If you live in NYC, I’d love for you to join me at COMMONPLACE. Founded by London-based author William Rayfet Hunter, it’s an intimate literary supper club bringing writers and readers together around a shared table. And it’s here in the Big Apple for one night only this Wednesday, September 2nd from 7-11pm at Open Book Club's new studio on the Bowery. The theme of the night is OBSESSION. Hear from myself, Jordan Tannahill, and Megan Nolan as we share readings and reflections on the things we can't let go of: desire, fixation, compulsion, love, and everything that happens when fascination becomes something more consuming.

Purchase one of the last tickets here and take 15% off with my code LDN2NYC to hear me read this essay aloud. The piece might change a little between now and then, so here’s a sneak peek into my process regardless of your attendance.

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This was likely because my perception of time transformed. I’d spent half of the previous year twiddling around my life, a Type B person’s fantasy: waking up whenever I wanted, the necessity of checking the time diminished by a project-based work routine and a newfound hunger for attending DJ sets alone. It had been good for my nervous system, this new approach to life. I’d even started dating someone new and found a gig that would pay the bills while I continued to live off my savings, waiting for a healthy advance on my second novel. I understood why some folks leaned toward chaos and spontaneity, why unstructured time was necessary for creative freedom.

But my Type A instincts — my true instincts, if left untouched by my curiosity toward other ways of living — were proven right. Having your shit together, some constructed illusion of certainty, is more freeing than unpredictability. My bill-paying gig turned out to be incompatible with the needs of my new nervous system, my boyfriend a narcissistic freak, my second novel unpublishable. Perhaps 24-year-old me had it right: a full-time job creates a structure within which I could operate freely to dance, write, socialize to my heart’s desire.

I’d just been exposed to too many people making a living off doing their own thing. Although social media could never confirm a stranger’s bank account balance or amount of debt owed, I’d met folks who were less talented and worldly than I making money off their content and content off their personalities. I wanted to be that person — emotionally and financially rewarded for my talents and charm — and in the year I spent exploring a creative life, I’d failed. No one wanted to pay me for being me, and the Me I’d found myself left with was lost.

I’d been spoiled, too. Strangers had come up to me telling me they loved my first book, I’d made a surplus amount of money on brand partnerships, I could look in the mirror and see someone who was untouched by botox or filler and yet beautiful.

To build a life that one is proud of and to live fully in a borrowed body requires more than being rewarded immediately. Failure and challenge are key components of youth, the components that chisel away naivety and sharpen someone into an Adult, yes, but also an Artist with integrity — which, deep down, are all of which I wanted to be. These things do not come easily and truth walks slower than lies, even if lies seem like the truth when they’re presented on a screen with enough followers.

I find myself at the top of a spiral staircase, looking down at my desires from a different perspective. It’s not that I’ve returned to Square One — a full-time job and early mornings at my laptop, chipping away at yet another novel — but that I’ve acquired tunnel vision with guardrails. I’ve given up on working in social media and spend every day writing instead. I know that a routine is what I need to finish writing a book, and a routine that isn’t entirely self-imposed nor reminiscent of a Substack girl’s wet dream in Note form. I identify my loathing of literary circles as a signal of my own direction toward my goals, a path that won’t look like everyone else’s nor require me to spend time with people I don’t truly respect.

On the day of my birthday party, there was thunderstorm that made the trees look like they were arching backwards. I sat in my apartment dolled up, my two best friends wincing at the weather on my behalf, only to close the curtain so I wouldn’t continue to estimate when it would stop and whether my guests would show up. The party was delayed by 3 hours, but the timing was out of my hands. My friends began to trickle into my apartment and then we crawled into the backs of Ubers, making our way to Nowadays for a daytime dance. The sun shined through the mist, curling the ends of my hair, leaving my shoulder and collar bones glistening. Then more friends trickled into the club, throwing their arms around me and wishing me a happy birthday, and it all felt allegorical to this year. Rain and shine, thunderstorms a prerequisite to rainbows. Whatever comes next will be good, I told my friends.

And it’s here, and it’s good.

Being a fan is embarrassing. A fangirl is someone who is entirely submissive in the face of adoration. In a sense, a fangirl is content to declare her inferiority to the person they worship, and one must never worship another human. Humans are not deserving of worship.

I have never asked someone for their autograph, nor have I interrupted Keira Knightley’s afternoon glass of wine to obnoxiously (and pretentiously) let her know how much I love her writing for Noble Rot. I did bother Min Jin Lee on a plane, but only to give her the book I’d written. I feel no tenderness or affection towards celebrities (except in the wake of their death — Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams).

But when I listen to Phoebe Bridgers, I cry. Without fail. I have to be careful; if a Phoebe song comes up on shuffle while I am on the subway, or while in a car on my way home from a party, I press skip to keep myself safe. If I do choose to listen to her music, I am unfortunately crooned into submission.

I have the potential to be her absolute Punisher. I’d be the fan so excited to meet her I’d trap her in conversation. (The track Punisher is indeed about Phoebe’s love for Elliott Smith, and when I listen to it, it’s relatable if only for my feelings about her.) All of this is why I can never meet her.

I refuse to meet her. But this is also why I am her greatest fan.

Other than physically and sonically embodying my deepest desires, Phoebe’s music also channels a wavelength of consciousness I am tapped into. This is more than feeling seen; this is a matter of energetic threads revealing themselves through her lyrics. She’s a can on a string and I’m on the end.

Phoebe’s music entered my life at a tender time. Someone had died. A terrible thunderstorm cracked and rumbled through the sky on the day I found out that my ex-boyfriend was gone forever. I’d taken both loving him and hating him for granted. I screamed into my pillow for hours, the sounds properly concealed. I begged God for a sign. A sign of what, I don’t know — but I could not withstand the idea of death being meaningless.

Punisher came out a month later. Every song on the album spoke to my grief, to the relationship. I was able to make friends with the permanence of the feeling and could accept the way it would hum in the background of my life, sometimes noticeable and sometimes not. A terrible case of magical thinking, sure — but in connecting the dots between my life, my past relationship, this unpredictable and premature death, and Phoebe’s music, I understood that Phoebe was the sign I asked for. I saw her in concert on a new moon. I paid $30 for a ticket.

Two years after Punisher, I met one of my best friends at another Phoebe concert — this time on a full moon. My friend, M, had only lost her mother a few months before. (I don’t know how she survived it, but she did, and sometimes I find it twisted how grief is love’s shadow and how grief can make you love harder, harder than if you didn’t feel the choke of it at all. I wouldn’t have my best friend without Phoebe.)

Seven months after we met, Phoebe’s father died.

A few days ago, M and I went to a planetarium and listened to Lost Weekend with our heads tilted back, lasers twisting and spinning in fleeting shapes in front of our eyes while her music swallowed us whole. No phones allowed. It was clear why Phoebe chose to release Lost Weekend with intention and aesthetic conviction (not to mention with morals: surprise, free no-phone pop-up concerts; the donation of proceeds from $1 Madison Square Garden tickets to an immigration bond; listening parties at local planetariums). She wants the music to do its job.

6 years in between albums is a long time, long enough to challenge my own destructive restlessness. I’m inclined to produce as much as possible when I feel like I’m being watched. But perhaps this is the truth: When people have their eyes on you, you have to be a bit precious with your art. You have to go back into your shell to remember who you are. Phoebe could accept this. Without knowing, she modeled a devoted patience I can apply to my own choices, both in life and in art.

I can only survive my own fallible, fangirl mind by asserting that I am speaking of Phoebe Bridgers the vessel, not Phoebe Bridgers the flawed, imperfect human. Talent is a gift we choose to nurture or choose to let wither. She’s done a terribly good job of nurturing her compulsion to make music, but the gift isn’t just hers.

There should be no ego in the act of creation, nor in the act of receiving one’s creation. This is why I know I cannot meet Phoebe. I will not be satisfied. Because who I really need to personally thank is God.

V and I had grown up in Chennai together. We’d been close friends during our preadolescence. We’d seen the very worst and best of each other, but going to school in India, we’d also witnessed some of the very worst happening to each other.

“Going to school in India is a death sentence,” I told V. And I meant it. Every year, at least 13,000 people in India die by suicide because of the education system.

V’s visit coincided with the week after the Cockroach Janta Party’s demands had been met, a month and a half since the protests began and Westerners bothered to pay attention to a single ongoing form of oppression in India — the education system itself, a system I’m sure would have driven me to suicide had I not moved back to the U.S. when I was fourteen.

At least twenty-one students killed themselves after learning the NEET exams — which are rigorous and expensive to study and show up for, considering families had sold their land (amongst other things) just for their child to get tutoring and secure their spot for taking the exam — had to be retaken after a leak, the result of an efficient education minister with broken methods of leadership. Without these exams, you can’t get into undergraduate medical (MBBS), dental (BDS), and other health science programs. And, even if you score really well, there’s still no guarantee you’ll make it into college. The system is so corrupt that people can pay for their kids to secure one of the sought-after spots, regardless of their exam score.

The reason I’m so sure I would have been one of them is because I’d faced the worst of the system even before I made it to the board exams. I'm referring to the hierarchy of goodness, which is based on how well you do in school. If you are at the bottom of it, then you'll be questioning your right to exist at all.

(Yes, there are more exams, as in the Class 10 and Class 12 exams conducted by school boards like CBSE, ICSE, or state boards like Maharashtra State Board — these ones are qualifying/school-leaving exams that every student takes regardless of what they want to study next)

I’d arrived in Chennai after a traumatic time in my childhood. In fact, the only reason I’d moved to India was because of a specific traumatic incident. Even just thinking about it gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. My 9 year old body was tense, my self-perception fragile and on high alert. For an American girl who’d only been raised in the suburbs up until that point, Chennai was the externalized perception of my inner state: chaotic, distorted, unpredictable.

On my first day of school I had one teacher who called me to her desk. She was kind; she touched my head and said, “This must be so hard for you, coming to a new country.” It was.

But from then on, my teachers had mostly been unkind. If poor grades don’t batter you down, your teachers will. They’ll kill you before you even get the chance to take any board exam. I watched teachers hit the boys, pull on their ears, call them idiots. The girls mostly did well in school, save for a few who’d get insults thrown at them because they were average or their parents weren’t wealthy.

I was targeted by my teachers for being American, which is such a silly thing to say in 2026 (like, don’t we deserve it?!). It didn’t help that I had terrible testing anxiety, which meant I failed every test — particularly math and science, which were the only subjects that mattered.

I once finished an exam before my other classmates, and the teacher came over to check my work. She was in shock and clearly offended (for some odd reason) that I had finished it so quickly, but the subject was English and I was of course good at it. It was the only subject, other than French, that I was good at. She flung the exam right back into my face and said everything was wrong, and my peers watched me get humiliated in real time.

I had a teacher go on a rant about American culture and how stupid we all are. (This happened often — if they felt like it, teachers would lecture us on so-called Life Things instead of, you know, teaching us.) Her rant stemmed from a bad place, I know, because she was looking at me the entire time.

I had another teacher ask the class for the answer to a formula on the board, and I was excited I had the solution for once. She ignored my raised hand until I had to call her name, to which she snapped at me: “Shut up! No one wants to hear your stupid accent!” After a point I was embarrassed to speak at all and was conditioned to become apologetic for my existence, which I had to unlearn once I made it out of my PWI college.

None of this is out of the ordinary. Many teachers in India are encouraged by the system to be on such a power trip, knowing that their position holds the key to children’s futures. Instead of cherishing this position with integrity, they abuse it. They act inside of a system that rewards abuse.

To me, the education issue in India has never just been about the structure of the system or the corruption. It is a deep-rooted cultural issue that has intertwined one’s right to be treated with respect with their ability to succeed in school. It is the failure of our culture to tell students to treat authority with blind obedience while condoning the abuse of children. It’s a disgusting, shameful aspect of our culture and the country that must have Jawaharlal Nehru — whose birth anniversary is marked by Children’s Day — rolling in his grave. He knew that children are the foundation of the nation. In my experience from both living across the U.S. and in Chennai, Indian culture doesn’t treat children like they matter at all. Neither does the country of India.

The CJP was a brilliant display of rebellion. The protests were made up of all kinds of people, but everyone was once a kid. The fear of not having a future — or the ability to financially fend for oneself — because of the failure of a system was one step too far. The despair started from the day they set foot in school. To me, the CJP isn’t defined just by the demands they made, but rather the ability to symbolize the pain and trauma of students across the country.

Education exists to expand a child’s potential. It was never meant to be a death sentence.

N and I walked out of the cinema disoriented after watching Backrooms — like we’d just woken up from a long nap and didn’t know what time it was or who we were. I was grateful, then, that I’d bought a ticket to Officially Ex’s EX’S PRIDE party at Honey’s. The thought of sitting at home alone, slowly turning every corner in my apartment and seeing every door as a portal to some terrible, liminal place freaked me out. I love horror, it’s my favorite genre, but I’m kind of easily affected.

On the train, N and I tried to decode what we just watched. I informed her I’d have a sigh of relief at this party, a couple of cocktails to ease the post-horror dizziness. Her phone was at 3% — but we made a plan for her to go home, charge up and eat and get ready, and meet me at Honey’s. She got off at Montrose and I got off at Jefferson, jeans hanging low on my hips, cheekbones bronzed.

I arrived 15 minutes after the event started; already thirty-some people waiting in line. I’d heard of the party from a new, gorgeous acquaintance named O, and her partner. O said the party would be filled with good-looking, chic dykes — they were right. I was thrilled to smell high-quality perfume, see glossed lips catching the light, heels clicking and button downs that were mostly unbuttoned. I always feel this rush of excitement in queer spaces, like I’m home, and can be the best version of myself, who also happens to be the hottest version of myself.

I sat at the bar, which had a foggy window peeking out onto the indoor dancefloor, which was empty. The DJ was going hard though: I wiggled my shoulders and moved my hips in my seat while I waited for the hot bartender to make my mezcal negroni. While I waited for N to arrive, I watched others arrive, enthralled by their outfits: a black bikini top with metal hardware, low rise jorts, and a racing jacket; a knit tank top dipped in silver and leather jeans; and standing next to me, a gorgeous blonde with a shimmery top, covered in large sequins, held together by delicate strings on either side of the top. I complimented her on her outfit and we talked about the party — how we’d never been to an Ex’s event, how she’d never been to Honey’s, how an acquaintance once threw a “10 Year Anniversary” party for her 10 years of living in NYC. I felt like a man because I was getting turned on just by talking to her. I pointed her in the direction of the bathroom when she asked, and she said she’d see me later, and I informed N via text of the exchange.

N arrived just a few minutes later, greeting me by the bar. I realized a woman had been standing there, waiting for a drink, and the excitement of seeing my friend had pushed her out of the way. I informed the bartender to take her drink order first. While she did that, I laid eyes on a woman with a perfect face, wearing a blue button down with her hair tied back. She reminded me of 070 Shake, which is to say I was very attracted to her. We chatted about soccer — Ecuador beat Germany 2-1, which was incredible, and Turkey beat the USA. We promised to run into each other later that night — her friends wanted to go upstairs.

When it was time for N and I to grab our drinks, the bartender informed us the woman behind us had paid.

N and I found her and thanked her — let’s call her W. An executive assistant to an investment banker and from Manhattan, I found her to be beautiful and with sturdy convictions, and a wonderful sense of humor. I told her I was excited to see 2 of the DJs in particular, and we went up to the rooftop to dance.

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Reggaeton, Latin house, it doesn’t get better than that. Alejandra Sabillón played Dansa by Klassik Frescobar and the mezcal negroni was hitting. N, W and I were up at the front shaking our hips and my knees were bent, ass inches from the floor. I watched a woman walk by with a cigarette in hand. I asked her for one and she informed me she rolled it. I followed her to a corner of the rooftop and she rolled it swiftly while she answered some of my questions. Name’s E, lives in Bed-Stuy, has picked up Djing after being a semi-famous child DJ on MTV.

“What?”

“Yeah, I played with some hip-hop legends…” she was rather shy and humble. She dropped some names I didn’t recognize but I believed her. I took her email down and said I’d like to interview her.

I returned to the dancefloor in time for Enur’s Calabria 2007. There’s a line to get onto the rooftop, slowly getting packed and W and N and I thanked our stars for getting here as early as we did. We went downstairs, still, out of curiosity — N grabbed us another mezcal-based drink — but the music wasn’t hitting the way we want it to, although the tracks were solid and the DJ seemed to be confidently transitioning in between them. We’re in the mood for Latin music, is all.

Upstairs, I ran into a woman I went on a date with once, but who I didn’t text ever again after that despite a hot makeout session outside of the wine bar we drank 2 glasses at. She had told me at the beginning of the date she had plans afterwards, but I guess she liked me enough to reveal she actually didn’t have plans and wanted to keep spending the evening with me. I didn’t appreciate this — commit to a 2 hour date if you want to be a person with boundaries, don’t make spur-of-the-moment decisions based on how well the date goes! — so I remember making a decision not to text her. I guess she remembered that because she said hello to me awkwardly and I realized she was with a woman who might e her girlfriend, and I say this not to be mean but to be honest: I was waaaay hotter and better-dressed than her, not to mention not white. Minutes later I feel someone pushing up against me and it’s them, making out quite furiously. I didn’t realize someone could hold a grudge for that long, but I do admit I’ve done some interesting things after no-text-backs.

I started to yawn and get hiccups. W wagged her finger at me and demanded I purchase another drink, so I did. A mezcal negroni for N and a mezcal soda for myself. It takes only fifteen minutes. All of this gets written off my taxes, thanks to this Substack.

W, N and I made some new friends. A group of friendly, cool women who like to dance. k.tea came on for her set and started to play soulful mixes, including multiple Beyonce tracks, and when Pyramids by Frank Ocean came on the whole rooftop was vibing. I’ve never been to a party with men that has ever emitted the kind of beautiful, strong, ethereal energy emanating from that rooftop last night.

O informed me that she and her partner were arriving. When I saw them, I was floored by how stylish they were, and was reminded of how good they smell. O asked N if she’s gay, N declared she is, and I know there’s no need to mention the boyfriend — boyfriends are irrelevant here!

Tacos are being sold on the rooftop. The smell can no longer be ignored. N and I, fully tipsy, managed to get through the crowd to the woman selling the tacos. We scarfed them down, spicy grease dripping down my fingers and burning my cuticles. It was too delicious to stop. was fully satisfied and so is N. And considering I was three drinks deep at that point, I know it’s time to go home.

W wanted to leave too — kismet. N and I waited for her downstairs while she used the bathroom, and I saw the woman from earlier — 070 Shake with her friends. We kept making eyes at each other but I knew it was my move. So I went up to her. I got her number, not her Instagram. She was even prettier and sweeter than I remembered before. I squeal with W and N on the walk to the subway, where N then catches her Uber.

W and I sat on the train, my stop before hers, and talked about Ariana Grande and Phoebe Bridgers and how W will see Hayley Williams live in concert soon. Man, I made a fucking friend last night.

When I transferred to the G, and then got off the G, a woman’s mason jar fell from her backpack and dropped onto the subway platform right as we exited. She apologized profusely and asked me if I was okay. I was! I wanted to tell her something about the glass breaking feeling like a good omen, a sign of something new beginning, a signal of good luck — but I kept the thought to myself and walked home, holding onto the thought for dear life. I needed last night.

I didn’t start the night out alone, which often feels like a bit of a cheat code: warm yourself up with the company of a few good friends and linger long after they leave so you can understand what that night is really about.

One of my best friends, M, is Haitian, so obviously we needed to show up and show out for the game against Brazil. The only problem here was that 1) Brazil has made 23 World Cup appearances and Haiti only two and 2) we both love Brazil and Brazilian music, so ultimately this was an emotionally difficult game to watch.

I took the train to Astoria while the Scots were playing the Moroccans, 0-1. I got to the venue — a place called Pig Beach, which evoked the image of sweaty pigs rolling around in the sand, but obviously it was a barbecue place. I ran into M in line and once we were in, we found our way to a large backyard filled with at least 500 people — mostly Moroccans cheering their team on and Brazilians lingering by the tables to snatch a seat before the game, just like us. It was intimidating being the only Haiti supporters there, and while we found a few others we realized we could count them on our hands.

A group of old, wrinkly Brazilian women — the kind who very well might be racist because that’s definitely a problem in that country — moved up on us to steal the table we had already laid claim to politely by way of standing next to it and smiling at the Moroccan family who was currently inhabiting it. This pissed us off, so we proceeded to mumble under our breath, and luckily the other table we were standing next to was filled with South Asian women who overheard our conversation. After another friend joined us and I continued to rant about the Brazilians, to which she responded “Talk your shit!” — one of the South Asian girlies turned around and said “Wow, I love your vibe — do you want to sit here?”

Another two friends joined us and now we had a table. Two middle-aged Mexican men stood by us drinking beers and I told them how much I loved their team. I said I had a couple of ex-boyfriends who were Mexican, the most recent one being a psychopathic narcissist, and this actually didn’t surprise them.

M and the others grabbed us beers, and M pointed out that there were tons of hot Brazilian guys, but she saw the hottest inside and he was certainly gay, but incredible to look at. I was noticing the same, and the gorgeous women were a given and not surprising at all.

Haiti was playing terribly. Luckily the first goal scored was offside. But then the goalkeeper fucked up in a way the Mexican goalkeeper wouldn’t have, as in he stopped the ball the first time and it bounced back into the reach of the opponent, and instead of trying to prevent the second kick he sat down there hopelessly. The Brazilians erupted into cheers, and this happened two more times and while I usually love watching the game I started to feel sad for Haiti so I chose to talk to the girlies instead.

They informed me they were going to C’mon Everybody to meet up with the rest of the group after this, and while I hadn’t planned on going out I knew Toribio was playing that night and I love his sets. I decided I would go.

After Haiti lost, the Brazilians were in the best of moods. I think a lot of people there were Brazilian and the others, like M and me, huge fans of the culture and accepting of their futbol empire.

While we were getting up to leave, I noticed three Brazilian guys checking me out, and one of them was exceedingly hotter than his friends and honestly hotter than the average man. Strong jawline, perfect haircut, glasses, tattoos up the wazoo. He asked me to go over and I did. He said he liked my style and that I looked like Rihanna, and I laughed. I think what he meant was that I’m just as beautiful as her, which is true because we both have symmetrical faces and perfect smiles on account of our parents. He was still holding my hand as he said this, after a handshake meant to test out physical chemistry, and I let him. He said he lived in Southampton and owned a construction company, which to me translated to: We’re either fucking tonight or never seeing each other again. He asked for my Instagram and I said that was a juvenile request, and that I don’t give it out to strangers, so he took my number instead with no intention of ever reaching out to me again.

That’s OK; as I walked back to the girlies they were giddy with excitement for me because he was just that hot. Considering my ex-boyfriend was not just a terrible person but punching seriously above his weight, it occurred to me that the Brazilian guy was a perfect example of the type of man within my league and that I could continue to keep such high standards for myself. M then said with excitement: “THAT’S the gay guy I saw inside who I said was the hottest man in the world! Oh my God he’s NOT GAY!” We waited until we exited the location to fully freak out together, and I was holding my head even higher. I appreciated the boost.

Our Uber driver arrived after the Empower one canceled on M and I had to send her a link to the complaint form. Our sharp, incredibly sexy dancer friend sat in the front and asked if she could play music; he handed her his phone and she happily took it and opened YouTube. When she pulled up J.Lo’s “Get on the Floor” we squealed because we could see he had already watched the full music video before. He sped and nodded along while we screamed the lyrics with the windows down. I think he was having the best ride of his life. After that I requested Enrique Iglesias’ “Tonight I’m Fucking You” and that seemed to really knock our socks off, and the song ended right as we pulled up to M’s apartment.

We stopped for beers and a chaser. I’d already had a Stella at Pig Beach and drank half of our dancer friend’s mango-flavored beer which she didn’t really like because she doesn’t like sweet things. At the apartment we drank Peronis while M and another friend got ready, drinking Casamigos with lemonade. (I can’t use their initials to differentiate because everyone’s name started with M.) Dancer friend and I cracked open our bottles and talked about Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which she got her diagnosis for and which I suspect I might have. We compared symptoms and she explained that while a blood test would confirm, everything I was doing for my body to offset symptoms was a telltale sign that I had it, and since there’s no cure, the doctor would simply tell me to do everything I was already doing.

I messaged Toribio and told him I was a writer and asked if I could get on the guest list. It was just C’mon Everybody so it wasn’t a huge deal, but he responded: “U’ll get lost regardless of writing. U on.” I was thrilled.

M played one more song before the Uber arrived and it was “I Don’t Care” by Michel Martelly. She explained this was a track all Haitians knew and that they all played at their parties, and that the singer might have been involved with the assassination of the president. I shook my ass and then when it was over, we hopped into an XL where we sang more — “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne, Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me” and a few more.

No one checked anyone’s ticket and no one even asked for my name. We got in. The rest of the group was outside smoking though, having arrived there a couple of hours earlier. I kept telling all the friends about the “guest list” and felt like a little kid or fangirl because I thought it was so cool, but I was tipsy and so it made sense that I was giddy and had gotten what I’d asked for. Plus, I was still riding the high from the Brazilian dude.

Inside, a few more pals were scattered. One of my friends told me she’d gotten broken up with earlier that day. Our friend who’d been there the whole time asked her to sit in the booth and chat, and with a regretful smile on my face I said I was going to go dance. I made a mental note to reach out to her in the morning.

Most of the group prefers music with words, while some of us are neurodivergent enough to indulge most in the freedom that lyric-less music provides. But this meant that mostly everyone was getting ready to leave while I was only getting started. I wasn’t sad about this, and it didn’t surprise me, because everyone was being chatty and restless and I am a dance floor purist and don’t expect anyone else to be.

Toribio was wearing a shirt that said HOOD CLOSED TO GENTRIFIERS, which I hoped and imagined was making a few people either amused or uncomfortable. Es verdad, you know. He played a remix of Kendrick Lamar's "DNA," which was soulful as much as it was hard. His set was just that — soulful — and mostly a mix of house and disco, the kind of music that makes your shoulders wiggle and your hips turn and your limbs roll like waves. My joints felt loose and my muscles like that of a centipede.

At some point, as the dance floor started to clear and left only the most dedicated dancers, a handsome gay man came round with a 12-inch platter of fruit arranged by color. Strawberries, red grapes, orange slices, lemon slices, pineapple, mango, kiwis, green grapes … I popped a few grapes in my mouth and felt a boost of energy.

I ended up dancing alone for another hour, and was reminded of how important it is to surrender to the music. Yes, sometimes you just don’t fuck with the DJ, or it’s not the vibe you’re looking for. But ultimately losing yourself to the music is a metaphor for how we surrender control in life — oftentimes you can find yourself enjoying it more if you just let go. I’d learned how to do that thanks to techno, and ketamine, and could do it sober or stoned or tipsy or fucked.

Toribio was making me sweat with re-enlightenment, which is exactly what I wanted. Once he started playing his last track, I exited the dance floor and gulped down five cups of water while a woman watched me with a smile. When I walked outside, the handsome gay man with the fruit was holding a nearly empty platter out for a few hungry individuals. I watched them chat for a bit, and when I was ready I hopped on an electric bike at three in the morning and made my way home, feeling sexy and blissed out.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a controversial theory of linguistic relativity. It poses that our thoughts are shaped by our native language, and that speakers of different languages therefore think differently. For example: if you, like me, can speak English and Italian, then you’ll understand why it is that in English I’m sweet, a little overly-accommodating, and articulate. And in Italian, I’m a total b*tch.

But the real reason I’ve been thinking so much about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is because I’ve been wondering if my ex-boyfriend, who is bilingual, is a different person in English than in Spanish, his native language.

My ex-boyfriend, who is ten years older than me, immigrated here about twenty years ago. He told me he learned English by listening to John Mayer’s music. So maybe he really wasn’t kidding when he told me my body was a wonderland. If you think about it really hard it’s actually super cute and not cringey at all.

I’ve gotten over this quick but stressful relationship thanks to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — because now I have some answers as to why he is the way he is, and why he did what he did. All I have to do is look at some of his favorite John Mayer lyrics.

First, we have Heartbreak Warfare: These lyrics go - Once you want it to begin / No one really ever wins / In heartbreak warfare

What John Mayer calls war is what my ex-boyfriend calls a relationship. He is a film photographer, not by trade but by simply needing a way to pull women. Luckily, as the years went on by and he transitioned from tacky boudoir shoots to photos of old men playing dominos in Bushwick, he got good with the camera.

Despite being self-conscious and occasionally creeped out, I let him take photos of me naked. I was excited when he got those images developed — but he then said he’d also gotten images developed of his ex-girlfriend at the same time. This information made me feel weird, so I told him. He simply shook his head and said he “knew I would get insecure.” It seems he was on both offense and defense, which is impressive, and luckily the only collateral damage was my dignity.

Second, we have “Half of My Heart”: Oh, half of my heart’s got a grip on the situation / Half of my heart takes time / Half of my heart’s got a right mind to tell you /That I can’t keep loving you

After the incident with the photos, I knew he was pulling away because he called me the day after to tell me he wanted space. His request didn’t make much sense considering I was visiting my parents at the time, so I was 700-something miles away in South Carolina. But I think he meant distance as a metaphor…and I think we know by now that John Mayer’s pretty good at those.

Third, we have “Better Man”: I can’t wait to figure out what’s wrong with me / So I can say this is the way that I used to be

My ex-boyfriend had finally figured out what was wrong with him! Or so he claimed. Given that he was 38 years old, I certainly hoped so. Any time we argued he reminded me I was lucky I was getting the best version of him. “The old me would have responded very differently,” was something he said often, and it made me wonder where the hell that guy was and if he was in the room with us.

Fourth, we have “Gravity”: Gravity is working against me / Gravity wants to bring me down

Gravity, otherwise known as the ol’ ball and chain. I’d been asked to do a reading of my work in the lobby of a beautiful beachside hotel, only a two hour drive away. We’d made the plan to go together, considering there was the romantic opportunity to stay in a suite alongside the beach. But the day of the reading he showed up late to pick me up and he told me he didn’t even want to go in the first place. He said he was putting the relationship and me first. I had to remind him where we were going and why, but that didn’t seem to work. When we arrived at the hotel, he asked if he really had to go to the reading or if he could just stay in the hotel room. Don’t worry, I used gravity to get him to come, and by gravity I mean a mezcal negroni and a burger that I paid for.

Fifth, we have “Waiting on the World to Change”: Now we see everything that’s going wrong / With the world and those who lead it / We just feel like we don’t have the means / To rise above and beat it

On the way back from the trip we got pulled over by the cops because he was speeding. My ex-boyfriend asked me if I had my license (I did) and he told me he left his at home (he actually just didn’t have one, I later learned). He swiftly came up with a lie for the cops: I was supposed to drive, but then I got period cramps and he had to take over. The cop gave him a 350 dollar ticket for speeding and driving without a license. My ex-boyfriend drove the remaining ninety minutes in complete silence, with his headphones on. ACAB, am I right?

And sixth we have “Daughters”: Now I’m starting to see / Maybe it’s got nothing to do with me

When I broke up with him, he said he’d only been treating me badly because he wasn’t sure he wanted to be with me anymore. Because I’d changed. He also said I wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship, given my trauma and my reactions to the things he did, and that there was a lot I had to learn.

It’s easy to blame John Mayer for all of this. But a part of me knows that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is just that. It’s a hypothesis. So maybe my ex boyfriend doesn’t live in a different reality when he speaks English, one in which he is worse than the reality where he’s speaking Spanish. Maybe John Mayer is just a source of inspiration. And maybe being a dick is a universal language.

Vani Dewan was an intern at the UCSF Sound and Perception Lab when she knocked on the door of Ustad Zakir Hussain — the foremost Indian classical percussionist in the world — while he was in his greenroom after a show.

When he answered the door, she asked if he wanted to participate in a study on musical improvisation. He said yes. As part of the study, he played a nonferromagnetic tabla live inside an fMRI scanner so the team could investigate the neural correlates of improvisation. Vani published her research in Brain and Cognition in 2026 — the same year I found her on the internet, and discovered she was both a neuroscientist and a DJ.

Vani is currently a doctoral student at the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. She is also an open-format DJ who goes by the stage name VANI.

Vani’s sets span genres such as afrobeats, baile funk, desi fusion, arabi, bass house, hardgroove and r&b. She’s supported artists including Jyoty, Zeemuffin, Priya Ragu, Flowdan, Mastané, and KSHMR in cities across the U.S. and Asia, including a recent tour of India. If you go onto her Instagram, you’ll see FOMO-inducing clips from these sets, plus videos explaining her research ranging from the Hussain study to the connection between athletes’ and musicians’ brains.

I slid into her DMs (my version of knocking on a greenroom door) to set up an interview, because I wanted to learn more about how neuroscience shapes the way she DJs - and what upholding the integrity of nightlife means to her. Our conversation is below.*

Upasna: We’ve been ping-ponging around on the internet for a couple of months, and I just think you’re incredible. Tell me how you’re feeling about the fact that more people are learning about your work and you’re becoming a voice in the music space. How does that feel?

Vani: It’s been cool. Social media is the kind of thing where you think, I don’t know, maybe someone’s seeing this. But over the last few months a lot of people have come up to me in person saying, “I actually know your work — I’ve read [the Ustad Zakir Hussain paper],” or “I’ve been to one of your sets.” That tangible thing people can associate me with is really helpful. If it were just “I’ve seen your content” or “I’ve seen your face,” that’s a different frame of understanding than “I’ve really engaged with your work in this way.”

Upasna: You describe your work as being built around fusion and frisson. As someone who studies music cognition, can you walk me through what you actually know about where that response comes from in the brain, and how you’re engineering for it when you’re selecting tracks and timing transitions — doing your DJ thing?

Vani: A few things come to mind. One is that we play with the subconscious a lot while DJing, because there’s a lot of cultural work involved in teasing out sounds people know and are familiar with — that they have a certain emotional response to — but delivering them in a way that’s completely unexpected. You can bring in a sample before the audience even realizes they’re listening to it, by introducing one auditory feature of it — a melodic component, a rhythmic component. Suddenly people start moving and responding without even fully registering what they’re hearing.

A similar thing hits when you play a nostalgic song; it takes people by surprise, and you get to watch the crowd realize what they’re listening to. And the art of a beat drop or a flip is that you can also catch them by surprise by changing it up entirely. That can be really satisfying — playing with cultural memory.

If you have a sense of who your audience is — and you can develop that by watching the other DJs of the night, by seeing how the crowd responds to your first few tracks — you can usually get an intuition for who’s there even without knowing anything about them. Then you can tap into shared cultural memories.

The other thing that comes to mind is tension and release. Building up the energy and then releasing it for everyone to feel. And I personally believe in the power of manipulating key and BPM to build the energy in the space. Usually we’ll increase the BPM over the course of a night, which physically gets the body moving. But there are micro-shifts you can do in BPM, even within a single song, that make people move faster and faster without fully realizing it.

Upasna: Right — everything you’re describing I’ve experienced on the dance floor without being able to put words to it. I know what it feels like to realize what song is playing even before you consciously identify it, to share that moment with everyone while the DJ basks in it. I know what it’s like to be edged for 20 minutes — swaying and moving — and then out of nowhere feel the release, the catharsis of all that time spent building toward it. Those are my favorite parts. As a dancer on the floor, you have to accept that you and the DJ are both going to experience those moments of restraint, but you’re working toward something that’s always worth it. It’s cool to hear you put words to it.

Vani: I love the words catharsis and release. The craft of DJing is telling that story — the story of the whole room, over the course of the set, together. But then you actually have to execute it.

There’s a craft in having downloaded the right tracks to begin with, and then in finding them and sequencing them at the right time.

Upasna: That’s the art of improvisation — which actually relates to a question I had. You looked at the neural substrates of improvisation, and you studied Ustad Zakir Hussain’s brain, which is incredible. Can you tell me more about a time you really took a risk behind the decks, and how studying improvisation in the brain changed your approach to taking risks after that study was complete?

Vani: One of the key findings in the neuroscience of improvisation literature — found consistently across multiple improvisers — is that your logical, intentional decision-making center, the prefrontal cortex, actually gets deactivated when you’re in a state of improvisation. That means a more intuitive part of the brain and body takes over and executes the actions of improvisation without you needing to ask, okay, Vani, what song am I going to play next? Did that work? Did that not work? The brain has to move quicker than that in performance.

DJing is a little different from something like singing, where the body produces the notes in real time. In DJing we have more flex time to respond — to watch the crowd. DJing is a give and take. The craft allows for — and insists on — the time to evaluate and feel what the crowd is feeling, which I love. But you’re still making decisions extremely quickly.

You might have heard of No Nazar, the South Asian DJ collective. Many of the members have since rebranded into SPICE, but No Nazar was the original one a lot of us found our dance floor on. There was one time I attended a No Nazar party as an audience member — the photographer gave me a wristband to get behind the decks. So I’m dancing behind the decks, not even as one of the DJs. It was a 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. party, and at 2 a.m. they found out their surprise headliner — a DJ who was supposed to do an unannounced set — wasn’t showing up. At 2:05, one of the No Nazar DJs looks at me and says, “Hey Vani, do you have your USB?” And I said yes. I pulled my USB out of my wallet, plugged in, and started right away. I didn’t even have a minute — I literally plugged in and went.

That was the set that confirmed for me, oh, I’ve got it. No prep, no nothing. Improvisation is trust in the self: the ability to take a risk or make a decision, commit to it, execute it, and follow through without knowing whether it’ll land.

Upasna: That is so cool. All the perfect ingredients were there that night. But I’m curious why you had your USB on you — was it a “let me take this just in case” thing, or do you always keep it on you?

Vani: I always keep it on me. Just in case something comes around.

Upasna: And as that scenario proved, it can. That’s so clutch. Okay — your current research touches on audio-motor integration: how sound couples to movement, from my understanding. So when you’re choosing between a track that gets people dancing versus one that gives them more of a head nod or a break after a handful of tracks, what is your brain knowledge telling you in that moment?

Vani: There’s a lot of subtle decision-making in sequencing a song. One thing that comes to mind is the trade-off between songs the audience will know and songs they won’t. That’s an easy binary: what’s the ratio of songs I want to play that the audience knows versus doesn’t? Every DJ has their own philosophy, and mine depends on the crowd. Sometimes the atmosphere is one where people come with expectations, and you can feel them, because an audience will literally stop dancing if they don’t like what you’re playing. Audiences can be very reactive, and you can tell when one is going to be. I’ll note that South Asian audiences can come with a lot of expectations and stop dancing if you don’t play what they want to hear.

I curate that ratio depending on the vibe I’m getting. My ideal ratio is about two to one — two songs they don’t know for every one they do — because I want them to have a good time, to respond, to sing along. People get a lot of physical relief and catharsis from being able to sing along; that’s important to them, and I respect it because I feel that way too. The physical sensation of singing and dancing along to a song you know is different from doing it to a song you don’t. Sometimes I lean more toward familiar music, and I have no issue with that as long as I do it artfully and sequence everything in an order that’s authentic to me.

I also loved your question about when you give the audience a break versus when you keep them moving. That depends on set time, too. There’s a real art to set times — what time of night you’re playing, who you’re setting up for. I’ve played a lot of opening sets where my job is to warm up the room: get people moving, get them off the wall, onto the dance floor. I’m really good at bringing people in, but you have to build them up and then hand them over to someone else. That can be a lot of fun — you bring the energy up and then bring it back down a little so the next person has a nice launching place to take it from. Moments of groove between constant beat drops can be really good for the audience. As a DJ, you just have to be psychologically ready for them to stop moving as much — maybe that’s when they go get water. And that’s okay: go get your water, come back.

Upasna: There’s a little bit of playing the long game.

Vani: I’m playing the long game — and I want them to stay hydrated. I’d have preferred you got your water and went to the bathroom before I started, but come back! You need to see them come back.

Upasna: I want to talk a little about genre, because your work in global fusion spans so many different traditions, cultures, and places. What does your research tell you about why blending genres and rhythmic structures lands the way it does with a crowd?

Vani: So, one: the body has an evolutionary instinct to respond to rhythm. The interesting thing is that we still haven’t really gotten to the source of why the body responds to rhythm. There are a lot of theories, because rhythm is part of nature, so it makes sense that the body would evolve to respond to it — but it’s not clear whether that’s the direct function of the response or whether the rhythm response is a byproduct.

My intuition is that music was the luckiest, most magical byproduct ever — except for the fact that birds sing. Birds sing, insects respond in rhythms; rhythm is there in nature, and melody is there too. We have a lot of evidence of music in nature, which adds fuel to the idea that music is intrinsic to humanity.

I’ll say that evolution is a very strict criterion — it’s the phylogenetic tree, why did things evolve. But the fact of the matter is that music has existed in every society. You can trace music back to every society in the world independently of one another. Music has started to cross boundaries as time has passed, but it began independently in every society on its own. And music can encompass chant, drumming, singing, melodic communication — all of those things are there.

The second thing: because the body responds to rhythm, it’s actually really easy to use rhythm as a tool to invite people into other cultural practices. I did a SWANA party where I transitioned from a Palestinian song to a Punjabi song — it’s a simple act of switching the drums out at the right time. You watch people doing dabke, and then you switch to a bhangra beat, and they’re like, oh, I know how to move to that. Audiences can do that seamlessly, in an amazing way. I do think music transcends boundaries, but DJs have the power to blur those boundaries too — and the smoother your mixing is, the smoother those transitions happen.

I’m also the type of music listener — and increasingly I think we all are — who doesn’t depend on lyrics. Lyrics are becoming deprioritized; we’re all craving to listen to music in languages we don’t understand. I’ve honestly never been a big lyrics listener, because I’ve always listened to music I didn’t understand. Even with Bollywood and Hindi music — I technically grew up understanding Hindi, but that doesn’t mean it translates to understanding the structure of the lyrics. Similarly, I grew up in LA, so I started listening to Latin music early and developed a working knowledge of Spanish, but again that doesn’t mean I fully understood the lyrics. I love that, because as audiences become more receptive to music from different cultures, they’re also focusing on different parts of the music — and able to embrace it without needing to understand every lyric.

Upasna: What’s something you learned in your research, that you wish more DJs understood?

Vani: I’ve started to learn about hearing, and I’m a bit worried about it, because I’ve learned that once the hair cells in our inner ear die, they never come back. Hearing is one of the senses we have a lot of strategies for — the cochlear implant, the hearing aid — but there’s still no solution for regenerating those hair cells. It’ll be exciting when there is, and science is moving in that direction, but we’re not there. There are also phenomena like tinnitus and other hearing-related issues that, for music lovers, could cause a lot of anguish down the line. And I don’t think we’re taking the right protective measures.

So I’d hope promoters and DJs pay more attention to how loud the music is. It makes sense that they want a larger-than-life sound system — they want the audience to feel the rumble of the bass, they want it louder than is comfortable. But then I think it’s their prerogative — actually, their responsibility — to provide earplugs. I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to go to a venue that doesn’t even have them to sell behind the bar or at coat check. If they don’t even have them on site, I’ve had to wad up napkins and stuff them in my ears — I’ll do it, but the average audience member won’t. The number of unprotected girlies right up against the DJ booth — and mind you, those are the people most excited to be there. They’re right up against the speakers, ears completely unprotected.

I think promoters, club owners, and DJs should all take a bit more responsibility for the health, well-being, and comfort of the things we can control. Not policing the dance floor, not more rules — just investing a little more money in making sure there are earplugs at the club, multiple water stations, maybe a section with a fan where someone can cool off. Those little things. I wouldn’t say we need to police anyone’s substance use — people can take care of themselves, that’s not my domain. It’s the venue and party infrastructure that gives people a chance to stay safe and healthy that feels really important to me.

Upasna: Is there anything you learned on the dance floor that you feel the science just can’t capture?

Vani: I love the rigor of science, and it’s very hard to come to any conclusions unless your experiment is tightly controlled. As a trained scientist — only ever in more training — it really is difficult to conclude anything or say anything with certainty without that control. So I understand why science has been so restrictive: you can’t study music until you’ve understood how the brain responds to a pure tone frequency. Music is such a complicated stimulus that even using it as a stimulus introduces so much variance a single tone wouldn’t.

I’d love to push the bounds of naturalistic science, because the real world is so complicated. I actually feel more comfortable with the social sciences in a way, because they’re more behavioral and observational and allow for that messiness. Basic science pushes toward baseline conclusions that are generalizable to everyone, which isn’t the most realistic for a cross-cultural society. That’s an issue science has had: it’s pushed to be generalizable while sampling a very small subset of the population, and then forced that generalizability onto everyone.

I’d be interested in taking a slightly more social-science-y approach to my neuroscience: not having to reach a grand conclusion, but the most accurate conclusion within the confines of my research. That means embracing the messiness of studying real-life scenarios, or at least using real-life stimuli, and then inevitably caveating the results. That’s the trade-off: the messier your experiment — because it brings in more of how messy the real world is — the less generalizable and conclusive it becomes. But if we’re okay with that, we might actually be more accurately capturing what our little subset of real life was sampling. Every scientist has their own threshold for how messy they’re willing to get, because tighter science is more satisfying to write up. But it’s a good pursuit.

Upasna: What does integrity in nightlife means to you specifically, and what variables or forces you see actively eroding it?

Vani: I love the choice of the word integrity — because why would you associate it with nightlife? Who’s using the word integrity to describe nightlife? But as DJs, as people who craft nightlife experiences, we’re absolutely in a position of power. I realized this when I started DJing eight years ago, with college radio. One thing I’ll give them so much credit for is that they drilled in the importance of being intentional about who you choose to play, no matter how small or big your platform is.

In the art-versus-artist conversation, I hold artists to a high standard, though subject matter can vary. I love hip-hop — I love its honesty, its grittiness — and it’s not really my place to police what people can and can’t say. I’ll spotlight hip-hop without necessarily thinking about the exact message I’m platforming, but the greater ethos is there: I don’t platform abusers. I’ve always pushed music made by women and queer folks, because that’s the culture — and I know who my audience is. That’s always been my underlying reason for DJing: knowing that, as a DJ, I have a relationship with the audience I’m playing for, and that I have a platform with a lot of responsibility.

That extends not only to the music I play but to how I operate from start to finish in the night. As a DJ at a club, you inherently have a lot of power. And although I’m a woman — a young woman at that — I still have a lot of power. I’ve actively intervened in situations I felt were unsafe, because I had enough recognition to do it.

Passive intervention goes a long way. As the DJ, you’re elevated; you can see what’s going on, so you can alert security, or check in with a girly afterward — “Yo, are you okay?” It’s hard, as a DJ, to hear how loud it is in the room, so I’ll give DJs grace there — but if someone comes up and tells you it’s too loud, you can marginally turn it down. Owning that responsibility and being proactive about it, to me, is the only way to move with integrity. DJs need to take an active role in the nightlife spaces we create, and act on situations when they’re presented, because we have such a unique vantage point in the room — and such unique power.

Upasna: There’s a lot of talk about phones and photo-op culture, bottle service, algorithmic flattened taste — and people saying the dance floor is dead. Out of all of that, what do you actually see as a real threat to a music- and movement-first space, and what do you think is overblown?

Vani: I think the dance floor will be okay. Everyone needs live, in-person experiences. I’m one of those DJs who feels regret when I don’t get some kind of capture of my set — it doesn’t have to be full video, even a simple audio recording — because it’s such a meticulous craft, and it’s so present in the moment, that I have no idea what I did once I get off if there’s no record of it. That bums me out, because I want it for my own growth.

But video recording should be a bit more disclaimed, because it’d be nice for people to keep feeling safe on the dance floor and not feel surveilled — like their full business is being put out there. The camera in front of the DJ is one thing, because it’s capturing the performance — but the multi-cam, all-the-cameras setup isn’t always necessary for the content you’re trying to get. So that’s one.

I’m not always trying to play to the most mainstream crowd; I’m pretty selective, because I want to play for community spaces that resonate with me, with people who come with an open palate and open taste. But I’m also down to curate to a degree — I’m never going to be pressed to play a TikTok song. At the same time, that’s kind of the same vibe as Bollywood, where everyone knows the choreography and has so much fun dancing it together. I want people to have that shared experience — it’s nice that in person you realize, oh, my body actually knows this choreography, even though I never practiced it. I love that people have those moments, and I want to create them, because you can do the choreo, see the person next to you doing it, and do it together — that’s a really nice bonding moment.

Upasna: How did you end up holding both identities — neuroscientist and DJ — seriously, at equal levels, instead of being asked to pick one? And was there ever a point where you felt you had to pick, or someone told you you did?

Vani: People ask all the time. The more they get to know me, though, they understand how the two feed into and complement each other. I’d say it takes discipline to maintain your craft. A lot of people around me are balancing multiple hustles and I know the feeling of having to work a job. And even if your job is your passion, it’s still a job. No job gives you full creative flexibility; every job requires you to lock in on some admin bullshit, parts that aren’t fun to do. So for everyone, it takes discipline to say, “Okay, I’ve wrapped up and tied the knot on all the work things I have to do — now I need to create the active space and time for creativity.”

Even if I had endless time in the day — even on weekends, when I technically have the full day — that doesn’t mean creativity flows out of me effortlessly. It’s still something I have to be disciplined about: making time to practice, and forcing myself to practice even when I don’t want to. That’s more my ethos. Everyone’s in the same balancing act; mine is just a little more branded, a little clearer — it’s very clearly two careers, which I love. I’m obsessed with the fact that they’ve grown into two careers. But even if one or the other weren’t as big and grand, I’d still be in the discipline and practice of keeping my craft alive, because the world will try to suck it out of you.

People have this honestly flawed notion that monetizing your craft is the way to keep it alive. If anything, that can be the way to kill it — to turn it into a business and add more admin-related things instead of creative ones. If anything, it takes more discipline to keep it up day to day. That, I think, is the true path to creativity.

Vani going B2B with Bianca Maieli, courtesy of the artist.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I start getting ready after eating a bowl of spicy daal and rice. The mango pickle tinged it red, and I eat it with a spoon. I video call my mother to pass the time while I get dressed. I rant about friends; she listens quietly. She asks about my agent and I get aggravated. She calls me volatile, and I realize I really do need to let some energy out.

I feel better once I’m dressed. I try on a denim mini skirt and my mother tells me to wear the white pants instead. She’s right, obviously. I wear gold glitter eyeshadow, concealer, blush, and mascara. Then I’m out the door.

I stay on video with her while I walk to the G. A young Arab dude pulls up to a stoplight in his car, blasting Arab music (yallah, habibi). He leans out the window and flashes me a heart sign with his hands, and I give him a bashful eye roll. Not exactly a catcall, and I admittedly look incredible.

It’s dangerous to be a woman, but it’s slightly beneficial to be a beautiful woman. Another man opens the gate for me at the subway station so I don’t have to pay my $3 fare. Returning the karmic favor: I’ve done this for strangers many times before, in addition to carrying strollers and grandma carts up the stairs.

On the G, I admire the other Young Hos who are well-dressed for a night out. A woman in a flowy lime-green dress and silver winged eyeliner catches my eye. Another woman in a tight playsuit takes a selfie with her arm stretched all the way out at a forty-five-degree angle from her body. This is like a pregame of its own kind: sharing a ride with other people on their way to have a good time.

I’m listening to “That’s How I’m Living” by Tony Scott before switching to Fred, Again’s album “USB”. I’m walking from Nassau Avenue down Wythe, looking at all the billboards and murals along the way. Hinge, Book of the Month, Deli Boys. I realize I have strong opinions on all of these brands, and realize it’s because I’m connected to the people involved in either the ads or the brands by zero to one degree.

Williamsburg is littered with corporate folks fiending for an escape, and by escape I mean a drunken Thursday night that serves as a preview of how they’ll spend the rest of their weekend. Their ids have taken the steering wheel, craving excitement like little kids needing a snack after a day at the pool.

I arrive at Gabriela and mix up the entrance and exit even though I’ve literally been there over twenty times before. I order a mezcal Negroni and try to find a seat, but realize all the booths have been taken by straight couples. Makes sense; it’s Romance Thursday at Gabriela, after all, and despite this being a gay club, we are indeed in Williamsburg.

Sitting with a couple just because there’s space isn’t a good move unless you’re willing to deal with the consequences: the implication that you’re lonely, looking for a threesome, or threatening to the woman. I stand at the bar and bounce to the music, currently oldies that could be played at weddings or during karaoke. I see another woman standing alone, so I walk up to her. Her name is Sarah. She tells me she’s waiting for her friend, wearing the biggest, most gorgeous smile on her face.

A man waltzes into our conversation. It’s her friend.

“What an entrance!” I say.

He likes this comment and thanks me for it. I can’t tell if he’s gay or her lover. He looks like a bootleg Heath Ledger, I’m sorry. Later, I see them kissing on each other’s necks, him holding her waist, so that ends up being my answer.

I let them know I’m heading onto the dance floor, and she says she’ll see me there.

The dance floor is empty, but a handful of people are dancing despite being stuck in the corner of the room, nursing their drinks on the skinny ledges provided. I see two friends standing at the front, close to the DJ, dancing their hearts out. Their energy draws me in.

We dance to “Enjoy the Silence” by Depache Mode which transitions into “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel. I’m always pleasantly surprised when certain songs which I associate with the radio are played in a club setting, and people know exactly how to move to them.

I’m slightly disappointed because I was looking to dance to electronic music—but miraculously, or skillfully rather, the DJ takes a hit of their blunt and transitions into something wavy and optimistic. A wish granted: we’re getting to the really good stuff.

A one-sided dialogue plays over the synthy yet bass-heavy track.

“How are you feeling?”

“You look fucked up.”

“Do you need water?”

“What’s your name?”

The crowd grooves and giggles. For the next thirty minutes, the DJ plays what I can only describe as optimistic tech house. Bubbly, poppy melodies with deep bass lines. I’m completely enraptured and catch sight of another solo dancer. Somehow Sarah, her lover, a frat-bro solo dancer, two normies with Apple watches, and I end up dancing in a circle. Our bodies just gravitate toward one another like that—no eye contact exchanged, just pure energy.

I get secondhand high from the DJ’s blunt smoke and step outside for a cup of water. I drink while taking notes on the night so far. Gabriela is significantly more crowded now, and unfortunately I see more normies in jeans and going out tops than I’d like. Everyone is hot in their own way, admittedly.

I debate going home or heading to H0L0 in Ridgewood to listen to a vinyl session. It’s twenty minutes away on the L, which is not bad at all. I take a shot of tequila and go back onto the dance floor for one more boogie, and then I’m off into the night.

Earlier in the day, a friend invited me to a party in Alphabet City. I realize that’s also an option, and that I’m tipsy enough to show up to a party alone with 300 strangers without having to practice diaphragm breathing to regulate my nervous system.

Still, when I get to the tracks and am about to hop on the Manhattan-bound train, I decide against it.

I hop onto the train going in the other direction and run into a guy I used to have a big crush on. We used to box together. He’s a sommelier and has the cutest face.

We catch up. He says he’s coming from work. He looks exhausted, but he still indulges me in conversation. I tell him I’m writing about my nights out for my Substack so I can write this shit off on my taxes. He tells me he remembers seeing my name all over the subway last summer.

He says he doesn’t go to the boxing gym anymore because he’s too busy with work. We talk about the state of the world and agree that it’s a pretty dark place. He says he wants to go to Italy for the harvest this fall.

I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to get off at the same stop, but instead I get off three stops early because I’m worried I’m burdening him with conversation after a long day at work. I hop back on the L and get off at Halsey.

Everyone in Ridgewood is on their way home from work, while everyone in Williamsburg was on their way out to start the weekend. It’s amazing how there are these little mini-worlds in Brooklyn.

When I get to H0L0, I realize there are only about fifteen people there, and we’re in the bar part of the venue, not the club which I’ve been to before to listen to musclecars. I need to pee really badly and find the bathroom, which smells terrible and looks like it would be a solid hideout during a zombie apocalypse.

A man asks me for a lighter on my way into the stall. I tell him I don’t have one, but I do ask him for a cigarette. I meet him outside when I’m done peeing.

He’s Irish and his name is Aiden, though he goes by Ado. He’s from the southern, middle-of-nowhere part of Ireland. He wears his hair in a low ponytail. He could be good-looking if he put in more effort.

One of his Irish friends joins us outside for a smoke. Tall dude with a mustache, from Dublin. He’s wearing a shirt with a Care Bear graphic on it—the purple one. Very talkative, going on and on about how he’s a chef and wants to open his own restaurant in NYC. It’s his dream. Pretty sure he can do it, and I tell him so. He says he’s going to play later that night, and that DJing is just a fun hobby for him.

Another one of the Irish dudes in the friend group joins us, and I realize most people at the venue tonight are Irish because the DJs are Irish and they need bodies to fill the room. These dudes formed a techno collective back home, playing some of the biggest festivals there. They’re called Solace and have since settled in NYC. Their DJs include Ramsey Neville, STE-VÍ, Adrian Hex, plus some other dudes. They’ve all played at places like Basement, Refuge and Renate. I guess they’re doing quite well for themselves.

I meet the older brother of the group, Jack, who says he doesn’t play anymore but his younger brother is still performing with one of their other friends. I’m not sure if they’re actually brothers, but I don’t ask.

I tell him I want to listen to him play, but I’ve already missed most of the set on account of peeing and smoking a cigarette with these strangers.

I ask Jack why he doesn’t DJ anymore.

“Ego,” he replies. “Wait, are you recording this whole thing?”

“No. Just taking notes. Why ego? I had a thought earlier tonight that DJs and photographers are similar in that egotistical desire to orchestrate how people feel in any given moment. The music, the camera lens—both hold power.”

“Not so much that,” he says.

“Clout-chasing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think someone can be a good DJ without being a clout-chaser?”

“Absolutely.”

He tells me they chose the name Solace because it’s a word adjacent to relief. Being brought solace. And music does that for people.

I listen to the younger brother play. STE-VÍ is his name. It’s so impressive to watch him switch out vinyl records, and I remember that digital music somehow makes us more tired, it’s a scientific fact. I have a sudden surge of energy now—or maybe it’s just placebo. Glittery melodies, 130 BPM, heart-thumping bass lines.

Ado follows me on my way out to ask for my number. He opens his phone, but unfortunately reveals that he was just on Tinder. I catch a glimpse of a woman’s mirror selfie the moment he unlocks the screen. She has huge tits. He’s very embarrassed.

I try to play it cool, but then Jack overhears Ado asking me to dinner and starts slipping away, clearly feeling like he’s interrupted the moment. I tell him I saw his friend’s Tinder and that this is his chance to save him.

He tries to talk him up but does a really bad job. He just keeps slapping him on the back and saying, “This guy, this guy...” without actually saying anything about his character. But I let them have their moment.

I watch a string of men line up to enter the club and shout, “Sausage fest!” as I walk away. They laugh because it’s true.

I start getting ready early because I have nothing better to do following an afternoon of doing laundry and binging The Four Seasons. I change my outfit 4 times, meaning I try on the same 2 outfits twice. I do this in the same way one test drives a car. I debate between the black lace capris and black jeans and a white tube top; I decide on the latter because the capris are see-through and I’m not in the mood to have my ass out, but I am okay with having my boobs out.

Technically, I’m not going out alone, but it feels like I am because I’m hanging out with a new friend and his friends. Oftentimes I feel like I’m making a guest appearance in other people’s lives, in their friend groups.

I met J a few months ago at Nowadays. It felt serendipitous because I was standing by the bathrooms taking notes and he just started talking to me. I found out he was a screenwriter, so obviously we were meant to be friends, even though I live a life now where writers are always a stone’s throw away. He was sweet and generous and warm, and we spent the last two months texting back and forth. He read Comedic Timing and sent me a playlist inspired by it, and I was impressed by how sonically aligned it was with the arc of the story. I felt understood, which motivated me to finally make a solid plan with him. I was to meet him at 7:30 at Doubles (or Doublés, I’m not sure if I need to pronounce it with the accent) and then we planned to go to Basement with people I’ve never met before.

I wear blue eyeshadow and contour my face, the kind of makeup look I reserve exclusively for clubbing or Halloween. I realize it might turn cold later, so I throw on a sweatshirt, only to leave my building and realize it’s covered with stains. I debate returning home to switch it out for a jacket, but then I run into my neighbor — who is also one of my best friends — and she validates my choice by pointing out that it will inevitably get dark and that I’m going to a grubby club, so a stained sweatshirt was actually the best option.

I take two buses to Bushwick. I feel like an Essex woman, because I have a very heavily beat face but my clothes are extremely casual. When I arrive at the bar, I find a booth at the back, way too large for just 2 people, and my new friend J finds me.

He’s younger than me by 2 years but it feels like more; I don’t think he likes it when I say that, but I explain to him that in your twenties each year feels extremely long, and because our perception of time shrinks as we get older, this is the time when our maturity levels increase exponentially. 26 and 28 are separated by a slew of inexplicable realizations and choices that ultimately determine what kind of person you’ll be in the world. No pressure.

He says he has a confession to make, and it’s that he’d been day drinking at a rooftop party, so he is already tipsy. He says it was two drinks, and then a few minutes later says he has another confession, which was that it was actually like five drinks.

He orders an espresso martini, I order a mezcal soda, and we share fries. I eat most of them. We talk about writing, and how I’m creeping out of a phase of low morale after my second novel was rejected by 40 publishers. Thankfully Colman Domingo was the commencement speaker at my cousin’s graduation last week and he sort of saved my life, not to be dramatic or anything. He gave a very inspiring speech which reminded me that I’m still young and I’ll be okay. And earlier that day, while I was folding laundry, I listened to Noah Baumbach’s Vassar commencement speech, the essence of which was something along the lines of: if being rejected makes you want to give up writing, then you’re probably not meant to do it anyway. I tell J all of this, and he agrees — both that rejection is hard and that we’re young. It’s just that perhaps the stakes feel all the more high because we’re children of immigrants and our parents need us to excel, otherwise what was the point of crossing an entire ocean?

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J asks if I want to go to his friend’s place in Harlem because they have a lot of drugs and he doesn’t have any. I refuse to sit on the train for an hour and a half with drugs as a source of motivation; God, what would that say about me? Thankfully he’s not offended by my reasoning even though he easily could have been, and offers an alternative: go to Birdy’s and meet his friend Jesse, who will join us at Basement, too. I agree to this plan. He asks if I’ll sit on the back of a Citibike, in terms of our transportation to Birdy’s, and again I refuse: am I a wet blanket, aging myself on purpose, or is he just proving my point about the expansive maturity levels between the ages of 26 and 28?

Instead we ride two separate Citibikes, thank goodness, and I let him lead the way. But then he says we need to stop at his apartment because his roommate just texted him because he left his keys in the door. Now I’m wondering if the difference between us isn’t just our ages but a matter of being type A and type B. I find his recklessness inspiring.

We ride to his apartment and I meet his roommate, who is very sweet, and once he retrieves his keys we walk to Birdy’s. I have to tell him to slow down because my Doc Martens weigh like 2 pounds on each foot and I can’t keep up with him. Rare that I meet someone who walks faster than me, usually it’s the other way around.

Once we’re at Birdy’s, we go all the way to the back. We’re both holding in so much pee, and so we stand in line for the bathroom. J tells the guy standing behind us that he likes his neck tattoos. I think this guy with the neck tattoos is pretty cute. We let him go ahead of us for some reason, maybe the reason that he’s cute, and I ask J if I should get a neck tattoo. I’m only half serious; I cannot put up with the repercussions of that.

J goes to the bathroom after me, and while I wait for him, neck tattoo guy comes up to me and says he heard what I said, and that I should definitely get a neck tattoo. I take a closer look at his: the grim reaper on the right side of his neck, a snake head on the left. More scribbly, playful pieces peeking out from underneath his sleeves. I show him the few I have, mostly stick and poke; he’s very complimentary. He goes back to his table where his other very heavily tattooed friend is waiting for him. Nice guy; he gives me a small wave.

J tells me about his ex-girlfriend, who he recently broke up with. She’s a TV writer high achieving to the point where he was intimidated at first when he met her. I’ve been on the other side of that, and I tell him it’s never a good thing for a woman’s boyfriend to be intimidated by her. The relationship ended amicably, but ultimately she has a hard rule on being friends with exes, as in she doesn’t do that.

J’s friend Jesse shows up and I immediately like her. She has a very smiley face and is very chatty. I say I want a cigarette, so I go up to the tattooed guys and ask them for one. They say I profiled them as cigarette smokers just because of the way they look, which isn’t entirely untrue. I take an American Spirit and step outside to share it with Jesse.

Meanwhile, J is being quite talkative. He talks to strangers when he’s drunk, and people talk to him because he’s warm and friendly. Jesse and I watch him with amusement, and she calls after him, asking if he still wants to hang out with us. I watch the tattooed guys walk out of the bar, running across the street, and I call out to them to say goodbye, but then they say they just need to pee. That makes no sense because there’s 3 bathrooms in there, but okay.

When we go back inside, I notice the photo booth. I ask Jesse and J to go in with me, and they do. I’m in the middle, so I’m in every photo in the strip, but Jesse and J had to compromise on the other half of their faces.

Two mezcal sodas deep, which is my limit usually, I suddenly feel bold, and I ask neck tattoo guy, who I’ll call I, to come into the booth with me. He jumps up from his seat like his ass is on fire and enthusiastically hops into the booth. I sit on his lap, and by the third shot we’re making out. He says I’m a trickster and that I seduced him into the booth, which I guess is sort of true.

I sit at the table with him and his friends, who are the kind of white dudes I’m okay hanging out with. They’re all from the South: I from Houston, T the American Spirit smoker from Alabama, and another a new guy who popped up, from Dallas. I is an illustrator and the other dude is an animator. T is a chef; he says the restaurant he works at is located somewhere in Chelsea and cooks for up to 1,500 people a day. They offer me a shot of tequila and I take it. I tell them I rarely do shots, by the way.

Jesse and I somehow begin talking about astrology, and she pulls up the only astrology app I believe in, and we both squeal because we’re the only ones we know who use it. According to astrology, our friendship bond is “epic,” our romantic bond is “soul mates” — this excites her because apparently she and J are soul mates too. When she runs my chart with his, she sees he and I are soul mates as well. To her, this means the 3 of us are soulmates and we will be friends forever.

I appreciate her sense of spirituality, her woo-wooness - there’s a foosball table with no ball, but she pulls out a blue obsidian sphere which she apparently carries with her everywhere, and we use that instead while we stifle giggles.

I learn I is from Monterrey, which changes things for me a bit because I don’t date white men, and he is technically white but he’s Mexican, so I am incentivized to flirt with him. When he asks for my number I give it to him, and when he asks me out for dinner I say yes, even though I know most people have terrible follow-through and it likely won’t happen. He’s disappointed when I say my friends and I should leave to Basement so we don’t have to stand in line for an eternity. Normally I’d stay and wring out the interaction, but male validation doesn’t give me the same high as it used to. We leave gracefully at 11:30pm.

I order an Uber, and as usual, I’m worried my Uber driver hates me because everyone in the car is yelling over each other, talking nonsense. But that’s the whole rub, isn’t it, driving on a Saturday night in Brooklyn? I only feel this way because my parents raised me to respect my elders and other people’s cars.

Basement reminds me of Berghain: a quiet line, everyone’s dressed in black, and you can hear the bass from all the way outside. A very Russian, stone-faced woman asks us if we know the rules, and I nod eagerly like a little kid. She lets us in.

I’m relieved to be dancing, to be moving my body. I need to get the energy from all the mezcal and tequila out of my body. I’m most excited to be listening to DJ Stingray 313’s set; he’s an older dude who’s kind of a legendary techno DJ from Detroit, which is the OG, purist shit I care about. J meets some of his other friends, all women in their mid-twenties, and I realize Jesse, who’s 29, and I are the oldest people there. J introduces everyone whilst on the dance floor, a futile attempt considering we can hear nothing and my name isn’t American-friendly. At one point I run into an actor who read my pilot at a table reading, and that feels very kismet, along with some other meetings: a group of good-looking Italians who are impressed by my intermediate speaking skills, allowing me to perform while standing in the bathroom line for the water fountain; a sweet gay I meet outside who tells us about the time they moved back home to take care of their grandmother, and learned about all the family tea and grew closer to her in a way they could have never imagined, or known they needed.

Before Stingray’s set, I find my way toward the DJ decks and into a corner by the speaker. I can see the vinyls spinning, the crowd dancing ahead, and realize this is the perfect spot. I meet a ripped woman who looks like a gymnast or a powerlifter, and learn she is both. I tell her that her outfit looks like it would get her into Kit Kat Club in Berlin, and she’s pleased to inform me she actually bought the outfit in Berlin. A serious raver, my kind of girl. She points to a tall man in a ski mask and says that’s DJ Stingray. She tells me she asked him when he prefers to play, and he said not too late because he likes when people aren’t too drunk or too high and have enough energy to move to the music. It’s 1:45am and he’ll be on at 2. I go up to him and ask him for one word to describe his journey. “That’s impossible,” he says. But then he thinks really hard, and then says “humbling.”

His set begins with a synthy, ambient track — I call this edging — before letting the bass drop into some serious, 140 BPMs. His set is funky as much as it is classically hard techno, and the dancers are going crazy. I end up leaving the corner and finding a different area of the dance floor, and my gymnast powerlifting friend joins me. She’s got a huge bottle of water that she lets me drink from occasionally. We dance from two all the way until four in the morning.

I leave at four forty-five, with only two casualties: I lost my Rhode peptide lipstick and one of my Loop earplugs. I texts me and says he hopes I’m having a good night. I’m in an Uber, nauseous and ready to wash my makeup off my face. When I get home I do just that, and then lie in my bed and listen to Bon Iver to fall asleep because I’ve been doing that for over ten years now.

My dreams are a mix of subconscious visions and casual memories from the night — the strangers I danced with, who wanted the same thing: to lose oneself to the music, to experience the essence of humanity through pure, shared desire, and the collective conscious in the form of rhythm and beats. This is exactly why I go out alone, because it’s a reminder that aloneness is temporary. I always end up in good company.

Thursday, May 28 2026
Location: Paragon
DJs: Nataliepops b2b Martine, Simisola, Mui Mui

I spent an hour picking my outfit, even though 90% of the time I realize I was dressing myself for the wrong reasons. I’m still learning a bit about self-expression, which is why the dance floor is so helpful. I wear purple eyeshadow and concealer — no foundation, but a little blush. I blend it in well so I don’t look like a clown. It’s going to be dark in there anyway. It’s always dark.

I spend thirty minutes recording TikToks. Clairo’s sensual slow-mo videos are deeply inspiring to me, and since I’m just getting off my period, I feel sexy again. I record two videos, delete one, and post the other from my drafts.

When I leave the apartment I pass by the Chinese restaurant on the corner. A man does a double take and cranes his neck out to wish me a good night, to get my attention. I don’t look at him — in fact I turn my face the other way.

I take a Citi Bike down Myrtle then turn onto Broadway. It’s a little too stimulating for me, so I walk the blocks with the bike until I can park it, right in front of Ornithology, where I haven’t been in a long time because it’s filled with artsy students who dress poorly and pretend it’s a reflection of taste.

I’m greeted by the bouncer, just like every time, and his locs smell wonderful — like coconut and rose. At the front of the club I run into a new friend I made last week: a writer and a DJ with the sweetest smile, tall, Jamaican. She thanks me for coming and says she wished she got my number, but alas, serendipity — when I decided to come tonight I realized she was playing. She tells me her set is at 2 in the morning and I know I’ll miss it. One of the other organizers catches her attention so I slip away.

Downstairs the dance floor is empty. A group of four friends, two DJs, a couple sitting at the bar by the water fountain. I love coming early so I can watch the dance floor transform. In that way I have the same hunger as a DJ, except I orchestrate nothing — I only witness.

I remember how my friend hates fog machines, but we’d just been here a month or so ago and had a blast. The DJs play R&B mixed with hyperpop. “I’m So Into You,” sped up a bit. I’m sober, so technically this is exercise. One of the DJs takes a step back from the decks and watches me, arm outstretched, a tuft of hair peeking out from under their pit. They’re nodding to the music and I pretend they’re looking at me. More friends join, the dance floor turns chatty, but the bass is loud enough.

The music shifts: bouncy bass. My knees bend and my arms and fingers go from wavy to sharp — right angles in my joints. After taking a short break to sit in a booth and write on my phone, I go back to the dance floor. I move my body alongside my new friend and some of their friends. I think about how only a few months ago I was dating someone, which meant I had someone to grind with consistently on the dance floor and share my killer moves with. Now I’m all solo.

The limited light — lent only in shades of green, yellow, and purple — plays a trick on my eyes. I keep seeing people I know in other people. For some reason I believe the illusion. I believe one of the DJs is a friend I don’t talk to anymore, and that my friend is cheating on her partner with a woman, and I’m watching them dance with each other right now.

Suddenly the dance floor empties and it’s just me and my new friend. She tells me she’s so thankful I came to the fundraiser. I tell her I was looking for a set to go to this weekend and this came up. I ask her what she does for work and she tells me she’s a student, in school for eight years — some mix of a master’s and PhD program. She has two years left, but she’s taking a break this fall. I tell her I’m happy for her and that slowing down is so important. She looks really young, or maybe it’s just a kindness and purity of heart that makes her seem that way. I ask how old she is and she tells me she’s 31. I’m shocked, but also pleased — she doesn’t seem jaded, and a lot of people are jaded by the time they even hit my age.

I start to get tired and my back starts to hurt. Chronic pain in my left elbow from all the typing, and behind my left shoulder blade too, somehow also from all the typing. My body hurts less when I manipulate it into certain shapes. I allow dancing to help me do that.

At one point I think about leaving, but then “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne comes on and one of the other party-goers moves up near the decks and starts shaking ass. There’s something very visually specific — and also sensorially, tangibly specific — about the phrase lovely lady lumps. It’s true: lumps can be lovely. They’re mostly soft, and sometimes they’re scary, and they’re not supposed to be there. And now I’m joining the stranger, along with another person, and the three of us are just doing our thing alongside each other and I’m smiling at these strangers, realizing that this is exactly why I go out. And while tonight is one of the simpler ones — the priority being fundraising and not losing oneself — I am able to have these pockets of moments where I have a grand appreciation of life, and the freedom I experience when I take myself out and move on the dance floor.

That was the last track of the set. Now there’s a new DJ. She starts playing more bass-heavy techno and I am moving with a lot of excitement because I know I’ll be leaving soon and my only job now is to savor the minutes I have left.

I leave after three tracks. I say goodbye to my new friend and return to the Citi Bike dock where I had left a bike earlier. I ride down my street and feel blessed when I find open parking spots at the dock closest to my home. That almost never happens, and it truly is a big moment for me — because inconvenience is more certain than comfort. Comfort is actually a gift and a privilege, even if we’ve all found a way to manufacture it in almost every moment. When I come home I’m excited to wash my face, and I do. I drink water. I need a snack, and soon I’m lying in my bed in only my underwear and a t-shirt, feeling my lovely lady lumps press against the bed, thinking about how I have two more sets to go to this weekend and how I’ll write about those as well.

In a country where the constructed racial narrative dances on polarities of black and white, I was raised within a particular kind of intersection: the wisdom of Black women and the shame of Indian women.

I attended high school in Memphis, Tennessee where the teachers I looked up to most were no-nonsense Black women. They were well-dressed and articulate. The girls deemed “ratchet” by the unspoken social order were often corrected and sometimes berated by these educators, for it was a matter of survival: police officers roamed our school and bleating metal detectors waited by the entrance in case anyone had weapons. We could not wear matching accessories - as in no red shoelaces, hair ties, bandanas, or baseball caps as elements of the same outfit. The same went for blue, for either could indicate allegiance to a gang. Everyone had to be on their best behavior, and those who weren’t were sliding into a pipeline - a pipeline which resulted in mugshots, but mostly bets on who’d be the first to have theirs taken.

I fit in well into these expectations of survival, especially since I was raised on education and shame as dictators of a high-functioning life. While I was secretly promiscuous, I was mostly studious, and had formulated a path to success: one devoid of parties, drugs, drinking, and dependence on male validation for economic survival - or at least doing a really good job at maintaining a level of competency while still indulging in all of these things. The same sort of pressure applied to the Black girls in my school as well, only they had systemic pressures closing in on them as they reached for the same kind of comfort my parents had taught me to aspire to, and that the U.S. was more likely to offer us by nature of H1Bs and the myth of our model citizen status.

I subsequently experienced the Upside Down attending college in Naperville, Illinois, where 70% of the student body was composed of white people at the time of my admission. Here I observed a level of recklessness demonstrated by white women whose stakes had never been as high as mine, nor the girls I went to high school with.

I found American white women - particularly the tiny, blonde ones - to be devoid of the shame and fear instilled in me by my parents, who had sacrificed everything to build a life in this country. They were also not privvy to the fragility of circumstances experienced by my Black peers. (I’ll refrain from speaking on behalf of Black people for the rest of this essay, but please know they’ve always been the standard for how I understand the true American experience.)

Especially since I’d been raised by an single mother, I knew exactly what to be afraid of: getting pregnant too young, being addicted to substances, being financially dependent on an abusive man. Under no circumstances would I find myself in these positions, which meant I took only the most educated risks. My mother raised me to be independent, because independence - emotionally, financially - as a woman was an immense privilege which the U.S. could afford me. I would never, ever take that for granted. It appeared to me that the average, non-migrant white woman did not move through life with stakes unfamiliar to the rest of us - reproductive access, voting rights, safety - while also having no idea what it meant to make the sacrifice of emigration, or the involuntary existence of being a person of the global majority, worth it.

My junior year of college, I witnessed an influx of young white women admitted into the theater program. One of them was a healthily pierced girl with tattoos and stacked rings. She was a part of a friend group of which I was acquainted. Yet, she never looked me in the eye. In class, in ride shares, at the cafeteria - she avoided eye contact with me at all costs. I understood this to be jealousy, because I was a better actress than her and spoke better French. She learned that I wrote for Rookie Mag and I think that had made her more envious; why me and not her? I was nerdy and studious and chubby, she was a midwestern hipster with a raspy voice.

This same woman slinked her way into a virtual friendship with me during 2020. Social media is an excellent vehicle for farcical friendships. She reshared my writing and commented on my photos. Half of me wondered if this was damage control, since this is back when white people were afraid of being labelled racist. But back then I hadn’t understood why she had been cold to me, and was relieved she was finally being kind. I felt we were always meant to be friends.

Fast forward to my life in New York, I managed to offer her not one but two job opportunities, the latter of which was high-paying and remote - an absolute dream. She stayed with me in New York while on vacation, and that is when my eyes were opened to a possibility I had never been privy to before: I too could weaponize my beauty and youth to get whatever and whoever I wanted, but I had never been taught by the social conditions of this country to do so. Everything my family had taught me about making it in this life had to do with education and work, and making oneself as small as possible.

This realization initiated some resentment, since I felt she lacked the kind of etiquette I was raised on, and I couldn’t understand how she’d made it this far. She did not buy me a drink, a dinner, a coffee, nothing to thank me for hosting her or getting her a robust-paying job with health insurance. In Indian culture - which is the only culture I can truly speak on - we offer gifts to show our gratitude. We never want people to feel like they are not valued or that they are not appreciated. My Italian friend and Ukrainian friend also demonstrate this value, so I know this is a matter of cultural adherence and social competence. This ditsy American girl had neither, and I can’t blame her. But I had never realized you could be unsuitable for a job and act as if you had always been deserving of it. I was frustrated with her, but also in awe. (She also proceeded to sleep with multiple strangers during this trip while being in a one-sided open relationship with her partner. Oh, the possibilities were limitless.)

She also proceeded to get laid off from the job I got her because she was not good at it. She had no work ethic nor proactivity. I was embarrassed in front of my colleagues because I had been the one who recommended her and they all hated her. This was actually a very chill, non-profit job where people prioritized their family lives over deadlines, so it was a big deal that they found her incompetent. And because we weren’t close enough, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had been bad at her job and too blissfully ignorant to know that in the first place.

You see, I had always lived on the other side of blissful ignorance: I had been taught to serve, to work, to apologize. To immigrate to the U.S. was to accept capitalism as your God. To work here as a first-gen Indian American was to accept your parents sacrifice and never let it go in vain. The stakes had never been as high for her as they were for me. Her sense of freedom had always been more expansive, untethered to someone else’s story.

The stakes. The kind of stakes that don’t leave you groveling over men who aren’t worthy of being your husband, according to your conditioning. I’ve witnessed American white women throw both their self-respect and caution to the wind in a very different way than Indian women do, in the name of feelings and mental health, for they are not worried about their lives falling crumbling as part a grander narrative of legacy in which they are a disappointment. But rather, they are attuned to only their own internal suffering.

I was always jealous of American white women. Not just for their looks but for their carelessness. Their aloofness. Their weaponized ditziness which men are magnetized to. Men despise my intelligence and my unattainability. In fact, it is worse that I am good-looking and live in my own apartment and know how to fend for myself. They have nothing to offer me otherwise; I have nothing to be saved from.

Plus, Indian women are known for being smartypantses. Not for being emotionally tortured, depressed, needy, adventurous, violent, crazy. Despite being a heavy Tumblr user during the early aughts, my depression could not be aestheticized in the same way as the tall, conventionally attractive skinny ones’ - who also happened to be somehow even more depressed, in dire need of a narrative to anchor themselves to. These are the same women who get to make a choice between a gap year or a college degree. They crave meaning; contrastingly, Indian American women are defined by a legacy in which we have no say. We were born into this.

(My cousin is graduating from college this year and her father - my uncle - is a successful Indian immigrant, in that he went from sleeping on couches during his studies for his masters degree to becoming the CEO of a data company in a span over over 20 years. My mother, whose financial situation has always been fickle - which is why she guided me in a particular direction so I did not have to experience the same - has reminded my uncle that his wealth has afforded his daughter the privilege of mediocrity, the privilege of discovering herself or whatever the fuck white girls get to do. Otherwise what was the point of the American Dream? She should get to do whatever she wants, act however she wants, just like the white girls. And she should do it. I agree.)

The messy and demanding white women I admire or gravitate towards - Ivy Wolk, Chloe Cherry, the girls I went to college with, the queers who do not have to panic about coming out in the same way we do - have no Indian American iterations, because most of us are mentally stifled by shame and guilt and appropriateness and expectations they are unable to fathom.

And yet buried beneath the stifling shame and guilt is likely a lot of humor, distastefulness, recklessness. How do we excavate and transmute that into being unapologetic? This is how we move forward as a diaspora. Men, regardless of race or ethnicity or culture, will continue fail us for the foreseeable future; they do not know how to morph themselves into the new order of feminine authority, which is personified by the very things the patriarchy deems as loose or not feminine. So why don’t we learn to shed our shame, cuss more, show our bodies off, openly talk about our sex lives, sleep with whomever we want, and perhaps build a career and life out of this?

I’ve learned much from other women, but I am inspired by the self-absorption of white women. I am encouraged to fill every nook and cranny of my body, be proud of my looks and my youth, laugh in the faces of men who drunkenly drool over me before they find out that I am much, much smarter than them. The stakes feel much higher for me and other women of the global majority, but perhaps the reward is just as high, too.

I thought the car would stop. I remember how it felt to be hit. How I braced myself against the impact with my arms outstretched, my face turned to the side. Then suddenly I was on the ground, clutching my knee, wondering how I was still alive.

I received a month of medical leave from my employer. I couldn’t walk for six weeks. As much as I was in pain - my body and my self esteem debilitated due to being temporarily handicapped by a meniscus torn in two places - I didn’t mind the down time. I was excited to live out my fantasy of smoking weed, being high, every single day. Work had always prevented this.

I smoked nearly every day my first two years of college, and then again during the pandemic. Every time I had a passing thought about getting high, I was giddy. There was relief at the end of a joint. I loved letting my mind surrender to the sensorial fantasma of being stoned. I enjoyed the way my stoned thoughts branched in directions my sober state couldn’t. When high, music became a soundtrack to every moment.

I cannot pinpoint the beginning of my dependence. I never considered that I was smoking every day in the same way an alcoholic drinks every day. As far as I was concerned, weed was less harmful than a drink. Plus, to my ultimate detriment, I found it easy to pathologize smoking weed as a self-proclaimed, free-spirited artist.

During my medical leave, I smoked so much weed that I no longer felt high. I lived inside of a cloud which cradled me through my days. I was on autopilot, numbing myself into oblivion. In situations I would normally find frustrating, euphoric, or even boring, I felt nothing.

My mother and my friends took care of me so diligently during my injury. They did not judge me for smoking weed on the hour, every hour. I’d been hit by a car - by a fucking drunk driver - after all. I had a free pass to cope in whichever way I wanted - especially since the prescribed percocet ran out and was a way worse alternative.

I retold the story of the accident many times. I explained how I was crossing the street, how it was my right of way, how I saw the vehicle make a right turn onto the street I was in the middle of. How I swore I thought it would stop.

What I didn’t tell them was that I’d been high.

I’d been high and I was wearing my headphones. (This they knew - I couldn’t listen to the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas for months after.) In the daily, sober slivers in between smoke sessions, I negotiated with myself constantly. I wondered how much of the accident had been my fault. No, the headphones hadn’t made much of a difference, because I’d seen the car after all. He should have seen me and stopped.

But I wondered, for all the love I had for this plant - the way it transformed my perception in that ephemeral way my sober state never could, and always craved - if weed had taken something away from me in that split second before the car hit me. I wondered if I could have saved myself somehow, if it weren’t for me being high.

I couldn’t change the past. But I was unable to convince myself of my own clarity leading up to that traumatizing moment. I could never be sure if I could have prevented being hit.

I was lucky to be alive, yes. But I was confronted, thanks to that exact stroke of luck, with the reality I could no longer trust reality, or at least my perception of it. I had surrendered my autonomy to weed entirely.

According to SAMHSA, marijuana use in the U.S. has surged over the past decade, rising an estimated 65.2% between 2015 and 2024. Marijuana is objectively less harmful than alcohol. But weed has never solved anything for me. Weed had only formed a fog over my preexisting pain, over the emotional intensity I’d felt since I was a girl.

After the accident, I craved trusting myself more than I craved weed. I wanted to trust my choices, my perception of people and situations. I did not want to take consciousness for granted.

I was forced to change my life, to accept that I’d been hurting myself with this plant I’d once sworn was saving me. Maybe weed did save me, at some point or the other. It was a tool like any other. But, of course, only I can save myself.

My journey with sobriety is at a nascent stage. I can at least say I am here, present for every moment.

I know a woman who lived in a house so spotless, one could eat off the floors. She stayed with her in-laws and routinely cleaned the two-story home. She did this even throughout her pregnancy, at their demand. This woman was my mother.

Sometimes I imagine myself as her. Cradling my pregnant belly with my left hand, holding a broom and sweeping the floor with the other. But it’s an image so detached from the life I live now, I can only sympathize.

I never have to explain myself to anyone. I get to choose whose needs I want to meet. I will never know the experience of tiptoeing around others, making myself smaller, as my duty within a familial hierarchy. I have enough within my control.

This includes my relationships, which are only of my concern. Rather than catering to the every need of my husband and non-existent in-laws, I search for my life partner at a leisurely pace. I go for long strolls with handsome men who I sometimes never speak to again. I walk away from relationships which don’t feel aligned with who I am, and who I hope to become.

I’m fixated on breaking generational cycles. Risking it all runs in my blood: My parents, who had an arranged marriage, divorced shortly after I was born. My mother lost a lot of people she thought were her friends, raising a child on her own in a country that wasn’t hers. My father did not marry again.

The decision to arrange my parents’ marriage was financially and culturally sound. My father came from a good family. But much was buried beneath the shiny promise of class and wealth.

While a husband won’t be selected for me, I still have to choose wisely. I wonder if there’s an unspoken agreement to make up for someone else’s mistake. My grandparents’, I assume, when they chose to marry my mother off to my father - and technically his family.

Sort of like the tender part of my elbow, marriage is a sensitive topic in my family. We exchange knee-jerk responses, well-rehearsed statements. Sometimes the topic of marriage is funny to us, too. A sense of humor is the healthiest processing tool. I guess we’re not very good at saying the obvious things out loud.

My marriage, or who I will choose to marry, or whether or not my marriage will result in a divorce - the topic has been only lightly brushed. We generally conclude with a shortlist: educated, steady, good-looking. Comes from a good family.

What does the last one mean, exactly? I’d asked many times and received variations of the same answer. Everyone’s educated, has great jobs, are businesspeople or doctors. I was conditioned to understand class and caste indicators - and label some as more desirable than others. My father’s family ticked all the desirable boxes. It did not matter by the end.

I find it difficult, this idea of coming from a good family. What do “good” qualities actually entail? What structures are we really upholding when we say that? What are we buying into?

By what I assume to be the agreed upon, unspoken definition of a good family - the family’s caste, class, complexion, education level, history, and careers measured alongside the realistic value one’s children have to offer - I do not come from a good family.

Privilege from class and caste, yes. Complexion no. Family background…well, some people might call it complicated, but I like to call it colorful. Marry me, and you will marry someone who is resilient.

I’ve shaken off most of my conditioning, so I have my own preferences. I ask certain questions to the people I go on dates with, questions which my family would not know to ask.

(I also have the privilege of self-discovery. This accords me a sense of self and framework of life. I am the most free of every woman who came before me. It is likely you are, too.)

My questions are something like: What is your relationship like with each of your parents? How would you describe your older sister? (Your younger sister? Your ex-girlfriend?) How many of your friends are in relationships? What is one thing you want to do differently than your parents?

When we have the freedom to choose, our needs will ultimately be different than our parents’ wishes for us. Which means we hold the power to be discerning - create our own shortlists based on our experiences and values. Define what a good family is to us.

Compared to our parents, there are different variables at play here, of course.

My mother caught onto the idea of dating apps quite quickly. They fascinated her. On one hand she liked that I largely had a say in who I’d communicate with. In a way, any additional pressure to gently guide my choices was off her. On the other hand, it seemed that dating apps required a certain quality of discernment: a balance between contextualizing humans as much as possible, while not being naive. There are too many choices and it would be difficult to know fully, through a screen, who people really were.

When I showed her the apps, including Dil Mil, she scrolled way slower than me - meaning she’d take her time and look at each profile with the intent and patience it deserved. (There are still many things I can learn from my family.) Some of her reactions:

“Handsome, but might want a traditional girl.”

“He’s just playing.”

“You both have a lot in common.”

“Seems nice.”

“What is this?”

When I match with other South Asians on Dil Mil, there’s a shared cultural fluency that exists simply. But familiarity isn’t the same as shared values. What the app holds, and what my family’s method never could, is both at once: the comfort of someone who already understands the world you come from, and the freedom to decide, entirely on your own terms, whether they’re the person you want to build something with.

This essay was written in paid partnership with Dil Mil.

It was two in the morning and Cathy Bloom and I had only known each other for a few hours. We met earlier that night at a mutual friend’s birthday party. But we shared a long meal together at Kellogg’s Diner and talked about plays. I asked her to send me one she wrote.

The play was Little Hugs, Tiny Kisses. I read the play in one sitting, entirely amused and shocked by the characters I was encountering:

Little Hugs is a funny, slightly absurdist, and weirdly heartwarming story about a woman named Nora who survives a plane crash on her way to NYC, where she has a job as a live-in nanny for a recently adopted twelve year old with a growth disorder, Helena-Marie.

As of Fall 2025, Cathy has been studying at Brooklyn college for her MFA in Playwriting. Graduates of this program include Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker, Clare Barron, and Young Jean Lee.

Cathy, who is also a performer, has written 6 plays and 2 pilots, one of which we co-wrote together: Damage Control. We work well together because we both actually keep the promises we make to ourselves as writers (that is, we show up and do the work) but also because we love riffing together. We understand writing for the stage is entirely a form of play (no pun intended) once you’ve got the discipline and technique down. We’re insistent on becoming better screenwriters, too.

It is a great privilege to be someone’s friend, collaborator, and admirer.

On what it means to be perverse

Upasna: So on your website there’s a description of the kinds of plays you write, and you describe them as perverse. So my first question is: what makes something perverse, and how do you define it?

Cathy: My plays are perverse in a lot of ways—sexually, obviously—but also perverse in terms of expectations. Like, what you expect from characters, how much you expect to sympathize or empathize with them depending on what they do or how they feel. And sometimes that empathy just isn’t there.

Upasna: Oh, like empathy from the audience?

Cathy: Yeah—like, I make the audience perverted. I think there’s something really cool about making the audience root for people who aren’t even necessarily bad, but just deeply annoying—people you would never want to align with. Putting those people at the center of the story and having the audience side with them.

Upasna: Has there ever been a character you felt was too shocking to write?

Cathy: Yeah. I mean, I’m writing a play right now that started as something totally different—it was about annoying podcasters. I was listening to podcasts for inspiration, but after a while I was so fried and bored. I think maybe they were complex in a way I just couldn’t tackle then. So I pivoted and turned those characters into something else.

Upasna: What was shocking about it? Do you feel like you try to write shocking things?

Cathy: To an extent. I try to write satirical things that might get under people’s skin—be a little irritating. But I don’t think I aim for shock. I want to write things that prickle you a bit. Like a scratch you need to itch.

On beautiful femcels and debriefing The Drama*

(*spoilers ahead)

Upasna: What’s something that made you prickle? Did The Drama make you prickle?

Cathy: Oh, totally. It sparks so much conversation afterward. And something like gun violence—it’s such an extreme form of violence. You’re taken aback, obviously. But paired with the glamor of the world they’re in—and the fact that it’s Zendaya—it creates tension. People might hate seeing someone like her do that. And also, the possibility that she’s not a good person—that’s what the movie rides on.

Upasna: Hearing you say that makes me wonder if she was judged more harshly because she’s beautiful—like people held her to a higher standard. If she were unconventionally attractive, would people react differently?

Cathy: Totally. And I actually related to her character.

Upasna: Me too. It felt very Pearl.

Cathy: Yeah.

Upasna: Like, how does an American girl take out her rage? And let’s not forget there is such a thing as gun culture—you grow up online, you don’t fully understand the gravity of what you’re seeing.

Cathy: She’s definitely a perverted character. And it’s the most extreme form of violence—like a mass shooting—but it almost feels like satire about letting women be fucked up. Usually there has to be a clear justification, but here she doesn’t really have one, and yet she still feels bad. It’s holding two extremes at once.

Upasna: Yeah. What about Robert Pattinson’s character? Was he perverse?

Cathy: Oh yeah, but in a different way. I actually think he’s more fucked up in the relationship. He sees how alone she is and probably likes that.

Upasna: Right—she’s vulnerable, inexperienced. That was her first crush at 28. She doesn’t even have the tools to judge him properly.

Cathy: Exactly.

Upasna: And then you get mad when that person turns out to have a past.

Cathy: That’s what the movie is about to me—a man being mad at a woman for having a past. The gun almost feels like a metaphor for that.

Upasna: Who do you think put the photography book on his desk?

Cathy: I think she [Zendaya] did—just to fuck with him. Turn him on.

Upasna: Yeah, because they’re kind of on the same wavelength. Maybe they’re perfect for each other.

Cathy: It’s like crazy attracting crazy.

Upasna: But I want to be better than that.

Cathy: There’s a right kind of crazy.

Upasna: Would you define this as a perverse movie?

Cathy: Yes—but it’s perverse and glamorous. And I think true perversity has a kind of ruggedness to it. When something is too polished—too star-driven—it almost loses that edge.

Upasna: Yeah. Watching it, I wasn’t thinking “what story is being told,” I was thinking “I’m about to watch Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.”

Cathy: Exactly. To make something really perverse, there’s almost a John Waters-ness to it—something messy, disturbing, specific.

Upasna: Like when you believe, just by looking at the character, that they actually had those thoughts. You see them as a real person.

Cathy: Her acting was good.

Upasna: Robert Pattinson, though—he immediately felt creepy. Like an incel type.

Cathy: Lowkey, I think it is about incel culture.

Upasna: Yeah—him being an incel and then realizing she’s kind of adjacent to that too.

Cathy: Exactly.

Upasna: What felt actually perverse to you recently?

Cathy: Baby Reindeer. The casting felt truly perverse. It balanced trauma, humor, and satire really well.

Upasna: Yeah—the sex montage after the assault was so revealing and honest and fucked up.

Cathy: That’s what I mean.

Upasna: I also feel like nothing in theater right now feels naughty.

Cathy: Nothing does.

Upasna: It’s all either overly polished or predictable.

Cathy: Or it gets stuck in very specific lanes.

Upasna: Right. Like I already know what I’m going to see.

Cathy: Exactly.

Upasna: Also, I feel like [The Drama] is the first time since Jennifer’s Body where beautiful women are allowed to be scary.

Cathy: And admired for it.

Upasna: I left the movie admiring her.

Cathy: Same.

You can follow Cathy on Substack and Instagram.

Astrology as a tool, not as truth.

I woke up a few mornings ago to a notification on my phone which informed me of the quality of my (now past) relationship.

On a good day, it feels like J’s helping you redefine your sense of security - he’s opening you up to new ways of feeling at home, both in the world and within yourself.

On a different morning, another notification - from the same app - says that his influence is unsettling, and it makes me feel like I’m losing control.

The app, which analyzes astrological aspects to then create a narrative about one’s life, patterns, and timing, explains that this particular aspect of our relationship is an influence of the Imm Coeli in Sagittarius Conjunct Uranus. My understanding of astrology is quite limited, so I’m not sure what this means.

Today, 3 days after I broke up with him, I receive this notification: Don’t punish yourself by staying in a relationship out of guilt or obligaton. Realize that you don’t need a partner to be complete - you already have all the necessary strength and power to take care of yourself.

Strangely and eerily, all of these statements feel accurate. A skeptic of astrology, or perhaps a Reddit-pilled man who deems himself an atheist, or maybe a person with degrees in the sciences and a bookshelf with only non-fiction titles, would say that these statements could be applied to anyone and everyone. My opinion on the matter fluctuates depending on who I’m speaking to. I think it’s because I’m open to the esoteric while also being open to the unexpected. I like to be surprised by life; I don’t always need answers. Astrology would say that’s because of my Mars in Libra in the first house.

However, I’m not completely clueless to what the practice entails. I was interested in Western astrology when I was a pre-adolescent. By “interested” I mean I was hyper-fixated. Before he had the chance to read it, every morning I’d steal a newspaper page from my grandpa to find my horoscope in The Hindu. Vedic astrology seemed too complicated, but Western astrology felt like a distilled, accessible version. I went on discussion boards and chat rooms to gather as much information as possible. I was an anxious and depressed child and astrology was a salve. But as I grew older (and more cynical), the framework of astrology faded into the background and as I applied the scientific method to every question I had about myself, my life, or other people.

Obviously, my previously deep fondness for astrology proved helpful as the practice made a cultural comeback and my discomfort with uncertainty grew. Even the most resentful of astrology likely knows their sign and what people say - Scorpios and Geminis are aware that they’re infamous, for example.

But this ability to even reject what astrology might say about oneself proves helpful. To me, astrology is a tool. To be able to take an astrological analysis and say “this isn’t me” or “this is me” - whether you believe it or not - is quite helpful. It allows you to deepen your understanding of yourself, or perhaps stay in denial about what you may already know deep down.

The Saturn Return as an opportunity to get your shit together.

One astrological phenomenon that has always fascinated me is the idea of the Saturn Return. It occurring roughly every 27–30 years when the planet Saturn returns to the same zodiac sign and degree it occupied at a person’s birth. It occurs twice in one’s life - late twenties and then mid-to-late fifties, I believe - and often brings about some type of restructuring and reshaping to one’s life. Saturn apparently whips you into shape.

I’m currently in my Saturn Return. Do I believe in it? Here’s what I’ll tell you: It’s occurring in my 7th house, which rules partnerships, marriage, and contracts. My Saturn is in Aries, which is apparently a tricky thing. Saturn likes structure and certainty and discipline, but Aries is livewire, impulsive, fiery energy.

I just walked away from a relationship which was ultimately wrong for me. But after putting off dating for 6 years, I had some catching up to do. Some might say I needed to be put to the test so I could develop an understanding of what I will and will not tolerate, and who is and who is not the right kind of person for me.

Curious about the Saturn Return beyond what I could find on the internet, I reached out to Mack Huneke, a Brooklyn-based astrologer, to ask more about how we might think about this concept and apply it to our lives as a tool, rather than as a predictive indictment of our future. (You can book time with Mack here.)

Below the interview are some quotes friends shared with me about their experiences with the return of Saturn, which, if you’re past the age of 30, 55, or God willing - 80 something - you might find interesting or applicable to your own life.

Upasna: What do people get wrong about the idea of the Saturn Return?

Mack: What people get wrong about their Saturn Return is, first, that it’s going to ruin your life or that it’s something to be afraid of. Second, that it’s some kind of test you have to “get right.” And third—if you’re not paying attention to the house your Saturn Return is happening in, you’re missing the real opportunity. That’s where the work is.

Upasna: Right. And I’m curious how Saturn’s placement in a sign interacts with the house. What are the layers there?

Mack: Saturn is currently in Aries. Traditionally, Saturn is at home in Aquarius and Capricorn—though modern astrology focuses more on Capricorn. Aries is actually Saturn’s fall, meaning it’s debilitated there.

Aries acts quickly—it leaps before it looks. It’s driven, courageous, and wants things now. But Saturn wants the opposite: patience, discipline, and long-term commitment. It’s about tending something slowly and watching it grow over time.

Upasna: That’s interesting. A lot of discussions about Saturn Return focus on external events—breakups, career shifts, relocations. But what internal structures tend to change? What belief systems or psychological frameworks does Saturn dismantle?

Mack: It’s a reckoning between what you thought your life would be and what it actually is. That’s different for everyone. It depends on the story you’ve been telling yourself.

For me, it showed up as a major reckoning with my finances. My Saturn Return is in my first house—the house of the self—so it felt all-encompassing.

For my sister, her Saturn Return happened in her tenth house of career and public image. The day after her Saturn Return ended, she started a new job. It was incredibly literal—like a direct manifestation of the transit.

Upasna: That idea of a reckoning comes up a lot. Do you see Saturn Return as a kind of karmic accounting period? If so, what’s being settled?

Mack: Yes—though I’d frame it more as an accounting of inherited patterns. A lot of it connects to our upbringing—what we absorbed from our parents and early environment.

Saturn Return is when you assess what’s actually true for you. What do you keep? What do you release?

And that process itself is work—which is very Saturnian.

Upasna: How does Saturn reshape someone’s sense of authority over their own life?

Mack: You look at where Saturn sits in the chart and your relationship to it.

For example, my friend Suzanne has Saturn in Capricorn in her first house, along with several other placements. Saturn is very strong for her. During her Saturn Return—especially during COVID—she went through deep self-reflection and reevaluated her path.

The result was her stepping into authority over her own life. She left her architecture job and started her own business. That’s a clear example of Saturn shaping autonomy.

Authority also shows up in relation to parental or external figures. Whoever shaped your sense of self—there’s a moment where their authority diminishes, and yours takes its place.

Upasna: That resonates. I’ve been dealing with how my relationship with my mother impacts my romantic relationships. I previously dated someone I really cared about, and I realized I couldn’t move forward unless I rethink what I’ve internalized about relationships from her.

Mack: Exactly. That’s the shift in authority. If she was the authority before, now it becomes you.

Upasna: I’m also curious about Saturn on a collective level. Since people born within a few years share the same Saturn sign, does Saturn Return function as a generational restructuring event—not just an individual one?

Mack: Yes, absolutely. People in their late twenties—around 27 to 31—are stepping into adulthood at a time where collective responsibility is unavoidable.

Saturn in Aries, for example, brings a kind of urgency and drive to act collectively—to fight for survival, to organize, to build solidarity.

At the same time, many people in this cohort are creating their own paths to security—freelancing, entrepreneurship, rejecting traditional structures. That’s very Saturn in Aries.

Upasna: That’s literally me right now. Fully freelance, choosing my clients, making my own schedule. I couldn’t have a boss.

Mack: Exactly—that’s Saturn in Aries energy.

Upasna: So culturally, Saturn Return is often framed as chaos in your late twenties. But based on this conversation, that feels like a misunderstanding. What does a “successful” Saturn Return actually look like?

Mack: You’re going to experience growing pains no matter what. But if you know how to show up for yourself with compassion, it becomes much easier.

The changes are happening either way. You can either collaborate with them—or resist and create unnecessary suffering.

A successful Saturn Return isn’t about avoiding difficulty. It’s about engaging with it in a way that leads to growth.

Upasna: Is there anything people don’t ask about Saturn that you think they should?

Mack: Yes—work with Saturn on Saturdays. Each day of the week is ruled by a planet, and Saturday belongs to Saturn.

If you know which house your Saturn is in, dedicate even an hour on Saturdays to that area of your life. That’s a meaningful offering.

Also—devotion is a practice. That’s what Saturn wants.

If your Saturn is in your second house, for example—focus on your values, your stability, your boundaries. Saturn is about structure, limits, and what’s possible within them.

Upasna: That resonates so much. My name literally means devotion, and I’ve been thinking about that in terms of craft, relationships, everything.

Mack: That’s beautiful. Devotion is exactly what Saturn asks of us. And one last thing: Refinement. Saturn helps refine.

How did Saturn impact you?

“i realized just how important community was to me after i lost mine in the physical sense. covid also changed everything in that respect and i also tried to keep in mind that i’m not the only person dealing with isolation. i had to grapple with some friends deleting social media or never getting on it so we lost contact, and that made me sad but i also wanted to allow them their space without centering myself in the midst of my social crisis. at the end of my saturn return, i made peace with the fact that my friends and community live online. how it’s not a sad thing, it’s something to be grateful for, and it’s a direct benefit of living in this era of technology. as for IRL friendships i just don’t have it here. and i’ve made peace with it.”
- Mariko, Saturn in Pisces in the 11th house (The eleventh house is normally called the house of companions, and it in fact rules friends, gatherings and any sort of associations that the individual has a place in.)

“My Saturn Return ultimately made me realize my life is in my own hands. Terrible things will happen but how I respond to these moments is what really matters. I can’t lay in bed and hide away until things resolve themselves no matter how much I wish that was the case. If I want my life to change I have to change it. If I don’t like the way I’ve been treated I have to stick up for myself. I feel like a different person to when my return started. For better or worse. Living a full life means agreeing to engage with the good and the bad and post return makes you feel a bit more equipped to handle both.”
- Marjorie (sillyphase on Substack), Saturn in Pisces in the 8th house (The eighth house is viewed as the house of sex, taboos, death, resurrection and other people’s possessions.)

“My Saturn return hit my 7th house, and it felt like the universe doing a very honest audit of my relationships. For most of my 20s, I thought I was pretty self-aware, but during that period it became clear how often I’d confused chemistry with compatibility or held onto potential instead of reality. People and situations that once felt exciting suddenly started to feel misaligned. It wasn’t dramatic or explosive: more like a slow realization that the way I approached partnership needed to mature. In the end, it gave me a much clearer sense of my boundaries and the kind of relationship I actually want to build.”
- Naomi, Saturn in the 7th house (The seventh house is generally known as the house of relationships and partnerships.)

Two years ago, I went on a date with an Indian man who was better-looking in his photos. My mother, who has always been my confidant because she raised me to believe she was, told me to go on a date with him.

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A previous version of myself experienced life from inside of a shell. Now I know it was not a shell really, but a cage.

The cage was perfectionism tied to aspirations of being valued by institutions that are now failing, and maybe always were. I wanted to be good at everything, but particularly being good at things that don’t matter (like a computer job or getting into an Ivy League school) because I thought excellence was a precursor to safety. Back then, I wouldn’t have thought about these desires as direct reflections of capitalist moralism. Now my value system is different.

I was raised with the belief that one of the most important things about a person was whether or not they had a job, specifically a respectable job. (I won’t get into examples. It’s boring, anyway—I don’t feel like talking about the model minority myth or Indian stereotypes.) This belief was passed down from my grandparents and then to my mother, who by the way struggled a lot as a single mother and raised me with a lens of defense (be financially independent, don’t slack off, be punctual, laying around is bad, love is a waste of time, etc.). But what was passed down to me was a belief system created from a place of survival.

Those beliefs followed me into adulthood, where work became the primary place where I proved I deserved to exist. Being really good at a job (even one that asks me to respond to emails on federal holidays and vacation, one that wrings out every bit of my brilliance and distills it into bullshit work) used to be the only way I knew.

Naley (known as naleybynature on Instagram) posted this video about what true privilege is: not being in survival mode. It reminded me a bit about my piece on freedom—how true freedom isn’t linked to consumer choices, but the ability to experience Life itself. Real Life, not work deadlines and watching things on your phone. Real Life, as in breath and presence and being in your body. As in making conscious choices and decisions with a calm nervous system, not from a place of fear. Not from a place of dependency on institutions that are, ultimately, the instruments of our and the earth’s destruction. Naley says:

“We create a dependency on the system when we’re in survival mode. And that’s the easiest way to control [us]…

We can’t begin to even organize to change the world if the population is in survival mode because what are we even asking from them? The goal is to support people regain agency over their minds and get out of survival mode so they can finally hear themselves. We need people to find their calling so they can contribute it to the new world that’s being built.”

I’m an artist who is, like everyone else, is forced to lend their body + mind to a job which demands my attention. Also like everyone else, I hate having a job.

Going above and beyond at a job is essentially exacerbating a dependency on the thing that’s destroying you. Being angry about that is the least we can do for ourselves. Feeling the anger, then, is just as important. The normal response is to take that emotion and buy things—why work if we can’t buy things!—rather than create experiences that calm our nervous system. Most people don’t even have the choice.

I don’t work full-time anymore and I don’t have a salary for this reason. Something has been stolen from us, and in its place is a life on loan to someone else. And having benefits and a salary is essentially being indebted to your employer via your labor (I’m currently reading Debt by David Graeber which is radicalizing me quite a bit.) and when I feel like I owe something, it’s not a good feeling, especially when the employer and job is BS. Feeling like you “owe” something to your employer is a shared and unjust experience. We know the system is fucked. Healthcare is a human right and being paid to do your job isn’t that complicated of a transaction, nor should it be a part of your identity and how people deem your level of respectability. I don’t want that kind of capitalist moralism hanging over my head.

But a lot of people offering contract and freelance opportunities (particularly computer jobs in marketing, advertising, and the likes) are actually quite predatory when it comes to people like me. They want people who are talented and brilliant, but also really good at respecting authority and tend to be overachievers. (These people are presumably Asian, most likely, if you’re a white hiring manager.) They know artists need money and they know our creative output offers something unique to the world. They ask us to give our brain power and energy and bad backs to them—and without health insurance or actually good pay!

To be a perfectionist with a job like this is to be crushed underneath the weight of someone else’s aspirations. Forcing myself to maintain robotic standards for a job is terrible for my nervous system. I know that now, even though in the past I thought embodying this standard was simply what made someone “good.”

But I have support systems in place that make it easier, I think, then most people, to be able to pull myself out of survival mode. It is my responsibility.

Which is why I’m learning to be bad at my job.

I don’t want to be compliant. Compliance causes harm. Our country is literally on the brink of a civil war, and to be compliant at a computer job—especially when I have very little to lose—feels like a cowardly move.

This Friday, January 30, I’m joining the Nationwide Shutdown. I will not shop. I will certainly half-ass my job (arguably better than calling out sick; being incompetent is funnily more disruptive). I will remember that the institutions I once believed in are all an eyewash, and that none of us have ever been safe. I will talk to my neighbors and call my grandparents and hug my boyfriend and meditate and call my representatives and be out on the streets protesting against ICE. I’ll be calm. I invite you to do the same.

To reset one’s nervous system is to be conscious. To be conscious these days is to be in a state of privilege. And consciousness is also a tool. Some of us do have the ability to use this ourselves. We have to try. We have to be bad.

At the time, this photo represented a dynamic which I considered to be romantic. Organizing alongside my boyfriend, marching with him, calling ourselves activists.

I was a very self-conscious child, which turned into me being a self-conscious young adult, which meant that I constantly wondered what others thought of my relationship. My hope was that they saw us as a “power couple” or something ridiculous like that. This perception sounded cartoonishly beautiful. I envisioned our working together as something like Ben and Leslie from Parks and Rec. Oh, how romantic.

I broke up with him a week before our one-year anniversary. I didn’t like who I was becoming. I was abrasive and judgmental, less focused on nurturing something intimate and more focused on preserving the idea of something, and aligning all my actions to that idea. Although the relationship ended, it took me awhile to get to the root of the problem. It wasn’t that our relationship had skewed into something less genuine, but that I had always been too concerned with outward appearances.

In 2023, I wrote a play called couple goals. It’s about two actors who flirt in the DMs—only to finally meet up at a producer’s house to get to know each other over the span of a week. One of the actors, who is housesitting, is an award-winning performer. The other is a TV star recently out of rehab. It’s a dialogue-heavy, but fast-paced play with elements of surrealism.

I wrote it because I’d been obsessing over the idea of PR relationships after a previous UTA assistant told me a very famous but blacklisted Bollywood star had been set up with a child actor turned boy band member. Said Bollywood star was having trouble breaking into the Hollywood market, and because India was an untapped market for the boy band member, they were set up to see if there was something there romantically. Something there romantically could mean something there financially.

They indeed got married, but a part of me wondered what their attraction had initially been rooted in: not just physicality or chemistry, but perhaps the secret knowing that their combination of fans would absolutely lose it once they found out.

During this time there was talk of other PR relationships, both new and old: J Lo and Ben, Kristen and Rob, Timothée and Kylie. Apart from Kristen and Rob, the same question returned: was there a part of the attraction fueled by external self-awareness? The knowing that others would perceive them? Of course, being perceived doesn’t always feel good, and neither does strangers having opinions about your relationship. But if two hot people date, especially if said people are considered an unlikely pairing, people will be excited regardless. They may have nice things to say, or bad things, but the point is that people are noticing.

It isn’t just celebrities in the business of emotionally (and actually) commodifying romance, either. I went to PWI in the midwest, where most of my classmates graduated already engaged or on track to do so. Scrolling through their Instagram feeds minutes prior to unfollowing them, it’s clear that their relationships play a big role in how they’re perceived by friends and acquaintances is alike. That is to say, their feeds are mostly photos of them and their partners. It makes sense, I guess—you’re sharing a life together. But we all know that social media permeates our senses of self, and the lines between performance and real life have absolutely been blurred.

I had a friend in college (we are no longer friends because I am no longer a people pleaser and she is guilty of racism and cannot face me) who was obsessed with getting married. She had a boyfriend who was a youth pastor or something, I’d met him a few times and he was a decent person. Her idea of hanging out, however, was sitting in her dorm room underneath string lights and watching other people’s wedding videos.

“If Ben doesn’t pump his fist in the air after we say I do and kiss, I’m going to be soooo mad.”

She couldn’t wait to be married. A part of me wondered if it wasn’t that though. Maybe she couldn’t wait to have a wedding and couldn’t wait to post the photos. She was especially excited about changing her Instagram username to her husband’s last name.

Even in NYC, I knew of a woman who had an incredibly shitty boyfriend—shitty values, politics, inflammatory speech, and a roving eye—and refused to acknowledge or accept his terrible personality. He was going to become a doctor, came from a wealthy family, and was handsome. She wanted to be married to him and have his babies and that’s all that mattered. She was a kind of spiritual/woo-woo person that only used spiritual talk when it applied to her and gave her permission to be shitty, and for her boyfriend to be shitty. She really needed him. I can’t say I blame her; our society is built on the foundation of capitalism, which is built on the organized structure of nuclear families, which is a significant form of social capital. Our economy and our institutions aren’t built for single people.

But this focus on outward appearances—the idea of having a partner, the idea of being a good-looking couple, the idea of showing your Instagram followers that someone has chosen you and is attracted enough to you to want to have sex with you (I indeed think most of our desires are ruled by sex, more than we like to admit)—is ruining real romance.

Yes, you have to believe in romance in the first place in order to agree with me. I think romance is important to any relationship, despite it not being necessarily foundational. It the beginning it’s salient, and over time it becomes more of an effervescent presence. (Although, some of us generally live our lives with a romantic lens—we like to listen to the birds sing and smell the rain as it pours and drink our coffee slowly—and that can make relationships more robust, generally speaking.) Love and romance is privilege in a lot of cases. In India, we have specific lexicon: A love marriage versus an arranged marriage. Space is made for romance to show up in both bases, but only the former is predicated on existing romance.

Going back to outward appearances: This piece by Sex Happens about a woman being in love with her bald partner (having been rejected by them but mentioning them TWICE on my Substack is unfortunately giving pick-me behavior, but alas I write a lot about sex and love and have no choice but to cross-reference) comes to mind. It’s called “How falling in love with a bald man irrevocably changed my understanding of “settling”. I sent it to my friend who I used to have a crush on who is indeed balding, and he said this:

When women talk amongst ourselves (although I imagine straight women have an entirely different orientation when it comes to their ideas about men) we’re constantly negotiating good versus bad qualities. Most women would consider short height and baldness as “bad” qualities, which is ridiculous because they’re superficial. And when this is called out is immoral or in poor taste or maybe even inhumane, stories of male privilege and incel behavior and general patriarchal frameworks are evoked, as if an eye for an eye has ever been a way to measure moral debt.

I am not sure my friend read the entire essay though, because this quote pretty much sums it up:

“So, no settling. Instead, what I think is that having these abstracted rules — about baldness or height or weight or income bracket — which are so much easier to enforce on dating apps than when encountering people organically where chemistry easily overrides pre-conceived ideas, makes it less likely to fall in real love.”

The idea of a woman “settling” because she’s choosing to be with someone bald or short or whatever is inherently rooted in groupthink: That there is a way for men to be attractive, and if you don’t end up with a guy who’s hot—or at least with a full head of hair and fine, at least above 5’10”—you are indeed settling. Forget being treated well or any of that stuff, that comes later!

And the reason we think this way is because we live in a celebrity worshipping culture. People want to emulate power couples and hot couples and TV couples. We look to modes of behavior because most of us can’t think for ourselves and most of us are too scared to just listen to what is good for us. Most people don’t even know how to think for themselves, rushing to tell our friends every detail of every date, picking apart things to try to calculate some conclusion or measured step instead of having a set of values we can look to and follow. Baldness and shortness are not values—but prioritizing certain genetic outcomes over others is certainly reflective of a certain kind of value.

Even if the writer in the aforementioned Sex Happens piece is ultimately advocating for a romantic, organic approach to love—the fact that she is at all aware that she’s would a Bald Man and this in fact is deserving of a think piece is, I feel, evidence of the point I am making.

Imagine if it was abnormal to post about your relationship. I mean, people don’t just post photos. I mean look at Kristen Bell and Dax Shepherd. I also know of an influencer who posts about how much she and her partner fight, which like, thanks for making yourself sound more #relatable I guess but also, what the f*ck?

If we all agreed that committed relationships were intended to be private, intimate, and not put entirely on display as either a) evidence of your desirability b) evidence that you are competently living Adult Life or c) a combination of both, I believe it would change our entire approach to how we look for partners and how we maintain our relationships.

(A part of me is like, whoa, maybe it’s a really good thing Mindy Kaling keeps the identity of her partner a secret—I know everyone thinks it’s BJ, but we’ll truly never know. And she might have an incredibly romantic, swoony, human relationship and we may just not ever know. Do lovers have to post each other for trust to exist? For others to believe that we’re actually wanted? It seems unfair to think so.)

I think a lot about this video of Taylor Russell, who when asked what she’s manifesting, says that it’s not good to talk about that sort of thing. The dopamine rush from revealing one’s wishes makes it less likely to be achieved. I sort of feel that way about love—that allowing strangers (or people outside of your inner circle) access to any level of your relationship is like letting someone else into a room where they don’t belong. It messes with the intimacy. This is why I feel especially nervous about my current lover, and am struggling a bit because:

• In the last 6 years, I haven’t had reciprocated interest from someone who was only committed to me

• I am very excited

A HUGE part of me wants to post photos, and talk about him publicly, and so on and so forth. I’ve already posted about him on my Close Friends story and I feel like a f*cking teenager. But when I ask myself what I would get out of something like a Launch Post (which feels juvenile for me), the answer is I actually get nothing. I only give people more access to MY life. In fact, being someone who was raised to be wary of the evil eye, I’m extremely hesitant to share details beyond the fact that I’m currently not single.

When I think about our relationship being something only we experience…that to me feels very romantic and exciting. I want to preserve that sensation of blissful privacy as much as possible. I mean, I used to be the kind of young woman who’d share every detail about her sex life with her friends. Now I find it easier to just say we have so much chemistry/it’s great and let the details live between us. This is a big change for me.

But I think I am just as susceptible to external validation as any other anxious person who wonders if they’re doing life right, or who grew up severely bullied and thus eager to please. What I am trying to focus on is building intimacy that I can actually live inside of, rather than intimacy that needs to be displayed.