I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about motherhood over the last couple of years in the form of private notes, lists, ideas, etc. A while ago, I started organizing it all into themes like “time,” “pain,” “money,” “love” etc. Months will go by and one day I’ll open my ten thousand word screed on “the demiurge of my old self” and feel nauseous. I’m familiar with the War of Art-level resistance to making art, but this is different. There’s something about writing about motherhood and sending it out into a context-less void that makes me feel insane.

Originally, I wanted to document what was happening in real time, knowing I’d forget and the forgetting was by design. In the first year alone, I encountered a hundred different versions of my baby, each week bringing a new software upgrade, requiring a new version of myself. With writing it’s always, wait until the dust settles, when you have enough emotional distance from something, once you’ve gained some clarity and wisdom, etc. But that distance also causes amnesia, softening its edges. Some people welcome the forgetting, not wanting to revisit the past. Some might want to act like it didn’t bring them to their knees, they’re fine now, who cares, it was all worth it! But when you’re in it, everything about it feels profound. It’s hard to imagine that all the hard-won tricks and sentimental objects and the rhythm of your day will be forgotten and replaced, but it will. I’ll look back at photos of my son as a newborn and think, umm who is this guy? I didn’t want to forget. I actually wrote “DO NOT FORGET” over and over again in my notes. The work of caring for a baby is so relentless and invisible that I needed to prove that it all really happened. It was an almost religious compulsion to document feedings, diapers, sleeps, moods, developmental milestones, etc. Clearly some kind of leftover Catholic impulse, to think that there was a God watching me, adding my private toil to the ledger. Sometimes I think this kind of writing is worth sharing, other times it sounds like things I used to write in my notes app while on mushrooms, thinking I’ve landed on the secrets of the universe, but then it’s always just like, “music is soo important”.

The moment I think I’ve arrived at some big unified theory about motherhood, it collapses in on itself. That’s also why it interests me so much. But motherhood is so loaded and subjective. How to write about this elusive, undulating, ungraspable thing? In trying to work out my own resistance (me being a little bitch, having no time, etc.) I always come back to like, well, I’ve been moved by so many mothers’ accounts of new motherhood, from, My Work by Olga Ravn, Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood by JoAnna Novak, Matrescence by Lucy Jones, The Longform by Kate Briggs, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy etc. (I’ll make a separate list at some point), so it’s worth trying! Especially as a counterweight to the actual poison new mothers are subjected to while on their phones at 3am nursing their babies.

The self-harm ritual of mainlining mommy content was another DO NOT FORGET note to self. So much of early postpartum was lonely and involved being a kind of willing hostage to my baby, so my phone became this surrogate (evil) friend and sole connection to the outside world. I remember watching a video that explained this impulse as an unconscious attempt to seek a village, because historically, a mother alone with her child meant that they were in danger. Is there anything darker than the image of me scrolling Instagram and Reddit threads to simulate a village? It reminds me of those experiments where they isolated some rats and gave them morphine while their fellow rats got to live in a communal utopia called Rat Park.

Entire media empires have formed around the unholy trinity of mom + baby + phone, baiting and trolling exhausted mothers with “educational” content like, “Sleep: 10 Ways You’re a Bad Mom” or “One Weird Thing You Do Every day is Traumatizing Your Child” or “While You’re Reading This Your Child is Probably Choking in the Other Room,” or personal essays designed in a lab at The Cut to predictably produce downstream reactionary think pieces and clips, everyone feeding from the same outrage trough. Then there are the content creators: tradwives, or girl bosses, or some cursed hybrid of both, extolling advice and recipes while omitting the invisible scaffolding of paid help that makes their lifestyles possible. Professional advice-giving is crazy, by the way. Imagine thinking you have the answers, and that your way works for everyone. Never mind that the whole notion of giving advice is predicated on this idea that you could save someone from their suffering with “life hacks”. I don’t think optimizing is the point of life. I think it’s more about walking with someone through pain and making them feel less alone while they’re in it.

Anywayyy, can you feel my eyes rolling? That’s because I haven’t had unbroken sleep in almost three years. My mind has been warped by chronic sleep depravation and hyper vigilance. I’m also currently experiencing the phenomenon known as pms. I shouldn’t even be online. Someone should take my phone away and wrap me in one of those foil blankets. But instead, I’m telling my toddler to go find me another rock so I can have twenty seconds to mentally escape into my phone and read a quote from an artist mom about how motherhood has made her more creative and productive :( and another article about how the strawberries I feed my son everyday contain an illegal amount of deadly pesticides, and a photo of a celebrities emaciated body, with the caption, “my body after three pregnancies, loose skin and all,” and he’s back with another rock.

I’ve completely lost the thread on what my point was, and that’s what blogs are for. In conclusion, this post was about writing about motherhood, memory, the mommy content distortion field, and other stuff. Oh right, mom readers. When I imagine who this is for, it’s usually myself in the past (shout out), and maybe new moms who are trying to balance art with motherhood with no family help or money, and are in a constant state of whiplash from moving between worlds: the private enormous world of mothering and the public/social world of the dead self you’re trying to reanimate. So that’s like, twelve people. Just please know that anytime I post anything on here I feel sick to my stomach. Maybe the trick is to keep doing it until I feel nothing.

More soon ! / ?

A few months after I had my son, I was invited to a friend’s birthday party in the Hollywood Hills. It was my first outing post-birth and I had no new clothes so I wore a giant Mickey Mouse t-shirt and maternity leggings. I arrived late and sat on the edge of a couch as the group debated some version of “LA vs NYC” and I kept thinking, hm that’s weird, here I sit, having incarnated a human soul onto the earth plane and reanimated my corpse for this very occasion and no one seems to know or care...this fact might even be a little bit boring to them…I tried not to take it personally, I never really noticed mothers much before I became one. I was ambivalent about motherhood and mostly saw it as an existential threat to my hard-won, sedentary, internet-based lifestyle. Now, they are all I see. I scanned the room for a fellow mother, and spotted a blonde woman I barely knew, but felt that new motherhood had now rendered us sisters. I approached her and asked how she was doing and she lied and said, “so good!” while refusing to meet my gaze, because she knew that I knew that she knew. “That’s great,” I said, totally heartbroken, an island unto myself. Part of me thought we might hold each other, weeping. Instead she turned around to talk to her friend.

All my life I’d had the sense that this was my first time on planet earth and everyone else has already been here for millions of years. It feels like there’s always some unspoken custom or way of being that I’m unaware of or misinterpreting. Or to put it simply: everyone thinks I’m the weird one, when they are the ones being weird, actually!! New motherhood seemed to confirm my suspicions. I thought it was strange the way people kept treating me like the person I was before, plus a baby, and their casual slights sometimes left me breathless. In the fragile first weeks, some visitors came barreling in, talking loudly and scooping up my newborn without asking, and it felt like I was being electrocuted. Friends would text me to come out at 8pm, and “bring the baby” ??? Some were upset when I didn’t text them back (and guess what, I neva will!!). At a wedding, a distant cousin, a man and father of three, teased me for not finishing my book yet. I told him I hadn’t slept in six months and burst into tears. At a baby shower, a twenty year old “who used to babysit” gave me unsolicited advice on feeding my son solids. For the rest of the party, I stared at her from across the room trying to do telekinesis to light her hair on fire. (Not everyone was this clueless or cruel. Many angels surrounded and protected me too, namely my husband, and my own mother, a living saint, who flew from Europe to walk me across the threshold.)

How was it that I had dissolved and regenerated into a new form and this transformation was being relegated to hormones and sleep depravation? Or that the only mention of it came in the form of a depression quiz they make you take at the pediatrician where, gun to your head, you must answer “zero percent mentally ill” on every question, lest the state deem you defective and take your baby from you? What if part of what we call postpartum depression is just a natural reaction to a rite of passage that’s gone unacknowledged? I couldn’t really talk to other new moms about it because we were all too deep in it to process what was happening. Some mothers refused to admit it, buffered by wealth and/or fame, and familial support enough to falsely claim victory over it, to not feel it in its totality. Moms with older kids told me they had amnesia and couldn’t remember or didn’t want to. Strangers salivated as they said “just you wait” or “enjoy it while it lasts” depending on what made them feel superior and all-knowing in the moment. A few European friends who lived inter-generationally and had subsidized/free childcare and paid maternity seemed to manage it better, but I had a sense that we were all, in our own way, moving through a seismic rupture and expansion.

As rites of passage go, this one is easy to miss, because it orients around another person and temporarily relegates you to a supporting role. In preparing to welcome them, you forget to say goodbye to yourself. In pregnancy especially, the focus is disproportionately on birth as the main event. All those prenatal appointments and no one said, hey, by the way, there’s this thing called Matrescence where you will experience a biological, neurological, psychological, and social identity shift akin to a second puberty. This might feel extremely destabilizing and alienating depending on the inner and outer circumstances of your life. In fairness, I couldn’t think beyond the birth, because I could barely get through the hour. I had hyperemesis (severe nausea and vomiting) and gestational diabetes my whole pregnancy and I was told that all my symptoms would disappear the moment my placenta was out, so that’s all I could think about. Unceasing nausea is a kind of psychological torture I would not even wish on the twenty year old with huge boobs who told me to try cutting my son’s food into animal shapes. Because of this, I spent a lot of my pregnancy on my phone in bed, watching a tranquilized, airbrushed tradwife make homemade gum, and educational videos about breastfeeding, sleep schedules and tummy time. My entire adult life has been mediated by a screen, so it seemed like there was nothing I couldn’t learn, or do or be that wasn’t on my screen. The screen told me what it would be like, what it would feel like, and it was nothing like that, not even close.

I now know that the aftershocks I felt weren’t because of a personal failing, but the natural growing pains of becoming a new person, and the realization that I’m no longer in tune with the background frequency of my culture, which is generally hostile to mothers, children, aging, dying and anything that falls outside of the capitalist paradigm of infinite productivity and optimization. It has taken me almost three years to understand what I went through, what I’m going through, and none of it is (Emily Oster voice) “data-driven.” The most useful frameworks I found are ancient, mythological, alchemical and paranormal:

The Container Problem

“If the container isn’t built, the receiver doesn’t understand what it’s receiving.”

My godless LA lifestyle is so bereft of ritual and meaning, that I had to go to ufology to make sense of it. In the essay, “The Container Problem” Meredith Spearman writes about the West’s inability to receive and integrate entity encounters and anomalous experiences, because the scientific materialist paradigm lacks the tools to understand them. Instead, we pathologize these experiences, dismissing them as psychosis or imagination, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real.

I found similar parallels in crossing the threshold into motherhood. Like an NDE, alien abduction or plant medicine journey, it was ineffable, challenging, and holy; made all the more destabilizing without a container. Indigenous cultures throughout history understood preparation as a prerequisite, “In Haitian voodoo, initiations at higher levels involve elaborate preparation of the initiate’s head (literally, and ritually) as a vessel. An unprepared person encountering certain spirits at full force would, in his assessment, shatter. What the West has done is dismantle every structure that would build the vessel, and then expressed bewilderment when contact destabilizes rather than transforms.” My lack of initiation basically felt like doing Ayahuasca at an EDM festival, surrounded by cops.

Spearman explains that in our left hemisphere dominated Western culture, we’ve constructed what Charles Taylor calls the buffered self. “The buffered self is defended against the world: sealed, bounded, its inner life private property, its encounters with anything outside the container automatically suspect. The porous self is constitutively open: to ancestors, to landscape, to presences that exceed the individual…porosity is not primitive. It is a precondition. Without it, meaningful contact becomes nearly impossible. Not because the phenomena aren’t there, but because the receiver has been modified to exclude them.” There is a porosity to motherhood that our culture doesn’t like, so we deny or reject it. The buffered self sees it as a threat, and in the same way the UFO phenomenon has become a military matter, matrescence has become medicalized. The mother must “bounce back” in her body, work, life. If she can’t or won’t, we question her sanity, her fitness, her gratitude. In places like South Korea, China, Japan, India, Mexico and Eastern Europe, mothers spend their first 30-40 days, or their fourth trimester, in luxurious postnatal care centers, or in the care of family members as they rest and recover, whereas in the US, I got a night’s stay in the world’s most haunted hospital room and a bill for eight thousand dollars.

Descent into the Underworld

The “descent into the underworld” as depicted in Greek and Sumerian mythology and Jungian thought, is in many ways, the feminine Hero’s Journey. In the classic hero’s journey, a man (usually) reluctantly answers the call to go forth and conquer the world, whereas the woman must descend into the underworld, die and emerge reborn. No one enjoys the descent, because it’s scary and you must it go alone. All our attempts to transcend or evade the descent and its many forms: aging, illness, motherhood, loss, only make it worse. We can either be blindsided by them or surrender to them, knowing they’re a part of the death and renewal cycle and we are made new by them. I white knuckled it through my descent because I didn’t have the language or conceptual framework for it.

In her book, Descent to the Goddess, Sylvia Britton Perera uses the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, who descends into the realm of her sister Ereshkigal and must pass through seven gates where she’s forced to surrender seven items representing an unburdening, leaving her exposed, stripped bare, judged and killed before she is revived and returns to the world above. “It is to this descent that the goddess Inanna and we modern women must submit, going into the deep, inchoate places where the extremes of beauty and ugliness swim or dissolve together in a paradoxical, seemingly meaningless state. Even the queen of beauty becomes raw, rotten meat. Life loses its savor. But it is a sacred process, even the rot, for it represents submission to Ereshkigal and the destructive-transformative mysteries that she symbolizes.”

Perera explains why this passage is so hard for “the daughter of fathers” ie, ME, ie the Puella archetype; the woman who has internalized masculine ideals, the “buffered self” because it means, “giving up both defensiveness and the illusions of the identity provided by the regalia of the upper world, those roles and marks of power and status earned from the patriarchy which serve as surrogates, persona-identity to a woman who is handmaid to the fathers and the animus.” She goes on to say that the return to the goddess offers a counterbalancing force to the Puella, “The patriarchal ego of both men and women, to earn its instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from the full scale awe of the goddess. Or it has tried to slay her, or at least to dismember and thus depotentiate her. But it is towards her, and especially towards her culturally repressed aspects, those chthonic and chaotic, ineluctable depths that the new individuating yin-yang balanced ego must return to find its matrix.” This collision begins in childbirth. Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth reframes birth as a spiritual threshold, a liminal space where “Apollonian” and “Artemisian” energies collide. Birth is a place where logic, expertise and measurable outcomes give way to instinct, wildness and surrender.

Marion Woodman’s “The Pregnant Virgin” invokes a similar argument to Spearman’s Container Problem, saying, “unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.”

Expanding on that, Mollie Adler’s “Motherhood as Death Ritual” from her podcast Back from the Borderline says that this rupture is not a moral failing, but a mythic one. A death must be grieved, but since no one has named it, we turn in on ourselves: “Motherhood is a rupture...it splits the world into before and after, and no one prepares you for the silence that falls in between. Before, you are the center of your own life, even if you suffer, your breath belongs to you, your time belongs to you, your pain, your pleasure, your past, they move in a straight line, and after everything shifts, the axis moves, something begins to orbit through you, your body becomes a vessel. Something larger than your personality starts to take root inside of you. This is literally what happens when a soul is asked to house another soul. this isn’t poetry or metaphor. you do not become a mother, you are undone into one. the structure collapses, the scaffolding of the self.”

Adler explains that the maiden is defined by her orientation, shaped by her desires, whereas the mother doesn’t look outwards, she roots and holds. The maiden is the sun. The mother is the sky. When the maiden won’t let the mother lead, “the body keeps moving, but the psyche starts to unravel….the woman lives in urgency, in hunger. The children of these women feel the pulse of their mother’s unresolved ache and wonder what they did to cause it. And when the maiden is exiled completely, the hearth grows cold. The mother becomes dutiful, mechanical, efficient. She keeps everything going but the warmth is gone. the children of this mother learn that love is a duty.” The matriarchal wound is what happens when the woman is forced to transition without being initiated, but “if you allow yourself to name what’s dying, you’ll have a chance to grow into the kind of woman who doesn’t pass this silence on to her children.” (I highly recommend this episode, I listened to it, sobbing and vacuuming.)

Writer and humorist, Jesse Klein writes about motherhood as an inner Hero’s Journey in her book of essays, “I’ll Show Myself Out”: “The truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey. For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was there.” She says the reason motherhood is rarely framed in this way is because it threatens the foundation of our identities to think that our mothers were fighting an epic internal battle while cradling us in their arms, “Every mother you know is in this fight with herself. The sword that hangs over her is a sword of exhaustion, of frustration, of patience run dry, a sword of indignation at how little she feels like a human when she so often has to look and behave like an animal. Mostly, it is the sword of rage: the rage and shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive.” But the heroism is in privately swallowing the sword, “A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves but about how she stays.”

Like teenage growing pains, I’m beginning to settle into my new form, and I’ve (mostly) forgiven those who crossed me while I was sleep-deprived, brain damaged and subsumed by the underworld. Even at my lowest, I knew I’d make it through the distortion field of pain and confusion because of the love I have for my son. On my own, I’ve always felt fragile, always bracing myself against the world, not actually a part of it. But to be connected to something so indestructible and powerful and primordial as that love is to know that I’m made of the same stuff. I mean, are you kiddding me with that love? I can lift a car with that love. I can stay up all night, again and again, and I have. It’s the honor of my life and the endless gift of which I’m unworthy, of which I will spend my whole life in service to, with or without a map, in endless freefall and constant prayer, in praise of life itself.

I live in a very old house with an open living room/dining room/kitchen area and nowhere to hide. It reminds me of the decade I spent in the psyop known as the open plan office, a surveillance tool presented under the guise of collaboration and transparency (much like “unlimited PTO”). At the end of every work day, I’d have to lie down and wait for my body to offgass my coworkers’ energy fields. Now there’s no end of my work day and no lying down. And yeah I know some people can tolerate living in uncontained chaos, but I prefer to be ensconced in a womb-like structure or a Faraday cage, ok!

A few weeks into my cursed little setup, I gave up and started looking for my own office. I spent most nights searching commercial real estate websites, having set my parameters to, not joking, $0-$500 somewhere on the Eastside of LA. I quickly learned that, at best, $1k could get you a co-working desk in Pasadena, or a partitioned section of an artist warehouse in Boyle Heights, or an ADU in some guy’s yard in Alhambra. Basically, I was looking for a miracle.

When I got an alert for a listing in a Glendale business complex, I thought it was a scam. I scheduled a tour anyway, and arrived at a building frozen in time. The agent arrived 45 minutes late, and I reassured her that it was totally fine. I hadn’t been sitting in my car, in complete silence, waiting for her. I wasn’t praying. I just smiled and tried to come across as the kind of normal, easygoing person I’d never once been in my life. I could take it or leave it. Down for whateva.

We took the stairs to the top floor, past a group of Armenian men smoking on the balcony, and walked down a long hallway of offices. There was an accountant who sat behind a large mahogany desk with filing cabinets and a landline phone, a contractor with a wall of framed certifications behind him, and a breakroom with a water cooler and espresso machine and a sparkly cursive sign that read: COFFEE, MON AMOUR. She showed me around a small, empty unit and asked me what I needed it for. I told her I was a writer and needed a quiet place to work and she didn’t ask any follow up questions, out of confusion or disinterest, the way I don’t when someone tells me they’re an engineer. I filled out the paperwork with my whole body vibrating. The following week, I got the keys.

LOOK AT MY BEAUTIFUL OFFICE !!

What I did not tell her was that I’d just emerged from the bloody, milky underworld of childbirth and motherhood and that I’d spun around the wheel of birth and death and that I was the wheel. That I’d only recently regained some of my bodily and mental autonomy, like tiny souvenirs from a country that no longer exists. That I’m only away from my child for a few hours each day, but otherwise he’s on or near my body at all times, day and night, like the silver chord that tethers the soul to the body.

Or that I came here to construct an altar for my inner world, to remember what it feels like to be in my mind. Or that I plan to adorn it with sacred objects and furnishings from Facebook Marketplace, eBay and OfficeChair.com. I was careful not to evoke the image of a mother in a room alone. It’s unsettling to some people, like seeing adult twins. We know it happens, but something is off about it. It’s like, ok what is she doing in there? Where is her child? She might be forgiven if she’s very old, or in the hospital. Or if she’s in a hotel room, on business. But an artist or writer, it’s like, I guess……(Luckily, she did not care whether I lived or died, just that I paid rent.)

Over the last few months, this office has become the central stabilizing force in my life. Every morning, I arrive at 9:30am, having spent the previous two hours fighting for my life to make my toddler breakfast and lunch and get his shoes on. I work for 4-5 hours like a cloistered nun with no internet or music and only the muffled sound of immigrant men who all sound like my dad, shouting on the phone (my white noise). By 2:30pm, I come back down to earth to pick up my son and resume my other life at home.

PROOF OF LIFE

I have very few images of myself as a mother. On the rare occasion that my husband takes a photo of me and my son, it has a way of ruining my whole day. All I see is an angelic being held by some kind of humanoid creature with melasma and a unibrow.

At some point, I stopped perceiving myself as a person with a face and body. I’d become this other thing, a vessel for new life. I avoided mirrors and showered infrequently and pretty much only wore the same three giant tshirts that I also slept in. This was fine for a while and not something I had to confront as a vessel. But now that I’m nearly three years into having a child and one hundred years into writing this novel, I’m starting to feel like a ghost (which makes my son the kid from the Sixth Sense as he is the only one who can see me).

One day, alone in my office, I started doing something I haven’t done since I first moved to LA and didn’t have a full length mirror in my east Hollywood apartment, I opened up photo booth and took a photo of myself. First I wanted to see what I looked like. Then I just kept it going as a way to mark my days. Some proof of life.

Here are some of those pics:

Part of me thinks this little ritual will only make sense to me, years from now, once I’m out of the fog of new motherhood and on the other side of this book. Mostly, I hope to look back on this time and think, wow you really did it, you crazy little girl, you made it out alive.

This concludes my office tour, thank you for reading xo

at first I was sad to discover that this book is actually not about how the earth is flat, which is a topic I am deeply passionate about, or rather, wanted to use a gateway into unpacking a giant web of interconnected conspiracies I pretty much fully believe in at this point having watched hundreds of hours of youtubes about hollow earth, mk ultra, ancient aliens, simulation theory etc etc. and now consider myself an expert in and have yet to figure out a way to channel/exploit my deep knowledge base for professional gain and therefore must sneak into every social interaction I have as a way to off-gas all this urgent and probably classified?? info I have accumulated over the years.

but once I read the book I was like wow this is even better than all that because it’s about spiritual survival amidst social and economic collapse and all the downstream effects it has on politics and interpersonal relationships right here on the 3D plane, which of course is dense and is all about nonstop suffering but there is no way to bypass it and trust me I have tried (and will continue to try just to be 100% sure.) Anika has this way of addressing topics that are mythological in scale but also very niche and contemporary, like girlhood or modern dating or America, as a concept and I’m going to ask her how she did that even. Also, her sentences are very good, unlike mine currently because this is not a novel, it’s just a very long invite to a book event next Thursday and honestly come or don’t it will be packed anyway through no doing of my own but through the power of her breakout novel that is the kind of novel that makes me want to stop watching Graham Hancock youtube videos and get back to work on my own book !

The last thing I will say because I don’t know how to fit this part in organically in the above text, but to me, Flat Earth reads like How Should a Person Be? 2.0, which like thank god because people still want to know how to be and we need to keep iterating on that q for the modern age, unlike the bible which is so old that it’s basically unreadable at this point. I’m not saying that Sheila Heti or Anika Jade Levy have figured it out, but they are loving the questions (Rilke) and living the questions (also Rilke) and that is not something I have time to do so I like when other people do it for me.

Books for sale onsite, or you can purchase a copy here.

Bar Henry 1228 W Sunset Blvd at 7pm

dress code is “computer angel”

RSVP here: bit.ly/yhanm

YHANM is deeply smart, philosophical and funny, every sentence knocks me over and every essay has stayed in my brain for weeks/months. Here’s the original blurb I sent her that was wayy too long, but it’ll give you a sense of what a fan I am (she’s received equally fanatical blurbs from the likes of Tony Tulathimutte, Phoebe Bridgers, Allie Rowbottom, Isle McElroy, Sarah Rose Etter and others).

The critic and the oracle have historically stood apart from society, offering up their diagnoses and predictions from their perch on mountaintops and the middle class with cool detachment. In “You Have a New Memory” Aiden Arata reports directly from the source, as a living, breathing participant in the creator/consumer samsara, where the stakes have never been higher.

Arata traverses the woozy, vibe-based economy, the precarity of platform capitalism, the schizophrenic deluge of content and its downstream cultural, politic and sexual implications and the performance of selfhood with the ease and dexterity of a thumb scrolling through infinity. She contemplates the psychic resonance of a lone sponge in a French monastery, elucidates the ambivalence and alienation of calling out an abuser, and weighs parenthood in the waning seconds of the doomsday clock; mapping out these seemingly disparate data points to reveal an elaborate mycelium network of interconnected lives. Delivered in her signature undulating prose, she knits microscopic observations with the shock of humor, violence and unexpected pathos, resulting in a vivid, hyperreal effect; the kind often reported in psychedelic use where the world is rearranged and seen anew. And like any good trip, describing it feels reductive and besides the point, one must simply experience it.

If Adam Curtis’ theory is correct, that institutions and governments distort reality, constructing “fake worlds” to pacify and distract us from real global crises, this psyop somehow failed to take hold on Arata, who emerged from the anesthetizing trance of contemporary online life with her soul stubbornly, dazzlingly, intact.

Free! RSVP here: bit.ly/sohorsvp

RSVP here: bit.ly/sohorsvp

Free! Starts at 7pm.

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