oak.

In my mind I saw none of those things. I saw no nature. In the thick silence of his fall, I saw the curve of his back, the bulk of his shoulders across my lap, and felt a dawning realization that he was not playing. He was going unconscious. I reached for his shoulders. I lifted him up. I stood and turned to him and looked into his face and called his name. And then I watched his eyes flutter, and his face turn, what looked to me, gray.

Once, when we were very young, I said for probably the 100^th time, “You never buy me flowers!” as if I were mistreated and unseen. He stopped the car right there on the country road, threw it in park, walked back to the trunk, and returned with a rectangular box in floral wrapping paper. Here, he said. Flowers.

Inside, a necklace of single white pearls connected by a delicate white gold chain.

They told me I was screaming “Something is wrong,” and “Somebody help him!” and that they will never forget the sound of my voice. I do not recall the sound of my voice. What I remember is every line of his face, each one by itself and the whole thing at once, and the way he did not respond no matter what I said, or how I said it, and yet I continued yelling for him, sure that if I said the right words, my voice would push into him the way it always had, and he would turn and look at me, the way he always had.

I can feel my words now, the single focus of my pressing fury, as if my blood were pulsing all of that panic into nothing but words, my only weapon. I felt in my body, and saw in my mind my whole life slipping away in front of me and I knew. I knew that nobody, not one single person, could save this man, this best friend of 25 years, this father of our four children — from whatever it was taking him then.

Once, I threw his keys at him and screamed, “Leave, then!” And if I remember correctly, I shoved him so hard he stumbled to the ground.

Once, I said, “I can’t be with you anymore,”packed my things and took our little daughter away, moved into a house I had rented without him. I took a picture of us, my daughter and me, to mark our new life.

Once, he said, “I can always trust you to be exactly who you are.”

Now looking back I remember a moment while holding his head up and yelling for a doctor, for any help, that the entire restaurant had levitated, seemingly at once, a swell of rising Greeks having lunch by the sea, by the crystal blue and green of the waves, translucent where the sun cuts through. Have you ever seen the color of the Aegean Sea?

A huge Greek man in a black sweatshirt arrived, demanding we “Get him to the ground on his side!” and we all obeyed. He commanded in a way that makes people obey, with strength and not one iota of self-doubt. He held my husband’s body and rested it on the rocks.

Once, he wanted to be a fire fighter. He was 20 or 21 and it would be his first real job after a whole youth working on his dad’s ranch. He trained for a whole year. He took exams and passed. He sat for interviews and made it through. He was accepted. Maybe the proudest I’ve ever seen him. A new job and new life for a new dad and a new man.

A few days before his start date, we started drinking. A few days after his start date, we noticed we had forgotten to stop. There is no possible way I can remember the look on his face or the sound of his voice when he realized. There is no possible way to recall what I said to try to fix it.

Somebody pushed a jacket under his head. He woke up and looked around then, but he didn’t move. I knelt next to him with my knees digging into the rocks, aware of a woman kneeling close against me, holding both of his hands in hers. Her voice was so familiar I knew she was in our party, though I couldn’t quite place her. I didn’t look at her. I trusted my consciousness still scanning the scene, dropping a thought here and there.

I wonder how the brain decides which thoughts to let in when the whole thing is closed, the whole body down, the whole world knotted into one face of one man against the smooth sea rocks. I waited for it to happen again. I waited for his heart to stop.

He had flopped onto his back but the commander said No! His side! while the woman with the voice of an angel asked him his name and made sure the ambulance had been called and a few other things I couldn’t understand. She held his hands and directed the Greeks like a symphony. She and the big man in the black sweatshirt. Our waiter came out offering Aspirin. A child caught my eye through the crowd.

Every time he fell asleep the woman asked him a question and I noticed the calm of her voice against the strange panic of mine. He answered, but he didn’t get up. When his eyes closed I could not stop myself from saying his name again and again, touching his face, forcing his eyes to open again, if I could. The peace across his face, gray, wan, was no peace I could accept.

Once, he talked of joining the rodeo. He talked about it again and again, but only after a few years and a couple of days of cocaine and whiskey. I’d say, you can do it, and wonder, perhaps, if all the fires had been put out.

A thousand times I said I wish I had never married you.A thousand times he said not one word back to me.

Finally, for some reason, I glanced over at her, the woman with the voice of an angel, and saw the face of a stranger.

Once, when I was a few weeks sober, after being away from him for two years while he got a job and took care of our kids and I ran, and ran and ran, he came to a little birthday party my mom had for me, and after dinner, we went outside and he said, “I don’t know if I want you in my life again.” In his eyes I could see his heart breaking, that he would have given me flowers if he could.

And once, I understood.

The commander helped the EMTs carry the stretcher across the rocks. He didn’t have to. They were plenty strong. After they pushed him into the ambulance, the commander caught Mac’s eye and gave him a big smile and two thumbs up in front of his chest in a gesture that was not at all how I describe it now, how it sounds as I say it. It was strong, genuine. No frivolous gesture of a silly man. But you know how it all sounds once you try to tell it later, like a B-rate Hallmark movie, like an old adage your dad’s been saying for 25 years. Like a story of lovers and fights and nothing at all.

In the ambulance, he lay on his back in front of me and I sat in one of those chairs attached to the wall and leaned over my knees to hold his arm and be closer to him. Again he fell asleep — again and again — and the peace spread across his face like a shadowy thief I blew away every time with my words. I’m not saying I kept him alive. It was nothing like that. If he was going to die he was going to die whether or not I blew breath onto the sweat of his face.

We both knew this.

When he opened his eyes, I saw tears falling out of the corners in a slow roll, and I thought, he must be afraid of dying. He must be in so much pain. He must be overwhelmed by this moment so suddenly arrived on the edge of the Aegean Sea, where the rocks are crystal in the right light, and the water turquoise glass.

Once, he said, “I’ve always already forgiven you.”

The next day, when we were back in our bed after a night in the tiny Greek island hospital, with very little news but that he could go home, and instructions for many tests once back home, where they have the fancy machines, I wondered if we would ever find out what almost stole him, or seemed it could have.

When he woke up, he told me what was happening in the ambulance when he opened his eyes and the tears dropped out.

“I was thinking,” he said, “but who will take care of her? There will be nobody to take care of her.”

Once, when our house was full of babies and he woke every day at 3am to drive to San Francisco for work, because the wages were higher, because the unions were better, I’d wake hours later to the sound of rain. I’d wake to the sound of a man who had opened the window before he left, so I could hear the raindrops fall, one by one, like a goodbye gift. Like a tear falling on a sterile sheet, hands in those of a stranger, or an old Greek woman praying over a man with an amulet in her hand, and the whole world parting for her arrival.

Once, I’ll say, I held your face in my hands and fought a whole war with words. I’ll say, I thought we were going to lose you. I’ll try to tell that story. I won’t expect anyone to understand. I won’t admit that I never knew I loved like that — what I mean is, that I could love like that — that there would be a moment, kneeling on the rocks of the Aegean shore, when every word I’d ever spoken would flash across my mind, and it would all seem insane, then, even one moment of cruelty! I won’t explain the way I thought I could fix it, that maybe there was still time, if he came back, if I could spin every word into just one breath, one final plea, my god, just stay with me, once.

And never let me forget.

Share Janelle Hanchett

I also knew the woman who wrote it. Not personally, just internet acquaintances, but still, that’s even more pressure to engage. However, about halfway through reading the comment, I began skimming. Not because I wasn’t interested in what she had to say, but because I recognized her sentences as the rote talking points “of our side,” the phrases, mantras, and slogans carted out in the face of opposing ideas.

I finished skimming and clicked away, unresponsive. I didn’t engage at all. I wasn’t even mad about it. I was simply unable to engage in a sort of benign neutrality and complete disinterest.

This was odd behavior for me, particularly how I truly felt zero interest in engaging with her. I thought about the feeling I had reading her words. Mostly that it was absolutely futile to respond, to attempt a real conversation. So futile I won’t bother. I could also summarize it as a sort of bone-deep boredom.

Since then, nothing has changed. I simply cannot bring myself to engage with people who speak in that kind of robotic recitation, as if they’re some sort of political AI programmed to make certain utterances and nothing else. I don’t get the feeling they’ve thought very hard about what they’re saying, neither whether they’re true or even if they particularly agree. And definitely not if what they’re repeating is critically or logically sound.

This essay is about how I eventually made sense of this response by reading about the Ancient Greek concept of “parrhesia,” Mattias Desmet’s words on “sincere speech,” and Hannah Arendt’s observations on the role of slogans in the Nazi she observed on trial after WWII.

Warning: this is perhaps the nerdiest thing I’ve ever published outside of grad school, and I do not suggest reading it unless you’re well-hyped on coffee. I feel like I’m really playing my hand here, giving an insight into the things I’m really, really interested in, but knowing that in doing so, I may be limiting my audience to like four people. It’s a bit niche, perhaps. But I’ve tried to make it more widely relevant. You can let me know if I pulled it off.

***

I don’t recall the exact path that led me to the concept of “parrhesia,” but I doubt I’ve gone two days without thinking about it since encountering it a year or so ago.

Early on, my main thought was “Why the fuck didn’t I learn about this in college?” Felt a bit robbed. Nine years studying literature and rhetoric yet never came across what seems to me a vitally relevant concept to both. On the other hand, maybe my professors did attempt to teach me and I don’t remember. Possibly at age 18 or 20 or even 25 I was slightly less interested in the Athenian concept of frank, open speech and its role in democracy.

I am not a scholar of Ancient Greece, and have not performed dissertation-level research on the topic. I have however read enough to encounter nuanced interpretations and disagreement about the details of parrhesia, the role it played in Athenian society, who did it, etc., but also the central, agreed-upon aspects of parrhesia, which I’ll summarize here in my own words.

The word literally translates into “saying all,” but does not simply mean “saying everything in your head” as if all thoughts are worthy of speaking. It is further defined in modern terms as “free speech” or “speaking truth to power,” which is certainly an aspect of it, though not the entirety.

In short, “parrhesia” is a type of open, frank speech that Athenians believed vital to their democracy; indeed it was established as an antidote to what Greeks believed was a serious threat to their democracy: loud, uniformed masses. Or “ignorant outspokenness.”

Sound familiar?

They recognized the danger of Athenian policy driven by emotion rather than reason, by mob formation instead of justice and fairness, and the way this could all be exploited by demagogues who lead by emotionally charged theatrics catering to the whims of the masses.

AGAIN. I ask you.

And this was before TikTok and Twitter and AI slop. You had it easy, fucking Socrates. You lived in a time when folks gathered in marble enclosures to listen to dudes in robes ask each other questions about caves and the nature of reality. People hung out with Pythagoras in caves on purpose (lot of caves involved) to discuss philosophy and theology and theorems of math or whatever that thing is he made.

We can’t even get the President of the United States of America to stop sending robot-created videos of himself half-naked, turning nations into strip malls to the spastic glee of millions of people in matching hats.

Anyway, it’s a bit confusing from a modern perspective because “parrhesia” is not solely a guiding philosophy of speech, although that exists within it, but more a particular type of speech, an actual act with delineated standards, and people were chosen to engage in the practice. And of course, this was also revoked from some people who were then, you guessed it, thrown into caves. (See: Socrates, Pythagoras, et al).

Anyway, as promised, here’s what I have found to be the most agreed-upon aspects of “parrhesia:

1. It had to be true. The speaker cannot just get up and spin lies. The speaker must believe the words are true and they must be true in reality. Or, perhaps better said, the speaker believes them to be true because they are true.

2. It had to be helpful, and the speaker must feel a duty to speak. The truth spoken must serve the interlocutor and/or society as a whole. The speaker also cannot be forced to speak but does so out of an internal sense of ethical duty.

3. It had to be dangerous. This is fucking fascinating. The truth spoken had to put the speaker at risk, which the speaker accepted fully. As in, he (and yes, they were men) knew it was risky and did not expect safety. The risks could be physical harm but also shaming, bullying, or social ostracization. In other words, I could not engage in the act of parrhesia if I am speaking to people who already agree with me or do not have to power to harm me. This is where the “speaking truth to power” concept comes in.

4. It had to be complete, holding nothing back, so the interlocutor can understand the speaker’s argument fully and assess it on its terms.

Foucault wrote at length on this topic. He referred to parrhesia as “truth-telling,’ and delineated it as follows: “…parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth - telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”

He goes on: “…parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty.”

(Both of these quotes are in “Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia.” 6 lectures at University of California at Berkeley, CA, Oct-Nov. 1983.)

When I encountered this concept, I had just read Mattias Desmet’s excellent book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism,” in which he analyzes how psychological mass formations (as in, we all agree on some super weird shit) develop in society. He argues that the steady march toward mechanization has divorced us from sources of meaning, making us more vulnerable to totalitarian movements of mass formation because they offer the meaning we lack, provide a source for the free-floating anxiety our mechanized lives create, and give us, in a way, an easy “answer” that keeps us subdued and in line. This is a rather unsatisfying summary of the brilliant book, but it’s so complex, I can only suggest you read it. You can also listen to podcasts interviewing him — highly recommend.

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Anyway, at the end of the book he talks about how, throughout history, there have been folks who are immune to mass formation. Interestingly, he asserts that there is no shared identity factor among these people. They come from every economic class, ethnicity, gender, education level, religion, and secular realms. There is no discernible commonality between them. However, he argues that what he calls “sincere speech,” referencing Foucault’s “truth-telling,” is the one factor that seems to immunize people against the powers of propaganda and the “psychology of totalitarianism.”

As in, a commitment to engage in what the Greeks might call “parrhesia” shields us from the powers of mental control that lead to physical control in totalitarian movements.

Speaking the truth as we see it, against the forces around us, even when, or particularly when, the whole world is engaged in mass delusion, because we know something to be true and feel a sense of duty to speak it with honesty, openness, and complete transparency, holding nothing back — that is the act that keeps us free. According to Desmet, this is not only our protection against mass formation but also the way we work to dismantle rising cultural totalitarianism.

As in, it’s what we should be doing right fucking now.

Okay, one more thought. Stay with me here. After reading Foucault and Desmet, and considering deeply the concept of parrhesia, I read a lecture series by Hannah Arendt that has properly fucked me, long term. In reading it, the concept of parrhesia and “sincere speech” as a resistant act began making deeper sense, and also clarified for me why, perhaps, I’ve felt an increasingly deep repulsion to those who speak in political slogans.

The Arendt book is called “The Life of the Mind,” and in it she recounts what she saw at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem after they nabbed him from hiding in Argentina after WWII. He was, of course, one of the main SS officers responsible for the systematic deportation and murder of millions of Jews under the Third Reich.

She references her famous insight into the “banality of evil,” stating what she saw in him as he sat trial. While he performed incomprehensible acts of depravity, evil, and cruelty, what she witnessed went against that which we have been taught about evil, namely that it requires an abandonment of moral codes in the name of a distinct turn toward the demonic (evil). As in, people become villainous and then commit external acts of evil reflecting their internal rot. But that’s not what she observed.

Rather, she observed “a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer…was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.”

It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.

This is so interesting. She did not observe particular evil. She did not even see a coherent ideology. She did not see stupidity. She saw thoughtlessness.

Expanding this, she points out that when Eichmann was confronted in court with “situations for which routine [Nazi] procedures did not exist,” he found himself “helpless,” resorting to “cliche-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life.” She referred to it as creating sort of “macabre comedy.”

Reflecting on his almost comically pathetic recitation of Nazi slogans, she makes the connection between the thoughtlessness she observed and his use of propagandistic language: “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

She goes on: “Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all. It was this absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think—that awakened my interest.”

Oh, shit. You see where we’re going here. Clichés invite and enable us not to think. Many of us, however, think anyway. We respond to “events and facts” by thinking about them. Eichmann, however, did not. According to Arendt, he seemed wholly willing to simply allow the “protective” force of stock phrases and “standardized codes of expression and conduct” to determine his actions. He stopped there.

Arendt asks: “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?”

What if evil has less to do with motives or the conscious adoption of a specific ideology and more to do with a person thoughtlessly allowing propagandistic mantras to guide their lives?

For if we stop thinking, we do not have to look at “reality,” neither our own actions nor the world as a whole. So why couldn’t we commit evil? We can simply adopt the slogans as a replacement for our brains and go about our day. Contemplation, critical thinking, and even basic observational powers we normally apply to our lives are usurped by totalitarian messaging, and maybe, the ones committing evil are the ones who just never question this. Or perhaps Arendt is arguing that in folks committing evil, there is no thinking to usurp.

Finally, Arendt asks: “Could the activity of thinking…the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it?”

Well, shit! That’s Desmet! This is what parrhesia asks us to do. And this is where it all came together for me, specifically how parrhesia protects us from mass formation and resists authoritarianism.

Parrhesia, or “truth-telling,” or “sincere speech” is by definition the opposite of groupthink and the clichés it produces. It requires not only an examination of reality in search of truth but it is rooted in a sense of moral duty and ethical obligation. We must look around, consider reality, recognize what’s true, and say it precisely because it reflects reality and is, in fact, true. Beyond that, it places the speaker at risk precisely because it goes against a universally agreed upon narrative. So it is inherently resistant to groupthink and mass formation.

I could see how that type of speech serves as a defender of democracy, and shields us from the brain-numbing power of propagandistic, seemingly universal narratives. And it shed light on my allergy to people who speak in slogans, the way it feels sick, boring, dead, and a million miles removed from what I’m seeking, from what I believe these times require — but beyond all that, the sense of futility in trying to engage with people who respond to ideas with canned political mantras repeated with religious devotion. Thoughtlessness. It feels to me like I’m talking to a robot. A cult member. A person deep in a religion. Why argue? They aren’t thinking. Reason will not work.

And yes, people on the left do this as often as those on the right, and to me it’s more terrifying precisely because we recognize the behavior in others but cannot see it in ourselves. This is the real work, in my opinion: an awareness of where this exists in us. We readily see the recitation of “Make America Great Again” or “build the wall,” or “all trans people are groomers” as slogans serving the purpose of eliminating thought and creating mass formation in support of Trumpism, but we cannot see the mantras on our own side, the things we repeat endlessly without asking ourselves what they actually mean, if they reflect reality, or, perhaps, if we even believe them.

The fact that everybody seems to believe them only makes it all the more entrenched and difficult to resist, as the ubiquity and repetition alone imbue these mantras with a power that many of us may conclude means they are also correct. As in, how could this many people say it if it’s bullshit? Yet we recognize this on the right all the time!

Of course this also makes it extremely difficult to engage in the “sincere speech” Desmet argues is necessary to combat this sort of formation. Because parrhesia involves risk, because by definition we are alone, or feel alone, in holding the truth as we see it, it is always much easier to not think at all, to ignore what we see it, opt instead for the safety the group offers.

Slogans, cliches, mantras, all those “thought-terminating clichés” allow us to sit back in the warm embrace “our side” has created. Lay low. Be quiet. Repeat the words. You’ll be fine. We can rest easy in our tribe, follow the lead of our “thought leaders", and avoid the uncomfortable work of learning, growing, and changing.

Not only that, adherence to groupthink offers a sort of intellectual safe space in that we never have to be wrong; we don’t even have to look. When faced with ideas different from our own, we can simply discharge the appropriate mantra, dismiss the speaker, and return to the bubble bath of our own ideas (or the group’s).

Rabidly defined boundaries of discussion —and with some topics, even the slightest deviation will get you annihilated by the group — serve as the easiest and quickest way to shut down open debate and conversation. I would argue that people rely on mantras and bullying precisely because their shit cannot withstand inquiry or curiosity. As in, if people started looking harder at what’s actually being said, they’d quickly discover they only work as empty mantras; they hold no foundation in reality. Thye are not true. They are only imposed on people through bullying, shaming, attack and intimidation. Thus slogans enable us to bully others into submission, define the terms of acceptability, and protect the nonsense of our arguments by avoiding all real critique.

Indeed, to speak parrhesia makes us outsiders and places us at serious social risk. Further, don’t know about you, but when I hear some of these slogans, even if they’re entirely nonsensical, there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m the crazy one. Am I wrong? I’m wrong all the time! But sometimes, the group is wrong. And we are left asking: If all these “good people” think it, how come I don’t? Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

Ancient Athenians would perhaps say, speak anyway.

I write this because perhaps you have noticed the slogans and crave something more. Maybe you have a truth you aren’t speaking. Maybe you watch the “uniformed outspokenness” all around us and wonder what would happen if you spoke the truth as you see it, against all that — bravely, frankly, holding nothing back, knowing you may be thrown into a cave. But sensing, at least, that you’d be free.

In the cave where Pythagoras taught theology and math on the island of Samos in Greece.

It’s a theoretical scenario posed to women: “Would you rather be alone in a forest with a bear or a man?” The apparently universal response of women is that we would rather be alone with a bear than a random man. I’ve read countless women unequivocally asserting that they would choose the bear, and it’s often brought up in response to a story about male violence. As in, “This is why we choose the bear.”

Allow me to be clear: I would not choose the fucking bear. But we’ll go into that in a moment.

First, I understand this is a hypothetical exaggeration to prove a point. Second, it’s fucking dumb. However, as I may have mentioned, I am no longer accepting dumb things simply because people say it’s what good people do, or some stranger’s “lived experience” insists it’s true.

Further, because this is fucking dumb, anything I write about it will pretty much be, by definition, also dumb, but I’m holding out for the point I will eventually make if all goes well.

I am never choosing the bear and I can only assume the women saying they would are not considering the scenario.

***

I am alone in a forest. A big one. Wilderness extends in every direction. I’m lost with nothing more than a backpack, compass, and a few granola bars. (In our scenario I am a new and different person who hikes.)

And now, I’m lost. What a day.

A truck pulls up. The driver gets out and says, “Oh, I see you here, lost in this vast forest. In my truck I have a man in one cage — you know, just any old man off the street, your typical man, if you will — and in the other, a wild bear — plucked from the forest. An everyday bear. You can have one of these things. Which will it be? The random bear or the random man?”

Everybody on God’s green earth is choosing the man. This would take zero thought. First, there’s a good chance the man is not a predator whereas there is zero chance the bear is not a predator. There’s a solid chance the man will be like, “Hi, I’m Paul. Guess we should build a fucking lean-to,” or help me figure out how to run down the truck that just abandoned us for no reason, whereas 100% the bear will eat my face immediately.

Edging further into dumb hypothetical territory: If the man is a predator I have a chance to fight him off. I do not believe a man is harder to hit with the boulder I wish I were living under than the bear. I am betting on the human every time, man or woman.

Alright so what is my point beyond a dumb analysis of a dumb thought exercise?

It’s this: 1. We need to elevate ourselves beyond stupid discourse on complex topics. 2. Have we forgotten that most men are not rapists, abusers, or predators? The nature of this discourse has me thinking we have indeed let slip our minds the fact that we walk around with men all day and the vast majority of them are Paul trying to get a fire started with a rock and stick because he saw it once on YouTube.

And if we are aware of this fact, why are we creating sweeping generalizations that quite literally assert that an everyday wild predator is a safer companion than an everyday man from the wild?

Now before the bear feminists get in my face, allow me to caution that I am acutely aware of what it means to be a woman on this earth, and I, like so many women, experienced sexual molestation in childhood, assault and harassment in adulthood. I will not go into detail about my childhood, but I’ll tell you about my older years.

In my junior year of college in Barcelona, a man followed me into a bar bathroom and tried to rape me in a stall. Later that same year, a man lured me into a wine cellar beneath a bar, latched the door above my head and tried to rape me against a wall. I fought these men off in wild panic, and only avoided the second situation because I had a rather badass and unhinged friend from Chicago who “got a bad feeling” seeing me walk down to the basement, so ran down and began banging on the door and screaming like a maniac. Side note, a man with a knife tried to rob her once while we walked the ancient streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter and she somehow ended up chasing him down. He fled like a terrified puppy. God I wonder what she’s up to today.

Apparently Chicagoans are made of some different stuff.

At 16, my boss at the restaurant where I worked pinned me to a wall and stuck his erect dick against my thigh, then stood there and stared into my eyes, presumably because he could and absolutely no other reason. He was at least 50 years old with an obvious, sick satisfaction in his power.

When I told my female coworkers about this, they said, “Yeah, he does that, but he’s been here forever, friends with the owners, and if you say anything, they’ll fire you.”

That was quite a Life As a Woman learning moment.

My boss at the coffee house where I worked my first year of college took me aside one night during a staff party and said he thought it would be a “really good idea” if we had sex. This was after he had shoved his tongue down my throat. I have had a stranger shove his hand between my legs and up my skirt while I was sitting on a barstool, grabbing my vagina with painful force. I have had sex with men I didn’t want to have sex with because I knew it would happen anyway. If I thought harder about this, I could come up with more.

You do not have to tell me what we’re facing here.

And yet, I have been the only woman, alone and on cocaine in a studio apartment with three men, and when one came onto me and I said, “No thanks,” we went back to chain smoking and talking a lot until I went home. I have been out-of-my-mind drunk and driven home by men more times than I can count, from clubs and parties at 2 or 3 or 4am, and ended up exactly where I wanted to go: at home, in bed, alone.

Men have helped me into their beds when I was too drunk to go home and then slept elsewhere, or, once, above the blankets while I was under them so I didn’t feel unsafe. One of my favorite humans in the world was my stepbrother, who would let me crawl into his bed when I had a bad dream, and I’d curl up next to him. I was 10 or 11. He was 18 or 19. He was a lovely friend, and I wish I could thank him for being a rock solid human at a time when I needed one. After his dad and my mom divorced, I never saw him again.

What I’m saying is, while the moments of assault, violation, or harassment stand out in my mind like beacons of rage terror, for every one of them I have a hundred moments of the opposite: banal moments, forgotten ones, men being decent. There’s nothing there to remember, so I guess I don’t. I would feel relief if any of those “boring” men showed up in my lost-in-forest moment.

I understand protecting ourselves. I understand listening to our intuition. I understand realizing that although we don’t know a man is a predator, and logically we know most men aren’t, we must act as if they all are until further notice. We protect ourselves from all of them because some, if even a very few, could rape and harm us. Even if it’s just listening to our gut feelings or being aware of our surroundings, or putting a key between our fingers, or checking the backseat before we get in the car at night, or, or — this is disgusting. I hate it all.

I did profoundly reckless things in my 20s. I repeatedly put myself in positions where predatory men could more easily hurt or assault me. But that is not why it happened. It happened because some men rape, grope, and prey on women, and it will stop when they stop doing these things.

Fun fact, there were also men doing cocaine in very little clothing, drinking within an inch of their lives, but the women were substantially more likely to be raped. Or, perhaps better said, men were the predators all of us faced, whether male or female, but let’s be real, women are more vulnerable due to the norms of physiology and literal power differences between the bodies of men and women.

This will stop when these men stop using the fact that they can as sufficient reason to assert what they will.

While that’s what “should” be happening, it isn’t. And I am not going to allow my daughters to be victims of a delusion that would allow them to exist in a world where women do not think almost constantly about how to not get assaulted when in the presence of the male sex.

I will teach them to do all of the things we do to avoid rape, to the best of our abilities, while knowing full well I cannot protect them. I hope to God they do not do the things I did. I do not allow my children to have sleepovers at houses where there are older brothers or fathers or any men I am not extremely familiar with (well, obviously I need to know the women well also). As in, very close family friends. I hate letting my kids attend overnight school camps. I’m nervous about male teachers and parent volunteers.

When my daughter was 13 years old, she flew to the USA from The Netherlands as an “unaccompanied minor.” This designation, which you pay extra for, afforded her certain protections and oversight by the airline. When I read that they assign the child’s seat, I called the airline to ask how they decide who the child sits next to. I had imagined all of the possibilities of a 11-hour flight with my 13-year-old in the dark next to the wrong man.

The Dutch woman at the airline understood the implications of my questions and said without hesitation, “Don’t worry, we only let children sit next to women.”

First of all, that is so fucking sad. Second, I love the Dutch. They certainly tell it like it is.

****

Am I not contradicting myself? Am I not proving the very point of why a woman would choose a bear?

No, I don’t think I am. I am talking about precautions and awareness of the vulnerability of women in the presence of certain highly dangerous men. It is not saying all men are predators; it’s saying we, as women, do what we can to avoid the ones who are. This is a dark reality, but it is reality. I will teach my daughters this fact, and my sons not to perpetuate it.

But I will not teach them that men are bears.

I will not teach them that men are, by nature, violent, destructive predators ready to decimate all those weaker than them in the interest of their own survival or whim.

They are not instinct-driven mammals who will kill a baby deer as fast as they’ll kill me because they are biologically driven to do so.

I will not teach my sons, nor do I believe it to be true, that they are intrinsically predatory and flawed and must fight against their natures to become loving, kind, good people.

I tend to believe that boys and girls begin with the same “goodness,” and it’s through a process of toxic socialization, physical, mental, and sexual abuse, emotional destruction, misogynistic messaging — all the devastation we throw at our young — that some boys become teenagers and men who rape.

I don’t have space in this essay to explore which factors might contribute to that process, but porn comes to mind, absent, distant fathers and role models, turning our kids’ socialization processes over to private companies interested only in algorithmic dopamine addictions, a meaningless, mechanized society that divorces all humans from their sense of place, self, and purpose, the constant and abject objectification of women and abuse of our bodies as entertainment — off the top of my head.

****

The term “toxic masculinity” has become so distorted, I’m not sure it means much of anything anymore, but it’s relevant to this conversation, so let’s get into it. Like so many over-used catch phrases, it lacks nuance, and holds meaning in disparate ways according to who is speaking it.

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a set of attitudes and ways of behaving stereotypically associated with or expected of men, regarded as having a negative impact on men and on society as a whole.”

Okay.

I also found this:

“Toxic masculinity is a set of beliefs and behaviors based on the idea that ‘real’ masculinity relies on dominance, and through this dominance is separated from anything traditionally deemed feminine – femininity being viewed as weak and undesirable. The dominance that toxic masculinity demands can impact particular aspects of a man’s life, or all of them; social, physical, professional, financial, emotional and sexual.

Socially, toxic masculinity demands that men always assume the ‘alpha’ position in social settings, approaching relationships with other men with distrust, competitiveness, and a lack of vulnerability. This desire to assert themselves socially can often tie into ideals of male physicality, as men are encouraged to either change their bodies to make them bigger, or merely to take up as much space with their body as possible. Physically asserting oneself in an aggressive or intimidating manner or acting violently is thus a by-product of how toxic masculinity affects men, as they are encouraged to prove their physical dominance.” https://www.image.ie/agenda/stop-talking-about-the-definition-of-toxic-masculinity-and-start-tackling-the-problem-135107

I see what the writer is saying: We aren’t talking about masculinity as a whole, but rather certain culturally-defined aspects of masculinity assumed to be what constitutes a “good man” but harm men (and women).

For example, encouraging boys and men to reject aspects of themselves that are deemed “feminine,” such as nurturing, gentleness, compassion, emotions. Or teaching them that their value as a man rests solely on dominance and “alpha” positions, which one can see extending to sex and intimate relationships, particularly when compounded by the patriarchal alignment of many of the world’s major religions — and suddenly men have a “divine right” to their dominance.

But this definition conveys the precise nuance that’s lacking when the term is generally used, owing in large part to the way it’s deployed as a weapon to smash any man who’s saying or doing something another person doesn’t like — as yet another example of that universal brokenness in men.

I appreciated this quote on the subject, despite a couple of sweeping generalizations I wouldn’t have used:

“…the term [toxic masculinity] is almost never defined, even by academics, and is instead used to simply ‘signal disapproval.’ Lacking any coherent or consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of, from the tragic to the trivial. It has been blamed, among other things, for mass shootings, gang violence, rape, online trolling, climate change, the financial crisis, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and an unwillingness to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lumping together terrorists and delinquents, it ultimately poisons the very idea of masculinity itself.” https://bigthink.com/the-present/toxic-masculinity-myth/

As in, masculinity, as it stands, is toxic. And obviously, since masculinity is largely understood as an inherent trait it men, it is not a far stretch to reach men are toxic. The lot of ‘em.

Look, I can get behind there are aspects of what society has deemed ‘good man behavior’ that divorce boys and men from vital aspects of themselves and rob them of the full human experience.

I cannot get behind “men and their masculinity are inherently toxic,” as if the naturally occurring traits within a boy must be actively reworked, washed into an improved version, or abandoned outright. It’s unfair and untrue. Further, it’s a small jump from there to conclude that commonly occurring traits in boys are the seeds of “toxic” behavior and are thus inherently destructive to society.

(As an aside, this reminds me of the podcast series by On Point called “Boys as Malfunctioning Girls,” which I wrote about in this essay. Examining the treatment of boys in schools through the lens of the “toxic masculinity” framework is an interesting one.)

And while I don’t think many people believe all boys are nothing more than potential future rapists, just as most people don’t believe women are uniformly too stupid to do math, or drive (I see you, DAD), the way we sling these terms at each other indicates that a good number of us really are turning complex ideas into idiotic but useful weapons, and I think my point is this: We can look for this in ourselves, and we can ask our sons about it. We can pay attention to the messaging they may be receiving about themselves, the ideas that may be forming in their minds when they’re alone and contemplating these things. We can pay attention to who our sons have as role models, who and what is influencing the formation of their selves — what they’re learning about manhood, what it means to be a man.

I do not think we can rely on society to do this work for us.

To be a bit more crass about it: I believe our sons and daughters are absolutely fucked if we allow Society to teach them who and what they are.

***

In an ideal world, namely the exact one we don’t live in, everyone would know that men are not born possessed by a Monster of Masculinity and thus dangers to all.

Everyone would hear the bear scenario and think, “Oh, this is hyperbole to illustrate a point.” Or, “Wow, this is how scared women are of men. I’d like to do something to help this situation during my time on earth.”

I believe the chances of this are around zero. I have also grown sufficiently disillusioned by the loudest voices of common discourse that I think most people saying this actually believe they’d chose the bear — that actually, in fact, bears are safer than your average man. Or they haven’t actually thought at all about what they’re saying. This, to me, is somehow more terrifying. They just repeat it because, like, that’s what “feminists” are supposed to say.

I believe these oversimplifications load the barrel of our own dismissal. Why the hell would any teenage boy or young man listen to us if what they hear from us is you are already ruined on account of being male?

I think about them, 13 or 14 or 15 years old, a budding sexuality, and all around them the world screaming that their natural instincts are predatory. I imagine a boy would grow rather suspicious of himself, his body, his sexuality — insecure, unsure, and without footing. And from that place, shit gets precarious. We lose the way. We think Andrew Tate is looking pretty alright. A bit of Nick Fuentes, perhaps.

These boys are trying to figure out who they are. They are looking at the world and wondering where and how they fit in it. Do we make space for them, or do they find more space in right-wing circles saying, “We see you. You aren’t a monster. You’re actually a victim.”

Of course it’s bullshit, but it’s much more pleasant bullshit.

Which message is going to appeal more to a young brain? How many teenagers will manage to see past the obscenely stupid bear rhetoric to the nuance that probably doesn’t lie beneath but should? How many young people of either sex are going to do that work, and how the hell do we think this doesn’t matter? That this isn’t working in direct opposition to our cause?

If “toxic masculinity” is reducing men to traits that cut them off from their whole selves, then we are doing the same thing. By defining all men based on the violence enacted by some, we are also reducing men to the worst of masculinity as we’ve defined it.

Toxic masculinity is saying “Men are violent, domineering, alpha predators, and they should be.”

We are saying, “Men are violent, domineering, alpha predators, but they shouldn’t be.”

The underlying assumption is the same.

***

I’m going to get really honest here: It’s only been in the relatively recent past — the last five years or so — that I have really started considering the effects these oversimplified versions of feminism may have on our boys. Perhaps I fell victim to the overly black and white thinking of “boys don’t matter because girls have it worse.”

And you know what else? It’s easy to become so fucking tired of the incomprehensible depravity of some men that there is a part of me that feels, for even a moment, a hatred for all of them.

A couple of months ago here in The Netherlands, a 17-year-old girl was stabbed to death while biking home from Amsterdam by a 22-year-old man who had beaten and raped another young woman a week before, and raped a different woman a week before that. Yes, that’s two rapes, one beating, and one murder in three weeks.

A few days ago I read about a 75-year-old woman in the UK who had a stroke at home, went into the hospital to recover, but was raped so violently while unconscious in her hospital bed that she bled to death from internal and vaginal wounds.

I read this sort of thing and I fucking hate the lot of ‘em. I read about women in Afghanistan not allowed to go outside or laugh loudly in their own homes, about gang rapes on October 7 in Israel, and the liberal men who, five minutes ago, were #believeallwomen, now demanding those Jewish women “prove” they were raped, as if sexual violence hasn’t been used as a weapon of war since the beginning of time. As if surely their brave Hamas freedom fighters wouldn’t rape!

How quickly they abandon us. How openly they demonstrate that they only care about violence against women if it works for their politics. And these are the ones “on our side.” Goody.

I think about the woman in Texas who died of sepsis because the dwindling moments of the dying fetus in her womb were more important than her whole life. I think about my friends raped as children by their family members, cousins, neighbors, whoever, always male — women I now watch try to carve out a life for themselves beyond what they were taught so young: That they are nothing. That they exist for the pleasure of men. That their bodies are liabilities. That they are never safe.

I think about it all, and begin to understand political lesbianism.

But the thing is, friends, this is not my larger self and I know it. This is the part of me that feels hopeless, helpless, like a caged animal willing to do anything to get out. To make it stop. It is the powerlessness that destroys me, the sense of being annihilated at another’s whim. We have fought for so many years, and yet, we are still here. I think about the suffragettes who died, were force fed in prisons, who threw bricks and destroyed art and started fires in their frocks and petticoats — and I cannot believe we’re still fighting this hard to not bleed out on a hospital bed because the wrong man found us.

James Baldwin said something that always caused quite a stir when I taught it in university literature classes. It’s from the letter he wrote to his nephew in 1962. This is the precise passage:

“…and if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it…”

What was difficult for my students was Baldwin’s assertion that his nephew, a young Black American, must “love” his white “brothers.” The love he refers to, however, is a transformative, powerful, active, and deeply uncomfortable one. It is a love that “force(s) our brothers to see themselves as they are…to cease fleeing from reality.” It is a confronting love, an unflinching one. It is not gentle. It might not even be “kind.” It is definitely dangerous.

What this represents to me, and I do not claim to be personally suggesting this is the approach anyone should take, for I do not know, and I am certainly not saying anyone needs to “love” anyone else, even in the Baldwin way — but what I do know is that what Baldwin speaks of here is the opposite of the “lower self” I mention above.

Baldwin left the United States for France after he lost his temper at a racist waitress in New York, not because he “felt bad” or even that he feared retribution from the state. No, he left because he feared he would lose himself. That he would be consumed by rage that he would lose his own humanity in the face of the inhumanity around him.

He spoke a higher truth. Higher than murdering our opponents then celebrating, higher than collecting half the population into one inferior definition, higher than the part of me that wants to scream “fuck ‘em all,” watch them suffer, and walk away.

Higher than the part of me that wants to reject their suffering because “they have the power.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever be that solid of a person, but I know the only way is to keep (vaguely?) trying, look to those who’ve gone before, insisting on a higher truth having faced a world much more brutal than the one I face, and insisting, still, to never flee reality, in all its complexity. It’s not about being “good.” It’s the only way that ultimately works, really, if we want to believe we are better than the bear.

Or someday could be.

I’m surprised by the depth of my sadness watching what seems to be the vast majority of the left miss the entire point about what happened to Charlie Kirk, so many overtly celebrating his murder, others reveling in what they see as a beautifully sweet “gotcha” moment.

The man was a lover of the 2nd amendment, and now he’s dead from a gunshot. The man critiqued weaponized empathy so now we can all laugh at his murder. Ah, it feels so good.

And the analysis ends there. I am most moved, I think, by that fact, that people are not even trying to move beyond their most short-sighted, knee-jerk reactions. They don’t seem to care about the greater implications of the event, about what normalizing political violence means for our nation, about the dystopian nightmare coming our way if we all start accepting bullets to the jugular as legitimate political discourse.

To everyone out there engaging in the above, let me say this: Nobody is asking you to mourn the death of a political pundit you’ve never met and don’t agree with. What people are asking is that you recognize the seriousness of a country degraded to the point where folks are assassinated on university campuses for their political beliefs.

We’re asking you to see that all this means is the left is next. The left is next.

We’re asking you to move beyond your most myopic and base reaction to see the extremely obvious truth: Normalizing political violence in a country where such actions are becoming more and more common is accepting the failure of American democracy, that there’s nothing left for us now but to shoot each other.

In other words, we aren’t even pretending to support something better, or even believe better is possible. And while we’re on the subject, Voltaire can fuck off with that “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

We’ve evolved, Frenchie. We assassinate now and call it freedom.

We shot each other for independence during the American revolution. We shot each other to end slavery. What are we shooting each other for now? What exactly is the aim (ugh) of erratic and random terror?

There is no clear goal here. There is no united effort of liberation. There is no fucking higher calling or objective.

A Democratic state legislator and her husband shot in their home in Minnesota, ICE agents in Texas murdered by 12 gunmen spray-painting “ICE pig” on cars,” two young Israeli embassy employees murdered “for Gaza,” Charlie Kirk murdered while speaking at a university — this is the maniacal violence of a crazed population in which “Traditional ideological divides — once centered on policy disagreements — have morphed into a deeper, more personal animosity.” (source)

This is not happening because people are deeply passionate for change. This is not some noble project. This is happening because democratic means are failing. Because people are hopeless and helpless and poor and sick and crazed enough to give up on the methods we once believed would or could lead to change.

What’s stunning is the rapidity with which Americans are accepting this degradation.

I agree that political violence is increasing in the United States because people have lost hope in achieving change through democratic means. Obviously! It’s one of the reasons I left. People with four brain cells and a vague knowledge of history know where such divisions lead.

What I didn’t anticipate is the number of people who would rather joyfully accept domestic terrorism as a natural development deserving of no particular critique.

As in, we’re here now, in a failed democracy, better just lean into it.

I immediately thought of Malcolm X’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit. After delineating the myriad ways voting failed Black America over generations, the way gerrymandering and political stratagems robbed Black Americans from democratic means of gaining equality, leaving them “fed up…disenchanted… disillusioned...dissatisfied,” having “listened to the trickery and the lies and the false promises of the white man now for too long,” X explains that it had “built up frustrations in the black community that makes the black community throughout America today more explosive than all of the atomic bombs the Russians can ever invent.”

He asks us to “Understand this, it's dangerous.“

In other words, when cut off from democratic avenues of change, people have nothing left but violence. But X frames it as a choice America must make, not the inevitable outcome or only path to liberation:

“This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet. It’s liberty or it’s death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh, yes, they are. They haven’t never had a blood-less revolution, or a non-violent revolution…

A revolution is bloody, but America is in a unique position. She’s the only country in history in a position actually to become involved in a blood-less revolution. The Russian revolution was bloody; Chinese revolution was bloody; French revolution was bloody; Cuban revolution was bloody; and there was nothing more bloody than the American Revolution. But today this country can become involved in a revolution that won’t take bloodshed. All she’s got to do is give the black man in this country everything that’s due him -- everything.”

He was not saying blood and murder are the only means to change. He was saying if you leave people no choice to achieve freedom through other means, they resort to bloody revolution. “If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet.”

And now, America seems to sit in the acceptance that we have no choice, that bloody revolution is all that’s left for us.

We murder Kirk. They murder us. We go around and around. When does it end? Who makes it stop? Once we enter the cycle of rage, retaliation, murder, revenge, how do we find the exit?

We’ve accepted the bullet.

And I’m not sure we even know it.

Indeed, from where I’m standing, possibly the most alarming part of all this is that folks have moved so far from an expectation of American democracy actually delivering real progress that they don’t even realize how insane it is to accept assassination of political opponents as an understandable and legitimate political act — in a democracy.

I’d probably be the same if I still lived in the United States. I’d probably be so mired in my own political ideology that I, too, would revel in the death of one more evil conservative, and fail to see what it meant for my own party, my nation, our future.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was physically, rather literally, unable to listen to people who disagreed with my politics. They weren’t just wrong. They were existential threats. They were broken, brainwashed, evil.

Would I have cared if one of them got shot in the neck? Not sure.

So, no, I’m not better than any of this. I’m just removed from it. For six years I have been out of the simmering pot of American political rage, and my god, does it floor me now. I wish I could adequately express how not normal this is, how it all looks from afar.

I would like to think, though, that all of us want better than this, that we believe life is worth a little more than what we’re watching right now. That we all want a slightly more elevated discourse than “Yay, bad guy dead.” That we want more for our country, for our kids and grandkids. That we might unequivocally disavow this violence, even against a bad guy, rise slightly above our basest selves. It really does seem like the time to speak.

I know many of you feel as I do, and you are in it! I admire your ability to see. All the fish swimming in the water and you’re over there yelling “HEY GUYS LOOK AT THE WATER! IT IS ALL AROUND YOU.” They tell you you’re crazy and swim on by.

At least you can say, when given the choice, you didn’t choose the bullet. You didn’t lose yourself. There are always some immune to the masses, insisting on greater, seeing through it all. We need you now.

“Mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys an individual's ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.” - Mattias Desmet

Yes, we need you now.

Please share smart shit you’ve encountered lately. I am always looking for things worth their existence. (Is it just me or is life requiring way too much discernment lately? Deciphering what’s worth my time vs that which should be immediately discarded as nonsensical trash is not aligning with my overall energy levels.)

This op-ed:

Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, researchers in clinical and applied psychology at Northwestern University.

I found the results of their student surveys astounding. Here’s a rather extensive quote, but worth reading, I think, and a bit of my commentary to follow:

“Publicly, [students] conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.”

I will be writing an entire essay on this, but I cannot stop thinking about the fact that the vast majority of 1400 students surveyed at Northwestern and the University of Michigan by graduate-level researchers self-censor as “second nature” to “preserve their academic and professional standings.” And 38% of these students felt “morally confused,” beginning to doubt the value of authenticity and honesty if either result in social exclusion. Heavy Stalin vibe.

“Orwellian” is overused these days, but it’s wholly apt here, for it is when Winston Smith states that 2+2 = 5, when his internal reason, reality, truth, can no longer exist under the oppression of the regime, that they’ve won. As long as Smith has an internal truth, however protected and private, he maintains a shred of autonomy.

But what precedes the successful takeover of Winston? A double-self. A sense of secret truth inside that cannot be spoken, cannot be admitted. It is when there is a true internal submission that the totalitarians achieve full victory.

Is this not what the students describe?

(Fun fact, this is a major factor of totalitarian control, also addressed in the book I refer to below.)

Forcing myself to stop going on about this, but one more thing: I can’t help but think about all the “surprise” so many liberals express at conservatives who seem to come out of nowhere during voting time. I wonder how often we’ve confused silence for agreement, the complacency of colleagues as acceptance of that which we’ve deemed the correct way to believe? I mean, think about this! Think about how many students are going through college playing a fucking game, hiding their real thoughts, ideas, and beliefs to appease a group that’s simply declared themselves the arbiters of morality!

I will be writing a whole essay on this because fuck me.

This podcast episode.

Paul Simon on City Arts & Lectures. He is one of my favorite artists to learn from. His descriptions of the creative process, of the constantly shifting elements of intellect, inspiration, chance, all coming together to slowly result in a song — the failure, the difficulty, the playfulness — goddamn he’s a fucking gift.

(note: I have no idea why this is appearing as a sort of ad for Apple podcasts/a full graphic. I paste the link it and it turns into this. Apologies for being old and too tired to care.)

What I’ve been reading

I read books in a few genres at a time. I do this because I want to read what suits my moods. They range from “my brain appears to be working. I shall read smart shit” to “I remember when I used to have a brain” to “Dear world, please cheer me up” to “I’d like to stand on the precipice of my own inevitable annihilation; please send Russian literature.”

As in, I am usually reading a book in each of the following genres: history, philosophy or political/cultural theory, Literature, spirituality, brain candy — not because I’m an intellectual giant but because I’m deeply interested in appeasing my every whim.

Excuse that whole Literature with a capital L situation in the paragraph above, but you know what I mean. I try to read a classic, something canonical, or would be if the canon weren’t created by dinosaurs who generally prefer penis writing. Look, I had to. Forgive me.

I achieve my reading goals by consuming many formats (paper, e-book, audiobooks).

Here’s what I’m currently reading with a few notes on each text.

History: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I’m almost done with the first two volumes. Everyone on god’s green earth and even the non-green earths should read this text. All young people in all parts of the world should read this, but particularly the first world 20-year-olds who think they’re deeply suffering because their professor made them read a book makes them sad, and all liberals who do understand how and why free speech is an inherent and vital component of freedom, resistance, and democracy, insisting it’s better to just force everyone to believe as we do because We Are Correct.

Authoritarianism is not cuter when we do it.

And yes, of course the right suppresses speech, but I’m not really talking to them, for reasons I’ve already articulated.

Literature: see “brain candy”

Brain candy: Well, I’m reading Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett,

which is absolutely Literature with a fucking capital L, or would be, if it weren’t a genre that’s not taken seriously by The People Who Know What Art Is. Pratchett is a goddamn genius. I don’t have time to go into it now. I discovered him a few years ago, but my brain was apparently too underdeveloped to recognize the brilliance of what I was reading. I was sort of confused, mostly. Why are we talking about a disc planet held up by four elephants? (if you know you know)

As I recall, however, this was during the pandemic and I was in my Russian literature era. More fitting for obvious reasons.

Someday I will articulate my love of Pratchett, but for now, I’ll just tell you I am going through his entire oeuvre, one book at a time, and I’ll drown myself in the nearest canal when I’ve read it all. This particular book has an unfortunate character who finds it amusing to laugh about raping women, but hey, this is the first time I’ve seen Pratchett do this in any of his books (let me try to comfort myself, please), and the character is in fact a “barbarian,” — a mindless, uneducated, killing machine, but at the same time, the “barbarians” are a little group of men respected and admired, to some extent, for what they are — that sort of simple, anti-intellectual “everyday” hero thing.

So no, there isn’t an excuse or justification, and no, it isn’t fun to read, and yes, I wish it weren’t there, and as hard as I’ve tried to twist it around as Pratchett doing something acceptable if you tilt your head just so, I pretty much have to land on “Yet another man laughing at raping women.”

Will I still read him? Yes. I should probably explore that more. Why did Sedaris die on the podium on account of his superfluous rape jokes but I know damn good and well I will continue reading Pratchett?

For the record, I am not reading Pratchett for life guidance. I read him to learn to write better. The man is a master of voice, narration, characterization, fucking DIALOGUE. Bah.

Spirituality: New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

One of these days I’ll tell you how I’m 90% sure my life was saved by Catholic mystics and theologians. In the deepest depression of my life, the worst mental crisis I’ve ever faced, they gave me more help than anything else I read. Weird, right? I gotta tell you that story.

Since then, I’ve never stopped reading those men and women (and there really are women!). I’m only halfway through this book, so I don’t have much to say yet.

Also Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis

Ya know, I dig self help that isn’t dumb as fuck, and the Jungians deliver. I’ve read a lot of Hollis’s work. He writes about the Jungian process of individuation, about how, during the second half of life, our identities shift from externally to internally centered, how all of the things we relied upon while young to define ourselves (careers, parenthood, youth, money, etc) fall away around midway through.

As in, they fail to produce the meaning we thought they would offer. Rather than telling us to just EMBRACE AGE or whatever the fuck the instagram feelings circles say, Hollis talks about this as the time when we define ourselves from within, face all that early life allowed us to run from, drop self definition from what the world told us we should be, and instead figure out who we actually are. Ya know, so we can die happy or whatever.

In other news, I am more fucked up by midlife than I expected. Apparently my life is a steady march to Clichéd Woman who Loves her Plants and Vintage French Linens.

Is that a genre? It should be.

Theory: The War on Science by Shawn Lawrence Otto

Listening to this as an audiobook. The narrator is making me want to stab myself in the ears with chopsticks. He’s one of these narrators who reads every sentence like it’s changing lives. The height of drama. WHY. Just read, sir. Not everything needs the power of a preacher’s last sermon.

Little bored at this point as it’s a lot of statistics, which I usually want to get the gist of and then move on from. Analyze, please. But I’m only around 1/3 through, so I’ll let you know. I am intrigued by how so many on the right and LEFT (oh, yes, we have our version of this) have abandoned science, and the methods of inquiry, discovery, and “proof” supported by scientific research, as sound ways to understand our world. I’m at the point where I really think the left should just start arguing why they believe enlightenment ideas are no longer applicable, and we should just believe whatever illogical shit because it’s nicer or whatever, or we want it to be true.

It’s like everyone is moving to a purely faith-based understanding of the world. I know I’m being vague. Sorry, not ready to be canceled yet. Soon, though, don’t worry!

Wow, this was longer than expected. Am I physically unable to engage brevity?

Here are a some pics around my neighborhood, taken a few days ago on a walk with my dog. I live in a pretty dreamy area of Haarlem, but I included a standard building and graffiti so there’s a hint of balance and accuracy.

The Netherlands is not all quaint snow globe shit, although admittedly, the medieval centers of the towns kind of, well, are.

The installation was inspired by a painting of Mae West by Dalí, and made in collaboration with Catalan architect and designer Òscar Tusquets. The piece is Mae West’s facial features placed on the floor, but as furniture: huge, bright red lips in the foreground (a sofa). A giant gold nose behind the lips (a fireplace), and on a wall slanted slightly backwards, two huge photographs of Paris that make up her eyes. In front of the whole thing is an arch of blond hair, a sort of frame, and in front of that, a sort of podium reached by climbing around 10 stairs, complete, of course, with a massive wooden camel above it. Obviously. Obviously there is a camel. And a bathroom on the ceiling.

So I was standing in the Mae West Room waiting in line for my turn to walk up the stairs to the platform, where you gaze through a large lens pointing toward the hair arch, lips, nose, and eyes. If you want a visual of what I’m talking about, especially considering I did not explain any of this with the eyes or skill of an art historian or museum curator, you can go to the virtual tour of the museum and click on the “Mae West Room.” Or you can look at the photo I snapped while in line.

I watched people walk up the stairs, one by one. There was only enough space for a single person to stand on the platform and look through the lens, so it really was a stream of mostly solitary humans. The whole point, of course, is to look through the lens and experience the face, the installation, through that lens; indeed Dalí made this whole damn thing, piece by piece.

We are not supposed to observe it only from the side, or straight on from ground level. We are supposed to climb the stairs, stick our faces against the lens, and see what we see. The view, the standing, the looking, the lens, the experience created by it all is the fucking art. If I spent a little more time I could probably come up with an interpretation or two about Mae West, about being under a gaze, under a lens, examined, while you exist prone, on the floor. As furniture.

But that’s not what this is about.

This is about what I noticed while waiting my turn. Namely, that just about every person waited in line for ten to fifteen minutes, climbed the stairs, stopped at the top, faced the lens, held up their phone, snapped a photo through the lens, and walked immediately down the other side of the podium. Many people just held the phone up and took a shot of the whole thing, lens included, while passing by. Then they descended the stairs and left the room. If they looked through the lens at all it was for a second or two before taking a photo. But the vast majority of people did not look at all with their own eyes. They just took a picture.

In moments like this I’m overcome with a sense that we’re living a dystopian nightmare of robot humans who have lost all meaning in life. I have little confidence that the level of disruption and sorrow I feel watching this sort of thing is on the spectrum of rational. It comes in flashes, really, a sense that there is truly nothing left, that nobody is around anymore to understand that you have to look through the lens with your own eyes, that Dalí made it for us, for me, that we traveled all the way to Spain for this, or across town. We paid money to come here. We waited in line for this moment. There’s something in us that wants to see this, isn’t there? Why am I here otherwise? WHAT ARE ANY OF US DOING HERE IF NOT TO LOOK THROUGH THE LENS AS DALÍ THE MANIAC WANTED.

Sorry, I’m fine.

With each person who waited, got to the top, held up a phone, then walked away, my anxiety rose. Nothing changed! I felt myself wanting to scream SOMEBODY LOOK THROUGH THE LENS, PLEASE, GOD. But again and again, they wait, walk up the stairs, hold up the phone, leave.

Once I notice something like this, I’m transfixed by it. I can’t stop watching. I did the same thing the last time I was at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh’s 1887 Paris self portrait is there, and I stood immobile in a corner of the room it’s in, watching throngs of people patiently wait their turn to get close, finally get to the rope, at which time they’d lift their phone, take a photo or two, and leave. Occasionally people would look at it for a second or two with their actual eyes, but the vast majority did not. They were literally just taking a picture and walking away. Checking off the box of “saw famous Van Gogh.” Or, in the Dalí Museum, “took photo of Mae West face thing.”

Lest you think I’m coming at this from a place of cultural elitism, I’ll share with you the game I created for myself in the Dalí Museum. It was called “find the penis.” As the name cleverly indicates, the game was to locate a penis in every Dalí piece. I came up with this myself.

As significant as Freud and my creepy psychoanalytic neighbor may find it, I’m sharing this because I want you to understand I am not what you’d call a cosmopolitan superpower. Couldn’t fake it if I tried. I rarely know what I’m looking at when staring at art, let alone possess the ability to say something intelligent about it. I love going to museums with artists who actually know things; I love the way they stare so closely at the paintings, pointing out to me this stroke or that one, that color or this one. Dimensions, space. What makes this piece incredible in light of its era.

And I read. I definitely read. I read books about painters. About art history. I read the little explanations of the paintings. I always buy the audio tours. Or I find the penises. Occasionally I do both.

But I do know one thing: If I am at a fucking art museum it is to take in the fucking art, and drive-by iPhone experiences do not allow me to do that. I do know that my one job as an observer of a piece of art is to observe the piece of art. That’s sort of the beauty of this, isn’t it? All these elitists can run around declaring what’s high or low art or who’s worth our attention or not or who’s influenced by whom and yet, those people can do nothing about the moment I have standing in front of a painting. What that art does to me is mine. I don’t have to explain it, share it, or pretend I have a response beyond the visceral one. I don’t even have understand or place it. It does not need intellect.

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Our lives were not on the line. We were not destitute. There were no shady criminals leading us across California deserts. And this move was not the only time life has forced me to I realize I do not know what the fuck I’m doing, must figure it out, and those two facts are terrifying.

We could also call that “adulthood.”

We left the United States for the same reason many of our ancestors left their countries. Namely, in search of a better life. We didn’t leave because our lives were under threat. We did not arrive seeking refugee or asylum status. We were not fleeing imminent danger or political persecution. We were not part of a diaspora. There is privilege in those facts alone. Add to that our racial and ethnic advantage of being white folks from the United States, and it is even more so.

But on the spectrum of privilege in moving abroad, if we understand it as ease due to money, class, education, and social advantage, seems to me we fell just about in the middle. We are not refugees, nor are we wealthy folks with corporate contracts who jump continents on the dime of the company they work for, keeping their house in New York because why not, send their kids to international schools also on the dime of the corporation, and enjoy financial and employment security even in one of the most expensive countries in Europe.

Over the years, however, I’ve noticed people often do not allow this nuance, instead glorifying what we’ve done as brave and courageous or dismissing it as a mere gesture of the obscenely privileged. This is sort of odd, and yet, I understand it.

I learned years ago that many people don’t read what’s written on the page. They read themselves into the page. This is a funny position for a writer. We do our best to communicate clearly with all who read our work while knowing full well we will fail in this effort. We have no ultimate control over how our words will be received. People read through the filters of their own experience, pain, trauma, rage — or maybe they’re just fucking hungry as they experience your work. Many people read through one lens alone: Does this reflect and validate my own experience and opinions?

As an aside, this is why I’d argue everyone needs education in literature. We need to learn to read. Read in the context of the piece. Read a bit more objectively. Consider and critique it within its own framing, not simply through the lens of our own feelings and egos. Read critically, in other words.

If we are only reading for feeling validation, how do we expand ourselves, incorporate the experience of others, learn a damn thing?

I often tell my writing students that this is why you cannot obsess over a certain outcome with your work, and when the crazies come — as in, the folks who seem to have a deeply emotional response divorced from anything you said, lose their shit or misunderstand you so deeply you feel you’ve entered a Black Mirror episode — you have to let them go. The only critique worth our attention is that which responds to the work itself, the ideas themselves. Now, if many people have the same critique, even if it seems odd and surprising, I’d argue it may have some validity and then it’s absolutely our job as writers to see if we were unclear, or failed to support our arguments, etc.

It took me years to figure this out. I used to spend hours in useless comment wars with random people in Iowa who wouldn’t stop calling me a “dumb cunt.” I once wrote a satirical essay about how tidy houses are not real because I couldn’t keep my house clean. No really, it was this silly. I claimed that tidy houses are obviously just an invention of liars. It was a rather unhinged rant about the chaos of my home.

The premise “I suck at this and therefore everyone on earth who’s better at it is obviously lying” seemed sufficiently ridiculous to me that I was communicating my lack of seriousness. I thought people would understand I did not actually believe neat houses do not exist, and was simply making fun of myself, and inviting mothers who also suck at domestic work to feel seen for a minute, and laugh.

It was the only time in 11 years of writing my blog that I had to turn off comments. They grew so vitriolic I had to shut them down. I had never in my life enraged so many women. And I was utterly baffled. I had written way more offensive shit than that! And good lord, it was a fucking stupid blog post. I looked inept and vaguely insane. Why would some woman in California failing to keep her house clean then making stupid claims about it enrage a person so?

It was so weird I grew deeply curious. I read all of the comments again, really trying to understand what was happening. I noticed that most of the enraged comments were by women who professed themselves as excellent domestic managers, and finally, after a few days, it dawned on me: By flippantly dismissing not only the expectation on myself to keep a tidy house but also rejecting the entire institution of Clean Houses, I was belittling and insulting a central source of pride and identity for these women. I do not mean this in a degrading or demeaning way. I mean that for many stay at home mothers, particularly those who do not work outside the home, religious women, etc., their whole lives centered on their ability to build an organized, orderly home, and raise kids in it.

And here I was, some asshole liberal in California, implying they aren’t actually doing their work, and boldly declaring that I just, uh, don’t keep a clean house, announcing all of this on the internet and inviting hundreds of mothers to agree with me that keeping a clean house is impossible and all those tidy houses are fake. (Read: the people who could read satire often joined in my nonsense. They were also not serious.)

I understood, and I wasn’t upset about it anymore. I got it. I didn’t feel sorry for writing it; it’s not my job to teach the world how to read satire. But I felt compassion. Funny thing is, if any of those women had asked me what my opinion is on whether a neat home or thrashed home is better, or if I could improve at being a mother when it came to domestic shit, or the amount of respect I hold for stay at home mothers, and women who make their families their main area of focus, they would have heard from me that I respect them deeply, reject the feminism that claims they are losers wasting their lives, and believe they are doing vitally important work much better than I am.

But we never got that far because they were screaming at me until I turned off comments.

And so, here we are. Back to my the way people “read” my move to The Netherlands. I’ve written a little about people projecting the romantic dream of moving abroad, but I also realized I have never told the whole story of how we got here. I’ve never just laid it all out.

So I’m going to tell you now exactly how it happened, including details about actual money, so you can decide for yourself if we are Brave Renegades or Privileged Assholes or both or neither.

My opinion is that we are neither, and actually, we are much worse than either of those categories. I’ll explain what I mean at the end of this rather extensive delineation of our path to Holland.

***

Why We Left

We left the United States because we stopped believing our kids’ lives were going to better than ours. We left because we had spent time in France and Spain in 2017 and felt a weight lifted off of our shoulders while there.

We did not leave because Donald Trump was elected. We left because Donald Trump is what’s coughed up by a dying empire as it circles the drain of its former glory.

We left when we saw that “the resistance” was a bunch of ancient, centrist Democrats who were almost as firmly entrenched in the oligarchy as the Republicans they claimed to loathe. We left because we lost hope of anything in our country changing during our lifetimes or our children’s.

We left because in November 2016 my mentally ill cousin stabbed my grandmother in the jugular vein after eating a dinner with her. I’ll explain. When you believe you are in a family where people do not kill each other, that you are part of a relatively stable, sane, loving family—not like those weirdos you hear about on the radio who murder each other—when you believe your whole life that you would never be living a true crime podcast episode and yet one day your mother calls, screaming in broken hysterics “He killed my mother!” over and over again, well, your understanding of life and your place in it change. When you learn that the “he” she spoke of is one of your closest cousins, once a mild-mannered, kind, beautiful child you knew well, things change even more.

The security we once had, the idea that someday, “in retirement,” things will change, our life will look as we want it to look—we won’t race endlessly in jobs we hate to still not pay all the bills or take vacations—all of those delusions just die. And it’s almost instant. If my grandmother can bleed out on a cold linoleum floor because her grandson stopped taking his medication “because it was making him fat,” and this can all happen one banal evening in a banal tract home in the San Francisco Bay Area, how the fuck does a sensible person claim there is one iota of guarantee of a future to hold onto as the time “I’ll really start living?”

The game was up. We saw through it all. Not because we wanted to, but because we were leveled by the randomness of life, the precarious reality of it all, and we were stripped of the delusion that we were somehow immune to this fact, that we had some protection, some special dispensation from the gods that our lives, despite appearances, were guaranteed.

We saw, no, we felt in our bones, that we needed to make life what we wanted it right now. We had to live now. And we could not figure out who the hell decided life, big life, the grand life, the one single life, should look like what our American life had become. It felt insane, frankly, to accept what we were doing. Ridiculous. We lost the ability to convince ourselves otherwise. And frankly, we just stopped giving a fuck if we blew up our lives. It was all a bit cliched, really.

How we Left

I began scouring the internet for ways into Europe. I could not find a visa we qualified for, had the money for. I searched for at least a year. I had a spreadsheet of notes. I found nothing.

In December 2018, we went to a Christmas party at a friend’s house in Davis, California, where we met some folks who had recently moved to Amsterdam. We told them how badly we wanted to leave, and they suggested we check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty (the “DAFT”). I went home and did so. It was a treaty in place since the 1950s between the US and NL, and it allowed freelancers and entrepreneurs to move to The Netherlands without a large financial investment, and without highly skilled migrant requirements. (Note: the US did not uphold its end of the agreement, shocking absolutely nobody, but the Dutch did, and still do.)

It was a 2-year visa that could be renewed for 5 years after that. At 5 years residency, we could apply for permanent residency. We could not get Dutch citizenship without renouncing our American citizenship, but in 5 years we could be quite close to naturalized. The financial investment was €4500 per person. For perspective, at the time, freelancer and entrepreneurial visas in other European countries required more along the lines of €100k investments.

I didn’t believe for a second that we could do it, that DAFT was really something we qualified for, but I set up a phone call with a Dutch immigration attorney anyway. She said we would qualify because I was a writer and editor, had a proven business and income, clients, etc. I explained that we could not support ourselves on my income alone. She said it was fine if Mac also started a business in The Netherlands. I didn’t believe her.

I set up another call with another Dutch immigration attorney. He said the same in unequivocal terms. He said that in 20 years he’d never had a DAFT visa denied, that if he says we can get it, we can.

This time, I believed him.

Our Qualifications for A Move Abroad

But Mac had never run a business. His entire work history consisted of working on his parents’ ranch then as an ironworker for over a decade. There was a brief stint in a restaurant kitchen where I was a waitress because we had just met and couldn’t be away from each other at night. Lol.

We wondered. We sat on the porch after the kids went to bed and talked and dreamed and discussed for hours. We googled The Netherlands, read about it: bikes, cold, rain, progressive politics, the happiest children in the world, hybrid public/private healthcare system, the best work-life balance in the world. We’d never been there. I repeat, we had never been there.

What if Mac started a business as a builder? What if he took all he knew about building and worked on people’s houses in The Netherlands? We heard builders were greatly in need. We knew it was quite a wealthy country. But we did not know how to run a business. We did not know how to do a damn thing. And yet, we could try. Could we?

Over the next few months, as we moved through our daily lives alongside the knowing that we could potentially not live like this anymore, all of the feelings I described above exponentially increased. It was as if a secure alternative made the whole thing worse. In no time at all I grew overwhelmed with the feeling that I refused to accept this as my life, that my kids should live this way.

We grew indignant, perhaps, just a little, and maybe there was an element of mid-life crisis in there somewhere, a desire to blow up our lives in the interest of amusement. If this makes sense to you, if you can understand the vague urge to just fuck it all up and see what happens, you may also be an alcoholic.

Just kidding. Sort of.

We decided to go. The part that took the longest for me was the idea of leaving my parents. My mother was my life. We had never been away from each other. I knew my children were a huge part, no, the most central and vital part, of my parents’ sense of meaning and purpose. For better or worse, this was true. And I would just rip them away? It felt cruel, selfish, impossible. But my life in the USA did too. I thought about being 40 years old, that they had been with me half my life, that my two older kids through almost their entire childhoods. I tried to tweak my interpretation into something less selfish and mean, but usually I could not.

I landed always, however, on my grandmother, and the one life I had to live, how I could not, should not, will not, live for my parents — what I thought I owed them, how much I didn’t want to hurt them. At some point, I saw that I too must make my life as an autonomous human on this earth. I have to live for myself, my children. And when I thought about it in those terms, I knew we had to go.

Was it the “right” decision? Who knows. How does one determine that sort of thing? Are there “right decisions?” Compared to what? Is there some cosmic spreadsheet in which everything is organized as “right” or “not right?” Do we decide based on outcomes? Impossible. Everything has a cost. My life is exponentially better here and yet I’m fucking lonely, without friends, really did abandon my parents, and missed the last three years of my father’s life.

Was it “worth it?” From what perspective? My own? Not sure. My kids? Yes, as long as you ignore me taking them away from their extended family. If we pull back far enough, it all becomes blurred.

The longer I live, the more convinced I become that people invent stories of “worth it” and “right” to avoid how little we actually know about such things.

The Move Itself

We applied for the visa, sold our house in February 2019, and moved in with my mom. Mac and I visited Amsterdam and Haarlem for the first time in April 2019, tried and failed to find a house to rent, and came back to California. We knew we were going to live in Haarlem. It was close to Amsterdam and people had money. (It was also fucking beautiful.) We hoped these factors would result in plenty of work for Mac.

We bought six one-way tickets to Amsterdam for July 7, 2019.

Here was our plan: We had some equity in our house in Woodland, California. It had appreciated in value. Around $80k. This was more money than I had ever fathomed, and we wondered if it was enough to get us to the new country and supplement our income for a year if necessary as Mac built up his business. Fun fact, because we had no corporate contracts, and no financial history at all in The Netherlands as freelancers, nobody would rent to us. Two weeks before our flight date, we had no place to live. Airbnbs were so expensive for a family our size I could only laugh at the thought. We worked all day every day trying to find a place to live, doing video tours with the real estate agent in Haarlem, applying for everything that would even remotely work.

We finally found one company that would rent to us, but only if we paid an entire year’s rent in advance. The rent was €2665, absolutely astronomical. We also had to pay a deposit of three month’s rent and agent fees. It was around 40k euros we sent to one fucking company for a year of housing. Half our money gone.

We knew we were getting robbed. We knew we were getting taken advantage of by an exploitative rental agency. We also knew we had absolutely no choice but to take it. They had us over a barrel. Another exciting fact, after we moved out of that house, it was deemed uninhabitable due to a gas leak. I now understand why we all got chronic headaches in that house, and spent most days wondering where all the strange smells were coming from.

We sold just about everything we had in California. What we kept, we put in a storage unit while living with my mom, and coordinated a shipping container once in The Netherlands. We moved one container for around €6k, keeping our beds, some dressers, Christmas decorations, things like that. Immigration application fees and lawyer fees were around €10k. Including the furniture and things we had to buy here, you can do the math: We had around €20k left to start our lives in The Netherlands, to cover us for a year if things went badly.

I comforted myself with the following: If we ran out of money, if all failed, our parents could buy us plane tickets to move back to the US and we could live with them, start over somehow. I knew we would never be on the streets. (On the DAFT visa, if we even APPLIED for social welfare help we would be immediately deported.)

On the other hand, in that worst case we would be starting with nothing in the country we just left, in worse condition than before. We would have wasted everything. In other words, failing did not really feel like an option, I just needed to know our kids would be okay if we really, really, ran out of money and needed to get back to the USA.

The Early Days in Holland

Our new life in The Netherlands became a sort of fuck it all beast mode 24 hours a day. I knew nothing. Neither did Mac. We were insane with the newness of it all, a sort of dazed wandering through the days. I remember calling to set up health insurance, looking for doctors, trying to get our visas finalized — the machine recordings in Dutch and me having NO FUCKING CLUE what they were saying. I would just push numbers and hope for the best, hoping to get through to a human. I once hit the emergency number when trying to call our doctor. The woman who answered was not amused.

I remember one day walking up to the door of a store, staring at it, and simply turning around and walking home. I could not handle one more insecure interaction. I could not face one more unknown place, person, system, item. The humiliation was vast, the isolation more than I could have imagined. And yet we had these children to raise and this life to make. We were here now.

I was not what you would call happy. And yet, I posted photos of cobblestone and tiny espressos and medieval churches. If I didn’t, I probably would have gotten on the first plane back to San Francisco. I held on for dear life to how pretty it all was, how exotic, how safe. In that way I made it through one day to the next, telling myself it’s all so incredible. Look how old this shit is!

We were sleeping on Ikea mattresses on the floor and unknowingly washing our clothes in fabric softener. Our kids attended a “taal” school (language school) for immigrant kids to learn Dutch before moving into public education. They bravely walked into a new school with kids who all spoke different languages, but I can tell you the Dutch way with children wrapped them immediately in warmth, security, a sense of place and purpose. They were taken care of. I knew they were taken care of, and this is a feeling that has never left.

From the free healthcare they received to the loving, firm direction of their teachers, to the way they were allowed to climb trees and whittle sticks and run and play and be children, from the clean streets and almost total lack of people without homes, sick and dying in the streets, from the money the government put into our account ever three months to “help take care of the kids” to the bicycles to the dental care to the way they offered them sweets in all the shops we entered, I knew I had come to a place where my children, at least, would be taken care of. That I never questioned. That I saw immediately. They were going to have a fucking great life here. And most likely a much better future as well.

We messed up a lot of things, but we got that right. Our kids were the ultimate, profound beneficiaries of our move. After six years here, this has only become more clear.

At the gas-leak house, our Dutch neighbors heard Mac was a builder looking for work. They told us their nephew was looking to have a room added onto his house, and asked if Mac would quote the job. Now, having been an ironworker, Mac knew how to do structural work. Working with steel beams, reading plans, creating structures that weren’t previously there, that was his actual expert zone.

He had absolutely no idea, however, how to “quote a job.” There was a lot of YouTube and guessing involved.

He quoted these people €14k on a job that should have cost €60k-€80k. THEY ACCEPTED QUICKLY I CAN TELL YOU THAT MUCH.

So yes, Mac did a job basically for free because we had no idea what the hell we were doing. He didn’t even have a car for the first part of that job. He’d bike to their house with tools in his bike basket. Eventually he got a car for €600.

Funny thing is, that massive “fuck up” in the first job was not a fuck up at all. Because you see, yes, he had given away tens of thousands of euros, but also, he had never worked in The Netherlands as a builder before, and adding an extension to a house is a big, serious job, only given to builders with proven experience and references. These people were willing to risk it with Mac because it was so damn cheap (no, we did not know any of this).

But Mac started with this type of job, and did excellent work. These people loved him, a lot. They were so keen to help him they told everyone they knew about him. They let random potential clients of Mac’s come to their house to see his work. In no time at all, word got around that there was this new American builder who did great work for reasonable prices (lol), and Mac got an immediate second job. And then a third. And then there was a German woman who tried to scam him and freaked us out and it was awful. And then a fifth.

He has not, in six years, gone more than a week without work. And at some point he started charging remotely accurate amounts. Go Mac.

In other words, that original fuck up set us up for years of work, repaid itself ten times over. Life is funny, ain’t it?

I could tell you a thousand more stories of how deeply we messed up, how many times we screamed at each other, expelled our stress in yelling matches or cold silence. I could tell you how we clung to each other, laughed and wondered at it all, how Mac once said, “I’m so out of my comfort zone I don’t even feel afraid anymore.” And that really was it. It was all so new, so crazy and disorienting, so seemingly impossible, that there was barely time for fear, really. Everything was so fucking nuts it all just blurred into who cares.

I could tell you how I fell into the deepest depression of my life, how angry our adult child was that we moved here, how we sent our older son to the wrong school and paid for it dearly, literally and figuratively. I could tell you how covid hit six months after we arrived, and my world got even smaller than it already was, until I gave up trying to make a life here, trying to find friends, community, and my life became two bike rides a day to take the kids to school and pick them up, a trip to the store if I absolutely could not avoid it, a pack a day of cigarettes smoked alone on my porch while I stared at my phone. I could tell you of our dreamy trips to Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, the Alps. I could tell you a thousand stories of how much I hate it here, how much I love it here, how much I do not, in the end, regret leaving.

But as I’ve said many times, I have no neat narrative to offer, no cohesive interpretation to frame this story or wrap it up in some deep meaning. Perhaps I simply cannot do that to myself, convince myself that I understand what we did, if it was a “right” choice or a “good” choice, or even that I know what those terms mean. So you have to sit with me and the unhelpful facts, and wonder what kind of person blows up their life even if they don’t know if it’s right or good.

My Theory on Why We’re Turned into a “Type”

I have thought hard about the way people often categorize the above story in overly simplistic terms of Brave Renegades or Rich Assholes. It surprises me - how often it happens, how quickly these determinations are made, and with so little information.

I don’t think they want to move to The Netherlands, or any other country necessarily. I think they may be telling themselves stories about what’s possible in life, about aspects of their own lives they aren’t happy with, that they’ve convinced themselves they cannot change because they don’t have what it takes.

They are reading through the lens of that experience.

And I understand. I understand why people frame our experience as some neat and precise type. It’s easier to dismiss others when you can categorize them as separate from you. It’s more comfortable to say “Well, they had this special thing (bravery, money) and thus could do that big thing, but I cannot.”

I understand this because I’ve done it.

I spent years wanting desperately to write a book. But every time I tried, I’d get to page 30 or so and realize I sounded like a 12-year-old trying to be clever. And it really was shit writing. I had no idea what to say next. The brilliant idea that brought me to the page morphed into a distant memory. The way was unclear. My confidence gone. What was surely going to be the next great American novel (memoir) became a silly dream of a fraud.

I would decide I did not have what it took to be an author. Sure, I could write blog posts, essays, even some bad poetry, but not a book. And this conclusion hinged entirely on my beliefs around what Real Writers did. What they looked like in my mind.

To be specific: I imagined authors sitting down each day at soaring mahogany desks, a typewriter in front of them (in my fantasy it was always 1920), sunlight pouring through linen curtains onto bookshelves packed with obscure Russian poetry. They sat down with the muse pouring through their fingers, words racing across the page in some beautiful cosmic download. I saw ease. I saw magic. I saw Hemingway drinking whiskey and pulling each page out of his typewriter, stacking it up into what would become in no time at all The Sun Also Rises. And then he went downstairs to meet Gertrude Stein in a smoky, also mahogany, bar. I saw no editing. I saw no grueling work. I saw no writers feeling stupid and incapable and wordless. There was a lot of dark wood involved.

And because I did not have the experience of my imagination, I gave up. Because I had decided that is what a writer looks like, that was the experience of a real writer, I logically concluded I was not one. I sat up nights staring at my laptop with blurry eyes and a half-baked idea, writing sentences that made me want to drown myself in my own verbosity. My attempts to write better sounded like attempts to write better, which is forced, affected, false. To me, the worst kind of writing there is.

So I quit. Over and over again I quit. I did not have what it took because I did not have what they had. They had magic. They had surroundings that invited brilliance. They were naturally creative. They knew how to work with the page, be an artist. They were not experiencing what I was. I sat down and writing felt like dragging a giant boat through the mud. All that effort, very little progress, and why the fuck was I doing this anyway?

I did this for years, growing more and more irate at everyone I knew who was writing and publishing books. I wanted it to so badly. I had something to say. But every time it got hard, I encountered my story, and it felt real and impenetrable and always ending at the same place: “I do not have what it takes.” I’m just a mother of four in a stupid town in the Central Valley of California. What business have I? Paris ain’t shit to me.

After years of this, I grew so sick of myself, so desperate to tell a story I had in me, that a wild and crazy thought entered my mind: Maybe, Janelle, having never written a book, you don’t actually know what it’s like. Maybe you should see what actual authors have to say. So I did. And I made a choice to trust them. Whatever they said, I’d trust them. And what they said was nothing of what I had invented. Hemingway said he wrote “one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.”

Anne Lamott said “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts,” and that she had hoped she didn’t get hit by a truck before she’d edited a first draft she was working on because people would think that’s how she actually wrote.

Junot Diaz said writing a first draft was like being “lost at sea.”

Toni Morrison said she wrote the first draft of The Bluest Eye on a yellow legal pad with her toddler running around the couch she was sitting on, and he spit up on the legal pad, so she “wrote around the puke,” figuring she could “always wipe that away, but…might not get that sentence again.”

Those authors became real people, standard people, everyday people, armed, yes, with talent I most likely did not have, but no magic. No direct line to the muses. No special dispensation from the gods to sit down and write genius with ease. They wrote shit. They wrote badly. They were embarrassed of it. They were lost. They had babies who vomited on their work. They worked very, very hard.

It was only when I saw, understood, and accepted that they were human and worked as hard as losers like me that I was able to accept my experience for what it was. This is me writing a book. There is no correct way. There is only the way I’m doing it. It was only then I’d work as hard as necessary to get it done.

I wrote a horrifically bad first draft in November 2014. In 2018 it was published as my first book.

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What I’m saying is, the harder and harsher reality, I think, is the idea that people doing interesting things are absolutely standard people.

Don’t know about you, but the most terrifying thing imaginable is letting go of the judgments and conclusions I’ve drawn to justify my own inaction.

It is threatening to think about actually doing a thing we crave, dream of. It is existentially brutal to face the idea that maybe, maybe we could just do it. Maybe we can write the book. Maybe we can move to another country. Maybe we can — whatever the fuck it is we want and aren’t doing.

This is edging way too close to life-coach empowerment talk so I’m going to stop.

No, not quite. One more thing. What I’m saying is that sometimes others are a spotlight on the lies we tell ourselves. By nothing beyond their existence, they shatter the glass house we’ve built around ourselves. What did that Thoreau guy say? Something about all of us leading “lives of quiet desperation?”

A dream deeply buried, long forgotten, a whole world built up within us, around us, assuring us it cannot be done, we’re right to bury it. This is more sensible. This is more safe. Don’t try. Don’t go. Be small, day by day, someday it will change. We suspect occasionally it will not. And then some asshole pops up doing the impossible.

I watch them still. Lately, I watch people saying things I’m too scared to say. I admire them, wonder how they do it. How did they get comfortable with heresy? Are they so strong? Unafraid? Why can’t I say it all, lay it all out?

I’ll do it when I stop separating them from me, telling myself they have some special power. Someday, when I’m sufficiently fed up with myself, I’ll remember they have no more than me, and I have everything I need. I’ll see my grandmother, and myself, the day I stepped off the plane in Amsterdam, four kids looking up at me, a whole damn life to figure out.

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