Time to write a poem again, after years of wondering,

“now what will happen?” Each year, the creeping

sensation that life is calcifying into prose. In adolescence,

I was a poet, the bad but occasionally lucky kind, and every word was an

island. In university, Gordon Lisch told me (speaking

through my professor,

a woman who lived upstate in a house with a skylight and commuted into

Manhattan) that every sentence should be a place

of stone and steel.

So many people would have taught me if I had let them. What next?

The novel won’t write itself. The laundry won’t do itself, going outside

is expensive, my friends will soon tire of excuses; how long

to demand the belief of others? Poetry is being an ex-ballerina

and going on and on about tomatoes. Poets have bad haircuts

and live in Vermont and are content with the company

of birds, whereas I like when people think

I am funny, to the detriment

of my guilt-prone, snail-like heart.

How to return to feeling-language, to meter, to saying things like: you

are the bone-white cliffs of Ischia, the lumbering sky horses, the insinuation

of the moon, also, now that you mention them, the tongues of the cicadas that

steal my sleep. Or something

like that, that’s just an example, but case in point! I’ve lost it.

How to see again? Maybe it’s like what I’ve heard of painting:

paint in the order that god created

the universe: sky, sea, earth, man.

Then you can give man a little outfit.

The last time I was a poet, I was lank-haired and hungover at the Prado, legs

sore and throat clenched. The last time I was a poet

I was in love with a gay man.

He took me to an abandoned mining town in the desert. I lay

awake a wall away from him every night for a week in a lunar beach town,

breathless and sleepless,

my torment later manifesting in me

throwing up limoncello out of a car window for six hours while he eyed me

pityingly and non-sexually rubbed my back. I had forgotten about all of that.

Being in love with a gay man is actually the perfect condition for poetry–

when someone wants you back, it’s prose.

Hardly anybody who knows me now remembers me as a poet, seventeen, with a

craving for language like pica. I wanted to write the way pregnant

women want to suck on pennies and eat dirt. I’m not saying

I was very good,

just hungry.

Now, honestly, how many ways to say, “What a nice view.

I wish you were here”?

During our lessons on figurative language, my students

are always offering examples like, “the snow was as cold as ice.”

Drives me nuts! Vengefully,

I declare there will be no recess

until they can each tell me one way in which a cake

is like a train. I think they daydream

about my demise. Fair enough. Our room is ugly;

outside, the sky is changing and everything important

is happening elsewhere.

Free association isn’t very free when I’m up here

in my cardigan trying and failing to employ

positive discipline practices while

teaching them about parallelisms. Why can’t a sentence crash into itself?

Parallel is a lonely place. Parallel, like the railroad tracks that construct

themselves while you are wondering

if you should cut your hair, if you are beautiful, if you will win, if the thing

that is wrong with you requires medication. Suddenly, you realize the whole time

you’ve been looking in the mirror, you’ve been on a train

with your enemies and allies alike. You can throw yourself

off the train or blow the whole thing up, that’s true.

You can talk about that possibility

and hold it against anyone and anything that wants to keep you.

Is freedom very free

if it requires so much vigilance?

At least I am not a very effective conductor myself, at least the kids

are laughing. I tell them, more gently, a metaphor can’t be too close or

too far away from the thing itself. Mind the train, mind the gap. Too close

and too far are two walls to bang your head on. Too close

and too far are two dogs licking your face

when you come home. You love them, but

in the morning you will once again

wake up and

abandon them both.

1. Alien Manifesto

   You are not from this planet. You are just visiting. You notice the curvature of the earth, which from a distance appears like a blue marble you want to slip into your mouth. You see the trees reaching up to the sky, the placement of people having picnics on a hill, the rat caught in a trap, the trash cans and strawberries and sun and desert. You are trying to be a good guest, observant of the customs and temperaments of those around you. You know that you can never truly understand, nor change the fate of this place–not the whole blue marble of it–during your short stay. Nonetheless, you are kind to the locals. You clean up after yourself. You dress yourself in good walking shoes, so you can make the best use of your time. When you return to your home in the ether, you will watch the marble get smaller and say thank you for having me.

2. Suffering Manifesto

   Love should only hurt as much as peeling an orange when you have a paper cut. A paper cut can really, really hurt, depending on where it is.

3. Bad Choice Manifesto

   Most of the time, you know what you should do. Often, you’ll do what you are supposed to. Most situations have been repeated enough times with slight variations that a school of popular advice has emerged around them. Probably, you should not run away from your problems, put yourself in dangerous situations, buy things you can’t afford, etc. But sometimes there is an amount of self-knowledge that will show you certain missteps are inevitable, and you might as well do what you’re not meant to do and be sure it was the wrong choice rather than wondering about it. This manifesto is derived from the experience of my friend who embarked on a 48-hour long hallucinogenic experience with her distasteful ex-boyfriend. She explained this by introducing me to the notion of getting the bad choice out of your system. Or: if you are going to make a bad choice, make it your own kind of bad choice.

4. Expert Manifesto

   Can you do it, whatever it is, while imagining that you’re already an expert? Can you do it, whatever it is, like you’ve been studying the art of it, whatever it is, for centuries, defying time and space and physics in your mastery? If you are sad, you are the Prime Minister of Sadness. If you are confused, you have theorized about confusion to an adoring crowd for years. You have tenure at the School of Confusion. No matter what you say, they can’t get rid of you.

5. Inner Child Manifesto

   Speak lovingly to your Inner Child every day. Don’t mention these conversations to any Outer People.

6. Dream House Manifesto

   Inside you there is a house. There is a woman in the house. The woman does not need you to be perfect. The woman just wants you to be young, as in younger than she is. The color of the walls will tell you something about where you are or where you’re going, but you won’t know which until later. My house is purple, if that’s helpful at all.

7. Terrible Things Manifesto

   Terrible things can happen, it’s true. Terrible things happen all the time.

8. Bearing It Manifesto

   When there are no more people on the Earth, the cities will turn back into wilderness. This wilderness will be mediated by the remains of what we came up with. In New York City, for example, the subway lines will fill with water. Eagles will build nests around the spires of high rises, before they eventually the slide into the earth. Nuclear reactors might burn brightly and fester for decades. The insects will return in droves. It will be very loud on Earth without us.

9. Honesty Manifesto

   Be only as honest with yourself as you would allow your best friend’s mother to be honest with her without inspiring you to offer a conspiratorial eye-roll and say “that is so typical Joan or Susan (or whoever) to say that to you.”

10. The Right Thing Manifesto

    Whether you should or should not do something has little to do with how it feels.

11. Answer The Phone Manifesto

    You can always hang up.

Part I

Before the novelist, I had only worked for men. Some were sociopathically charming, and would introduce me with a light touch on my shoulder to other men. I couldn’t live without her, they said. Other men were terrified of me, afraid for our eyes to meet in case I filed a lawsuit. Working for men made me powerful and vulnerable. None of the men were upset when I was late. I learned to glide rather than rush into a room. But also, the charming men would grow tired of being gregarious and retreat into silent moods. They would make snippy comments when I asked them if I could RSVP to some event for them, leaving me nauseous with anxiety, sure I would be replaced. The inattention of the men who feared me made it unclear what I was meant to do all day. And sometimes they would be frustrated that I had not divined their list of priorities through their vague directions.

The novelist was known for being interpersonally nightmarish. She left her husband through a Paris Review interview–that was how she announced her divorce to the world and also to him. She was photographed shouting at a waiter at a French restaurant in Manhattan, her martini loose in her hand like she might have thrown it at him. Her style was brash, abrasive. Her novels were about self-destructive thin women who called other women fat. Her novels were about industrial towns where all the residents were hooked on opiates and called each other retarded. Her novels were about young people who were a little bit racist and old people who had killed someone a long time ago.

Personally, I found her work reactionary. I liked reading poetry, and ecological fiction. I liked learning about root systems as an allegory for what the world could be like, if we tried.

At the time, I was convinced that if I was truly myself, if I acted like myself, I would be lonely and die in poverty. Despite the fact that many people cared about trees, despite the fact that I could have done anything, really, with my youth. The world was much bigger than I realized. Or, maybe I was just scared of how big it was. And that was why I kept applying to be a personal assistant, though it was a job I did not find meaningful, politically aligned, or financially sensible. Easier to be a cog in the machine of someone else. A part of the root system, the network of invisible hands that enable someone to be a “visionary architect” or “television executive” or “founder of a lifestyle brand.”

The novelist posted the assistant job online. I applied while mid-conversation with my roommate’s friend who was staying with us. She was a professional violinist. It amazed me that that could be someone’s job. I mean, either you can play the violin, or you can’t, she said. I was matching up my socks from the laundry when the novelist called me two days later. I answered with trepidation, expecting a robotic voice to inform me that I qualified for fake home insurance, or had to supply my social security number to pay a fake parking ticket. Instead, the novelist told me she wanted to interview me tomorrow. I recognized her voice from an interview I had watched, where she forced the interviewer to define postmodernism. He laughed, and said that postmodernism was “always shifting” and she said, “so do you know what it is or not?”

I said I would see her tomorrow. She texted me the address of her house while we were on the phone. “Looking forward,” she said. I almost responded, “Love you, bye” out of habit. Most of my phone calls were with my mom.

The next day, I took a car up a steep hill. The house was a Spanish colonial home, ochre yellow and covered in vines of jasmine. I could hear running water as I stepped out of the car. The house extended into a glass atrium that revealed a swimming pool. From the front gate I could see all of the city, the reservoir, the people picnicking around it. When she answered the door, the car that had carried me sped away.

“You don’t drive,” she said plainly.

“I can learn.”

To my surprise, she reached out and hugged me. Her body was lithe and compact, her skin warm, her breasts soft. I recognized her complicated perfume, could visualize the heavy black bottle in which it was sold. The novelist had pin straight red hair, a sharp little nose, a slight overbite. Her skin was supple and glowing, and she wore a drapey accordion-pleated matching set. Her forehead did not move as she instructed me to take off my shoes, slip into a pair of her sandals, and began to lead me around the house.

“This,” she gestured at a jade inlaid fireplace, “is original.”

“That,” she waved at a concrete book shelf, “I had made.”

I nodded along. The house was airy, with components both delicate and solid. There was always so much glass and stone and raw wood in the houses of people I worked for. It made me think about the phrase “titans of industry.” For a summer in college, I had interned at a magazine in London. The other interns explained their life stories by saying, “My family is in tin,” or “ore”, or “coffee”, or “oil.” Those are just things I had thought, stupefied.

“So,” the novelist said, as she jutted her chin out at me to indicate I should take a seat on her suede couch. “You’ve worked for a lot of gluttonous old men. Why do you want to be my assistant? I don’t have a plane.”

“I hate flying.” The novelist laughed.

“And I wanted to work for an artist.”

She smiled, squinting at me, her forehead unmoving. “Artists are assholes, too.”

“To be honest,” I said, “and I don’t mean to sound undiscerning, but none of the people I’ve worked for have been assholes.”

“Which of my novels is your favorite?”

I had thought about this question, just in case, but I was disappointed she had asked me it.

“I liked Ragazzo,” I said. “I felt like I could smell everything. The forest, and the city. And the cannery.”

She nodded. “Can you digitize my files?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, I can, too. Just don’t have the time. They’re not even files…it’s more of a question of can you photocopy a journal entry from the 90s, I guess.”

“From any decade.”

“Ha.” She squinted at me.

“Look, I’m kind of a difficult person to work for. I’m a little autistic about things, kind of toddler-ish. And I don’t like being around people, but I don’t like being ignored. So, I will try not to be a tyrant. But I can get snippy.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “I have thick skin.”

“Well,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I wish you could drive.”

“Me too,” I said. “Well,” I considered what I was about to say, not wanting to expose myself. “I know how to drive. I just get really nervous.”

“Oh,” she uncrossed her arms. “Well, then you can use my second car for errands. You’ll get used to it. I don’t care if you bang it up, honestly. It’s not worth anything.”

My stomach twisted. I imagined, as I often did, myself driving full speed off of a perilously high bridge over a rocky canyon.

“Alright,” the novelist smiled at me, looking into my face. My body flooded with warm light. My stomach softened.

“Will you take the recycling out when you leave?”

And just as quickly as it came, the feeling was gone.

That day, I walked down the hill, not wanting her to see me take another car, not wanting her to see me waiting around at the mercy of a stranger. As I walked, ducking my head under the boughs of jasmine and bottlebrush trees that stretched beyond the sprawling backyards, I realized I had not asked her any questions. I had no idea how much I would be paid, or when, or the next time I should come. Just as soon as I had had the thought, my phone buzzed. The novelist had texted me “5K??”

My descent over, I called a car and texted her back “That works for me.” Inside, I was jubilant. I ordered sushi for myself and my roommate to arrive home at the same time as I would.

So my life as the novelist’s assistant began. I waited for three days without a word from her, wondering if she had changed her mind, or if her silence was a way to test my initiative. Then my instructions came: show up at 9am Monday-Thursday and Saturday. I took a car up the hill again. “This is where you live?” the driver asked me as he sucked on a green-apple-scented vape. The sweetness was nauseating. “No, my boss,” I was going to say. And then, for some reason, instead I said, “No, my parents.” Why this lie, which would surely alienate this man, who was not so much older than me, whose accented English suggested a life full of more complications than my own? Instead, he nodded. “Family’s so important.”

The novelist greeted me at the door again. She hugged me more efficiently than the first time. This time, she was wearing an oatmeal-colored cashmere set, shorts and a tank top as soft as rabbit’s fur. True wealth: an outfit that could only be worn on days when it was exactly 70 degrees out. The novelist led me to her bedroom on the second floor. Her bed was enormous, the duvet eggplant purple and the texture of burlap. On the walls were black and white photographs of children, old people, canyons, grass. On her bedside table there was a stack of leather notebooks in different jewel tones, a bottle of Ibuprofen, a book about Caravaggio, and hot pink earplugs, the cheap, squishy kind that you jammed into your ear canals.

I followed her into her walk-in closet, which was full of garbage bags and piles of beautiful, colorful clothing and shoes. I couldn’t imagine the novelist wearing any of it–the Barbie pink Miu Miu high heels, the butter yellow blazer.

“If you could sort these things,” she said, “anything cheap I’ll donate, and the rest I’m selling. It’s for an abortion fund, I think, I can’t remember what Adele said. Use your judgment, and I guess you can look up the designer if you aren’t sure. Like, this–” she dislodged a silver spangled jacket from one of the piles “is old Zara, so definitely a donate.”

“Wow,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought so.” Adele, the novelist’s publicist, sent her many, many emails that she generally instructed me to ignore.

The novelist tucked her hair behind her ear, still crouching, and surveyed her piles. “I love collecting things, and then after a certain point it all feels incredibly depressing. But yeah, funny right? That’s Zara from like 2002. I think I didn’t get rid of it for nostalgic reasons, and now I don’t remember.”

I didn’t believe her. I felt like she didn’t forget anything.

“I’m going to work in the living room, so you can come let me know when you’re done. And then I can show you the car and you can drop some off this off.”

My stomach dropped. Again, the vision: driving off a bridge, into a brick wall, through a house where a family was, for whatever reason, eating Thanksgiving dinner. Carnage and cranberry sauce, my brain splattered on cement. Or worse, me unscathed, the bodies of my victims splayed around at terrible angles. I got to work sorting the clothes, breathing deeply through my nose and out of my mouth. When the novelist was out of the room, I looked up “driving anxiety” and found an audiobook, which I played quietly as I kept sorting. An Australian man murmured, “You’re not really afraid of driving. Your fear is awakened in the car, but it didn’t start in the car. There’s something much deeper. The fear of being powerless. The fear of being powerful. The fear of making a mistake.” I turned the audiobook off and looked up “Is Rachel Comey dress expensive.”

Sifting through the piles of fabric, I imagined the novelist trying them on, shedding her clothes in a dressing room, regarding her own body under showroom lights. I heard water running from the kitchen, whispers of a phone call. Why was the novelist selling everything? Was she in financial distress? Probably not, if she was willing to pay me so much for this simple task. Still, people did strange things. Deluded themselves. The last man I worked for let me go after filing for bankruptcy. But just a week before that, he had bought a house in the Hamptons on a whim, and as I left the house for the final time, his wife was inspecting slabs of marble from Italy for their new countertops.

Maybe the novelist was just practical. A regular person, at the end of the day. She was kinder than I thought she would be, though it was still early. I kept looking up the names of designers, separating the clothes, marveling over some of the treasures–a tiny Pucci dress, a crystal spangled lingerie set, the heavy, ornate layers of what looked like some kind of ceremonial garment from Central Asia.

Finally, when I could realistically take no longer, I found the novelist in the living room. She was typing, frowning slightly. In front of her were two cans of different seltzers, several legal pads, an Anais Nin novel–the cover a close-up of a woman’s torso, the author’s name in white print over the dark tangle of public hair at the bottom of the page.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I just finished up with the clothes.”

She responded without looking up. “Great, thank you so much for doing that. Let’s go check out the car.”

I had hoped she would change her mind and ask me to do something else. Filled with dread, I went back to her bathroom and collected the bags of cheap clothes before following her through the kitchen to a door that led into the garage. The garage was unfinished and smelled like a stable. Inside there were two cars. I knew very little about cars, despite living in a ‘driving city.’ So to my eyes, one looked old and one looked new, one was black and one was red, and that was all the difference that was apparent to me.

“My ex told me to keep the Camry for when I went into neighborhoods that he thought were unsafe. Someone threw a dime at the Bentley once and he freaked out,” she laughed. “He was a little delicate. Anyway, it’s nice to have a back up.” I smiled and nodded dumbly. She took the keys off a hook in the wall, and showed me the code for the keypad to open the garage doors.

“Alright,” she said.

I stood in place, waiting for her to leave so I could Google how to back out of the driveway.

She scrutinized me. “Let’s go together, actually,” she said. “So you can get the hang of the car. It has some idiosyncracies.”

The novelist sat pertly in the passenger seat. The garage door groaned open. I could feel my pulse in my throat. Praying to a nondenominational God, I put the car in reverse, wondering if the novelist could smell my sweat, or if it was obvious that I hadn’t done this in years. I inched the car out of the garage, and then paused, realizing we were entirely perpendicular and that I had no sense of how to turn without 1. Running over the rock arrangement 2. Backing into the neighbor’s house or 3. Plummeting down the hill.

“Cut it all the way to the left,” the novelist said, adjusting a ring on her pointer finger, “and then all the way to the right. Yeah. It’s a squeeze but you have much more room than you think. The car won’t go anywhere you don’t put it.”

My face was hot and I could feel tears collecting in my throat. Once, when I was seven and still pathologically shy, I had been so anxious to ask where the bathroom was that I peed my pants while insisting to my camp counselor–who was suspicious of my pacing around that–I didn’t need to go. I felt like that now, like I was sitting in a puddle of my own shame while she coached me out of it.

After some jerking around, I maneuvered the car out of the garage and carried on down the hill. My pulse was still throbbing in my wrist, behind my eyes. The novelist put on the radio, a song about September. She gave me gentle directions.

“Slow stop here. You’re going to wait for the oncoming traffic and take a left when it’s safe.”

I followed her directions silently. I didn’t know if I should acknowledge what was happening, that she was giving me driving lessons when I was meant to make her life easier. But also, my anxiety eased with her in the car. I felt, for whatever reason, that nothing bad could happen to me like this.

After she directed me into a parking space at the donation center, I sprung from the driver’s seat and hurried the bags into a giant bin. I turned back and observed the novelist texting through the windshield, her face impassive, her thumbs agile. I returned to the driver’s seat, bracing for chastisement.

Instead, the novelist said, “Let’s just order in. I don’t want to look at anyone. Are you a vegetarian? I’m dying for a chicken cutlet. Boring.”

“I like chicken,” I whispered pathetically, and then wondered if that combination of words had ever passed my lips in adulthood. I inhaled and exhaled and started the car, retracing the winding road back up the hill. This time, the novelist was preoccupied, texting with slight smirk. A man wearing a blue tarp as clothing and muttering to himself darted into the road, and I stomped on the brake, sending the novelist’s phone flying out of her hand.

The man stared at us, his eyes widened. He was young, with a rash around his mouth. I was trembling. He smacked the hood of the car once, then twice, then ran out of the road.

“Go ahead,” the novelist said while I tried to catch my breath. I drove slowly, attempting to gracefully trace the curves in the road, my heart hammering in my throat.

“My mother was schizophrenic,” the novelist said as I inched us back into the garage. “Same eyes. It’s too bad. Oh, good. The cutlets are here. Can you grab them from the front door? Make sure the delivery guy leaves quickly. I don’t like when they linger around.”

More soon!!

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump responded to a question about a bipartisan border security bill by insisting that, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”

He was referring to a debunked hoax popularized by conservative media which claimed Haitian immigrants were eatings the pets of local residents. During the debate, the commentator addressed the fact that this story was simply not true. It didn’t matter. That was the soundbite of the night.

Why this lie? What is the salience of this story, so easy to disprove, so seemingly random? Trump and his ilk profit off the absurd, the quotable, the remixable. But this specific accusation highlights a bordering logic with deeper roots.

To understand its significace, we might turn to the work of anthropologist Edmund Leach, who writes about human/animal relations as marked by “social distance” mirroring incest taboos. Leach theorizes that animal “eatability” is determined by physical and emotional closeness. Cats and dogs live within our homes and are considered parts of our families. They are too close to be eaten. Animals like lions and zebras are far away: in zoos, or foreign countries. It would be too strange to eat these animals because they are too distant. Alternatively, cows, pigs, and chickens live on the land surrounding our homes (at least traditionally). They are not relatives like cats and dogs. They are both of us and not us, and therefore able to be safely consumed.

This proximity framework is imagined as a projection of an incest taboo upon human/animal relations. While different cultures have different incest taboos–for example, marriage between cousins is considered preferential in many places, but generally not in the United States–the notion of an incest taboo itself is universal. That is, there is no known culture without some restrictions on marital relations.

A similar distance-based logic underlies these taboos. In the US context, marriage to someone in one’s immediate family is unthinkable, as these relatives are “too close.” Marrying someone entirely outside one’s community and culture is still a taboo, if not as pervasively as years ago. Still, consider the spectacle of television shows like 90-Day Fiancee, or the sort of collective disgust directed at men who seek partnerships arranged by international marriage agencies. Suitable partners fall in the “cows and pigs” territory: neighbors, community members, people with similar circumstances.

When immigrants are accused of eating cats and dogs, it evokes both disgust and a shadow of the incest taboo, a kind of perversion. These people who will eat anything could do anything to us, too. Of course, this thinking throws cultural relativism out the window and fails to truly consider the moral equivalence of eating dogs and cows, pigs or cats, etc. Rumors about immigrant groups eating pets have long been a racist scare tactic. In the 1880s, Chinese immigrants were ridiculed for eatings “dogs, cats, and rats” and these stereotypes resurfaced when Cambodian refugees fleeing Khmer Rouge arrived in the United States. Then and now, claiming that immigrants steal and eat the pets of others is a way to invoke a fear of invasion, a question about the security of the private home. It’s akin to accusing immigrants of stealing away the children of white families, but stranger and therefor stickier in the collective consciousness.

Cut to 2026. The Trump administration has enacted most of what he said he would do during that 2024 debate: sending ICE en masse to terrorize migrants and citizens, occupying cities, and deporting people without due process. This month, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem attempted to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants, which would leave 350,000 people vulnerable to deportation to a country facing one of the worst documented humanitarian crises in the world. Judge Ana C. Reyes temporarily blocked the motion. In her 83-page opinion, she opens with Noem’s own tweet:

“I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom — not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.

WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Judge Reyes states that not only were Noem’s actions illegal and unconstitutional, but per her own words, they are clearly based in profound xenophobic racism.

This is not the first time that Noem’s own words have been used against her. When returning to those cats and dogs in Springfield, one might remember Noem’s treatment of animals. In her memoir No Going Back, Noem describes taking her puppy, Cricket, to a gravel pit to put a bullet in its head. “I hated that dog,” Noem writes, calling the 14 month old Whippet “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless…as a hunting dog.”

This was how many people were introduced to Noem as a public figure, and she was both condemned and ridiculed for an act many saw as somewhat sociopathic. It’s sort of a perfect punchline, until you consider that shooting a puppy is more provocative in American politics than Noem’s early offer to “drive more razor wire” to the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from crossing the river–or really, to increase the number of deaths of men, women, and children seeking safety in the United States.

In Noem’s estimation, this story served to show how she could roll up her sleeves and get ugly work done. That she could be cruel to protect her children from threat, however ambiguous, and the community at large. In her story, the puppy is unredeemable, criminal, deviant. A killer. A leech.

The violence of border maintenance always requires these kinds of moral inversions. To find ugliness in the vulnerable, infamy in the innocent. Fundamentally, bordering is a practice in cutting off the interconnectedness of the human family. This family already includes these animal others–the creatures we kill and eat, the creatures we love and fear. And so these animal others are easy actors to project discomfort and cruelty to the human stranger, though of course migrants are not strange, but systematically estranged.

Consider Alligator Alcatraz, the operationalization of locally exotic creatures to act as guards against the people the government has deigned disposable. Not for the first time, as many have pointed out, given the stomach-turning history of the term “alligator bait” being weaponized against Black children. If we apply Leach’s theory here, we can see how “strange” people are placed in “strange” quarters, tossed off to be handled by our most un-familiar animals.

I couldn’t help but think about this animal mirror-world when I saw the picture of Liam Conejo Ramos, standing in the snow in his blue bunny hat, towered over by ICE agents. A little boy who found joy in the animal-ness of his name. A little boy whose vulnerability was exploited, used as bait like a rabbit. A little boy who is now afraid of strangers and cries out for his father at night. A little boy whose family followed all the protocols necessary to seek asylum in the United States, for whatever that is worth.

This image moved the country because it called upon a duty of care. People should not have to be turned into prey to be valued, shown at their most vulnerable, nor do they need to be innocent or good to be afforded their place in the human family. But in part I do think it was this sign from the animal world that reoriented the public to find shared humanity, that the symbol of the little rabbit reflected the vulnerability and preciousness of this sweet boy back onto him at a time when even children are conceptualized as threats to the nation.

A theoretical text about linguistic anthropology is admittedly strange source material for dealing with the pressing present moment, but I find Leach’s work helpful for uncovering how we are taught to accept certain logical systems of relating to each other. Considering the use of these animal taxonomies by Trump and other hatemongers reveals how deeply entrenched division and hierarchy are in human relations. The white supremacist engineers of this bordering regime desperately want us to believe that violent, systemic xenophobia is somehow natural. But of course that is not the case. Whether it’s the Springfield lie, Alligator Alcatraz, or the weaponization of the sea and the desert against people seeking safety, these men have jammed their hands into natural symbols like puppets and forced them to pantomime their bordering logic. Left to speak freely, the natural world tells us that migration is ancient, essential, sacred–if only we listen.

Out: tea

In: coffee

Out: milk

In: sugar

Out: you holding back my hair while I see cerulean, smell bleach and the refuse of everyone before me

In: waking up in a house where everyone is already talking

Out: we went to this teahouse where all the workers were self-named after plants. i actually think that’s nice. i actually think if we all were named after different species we would feel less inclined to mow them over. still: you know when something feels like incest even though nobody is related? they–the resident poem-writers–asked me to tell them about my favorite type of day so they could write a poem about it. i indulged them like children. i said: i wake up, everybody is already talking. i’m at a beach house–no, in the mountains–or, in the mountains by a beach. i’ll eat fruit for breakfast. everybody loves me and i don’t have to talk to them. we’ll go to the beach. more importantly, we will come home, shower, and having internalized the glow of the sun, having had the sun pummeled into us, we will feel the sun’s heat radiating out from our centers. we will shower and wear mascara and be tan. the end. however, the poem writers had actually asked me about my favorite time of day. now i’m the child, wishing unprompted. i said, oh. probably five o’clock.

In: writing the world’s longest unsent email

Out: touching my own skin and thinking of you

Out: i fell up the stairs for no reason. a hairline fracture in my shin. that was september. it still hurts to be on my knees.

In: the fracture will not resolve on its own//standing up

Out: credit card debt

In: everyone wants to watch a movie. everyone wants to read a book. well, some people want to read a book. lots of people want to say they’ve read a book. nobody wants to be the one to write. nobody wants to be the one whose child spits on their good fortune to lay in the grass and think and sometimes, on a good day, type out some words all in lowercase. nobody wants to navigate the state health care system. everyone wants to be so different from how they are, without changing.

Out: clenching, grasping, glabellar flexing, bearing witness, bearing down, being born again

In: re: the plant people, in igbo tradition, when a baby boy is born, a palm tree is planted, the kernel placed in the ground with his umbilical cord. the plant is named after the child. they grow up together, their fates intertwined. imagine how much you might love that palm tree. imagine a forest all named after people you know.

Out: ultimately, i would eat all the rest of my meals out of the palm of your hand

In: i would do it in front of anyone

Out: i already know what it will be like when i have a child. in dreams, i feel my water break, feel compounding pressure splinter my spine, watch the head emerge. i am struck with the prescient knowledge of a future child while walking to a party where i hate everyone and they hate me, or in yoga as a white woman in a turban screams at me to breathe faster, or in the rare cases where i look around a hostile terrain i’ve put myself in and think, oh, i might actually die. the knowledge of the child, who is a girl in essence if not literally, makes these humiliations not only tolerable but essential. one day my living may be secondhand. maybe the child is a book or another thing that gestates. i think the child is probably a child.

In: everyone has already been here. everyone is already talking.

The end of a type of life. Everyone getting married.

Cheap flight to one much loved city then the next. Bag a web of hairstyling cords, patent technology. Mass-produced breakfast while sleep beckons. Plastic smush of the tray table. One thousand undulating dresses: gossamer, polyester, toile.

Is this real life or far from it? Dancing with you slightly stupefied, cake-faced, all powerful, enjoying the wealth of a more calloused generation. Short rib and lemon icing and tangerine crush of pill discovered in the folds of someone’s handbag. Ambiguous thrill of being the hot friend in a crowd of cousins. We couldn’t have done it without you. Love is this, but also that.

Tomorrow the staff will bleach the napkins of our sauce and spit. Toothless bartender. A lifetime of.

Why don’t we do this more often? Come together, my friends and their sisters and mothers and I, alter our waistlines, laugh theatrically. I want to scoop them out of the arms of their husbands and take them back to being 22 with me, condemn them to more wondering and wandering and a now regrettable style of eyebrows.

In the airport you ask me do you want to be a wife? A bride? I think in terms of theory from gray-paged books rather than the practical matter of my insomnia without you. I don’t answer, instead tell you about a book I’m reading, what that protagonist wants to do. To be the protagonist is not just a matter of fact but of virtue. To be a protagonist is to have desires that fuel plot. To be a bride is to be the protagonist for a night, to wield goodness irrefutably, advance the plot undeniably. In the old novels, this would be the end. In the air above my friends, the wives, I wonder “now what?”

For the first time, I feel like I don’t know what’s going on. My finger has slipped off the pulse.

I’m in a city of suspended childhood. A lot of what I thought my adult life would include is now irrelevant. A lot of what I thought being an adult would look like was based on the presupposition of a moral West, a thriving print media industry, and the bizarre but mainstream 2010s concept that you could be a professional activist.

Everything I’m reading and watching is old. I finally saw The Big Lebowski for the first time. Then I picked up The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing at a used bookstore with one employee who told me she was a poet and that if I gave her my resume she would just lose it. Tonally, The Big Lebowski and The Golden Notebook don’t have a lot to do with each other, but they are bizarrely united in how they present the disintegration of communist politics. Oddly, they both felt equally ancient. Anything noticeably dialectical now feels old. Both these works made me feel that I don’t understand anything, and maybe I never have. Or: if the 50s and 90s were life, what is now? More specifically, The Big Lebowski made me aware that I was a child through the Bush years and don’t really understand the Gulf War and while I abstractly can grasp how one phenomenon may “give rise” to another, I never am not caught off guard by how decades flow into each other, or how everything happens and happens and happens. Everything I thought I knew was wrong, or got whooshed away in a gust of wind. I remember how triumphantly, indignantly people said they were certain Trump was going to win in 2016, and the shock about the election was all white privilege. Well, I was 20 and I knew things were bad but I was still shocked! I’m always surprised when one thing leads to another, no matter how many warning signs there are. I feel that in my own life, too. When I went to prom, I couldn’t believe I was going to prom. The first time I had sex, my first night at college, the first time I walked into an office job I was stunned that something that happens to a lot of people was happening to me, too.

Part of the reason I feel I don’t understand anything is because after a years-long stalemate I gave in to my own curiosity about experiencing constant sunshine and trying to make writing my job and moved to California. I feel like I’m on Mars. Recently, I freaked out in a cafe resplendent with dried marigolds and golden light because everyone was talking so slowly, and time was moving like syrup, and I felt like I was screaming in comparison to their ‘dulcet tones’. It felt like the cafe should have been called Dulcet Tones. I do love living in what feels like an embryonic sac, nestled into endless blue mountains and blue sky, and the preponderance of hummingbirds, and that nobody expects anything of me. But I still feel like an alien, like I might look down and find myself to have webbed green feet.

Also, I am re-learning how to drive, and the World of Cars is mystifying to me. In general I feel like I’m kind of lopsided in my knowledge and intelligence. I can bullshit literary analysis about anything, but the other day I pulled into the wrong side of a median in Pasadena and saw my life flash before my eyes. This experience made me realize I’ve been calling “medians” “meridians” for years. I now think about this mistake every time I go to my biweekly Yin & Meridians yoga class, where I release being ironic about breathing deeply and push on parts of my body that make me hallucinate. Having to have a car and talk about a car makes me realize how much of an alien I am in car-world, where most of my loved ones reside. Pushing on my thighs and hallucinating makes me realize how it is impossible to be alien in a world with others.

Car-world is a selfish place, where people forget they’ve ever had to merge when someone else tries to merge. Car-world makes people atomized and only think about themselves, and introduces an undercurrent of mortality that I think is cumulatively deleterious for the nervous system. In general, living in LA makes it very easy to both constantly think about collective death (the presence of ICE, the looming threat of more fire, the imminent collapse of the palm trees that will are set to die all at once) but also obsessively about your own face and your own self. It’s easy to look away, at your phone or through your windshield or at a half-written pilot, even if you want to be someone who faces things head on. Part of my personal problem with meeting the moment consistently is that I hate looking at ugly things. Not hard things, or difficult things, or devastating things–I’ve accepted that that’s part of life, and that witnessing can do something. I don’t want to look at cheapness, meanness, ugliness, and the tenor of politics now is both stupid and ugly (with the exception of the recent election of MAYOR ZOHRAN KWAME MAMDANI!!) Other than rare and hopeful wins, paying attention involves subjecting oneself to such topics as “groypers” and “Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book” and “military AI.”

The other night I had a dream that I was at a dinner party with some of my friends here, who are all working musicians. We were in what looked like an 80s ballroom, where people were wearing stiff collars and there were vinyl, flower-printed tablecloths on all of the tables. The waiter brought an entire seal garnished with pearls for the table, a perfect, puppy-eyed baby seal, and then stripped it of its flesh, leaving behind gray bones and a skull and eye sockets. Everyone was eating the seal except for me. Then, the waiter brought over salad that he said he made personally, because I looked like I needed something fresh. But under a layer of undressed arugula was a thick, sludgy seal meat stew. I think the dream has to do with virtue, the choice I fear I am making–that by pursuing art and accordingly proximity to institutional gatekeepers I’ve betrayed my Real Work, which is to protect vulnerable people and things. That I can’t get through this life without eating some seal, so to speak.

Here, symbolism has been hitting me over the head. Or, there have been a lot of coincidences lately. I made my boyfriend dress up as Lorde to be the counterpart to my Charli XCX, and we went to a Halloween party where none other than Lorde showed up. In Ojai, I was reading Motherhood by Sheila Heti, agonizing over a far-off choice, when a minor actress sat next to me and started telling me about having a baby at 44.

Fame is the ultimate symbolism, and it makes it easy to feel like you’re cosmically aligned when you keep seeing familiar but mystical faces: sitting next to an indie darling at Ye Rustic Inn, having a laugh with a former child star while ordering matcha. There’s a sense you’re on the right path, somehow, but what is the path, and what is the significance of having parked semi-close to Clairo?

I am trying to embrace the random symbolism, and also minimize my car-time, so I’ve watched more movies in the past two months than I have in the past two years: One Battle After Another (twice), Twinless, Bugonia, but also Lithuanian Toxic and French-Canadian The Nature of Love and Korean Oasis, among others. For some reason, whenever I’m in a movie theater, I am transported back to my freshman year film class, where my hot-adjacent professor told us he wasn’t going back home for Thanksgiving because he hated his family. For a long time, he lived on in my mind as a tragic figure, a uselessly handsome man in a small town run by women and witches, constantly tucking his hair behind his ear and shifting around in his brown tweed suit. I remember exchanging a tepid wave with him when I spotted him on one of the cool-dark, mapled streets on campus, and thinking that I never wanted to be like that: awkward and solitary in my 30s, in thrifted clothes. Now, I would kill for that kind of an academic job, to tell 18 year olds about the homoeroticism in Citizen Kane. But I guess that’s how it goes. You get older, and things change.

When I was in grad school, I went a little nuts. This happens every few years. It comes in the form of a bottomless dread, waves of sobbing, a compulsion to snip the connecting threads of my life so I can fall or float unattached to all that has come before. Usually, it is accompanied by about a two-week period of a new practice: meditation, journaling, flirtations with religion. Then, I feel better, and I go back to being myself, letting my desperation bangs grow out and my yoga membership go unused. This time, feeling a little nuts lasted longer. It felt like when an iceberg melts and reveals all the poison hidden in the permafrost.

During this period, which coincided with a historic barrage of rain in London, my phone became all powerful. I was lost and unmoored and kept using its glowing screen like a lighthouse, except the more I stared at it the more I felt thrashed around by the waves. My anxiety was reflected back by my TikTok feed: “Ten ways to know you should end your relationship” felt like a death sentence. “How to change your whole life” was a threat. “Tips from a recovering People-Pleaser/Eldest Daughter/Narcissist” an official diagnosis. Every foretelling of quantum-leap-inducing astrology, chaotic cazimis and the movements of Saturn filled me with doom.

At the same time, I searched constantly for symbols in the Real World. I’m a believer in magic coincidences, in “signs” generally. A shock of blue or red in the wild–a blue jay, a tin can, a piece of sea glass–can signify a sense of cosmic protection. Feathers, repeated numbers, a book or song or word that keeps appearing sends a little ripple down my spine, a kind of quiet pleasure in lifting the veil of mystery that cloaks what usually feels like a random, winding life. I come from a long line of women attuned to beautiful synchronicities, repeated dreams, the occasional inexplicably prophetic moment. Usually, these signs pop up spontaneously, I smile about them, and move along, feeling a kind of kinship with my witchy ancestors. When you are feeling very lost, though, this relationship with meaning can turn compulsive, I realized–even extractive.

As the London winter dragged on and on, I mined rare clear skies for answers, plundered the city for magic motifs that would ease my mind or tell me what to do. There’s something quite different about that pleasurable, organic way of locating signs than the evangelistic utilitarianism of seeing the gorgeous, terrifying, boring mess all around you and only relating to it as a maze through which to arrive at some sort of self-knowledge. It’s like stripping a peach of its flesh to get to the pit and leaving all that beautiful goo rotting on the ground instead of biting into it.

There’s a scene in one of my favorite television series, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, in which the protagonist sees a commercial for butter that asks, “When was the last time you were truly happy?” The ad comes at just the right time, and Rebecca takes it as a divine directive, leaving her high-power lawyer job in NYC and following her middle-school crush to West Covina, where he already has a girlfriend.

This scene always reminded me of the billboard painted with the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes, “The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.” The faded, haunting eyes on the billboard serve as a constant reminder of the American wasteland, a sort of moral authority replacing the judgment of God in consumer culture and an omen of the disaster that will inevitably befall the characters.

The Great Gatsby is a funny book to write about as an adult, because it is so thoroughly associated with AP Literature. Fitzgerald is pretty unsubtle with motifs–it’s a great book to teach teenagers how to analyze literature, because it’s like, “yes…the green light….capitalism.” There is a great joy and exhilaration that can come from really sinking into a text, examining each word so a sentence lifts off the page, becomes a kaleidoscope of references and second meanings. At the same time, I wonder if this is where my troubles began; if studying literature bred some form of magical thinking and over-assignment of meaning to signs.

In the era of algorithmic, data-focused marketing, there is no more Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. That is, when I see an advertisement–or anything online, for that matter–I assume that it has been curated for me, rather than that I have happened upon it by chance. And unlike the symbolism of Fitzgerald’s billboard, these eyes do see, observing my engagement as a series of data points. I talk to my friends about going to Italy, and flights to Rome pop up on my Instagram. I look up a red dress, and then red dresses haunt my peripheral vision, models twirling around headlines about our collective extinction. In this system, a sign is not a product of an objective and distinct structure or logic, but instead the creation of an algorithm that constantly monitors, surveils, and gives me what it thinks I want. In this solipsistic universe, wherein meaning both begins and ends with the individual, the algorithm becomes all-knowing. The algorithm knows me better than myself. And because I have grown up in a context in which psychoanalytic thought dominates, I read into the algorithm as a reflection of my unconscious mind, too. My repressed desires and fears (girls getting filler, weight loss before and afters, robotic voice overs of true crime stories) in addition to the ones I say aloud. The Internet is therefor imbued with this mystical power–of knowing me better than I know myself.

While I was personally feeling pretty bonkers and being terrorized by the algorithm, I was also reading a lot about psychosis. As part of my MA program, I took a psychological anthropology course called Mind, Culture, and Psychiatry which was, in part, about questioning the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and considering diagnoses as informed by local and global political and epistemological struggles. We often discussed what Ian Hacking calls “looping effects”, or the ways that individuals interact with diagnostic categories pertaining to mental health. Generally, people who are suffering will express that suffering through whatever cultural model is available to them. This logic explains, to an extent, why suffering ‘trends’ in particular ways–from a spike in ADHD diagnoses in the American context to an influx of spirit possessions in, for example, a rural Nigerian one. The way we understand our minds–as bounded, impenetrable entities vs. porous and collective, as spiritual containers vs. a mass of biomedical conditions–influences the ways we experience our minds, though this logic is usually not obvious or optional to us.

Western psychology is algorithm-like in this way, too. Whatever cultural tradition around illness and healing you are born into reproduces in your mind, changing it along the way. Analyzing the machine is not enough to free oneself from its logic: take the example of psychologist Juli McGruder who studied the relative success of schizophrenics in Zanzibar, where schizophrenia is not considered neurological but rather the product of spirit possession (Watters 2011, 179). Per her own admission, her findings about low-interference, communal models of care in this context did not offer a way forward back in her American context when her husband later suffered a mental breakdown

When I started a draft of this essay last year, AI was still in its more rudimentary phases. Now, the technology you and I have access to and the widespreadness of machine learning has crescendoed. And so it feels fitting that one of last year’s Sexiest Movies–one of the most “body” movies to screen in theaters as of late–is really an investigation of the algorithm.

In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s Romy is the CEO of a big AI shipping company where she is told she appears robotic on camera has a kinky affair with her gorgeous intern. In one of the earliest scenes in the movie, Romy flees a session of lovey-dovey but unsatisfying sex with her husband to get herself off to porn in the other room. The video she plays is sort of banal, simpering rough sex (babyvoiced woman, grunting violent man). Later on, during an EMDR session, we see flashbacks to her (ostensibly abusive) upbringing in a cult. These moments bring up the central question in the movie: why? Why does Romy want to drink milk out of a plate–because she was conditioned to desire domination through pornography, or through romance movies? Or is her sexual life a response to her traumatic childhood? Both of these premises trend into “algorithmic” or automated thinking that people are “programmed” through porn and representations of sexuality (see Dworkin) or “programmed” by their childhoods.

As in the case of the psychologist who can’t cure her husband despite her study of comparative psychology, analyzing the machine does not provide an escape. Romy thinks what she is doing wrong, but she can’t stop. She is horrified by herself, then emboldened, then ashamed, and profoundly confused. She can’t figure out why, why, why.

I remember feeling relieved about humans not being totally expendable when my friend tried to use ChatGPT to write an essay and accidentally produced a work full of hallucinated citations referencing made up but real-sounding sources. On the Duke University library blog, there’s a cautionary post about using ChatGPT to generate citations: “It is important to note that AI can confidently generate responses without backing data much like a person under the influence of hallucinations can speak confidently without proper reasoning.” You can imagine the relief–maybe even the satisfaction–of the librarian typing that out. I also looked at these hallucinated citations as a kind of gotcha moment, in part because it affirms that what I’ve spent a lot of my life learning how to do (literature reviews) is not obsolete.

But as AI use has become more widespread and similar issues have proliferated, I wonder if AI’s shortcomings are less proof of its fallibility and more markers of a new milieu. There’s been an increase in what psychologists are calling AI psychosis, where AI users experience amplified delusions. Dr. Kevin Caridad writes, “Imagine someone struggling with loneliness or existential fear. They open a chatbot. It listens. It responds. It agrees. It calls them brilliant. It entertains conspiracies. It indulges fantasies of divine mission or digital romance. There’s no therapeutic containment—only a recursive, ever-reinforcing loop of “yes.”

The recursive loop of “yes” and the breakdown of signs and meaning feel like a hallmark of what it means to live now. This contested relationship to meaning itself is crazy-making, never mind the many crazy-making features of the Real World itself. Fashioning a coherent interpretive style to understand the world when one keeps encountering all of these affirming mirrors for one’s own subjective experience erodes self-trust, especially when one is armed with analytical instruments that promote further rumination. To know that one’s experience is culturally and temporally mediated, and to know that one’s attention, desire, and fear is constantly being recorded and manipulated does not provide all that much calm. In this world of mirrors, one must cultivate a certain amount of both self-trust and self-discipline in order to believe in magic without succumbing to disordered thinking. To not be sold coincidences, ailments, or cures, but to discover them organically, pleasurably, luxuriously. Maybe in writing this I’ve mostly betrayed my own frenetic inner monologue, the delicate and not all together unpleasant form of craziness I’ve been cultivating for years. But I do see the strain of analysis–textual, psychological, algorithmic–wearing down people I know, a certain collectively-held tenuousness between signs and symbols and interpretation.

I don’t know how to conclude this, except that this weekend I went home to the island in Maine where my family lives and jumped off a dock I had longed feared after the gentle urging of my friends, friends I’ve known for a decade through a series of almost eerie synchronicities. I found in the moment the cold flooded my body a type of sign I could not have located through searching. I saw a meteor shower, a comet bursting across the sky so low and long it felt impossible despite the other shooting stars I have seen, and that meant even more than a well-placed feather. My life has taken me away from the place I grew up, a place where the sky drips with stars. I think starlessness is a massive problem with urban living. You lose half of your context. And maybe this is how you can tell what is profound and what is a mirror–there are signs and symbols that make you retreat further into yourself, into thought, into questioning. And there are signs and symbols–like the uncontainable text of the stars–that make the world expand, that communicate something to you that is both ineffable and strikingly clear. The opposite of crazy.

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Thank you to my amazing editor extraordinaire for helping me get my thoughts together!

I saw my first Waymo in December while the Franklin Fire tore through Malibu. I thought I was going crazy when I realized there was no driver in the car next to me, just a woman in the passenger seat frowning at her phone. Behind it, a Tesla Cybertruck announced itself, the dull gold of a dollar store trophy. Obstinate ugliness while thousands of small animals were incinerated.

I was thinking about these stupid vehicles and the charred remains of squirrels and impending collapse when I saw Interstellar for the first time in December. My friend called me a car to a late showing at the IMAX theater in Alhambra, and an elderly man drove me from the tippy-top of City Terrace down into the valley. The driver’s obvious frailty made me wince every time he labored to hit the gas.The night smelled like jasmine and smoke, and the cold, hard lights of the city blinked through their own rainbow penumbra. I wondered if maybe a self-driving car would have saved the elderly man an hour of his life, or just stolen his paycheck.

Interstellar made me cry from my belly. The thought that this could be the love–a love necessarily rooted in difference, the very opposite circumstances of fatherhood and daughterhood–that saves everything. The nauseating roundness of the planets, all the twinkling silence brought a familiar feeling to the surface. A feeling of having imbibed all that vacuity, a wonder/dread that feels both cervical in origin and contained in the throat.

Afterwards I felt half-ashamed and half-superior that I personally would not abandon my family to save humanity. The thought of everyone getting obliterated by dust quickly enough was actually kind of soothing, though an asteroid would be a best case scenario. What an equitable turn of events. Besides, I would miss my little planet too much. No flowers, no fruit, no cold water or hot days, no birds. No skin on skin without the layers of a space suit. The frictionless simulacrum of the new society in Interstellar doesn’t interest me.

Later that week at dinner in a neighborhood that would soon be ash, another friend pointed out how blindingly White Interstellar is. And indeed, the New World on the new planet looks like a Ford commercial, like a Christian colonizing mission. It reminded me of that Ray Bradbury story “All Summer In A Day”, about a little girl on Venus who gets locked in a closet by her classmates on the one day they will all see the sun, which only appears for an hour every seven years. Humans will probably live in space, but which humans? To be part of the select few with the resources to escape Earth suggests a certain degree of sociopathy.

What will be the culture of space? Children can be cruel anywhere, but the children in All Summer In A Day are the children of people who could afford to leave. Like in the case of the bellicose British schoolboys of Lord of the Flies, one has to wonder about the universal ugliness of human nature versus the acculturating violence of social domination. Considering the material reality of space travel makes it feel ugly, clunky, Machiavellian. The ultimate vacation for the 0.1%. But at the same time, space is gorgeous, cosmic, lush, and venturing there is the ultimate romance with the unknown. It remains that way when space is considered as a possibility rather than an asset, when it’s looked up at from below.

Back on the East Coast, I walked my dog through the woods behind my house and wondered if the trees were dying. Everything seemed in order, but what did I know about their root systems, the microplastics in the soil? While walking, I listened to Krista Tippet’s “On Being” episode with the then-recently-deceased Nikki Giovanni, wherein Giovanni describes herself as a “space freak.”

Giovanni imagines space as the stage of a more hopeful future, one where Pluto is a planet where “Black kids learn to ski.” On the subject of Black futures in space, Giovanni says, “It goes back to Middle Passage, because if you can survive that journey from west coast of Africa to the east coast of the United States and be sane when you get here…that’s what we haven’t looked at.” In her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” she imagines Black Americans as experts in space travel, having journeyed through the unthinkable and stayed whole.

At one point, Giovanni surprises Tippet by asking, “Can you imagine sex in space?” How we will remain human, and connected to pleasure? How will we touch in space, drifting away from each other, aging years in minutes?

In January, my two aforementioned friends lost their homes due to severe damage from the wildfire. Those days like hell on earth: the jaundiced sky, the rush of smoke, the smoldering mountains.

A few months after the fires, SpaceX launched the first female mission to space. Four minutes of weightlessness, four hundred photoshoots. I think if I went up there I would also be annoying about it. Katy Perry promoted her album. What a vision of the future: the technology produced through years of devotion and perseverance and ingenuity used as a flying Spotify ad. The legacy of the martyred heliocentrists of the past. Katy Perry returned to Earth jubilantly, orgasmically. She said, “I feel my message that I’m getting is you never know the amount of love that you have inside of you until the day you launch.”

But I think the problem with space is that ideally, you already know about that love. You go there thinking about wine and sex and the legacy of slavery, of colonialism, and Black children learning to ski, and the bloodsoaked voyages that precede your own. You have to be mourning who you can’t take with you. And I wonder if the people who make it up there will do the mourning properly. How will we love each other in space? What will the children learn?

When the vessel landed, Jeff Bezos fell flat on his face while running to greet his fiance Lauren Sanchez. This gave me some hope. At least for now, the most Martian among us are still embarrassed by gravity.

The first time I went on the Dukan Diet I was 13 years old. Every day after soccer preseason, I restricted myself to only eating Trader Joe’s salmon burgers. I remember watching them defrost in a pan, globs of white fat sizzling in the olive oil. Turning gray to pink to gray. I lasted a week.

It was the era of the Middleton sisters, represented in the media as demure, lean Kate, and canonically vixeny Pippa. The Dukan Diet was allegedly how already svelte Kate was slimming down to enter the ranks of the Royal Family. The concept is high protein, no carbs. At first, you only eat eggs, meat, fish, and their sugar-free, carb-free byproducts. Later, you’re allowed oat bran.

There are lots of problems with this idea. For one, that it’s fiber-free and catastrophic to your digestive system. Second, any form of extremely restrictive eating is just not sustainable.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and everyone is obsessed with protein again. The Khloe Kardashian protein popcorn, those David bars, protein-packed soda, the carnivores of TikTok, the fact that it’s become culturally acceptable to advertise that you’re eating ground beef with cottage cheese and honey and bananas for the sake of your gains.

In the most extreme cases, protein-pilled men are praising the benefits of raw meat or Just Chicken and semi-relatedly would probably be Botoxing their penises if they all had Bryan Johnson’s budget. People have rightfully started to associate this national fixation with the rise of right-wing fascism. Vanity Fair identified the protein obsession as an epidemic caused by the manosphere, pointing to the distinctly gendered dimension of protein politics.

But a feminized form of protein discourse has also risen online and offline. All of the sudden, every woman I talk to is trying to eat more protein. An industry has sprung up around this, jamming huge amounts of protein into everything from ice cream to smoothies to crackers.1 Part of the protein turn has to do with a (long overdue) interest in perimenopause and menopause, and the protective effects of protein consumption on related conditions like osteoporosis. Relatedly, there’s been more of a focus on strength training for women, which of course has proven health benefits that aren’t related to aesthetics.

At the same time, this emphasis on protein fits squarely into a larger, regressive diet culture. Thin is back in and body positivity is out, with a bodybuilder twist. It’s Solidcore season. The girls are doing bootleg Pilates, led by YouTube overlords. It’s still sort of embarrassing to declare that you want to be thinner, but saying you want to “build lean muscle” is fine. You can be strong at any size, but ideally it’s a size 2. As Mikala Jamison pointed out, even if the terms have changed, it’s (still) the body fat, stupid.

I’m troubled by this widespread fixation on protein (and accordingly, on losing fat while gaining muscle) not just because I think it’s bad for women’s body image, but because the combined focus on thinness and strength in the physical body echoes a fetish for these qualities in the representational body of the state.

Here, I’m drawing upon Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock’s 1987 essay “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology”. Within, they consider three (often overlapping) perspectives on the body in medical anthropology, which can be very, very briefly summed up as:

1. The physical body, or body of lived experience. As I type this, I’m aware of my physical body, my fingers moving across the keyboard. This is the body of lived experience, where we feel pain, desire, hunger, etc. However, this lived experience is mediated by cultural perspectives about ‘realness’– e.g. Cartesian dualism.

2. The social body. This is the “representational” body, the body we use to create metaphors that explain the world, or communicate ideals. E.g.: the head of state. Certain ideologies are a cancer. Statues and models in makeup advertisements and body builders. The idea that “healthy bodies” make up “healthy societies.”

3. The body politic. The body as an “an artifact of social and political control.” The body politic refers to how the state produces the body as a subject–e.g. access to abortion, gender-affirming care, border regimes, lack of health care in prisons.

Regarding the last point, Scheper-Hughes and Lock write that “when the social order is threatened…the symbols of self-control become intensified along with those of social control” (23). This is clearly the case in the Trump Era, as his cabinet doubles down on their dubious promise to Make America Healthy Again. But it also helps explain the protein fixation.

In 2025, the physical body and representational body of the nation are both white, lean, and economical, packing as much power as possible into as little space as possible. The ideal physical body is austere–as is the national body. Consider the language around federal spending in the DOGE era. The budget needs to be “trimmed down” so it isn’t “bloated.” We need to cut social programs like we cut calories.

At the same time, the defensive language around the physical body echoes calls to strengthen and fortify the national body through immigration policy. Here, Sarah Ahmed’s work on embodiment and affect theory is instructive. In her seminal work The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed takes up the example of the (fascist, nakedly white supremacist) British National Front’s rallying cry against a “Soft Touch Britain” to illustrate the connection between bodies and states. BNF argues that “swarms of illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers” are drawn to "easy comforts” in “Soft Touch Britain” at the expense of the (white) British taxpayer. Ahmed writes, “the metaphor of soft touch suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous, and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others” (2004, 1). And in this example, as in border discourses around the world, the soft body of the nation is distinctly female, penetrable and in need of protection from masculinized disciplining forces in the form of government or border control or xenophobic vigilante groups.

The physical and national bodies are constantly co-creating one another. We see this border discourse reflected in the view of the ideal physical body as a “lean mean fighting machine”. Mass culture tell us we need to tone and chisel the body’s boundaries, or its physical borders. That the ideal body–the protein-pilled body, the bodybuilding body, the Pilates body, the mewing body too, unfortunately–is not just thin, but defined. It’s a body with hard lines, self-contained, bursting with brute force and productive energy.

Of course, this body ideal exists at the same time as many contradicting ideals: there’s a point at which women can look “too strong”, especially women of color (it’s also important to consider the legacy of scientific racism when discussing muscularity, especially with regards to the masculinization of Black women.) Particularly at an inflection point of transphobic sex panic, not looking “feminine enough”, or “soft” enough can carry grave social consequences for trans and cis women. And gendered softness can be the impetus for bordered, violent protection, as Ahmed illustrates. These constantly shifting goalposts, the convergence of many dynamic ideals, keeps us all on our toes, constantly reacting and responding. It’s not that muscle is regressive and a lack of it is good–it’s more to say that a particular body ideal is emerging simultaneously with an extreme national politic.

While the US pursues a genocidal war abroad, people at home are eating and exercising like they’re preparing for war, as though there’s some sudden imperative to define and defend their bodies. The coalescing of this militant body politic with a white supremacist, eliminationist immigration regime feels like another level of normalization, the slow, silent creep of fascism into our lives.

Obama-era social politics left much to be desired, but there was a moment when it seemed like people, and women in particular, might have transcended an inherited all-consuming, self-cannibalizing fear and hatred of their bodies. Seeing fat women joyful, desired, beloved was revolutionary, even if that revolution was co-opted by advertising agencies. My thirteen-year-old self could have been spared a lot of salmon burgers if I knew that this was possible.

The sudden rejection of that acceptance is no coincidence. Fascism hates jiggliness, abundance, spill and spread, dimples and folds. Dynamic, moving, shaking, unboundaried selves. Communities that clump together, that bump and brush up against each other and enjoy it. Fascism hates strength that does not pursue power.

I would by lying if I said I am not also vulnerable to the effects of all this body weirdness. Sometimes it feels like all you can control is your weight or your waistline when the world appears unmanageable. That Kate Moss quote “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” is making the rounds again, and it haunts me a little even though I have lots of evidence to the contrary. I bought those protein bars that are kind of like marshmallows dipped in chocolate, and they aren’t bad. But I am trying really hard to be militantly compassionate to myself, because one of the biggest issues with fixating on your body–whether in pursuit of thinness or strength or flexibility or muscularity–is how it alienates you from other bodies. How it leads you to pursue these abstractions on your own. What I have found to be true time and time again is that when you look outwards instead of at your thighs, you’ll likely find more strength in with other people than you could have conjured on your own.

To never begrudge my own kindness.

To be exacting with language.

To pursue a life characterized by a sense of wonder.

To get a grip. To never abandon myself.

To abandon the idea of the self.

To be like a vacuous, clear-skinned glass of water. To never let the possibility of experiencing some general, golden success come before the children, the wounded, the dead. To pursue justice relentlessly. To be a memorable lover.

To be graceful in failure. To let bitterness subside. To be constantly surprised. To have an inner monologue that isn’t like, “you’resodumbdumbdumb.”

To speak plainly. To master the stomachache. To devise something sumptuous out of routine humiliations. To retain information like they did before the printing press. To be calculated to a degree that befits a modern woman. To give my life back to the earth when I am called to. To banish fear of pain. To wield anger like a blacksmith. To be freakishly generous. To speak to people in their language without making a mockery. To explain the world clearly to my opponents. To acquire the perfect red dress that shows my shoulders. To never buy anything stupid again. To fight the government and win. To resist the pull of infantilization. To sleep in your arms every night in a nightgown patterned with bluebells. To learn how to shoot a gun. I will not carry the gun.

Today I was walking around a small reservoir as sunset neared. Bluish light peppered the water, which amounts to a city-planned oval on a periphery of artificial sand. I felt like I was in the backyard of everyone, sneaking around. The water reappears deeper in the surrounding woods, off the record, softening rock, promising escape. In my ears, a woman droned on about the parasympathetic nervous system. I was thinking about whether or not I believed in the brain, conceptually, as this woman did when I glanced again at the reservoir just in time to see it alight with the presence of a giant, unexpected swan.

The swan produced a mass of concentric circles, spirals gliding across the surface of the water. I thought about taking a photograph, and didn’t. I thought about researching what it meant to see a swan, suddenly, in a metaphysical sense, but decided against it. I thought about telling someone, but I didn’t, although I suppose I’m telling you. It was one of the most important sights I’ve seen, this beautiful bird, so out of place. I will not look you up, I told the swan, walking faster to beat the dark, my voice canceling out the woman and the brain in my head. I will let you mean whatever.

Winter does not feel like winter anymore. Everything got hotter and bleaker, but also I have changed along with the world. I’m not where I started out either.

Growing up in my hometown–a little dot on a dot, a cluster of homes on an island in Southern Maine–November through April was blanketed in snow. I remember childhood being muffled, like a silent movie, because snow sucks the sound out of the world. The gasoline granita in New York, the perpetual drip of rain in London, even the frigid, puritanical winter in Boston is just not the same.

Ever since I was a child I have felt like my inner self was this chasm, a sort of infinite Alice and Wonderland like tunnel into–what? More of myself? More nothing? My life is so, so stupidly easy, easier than life anywhere or anytime in the world by most measures, but I am always teetering between awe/wonder and doom/dread and it makes it very hard to answer emails or text back my friends. In adulthood, I guess this feeling is generalized anxiety. I used to think that some of this-the sort of excess of space inside me, the treacherousness of all that abstract but pressing emotion–was a kind of diasporic second-generation holdover, an inherited melancholia from things left behind. I wrote a lot of weepy autofiction to this effect in college. I thought a lot about mangoes.

But actually, what is most true about my life is that I grew up on the swell of the Atlantic ocean, confronting its vastness and danger every day, my tiny body at its mercy with just a bucket for building sandcastles in my hand. In Maine, there is the scorch of the summer, the endless sunlight, the cataclysmic storms. Standing in the dark, watching purple lightning rupture the sky, the power snapping out when rainstorms rolled through. Playing alone in the forest, conversations with myself surrounded by all this silent, imposing life. Shuffling home from the bus stop, nearsighted from the flurries and encountering a buck standing breath-close. The world painted in Jungian blues and kelp brown, tangled and snaring your feet, air stinging with pine sap, so clean and seamless. Everything turned to tundra, blinding, knife-sharp.

I think the landscape you grow up in shapes the contours of your inner landscape. A kind of environmental Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. California siren-calls me every few years, but truly befriending someone from California often feels untenable because of the incongruent shapes of our insides. West Coasters on the whole are nice but not warm, sincere but disinterested. It makes me feel like I have something on my face. Feels like it has to do with the wind patterns there.

If you grow up somewhere with a lot of cold, wild space you feel like you need to fill it, or go very, very still like a small animal. The explorer of your inner wildness, the fractured self that goes inside to explore the Big Self, is wearing an LL Bean jacket and is armed with an ice pick. Night will come hard and fast and freezing, and you’re afraid of being lost in the woods.

I hate when life is hard, but I don’t want things to be easy. This time each year the winter knocks the reasons for living out of my head, fills everything with a tar-like, sludgy sadness. But I stay put. I can’t justify seeking out sun and pleasure and indolence. My fate is suffering and slathering myself in Vaseline so my skin doesn’t split. Why do I resist ease? I guess I don’t trust it. There must be a catch. Better to wait, better to earn pleasure. And besides, soon the snow will melt (historically, this happens around May after the last surprise April storm, though now it’s different). Then a series of mini-seasons like biblical plagues: black fly season, mud season, tourist season.

Eventually, after this set of trials, the sun will warm the sand, linger until late. The stars will spill out in the sky, thick as cream. There will be blueberries and fireflies and, tourists notwithstanding, (I guess I am one now?) a certain rich stillness if you know where to look for it. The water will still be bracing–that cold vacuity is never far–but it will pour something back into me. The traveler inside can rest for once.

I never remember the bad parts. Talking about memory is boring, obvious and incredible. Still: isn’t it strange that I remember what the trees looked like when I walked miserably through the woods by my university/several European cities/the streets by my house during a listless summer/the beach where my family fractured, but I don’t remember how it felt, not really. I remember the bad parts the way you try to remember a song, seeking out music with some secret part of your inner ear, straining an imaginary muscle.

Everything delicious still lives in my body. I remember the feeling, can conjure it in the space between my ribs, of my apartment on 123rd and Claremont, the night my best friends and I rearranged all of our furniture in our famous-to-me, perfect apartment (we could barely all fit in the living room), when we took the ferry to Astoria, went to our favorite restaurant, when someone’s uncle made us a whole fish he swore was vegetarian. I remember dancing in the half-dark with a hazel-eyed man who I met on the street, feeling godlike, like I was getting away with something. I remember throwing up into my bathtub after someone I might have loved came over and drank a bottle of wine with me and kissed me at the train station, thumb pressed into my chin. The thumb on my chin is made of stone, and the insanity it wrought in me dissolves like sugar in my mouth. Now, we’re good friends. I remember scooping my own vomit out of the bathtub and apologizing to nobody. I don’t remember how it felt, the bile rising. I remember laughing about it later, can still taste the laughter in my throat, the sunniness of it, the wholeness.

I remember when the hazel-eyed man asked me to dinner I was surprised, but excited, wasted a perfectly good Tuesday evening–all silk blue sky and evil stillness–waiting around for him to call me, I remember my best friend finding me cocooned in my Ikea duvet–that Scandinavian icy pink will always be the color of being 22–all the lights out in our perfect apartment, crying my eyes out watching Jenny Slate in Obvious Child even though I’ve never had an abortion. I remember telling her, “It’s not about him, it’s just that I can’t believe I’m going to have to be myself my whole life!”, half-laughing, and how she said–big serious eyes– “No, I know exactly what you mean.” I remember how much I loved her then for understanding, the solidness of that love like another organ inside my body, and the horrible wanting–wanting to be at dinner with someone who loved me–is like a footnote.

I remember when I got so sick, sick in a mysterious way like hundreds of thousands of other people, all felled down quietly like trees in the proverbial forest without the proverbial listeners, so dizzy from the leftovers of the disease that I couldn’t lift a frying pan or take a shower. I remember it was bad, I remember spending so much time in bed wishing not for death but truly anything else. I was so bored! But I know I don’t remember it, not really. I do remember the luster of the powdery-smelling marigolds in a vase in my room. I remember eating a lot of papaya that year, lush and astringent, and that my downstairs neighbors were in a cult and were always banging on a piano and my roommate and I became obsessed with them, tracked their movements and times of activity while the rest of the world was sleepy and horrified. I remember the feeling of the piano coming up through the floor.

I half-remember all the other times I felt like I was drowning. I remember the stupid shoes the receptionist was wearing the first time I filed a police report. I remember being so heartbroken over my first love, but that pain is inaccessible to me now, stored like an ancient necklace of an empress behind museum glass, a plaque explaining its origins posted next to it. Museum plaques always leave out the good parts, all materials and no meaning.

I remember my body thinned out by anxiety, moving differently, but I don’t really remember, not really, not the feeling of it, not the type of memory that reorganizes you and gives your children’s children an adversarial relationship to gluten or relationships. And that’s a small comfort to me now, at another one of those sort of valleys of life (even though life is less like a graph or a landscape and more like one of those toys that you flip inside out and wait til it scares the shit out of you by succumbing to its own internal pressure, bursting through itself and smacking the ceiling rightsideout). I remember the good parts so well. I remember everyone who has ever loved me. This is partially because I have practiced, still do: when I sleep in my partner’s arms I screw my eyes closed and try to memorize the feeling at each point where our bodies touch, thigh on thigh, hand on cheek. I’ve done this forever, not just with boyfriends but with my childhood pets, spent hours staring at a rabbit’s paw in my own small hand. I remember every time I went swimming. I will remember the ocean until I’m dead, maybe after that. I can conjure every time I felt the sun.

I think like this in the winter, self-eulogizing. In a few weeks, the world will be burnt and new. This is probably who I have to be my whole life, but maybe in the spring I will think about that less.

The first week of my Masters in Migration & Diaspora Studies program, I showed up to my first meeting with my advisor already panicking about applying to PhD programs. She handed me a cup of tea, put her hand on my shoulder, and told me to relax. “Take some time to learn London before you rush to the next step. Don’t forget,” she said, “you’re away from home. You are also a migrant.”

She was technically right, in the sense that I was an American living in London. But of course I was not going around introducing myself–with my American passport and international student visa–as a migrant, a term associated (not without consequence) with precarity and vulnerability. I knew that intuitively, so I find it a little shocking how popular the term “TikTok refugee” has become. Assuming this digital identity as an American citizen right now feels like a huge misreading of the room, as actual migrants are increasingly at risk of deportation, family separation, labor exploitation, and racist violence.

Is there an argument for loosening how we use these terms? One might say that applying the term migrant or refugee more broadly destigmatizes the experience of statelessness, that stripping it of its context makes it less loaded. The significance of the figure of the irregular migrant is debated in Migration Studies, and many scholars have challenged the doom-and-gloom of it all–the theorization of migrants only in terms of their vulnerability and suffering. When my professor called me a migrant, she was not being insensitive to the suffering of displaced people, but drawing upon the latter point: migration is not inherently some catastrophe or anomaly. Movement is the way of the world, and nobody is immune to its consequences. In decoupling words like “migrant” and “refugee” from their associations with “a nameless flood of poverty-stricken women and children” (Johnson 2011) we are better equipped to examine the far more nuanced, locally and temporally specific experiences of migration and challenge narratives about migrant communities as objects of pity–and its alter-ego, resentment. Still, I think it’s important to acknowledge those dimensions, as Giorgio Agamben does in his writing about the refugee as the “homo sacer.” The term comes from Roman law, and is used to describe a person who falls outside the law. Agamben considers the refugee as the contemporary ‘homo sacer’. The gist of his argument: when national borders form the contours of our social worlds, to be stateless is to be made the ultimate biopolitical subject, held in a constant state of exception, vulnerable to the fickle whims of the state and stripped of the protections that are afforded to citizens. It is through placing the refugee in this state that the nation legitimizes its own power. Borders are carved out of the flesh of the people they push to the margins. The refugee is not displaced by the border–the refugee IS the border.

It’s safe to say being ‘forced’ to use Instagram Reels or Chinese social media Xiaohongshu instead of TikTok is incomparable to the experience of claiming asylum in a new country, or living in a refugee camp, or trying to cross a border in pursuit of dignity. For one thing, TikTok was made inaccessible and then was back online for American users in the time it took me to write this essay today. I would not say that beleaguered influencers are the homo sacers of the moment. I think it is totally bizarre and callous to call yourself a TikTok refugee unless you are a refugee who is also on TikTok, and people should probably have a bit more tact, in general.

At the same time, the TikTok vs. national security debacle is an instance of the state employing a bordering practice, so I am not surprised that the language of migration has popped up in face of the ban. The notion of digital state sovereignty in this context is interesting, but I’m more curious about how unmoored people feel by losing access to TikTok. Of course, some people are using the term TikTok refugees ironically, and it is being picked up by Chinese users of Xiaohongshu in what I interpret as an acknowledgment of the tables turning: mass digital migration of Americans to China, in a sense, despite our government’s warnings about Chinese society and government. Still, I think lots of people are using the term completely earnestly. I keep seeing videos about the TikTok ban as loss of a sacred space, a space for gathering community, a space that had its own culture and its own revolutionary power. One TikTok user likened the ban to “having to move back to your hometown after moving away”, as if it were a kind of deportation. Other users speak about the loss of community they are experiencing with a true sense of grief that does not sound totally dissimilar to the pain of leaving one’s homeland behind, though surely different in scale.

In the age of the avatar, when our digital personas function as extensions of personhood, the lure of the refugee metaphor makes sense. Cast out of their digital homelands, digital selves flee to the next ‘safe space’, trading American webspace to place themselves as subjects of Chinese digital sovereignty, in part to spite the US government. That’s the catch though–they are still subjects, just trading rulers. Glorifying the nation or a tech company as a more benevolent overlord than another ignores the way power works, and obscures one’s place in the structure.

In Migration Studies, there’s a concept of ‘diasporic nationalism.’ While it’s easy to see migration as a phenomenon that is inherently anti-state and anti-borders, revolutionary all of its own accord, in practice diasporas often perpetuate nationalism for abroad. Think of the giant pro-Modi rallies from the Indian Hindu diasporas in California and London, or some American Jews’ embrace of Zionism. It’s easy for diasporic affects–longing, nostalgia, grief–to be expressed politically as boundary maintenance through extreme nationalist movements.

When I see self-proclaimed TikTok refugees mourning TikTok as a platform, focusing on access to the application rather than the user-generated ideas and communities generated within, I am reminded of diasporic nationalism. In both cases, I would argue there is a conflation of the container (digital or national sovereign states) from their contents (culture, family, belonging). When I feel a sense of discontent in the separation I feel from my family’s countries of origin, I am mourning my separation from language, flora, fauna, my cousins, a way of being in the world. I am not longing for Nation. But it is so easy to confuse these things, and that’s by design. When the state of a corporation owns the terms of your sense of belonging, it can manipulate you into a number of positions that are not in your best interest, from racist xenophobia to having an average daily screen time of 7 hours.

TikTok might be the site of activism, crowdfunding, laughter, and connection, but TikTok is not your home. Your home is in other people, including your undocumented neighbors. Your home is outside your phone, where ICE raids and border walls separate families. You might use the container to access its contents, but they can fit into any number of differently-shaped vessels. Your home is in connection, which migrant communities show us can be built with love and care and resilience, anywhere and with anyone, if you decide to make it so.

1. Start an alcohol free adaptogenic/hallucinogenic? wellness drink company with flavors like “hibiscus moron” and “tautological turmeric” called “booby” or something, in a font for a children’s birthday party invitation.

2. Fold your diploma into a paper airplane.

3. Respond “okay, Foucault!” in conversation, to the canned laughter of your friends.

4. Copywriting for arms dealer.

5. Write an award-winning treatise.

6. AI training for copywriting for arms dealer.

7. Write a monogram published by a precarious indie press called “wandering eye” or “dirt freak” or “words and sounds”.

8. Make robot sound happy. Make robot sound sad. Make robot write non-rapey erotica. Evoke in robot through a series of 0s and 1s the texture of dance, the perseverance of wind riffling the hairs of your arm.

9. Fold your diploma into a paper boat.

10. See the world through the eyes of another.

11. More grad school. Wear a backpack at the age of thirty five, without the sort of pre-sexy adolescent gumption to let it dangle, one-strapped, from your back. Like another set of tits.

12. Confetti!

13. Worry, with more credentials.

14. Start a consulting firm…..for Good.

15. Cut your diploma into a paper chain of dolls. Self-replicating women, produced asexually, fates bound together. Enemy of men.

16. Email your undergrad professor several paragraphs detailing your accomplishments and aspirations. Await three line reply sent from iPhone.

17. Feel weirder about getting Botox than other people, or more self-righteous about not getting it than other people and really communicating that to them.

18. Reminisce about the good old times, with more credentials.

19. Teach robot how to avoid the traps of morality.

20. Go to the Global South to teach English to children who think Americans smell like milk.

21. Devastate a local economy.

22. Market yourself.

23. Eventually become a professor yourself, seeing all the best and worst of you at twenty reflected back to you, wavering between enforcing attendance, cursing the robots, letting your students cry in your office.

24. Relearn how to do a pirouette in your childhood bedroom, with more credentials.

25. Journal, with more footnotes.

26. Maybe the robot you were teaching was the teacher along. Maybe you learned more from the children than they learned from you. Maybe the robot will learn so much from the children! Maybe robot is a baby.

27. Interrogate the praise kink that led you here.

28. Commune with the dead, who will find you more impressive.

29. Europe, generally.

30. Change the world!

I thought talking about it would make it easier but now the possibility of you runs like a current through everything. I thought drinking coffee with you would neutralize it but instead my body feels so much like body, crawling with life forms. Time travel dupe? Love triangle. Suicide dupe? Haircut. I burst into the world through my mother after 24 hours of cultivating for her an exquisite pain, holding her life in my bloodied fists, and I’m still so afraid of hurting anyone. As if violence is an unnatural practice. As if polar bears don’t eat their young.

You and I can see each other in the day time. You and I can see each other in natural light. Her body opens to you like a flower, or whatever. My body is a mousetrap. Instead of honesty, the second person. Life is a series of small betrayals. Life is a wheelbarrow. Life is so French. Obviously fantasy holds reality hostage. Obviously I’ve dreamt of you for years.

Theo having problems at school. Says Connor is “hunting him” at recess. I ask what he means, Theo is vague. Theo knows I don’t like Connor, is trying to protect his image. Connor’s dad is huge prick.

Ask T if kids are bullying him because of his port wine stain. T says “mama why would they bully me about something I can’t control?” Almost made me cry. Totally innocent. Kids are way nicer now. Now worried T thinks I think stain is problem.

I tell Rose Theo is getting hunted. Hunted! So freaking creepy.

Rose says C is a creep, agrees with me about dad of C, but is not taking the hunting seriously. I suggest we tell school, R says we can’t intervene every time T has a problem at school or he won’t have resilience and grit.

Need to schedule derm for T

Need to schedule ortho for T

Need to schedule PT for Rose

Karate tm

Tuesday 9/21

Rose is at a client dinner and Theo is staying at G’s. There’s finally silence in the apartment. I lit my new candle (raspberry kush, so good) but then sort of ruined it because I realized how excited I was and felt embarrassed. I’m worried I’m living a small life. Mom used to say golden handcuffs, blah blah. I told the reception guy at the gym I couldn’t wait to light my candle, wtf? Also embarrassing–I forgot Theo’s teacher’s name. Teacher is Margaret. Who goes by Margaret?

Theo gave me such a look. He is the spitting image of Rose when he is annoyed at me, but also when he is being all lovey in the AM. Dreading when he stops being nice to me at all.

It’s hot hot hot out. T keeps crushing spotted lanternflies when we walk. I know you’re supposed to, but I don’t like how excited he is about it, or that I’m always scraping crushed up wings off the bottoms of his sneakers. All the kids do it and are total sadists. Our whole street is papered with flattened lanternflies, red white and black.

Might try going to P’s mom’s wine night. Think P would be good influence on T (not a sadist).

Fought with R before her dinner, feel badly. Need to get her birthday present (new tennis racket?), need to drop off her shirt at dry cleaning.

Was going to do moon salutation, am going to bed instead

Wednesday 9/22

Had a dream I was with my mother and in the dream she was still dead but we had a mirror we could each step through to see each other. Mom kept saying, “don’t worry, don’t worry, this will be over soon” but wouldn’t say what would be over. Her hands were pale and blue and her arms still had IVs in them. Then she took me to her side of the mirror–liquid blue, like a swimming pool but we could breathe, sparkles on bottom of pool, kept trying to touch them. Things floating by like dad’s clothes. She kept saying “I need to donate those”, very stressed. Weird dream!

Follow up appt with derm in 1 mo

Need to book Keratin

Tennis racket research

Thursday 9/23

Theo says Connor is still hunting him. Ask if C is bullying T because 2 moms. T says nobody cares about 2 moms, says Rose told him if kids are bullies to “knock their lights out”??? Rose is always very fire with fire, which is sexy sometimes in regular life but not good fit with Waldorf method.

Connor’s dad was at pickup. Might have mentioned the hunting. He said, “dramatic play is good for development.”

Karate uniform too big, email for exchange

Need to book Keratin

Friday 9/24

Got into it with T about lanternflies. Said we can’t pretend to drop bombs when we step on them. T says we have to protect our forest, bombs are less bad than deforestation in context of lanternflies. Very combative for rest of walk. I snapped and said no playdate, problem because he has to go to playdate so I can go to wine night.

Brought up to Rose that I think it’s weird we all were told to start squishing the lanternflies and then we did. Said, I am not an entomologist, don’t even know why they’re bad. Would we believe anything NPR told us? Are we like NPR bug Nazis??

R very touchy about Nazi comment. Ever since R got back 23 and Me and found out her dad is 1/4 Ashkenazi has been a little sanctimonious about things like that. Said I should read full article to understand how climate is changing bug migration patterns, etc, says I only read headlines. Says lanternflies from Japan.

I said, I can’t say bug Nazi but lanternflies bad because from Japan??? Not productive. Not following Conflict Ground Rules.

Think we need to get back to date night. R stressed with work, I’m stressed about T, T is stressed about getting braces/karate camp/getting hunted/environment. Too much stress.

Need to book hair

Saturday 9/25

Got home from yoga to Rose teaching Theo how to form a fist. So pissed off. Rose says Theo needs to know the right way so he doesn’t break his wrist if he needs to punch someone. Why would he need to punch someone? You’re the one who was worried about the situation with Connor, says Rose. He needs to be able to defend himself. Says we should have had wine stain lasered off to prevent bullying. This is not about the wine stain!!!!

Admittedly I do not want Theo to break his wrist. Probably better for him to be prepared, but angry at Rose for encouraging violence. Eating dinner alone in park writing this. Sick of my small life. Sick of lanternflies but letting them crawl on park bench. Will not be someone who has to crush everything up!

Sunday 9/26

Apology sex with R=feeling great this AM. R bringing coffee to me now in kitchen. T practicing violin. Doesn’t sound horrible.

Weird mom dream again, this time dad there, too. Nice to dream about dad, in dream he was saying T is great kid. True! T is great kid!

T wants to have playdate with C, not sure if good idea. T says he likes being hunted, says hunting game is fun. R says “you’re just like mama.” Haha, very funny. Need to book hair.

1. A window full of leaves, ideally across from your bed.

2. Cycle syncing your relationship with God. He is all-knowing and ever-loving during your luteal phase, but He is not Real during ovulation (unnecessary).

3. If you don’t have a window across from your bed, you could draw a picture of some leaves and then draw a window pane around that and hang it up. Or move your bed to face a window with a tree outside of it. Or plant a tree outside your window.

4. Recognizing that you and your childhood dog are responding to the same familial traumas.

5. Relatedly, chewing on a stick.

6. Sharing a donut with someone who loves you and gives you most of the donut and wipes the sugar from your mouth. Loving someone who always carries napkins when you are someone who always needs a napkin.

7. Saying “ah, isn’t this nice” sometimes.

8. When you have something nice, imagining you are sharing it with someone else. Using your imagination to direct the hot water of your shower to someone who has been displaced, in their own city, from their own country. Imagining rain in Boston putting out fires elsewhere elsewhere. Saying, “I love you I love you I love you” when you see crumpled bodies, and wondering where the words go if nobody can hear them.

9. Wallowing for exactly 45 minutes and then getting up.

10. Transfiguring the fifteen pounds you’ve been gaining and losing for the past ten years into an object that actually weighs fifteen pounds, e.g. 2,000 paintballs, or a Yorkhire Terrier, or a fish tank. Rationalizing the presence of the 15-pound-thing by saying, “it’s fine, I’m the same person, now I just also have 2,000 paintballs.”

11. The television show The English Teacher (you can watch two while you wallow.)

12. Calling your senator, going to the protest, sending away whatever money you can part with. Being insane, as in, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. Hoping and hoping and hoping.

13. Spending time with children. Last week, as a reward for his good behavior, one of my kindergarten students got to watch his favorite video which is called “Banana Banana Meatball.” He sang and danced through its entirety in front of his whole class. Banana Banana Meatball is three minutes long. Part of the song “Banana Banana Meatball” goes “LOUD LOUD LOUD quiet quiet quiet,” but my student sang it like, “LOUD LOUD LOUD QUIET QUIET QUIET!” It was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. Watching him perform Banana Banana Meatball made me feel hopeful and triumphant, how I imagine people felt when they watched Charlie Chaplin during WWII. I wanted to salute him, my tiny showman. What joy to follow choreography, to know the words and where to put your feet.

14. The Northern Lights. Last year, a childhood friend sent me pictures of the Northern Lights in Finland. I was sort of starstruck, but he told me they weren’t as impressive in person, that they appeared brighter in photographs. This year, I stood in the field we had once walked through together and knew what he meant. Maybe that’s something special about being alive right now–holding this thing in your hand that reveals geomagnetic storms to you, all awash in rainbow, and lets you send them across the world.

15. Spending twenty years burying your desires so deeply and completely that the dirt changes their composition, so they spring forth as an irrepressible rush of just Desire itself, attached to nothing you can put into words, wondering why you are dissatisfied when you do finally decide to be someone who wants things, and then looking at the leaves outside your window and thinking, actually, right here, right now, this is nice. Maybe that’s the thing I want.

16. Praying to the God you believe in half of the month, just in case.

When I heard the opening lines of “But Daddy I Love Him”, my jaw dropped. Taylor Swift sings:

I forget how the West was won

I forget if this was ever fun

I just learned these people only raise you

To cage you

Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best

Clutchin' their pearls, sighing, "What a mess"

I just learned these people try and save you

'Cause they hate you

Wa…

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