One of the lovely things about living in San Francisco, or any similar city, is summer music in the park. I’ve never taken advantage of it before this summer, because I’ve always thought my feet and back would hurt, I’d have to stand in a long line to fulfill basic needs like peeing and drinking water, and I’d be traipsing after some group of random friends-of-friends, failing to charm them as my mind called up complaints instead of witticisms. This is also why I don’t like the Fourth of July.

But my roommate Madeline, whose stated goal in life is to have fun and look hot, really wanted to see Charli xcx this year, so she’d gotten us tickets. By the time the festival rolled around, Madeline couldn’t go because of her concussion/whiplash injury. “You have to enjoy it for the both of us,” she said from the floor, where she was tangled in an ergonomic pillow and chugging electrolytes. “And get me a Charli shirt.” I didn’t want to go alone. I actually didn’t want to go at all. But thanks to a previous New Year’s Resolution to eradicate Taylor Swift from my Spotify Wrapped, the lineup was actually peppered with a lot of my favorites. I did it for Ethel Cain and Audrey Hobert. And Madeline. And because I was still haunted by the time I asked one of my senior-year high school teachers how many parties he thought I’d managed to be at over the past four years and he accurately guessed that it was three.

And the music festival was actually really fun! What a relief. I am normal, capable of enjoying something that is universally beloved.

I want everyone to have this kind of fun. So if you have avoided going to a music festival because you think you’re not cut out for it, allow me to solve your problems.

It’s more comfortable than you think.

Despite my Oregon upbringing, I hate sleeping on the ground. Growing up, a lot of my friends went to the now-defunct Sasquatch, and I think the Columbia River Gorge was probably a nicer place to camp than the scorching hot desert at Coachella or what I imagine to be a sort of orgy of mud wrestling at Bonnaroo. But what I didn’t previously understand is that city-centric festivals like Outside Lands, Lollapalooza, and Governor’s Ball are different. You can sleep in a real bed and shower in a real shower and then take transit to the festival grounds. If you are lucky enough to live somewhere with a festival like this, you can sleep in your own bed and take your own bus.

Plus, festival grounds are not stadiums or even music venues. Often, they are parks, with wide-open spaces, creative seating areas, and picnic tables. I thought you needed to stand in the crowd for every set, so I approached my first few shows the way I do dinner parties: by arriving so early that it’s even more rude than being late.

Festival People do not behave this way. They saunter up to the shows they care a medium-amount about, then chill in the back on the grass or at a table to conserve energy for their faves. This is an effective strategy. On Day 2, I brought a dish towel in my fanny pack, because I wanted to be able to park my ass wherever without getting wet.

I also brought illicit gummies designed for Bay Area tech bros to microdose their vibe coding to the next level. This was off-brand for me. I like to stay sober. But the first and only other time I took drugs at a concert I was 28, and I finally realized that was how everyone had been enduring music festivals. So I brought these gummies and they distracted me from thinking about my feet. I felt really old for wanting to take drugs not for the rush, but for the increased stamina. Outside Lands is chill enough that I could have skipped them, but I didn’t, and I want to write an honest review of my experience.

It’s a good deal.

If you are not a Festival Person, you’re probably not going to that many concerts throughout the year, and maybe this point doesn’t mean a lot. But I paid ~$500 for my Outside Lands ticket and saw twelve artists in a satisfying way. Five of those are newish artists that I listen to all the time, two are lifelong faves, and two are artists that I feel like I discovered through being at the festival. For comparison, since August of last year I spent a little over $400 on four concerts, only two of which I actually ended up attending. Only one was as important to me as the artists I saw at the festival. Even though Outside Lands is objectively expensive if you don’t buy the early tickets (and even if you do), thinking about it this way helped me feel like I was getting my money’s worth, which in turn helped me chill out.

More importantly, though, each individual concert requires getting dressed, getting there, standing around, and getting out. This is not a small effort. A music festival, on the other hand, requires you to enter and exit only at the beginning and end of the day. For each individual set within that, you’re just casually wandering up to the stage with a Korean corn dog in one hand and a cardamom iced coffee in the other. This made me much more likely to attend and enjoy the shows.

You can go alone.

Madeline and I were in mourning over her lost Outside Lands experience for months. When I got there on Friday, the friends I was supposed to meet up with got VIP tickets through their work and did a bad job communicating that they were actually not going to leave their cabana to fraternize with me in GA. This made me worried for the rest of the weekend, which I’d assumed would include meeting up with people. I wondered if I should have sold the ticket after all. I often struggle with groups in this type of situation, because it doesn’t always feel like meaningful connection is happening and it’s more a battle of whose particular social climbing will set the agenda (perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s never mine).

But then I found my friend Emma, and joined up with her high school friends. We traversed three different stages in just a few hours so that by the time Charli came on that night I felt like a member of a wagon train. A guy with a flannel and a beard used his broad shoulders to protect our area from drunk people who wanted to crush us, and a sweet dad with a 12-year-old daughter at home clipped plastic sprouts to our heads and belted out all the lyrics to “Girl, So Confusing” with me and Emma. We all squealed and gripped each other gleefully when the bass shook the lawn.

The next day I texted my friend Fima who’d mentioned he also had a ticket and scooped him from the Castro on my way to the park. We accidentally got off the streetcar at the wrong stop and ended up starting the day with a long walk-and-talk through the misty park, which satisfied my need for real conversation, putting me in my best possible mood once we got to the Audrey Hobert show, which was my #1 priority for the entire weekend. When we got there, he came right up to the front with me even though he’d never heard her music and laughed out loud at her lyrics. In the afternoon, we wanted to do different things, so we split up and I went to see Dijon with another of my good friends from college and her husband. It turns out that’s what everyone does! They just split up from their friends when they want to do their own thing, and being alone at a show doesn’t mean that you are a loser. Festival People are friendly, so every time I found myself on my own, I found random people to chitchat with.

You don’t have to stay all day.

The whole weekend, I was constantly telling myself that I could leave if I wanted to. Dayenu, having seen Charli, Audrey, and Ethel Cain would have been enough! I also think telling myself I could leave helped me feel free to stay. On Saturday night, I considered going home a little early to get on an empty bus, but Fima was infectiously excited about The xx, so I kept staying for “one more song” until it was the end of the set. It turned out to be the best show of the weekend. I’d forgotten how much I loved those songs.

I’d also considered skipping Sunday entirely because I didn’t know anyone going and was only excited about one or two artists. But by that point in the weekend, I truly was a new person. When I wasn’t at the festival, I was at home lying in bed tearing up over the beauty of Ethel Cain’s songs, wondering why I’m not devoting more of my life to being an artist and having collective human experiences, with bras and drug gummies strewn all over my bedroom. I had even stopped by the Soma stage and listened to Ben Böhmer on my own at one point, considering becoming the kind of person who goes to raves in the redwoods. I needed to go back to the park.

But I really only wanted to see Death Cab, which was an early set. I was one of the first people in. The grounds were so peaceful in the morning, with mist rolling in off the water. I went to the merch tent, which on Friday had been mobbed with people who apparently want to pay hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to maybe buy a tee shirt. On Sunday morning it was practically empty. I got Madeline her Charli shirt and slipped it in my fanny pack, then went to get a good spot for Death Cab. I made a friend in the crowd, cried about the passage of time, and put my sunglasses on as I filed out so my new friend wouldn’t think I was unhinged.

Then I got a coffee, did a spin around the grounds to see all the little nooks and crannies I missed, and left at 2pm. Because it turns out, you can actually just do whatever you want.

I went to the Musee D’Orsay. My time slot was at 3pm and the museum was closing early because of the heat wave. I tried to fit everything into an hour. My feet throbbed and my attention waned. There was a Renoir exhibit. Beautiful, to see such iconic artworks refracted through nine other tourists’ iPhones.

What’s the point of seeing the world? I thought as I risked getting trampled in a crowd crush at Citypharm so I could buy an eye cream. When I’d pictured my Eurotrip, I’d imagined Aperol Spritzes clinking on a patio in golden hour light. I knew that when I got home I’d only remember how beautiful my sister looked in her dress, how it felt to plunge into a cold river with my new Bavarian brother-in-law, walking through a lush Berlin park with my friends, my feet dangling off a ski lift over the Alps with my friend Anna. But in the present, I thought I looked fat in the photos and I was developing a bunion.

I showed the hostel boys some photos of my sister’s wedding in Munich and accepted their invitation to go take pictures of the Eiffel Tower. For some people (maybe including me), that is the point of seeing the world.

“Are we ready to go now?” I asked after I’d had enough of trying to fit both their bodies and the top of the Eiffel Tower into the frame of their iPhone cameras. The boys encouraged me to sit down on the concrete steps and look at the tower, all lit up in the night. One of them was in Europe to see Tomorrowland. It was his lifelong dream.

“What do you have to lose?” he said, poetically. “Only time.”

“I am losing sleep,” I said, but sat on the steps and looked. I wasn’t relaxing on my vacation, but maybe the point wasn’t to relax. Maybe it was to experience awe and meet the other people who were living on the other side of the world at the same time as you. Maybe it was to be a character in their lifelong dream. I focused again on the view.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and it actually was.

The next day I went to DHL to mail my application for a Lithuanian Sorry-About-the-Holocaust passport, which would unlock my ability to be uncomfortable in Europe full-time. The guy who worked at the little store that sells fans and SIM cards didn’t speak English and my internet was broken so I couldn’t use my translation app. We had a dispute about the zip code. I walked out of the store, having paid 48 euros to not mail the documents, and urgently had to use the bathroom. I was also late to check out of the hostel. I went to a nearby Ibis hotel, where I’d stayed in Berlin, because when I am in a foreign country I think that anywhere I’ve spent money at any point in my life is basically an American Embassy. Their WiFi didn’t work and they didn’t have a bathroom in the lobby. I burst into tears, which didn’t move the woman at the front desk at all. I hurried back to the hostel looking out over the canal and ruminating on wanting to go home. Maybe the point of travel was to experience what life would be like if San Francisco and its temperate climate and technological advances hadn’t smoothed every remaining wrinkle out of my existence. I saw that it is possible to know, deep down, that you’re lucky to be seeing the world, and also feel on a physical level like you are fighting to survive in the wilderness.

Whenever I feel like this, I always think to myself that I should really try to be happy and enjoy my objectively good life. And then I think of the phrase practicing melancholy, from Camille Bordas’s How to Behave in a Crowd. Here, the eleven-year-old protagonist’s older sister is speaking to him.

“‘What goes on in your head when you step out of the present is always richer and more satisfying than what you come back to when you’re done. That’s the sad part. That’s what’s at the core of melancholy, not the things you actually imagine … Most people find it sad that someone would think the present so mediocre that they’d be eager to retreat to a life that is only a figment of their imagination, which is what melancholics do. That’s why they, like you, equate melancholy with sadness, but they’re wrong. Practicing melancholy and being sad are two very different things.’”

Then, on the next page:

“‘Also, being in the present sucks because there’s always something sort of annoying going on in your body, whereas if you think in another time dimension, the body becomes less of a problem.’

‘What goes on in your body that annoys you?’

‘Don’t get me started.’”

By the last day, I was ready to go home. But when I’d set an alarm for “tomorrow” it was already 12:30am, so the alarm did not deploy and I woke up late, only to discover my flight had been cancelled and rebooked for two days later. At this point, I’d spent about 2,000 euros I hadn’t planned to spend, pissed my sister off two days before her wedding, and missed both a concert and a train ride, each of which had cost a non-refundable 150 euros. I accepted the cancelled flight with a saintly composure, too tired to get worked up. I called my friend Julia, who invited me to her apartment on the outskirts of the city where she said I could sleep in her roommate’s empty room.

The temperature dropped to 70 degrees. Julia lives in a sort of expat sorority of New Yorkers who wear colorful, flowy pants and have quietly ironic senses of humor. Their apartment is beautiful. They told me the best things to do (a local flea market with actually low prices, a deliciously uncrowded Calder exhibit) and at night they cooked for me and we all worked our American jobs around their big dining table between rounds of Rummy 500. I coordinated the removal of my old couch and the seamless delivery of the new one via my roommate, who was feeding the cats and holding down the fort. I was finally having a relaxing time in Europe. All it had taken was the removal of pressure (and some cool air).

On the flight home, I sat next to a sweet dad and his two daughters from the Caribbean island of Martinique. They were flying from there to Paris to San Francisco all in one day, so that they could road trip through the American desert in July. The dad showed me their itinerary, printed out and slotted into a leather-bound binder. My heart ached for this man, who had given me his snack mid-flight because I slept through the meal service. I hoped the reality of their trip would match their expectations. I worried that after all that travel, it wouldn’t, that they would be too hot in Arizona or get lost in the Century City parking garage or have to eat at a Holiday Inn breakfast buffet. I typed “IN N OUT” and “DUMPLINGS” into a note on the daughter’s phone and told them to bring water on their hikes.

When I got home, the new couch was in the living room. The first thing I did was hold my breath, take in its color and texture, and sink onto it. The couch was expensive for me, which basically just means it was new from the store instead of used from Craigslist. Before the Eurotrip the price point had been doable but now felt like a referendum on all my life choices.

“I think it’s good, right?” Madeline said. “Do you like it?”

I assessed the situation. Normally, I think, I would have found something to nitpick. But at that moment, I needed to sit on my own couch badly, and could find nothing wrong with my apartment purely by virtue of it being my home. My bed was still there. The books I’d optimistically checked out from the library had collected some dust. My tabletop herb garden had exploded while I was away. My cats were perfect even though one of them immediately plunged her fang deep into the fat part of my hand. I had work opportunities in my email inbox, which is always both good and bad. I’d run into a friend on the bus and another walking her dog around the neighborhood. I had a renewed appreciation for San Francisco, the people I’d seen and met on the trip—and for my family, who had all done a pretty good job of getting along with each other after flying across the world to see my sister get married.

I sat down on the couch.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. And it actually was.

We both spend all day in the apartment, so we have no reason to get dressed. I work from home and she is on medical leave from her job as a flight attendant. She used to fly to Seoul for 36 hours and come back bearing fistfuls of Laneige. But since her accident, she mostly lies on the couch with her heating pad. In the morning she sits on the couch staring into space like a Victorian woman suffering from consumption. I don’t really know what consumption is, but Madeline looks like she has it. I usually sit at my desk in my room doing my 900 jobs and worrying about her. Sometimes we take breaks for me to read Yesteryear aloud to her as if she were my child, and then I’ll make us both an elaborate meal while Madeline tells me that I’m the tradwife. We are both trying to define what’s happening here, because there isn’t a shorthand for when your roommate gets a concussion and you become her de facto caretaker. Three years ago, Madeline was just some flight attendant moving to the city looking for a roommate on Facebook. Two years ago she was my roommate who became a really good friend. Now she’s basically my next of kin.

She sits down on the banquette and when they call her name I bring the coffee to her. I look around at all the Bernal Heights moms with their toddlers and then I look at Mad in her collar. When we look especially bedraggled, it exaggerates our differences such that I feel especially like the shabby mother of a teenage girl. Even now, she’s prone to wearing hot pink and acrylic nails, afraid people won’t be able to see she’s still hot and blonde. I’m on the prettier side of plain-looking, the human equivalent of a Honda Civic, and a little older than her. Before, we were just two girls who came in different flavors. Now, with the cervical collar and the servitude, we are a weird pair.

“I wonder what kind of kink relationship everyone thinks this is,” I say as I bring her a wooden stir stick. “Maybe they think I’m Cheryl and you’re Clee.” But Madeline hasn’t read The First Bad Man. Since her concussion, she can only read a few lines of text at a time, with the little frames the vestibular therapist gave her held up like opera glasses.

While we’re waiting, I remind Madeline that she needs to call the UCSF Primary Care line as soon as they open. She is annoyed at me, because she is sick of calling doctors, especially since they never know what’s wrong with her.

“But it takes three months to get an appointment, so every day you wait, it’s three months plus one day,” I say, even though I know she knows this.

“GOD, you’re SO MEAN!” she says. Then, after she’s settled down a little: “Is this making you want to have kids more, or less?”

“Less,” I laugh. I actually think about this a lot lately. I have increasingly begun to suspect I don’t want kids, and my caretaking has somewhat confirmed that hunch. But it’s not because I feel resentful of Madeline. I think I just don’t want kids.

If everyone around me wasn’t having kids, I would never, ever think about it. I have never once yearned to hold my own child. When I think about being on my deathbed and not having published a book, my stomach drops, but when I think about being on my deathbed and not having a kid, I just feel…nothing. Every so often I start dating someone I really like, and then I think I would maybe do it with them, if they really wanted to. After all, even a broken biological clock is right twice a day. But other than that, any drive I have to procreate is just a fear of being the only person left without kids when I hit my forties.

I’ve been having the realization that I probably don’t want kids just as everyone else around me is getting pregnant. It’s not uncommon that when I’m catching up with a friend, their update is that they are pregnant, and mine is that the biggest drama in my life is Madeline’s injury. I haven’t perfected the art of delivering this information.

When I say that the doctors seem to agree that Madeline will get better eventually, I worry people will think it’s weird that I’m so affected by something that seems like it’s not a big deal. But when I say that she’s really debilitated, people look disturbed and think it’s hopeless when it’s not. I often don’t even attempt to say what I really want to say—because I’m afraid it makes me sound like one of those moms who want their kids to be sick—which is that it is kind of hard, but Madeline and I are still having fun. We are actually having so much fun that I can’t believe no one told me about this option when I was growing up and my sister and I were planning out the age at which we would each get married and have kids. When I was taking on debt to go to college, my dad always said, horrified, that if I did, I’d still be living with roommates at 30. Now I’m 35 and the debt is gone and I’m living with roommates because I want to. Because I don’t think the pinnacle of success is living alone in a box, and I just haven’t found anyone I want to marry yet.

Like in a marriage, the thing about living in a community is that, in a good one, you get back what you put in. I worry about Madeline and go with her to her doctors appointments and pull her out of the deep dark hole she can sometimes fall into on Reddit, and she tells me the food I cooked is restaurant-quality and then does the dishes and sits on the couch psychoanalyzing the cats ad nauseum with me. We share a French press every morning and take turns taking out the trash and she tells me when the shorts I bought online to try to look like Billie Eilish look like ass.

Every day Madeline makes a smoothie and brings me a tiny glass of the leftovers that won’t fit in her cup while I work at my desk, watching the hummingbirds in the tree outside. We get along so well that anyone in my life can call and I can put them on speakerphone and I am not worried about them spilling something I’ve said about Mad behind her back. Everything we’ve had conflict about, we’ve said to each other’s faces. We don’t have passive aggressive roommate tension because when one of us annoys the other we just fake-yell at each other about it and then laugh and stop doing the thing we do that is annoying, or the other person gets over it because we remember that we love each other.

“I’m pregnant” is so much easier to convey than everything I just wrote. In lieu of an equivalent shorthand, when people ask me how I’ve been, I usually just say that I’m great except that Madeline is really sick and I’ve been trying to help her a lot. “Make sure you’re taking care of you,” they always say. This is the correct thing to say based on the probably overdramatic things I have shared, and I would say the same thing if I were in their shoes. People want to make sure that I’m not forsaking myself for this uncategorizable relationship that doesn’t even come with a tax break. But I think it’s also important to remember that sometimes it’s okay to forsake yourself for someone who would also do it for you, because that’s what real friendship is. Isn’t this the “community” so many people on the internet have been saying we’ve lost? Isn’t this kind of the ideal alternative lifestyle, if it’s looking like you’re not about to get married anytime soon?

While we’re sitting there in the cafe, one of my closest friends calls to tell me she’s pregnant. Madeline hears the whole conversation, and when I get off the phone, we both say, “That was weird timing.” She asks me how I feel, because we both feel left out whenever someone else gets pregnant, but for different reasons. Madeline is worried she’s missing her window and I’m worried everyone is going to leave me behind.

“I actually feel really happy for her,” I say, and I mean it.

As we get up to leave the coffee shop, Madeline takes her neck brace off.

“I’m going to try walking back without the brace,” she says. I look at her with an expression I know is flat and condescending. She never wears that brace and looks for every excuse to walk without it, then feels sore later.

“What?” she says.

“‘Trying’ would be putting the brace on,” I say, and she rolls her eyes but puts it on. We walk home in silence in the sunshine. We don’t say anything. We don’t really need to.

I spent last week housesitting in Venice Beach. I’ve been back to Los Angeles many times since I last lived there, but this was the first time in years that I stayed on the West Side, which is where I lived previously. So it felt like the first time I’d actually been back. It may be difficult for my fellow San Franciscans, who think that a seventeen-minute drive is a schlep, to imagine a city so huge that the other half of it feels like a different city entirely. This sense of sprawling, infinite possibility is a feature I sorely miss when it is 8pm, every mom-and-pop restaurant in my neighborhood is closed, and thanks to the ban on chains there isn’t a Sweetgreen for miles. Despite my obvious preference for Los Angeles, I remain a San Franciscan.

On my trip, I listened to the Famesick audiobook. Like every brown-haired Jewish girl with a blog, I saw so much of myself in Lena Dunham’s crisp explication of a millennial’s emotional blueprint, and I couldn’t help but feel a little insecure about my own life and creative career. I understand that the message I am supposed to take away from Famesick is that being a famous artist will ruin your relationships, maim your body, and land you in rehab—and that’s if you’re lucky enough to survive it. But I have a habit of absorbing the wrong message from cautionary tales. While I was there, Los Angeles was also plastered with marketing for the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, a film that is single-handedly responsible for my decision to shell out $200,000 I didn’t have for a journalism degree from an institution I was sure would issue me not only a diploma, but a glamorous wardrobe inclusive of a collegiate sweatshirt, and a boyfriend who knows what Jarslberg cheese is.

I was already thinking about these millennial heroines when my childhood best friend came to have dinner with me in my borrowed bungalow.

“I think you’re a writer because it allows you to go from feeling like the side character to the main character,” she said, apropos of whatever writing-related thing we were talking about. My best friend is a blonde, gregarious actress/writer. This feeling is not one she was assigning to me, but one I’ve told her has always plagued me. Once I heard or read someone describing their position in the social hierarchy of high school as “just close enough to the popular kids to be able to make fun of them,” and I have never related to something more.

One reason Famesick was so fun to read is because it’s part of a very defining pop culture tradition for a certain kind of millennial girl: the brown-haired smart girl who becomes popular. Like Andi Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, Gracie Hart in Miss Congeniality, or Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries getting makeovers, Lena’s writing catapulted her from side character to red-carpet-worthy protagonist. As I tore through Famesick, I realized that the desire to undergo this kind of transformation has been dormant within me since childhood. It is perhaps the same way for everyone else inhabiting my category of girl: I thought of how, recently, I was having dinner with one of my brown-haired smart girl friends who told me how she beat out all the other counselors at Jewish summer camp to get with the hot Israeli soldier. All summer, people whispered to her about how impressed (ie, surprised) they were. “I ensnared him with my personality,” she said, and I felt the triumph of the story viscerally.

Obviously part of why I enjoyed Famesick was the indulgence in this fantasy. There is perhaps nothing more millennial than feeling entitled and special enough to see Lena Dunham on the red carpet and think that could have been me. But my own twenties were full of examples of times I positioned myself just adjacent enough to the thing I wanted to observe the people who were actually getting it. I was presented with a lot of genuinely good opportunities, and instead of seizing them, I often took a sharp left turn. Or I hung out on the sidelines talking shit.

When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to be admitted to Northwestern’s journalism program, but when I got there I understood quickly that I was a little, insecure fish in a sea of Longchamp nylon purses. Instead of rising to the occasion, a friend and I started an anonymous satirical Twitter account called @NorthwesternGirl to make fun of the specific type of humblebrag that plagued the campus culture. (It is not lost on me that this post also has a humblebraggy quality to it—listen to how close I was to Greatness! At the end of the day I am also a Northwestern Girl.) @NorthwesternGirl viciously retweeted people who said things like, “I own enough Ann Taylor to clothe a small village” to point out that they were saying it without a shred of self-awareness. The account actually amassed a decent number of followers, enough that when I revealed that I was behind it to Ziwe (yes, that one) at a party, her eyes grew wide with recognition and admiration. But only one of us got famous for being cunty. Northwestern functioned much like those millennial makeover movies: it was an institution that turned nerds into stars. I just wasn’t one of them. It’s hard to know what to do with the feelings evoked by still being friends with SNL cast members on Venmo because you crossed paths with them in college. You feel lucky to have been there at all, and also like you’re wasting potential you never even believed you had.

Maybe Northwestern’s failure to transform me had a lasting effect. After college, I got a junior-level job at Condé Nast, but spent those years designing sales pitches for Brides while my Northwestern classmates fact checked for The New Yorker. Now I think about how I was in the building but on the wrong floor, and left before I could find my way to the right one. When I moved from New York to LA, my best friends and I made short films in our garage, but instead of writing or acting, I glued fake labels onto prop beer bottles and donated to their GoFundMes. I was writing short stories, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say, and so even if I had been savvy enough to tap Los Angeles’ vast Northwestern alumni network for help, I don’t think I would have gotten very far. What made Lena the type of person who took full advantage of the opportunities in front of her while I slunk off to the corner to gossip?

As my trip went on, I started to crave moving back to LA. I scrolled Zillow on my phone until my pinky went numb, wondering if a desire for a do-over was fueling the fervor. As I luxuriated in the chance to dip back into my old life as if it were a heated pool, I tried to remind myself, to no avail, that Famesick is not supposed to be an instruction manual. Lena became besties with Nora Ephron! I thought as I went to a writing workshop in Culver City with one of my all-time favorite authors. Lena wrote so beautifully about her fucked-up love affairs! I thought as I swiped on Tinder, just in case being in a new city might break my dating dry spell. This generation of workout class is completely different than those of the Tracy Anderson era! I thought as I did dozens of jumping jacks in a palo-santo-scented “somatic” workout class whose instructor insisted we were “creating strength instead of a deficit.” I spent large swaths of each day I was there working on the second draft of my novel on the sunny patio pretending it was a paid gig, like Lena writing Girls from her permanent residence in the Sunset Tower Hotel. I wished my trip, and my sojourn into a fantasy of creative success, was longer.

But when you’re just visiting, it’s easy to forget about the toxic fumes released by the commingling of Los Angeles and the millennial mindset. As in Lena’s ascent to fame, darkness lurked beneath the surface of my trip. Earlier this year, my roommate in SF got in a car accident that left her with scary complications from whiplash. Living in such close proximity to her misery, I remembered with horror that when I lived in LA, I T-boned someone at an intersection who sued my insurance, claiming whiplash. Everyone said they were sure she was just trying to get a payout, and I believed them. It’s only been in the last couple of months that I’ve realized how destructive my bad driving might have been, and the reality that someone out there might have been debilitated for life has been haunting me. Because I am a millennial and I run on shame, on my trip I conducted most of my social business on Abbot Kinney, which was within walking distance. I took buses all over the west side, no longer trusting myself to drive a borrowed car. I was jealous of the way Lena’s mistakes made for good copy, but I have never been that good at enduring the discomfort of my own.

Finally, on Friday I had East Side plans I could not bus to, and Uber would have been $50 each way. “Just drive really slow,” my best friend said. “And I’ll come help you if anything bad happens.” Our friend who drank himself to death last year had three brothers; two of them were in town at the same time I was and we all had plans to meet in Echo Park. As I gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, I considered how much baggage one can amass by their mid-thirties. Breakdowns, breakups, newfound hangups. How many 30- and 40-somethings reading Famesick have probably lost loved ones to addiction—or been the ones to hurt others? Lena’s pill habit was worth it because it made a hell of a story is something even I couldn’t delude myself into thinking.

There is a chilling line in which Lena describes realizing her illness was chronic. She writes: “Illness wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in.” It struck me that while I was wondering why I never became Lena Dunham, she was describing grief about no longer being someone like me, a side character just blithely passing through. I was a tourist in not just Los Angeles, but also all the alternative ways my life could have gone. And while it could have been better, it also could have been so, soooo much worse. Normal’s boring, but as you get older you’ve passed through some pretty desolate towns, and boring doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

After we met the boys for drinks, I walked a couple blocks to Echo Park Lake to go to Shabbat services with a friend. The sun was going down and my friend pointed through the window of the sanctuary at the golden hour light illuminating the fountain’s spray. The congregation was small, sweet, and welcoming, and I stood in the back with a group of girls—mostly brown-haired, all smart—dancing through Hashkiveinu like renegade ravers in a redwood grove. Someone gave a speech about how this place was the first Jewish space they’d ever felt truly accepted them, and I could see why. As my friend introduced me around, everyone greeted me like I was an honored guest on the red carpet when they heard I was from out of town—a marked difference from the way LA people usually greet an outsider. After the service, there was a dessert potluck in the courtyard, and I exchanged Substack links, book recommendations, and novel and script ideas with the girls over babka.

On the way back to Venice, I thought about how easy that had been, both because of their complete lack of competition or pretension, and because of mine. As I pulled the car into the driveway, not having hit anyone with it, I felt a surge of gratitude and affection for my normal little life. I knew that I was lucky. To be reading Famesick in Los Angeles instead of living it, to have had the kind of youth worth revisiting, to have made it to age 35 with a healthy body and maturing sense of what matters. What a great opportunity it is, I thought, to be the side character.

I cannot stress enough, for those of you who don’t know me, what a departure this is from my normal state. I am usually plagued by a wide-ranging and ever-present doubt. Some examples: At one of my first graphic design jobs in New York, I fucked up the design of a greeting card just before Thanksgiving break, and spent my entire visit to the 9/11 museum with my family ruminating on what my boss would say about it when we returned. Not even the room with the recordings of the victims’ last phone calls could penetrate my whirring mind. During COVID, I quarantined my socks because they had been outside and were probably contaminated. I lost track of how long each of the socks had been there but kept adding more until they were distributed across the carpet like craters on the surface of the moon. More recently, during Pride, I was given a free dental dam in Dolores Park. Later I went home to drop off my stuff before going to the club, but then got out of the line for the club to go home when I realized the dental dam was at large and the cats might swallow it, forcing me to choose between a $7,000 surgery or letting them die.

One of my new fans clocked immediately what it has taken me a lifetime to come to terms with:

Sometimes my worry spreads from my mind to my body. I’ve experienced involuntary full-body shivers in anticipation of events as minor as a first date, a wedding toast, a meeting. I have had debilitating work panic attacks about things like vinyl window lettering and business cards. I have made a car full of people turn around halfway to Disneyland to check if I turned the space heater off (I had).

It’s probably no surprise that I’ve experienced many similar doubts about writing. I spent so much on that fancy journalism degree and didn’t become a journalist; why am I not Miranda July; what if that person reads that thing and gets mad; I spent a year on a novel and it’s utter trash, etc. etc.

To remedy this, I usually turn to the internet and the wider culture, which is brimming with diverse peddlers of what is essentially the same message: confidence is sexy, so you should do xyz to get some. My friend recently told me she’s doing a mushroom journey. “To UNLEASH MYSELF,” she said. She asked me if I wanted to be there. I did. I actually also wanted to do the mushroom journey, but she said I was supposed to remain stable so that I can watch out for her and be available post-unleashing to watch Queer Eye and eat soup. Later I realized that while I think the mushroom journey is right for my friend, I probably shouldn’t do it. I’ve tried so many things like mushroom journeys, and none of them has ever made me any more confident in myself or my environment. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have failed to anoint me with Big Dick Energy:

1. Positive self-talk

2. Years of therapy

3. Antidepressants

4. MDMA

5. Moving to a foreign country that’s always on the brink of war

6. Looking at other people’s cellulite on Instagram

7. Listening to Brat

8. Dating people hotter than me to prove I was in their league

9. Dating people I didn’t really like that much so that I’d have the edge

10. Baring it all at Archimedes Banya

11. Participating in a ceremony of renewal at a Berkeley-based synagogue that involved chanting and an altar of botanical sacrifices

12. Reading all of these self-help books:

Freddie deBoer recently pointed out that the millennial tendency to perform insecurity, often branded as “imposter syndrome,” is annoying. But I think a lot of us genuinely feel anxious, insecure, or uncertain, and the only real cure I’ve come across is to get more experience. The good news is that it’s usually possible to get experience. The bad news is it might take a really long time, it’s not as easy as buying a crystal, and the monotony of getting better at something doesn’t lend itself to the specific brand of self-deprecating humor some of us like to wear as armor.

Still, in all the areas I care about the most, I’ve seen that it works. Five or six years into my graphic design career, the anxiety about making mistakes began to subside. Ten years in, at my local politics job, a miscommunication that was my fault resulted in us pissing off a beloved local farmer’s market. There were angry viral tweets and even an op-ed. We had to apologize on Twitter. This would have sent 23-year-old me spiraling. But at age 33, seeing immediately that I would live to tweet another day was a major personal milestone. Not as exciting as 2k likes on Substack, but it still felt good to realize I’d gotten over something that was once paralyzing. Similarly, four years into vaccination, I no longer worry about COVID, instead stopping every so often to marvel at having lived through a massive human tragedy. Years of dating have cured me of being nervous on dates; multiple wedding toasts have made public speaking bearable. And writing an essay people read has helped me believe I can do it again.

The idea that there’s no substitute for experience is, of course, not my own proprietary concept. My friend Jenny points out in my very favorite Substack Uneasy Going that exposure therapy is an evidence-backed approach to reducing anxiety and improving one’s life. Another of my friends was recently told by her therapist that she should strive to increase her “window of tolerance.” Yet another friend recently recalled how making friends at the foreign middle school her parents put her in during their sabbatical helped her stop eating lunch alone when she returned to the states.

Sometimes life exposes you to your greatest fears via brute force. Last summer, I lost someone of almost mythical import in my life to addiction. I wondered if losing a friend this way was somehow my failure, which is also my fear about the cats—that they will die because I didn’t protect them from themselves. But one strange silver lining I noticed after this loss was that I don’t freak out about the cats anymore. If I could survive losing someone so vitally important to me, I think, I could probably handle losing a cat. Actually, I don’t just think that. I know it, in only the way experiencing it can achieve.

Writing a clickable essay on Substack is, of course, not a cure-all for my writerly ruminations. But it’s definitely had a major impact. This blog is my most consistent writing and publishing practice to date, and I’ve felt plenty of panic about what I choose to post here. But I didn’t stop posting, even when some of the posts got 4 clicks. Now, for the first time ever, my brain has a rebuttal for a lot of its churning writing doubts. You wrote something that you thought was good, and then it made other people laugh, I keep thinking to myself whenever my brain starts to gnaw on whether it’s worth it to keep going.

So if you are one of the people who read my work and liked it, thank you. And if you’re someone who is wondering why you’re not confident in whatever it is you desperately want to do, maybe you just need to get out there. Pick your socks up off the floor, give your cat a dental dam and go enjoy the 9/11 memorial.

“I try not to do anything I don’t want to do,” he said.

Because I am chronically uncertain, I am always shopping for new ways of Being, and this intrigued me. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do! I thought to myself. That’s it!

But of course, many problems with this approach came to mind.

What do you do about work? I asked him in a Zoom DM when the group broke to do a generative exercise. He never responded. I guess he didn’t want to! This tapped a deep well of memories of other men who have never responded to me, and I began to feel less charitable to the man and his breezy outlook.

It only took me until the end of the Zoom meeting to conclude that this attitude is extremely male, and that hunch is in fact backed up by research. Even among singletons, the Gender Equity Policy Institute found in 2024, women enjoy 17% less free time than their male counterparts. Says the report: “Being a single woman is associated with having around 2.6 hours less free time per week compared to a male peer.”

I wondered: how many hours per week do I spend doing shit I don’t want to do? Surely more than 2.6 hours. What follows are my field notes from this pressingly urgent investigation.

***For legal reasons, let’s call this one autofiction.***

Day One

I wake up at 5:11a to the metallic melody of my cats’ dry food dispensing from the spout of their automatic feeder. Two weeks ago, I took one cat to the vet to have her anal glands expressed. She came home smelling like ass (or, as my friend Max pointed out, lack thereof), and my other cat no longer recognizes her scent. Post-vet visit, whenever they encounter each other in the hallway, they moan and shriek and fill the apartment with the kind of tension I’ve only ever experienced when I want to fuck someone I really shouldn’t. So for two weeks, I’ve meticulously kept them apart and slowly reintroduced them to each other as delicately as one would perform peace work in a region recently ravaged by ethnic violence. I have even engaged a local cat whisperer, who taught me words like nonrecognition aggression and high-value resources. His services cost $125 for half an hour of Zoom advice.

As part of this, at 5:11a, I accompany my cats to the autofeeder to oversee the successful sharing of these high-value brown rocks and then shepherd them back to their safe zones. After this, I cannot go back to sleep.

Would a man put up with this indignity? I lie there and think to myself. I remember that my guy friend gave away his cat because it was too annoying to vacuum his apartment all the time. And recently, on a date with a man, I explained that my cats are extremely high maintenance, but what am I supposed to do, get rid of them? The guy shrugged as if to say, well, yeah, that’s what I would do.

I do not agree. According to my personal values, you should hang onto a pet you’ve adopted unless said pet is really, really impacting your life—like you can’t fall asleep at all and you’re on probation at work, or you’re being sued for all you’re worth after putting a friend in the hospital with cat scratch fever. Plus, my cats are really cute, and I love them! What a silly, feminine impulse, to love an animal and delight in a years-long cross-species bond.

Total time lost doing something I didn’t want to do: My alarm was set for 6:30a, so, 1h 19m.

Day Two

I’m in the middle of my freelance graphic design work when I get a text from a male client.

Sarah deck will be coming shortly to polish and make deck high end this is move quickly its making it clear and needs design

This communication style is, unfortunately, typical of this client. (And most men at work: another client texted me the other day, out of the blue, nothing but a cryptic “Soonest.”) The female project manager who usually protects me from having to deal with the first client is on vacation. I have told him repeatedly that I will not begin work on any projects until he sends me a clear and coherent brief with a deadline, and I remind him of this again.

Here is WIP find a richness in simple use of color, richer photography once we shoot and finding forms and layers where the gradient is subtlety included verses large uses of it, see here in this brand light used with refine type. We need to find layer’s and shape like social posts maybe the forms have rounded edges to marry to the logo. Illustration finding the form in shape and simplicity and graphic. Type needs to be more refined, use space and hero beautiful photography

This is as close as this client tends to get to a brief, so I move some things around to accommodate his request. Do I want to do this? Absolutely not! I want to do it even less than I want to do my other work, which is at least for clients who respect me. But, this client happens to pay me the most, and I like being able to order DoorDash and live in a liberal city, so I do it.

Two hours later, I get another email from my client.

Seems first draft there ok with content for now so no immediate need for tomorrow

I am incredulous. Does this mean what I think it means? I ask for clarity again.

Can stop working on this for now
Sent from my iPhone

Time lost doing something I didn’t apparently even need to do, let alone want to do: 2 hours.

Day Three

My landlord calls. He always calls me when he needs to communicate with the tenants in our building, because I have lived here the longest and am the friendliest and am therefore the unofficial mayor of the building. I am always the person he asks to talk to prospective new tenants and strike the right balance of honest and encouraging, telling them that yes, my friend once got held at knifepoint in broad daylight nearby, but other than that there are lots of different kinds of noodle joints from all around the world in this neighborhood! Plus, there’s parking and in-unit laundry.

My landlord tells me he had to get rid of a toilet in his personal home and is breaking it into tiny pieces and depositing it in our trash bin as we speak. There is, indeed, an extremely percussive banging sound echoing off the concrete.

“Do you normally fill the trash each week?” he asks. There are 8 people living in this building and although it is the law in San Francisco, none of us compost with any real regularity. The guy who just moved in doesn’t even know that you can’t recycle styrofoam, so I often move it into the trash bin, I guess because I’m a woman?

“Yes,” I say. “We are using the entire trash bin for our trash.”

“Aw, shoot,” he says, and agrees to only place half the toilet in our trash bin.

That’s probably illegal, my friend Tommy texts me. I research this and find that he is right. I feel sad, because I actually really like my landlord, and think of him as a sort of father figure I can call when I don’t know how to patch the wall or snake the drain. I don’t think he consents to that type of relationship, and once bought me my own snake and told me to stop calling him.

Time spent learning my chosen father figure is, in fact, flawed: 32 minutes.

Day Four

I recently realized I want a partner, so I go on Tinder to do some swiping, even though I don’t want to!!!

Generally on the apps, I’ve noticed men asking more questions. This is a net good. Someone in the manosphere must have recently preached to them about talking about something other than oneself. The problem is, they don’t know how to ask good questions. Probably because most of them have never done it. So now instead of just, you know, asking simple follow-up questions or inquiring more about how something felt, they start with the question, and the question is so cringe I can’t imagine ever answering it. Here is a recent sampling.

My profile says that I like reading, writing, and seeing movies. This is an attempt to attract someone who also doesn’t want to go hiking—a near impossibility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What’s a good movie you’ve seen recently? one “Jeremy” busts into my DMs demanding to know. No hello, no how are you. I realize that this is kind of on me, for putting that in my profile, but I have been at home with these fucking cats for two weeks and was sick over the holidays, so I haven’t seen anything in a theater in a while. Plus, I was imagining this tidbit leading to, you know, a date, not a pop quiz.

I have seen no good movies lately!! I write to “Jeremy.” It’s really upsetting. I want to see Wuthering Heights and the Charli XCX movie. But I’m also not sure those are any good. What about you! Inspire me

He writes back:

Not a recent one but I watched Fire Walk With Me with a friend recently which was good.

Then, refusing to take the hint and pivot the conversation to something I actually want to discuss:

What’s the last *really good* movie you saw?

I give up.

Time spent swiping: 1h 4m.

Day Five

I am sitting in bed engaging in my morning ritual, which consists of alternating between journaling and scrolling—an activity that would probably make Julia Cameron keel over and die. This takes, on a good day, a full hour. Part of the reason for my high level of distractibility is that I am constantly being bombarded with potential improvements I could be making to my physical appearance. Recently, a viral clip from Love Is Blind of a leprechaun dumping an infectious disease doctor who looks like Rachel Bilson but doesn’t do Pilates daily graced my screen. While the reason it went viral is that the entire world hates him, I have still internalized his message and realize I am holding the secret belief that if I were thinner things would be going better for me romantically.

This morning I am confronted with an ad for a GLP-1 in pill form. I Google this and get served an ad for the weight-loss app Noom. I remember that everyone always says, “people really like Noom!” The fact that no one I know has ever successfully used Noom to lose weight doesn’t seem to factor into what happens next, which is that I complete several quizzes about my level of activity, my attitude toward losing weight, and if there are any milestones on the horizon that I might want to be thinner for. Although I am not being charged today, I hand over my credit card number.

The 17th step is to actually download the app. Once I do, I remember that I’ve done this before, and that the app’s copywriting makes me want to die. What is one kind thing your heart needs to hear right now? a section of the app titled “Take Your Weekly Art Break” asks me. The next screen is a digital image of an impressionist painting. I navigate to the settings section of the Noom app, cancel my subscription, and delete the app.

Time spent being on a diet: 47 minutes.

Overall, it seems that I spend well above the average amount of time doing things I don’t want to do. If you add up all the entries here, the total is much higher than 2.6 hours, and I don’t even think that encompasses all of the things that I didn’t want to do. The scope is, if you can imagine, even broader than what I’ve laid out here.

After careful consideration, though, I have determined that I like it this way. I laughed at my own jokes a lot while writing this piece. And I wouldn’t have done so if I only did things I wanted to do. Life is conflict! Life is hardship! It is 2026 and we are frictionmaxxing. This is womanhood. This is the human condition.

The second the clock struck 2026, I started freaking out about turning 35. I noticed that I started saying things like, “I am 35 years old! I’m better than this!” and “At 35, I know these things,” even though I was not, technically, 35 yet. I think this was a way of preparing myself, a way of coping. The other way that I have been coping is by frantically grasping toward love. Because the problem, of course, is not just that I am turning 35 at the end of February. It’s that I am turning 35 at the end of February, and I am single.

I used to not really care that I was single. I was raised by a single mother and a VHS tape of Bridget Jones’ Diary. In some ways, this was inevitable. Plus, I’d rather be alone than with the wrong person, and I don’t really care whether I have kids. But where being single on the internet once felt thrilling, on the cusp of my 35th birthday, it’s begun to feel sinister.

First, a Hinge guy I went on three perfect dates with, who read a book I recommended before we’d even met, stopped reaching out to make plans after our third date. A common occurrence, I know, but it was a new one for me. This abrupt end to a promising romance plunged me into a sudden and urgent awareness that I really do want a relationship. It was inconvenient to be shown this fact about myself while simultaneously being ghosted by someone who was probably hotter than me. I see now why I had previously pretended not to want a relationship. Wanting something and not getting it, it turns out, is much worse than telling yourself you don’t want it in the first place.

In the following days, I spent even more time on the apps. I started messaging someone from Tinder with four bad photos and no bio who got squirrelly whenever I mentioned meeting up but who made me swoon by saying he felt like he was really starting to like me. This was a new low.

I’m like a little old lady sending money to a Nigerian prince, I texted my friend Tommy with a screenshot of the guy’s messages.

It’s definitely sus, Tommy confirmed.

It was in this vulnerable emotional state that I discovered that Daren Thomas Magee, the artist behind the Instagram account @realfunwow, has fallen in very public love with the writer Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, who goes by @thewriterjess on Instagram. While I’ve been aware of @realfunwow for years, this was my first introduction to Jess. Jess met Daren last year, when she was 40, long divorced from actor Josh Lucas, and enjoying a successful writing career. Now she is in the best relationship of her life, with someone who is completely and utterly obsessed with her. I understand why the algorithm wanted me to know about this relationship. Not only has it managed to serve up bite-sized videos of exactly the kind of love I long for, the content also comes in a package I can’t resist.

I love people who are radically, brutally themselves at all times—or at least appear to be—so I was immediately taken by Daren and Jess’s Whole Vibe. They are both Ojai-based artists who make money from their work. Their Instagram accounts are shrines to the Silver Lake Shaman aesthetic of the 2010s, a cultural milieu that makes me feel safe, like it’s 2016 again. Daren and Jess are millennial elders of virality, pioneers of the accessible yet aesthetically pleasing. Daren’s online voice is like if Father John Misty and the guy who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck had a baby—his textured, folksy, 1970s-style prints share a New Age quality with the misanthropic nuggets of tough-love wisdom he dispenses. Dying is mandatory, one of his prints declares. Living is optional. Jess is like a California Rupi Kaur, and her feed is mostly her poetry on a white page interspersed with photos of her looking beautiful or an inspirational phrase like Bitch, you better listen. Sincerely, your intuition.

Now that they’re together, they post black and white reels of their makeout sessions beneath serif fonts declaring how it feels to have finally found each other, near-naked videos in pools, a silhouette of Daren holding Jess with her legs wrapped around his waist on a sunset beach. Like FJM and his concept album about falling in love with his photographer wife Emma, we’re being told a story of two California artists in different mediums whose ability to make provocative yet accessible art from their love distracts from the fact that the love in question is universally appealing, heterosexual and seemingly monogamous. It’s actually pretty traditional, and yet it feels transgressive, maybe because we can see so much of it, or because the word fuck is thrown around liberally.

On Valentine’s Day, my birthday was fewer than two weeks away and the algorithms had been feeding me an IV drip of Daren and Jess content for several days. I woke up and began my morning routine. I checked my dating apps. Nothing. I toggled over to Facebook, where my feed is mostly content from the group I am not supposed to name where women compare their interactions with the same men on dating apps. The consensus in the group was that the dating apps were dry this week because of the holiday: the dating-app cadence of finding someone to meet up with over the coming weekend was being disrupted by the fact that February 14 was a Saturday. I felt soothed by the existence of 89,000 other Bay Area women who are dating men with baby mamas who want to take them to Dave and Buster’s.

Next I toggled over to Instagram and saw that Daren and Jess’s brand new podcast, I Love You, But…, was live. I got dressed for dance and put in my headphones. Even my AirPods were yearning—my friend Zach sent me his old ones because he is an audio nerd and was sick of talking to me on the phone through the low quality mic of my Bose QuietComforts. But he didn’t unpair them correctly, so whenever I wake them up they cry a shrill digital trill as they look for him. I get it, I thought. Everyone wants to be with someone who is not me.

I normally hate podcasts where people just talk. I need NPR-level editing: Zero fluff, specificity, cliffhangers. A morsel a minute. This is the same reason I can’t do reality or any other kind of ambient TV, which I find to be the exact inverse of social media content. I need a hook, a hit, a sweet treat approximately every 30 seconds or I will lose interest. Daren and Jess’s podcast is not like this. They are two people who are drunk in love and experts in appealing to the masses, so they use the max number of words possible to say every single thing. They give scant specific details and paint few tangible scenes for the listener. I feel comforted by the way they just let themselves be—as someone who secretly wants to be my most selfish self, I enjoy the fact that they take zero pains to seem like they’re not completely self-absorbed. When describing their shared commitment to service, Jess cites her participation in a women’s choir and the fact that they both “volunteer with the turtles every week.” When Daren initially came onto Jess, he did it via the worst DM slide in the history of hipsterdom—after complimenting her viral article on women choosing to be single:

I do wonder, and I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this, where does physical fulfillment come into the equation where one has established a level of conscious and intentional independence?

Still, I found myself loving their raw vulnerability and worn-in wisdom. At one point, when Daren says he’s afraid of losing Jess, she reminds him that the love he feels is not coming from her, but rather from within him. “Mhmmm,” I hummed out loud on the bus, then remembered that I was in public.

The entire premise of this content vertical, its raison d’être, is showing us a love that most people don’t have and should want. Jess says she’s chosen to be “generous” with these details about her personal life (you can sponsor them on Patreon, they remind us throughout each episode) in order to give people a blueprint for life that she didn’t have. The idea that other people need help attaining Jess and Daren’s kind of love is, on its face, a little offensive, and perhaps the entire problem with social media. But when I look at my life—in the space of just two weeks, I went from fucking a hot French economist to spending 18 hours a day dealing with a mishap with my cat’s clogged anal glands—they’re right. Most of us DON’T have the love they have, and would go to great lengths to get it. In a culture where having a boyfriend is embarrassing, having a good one is newsworthy. This type of earnest, head-over-heels, balls-to-the-wall, fuck-in-the-restaurant-bathroom kind of love used to be a cliché. Now it’s radical. A near impossibility. And I want it.

So I have turned to Jess. Her self-assuredness is inspiring. As I freak out about turning 35, here is a woman who is older than I am, and happier by nearly every discernible metric. She’s gorgeous and seems able to enjoy it. She’s a talented and accomplished writer whose Modern Love column made me burst into tears before I even got to the end. And she fell madly in love when she was 40. What can I learn from her?

Modern dating often feels like a game of who can best perform caring the least. My newfound desperation is in direct opposition to winning at this game. At first, Jess snagging Daren seems like an endorsement of the game. Did simply writing that article, positioning herself as the voice of women who don’t need men, serve as a kind of challenge to every man who’d ever secretly wanted to fuck her?

But when I really listen to what Jess says on the podcast about the inception of their relationship, she wasn’t (as far as I can tell) manufacturing disinterest. She was actually being ultra-genuine (something I can achieve!). She was turning down what didn’t seem meant for her. After receiving Daren’s wordy offer of casual sex, she did not think to herself, Well, I’ll take what I can get. She said, No thank you sir! I am waiting for real love, baby.

“I, at that point in my life, was so fulfilled, in every possible way,” she says to him in episode 2, and I am condensing her quote: “I didn’t respond to you all day. And then I said, more or less, ‘I’m sure if you just want to have sex with someone, that is readily available for you to find in Los Angeles.’ For me, the idea of having sex without love is like cooking without heat. There’s nothing appealing about that. That conversation ended with me saying ‘I really hope you find what you’re looking for, but if you ever want to take a walk and get to know each other, I’d be so down for that.’”

Like Jess, I find having sex with someone I don’t care about as exciting as pairing socks. But that hasn’t stopped me from pretending I’m different so that I don’t lose the interest of whoever’s on the hook. This is what Jess would caution against. Maybe having a boyfriend is embarrassing because caring about a man—or any person, really—who gives you the dating-app breadcrumbs we all call romance is the lowest kind of indignity. And Jess refused to engage in it. In that way, she has earned her Instagram dais.

So maybe the answer isn’t to care less, but instead to horseshoe all the way around to caring so much that your certainty of what you want achieves the same effect. I don’t care who sees that I care! What’s meant for me won’t miss me! You can’t say the wrong thing to the right person!

Maybe it’s worth a try.

I’ve been published before, but it’s been a while since I tried to get published in a lit mag. A lot of lit mags are esoteric and not that pleasant to read because their fonts are horrendous and I hate reading things on a website, even Substack. I think other people might be smart and focused enough to get something out of reading these journals, but I am not one of them, so I’ve always thought it a bit inauthentic to submit my writing there. But in December, my friend Lauren told me about Chill Subs, and I was then able to browse through the thousands of little lit mags to find the ones that I found understandable and enjoyable, and submit two of the essays I worked on last year. Now I will be deeply seen by people who are capable of focusing on the avant garde, I told myself, and I will be happy.

The essay that’s going to be published was accepted by the first journal that read it, which made me feel very special (a hallmark Enneagram 4 trait). I was high for two days. Then a cold dread began welling up within me at random. What if the people in my essays, God forbid, read them?

Someone I was on a date with recently expressed an interest in looking up my Substack and reading it. This was a good thing, a green flag, a reaction I interpreted as increasingly-rare Normal Behavior. “Oh, you have a Substack? I’d like to read it.” But of course the thought of someone I’m dating actually reading it is terrifying. What if they don’t like the writing? Or worse, what if they don’t like the fact that I’m writing? Understanding that they themselves might be written about could certainly be a turn-off. What if they judge me before I get the chance to explain that I only write about situations I’ve given the other person ample opportunity to resolve? That even then, I obscure their identities as much as possible without losing the original intention of the writing?

I once asked one of my writing instructors what responsibility the writer has to the real people they write about. “What makes you think your friends and family are actually going to read your writing?” he asked. Brutal, and true. If that person read my Substack, I’d actually be shocked. Most people can barely even be bothered to respond to a text, myself included.

The truth is, I’m projecting. The truth is that I, not my real or imagined lovers, might have a problem with my own style of writing. Whenever I start to overthink about this, there are two questions I always return to that I don’t really know how to answer. The first is the aforementioned question of responsibility. The second, and perhaps more important, is whether confessional, emotional, sometimes fluffy pieces about your life can be considered aesthetically or critically good. Is it respectable writing? Critics have probably been debating that since before Eve Babitz.

On this question, Elizabeth Austin writes in Electric Lit:

“Of course, there is a long tradition of belittling this kind of narration. The journal girl has always been culturally suspect. She’s been framed as too sensitive, too self-absorbed, too inconsistent. Her subject—herself—considered too boring, too indulgent, too much. We’ve long internalized the idea that the personal is frivolous unless made universal, and even then, only if filtered through irony or male detachment.”

Indeed, when I see stuff like a casual comment from a Substack critic asking whether something is good or if it’s just “Sheila Heti style drivel” I have an existential crisis. I love Sheila Heti.

Because the world is cruel, the algorithms really want me to know that Madeline Cash, the 29-year-old author of Lost Lambs, was inspired to write this debut novel by the light of her own imagination. “I wanted to challenge myself to write a complete work of fiction that had no purchase on my life or resembled it in any way,” she told New York magazine as part of the book’s stunningly buzzy publicity blitz. “That was the initial impetus to write a pure, genuine capital-N novel.”

I experienced this quote as a personal attack. Its implication is that autofiction is not challenging to write, pure, or genuine. But stories about normal boring people written in an interesting way are all I want to read or write, and I fear that I cannot really do anything else. I wish I was the kind of writer who thought in abstract images, a conduit through which divine, anonymous characters and their associated plotlines revealed themselves. But I’m not. I kind of just want to write about how things made me feel. This personality trait is also why I might seem game for a verbal debate but end up dropping out in the middle—I tend to not remember tangible facts, just feelings, and I am engaging in the debate so that those feelings can be expressed, not because I want to win the argument. When I realize the other person wants to win, I feel abandoned. This kind of over-emphasis on feelings and propensity to overthink is probably why I didn’t make it as a journalist. What even is truth? I would ask myself as the deadline to turn in 150 words on the best chocolate chip cookie in Los Angeles loomed.

I liked Lost Lambs. It was sardonic and precocious, like if How to Behave in a Crowd and Birnam Wood (two books I loved) had a baby. But it also took me two weeks to finish it, which means I didn’t like it as much as something more sincere like Prep or All Fours. Those books felt like inhabiting someone else’s brain and not, as Austin would say, ironic or male-detached. This is probably why Cash is getting so much buzz: she’s pretty, young, and her writing is good in an ironic and “male-detached” way even though she is a woman. These are not bad things. I just don’t think I am interested in doing them.

I’m also not sure that good autofiction or memoir is any easier to write than “pure” fiction (if that even exists). This week I went to a reading and met a magazine journalist who’s had the kind of career I aspired to when I was younger and more delusionally self-confident: New Yorker bylines, war through a human lens, awards.

“What do you write about?” she asked.

“The most interesting topic in the world,” I said. “Me.”

“How do you know what the themes are?” she asked. She said she’s been working on a long personal essay. But because she’s so used to looking through her finite amount of reporting for the themes, the infinite possible themes of her own thoughts are harder to grasp.

“That,” I said, “is exactly why it’s hard.” I remember coming home with journalistic notes from an event or an interview. If you’ve done enough reporting, the piece—and I say this about chocolate chip cookie quests, not the kind of writing she’s doing—writes itself.

The idea that good personal writing makes someone else’s brain understandable to both the writer and the reader brings me back to my original question about responsibility. The thing about being in someone else’s brain is that, well, there are secrets in there. I don’t usually tell people everything that’s in my brain, because it might hurt their feelings or embarrass me, or it might just not even be that true. I worry about this a lot. But look at Lily Allen’s West End Girl. Look at Sarah Manguso’s Liars (I actually didn’t love Liars, but notably, I inhaled it in the fraction of the time it took me to get through Lost Lambs). Look at the two examples of books I loved, Prep and All Fours, which were inspired by the writers’ lives but also both critically acclaimed and beloved by readers without employing irony.

Look at what we look at, mostly: each other’s real, boring lives.

I think I’ve been worrying about the wrong things. I don’t think I need to worry about what the people I write about will think. I think I should worry about why I want to write this way. And I know why. I want to write this way for the same reason I date, or make friends, or really, do anything. I write to be seen. Not literally, but spiritually. To be recognized, increasingly, for the person I actually am and not the person I might appear to be.

When I am writing my novel, I feel like I am going to die. When I am writing a personal essay, I’m so engrossed in trying to hone the thoughts I want to be validated for that hours pass without my noticing, the thoughts keep churning on the bus, and I don’t really feel like I’m working that hard, even though I know I am, because of how all-consuming it is. The essays that feel that way are the ones that people in workshops praise and lit mags pick up. The excavation of my personal relationships and feelings has a purpose, actually, and it’s not to navel-gaze. It’s to connect with other people.

I don’t really like talking or thinking about AI, because it’s even more boring than reading some girl’s diary, but I can’t help but think of it here. In the future—even in the present, actually—a computer is capable of winning an argument. It is probably capable of constructing a plot, even interesting characters. What it’s not capable of is revealing its real, messy, human life. We are living in a moment that makes it laughably easy to determine what is and is not fundamentally human.

The person who expressed interest in reading my Substack might be losing interest in our budding romance. If that’s true, I’ll be more disappointed than I’d like to admit. When I think about what got me excited about them, it was the fact that they held my hand and touched my face. How sincere, how tender, how human. How embarrassing. How simple it is, what I really want.

I could say the same about my writing. How embarrassing it is, to be needy enough to end up crazed on a bus, editing your thoughts in a phone note, missing your stop because you just really, really need twenty of your closest friends to remember you’re vaguely funny. But isn’t that what we all really want, deep down, even if it comes in a different package?

This, I think, is why people hate autofiction. Because it reminds them of how embarrassing it is to want to be seen.

It reminds us too much of ourselves.

In 2025, my New Year’s Resolution was to post an essay on Substack once a month. While I’ve already posted one this month, I also skipped two months, and because I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, I’m posting one more to make up for it. If you’re reading this, thanks for putting up with an extra email from me.

When I worked in local politics, there were a few phrases our nonprofit organization and its associated coalition liked to repeat. One was “We still believe in the power of government to solve big problems.” Another was “We’re interested in solutions, not ideology.” Another still was “It’s okay to think this is unacceptable.” This being the disorder that has come to define the streets of most West Coast cities. We pressured local government to come up with solutions to problems like homelessness, public drug use, and onerous tax policies that inspired businesses to leave the city for laxer municipalities. Without tax revenue, we said, these problems were even less likely to be fixed. We wanted the city to be well-funded so that it could offer genuine solutions to people living on the street, particularly those suffering from addiction. It seemed obvious to most of our org that a city full of yard-sign liberals leaving people to die of drug overdoses on the street was fucked up. Street homelessness is also not that great for everyone else, like people who prefer to walk on the sidewalk instead of in traffic, or people whose kids have to walk through tent encampments and their associated needles, feces, and uncontained fires to get to school. I still believe these things. (And, full disclosure, I still do a little freelance work for local initiatives here and there, but it’s a small portion of my freelance business.)

I came to work in local politics after a year spent working with Arab-Israelis and another couple years living through the pandemic. My world view had developed to include the idea that hard problems can be solved through compromise, that under all the layers of dysfunction we have something in this country that’s worth fighting for. But the problem with politics is that in order to get a lot of different kinds of people on board with your message, you need to choose a simple way to explain your position and stick to it. I consider myself an artist and a generally skeptical person, so this made working in politics very challenging for me. But I also didn’t want those traits to keep me from ever trying to make things better. Whenever we launched a new initiative, I had to ask a lot of questions, “do my own research,” ask myself if I would be advocating for this if I wasn’t being paid to do so. More often than not, I decided I agreed with the basic tenets of our organization, even if I would have geared the advocacy toward different focus areas had I been in charge. Which I never would have wanted to be.

In January of this year, the plan for the organization changed and a lot of us were let go. I was already fairly sick of waking up each morning to Twitter mentions about how the comms plan I’d poured my heart and soul into was reading as “technofascist,” so while I was stressed out by losing my job, a part of me was also immediately relieved to be forced to move on.

Now, when people ask me if I’m following this or that horrific news story, I avoid getting into it by saying something like, “I think we are beyond politics and only art can save us.” Like my work at the political organization, this is a persona I am trying on, to see if it fits. The truth is, I have no fucking idea what can solve homelessness, loneliness, addiction, greed, war. And after only four years working in politics, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the people working in the field don’t, either. But they’re trying, which is more than most of us can say.

This weekend I was at the library and I checked out a book called Front Street: Resistance and Rebirth in the Tent Cities of Techlandia. This year, the same year I lost my local politics job, I also read more books than I have in years. If I had to summarize my most-updated world view, it would be: Everyone should read more books. Unfortunately, our country is headed aggressively in the other direction.

I read Front Street in two days. Journalist Brian Barth, who spent two years getting to know residents living in encampments in three Bay Area municipalities, is a stunningly beautiful writer who balances detached observation with genuine emotion so deftly that I started to feel uncomfortable. I spent two overthinky days questioning not only my political beliefs (what’s left of them, anyway), but also why the fuck I am not doing more brave things and writing about them beautifully.

Barth’s thesis, informed by his subjects, is that the tent encampments that have come to define the Bay Area are not the problem, but actually the solution. That maybe these communities are like a disowned shadow of our collective psyche and hold the key to healing what spiritually ails us. And if we just stop stepping around them in revulsion and railing against them at City Hall (and, most importantly, razing them), we’ll allow them to heal themselves. In the process those of us who are housed will learn to let in a new and powerful understanding of what it means to be human. But you can’t let that in if you don’t engage with the encampments on a human level.

I’m going to somewhat “spoil” the book, if it can be spoiled, so if you care about such things, read ahead with caution.

The other thing the book makes clear is that top-down solutions to homelessness, the kind my organization advocated for, have failed. That seems like something everyone can agree on. What will be more contentious is his assertion that letting encampments flourish or fester (depending on your view of them) in sanctioned areas is the key to healing them. What kept me reading this book so voraciously wasn’t just Barth’s razor-sharp observations and utterly perfect pacing—it was a rabid curiosity about what he proposes we DO with this information, and also a little bit of indignation. It is not until page 218 that Barth acknowledges that there are good reasons that the housed population might not trust the unhoused population, making it difficult for a social contract to be kept. Until then, he writes about the problems created by street homelessness, and the objectively bad behavior of his unhoused friends, with a bemused detachment that is both journalistically satisfying and also a little infuriating. As I read, I thought, Is he really not going to interrogate the fact that his friend Kent stole $62,000 worth of ceremonial Hindu jewelry from his neighbor, or abandoned his nine kids, or wasted a $10,000 windfall on a new electric bike when he was living in a tent? Anyone who’s ever loved someone with addiction knows that people possessed by it tend to leave a wave of spiritual, emotional, and physical destruction in their wake. It causes real hurt—just look at the tragedy that befell Ron Reiner and Michele Singer this week. That doesn’t mean that people suffering from addiction are bad people, just that perhaps the effects of their predicament might also have an impact on other people that it’s worth attempting to mitigate.

As I read, I was also kind of annoyed at Barth’s naked hatred of anyone he considers to be of the tech world: at one point, he describes downloading Hinge just so he can troll local tech workers (he ends up marrying the one person he connects with, which made me kind of doubly annoyed at him, for having dating app success at all, and for doing so and still getting to wear an anti-establishment badge). I don’t even work in tech, but a lot of my friends do, and I don’t think they’re bad people—I think they’re smart people who want to be intellectually challenged and also be able to live comfortably.

But Barth does pay this off as the book goes on by introducing us to so many concepts new to the average-but-informed normie like me that I think his contradictions are earned. He does a good job acknowledging those contradictions, and a good job explaining the political belief systems undergirding his arguments. Those systems zigzag all over the map, from his suggestion of anarchy as a paradigm for us to learn from (even if you don’t embrace it, it’s hard to argue with his explanation of why it matters), to explaining his belief in the Yoruba religion and its trickster deity, Exu.

I also saw a stunning number of parallels between his experience exploring living without a roof over one’s head and my year in the Bedouin village making a $400 monthly stipend. “The more money I’ve made,” he writes, “the more stressed about money I’ve become—a pervasive pressure to avoid losing my buying power seeps through me.” Then, a few sentences later: “Is it worth the hustle required to keep my lifestyle afloat? I’m unsure; it depends on the day and how encumbered I’m feeling by the choices I must make to maintain my comfort.” It’s a sentiment nearly everyone I know has felt on some level at some point, and his vulnerability in confronting these contradictions made me more comfortable confronting my own. Now, Barth admits, he owns several properties, one of which he makes money from on the app created by the tech barons he derides, Airbnb. But I like that he does not hide this from us. It makes me imagine that if he and I had a conversation, I could talk about my time with the common-sense-politics people and he wouldn’t judge me for it.

Barth’s ultimate recipe for change, what he calls “The Fix” throughout the book, is nuanced. It involves a return to the micro-communities that raised us, an embrace of discomfort, and an interconnectedness our culture has long abandoned. It also involves stopping encampment sweeps and sanctioning certain underutilized parts of cities to allow encampment communities to empower those who live in them to save themselves. If I could summarize it neatly, well, he wouldn’t have had to write the book. But one of the most important elements of his argument is that the housed population, being more stable, is the side that needs to take the “role of the more yielding and accommodating spouse.”

After becoming disillusioned with all “sides” of politics, I’m still skeptical of the type of politics that requires the “other side” to see its faults and change, which brings me to another of Barth’s seeming contradictions: this is actually the exact kind of attitude he says doesn’t work for the unhoused. If you can’t force someone who wants to live in a tent on the street to accept the rules of society, by the same token you cannot force someone who wants to live without the fear of a tent fire consuming their home to accept that risk. Ignoring the fact that humans all want the right to self-determination calls his entire thesis into question. He’s saying that we’re forgetting homeless people are human, but then he’s asking us to conveniently or temporarily forget that the rest of us are, too. Does that mean he thinks that people experiencing homelessness are fundamentally different from us? Is that okay?

I think he’s actually just inviting us to grow. I think he’s saying that homeless people have gone through a spiritual gauntlet that most of the rest of us haven’t, riding their misfortune right up to the edge of their very existence and surviving by the teeth of their own emotional ingenuity. People in my situation have become increasingly anxious over the past few years as the systems that used to protect us break down. But I’ve noticed that the more bad shit I experience, the more my anxiety dissipates. Okay, so your family fell apart and you lost your job and there was a pandemic and you’re single at 35 and your lifelong friend drank himself to death, and you’re still pretty much fine, I tell myself frequently. Bring on the rest of whatever’s about to happen. Barth is suggesting that letting the darkness in is the only way we can truly grapple with it.

I mentioned at the beginning that at the political org, we often railed against a lot of the dysfunction of West Coast cities as “unacceptable.” It’s a phrase that Barth quickly and efficiently dismantles as being possible to read two ways: “as harm that we bore collective responsibility to repair, or a declaration that the issue would be resolved by any means necessary. The former preserved the veneer of compassion, while the latter spoke to those concerned about excessive compassion.”

As I read, I kept returning to this word. Unacceptable. It reminded me of a lot of the conversations I have with my therapist about death. “You’re trying to explain the unexplainable,” she always says. Because that’s easier than facing the brutal fact that people die, don’t fit into society, are abused and abuse others and sometimes want to live on the street where you’d like to walk your dog. Perhaps politics, then, is trying to make unacceptable what we are actually, by virtue of being human, required to accept. Accept the darkness, accept the parts that don’t fit, accept what we are not powerful enough to change. Only then can you begin to imagine moving beyond it.

Toward the end of the book, Barth describes tramping around an encampment in the middle of the night with his friend Monte, who wanted to chant at the feet of an acacia tree beneath an overpass (naturally). When a security guard tells them to move along, Monte delivers perhaps the most thematic line in the book when he says to him, “Nobody owns the earth.” Maybe the fact that we have forgotten that, on so many levels, is the most unacceptable fact of all.

“His words didn’t quite make sense,” writes Barth. “But they kind of did.”

His words didn’t quite make sense. But they kind of did.

I mentioned this was my best reading year in a while. If you’re interested, here are the rest of the books I read. I’m also tearing through Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp, and will probably read a couple more excellent books over break. Unfortunately, I usually read a lot at the end of December, when it becomes harder to brag about having done so.

I never thought I’d be one to rail on the corporatization of group fitness classes. In my twenties and even earlier in my thirties I loved workout classes. When I lived in New York I went to spin class at least three times a week, priding myself on being one of Peloton Studio’s original in-person patrons. I freelanced for Physique 57 in exchange for free classes and grippy socks. I brought my workout clothes to the office and stopped at every ClassPass studio I could on my way back home up the 2/3 line. That was just what you did. Maybe it reminded us of being in the womb of an upper-middle-class suburb: everything the same each time you dropped in for a class, everything branded and sleek and ready for consumption. Smell the Volcano candle. Scrub yourself down with Oribe.

But if you are a millennial and you ever want to find out how much you have aged, take a SoulCycle class now. Observe how the pounding music makes you worry for your aging eardrums. Fight to stay on the bike as you, impossibly, insanely, do a crunch? Imagine the Coronavirus particles that are being expelled from other people’s bodies and into yours from all directions, because you are squished like sardines inside the stifling studio. Picture Ebola or Monkeypox leaping off your “teammates’” sweat-drenched skin and landing on your Botoxed brow. Stumble out and fight a Google employee for locker access. Struggle to fall asleep from the adrenaline and the ache of your back.

I did this about a month ago, and vowed to never go back.

In the wake of realizing I no longer enjoy the classes I used to, I’ve been at a loss for how to exercise in a way that doesn’t make me feel like my soul is slowly leaking out of my body. Around the middle of last month I started getting antsy. My friend Galit once told me, when she was 36 and I was 28, that she had to exercise daily because otherwise it hurt. Now I know what she meant. I’m there. I’m waking up at 5 to write and then sitting in my chair all day to work and then by 5pm it’s dark and my lower back is screaming that we can’t keep living like this.

For a while, I was biking. Like, outside biking. If there is an antidote to paying $42 to bike to nowhere in a cesspool of germs, it is smelling the eucalyptus (and not the fake Equinox kind) as you whiz through the Panhandle. It is finally reaching the beach and its crashing waves and luscious dunes and then coming home feeling wrung out and accomplished. But ever since my best friend got taken out by a truck and broke his face I’ve been a little wary of increasing my chances of becoming a cycling statistic. Now, I bike maybe two or three times a month—and always the same route, so I know where to look for the cars that might back up or swing out before they can even think about doing so.

I have always wanted to learn how to dance. I’ve tried, too, accompanying my talented friend Julia to dance classes in the Mission. The problem is, if you do not know how to dance and you are in a dance class, you will just stand there. If you are like me and are kinda immune to embarrassing yourself by now, you won’t even feel bad about it. You’ll just be sad, because you cannot dance, and you wish you could, and you do not see a path to learning. It reminds me of the whole reading theory—just as children will not absorb knowledge of phonics simply by being read to, I cannot absorb dance moves by being thrown into a class.

One day I complained about this to my roommate. “I wish Step class still existed,” I told her, remembering that in high school I used to do dance aerobics with a bunch of moms and old ladies at the Bally Total Fitness in Beaverton. That class is how I learned that my ass loses weight first, because my sister observed that the hem of my bodycon American Apparel dress had become horizontal instead of curved upwards in the back. Those classes had really worked for me. Wasn’t there some sort of modern Jazzercise or Zumba class I could take? I craved being told exactly what to do by adults who were at their physical peaks when Trump was still just a reality TV star.

I went out for a walk. It was a walk I’ve done a million times, and tired of years ago. I don’t even see its scenery anymore. Because none of the signage on the storefronts in the Mission has been redesigned by someone who grew up listening to MGMT and tweaking their friends’ Myspaces, I usually don’t really notice it. But this time, I suddenly clocked that Mission-Bernal-Noe or whatever the fuck the realtors call this neighborhood is full of teeny-tiny dance studios. Surely one of these had the type of class I wanted to take.

It took about four rounds of Googling, but I finally landed on this aggressively underbranded homepage for a dance class called Rhythm and Motion and signed up. I should note that Rhythm and Motion is not at a teeny-tiny dance studio—ODC is a storied SF institution. I just didn’t think it was for me, because they don’t have organic tampons in a cute little tin in the bathroom. But it turns out ODC is a ten-minute bus ride from my house. There are tons of classes. And at $22 a class, it was already less stressful than Barry’s. The worst thing that could happen, I figured, was that it would be too hard and I wouldn’t go back.

When I got there, I was immediately confronted with a scenario that was worse: one of my ex’s cute fun girl friends was there, and she was really good.

I was really bad. It wasn’t as egregious as some other classes where I’d just stood there—I was still able to occasionally complete a move correctly or at least jump around enough to break a sweat—but I felt that familiar disappointment-verging-on-anger that I always feel in dance classes. Why is this advertised as something anyone can do? I thought as I desperately tried to mimic the tall ballerina in the first row, because I had stood in the back and couldn’t see the instructor. The moves seemed easy enough that I could get them with a little practice doing them slower. It wasn’t clear, though, how to get practice. Maybe dance just wasn’t for me.

But then something happened that has never, ever happened to me in all my years of corporate fitness classes: at the end, the instructor, my ex’s friend, and a mother-daughter duo who have been dancing in this program since the girl was five (she was now in her late twenties) came up to me and told me it was okay that I was bad. “You should come back,” the instructor said. We talked for over ten minutes. No one seemed antsy to leave and get on with their evening. Everyone helped me find which teachers were easier and which classes provided breakdowns of the moves for beginners. “Some of these people have been going to these classes for forty years,” they told me. “Don’t feel bad that you aren’t that good yet.” Indeed, the program was founded in 1979, and the choreographed dances never change. Some of these dancers have literally been doing the same dances to the same songs since 1980.

So I went back. Again and again. The dancers in these classes are mostly moms and older women, but there are occasionally men and people my age and younger. Some people are clearly real dancers and some people are less expressive dancers than I am. But none of that matters. Everyone knows each other, and is having fun. The vibe is that of Miranda July dancing on Instagram. I have yet to go to a class in which the instructor doesn’t connect with me. Usually, at least one other dancer introduces themselves, and tells me they’ve been coming to this class for X number of years. In one Saturday morning class, I overheard one woman say to another, “When you make that face, I see your kid.”

“I think dance is the key to your spiritual awakening,” Zach said. “Like specifically you.” If you ever want to know if you are wound too tightly, tell your lifelong best friends that you have started taking a dance class. I sent Claire a photo of me and some of the ladies who all showed up wearing some variation of maroon or magenta, lined up in front of the mirror.

“There is something very natural about this becoming your new world,” Claire said. “It feels like we’ve been building toward this.”

I think the reason I am obsessed with Rhythm and Motion, beyond it feeling like a third space and community at a time when that feels hard to come by, is that my brain is categorizing it as something other than exercise. Maybe it’s detecting it as something like language learning? It’s a code I want to crack, and I have to move my body in order to do it.

Something’s happening, anyway. Since I started dancing, I’ve been having insanely vivid and satisfying dreams. In one, I was exploring New York in hyper-definition. I saw the Subway routes and heard the screeching sounds of the city, stumbled upon hidden ancient houses, looked up at the ceiling of a kaleidoscopic greenhouse. In another, I wrote an entire song. I could still sing it when I woke up. It was kinda good.

I was so certain that the dreams were a result of the dancing that I didn’t even need to Google it. But when I did, dozens of hits confirmed that when we dance, tons of new neural connections form. “The reason we have a brain is because we move,” says Andy Noble, a choreographer who works with a research team at Sam Houston State University to study the new neural pathways created when we dance. That, he says, is why we’re not plants. We need to move around in order to get food. Dance can be used to improve outcomes for Parkinson’s patients, people with autism, and older adults. Even more than walking, it’s really, really good for you.

I sent the lyrics of my dream song to Zach, who put it into an AI song generator and sent me three different versions. They were pretty good, but mine was better. Look at me! I am a musician now. I am Charli XCX or Caroline Polachek or Audrey Hobert. I am Miranda July.

All it took was a workout class that was actually designed for our enjoyment.

If you count the time I actually spent there, I have been working on a fictionalized account of the year I spent in Israel for over five years. When I left I had over 10,000 words of notes and diary entries, which felt like a lot at the time. I actually had more, but at the time I was also having a mental breakdown and I thought one of my journals was contaminated, so I threw it away in the trash at the airport.

Now I have over 80,000 words and the novel has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a first page and a last page. It also has a lot of holes, inconsistencies, and cringe-worthy sentences I can barely look at. But that’s not the point. The point is, I don’t finish things as often as I start them. Take for example the fact that I said I was going to Substack once a month at the beginning of this year, and I missed last month. I’ve quit music lessons, diets, workout routines, relationships, Greek life, cookbook club, budgets, and book clubs. But I didn’t quit this.

A big part of the novel focuses on the idea of quitting the current version of your life because you think a better one is out there. I won’t say too much more about where the novel goes from there, because, duh, I want you to read it someday. To me, this relates to the idea that doing things for external validation isn’t as sticky as doing things for the sake of personal satisfaction. (I say as I post this and then refresh the views.) In my own life, I found that my era of up-and-leaving ended around the same time as my era of being obsessed with getting a job at a brand-name place and getting stuff published. When I was younger, I didn’t really know what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it, but I didn’t care as long as it was appearing somewhere in print.

The pandemic humbled me. Through mechanisms that are still somewhat mysterious to me, it forced me to sit down and think about what I really wanted to say. I’ve spent the past couple of years doing that with no real goal in sight.

Now that I know what kind of stuff I want to write, mostly, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I’m writing because I want to be published, or one day receive accolades, or if I’m writing for me. That part of me that absolutely wanted the accolades still exists. Without it, I don’t think I’d strive for anything, and at 34, I understand that striving is a key ingredient for my happiness.

But what the process of finishing something has shown me is that there’s another part of me that knows that it’s in the act of striving that the real happiness is found. You need them both: the possibility that you could hit it big, and the understanding that the possibility’s true purpose is to get you to try.

All of this is to say, I learned a couple of small tips for finishing a long piece of writing that I’d like to share. I am aware that this platform is full of literally thousands of people more qualified than I am to give you this kind of advice. But I might never actually get to the point where I am technically qualified, so whatever. I think part of writing for yourself means getting to take a tiny victory lap where you can. So here’s what I learned about writing from actually finishing something for once.

1) Let your first draft be shitty. Everyone told me this. I read 900 essays about it. I still didn’t listen. It was only after hitting the 25k word mark and getting stuck several times that I accepted that I needed to just forge ahead instead of trying to keep track of every single thread I’d begun weaving. Now that the draft is done, it doesn’t seem as scary to go back through a couple times and comb out the wrinkles. What does seem impossible? Concurrently combing out several threads with infinite possibilities that aren’t on the page yet.

2) Write every day. Brought to you by the same people who came up with “let your first draft be shitty” and “exercise will make you feel better!” Chelsea Hodson, whose workshop I took earlier this year, says “be with your project every day.” Even if you’re just musing about it, you need that daily contact so you don’t lose your train of thought. If I ever let myself take a break from my manuscript for a big work project, it was really hard to get back into it.

3) Let yourself take breaks. This directly contradicts the point above. I had a shitty year. I did not work on my novel through the death of my best friend. I took a very long break. It was needed. So were the three weeks I didn’t write because I had pneumonia. The periods after those breaks were the most productive sprints of the whole year, writing-wise. Trust that you’ll get back into it and take breaks for the things you really need to take breaks for. A client’s pitch deck being due doesn’t qualify. Death does.

4) Workshop your first two chapters. I took two workshops in the first part of this year. In the first workshop, I was ready to be the best one in the class, so sure my slightly polished journal entries were going to be endlessly interesting. Everyone was like, “I don’t get this character! Where is this going? She sucks!” I read a book on plot, rewrote everything, and my next workshop went a lot better (then they were like, “she sucks, but in a good way!”) That workshop allowed submission of two chunks of ~6,000 words, and I used it to get my first two chapters really solid. The workshop was great (we’re still meeting without the instructor!) and I got enough good and constructive feedback to feel like the first two chapters were a proof of concept I could return to every time I started to write away from the original voice of my novel. I do think the shitty first draft should be exploratory and not adhere too closely to any one concept, but I have a tendency to forget where I was going and the first two chapters helped remind me.

5) Keep track of your scenes. One thing that made a huge difference in my progress was keeping a spreadsheet of each scene that I’d add to each day when I finished a chunk. That helped me remember where I’d left off if I ever took a big break and gave me a place to record stray thoughts about things I wanted to go back and fix later without actually going back and getting caught in the weeds.

6) Read books about structure, even the formulaic ones. You don’t have to take them literally! You’re not better than Save the Cat. I read Save the Cat for novelists and Refuse to Be Done, and they were both great. I also read Bird by Bird in the beginning of this year, right after I lost my job, and it probably set the tone for my whole year of getting a lot of writing done.

7) Read a lot of books. This is the first year since I was a child that I set a reading goal and completed it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is also the year I finally finished writing my own book.

8) Lose your job. If you want to finish your novel, I really can’t recommend enough getting laid off.

xo

Nate’s mom is spending her days digging up photos of our childhood. We text every day, because I am putting together the slideshow for Nate’s funeral, and maybe because when we stop texting each other every day, we will be in a new, somehow sadder, phase.

She finds pictures of me, Nate, and Claire lying on the floor of Nate’s bedroom, taking pictures of our braces and our side bangs. We’re taking selfies in the mirror with a digital camera. Going to dances. Wearing Halloween costumes. Burning our SAT prep books. Graduating. Wearing college sweatshirts and rain jackets in front of a Christmas tree. Meeting Nate’s parents for dinner in a Los Feliz restaurant. Wendi puts them all on our shared Google Drive that holds pictures of Nate. This folder is a portal to another world. I can enter it at any time. Leaving it is harder.

I am mesmerized in this specific, cliché way. Were we ever that young? I think. And: Nate is right there. Why can’t I call him? In high school he and I made a slideshow for our graduation ceremony, because we were the yearbook editors. Is that happening now, or was that the past? It feels, almost, exactly the same. I find a 2017 gchat from him, in which we imagine he is from the future and telling me what will happen to me. ~ Nate will be gay ~ he writes. ~ Yearbook isn’t as important as you are going to think that it is ~ Claire and Zach will date ~ Donald Trump will be our president ~

He doesn’t tell me that I am going to move to San Francisco and live in a high-ceilinged townhouse with his ex-boyfriend, Tommy, and we are going to summit with Claire in 2022 and call our friends who are therapists and figure out how to get him to rehab. He doesn’t say that the rehab won’t work, or why. He doesn’t tell me that I am going to have to call Tommy and tell him that he’s dead. Thank God I have Tommy. You know when your gay ex-boyfriend dies, and you call his ex-boyfriend every morning to cry about it? No? I feel like I’m a military wife who lost my husband in war, but I was pregnant with his baby, and the baby is Tommy, I text Claire. I tell Tommy this, wondering if it will land. It doesn’t. What? he laughs. I think I have stopped making sense to anyone but me and Claire.

Take me back to 2005, I write on my Instagram story next to one of the pictures. We are all lying on the floor on the blue carpet and I am kissing Claire’s cheek and she is laughing. On Instagram, I add the HAIM song, “Take Me Back,” that Claire loved as soon as it came out earlier this summer but I didn’t. Oh, now she likes Take Me Back, Claire texts me, and it’s like we’re on the floor of Nate’s bedroom again. I am 34 and my best friend still knows what songs I’m skipping on my new CDs. We are still talking on the phone for hours at a time, our feet up on the wall.

I have never wondered who you are, she writes as we dive to the bottom of a 20-year digital archive of our existence. I endure the cringe of reading my old journal entries and see that she is right. I have been obsessing over some queer person who’s kind of mean and writing my little articles and getting bangs since I was fourteen years old.

At night I dream that Nate’s still alive. When I wake up, I don’t know what’s going on or what year I am living in. Some days, I don’t leave the house. I don’t need to. My life happens inside a computer. When I write my SEO articles for my freelance gig I have to remove the em dashes otherwise the computer will think I am also a computer. I long ago stopped reading the news, because whenever I do, it’s like The government is getting rid of medicine. The Supreme Court approves racism as national policy. More drawings of boobs declassified. I feel like that Jia Tolentino article, “My Brain Finally Broke.” I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor, she writes. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? I am 34 and I never became Jia Tolentino, and I probably won’t, and none of it really matters because Nate is dead and I think we might be losing control of everything.

If I die delete this playlist. That’s the name of a playlist Nate made in 2024 when he heard a song we loved when we were fourteen—“Beating Heart Baby”—playing as he passed a bar. I thought we were the only two people who knew of that song, he wrote. I rediscovered this message from him after I posted my little Instagram carousel about his death and added that exact song to the post. I second-guessed it after I posted it. Was this the right song? I thought. Did he even like this song? I couldn’t remember. Now I see that it was perfect. I wonder how Nate became a person who didn’t care if he died. Now we are deleting his dick pics so his mom doesn’t have to see them.

I start to realize the volume of things someone would need to delete if I died. Should I try to tidy it all up now just in case? I get overwhelmed and decide this has to be something I let go because it’s too big and impossible to control. Here’s the extent of my planning. If I die, delete: my Notes app, three plastic buckets of journals, my screenshots of comments I left on strangers’ posts about Israel (both sides), my work crusading for common-sense local politics, my text threads with everyone.

How silly of me to have once cared about anything, I think. In digital retrospect, I am the most cringe when I am trying to exert control over the world. As I am wondering if I’m just depressed, Ezra Klein and David Wallace-Wells discuss the death of Americans’ belief in politics on a podcast about the aftermath of the pandemic that helped Nate drink himself into oblivion. I think there’s a sense that politics failed, Ezra says, on the left’s post-pandemic shift away from movements and toward individualism. It’s not just me. We are in a new era. We are all receding into ourselves. I am in danger of drowning. I wonder if grieving Nate’s death has freed me to be the drama queen I have always secretly wanted to be, and decide it’s not a good thing. You’re not supposed to gaze at your digital reflection for hours at a time. You’re supposed to grow up. Is that what this is?

Personal growth is kind of like getting hit in the face with a frying pan, my new colleague writes to me. We are both freelancers figuring out how to sell—I just typed cell—cell-cultivated chicken. Her partner lost his girlfriend at 35 and said that to her. It’s like I can feel my perspective rearranging itself, I write, and she reminds me that before caterpillars become butterflies they turn into disgusting slop inside their cocoons. I just typed cuckoons.

The thing about being able to gaze at yourself at this level of zoom—I can review what I said to Nate, and when, and if it’s a voice memo, how I said it, and then I can go to my journal and see if what I felt matched what I said, and then I can look at the pictures and see if one of us was side-eyeing the other, and on and on—is that it creates the illusion of control. I can navigate to any point in time and peek in. If I can do that, I must be powerful. Did Nate die because I left him on read that one time? Because I didn’t leave him alone when he came out? Because I lived with Tommy later? But as recently as last year, he was texting me that he still cared about me. Even before rehab, he was leaving me on read. Look, here are the receipts.

I truly don’t think there’s a single thing you did or said that you should believe contributed to what happened, my sister writes to me. I am self-aware enough to understand that what she’s saying is actually scarier than Nate’s death being my fault. If it were my fault, I could have controlled it.

But the truth is, we never had any control, at least not on an individual level. Maybe on the other side of this, I will have become someone who doesn’t just know that is true, but feels that it is true. Maybe that’s the kind of grown-up wisdom you need to survive a pandemic and mass addiction and the changing of the political guards. Maybe that’s what we have all been trying to outrun.

A week after Nate dies, I am supposed to go to London to visit my sister. I do not feel like vacationing in Europe, but I also do not have the will to dig up the emails and change the reservations. I am too busy trying to find the ends of my sentences and tearing through my teenage diaries like they are romance novels.

In the diaries we are 14 and 15. We are best friends, and I have a crush on him. He doesn’t love me back. When we are 16 I date someone else; in my absence, he becomes interested. We finally get together at 17, and date for two years, and I am triumphant.

“It was like a movie,” I tell my sister.

“I was watching it,” she confirms.

When we are 18, we break up for college and once we are apart, at our separate colleges, he comes out. The summer we are 19, and forever after that, we are still friends. When we are 30 I date a woman for the first time. When we are 32 Nate goes to rehab. Now we are 34. Well, I am 34. Now 34 is the age he was when he died.

When I get to the end of the journals, I am devastated all over again.

On the plane I read a novel about a queer teenage romance by an Irish author. Did Nate and I have a queer teenage romance? Reading about sex makes me think about the body and even though I lost our romance long ago, this is my first experience of losing—really losing—a body. Gruesome, how losing feels uncannily like falling. Replaying scenes in your mind, thinking of your lover morning and night. I have a photo of us on the locked screen of my phone. “Do you think that’s helpful?” my sister asks gently from across the table at a London pub. She is right. She helps me change it. I don’t tell her about the printed photo I’m using in the book as a mark. That one I let myself keep.

For years I wondered if Nate revealing he was gay shortly after our romance ended meant his was no longer my body to miss. Now I wonder again, what I am entitled to. Miss is a funny word. When he came out I wandered around my snowy campus ruminating: how could I have missed it? I replayed scenes in my mind then too, feeling like they had been rendered invalid and I was a fool. But now that I have had sex with women I know it’s not so simple. It’s easy to miss what you’re not looking for, I wrote in one of my diaries that year. A quote from a freshman year literature course.

Every time I return to my hotel room in London I am consumed by regret. What else have I not looked for? If we truly had the romance and friendship I remember, how could I have let this happen? How could I have let someone so significant to me die? I took the eye off the ball, I think. I broke away to become who I am without my childhood friends and when I looked back, he was gone. It feels like stepping over a new kind of threshold, and I wonder if this marks my irreversible ascent to true adulthood. Or maybe all my problems can be traced back to wondering whether I am truly an adult at age 34.

Zach texts me from Vermont, where he is touring a farm with another of our childhood friends. The friend’s girlfriend is an editor at New York magazine. My teenage dream. When I was 15, I wrote that when I grew up I wanted to go on a cross-country road trip with Nate and work at New York magazine, and then travel the world. Now I am not jealous of the New York magazine editor. I am traveling the world. In my journal I wrote that if I ever didn’t have Nate, I would die. I underlined “ever” twice. Now I am in ever and this is a postcard from my travels. I am still, as it turns out, alive.

I go to the British Museum. Africa and Asia this way, it says. Living and dying that way. The arrow points straight ahead. The exhibits indicate that dying is an ancient human tradition. We’ve been doing it for centuries—they have the evidence.

I sit in a café and eat a pastry stuffed with halloumi and za’atar, hoping it will transport me back to my Bedouin village. I am supposed to be working on my novel, which takes place there. But in the days since Nate died I cannot access that voice. A girl so naive that she is worthy of 80,000 words of loving ridicule. Instead I am ruminating on heavy thoughts and feeling like I have lived a thousand lives. When I look at the photo stuck in the pages of the book it feels impossible that we were ever that young, and also like that life is still accessible just below the surface of my everyday. Now I am writing the way I did when I was actually young, in that I am taking myself too seriously. But isn’t death serious business? I am finding out I am not one of those people who remains gamely wry and sarcastic in the face of death. I am the kind of person who sobs the second she is alone, who has nightmares the second she closes her eyes.

I take a tour of Bloomsbury. A lady in a straw fedora tells us as we assemble in the leafy square that messy affairs among creative people with mismatched sexualities is another antique human tradition. We look at the facades of these artists’ homes. People died young all the time back then. After they were gone, they were immortalized in paintings and novels and poems. I am handed a reading list at the end of the tour, a syllabus for living and dying.

“Way out,” the signs in the Tube say to mark the exits. There is an arrow that points straight ahead. Is there another way out of this? I wonder if I will ruminate on this forever. All the exits lead to the same place—among the living, above the underground. Over and over again, I walk up the stairs.

There is a shop in Temescal called Womb House Books. I go there when I want to be tortured, like some kind of literary kink. The hot shop owner—I think her name is Jessica—is almost always steering some lovestruck man or woman from shelf to shelf telling their future. They need a little Babitz, some Williams. She has green eyes. I always spend more than I mean to.

The shop sells hats with the names of women writers stitched across the fronts. I’ve been wanting the Sheila Heti one but think I should read Pure Colour first in case someone wants to talk to me about the hat. I want to send out a signal to the kind of person I hope will love me.

One warm evening, Caroline and I go to the shop while we wait for a table at the place around the corner and I run my fingers over the stitching of a new hat on display. It says Dump Your Boyfriend. Earlier that day, I spent hours lying in a field kissing a boy I’ve been dating, trying to suture together the things he told me. I want them to make sense. I want to ignore this hat.

“He loves that I’m a writer but hasn’t asked to read my stuff,” I tell Caroline over chilled red in a cup and warm olives. I am seeing him tomorrow and Caroline and I agree I should ask him to read a little of my work-in-progress novel, see what he does. Every woman I have ever loved, platonically or romantically, has read my writing without hesitation.

“Whenever I’m with a man a little voice in my head tells me that Elif Batuman and Miranda July and Nussaibah Younis and Yael Van Der Wouden are all gay,” I tell Caro, who is not Caroline, but a different writer girl I meet in LA. We have written twin essays about being lonely with a man that for different reasons also both take place in Croatia.

“Did you go to the Museum of Broken Relationships?” she asks, as if that couldn’t be the title of my memoir. She says Either/Or is the best case she’s ever heard for compulsive heterosexuality and I re-listen to it on the drive back to San Francisco. “It was somehow implicit in my friendship with Svetlana that she wanted to be in ‘a stable relationship’ and to someday have children, while I wanted to have interesting love experiences that I could write about,” Selin says in the book. No matter which kind of life I am attempting, I talk to my friends to check if I’m doing it right. But I’m starting to think that no one really knows.

*

I write about love but more often, I talk about love. Whenever I seek advice, my friends have a tendency to ask if the problem is me. I appreciate this quality. When you live in your head, the last thing you need is another echo chamber. But I’m also starting to wonder if people don’t have a subconscious tendency to give men the benefit of the doubt. When I was dating a 24-year-old girl, people scrunched up their faces when they heard she was making TikToks and living at home. But I never felt lonely with her. She texted her friends that she wanted to chew on my thighs and sleep in my boobs. She said she would listen to a 30-minute monologue about a yawn that I had. When I showed her my 2024 reading list and pointed out a string of self-help books where a man had derailed me she said, I will rail you. Books and otherwise.

The boy who derailed me made me a flip book. It’s a video of my cat climbing the wall, printed on twenty-five sheets of paper. Its cover is pink and has a title: Indigo, Agent of Chaos. It’s still in my living room even though he hasn’t been there in months and won’t be back. Everyone always picks it up and says how could you have dumped him? He made you a flip book.

I wonder which example to select. Which best illustrates the idea that a man who gets your cat does not necessarily get you? Should I tell them that he always swiveled his head around to ogle other girls like a caricature of a bad man? That he skipped all my songs on our Spotify blend? Once he said he wasn’t listening to me as I spoke because I “didn’t grab him.” He wouldn’t kiss me in public. Once his friend asked us what we were doing that weekend, and he listed every plan except the one that involved me.

When I dumped him, I cried hard once—because I felt guilty for running out of patience—and then never again. The next morning, in that little moment of clarity right before I’m fully awake that is somehow connected to my intuition, I felt free for the first time in months. For the next year after that, the times I’d tried to be patient with him came back to me when I was sweeping the floor or folding laundry, always accompanied by a mild horror. I had been my own captor.

On my next date with the new boy he asks me not to see other people. When I ask him to read something I wrote, he says okay but looks stricken. When I push, he says it feels too intimate, like peeing with the door open. He spends the rest of the date revealing achingly personal things. I listen, put a hand on his, ask questions. When I stop asking questions, it’s quiet. We walk along the Embarcadero and I ask him what he thinks a relationship is for. He says he wants a captive audience. Ha ha. Later, after he leaves my house, I imagine how that will read when I type it all up. I can’t believe it’s real.

Before I dump him the next day, he asks me to be patient with him.

*

When you are in a relationship and seeking advice, people fall into two camps. They either say that love is hard work, or that you should never settle. The Love is Work people are more common; the Never Settle people are either single or with some fluke soulmate. They are both right, but there is no way they can know which situation you are in—or if neither apply. You know it’s not the soulmate one, but you want to be in love, so you start to believe that yours is a love worth working on.

When I ask my best gay guy friend for advice about love he always says that’s what I’ve had to learn in my marriage. They have a house with a wedding photo on the mantle and one day, probably, will have a kid. But lately I’ve been getting tired. Lately I’ve started to think that I don’t necessarily want those things. I don’t necessarily want to learn things in a marriage.

There is a book that for a while everyone was saying you should read, about why you should settle. Women, it says, are too picky: whether a man is tall or a banker says little about what kind of father he will be. The book about settling is for women who want to have children the old-fashioned way. You can’t, actually, have it all. I agree with this book. We have eggs that expire, and the choice is real. But I don’t really care that my eggs are expiring. It’s hard to imagine that being worse than the thing that I fear.

I used to think I was afraid of ending up alone. Now I think I’m afraid of ending up in some version of this lonely-in-a-relationship hell, in which you wake up next to someone you can’t reach, drive down a mountain road with someone who just wants you to try to have a good time, leave a movie without being asked what you thought of it. When you report the facts, everyone tells you that’s just what a relationship is.

When I was dating the person I lived with in New York, I read the Cheryl Strayed essay about the moment she realized she needed to leave her husband, and how it was the same moment she realized the homeless woman who visited her every day at work had a bundle of rags on her head. That has become a lit-girl shorthand for knowing you need to leave: having a bundle on your head. The point being that when you’re in the wrong relationship, you look everywhere for permission to leave, or the right combination of arguments that you should stay. That’s why you can be undone by the stitching on a hat.

I want to end this essay by naming a villain. Society, or men, or heterosexuality, or marriage. I want to end it by saying that if you’re looking for a sign, this is it: you should dump your boyfriend. But instead, I will tell you that I don’t know what you should do, because I am not you. Instead, I will quote Cheryl and say this. You aren’t torn. You’re only just afraid.

More than three weeks ago now, I was sitting at a Passover seder when I started to feel overheated. I went to the bathroom and took off my overalls and sat on the toilet not even using it, just sweating it out while the four questions went on without me on the other side of the door. At a different seder the night before, I’d drunk four glasses of wine and gotten a nosebleed in my brisket. I figured I was just 34 and having a hard weekend. But later that night when I got home, I came down with a fever that lasted eight full days, like Passover itself, or one of the plagues. Then I got pneumonia.

Look, before I complain about this: part of me is aware that every single day, way worse shit happens to people than getting the flu and then getting pneumonia. There are gruesome accidents and cancer and wars. People even get way worse flus and worse pneumonia that they die from, or are at least hospitalized for. But another part of me wants to uncheck my privilege for a moment to say this: COME ON, UNIVERSE. At the time that I contracted this flu, 2025 had already thrown me one heartbreak, one layoff, one roommate turnover, one best friend getting mauled by a car, about 900 job application rejections, one gum infection, and a different flu. And it was only April.

As my flu raged, these various injustices began to intersect with one another. I was so feverish that I couldn’t get out of bed to do things like feed cats or make food, and my Facebook marketplace roommate was too new to be asked to care for me in my highly contagious state. I’d fucked up all previous chances I’d had at a relationship and broken it off with the nice, normal girl I’d been on two dates with recently because I just wasn’t feeling it. Faced with my irrevocable singledom, I found myself calling my downstairs neighbor—another childless cat lady—for help. She kindly fed the cats for three days and deposited an armful of Gatorade in my fridge. But you can’t ask your downstairs neighbor to do much more than that.

Being unemployed, I had just signed up for a Kaiser plan through Covered California. I never got a card or any communication in the mail from them, so I had to endure their insane phone tree dozens of times just to get to the point where I could download their app, which didn’t work for scheduling appointments, viewing messages, or sending new ones to a doctor. I was told it would take 10 business days to process my tech ticket. Two weeks later my app is still defunct. The phone tree operators kept trying to direct me to a phone consultation with a nurse instead of a real, live doctor who could listen to my lungs, so I had to call four separate times sobbing and remind them that I pay them $700 a month for this shit just to get a single, in-person appointment. I started racking up DoorDash fees as I realized I was out of Advil, then NyQuil, then something else, and tried to put the fact that I didn’t have a job but was paying a 400% markup for a simple bottle of fever reducer out of my mind. I took a $45 Waymo to the Kaiser appointment to avoid infecting a human.

I tried to do my freelance work to offset some of these costs. I took four Advil just to be able to attend a meeting, and when I stood up after it was over I saw that my clothes were completely drenched in sweat. Which had also been happening every single night, which meant I had to drag my ass to the laundry machine to wash my sheets over and over again. Outside, San Francisco’s perfect spring weather beamed. I was missing it. Instead of enjoying it, I was shivering and watching every single episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, because I wanted to be swaddled in early 2000s Tuscan-kitchen comfort and Jewish cringe as if I were a child again. When my fever finally subsided but my cough just kept getting worse, I took another $45 Uber to the Kaiser in Oakland to get a chest x-ray, a pneumonia diagnosis, and a prescription for amoxicillin. At that point, it had been two weeks since the seder. It felt like nine years.

*

When I was younger—and I realize how trite this sounds—I thought that everything happened for a reason. But because I am me, when I told myself this, it didn’t sound like a distressed farmhouse-style bathroom sign from HomeGoods. It was more like: I am a young and vibrant person on my way to fulfill my obviously illustrious destiny. Every obstacle put in my path is just training for when I am old and wise, married with three gay children going to Yale, barefoot in my remodeled Pasadena home writing a memoir and bringing an enormous salad to an outdoor dining table surrounded by friends congratulating me for my Pulitzer or my Booker prize. I can handle anything because it will eventually be incorporated into my hard-won success story. In fact, what even is a hard-won success story without the hardship, the struggle, the obstacles that the protagonist must conquer?

Now that I am 34 and my hard-won success story isn’t really materializing the way I always pictured it, I’ve begun to doubt my worldview. What if life isn’t actually a bespoke spiritual playground for my self-actualization, rife with messages and symbols ready to be mined for narrative gold, but instead random and cruel? Once I told my friend who’d had a stroke that it probably taught her a lot. “I’d rather be stupid and happy and not have had a stroke,” she said. Around that time I was dating a Syrian guy who’d escaped their civil war and agreed with her. Everything that happened, he said, was random, and usually tragic.

Still: “I think I have bad karma,” I told my therapist, who smiled and asked me who it was who was thinking in this young way.

“If it’s not karma, what is it?” I asked her.

One of the things I am most grateful for in this life is my therapist, who is somehow mystical enough to have once given me a crystal but also intellectually legit enough to have read every single book on Jungian analysis, psychotherapy, alchemy, and probably a dozen other topics I don’t even know exist. Molly never tells me to name 5 things I can see in the room when I’m having a panic attack. Instead, she usually reminds me that feeling like shit is an ancient human tradition and by having a panic attack, I am feeling the full effects of being alive.

As such, this is what she said: life is constantly killing us and bringing us back. We are constantly being initiated and then alchemized down to our most essential spiritual parts, until everything but the truth is burned away.

“Being sick is a great humbling,” she said. “And there’s nothing more human than being humbled over and over and over again.”

This sounded more right than the idea that, for example, the Gazan children all had bad karma and that was why they were living through hell. But I still didn’t like it. It meant that I had to just sit there and be uncomfortable, sick, and completely alone. And at the end, I might not learn a lesson. I might not get a prize.

*

After four out of five days of amoxicillin, I wasn’t getting better. The only thing that had changed was that I had developed what my physician’s assistant friend Sonja said was probably pleurisy—inflammation of the lining of the lung. It hurt so bad I couldn’t even change positions in bed.

Okay, my sister Becky finally texted from where she lives in the Netherlands. I’m coming. Then she bought a ticket and rented a car.

When I realized that in less than 48 hours my little sister would be there to bring me toast, drive me places, and put my dishes in the dishwasher, I burst into tears. I burst into tears again when she appeared on my doorstep with a suitcase and a gift—a blue and white Dutch vase. She brought me fresh toothpaste and dental floss and picked up Thai food on her way from the airport. I hadn’t had an appetite in days but I choked down an order of fresh rolls and savored the fact that someone had brought them to me. After dinner I put my head in her lap and she rubbed my back. Her hands were exactly like our mother’s; her conviction that I’d live through this was our father’s. She laughed at me every time I cried and said, “This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.” The entire time she was there, I worried that her being there was ruining her life in some way, distracting her from her MBA or her job or her relationship. I was afraid my bad karma would rub off on her.

I went back to the doctor and got more and different antibiotics. Becky made me pickles and stocked my fridge with cultured butter and kefir. She made me cinnamon toast on demand, took out my trash, fed the cats, asked her coworkers at her pharmaceutical consulting firm about my symptoms. The different antibiotics started working. I started walking around without getting winded or exhausted or doubling over in pain. We drove to the Abercrombie in Burlingame in the rental car and I sat in the dressing room trying to stay awake while she tried on clothes. Afterwards I ate an entire salad without feeling sick. We drove to the Presidio so I could walk just a few feet to a picnic table with a view of the Golden Gate bridge and color in the sunshine. I lost track of the days but tried to remember to notice and enjoy the feeling of having a companion, someone to witness my humbling, and even alleviate its worst effects.

Of course people have done nice things for me before—I’m thinking in particular of my grandparents, who saved me from drowning in student debt, or my mother, who gave birth to me. But it is hard to think of a kindness that ever made such a dramatic and primordial impact on me. I thought about all the times I could have done something like this for my sister, but hadn’t. Most of those times, it hadn’t even occurred to me. Was that the bad karma?

By Becky’s last day in San Francisco, I was able to clean the apartment even though the pain in my side and back from coughing persisted. I could take deep breaths and my coughs weren’t as disgusting. I could work, I could write. I could feed the cats on my own. She’d healed me. Or maybe time and antibiotics had, but it was impossible to imagine having done the last week of this alone.

After she left for the airport I kept cleaning, sitting down for long periods of time in between tasks to catch my breath and cry because she’d been so nice. As I vacuumed my room, tears streamed down my face.

I finally understood.

The question wasn’t what I had done wrong to earn this illness, or how to align it with my personal shortcomings so as to reduce them, or how to spin it all into a scene in the larger narrative of my life. If there was wisdom in living through a medical event, it probably looked more like simple gratitude for one’s health than a new understanding of the interconnectedness of it all.

But because I have my sister, I am lucky to be able to focus on a different question than what pneumonia taught me. Instead, the question becomes how to stay here, in its aftermath. The question becomes how to remember this—the feeling of being so thoroughly helpless, and so thoroughly loved.

And the opportunity to remember?

That’s the prize.

Honestly, you guys, I didn’t want to write this. But several people whose opinion of me I deeply care about have said “Hey, what happened to your Substack?” And I’m not yet enlightened enough to thrive without the approval of others, so here I am. I got laid off, I have a gum infection, and I want to make the last thing in this list our chaotic descent into autocracy, but at this point it’s cliché. You can’t even write about the end of the world because simply reporting its basic facts makes you sound unhinged. And I don’t have a great track record of remaining hinged during a crisis. During COVID, I coped by washing my hands in between each individual shower activity (the vagina is a mucus membrane, people!) and crocheting so hard I needed physical therapy. So instead of the haunting but funny, achingly true braided essay that gets to the heart of something true and human that I’d like to be writing right now, here are a few disparate thoughts that might be of interest to my very small but loyal readership.

On getting laid off.
Like many people, I am a creative person with a day job who has now found themselves without a day job (thank you, system collapse). This isn’t just a problem for my bank account; it’s a problem for my writing, too. After years of trying pretty much every permutation of living a creative life—freelance and underbooked, freelance and overbooked, full time, contract, fucking off and living abroad—I had already concluded that a plain old job is what’s most likely to bring about the stability that allows my personal creativity to emerge. It’s kind of like how after trying nine Millennial-branded mattresses I ended up loving the spring mattress from the cheesy box store that has disgusting grandma flowers all over it. In some cases, the old-fashioned, unsexy thing is the answer.

But my 9-5 is gone now. And because I’ve never been very good at creating my own structure (see above re: pending enlightenment), I am now at risk of descending into what one of my former colleagues recently called “a state of bathrobe.” In a State of Bathrobe, time means nothing, no one cares when I log on to do my freelance work on top of no one caring if I never write my novel, and the creative job market is so bad that it is entirely possible to spend 40 hours a week job searching and end up right back where I started—with no job and no book. We have now arrived at what I think is the theme of this post, which is that deep down, I am a moderate old Jewish man. I’m tired. I have a gum infection. I have cats to feed. I am not in the mood to redesign my life again. If you know anyone who is hiring a designer/writer/editor/Slack comedian, please get in touch.

In the meantime, I have one small epiphany to offer anyone who finds themselves trying to stay creative in the face of mass layoffs, an impending recession, and the potential collapse of modern life as we know it.

Everyone has always told me that the key to being successful, especially in creative endeavors, is consistency. But every time I tried to stick to anything, it didn’t work. After two weeks of working out, I still wasn’t skinny, I was just hungry. After two weeks of The Artist’s Way I was like yeah yeah, I get it, I’ve been doing morning pages since I was 11. But my best friend recently booked a part on NCIS after keeping at these things for like five years straight and I don’t have a lot of other options right now, so this week I decided to give it another try. I put working out, all the tasks from The Artist’s Way, and my blocks of freelance time in my calendar as if it was all a job I needed to report to.

By Thursday, it was, like usual, realllllly not working. The world was still ending and I still didn’t have a job and writing anything seemed completely futile. But I did my stupid morning pages anyway. Halfway through finishing them I decided to check my spam folder to see if any emails offering me incredible jobs had taken a wrong turn on their way to me. They hadn’t. There was an email from American Short Fiction celebrating a debut novel by someone I briefly worked with in LA. Fuck. I decided to start writing this Substack from that headspace. Then I ended up blowing off half a day of non-time-sensitive freelance work in order to finish it. Suddenly all the voices that had been telling me to get writing were mad at me for ruining my carefully-planned structure. This is not your predetermined writing time! they said. This is why you’re unemployed. You do everything halfway. Etc.

But you know what? After I finished it, I felt fucking amazing. I looked at my calendar. Everything I had to move to make room for that time was possible to move. Because I don’t have a job.

That’s when I realized something was clicking that never had for me before about self-imposed structure leading to creativity: it’s not about the structure. It’s about the tension that comes from imposing the structure. What I already know is that I can’t be creative without something to safely rebel against. What I didn’t before understand was that I had to create the thing to rebel against.

That’s it. Just make your stupid little workout or job searching or writing schedule and try to stick to it. It’s not so you can be skinny or get the job or finish the book. It’s because along the way, while you’re trying, you’ll figure out what it was actually all about. I understand that everyone else already knew this. But I didn’t promise you original thoughts, I just promised you regular posts.

On the incest in White Lotus.
This show is the only thing keeping me going right now. I think it is brilliant. It is a sharp satire whose characters have actual depth in a sexy, lush setting with stunningly talented actors. (Jason Isaacs, who plays Tim Ratliff, is really stealing the show for me. How do I feel so bad for this horrible person? Again, moderate old Jewish man with acid reflux over here, living in fear of being sued for absolutely no reason.) If you aren’t watching, please skip the following spoilers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this season, which I think is the best yet, is trying to say. Of course every season of this show is a searing critique of wealth, but there’s always another layer. In the first season, the man at the intersection of the lower class and upper class was killed by an aggrieved representative of the upper class. In the second season, a woman at the intersection of femininity and masculinity was killed by an aggrieved representative of the masculine. In this season, I think we are at the intersection of the practical realm and the spiritual realm. I don’t know who will kill and be killed, but I will not be surprised if someone who represents the spiritual (Chelsea? Gaitok?) is killed by someone who represents the practical (one of the Ratliffs? The Russians?). Or maybe it’s the other way around. Because this show is inherently cynical about power, and I think it is giving the power to the spiritual realm. Anyway, I don’t know who will die.

But I keep seeing this take about the incest, which is that it’s about how the rich only want to fraternize with their own people. I think it’s more than that, though. I think the show is trying to say that you can’t transcend your karma even when you’re really, really trying. Piper wants to be a Buddhist. Frank wants to be an Asian woman. Gaitok wants to be a bodyguard. That other guy who works at the hotel wants to be a Thai singer. All the LBHs want to disappear. But none of them will get what they want, because while we are all—not just the rich!—under the impression that we have free will, our decisions are constantly creating ringlike ripple effects that seem more like a fate that encircles us. You might want to get away from who you are, but instead you’ll probably end up oppressed by the very monsters you created during your most vulnerable moment. That’s why Saxon’s hypersexuality loops back around to destroy him, Tim’s family values betray him, and the demons that Chelsea so desperately wants to rid Rick of literally come back to bite her. Dark. I love it. Which brings me to my last point.

(Back) on Instagram.
At my last job I was in charge of our social media, which meant that it was not only possible but helpful for me to wake up, log into X, and see who wanted to call me a fascist today. I would not recommend this, particularly during a period of immense social and political upheaval. When I got laid off one of the first things I did was delete all my social media apps and stop reading the news.

At first it was hard, because, you know, it’s a drug. I was bored and wanted a piece of candy and it didn’t feel good to not be able to get it. But after about three weeks I had my brain back. I went on vacation and didn’t post a single photo. I read 10 books, rewrote the first 20 pages of my novel twice, and still had a general idea of what Trump was up to. That’s the thing about bad news—it knows where to find you.

But then I went to see Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson speak about their new book, Abundance, at the Sydney Goldstein Theater. I brought my friend who’s a civil rights lawyer and we met up with some of my old coworkers, who are political organizers. I’d become annoyed during the show because Klein and Thompson said so many correct things that everyone in the crowd cheered for, but I know from intimately studying the San Francisco voting maps that they probably will not consistently vote for. Right now, on my block in my ultra-progressive neighborhood, there is a group of residents organizing to oppose an affordable housing complex that wants to expand into half of a playground that has been closed since COVID. They’re calling us NIMBYs, says the flyer that hangs on a lamppost outside my apartment. THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE BEING NIMBYs, I think, and almost write on a Post-It to hang next to the lamppost, but then decide not to because I’m not doing that kind of thing anymore. I am being an artist, unconcerned with the politics of it all and more interested in nuance and the various shades of human emotion. But also, fuck that. There are literally FOUR parks within 10 minutes’ walking distance of that park, and they’re really nice ones too. San Francisco is short 82,000 units of housing and I pay $2,500/mo to live with a roommate at age 34. I think they can spare half a park.

What does this have to do with Instagram? After the show I realized my only true knowledge of any one current event was the sign I had seen on the lamppost, and in front of my civil rights lawyer and political organizer friends, I was sheepishly quiet. I remembered how two of my closest friends are girls my ex worked with when we were 24 who reached out on Instagram when I moved to San Francisco. Without social media, I would’ve had to wait to run into them on the street. Not efficient. And us old Jewish guy moderates are all about efficiency.

Instagram is good for keeping up with your friends and sounding like you know what’s up at a book talk. It’s bad for pretty much everything else. But right now, those things are actually important to me. So sue me.

Actually, please please don’t. I have enough problems.

Bye for now!

“Do you think they made all these divorce movies in 2011 because that’s when the systems began to collapse?” I asked her. “The 90s and the 2000s being like a home with a stable marriage at the center of it.” Anna and I are both children of divorce, daughters of collapse. We are experts in picking up pieces and in picking up and moving. But maybe the pace of system collapse is the reason I spent my twenties choosing to flirt with collapse while Anna is spending hers being forced to. This is an essay about how everything I love is burning to the ground.

*

I moved to Los Angeles in 2016. I was 25. I lived in a rent-controlled apartment off the La Cienega exit on the 10 with my two best friends from childhood, who were now dating each other. We each paid $600 a month in rent and did odd freelance jobs to survive. We told ourselves if we didn’t do this we were wasting our privilege. We made short films inspired by other groups of friends who were making similar short films just a few freeway exits away—we watched Brian Jordan Alvarez’s Caleb Gallo on YouTube dozens of times—and pretended the sound of the freeway was the ocean. We went for very long, myopic walks through Beverlywood and talked loudly and unselfconsciously about our Big Dreams in coffee shops in the middle of the day. I spent a lot of money on parking meters, which were always impossibly slow at processing my payment. Authorizing, please wait, they blinked, and I wondered when my author-ization would be complete. When would I become an author?

When Donald Trump won the election, we got IUDs and researched countries to flee to. Zach wanted Uruguay because, he said, everyone there still read the newspaper and breathed clean air. He was always monitoring our apartment’s air filters and glaring at the freeway out the window. At night we’d drive to Santa Monica and walk on the beach for exactly 80 minutes, which was how long parking in the city-funded lots remained free, plus time to get back to the car before we would be charged. We’d look out at the inky water, the silhouette of the Santa Monica mountains against the glowing sky, and wait for the other shoe to drop.

Sometimes we’d talk about how we managed to be born within this narrow slice of privileged perfection that was the ‘90s. What were the chances, we asked, of being born to upper-middle-class American families in the suburbs just before everything collapsed? Because, really, collapse is the norm and our roughly 30 years on this Earth are the exception that proves the rule. Ezra Klein wrote recently that “Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years—from the climate to birthrates to political institutions—is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.” History shows us that the actual human experience is technological change and natural disasters and pandemics and political upheaval. What we have been living through is a delusion, and only now are we being forced to contend with reality.

Now it is 2025 and I don’t have to tell you what is happening to Los Angeles. I don’t have to tell you that the destruction’s ever-growing total acreage is more than double that of Manhattan, that the fire consumed family photos and pets and bedrooms being kept as shrines to kids who died of cancer and pianos and art collections. I don’t have to tell you this because every time you pick up your phone there it is: your very own adventure through the chaos that the algorithm has chosen specifically for you. I don’t have to tell you that the adventure has replaced the movies we all thought we’d make, the books we thought we would write.

*

I decided to move to Israel three weeks before I left. Claire and Zach had broken up and when Claire moved to the east side, Zach and I had to pay more than $600 a month to enjoy the sound of the freeway. By that time I was working at Los Angeles magazine, which was a shadow of its former self. I’d wrecked my car and couldn’t afford to paint its new front bumper or pay the new insurance premium that was my punishment for being a careless driver. And then there were the earthquakes. They came one after the next for three days, beginning on the Fourth of July. When the earth would sway like a ship tilted in the sea we would turn to each other, wide-eyed, wondering if this was finally The Big One. When Zach decided to move to New York, I was alone in the little apartment off the La Cienega exit on the 10.

Then I moved to Israel.

I have been trying to write about Israel for five years and I still don’t know how. The first problem is that I cannot fully explain why I went. Someone without an addiction to blowing it all up may have, at this point, been able to talk themselves through this kind of adversity. Some people see a pessimistic think piece about earthquake preparedness or a dwindling number in their bank account and look ahead, considering how they can build a life or a career that endures. I flirted harder with danger.

I moved into a one-room apartment in downtown Haifa, where I slept one foot away from another girl, stepped on cockroaches on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and cooked Shabbat dinner with nothing but a hotplate and a toaster oven. Every day I commuted to twin Bedouin villages in the Tzippori Valley where I taught English at the local school. This, too, I have struggled to write about. When cheerleaders for the state of Israel tout that 20 percent of its population are Arab Israelis, what they do not explain is that Israeli society is segregated. Arab Israeli and Jewish Israeli students do not attend the same schools. This is mostly because of the difference in language, but that, too, is unequal: Arab students are required to learn Hebrew but Jewish students are not required to learn Arabic. The program that hosted me gave me the option of teaching in a Jewish school or an Arab school and I said I didn’t care which. Apparently most people did not say they didn’t care which, because I got placed in the Arab school. It should have been hard, being the only American Jew in a devout Muslim village on the Israeli periphery, and sometimes, it was. It was hard to manage a classroom or intuit social cues when I didn’t speak the language. It was hard to wonder whether, if my coworkers knew that my grandmother served in the paramilitary group that became the Israeli Defense Forces, they would stop offering me knaffeh. It was hard to be the only one like me, which was an experience I’d never had in the states.

But then there were the ways in which it was not hard at all. I spent my free periods with Abu Ahmed, who worked on the school grounds and spoke English because he spent some years on a kibbutz. He picked herbs from the garden for our tea in the fresh mornings and in the afternoons we sat on a bench in the sun sharing a pomelo from his tree. I had never seen one before, and he taught me to peel back the very thin skin of the fruit’s sections to reveal the part that is more sweet than it is sour. When Abu Ahmed was busy and I had free time I sat at the big communal table in the teacher’s lounge drinking coffee so strong it could put you to sleep and dipping fennel in labneh spun from home-grown sheep down the road. Everyone around me was always speaking Arabic, and I was surprised to discover that I loved not being able to understand what was being said. It freed me from having to analyze what it meant.

Eventually I figured out who else in the village spoke English and they brought me home to spend weekends with their families. I ate the best dinners of my life: perfectly charred kebabs and thick creamy hummus and tangy tabouleh and hand-rolled dawali. I pronounced English words for their kids in my Californian accent and they showed me how to write basic Arabic letters. When I asked about the conflict most were either too diplomatic to answer honestly or had truly stopped caring after years of non-resolution. Abu Ahmed would drive me to get falafel in a neighboring village and on the way there he’d point out all the neighborhoods where Arabs and Jews lived together peacefully. When my father came to visit, Abu Ahmed hosted us for tea in his home and they talked in Hebrew about everything: philosophy, fatherhood, religion. People, we agreed, were just people. My father, who spent a year on a kibbutz and has an Israeli mother, told me he’d never have had such an experience if I hadn’t invited him to the village. When my students punched each other during Hangman or tried to cheat on their tests or ran out of the classroom at top speed these were the moments I clung to. I thought I was building something that could one day be a bridge, and fantasized about staying in Israel to work at a peace school that taught in both Hebrew and Arabic.

I didn’t realize how much pressure I had put on myself until COVID hit and school shut down and I was locked in my cockroach-infested room for six weeks straight. The lockdown started right after a four-day break from school for a Jewish holiday, and I had recently breathed the breath of dozens of other English-speaking Jews who were placed in other schools who had all traveled to Europe over the break. For two weeks after the lockdown began I waited anxiously to hear that I, the only American Jew coming from a big city to the village, had brought the deadly virus to the population I was there to teach. I could see the headlines. That’s when I realized I had already spent a year in fear: of being found out, of being called out, of being an interloper or a colonizer or simply an American with privilege. What was I trying to prove?

My friend down the hall in the cockroach-infested apartment complex lost her father to the virus back in Ecuador; my sister was in Spain at the height of its spread and fell ill; the Israeli government began cracking down on walks. I started having panic attacks about latex gloves and calling my family to ask if sweeping the floor through the square of tile where my shoes had been was a mistake. I opened the window to get some air and a cigarette butt flew in, covered in saliva droplets. I used the last of my groceries to make cookies in my toaster oven but was so shaky searching for a bowl in the cabinet that I dropped a stack of four glass dishes and they shattered, coating every surface of the apartment—and the cookie dough—in a new kind of invisible danger.

Now I think that maybe I had become obsessed with living precariously. Once someone told me that people who had chaotic childhoods often want to be writers or editors because it feels like taming the chaos. So, too, does living in chaos. Like people who want to climb straight up the sides of mountains or surf deadly waves, in my twenties I became—without realizing it or understanding it—addicted to walking right up to the edge of the stable world I’d been born into and peering down. As I have gotten older and less reactive I have looked back on this and felt embarrassed. Now a new feeling is emerging. Now I long for my somewhat self-destructive youth, remembering the privilege of being able to choose the specific way in which I’d like my life to fall apart next.

Here’s another thing I won’t spend time explaining to you: the war in Gaza. Your phone has chosen this adventure for you, too. Depending on what your eyes linger over, you could be inundated with images of dying and maimed children, or maybe Americans who have an issue with the very idea of a theocracy, or maybe children in army uniforms doing TikTok dances. The horrors are endless. For a while I thought I had a unique perspective on Israel-Palestine. My father says he never fed me the Israeli story about turning the desert green and conquering the Arab armies in the various wars on purpose so that I could form my own opinion. At my school, that is exactly what I did. My opinion is that you should donate to Standing Together and stop posting about the war on Instagram unless you have read over ten books on the Middle East. I have no more words on this matter. I am too sad that the people I love in the North who have nothing to do with any of this spend their days wondering when they will have to run to the bomb shelter. I am too embarrassed that an entire country has been flattened in the name of my ethnicity.

*

In December of last year, Brian Jordan Alvarez was accused of sexually assaulting his co-star during one of the scenes in Caleb Gallo. We all texted each other about it. Everything good, we agreed, was secretly fucked in some fundamental way. Even the little cult classic YouTube series you watched while you were eating your microwave pizza on an exhausted Wednesday night after work that reminded you of your misspent youth filming short films in your garage.

Anna wants me to tell her that she will be happy. I cannot bring myself to do it. I long ago stopped measuring my life in terms of happiness. She wants to know that it is worth it to pursue art professionally. I don’t know what to say to that, either. I have lost track of what I am aspiring to, or if aspiration even makes sense anymore. Living on the periphery of all these disasters has shown me that it is not sustainable to live in relentless pursuit of anything, nor is it to stop your life for every loss of those pursuits. Modern life demands that we forge ahead in a liminal space. In that way, I know that Anna will be okay. She is very good at forging ahead.

When Anna and I met on a tour bus in Europe, we both opened our backpacks and pulled out All Fours, the book that broke the perimenopausal internet and is the first mainstream blueprint for marriage beyond system collapse. All Fours is in so many ways the answer to the divorce movies of the 2010s. In 2004, when I was in high school, my state voted to amend its constitution to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. In 2025, I am learning about lesbianism from TikTok and Miranda July and Anna. When I tell my therapist that I oscillate wildly between the need for stability and the need for chaos she tells me that from the tension will emerge a third way. When I imagine telling my 2010s self that I left my age-appropriate but distant boyfriend and kissed the 24-year-old girl I met in Europe who told me she’d listen to a 30-minute monologue about a yawn I had, I think that version of me would be proud of how I am finding the third way.

People are saying the fires in LA and the war in Gaza are failures of government, and they are. But they are also the logical conclusion of a world that was built on precarity. Los Angeles relies on human manipulation of the natural world. Israel relies on the human manipulation of other humans. Like well-meaning people entering a marriage doomed to fail, our global society has built systems that were always going to collapse because they were built on something dishonest.

Between stability and chaos, there is collapse. And amid collapse, we can look for a new way.

Hello and welcome to my island. If you’ve known me for more than ten years, you are probably already subscribed to both a constant stream of anxious text messages and periodic announcements about how I’m starting an Instagram for my “art,” a blog with over-filtered images of my apartment and its pedestrian IKEA furniture, or a TikTok dedicated to noteworthy bathrooms. You may have noticed how rare it is than any of these endeavors materialize. For that I am sorry, but not sorry enough to change my behavior.

Here’s why this moment is different though: for the first time in my life, I have made and kept two New Year’s resolutions. The first was to cultivate a Spotify Wrapped I can be proud of (ie, no Taylor Swift or white men rapping in Hebrew) and the second was to finish a book-length writing project. While I can offer you proof of the first one, I did not entirely complete the second. However, given that it is now a new year and I haven’t abandoned or forgotten altogether that I made this resolution, I’ve decided it counts. It turns out that getting old means it’s easier form long-term habits because entire years feel like five minutes. And we all know you can do anything for five minutes, except look out the window on the bus without checking your texts. So I’m resolving to write at least twelve newsletters in 2025, because hard work should always rewarded with more work.

First Up: Did You Like That Hinge Date, or Are You Just Better Than Everyone?

If you aren’t here because you’ve been Googling the likelihood of contracting botulism on my behalf in the middle of your workday, you might know me from all two of my dating advice columns in the San Francisco Standard. I am back with my current thinking on the one and only thing me and my friends ever want to talk about. Today’s topic: my four-part system for deciding if you actually liked your date.

Before you freak out about why I’m approaching my life with such an utter lack of poetry and sensuality, consider for a moment that I live in San Francisco, where one sits in a self-driving car just to get away from it all and couples have shared Slack channels to assign who’s giving vs. receiving head tonight. This place is like Mecca for people whose iPhones control their dimmable lights. This is the culture I’ve been steeped in for three years.

Personally my biggest problem with dating—fine, my actual biggest problem is that I’ve been dating the wrong gender, but we’ll cover that later—is that I usually spend so much of the date trying to be witty and charming that I forget to notice if I liked the person. If that sounds relatable, this system is for you! Here’s how it works. Ideally you will familiarize yourself with this system before the date, try to pay full attention to the other person for at least ten minutes, and then go home and fill out this questionnaire.

You have 100 percentage points to award your date, across four categories. The categories are:

Sex Appeal: did you sustain an interest in having sex with them for the entire ten minutes you weren’t thinking about yourself?

Presence: did their very existence make you feel as though all is right with the world?

Interesting: did they exhibit editorial judgment and say things that made you laugh?

Interested: did they ask you at least three questions? This may sound basic, and yet it is the most difficult category to find high performers in, especially if you are a straight woman.

Now award your date points in all four categories. To make this simple, you can choose only from 0, 12.5, or 25 in each category. Here’s an example.

This leads to only a few possible scores, which makes it very easy to decide what to do next.

0–12.5: Ghost them. Better yet, pray they ghost you. Better still: set them up with your mortal enemy.

25–50: Depending on the distribution, you might possibly fuck this person and then move on (high sex score), or maybe keep them around as a friend (high interesting/interested score).

62.5–87.5: Almost all my major partners have been in this range. Make of that what you will.

100: All my major partners should have been in this range. Make of that what you will.

My last partner was a 100. So it is completely possible to find, especially given that the categories are pretty basic—some might even consider them table stakes.

All of that being said, it didn’t work out with my last partner. Here’s the thing. It is of the utmost importance to note that love is chaos. This system will not prevent future heartbreak. It only advises you on immediate and early next steps. Because the truth is, there is absolutely no way to avoid descending into madness while waiting for a text back; saying the wrong thing; having incompatible childhood traumas; realizing you’re actually more bisexual than you thought you were; learning they skip all the songs from you on your Spotify blend; owning cats that keep the other person awake all night; subscribing to different pop psychology systems (enneagram vs. astrology is a common mismatch); or learning the other person is secretly an anti-vaxxer.

Anyone who believes otherwise is better off staying home to program their sound system and have cybersex with Claude.ai.