“Does it get easier? The loneliness?”

I’m laying in the itchy grass, frogs and crickets singing the soundtrack of this humid southern summer night. She’s only 16. Too young, you may say, to be asking this question. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from being a counselor at grief camp, it’s that so many of the wisdoms I once attributed to growing older are actually wisdoms won through grief and loss.

My parents died less than one year apart when I was 25. It was the loneliest experience in the world. I knew a few peers who had lost a parent, though none whose quarter life crisis involved becoming an adult orphan. But today, as I approach year 7 of orphanhood, the burden of loneliness feels lighter than it used to.

I keep a note in my phone with miscellaneous quotes that help me make sense of this chaotic existence, pearls collected from my years of making meaning of death and loss. Grief is the weight we carry, but also the bridge that connects us all, one note reads. Another, grief makes some families strangers and some strangers family.

Perhaps the greatest gift that grief gave me is a family, a community of grievers. All the bridges grief built have brought me fellow travelers who have lightened my load and shined a light into my darkness. Our little sparks of sorrow flickering like candles, until some wonderful idiot breaks out the kerosene and suddenly together we burn bright enough to transmute our grief into joy.

After all, as that wise old farmer on TikTok said best– joy is the fruit of well-lived grief.

And at camp, we live our grief well.

This was my second summer stepping through the portal that is grief camp. There is simply no substitute for being around people who get it; the big sigh your body feels when you surround yourself with people who have lost people. At camp, the kids aren’t “that girl whose dad died,” or “the one with the dead brother,” because that’s the water they’re swimming in. They get to be normal at camp. And part of being normal at camp means they get to be witnessed in their grief without someone lobbing platitudes their way; no adults giving them puppy dog eyes, proffering pity and the token “you’re so strong.”

At camp, their grief is normal. So normal that they bounce back and forth between grief and play, crying and cavorting, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. And for kids, it is. Puddle-jumping, they call it, the way that kids tend to move in and out of grief. Growing up, I pretended the puddle didn’t exist. Oh that thing? I just spilled my water, I can clean it up! Don’t worry about me, no really, I’m fine! Adults tend to wade into the rushing river of grief for more extended periods. Adult me? My instinct is to just take a picture of the sun dappled water from a distance. Isn’t that pretty? Let’s make it look pretty!

But now, these kids have shown me it’s possible– and even healthy– to jump in and out of grief’s big emotions, and to metabolize those big emotions through play. At camp, the kids make me feel brave enough to not just dip my toes in, but to splash around the grief puddle and make waves, and to jump back out again when I need reprieve. At camp, we stomp around in puddles, then dance in the cafeteria, then weave the stories we’ve heard into friendship bracelets. Together, we transform pain and sorrow into connection and joy.

The thing about grief is that when you keep it to yourself, you can’t digest it. It gets stuck deep in your chest, heavy and rotten. But when witnessed, grief can evolve into something with wings, something that can lift you up rather than drag you down. It’s no easy task, pulling back the curtain to expose your raw grief to friends and strangers, because what if someone doesn’t meet you there? What if they leave you feeling exposed and even more alone?

But at grief camp, people always meet you there. And they will meet you there over and over again, ready to sit gingerly with something that cannot be fixed. The real magic of camp is just this– having your grief witnessed by people who can effortlessly be present with the magnitude of your pain, people who understand the opposite of despair is not hope, but serenity.

At camp, I get to be an adult who doesn’t suck the air out of the room when I make a joke about my dead parents. I get to be free from managing other people’s comfort. At camp, we are seen in the fullness of our being, the messy bits, the dark bits, the resentful bits– all the pieces that we are afraid to reveal to those yet untouched by death for fear our grief won’t be handled with care.

As a hyperindependent human in recovery, I’ve spent the better part of my life keeping my shit to myself rather than risk making someone uncomfortable, or worse, risk my own disappointment. But I’ve been working on feeling my feelings.

This year at camp I came to realize that feeling my feelings is only half of the healing equation; the other half is allowing them to be witnessed. There’s centuries of evidence to support that communal grief rituals were central to life and society, a vital medicine for survival– it’s no wonder we feel lost, drowning in our unattended grief. We’ve largely lost that part of the human experience. But grief camp has given it back to me.

So perhaps, dear camper, the loneliness never truly goes away, but it becomes a lighter burden to bear if and when we allow our grief to build bridges. Perhaps there’s no antidote, but being witnessed in our grief can be a salve for our lonely souls. Maybe that’s what makes it survivable. And maybe, I hope, laying in that itchy grass, looking up at the starry sky, we were able to pull the curtain back and let a little light in for you.

Experience Camps is a free weeklong grief camp for kids ages 8-18 who have lost a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver. They also host adult grief retreats! Learn more and/or get involved here.

My mom died 5 years ago today.

Each year, I set aside this day to do whatever feels good, or at least whatever feels not bad. I try to do at least one thing in her honor, sometimes I sift through the sale rack at Macy’s, other times I sit at a bar alone sipping a martini. Today, I decided to take myself to brunch at our old family haunt, the Original Pancake House.

I entered the address into Google Maps. “Permanently closed” it read in red beneath the google listing. Well damn. I wish I had known the last time would be my last time.

I grew up going to the Pancake House regularly with my family. They knew us there, and I was always proud to brag that my parents had been eating there since before I was born. We didn’t hold many traditions; this was one of our few. The waiters and waitresses knew us there. There was Bernard, the bearded man with a booming low voice and sad eyes who fittingly reminded me of a St. Bernard. And then there was the man who worked the lunch counter for as long as I could remember, though I never could remember his name. He had a strong jawline that made me think of a Pixar superhero. And of course, I could never forget Miss Maryann, the former pre-school teacher turned charming diner waitress with the friendliest smile I’ve ever seen.

We would start with an order of fresh fruit and whipped cream, I don’t know what they put in their whipped cream but it was magic. My brother would order the banana pancakes, tropical syrup on the side. My parents would split an order of French toast, plus two eggs over easy for my mom, and two eggs over medium for my dad. If the yolk was the slightest bit too runny, my dad would send it back, as I would wince with embarrassment and my mom would roll her eyes. Me? I would order the Dutch Baby. When it was just me and my mom, we would split one.

So I came home today, a little disappointed but determined to recoup my idea of honoring my mom today. And I made a Dutch Baby.

It was beautiful, but it wasn’t the same.

Every year that passes, the things, the places, the experiences that tether me to my parents memories slip away. It gets harder to remember.

“It’s funny the things you remember that I don’t,” my brother remarked the other week. We were talking about unaccompanied minors on flights. “Mom and dad sent us to visit Nonno and Nonna, I remember because I cried so hard that I fell asleep before we even took off!” I recounted. He had no memory that we had ever flown unaccompanied, while it is cemented in my brain as one of my earliest memories. “It’s because it was a traumatic event for you,” my sister-in-law chuckled.

We do, in fact, tend to remember traumatic events much better than average events. When we enter into a high stress or emotional state, our brain goes into overdrive to encode the events in our memory. For awhile after my mom died, I was worried that I would never remember her as she was, healthy and vibrant. All my brain could conjure for the first few years after her death was images of her sickly and frail. I understand now why some people opt out of saying goodbye to loved ones on their deathbed.

I will never forget the weeks I spent sleeping in the hospital recliner as my mom recovered from an emergency craniotomy, or the nights I crawled out of my childhood bed and into the bed next to my mom’s hospice bed when I heard her whimpering through the night. Or the time she miraculously took herself to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so unsteady on her feet, only to fall and hit her head on the towel rack. Those memories are forever encoded.

But as my mom is frozen in time, time hurtles onwards and these bad memories shrink in proportion to my life. 5 years later and despite the odds, the good memories are coming back into focus. I remember her voice, shouting from the bleachers during my high school basketball games, “COME ON, REF!!!” She was always so mild mannered and even-keeled, but the first to jump up and stomp her feet when a referee would make a bad call. I remember her love for British legal dramas and her hatred of conservative politicians. I remember her soft hands, and the way she would grab my bare feet and ask “aren’t your tootsies cold?”

I remember.

I remember.

I remember.

Won’t you remember her with me today?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the various ways that we carry forward a lineage. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we, or I, engage in tradition.

I’m prone to intellectualizing this practice. I catch myself believing that I need to be writing about, reading about, thinking about, planning, creating intention around this thing, this memory, this value, this ritual act. I spend more time in my brain contemplating and calculating than I do in my body actually doing and enjoying the thing. I’ve fallen prey to the notion that I must be constantly advancing my aptitude, my excellence on a topic to justify its continued existence in my life. That this is the only worthwhile cause, to intellectually understand and justify my choices, and anything running counter to the current iteration of my belief system is off limits to me.

That’s what being steeped in leftist dogma can do to you.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this question from Kai Cheng Thom, “when does my commitment to being politically ‘radical’ prevent me from perceiving a more complete truth?”

Sometimes it’s the things that so blatantly contradict a part of my current consciousness that are so necessary for me to engage in for the sake of honoring my grief, for connecting me with the memory of someone or something. Sometimes it’s the very things that make me afraid of being perceived as a fraud that I must do in order to stay tethered to my identity.

Like going to Dillard’s on Black Friday.

My mom raised me to never pay full price. She was a dedicated bargain shopper, a maxxinista. We didn’t have a lot in common, in fact I often felt like we spoke different languages. But shopping, clothes, shoes, oh especially shoes, we shared a love for shoes. We shared a love for sale racks and a good deal. Dressing rooms and Saturday mornings cruising up I-85 to Lenox Mall, listening to Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. And Black Friday at Dillards. We had that in common.

Department stores in particular remind me of my mom. Outside of the house, it’s probably where we spent the most time together. I find them comforting in that way, like I can step into a reality where my mom is still here. Any second now, I’ll hear her voice from outside of the dressing room. Even before she died, department stores were a source of comfort for me. When I lived in Scotland for my first two years of undergrad, I only came home for Christmas and summer break. In between, bouts of homesickness were rare, but when they hit, I would hop on a train and go to the nearest department store. The employees had different accents but the sale racks looked the same.

So this past year, with an explicit call to Boycott Black Friday in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, I was faced with a pointed contradiction. I’ve gone to Dillards every Black Friday since my mom died. But my politics are principled. I am deeply committed to collective liberation. I have been a wreck over this genocide. But I never want to lose sight of a more complete truth for the sake of being politically radical. Because my grief, too, is principled. Plus, I fundamentally disagree with the notion that liberation can be boiled down to individual consumer choices.

So I went to Dillard’s on Black Friday.

“I think that overrides boycott and is actually essential,” my friend reassured me when I explained my predicament.

A few months prior, I spotted a banner commending Arab veterans at our local Arab cultural center. To me, this is an obvious and sharp contradiction, one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. But to some of our elders, it is not. My options for connecting with Arab community in Atlanta are limited; how can I turn my back on my biggest opportunity to meet and connect with my community? Am I going to stop supporting our cultural center for tacitly supporting the military? Sure, there are elders in our community who do not quite share the politics of young Arabs, but they share our culture, they hold our history in their hands, and that’s worth something. That’s not something I’m willing to throw away for the sake of being politically radical.

And yet sometimes I still deny myself such pleasures, connecting to my culture and my past. Sometimes I deny myself the honor of honoring my parents and where I come from. I intellectualize which parts of my origin I want to carry forward and which I want to leave behind. And when I do decide I want to carry a piece of my past forward, I tell myself that I must save this experience, this ritual, for the optimal time to enjoy it. It’s often not even something that I need to ration, and yet for some reason I hoard it. I hoard the tradition for some unknown future date when I will have capacity to fully relish in the memory and the meaning of it.

But isn’t every day a good day to remember someone?

Why do I deny myself the experience of pleasure and pride that tethers me to a part of my past, a part of where I came from? I wonder, maybe, it’s because of the pain that comes along with it.

I opened the Panettone on a whim, late one night. I bought it several months earlier, ahead of the holiday season. The big red box of sweet bread sat on the counter for weeks. Until late one night in early January. Christmas had already come and gone, what am I waiting for? If I keep waiting I will miss the chance to eat panettone at Christmastime, an Italian tradition.

I made a mess with the packet of powdered sugar, a gift for the ants that would later find their way onto our kitchen counter. I cut a slice, sneaking a bite before plating it. I realized the slice was too small for my appetite— not my appetite for food but for the memory. So I cut a second slice and added it to my plate.

The smell, a blend of custard, sourdough, and citrus, transported me back in time and place. It’s the very same panettone that my mom would pick up at TJ Maxx or Costco in the weeks before Christmas. The smell reminded me, too, of the homemade pinze that my Tia Nella would send us every Easter, wrapped in pastel colored plastic.

The texture is soft and airy, it almost melts in your mouth. I could taste the sourdough beneath the notes of vanilla and orange. For me, it tastes like home. But I don’t know how it tastes for people who don’t feel grief when they eat panettone.

Grief, however, is not a thing that happens to you. Grief becomes you. It alters your very being in a way that you will not understand until you too are changed. Grief becomes you such that every moment, every choice becomes political. Every moment is an opportunity to honor someone you’ve lost. Every choice is an opportunity to stay tethered to your ancestors. It changes once simple acts into rituals and traditions that you cling to.

And it’s in these small moments, these often unseen choices, that you reproduce a lineage. It’s in the ordinary. It’s in the contradictions, in the connections and experiences we are inclined to deny ourselves. It is here where we find the threshold we must step through in order to connect who we once were to who we want to become.

I’m trying something a little different this time around.

For years, I’ve battled the paralysis that comes after the idea and before the execution. I am FULL of ideas! They come pouring out of my eyes and ears and mouth and hands at all hours of the day, and generally find a home in a random note on my phone. Countless plans for paintings, concepts for essays, fun little phrases I want to turn into comics or newsletters… but most of those ideas live and die in the digital graveyard that is my notes app.

It’s no secret that I think we’re doing too much as humans today, particularly in the western world, and I believe this contributes to my paralysis. I simply don’t have enough brain cells or minutes in the day for all of these ideas. But I’ve also come to the conclusion that my paralysis is furthered by a socialized expectation that I have to have it all figured out before I open my mouth, before I put pen to paper or brush to canvas. And the idea of having it all figured out feels rather… insurmountable.

I feel like what I write needs to mean something. Like every piece I put into the world needs to be perfectly polished. This is something I believe is fairly unique to the chronically online generation. Sure, writers and artists and theorists of yesteryear spent a lot of time laboring over their work, iterating and polishing and refinishing before releasing it into the world. But this phenomenon where we are constantly under a microscope, held to unspoken and frequently shifting social standards, and expected to have a stance or perspective on everything— the idea that we can’t be making and sharing our art without also addressing all of the social ills that plague our communities— that is unique to this point in time, in history, in the continuum of technological advancement.

What if we were able and encouraged to struggle through these things more privately, specifically offline and in the physical plane? Alternatively, what if it were okay to be a little wrong in what we share? For our words and our art to be a little underbaked? What if the goal wasn’t to be right or correct or the most morally superior all the time, but rather to be human? What would it look like to accept that it is not a moral failing to not have grappled with every facet of life and the systems that shape it? What would it look like if we gave other people that same grace to be human, and to develop their analyses over time without making assumptions? What if we aimed to make more bad art and write more shitty poems? What if I allowed myself to write this newsletter and send it out without editing it?

Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so stuck.

In my personal life, in my spirit and soul, I have gotten really comfortable these days with these kinds of ideas. I am not interested in having it all figured out, or being a ~better leftist~ than someone else (whatever that even means), or in smoothing out all of the contradictions in my beliefs and politics. I am very cozy in these feelings offline.

But when it comes to online culture, I haven’t yet figured out how to translate these personal politics to my online practice. I fall right back into old patterns of seeking approval and validation the minute I open up Instagram or sit down to write a newsletter. And I’m simply not interested in that way of being anymore.

There is no neat and tidy ending to this musing. I’m going to leave it where it is— rough around the edges, an analysis in process. Maybe I’ll write about this again in time, maybe I won’t! Maybe I will keep my conclusions to myself. Maybe my conclusions will continue to change too often for me to feel confident disclosing them because I know that tomorrow I will think and feel just a little bit differently. Maybe this time I will keep myself from manufacturing social pressure and instead make peace with being where I am, regardless of what anyone else might think…

In an effort to practice sharing half baked ideas, here are a few things I’ve been musing on lately. . .

Diaspora culture has been really heavy on my heart and mind in recent months. For so long, I have felt disconnected from the cultures that birthed me— I am too western and American for them, but too brown and immigrant for America. I do not fit neither here nor there. But maybe there is a third option— diaspora culture. For many months I had a hard time conceptualizing what diaspora culture really meant, but recently it clicked for me: I am a product of diaspora cultures. Diaspora is my culture.

I’ve also been musing on the mad-coding of certain animals, particularly in animated films and shows. Similar to the queer-coding of Disney villains, some choice animals— particularly scavengers— have been socially coded as dirty, dangerous, and deranged. Just think about any depiction of a vulture or hyena in Disney movies. Some of these characters have been queer-coded, but they’ve also been mad-coded. It feels to me like a not so subtle othering of our mad, disabled, and unhoused siblings. If you’re new to mad liberation, check out Mad in America, Asylum, and the Mad People of Colour Manifesto.

Finally, we recently celebrated Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. Nowruz marks the new year using the vernal equinox, or the beginning of Spring; it’s a time to celebrate re-birth, light conquering darkness, and the connection between humans and nature. In reflecting on the meaning of this holiday, I was reminded once again that there are calendars and experiences of time that are much older than the Gregorian calendar that shapes our lives in American society today. There are ways to live and perceive time that are more in touch with our innate purpose and the way we should be relating to the earth. I’ve never really enjoyed celebrating the Gregorian New Year and it’s never made much sense to me. I’d much rather hibernate with the bears and re-emerge with the blooming flowers.

And just for good measure, here are a few things that have made me smile lately:

» Kissy SkateTok <3

» This my little pony meme carousel by Softcore Trauma on Instagram:

» This Rani Ban print which I promptly added to my Rani Ban collection:

Final announcement before I bid you adieu:

Atlanta pals, visit me at the Georgia Vintage Goods market, A Day at Dairies, this Sunday April 9th! We’ll be posted up from 12-6pm at Atlanta Dairies on Memorial Dr. I’ll be making my debut as a vendor under my studio name, Studio Yateem, slinging prints and paintings.

Also follow on my new art account! That is where I will be dedicating most of my social media spoons moving forward, and where you will be able to keep up with my creative endeavors.

I decided to break up with my hair stylist. I haven’t told her yet. Honestly I probably never will. Not outright anyhow. I think she would be appalled to learn that I’m cutting my own hair, and I’m just not interested in having that conversation with her.

This was not a rash or emotional decision. It was measured, many months in the making. My rationale built up slowly, slowly, and then suddenly tipped over the edge of no return. And as I free fall towards a future of at-home haircuts, a new special interest has been unlocked: my hair.

Let me give some background here. If you’re reading this, you likely know that my hair is one of my trademarks. My curls are by far my most complimented physical trait. Growing up, my parents never mastered my hair, seeing as my mother had been straightening her loose Italian waves for decades and my father never learned the same Arab haircare skills as his 8 sisters. So I had to learn my hair myself.

For several years, as a young teen, I would apply product to my wet hair and meticulously twist each corkscrew curl. Not a hair out of place, I disciplined my mane into precise, frizz-free, compact curls. This required showering every morning to style my hair anew each day. My hair got me a lot of attention. People frequently asked to “boing” my curls, pulling them down then releasing them to spring back up. One boy who sat behind me in 7th grade history class found great amusement threading his pencil up each of my curls everyday. When my friends wanted to see what my hair looked like straight, it became a sleepover activity. That is, until they got tired and bored halfway through straightening my hair, unaccustomed to the curly hair experience, and left me to finish the job myself.

Later on in high school, I abandoned my meticulous corkscrews for a less manicured look, allowing my hair to dry without manipulating my curls. “I like the natural look,” one of my guy friends told me soon after I started trialling the look. “Natural,” I thought… I’d never really heard that word used in relation to hair. After all, I had never had my hair cut or styled by anyone who wasn’t white.

I continued to trial new products and techniques with my hair, drawing from Ouidad and the Curly Girl Handbook that my mom bought for me as a tween. By the end of high school, my hair was very long, well past my shoulders while curly and nearly to my butt when pulled straight. I wore my hair at this length with minimal upkeep for many years. I would go to the hairdresser a few times per year to get my dead ends trimmed and to have some warm gold highlights applied. “It looks better, your curls look more defined when you have different tones in your hair,” my mom told me. She was right. She is still right.

By the time I turned 24, I was itching for change. I had convinced myself for so long that I didn’t have many options for hairstyles with my 3b curls. I would scour the internet for hours, searching for reference photos to show my stylist but I could never find more than a handful of images that featured people with my texture hair. This kept me from venturing outside of my comfort zone for years. But somewhere amongst the Sierra Nevada mountains, I found the courage to hack off my hair, with or without a reference photo.

For the first time in my life I sought out a curly hair specialist (albeit a blond white woman) and it was a total game changer. I learned about dry cuts and cutting edge curly hair products. We started by cutting my hair just above shoulder length, with curly bangs. Over the year that followed, we cut it shorter and shorter until I had just a few inches of hair, mostly on top of my head.

When I moved back to Atlanta, I started seeing my (now ex) hairstylist. Together we navigated finessing my hairstyle, first with a bit of a faux hawk shape, then with more of a fade all around. But, she admitted, she had never cut anyone’s hair like this. She even admitted on multiple occasions that she wasn’t sure about my ideas or how they would turn out. But every time she was pleasantly surprised. She was learning with me. Or perhaps, from me.

Eventually, I started to question if I’ve been wasting time (and money) letting someone else tell me what was best for my hair. Eventually, I realized that I was instructing her how to cut my hair, down to which guard size, where to start with the clippers, and which curls needed to be snipped. Wait… I thought the last time I was sitting in her chair, I can do this myself! 

Don’t get me wrong— hair dressers have skills and expertise that I will never have. They have dedicated time to learning and perfecting their craft and that is undeniable. I respect that. But we are all working with limited information. In the vast wasteland of information overload, we’re constantly sifting through what’s reliable information, what’s misinformation, what’s outdated, what’s evidence-based, what’s rooted in tradition, what’s applicable to our own personal experiences…. It is simply impossible to collapse all of this nuance into universalizable methods, conclusions, or philosophies. This means that even when someone is an expert in their craft, we must consider too the ways in which we are experts in our own experience. A hairdresser’s education and expertise is valuable information, but my daily experience with my hair is equally valuable information. We must consider how what we know for ourselves interacts with what “professionals” tell us. We must recalibrate our scales of informational legitimacy. We must consider the ways in which perceived power and authority keep us stagnant and incurious.

It’s amusing and endearing to me how as I age, I increasingly learn just how little I actually know about the world, but even more amusing to me is learning just how little everyone else knows too. I’ve always questioned authority in other people to some degree, starting with my father’s patriarchal tendencies. But never in my life have I been so skeptical of so-called “experts.” Never in my life have I unplugged so extensively from the matrix as I am today, entirely averse to being a sheep. Never in my life have I trusted myself and my own analyses so faithfully.

So anyways, back to my hair. I took a hair porosity quiz! Turns out that maybe it’s helpful to know more than just what curl pattern you have. I’m going back to the drawing board to test out new products. I’m researching what kinds of oils and techniques Arab women use to care for their hair. I’m connecting with my roots, literally. And it’s really liberating.

I know there is inherent privilege in this whole narrative. I can see the Onion headline now: “Trust fund orphan abandons their $100 haircuts to live like the proletariat!” I don’t take this lightly. But what I’m getting at, ultimately, is that I’m turning off autopilot. The systems that keep us and ours oppressed are the same systems that keep those of us with class privilege intertwined with capitalism, spending money thoughtlessly when we could be bartering and trading or doing it ourselves. Consider this breakup with my hairdresser another step towards prefiguring the future I want for us. Consider this breakup the start of something new, and I’m not just talking at home haircuts. I’m thinking bigger…

May your new year, whenever you celebrate, be filled with embodied experiences and trust in yourself.

Last week, child-star-turned-rapper Aaron Carter died unexpectedly. And like clockwork, the internet became a virtual Wailing Wall. Strangers posted tributes, speculated about the cause of his death, and in some instances shared crude and untimely critiques of the late Carter. It happens like this every time. We scour the internet to find out, “What happened?! Was it suicide? Was he secretly sick like Chadwick Boseman? Was there foul play?” If we had a chance encounter or a peripheral relationship with someone who has died, we dig up that one photo of us together and make sure the world knows “hey, I lost them too, you know?” We are so curious about death and ready to claim it, but only in the past tense and hardly ever with nuance.

I’ve been fascinated with death from a young age. That sounds so grossly cliché. But it’s true. As a teen I latched onto the inevitability of change—the death of everything— as a comforting truth. “This too shall pass,” reads my very first tattoo, etched across the side of my ribs at the age of 18. My second tattoo, a line of script on the inside of my right forearm, reads, “Memento Mori.” Remember your mortality. Well before I got this text inked, the concept had percolated into my high school art projects, courtesy of a one Patti Smith. The certainty of time’s passing had become a salve for the discomforts of my daily life, and I took pleasure in translating these grim reminders into visual art.

My capstone project Senior year was even titled Memento Mori. It was a collection of mixed media works that grappled with the passage of time, inevitable ends, and the precariousness of life. Fresh flowers adorned several works, carefully placed or pressed in the days before we hung the show. The predestined deterioration of the blooms over the course of 3 weeks became an integral element of the work. Each day, the works were different, at a different stage in their life, never to look the same again.

Today, I have a much more intimate understanding of death and dying. This month brings the 2nd anniversary of my dad’s death, and next month marks the 3rd anniversary of my mom’s. They died 11 months apart; my dad just before Thanksgiving, my mom just before Christmas. For the rest of my life, the holiday season will coincide with my very own season of grief. They say that your body knows these dates, even when it slips your mind. But I’m in good company in these coming months, seeing as more people die in winter— particularly around the holidays—than any other time of year. I learned this from the deacon at the Catholic Church were we hosted my mom’s funeral. A Franciscan priest presided over the service, an apt fit given my mom’s love for the Franciscans. He wore the traditional brown robe with a knotted cord belt, not unlike how you’d picture a monk might look, except on his feet he sported socks with Birkenstocks. I took a mental image of this man’s footwear, stored away to giggle at once the grief wasn’t so big. The grief is still really big. But maybe you can laugh at the thought of a priest wearing socks with Birkenstocks.

My understanding of death and dying is inextricably linked to politics of care. Through the process of caring for my mom, and then my dad, as their bodies and minds declined to the point of complete dependence, I learned to look at this act not as a familial obligation that I inherently owed to them, but rather as a prefiguration of the future world I want for us all. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to romanticize caregiving for the ill and dying. But in the early days, I felt forced into the role of caregiver, purely by virtue of an assumed family obligation that I personally did not subscribe to… but felt obligated to nonetheless. I had cultivated a deep sense of independence and individualism from my family; there was so much unresolved pain and trauma and dysfunction there, it simply made more sense for me to become self-sufficient. It felt like I could never go to my parents for a healthy dose of unconditional care and understanding, so why did I have to suddenly become fully available to provide care to them?

Over time, I warmed to the role of caregiver more. I felt the double edged sword of wanting it to be over and not wanting them to be gone. But you can’t have both. And in the space between, I had a lot of time to think about how I’d wished we’d been better at talking about death before it was on our doorstep.

Back when I was taking care of my dad, I used to come home and draw a bath (I get my love of long baths from my mom.) I would soak in the tub for well over an hour, dissolving the day’s frustrations away and reading Being Mortal, a book by Indian American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book is a personal and scientific exploration of end-of-life care and what really matters in the end. It provided me language to better articulate and examine the phenomenon that I was living through firsthand.

In recent centuries, advancements in medicine and public health have increased human life expectancy considerably. Our population of senior citizens is significantly larger than it was even just a few decades ago. And we don’t have enough doctors, healthcare professionals, caregiving systems, or even simply societal understanding to care for this increasing population of aging individuals.

Whereas Eastern cultures traditionally have practiced communal caregiving in multigenerational systems, this has been supplanted in the West by nuclear families, cultures of shame around illness, and the medicalization of aging. In the East, old folks are revered, considered sources of knowledge and wisdom, and are cared for accordingly. In the West, old people are viewed as a burden, as non-productive members of society undeserving of quality of life if they can’t provide it for themselves. It’s sickening.

And the field of medicine plays right into this! Malcom Gladwell’s review of the book says, “American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death.” Rather than acknowledging the limitations of medicine, the healthcare system prioritizes keeping people “safe” and alive over providing autonomy and supporting quality of life at the end of their life. You’ve seen it before, you’ve heard people say something to the effect of, “what kind of life is this to live?” Some people are kept alive and miserable rather than being allowed to die comfortably. Fighting the natural process can often create more suffering than relief.

Now there are many caveats I could add here about how socialized ableism has skewed our idea of what kind of life is worth living. So put a pin in that if it’s coming up for you— but know that at the end of the day, it should be each individual’s choice about what is important to them in the end. Additionally, I want to reinforce that we’re talking about age-related illness in particular here. Talking about illness and disability and mental health across the ages is a whole other can of worms that I don’t have the capacity to address in this space at this time. 

Anyways!

Death and dying are natural. Deterioration and illness are a part of life— a morally neutral part of life at that. But because we have collectively rejected our responsibility to acknowledge the reality of death, death and illness can often feel like a failure. This further reinforces our aversion to talking about it head on. Hell, some people even have a hard time saying someone died. Instead we’ve come up with all of these passive euphemisms, “she passed away,” “he was called home,” “they left us”… but you’ll almost exclusively catch me delivering this information bluntly—“my parents are dead”—no matter how uncomfortable it makes people. Avoiding the topic of death and dying is not helping us. In many instances, it’s hurting us.

Gawande references a study on Stage IV lung cancer patients; the patients who saw a palliative care specialist early on in their care— in addition to their normal oncology care— ultimately entered hospice sooner but suffered less and lived longer than those who did not have proactive discussions about palliative care. Gawande posits, “if end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.”

Confronting mortality enables us to improve our wellness and quality of life, and that of our loved ones. It’s scary. I understand firsthand how much easier it is to just push it to the back of your mind, even when it’s staring you in the face. But I’m telling you that I wish I’d had the chance to do it differently. I wish that my parents hadn’t been afraid to talk about death. I wish that I hadn’t been afraid to talk about death with them. It would have made many things easier on all of us in the end.

These days, my proximity to death has shifted my politics dramatically. My parents’ deaths accelerated personal growth in new directions, directions that have led me to deep politics of care, collectivism, abolition, and most recently, Marxism. Death has made me the ultimate cynic and at the same time, the ultimate lover. Death has allowed me to abandon binaries and get cozy in the spaces between. Death has enabled me to outgrow my individualist coping mechanisms, and begin to reach outwards into my ecosystem for community-based care and healing. Death has made me better at talking about death, but I’ve still got a long way to go, and I’d love to practice with you.

If you share this grief season with me, here are a few grief resources I can offer that I personally benefitted from:

Death Benefits: A particularly poignant book for folks with complicated parental relationships.

The Dead Mom’s Club: My favorite book for a humorous and validating take on watching a parent die and what comes afterwards.

Grief Therapy Group: I struggled with solo grief therapy, but found that processing in community was both easier and more beneficial. I participated in a virtual Bereavement Group facilitated by the Center for Loss & Renewal and had a wonderful experience.

Last month I was diagnosed autistic. My best friend of 25 years sent me a picture of a cake with icing that read: “Congrats on the Autism.”

It took me almost three decades to gain this kind of clarity about who I am. A few years ago I became acquainted with disability activism, and dedicated myself to unlearning my deeply internalized ableism. I credit some dear friends who opened my mind and offered their expertise via in person conversations and social media, which I soaked up enthusiastically like an eager sponge.

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been gently turning this idea over in my head… the idea that I might be autistic. The more I learned about neurodivergence, the more I identified with being atypical. There are many ways to be neurodivergent, but in particular I found many consistencies between my experiences and autistic traits.

I started keeping a note in my phone titled “Autism things”— it’s a list of the things I do or feel that I believed were potentially indicative of autism. The list includes things like: 

• I have a hard time answering big, open ended questions. I need specific questions.

• I’m very direct and literal. I’ve been told that I am defensive or argumentative at times, and I’m consistently confused or caught off guard when someone suggests that, because internally I do not feel I’m being confrontational. Just logical.

• I hate public speaking and struggle with thinking on my feet. I freeze up when I’m put on the spot to speak on pretty much any topic, except for special interest topics that I am very well versed in.

• I can’t interject into an existing conversation; I need to be asked a question directly in order to enter the conversation.

• I hate small talk and cannot fake interest.

• I take a long time to process and respond to happenings and information.

• My friends in high school said on several occasions, albeit jokingly, that I was born mature and didn’t have feelings or emotions.

The list goes on, but interestingly, many of these are characteristics of my being that I’ve been aware of for well over a decade. I’ve known these things about myself, but I haven’t known what they meant. Long before I ever started using terms like “ableism” or “neurotypical,” I would assert that I was incapable of faking anything; I’ve never known how to say or do anything other than what I genuinely think or want to do. I’ve said for years now that I am incapable of being deceptive. I hated role playing scenarios in school classes or leadership training workshops. My mom told me that as a child I was very quiet but clearly very engaged and observant, processing information on my own timeline; people tell me the same thing today. I’ve always strongly preferred to plan out my day intricately, and last minute changes that I am not expecting have always rattled me and made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

But the thing about going undiagnosed autistic is that many of these traits are behaviors we’re socialized to think negatively of. Many of these traits are things that I thought were wrong with me. Over the years, I’ve heard variations of the following sentiments:

Don’t be so uptight! Go with the flow!

Why do you always have to be right?

No need to be nervous or embarrassed, we’re all friends here, just act out the scenario!

Why are you being so quiet? Don’t you have thoughts on this?

You’re too blunt, it hurts peoples feelings.

In each of these interactions, people thought that my behavior did not suit the situation. I wasn’t following the socially determined script. But our popular models for social interactions are all neurotypical... And news flash! There’s a huge community of people who do not subscribe to these norms! And that does not inherently make us rude, or mean, or insensitive, or poor communicators.

I recently saw a social media post that likened being autistic to speaking another language. Some of us can switch back and forth between autistic dialogue and neurotypical dialogue, but when we speak neurotypical we have an “accent.” When autists try to speak neurotypically, that’s a key component of masking.

For the uninitiated to the atypical, masking is when people learn, practice, and perform certain behaviors and suppress others in order to camouflage better with the people around them. Masking might look like forcing eye contact during conversation, imitating gestures or facial expressions, feigning interest or downplaying personal interests, or developing a catalog of rehearsed responses to common questions.

Little did I know I’d been masking for most of my life; pushing myself through deep discomfort because I thought I had to act this way, look this way, speak this way to be liked, understood, appreciated, or successful. I thought that there was something wrong with me. I thought that my bluntness was a blade that needed to be dulled, and my slow processing time a tape to be sped up.

I am so relieved to know now that I was wrong.

Several of my close friends are well versed in autism and neurodiversity; some of them are autistic themselves. But the vast majority of people in my life have a very surface level understanding of autism. And they will likely be surprised to learn that I am autistic because of their preconceived notions of what autism looks like. These preconceived notions are particularly skewed by gender too; women and girls frequently go undiagnosed, largely because diagnostic criteria were developed around cis males, and also because women and girls tend to have more capacity for masking.

Now a quick caveat on diagnosis: there are many reasons to not seek a diagnosis, such as medical discrimination or being blocked from immigrating to some countries. Diagnosis also does not guarantee accommodations or any supplemental forms of healthcare. I want to emphasize that self-diagnosis or self-identification as autistic is one hundred thousand percent valid. You do not need a formal diagnosis to be considered autistic.

But for me personally, this felt like a necessary step to feel validated, to wash away any lingering imposter syndrome about my disability.

That said, my vision for the future is one in which we holistically acknowledge the nature of neurodiversity— that “normal” is a fictional concept, and that all of our brains work in wonderfully diverse ways. A future in which perhaps we won’t need labels or diagnoses to feel validated or understood.

People today are frequently misdiagnosed. Autists previously diagnosed ADHD. Folks diagnosed bipolar when CPTSD actually better explains their experiences. But none of this would matter if we just accepted this broad diversity in brains and cognition as the norm. If we just allowed people to be different without pathologizing their differences. None of this would matter if everyone— particularly folks closer to the neurotypical side of the spectrum— worked harder to be accommodating to these differences so that atypical folks weren’t forced to mask, or fight for accommodations, or resort to self harm.

It’s also important for me to note that while I believe in building this future now, a future in which neurodiversity is the norm, I want to caution white neurodivergent folks from overstepping. Particularly those of you who have low support needs… there is a concerning trend amongst young progressive white folks to inflate their disability, queerness, and neurodivergence as a means to claim marginalized space in leftist movements. Please understand when it’s time to sit down and listen. Listen to your elders, listen to Black and Brown folks, listen to disabled folks with high support needs. Know your place in the movement (hint: it’s not at the front).

Here is where I also remind you that I am relatively new to this world. I am about four years into my anti-ableism journey and one year into identifying as neurodivergent; I am by no means an authority on anything other than my own experience, and I continue to look to and learn from disabled leaders. You should do the same.

But I hope that I can be a portal for people who are unacquainted with autism. I hope that people who may otherwise not knowingly interface with the atypical community will begin to understand that we are everywhere. And I hope that I can influence my neurotypical pals to invest in their own anti-ableism journeys.

P.S. My inbox is open if you have any questions about autism, seeking a diagnosis, or any other curiosities about neurodiversity.

Here’s to being gentle with yourself when you want to do less, know less, talk less. The western world pathologizes any of us who don’t want to conform, but I’m telling you that you, as you exist, are a perfectly natural being. It’s the world around us that’s not natural. It may sound like satire but I mean it when I say: in a world full of more, be less.

MUM’S THE WORD is a newsletter featuring multimedia musings and unpopular opinions by yours truly. Take a walk inside my mind palace. Stay awhile.

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These days I’m trying to do less. Less work. Less texting. Less TV. I’ve lowered my expectations drastically for what I can and should accomplish in a day. It’s a key part to my personal practice of unplugging from the capitalist matrix and rejecting the productivity paradigm.

But one of the biggest obstacles to allowing myself to do less is the deluge of information that is constantly at my fingertips. The FOMO! What if I miss out on an important current event? Or an opportunity? What about pop culture moments? The latest celebrity break up? The newest incomprehensible string of wild words that some right wing nut tweets? I’ve gotta know what’s happening in the world!

But our brains have not evolved to accommodate this level of information influx. The rate of technological advancement and knowledge creation has moved lightyears faster than our brains can feasibly adapt to. Let’s contextualize this a bit.

In 1900, knowledge doubled every 400 years. A century later we entered the information age, and in 2000 knowledge was doubling every 8 years. Today? Today knowledge doubles every 12 hours. For some, this is thrilling. Human ingenuity! Look at us go! For me, this is terrifying. We’re hurtling towards an unknown future that is increasingly out of human hands. Ray Kurzweil predicted that the singularity will occur around 2045— this is when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain, and technological growth will become increasingly fast and uncontrollable. Steven Hawking warned that singularity could ultimately spell the end of humankind.

I don’t know if they’re right. Future Sarah might find out. But until then, I do know that we are not machines. We are not designed to compete with the computing powers of technology.

A group of UCL cognitive neuroscientists published a study in 2020 that suggests there is a very real metabolic limit to our brains’ information processing capacity. If you’re human and alive in 2022, you’ve likely experienced what we call “information overload”— you’ve felt overwhelmed by the amount of information you’re receiving at any given time, possibly frustrated that you cannot concurrently process and store all of the data in your brain. Maybe you didn’t hear your partner tell you something because you were watching a TikTok at the same time, or you have to read the same paragraph in your book four times over in order to actually process what’s written because you can’t help but eavesdrop on an interesting conversation happening nearby at the same time. 

Well there’s a neurophysiological reason that you cannot multitask with information processing! Essentially, this UCL study demonstrates that our perceptual capacity is limited by an overall limit to the energy supply to our brain. Our brain constantly receives the same amount of energy —about 20% of our body’s metabolic energy— regardless of mental processing demands. This study found that when our mental task becomes harder (perhaps due to the difficulty of the task itself, or perhaps due to distractions outside of our desired focus) the brain allocates less energy to the neurons responding to information outside of the focus of our attention. So when a given task becomes more mentally demanding, our brain naturally decreases our sensitivity to other stimuli in order to tune it out.

Guess what that means? We can’t overcome information overload with more focus. It’s empirically impossible. There is a hard limit to our brain’s metabolic capacity, and at capacity we will fail to process some amount of the information we are consuming. And when our brain is chronically at capacity trying to stay focused and productive, we have less self control, we are not as helpful or prosocial, and we are more impulsive. This is why I’m trying to do less.

I’ve been multitasking for most of my life. I thought I had to in order to keep up. Keep up with what? I truly don’t know— that’s the wild thing about socialization. And when the products of my multitasking did not meet my standards, I rationalized that it was because I needed to be more focused. I put the blame on my internal locus of control. But now, I understand it’s far more complex than that. The systems and society that I am embedded within are largely to blame. So the solution is not to increase my focus, but rather to decrease my focus.

I need to decrease my focus on the vast information ecosystem that surrounds me. I need my information vacuum to have a filter with the finest mesh, so that fewer things make it through to me. Fewer and fewer data points meet the threshold of importance and relevance in my life to be processed by my precious brain. I’m caring about fewer things, but I am able to care more deeply. Connect more deeply. Understand more deeply.

I’m allowing my brain to be unfocused more often. To be— *gasp* — “unproductive.” The reformed workaholic in me finds it hilarious that science shows time and again that the unfocused brain is necessary and helpful! If you want to learn, understand, and remember more, you need to consume less information. You need to shift your brain from collection mode to connection mode. 

When we our brains are constantly in collection mode, consuming information left and right, we don’t get a chance to process, synthesize, or connect the data points and ideas we’ve collected. But when we allow ourselves to be unfocused, our brain engages a circuit called the “default mode network” or DMN, something scientists jokingly call the Do Mostly Nothing circuit. When we unfocus, the Do Mostly Nothing circuit gets all 20% of our body’s energy dedicated to the brain, and with that energy the DMN opens pathways in the brain to revisit old memories, travel back and forth between past, present, and future, integrate new ideas and recombine old ones. When we let our brain enter into this state, we experience increased creativity and capacity for divergent thinking. When we unfocus, we can become not only more effective (and dare I say… productive?) but also more compassionate and self-aware.

So if you’ve hit a wall, leave your work unfinished for now. If you’re feeling saturated with communications, leave your text messages unanswered. I am giving you my ~very authoritative~ permission to do less.

Be easy on your brain. Listen to instrumental music and let your mind wander. Go for a walk and let your brain unravel. Spend some time in your garden and let yourself daydream. Lose the sense of urgency and let your thoughts flow like honey. It’s very likely that you will find greater happiness, fulfillment, and ease when you do less.

I painted my ceiling periwinkle blue.

It was a total bitch to do. And the whole time I was thinking about the man who died from looking up for too long while painting a ceiling. Something about pinching a vein and blocking the blood flow to the brain, but I’m not a doctor and I heard this anecdote on the radio so who knows how tall this tale might be. I’m happy to report that I survived my ceiling painting stunt and now my basement bedroom has blue skies.

But lately it’s been hard to look up. We’re all so used to looking down— at our phones, at other people, at the problems that are plaguing us personally— that we forget about our periwinkle ceilings. NASA recently released the most incredible photos from the new Webb telescope; the photos flooded my instagram feed, human after human looking down at their phone to share this otherworldly wonder that’s taking place thousands of light years above them. If we could just look up we might be able to better appreciate what we’re seeing within this little 1080x1350 pixel box on this pocket sized screen. I wonder how many people actually stopped to ponder the meaning of these images. Not just the scientific feat of the telescope, but what this event signifies about us as humans, and how small we are.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a nihilist newsletter. What I’m trying to say is that we’re so wrapped up in our own lives— our own individuality— that we’ve lost sight of each other. We’ve lost sight of how much we need each other. We’re not meant to be self sufficient creatures; we are meant to live in community. And I’m not talking about the Western whitewashed brand of “community” that relies upon transactional exchanges and masquerades behind feel-good branding only to perpetuate individualist values. I want to see more intricate ecosystems and fewer social networks. We were meant to rely on each other, to need each other, to put the wellbeing of our relationships and the collective above all. To put the common good first, and ourselves second.

I have a number of single friends who have dedicated significant energy to being “okay” with being “alone.” Secure detachment is a beautiful thing, truly, but the only reason that anyone thinks they need to learn to be okay with being single is because society tells us that our purpose is to find a romantic partner; and that the antithesis to being in a monogamous romantic relationship, according to societal narrative, is being alone. The only choices are to be in partnership with someone or to be alone. But what if we shifted our thinking about what family is? What if, instead, we promoted standards of collectivity and inter-dependence outside of romantic relationships? What if we realized that the antithesis to being alone is not being in a relationship, but rather being in community? Like real, collectivist community.

Lately it’s been hard to look up. To be optimistic and maintain perspective and have faith that despite how it feels, things are looking up. I have hope, I have so much hope for our future. But boy is it hard to beat back the despair. The problems we face collectively inevitably breed despair when we try to face them individually. Individual action is a lie. Individual action perpetuates the idea that we can tackle these problems on our own. And the powers-that-be prefer it that way. Our actions can feel inconsequential when we act independently rather than interdependently, and frankly, they are rather inconsequential. What if the antidote to despair, to apathy, to paralysis, to inconsequentiality is… each other?

I came across the term recently, “prefigurative politics,” and it gave me words for my beliefs around organizing praxis.

Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group.

In other words, prefiguration involves striving to reflect the future society we seek right now. We build it right now. We model our hopes for future society on a microlevel, experimenting with new socialities that are not possible under the kyriarchy’s paradigm. Prefiguration embodies the very alternatives we are hoping for. Right now.

So, dear reader, it’s time to give yourself something to look up at. We have to build the thing we’re looking forward to, the thing we’re hoping for, right here, right now. We have to paint our ceilings periwinkle blue and knock on our neighbor’s door. We have to decenter ourselves and reconsider what it means to set a boundary between you and me. We have to clothe and feed and finance our disenfranchised communities without condition or carceral logic. We have to look up, look around, and uncover what it means to be collectivist in our contemporary existence.