Based on a comment my mom texted me recently, I think my parents largely blame one man for me leaving Mormonism (and it ain’t Satan). They’d be wrong to, but I get it. Years later, it’s still hard for me to shut up about the guy.

This Man Who Must Be to Blame was my Institute teacher, mentor, and friend. I was friends with his son. I did a lot of service work alongside him in our stake. I thought he cared about me. Then he saw a picture of me at a protest.

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Celebrity skeletons are visible again. There’s a pilates instructor who went viral because the left wing of her pelvis looks like it’s seconds away from bursting through her skin. Demi Moore looks like she’s actively taking The Substance. There’s a photo of Ariana Grande going around where her closed eyes are tilted skyward towards stage lights, fans scream around her, and her clavicle is so pronounced, she looks like a catacomb saint surrounded by the devout.

The sight of life-threatening muscle wasting actively happening on red carpets and TikTok lives makes me recoil. Maybe it’s tasteless, but recoiling makes me feel good. Like I’ve been marked safe from thinspo. I’m at an age where I’m not terrified these kinds of bodies will influence me to harm myself. The fatphobia of the mid-aughts was a final boss I lived long enough to beat, I tell myself.

Then I take my winter-softened body into public spaces. Then I overhear the way other women talk about bodies.

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One thing I’ve been low-key offended by since leaving the church—but overwhelmingly relieved by at the same time—is that in the past 4.5 years that I’ve been living in sin, I’ve had the ward reach out exactly one time that I can recall.

Last week, it happened a second time.

This is so-and-so from the YSA Ward! Just checking to see if you are in the area, and if you would be interested in being invited to ward events?

It awoke in me the dormant reaction I used to have when a reply guy would respond to one of my tweets: “Yes! Someone is thinking of me!” followed almost immediately by, “Oh no! It’s you!”

I responded that I had moved and gave this person the usual blah blah blah: I’m not practicing anymore, but thank you for thinking of me!

I thought that would be the end of it. At my big age of 33, I’m surprised there was the start of it. (I guess the church has shifted the age limit of their young single adult wards away from 31, because back in my day, the thirsty, balding thirty set would attempt to woo every 19 year-old in the stake to avoid turning into a pumpkin and being shipped to the mid-singles ward at the stroke of midnight.)

It wasn’t the end of it, however. I got a text back.

Thanks for letting me know. Would you mind sharing your current address so we can push your records to the area you currently live in? We can’t move them without that.

I didn’t know what to say.

I wanted to say, “I’m not practicing anymore, didn’t you read?” I wanted to say, “Is there a way to just archive my records or put them on sleep mode?” I wanted to say, “Why, oh why would I want my records to just be punted between wards I’m not attending and don’t believe in attending?”

In the end I didn’t respond. I know I’m ignoring the obvious. I know I’m avoiding the only real solution: submitting my formal resignation to the church. Cancelling my baptism.

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I turn left down a paved road I’ve always passed by. The sky is the color of exhaust, the plateaus to the north a soft red and cream. Aside from a pinprick sized semi-truck in the distance, I am alone. I have time.

There’s a crusty pickup truck on a wide dirt lot to my right. An empty vehicle left in the desert is always one of two mysteries, a “what went wrong” or a “what did they find.” Sometimes I slow down and crane my neck to try to solve it. This time, I keep my pace.

The eighth Emma M. Lion audiobook is playing in my car. I’m on the chapter where Vicar Hawkes steps into the fighting ring on May Day to pummel the strongman out-of-towner who’s cheated his way to victory, the women of Saint Crispian’s flushed at the sight of so much bare male skin. I’m so rapt in the story, I almost don’t see the reaper-red face of a turkey vulture in the street before it’s too late. I brake, I swerve, it lifts its dark weight into the sky. I watch it fly over a hay field and will it to come back as I catch my breath. It’s lucky to be alive. I want to see the way it interfaces with death. I want to see the flesh hanging from its beak.

I’ve always found this aspect of myself to be funny and slightly bizarre, that I love teacup, corset, and bonnet formality as much as I love the macabre. That part of me loves what is refined and controlled and part of me loves what is wild. It’s perhaps, in every instance, the defining pursuit of my life, choosing between the two.

I’m driving and listening to my book again. One moment there are empty fields. The next, I’m cutting through red rock into the belly of a valley with a large marshy lake. I take the sign towards the Ouray National Wildlife Sanctuary, a place I’ve never been. Before I’ve even entered the sanctuary, two things occur consecutively: I see an osprey peering over the edge of a large nest atop a pole and my “check brakes” symbol blinks on my dash.

I’m yanked back out of Saint Crispian’s and into Leota, Utah, where the yards are dusty, all dogs are to be bewared, ducks chatter in the cattails, and a prey bird cocks its head at me as I pull over and rifle through my car manual to figure out how much time I have to get to a mechanic before I’m royally screwed. The osprey has flown to a nearby tree, wary but protective of its roost. It’s joined by another. I’ve never seen two together. Ospreys always strike me as wildly solitary.

It’s a Sunday. The closest, open mechanic is in Heber, two hours away. Caution forces me to turn around, drive slow. I don’t reach the wildlife refuge. I watch the ospreys grow smaller and smaller in my rearview. I wish, not for the first time, that I could be a bird. That I could see where every single path leads and choose them all.

That I could land somewhere and it was still natural to fly.

One pill at 2 am. Two pills at 5 am. One pill at 8 am. Two pills at 11 am. One pill at 2 pm. Two pills 5 pm. A whole civilization dead, never to be brought back again, at 8 pm. One pill at 8 pm.

The SLS rocket carrying the Artemis II crew splits the atmosphere like a paring knife days before my lingual tonsils are serrated from my throat while I sleep on an operating table, which happens days before the president of the United States threatens strikes against an entire country (“strikes” being the anesthetized way of saying to shear the skin and limbs off 93,000 individual human beings with fire and shrapnel until the muscle and blood they live in—love with—remaps their home country in trails of death).

I coast back into my body as the Artemis crew coasts to the moon, my eyes blinking open to see what for me, in that moment, is the whole world: a nurse at my lefthand, my boyfriend at my right.

My legs spasm. My tongue is lead. I’m told my mouth is really small, but surgery went well in spite of limited acreage. I’m told to rest for at least a week. The nurse calls my boyfriend the wrong name. I’m prompted to get into my street clothes and into a wheelchair before I’m fully ready. The sun outside the hospital feels too bright. The bumps in the road acute. I’m given my timekeepers for the next week: acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and oxycodone. The only way I really tally the hours.

That night, we’re see images of our cloud-shrouded world taken through the Orion capsule window. On Easter, Earthside, we’re given threats and a deadline by the sitting president: Tuesday at 8 pm. I am in bed and I’m wondering if I’m going to watch the world end in bed.

My life is pillows and books and medicine and Stardew Valley and NASA’s Instagram. I leave the church with David Archuleta, I win the Hunger Games with Haymitch Abernathy, I accidentally eat Void eggs and turn green. I almost memorize each strand of Christina Koch’s frizzy braid floating near her forehead. She looks out a window with wonder at our planet suspended in space. For three days, I wake up and wonder what it will feel like to see a nuclear holocaust from up there. To know the Earth you’re returning to is furiously and immediately being eaten alive from the inside.

Someone filmed a video of Charlie Kirk being shot in the head and the visceral image of the blood leaving his body gave silent people their voices back. Would they find their tongues if they could livestream what nuclear bombs do to human bodies? Would the distance between the US and Iran close if they could see entire families turned to ash?

In between my naps, we get a colorful image of the moon, one that shows more clearly its compositional makeup. It feels like seeing her for the first time. It feels like seeing her for the last.

My brain is running on oxycodone and Gil Scott-Heron: ten years from now I’ll be paying still while whitey’s on the moon. How dreadful a thing a rocket becomes when it isn’t aimed at space.

Tuesday comes, staccato.

8 am: pills

5 pm: nuclear war (I’d forgotten about mountain standard time)

11 am: pills

5 pm: nuclear war

2 pm: pills

5 pm: nuclear war

5 pm: pills

5 pm:

A new deadline. Two weeks.

I lie back down in a swath of sheets. Lebanon is lying in rubble. I sleep soundly for the first time in days. I shouldn’t. I can do nothing else.

They name the brightest spot on the moon Carroll after an astronaut’s love. I forget that places can be given names out of love and not the insatiable need to own. It somehow becomes the most beautiful, human place in the solar system, that crater, that cabin.

Cradled by pillows, I see a whole universe pass by me: food shortages are expected by the middle of the month, the administration is strong-arming satellite providers into hiding imagery of what’s happening in Iran, influencers are doing fit checks for Coachella, Whitney Leavitt’s bringing dirty soda to New York City, and thousands have been killed in the Middle East. The Orion capsule falls from the sky. Every chute deploys. Christina Koch steps back out onto Earth for the first time in nine days, rocked by the moon’s tides. I cry.

Starving to escape gravity, I think that’s what this feeling is.

There’s rain in Taipei on January 23rd, so Netflix delays broadcasting Alex Honnold’s climb by a day. Risk of death makes for good television, after all. Not a death march. Not pushing a man into a loaded gun.

Taipei 101 is 1,700 feet tall, all glass, concrete, and steel. It’s almost floral in its shape, walls pluming upward and out, coalescing into a long stem at the top. Alex, famous for his free solo ascent of El Capitan, looks on with an excited grin at the start of the live feed. His partner Sanni’s smile is tighter.

If successful, Alex’s ascent of Taipei 101 will be the largest urban free solo in history. If unsuccessful, he’ll have fallen to his death, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The question, if that happens, is when will the producers cut the feed. The second his fingers slip from the steel? Or when he’s in free fall, a live-streamed Icarus whose wreckage only the bystanders will witness?

I talk to friends and colleagues about it, consumed by the ethics: is it wrong to watch when you don’t know if he’ll walk away from it? The bystanders in Taipei seem less concerned. Three minutes in, you can see them amassed in throngs outside the tower and pressing their cell phones against the glass inside to film him. If Alex makes one wrong move, it will be captured from every single angle, millions of people watching him fall over and over again.

7,150 miles away. The same day. Another live stream. Another Alex. This one is an ICU nurse, three years younger than Honnold. His friends call him kind. Bystanders with phones capture multiple angles. They don’t smile and wave. They scream.

In one video, Alex Pretti holds his phone against his chest while an ICE agent pushes him backwards. In another video, a woman is shoved by an ICE agent into a snow-covered curb, and Alex steps in to help her. Alex is pepper sprayed in the face. Alex turns to once again help the woman on the ground. It’s the right thing to do. It’s his one wrong move.

“Free soloing is not something that’s super comfortable to watch.” Alex is thrown to the ground and an agent wraps his body around his legs. “It feels like we’re normalizing something that’s not normal.” Alex is beaten by multiple agents with their faces hidden. “There’s no room for error.” The gun Alex concealed-carries is wrenched from his waist.“The danger level keeps growing and growing and growing.” Alex is shot by an ICE agent. “Alex is trying to conquer this villain. Can he do it?” Alex is shot again by an ICE agent. “That is not something you feel like you’re supposed to see.” Later, they’ll confirm there were at least ten gun shots. “Will Alex continue, or will he tap out?” Alex isn’t moving. “This is a once in a generation moment, and we all witnessed it together in realtime.”

I watch the video on mute in the passenger seat of my partner’s car. My breath grows short. My stomach sours. Is it wrong to look away when I know he won’t walk away from it alive?

ICE can’t cut the feed before Alex’s body hits the ground. They can’t make it go dark when fingers slip off the trigger. Risk of death makes for good television, but murder doesn’t. So they lie. They spin. They do exactly what they were hired to do, exactly what Congress lets them do without consequence. They tell us Alex was a domestic terrorist. They tell us ICE agents acted in self-defense. They roll out the same script they had for the murder of Renee Good two weeks prior. They can’t doctor someone else’s footage so they have to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw. And if that doesn’t work, they have to make a new spectacle—“Quick! What’s that over there??”—banking on the fact that we will never not look.

I watch Honnold’s climb when he’s safe in the arms of his family. My breath grows short. My stomach sours. He’s a red dot against a blue and green Taipei in miniature. Every time he approaches a new problem, the audience gasps. On the overhangs, the crowd goes silent as death. History. The commentators grow almost heady and drunk on the word.

One Alex makes it. The first thing we hear him say is “sick.” One Alex doesn’t. The last thing they hear him say is “are you okay?”

Does your fixation on the world ending stem from Mormonism?

I’d been babbling to my then boyfriend about how I was ashamed to admit part of the reason I hadn’t removed my name from church records was because, if the world fell apart, I wanted to be able to access resources my tithing money had paid for for 29 years. As if, at the end of times, I’d have to wait in a bread line and prove my name was still on the list in order to get my ten pounds of grain.

I hadn’t really noticed that when I left the church, this particular fixation had slunk out after me, until I was dating someone who had never been Mormon and could ingest my catastrophizing with the detached eye of an outside observer.

He was right to ask. I brought up the end of times a lot.

I had started getting bags of beans and rice at every grocery store trip in case “things got bad.” I’d recently ordered two survivalist books just in case the internet stopped working. Hell, I bought a gravel bike explicitly because, if freeways became apocalyptic junkyards, access to gasoline was cut off, and I needed transportation to get to my family, I’d have something that could ride off-road and haul gear if necessary.

Fixation indeed.

I’d spent my whole life being prepared for the world to end, being raised to look forward to it, in fact, because it meant the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous spared. It was sanctified schadenfreude. We, the faithful, took solace in chaos and destruction and evilness like they were cairns pointing us closer to god. And when we found god’s only begotten at the end of it all, it meant all those years of laborious steps had been worth something. How desperately I wanted them to be worth something.

When I was in the church, the world ending was part of god’s plan. What did it mean to me now? Why was I so afraid of it? What kind of apocalypse do you worry is coming when you no longer ascribe to a religion that thinks apocalypse is inevitable?

The answer, for me, is an end-of-times Frankensteined together on the tables of men sick with the fear of their own smallness, who would bleed the world to prove their own salvation.

No man may know the time of Christ’s coming. How many times was I taught that? Yet so many seem intent on inducing an emergency C-section to rip Jesus from wherever he hides.

Israel’s rebirth will be a witness for Christ, the Bible says, so they give Israel the shovel to make Gaza a grave. They watch proudly as countries baptize countries in the blood and bones of the innocent until they come out “pure.” The Bible says “wives, submit to your husbands,” so they make womanhood as boundaried and small as they can make it. They talk of taking away our political choices, our reproductive choices. The god of the Bible razes the Earth, so they do the same. Their Bible tells them god would gladly make a Pompeii’s embrace of living, breathing human beings for the crime of being gay, so what’s it to them if their gay neighbors suffer.

Before they were introduced to the Messiah who dined with the marginalized, they met the god who destroyed them. The father who taught his children that holding a blade over their own kin would make him proud. What’s it to them if innocent children and parents are torn apart, if a woman is shot and left to die on the winter-salted streets of Minnesota for the crime of turning towards home?

In Mormonism, the Bible is true “as far as it is translated correctly,” and we acted like the stories of Christ in the New Testament were the truest, most correctly translated part. The latter book was a sigh of relief after all the plaguing and calcifying and drowning and burning in the former. We were to be like the Messiah of the New Testament who dined with sinners, touched those riddled with plague, forgave the men sticking spears into his sides and ripping the flesh of his palms with nails. We sang songs about him, we ended our prayers in his name, we pledged to bring him to the court or field with us before we played basketball or softball or soccer. We watched men break sacramental bread every week in his name, covenanted to “this do in remembrance of him.”

Now I wonder if in other Bibles or even the next pew over, men are being taught to put the sacramental cup to their lips and imagine someone else’s blood. Is it an act of remembrance or a pledge for vengeance? When Christians hear “become like god,” which god do they picture: the god who is love or the god who is violence? Is there actually any difference? Or did we all just embrace the quality of god that was easiest for us to swallow because the contradiction never has been?

Believing in a god who is violent means violence becomes a comfort. Congratulations, Christ is on his way! Follow his progress with the following tracking number: 73,600 and counting, at least six million, unknown. Aren’t your souls sick of staying silent? Aren’t they heavy at the thought that stopping wars and rumors of wars means stopping god?

What’s to stop bad men from making their own signs? What’s to stop a person whose entire belief system hinges on the reality of heaven from making Earth hell for other people who have found happiness on a different path? What’s to stop desperate men drunk with pride and starved of the feeling this is all worth it from ending the world themselves? From using greedy, wealthy, abusive cynics to do it for them?

Apocalypse is a power move for the evil and an emergency beacon for those who think they are good. I worry that, at the end of it all, we’ll have destroyed everything to catch the attention of a cold, empty universe with no god in sight.

I worry there is a god and he approves of any of this.

Jane Austen hits differently when you’re I-can’t-sit-on-a-backless-chair-at-the-bar-anymore years-old. I read all of her novels in celebration of her 250th birthday last year, and more than anything, I was left with the impression that Austen isn’t for the girls—she’s for the thirty, flirty, and thriving (or barely surviving).

Austen handles age in a way that is incredibly relatable to women like me who grew up in a high-demand religion that conditioned girls to get married and start families young. Not one woman in my own immediate family (that I know of) has not been married before age 30.

Enter me. The anomaly.

This year I turn 34. I’m not single, but I am one and a half years away from being “vastly old” and “decrepit”— if Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood has any say in the matter. I’ve already reached “the years of danger” — if Persuasion’s Elizabeth Elliot has anything to say about it. More pressingly relevant is my approach to the dreaded “fertility cliff” red-pilled contemporaries like to prattle on about in the same hissing tones they give to the phrase “childfree woman.”

I don’t give two dumps about what incels have to say about my biological clock. My body, however, is chatty and lately, she’s been persistently pressing me about kids.

Had you asked me in my mid-twenties if I wanted to have kids, I would have told you my best family Halloween costume ideas, what theme the smash cakes would have and the list of boy and girl names quietly saved on my phone. Ask me now and it’s a very complicated, more painful question, one enmeshed with the shrapnel of religious conditioning, one that circles hungry-eyed around the thing whose loss I don’t actually know if I could bear: autonomy.

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My heart is so full of questions for God that those questions are etching their way in[to] the muscle, carving like a lover into an aspen. They’ll stay there for eternity perhaps, slowly killing the heart dead.

I found that scribbled into a small, old notebook of mine a week ago. Like many notebooks of mine, this one was partially filled and promptly abandoned, and as I flipped through it, my gut twisted.

Each page contained questions I had written down presumably to take to the temple:

What should I change in my life?

How can I love [him] more?

Would I be happier with someone else?

How can I address my anxiety?

Would marrying him be a good idea?

Is this the right choice?

Would he become what I want?

Is there an end to this feeling with [him]?

Please tell me what to do.

I had written a header above one chunk of questions: “PLEASE BE SPECIFIC WITH ME.” I can’t tell if it was a plea to god or if it was me putting myself in god’s shoes to tell myself I wasn’t being specific enough to get answers.

I don’t know how much more specific I could have gotten, maybe God, I found a really good person who wants to marry me, just like you told me to do, but my anxiety is so bad when I’m with him that I’m starting to think I’d rather kill myself than live this way, and I might do it by accident because I haven’t been able to keep food down for weeks. Any tips?

God had nothing.

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I love the way the English name their houses, though most of the names I know come from fiction: Pemberly, Inverness, Thornfield Hall. Names, it seems, are always given to some great house, which is why I suppose I never named my last place out loud.

It’s still got electric tape over the front window where hail cracked the glass three years ago and a black tarp nailed over the downstairs shower because a leak in the ceiling caused it to bubble and burst four years ago. Everyone always commented on the living room ceiling being sparkly and I wondered if I was going to drop dead from asbestos one day. There hasn’t been actual grass in the yard for years, and the corners collect cobwebs, not entirely from disuse, but from the sheer number of spiders who’ve found their way inside (you can deal with a lot when your rent is $400).

Quietly, I called the place the Ivy House.

Draped like a fondant on the southwest corner and west side of the house, a swath of ivy curls and twists down the wall and in front of the kitchen window so that, in mid-day light, it feels like the understory of a garden. Sometimes I read there and felt like Elisabeth Bennet. Inside, a stubborn strand of ivy has pushed its way into the kitchen somehow, peeking its leafy little head through the stair that leads to the basement. I clipped it sometimes. Sometimes, I let it grow, delighting in the idea of ivy slowly devouring the house from the inside out.

I can remember taking a detour on my way to Logan years ago and falling in love with the way Mount Olympus’ finlike silhouette rose up above Foothill. That was the view outside my living room for six years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere as an adult. It felt like kismet to end up here.

When I first moved to Salt Lake, I couldn’t wait for my first summer in the city. Instead, I spent summer with my roommates behind the Ivy House’s brick walls, praying they were strong enough to keep a pandemic out. It was where I felt my first earthquake, too stupid in the moment to do anything but run upstairs gasping in awe. It was where I kept safe from a windstorm that lasted three days, crashing over the house like an ocean, and I can still feel the green front door hard against my back the night a neighborhood house party was interrupted by gunshots. The neighbor’s house had bullet holes in the brick the next morning, blood on the sidewalk. For days afterward, I quietly watched reporters, warped small by the glass in the peephole, come up to the front door and knock. Four years later, I will tremble in fear at the sound of unexpected fireworks and balloons popping, but I never again trembled in fear behind that door. It was somehow still something safe.

The Ivy House was where I had church for a year, and it was where I lived when I left. No other place, not even a chapel, has as intimately seen my belief.

At the Ivy House, I coaxed stray cats who made their way into the wilds of the backyard. At the Ivy House, I cried in the arms of a best friend after having my heart re-broken by a letter I probably deserved and texts I know I didn’t. At the Ivy House, I swung in a hammock and read beneath the soft light of summer. At the Ivy House, I stayed up late laughing and ranting with roommates. At the Ivy House, I accrued so much outdoor shit that it’s a miracle my bank account survived. At the Ivy House, I was ten minutes away from some of my best friends, five minutes away from the canyon. At the Ivy House, I learned how trauma feels. At the Ivy House, I healed.

For the first time in my life, I’m living on my own. I don’t have a name for this new place yet, only that it’s mine. Maybe “mine” will suffice.

Maybe I’ll sneak into the backyard of the Ivy House one of these nights. Maybe I’ll take a clipping from the wall and carry home a little leaf to keep in my kitchen window. Maybe I’ll clip it. Maybe I’ll let something new grow.

Alone in a dark room with strangers at the foot of what I mistook for a red pentagram was not where I expected to be in Spring of 2024. Then again, where was?

I was 31 years old and single—the only woman on both sides of the family to be unmarried at this age. I’d left the LDS Church a year or two prior (also an unpopular route), and I was traveling the East Coast alone to see the total eclipse.

The Witch Museum in Salem was just a fun little oddity in a series of them.

Salem in April is spooky. You get the autumnal bare bones of the trees and that ocean gray feeling in the air that proceeds the warmth of spring. There aren’t that many people milling about in the chill. I paid $13 to go through a small spook house in the mall and the scariest thing about it was that I was the only one in there.

I didn’t know what to expect at the Witch Museum.

My hot girl walk had taken me past the statue of Nathanial Hawthorne and right to the foot of the Witch Museum’s gothic, red-brick facade. I had just made it before the next tour. We were led to the dark room where a grotesque cast of wax figurines looked down at us from above, simultaneously making my blood curdle and giving me the uncontrollable urge to bully them. By the end of the tour, I was solemn.

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If you haven’t been there, the Witch Museum tour takes you through the timeline of the Salem Witch Trials, then you’re guided to a room where you learn about modern witches, witch hunts, and witchcraft. You learn about Glinda and Elphaba, but you also learn about contemporary feminists and the way witch hunts are weaponized against marginalized communities. It’s a fascinating experience, the first time I’ve ever thought that it would be a compliment to be called a witch.

It wasn’t until after my trip was over that I realized a truth that thrilled me to my core: I absolutely would have been burned at the stake if I’d been in Salem 330 years earlier.

Consider: I was 10-12 years older than all of my aunts and my mother were when they got married, and I was single without children. Most damningly, I’d defied the Church (they probably would have hated this Church, but it was in fact a church). In spite of the fact that my greatest sin up to that point was sneaking smut home from the Bookmobile, I was a woman soaked through with Puritanical scandal. I could see the banner ads now: “Ministers hate her!”

What tickled me even more was to think about what those Puritans would say if they found out I had traveled hundreds of miles alone just to see the moon hide the sun for three minutes. My body would be buried in stones.

The more I’ve read about witchcraft and women’s rights, the more comfortable I’ve felt with the conclusion reached by many that witch hunts were a fear-induced response to women stepping out of roles of submission and disrupting the societal status quo. When you read about the individuals who were accused of witchcraft, in Salem and beyond, you find accounts of women who were loud and women who were too quiet, women who were assertive, women who were financially independent and self-educated, women whose bodies were “deformed” or women considered beautiful, women who seemed more at home in the natural world, women whose spirituality was called into question, women who lived alone, women without children, women who dressed funny, women who practiced medicine, women with children out of wedlock.

We talk often about the fact that women can never win—if you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore, if you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a whore…ibble person and all that. The witch trials seemed to exacerbate that idea. Writers like Mona Chollet in her book “In Defense of Witches” have perhaps rightly concluded that the witch trials were an example and consequence of mass misogyny. A lot of those prejudices have not left women alone all these centuries later, especially as we’ve gained more freedom.

I think about my own life. It’s free, but it’s odd to other people, something they sometimes react to with suspicion. People often ask me how I can travel alone, some with curiosity, others with disapproval or fear. My friends and family members who are in the church don’t often ask me why I left it, which is how I can usually tell they disapprove or are afraid. I’m a woman who, with the help of Lexapro, is getting better at answering to herself, and that scares people, I think. That, above all else, is what makes a woman witchy.

So catch me dancing in the woods in my nightie.

This month, like many former gifted children I know, I got trapped in Curriculum Tok aka I Don’t Need Grad School, I Just Want Structured Learning Tok.

For those not in the know, Curriculum Tok is a trend where you essentially pick a few subjects you’d like to learn more about and then create your own independent learning curriculum around said topics.

My curriculum for the month (because of course I’m doing it) isn’t very sophisticated, but I decided to do a historical exploration of gothic literature and its impact on modern culture, which is rapidly expanding into an exploration of gothic literature, women, and The Church.

I owe a debt of gratitude to PBS’ Arthur for many reasons, and one of those reasons is it introduced me to the young brilliance of Mary Shelley, who I consider the mother of Goth. I’ve learned, however, that the very first gothic horror novel (that we know of) was published 54 years earlier.

“The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole is the first book I’ve read in my exploration of the gothic. With spectres, dark castles, knights, virgins, and a skeleton, it’s definitely got the ~vibe~. I’m delighted by how much Shakespearean influence exists in it. I think what added to the mystique of Otranto was that, when it was first published, Walpole pretended it was a real, old manuscript he had discovered that was written in Italian. Funnily, critics seemed to love or at least by fascinated by it until the second edition came out and Walpole owned up to having written it.

SPOILERS AHEAD (the book’s been out for 261 years, but you do you)

Otranto is bananas from the jump: a massive, plumed helmet falls from the heavens and crushes the young prince Conrad on the day of his wedding to Isabella (The Summer I Turned Dreary, amirite). Distraught at the thought that an old curse is coming to fruition to end his family’s reign, the elder Prince Manfred begins what I, a woman with a bank account who knows what weaponized incompetence is, consider the ultimate horror of the book: a horny nighttime chase through the castle to entrap Isabella, secure her hand for himself, and somehow convince his devoted but infertile wife to divorce him, a wife who is so submissive, she lets her husband convince her separation is best.

The intemperate Prince experiences multiple visitations in his pursuit, which are supposed to be omens but which he ignores five seconds after they happen. It takes him mistakenly murdering his own daughter in a jealous rage to wake tf up.

Truly, this is a book of horror for women. I don’t know what horrifies me more, Isabella being pursued by a father figure in her life who wants to marry her against her consent or Hippolita, the Princess, becoming so small and submissive in her marriage that to call out her husband’s abuse would be an act of impiety and disrespect to her.

What I find fascinating about this novel is the role of the church. Isabella flees to the church for protection from Manfred, and for awhile, she is protected from him, but later in the novel, Manfred’s daughter Matilda is murdered in the church by Manfred. The forward of the book mentions that Walpole’s ultimate moral in this book is how the sins of fathers revisit their children for generations. I can’t help but take away, with a contemporary lens, the message of how the sins and abuses of men impact women. My deconstructed fomo (former mormon) lens is also a bit fixated on the concept of the church being meant to protect women, but it ultimately doesn’t do that, does it? Not consistently.

What makes gothic literature what it is, in part, is that the sublime and the supernatural collide. I don’t know that gothic could exist without the church. I’ll be fascinated to trace that as I read through gothic history.

Also, the next book on my list is by a woman who starts her novel by saying “I can do what Walpole did but better,” so I’m excited to keep reading.

Let’s she if she goth bossed too close to the sun.

Baby’s First Tattoo: How a pop-up tattoo shop at a paranormal convention low key changed my life.

DIY End of Times: Evangelical Christians may consider the Tower of Babel a cautionary tale, but why then are they trying to kickstart an apocalypse to rip god from the heavens?

Follow the Propagandist, He Knows the Way: Mormonism and Charlie Kirk

Husband-Educated: Why are so many of the married women I grew up with suddenly loudly defending bigotry and why do I suspect their husbands have something to do with it?

To NYC or Not to NYC: Should I stay or should I go?

“This is America. Speak violence.”

Since I was young, I was taught I was a child of a god who might one day ask my parents to kill their children.

Overheard at Phenomecon

Arianna the Thirty-three Aged Witch: Reflecting on single womanhood and my quietly radical trip to Salem, Mass

Not Your Conservative Uncle’s Chicago: Reflections on the rural terror of big cities that are actually sick as f*ck.

I’m seeing Einaudi next month: WHAT SHOULD I WEAR?!

Life of a Capitalist: The Capitalist Vinyl

Has the Ex-Try Guy Tried Shutting the Hell Up? Forever?

What it Sounds Like When the Gun Goes Off

Okay, but is my therapist okay?

What I think K-Pop Demon Hunters is About Without Having Watched It

Goth Girl Fall: A List of the Gothic Novels I Plan to Read This Autumn

ISO: A Familiar: I’m ready to have a pet (in spirit)

Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee

The first was when, at four or five, I vomited hot dogs all over my best friend’s family car on the way to dance class, and I was so scarred from the experience, I refused to show my face there ever again.

The third (we’ll get to the second) was when I went swing dancing at Fun Park with my then boyfriend, but he didn’t want to dance with me because I wasn’t that good, so I spent a majority of the evening in a chair against the wall watching him dance with other girls.

The second, chronologically, was when I tried out to be a dancer for the Hill Cumorah Pageant.

The Hill Cumorah Pageant was like the OG Book of Mormon musical—sans, you know, the sexually explicit, sacrilegious stuff. My mom was in the Pageant during its 50th run, and in a fun full circle, my sister and I were accepted into its 75th in 2012. Taking place right on the hill best known for being where Joseph Smith said he found golden plates, the Hill Cumorah Pageant was a whole ass production. There were flame throwers run by boy scouts beneath the stage, mattresses to catch people falling off platforms, and a whole rope and pulley situation for the scene when Christ visits the Americas.

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Last week, I spent some personal time in The Windy City, and unfortunately, in spite of being conditioned for 23 some-odd years by Rush Limbaughheads to fear Chicago with the intensity middle managers fear women with bobs, I fell head over heels in love with it, particularly the food. The first dinner I had back in Utah was J. Dawgs, and it, as expected, fell abysmally short of a Chicago hot dog—add Portillo’s under Bleecker Street’s John’s on the shortlist of restaurants that have ruined my life.

Perhaps the restaurant that has caused the most ruination to my life and even the very act of eating, however, is Alinea.

I decided to go to Chicago because last year, I developed a World’s Fair fixation after reading The Devil in the White City. The other, less romantic reason is I was lured there by a Hilton deal. But the reason Chicago even became a pin on my map to begin with is because of a sonofab*tch (respectful) named Grant Achatz.

I was introduced to Grant a few years ago when The Great British Baking Show ended (as it does every season) and took my mental health with it (as it does every season). Hungry to fill the gap it left behind, I started watching a show called Final Table, where chefs from across the world create their spin on a different country’s national dish and compete for survival by cooking with an ingredient chosen for them by one of each country’s best chefs each week.

I’ll be honest, I kept watching because I’m a part-time certified hater and I expected the America week to totally blow. What national dish or ingredient do we even have, high-fructose corn syrup? Well, turns out we’ve got Thanksgiving dinner and pumpkins. And Grant Achatz.

In my memory, Grant Achatz was introduced like an MMA fighter, his arms folded tightly across his chest, his brow serious. He was one of the best chefs in the USA, the host said, his Michelin star restaurant Alinea was consistently ranked the best in the country and one of the top 50 best restaurants in the world, he was intensely imaginative, doing things with food that nobody else was doing, including creating a fully edible helium balloon. That balloon immediately became my Roman empire. I was infatuated, both with the balloon and Grant Achatz’s imagination.

Fast forward to July of this year. It was my birthday, I had no plans, I’d just broken up with someone, I was intensely depressed. I was planning my Chicago trip, which, due to scheduling conflicts, I was doing solo, and I remembered Alinea was in Chicago. I looked it up. From everything I could tell, they only sold one single table a night. That table was available on precisely one of the nights I’d be there. I added it to my cart. It was a non-refundable $500 seat. I panicked and let my cart time out. I sent an email. I went back to Alinea’s website and the single table was gone. Disappointment flooded through me. I sent more emails. I went back to Alinea’s website five minutes later. The single table was miraculously back. Without thinking, I bought it. Because it was my birthday and I was intensely depressed and intensely motivated by FOMO.

I defended this decision to loved ones all month. They had buyer’s remorse for me, and I didn’t want to admit that I was feeling it a little, too. I was panic buying rice and beans out of fear of recession, for Pete’s sake. By all accounts, it was a decision that made no damn financial sense. But it was also a small dream of mine and something to look forward to.

The time arrived

Fancy dinners deserve fancy dress, so I awkwardly clicked my way out of the Palmer Hotel and up to the L Train in new heels I’d bought for the occasion. The train spat me out on a quiet street in Sedgwick. My map told me I was a minute away from Alinea, but I could not for the life of me see any signs indicating it was there.

After talking with a couple on the sidewalk and retracing some steps, I came across some black, reflective doors with no signage anywhere on them. I opened one and immediately stepped into a dark, narrow foyer with candles flickering and a very friendly host welcoming me in. The entire wait staff was dressed in suits. It felt like walking into the bougiest speakeasy of all time, platform 9 3/4 for the 1%.

I was escorted upstairs to my table, which looked out over the whole room. Any awkwardness I felt about being alone at the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been to disappeared when the intrigue of the meal arrested all of my attention.

Alinea is a mystery novel plotted across skillet, glass and plate. At no time did I know what was coming next. The times when I thought I knew what was in front of me, I was immediately afterward proven wrong. It was a series of delight after delight. The only thing I can compare it to is like a gentrified Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. And now I’m going to spoil it for you.

Spoilers!

The meal started with caviar on a pineapple/mezcal jelly in a textured bowl, and then Tyler, my waiter/guide for the evening, swept past my table and quietly left a postcard featuring a Chicago hot dog. It was a clue for what was coming: a Chicago-style hotdog but a Chicago-style hot dog distilled into gelatin form with small dots of condiments on top, the most absurd dish I have ever seen in my entire life, but one that delighted me beyond reason.

After that, my table saw a rotating cast of subversive characters. Peeled grapes and arctic char sitting on top of a dish that you flipped over to reveal char roe stuck underneath. At one point, I was escorted from my table to the downstairs kitchen where, amid the hubbub of chefs preparing dishes, I was served rabbit and sofrito and then given a covered tube I was instructed to punch out, revealing billowing steam rolling off lobster, mango, and pickled ginger. Being invited into the room where the magic happens made everything taste sweeter. I felt like I was in The Bear (I’ve never seen The Bear, so I literally have no idea what I’m talking about).

I was given a dish called hot potato, cold potato that I was instructed to down like an oyster shot immediately, because the flavors and heat were time sensitive. I ate a bit of curry infused coconut sitting in a coconut shell as a dish.

The most absurd dish of the evening, one that made me feel like a kid in a sandbox, was called Fossilized Tamale Bone. Several dishes earlier, they had set a big bowl on my table, lit a match, and let flames burn in the bowl. It gave ~ambiance~ but what it was also quietly doing was cooking a tamale being prepared right in the bowl without me knowing.

That tamale was served with a stone plate that was covered in edible “dirt,” a bone that had food cupped inside it, and a tool kit with a palette knife and brush that I was instructed to use like a paleontologist to discover the food buried beneath the “dirt.” And yes, I don’t know how they did it, but a portion of the plate was edible paper that I had to break through to reveal more of the dish.

At one point, I was given what looked like a strawberry but was beeswax shaped to look like a strawberry. The wait staff set a little pagoda under glass on my table and later dissembled the pagoda, revealing an Okinawan sweet potato layered between tiers that they grated over the best wagyu beef dish I have ever eaten in my entire life. Like, Faustus bargain level good beef.

Then came time for dessert. They covered the table with a rubber tablecloth and then proceeded to paint the cloth with candied oats, dark chocolate, and some other delicious sauces, after which they cracked open freeze-dried ice cream, I believe, and sprinkled “blueberry snow” on top. I was taking so many notes, but the vocabulary it takes to keep up with this experience is past my understanding.

Finally, they brought out the balloon, a green apple flavored helium balloon tied with taffy. It was everything I hoped it would be. It bobbed up and down when I tugged on it like a real balloon. When kissed, it disintegrated and gave me a shrill helium voice like a real balloon. All around the room, I watched other diners experience their balloons and giggle raucously. I have never seen so much joy at the experience of eating. I’ve never experienced food as storytelling to this level.

Because I’d mentioned in my reservation that I was doing this as a late birthday gift to myself, they brought out a candle, had me blow it out and make a wish, they smoked the inside of a glass with that candle, and then they poured what they called “liquified Betty Crocker birthday cake” into the glass. And you know what? It tasted EXACTLY like Betty Crocker birthday cake.

Never getting over it

Maybe it was the champaign or the Rose’ or the mezcal, but I experienced this whole dinner on the brink of tears. I don’t know, man, not to sound pretentious, but there are moments when you discover poets in fields you don’t expect them to be and this was one of them. Prose as a meal.

I experienced food differently than a lot of people growing up. I learned to not be picky, because what we had was what we had, and sometimes, it wasn’t a lot. It’s a gift I appreciate now, because I can do with little if I need and I’m not afraid to try new things. To experience food as more than a means of survival is an intense privilege, one that I’ve discovered the past few years but have not always experienced. To be honest, I never really realized that hot dogs could taste great, because we boiled hot dogs from the cheap packs and ate them in cheap slices of bread that grew heavy and soggy with ketchup and mustard. To experience a Chicago hot dog felt like a wild new world for me, let alone a distilled Chicago hot dog.

I didn’t know that you could experience food this way, that it could be filling and delicious but also that it could say something, do something, challenge something. I left Alinea three hours after I got there with a full belly and a racing mind. I didn’t sleep much that night. I honestly feel like I’ll be chasing the high of that dinner like the high of watching an eclipse. I want to remember what that food tasted like. I want to remember how creative it was, how delicious.

Alinea feels like something to experience with other people. I don’t know if I’ll ever experience it again, or experience it with other people, but man, I’m glad I got to go once, contextualize food that way. What a joy.

I finished reading the last page of The Courage to Be Disliked this week and thought to myself, “Where the hell was this when I was leaving the Church?”

Honestly, I don’t know how this particular book would have landed in that period of my life, but reading it now, I’m reminded of how deeply afraid I was to choose a life that would disappoint the people I love and how deeply anxious and disappointed I felt trying to fit into the life that I had allowed other people to choose for me.

As I’ve been building a different life outside of the church, one where the choices are truly mine, there have been so many songs and stories that have held me and given me a space to cry or a gentle nudge forward.

Here is the literature that held me when I left Mormonism and that holds so much meaning to me now:

The View Between Villages by Noah Kahan

Nothing, for me, has captured the grief of being caught between the physical and figurative homes you’ve left and the physical/figurative homes you’ve chosen like this song.

I sometimes switch the lyric to “the things that I knew here, the people I lost,” because changing, for me, came with a cost of losing the things I “knew” and some of the people I cared about. I’ve cried to this song more times than I can count.

“Pioneers,” a poem by Carol Lynn Pearson

I reference this poem fairly often because, for me, it was a tipping point, shared by a friend on a dark evening when I was wracked with guilt at the idea of leaving the church my ancestors had sacrificed so much for.

It reframed what a pioneer is for me and helped me realize that, even though it’s a choice my pioneer ancestors wouldn’t have made and may not have been proud of, leaving the church to go out into a wilderness of my own choosing is exactly the kind of thing a pioneer does, not because it’s popular but because it’s the call their soul responds to.

wonder eye by Little Moon

I think I stumbled onto Little Moon by stumbling onto their Tiny Desk Concert, or it may have been Salt Lake City Twilight. Unsure. I was told at some point that either the lead singer or multiple members of the band are former Mormons. This particular song grapples with death. To me, the lines that are particular poignant are:

“Is there a tale that we make true in the telling? Is there a knowledge that is found in not knowing?”

You can probably unpack the significance of that. I’ve rolled my mind over those lines so many times to grow more comfortable with not knowing anymore, to feel confident in not knowing and what acknowledging that unknowing does to empower me.

The Truman Show

I watched parts of this movie years and years ago, in the ninth grade, I believe. Then, it didn’t mean much to me. Last year, I got on a treadmill and The Truman Show was playing on the TV. I started watching late enough into the film that I nearly fell off the belt, the similarities between the film and my experience growing up in the church and starting to see cracks struck me so hard.

My Own Soul’s Warning by The Killers

I highly doubt Brandon Flowers intended for someone to take this particular meaning away from “My Own Soul’s Warning.” In fact, I’m pretty certain this song is about distancing one’s self from God and then realizing you want to get back, which I fear is not my particular story.

However, the hook of this song is a mantra I repeat to myself often to remind myself that I know how it feels to be dishonest with myself and make choices that don’t align with how I feel. My soul’s warning told me to leave, and leaving is how I listened.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

For the number of times I heard that Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity growing up, I also don’t think he would be particularly pleased with the way I’ve interpreted his work, but c’est la vie.

No other story contextualizes my experience of leaving Mormonism like The Hobbit. It’s, in part, the story of a little being who is extremely comfortable in the community he has never left, who fears that everything outside that community will be a horror and discovers that, while the world outside is scarier, it is so big and so beautiful and so much more than he ever imagined. So much so, in fact, that he can barely tolerate it when he returns to The Shire, it just feels so small and, in my interpretation, so small-minded to him.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Admittedly, I don’t remember any of this book, which it makes it seem weird to include it, but I read Untamed soon after it came out in 2020, right when I was stumbling into the penultimate gasps of my life in Mormonism. I remember hating it because it scared the spit out of me. It touched the nerve that was telling me to go and I didn’t like acknowledging that that nerve was there. I think I might owe more to this book than I think I do, so definitely time for a reread.

Honorable Mentions: Psalm of the Wild-Built (for a different interpretation on the meaning of life), LABOUR by Paris Paloma (this song doesn’t really hold or comfort me, but it voices the anger I feel towards institutions that pretend to care about women but never ever choose to hear them), To Shake the Sleeping Self.

One of the things that scared me most about leaving the church was not knowing who I’d be without it. I pictured myself like a 7-layer dip where six of the layers were related to Mormonism. It was so enmeshed into my identity and my personality, I imagined removing it would only leave behind a sad puddle of guac.

Then I left and discovered I was essentially the same underneath everything, except I liked coffee and I loved not going to church on Sunday.

My exit was propelled in part by the church’s treatment of the LGBTQ community. For one of my good friends who’s gay, leaving the church was propelled by its treatment of women. It’s funny to me to think we could see the way the church harmed people we cared about before we could fully see how it was harming us.

While my identity is no longer fully wrapped up in the church, I’ve realized that it’s still tightly wrapped up in what the church taught me about womanhood, namely the centering of men.

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I grew up in a country town with some of the flattest and quietest roads in the state of Utah. That meant I grew up hearing my neighbors incessantly talk shit about cyclists.

They complained about cyclists slowing down traffic, they complained about cyclists creating traffic, they joked about wanting to plow cyclists down in their trucks. Some of them attempted it (ask me about the farmer off Sam Fellow road who nearly ran me over then proceeded to scream at me for something he did wrong). Few things seem to bother the lifted truck community like recreationists in tight shorts legally riding on their roads.

There are at least four major organized rides that regularly traverse the area I grew up in. Most of them are male dominated rides. But the ride I heard the worst shit about growing up—from cyclists, family members, and neighbors—was Little Red.

Little Red was the kiddie ride. Little Red was the ride for people (read: women) who have no idea how to ride, who have no business cycling. Little Red was nothing but women having “Relief Society” in the middle of the street (said derogatorily). You think country men hate men in tight shorts? See what they think about women in the saddle.

That kind of talk rubbed off on me.

I grew up with a dad who did Lotoja for several years. My siblings and I were his Lunchable and Capri Sun-armed support crew, whom my mom would sate on long stretches of the route with playground stops and lava rocks. One of my earliest memories is sitting with my sister in a yellow Burley attached to the back of dad’s beetle-purple Klein, whipping around the corners of country roads. I learned to ride a bike in a pasture. When I turned 21, I rode in my first Cache Valley Century. It dumped rain and hail, and I was so proud that my small group of friends finished when so many other cyclists called it quits. I did a Gran Fondo soon after that. Then I did another Cache Valley Century. The one ride I never touched was Little Red.

I associated Little Red with incompetence and inexperience. I looked down on it. Something about participating in co-ed centuries (and being one of only a few young women I saw participating in co-ed centuries) made me feel like I was special and too good for Little Red. I felt like I was one of the boys, and feeling like I was one of the boys made me allergic to the idea of being one of the girls, especially since I’d never fully felt like I was one of the girls to begin with. I think maybe, when you’re taught that womanhood looks a certain way during your formative years and you don’t fit into that mold, it’s easy to resent feminine spaces and expression and instead seek validation from people or groups that don’t take women seriously. I think that’s why the idea of riding with other women was completely unappealing to me.

It was my damn loss, honestly.

The first time I participated in Little Red was two years ago. I was 30. I was also in my Unpacking Era, healing my relationship with femininity, deconstructing the church—an ongoing endeavor—and generally wanting to seize life by the horns. A friend asked me if I wanted to do it and since I hadn’t been in the saddle in awhile, I said yes. That ride turned out to be my favorite ride I have ever done.

There’s a special energy I’ve fallen in love with since leaving the church that I thought was just unique to the women’s restroom of a bar/club. Everybody is a little buzzed and sweaty and messy. Compliments bubble out of them. They tell you how beautiful you are, they compliment your dress, your hair. They help you fix parts of your outfit that have fallen askew. It’s unconditional. It’s raw and honest, not glossed in religiosity. One second you’re surrounded by strangers at the sink, and the next, they’re the greatest hype women you’ve ever had. Little Red was the first women-centered space outside of a bar where I felt that energy.

Both of the times I’ve done Little Red, I’ve stood at the rest stops in awe watching women of every age, body type, and experience level interact with each other. On my first ride, my friend and I drank pickle juice shots with a table full of women I met that day, all of us gagging and giggling together. Different segments of the ride have signs up saying things like “Tell the next woman who passes you that she’s hot!” You’ll have cyclists ride by and compliment you on things like your bike or your kit or your hair. They’ll tell you you’re doing great. There’s support at every single step, from volunteers and cyclists alike. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced at an organized ride, free (for the most part) from the harried, strict, dog-eat-dog business of co-ed rides that I’ve experienced.

There are women who ride tactically, who zip past you on an uphill after having done 20 miles more than you, whose iron calves I’ve definitely caught myself gawking at. But the thing I was struck by the first time I did this ride and the most recent time this past weekend is the way Little Red has made cycling more accessible for women of all experience levels and how, rather than being the weakness of the ride, it’s its core strength.

Cycling has, in spirit, always been a women’s sport. Suffragettes found independence and greater ability to organize with the invention of the bicycle and it led to the liberation of women’s legs with more riders wearing pants for practicality reasons (big fan). But women have historically been underrepresented in the sport and had less access. As a child, I only ever associated Lotoja with men. We can name Lance Armstrong, but can we name a woman dominating the sport (without taking performance-enhancing drugs to do so)? Also consider that cycling makes you vulnerable. I still remember sitting uncomfortably on my bike at a light in Logan as strange men catcalled me from the safety of their truck. I worried they would follow me home. I was 18 when the man who nearly ran me over pulled up and screamed at me. I couldn’t speak, I was so afraid he would harm me.

Even when I think of the rides I did in my 20s and how special I felt as one of only a few young women there, I’m reminded of comments and behaviors by men on those rides that, had I been attuned to it, I would have recognized as sexism. Instead of recognizing the sexism, I gobbled it up and spat it back out, treating the women who did Little Red like they were unserious while being treated like I was unserious by the men whose words I parroted. The co-ed rides I participated in had an air of brashness and competition around them that, I can imagine, made them a hard space for many women to feel comfortable entering, especially if they’re just starting to develop an interest in cycling. Add a little casual sexism and it’s even less welcoming.

It’s a funny and sad irony that I resisted female spaces like Little Red for so long when participating in them would have helped me feel more at home in my own femininity, feel more belonging as a woman, feel like a real woman can have whatever interests she wants, whether they be painting nails or sweating balls on a clanky Specialized bicycle up Newton Dam.

Between Little Red and the Eras Tour, I’ve learned that women’s spaces (divorced of the judgment and perfectionism I grew up around) are magical, that femininity takes many forms, and that it’s hella fun to be around thousands of women who like the same thing or are trying to get better at the same thing. It’s sooooooo fun to be one of the girls.

I’ve even learned to love the color pink a little.

For one thing, she amassed enough attention to be honored onstage at Trixie Mattel’s show in Salt Lake City. For another, up until, like, five days ago, the Salt Lake City subreddit had a superthread pinned on their page that was just about Julia, filled with AI generated votive candles and pissed people wanting Julia to just die (again) already—or at least for billboard companies to die.

I entered this conversation last fall when I decided to dress as Julia for Halloween. Since then, I’ve become a weird sort of human confessional box where people drop their favorite Julia memes or their uncensored opinions about the billboards. I’ve gone to bat for Julia more times than I can count, sometimes ending up so deep that I have to rein myself in by reminding myself I literally know five things about her. Lately, I find myself enchanted by the Julia effect, but also billboards. Enchanted by them, despising them, and just generally fascinated by the culture around them.

Take the long stretch of highway south out of Beaver or west past Tooele, and you’ll likely be inundated with sun-faded hamburgers and drip coffee you should try, out-of-state casinos ravenous for the flesh of your dollar bills, or the scaly cover of a Holy Bible paired with a cry of repentance. To move through the veins of the barren West is to be sold cheap food, cheap thrills, and the fear of hell—capitalists and evangelists alike battling to be your manna in the wilderness. And if not you, some other desperate, soul-racked chump.

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It’s been a little while since I wrote something in this space! I logged in today to the news that I’d lost a couple of paid subscribers (and you know what, in a time of tariff-induced uncertainty, I can’t say I blame anyone for jumping out of the S.S. Ari). I’ll be honest, it’s hard to feel creative when you’re crashing out, and the past two weeks have seen a lot of crashing out in my neck of the woods.

Between my mental health taking a steep dive and existing in the time that we do when every day the news presents some new horror to grapple with, it’s been hard to find the mental stamina to write. I took a poetry course the past couple of weeks and every time I put pen to paper, my brain was a shadowy, spidery spiral. I wrote nonsense. Complete fluff. Incomprehensible garbage.

This is the first time I’ve really felt like I’m on the up and up. So, we’re back! We’re not so back, but we’re back.

A lot has been happening in my little world the past few weeks, some I’m keeping close to my chest. I got to attend the Bernie/AOC rally in Salt Lake City on Sunday and was nearly brought to tears by AOC. I think she’s one of the most genuine, empowering and good people in DC right now and all I could think about was that I want her to be president. I thought I was there to see Bernie, but I realized almost the moment she began speaking that I was there for her.

There are lots of other new things happening in my world. I’ve been taking a dance class—that isn’t so new—but I’ve been discovering in new ways how that dance class has made me feel empowered and sexy in my body. I’ve been feeling very empowered and sexy in my body.

While I’ve felt empowered in my body, my brain has felt a bit like a mine collapsing in on itself. It’s been hard to breathe. It’s been hard to move forward. I’ve been here before, and that’s what makes being here another time so shitty, but I am a different person this time and all I can grasp at is that I have different tools to deal with this than I did, and hopefully better tools.

I’m hurrying to finish this week’s Stack because in about fifteen minutes, my friend Sarah will swing by to take me to the airport on a trip to New York City. I haven’t been since 2019. I’m so excited to be back. To reunite with John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street, my true and everlasting love. To see Sarah Snook on Broadway! To go get my picture taken next to that massive-ass pigeon. To see everyone parade down the city in their best Easter bonnets! I can’t wait.

Just god give me the strength to survive this red eye.