One of the reviews of my memoir had this criticism: “There should’ve been a trigger warning for orthorexia.”

I don’t know if those are the exact words, but it was something along those lines. You are not supposed to respond or retaliate to book reviews, but I haven’t been able to stop being annoyed at that one. Are we all supposed to pretend the body doesn’t matter?

I think there should be a trigger warning for novels where the heroin is naturally thin, good-looking and never thinks about what she eats and often forgets to. If she does work out it is to show the grit and determination she needs to complete whatever main character task she must complete.

I start seeing people around me shed extra pounds while they eat whatever they want and don’t think about food (Ozempic), and I want to do it too (not the Ozempic—just the eating). Except, instead of going on a GLP-1, I let the foods I had been strict about back in, unmitigated. I eat bread, white rice, potato after potato, and have multiple cups of coffee with heavy cream throughout the day. I pick at the scones and waffles leftover from brunch, I order a cheeseburger and fries every now and then. I am sick of not eating the things that everyone else does.

When I see that my A1C has risen into the pre-diabetes range after being just on the cusp six months ago, I spend two days having a fit.

I don’t drink sugary drinks, I have an active job, active hobbies, shoot for protein goals, and people often ask me what my workout regimen is based on the muscle definition they see. I don’t buy from the center aisles at the grocery store and rarely go out to eat, but every now and then when I am feeling hormonal or depressed I’ll gorge on sneaky foods and veg out in front of my favorite reality show for hours. My body climbs up and down the same 20 pounds through the decades, but she looks good, healthy, solid.

And in the back of my mind, I feel vindicated, validated. SEE? See what happens when I don’t cut out sugar and flour?

Why isn’t there a trigger warning that relaxing on the controls can lead to a slow and horrible death? My daughter’s father and I used to play this game where we would pretend each other was quadriplegic. The non-quadrplegic one would have to do tasks for the other, like taking off a shirt, or rolling them out of bed. If the game had a winner, it would be him since he was 6’4” and over 200 pounds.

I can’t consider a new disease without playing the tape forward to ending up in that place. If I don’t control my body, what else do I have?

When I think about letting go, my mind always drifts back to when I worked in the assisted living facility. One of the most depressing patients was a type two diabetic and also a very wealthy man. I knew this because when I was flipping through the member guide at the country club where I was also employed I saw his name and picture—amputation, sepsis, PPE. I wonder if he’s still alive.

Have you ever given someone who can’t walk a shower? In a chair? The patients don’t get a daily shower. There are two days of the week when each person gets their shower. They don’t choose the days. They don’t choose the times. We go into their rooms and get them out of bed, pick out their underwear and rifle through their clean clothes—their names written in sharpie on the tags, so they don’t get lost in the laundry. It’s a scary orphanage for people on the way to death.

Getting vitals at the beginning of each shift is terrifying. I’m a reverse of my sleep paralysis monster—entering the rooms of the elderly with my thermometer and blood pressure cuff, clamping their fingers with the pulse oximeter. I can’t imagine being in such close proximity to anyone anymore. At the end of the day, the physical pain from lifting adults from the beds onto their wheelchairs, hoisting them onto toilets and feeding them slop that I would never eat, even with my most lax controls in place.

How do I never end up here? The one pervasive thought that sits on my shoulders through every shift, until I eventually never go back.

I’ll tell you that job at the facility was the hardest work I ever did, and the people who were the best at it showed no emotion. They lugged patients—not carelessly but maybe a little callously, detached, but in the way a mother gets while changing her thousandth diaper while also thinking about the 47 other things she has to do that day. She might just go through the motions—wipe, fold, baby giggles, baby on floor. It’s like that except the babies are almost always pushing 200 pounds, and you can’t set them down on the floor.

Am I allowed to obsess about my health now? Am I allowed to write, without warning, about how I will not eat a meal without a post-meal walk. How I’m tortured by the morning buns, chocolate chunk cookies, ginger-snaps, and even the fresh-baked sourdough bread that sits in the bakery case from the moment I get into work until we push boxes of it on the last tables of the night. Am I allowed to restrict what I eat without it being “disordered” because now the doctor says I should? Even though every time before it was just me being extra, weird, orthorexic, hyper-vigilant, etc.

The amount of time I spent hemming and hawing about writing this. The amount of time I spent popping in and out of denial about whether it could be true, plugging glucose readings into chat, and asking if I’m going to be okay.

When can I expect to be okay?

I found out last week that I have pre-diabetes, and the food noise has turned into a late 90s grindcore food concert being blasted in my ears—no earplugs, and I’m right next to the speaker. I am finding it hard to write this week.

I just attempted to quarter a raw chicken and was so put off by it that I only thirded it. It reminded me of this essay, which was previously behind a paywall which follows.

Eating Meat

(Originally published on August 30, 2023)

I have a fraught relationship with meat. I don’t know which dead animals are okay to buy and consume. In the first days of the farm-to-table restaurant where I work, one of the owners gave us a speech about the sweet lives of her pigs, the stress of factory-farmed animals, and how a feed-animal’s stress—if they’ve lived a shitty life—becomes a part of the meal.

The subject comes up while I’m laying by the pool with my sisters and cousin. It’s the beginning of the Ojai summer, We have to warm ourselves in the sun before our bodies can get hot enough to need the relief of the cool water. The neighborhood is on a plateau of some Hollywood producer’s ranch and from the pool deck wealthy cattle graze on the straw yellow rolling acreage. My sister, Jess and cousin, Rayanne discuss where they buy their meat, how much is stored in their extra freezers, and the difference in the price of chicken at Vons and Costco.

I announce, “My freezer is full of ethically sourced meats that I get from a subscription box.”

“You sound pretentious,” says Trish, my younger sister.

There’s a record scratch in my brain at this unexpected assertion from the least likely criticizer. Trish, my agreeable sister, is an easy-going and hilarious makeup artist who is mostly cheering me on for everything I do, so it cuts deep when she makes that remark.

My cousin claps back, “You better watch what you say. She’s going to write about it,” and she’s right because here I am.

A few weeks before this rude pool scene, I was listening to a podcast episode of the Doctors Farmacy. This is one of the symptoms of my obsession with health. Dr. Hyman is a functional medicine practitioner who extolls the virtues of using food as medicine. Reading his books and listening to his podcast has given me new ways to be obsessive about food.

As an adolescent, I used to wish I had the self-control to be anorexic, but time and access to information have given me all the ingredients I need to be orthorexic. With orthorexia, I can obsess about the health and nutrition benefits of food, but also sometimes eat things that I think are bad for me. The only requirement is that I mentally flagellate myself over them. In this episode, Dr Hyman paid a visit to Roam Ranch—a regenerative bison ranch in Texas that aims to mirror the natural world in the raising of meat. I navigated Friday morning traffic on the 210 freeway through stinging tears as I listened to the rancher talk about the ritual they use when they harvest a bison for its meat. You can pay $175 and take part in the harvest where a bison is gently killed by a bullet to its head in front of its herd, and then all of the other bison individually pay their respects to the dead bison. The bison accept that one of their herd is dead and then move on.

Dr Hyman describes the scene with sentimentality and reverence. He explains that the typical method for harvesting meat would involve first transporting the bison to a slaughterhouse and causing undue stress when it’s removed from the fields and herd that it has known all of its life. You would end up eating stress in that meat. The Roam Ranch method is unexpected and swift by comparison. The animal is taken while in a peaceful state—a stress-free source of protein.

A few weeks after I learned about Roam Ranch it is announced at work that we will have an extra special guest at line-up. Dylan, who raises the lamb we use in our biryani, has come in to tell us about his sheep–what makes them special—how they live and eat. It sounds like they have an idyllic life trudging up and down the Ojai Valley.

Dylan looks like he has stepped through a time and space portal into the modern world. His hair and beard are long, and he wears a good amount of brown leather including a hat with a shape like Indiana Jones’s. I could see him carrying one of those shepard’s poles with the giant hook at the end like a mix between Little Bo Peep and Gandalf. I wait until he’s done talking about the biodiversity of the grasses the sheep are grazing on, the procurement of his own ranch and the progression of his professional relationship with the restaurant and our chef. I don’t ask the question I want the answer to until the Q & A is over and we are all on break because it could make me sound like either a serial killer or an agent of PETA.

“Do you personally slaughter them?” I want to know how they die. I’m being haunted by that podcast episode about the bison death ritual, and am hopeful that Dylan has a similar story about the lamb harvest.

“No, since it’s being sold at a restaurant they have to be slaughtered at a USDA facility.” He goes into the method that they use, and I’m disappointed that the lambs who have been living such a beautiful life in the shangri-la of the Ojai Valley might be living their last moments in a state of stress at being transported to a USDA facility. It’s not his fault, though. I guess the people who decide on these laws aren’t considering the stress of travel days, and its possible effect on meat quality.

Since I like my meat to give less clues as to it having once been a whole living animal, I have seldom dealt with entire chickens until they began arriving frozen in my meat box. They send whole pasture-raised carcasses. They’ve been beheaded, plucked and gutted, but the fact that all the meat is still on the bones of the skeleton gives a little too much evidence of their corporeal form. I let them defrost for a day and then I roast them using an Ina Garten recipe where you stuff a chopped lemon, a bulb of garlic and some thyme in the cavity between the chicken’s thighs and then brush the skin with butter and sprinkle it with salt and pepper before you pop it in the oven.

When I handle the chicken, I notice how much the shape and weight of the carcass reminds me of my cat’s body when she’s in the bread-loaf position. With her tail tucked underneath and all her limbs and perfectly square to the floor, her haunches stick up like chicken thighs. I feel a tenderness toward my chicken carcass that makes me a little squeamish. I never considered how the chickens I ate lived their lives until I saw salacious footage of factory workers kicking chickens. I pay more for my chicken because under the “pasture-raised” designation I assume there is a promise that my chickens aren’t being kicked. I wouldn’t want an animal to be abused or uncomfortable on my behalf, and God forbid it should spend its short life yearning for space to move around.

What is the difference between a companion animal and one that’s used for meat? I have a deal with my cats that says they are free-range and welcome to leave my care any time they want. They spend their days frolicking in the yard. I lure them back in with their dinner at night, but if they wanted to go somewhere else—live with a new family with a better selection of wet food—there’s nothing to stop them. I convince myself that this is evidence that I have supreme empathy in the care of animals.

Sometimes I log into the Next-door app and scroll through missing or found cat posts and read the debates between the indoor cat and outdoor cat people. The indoor cat neighbors spend their time tisk-tisking us for being irresponsible pet owners who are inviting death and injury to our animals. The bird-man invariably shows up in defense of the aviary population of all the neighborhoods of America. When I first started noticing him chiming in on the debate, my cats had not yet killed a bird. I scoffed and told anyone who would listen that my cats didn’t kill birds and mostly ate flies, potato bugs, and the occasional gopher. Over the years, their hunting skills have improved and the body count of birds has increased. I can better see everyone’s point, but I’m still team freedom.

I wonder which neighbors are giving me and my outdoor cats the side-eye as they pass us while I garden. I know there’s a silent faction that politely nods in person and then goes onto the internet to thrash on people whose outdoor pets have gone missing. I just want my girls to have the full experience of life before they curl up next to me at night as my companions, not my captives.

When Dylan, the shepard talks about the slaughter of his animals, he is very matter-of-fact about it. He does not express sentimentality. I wonder how these ranchers prevent that human affection from seeping in. Don’t they ever want to just lay down next to and spoon their soft little lambs?

I read this book, Tender is the Flesh recently. The story is set in a dystopian version of our world where there has been a pandemic that affects animals in such a way that humans can no longer eat or come in any contact with them without catching a deadly virus. This results in a world where all pets are euthanized. People use umbrellas to ward off bird shit, and meat producers have turned to breeding humans deemed as “heads” and something subhuman to provide protein. They brand them and cut out their vocal cords to assure this.

The main character is a bigwig at one of the most well-regarded meat processing plants and ends up impregnating one of his “head.” The story has you kind of rooting for his redemption while he vacillates between being on the cusp of enlightenment (realizing the humanity in the heads) and compassion and playing along with the barbaric structure of society. The concept is a little far-fetched since we’ve all heard of vegetarians, and in this world, the plants are still in existence. But then I think about the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes, and they had to resort to cannibalism to survive. In an extreme circumstance, you can get squeamish about eating a friend or a pet…or you can die. Of course I could never kill my cat or my sister for food, but if that’s all there was and they were already dead maybe I would break that seal. I have to shut off a part of my mind when I eat meat anyways. A lamb is just an adorable baby sheep, and a dead person in a moment of desperation could be a big piece of meat.

These are not extreme times though. We are presented with a paralyzing selection of options as far as our protein goes. Sometimes it seems unfair how docile and trusting cows and chickens are. It’s almost like they’re begging to become a meal. I wish I wanted to eat insects. I wish it was normal to stop a fly from buzzing around your head in an irritating manner and pop it in your mouth. It would feel less like we were eating our friends or ourselves. Their alien bodies are offensive and villainous and need to be stopped.

In the meantime, I get these frozen boxes of ethically-sourced meat. Sometimes, I’ll put something in the refrigerator to defrost and get too lazy or distracted to even prepare it. Those are the times when I am most savage—when I end up tossing a piece of a dead animal after its blissful life on an American family farm. A life that has been cut short, so that it can be frozen and sent in a cardboard box full of dry ice and other dead animals–a whole series of actions bringing its offerings to my front door, and I end up throwing its rotting body in the trash.

So, the long-winded rebuttal to my sister’s assertion that I sound pretentious is that she’s right. My declaration about only buying ethically sourced meats is virtue-signaling. While everyone else was sharing where to get deals, I was thinking about everything else I think about before I make the choice to buy meat. Sometimes it feels like I’m posturing as a good person for myself, but when it comes down to it, I’ll eat an unethically-sourced hot dog at the movies. After an especially desperate shift, I’ll make a late-night trip to Taco Bell. The person I wish I was has higher standards than that. I got called out for being pretentious and realized that deep in the center of my meat is a sloppy waster. I may as well be eating people.

Books that made me this way:

Julie Fontes

Author

to bookstores and slip them into books. It’s a new part of my job. I put one in Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind and Mark Lewis’s The Biology of Desire in my local Barnes & Noble.

The first best thing I did when I got sober was that I started to fill the pages of notebooks. I don’t resemble the romanticized tortured alcoholic writer. In fact, most of the writers I know aren’t very cool. Coolness is its own kind of malfunction. Is it that the cool people are truly unafraid or that they appear to be unafraid? Whatever it is—it’s attractive—like the way a cool cat will receive visitation and admiration, lifting her chin for scratches. I’m desperate to be cool.

I have this table of big dorks. How does one become a dork? Why do they have the opposite effect of the cool person, with their nasal questions and inability to make a decision? A server’s dream is a table full of decisive people. They look at the menu and close it. They don’t ask me for “the favorites.” They tell me what they want.

What they really really want.

Round up all the dorks. Round them up and do something with them.

Round them dorks up and what? Give them makeovers? Get a barber to shave that neck hair… get them to the gym…a physical therapist…fix that arch in the upper back that makes them look like their shoulders are caving in.

If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.

I’m rolling silverware with a colleague and I tell her, “Covid was one of the most magical times of my life because of all the free time.” I spent most days taking walks around town with my robust immune system and mild weather. I started seeing it through rose colored glasses quickly after the vaccines came available. I have to dig deep to pull up the other memories—the hospital capacity updates, the mask debates. “Too bad so many people had to die.”

She stops rolling and stares at me with a horrified look on her face. Have I made a terrible faux pas? Did she lose someone?

“I’m sorry?” she says.

“You know—all the people who died of Covid.”

She looks relieved and starts laughing, she had only been half listening and for a moment thought I might be confessing to being a murderer.

We both laugh till we cry and keep rolling.

Idle hands are the devil’s play things.

I have journal entries from when I was in my twenties and drinking. They are feral animal things. The height of uncool though I was good at pretending. I am saturated in the pain of desire for this or the other man, and thrash on the pages of the early aughts begging the universe to make him finally love me correctly. I should have just told them what I want.

What I really really want.

But I played it cool.

My frustration with my past self plays out in conversations I have with my daughter. I try not to be so helpless against the words that come out of my own mouth. Don’t fold. Don’t act like what you want doesn’t matter.

She’s smart. She’ll be fine. I need that on a Post-it note on my phone so I stop proselytizing every time I have an opinion that’s more about twenty-five year-old Julie than it is about 25 year-old K. I already had my turn at youth.

I wish I could time travel back to myself at that age and tell her to dork the fuck out.

Whose voice is it that tells me I’m wasting time by resting? Who is in there? What if it’s me twenty years from now coming back to say, “Work harder. I need cash for all this illness in the hot and crumbling world.” I feel guilty when I use my days off to rest and recharge. I buy panniers for my bike so at least I can turn cross-town travel into an activity—pedal against the impending whatever that tries to catch up to me.

I send my mom this Substack article that links leg strength to cognitive health. I’m pleased when she starts doing squats while brushing her teeth and going on hikes with me. What do they call us? The sandwich generation? The know-it-all in the middle carrying messages up and down the family line.

For one month I was the kind of person who made her own kimchi, but now I roll that cruciferous ball down the road to a time when I’ll feel more like it. When I was better at structuring my free time, I would make sure that the apartment was spotless on the eve of my day off so that nothing nagged at me and I could focus on leisure (what is leisure). Entropy strikes the rules I make for myself and I end up with a half finished list of chores. Only two dust bunnies left in a corner and another head of cabbage rotting in the vegetable drawer. Is it normal to finish your chores, or to leave some undone?

During the Personal Pizza reading contest in fifth grade, I blew all the kids out of the water on that leaderboard to a point where they stopped believing I had actually read all the books I said I had read. It had not been a chore. It was like they had put us in a candy-eating contest. I’ll make myself sick with books. I will vomit pages back up.

I wonder if my parents would’ve seen that chart, if they would’ve thought I was neurodivergent. I was lonely. I would beg and cry to not to have to go back. Let me stay home with my books.

The only time the guilt leaves is when my body is in motion. After an unprecedented three days of rest, during which I watch an entire scripted series and read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, it’s a relief to get back to work and restore some morality to my life.

La cigale ayant chanté tout l’Été

Se trouva fort dépourvue

Quand la bise fut venue.

And all that. I keep looking for something to get me out of the house on the community bulletin board. It’s all breathwork, folk songs, and mushroom integration. I don’t know how to have fun. How do you have fun?

How much does it cost to go to Fiji? They make us feel like we’re bad people just for trying to live our lives. Everyone is bashing up against something, though. Who is the neurotypical person?

If we aren’t gathering together and community organizing, we should just shut up. I know people who are organizing the community in other ways. I know people who are teaching the community how to dance. I would not see Morticia in her spot of sunlight and say Morticia how can you lay there when other cats are dying? You have a responsibility, Kitten—a responsibility to tell everyone you know the terrible things that you know so that they can tell everyone they know, and then we will all know.

What’s Eating You?

• Are you giving unsolicited advice while also being psychologically crushed by the weight of everything that you are supposed to be but aren’t?

• Are you cool?

• Are you a dork?

• Tell me about it.

“If you can do a shot of tequila, you can do anything.” Marissa, season 20 episode 1, Married at First Sight.

What Marissa doesn’t know is that the “experts” have set her up with Adam, who is in his non-drinking era, committed to excellence, and once had a girlfriend who played in the pickleball league with him, a time which he declares as, “The most fun [he’s] ever had.”

Do any of you watch Married at First Sight? I know how polarizing reality TV can be, and that some may have checked out and unsubscribed just at the mention of it, but it makes for some of the most riveting storytelling of our time. For the uninitiated, this is an arranged marriage reality show where “experts” matchmake behind the scenes and the show starts with couples meeting at the altar where a wedding ceremony is performed. Cameras follow the couples to a honeymoon, and then on a weeks long journey where they are put up in an apartment and we gleefully watch them either fall in love or things go horribly wrong.

Peacock is doing an ethical drop of episodes this season—three new episodes every Thursday. Just enough and not too much. I don’t make myself sick with a tv binge, but I get to check out and enter the world of semi-manufactured drama. Adam, this season’s sober groom, keeps getting called out for not being the normal one in the relationship. The other couples say this because of his lifestyle. He works remotely, lives on a lake, and shreds the jet-ski daily—a self-professed adrenaline junkie.

After hearing what Adam has to say about his all-in lifestyle, one of the TV therapists says, “Whenever I see someone who’s all in 100% like that, I wonder what are they running from?“

I watch this cycle of episode drops while recovering from my second Whitney attempt. This time, with my aunt Carrie and my older sister, Jess, we did the one day ascent. We aimed for a sunrise at Trail Crest and so chose to forgo sleep and start the hike at 10:30 p.m. the night before summit day. The hike in total is a 22 mile out and back with the summit being at 14,505, the highest in the contiguous United States. We trained for this, but altitude affects everyone differently and it’s unpredictable. The highest peaks in our training grounds didn’t get up to 12,000 feet—the level where things start to go haywire.

It was at around this elevation at mile five, that Jessica’s leg started cramping around, which allowed Carrie to admit she was getting an altitude-induced headache. We made the choice to turn around before even getting to the 99 switchbacks. Our previous attempt took place over the course of three days and two nights. I declare that next time, I will keep at it alone, or find a suitor that can take me to the summit. The Whitney trail shall be my Odysseus’s bow.

Though I was disappointed in how far we didn’t make it, I did not despair. 50-70% of Whitney attempts do not succeed, and a large part of me was excited that we would have a chance to eat the pancakes at the trail head if we hauled ass down the mountain. The pancakes spill inches off the paper plates they are served on, and the batter is sweet, fluffy and full of cinnamon.

Though I joke about a suitor’s challenge, a small part of me is panicked about my ability to get anyone to try this with me again. Both of these women are some of the toughest I know. Jessica did the Grouse grind even though she woke up with vertigo, and Carrie pushes herself to the point of exhaustion to complete every task she attempts.

More than just whatever happens on the day of the summit is the joy of all the little training trips that lead up to it. I can pull my hiking partners from their husbands into something special, into experiences that only “crazy” people do. I’m hooked on the crunch of the footsteps of the people I love going into the wilderness with me.

For days after our failed summit attempt, I check recreation.gov for released permits. It’s a four hour drive, so I could just drive there, bang out an all night summit and drive home. This doesn’t seem that crazy to me as the mountain has gotten under my skin…

….but I don’t want to do it alone.

When Adam reveals at the group dinner that his fantasy is to have a partner that shows up with him to challenge other couples when they’re 70, I see the looks that the other couples give him while they collectively tell him that he’s not normal. I think about my 12,000 foot declaration of my future mate and feel a kinship to the poor guy. I don’t think Adam’s desire is the problem. The problem is that it has taken Marissa weeks to finally push back and say that this is not the life she wants.

I look up AirBnBs in Leadville, Colorado, the highest elevation town in the U.S. If we could stay there for a week before the next Whitney summit to acclimate, I know we could make it. I am tentative about reaching out to my loved ones about a potential third attempt because I feel like a weirdo. I keep manufacturing drama, proposing scenarios that don’t appear normal to the average cocktail girlie. The feeling afterwards not unlike the hangovers I had in previous lives.

I’ve made hiking into another type of binge, but I don’t want to hurt anyone with it. I don’t go into nature to recharge and forest bathe. I go into nature to deplete myself until I feel gratitude for my soft life again.

I think the experts on MAFS knew full well that they were setting these two up to a doomed relationship. 90% of the photos on Marissa’s Instagram show her with a cocktail in her hand. In her frustration, after having her hair messed up on the jet ski one too many times, she declares, “I don’t have strong hobbies.” I would argue that her hobbies are strong and normal and supported by the group. She likes to go out to dinner, have a beverage in a sparkling glass, and take pretty pictures with her friends. This is easily recognized and celebrated. The path appears as a straight and paved road, well-lit. Most of us have been there.

I take issue with the framing that the therapist gives about Adam’s all-in tendencies. We can’t expect our partners to be that way if they are not and have no desire for it, but is there really something wrong with striving? Does it mean we are destined to summit alone?

I don’t know…but today is the fourth anniversary of my sobriety, and if Marissa’s right, I’ve taken enough tequila shots in my life to be able to do anything…Maybe even drag my girls up that mountain one last time.

Talk to me

• What is your go-to reality show? 90-day fiance? Traitors? Love Island?

• Have you summited Mt. Whitney?

• Have you shredded on a jet-ski?

• Have you picked up a sober hobby that everyone else thinks is crazy.

• Does your partner happily wish you well as you pursue your hobbies or are they right there by your side?

TELL ME!

Also thank you for mentioning this article about my dumb phone in your piece about binging TV. I, too can have a problematic relationship with television and completely understand why someone would spend 33 hours watching the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

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We both prefer loops, but I chose this out-and-back fire road because of its width and lack of canopy. I wanted the full moon to shine on us like a spotlight so that we wouldn’t have to turn on our head-lamps. Jess, however has the idea that the lights will scare off any predators—an idea I no longer think is silly as between where we are now and where our cars are parked, it sounds as though there is either one very vocal coyote or several in conversation.

I’ve seen the beasts from the windows of moving cars but never come across one while in the wild. Jess speaks about their ability to “surround us.” I imagine the squeals I hear as a plot to do such a thing—hence the boulder and the stone.

I say, “Imagine how good it’s going to feel when you’re at home in bed and there are no coyotes.” This is part of my love of the trail—the clean sheets and warm bed that lie in contrast of it . This is why when Jess says I missed my calling as a park ranger, I disagree. I don’t want to be out here for a paycheck. This is personal, life-giving, grit-development. It is the distillation of gratitude.

Working in restaurants has nearly ruined eating out for me. The crunch of my steps on the dirt mustn’t be associated with earnings. While I still have legs that walk, no one can take it from me or tell me I’m doing it wrong, or that I should smile or sell another margarita, or check the expiration date on that whipper-snapper’s ID. All I have to do is walk, inhale, exhale, and carry a rock, maybe several, that are big enough to scare a pack of coyotes off of me and my sister.

We will climb Whitney in four days. The walk up the tallest mountain in the lower 48 should provide a counter to how low I’ve been feeling. Adventure is a salve, especially in the summer months. Adventure followed by complete and total rest. I deal in extremes. I’ll do seven shifts in four days and collapse on the fifth. I’ll eat nothing but lean protein, fermented cabbage and vegetables for two weeks and then order a dozen donuts from Postmates. It’s been a new kind of peace to stop viewing this as a flaw that needs correction.

There is no other way. I fucking love it.

Now that alcohol isn’t one of the things I overdo, these pendulum swings are less dangerous—though not completely benign.

I did not expect the frogs. We see more frogs than either of us have ever seen on all of our hikes put together. Fat little baby frogs that give me a maternal feeling as they hop across the trail. The frogs are the reason I turn my headlamp on. I don’t want to squish one as they hop across the dust. We can’t figure it out. It’s 9 pm and the terrain is high, parched, waterless desert. Yet the frogs seem like they are on their way to a bog party on just the other side of the trail.

The pack of coyotes I expect to see around every turn aren’t exactly a calming image. I inhale and exhale through the yips, try not to clench my jaw, but instead of the animals whose calls seem to surround us, we see quiet cows. Their eyes light up demonically from our headlamp beams, but they don’t move a muscle or make a sound. They are slow-breathing statues that line the trail.

“You don’t have to be afraid of us,” Jess says, and I think about the animal style cheeseburger I got at the In-N-Out drive-through last night and feel guilty. They have tags on their ears. One day we might eat them. But today, me, Jess, and the cows are all listening to the hoots and squeals of either one or several coyotes. Maybe one coyote giving a fantastic speech on the mountain top—a speech about how it’s time to turn on the humans and show them whose territory they are in once and for all.

And then, come the tarantulas. Jess shouts as we cross paths with the first one. I shine my light on its silky body. I have never seen this exact kind before—goth, spindly, and covered in black velvet. It fits in with the creepy crawly theme of our night hike.

We make it to our cars without ever seeing the coyotes.

I keep forgetting why I feel sad, and then on the way home, I remember the absence of Karli. The house will be just as I left it when I get back. There is a possibility that the house will be just as I left it for the rest of my life. Because of this sadness, I am less hard on myself for eating both of the honey cakes Jessica brought me to the trailhead.

“I brought two pieces so you can give one to Trish.” Trish, our other sister, will never see that other piece of honey cake because I shove it down my gullet like a bottle of whiskey in the car on the drive back to Ventura. I didn’t expect to be so afraid during the hike.

For more hiking stories, check out these posts:

Coming Next Week

My full account of my second Mt Whitney summit attempt, which includes my declaration of my suitor’s challenge. You might be able to guess what that is. At the time this newsletter hits your inbox, I am in recovery mode. It seems my most burning love comes from things that require total collapse. So be it.

Tell me something

Did you ever think you were going to die on a hike? What did you eat afterwards? Sometimes, after a really long hike, I just want a giant pickle. Do YOU ever want a giant pickle?

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I don’t know. It is less burdensome than quietly carrying the thoughts that pop into my head about what it means about me. It gives me a chance to stop and switch the lens. Another better and more useful perspective is always available.

Today I do declare that failing creatively is a good thing. It builds resilience. It seems that from where I sit, at least according to the numbers, this newsletter and my writing career as a whole, at least monetarily, is a sinking ship. My career in hospitality, however, is reaching its apex. The goal was to have two lines rising in tandem, but they seem to be wanting to cross. Honestly, this is just another thing you can blame on AI—not because it’s stealing my job. This clearly is more of a hobby than anything (though I wish it wasn’t). But when I fed him my CSV, Claude is the one who told me that my behind the scenes Another Day in Paradise series would be the thing to get free subscribers to convert to paid.

The graph below illustrates my progress in debt pay-off, and I’ve been thinking that the line of declining subscriptions is my failure. Now I realize it is not a reflection of my writing abilities or my worth as a creator but of other people’s willingness to pay. That is not my failing. It’s yours.

See that lens switch? I learned those manipulation tactics from decades of ex-boyfriends. Now no one can ever say I wasted my pretty years.

Anyways, here’s my story from the trenches. Tell me if you like it. Don’t tell me if you don’t. I’m fragile despite the resilience.

Read more

I couldn’t keep a plant alive when my daughter was young. It is for this reason that I found the end of 28 Days (my first favorite piece of pro-sobriety media where recovering addicts are advised that they musn’t enter romantic relationship until they can keep a plant alive for a year) disturbing. I blamed the plants because they were quiet about their thirst and because they couldn’t pick themselves up by the roots and get to the sink for a glass of water. Now, there are 19 houseplants in my bedroom alone, the oldest being a nine-year-old snake plant that I’ve brought to the brink of death and back through cross-state moves, relapses into drinking, and several relationships that didn’t stand the test of time.

I’m a woman of my age.

I have this picture of my grandma on my fridge to remind me of how beautiful I could be in forty years:

I have become less afraid of the years and the wrinkles as they happen. At an Arbonne event, a young woman in her 20s or 30s tries to sell me an anti-wrinkle product. I observe her dewy collagen-filled complexion and stuff my cynicism. It all wrinkles and sags if you’re lucky to live long enough.

My mother told me that at a certain age, you become invisible. I haven’t found that to be true, or maybe I haven’t gotten there yet or through this newsletter I’ve become more demanding that people see something else. Like what I see when I look at my grandma. I’ve become less terrified of a wrinkly neck and more aghast at the way I sell off huge chunks of my time in the service of a dream that isn’t mine.

I walk at the edge of shore, the surf splashes my feet like a good time. It’s the first day off I’ve had in ten days, and my newsletter is due tomorrow. This isn’t a brag about the hustle but a marvel at the technology that lets me write through dictation in a way that looks like a woman having a walk and talk on a perfect beach day. This part is hard but temporary. I’m not a workaholic. I’m just fighting to get back the rest of my life. I might end up with tar balls stuck to the bottom of my feet. Every now and then I see one rolling in the surf.

You’re so lucky to live here.

You’re so lucky it’s not on fire.

AND I don’t understand how with this most crowded schedule, I still find time to feel fat. There are thousands if not millions more beautiful thoughts available for the thinking. I wish someone cared for me the way I care for my plants and cats—someone besides myself. I took my kitties off their crunchies because I suspected they were overeating and now they are thin again. If I want anyone to take me off my crunchies, it has to be me. Me and therapist # 3 discovered the hyper-vigilance and need for control comes from living for someone else for so long—ever since I’ve been an adult, I’ve had a child to raise. Now I grip so hard the muscles in my upper back seize up when all I need is to stretch them out.

I wonder if drinking would loosen them up, like how they say it’s protective to be drunk in a car crash. Would I be visiting the physical therapist less if I could just relax with a gallon of tequila for one goddamn moment?1

I do an online harassment training in my car while at the drive-through oil change. This is the second time I’ve written about being at the drive-through oil change. I must find it more remarkable than most people do because I’ve never read about anyone else’s experience of it. I knew the training would be an hour, so every time the guy holding the tablet suggested a service, I went for it. At a certain point, you have to say yes to these things, anyways. May as well be while doing a harassment training for work.

The training is formatted in a way that panders to people who only know how to be on phones. I toggle through fake social media posts, text message conversations, swipe through “stories,” and learn ways to be a victim if I could get someone to do something to bully me for being over 40 and a woman—everyone I work with is just so NICE. I feel like I would have been a victim of the training and its time theft if I hadn’t used it to time-max during radiator and transmission flushes, and the replacement of several filters.

I keep imagining my phone dropping into the surf, being tossed amongst the seaweed and tarballs, especially as a colleague sends a text to the group chat.

Can anyone pick up my shift tonight?

Sorry buddy. I have a new squirrel friend in the fig tree, and a couple of cats to tend to. Maybe next time.

Okay but how close are you?

Thank you to everyone for the book recommendations last week. Reading is my favorite way of becoming who I’m going to be.

Books that made me this way:

Next week:

For paid subscribers, another missive from the Another Day in Paradise series, where I talk about how much it hurts my feelings when people leave me bad tips or even talk about food or service or anything that has to do with a restaurant.

“My eldest daughter was like me, not just in likeness but in disposition, too: she held her intelligence like a knife behind her back. Now that she was creeping toward womanhood, I found our similarities a bit unnerving. Like watching a clone of myself walk slowly toward me from a faraway point in the distance: What would happen when she arrived?” -Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear

I smell blood and stinky feet. Both scents fill me with rage but not before I’m bothered by the woman doing wall splits. This other one lays her mat at the doorway before the class is even half full. She obviously is squish-baiting and wants someone to step on her face. I should have known it would be like this when I pulled in the parking lot and a man walking across it made eye-contact with me as I gathered my things. I muttered under my breath, “Don’t look at me.”

Over the weekend, I consumed Yesteryear, a book about a trad wife who finds herself living the life she’s been cosplaying, in which the protagonist is written to be unlikeable. I wonder if I’ve internalized her personality.

It’s supposed to be a gentle yoga class but the smell of blood persists. The teacher tells us to kneel while sitting on our blocks and then to tilt our pelvises forward and back. We should have been warned that we should be practicing humpy in class today. If I knew I was going to have to do humpy while smelling blood and feet, I would have made other plans. I hate this. Is this why they say not to swim in the ocean when you’re on your period? Am I a shark swimming the sea looking for flesh, trapped in a human body as it humps a yoga block?

During shivasana, the teacher plays a song of harp and vocals that repeats the same line over and over, “Help me open my heart, so it can hold all that it needs to hold.”

The pelvic tilts and the song aren’t working. My heart is confused.

There are daily, if not hourly reminders of Karli’s absence. I drive past a CR-V the same color as hers. A silver-haired man is behind the wheel.

Instead of saying, “Look how cute Morticia is,” I pick up my phone and record a video to send, make sure it picks up the revving of her purrs.

Instead of both of us freezing on the couch as Morticia inspects our laps and chooses a seat, it is just a battle between me and the furniture. Sometimes I still lose. Karli is both not here and all around. I feel bad for ever leaving my mother and send her an apology text.

I tell my mom, “I took it for granted that me and Karli would always be together.” Mothering is a relentless job that gives one a false sense of permanence. We grieve the loss of every version of person our children have been even while they are perhaps sitting right next to us. We might hold her hand and whimper that we will never get to squeeze the chubby baby she used to be.

I remember my mom not knowing how to handle me at 13. I think she was afraid I would be a monster forever. Clearly, I still am.

I think often about the work it takes to be a woman. The yoga instructor speaks in a sing-song voice to individuals as they leave class. I am glad she does not address me. Sometimes the friendliness of others feels like chest compressions. It is like being 13.

They’ve been out of my estradiol patches at the pharmacy for long enough that I started to think it was part of a right-wing conspiracy to get rid of women who were past child-bearing age. It’s just a result of the increased demand as the erroneous and damaging black box warning was finally removed from our HRT. My generation is clamoring for our hormones.

On the walk in to the pharmacy, I pass a car that shouts at me with its bumper stickers, As a former fetus, I am against abortion, I love Jesus, Make America Healthy Again. Inside the building, I wonder whose car it is. A woman sits in the waiting area in a modest linen dress reading a book in a way that looks performative. She looks too demure for all those shouty stickers but also looks as though she would be at home in a pew. She looks like the trad-wife from Yesteryear. I wonder if the driver of the bumper sticker van is watching me now. I want to wait outside by their car and tell them about both my abortion and my living child. I want to be smug under their judgement of me.

When people ask how I am, I either tell them that I’m better than I was or that parenthood is a sham. You spend days wishing for the freedom to enjoy just a moment of peace and quiet and then the rest of your life wishing they would come back. Or at least that’s what it feels like from here in my shark-mind. I haven’t lived the rest of my life yet.

Books that made me this way:

Tell me something good

Did you read Yesteryear and did it live up to the hype for you? I didn’t like being inside this woman’s head. It was ycky.

I hope people don’t feel that way about being inside my head even though I understand if they do.

On this week’s episode of Hidden Brain, Shankar mentioned this Buddhist concept of the second arrow: painful event is first arrow→ your mental reaction is the second→

Is writing about it on Substack the third arrow→and then the reader’s reaction to the writing the fourth→? What do you think? Am I doing everyone a disservice by spreading my humpy far and wide?

Leave a comment

Since I have yet to do either, I’m proud to announce that my favorite thing about living through this brave new phase known as perimenopause is the chemical castration. I’m not sure if it happens to everyone, and I’m not even sure if it’s happening to me, but I think I’ve mostly lost interest in mating.

Of course, on one of the first most delicious days of summer, I decide to run on the promenade that spans the Ventura Beach to test if I’m really as non-horny as I think I am. This route has historically been lustful for me. There’s a portion of it where surfers change out of wetsuits in the parking lot, rinse the sand from their bodies in the cold shower, and are just generally muscled glistening and hairy. I use the stir of it as inspiration to get more pleasure out of the grinding work of training my body to keep being a body. I’ve been running in less public places—streets that are mostly empty of other pedestrians, with less eye-contact and howdoyoudos.

It’s hot pink and coconut oil summer, though. Love Island is in full swing, the sun reflects off the pavement, the American flags flap in the breeze, stir our reflections on patriotism, and cravings for hot dogs. The islanders keep using “lustful” as a demerit in how certain people play the game on this season of Love Island USA—this on a show where every woman is in a cheeky bikini in peak breeding years, and all the challenges involve some level of seduction if not outright making out and dry-humping.

“I don’t like the way he moves. He’s being ‘lustful’” They say.

I don’t understand why I like this show. It feels like the writers are little kids smashing a diverse set of walking and talking Barbies and Kens against each other.

I think how wonderful it is that I don’t think about sex, getting sex finding a partner, or cuddling. On this run, I’m mostly concerned with my pace and breath. Desire used to take up so much of my waking thoughts. I used to swipe, chat, make arrangements to meet for coffee, wonder what he looks like without his shirt off, how he smells, how strong his arms are. Could he bench press me? Could he go again if he came too soon?

We have a family member who transitioned from female to male and when he started taking testosterone, he noticed that he became more horny and insensitive. I wonder how low my testosterone levels have fallen because the opposite is happening to me. Since going on HRT, I spend a lot of time considering how much of me is intrinsically me and how much is just the results of chemical ratios pumping through my veins. Holding onto our youth is deeper than just freezing the muscles that cause face wrinkles. Would I trade this quieting of the sex drive for a smooth neck? Why do I still want to look attractive if I don’t want to bring anyone close enough so that I have to smell him?

But am I really so not horny as I think I am? On this particular run, on this particular morning, the surfers are not out in abundance. There is, however a battalion of firefighters or firefighter trainees and captains on their run, going in the opposite direction of me. One mustached and especially roped one makes eye contact and gives me a little smirk. The tiniest flame flickers. I don’t even really find handsome men handsome anymore.

They all look like work.

They look like they are going to ask me what’s for dinner, and not going to like my answer. But this day, this particular group of men in the uniform of the off-duty hero, are kind of a turn-on. I see the back story of this run—that they’re getting fit to be the people who run into burning buildings, save cats, dogs, children and infirm people on the worst days of their lives.

I think this is why Love Island wouldn’t work for me—like if they decided to open it up to 45 year-old women who still kinda got it and look less like Meghan the Stallion and more like Sally Field. Men hanging out by the pool and making out with other women doesn’t do it. They’re always just…around. I need them to have a task that is not finding a woman that their attention is on. I need them to be whittling, finding a stud in the drywall, carving a big hunk of meat for our dinner. I like the idea of a man who is gone half of the time. Perhaps I’ve always desired absence because isn’t it more pleasurable to yearn than it is to have.

Is this boring of me? Is this like guys only wanting to date models? I only want to date men who are mostly not around and might die running into a burning building.

I told people in the months leading up to Karli’s departure that I would start dating again as soon as she moved. That I would just enjoy the last of our time together, and when she was good and gone, I would start swiping and batting my eyelashes again. The problem is that except for that group of 20 firefighters that only conceptually made me a little bit horny, the desire isn’t there.

I read All Fours, by last year, which was regarded as a groundbreaking vignette on perimenopausal sexual exploration. In it the main protagonist becomes less married and more alive—a stark contrast to the treatment Tolstoy gave to Anna Karenina or Wharton gave to Lily Bart. I loved the unexpected twists in July’s narrative and after reading it immediately gave it to my sister and she loved it so we gave it to our other sister and she called it weird and annoying.

Since then, I’ve had a contentious relationship with the author’s newsletter while also being a fierce admirer of her and her writing and weird dance videos. I don’t understand how Miranda July keeps such a sexually charged and active readership. I want to want to be and stay as cool and relevant as all the writhing beasts being served by her very boutique, very exclusive online dating service—-the beguiled series—a service she started three months ago where readers who want to be matched with other Miranda July readers fill out a profile and July sends it to her readers. Maybe a couple she matches up will find lasting love and get married. And now we’ve come full circle—an author putting characters together. I upgraded to a paid subscription then hovered over the comment section thinking, I’m not cool enough to be here. I’m not even cool enough to be in my own comment section.

Sexuality feels like a raging river I’ve pulled myself mostly out of. Perhaps it is supposed to be this way. I find myself being overly negative when Karli tells me about her dating life, saying outrageous things like, “How do you know he’s not lying?” About a person I’ve never met and why he won’t be in contact with her for the next few days. I can’t resist projecting every bad experience I’ve ever had with a man onto my adult daughter. I forget that feeling of new love and how it can be this thing that undergirds and lifts you to the full throbbing beautiful moon through entire days and weeks until it shifts into something cozy you can curl up with.

She tells me it’s none of my business when I start going into how strong attachments to the wrong people can ruin your life. She is absolutely right, and I’m embarrassed at what a downer I’ve become.

Maybe that’s why this reality dating show about Gen Z kids still holds my interest despite the misophonia I get from the slobbery sounds of their mouths sucking on each other’s during challenges. I can watch vignettes of something that reflects the most meaningful and life-changing moments of my past.

On last night’s elimination, Jen was dumped from the island. She’s this gorgeous model girl who reminds me of Karli and my friend Briana mixed together. She was eliminated because no one chose her. All the women had to stand in a line like they were being picked for a kickball team, and in the end it’s just Jen and Amora left, with one dude who is literally the epitome of every SoCal Peter Pan floppy-haired bruh I’ve ever dated.

In a post show debrief with the producers she says, “If I wanted to be rejected by a guy from Venice Beach, I would have stayed in L.A.”

RIP, Jen

Books that made me this way:

Help me:

Tell in the comments about any books you’ve read with a female protagonist who doesn’t end up all cozied up in a love match or die in the end. The plot must also not be driven by the pursuit or escape from love. It must be about everything else that might be interesting to a person. I currently have Miss Benson’s Beetle and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead on hold at the library. What else should I get? The weirder the better.

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ACV Airport

We will never be as young as we are today.

She says, “Sorry my back is sweaty,” as we squeeze each other. As though I would be mad about it. As though I would be waiting in line at TSA cursing the sweat she left on my hands.

There’s only six people in line, but the man in business-casual shoes who gets in the pre-check line says it out loud twice. Looks at the sign, says, “Oh, yeah. This is pre-check.”

I am not mad that her back is sweaty. It has grown warm and we’ve done so much.

“Thank you for Housing me for 25 years.” I’ve only officially been an adult for 27 years, and I think today is the day I became a grown-up.

I ask a man to take our picture in a cave on the beach.

I tell him, “I’m dropping her off at college today.”

She makes fun of me for telling him that before we are even out of earshot—probably because I’m not the kind of mom who tells people things. I feel silly.

For weeks I’ve been facing away from this moment so as not to miss her while she is still here, but today is the day that she drops me at the airport, apologizes for her sweaty back, and thanks me for being her mom. As though it wasn’t my idea to climb the sunlit staircase at moonstone beach—the one that was so steep, it almost looked like a ladder. She leaves her leather jacket at the bottom and I take it one step at a time and think of Mt Whitney. At the top there is a trail. I tell her, “I’ll always find the trail.” At the bottom of the trail is a scramble down the rocks and back onto the beach. I think of my childhood and my mom and how she was always game for an exploration, too.

The tide comes in fast on the way back to the parking lot and we have to trot and climb rocks to avoid getting our socks wet.

“I wonder if all the parents take their kids here before they leave them at college.”

She says, “Yeah that guys like, ‘This is my third one today.’”

I’m fine at the airport until I write that down. That joke she told about us being the third one today. That’s when I start to act like I’m on my way to or from a funeral. The tears start, and I can’t stop them. I have to move from a seat that faces the room to one that faces the tarmac. I watch people as they march away from the plane I’m about to board. They don’t know how lucky they are that they have just arrived in the place where I’ve left my favorite person.

I take deep breaths and bring the wall back up because I don’t want to mess up the line I made with her Anastasia liner. It’s an ongoing argument we have about liquid eyeliner pots vs. pens. I say I can’t use the pots without making the line insane, but this morning in her apartment, she said I’d never made a more perfect line, and now I just miss her.

For more on this series about saying goodbye to an adult child:

Also, if you read, “Before She Leaves,” and are wondering if I made the speech, I must tell you that I did it, and no one said I was weird afterwords. It wasn’t exactly the words I had planned, but what ever is? Only movie scripts and maybe not even those.

“I love babies,” he says. “You know why I love babies?” He observes a squishy round-faced cherub as the baby wiggles in his high-chair and then answers his own question. “Future customers.”

This one Monday, standing at the drink pass, he tells me there is one less tray than there was yesterday. Does he want me to find the missing tray, or does he want me to know that he’s got an eye on the numbers just in case I want to take a tray home? One can never be sure.

The restaurant carries only one brand of hot sauce which we buy in glass bottles, but also in big jugs, so we can refill them cheaply. I do this at table 41 before we open. Paul is walking around the building doing something when I knock one of the hot sauces over onto the chair below it. The chair seat is made of woven white rope. The hot sauce has a carrot and habanero base. It has oranged the previously pristine chair. I grab the disinfectant spray and saturate the spot with it. The sauce stubbornly clings to the fibers. Paul still wanders around, probably counting fronds on palms and making sure no dogs have left fur on the patio cushions. I spend the next five minutes trying different formulas of scrubbing to get the orange out of the chair.

I see Paul out on the patio about to enter the building, and I panic. I don’t want him to see the chair and lose all the good will and trust we’ve built in the past year.

Read more

Karli comes in the house to use the bathroom while I’m recording audio for my newsletter, and I tell her, “I can’t wait for you to leave.”

I have made the decision to save being sad for when my daughter is gone.

When she gets the call that she has an apartment, I am legitimately excited with her. I’m not even faking it a little. I tell her how great it’s going to be to finally have my alone time. It’s to make the separation easier—this emphasis on the bright side. After all—creative work doesn’t thrive in an environment that is constantly interrupting me.

Last week, I googled enmeshment to make sure that it’s not how I am with her. I don’t know why that scares me—I know where I end and she begins. I just like to have her around, and I like to tell her my stories and see how she reacts. It makes them better—telling them to her. I was worried about the enmeshment because I cried for too much of this one day. It bled into my work. It’s bleeding into my work as we speak.

There are psych terms for every mistake we think we might have made as parents. Was it ‘parentification’ when she was eight years old and woke me up to take her to school instead of the other way around? It worked for us because I worked nights. I’ve stopped running through the lists of ways I might have fucked her up. These days, I pat myself on the back for providing adversity. The rest is for her and her future therapist to sort out.

It’s not like I trust psychologists anyways.

My mom has a master’s in organizational psychology and says I am perfect. I dropped out of my bachelor’s English program, and I say Karli is perfect. Karli is going to school to be an art educator and says her cat is perfect. We are all correct. Let the rest of the world argue otherwise. You know it will.

On the way to REI, I tell my sister, Jess about my plan to give a speech at Karli’s going-away party.

“Why do you need to give a speech?”

“Because I need to tell everyone who helped me…how…,” I’m so touched by my explanation for why I need to give the speech that I choke on my words and can’t finish telling her why it needs to happen. “Maybe I can’t give a speech.”

That’s a thing, though. I’ll think of something touching I could do to tell someone how much they mean to me. It ends with me and doesn’t extend to the person outside of my head. I’ll imagine writing a letter—how I’ll press flowers from my garden on the stationary where I hand-pen all the words that explain exactly what I mean when I say you are perfect and everything, and I am so glad you’re here. Or I’ll write a song for you and learn how to sing like the cute old lady with the meatballs in The Wedding Singer.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to give a speech. As a writer, you’d think my love language would be words of affirmation, but I think it might be acts of service. Once I start saying how I feel, it might come out all crazy and broken, the instrument cracks, and everyone will discover I’m dramatic and weird. Instead, I will clean the garden for her.

I know that in a previous letter, I declared that I was going to mess it up, but I only said that because I felt a little bad for how nice I’m going to make it. Bad because she’ll have her head on a swivel, in the perfect garden, surrounded by people who love her, and then she must leave.

It will be the first party I’ve thrown since the last time I got black-out drunk. I blended up berries and sugar to drop into everyone’s champagne. It was love, booze, charcuterie, darkness, and then the morning after. I woke and wondered if I had a concussion. It led me to the therapist who taught me how to moderate (I turned to abstinence when successful moderation proved to be boring and dumb). I guess that’s when the mistrust of therapists began.

I’m sorry about the next sentence.

Someone walking their dog past my house just said, “Spencer Pratt did a bang-up job.” She had on bright orange track pants and a white T-shirt.

An anonymous neighbor complained to the city about our yard. I have a theory that it’s the two men whom I’ve watched pick up neighborhood trash. I think they live in the brand new million dollar townhomes. Whenever I see them, I think of David Sedaris, who also walks around his village (he lives in England) picking up trash. I’m never close enough to tell my guys with the trash-picking poles how lovely they are.

One day, as I exit my gate at the start of my run, they pass through the intersection in front of me. I prepare my face with a smile, ready to greet them, introduce myself and become their new best friend. They aim their eyes straight ahead, stone-cold and set against making eye-contact.

I turn around, aghast and watch them walk past my house. One of them ducks as he passes the lowest branch of my tree (WHICH IS AT LEAST A FOOT ABOVE HIS HEAD). That’s when I realize they must be the ones who called the city. Now my yard has three enemies.

I love the overgrown look at peak spring, but things start to brown in the summertime. When I tell Karli’s dad we are throwing a party, he asks if I need help and specifically mentions the yard. We are a corner lot, so it is no small thing. If it were a typical yard with a rectangle of grass and a few bushes, I’d get out the weed-whacker and call it a day. Like everything I create, it’s a little wild and unkempt. It’s a combination of plants I’ve put in the ground, seeds I’ve scattered, and surprises that spring up every year. It’s a delight and every square inch is a thing to be considered. I feel guilty for deciding which plants deserve to live and which deserve to die based off of how pretty their flowers are.

The fact remains, though, that if you let certain plants grow too high and in too large of a concentration, people will think you are white trash—not to mention that it is rude to create so much kindling in a crowded southern California neighborhood. So for the next couple of weeks, before she leaves, I’ll be weeding, pruning, planting, and mulching. It will be carnage.

My stomach will hurt.

But it must be done.

I must prove my love to my daughter and everyone who helped me raise her. Most of all, I must prove to those David Sedaris garbage picker-uppers that I am not white-trash and how dare they.

Coming up

Next week’s newsletter will be for paid subscribers only. In it, I will include the after-pictures of the yard, the escape plan for the two-job situation, which includes a sick motivational growth chart that is also a race between two data-points, full disclosure on what an indie publishing income can look like if you are weird and not very good at it, and the story of how I unwittingly got my boss to spill hot sauce all over a white chair that I had already spilled hot sauce all over.

Are you lost? Here is some context in case you missed it.

More about what it’s like to send your adult child off into the world. This is the post where I lied and said I plan to mess the yard up:

I mentioned that my yard has three enemies. In this essay from three years ago, I tell of the sad yard across the street and submit to you a warning against having a fig tree.

At the exact moment she asks, I’m trying to find the right button to click so that I’m viewing her shared screen while she and the group critique my ‘about me’ page. The technical difficulty of the moment weakens my response. Something about the disembodied faces staring at me, expecting any kind of expertise, sends me into a mode. It’s not fight or flight—it’s flop mode.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not qualified. I’m not a teacher or a guru. I’m not an expert at anything. I’m just a waitress.”

I am disappointed in my answer because I’m trying to believe in myself. I’m blowing it—but also there was a moment in one of the meetings, where she said we shouldn’t put tip jars at the bottom of our posts because, “We are all professionals here.”

Should I be embarrassed for living almost entirely off of tips? Have I always been unprofessional? They don’t know what it’s like to get trapped in restaurants.

I’m haunted by this pile of bones we saw while hiking Gridley, pushed to the side, a pale brown pelt with white spots and big femurs that could have only come from the gangly legs of a baby deer. It is the evidence of a past violence—the gnashing teeth of a coyote or mountain lion. My stomach turns at the site of it. The sight of the corpse feels like a personal attack.

It’s not explicitly stated in the job description, but you become skilled at fawning in my line of work. Each day brings the fear that someone will be mean, and I will take the impact all the way down to my tendons and bones—shrink back into the earth.

Even the owners are caught in a trap—especially the owners.

After years of working the line at Sweeneys Cafe, Dad was given the opportunity to partner up with Mr. Sweeney and became a co-owner. There’s only one reason I would want to have my own restaurant, and it’s the exact reason why I never should. It’s to live moment that my dad had in defense of my older sister.

Jess was the first of the sisters to work at Sweeney’s. Her nickname there was “LP,” which was short for Little Princess. She was better at it than any of us—especially me. They served omelets and pancakes, BLTs and club sandwiches. Little clear plastic ramekins full of warm maple syrup sat on the line next to a tub of whipped butter. Despite being LP, Jessica is the sister least likely to put up with anyone’s crybaby shit.

She was around sixteen this one shift at Sweeney’s—maybe she was a little less tough back then. She came into the kitchen crying because a woman was being mean to her. My dad was on the line, flipping omelets. He fathered and managed through the frame of the pass-through window.

He came out of the kitchen and approached the table of the woman who had made my sister cry. The restaurant was in a city that seemed to be comprised almost entirely of retirees who go to restaurants and act cranky to servers. He asked the culprit of LP’s tears, “Is this how you treat people in their homes?”

The woman, likely startled to see this man giving her the what-for answered, “No.”

“Well, this is my home, and I expect you to treat my staff with respect.”

Subsequently, the woman did not stop coming to the restaurant. She kept coming in—Dad says after that, she was sweet as pie. She would make sure to smile and say, “Hi, Tom!” on the way to her table.

Maybe she needed to be reminded that the people who served her were humans. Whatever it was, my dad loves telling that story. The restaurant had always been his passion. Those little moments of success—that he was at the center and in charge made all the toil worth it for him. He cooked until the day his cardiologist ordered him to stop.

I’ve written so many words about what living in the fawn response can do to your body. It’s not good or healthy, but people are hungry. If they stop eating, they die. If they stop reading, the consequences are not so dire.

I almost quiet-quit my newsletter before I signed up for the coaching sessions. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being perceived, but after this catering thing at some richie-rich property, I resolved to never, never ever give up.

I wear my most waiterly dress to the off-site. It is a button-up pinafore style mini, made of a black corduroy. The host has hired us for passed-apps during cocktail hour, another local restaurant to make pizza after we pack up and leave, a mobile bartender, a DJ, and a line-dance instructor. Her house has panoramic views of the mountains. I gawk at the sweeping vista outside her kitchen window- the one above the sink. I wash my hands and imagine what it would be like to wake up and make my morning coffee in that kitchen. The wall that separates the open living space from the bedroom is a built-in bookcase that extends to the exposed-beam ceiling. Bookshelves are my kink.

Jessie loads my tray up with fritters and says, “Sell, sell, sell.” We laugh at that because the fritters have already been sold. She is a singer and a master at strutting through these spaces like she belongs. My other app-passer is a dancer. The hospitality industry is overflowing with people like us—artists who sell time to industry, so we can keep chasing what we really want.

The job at hand is to find the people scattered throughout the property who are willing to eat a fritter from my tray. I am paid well for it. It affords me my home, a functioning vehicle, a plane ticket to a far-away place every now and then. While we sit at the bar after the event is over, Audrey the dancer tells me about the ambitious performance her dance company is putting on in a couple of months. It involves a string instrument that extends across an entire barn and storytelling through dance. We have both spent the afternoon doing the job that a table could do.

I realize as she tells me about her creative outlet that I’ve been missing my connection to the audience. I understand that the melancholy of feeling like a failed table when my tray of ceviche is rejected isn’t about the table or the ceviche. It’s about having something that’s mine.

In the summer of 2022, after decades of honing the practice of drinking ‘like a normal person,’ I threw in the towel. I had my last boozy ride on the ferris wheel (literally) and changed the trajectory of my life forever. The following winter, after a flurry of new hobbies and wellness rituals, I realized that being normal, even without alcohol, was and always would be a fantasy.

I published my first personal essay on Like a Normal Person in June of 2023 after a bad bout of limerence and love addiction. During my first year without alcohol, before I made it publicly known that I was a writer, I stayed vigilant through morning rituals, trained for long-distance races, rehearsed for tap recital. I had decided to do something different from “one day at a time.” I wanted to take back every single dream the numbed version of me had abandoned. It was escape through busy-ness. It was proof I could over-function during an upturn of productivity. It was performative thriving.

As the attention grew and the audience pulled me to the page, writing felt like the only way back to myself. The hit of good feelings I had previously sought through a returned flirtatious text was replaced by a reader’s email saying, “Thank you for seeing me.”

There is so much writing about sobriety and wellness, and I consume a lot of it myself. I feel the pull to speak from a place of arrival as a ‘healed sober person’ and have to catch myself. Because it is phony and not me and frankly boring to read.

On these pages I chronicle the “everything else” that surfaces when you pull the plug on that last barrel of beer.

Subscribers to Like a Normal Person receive vulnerable, funny, honest slices of life along with the chance to support independent writing and publishing. Paid Subscribers will receive one exclusive essay per month and be part of a community of the best patrons I’ve never met in my life. I will also send an electric copy of the reader-favorite memoir, Like a Normal Person–a true account of the year I spent not drinking.

In a world that is trying to keep us addicted, the newsletter is not designed to hook you, but who knows?

You may wear out the skin of your fingers refreshing your inbox on Wednesday mornings waiting for the next installment.

I hope you don’t, but I also secretly hope that you do. Because if I’ve learned anything in these four years, it’s that addiction may just be the most human condition after all. Lets get addicted to better things.

Please share this with anyone who you think might like good clean fun and laughter. No crazy assholes or people who are mean to servers, please. ALSO no one who hits animals or small children.

Wait, is this my Hinge profile? Send this to someone who doesn’t want to procreate who you think would be a good match for me.

Wait, nevermind. Just subscribe.

Check out the Greatest Hits

I was sure she would come out with a face that only I could love. It was the face to head ratio in my baby pictures that convinced me of this. There was a lot of blank space around my beady little face. It didn’t photograph well. Karli wasn’t ugly, though. Not even a little bit.

How do you prepare the house for the adult child’s exit? Do you dismantle the nest? Making any kind of home improvements seems like a betrayal—like I should have done it sooner so she could enjoy it for longer.

She will be the one doing the dismantling though. The posters and paintings will come off of her walls, the closets emptied, the plants, art supplies, creepy dolls and sculpted heads, loaded into a U-haul. I will come home to my cats minus the one that she’ll take. I will get better sleep since she wont be on the couch for the nightly post-restaurant shift debrief.

Maybe I’ll take a lover. LOL.

I should let my home fall into complete disrepair as the month progresses, let the floors get grimy and the dishes pile up. The weeds in the garden are already out of control. I should search through people’s recycling bins on trash day and collect beer cans to leave strewn about the yard. I will un-nest the property so thoroughly that she doesn’t look back. I hope I’ve given her enough love for her to turn it back on herself again and again and again.

Should I not have been so honest about all the versions of me I had been? The other day I told her the story of the Argentinian polo player I woke up next to after a blackout at Wildcat when I was still drinking in my twenties. I had no purse, no shoes and no house keys twenty miles from home in Summerland. He called me a cab but didn’t give me enough cash, and the voyage home involved an intricacy of analog steps that the modern young adult would not be capable of. Halfway through the ride, I had the driver drop me off in Carpenteria, with the intention of walking along the beach all the way to my home in downtown Ventura. The polo player had given me his Tevas, which were too big for my feet even with the straps adjusted. The situation was untenable. I called for another cab after a half mile of walking and called my rental company letting them know I was coming by for a spare key. My sister, who lived with us at the time, had a small fortune in cash tips in her closet with which I could pay the cab driver. I presented the story as a warning against alcohol, but I’m worried Karli took it as a challenge. She says she could figure it out.

I fear I have undersold sobriety. If I could have made more money from my sober memoir than I have from wine sales, perhaps it would be more believable. The emerging sober writer replaces the aging server. There is no comparison. If I really focus and commit myself, I could push past six figures in my hospitality career, but it would cost me more than the energy I have for my art. The pull of the easy money in alcohol sales in direct opposition of getting people to read about how great it is to be sober.

I don’t know if my parental worry is about her, or if I am afraid of my own mistakes repeating. The pull of companionship that can sour. The reason I started drinking so heavily that night was this moment that the man I had arrived with, not the polo player, but one I had been casually seeing. He yelled at me for spilling a drink on his shoe. He yelled at me like I was a child, so I made myself disappear. I don’t want her to ever want to disappear.

I have to bite my tongue about the men who will drag her out of her own life and into theirs, about the nights that can be stolen by one shot too many, the weight of making every payment, every single month, just so you can do it all again every year until you die. The compromises that come with all of it. I don’t bite my tongue, though. I can’t help myself. I want to ride on her shoulder with a shotgun, tell them all, ‘Don’t you dare stand in the way of her dreams. Not even if she begs for it.’

They change the plating on the chicken so that it has coconut rice in the bottom of a clay bowl. The thing is that when Chef brings out a display sample it ends up in front of me, and I eat the whole thing for family meal.

I wait on a man whose hat says, “Feeling depressed? Smith & Wesson.” His wife or girlfriend is about to order her drink when the handheld computer slips out of my hand onto their table and knocks a wine glass over. The bowl of the glass detaches from the stem and shatters all over the table. It’s fine. People actually kind of love it when you fuck up.

I drop a knife on the floor and Alexander says “I can’t believe you dropped a knife on the floor. I can’t wait to tell Mary and Joseph.” Joseph puts the orders of three tables onto one table. Cassandra has a tall man at her bar with nice arms. He signs his credit card with a heart. We figure he is either gay or in love with her. There is no third option. There’s never a third option.

Nate says, “I’m leaving now” from 7 o’clock to 8 o’clock. Thirty minutes after he finally leaves, he reappears to visit chef at the bar.

Karli1 is beautiful and I love her so much. I drop another knife and she says, “how embarrassing.”

2. Coast Restaurant

It’s been raining for almost 48 hours, so I set up the cat-tube playground before I leave for work. All day they beg to go outside, and I let them. But then they appear at the window.

When I get to restaurant, the patio is empty. Linda shoots photos of it to try and make it look cozy on the Internet. They give me the station I never serve because it’s always Pedro’s section. I back into a pole while talking to someone.

The hostess has one of those voices that goes up at the end every time she says anything. I wonder what she’s hiding.

I have this couple that looks like they hate me or each other. They order two cocktails and halibut ceviche. They don’t talk to each other and tip 15%.

There are wet floor signs all over the patio which is weird because obviously the floor is wet: there is water falling from the sky

3. Valley Restaurant

I keep expecting people to be awful, but they keep being OK. Alexander hurt his back and can’t lift things, so he started the meeting with a wine activity. There were names of three wines listed in the lineup notes and we had to first find them in the wine book and then Samantha told us about how to sell them. The first was Amevive Gamay from biodynamic vineyard: berry and light pepper. The second was Jolie Lade Granache, a wine with dark cherry notes. The third was Chardonnay from I forget the name. It was a burgundy from France only two cases in the US. I’ll find out on Monday. We also learn that it’s not cool to want buttery Chardonnays anymore. Or maybe I’m the only one who didn’t already know that.

The night was easy. I did not sell any bottles from Alexander’s special list because my one table that was thinking about getting a bottle decided to get beer instead. I wore my black velvet dress that I was supposed to wear on Thanksgiving but I didn’t because turkey day was 80.°

I’m always tensing for the worst. I think that’s why my shoulders are becoming deformed. My bang-trim looks kind of insane. I have to adjust my side pieces. It’s kind of like a Lego person hair. I don’t wanna sell cocktails and food anymore. I’m too Lego-hair.

Baylee was one of those people who would stop people on the street to ask if she could pet their dog. I don’t know when it happened, but some time after she died, I took on this trait of hers. Instead of avoiding eye contact with dogs and their humans, I began to experience elation at the sight of them. I fall in love with the way a dog stares attentively at its person, the way it flops down on the concrete and sighs, how it will tangle a toddler up in its leash while the two climb over each other.

It feels soothing to watch them now—the way they trot up with big smiles, game for anything, kind of like Bay.

It made the news when she died. The headline referred to her as a 20-year-old-woman.

It did not mention that she was someone’s baby, and that she loved every single dog she ever met.

I keep returning to this moment with my mom and Carla—something that was probably insignificant to them. This tiny sweet nothing that I revisit when I want to be mothered and mothered and mothered. I was starting my podcast and had to record at their house because there was construction at mine. They fussed over me and their new espresso maker while making me a breve. The middle child in me stoked to be the center of attention of two moms. Without my sisters and brothers-in-law and all the rest of the family chaos, I felt what it must have been like to be Baylee when she was the only kid in the house.

There is both a deep weight and a joy in the memory. I never feel like anything I give them for Mother’s Day will be enough. Nothing will ever be enough again, right? Things can be good, and moments can be sweet, but from Bay’s death forward, the best times will always be over. That’s how it is when you lose a child.

But on that morning, with their new steaming pitcher, they were so sweet with all that mothering and somewhere to put it.

When people ask how it is that we are so close, I say one day she’ll leave me; she’ll hate me; she’ll discover I was in it for myself. She’ll discover how much of a dork I really was.

I keep her close so that she doesn’t leave me and find the space to discover that I’m a wretch, after all. I design an off-ramp that stretches for miles and years; give her fond memories, something to talk about at my funeral, dead-mom footage of all the times we had the most fun.

I’m a fine mom. We live downtown and don’t have a yard. The city is our playground. Claire is Karli’s best friend. Sometimes, in the middle of a sleepover, she will call her mom and make her voice real high while she asks to be picked up. It leaves Karli and me to shrug and hope it wasn’t something we did.

I wonder if her parents worry every time she comes over. They are good parents. They finished their degrees, and when I go to their home, Claire’s mom takes me around her garden and shows me every succulent and vegetable she has planted.

My cat has started peeing on the carpet. I wonder if Claire calls her mom to rescue her from the smell.

I am a wizened mom. I tell Claire she is the age I was when I met her as a kid. It’s hard not to feel guilt when I look at her face and see the scar above her lip where it split on a brick in front of our house. I now have more plants than I can begin to care for, and internalize the pride of their blossoms. The heartiest ones survive and the rest go to compost.

Karli is transferring to university next semester and leaving me. I never saved a college fund for her. She works three jobs.

I panic-book this backpacking trip to Santa Cruz Island so I can be sure that she is left with memories of what she will be missing. I play it all out in my head before it happens—the trip where Karli learns, finally that she is tough enough for the rest of what life will demand of her.

It is the latter half of April, and I’m excited about the 150 endemic species that live and are protected on the 92-square-mile island. My eyes are hungry for blooms and greenery. Only half of the terrain is accessible to the public in the form of a national park. The middle pier in Prisoners Bay is the gateway to the four backpacking sites on the north (east?) side of the island — I don’t have a compass. There’s no potable water until we traverse the 14 miles across the island to Scorpion Bay campground. The plan is to hike 3.5 miles into the Del Norte camp, sleep and rest, then do the big 11-mile hike to the other end.

My major anxiety leading up to this trip has been the fear of running out of water. In all of my backcountry excursions in all of my life, I’ve never had to be rescued, and I hope to make it to the end without that ever happening. But wouldn’t it just so happen that the first thing to occur as we wait for our ferry to board is that my 3L bladder is punctured as it scrapes along the concrete of the sidewalk? Water starts leaking out of the mesh bag that holds all of our bladders. It’s the only real warning I sent the girls: try to pack at least 5L.

The leak elicits a frantic search for duct tape, which one of the dock hands provides. I wrap the tape around my bladder, probably more times than necessary.

Is this an omen? Is it just the beginning of inevitable disaster? I french braid their hair on the boat.

“Remember when I gave everyone Katniss braids on the Open Classroom camping trip?”

“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” Karli notices my excitement has been replaced by worry.

Water is a foundation, not a treat like the chocolate-covered espresso beans I have squirreled away. I try to push the thought from my mind for the rest of the boat ride. It takes about 40 minutes to get to Prisoners Bay. Once I repack my pack with the duct-taped bladder and see that it has held, the fear of running out of water subsides. I come back into my body.

The trail to the Del Norte backcountry campsites is mostly uphill. I did the whole trek a decade ago in reverse and keep having false memories of what its landmarks mean. I erroneously say, “It’s just around that corner,” until I realize I have no real memory of this trail except that it is a trail on an island and that my body has walked it.

Karli gives us the instructions: “Don’t wait for me.” This is her rule on the hike. You are not allowed to hike slower for her, and you are not allowed to stop. She is resentful when she struggles as we take a rest.

I make sure that when I stop at a spot in the shade I say, “I’m not waiting for you. I’m just resting and having a snack.”

We keep climbing ridges that I think are the last ridge until finally we land at our spot.

There is a familiarity in Claire’s sensitivity — moments when she is quiet and says she needs to write. Sometimes she has the same expression she did when she was a little girl and about to ask if she could call her mom. I rip out blank pages from my notebook and hand them to her. The picnic table at camp is scattered with the random contents of our backpacks. This site is on a grassy hill that overlooks the cove. It is that moment in late afternoon light where the light changes just enough to give everything a golden outline.

The only sounds are birdsong and then, eventually, Karli’s barely audible snores. I take a few photos and then, to stick to my analog roots, I draw pictures of them both in my notebook. Claire, in her own patch of grass, writes on the loose pieces of paper. Any guilt I’ve ever felt for being young and irresponsible is useless as the breeze rustles the golden grass, and I take a deep inhale. We have eleven miles to walk tomorrow with ravens and foxes and Island Scrub Jays to meet.

When Karli wakes from her nap, the sun is about to set and I tell them that I can feel it — that this is one of those moments I’ll want to return to forever.

I am a good mom.

I am on a barstool next to a handsome man, and I pretend to want to be interested in the Dodger game that plays on the TV. I have decided that this man is the one. My will to love is stronger than the absolute brain-numbing boredom that is a major league baseball game. I order one more beer which becomes one more martini, which makes the whole thing more tolerable. He knows all of the bartenders at this dive by name. We take breaks from the game to smoke on the patio. It’s mostly old-timers that start their drinking while the sun is still out.

I watch Surly’s face as he is caught up in a conversation with one of the leathery ones. Something about the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones. I want him to take me home so we can lay in bed—to feel his whiskers brush against my shoulder. I can feel his interest waning. I look at him, and he looks at the sky.

He tricks me into going on my first backpacking trip. I follow him into Real Cheap Sports where he convinces me to spend money I don’t have on equipment I have never considered wanting. I stand in front of a row of sleeping bags hanging from hangers on swivels and wonder why they are $300. He holds different bags in front of my body, assessing the size.

I am just glad to have his attention. I buy the bag. I buy the backpack. I find myself at the bottom of a mountain in my waterproof alpine boots with a pack strapped to my back and a snow-adapted trekking pole in each hand. I am his paper doll loaded up with fruit leather and Cliff bars. His will is mine.

I follow him up the fire road that winds its way up Mt. Pinos. I have never hiked in the snow. It doesn’t take long for me to have to start unzipping and shedding layers. Each uphill step in the three inches of snow stokes my internal fire. I try to keep up, but I always lag behind a bit behind him. His nickname for me is Pokey.

At the top of the hill, it starts to snow. He gathers frozen sticks and wood and holds a flame to the stubborn wet and frozen pile. I am secretly glad that he can’t light it because I want to lay in the tent and cuddle. He tells me the sleeping bags don’t work that way, so I rub my legs together to try to warm myself. I squirm in my sleeping bag. The hike up that had kept my inner furnace burning has gone steely. The fruit leather is giving me gas that smells weird and fills the tent.

I worm around like this for most of the night, putting an extra pair of socks on my feet. My sleep probably totals two hours. My gratitude is immense when we finally pack up the tent and start down the mountain.

I can no longer feel my toes. I mention it once and it seems to annoy him. I worry that this is it for my job. I will not be able to continue as a server after the gangrene has taken my toes. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to support myself and my daughter. I just hope when he finds out I’m disabled, Surly will be there to support me. I do not voice this grim peek into our possible future to Surly. I figure we can worry more profusely at the bottom of the mountain.

After a while, the feeling returns to my feet, and I see the beauty of the fresh snow reflecting the morning sun. We are alone on that mountain. The solitude and danger of what we have done is its own high. My connection and desire for him are stronger than they’ve been since we were still novel ideas to each other.

We eat breakfast in Oak View, and it’s one of the best I’ve had in my life. We are giddy in the warmth of civilization. I look around the cafe at all the normal people who slept in their warm beds last night. They don’t know where we’ve been. I want to shout it out to them. “I slept on top of snow last night! What have you ever even done?!”

I look across the table at the man I love. He is perfect, broad across the shoulders, a little distant, a little dark and mysterious, sometimes cruel. I can never lose him. I would lose my toes for him. Who else could have brought this survivor out of me but someone I was destined to be with?

At the bar that night, he brags to all of our friends about what we have done, the extreme conditions we’ve put ourselves in. For the first time in a long time, I feel like he is proud of me, and that means everything

After four months off, I realize I’m going to start writing with a vengeance again. Stay tuned.

Imagine being so secretive about what words are in your head while dreaming of being a writer. Imagine becoming a writer and realizing that speaking is actually a part of it. The horror. You must understand that I was the person who would never raise my hand in class even if I knew the answer just because the sound of my own voice coming out of my mouth in a room full of children my own age and a teacher who I always felt like was out to get me, was one of the biggest little-t traumas of my young life. I can’t tell you the amount of times it was pointed out to me that my entire face turned red when I was called upon. The only thing more embarrassing than speaking was being visibly embarrassed about speaking.

I never imagined myself as a person who would not only record my voice as I speak aloud but broadcast it indefinitely. I can’t believe I podcast. I can’t believe all of the hang-ups and doubts I’ve pushed past to get where I am today. To believe in yourself as an artist (at least in my experience), there is a particular hopelessness and despair that one must push past not just to “succeed,” however you define it, but to keep motivating yourself to grow and change and keep going. Even if where I am today is hanging onto my author career by a thread, having sold one single book to one person in the UK last month, laughing out loud at admitting that—but hey, at least it was one person I’m not related to and have never met and has no vested interest in giving me good feelings. It was a clean sale.

There is a nebulous “they” in the literary community, especially the memoir writers. Established voices in traditional publishing cast edicts upon us about what is okay and not okay to write about. Glennon Doyle gives the advice to “write from the scar and not the wound,” and Mary Karr writes that if less than seven or eight years have passed, there is not enough distance to keep the writer’s ego out. Supposedly there is some point on your timeline where you are supposed to have recovered from all of it.

The underlying message of these rules about how and when to write about our own experiences is that the present pain doesn’t get a voice. Only the person who is “well” should be allowed to speak. It is the mantra of the perfectionist, and I’m not buying it.

I listened to Karr’s The Art of Memoir after I had already published mine. Her words gave me that embarrassed hot under-the-skin feeling. This involuntary flush of the face was communicated to no one because I was of course listening to the book alone in my room. Karr’s authority, especially as she is not an embarrassed unhealed waitress, has weighed on my psyche. The problem is that I read her book less than a year ago, which means I’m too close to it, which means I shouldn’t be writing about it now. How embarrassing all of us bloggers are. Writing in real time, from our wounds, like a bunch of amateurs.

What decides that the right amount of time has passed? A therapist? A calendar? A writer who wrote before you? If this is the beginning of an era without gatekeepers, then it’s time to come up with our own rules. Write from the wound, especially if it’s festering. Don’t wait for the sterility of being a distant onlooker. You don’t know how many years you’ve got. If you do it wrong and feel shame, do it again in a different way. Create a Russian nesting doll of literary embarrassments. Stand by all of your ugly little darlings.

From any direction on any given day I read that I must write less often, write more often, write from the skin healed over the wound and worn so thin it tears off if you brush against a surface. Write from your mummified body as your family gathers around and says her pain has finally ended. Write from heaven where you can say, “I’ve found the solution to life, and it is in fact death, just as I have always suspected.”

Why would I wait when I die a little more every day? How can I heal when one of my wounds is an inability to find exactly the right therapist? What if therapizing in public is the thing I need to heal my wound? What if my wound is putting too much stock into voices of authority instead of listening to my own?

But also sometimes it feels like they are right. The problem, and what I’ll give the Karrs and Doyles of the world is that the closeness to the words means I don’t like standing next to my raw memoir in public. It is embarrassing. A piece of writing this vulnerable and this close in linear time and psychological status is hard to sell. I cannot pretend that the narrator is some other unwell version of me and that I, the author am the healed, new and improved saleslady.

Putting oneself out there sometimes feels like just being stripped away bit by bit. It accumulates. It’s so painful but also so necessary for selling the work. Even if you just sell one of the things you made—that is not just validation. It’s also a kernel of hope. That thing that keeps the artist going. If one person is willing to pay, then why not one million? Then, the joy of that one wears off and you need more. So, how many sales of one’s art/memoir item would be enough to feel completely validated and worth all the embarrassment? That number is infinite, and my numbers are so far from infinite that I can’t help but wonder if I should have listened to the Karrs and Doyles and waited.

I can’t tell the story of how I overcame my embarrassment and fear of rejection and became a perfect person—one with the authority to tell my story. That person may never exist. No matter how many times I push publish, she never materializes, so guess who doesn’t get a voice? That self-assured, cauterized and sanitized future version of me who thinks she knows how to tell my story. Let her talk about all the things I don’t know yet, and I’ll tell what happened to me.

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