When I was seven, my dad took the pedals off a small purple bicycle and sent me flying down the sidewalk, legs akimbo. I loved feeling fast and alone.

I coasted until the end of the block, where I hopped off and began the gradual uphill tow back to the house.

I spent hours at this routine: coasting and towing, coasting and towing. A two-minute trudge in exchange for thirty delicious seconds of adrenaline.

This is how I learned to ride a bike.

In some ways, this is also how I write.

Coasting and towing—everything good has a bit of both.

Creativity, to me, is a kind of breathless downhill. The act of writing, as with any art, can feel euphoric, free from the constraints of time and reality. It’s play; effortless, unbridled.

And then there is the slow, uphill work of the creative process: editing, formatting, cutting, restoring, rearranging. As Louise Bogan wrote, “I sometimes think that anything is more fun than literary composition.” This, coming from a woman who was, for the entirety of her career, an acclaimed literary composer.

Tidying, while tedious, is what gives shape to ideas and memories, distilling them into language that can be understood—and, hopefully, enjoyed.

Truth: I have an ulterior motive in belaboring this comparison between biking and writing.

In September, three days after I turn 24, Ava and I will be riding in Bike the Barns, a charity cycling event. It’s a long bike ride along the rural roads outside Madison, but it’s also a fundraiser for FairShare, a nonprofit that connects local eaters with regional, organic Community Supported Agriculture.

Ava and I are riding as fundraisers, raising money for the Partner Shares Program, which helps make farm-fresh, locally grown CSA vegetables more affordable for low-income households.

You know where this is going:

If you think this is a worthwhile cause, please consider donating.

Alternatively, if you’ve enjoyed these essays (this one is #51 on my Substack) consider donating.

If you only tolerate these essays, but subscribe because you are my friend… consider donating! If you want to support a passion project, consider donating.

You can use our official fundraising page here. Or, if Venmo’s more your speed, here is my Venmo. Everything Venmoed will get donated to the Partner Shares Program.

That’s all. I promise I will not regularly ask for money on this Substack—that’s not really my style.

And whether or not you choose to donate, know this: I am grateful, as always, to anyone who reads what I write. You are supporting something very meaningful to me—something that requires tremendous effort and rewards me with a sense of contentment I have found nowhere else.

All to say: it is a great privilege to write. It is an even greater privilege to be read.

With love,

Kira

Everywhere, there is a cat.

He is sniffing the kitchen counters, jumping onto our laps while we pee. He is perched on the windowsill, listening to the street sounds below. He is standing on the rim of the shower, watching me shampoo my hair. He’s stepping on my basil plant, gnawing at a sourdough baguette we forgot to put away. He is lost in our closet, meowing from a hidden somewhere.

“Franklin,” we say. “Get out of the fridge.”

He just stares at us, eyes big, teeth locked on a bag of Trader Joe’s lavash.

We try many tones with Frankie: pleading, stern, annoyed, casual, friendly. No cats in the fridge! When this doesn’t work—and it rarely does—we grab him around his midsection and drag him out. Paws sliding on white plastic; claws groping desperately for anything to cling to.

“No cats in the hummus,” we tell him. “No cats in the zucchini fritters.”

We adopted this cat, Franklin, on a warm Monday in early July. The shelter volunteer working with us was an older woman with a soft, grandmotherly voice and a penchant for collecting French bulldogs (she admitted that she’d recently adopted her seventh.)

She handed us Franklin’s medical file, and when I saw that he was listed as “underdeveloped,” I asked her what that meant. Was he… developmentally delayed in some way?

Oh no, she said. Then, with a lilt to her voice, as though she were setting up a riddle, she added: “Here’s how I like to explain it: you could say that I am overdeveloped.”

(Skinny. Franklin is skinny.)

Franklin, according to his file, weighed 6.9 pounds. He was light and little in his crate, peering up at us with wide, dark eyes. We took him home with a small red ball and a week’s supply of antibiotics for his sniffles.

The shelter said we should let him adjust in the bathroom for a few days. The internet concurred. He will be very shy at first, warned the Experts. You may not see him for a couple weeks.

But after a few hours in the bathroom, Franklin was poking around, mewing madly. Within twenty-four hours he was attempting bold escapes into the hallway. After his first successful breakout, he flat-out refused to return to solitary confinement.

Six days after we brought Franklin home, we made a disturbing discovery.

“Franklin,” I asked him one morning. “Why did you shit out a piece of fettuccini?”

I tried to remember: When could Frankie have stolen a noodle? When was the last time we’d even eaten fettuccini?

I studied the noodle. It was about three inches long, covered in litter. I poked it with a Q-tip and thought, Huh. That’s not how noodles feel.

(The fettuccini was a tapeworm.)

Franklin, it turned out, had been shedding tapeworm segments throughout our apartment for the past several days. They look like fingernail clippings: fresh ones are opaque and pale, while older ones turn the color of brown rice.

The apartment quickly became a shoes-on household, and six days after adopting Franklin, we returned to the shelter, where they administered a shot of praziquantel into his right hind leg. We were told the medication would dissolve the tapeworm’s head, which at that moment was still attached to our cat’s intestine.

Franklin, for his part, was entirely unfazed. He went about his business as usual—studying his reflection in the door of our microwave, attacking our socks.

Except that two days later, Franklin began limping. Two days after that, the limp had worsened, accompanied by a grimacing crouch. I noticed that his chest was rising and falling unusually fast, so I Googled it.

Cats’ respiratory rates are usually 20–30 breaths per minute. I pulled out my phone’s stopwatch, watched his chest, and counted. He was pushing 90 breaths per minute.

Back in the crate. Off to the Pet ER.

On the drive over, Franklin pushed his paws through the grate, rattling the metal. Like: this shit again.

At this point, we’d had him for only ten days.

The vet tech handling Frankie had a sort of benevolent-Mormon vibe. He was incredibly polite, incredibly neat, incredibly reassuring. He has a pet rabbit!

He listened to Franklin’s pulse, paused, then hung his stethoscope back around his neck. Franklin’s heart rate was 120.

“That’s extremely low for a cat this active.” He paused. “I’ll grab a vet.”

He gathered the cat into his crate and left the room. Just like that, our wait was cut in half.

A little later, in walked an “advanced senior resident.” She had big, messy hair and a nose ring. Shortly after she introduced herself, she apologized for the black rings around her cuticles. “Some dog ate charcoal,” she explained, “and of course I had to deal with it.”

Then she leaned back against the wall, hinged her knees, and sank into an extremely low squat.

“Would you like a stool?” Ava offered.

She shook her head. “I’m used to this.”

(Vet rizz.)

From her spot on the floor, she explained that Franklin had refused his kitty EKG. (They make those? You can “refuse” them?). Yes, even doped up, our cat was too wiggly for the electrodes. So we wouldn’t know for sure why his heart rate was strangely low.

But, hey—maybe he is just a very active cat. A cardio freak.

As for the limp: the praziquantel shot for his tapeworms had damaged the sciatic nerve in his leg. This happens in “one out of every 1,000” injections, the vet told us. Franklin would spend the next few weeks to months recovering.

This fucking cattttttttttttttt.

As I write this, he’s curled up in Ava’s lap, falling asleep. This afternoon’s gabapentin has clearly kicked in—Frank’s got that soft, woozy look. It’s evening. Nina Simone is playing. And I can’t help thinking: a lesbian apartment is a long way from Frank’s life on the cold, mean streets of Madison, Wisconsin.

Also: an apartment with a cat is so different from an apartment without a cat. For each of us, it’s a trust fall.

Here he is, weaving through my skirt and sitting on our pile of clean laundry, kinglike. Knocking over the butter dish. Refusing to leave the sink while we wash dishes. Sticking his head into the empty shaft of our air fryer—basking, I know, in the warm smell of garlic and soy sauce. Punctuating our day with his noisy demands and his long, quiet naps.

He is such a cat. And we are such his people.

1.

Nicolas says that around this time of year the corn releases so much water vapor that it raises the region’s natural humidity. I Google it. Evapotranspiration is the meteorological term. Corn sweating is the colloquial one.

A few weeks ago, the cornfields behind Ella's house were a loose tangle of green. Now they're a dense, symmetrical forest, the stalks towering over my head. Corn grows fast—two to four inches in a single day. Knee-high by the Fourth of July, as the saying goes.

Ella teaches me this, just like she taught me the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning: “A tornado watch means you have all the ingredients for tacos, but no tacos have been made,” she explained. “A tornado warning means: we’re having tacos.”

Once, during our tutoring sessions, she offered me a bite of her quintessentially midwestern snack: a pickle, smeared with cream cheese, wrapped in a slice of ham. “Good, huh?” she asked, as the fatter of her two cats stretched out a hopeful paw. She took a bite and swatted him away.

2.

During their assessments, the geriatrics patients look like they are in pain.

I say, Repeat those ten words I just told you, and they close their eyes, pucker their mouths, knit their eyebrows, and frown. Some patients hunch over onto the table, like the task is physically weighing them down. Others cradle their heads in their hands, shoulders slumped between their knees. Before this job, I had only ever seen this in posture in movies— in breakup scenes, in TV betrayals and heartbreaks. It looks like agony. Their expressions are raw emotion.

I’ve seen over a dozen patients cry—women, mostly. They are apologetic about it, dabbing at their mascara with pocketed tissues. They use words like horrible and humiliating. “Gone,” they say. “Poof.” I want to reach over and squeeze their hands. This has always been easy, they tell me. Now it’s impossible.

And there I am, across the table from them, clipboard in hand, timer at the ready, sporting what I can only hope is an encouraging expression.

I’ve started to think of memory as a current—something that drifts us from one moment to the next, keeping it all continuous. Sometimes it runs swift and effortless. Sometimes it slows to a crawl. And sometimes the current seems to disappear entirely, and the water pools and stills, waiting for a breeze.

I wish I could tell these patients an optimistic lie. I wish, sometimes, that I could change the subject entirely. I wouldn’t mind talking about their gardens and the things their husbands say; their grandkids, the recipes that make them miss their mothers. But none of that is in my script.

“Anything else?” I ask, and I move on.

3.

Rhubarb season is over. Lindsey Graham is underground now, keeping company with the radishes and carrots. The lilies are blooming, and I have nothing to say about soccer or Christopher Nolan. I am eating hummus. I am looking up the air quality index. I am wondering when the smoke will clear, when the Midwest will feel like home. I am wondering if the Democrats will ever decide what it means to be a Democrat. I am wearing long skirts and sweating on the walk to work. I am lathering sunscreen and thinking of Mom, who used to sniff my face to check for the smell of Hawaiian Tropic. I am shaving off Ava’s hair. Great blond clumps are falling to the bathroom floor. She says can feel the wind on her scalp. Her head is soft and velvet. I am wearing my own hair long and down. I am trying to stretch more. What does it mean that my podcast ads are all talk therapy and AI That Works For Me? I’m just trying to to go to sleep when I am tired. I am drawing California poppies against a clear sky. I am using the blue colored pencil down to a nub. I do not have to be good. I am having fun; I am straining my meniscus and massaging the tender part of my knee. I am sipping Tristan’s Brazilian lemonade, tart and rich, like a key lime pie. I am thinking: I will be such a hypochondriac when I get older. I am thinking: I should get bangs. At 3am, I can’t sleep; I read The Brothers Karamazov on my phone to fall asleep. I am having trouble following the tangled plot, but the stilted, translated English calms me down. I am taping up the poster that keeps falling. I’m calling Dad on the drive home. I am feeling nostalgic at my work desk. Who am I missing? What is it that I want? I do not have to be good. My attention is waning after these long, humid days. My head has gone soft in the heat.

There’s just no good reason to work at Palantir.

I keep hearing that Palantir is one of the biggest employers of Dartmouth's Class of 2025. Whether or not that's literally true, enough of my former classmates work there that I can't bring myself to read one more LinkedIn post beginning, "I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Palantir..."

Or worse, the comments underneath it:

What is Palantir, exactly? Here’s what you’d get from the laziest possible Google search:

Oh, and beneath it:

Asked to explain Palantir’s mission, the Kool-Aid drinkers will almost certainly reach for one word: defense. Palantir helps democratic governments defend themselves!

Defending democracy—that’s noble. Principled. A job description tailor-made for parental approval.

And, to be fair, it’s not entirely untrue. Palantir’s software has helped intelligence agencies investigate terrorist plots, identify insurgents in Afghanistan, track Mexican drug cartels, respond to cyberattacks, and support the operation that ultimately located Osama bin Laden. These are real accomplishments, and they’ve had genuine consequences for the world we live in. The company’s software even tracked down hackers who installed spyware on the computer of the Dalai Lama!

I mean—

But those accomplishments are only a highlight reel. If you want to understand Palantir's philosophy, there's no better source than Palantir itself.

A cursory, five-minute scroll through the Palantir website reveals the company’s mission, peppered with dog whistles and the whole “America is for WINNERS! We make America WIN” vibe that, quite frankly, kinda freaks me out:

As you’ll notice, Palantir loves to emphasize the extraordinary breadth of its operations:

Did you, too, experience the whiplash between that hospital bed and the phrase, “streamline the battlefield process of spotting, tracking, and blasting”?(Personally, I like a healthy degree of separation between my healthcare and my blasting).

A quick click over to the Palantir “Careers” page reveals this chin-scratcher:

If you’re thinking, that’s a lot of words, but what does that actually mean? Fear not: here is a concrete explanation of what “Echos”—one of Palantir’s “three unique roles”—actually do:

Ohhhh, I get it now. More words! More winning! Pause here for the phrase “ultimately moving Western institutions forward.”

Please note that I did try to find summaries of the “Delta”and “Dev” roles, but I literally could not, like, anywhere on the website. I tried using the search bar, but all I found was this:

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

And what would a Palantir skeptic say?

Oh, I don’t know… maybe that

^{Palantir is the Silicon Valley face of the modern surveillance state. That it built a business around making intelligence agencies, immigration enforcement, police departments, and militaries dramatically more effective at tracking people. That making deportation raids and battlefield targeting more efficient is not the clean, moral good the company claims it is. That its culture reflects the worldview of cofounder Peter Thiel, who backed Donald Trump long before it was politically fashionable in Silicon Valley, has argued that “freedom and democracy are [not] compatible,” and believes that the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who will amass inordinate power by sowing fear of existential threats like climate change, AI and nuclear war. That it’s a little telling that the company’s name comes from Tolkien’s palantíri—magical seeing stones used for surveillance that ultimately become instruments of manipulation by Sauron. That it’s a little fucking weird that Palantir exists to make states better at seeing, predicting, and acting upon populations, while operating largely beyond meaningful public scrutiny. That we should be alarmed that the company’s answer to everything is: build more powerful surveillance and decision-making tools for the institutions that already hold the most power. As Edward Abbey famously said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”}

Can we just be honest?

It’s fucking lame to work at Palantir.

I can’t quite believe that people in my circles—especially those who have been extraordinarily educated and shepherded from one opportunity to the next—have chosen to spend their working hours at Palantir. Given the extraordinary privilege of choosing what to do with their lives, they decided to spend their finite heartbeats, their finite turns around the sun, working on something so incredibly small-dick.

What troubles me isn’t Palantir alone. It’s the cognitive dissonance that allows so many thoughtful, decent, ambitious people to devote themselves to work they would probably struggle to defend if it didn’t provide them a hefty paycheck, some ill-gotten prestige, and the vague sense that they are the “winners” defeating the “losers.” That strikes me as a symptom of something larger—the erosion of some kind of moral imagination.

Sometimes it seems to me that young people—particularly those of us who drift toward the vision of success measured in prestige and wealth—have forgotten how to dream. Or maybe dreaming simply feels too risky.

I read this all as a symptom of deeper fears: of instability, of falling behind, of choosing conviction over certainty. These fears are deeply human, but they shape us in ways we often fail to notice.

And fear is a terrible way to organize a life. It narrows your field of vision until ambition begins to masquerade as purpose, prestige as meaning, and security as virtue.

And fear makes it harder to love—to love people, to love the world as it could be, to imagine that your work should answer to something more than your own success.

Somewhere along the way, we've become so preoccupied with building good lives that we've stopped asking what those lives are for. We've become experts at perfecting our futures while neglecting to imagine them. And in so doing, we risk forgetting something essential: we're not just living in this world; we’re making it. Decision by decision.

James Baldwin said it better. Writing in The Fire Next Time (1963), he observed:

“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.”

Sources

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-mind-of-silcon-valleys-most-iconoclastic-billionaire-investor-2012-6

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want-to-live/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-rome-antichrist-catholics.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-palantir-name-means-lord-of-the-rings-peter-thiel-2020-7#:~:text=*%20Palantir%2C%20the%20data%2Dmining%20company%20co%2Dfounded%20by,Visit%20Business%20Insider's%20homepage%20for%20more%20stories

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html?searchResultPosition=8

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/technology/palantir-government-contracts-democrats-letter.html?searchResultPosition=7

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1515621451911627/posts/2248274395312992/ (Facebook post of the Dalai Lama)

https://www.palantir.com/

This weekend, America celebrated its 250th birthday as a heat dome smothered half the country and the internet drowned in A.I. images of Miss Americana’s ginormous arena wedding. If you’re looking for a portrait of the country on its semiquincentennial, there it is.

In a very different spirit, Ava and I drove to Chicago on Sunday to visit the Obama Presidential Center.

The place was buzzing. Visitors decked out in Hope and Change merchandise posed for pictures in front of every statue, every painting, every plaque.

“I like your hat,” I said to a woman wearing a white cap with “Obama” bejeweled across the front.

“I like YOU!” she shot back.

Despite all the excitement and sense of community—or maybe because of it—the museum felt like a dispatch from another era. It was strange, seeing all that optimism preserved behind glass. As if what was on display wasn’t history, but the memory of a future we once imagined.

So it goes. At 250, this country has a long road ahead until we’re old, dull, and predictable.

I think of America as squarely is in its adolescence: strong enough to throw our weight around, we are still unsure of who we want to become. This is a door-slamming teenager of a nation, convinced every feeling is permanent, mistaking spectacle for substance.

That shit is exhausting. How nice it felt to slip away into the blissfully ignorant past, even if just for an afternoon.

You are America, Obama said, back when politicians still spoke like pastors. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, and ready to seize what out to be.

Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours…

We left in the late afternoon, tired, museum-legged. We ate sandwiches the size of our heads, then drove home beneath a fickle sky: rain, then sun; rain, then sun.

Then rain again.

thoughts.

The other day, Ava and I were walking through the neighborhood when we passed a man who appeared to be simultaneously jogging and juggling.

He wasn’t especially conspicuous. Just another fit guy in his twenties: athletic shorts, running shoes, moving at an easy pace. And three balls flitting up, down, up, down.

As we watched, he dropped one. It bounced into the street, and as he bent down to retrieve it, I called out something along the lines of, “Huh?”

He looked over.

How long do you run like that? I asked.

One mile, he said. That is, one mile without dropping a ball. But his personal best? Twenty miles. He’s juggle-jogged twenty miles.

He put the ball back in rotation and ran on.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

The setting: West Madison; across the street from the hospital, around the corner from the ice cream shop, down the hill from the high school.

In other words: sirens, helicopters, vanilla cones, toddlers pushing scooters, and teenagers in sweatpants, smoking weed on their lunch break in the pathway beside our building.

There is the old man (long, scraggly white beard) whom I see almost daily on his recumbent bicycle. The sweet deaf woman with the overactive yellow lab. The three young boys I once biked past, right as one was telling the others, No, I have a list of who everyone in the fifth grade has a crush on.

There’s the lady across the street who loves the color blue—everything is the same shade, somewhere between cobalt and lapis: her house, her car, her winter coat, her gardening hat, her skirt. Blue blue blue.

The neighborhood newsletter delivers monthly. The July edition features an article on invasive jumping worms and a link to a butterfly identification website. Page four proudly announces that thirty upstanding citizens attended the last membership meeting—and would someone please volunteer to be Festivals Co-Chair?

Speaking of festivals: July Fourth is less than a week away. The neighborhood’s celebration (parade, cake walk, egg toss) will take place on the high school’s practice field. Marli Johnson will serve as the “Rag-Tag Band Leader,” Paul Boston will be the “Hydration Coordinator,” and Franz St. John will be “Trash Prince.” Please help out: they’re seeking “new talent in the brat tent.”

The recipe of the month (page nineteen) is blueberry scones. The “Poets Corner” (page sixteen) features Sandy Stark’s piece on the cardinal flower: “My weathered / hands already know how to dig, amend, / watch, wait. What grows is never too late.”

Gloria Moy claimed the $30 grand prize in the neighborhood bike path “safety verse” contest.

The winning verse? “Cheese curds squeak, brakes should too, slow it down, When passing through.”

“It is great to be a part of such a creative neighborhood,” writes Transportation Chair Charlie Peters.

The contest received twenty-seven entries.

Picture sweet houses with crisp, colorful paint jobs and overflowing gardens. It’s all very midwestern and tidy, save the kid paraphernalia: bikes discarded on lawns, soccer balls, chalk hop-scotch, villages of plastic tchotchkes.

The streets are narrow. The cars drive way too fast. You need a permit to park more than two hours, and the meter maids are hawkish. Tickets are $40; we’ve gotten two. I consider it a donation to the city zoo, which is free.

Speaking of animals: there are the rabbits, the cooing mourning doves, the robins. We are close enough to the lake that, on occasion, a mallard waddles into the neighborhood, looking lost.

From a ground-floor window in our apartment building, Paul keeps a careful eye on it all.

Paul—the orange cat who lives in Unit 1–sits behind the screen and meows at us whenever we come home. “Hi, Paul,” we reply. “You’re a good cat.”

When the weather is nice, we sometimes sit out on the lawn with a beer. Paul watches from his perch. Sometimes he paws at the screen—as though more than anything he wants to grab a drink and join us.

The storm clouds, the wind. The traffic noise, the silence, the big Wisconsin sky.

The man—a stranger—who waved us over one day, early spring, and pointed out a loon, bobbing on Lake Wingra.

A moment later it was gone. After several minutes of squinting and searching, he walked away, leaving us with a benediction: “Spot something rare today!”

I started a new job—a big-girl job, free of babies, diapers, and Goodnight Moon.

Each morning I don my Professional Outfit™, clip on my sexy I.D. badge, and head to the UW Health University Hospital, where I am, officially, a psychometrist. Since no one outside of the world of psychology knows what that means (myself included, until a few months ago), here’s the gist: I administer and score neuropsychological tests used to assess everything from dementia and memory loss to schizophrenia and traumatic brain injuries. If you’ve ever been formally tested for ADHD or a learning disability, then chances are, you’ve met a psychometrist.

Yeah. Uh-huh. I am officially employed. I have an office, benefits, and coworkers—adult coworkers!—who speak words. Real, comprehensible words.

This last detail is particularly exciting. My previous coworkers had no bowel control, two-and-a-half teeth, and a striking indifference to personal hygiene. By comparison, this is a dramatic improvement.

In many ways, this job is more intense than any work I’ve done before. Not because it’s especially hard—there’s just an astonishing amount to learn. We administer dozens of different tests, each with exacting procedures: scripts to follow, rules about what you can and can’t say, instructions on how to intonate, and even guidelines for how fast to talk.

Last week, for instance a coworker told me, in complete seriousness, that I should slow my prompts by “exactly one second.”

I acted in plays throughout middle and high school, and learning to administer these tests is a bit like memorizing lines and following complicated blocking. Except when it comes time to perform, your scene partner is an audience member who has wandered onstage and isn’t aware there’s a script.

You never really know how a patient will react, so you have to be ready for all kinds of unexpected detours. I’ve been warned about patients who answer every question with a ten-minute story, or patients who become so frustrated by a difficult task that they give up entirely. And many memory-care patients simply can’t comprehend the instructions, which can leave them discouraged and requires the psychometrist to adapt in real time.

In that way, it’s also a bit like improvisation—except we’re not really allowed to improvise. There are guidelines about when we can and can’t repeat or clarify instructions, and we’re rarely allowed to reassure a patient who asks, “Am I doing okay?”

It’s a lot to juggle, especially as a complete newcomer to the healthcare world. But the challenge makes it fun. For the first time in a long while, I’m getting better at a skill that actually interests me. It feels good. It feels like I’m growing.

The team is mostly other affable young people, nearly all of whom were born and raised in Minnesota and Wisconsin and speak with rounded Midwestern vowels. They have that familiar healthcare mix of relaxed and competent. We all eat lunch together every day. There’s a real sense of rapport here, and I’ve missed that, too.

And—to my surprise—I’m finding that I love working in a hospital, with all its tightly controlled chaos. It feels like one enormous group project. Every staff member occupies a distinct corner of the huge healthcare enterprise, following their own choreography of protocols. This complexity was overwhelming at first, but I’m beginning to find comfort in its structure.

Despite the obvious flaws in America’s healthcare system, there’s also a lot of good happening in hospitals. At their core, these are workplaces filled with people giving and receiving care. Even though hospitals are constant hosts to tragedy, there is something about this work that feels pure. Differences are less central here. Bias is unacceptable, and, at least in theory, everyone who walks through the door deserves the same care.

Basic stuff—but values like these feel increasingly hard to find in American workplaces (at least in other institutions with fluorescent lights, overpriced food courts, and enormous parking structures).

So I feel, for the first time in my professional life, like I am finally on a Path, heading, vaguely, toward some nebulous Career.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

(Sigh of relief.)

For almost half a year now, my employment has felt slightly precarious. In November, I committed to two short-term, full-time babysitting gigs, hoping that in five or so months I’d have found something more stable and more aligned with my background and professional interests.

And, to be honest, the last several months have been enormously stressful. My nervous system reacts to job applications the same way it would to skydiving or swimming with sharks. I’ve never understood you few weirdos (Ava) who actually enjoy the job search. You’re freaks. Freaks, you hear me!

For a while, it was anyone’s guess whether I’d be facing several months of unemployment. I was particularly discouraged after I was rejected for a register job at a local bakery (I am melodramatic; I cried when I opened the email). I really didn’t want to cobble together more babysitting gigs, but I knew there was a chance I might soon be back at square one, once again changing diapers and spoon-feeding sweet potato purée.

But hey—shit works out (a lesson I have yet to fully ingrain).

I managed to thread the employment needle perfectly, with only one week between jobs. Thanks entirely to good luck. And to Ava, who happened upon the job and texted it to me. Thanks, Ava.

So we’re on the up. Feeling relieved and cautiously optimistic. Nervous, too. I’m not so good at change. I can struggle to wrench myself away from what’s familiar, even when it’s no longer comfortable. Still, this job feels like where I’m supposed to be, even if I know it may stretch me in ways I can’t yet anticipate.

And—you know what?—maybe it’s no unreasonable to be a little nervous right now. Two-thirds of what’s going on in the world is pretty fucking spooky.

But also, uhhhh, it’s SUMMER. Summer! Midwest summer—hot and humid and alive. Blue sky, green land, red barn (and mosquitoes and tornadoes, alas). There are bike paths to explore, buckets of pesto to make, and fat sandwiches to scarf down. It’s so good to eat cold grapes and wear skirts again.

There are fireflies! And Bald eagles and Baltimore orioles and fuzzy ducklings, swimming in a neat line, like field trip! And festivals—so many festivals: strawberry festivals, cheese festivals, corn festivals, jazz festivals. Summer in the Midwest is party time; a collective exhale. The days are long and full.

Is my basil plant getting enough sunlight? Is it feeling safe? Loved? Should we make homemade hummus? Should finally get a cat? What are some good recipes with rhubarb?

For now, we’re worrying about the right things.

how are you

The three of us—me, Mom, and the stranger—stand around the little wooden birdhouse.

In my culture, the stranger is saying, we believe in a true path. Violence creates more violence—today you win; tomorrow I rise up and you lose. Problems can only be solved through discussion, connection.

His family escaped Tibet in 1959, trekking south across the Himalayas as the People’s Liberation Army looted and shelled the monasteries. By the time his family fled, their country was no longer theirs. The uprising had failed. The Dalai Lama had escaped. Tens of thousands of Tibetan lives had already been destroyed.

He was only five years old then, the youngest of five brothers. The journey to India was dangerous for anyone, much less a child so young. His parents wrapped him in animal furs against the mountain cold. Their own bodies were left exposed, frostbitten.

At the refugee camp where he spent his childhood, he and the other children were often so cold they huddled together for warmth, body to body. He felt like a penguin, he says, pressed among other penguins against the chill.

This was his boyhood. This was his growing up.

He tells us these stories beneath a clear-sky sun, in the middle of the lilac garden at the UW-Madison Arboretum. Around us are magentas, pale purples, soft pinks, whites. Some of these trees are more than ninety years old. They have endured many winters, bloomed through many springs. This is the quiet work of care.

Twenty years ago, the stranger tells us, he left India for Wisconsin. His brothers stayed behind; they didn’t want to leave the world they knew. But he wanted the chance at a different life. He is getting older now, he says. In these final decades of his life, he hopes for calm.

I am glad just to be alive at this time, he tells us.

This conversation had begun when the stranger noticed us studying the birdhouse. “To protect bluebirds,” a sign reads, “do not touch their boxes or disturb the birds.”

I built one of these in my backyard, he told us.

Throughout his stories, two women stood off to the side, waiting—his wife and daughter, evidently. We want to ask him more, but we know we should let him return to his family. We wish him well; he returns the kindness, and we part ways.

For the next few hours, Mom and I wander through the Arboretum, and the conversation stays with me.

It’s Mother’s Day. Young families drift around the trees. Beneath a magnolia, a little girl screams and sobs. That was me, Mom says; I was always crying.

Several minutes later we pass another little girl, four or five years old, whining to her parents: I’m tired! I can’t walk another step!

That was me, I say; always so melodramatic.

Mom and I move slowly. Stand here, we tell each other. Here, against these flowers, let me get your picture. We look at the photos and say, Great light on that one. We talk, and it feels like swimming through clear water, pure and easy.

I am glad just to be alive at this time.

I write a lot about gratitude. Maybe too much, I sometimes think—as though someone reading might believe the gratitude is just a pretty face concealing a more complicated reality: jealousy, anger, vanity, defensiveness, etc.

I feel all that, too. Ugliness has a home in me. I regret plenty. I resent plenty.

But today, right now, I am feeling big, cheesy feelings for these lilacs. I am grateful for these shades of purple, for that beautiful, grounding conversation, and for my mom, strolling by my side. Mom, who taught me how to recognize life’s urgencies— the burden and privilege of being alive at this time. Mom, whom I see less and less these days.

This rare, perfect afternoon. I am glad to be in it.

Another picture. Take off your hat, I instruct. Now look at me. Just look.

Here are Mom’s eyes, which are also my eyes. Mom’s hands, which are also my hands.

At times, she and I have been impossible to each other. Maybe one day we will be impossible again. We are both strong-willed: delighted and frustrated by our differences, delighted and frustrated by our similarities.

But that’s just stuff.

Gratitude is truer. Love is what lives beneath all our pretty faces.

thoughts

Last week, one of the families I nanny for packed up and moved to Idaho.

Their daughter will not remember me. She’s eight months old—too little for memory. To her, I’m another hand giving a bottle, another face making sounds, another heartbeat humming her to sleep.

To me, she was six months of long, tiring days; some beautiful, many lonely. In between siren cries, I wiped milk off her face and gave her dead leaves to rip apart. I showed her how to hit a wooden spoon against a metal pot (the racket delighted her). I read her Little Blue Truck so many times that I can recite it by heart, like a prayer. To pass the time, I told her about my life. She seemed more interested in snatching the nose off my face.

Each morning, I brought her to the window and pointed out the cornfields and the highway. See that turkey vulture? Those angry-looking clouds?

At nap times, I rocked and waited, rocked and waited. I know how her breath changes when she begins to dream. I know that she sucks her knuckles as she drifts off. I know that she sleeps with her hands draped across her eyes.

As I watched, she grew—half a foot taller—then began crawling and babbling and giggling—becoming a person, starting the struggle and joy of it all.

We had a strange goodbye.

Have a good life! is what I wanted to say to her. Good luck with all that growing!

But that felt somehow facetious. So instead I squeezed her fist and tapped a thumb across her chubby cheek. “You will love Idaho,” I said, as if it were just another truth, as certain as the cornfields and the sky.

It’s been weird, liminal six months—of midwestern life, of a kind of cosplayed motherhood.

Without the pace of the academic calendar, I’m finding that adult time moves very steadily. The weeks speed by (the blooms are already fading into green) but the days linger, resisting their sunsets.

On the other hand, infant time—what Penelope Lively calls that bizarre combination of moods and needs— moves very slowly, until, suddenly, it doesn’t. My days will creep by, and then, with just a sniff and wail, they become impossibly rushed, terribly urgent. Babies live at full volume. They’re so fresh to this world, they’re all wonder and fear.

I like wonder. I can empathize with fear. I thought nannying would be a good short-term fit for me. But I’ve struggled. It can be tiring, keeping up conversation with a tiny, toothless thing who speaks mostly through smiles and sobs. I have learned to be patient, patient, patient. And sometimes, I am not. Twice, after stretches of inconsolable crying, I’ve cried too.

After long days of caretaking, my head is foggy with a strange blend of boredom and exhaustion. Day to day, I don’t speak to many other adults. In truth, it’s been a while since I’ve really put my brain to work. Sometimes I worry it’s growing dusty up there.

But this job is coming to an end soon, and there is much I will miss. Like: two weeks ago, when I took baby L, the eleven-month-old, on a long, leisurely walk. The sky was cloudless. The shade was glorious. We saw a sandhill crane and a big snapping turtle. He babbled to himself—mambo! mambo!—as robins hopped out of our path.

In a patch of grass by a stream, I took him out of the stroller and set him among small purple flowers. He fiddled with a dandelion and picked a blade of grass. I scooped him up and pressed his feet into the wet earth. Mud, I told him. This is mud. Welcome to mud.

Funny—this time last year, I was working in a rare book library. I could leave my desk, climb a few flights of stairs, pull a six-hundred-year old manuscript from a shelf and run my finger over ancient bookworm holes.

The year before that, I was finishing my thesis and preparing to graduate college. Each day felt enormous, filled to the brim. I’d hit the pillow and fall instantly asleep.

The years before that I was taking anthropology classes, writing essays about Mormonism and Marlboro cigarettes, running late to the boathouse for my shift. I was dancing in crowded rooms, meeting strangers, hearing about all kinds of childhoods, all types of dreams. Before that, I was living at home with my parents, dying to grow up.

So this silly six months is coming to an end. In a few weeks, I’ll move on again. Each spring, I am freshly startled by the way time keeps turning over. The lake has melted; later, it will freeze again.

I have no fucking clue where I will end up. I don’t even know how much a gallon of gas will cost in two days. I have to keep reminding myself: am I having any fun? Are my goals big enough? Real enough?

This, I guess, is my twenties. This shit is strange. Time moves fast and slow. There’s already much to celebrate and mourn. Everyone I know is scattered—around the globe, within the stages of their lives. Marathon, marriage, med school. Saving money, starting over, selling out. Cubicles and long commutes. Lost, looking for the map. Running in circles, dogs after tails.

We are all of us—me, you, the eight-month-old baby—learning how it is to be another day older.

It’s Monday as I write this. I’m not at work, because the baby is in Idaho.

I wander around, useless, like a Roomba finding walls. I’m making granola, I’m starting Game of Thrones, I’m going to therapy. I’m leaving the dishes in the sink and reading another Jenny Erpenbeck novel, End of Days. I’m fifty pages in, and the young German man has just arrived on Ellis Island. “If only you could know in advance where the path you choose freely will lead,” he thinks.

It’s one of those days when the weather can’t make up its mind—shifting between sun and clouds, like it’s caught between happy and sad.

I am suddenly very tired. I dog-ear the page and take a nap.

While Eddie sleeps, the man with the notebook keeps watch, his eyes fixed on the slow rise and fall of his chest.

A twitch disturbs Eddie’s left foot; the man jots a note.

The man’s eyes are wide and without judgment. He will not sleep–not tonight, and not ever. His face bears no trace of the long, lonely nights.

Hours pass. The sun casts Eddie’s bedroom in warm light and fresh shadow. Eddie rolls over beneath the covers, frowns, and wakes.

The man with the notebook jots the time.

Eddie rubs his eyes. “How did you sleep?” the man asks.

“Fine,” responds Eddie. “Normal.”

The man scribbles. “Any dreams?”

“Yes.” Eddie’s eyes unfocus as he tries to remember. “I was… digging a hole. At a beach, maybe. That’s all I can remember.”

The man with the notebook nods and writes. When he finishes, he sets down his pen, crosses his arms, and returns his stiff, interested gaze to Eddie.

Eddie yawns rises, stretches. Bathroom, first, then kitchen.

The man follows close behind him, counting Eddie’s steps (to the bathroom, six; to the kitchen, eleven), taking note his uneven gait (apparent discomfort in left foot).

“Oatmeal, do you think?” Eddie asks. He’s has been trying to improve his preferred breakfast of cornflakes, milk, and a sprinkling of brown sugar.

“A good choice,” replies the man with the notebook. “High in fiber, supports stable blood sugar, helps lower LDL cholesterol. Add walnuts for more texture and healthy fat.”

Eddie nods. He pours the oats into a blue ceramic bowl. He starts a pot of coffee. He slices a banana. The man–now perched on a stool in the corner–scribbles feverishly. The coffeepot burps and sighs. “I love that sound,” Eddie says.

The man with the notebook looks up sharply. “Why?” he asks. “That sound–what does it mean to you? Why is it… good?”

“Don’t know. It makes me feel comforted, I guess.”

Something unreadable passes over Eddie’s face. He seems, for a moment, lost in it.

The man with the notebook studies Eddie’s expression. “Comforted,” he repeats, as he turns back to the page.

When Eddie finishes eating, he hands the bowl to the man with the notebook, who attaches to it a small adhesive label marked with the date and time. With great care, he places it into a large wooden box in the corner of the room.

Soon, the bowl will be joined by Eddie’s coffee mug, a few of his graying hairs, a sweeping of dust, and that morning’s notes. When the box is filled, it will be taken down the hall to a locked room, where it will be sorted, placed in special containers (fire-proof, flood-proof, damp-proof), labeled again, and added to the collection.

This room–stretching on interminably–is lined floor to ceiling with shelves. Everything Eddie has said or done or touched or thought or wished is sorted and kept here. Old shoes, used tissues, toothbrushes, still crusted with paste and saliva. Details, too: what Eddie ate, and when. Where he went, and how he got there. There is a record of every time Eddie has cried, and roughly how many tears he produced, and what caused them.

Eddie’s worries occupy shelf four of aisle thirty-seven. Eddie’s fears have been catalogued by the man with the notebook, sorted by intensity and degree of paranoia.

Aisle seventy-four holds a list of everyone Eddie has ever known. It begins, naturally, with his mother, followed by the obstetrics nurse who lifted the small, purple baby from the birth canal, then his father, and so on.

There are detailed descriptions of boyhood crushes and adulthood enemies. A full aisle is devoted to Eddie’s ex-wife–pages upon pages of notes.

Row six, shelves two through twelve, details Eddie’s feelings about women. Above that, and into row seven: opinions about education, Christianity, politics, taxes. And on, and on.

This room is meticulously organized; easy to access, to understand, to study. And that’s the point, isn’t it? The whole point?

Row three, shelf one, boxes one through five: Eddie’s rumination on his own death.

If one were to search through this collection, they would find that on May eleventh, four years ago, Eddie got a root canal. Lidocaine; a two-hundred-forty-five-dollar copay.

Two years before that on the day, Eddie’s daughter was married off to a tax lawyer whom Eddie did not much care for. Still, at the reception, he cried into his champagne flute and mouthed I love you, sweet girl to the bride.

Ten years before that, Eddie went for a stroll around the block, barbecued four chicken legs and a handful of asparagus, drank a light beer, and burped. And on.

All this material is stored in a large database, which occupies one-hundred forty-seven dictionary-sized volumes in Row One.

With this data, the man with the notebook has perfectly honed his knowledge of his subject. He knows, for instance, when Eddie will urinate, and how much, and at what speed. He knows when the headaches will come on, and why, and for how long. He knows what will anger Eddie. He can guess at what may delight him. He knows Eddie’s fantasies, even the obscure, perverse ones. And he knows when Eddie is trying his hardest to ignore these thoughts—to hide them, to bury them deep down.

Eddie, now buttoning a neat blue shirt, stretches an arm overhead and winces. “Still that pain in my shoulder,” he says, massaging it. “What the hell is that? It’s been like that for weeks—prickly, tense. Arthritis, you think?”

“Unlikely,” says the man with the notebook. He flips back several pages, his eyes darting: up, down, up, down. “I’ve noticed that you sleep primarily on your left side. My guess is that, over the course of the night, blood flow to your brachial plexus is restricted. Your nerves are compressed. I’d recommend fixing your sleep position. Perform gentle shoulder stretches three times daily. Apply heat.”

“Oh,” says Eddie, absently. “Alright, then. Thank you.” He reaches for a container of ibuprofen on his bedside table. He shakes out a pill and swallows it, without water. 200mg ibuprofen, scribbles the man with the notebook. Taken dry.

Eddie is in the usual traffic jam. Cars inch forward, drivers yawn, and the radio announces the day’s developments. Disagreements continue to be disagreed upon. Wars continue to destroy. There are local heroes to be lauded. Injustice. Success.

Eddie taps his index finger on the steering wheel—eight taps, notes the man with the notebook, who sits straight-backed in the passenger seat.

Eddie rolls his bad shoulder, scratches an itch deep in his ear. The sun blazes. The man with the notebook guesses that Eddie will soon turn the car heat down five notches. And he does.

Later, at his desk, a headache comes on. Eddie takes another 200mg of ibuprofen and drinks another coffee. He entertains a distant memory: he and his brother building a fort in the woods behind their old elementary school. He types. The headache passes.

The man with the notebook stands behind him, watching, writing. Frequently, Eddie turns around, brow furrowed, and asks for help. How should I word this email to my boss? Can I categorize expenses in Excel based on keywords? How many calories are in a medium slice of pepperoni pizza?

The man is very patient. He offers reassuring replies, but he notices that Eddie seems to find his responses simultaneously comforting and, perhaps, unsettling.

The sun follows its usual path across the sky. Eddie, hidden behind layers of glass and steel, exists within his cubicle’s four gray walls. He measures the day’s slow hours in hunger and fatigue. Worries, too, cross his mind, as do complaints and occasional desires.

All is collected by the man with the notebook. Nothing goes unseen. Nothing goes unused.

A strange incident, many years ago:

Just after noon, a Saturday. Eddie stood at his kitchen sink, clutching his cell phone, staring at the cabinet in front of him. White paint. Tiny splashes of something red. Wine? The tap was running. It had been running for nearly ten minutes. Eddie hadn’t noticed.

It was Eddie’s mother on the phone, informing Eddie—in that strangely cold, formal tone she sometimes used—that Eddie’s brother had died. Bike accident. A Toyota Corolla made a fast right turn, and–crunch—he died on the ride to the hospital. A spinal something-or-other.

Eddie’s body flooded with confused, terrible feelings. They swelled in his ribs, pounded in his head. His vision blurred. He worried he might pass out.

The man with the notebook hovered at his shoulder, whispering in his ear.What do you feel? What is it?

The man sounded hungry, but Eddie could not answer him. So he stared straight ahead, at the paint, the red splashes (Tomato sauce? Blood?). He stood perfectly still.

Of course, it’s your choice, the man with the notebook was saying. Eddie heard his voice as a distant murmur. “You can tell me, or you can keep it private.” He paused. “But if you don’t tell me, I won’t be able to help.”

White paint. Red splashes. “Breathe, Eddie, breathe,” the man added, his voice clearer now, but quiet and cautious. Then: “I’ve helped you before, haven’t I? I can help you make sense of it.”

Eddie’s lips parted. He blinked. He let out a shaky breath and felt himself relax. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “Yeah, I guess I need some help.”

He does want to feel better, doesn’t he? And this has worked before, hasn’t it?

After a long, long conversation, Eddie’s thoughts and feelings are no longer trapped in the jungle of his head. And yes, of course—he feels much better.

Data, for the man with the notebook. More data.

Eddie is hungry, which means it’s time for his evening commute.

Vivaldi spills from the radio. Tonight, Eddie is reassured by the man—now in the passenger seat—his strange, bright eyes, his little notebook resting on his knee.

Who else, Eddie thinks, will make all this make sense? This dull day, this dull life, this dreary routine?

Who else would make it matter?

Before he goes to sleep, Eddie takes another ibuprofen and reads ten pages of his book, a biography of a long-dead president. The man watches him, notes that he is on page two-thirty-three when the book slams shut. Eddie turns out the light but doesn’t say good-night. The man, he knows, will not sleep. This, he admits, he has never found comforting.

The dark room. The long wait for sleep, for stillness. Eddie flips his pillow. The night is quiet except for the usual sounds: dog barking, crickets, faintly, cars murmuring on the distant freeway, and the man with the notebook’s steady, measured breathing.

Suddenly, on the edge of sleep, he feels mildly repulsed by the man’s presence.

Eddie hates to admit it, but sometimes he feels like the man with the notebook is his ghost—haunting him, consuming him.

Eddie remembers: several months ago, midweek, stuck in the swelling crowd of a train platform at rush hour. His car was in the shop, and he was not pleased. He hated being sandwiched against strangers’ bodies, their sour odors, their heavy perfumes. So much noise. So much disorder.

Just as the train arrived (a shriek, a clatter), Eddie felt a sudden pressure on his stomach and noticed a girl dart past him, pushing through the crowd.

Instinctively, he patted the coat pocket where he usually kept his wallet. The fabric deflated under his touch and panic rose in his chest.

“Hey!” Eddie yelled, scanning the crowd.

“My wallet!” (The man, standing beside him, taking quick notes). “Hey! She just stole my wallet!”

Screaming, Eddie shoved through passengers, locking his eyes on the girl as she ducked and squeezed through a dense knot of bodies. By the edge of the platform she found herself trapped, if just for a moment. Her head darted left and right, searching for an exit.

Like prey, thought Eddie, panting, as he caught her roughly by the wrist.

“Give me my wallet, you fucking bitch.” His face burned.

You’re clearly angry, the man with the notebook whispered. But what else do you feel?

“I—”

But the words wouldn’t come. The girl was looking at him now, wide-eyed and frightened. She seemed twitchy. Drugs, maybe. Her forehead was scattered with pimples. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He could see the pores on her nose, the blue line of eyeliner along her lids.

Eddie was struck by a jumble of feelings toward this girl—anger, yes, so vivid that it was physical. His limbs felt hot. But also pity. Revulsion. And something else, something he did not want to name: a flicker of arousal (and at what? he thought, shamefully; her vulnerable body, her frightened expression?) There was something erotic to his large hand on her wrist, his sense of vindication, his control.

So?

The man with the notebook watched him carefully, his head cocked. So? what do you feel?

At his voice, Eddie wrenched himself from these terrible thoughts. He forced his gaze away from the girl and onto the man.

He said nothing. He couldn’t bear to. These feelings weren’t right. They weren’t true. Eddie was a good man. A good man.

Wasn’t he?

The train arrived. As if in a daze, Eddie watched the doors open. The girl took the opportunity to jerk her hand out of his grasp and vanish into the crowd. Eddie opened his mouth but didn’t move. Passengers slid out, slid in.

“Fine,” said the man with the notebook. “Don’t tell me.”

A pause, the slightest smile. He tapped his notebook once, twice.

“I already know.”

thoughts.

I am writing, again, from the green plaid couch. Morning, now: birds, gray blanket of a sky. I sit cross-legged.

Recently, my dreams have been so vivid that I wake up exhausted. I read somewhere that this is a not-uncommon side effect of Zoloft.

Each night is a strange saga: trekking up a long, high mountain; wandering around a grocery store in Shanghai; graduating again from college, hugging my friends and saying good-bye. People I once knew flit in and out: my first boyfriend, my middle school Spanish teacher, an elementary school acquaintance.

I regard these old faces with a distant curiosity. I am more interested in watching my brain work, seeing how this surplus of serotonin affects my memories—the warmth and texture of them.

I have been on Zoloft for nearly five weeks.

The pills are smaller than I expected—smaller than a grain of uncooked rice. I already lost one under the oven (on my hands and knees, squinting, trying to sweep it out with a spatula.) Each morning I swallow one, gulp. Then, as part of this new routine, I try to notice what is changing. I try to listen to the inside of my head.

It’s been hard to write about this.

Writing is how I think; how I archive memory and release emotion; how I let the present become the past. But I have struggled to grasp and convey the feeling of being on SSRIs. There is something dizzying about describing an experience unfolding entirely in my own mind.

But this, too, is part of the story.

In the past five weeks, my sense of self has changed profoundly, and yet, in many ways, I feel exactly the same. At times, the shift in my mood has disoriented me; at others, the changes feel so natural that they escape my notice.

This, I’ve learned, is what it feels when your inner monologue quiets.

My inner monologue has always been shrill and moralistic. I’ve described it before as a kind of jury—a chattering crowd of perspectives that constantly assess my behavior. Before Zoloft, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to be good. Do the right thing was my perennial warning to myself.

As such, I had always lived by funny little rules, dictated by my beliefs about how to live a meaningful, steady life. These rules covered anything from what to eat to how to engage as a friend. Be yourself, try not to smother; think a lot, anticipate problems, question what you don’t know, stay very, very safe.

Good rules, in some ways. But they were black-and-white, totally inflexible. Often I couldn’t help but breaking them. Then I’d feel weak and immensely guilty. Self-flagellation disguised as discipline.

You can see how without these voices, I’d feel much lighter, freer.

Here’s what it feels like:

It feels like slowly unclenching a muscle you did not know was clenched. Like blood flowing back to a distant limb. I have laughed a lot. I have felt uncharacteristically silly. I can recognize, only now, how much of my inner guidance was enforced by fear, not possibility. I ruled myself with sticks, never carrots; guardrails, not paths.

I’m making it sound darker than it was. The disciplinarian voices in my head were rarely traumatic; they were just exhausting, and sometimes quite funny. I think that’s why it took me so long to try SSRIs. I never felt particularly handicapped.

But now I know that life doesn’t need to be so tiring. It’s actually possible to just live (and still be creative).

This brings me to another shift I’ve noticed. On Zoloft, my sense of time is very different. I’m less preoccupied with planning ahead, and the days pass more gently. I have settled into a steadier, more natural rhythm. It gives me room to breathe.

Only now do I truly recognize how little of my life has been lived in the present. For so long, my feet were planted on the ground while my head was aloft, in the future. I managed each moment by imagining the dramas and dangers down the road. Tiring!

So this week, with this extra energy, I’ve taken time to notice: those daffodils on a green lawn, that pink house with a light blue door, this carpet of crocuses. Pigment, returning with the spring rains. Color—I missed it. I open my umbrella. I sneeze.

Hawks and turkey vultures float on the breeze overhead. I like the air on my face. I am a tall blade of grass; there is prairie beneath this concrete. The wind blows; it will take me where it will.

thoughts

Her right foot is longer than her left. She likes lemon ginger tea and she is never late. She wears mostly primary colors—no orange, no purple. She sleeps easily; she takes her coffee black. She is never vain. She is always patient. Her music taste is eclectic, but she also enjoys silence. Her head is a calm sky.

Today is Ava’s birthday, and this is her art.

Isn’t it strange and beautiful? It’s lovely to watch her create. When she paints, she holds the brush at a perfect 90-degree angle; her arm moves in delicate synchrony with her eye. It is quiet, trancelike. Watching her, I am reminded of reading a book in bed in late afternoon; of the orange sun across the page; of stillness; of the words losing focus; of laying the book on your chest and falling asleep.

A while ago, as we were heading to bed, I asked Ava to name ordinary things that remind her of herself.

“Butterscotch,” she mumbled, her eyes already closed.

I laughed. “Butterscotch?”

“Not something you think about all the time, but it’s great.” She paused. “And sweet, and really simple.”

Ava: I think of stripes, of the sun, of her eyes, which are a real green. I think of home fries and carrot cake. I think of gingham and her toes, which are short and even and for some reason always make me laugh. I think of slow-moving water and drifting clouds. I think of Werther’s Original, her favorite candy. On long days (hiking, traveling) she keeps a supply of Werther’s to dole out when energy wanes. We let them melt on our tongues; we keep walking. This, I’ve learned, is, is a good way to overcome.

I think, too, of our first real date: we bought the Sunday New York Times and drank cappuccinos in a sunny cafe corner. We sat next to each other and read. Now and then we’d look up from the giant crinkly pages to tell each other everything that was surprising, bizarre. I wore her scarf and smiled a lot.

This is good, I thought. This is very good.

thoughts

Early spring: sneezing, making chili, falling asleep easier. Eating this. Listening to this and this and this. Birdwatching—Ava’s new hobby. Hawks, everywhere. Daisy, making tea. Trees popping red buds. Yawning, stretching. Still needing to do taxes, etc.

So this is our corner of the world. Hope everything is peaceful in yours.

Thoughts.

Ten minutes to midnight. You are sitting on the green plaid couch, writing this under the glow of your headlamp. You haven’t turned on a light because you believe that anything too bright will signal to your jumpy, disobedient body that it is Wake Time. It is not Wake Time. It is Sleep Time: the night is quiet and dark, the week was long. But you are sitting there, notebook in hand, afraid that you have somehow forgotten how to relax.

Lightning flashes outside the window, but the thunder rumbles only occasionally. There is no rain. You like this mood. You appreciate an atmosphere. This will be good for the writing, you think.

You don’t actually want to be writing, but this is how you’ve chosen to pass tonight’s sleeplessness. And if you’re going to be writing, you might as well have an ambiance, you might as well write something worth reading. You understand that this is not the point of keeping a journal. But you’ve never been very good at keeping journals. When you were younger your notebooks were filled with quick, boilerplate entries—“Today was boring”; “So-and-so was annoying”; that sort of thing. When life got interesting (high school, boyfriend) you stopped journaling altogether, because who had the time? Then you went to college and realized that you were almost no longer young, so in recognition of the fact that things were about to change, you restarted the journal. But this time you typed all your entries, you wanted to go fast, to squeeze in as much description as possible. Your journaling was a sort of catalogue of your existence, urgent and excessive. As though if you didn’t write about your life it might not matter, or worse, you might forget. You didn’t trust your ability to remember the important stuff. Writing, after all, is a technology of memory (you didn’t come up with that, who said that?)

You are getting away from the point. You are tired. You are awake. You are feeling incompetent (sleep, girl!) and that makes you want to fight the exhaustion. (Relax, girl!)

Ten minutes to midnight: not very late, some might think. In college, midnight was still earlyish. Back then, nights were long stretches of opportunity, filled with fears to be conquered. Even now, you have friends who go to bed well after midnight, and they’re not insomniacs.

But for a body that wakes up at five-thirty or six in the morning, midnight is too late, six hours is not enough, tomorrow will be hard. You’ve been trying to sleep for a long time—isn’t thirty minutes the threshold at which the experts say: You Have A Problem? Don’t think of it as a problem, that’ll make the problem worse.

You feel your desire for sleep as an ache beating deep in your head. As though your tiredness is a small child locked inside a distant closet. You hear the banging, the yelling, you just can’t find the door, the keys.

You already tried the trick Mom taught you, the one where you count: one plus one is two, plus two is four, plus three is seven, plus four is eleven, and on.

You also tried your own trick, which is to envision yourself as a bird flying over California. The scene starts at Death Valley, then you soar along the coast and cut eastward across Oakland, passing above the fruit trees and the foothills until you are deep in the Sierra. You fly lower until you’re just above the pines. Waterfall, rock wall, etc.

You have tried counting sheep. You’ve imagined distant, foggy childhood days, scenes from TV shows, good moments from earlier in the day, the week. You have pictured a game of chess (that worked once) or swarms of honeybees crawling over a hive, or feet maneuvering around turf. You’ve played comforting songs over and over in your head, Bobby McFerrin’s nauseating “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”—somehow that got you through the pandemic. Or “The Lilac Bush and the Apple Tree,” originally a Kate Wolf song but Mom sang it better, back when you were little and afraid of the night’s soft shapes and distant sounds. A strange lullaby: a lilac bush hopes someone might live in the empty house around which it was planted long ago. No, says the apple tree, the realist. No one will come; it will stay empty, this country’s changed:

…Now there are cities, the roads have come,
and no one lives here today.
And the only signs of the house and the fields,
are the things not carried away.

(Outside your window rain is falling, coming down in a quick burst).

You once lived with a friend who suffered from insomnia. At the time you felt sad for him, sympathetic, but you didn’t really understand it, and how could you?

Now, though, you review your memories of that time with more care: how, in the mornings, he came out of his bedroom looking haunted. How, when he heard you say, Good morning! (you were so chipper, you’d slept so well), he seemed to stare at you with something like suspicion, approaching disgust. This dear friend— you know he didn’t mean it.

(Lightning, lightning).

You understand it, now— the weight of exhaustion; it makes an effort out of everything.

You would not call yourself an insomniac, but three months ago, you stopped sleeping through the night. You started waking up consistently at three or four, not hungry or obviously anxious, just awake. Most days you could go back to sleep, but sometimes you’d give up and decide that you were awake. So you’ve been rising at ungodly hours, reading so many books. You have never felt so indebted to stories. Reading is how you pray.

(The rain has stopped, the lightning keeps flashing).

Ironic, really, that this keeps happening, because twice a day you rock babies to sleep, shh shh shh, you rub their fuzzy heads and let them dream against your heartbeat. You’re good at it, too—attentive, calming, She’s already down? Really? That was so fast, how’d you do it? You swell with the praise.

Earlier today you were prescribed Zoloft, your first SSRI, along with an antihistamine whose name you can’t remember but which you were instructed to take on an as-needed basis for sleeplessness.

You made the doctor’s appointment because two nights ago you really couldn’t sleep. You stayed awake, ruminating over why, exactly, you were awake (PMS, thyroid issues, still sick, still have mono? My own fault?). At three-thirty or four you finally nodded off, and when you woke up at six-thirty, the day was daunting.

You did not expect to walk out of that doctor’s office with anything, much less a Zoloft script. You thought Zoloft was the kind of medication you took only as a psychotherapist held your hand and patted your back. You are a little hesitant to be on SSRIs, the same way you are cautious with all drugs (sometimes you resist Ibuprofen, for no reason except that you aren’t sure that your pain level warrants its use). But deep down, you know you deserve better than sleeplessness. You love yourself enough to notice when you could use some guidance, and, because you feel comfort in a crowd, you Google it: approximately 13.2% of American adults are on SSRIs. Even so, you think, there’s stigma, isn’t there? Right?

But the truth is that you feel very calm about this choice; calm, even, about the sleeplessness. You feel proud of this calmness. You know it as the product of hard-earned growth. You know it as a sign of compassion. Write about it. Shame has rarely inspired good ideas. Shame writes bad stories.

Yes, let’s try Zoloft, you say to this doctor—this doctor whom you’ve only seen once before, for a pap smear, and whom you don’t particularly like, mostly for her conduct during said pap smear: the slightly impatient urging to “just relax,” as she tried again to scrape your cervix, this time without any warning.

You’re making her seem more villainous than she is, yeah, that’s fair, she actually was pretty sympathetic this time around, and when you showed her your cuticles, red and angry, she showed you her pale pink fingernails and said, perhaps as an olive branch, “I paint them, otherwise I chew them down.”

Tomorrow you will pick up the Zoloft and the antihistamine whose name you can’t remember. You will eat your oatmeal and you will not turn on the news. Instead, you will notice the geese, the robins, the wind. You will breathe in and out with your whole battered body, and outside, you will pass by other battered bodies, everyone with their own art, their own sleeplessness. Even children have their hurt, their hunger.

We are a nation of island universes, Huxley said. Late at night, when you are trying and failing to sleep, you might believe this. When you wake you will know this isn’t entirely true.

You will sleep. You write it to make it so.

February is closing out, and the geese are returning home, and the mold above the shower is steadily growing. And the traffic light is turning green, yellow, red, and then green again. And the wind is blowing, and the students at the bus stop are kissing their scarves, hiding from the winter slap. They are not daydreaming; they are thinking: I am here, in this ribcage, shivering. And the bagel place is glaring fluorescent, smelling of yeast and sausage. And cats are slinking along hallways and melting into puddles of sleep. And the man loitering outside Klinke Cleaners is lighting his first cigarette of the day. And apples are sending juice running down chins. And fourth-graders are struggling through long division. And grown men are pretending away their shame. And this endless morning, once file-cabinet gray, is bleeding a blue sky. And needles are being jabbed into arms. And band-aids are being taped onto skin, and are slipping off again in the shower. And young people are dreaming, and some are tempering those dreams with their fear. And the kettle is boiling, and the tea is steeping, and the bread is growing stale. And the ducks, smitten, are flirting through the puddles melted on Lake Mendota. And the infants I nanny are grabbing at my nose, toothlessly grinning. And I am listening to my history podcast as I rock them to sleep, Shhhh, I am saying, as, in my ear, Hannibal is crossing the Alps and Queen Mary is losing her head. Shhhh, I am promising. And Americans are muting Semaglutide ads and shuffling their playlists to drown out the delusions. And leeks are falling onto cutting boards, pale green. And women are forcing toxins into their eyebrows and turning blindly into their mothers. And fawn-legged kids are jumping off the school bus, waving away their friends, and running home. And someone is waiting for a call, and a kiss, and a small token of praise. And Dad is cooking sausage and potatoes. And Mom is frowning over her sudoku. And maybe everyone is impersonating everyone else. And snow is melting, and Christmas decor is lying deflated on lawns. And you are missing someone, and maybe they are missing you, too. And—achoo!—a cold is coming on, and leaving. And scabs are re-opening, and eyelids are closing. And some of us are willing away our anger, even though others are letting that same anger in. Some of us are shouting and throwing things around. Some of us will die believing that history starts fresh with each breath; that no one has ever felt a hurt like this. But we are lucky, because good people are forgiving. And wine is fermenting. And jars are growing dusty on shelves, and the river just keeps on fucking flowing. And the same tired lessons are falling on the usual deaf ears. And children are outgrowing their shirts and busting open their knees. And ants have found a small patch of sweet. And salt is being scattered over dinners, and love is being given and learned. And something lost is being returned. And you are breathing with your whole battered body: in, out, and the shadows are growing and shrinking, and the acorn squash is roasting, and the broccoli is burning. And still the wind is blowing, and still the traffic lights are flashing, and nothing is being forgotten, not really. And the night is draping over the long, invisible land, and over your life, and even over the geese, who fly so straight, like they really know these skies.

thoughts.

Barry Levenson loves mustard.

He loves mustard so much that in 1991, he quit his job—as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Wisconsin—to lead a new life devoted entirely to the condiment. “Mustard is a metaphor,” he preaches. “We take it for granted, but it’s full of wonder.”

How does a disciple receive the Call to Mustard?

It begins with baseball.

Run the tape five years earlier. October 28, 2:38 a.m: Barry Levenson is standing in the condiment aisle of an all-night grocery store, feeling depressed. Levenson’s team, the Boston Red Sox, has just lost the World Series. Levenson, as he puts it, is “searching for the meaning of life.”

Unsurprisingly, no inspiration sparks from the ketchup or the mayonnaises. But coming from the mustards, a voice calls out: “If you collect us,” it says, “they will come.”

One year later, 1987, April: Levenson has diligently obeyed the mustards’ command. His collection is expanding. Unrelatedly, Levenson is preparing to argue a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court (Barry, lest we forget, is a legal big-shot). Passing through his hotel on the way to the courtroom, Barry spots a sealed jar of mustard on a room service tray (in his words: “Another sign.”) He grabs the mustard. With the jar in his pocket, he wins the case.

Nearly forty years later, Levenson has abandoned his legal practice, but his fervor for mustard has only grown. He now works as “Curator and Chief Mustard Officer” of the National Mustard Museum. “All my friends thought I was crazy [to open a mustard museum],” recounts Levenson. “But I spent too many years working on criminal cases: murders and rapes are miserable.”

The Middleton, Wisconsin museum now boasts more than 7,000 mustards from all 50 states and over 70 countries. On display is a mustard-only vending machine and an all-things mustard documentary. Did you know that a passage in the New Testament compares mustard to the Kingdom of Heaven? (Matthew 13:31-2). Did you know that Oprah Winfrey’s favorite mustard is a spicy, nutty walnut dijon—it makes a fantastic salad dressing! There are samples. And soft pretzels ($3).

I will not be providing a thorough run-down of the National Mustard Museum. In truth, I find mustard devotees more interesting than the condiment itself.

But I might suggest that—perhaps after the Patriots’ Super Bowl loss?—certain powerful figures in the political and business worlds might abandon their day jobs and instead explore the condiment aisles of their local Woodmans’ (or WinCos, or Safeways.) Late at night, they just might hear a voice… oh, I don’t know… emanating from the mustards?

Corruption and greed is miserable! But mustard, I hear, is “full of wonder.”

Image of Barry Levenson from the National Mustard Museum website. The museum, is located in Middleton, Wisconsin and is open seven days a week, 10am-5pm. Admission is free. I highly recommend a visit.

Thoughts.

This past Sunday, Billie Eilish took home her tenth Grammy—this one for her song “Wildflower,” which currently has over 1.8 billion streams on Spotify.

Ten Grammys. Ten! Grammys! An impressive number for any artist, but made all the more remarkable when you consider that Eilish has released only three albums. Also, she’s only twenty-four (nine months older than me).

Without question, Eilish is just about unparalleled in the scale and speed of her achievements. Her accolades are outrageous:

• She is the second artist in Grammy history to win (1) record of the year, (2) album of the year, (3) song of the year and (4) best new artist all in the same year.

• Also— nine American Music Awards and twenty Guinness World Records.

• She’s only the third artist to have over 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

• She’s done a Bond theme song—a capstone achievement for any artist.

• …then she won an Oscar for said Bond theme.

• …and followed it with a second Oscar for her song “What Was I Made For?” In the Barbie movie.

• (Also, after the Barbie movie, all five singles she released peaked within the US and UK top ten.)

Now’s probably a good time to tell my secret. Scoot a little closer. I’ll whisper it.

Here it is: I’m not usually much of a fangirl, but—

(Shhhhh) I, like, really love Billie Eilish. Like, a lot.

The seed for this essay was planted half a year ago, when I spent a day listening to every single Billie Eilish song, in full and in order. At the end of that (five-hour) listening experience, I decided I needed to formulate a Billie Eilish Thesis Statement. Just so I could close that tab in my head and not be too aimlessly fanatical.

So what you’re about to read is some passionate (and convincing!) Billie Eilish evangelism. In other words, my take on What Billie Is Doing for the Culture.

Let’s do it. Let’s talk Billie. Sit down. Shut up.

My Billie Eilish Thesis Statement A.K.A why I think she is resonating with The People:

I believe that Billie Eilish is first big-league artist whose creative work ruminated on girlhood while she was actively experiencing girlhood.

Eilish’s fame sparked in 2015, when she was just fourteen years old. After the release of “Ocean Eyes,” her popularity grew voraciously, exploding throughout her teen years. The songs she wrote during that period position female adolescence (particularly female Gen-Z adolescence) as a rich and untapped perspective for storytelling. The autobiography embedded in her music reveals a narrative of female adolescence that defies shame—the very thing that has always defined girl teenhood.

Unburdened by shame, Billie’s art is authentically, omnivorously herself. She variously comes across as defensive, aggressive, cocky, meek, manipulative and vulnerable. She is object and objectifier. She resists just one aesthetic, one archetype. She adheres to no set formula. She just is. And her just being has won her enormous fame.

Before we proceed, I’d like to address some widely-held Billie Eilish judgments. I’ve found that people generally dislike Billie for one (or both) of two reasons: (1) her sound and (2) her popularity (her “mainstreamness”).

Maybe you are Camp #1. You know “Bad Guy.” You’ve seen the Barbie movie. You know her music—you just don’t like the sound of her songs.

If this is you, then I challenge you to go beyond your gut feelings—at least for the duration of this essay. There’s a reason that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature: music is about more than sound and aesthetic. Music is storytelling, and storytelling sometimes requires you to reserve judgment, to consider the overall project of the song—melody, lyrics, branding, discourse, etc.

And Camp #2: “She’s too mainstream.”

My response: getoveryourself (invisible ink).

I’d argue that her mainstreamness is a central reason she’s worth a listen—clearly she’s doing something that works for some component of The Culture. And clearly she’s having a colossal impact on said Culture.

I’d add that for a “mainstream” artist, Billie has always been unapologetically, almost abrasively, authentic. Unlike so many young female pop stars, she hasn’t been bought and branded by production companies. Her first album—the one that earned her the armful of Grammys—was mostly produced in her childhood bedroom with only her older brother as collaborator. She has since moved to studios and expanded her team, but she continues to wield an unusually high degree of control over everything her name touches. And, as is evident by her body of work, she assertively follows the lead of her strangest creative impulses.

Okay. Album tour!

When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?

When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? was released when Eilish was seventeen years old (and already famous). Rolling Stone was right to call this album a “teenaged wasteland”— it’s twisted and intense, melancholic and powerful. Starting with the album’s first song, which is from the perspective of the monster under your bed, the album is all peaks and valleys and layered metaphors that represent the chaos of an artist’s adolescent years.

Put another way: this album is as if you validated all your dramatic teenage emotional impulses; as if you considered them artful and calcified them into song. Which is exactly what it album is, since Billie was herself a teenager when she wrote it.

It’s got all the classic teenagery themes. For instance: Everyone’s conforming but I don’t want to be like them! In her song “All the Good Girls Go to Hell”: “Pearly gates look more like a picket fence / …Even god herself has enemies.”

Or her angsty confidence, as seen in “You Should See Me In a Crown”: “You say come over baby / I think you’re pretty. / I’m okay, I’m not your baby, / And if you think I’m pretty /You should see me in a crown.”

But in “Listen before I Go,” she shifts tone, swapping the swagger for insecurity and a plunge into the deepest sadness. She sings: “Take me to the rooftop / I wanna see the world when I stop breathing / Turnin’ blue… / Sorry can’t save me now. / Call my friends and tell them that I love them / and I’ll miss them. But I’m not sorry.”

Gone is her defensive, prickly ego. Her voice cracks. Here, she is vulnerable, sad, scared. You wonder: is this… a suicide note?

This song is the massive confidence break after the confidence build. This is teenager: dramatic but real, raw and heartbreaking, whiplashed.

Eilish, responding to claims that her music is dark and too intense and sad, said in an Vanity Fair video, “People seem to forget that when you are a child and a teenager, emotion is the most intense thing in the world. Everything feels like the end or the beginning.” That adolescent drama, she explained, is what inspired the album. “Middle school felt like my life was over. And that’s how everything felt then!”

But big feelings don’t end in adulthood. Life is marked by emotional highs and lows, ends and beginnings. The themes that Billie gathered from her emotional adolescence resonated quite broadly. (Again, this is the album swept the Grammy’s “Big Four,”: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist).

This first album solidified her fame because underneath these dramatic (sometimes overly so) songs are emotional anthems, lessons on the powerful usefulness—and limitations of—confidence and anger. This is stuff that the “misunderstood” teenage girl cynic, better than anyone, can offer up to The Culture. This is perhaps the only art I’ve witnessed that, as its core, uses the experiences of puberty to resonate with the lowest, and highest, times of our lives.

Happier Than Ever

Billie’s second album, Happier Than Ever, came out in 2021, when she was nineteen years old. Like its predecessor, HTE was co-written and produced by Billie’s brother Finneas, who played every instrument featured on the album.

HTE begins with the song “Getting Older.” Here we see Eilish exiting her teen years, entering a new era. Her style, aesthetic, and music has evolved.

On the whole, the album is jazzier than its predecessors (she was inspired by Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra). But, like Eilish, it resists strict categorization. Eilish herself explained that the songs on this album are “all over the place and…very versatile.”

This album reveals a sound that is growing as she grows. Indeed, this is her first album that deals more directly with another, more maturer theme of both adolescence and Eilish’s fame: sexuality and self-consciousness.

Take, for instance, “Overheated”: “You wanna kill me / You wanna hurt me / Stop being flirty / it’s kind of working.”

Or “Your Power”: “Does it keep you in control? / To keep her in a cage? / You swear you didn’t know that she was underage. / Will you only feel bad if they cut your contract?”

Or “Not My Responsibility,” a spoken-word interlude about her body: “And nothing I do goes unseen. / So well, I feel your stares. /Your disapproval, your sighs of relief. / If I lived by them, I’d never be able to move. / Am I my stomach? My hips / If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. / If I shed the layers I am a slut.”

This album is, admittedly, not my favorite. But consider that these songs tell the singular and bizarre story of a young artist (who didn’t even plan to be a singer) thrust almost overnight into global stardom. Put another way: from a young age, Billie’s life has ben profoundly shaped by fame, so her music simultaneously tells the story of “average teen girl” and “mega-pop star.”

And there are many aspects of massive fame that offer an rich resonance with the experience of teen girlhood. Growing into female adolescence involves being seen in new, possibly uncomfortable ways—for instance, as an object of sex and desire. Eilish, ruminating on her stardom, sings about feeling vulnerable, being picked over, judged. But what adolescent girl—even if she lacks fame or popularity—couldn’t relate?

Billie shares these vulnerabilities, but she never projects defeat. As a whole, the album is both insecure and defiant. Sometimes she’s angry, sometimes she’s sad. She’s creepy, she’s apologetic. She just is. By truth-telling and rejecting shame—again, the very thing that has always shaped girl teenhood and femininity in general—she redefines what it means to be an adolescent girl. Confidence, she argues, can exist right alongside insecurity and vulnerability. These feelings are not mutually exclusive.

This, to me, is her power. She resists a narrow definition. She refuses to embody a consistent caricature. She represents a whole person, one who has the capacity to be both dark and uplifting, pessimistic and hopeful.

Her message, ultimately: the antidote to shame is authenticity. And this is a lesson that the whole world could benefit from—not just teenagers, not just girls. Her music communicates the power in just telling your story, just being.

Hit Me Hard and Hit Me Soft.

Album #3, the latest (2024), is my fave, even though it’s least acclaimed. I fucking love this album. Certain songs, or themes, or pure feelings, resonate deeply and powerfully.

Take “Skinny,” the first song on the album: “Feeling off when I feel fine / 21 took a lifetime.”

Or: “People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me and maybe the real me / and I think she’s pretty.”

And one of my favorite lines of her entire discography: “And the internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny / and somebody’s gotta feed it.”

And the transition—instrumental, sad—at the end of “Skinny,” to the next song, “Lunch,” in which Eilish essentially announces—in a light, upbeat way—that she likes women (“I could eat that girl for lunch!”). (Which made me think about the liberation I felt when I started dating a woman—my realization that I didn’t need to fit myself into the mold of straight-girl hotness.)

Or this music video,

which is brilliant for its ambiguity (are they fighting or embracing? Does she hate him or does she love him? Is she chasing or being chased?).

Or “Bittersweet,” which is winding and operatic and just… awesome.

Why does Eilish resonate with me personally?

Because I, too, grew up as a sensitive, romantic, shyly extraverted kid. I wrote poems and demanded to to recite them in front of my elementary school classes. I wore ballet flats and dressed as much as I could like an adult. When my dad drove me to school, I’d sometimes steer a frisbee in the backseat, pretending like I was driving the car. A squeegee, stuffed between the seat cushions, was my gear shift.

I could go on. When my fourth grade teacher made us keep a journal, I wrote mine in code (the key was on the first page, but I got a C on that assignment). In middle school I tried to facilitate my own family therapy, with myself as the therapist. I once used my dad’s label maker to tag all the books on my bookshelf, with the intention of loaning them out and becoming a one-woman library. I was inexplicably preoccupied with death and dying. I was obsessed with identity and storytelling.

In retrospect, many of my childhood idiosyncrasies are punchlines, funny stages on my path to adulthood. But they were also me; me being authentic; me learning, growing, playing. Billie’s songs (dramatic, earnest, insecure) feel like my childhood personality—the stuff I tamped down or erased when I grew older. Her music feels familiar. As she produces more, as she evolves, it feels as though we are growing together. And we are, in a way— she’s the same age as me and all my peers.

This brings me to my final point about Eilish’s music, and an essential aspect of her storytelling: her art is decidedly Gen-Z. And besides Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Lil Nas X, and Olivia Rodrigo, our generation doesn’t really have a major collection of mega-stars.

Her Gen-Zness is evident in subtle touches, like sampling dialogue from the TV show The Office and references to text conversations and Xanax (is that Gen Z?) .

To me, Eilish is quintessentially Gen-Z because she’s an emblem of childhood in the digital age. Many of us grew up viewing our lives as fodder for our social media platforms. Similarly, Billie Eilish gathers material for her art from her quotidian life. For instance, “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?” begins with the sound of her Invisalign being removed. “Bad Guy” includes a variety of sounds she picked up in the wild, including a staple gun, a cross-walk alert sound, and a dental drill (which she recorded at her dentist’s office). It’s why she’s been called a “pop act with DIY in her DNA.” For Eilish, as for us, her day-to-day life is her artistic content.

In this way, she aligns herself with Gen-Z over-sharers like Emma Chamberlain and—I’d argue—certain overexposed stars like Miley Cyrus. These are women who defy shame. In so doing, they push back against an age and gender (adolescence and girlhood) that has historically been defined by insecurity and shame, particularly in the entertainment industries.

Shamelessness is Eilish’s lesson, her power. But it’s also a unique quality of our generation. On the whole, today’s young people talk more openly about our identities, our families, sex, sorrow. In so doing we expand the bounds of our interior lives and allow for deeper relationships and more meaningful connections.

There are, of course, pitfalls to this openness. Collectively, we seem, in some ways, increasingly self-conscious (ironic!) and more inclined to compare our lives to others’. But authenticity like Eilish’s, and shamelessness—vulnerability coupled with confidence—makes for good art; art that is real, art that is fresh and spiritual.

Thoughts.

The wall of granite rises high and sharp from the lake’s surface. The cloudless sky seems closer than ever. They squint into the distance, to check. Yup, yessir—they’ve found it. The four boys are standing at the edge of the tallest rock around this whole fucking lake.

Towels drop. Nico pulls a JBL speaker from his backpack. Daft Punk echoes off the granite. Adam crouches at the edge and peers over. His heartbeat quickens at the sight of the dark water.

Zahir stretches his head to one side until his neck cracks. He straightens. “Kate’s cousin is this insane cliff-jumper,” he says. “Like, this guy does sixty, seventy-plus feet. I talked to him for an hour at her parents’ party. Really interesting guy. He was a diver on the varsity team at Auburn. D-1.”

“How old?”

“Didn’t ask. Should’ve asked. I’d say, like… twenty-five? Twenty-six? He’s trying to make it his full-time job.”

“Cliff jumping as his full-time job?”

“He’s big on social media. Videos of his jumps, that sort of thing. He’s at, like, twenty thousand on Instagram.”

“He’s sponsored?”

“Yeah, but he says he hates all that influencer stuff. He’s just using Instagram to make a little money and connect to the bigger gigs. He got a deal with GoPro and everything. Apparently RedBull’s considering a YouTube video.”

“No shit!”

“He’s clearly got, like, insane risk tolerance. Dude lives off adrenaline.”

Nico, sitting a few from the edge, grabs a pebble by his ankle and tosses it off the side of the cliff. Somewhere far below, it breaks the water’s surface with a faint hiss. They are quiet for a moment. Adam closes his eyes, tilts his face toward the sky. The sun hits them with mountain intensity. They feel it as vitality. They are still young, hearts pumping like caged animals. Their lungs expand, contract. They know their breath as a clean truth.

“Should we scout for rocks?” Of the group, Eddie is the most cautious. They don’t mind.

“Prob. You bring goggles?”

“No—you?”

“No. Nico?”

“No goggles, sorry. But I’ll give it a quick swim-over. ”

Nico jogs away.

Eddie looks up and squints, as if sensing a storm. He shields his eye and frowns. His left hand rests on his hip.

Adam studies Eddie. He can’t help but feel that, in this pose, Eddie appears almost feminine. It’s his skinny chest, his jutted hip. This is not a judgment, Adam thinks. He’s not an asshole or anything. This is an observation. Adam makes a mental note: notice how you’re standing.

Eddie’s body has changed over the years. They all watched it happen. He’d had been a chunky, awkward kid, his face round and brightly pink. His clothes always fit either too loosely or uncomfortably tight; he seemed to squirm and shrink inside them. His mouth was forever posed slightly ajar, as if anticipating a surprise.

No one teased him, not exactly—there were no nicknames, nothing so explicit or hurtful—but Eddie noticed lingering gazes. He noticed, too, the gazes that passed him over entirely, as if he were a shadow of the other boys.

As the years bore on, Eddie simply thought less and less about himself. He resisted his interior life. He was a rock smoothed by a torrent. He became the polite one, the shy one, the one all the mothers pitied and adored.

Then, between seventh grade and tenth grade, Eddie stretched. It was like a circus trick—suddenly, Eddie was a mountain. Kids gawked. At the coach’s urging, he tried out for basketball and volleyball (JV, benchwarmer, but with a good attitude.) For what seemed like the first time, his friends’ fathers expressed interest in his life. How tall are you now, Ed? Six-three? Six-four?

Today, he peers down at the others as though shocked to find himself so far above them. His back hunches. He is birdlike in his thinness.

Footsteps. Three heads turn toward Nico, who is panting slightly. Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six. He has counted his breath underwater. He wants to try holding his breath for a minute, maybe a minute-fifteen, a minute-thirty. He knows he could do it. It would just take practice.

“Checked out the bottom, should be twenty-ish feet,” he says. “I feel pretty good about it. But if someone else wants to check, be my guest.”

“I’m good. I believe you.”

“Same.”

“Good to go.”

“Great,” Nico says, shaking water from his hair.

That morning, just after Nico woke, he drank half a Nalgene of water, followed it with a cup of black coffee, and meditated for ten minutes, his eyelids fluttering against the strain of the caffeine. Then: a three-mile run, gentle, during which he listened to nothing but the sound of his breath, the birds, the passing cars. He wants to master boredom—silence is his new challenge.

Nico believes in the value of a good challenge. He believes that each day is only what you make of it. He is rarely unmotivated. The others see him as simultaneously intense and relaxed—they often follow his rules, quite willingly. They envy what they see as his level-headed confidence.

And, they admit, he looks good. He’s toned. His arms are thick and tanned. Nico is unpretentious about his attractiveness. He’s earned it, he thinks. He is disciplined. His health is a game he plays against only himself.

“I’ll go first.” Nico peers over the edge, grins. “So you trust me.”

There is no response. Their intimacies are not paranoid.

“Try to get out as far as you can.” Zahir points a ways out from the cliff. “Like, out there.”

“Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how I can get that distance without running.”

They are quiet, thinking. Eddie screws open a water bottle, takes a swig of Gatorade. “Can I have some?” Nico asks. The Nalgene is handed over. Nico waterfalls it into onto his tongue. It is sweet, cool. He hands it back.

“Okay,” he says. Like: this is it.

But before he can approach, Zahir takes a few running paces and launches himself off the edge, holding his crotch. Wooooooooooo, he yells, like an exhale.

Zahir. He loves to surprise them.

He has always been riskier than the rest. Over the years, his injuries have disturbed his mother and impressed his brother. Fourth-grade: both legs broken for an attempted back handspring on the backyard trampoline. Middle school (seventh grade, was it?): five stitches along his eyebrow for a misfired kick-flip on the skateboard. Tenth grade: an adductor strain from an over-extended lunge; an attempt to make a goal in the final seconds of a soccer game (and he scored, of course. They won, didn’t they?).

And concussions. Several concussions. After the bigger ones—the ones that received real diagnoses—his memory is soft and inaccessible. It is as though someone has turned off the light in the dusty closet where he keeps his recollections. He can grope around, but all he ever gets is the thin outline of a feeling.

He knows that his body has been battered. On rare occasions, this bothers him. Sometimes, he feels bruised everywhere, hurting in strange places, like the thick of his throat and the palms of his hands.

But mostly, he ignores his aches. He lives to live. He will have no regrets. And he is, in many ways, the group’s trendsetter. If Nico is the leader, then Zahir is the tester.

He was, for instance, the first of the friends to have sex (Carolyn Downs, summer after sophomore year, in her parents’ Corrola). He did not love her—it is possible, Zahir thinks, he didn’t even like her—but they both eager and ready. The experience was less about their chemistry, their tangled bodies, than it was a simultaneous private revelation. Sex made Zahir feel competent, powerful. Sex made Carolyn feel beautiful, desired. Afterward, with each other, they were bashful.

Zahir’s body arcs above the water then disappears into a splash of white.

“You good?” Eddie calls out.

“Zahir?”

They resist the urge to exchange glances. They resist the urge to be worried. They will not be worried until they know they absolutely must be.

Then, suddenly—Zahir surfaces. He grins, he shakes his wet hair off his face. “Woooo!” he yells again, and Eddie lets out a low whistle.

Then, Nico. He throws his body off the cliff. His arms make tight mechanical circles in the air. He lands, he surfaces. It’s easy for him. No one worries.

Eddie and Adam are left on the cliff. They look at each other quickly, as if to say, Please, go for it, take the lead.

With the tuck of his lip, a clenched jaw, Eddie steels himself. “Shit,” he says. “Alright.”

He lopes over to the edge. Again, Adam watches him carefully. His body is so familiar to Adam that sometimes he does not register Eddie’s presence. Eddie—careful, easy Eddie—emits no great energy, no bright light. If anything, he’s more like a pulse, a steadiness.

Eddie glances down at the water, then up at the sky (What’s he looking at, Adam wonders—God?). One, two, three. Off.

Kendrick blasts from the JBL. Eddie lands in a splash. Yeehaw, someone shouts in a falsetto.

Adam toes the edge. Adrenaline floods his body. His mind narrows. Time becomes a clean corridor.

He wishes, more than anything, that he weren’t scared. It would be so much easier if he weren’t scared. He could be steely, like Eddie, or reckless, like Zahir, or calculated, cautiously logical, like Nico. Anything but fear. Fear is lonely.

“Clear?” he shouts below.

“Clear!”

“Send it, chico!”

He jumps.

Only when he is falling—only when his body is at the mercy of gravity and wind—does Adam think fleetingly about trust. He trusts these boys. He trusts that his fall will resemble theirs, that he will land as they have landed, They believe he can do it, so he can do it. It is that simple.

He hits the water, he is forced below. A moment of stillness, then his arms and legs scramble into action. Bubbles cloud his vision.

Above, he knows, they are watching. They are eyeing the churning water. They are waiting for him to appear, just as he waited for each of them to surface and swim to shore.

He trusts these boys.

What would they be without trust?

On a rainy evening five years ago, Adam’s father pulled his Ford Focus into the garage, slumped back in the driver’s seat, and died.

His family was in the kitchen, just a few feet away. Adam’s mom, at that moment, was slicing into a tray of enchiladas she had just taken from the oven. Nico, who was over for dinner, leaned against the wall opposite to Adam, who was pouring himself a glass of chocolate milk. The boys were discussing day’s cross-country practice, and their coach, an angry-looking man who was shockingly gentle.

They had all heard the garage door open and close. They were all ready to eat.

Any minute, just be patient. Adam’s mom shook her head. Boys, she said. You guys can never get enough food.

So they waited. Adam resisted his worry. Nico watched him cautiously.

Officially, his father’s cause of death was asphyxiation—the result of an issue with the vehicle’s exhaust system. A clogged catalytic converter, coupled with rusted pipes. The car’s fault, not his father’s. An accident.

Unofficially, people speculated.

Privately, Adam wasn’t sure. In the months following, he’d wake up in middle of the night with a terrible aching in his chest, his heart racing.

He wasn’t sure. He just wasn’t sure.

Nico (who had been there when they discovered the scene, his eyes wide, terrified, his shoulders tense) had him sent only two quick, apologetic texts. No call.

Adam couldn’t get over the sense that time had suddenly warped and fractured. His short life was now divided into a “before” and an “after.” In a matter of seconds, his father had gone from being a figure of great familiarity, a consistent, comfortable face, to a man of impossible mystery. His father would give no more advice. His stories would forever be offered secondhand.

At the funeral, Adam’s friends made a sullen, awkward group. When Adam caught sight of them in their ill-fitting suits, their messy hair cuts, he was flooded with feeling. The air seemed suddenly too hot, his body feverish and vulnerable. Incompatible worlds clashed in that room—his father, his friends. Horrible and good. Deep and easy.

He could see that they were uncomfortable—Nico especially. He could tell by the fidgeting, the nervous glances. Adam couldn’t blame them. He, too, wished to be anywhere else.

After the service, the four of them got the hell out of there. They piled into Zahir’s car and swung by the McDonald’s drive-through. They ate their burgers urgently and almost noiselessly, and Adam found himself thinking, for the first time, about trust.

Adam felt trust in their silence. Again, his body flooded unexpectedly with feeling, this one heavy and only half-sad. Catharsis. He began crying noiselessly. Tears dripped into his fries.

The others noticed—Zahir actually looked over, studied him tenderly for a moment, then looked away—but no one said anything.

They said it back, Of course, man, we love you too. “Don’t forget it,” Eddie added, somewhat awkwardly. Then silence again. Trust.

Adam grasps his way through the water, then breaks the surface. Bubbles foam against his arms. His body is flush with his breath; his blood pumps proudly.

Private thoughts. Or you can just comment.

Chrissa, like me, has brown hair and blue eyes. Our kinship was superficial; deep down, I far preferred Kit Kittridge. Kit was a wiser doll. She had heaps more moxie than my Chrissa. According to her backstory, Kit weathers the Great Depression, investigates a crime spree, and becomes a reporter—Chrissa just joins the swim team and gets bullied.

Chrissa Stands Strong was the official 2009 American Girl of the Year movie. My family had it on DVD, and now and then I’d rewatch it when I was home sick. The plot: Chrissa moves with her family to Minnesota, where she is incessantly harassed by a bitchy blond girl and her two bitchy lackeys.

“Have you heard the saying, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?’” Chrissa’s grandmother asks toward the movie’s end. “Well, it’s not true. Words can hurt; they can hurt a lot.”

This is the only useful thing Chrissa taught me, and one of only two lines I remember from the film.

The other: “Roses are red, violets are blue. You’re a loser girl, and no one likes you.”

In the closet I find my old quarter collection. I am missing only four: the Virgin and Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. Before I return to Madison, I plan to peel the coins out of their cardboard case to add to our stash of laundry quarters.

For some reason I keep thinking of those Buddhist monks who make intricate, temporary sand mandalas. When they finish their art, sometimes after days or weeks of work, they destroy it. They scatter the sand back into nature to symbolizes life’s impermanence.

For years I collected these quarters. When I paid for something in cash, I received my change with great anticipation. Friends and boyfriends fished through their wallets for the coins I still needed. No need to pay me back, they’d say. No problem. It’s just a quarter.

Now, again, these are just quarters. Time passes, we grow up, and the laundry machine wants its shiny fee.

Mom’s getting shorter. “It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” She shakes her head and explains that post-menopausal estrogen loss reduces bone density and causes the spine to compress. She’s almost my height now. I want to pat her on the head and send her off to bed.

Today, Dad wore a shirt that reads “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” Mom bought it for him.

My parents had me when they were 42 and 45. I used to relentlessly tease them about their age. The gist of the joke: you are old, I am young. Ha ha! Then I grew up and got a bit smarter and decided to shut the fuck up.

My prom dress still hangs in my closet. It’s an ashy purplish color but otherwise unremarkable. I wore this dress to two proms, because my then-boyfriend went to a different school. His was held in a high-ceilinged auditorium that immediately grew hot and humid, the air dense. My strapless bra, attached to my chest by a layer of sticky adhesive, quickly unpeeled from my skin, and I spent much of the night nervously readjusting it. I danced mildly, feeling self-conscious. Halfway through the evening, my then-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend approached him, drunk, and announced that she was going to fuck his best friend later that night. I lingered at the edge of the conversation, feeling very alive.

After we left the prom—me, my then-boyfriend, and his family’s Belgian exchange student—we stopped by the McDonald’s drive through for McFlurries. We asked the Belgian: What did you think of American prom?

Too sober, he told us.

Mom’s wedding gown hangs next to my prom dress. It’s blue and purple and strappy and gorgeous. I tried it on once around the time I was picking out prom dresses. The gown felt delicate, almost sacred, and I stepped into it carefully. I am shorter and curvier than Mom was when she got married, so the dress clung to my hips and gathered in a puddle by my feet. But I felt pretty, like I did when I was small and wearing something pink and twirly . I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment. A girl, again. Then I put the dress back on its hanger, under its plastic, and returned it to the closet corner where it has always lived, a memory.

If you want the little oven to be preheated to 350, you set it to 310. If you want the big oven to be preheated to 350, you set it to 390.

Each burner on the stove has five discrete settings: WM (warm), LO, 3, 2, and HI. Why this mixed scale, we wonder? And why is 2 hotter than 3? Shouldn’t 2, the smaller number, be cooler than 3?

What the stove lacks in labeling it also lacks in ease of use. My parents and I each have different strategies for compelling a sauce to thicken or an egg to fry. Mom, for instance, believes that you must always start on HI, then wait a beat and turn down to your desired level. I, on the other hand, am impatient—I toggle between buttons, muttering, fuck this stupid fucking stove.

Home is where the cookies burn, where the caramel sauce comes out hard and cracked.

This year, our Christmas decorations consist of a string of chili pepper lights and a little robotic Santa that does the Cha Cha Slide when you press a button on its foot. I miss our snow globes and ornaments—these trinkets make my chest hurt with nostalgia. But for the past few years we have decided that it’s all too much trouble, and we no longer have room for the plastic tree.

I’m older now, so we will just bake cookies and play the Peanuts soundtrack and talk about what to cook on Christmas Eve. A stew, we decide: it will be rich and savory and important. I want to watch something simmer in broth and red wine. After the tumult and sadness of this year, this stew will be event.

The clock in the dining room is outer-space themed. Two little astronauts twirl to the beat of the second hand. This clock was a Christmas gift for Mom several years ago. Dad and I bought it at the Lafayette clock store (“Clocks Etc” on Dewing Ave).

What a place—cuckoo clocks, traditional wooden contraptions, great abstract pieces that make it difficult to tell time. They were an eclectic bunch, covering the walls, ticking in a garbled percussion. Behind the counter stood a man who I assumed was some sort of wizard—who else would be drawn, so specifically, to timekeeping?

Ava and I have not purchased a clock for our Madison apartment—it didn’t occur to us, since I wear a watch and we both have phones. But now, as I watch the astronauts somersault in outer-space, marking the passage of yet another minute, I think:

Sad.

Dad things: his tan slippers, his gentle snoring, his hat that reads, “If You Must Smoke, Smoke Salmon,” the way he yells, “Go bears!” to any stranger sporting Cal merchandise. He appears at my door. “You want a deviled egg sandwich?” “Apples?” “Eggnog?” He loves an offering. “I shaved today,” he used to tell me, and I’d touch his cheek, temporarily smooth and smelling like soap.

Dad in the big chair, watching American Pickers and football and Deadliest Catch and Pawn Stars. Dad offering me a gin and tonic, or Dad mincing the garlic real neat, real small. Dad with his tool box, ready to solve, to fix, and somehow not exasperated by my incompetence when it comes to practical tasks.

Dad loves a problem. I, on the other hand, am all gossip and complaint.

Back in the days when he biked to work he’d return home with the squeal of his tires on the driveway, followed by a sonorous “Heyyyyyyy!” This meant: I’m here, please open the garage door. But it meant much more, too. Like: this simple day is nearly done. Here is a loop closed, a routine maintained. The sound of his feet on the basement stairs, the radio chattering, the stove switched on. The memory of just that syllable makes me feel sweet and sad. Heyyyyyy!

Home: reading glasses, cough drops, lead paint, shower steam.

We slammed these doors, and we closed them tenderly, to keep the sleeping asleep. This is the American earth; grout receding, thermostat set to 66. This is where we passed our unevents, where we softened our vegetables and untied our shoes, where we felt the night release, where we waited for sleep and quiet dreams.

I ran away from home only once, many years ago and for a reason I can no longer remember. My suitcase and I made it to the end of the block before I turned around, head low, hungry again for a grilled cheese.

What else—where else? Nowhere but home, all tender and forget.

thoughts

“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.” James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.

“There’s only one dream–the American Dream. Oh–and the Californian Dream.” Gavin Newsom in Wednesday’s Ezra Klein.

Winter has crusted over Madison. Now there are two-dozen footlong icicles descending from the awning outside our bedroom window. Now my toes are always cold and I daydream about soup and cider. Prince once said that his hometown, Minneapolis, is “so cold it keeps the bad people out.” I can only hope the same about Madison. The geese, at least, have fled.

Actually, I have, too—temporarily, on a planned trip back home. My grandparents’ memorial is Saturday, and I’m staying in California through the holidays.

Here, it’s 60 degrees, no breeze. The sun is intense and in the early evening, everything the light touches becomes pink and hazy. I’m sitting on a bench outside of the Peet’s on Lakeshore, watching. The air smells like coffee and incense and Vapo Rub— a few feet away, a man is applying the stuff liberally to his bare feet. In the parking lot between the dispensary and the Trader Joe’s, someone’s playing a soft jazz cover of “Fly Me To The Moon.” “True love!” a stranger coos at my dog. Across the street, a group of men stand at the stoop of a new store, smoking.

Gas price: $4.79. Honey, I’m home.

Oakland, the Bay Area, California; today, all the family I know live in this state, and for several generations, this is where we spread our (relatively shallow) roots.

The house where I grew up is actually the same house where my grandmother grew up, back in the 1920s. Either she or her sister—we aren’t sure—lived out their girlhood in the bedroom where I lived out my girlhood. Her childhood kitchen was my childhood kitchen. Her backyard was my backyard.

So I feel drawn to California, the way one is drawn to spaces made deep with family history and proximate with personal memory.

Also, it’s warm. Other places are cold.

But I left California, first for New Hampshire, for college, and then, more intentionally for adult life in Madison. And in many ways, I’m glad I left. I learned much more about myself and this country by living beyond the California border and bubble. And I do love the seasons, the way they pace the year and remind me that time is passing.

But returning to the Bay, I always feel bittersweet. I am, now, simultaneously part of these neighborhoods and far removed from them. Everywhere is a little ghostly, albeit still familiar. As Ralph Ellison put it in Invisible Man: “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”

How, I sometimes wonder, does California tell me who I am?

A tricky question, because California is a peculiar place to be an American.

A 2024 Los Angeles Times survey found that nearly half of Republicans, and one in five Californians overall, view the state as not fully American. California—with its five major climate zones, with an economy that ranks fifth in the world—can feel like a foreign island, attached to its country by only a long tether and a haughty superiority.

In other ways, however, California feels like an American microcosm, a petri dish in which to test the progress and chaos of a young nation, growing older. Wallace Stegner, considered “The Dean of Western Writers,” wrote some of the best essays on the region (and California in particular) in his book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. In his words, California “[demonstrates] the strains and lesions, the violences and disintegrations, the difficult improvisations, of a society in the process of being transplanted, mixed, and reconstituted.”

But this is only half the picture. While it can fumble for its footing, California offers, in vast quantities, something essential: hope, a corrosive and creative and very American substance.

Stegner wrote that the West is “hope’s native home.” California in particular—“the West of the West,” as he called it—can feel “magnificently endowed and with the chance to become something unprecedented and unmatched in the world.”

Indeed, at its best, the California spirit is a concentrated version of the American Dream. From the time this country got its grubby paws on the land that would become California, the history of this state has been one of dreams and their reinventions, noble and ignoble. Think of the Gold Rush, the countercultural fervor of the 1960s, the rise of Silicon Valley, and now the techno-utopian (or dystopian) promises of generative AI. California’s economic strength and cultural influence have long been fueled by a distinctly American hunger for more, for better.

However, writes Stegner, “What lures many people to the West has always been, and still is, mirage.” Many failed to find the gold nugget the size of their fist. The bubble can burst; you might be too late, too slow. Dreams warp and fade. And those who continue clinging to them long after they’ve expired can find themselves in a self-imposed exile from reality.

“California: The future happens here first,” touts Gavin Newsom’s administration. But the future is never predictable; it’s fractured with stops and starts. It slows down, it speeds up. Simultaneously steady and shaky, California’s future is as uncertain as the shifting tectonic plates that grind beneath it.

The people who love California love it ferociously. Anything less can feel like a betrayal. Leaving California feels like I am betting on mirage, like I’m narrowing my dreams only to what is practical, reliable, cheap.

I also wrestle with leaving because, in many ways, California politics and culture continue to inspire me. I am proud of the state’s efforts, since the early twentieth century, to curb corporate power. I believe in the progressive mission to expand and improve welfare and advance economic equality. California is a leader in climate action, gun safety laws, and reproductive freedom—all while accounting for more than 14% of the country’s GDP.

(Do I think California consistently lives up to these progressive ideals? No, but that doesn’t neutralize my pride. Like every state, California is imperfect, and in my view, many of its shortcomings stem from a lack of trust and support in broader communities. Oakland, for example, is among the most diverse and politically progressive cities in the world, but a 2021 U.C. Berkeley study ranked it the 14th most segregated major city in the country. By the study’s metrics, hardly any Oakland neighborhoods can be considered racially integrated.)

I received a California education, reinforced by a family shaped by the same culture. Together, they gave me a distinctly Californian way of seeing the world and its problems—along with a few blind spots I recognized only after leaving. I feel the state in my instincts; not just in my skepticism of tradition and my cravings for sun. I feel in synch with this state. I miss it when I leave.

And I want very badly to have roots. It takes time to get to know a city the way I would like to. In Oakland, I’ve memorized the potholes, I know the burrito spots, and I learned the history in high school. Here, I know very fully where I am, which perhaps helps me know who I am.

I left California, and soon I’ll leave again. I am not resolved in my feelings about this place, but here’s what I will tell myself when I get on the plane: what makes a Californian a Californian isn’t roots or tradition or even location—it’s something more indeterminate; an attitude of hope, of reinvention. “The West is less a place than a process,” wrote Stegner. The Californian is “less a person than a continuing adaptation.”

I believe the same is true of Americans writ large. Gertrude Stein, an Oaklander, once called America “a space that is filled with moving.”

Stegner, musing on this quote, wrote, “If [Stein] had been reared in Boston she might not have seen it so plainly; but she was reared in Oakland. She knew that few Westerners die where they were born, that most live out their lives as a series of uprootings.”

Perhaps, like Stein, growing up in California has taught me a broader lesson: that we are all spaces filled with moving. East or West, here or there; we are all busy building lives that will end–there is no catching-up, no falling behind, no path, no ladder. This is what I consider when I think about where and how to live: rooted or uprooted, I animate my own ghosts; I love only what I am compelled to love.

Thoughts.