Once again, New York City Pride led me just where it’s preordained to. The majority of bars in Hell’s Kitchen leave much to be desired in the way of ventilation on any given weekend, but the annual influx of patrons on this midsummer occasion incubates these environments to the point of rather unironically reflecting their turf’s moniker.

I’d given up on maintaining homeostasis on Friday, but it was Sunday night and I was losing more liquid than the implausibly low volume I’d consumed, so I was waning as it was before a sore thumb stuck himself in my group’s orbit. Generally speaking, I don’t have beef with straight guys in gay clubs like I don’t have beef with non-fans in Dodgers caps—but his hubristic smirk when he told me he’d bought it at the airport immediately clued me in that neither really suited him.

He hung around asking inane questions in an indulgently snide tone like he fancied himself cunning as I took mental inventory of the sites of my perspiration, and when I lost the will to entertain for the sake of the friends who’d introduced him, he doubled down. “You’re getting really pissed now,” he taunted as his grin apexed. “I don’t get pissed,” I replied monotonically, “I’m a pretty apathetic person.”

I turned away and he remained in my periphery, trying to woo the others and solicit my attention, but I was busy sucking down a vodka pineapple soda and deciding if I’d lied. However irksome and phony I found him, he hadn’t gotten under my skin. In fact, the sweat fully coating it was more antagonizing than any of his antics. No matter—we left within the hour, but the broader inquiry loomed.

Attempts at provocation have the inverse effect on me. This was not always true. A word oft used by my male classmates to describe me in primary school was “aggressive,” and to be fair, a few of them did catch a knee to the groin or (on my worst behavior) a wooden block to the face. My second-grade archnemesis Jon was always trying it with me about sports rivalries, but he took his last jab that day. He got a bloody nose and I got a stern talking-to by my mother as my father looked on in stifled amusement. Thus, I was vindicated.

Reaction notwithstanding, I promise my dad’s not violent—he just always liked when I asserted dominance, especially over boys. I was the son he never had. There was but one feminine name on the list he’d prepped for my birth, and the iconic line he exclaimed incredulously at the hospital that day was, “How am I supposed to play football with a girl?” Two years later, he stuck a bat in my hands and the rest was history.

Adulation wasn’t hard-earned in my house, but the fail-safe strategy was—in his own terminology—to “kick ass and take names.” That catchphrase charged me up, and it meant, of course, to dominate. Whether I pitched a shutout or won an academic award, I was kicking ass and taking names. It always invoked the audacity and vigor in me, and it implied winning but, semantically speaking, the achievement was more specifically contingent on the defeat of others. That’s how I inherited the chip on my dad’s shoulder.

I hit puberty and suddenly some of those boys looked more like vessels for desire than formidable opponents. I didn’t want to race—I wanted to be chased. I no longer wanted them to fear me, and that same charged-up disposition and assuredness that inspired fear was now being perceived as cockiness. So I pared it down—got softer, sweeter, gentler. Success.

Shrinking yourself is ordinarily a disservice, yes. It’s a sacrifice that only bodes well with a scrupulous conscience, and the bad news is that I was 14 with a history of elementary brutality. However, some egos really do need to be cut down to size, and that made me a solid candidate for a trim. Even if the scrutiny’s disproportionate to the offense (and I was underserved this time), I’ll never be impervious to the lessons from a dose of humility. One thing about me, though: I’m gonna take it too far.

I didn’t toss that chip out, but I did trade it in. I used to be faster, stronger and tougher than the boys and so indignant that anyone would think otherwise that I just had to prove it, but now they wielded physical prowess beyond my capacity. Moreover, evidence of their heightened stature in social power dynamics had finally crossed my desk, so the writing was on the wall. My adversaries weren’t individuals anymore—they were systems, and I would only cause a rift in the name of justice. I was beginning to decentralize myself for more utilitarian pursuits—noble, even. This arc was good, I thought. I cared so much. It had to be.

Sometime post–social science degree, I was put on psychiatric medication, which seemed to quash my hallmark tenacity. It surreptitiously unplugged me. I supported the same causes and maintained the same stances—my convictions didn’t change—I just couldn’t be so afflicted to let them consume me as they once did. Upon inspection, that should’ve raised a flag, but I wasn’t inspecting back then. Honestly? I didn’t really notice. I just felt a bit of relief.

Triangulation now reveals that this is also when I started disregarding my best interests and believing that nothing matters at all. It was perplexing because—on a purely theoretical or spiritual level—the former felt so wrong while the latter felt so right. It was like some sick riddle. Apathy had overtaken me, and I was not privy to the insight that it was all just a natural consequence of the journey I’d been charting for a decade.

If you could snap your fingers and reform your mindset about something, what would it be and why would you want to? It’s probably something predicated on negative emotion, and you probably stand to gain quite a bit from the modification. You believe it, though, whatever it is. It has some merit or serves some function, and you know it. So the more important question to ask may be: Do you really want to?

Humility made me more affable and disarming, and I liked how my peers responded to that, but a part of me felt like it wasn’t enough—because it felt phony. I was only deceiving people into thinking I wasn’t entirely self-involved, I worried, and I pined to be mistaken. I didn’t want a hidden agenda. I just wanted to be good—really, soundly good.

Quietly, on the day I decided to shrink, I started telling myself a new story about me. I put it on loop and it became white noise. The rest was subconscious. The message seeped in slowly until I believed it—which I did, sure enough, because I wanted to. By gradually whittling away at my sense of self-importance, I could compensate for this moral deficit—so said my wolf of an id in the sheep’s clothing of a superego.

This internal conflict was damningly nuanced and hauntingly personal. It emerged at the advent of my self-awareness, but I didn’t see its spawn encroaching until I found it in a pharmacy bottle many years later. So there I was, nihilistic off antipsychotics in a dungeonesque 300-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn.

You can laugh. I did. I do. I know it’s ridiculous. And even if it weren’t, everything bad that’s ever happened to me is funny. Humor shields your audience from the burden of pity, but it also shields you from the burden of grief—semi-pro-tip from the wolf. Anyway, that’s when I realized the call was coming from inside the house. The only enemy left was me, so I’d have to care enough about her to kill the part of her that didn’t. Or so I thought.

I had a blind spot (one that requires I uphold this reductive Freudian schema, sorry). The ego is the mediator of the psyche, meaning you need it to negotiate your unconscious desires with your moral obligations. Possessing little to none leads to persistent oscillation between rigidity and impulsivity (which sounds not unlike a certain disorder of mine, but I’ll bite my tongue). If the superego says, “You deserve less,” and the id says, “You don’t matter anyway, so take what you want,” then the ego should say, “I matter enough to care what happens to me, and I can choose.”

However metaphorical (again with the semantics), my first instinct was violence, and that sort of breaks my heart. I didn’t shrink—my ego did. I actually might’ve killed it off altogether, and I was so convinced that there must be more carnage on the path to redemption. Maybe I needed to revisit my prescription (you were thinking it), but I wanted a more sustainable solution. Finally I found it, right where I left it.

I remembered how my resignation from anger began as a girl. I stopped wanting to be feared and started wanting to be loved. The two were inextricably linked. If I wanted someone to love me, they couldn’t feel fear with me, so I became safe. I listened, shared, connected and learned. I felt love. And the more I learned, the easier it was to spot and name fear in others—the easier it was to understand and uplift them. But the same analyses I used as a means to give others grace, I used to deprive myself of any. If I only did it for love, that made it deceitful. So I called myself poison then made myself sick... for fulfilling a basic human need.

Courage and tenacity go hand-in-hand, and I possessed both before I made them casualties. Growing up, I was never truly scared of anything but snakes. Horror films, heights and harrowing challenges were my bread and butter, but I’d clench my jaw through the Critter Caravan. When my high school boyfriend broke up with me, I was so devastated that I decided to reject my phobia. Why?

If fear is the absence of love, and I couldn’t have his love, then I’d simply refuse to be afraid. Maybe then I could even make my own, or so my logic went. I’d later tattoo a snake on the back of my left arm, but that was because I saw a cool design on Tumblr and this saccharine anecdote was a shoddy but passable excuse to seek yet another thrill—go figure.

Dispelling fear is incredibly meaningful to me. It gives me purpose. That’s why I can’t cope when someone I love worries about me. That’s why I couldn’t cope when I started worrying about myself. But if they can fear for me out of love, then the two must coexist. So what is the diametric opposite of fear? Faith, of course. Adherents of organized religion may nod along, and I’m going to bite my tongue again.

Faith (denotatively, that is) is how we love without fear. When caring for myself became too tightly affixed with fear, I shut down. You can’t be afraid if you don’t care. The only faith I had, rather ironically, was that nothing matters. But this wasn’t another pitfall—it was an inflection point. Perhaps pharmaceuticals played some role, but I do believe that my apathy was the ultimate consequence of all events prior, and my migration to active nihilism was the gift bestowed by it—the crux of the whole journey.

I have a friend who cares about everything. She’s admitted to losing sleep over the prospect of a nuke dropping on the city. She fiercely debates Christianity and gets visibly emotional discussing the preservation of human rights, and she’ll be the first to confront you if you’re dating a narcissist. She fights hard and loves hard. I admire her immensely for it, but the side effect is affliction, and she knows that. Her biggest fear is getting into a fatal accident. I felt a faint flutter of gratitude when she said it.

It’s just that I really do vehemently believe that, very objectively, nothing matters. We all die just the same. I don’t want anyone to suffer. I don’t want to suffer (what’s wrong with a swift death?), but I can’t control that, so I accept the possibility for what it is: a possibility. Fear is suffering that I can control. And I’ll always show up for others to help prevent their suffering in any case (read: meaning, purpose), but I won’t resume my affliction. Why, though, wouldn’t I do that for myself then? Why wouldn’t I make choices that will mitigate my potential suffering? The wolf’s disguise slipped off.

I have another friend who told me to take care of myself. We’d just witnessed the marriage of the couple we watched fall in love before our eyes. And we were sitting on a bench at a crowded table of the buzzy after-party when he looked dead into mine and declared with a grave tone of conviction, “We need you. We all do.” He couldn’t have known. Something shifted. I had to fix this—not to preserve his or anyone’s love for me, but because of it... because it’s what I did it all for. I owed it to that young girl to fix it.

Forgive me for the following, but the truth is embarrassingly cliché. I said I found the solution where I left it: in a stack of John Hughes DVDs beneath my childhood bed; an indie playlist titled “printemps ‘12”; a bowl of my mom’s spaghetti that was waiting for me in the fridge after she picked me up from the train. I watch her favorite movies. I listen to her music. I eat her favorite meal. I reach for her and she’s still there to remind me who we are. If this sounds too simple, that’s because it is. It’s supposed to be. I didn’t need to kill a new part of me. I just needed to revive an old one.

I don’t get pissed—not really, not anymore—but I’ve surmounted my apathy too. I like being composed. I relish in the moments I remain unfazed by efforts to instigate. Moreover, though, I feel a secure sense of contentment knowing that I know where the line is and when crossing it is worth my while, i.e., when someone needs defending.

I could stand to stand up for myself more. I could have let that guy have it. If he were being homophobic toward my friends then I certainly would have obliged. I could have called him out for infiltrating a gay bar for his own personal gain, but I saved a breath and his ego. Not for nothing, it already feels bad enough to be a phony. Never betray the way you’ve always known it is. Don’t drink the poison, though, because meaning isn’t intrinsic—it’s yours to create. I have faith that nothing matters. That’s why, now, I try my best to do everything like it does.

We often frame addiction as a symptom of overwhelming burden, adversity, and trauma. But what about privilege, and what matrix does that narrative expose?

People enduring systemic atrocities collapse under pressure into substances every day, with no safety net or support system to catch them. This is the picture of addiction that we’ve painted, perpetuated, and harshly stigmatized. It’s the lower-income single mom; the aimless high school flunk-out; the mentally afflicted street-dweller. The archetype that resonates most is that of a person lacking fundamental resources who resorts to abusing drugs or alcohol. But the scope of addiction is so, so much broader and more complex—particularly when you consider fixations beyond substances, and affluence as a mechanism.

It’s also the disillusioned housewife, the legacy college student, and the kingpin CEO. It can also look like boredom, complacency, or authority—because in the expanse of a life like that, there’s ample room for dissociation, entitlement, and greed. Excess begets excess when wide margins for error result in erratic risk-taking—the kind that we negate or excuse because that picture is comparatively aesthetic: the wine-and-Xanax mom, the exploitative frat brother, the fraudulent executive. Not so coincidentally, it’s cases of this ilk that tend to be glossed over despite their infliction of some of the most egregious outward harm.

It’s time to refocus the lens through which we view this condition—because it’s not actually a symptom at all, but a condition. And it festers in these binary contexts, poisoning an entire ecosystem and reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle while we name it only once. So I don’t make these assertions to divert attention from the oppressive systems embedded in our society that infect vulnerable populations, but to point it toward the beneficiaries and upholders of those systems—the ones who directly deal or contribute to damage that can literally compel the affected to harm inward.

The parameters of addiction are wider than we think because it lurks and lies dormant in us all. We all have the propensity—some of us just don’t engage, whether for fear of dependency or prosecution, or for any number of reasons. Some of us don’t give rise to the inclinations that could rapidly unravel our worlds. On the other hand, as I’ve just described, there exist worlds that are simply too big and impenetrable to be unraveled—especially and ironically when the implications of justice would be the greatest. In fact, it’s begun to feel like the impunity of the most deplorable addicts is commensurate with how many lives they’ve destroyed.

The majority of us will gravitate toward somewhat innocuous fixations, and we’ll turn to what’s most available and acceptable for someone “like us”—in our age group, from our community, with our values—not so much consciously, but inherently. Not everyone will try drugs or alcohol, even, or enjoy partaking if they do, but they will require some form of release when they’re idle, or sad, or tense. We all experience negative emotions. We all experience dysregulation. And we all choose different methods of diffusion through different outlets.

Less maligned than substances are food, social media, and betting, for example. Some carry positive connotations, like exercise, work, and dating. But vices are really just habits pursued to reliably escape discomfort, and discomfort is tough to outrun—unless the options for evasion are limitless, of course. The biggest threats emerge when access expands and power corrupts. Chicken or egg first, that story sounds the same.

I don’t advise that anyone quit marathoning and start smoking, but I wouldn’t suggest the inverse either. If it’s a risk you pose directly to yourself alone, then I’m no judge. Your personal choices are your business until they become someone else’s. You’ll know when, and may you know how to stop. To you, I’d say that addiction isn’t a terminal illness, and even if you think your path’s been pre-ordained, you can choose discipline over destiny. If that discipline leads you to busted toenails in lieu of busted lungs, then display them with honor as a totem of strength.

As for the greed-poisoned gluttons, the abusers in the truest sense, I have no sympathy or advice. May they seek rehabilitation, sure. But moreover, may they live to reap what they’ve so insidiously sown, and may we live to see the demise of both the chicken and the egg.

Afterword

Given the brazen allusion I’ve made in this essay, I’ll add a note to avoid dangerous misconstruction. The sentiment that addiction lurks within us all is not the one to extrapolate for Epstein discourse. I’d refer you instead to the one about finding fixations that appeal to your peers.

We glamorize, covet, and commodify youth in our society, so much so that it’s become the pinnacle of desire. For women especially, this is all reactionary—we didn’t design this reality. So why should we be shocked by the architects’ plunder? Why should we be shocked that, behind closed doors, they’d push boundaries beyond the standard they created for mass consumption?

Maybe each and every one of the hundreds of offenders on that list is and was always destined to be a pedophile. We don’t have a concrete statistic for it, but prevalence rates in the general population have been estimated between 1 and 5%. Even if that weren’t a likely undershoot, the math obviously works—but that’s not important to me. What’s important is the shared archetype of those mentioned.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” was one of the phrases that conceptual artist Jenny Holzer emblazoned across billboards in the 80s as a very public installation of her Truisms series—a provocative work of social commentary that, sadly but surely, aged like the finest wine. Abuse is predicated on power, and abuse of scale isn’t cast by one hand. Cult leaders become such because they compel first, and who better to enlist, or listen to, than other powerful elites?

In terms of destiny, I think I was clear the first time. The human condition isn’t a choice, but everyone has one. Every time you find yourself in disbelief that a suspect celebrity or high-ranking government official wasn’t mentioned, you’ve proven my point.

You either grew up a crusader or crucified. This is based on the story you start getting told about yourself at an early age—because there isn’t much you can do for a while but listen. It’s in the hopes and dreams projected onto you in your most formative years by the people tasked with that formation, but mostly in the ways they’re habitually and often reflexively reinforced. So it’s not your fault... or it wasn’t, at least. Your perspective’s your prerogative now, and that’s kind of the whole point.

Sleeping Beauty was my favorite Disney character, which is a misleading fact for a crusader to share, but she was blonde and wore pink, and that meant a lot to me when I was 3, I think. My parents—my mother—didn’t raise me under any impression that I’d ever need saving. That notion was projected, reinforced, digested and regurgitated, and it may have made me intolerably egocentric, but it made me. You can’t see me, but I can assure you that I’m both gagging and shrugging at that sentiment in that order.

Regardless of our standing in youth, no one evades crucifixion empirically. And even the staunchest crusaders can self-inflict. I might as well have been unconscious for the year and a half between my college graduation and my first full-time job, cursed by my own incompetence, but then I woke up—all the way up. Call it mania (it was), but I was back on my war path, and guided so valiantly by some indistinct and inexplicable forces that you’d think I was about to do something drastic (I was).

When I was asleep, I’d dreamed of financial autonomy recurrently and obsessively, and suddenly I was awake and salaried, and thereby free. Problematic to my grander plot, though, freedom and autonomy are two different concepts that aren’t perfectly interchangeable—especially as it pertains to romantic relationships. And I happened to be in one of those.

X was my counterpart for almost four years. I never felt like I didn’t exist without him, but I sort of didn’t. We were inseparable. I existed without him in theory, maybe, since I was alone in my head. I was alone in my conversations with my screens and walls. I was alone in my musings, but not in my plight—and maybe I should’ve identified those through lines sooner, but there are many patterns I’m still identifying more than half a decade later, so the shock of discovery’s worn off.

You don’t have to have read “Song of Myself” to be familiar with the Walt Whitman quote, “I contain multitudes,” but perhaps you have. I’m sure I’m not the only late-20-something with a fat copy of Leaves of Grass collecting dust on my bookshelf—relic of a bygone era of pubescent spiritual awakening. I’m also probably not the only one who sprinkles the reference into casual conversation out of context just because I personally get a kick out of it, but I’m going to utter it earnestly now.

I contain multitudes, yes, but they were fragmented back when I was with X, and those fragments felt incongruous at the time. I thought a lot about who I was and what I wanted, and I mostly tucked those rogue shards away—not out of deception, but fear. I certainly wasn’t afraid of him, nor what he would think of me for them, though. I had all the leeway I ever could’ve needed to explore myself with his avid encouragement, in fact, but instead I cowered at the challenge of synthesizing my findings and leaned on him for consolation. Instead, I became pathologically codependent, taking his kindness for supplementary strength because I refused to muster my own.

So I got that job and woke all the way up in the winter of 2020, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling so weak anymore. Suddenly, I was feeling more competent and capable than I’d ever felt in my life, and, very suddenly, that meant untethering from my most steadfast supporter to pursue my indomitable whims. I’d say Bipolar Disorder works in mysterious ways, but it really, really doesn’t. I can tell you stone cold today that this manic upswing (my first ever, mind you) was inevitable. Events have cataclysmically chemical consequences for me. This assessment by no means makes any of it right, but that’s a different story.

I’d always had personal freedom with X because he gave me that space, but my lack of self-sufficiency hampered my autonomy—my ability to act from my own will. It wasn’t until I secured the steady source of income that finally allowed me to spend freely that I felt fragments shifting—an identity coalescing. So what did I do with that newfound autonomy? I promptly sacrificed my financial freedom to move out of our sprawling apartment and into a meager one-bedroom in the next neighborhood, and I want to make a trite Virginia Woolf pun so bad but I’ve already made a literary citation, so I’ll refrain. You’re welcome.

Living alone is quite the crusade, especially for a woman. I rented that glorified shoebox with no cosigner at age 23, and I spent the two most difficult years of my life there—facing and fighting and fixing myself, over and over. But at least it was the battle I willfully chose, and at least I did it at all. The tough pill to swallow is that this feat was possible for a 23-year-old woman in Brooklyn six years ago. StreetEasy says my old unit now goes for a dastardly $2.7K. Freedom is priceless, though, no?

Your perspective’s your prerogative—even looking up through that glass ceiling. I’m not saying that all young women in New York should want to try living alone, especially in as piss-poor a market as this, but I will say that I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t. I just wonder where our generation—the most fiercely independent cohort yet—will land based on decisions we did or didn’t make to define our freedom in a city where it’s hard won. I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong definition of freedom either, and that’s kind of the whole point.

I recently watched the not-so-acclaimed 2004 rom-com Shall We Dance?, and I did so for one specific scene I’d come across in screen grabs on Instagram. Notwithstanding both the genre and castings that gave me pause (search immediately), I sought a particular exchange between Susan Sarandon (a suspicious wife) and Richard Jenkins (her private investigator) in which she tells him that marriage is about having a witness to your life. I gave it three stars on Letterboxd and one of them was entirely for that monologue. Surely I could’ve just found the clip online, but I believe I owed Susan more than that.

Though folded into a mediocre storyline, the idea struck me as profound, prompting queries into my own behaviors and underlying motives. I worked backward, as my queries naturally regress: “Am I independent if I need a witness? Why do I want to be known? Should I be so consistently vulnerable? Are people disarmed or disturbed when I overshare and do I even care?” I tried my hand at recounting reactions to my repeat-offending first date topics—most of which I call my “soap box issues,” most of which are just hot takes of varying audacity with built-in anecdotes for pizzazz—and they’ve historically landed. But where does the spectating end and the witnessing begin?

I’m good at giving myself away. Call it bare self-indulgence or some other sickness that makes me spit my guts out on a silver platter at the soonest sign of engagement, but it’s how I interact with the world. And decidedly so, it’s a tender pass at emotional intimacy—a thing I’ve come to expect quickly as a consequence of the unfettered depth I’ve known in my abundant friendships. It’s not about approval or even understanding. I just crave the connection that spawns from being known and knowing, and the softness and satisfaction of that subtle reciprocity that doesn’t feel so subtle to me. And I may be insatiable, but I’m not asking for your hand—I’m lending you mine.

I always say that the three core tenets of any successful relationship are sexual chemistry, best-friendship, and romance. Are you attracted, are you truly partners, and are you in love? I won’t grandstand about what I think it means to be “in love” because hopefully you and I can agree that it looks a little different for everyone and that we know it when we feel it, which is not only the most ineffective but single dullest way to describe a sensation people spill blood over. I even deterred myself from further demystification with that one, so you’re spared of extraneous sentimentality.

Dauntingly subjective and elusive at times, yes, romance is the tricky tenet we can’t often claim when the head and heart don’t sync, which could be why it’s also the most prone to influence by external factors. Sometimes women feel romantically inclined toward someone because they’re a provider, and sometimes that’s no more than biological collateral. Some women’s heads and bodies sync and start speaking for the heart, and some women’s bodies override the whole system (men may commiserate). In any case of discordance, we either deal with it or it deals with us.

I’ve seen more than my fair share of Real Housewives, so this issue’s crossed my mind more frequently than I’d like. Providers can seem like a solid investment—and even feel like one—when you don’t factor in longevity. Many if not most of their faultily superficial relationships tend to expire when their pretty young things aren’t so young anymore—the termination of an implied corporeal contract. Their hearts aren’t in it and perhaps never were, sowing irredeemable imbalance and underscoring their devaluation of the ones they “love.” You can call reality TV brain rot; I call it a sociological gold mine. Trash and treasure.

Like anyone, I want top valuation by my partner—and vice versa. I want zealous admiration, and to admire them zealously too. I want them to provide for me, but I also want to provide for them. Chiefly, however, I want to provide for myself. And I don’t want to do it lest they won’t provide for me anymore. I want to do it because I owe it to myself. Spoken like a real crusader, eh? Would a crusader call themself one? Too late, times four.

There was a night earlier this year when I stayed up with two new friends until they didn’t feel new to me anymore. Of course, as women of our age certainly must do in such 6 AM circumstances, we told each other why we weren’t romantically fulfilled. We sat hunched and deliberate in my living room as the sun rose peripherally and compared our three very disparate emotional postures with the utmost vulnerability and honesty, prying every detail and insight we could find from the depths of our hearts and heads and scattering them across the coffee table for communal inspection.

One of them shares in my only-childhood, but her parents’ undivided attention bore her a prerogative starkly different from mine. Rather than prompting her to incessantly seek that same grade of validation she’d grown up so accustomed to, the experience emboldened her. It taught her to self-assure. “I’m so envious of your mindset,” I remarked at some point, to which she replied with palpable sincerity, “I’m so sick of it.” She felt stunted by the standards and apathy that precluded her involvement, even if they stood to guard her from heartbreak. So the grass was greener, even where my weeds grew.

I currently have a sliver of the funds I’d need to have kids or retire. I spent a year and change unemployed and hemorrhaging, but I’ll tell you with my whole chest that I’m still not planning on making decisions with the fear of instability or insecurity in mind. That’s a scarcity mindset, of which the inverse is, of course, one of abundance. And anyone can have one—even me in my brutal insatiability, even still, and maybe even because of it.

I’ve been insatiable in the way that no amount of attention from the “right” person has ever been enough. I’ve always pushed. But weren’t those “right” people always wrong in the end anyway? I lived to see those reckonings, and it was painful, yes, but each misstep made the journey more memorable and infinitely more revelatory. How could I ever know right when I see it if I don’t know wrong? How could I know freedom without imprisonment? Maybe she was onto something.

The learnings from these detours are mine to deploy—financially and romantically—and with their limitless applications, they make my future seem pretty fucking abundant. Money comes and goes, and I finally feel sure of it coming. I’m also finally sure that I’ve become a version of me that feels so valid I’ll never have to hope for someone to validate it—because I’m so sick of hoping that I’ve actually stopped wanting it.

The quote from the movie goes like this: “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.” In this very moment, I’m insatiable in the way that I’m building a life so full that I don’t need anyone else’s to supplement it, and if you were already guessing... yes, that feels like freedom. But I’ll take a partner to complement it, and I’ll do it autonomously. I’ll take a witness, because it is and will be worth witnessing.

My cognitive processes often look like lists. It's as much a way of being as it is a way of thinking. Not everyone has a narrator in their head, and as someone who writes a lot of sentences, you'd imagine I do. Honestly, though, parsing my abstract from concrete thoughts is a practice so uninteresting that I've already defaulted to vetting and ranking openers for the next paragraph while attempting it. So be it.

The lists are my life's framework—they impose order. Reasonably, I mostly formulate sequences of things to do, and the important ones get transcribed so that I can stare at them until I do them. This is boring stuff. But there are plenty of other lists, and one master list in particular that has been my primary fixation for years now, for better or for worse. And recently it's been feeling worst of worse.

When I ask if your life "works," what does that mean to you? You'd probably ask me to expound upon that inquiry, and maybe then I'd ask you what you think it means if I'm feeling cheeky, but that's obnoxious, and you can't answer me, so I'll tell you instead.

"What works" is a checklist I've devised and continually modified that lets me know if I'm flailing, floating, or flying—in kitschy terms that I just made up and don't love but won't revise because I'm partial to alliteration when the shoe fits. It's comprised of the various tangible facets of my everyday existence, mostly those relative to routine, i.e., job, diet, budget, health, exercise, sleep, relationships, and so on. You get it.

I'll note candidly that a lot of these are in flux at the moment. They're not working. So I expend a lot of mental energy creating more lists about how to make them work, typically at the expense of my capacity to do the things on them. The absurdity is not lost on me. This issue has thus become my magnum opus of "don't work"s: growth. And in the city that never sleeps, where ambition is the baseline, inaction is a death wish. "So leave?" No. More on that later.

Jia Tolentino wrote an essay called "Always Be Optimizing" that was included in her book Trick Mirror in 2019, which I read in 2021 because it was my chosen contribution to book club and so I definitely had to. In short, it explores how the pressure to perennially improve oneself, especially for women, has been co-opted by consumer culture, rendering selfhood into a polished, marketable performance. A non-reader (how narcissistic of me, I've been known to say), I'm glad I obliged.

One insight stood out to me above the rest. She very lucidly acknowledged the labor of "self-care," distilling the term down to its raw definition: beauty work that we've euphemised to sound progressive. I had never really questioned why I hated these rituals before—I just did, and I cycled through them begrudgingly nonetheless. Needless to say, I felt seen.

"Having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree," she describes this "ideal," modern woman. Rereading the line earlier, I felt a melancholic tinge of either shame or wistfulness or both. I remember when that was me, back when things worked. But I'm realizing that things may have been working solely because I centered and strived for perfection... just like the women she writes about.

For the first two years of college, I went to the gym five days a week. I had to, I told myself, because I was 20 lbs heavier and my muscles were my asset, I also told myself. I'd think about food constantly, and every meal was a calculated decision. I made hyperconscious choices, coveting the ideal, every day. In the distant present, my intermittent hiatuses from working out and grocery shopping are so unconscious that I hardly bat an eye at them. Discipline didn't elude me—I just stopped giving a fuck. But when you give such a lack of a fuck, you start slipping. And suddenly you're flailing.

My master list is a rubric, and each section carries weight, all the way down to the criteria of the sub-lists. Like assignments and assessments, they demand my attention and require my effort. You have to work to make things work—to any extent at all, it's behooved me to find. As solid a student I once was, though, I now feel so far behind that I'm merely hoping to pass.

The essay, focused on the implications of this very conscious and consistent work that makes things work, was published six years ago. Today, we don't just have these same artificial obstacles; we have artificial solutions too, and while many may have existed then, I'd venture to call them the current standard.

Tell me: What do Ozempic, Botox, clothing rental services, payment plans, beta blockers and ChatGPT have in common? Sorry. They're modern cheat codes: Ozempic to get skinny, Botox to look younger, clothing rental services to stay stylish, payment plans to purchase what we can't afford and thereby appear wealth(ier), beta blockers to feel confident, ChatGPT to write articulately.

I don't have a single female friend in New York who's abstained from these offerings in totality, and I don't blame them one bit, nor do I judge them, nor do I posit that any of it is intrinsically harmful, despite the point I’m making. It’s more nuanced than that. It’s not our fault. Stay with me.

I'm a big fan of leveraging ChatGPT myself (though rest assured, I draw the line at my personal essays—in case you wonder). But we can't deny the fact that what we're all collectively doing is perpetuating manufactured realities. Artificial they are, but these shortcuts empower the modern woman to be her best self—even if that self isn't exactly "real," and even if it's exactly what the market wants her to be.

At the end of the essay, Jia mentions a particularly salient and pertinent concept when she references another: Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," which uses the cyborg to challenge boundaries between human, machine, and gender. As Haraway described it in 1985, a cyborg is "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." Pretty good stuff.

However, while she presented the cyborg as a symbol of resistance to rigid structures like patriarchy, capitalism, and essentialist feminism, it's become this ironic lens through which we view these falsities—(now objectively artificial) ways to optimize. Today it feels fantastical even to envision a world in which the advancements and enhancements available to us don't reflect the corporate greed that preys upon our insecurities and ushers us soundly into conformity. But could we still? Is there time left?

My list's criteria are different from those of some modern women, perhaps now more than ever. But I can't discount that every individual has their own unique set, meaning that there's room for unique solutions yet, and even (potentially positive) evolution on a grand scale. And I certainly can't tell you what will happen when things start working again for me, so don't ask.

What I will tell you is that if making it happen—flying high here in this city, so to speak—means becoming a cyborg in my own right, then a cyborg I will be. Perhaps by then we'll all be. Perhaps it'll be for the right reasons too.

Embodying New York's spirit means knowing that anything can become something at any time—to me, at least. That said, I became one with the city about two years in. That's when this adage was born. That's when I met them.

I've rejected then reworked and reappropriated my response to systems of belief over the latter half of my life. I've thought a lot about why they exist and who they exist to serve, and I've spent a great deal of time grappling with how they predicate our do-gooding and what it looks like. Lately, though, I've been on about the ends to those means, and to me, at least, the ends are extraneous. It's the means that are worth fixation.

September 2021 marked an inflection point—in my life just as much as my New York experience. My “secret notes,” or the receptacle of my inner monologue for more than a decade, mark this pivotal moment in the mention of a new best friend in that month of that year. I remember it vividly despite its singular documentation.

Our relationship progressed at light speed—as did the many others that spun out from its inception and spread like the circulation of blood to the toes after a barefoot walk through the snow. Even so, there was no follow-up for another two years.

I would have been surprised by this discovery if not for the fact that the space between was replete with broodings of epic turmoil—a silent battle being fought in the darkness of a perilous storm. Meeting her, meeting them, was like being lent a pair of boots as I refused to step inside, yet I reduced it to a mere whisper of an insight into that era. Sad, but true. I'll explain.

Many horrors of my own invention defined and comprised my time in the blizzard. Chiefly, I was bent on saving my relationship with a man whose emotions ruled my own, day in and day out, and what felt like every waking second. The notes sure do affirm this notion, and they stink of a desperation as shameful as it is somber or quasi-elegiac. I reviewed them with a sick stomach. There was nothing poetic about my self-imposed suffering. As hard as I tried to romanticize it, it wasn't fucking romantic. Part of me could see that then, but I can say it now.

In late 2023, I picked back up where I left off. I started exalting these saviors. Scoff at the theatrics of my word choice but this is no hyperbole (you'll see, I promise). I took a few breaths away from my petulant moaning every so often to acknowledge their ever-expanding roles in my life, though I still couldn't seem to prioritize this gratitude over my pain in the mental hellscape I'd erected.

The good times with them rolled concurrently with the bad in their obstructed peripheral, our friendships deepened, and I began to know them as intimately as anyone I ever had. I trusted them that way too. Still, there was something I couldn't admit to them—even as it ate me alive, bite by ravenous bite. Now I understand why.

The "afters" were a refuge for me, and I had developed a sneaking suspicion—a complex, even—about my proclivities to indulge. In one entry from January of 2024, I deliberate over whether or not I'm the last one standing to fill a void and to delay going home to myself. One could surmise it, and in my self-conscious state, I had for quite some time. But I came to a new conclusion that night.

Diving deep into personal traumas and hangups doesn't necessarily come easy in the sober light of day for most. Several drinks and a party or night at the bar behind us, we tend to open our hearts and loosen our lips. And it just so happens that empathetic psychoanalysis is my love language.

So I jotted: "I’ve been so focused on the idea that there's a void, but maybe there isn't. Maybe I have a rich life, and I just want more. Maybe it’s beautiful, not unfortunate, that I always want more; more people, more chats, more connection." It was suddenly apparent that these environments didn't provide distraction—they provided an avenue into the souls of those who made life worth living.

This revelation surfaced two months out from the very official termination of my relationship, interspersed amongst a few more regarding the link between his valuation of me and my own. I was beginning to see myself more clearly as I learned to unlearn this internalized hatred I'd been feeding so readily.

When I did initiate the conversation that would shut it all down, my world ending with not a bang but a whimper in the sullen, final moments of an attempted medication detox (impeccable timing—compliments to me, I must give, for cooking up this airtight plan), there was, in fact, relief. But the relief was hardly in our demise—it was in the demise of the facade I'd built and the artifice I'd deployed to conceal my perpetual grief. It was in the letting go and speaking up and breaking down—heart open, lips loose.

I could always express my love and support for my friends and work through their traumas and hangups with them. I couldn't tell them that they were the only thing keeping me from teetering straight off a steep ledge because I believed it would be a fatal admission. I wanted to protect them from my pain so that they wouldn't feel it too—because I thought I couldn't bear the bestowment of that burden. You can't take back an "I don't love myself." You just can't.

Thankfully, I didn't have to, because that was becoming a more and more disparate reality as I leaned further and further into the positive ascriptions they'd imposed upon me. I let their love pour into me and my purpose materialized as I inspected a reflection I'd never glimpsed so fully. At last, I saw someone who represented light: an agent of encouragement who makes others feel seen. Take the low-hanging fruit here if you must—I think it's funny, but I'll leave that to you.

The “afters” and the conversations at the crack of dawn and how it all may sound aside, our bonds precede any temporal or event-based classification. The love is abundant. It's in a morning at the pool, basking in the sun beside each other in total silence. It's in an afternoon pilates class, sweating profusely and smirking in the mirror through transitions. It's in every stream-of-consciousness spam of texts and rogue FaceTime call over the course of the workday.

It's in the showing up for each other every single time—when it's good, when it's bad, and when it's nothing at all. It's what I was put here for. It completely negates the need to believe in something more. And it's what I should have been consumed by all along.

So I finally grasped the hands that invited me through the door and into the foyer to stay. Now I sit on the floor of the den and help tend to the fire. And when it begins to smolder and the cold creeps back in, we huddle closer and add a log.

And I've found that there's a whole life for me in this—in the huddling and tending—and I feel that with such conviction that I don't care what comes after, if anything at all. Because I think I'm already there.

At the big age of 16, I renounced Catholicism with the vitriol and vindication of a young woman scorned. If you deem it tough to believe that a white, middle-class girl from Western Connecticut with a doting support system could be scorned by anything at all, you’re onto something.

That accurate assessment notwithstanding, I sat in my mother's …

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"What are your career aspirations?" a hiring manager asked me in the second round of my third interview process this year. If you've ever faced that inquiry and known no answer, then my shoes should feel familiar.

It's one that caught me off guard and churned my stomach in the past, ultimately evoking a half-baked monologue that spoke volumes …

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Real-life fairytales are few and far between. If you're prone to romanticization, you may beg to disagree, and I'm certainly a romantic, but one story stands tall above the rest I have to tell. I wish I could tell it from the hero's perspective, but that wasn't the part I played.

In real life, villains aren't necessarily evil—most aren't at all…

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Certain patterns are bound to repeat themselves. Allegedly, this will happen until the lesson is learned, but I have reason to believe otherwise. In the summer of 2012, I had the better part of my teenage years ahead of me, and it was all as innocent and incidental as it ever would be.

Y was my first real kiss. I remember romping around his tow…

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Today—for the first time, as she was making me dinner—I saw my mother look old. I popped my head up to peer through the wood-bordered space in the wall that opens into the kitchen, and there she was, stirring boiling pasta water on the stove. I had noticed the fine lines that curtained her mouth before, accompanied by mild crow's feet and the faint frown marks on her forehead, but I had never seen them this way.

She glanced up from the steaming pot and showed me her usual smile, which faded seconds later when she resumed tending to the water. But it wasn't just the usual. It was tired. It was downright weary and overexerted. Her wrinkles appeared clear to me and more defined than ever before. I stayed in that moment, staring at her face and wondering when she'd started aging.

Was it when I was 11 and didn't want her to stay downstairs with me and my father every time we would watch new episodes of CSI on TV? Was it when I was 13 and stopped talking to her voluntarily, only asking for rides and money and quietly despising her whenever she wouldn't let me go over to a friend's house? Was it when I was 15 with perfect grades, a good attitude, and a new boyfriend with whom I spent most of my time—always at his house and never at ours? Was it when I was 17, had been caught lying to her for the second or third time in the last few months, and refused her help with anything regarding my future, always with the claim that I knew what I was doing?

Through all of the dinners, piles and piles of laundry, bed sheets adjusted without solicitation after I'd left the house for school or for the night, copious dollars worth of clothing for me and never her, missed hours of sleep spent lying awake while waiting for the sound of the latch on the front door to indicate that I was home safely, stitching of ripped seams in the armpits of t-shirts, gas wasted on basketball games and softball tournaments, fears ignored with the purchase of my very own car, lunches packed every weekday morning at the crack of dawn (always according to my personal preferences), effort expended asking me how my day was when she knew very well that the answer would be just "fine"—not once did she complain that she was tired or worn out. Today she didn't need to say it because I could see it for myself.

I could have done one of many things. I could have stopped and thanked her right then and there. I could have told her that I love her and that she's done more for me than I could ever repay her for. I could have told her that she is the single most selfless person there is and that I would never know someone who cared like she did—even when I insisted that she didn't have to. I could have made it all worth it for her, standing there behind that stove in our kitchen then and every night before that, but I didn't. I couldn't, and I may never be able to. It's an oddity of mine, that vague detachment from my mother, probably spawning from my origins somehow, no doubt. At least that's what I attribute it to, to make sense of my horrible incapacity to acknowledge and reciprocate the love that has been infallibly distributed to me over the past 17-and-a-half years.

No matter how many times I've cried alone about it, it doesn't change the fact that I still can't say the words to her. So I only hope that someday, before she goes, I will be able to appropriately convey my appreciation of her and her kindness and generosity. I want to thank her for all of it. Maybe I will finally show her that I am not so ungrateful and callous—someday, but that day is not today.

---

08/22/2024

Today—for the second time this month, just after a job interview that went considerably well—I spent a half hour on the phone with my mother. The conversation was as formulaic as it tends to be when I call her, which is how we tend to wind up on the phone in the first place. We don't do much deviation—I share news, she reacts with genuine enthusiasm and unbridled support. It's cathartic and it's soothing and, as she says each time, she just likes to hear my voice. She doesn't call me much, and I know why.

Some parents become parents before they're ready. That's not a critique—it's pure fact. Emotional maturity and availability are tenets of the ideal profile—unique to humans, whose experiences or lack thereof can and absolutely do impact their child-rearing styles. Did your parents fuck you up? If you're lucky, or maybe delusional, you probably wouldn't say so. The tone of such a proclamation is derogatory and accusatory. But "fucked up" is a subjective sort of term. And I'm incredibly, astoundingly lucky, but there's no more succinct phrase to describe the nature of the impact in passing.

Almost exactly one year before the above entry, I wrote a photo essay in AP Language and Composition, which I modified as my college application essay. I used an image of me and my father on the beach circa 2004 or so. The bodyboard Velcroed to my wrist represented my parents' control—the theme around which I wove the condensed narrative of my birth story. They've never read it.

My mother is a carrier of the hereditary disease that caused the rapid cognitive and physical degeneration of her two sisters, who met their premature fates when I was very young. Devastated by the results of the genetic tests, she made the excruciating decision not to conceive but would not let that dash her dreams. The wife of her long-time boss and mentor recommended traditional surrogacy (a practice since outlawed in many states) and introduced my parents to the program through which they found and selected their star candidate. Several fertility clinic visits in Michigan, heaps of legal paperwork, $100,000, and just under nine months later, I was delivered at a hospital in Northern California—my parents miles high on a cross-country flight to receive me. I was "the most wanted child in the world," my mother always said.

The essay includes the following paragraph: "To be controlled constantly is a feeling that many adolescents claim to know well, but most of their parents had not spent so many consecutive nights wide awake, ruminating about the possibility of the baby they could not procure naturally. This was a reality for mine, and after finally being granted their wish, they wholeheartedly refused to let it be taken from them. To this very day, I feel bound by their loving yet crippling constraints that inadvertently choke me, though so well-intentioned." At the time, I believed it to be profoundly introspective. Now, I rate it melodramatic at best. I digress.

My mother was meant to be a mother—more so than anyone I've ever met. So she needed me, in a way, but she only needed me because she needed someone to need her. And that's the impetus that I'd venture to say many mothers lack. It's unusual because it's so deeply instinctual—primal. That explanation should make it sound commonplace, but the human experience is expeditiously becoming exponentially more complex, rendering those basic instincts more nebulous. Let me clarify that I'm not a proponent of biological determinism—quite the opposite. Mothers are people whose lives should not revolve solely around caretaking their progeny, or anyone else, for that matter. But the thing is, my mother's does.

The relationship between mother and daughter is an undulating current propelled by necessity. It's give and take, and my mother gave to get me differently than most do. She sacrificed money, time, and emotional bandwidth, as every mother does, but also any dreams of a traditional family she'd ever had. And it never stopped. She gave, and gave, and gave—to me and to anyone and everyone who needed her—and never put herself first, so I thought she would never take. Things only changed when she finally needed me too.

There's a clear delineation between the first half of the phone call, comprised of my updates, and the second. The latter has gradually become a fixture because a need needs meeting and has finally risen to the surface on her end. And I'm the one who can meet it. I'm the one who can listen to the tribulations surrounding her brother's death and her mother's declining mental state and validate, finally, in some form, that she doesn't deserve to bear the weight of this world on her shoulders.

Yes, anyone could do this, in theory. But I—the product of her ambitious love and the source of her joy—know that it means the most when I listen. It means the most when I assure her that she's doing the best anyone can possibly do and that it's going to be OK—just as she did and still does for me. It's not enough, but it sometimes serves as a proxy for my true intent. I found a way to give, no matter how slight.

My mother hardly calls me because, through many years of disregard, I think I've conditioned her to believe that she shouldn't assume I want her to. It breaks my heart and swells me with guilt to levels almost unspeakable (and I am a woman of many words). I've been cruel, perhaps as the average teenage daughter is to her mother, even, but not everyone's mother needed to be needed like this from the start. Not everyone's mother did what she did or sacrificed so radically as she did. Most couldn't. I believe that.

I felt powerless to give to the extent that I knew I should, so I hit a subconscious impasse and didn't even try. It's the single greatest disappointment I've ever had. My actions seem, to me, unforgivable, yet I know they've been tacitly forgiven. But that's not why I can't verbalize an apology. It's not even because we don't talk about stuff like that. It's because it would make it all real.

Despite the innumerable hours I've spent speaking to fictive audiences, this soliloquy that matters most has remained the one I couldn't muster. While our relationship has grown and evolved markedly, the roots are deep, mangled, and sturdy. Nevertheless, though, they are encased in a love so transcendent it brings me to tears. Not one to cry alone so much anymore, I cried writing this. I told you it was important.

Maybe my mother looked old that one night in the kitchen, standing over the spaghetti—before my uncle died and before my grandmother was diagnosed. But she's a decade older today, and despite the plight she's endured, she is more radiant than ever to me. And I think, finally, today is the day.

Last night I used a YouTube-to-MP3 converter to download Childish Gambino's fifth mixtape, "Culdesac." It was something out of my teenage years—like I was sat in my room again repeating the steps to add those same IDs to my old Macbook. It was all ethical, as it never hit Spotify, and I wondered if that was because, while it was some of his se…

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The ends are the hardest to see, they say, but they're always coming. I wrote that line three years ago, but I didn't know exactly how it would pervade the ethos of an era in the distinct way it did for me.

More than incidentally, it's also what the Costar app has told me one too many times in my weekly horoscopes—the ones I have a penchant for…

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My parents told me that by the time I was 2, I could say the word "scholarship." On each occasion that I've injected this anecdote into conversation, it's been tucked into a deadpan one-liner that ends with: "But it's ironic because I never got one of those." With an aim to rouse a laugh or project my humility, and probably both, it also serve…

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This morning my father looked at me across the kitchen, tears streaming from his eyes, an English muffin sitting idly in the toaster, and told me that if I were ever to look for a model of what love should be, it's the way that my grandmother loved my grandfather. "If you can have that one day with X..." he trailed off. 57 years is a lot to li…

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