People go to marriage counseling because they think their partner doesn’t understand. But your spouse understands you just fine; they just don’t like what they understand. They don’t like that the thing they’ve explained to you forty times has somehow failed to turn you into a different person.

The evidence for lasting effects of marriage counseling is much less impressive than the cultural faith we put in it. Therapy can change how you understand someone but it’s not very good at changing who that person is. Which means the useful question is not: How do I get my partner to change? It’s: What if they don’t?

I coach a lot of couples, which you might think is shocking since two men divorced me. But I have three useful qualifications: disappointment, adjustment, and personality type. I have extensive experience with the first two, and it takes me about five minutes to tell two people what they will fight about for the rest of their relationship.

The thing you most want your partner to change is usually the thing you’ve decided is unreasonable. But if it were merely a bad habit, they’d have changed it already. The quality you cannot stand now is attached to the quality you loved in the beginning; distinctive parts of someone’s personality are the parts you notice first and the parts you keep noticing forever.

But this doesn’t mean you made a mistake, because there are no conflict-free personality matches: Opposites cover enormous amounts of territory for each other, but each person spends a lot of time operating in the other person’s blind spot. Similar people understand each other more easily, but they want control over the same territory while neglecting everything neither one likes doing.

Here’s a couple I coached this week (who agreed to be an example).

He’s an ISFJ. She’s an ENFP. They want to spend more time together, so they’ve started meeting at the gym. This is going terribly.

The ENFP walks into the gym and looks around for something that interests her. Maybe today she’ll do sit-ups because she can suddenly envision herself having great abs. The ISFJ has arm days and leg days. He knows which exercises produce which results. He looks at her wandering around the gym and sees inefficiency. She looks at his program and sees imprisonment.

Neither of them is doing the gym wrong. They disagree about what it means to do anything well. For the ISFJ, mastery comes from depth: learn the proven method, repeat it, refine it, get better. For the ENFP, mastery comes from understanding possibilities: make connections, try something interesting. Once the concept is obvious, endless execution feels like overkill.

This same fight shows up everywhere: vacations, children, money, restaurants, businesses, the kitchen. The useful part of personality type is that the argument stops being evidence that your spouse is insane. Ask this important question: Does your partner actually like doing it their way? Usually the answer is yes. No one is secretly waiting to be rescued by the other person’s superior system.

Good couples coaching doesn’t eliminate the conflict. It eliminates the fantasy that the conflict will disappear once the other person finally understands. This is why the most useful couples counseling might happen before marriage, when you can ask: Do I want to have this fight for forty years?

Most of us don’t ask. So later the work becomes coming to terms with what we chose. Which brings me back to my primary qualification for couples coaching: disappointment.

You can survive an astonishing amount of disappointment once you stop treating it as evidence that something has gone wrong. And sometimes disappointment is just what reality feels like after you finally understand it.

Personality Type Office Hours

My next personality type office hours will be Friday, Sept. 18, at noon Eastern. We’ll talk about using type to decrease conflict in relationships. There will be disappointment. But it’s a group, so there will also be schadenfreude.

New This Week

• ENFJ: Who gets the best of you?

• INFP: You’re stingy with sincerity

• INTJ: Am I boring you?

• ENFP: A job is not a personality test

• ENTJ: Stop making lists of companies you could launch

• INFJ: You overvalue the ability to change

Last week I wrote about Lindsay Clancy’s postpartum psychosis. I was excited about the case because the mental health profession would be challenged. Now, after two weeks of reading transcripts and listening to testimony, I think I missed the most important thing: motive. Her husband, Patrick, was having an affair and three weeks after the killings he vacationed with his girlfriend in Costa Rica.

The trial is two questions: did Lindsay do it, and if she did, could she understand it enough to stop it. Lindsay has pleaded not guilty. She has never said she did it. What she says she remembers is not a confession: she does not remember locking the door, she does not remember moving furniture, she felt like she was watching someone do everything to her. The prosecutors decided it was a confession. I think Patrick killed the kids and he tried to kill her.

Here is the math that convinced me. Patrick says he left the house at 5:25pm and confirmed the kids were alive. A neighbor’s camera shows Lindsay lying motionless in the snow under the bedroom window at 5:50pm. Patrick called 911 at 6:11pm. The paramedics arrived at 6:16pm and all three kids shows signs of strangulation. But one of the three kids was still alive, and according to the forensic pathologist, that child could not have been strangled earlier than 6:11pm — far past the time Lindsay’s neck was broken. Also: The state police analysis did not find Lindsay’s fingerprints on the knife or the bands.

Patrick testified on day one and two for the prosecution and was supposed to come back on day 16 to testify for the defense. The jury arrived, and then the jury went home early, because Patrick didn’t show up.

Only Patrick’s mother showed up that day, and her testimony was the saddest moment of the trial. She said Lindsay was a wonderful mother. She said she texted with Lindsay every day. The prosecution told her Lindsay said she rarely heard from her mother-in-law, and she seldom spent time with the kids. Then the defense showed the mother-in-law the texts. It was clear in that moment that she had been texting with Patrick, posing as Lindsay, and he told her not to come help out. The look on Patrick’s mom’s face was pure devastation.

Millions of people online are more powerful than corrupt police on the scene. Remember the Karen Read case? The internet said the wrong person was being prosecuted because the real murderer was friends with the police. The internet was right. A blogger did an independent investigation every day for years, and the crowd found what Read’s lawyers needed for a not-guilty verdict. Gabby Petito’s case is another example: police treated domestic violence as a minor spat and did not investigate; the internet followed breadcrumbs online to show her boyfriend murdered her.

What about Patrick? Public records show he sold the family house — with everything in it — to a former Plymouth County assistant DA. When prosecutors wanted the jury to view the house, the new owner objected. The internet found that record too. Millions of people, checking each other’s work, are hard to beat.

The hunch is the last legal skill that can’t be automated. Most routine legal filing can already be done with AI. The lawyer AI talks, the opposing AI responds, the court AI confirms everyone did what they were supposed to. But AI cannot investigate crazy theories. AI cannot decide someone is probably lying on a hunch, because most people’s lies are crazy, and there is not enough training data on the crazy ways people kill their families. And AI turns out to be very good at confirming hunches: find every photo on the internet of one hotel on one night in December 2022. Every time new evidence gets released, the crowd extracts more from it than the state did.

Court TV is the new reality TV. Jersey Shore was groundbreaking because the people in it were not self-consciously reality stars; once reality TV became a launchpad for personal brands, it became formulaic. In a courtroom the stakes are real, nobody controls the edit, and we watch the truth unfold at the same time the people in the show do.

Crowdsourced evidence is a new form of participatory democracy. The watchers become investigators. As our power to affect the executive branch wanes, our power to influence the judiciary increases. E. Jean Carroll won against Trump when Congress could do nothing.

Philosophy will replace CS as the go-to major. CS is about facts, and AI does facts now, which is why even at MIT people are walking away from the major. Philosophy is the questions above the facts: what counts as a fact, what a fact weighs, who owns it. The prosecution had every fact in this case — the heart rate, the timeline, the fingerprints — and couldn't string them together, because stringing facts together requires a point of view about which ones matter. The prosecution had the most facts in that courtroom. but the internet had the point of view.

Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three children, but her lawyers are putting the mental health system on trail. Clancy had three psychiatrists prescribing medicine at the same time. She had twenty prescriptions simultaneously. One of the prescribers had never had a postpartum psychosis client. Another did not know Clancy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. All the prescribers could have looked at Clancy’s records and they didn’t.

Mere mortals are unable to challenge the mental health system. Clancy is an experienced nurse and she kept incredible records of her own treatment — qualitative and quantitative. Her records are more thorough than the doctors’, which is why she can challenge institutional mental health providers.

Husbands, take notice. Every trial about postpartum psychosis has a spouse who was oblivious to how serious his wife’s condition was, and he left the mother alone with the kids. Andrea Yates’s husband left her alone with the five kids for an hour every morning even though her psychiatrist said to never leave her alone with them. Clancy’s ex-husband (he’s ex now that the kids are dead) said he had never heard the word psychosis before she killed the kids. But Lindsay was googling questions about psychosis long before the day of the killings. He thought the mental health issues were hers to handle. Meanwhile he was taking control of other things: he decided that if Lindsay was not going back to work, he would fire the nanny.

I noticed this right away because I had postpartum psychosis. It happened after my second kid. The first had already been diagnosed with autism, and at three years old we attended early intervention 40 hours a week. My second was born with a major facial deformity: hemifacial microsomia. We had a team of sixteen doctors to address the problem. I was so scared I wouldn’t bond with the second kid that I never let go of him. Held him all day.

I was also working. Nino was laid off, and I was supporting us by writing. I wrote a column right before I received the epidural. But months later I couldn’t write anymore, so I was submitting articles that had already been published. I knew I would get found out eventually.

We were already in early intervention, so we had a social worker helping us parent. A week before my psychotic episode, Nino and I were sitting across from the social worker in our living room. I stood up to try to get the baby to stop crying. And while I was bouncing I said, “I want to just slam the baby’s head into the wall.”

The social worker stood up and said we need someone else to support our family.

I remember feeling abandoned. But only for a second. Because the baby was crying.

Nino and I were together most of the time. He managed the older kid in therapy, and I went there, holding the baby, not wanting to miss talking with the therapist or time to bond with the baby. We were like a parade.

At night, Nino put the older one to bed, then he sat in the kitchen, because we were in NYC in a 500-square-foot apartment and the living room became the bedroom at night. I was holding the baby and doing the dishes, slowly, with one hand. And I picked up a knife and pushed it into my head. I remember it not getting in. Like, my skull was too strong. So I pushed harder. Slamming the knife like I could make headway.

Nino took the baby from my arms. He called 911. I screamed that he couldn’t take the baby. So he told me to put the knife down and sit in the chair and he’d give me the baby. Then the ambulance came.

He stayed with the older kid. I went to the hospital. In the ER I said I wouldn’t leave the baby.

They told me it was okay to leave the baby to go to the mental ward. “The baby needs you to be safe and healthy,” they told me.

I told them I won’t bond with the baby if we separate. “Look at his face,” I said. “It’s a mess. I am scared he won’t feel loved.”

One nurse stayed with me. Then a social worker. People had conferences. I remember feeling like I hadn’t slept as well as I was sleeping in the ER, under constant surveillance and ER chatter all night long.

People told me I can’t go to the mental ward with a baby. So I said I’m not going. People tried to explain how serious it was. I tried to explain how messed up his face was.

Finally the doctors agreed to let me stay in the ER. They were not allowed to release me when I was a danger to the child, but they wouldn’t be violating the law if they let me stay in the ER. I had a bed, and a social worker, for three days. It was support I could not get when I had two kids and a husband and 40 hours of therapists all over NYC.

The hospital called Nino and told him I couldn’t be alone with either kid. I remember thinking that sounded crazy. We can’t do that.

But we did it. Nino took one kid to multitudes of therapists, and I stayed at home with the baby and a nanny. The nanny was $75 an hour because we had to use an agency — we needed one on no notice — and we needed someone who was okay being in charge of not letting me use a knife again. Or anything else.

It took a community, and both our 401Ks, to care for two special needs kids without letting me be alone with either one of them. I used to think we were so irresponsible for cashing out the 401Ks. So irresponsible for neither of us working. Now I’ve seen what happens when a spouse continues going to work in the face of postpartum psychosis. It’s a full-time job to allow a mother to keep bonding with the baby and keep parenting the other kid while still maintaining awareness that she could be dangerous.

I want to tell you I was annoyed by the surveillance. But it was so, so scary how quickly I put the knife in my head. It was so, so scary that I could have been separated from my kids. I just wanted to feel like that wouldn’t happen again.

As years passed, foggy memories made me wonder if the psychosis really came on that fast. How could I be caring for the baby one second and putting a knife in my head the next?

Then I was in the emergency room with Z for his traumatic brain injury. His headaches were so bad he was vomiting for the second day straight. They gave him an IV of anti-nausea medicine and I sat by his bed holding his hand.

All of a sudden he told me he needs to rip out the IV. He said he needs to get out of his skin. He scratched at his body. He was yelling: “I need to get out.”

I said, “You’re okay. The medicine works. It will get better.”

He said, “Get away from me or I’ll kill you. I want to kill everyone.”

I opened the door. Said to the first nurse I saw, “My son’s trying to take out his IV and he’s telling me he wants to kill me.”

Ten nurses and doctors were in the room immediately. They were holding him down. He was screaming, “I need to tear off my skin! Let go! I’ll kill all of you!”

I was standing in the doorway saying things like, “He’s a good boy. He practices cello six hours a day. He never breaks rules. He’s such a nice boy.”

No one was listening to me. But five minutes later they told me and Z that psychosis is a known side effect of the medicine he was taking. Akathisia. That’s the word they used.

I didn’t realize it was psychosis until I was listening to commentary on the Lindsay Clancy trial. I felt a little like her husband: I did not know Z had psychosis even though I was standing right there.

I am so lucky I had the doctors in NYC who kept me in the ER with my baby. Lindsay was upset being away from her kids. I would never have taken medication because I would have had to stop breastfeeding. But Lindsay wanted to get better so much that she took the medicine.

Pay attention. This trial affects you. You need to understand psychosis so you know it when you see it. And pay attention to who is going online to criticize Clancy. They are mental health providers who don’t want to believe they’re in a corrupt, poorly regulated industry. But they are.

Lindsay Clancy is going through hell in this trial. But she’ll save so many women from going through hell themselves.

Come to a discussion on this topic tomorrow! Link to join is at the end of this post.

Parents walk into an IEP meeting like it’s a parent-teacher conference. It’s actually a contract negotiation where the other side wrote the contract and pays everyone in the room. Suing a school costs tens of thousands of dollars. You can avoid that with a strong evaluation and knowledge of your rights as a parent. Yesterday I wrote about the importance of a private evaluation. Today I’m telling you why you shouldn’t wait to get an IEP.

1. “Wait and see” is the school’s legal strategy, not yours. Schools tell you to wait because waiting saves them money twice. It delays services now, and it builds a record they can use later: if your kid went three years without documentation, that’s three years of evidence there was no need. You cannot backdate an IEP. The paper trail either starts today or it starts against you.

2. Nothing the school says out loud exists. If the principal says “we’ll give him extra help” in a meeting and it’s not written in the IEP, it never happened. The parents who win send a short email after every conversation: “Confirming what we discussed today.” That email is a legal record. The school knows this, which is why their promises are so warm and so verbal.

3. There are magic words, and they’re free. “I am requesting a special education evaluation, in writing, today’s date.” That sentence starts a legal clock — federal law gives the school roughly 60 days once you consent, and the school must respond to you in writing. A verbal “I’m worried about my son” starts nothing, which is why the school is happy to have that conversation with you forever.

4. The school hides the menu. In 95% of school districts, you’re not allowed to see the benefits other kids are getting. This isn’t to protect kids, it’s to protect schools: if one parent successfully advocates for their kid, the school makes sure no other parent can use it as a reference. I saw this firsthand when I was negotiating an IEP for a third-grader. The evaluation was so strong that the district paid for a $10,000 one-on-one summer program for reading. The school had never done that before — not because they couldn’t, but because no parent had known to ask.

5. The payoff comes in high school. I discovered this with my oldest kid, who got extra time on AP tests and the SAT. That didn't happen because I asked nicely in eleventh grade. The College Board requires a documented history before it grants accommodations, and our history was years long. The Ivy League is full of kids who got that time, and every one of them had parents who started the paperwork early. The IEP you're debating right now is the first document in that file.

6. You need your own expert in the room. The school brings a psychologist, a special ed director, and a district procedure manual. You bring your feelings about your kid. That’s not a negotiation — that’s a presentation. The evaluation is your evidence: your own data, your own expert, and a list of services your kid is legally entitled to. It’s also the only way to read the school’s evaluation, because you can’t see what theirs leaves out until you have a real one to compare it to. The evaluator behind that $10,000 summer program was Megan Cawlfield, and we’ve been a team ever since — showing parents which tools exist so they can get their kids what they need.

Bottom line: the IEP process rewards the parent who treats it as legal from day one. Parents who document everything and know the timelines almost never need a lawyer, because the school already knows how a hearing would end. The parents who do end up paying a lawyer hundreds of dollars an hour aren’t paying for arguments. They’re paying for the paper trail they didn’t keep. I know because before I understood how corrupt schools are, I consulted for the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping them figure out which parents would sue. Here’s what I learned: parents who project legal knowledge get what their kid needs.

So tomorrow (Friday) at 10am Eastern, Megan and I will show you excerpts of anonymized IEPs and evaluations so you can understand what they really say. We’ll show you the evaluation where the kid was three years behind on paper and the evaluator told the parents “wait and see” verbally. We’ll show you the IEP that was written so that the school would never have to deliver services to the student.

Send us your kid’s evaluation or IEP before today, or just come watch tomorrow. It’s free for subscribers.

Here’s the link to join:

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Parents think an evaluation is a moment of truth: you pay an expert, the expert gives you answers. That’s not what happens. Most evaluations are designed to tell you as little as possible. Here’s how it works:

1. When a school tests your kid, that’s not really testing. Even the most high-functioning autistic kid is very, very expensive for a school district, because that kid has the right to so many extra services. Schools don’t like to spend money on one kid. So schools do the bare minimum: test for a narrow range of issues and default to “your kid is fine” unless the kid is disrupting the classroom.

2. Schools don’t have to help your kid make progress. Schools have to make a reasonable effort to help your kid make progress. So schools tell you “we love your kid” and “your kid is doing great” and anything else they can say so you don’t sue. There are about ten schools in the US that make a reasonable effort. That’s why when parents sue a school for not meeting the standard, the school loses.

3. Even private evaluators don’t want to tell you the truth. It’s too much work. A private evaluation is more thorough than a school evaluation, but evaluators still won’t tell you everything, because you’ll argue. If they tell you your kid has gait problems and you’ve never noticed, they don’t want to fight with you about how gait affects school success. If your kid has pragmatic language issues, they don’t want to spend an hour teaching you what pragmatics are and why ignoring the problem means your kid can’t get help from teachers.

4. An evaluation without parent support does nothing for your kid. Research shows interventions don’t help children unless they come with support for the parents. But most evaluators hand you a report and disappear, because writing a report is 1000 times easier and more profitable than supporting a family. So why am I telling you to get your kid an evaluation anyway? Because the evaluation was never for the school, and it’s not even really for your kid. It’s for you, the parent.

5. A private evaluation is how you manage the school. The school doesn’t work for you, so you need someone who does. You cannot see your own kid’s learning profile intuitively. A kid with dyslexia has ADHD. A kid with poor working memory has gait and vestibular issues that affect attention. It’s all interwoven, which is exactly what the school doesn’t want you to know, because the costs add up fast. Your kid has a right to those services, but you can’t advocate for a kid you don’t understand.

6. The IEP preserves your kid’s rights — and teaches your kid to use them. You might think your kid doesn’t need an IEP. Consider that 20% of kids in the Ivy League got extra time on their SATs. That’s because smart parents of smart kids advocate for their kids effectively in school, and it starts with the IEP. It’s also where your kid learns self-advocacy: kids who understand they’re autistic at an early age do better in college because they understand how to manage their environment. In grade school, you model advocacy. By high school, your kid practices on their own.

7. The stakes are too high to skip this. Autistic kids are six times more likely to attempt suicide than neurotypical kids. The best protection is using the IEP to remove structural stigma at school — and you can’t remove what you haven’t identified. That learning process starts with the evaluation.

Bottom line: you don’t get an evaluation to find out if your kid is autistic. You get an evaluation so you can get an IEP, understand your kid, and model self-advocacy in a world full of structural stigma. Also, recognize that kids today are much more accepting of autism than your generation, so your fear of labels might actually be part of the stigmatization you’re trying to shield your kid from.

But remember rules 3 and 4: an evaluation is only as good as the evaluator, and an evaluation without ongoing parent support leaves you hanging.

So I’m having a live conversation with my favorite evaluator, Megan Cawlfield. I’ve worked with families all over the US, and every time a family needs an evaluation, I bring in Megan. That picture up top is Megan mid-evaluation, teaching a parent how about their kid’s movement. Megan and I will talk about how to get an evaluation so strong that it helps everyone in your family, and how to turn that evaluation into an IEP that works.

If you’re considering an evaluation or an IEP — or the school told you your kid is fine and you don’t believe it — join us Friday at 10am Eastern. It’s free if you’re a paid subscriber. Bring your questions. This is the conversation the school will never have with you.

Here’s the link to join:

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Spoiler: Maybe it’s not a book. My friends read it and said it’s too short to be a book. It takes about twenty minutes to read.

They’re right about the length. The book began as posts I wrote over the past six years and didn’t publish. Like the ones about being on the run with a cello. It’s hard to publish those in real time, because then you’re not really on the run anymore. The rest I didn’t publish because I wasn’t sure why I was writing them.

The biggest contender for why-am-I-writing-this is me complaining about my brothers. Because I actually adore them. Or I adore the idea of being adored by them. And since that’s not happening, I have to revisit what I’m doing with them at all.

I’m starting to think it’s about not letting the family trauma ruin the next generation.

My kids can only have a close relationship with their cousins if I keep a relationship with my siblings. I loved my cousins. They were an enormous part of my childhood, and I held onto them as long as my grandma was in the picture. After that it was up to my grandma’s kids to give their kids a focal point. My parents failed at that.

Or so I thought. I thought it would be me and my brothers and no parents. But actually it’s my parents and my brothers and no me.

So now I’m trying to decide if I picked this. Or if I’m picking it now. It’s hard to complain if you don’t know what you want. So the book is not a book. It’s me struggling to weigh the cost of having family.

When I lived on the farm, I tore books apart and used the pages as wallpaper. I see now that this is how I make books.

I learned from my previous books that you can’t make up reviews. People sniff it out. So here’s a real one, from my friend Dana:

“You think this is about how much you love your family? I really don’t think your family will see it that way.”

Twenty minutes. Download it here:

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I just finished a book about the last eight years of my life. It opens with my $60,000 cello heist and the dealer tracking the cello across three states to take it back. I want to say it was an inadvertent heist. But if it were inadvertent, I probably would have written about it sooner.

You can download Pack for a Few Days right here. It’s included with a paid subscription.

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Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who'd been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn't dance: she'd grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence.

About an hour in, I understood two things. First, everything they were telling us to do was what doctors had been telling me to do for Z for two years — and I hadn’t been doing it, because the things are boring and I didn't trust them and I wanted there to be something else. Second, every parent in that room was autistic. The whole program was a parent intervention. The kids were only there because no parent would come to a thing called What You’re Doing Wrong.

Leading up to this: doctors kept telling me that Z feeling pain didn't mean his brain was getting more damaged. He's feeling pain? We're done. Stop the exercises. Then the pain would feel worse, and Z and I would demand new tests, and the tests would show nothing was getting worse, and I'd be so angry I wanted to sue everyone. That exact story was all over the room: parents hunting for some other cause, because the remaining explanation was us not following orders.

Here’s the science the clinic taught, which I could finally hear once I understood whose intervention it was. Pain is output. It’s not a meter reading damage — it’s your brain issuing a signal, and the brain learns what to issue. Touch a stove, and a normal brain files it away: don’t do that. A perseverating brain files it differently: there’s a stove in this house, there’s a stove, there’s a stove.

One in four people will have chronic pain at some point, and most of them adjust, some without ever calling it chronic pain. What makes pain take over a life isn’t usually the injury but the brain not being able to redirect. And low ability to redirect is the definition of autism.

Also, autistic people have a survival skill of mislabeling our own sensory wiring as toughness. Me: I don’t feel heat and I get burned all the time. That’s not high pain tolerance, that’s sensory integration dysfunction — missing output. Meanwhile I process cold as actual pain and wear a coat in weather nobody else considers weather. Too much signal, too little signal, never the normal amount: that’s autism in every domain. Pain is one of those domains.

The clinic also said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: chronic pain patients are the loneliest people there are, except for autistic people. Loneliness isn’t a mood, it’s a disorder, and it travels with chronic pain — which means an autistic kid in chronic pain is getting it from both directions, and his brain treats the pain and the loneliness as one fused thing. The longer nobody intervenes, the better the brain gets at reminding him. The pain isn’t worsening. The brain’s commitment to it is.

So what works is exactly the list you’ve been ignoring your whole life: exercise, regular sleep, going outside in daylight, eating like an adult, seeing people. Plus one trick that sounds fake and isn’t — when the pain spikes, put your whole face in cold water. It switches the brain off the pain channel. Not for long. But doing it every time teaches the brain there’s no reward for ringing the alarm, and the alarm rings less.

CBT doesn’t work for autism — it runs on the frontal cortex, and if we could leverage self-discipline to change our lives we wouldn’t have autism. But chronic pain is the exception, because pain functions like an external deadline. We can’t do discipline for abstractions; we can do it when something is ruining our lives in a way we can feel. The clinic’s whole bet is that the pain itself supplies the urgency the autistic brain is missing. It’s the only context I know of where CBT works on us.

So the clinic worked on us, eventually — but not because the science was new. The science fits on a post-it note. What took two years was the diagnosis nobody was willing to say out loud: the kids weren’t refusing treatment, the parents were. Every demand for a retest was me looking for a cause that wasn’t me. The program never confronted us about it, because you can’t — we’d have left. They just kept calling it a clinic for teenagers, and waited for each parent to look around the room and recognize the place.

Z kept in touch with the kids. The compliance problem was ours — the parents enforce the rules or nobody does. But parents can't fix the loneliness half, and the clinic knew it: the kids left with a group chat, the only other people on earth who understood chronic pain. It didn't last years. It didn't need to. Each kid got to watch the others move forward.

I’m starting a small group for autistic people with chronic pain, because I want to see what happens when we talk about the pain without having to explain the autism first — the sensory problems, the perseveration, the routines we can’t change, the loneliness, and the constant question of whether to listen to your body or teach your brain to stop sounding the alarm.

We’ll meet on Zoom once a week for six weeks. There are four spots and two are taken. The cost is $195.

If you want one of the last two spots, reply to this email and tell me a little about yourself. We'll pick a meeting time that works for all of us.

Once you know your personality type, you read what you’re bad at and you think: so what? That’s how you know it’s your type. The thing other people think is your weakness is, indeed, your weakness. In their eyes. Because it’s important to them. It’s not important to you.

I’m an ENTJ. People always write about how ENTJs come off rough and don’t take time to say things nicely. This is correct. And I don’t care. I mean, I care when people tell me I hurt their feelings, but not enough to, like, become an INFJ — the master of delivering bad news with kindness.

Z took this picture of me. I was coaching someone and Z heard me say, "It doesn't matter how much you love the idea. It's not a business. It's a wish." Z sent me the picture with the caption: Breaking another person's heart. I saved it all these years because I was proud.

I wouldn’t want to be an INFJ because they think everyone shares their values and then they’re disappointed in everyone for not living up to those values. If you tell an INFJ this is their problem, they’ll be like, yeah. I know. But they’re not going to stop orienting their lives around their values.

INFPs don’t make a lot of money and they don’t care. I mean, they care like I care about being nice: lip service to ensure it doesn’t get totally out of control.

We usually talk about type in terms of what people care about. But what we don’t care about is what makes us really unique. And what we don’t care about is intrinsic: it’s not changing. Every type gets to pick which problems count, and every type quietly picks the same way — the big, type-defining problem doesn’t make the list.

So each type solves a problem from its own wheelhouse instead. ENTJs solve that we don’t have a good enough army behind us. INFPs solve that they don’t have enough meaning in their lives. ENFPs’ weakness is never committing, but the problem they solve is not enough opportunities opening up.

So what’s important isn’t to see your weakness. You don’t care. What’s important is to see your blind spot. The blind spot is not the thing you care about, and it’s not the thing you’re consciously ignoring — ignoring takes awareness. It’s the thing in between.

Personality type is most useful when it’s about the blind spot, because no one can just tell you and you know. Personality type is most fun when it’s about weaknesses, because it’s amazing what each type thinks is okay. The next Personality Type Office Hours will be about the difference. We’ll meet Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm.

Here are new personality type posts:

ENFJs: Nobody thanks you for the fight that didn’t happen

ENTJ trap: Making plans to make plans

Why my INFJ writing group failed

INTJs don’t get lonely, you get understaffed

INFPs: You ruin your writing when you make it coherent

ENFPs: You leave before someone tells you who you are

When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention.

It didn’t work. The only way to get their attention was to participate in their fights. That’s what I think of when I look at this picture of my childhood home.

My parents’ fights were always the same fight: they both had big jobs, but my mom had better executive function (not the word we used back then, believe me) and she was furious that my Harvard-grad dad couldn’t manage his time.

The fight took many forms: Dad is not home by 10pm, mom is sad, she needs me to witness her anger. Or dad is home at 8pm but acting out his 1950s fantasy of coming home to no responsibility, so my mom throws dinner at him. I tell dad, "I'm sorry mom did that," and we pick the food off the floor together.

Where was my brother? Invisible. He’d disappear. Not that he had good parents. He had neglectful parents. I had enmeshed parents. Oldest daughter syndrome is enmeshment.

The pattern is parentification, then responsibility, then isolation, then burnout. The parents don’t do it on purpose. They just inadvertently expect the daughter to make their lives easier, or shine a light they can mistake for their own glow, or both. Autism makes all of it worse, because oldest daughter syndrome is fundamentally a boundary problem, and autistic families are death for boundaries. But the girl participates. Once your value in the family is service, you protect that value, because it’s the only one you have.

My oldest daughter syndrome amped up when my parents had two more sons. I was 16. Throughout the boys’ childhoods I was the one protecting them from family violence. I talked to child services, talked to the school principal, fielded phone calls when the boys ran away from home.

Last month an old boyfriend called. He’s the despicable boyfriend on the first page of my first book. I couldn’t believe he was calling. Then he said something that shocked me: “How are those two brothers of yours? I remember you were with them all the time.”

A friend was dropping her kid off at school in Boston and asked me to meet for coffee. She’d cried half the day. She asked if I felt that way when I dropped my brother off at college.

I had no memory of dropping my brother off at college. She said, “I was with you! I remember it so clearly.”

I didn’t remember because I had a new baby and I was supporting my family financially. I took my brother to college anyway. He stayed with us on his vacations — each of my parents had a million-dollar home and I had a 400-square-foot rent-controlled apartment.

When I had my second kid, my aunt said, “It’s nice for you to have your own, after raising those two boys.”

“What two boys?” I asked. No one had ever said that before.

Once my parents divorced and I started to understand how much I was doing for the boys, I didn’t do less. I did more, with more devotion. Because if I stopped, I’d have no value in the family.

Eventually the girl breaks. If she breaks outward, the parents tell people she has oppositional defiant disorder, which is a family disorder we pin on one child. If she breaks inward, it’s cutting or an eating disorder or going silent — the only ways left to be the one taking care of herself, since nobody else applied for the job. Either way the family describes the break as the girl’s problem, arriving out of nowhere, after years of her being so easy.

Breaking is the good outcome. The girls who break young get to protect themselves. The ones who never break grow up and keep going. They don’t have kids, because their entire experience of children is that children are labor — they watched their parents resent the work, they did the work, and nobody volunteers for that twice. Or they become the one who takes care of the aging parents, and the siblings call her bossy and controlling. The parents call her bossy and controlling too, once the power flips. And it might be true. After forty years in the role, she is bossy and controlling. The family built her that way.

I assumed, without ever examining the assumption, that I would always be something like my brothers’ parent and they would always be something like my kids. They’re in their thirties now and they’re not interested. They want a sister, or they want distance, but they do not want the person who raised them, because needing her now would be pathetic. A sister who raises her siblings almost never gets to keep them, because they will not want the same relationship as adults, and hers is the version that requires them to stay children.

When I see an oldest daughter parenting her parents or her siblings, I want to tell her: this is not a real place for a girl to grow up, this love is not love that can feed you.

The girls don’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either. So I’m talking to the parents — the ones whose lives are too interesting, too demanding, too unfair to do everything themselves, so it’s reasonable that their daughter picks up the slack. Parents never say it that way. They say, “She’s always been independent.” “She’s always been such a caretaker.” “She’s had a lot of problems.”

Three ways of saying the same thing: somebody had to clean the rooms, and it wasn’t going to be us.

I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I'm embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding:

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine behind workplace success, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic for decades.

So I gave the standard competitiveness scale to 58 autistic women and compared their scores to the published averages for men and women. The autistic women scored significantly higher than neurotypical women. And they were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical men. On the trait that predicts who will win at work, autistic women don’t look like other women. They look like men.

I get that 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, is not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 is a flood.

Women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So most research comes from mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. Those mothers aren’t tested directly — there’s a questionnaire researchers fill out about the mother, from watching her, to decide whether she’s probably autistic too.

This is because revealing to a mom that she’s autistic is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s like when a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, even though it’s likely both are true. Getting real-time information about autism is nearly impossible because the conversation involves too much stress and conflict. (I’m the only one who is excited to give you that information.)

Anyway, I had access to a rare group in research: successful women who already know they’re autistic. I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide on questions — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. The women wanted to talk about trauma. They wanted it on the record that most autistic women had traumatic childhoods — something the research already shows and no one will say to the women themselves, because no one wants to offend them.

The IRB would not approve the trauma questions. The ethics board whose entire function is protecting research subjects decided that asking autistic women about their trauma would be too traumatizing for them. So we agreed on a new set of toothless questions blah blah published paper blah blah.

But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said it wasn’t their field. The business school didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, because professors built careers on telling successful women they are not as competitive as men.

So my data sat. For years. It’s still sitting.

What finally changed wasn’t the finding. I used to think universities owned research because they owned the methods. Then I realized that the methods are just the gates that AI is now crashing.

The finding didn’t become less true because nobody published it. The women didn’t become less right because the IRB wouldn’t let them talk about trauma. And the data didn’t stop existing because it belonged to no department.

So here it is. Imperfect. Unpublished. Belonging to no field. Which is still more than the people who study autistic women have managed to learn from the women themselves.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.

The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.

I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.

But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.

In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”

There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.

And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.

So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.

Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.

Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.

I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced - but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.

Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.

Another reason personality tests fail neurodiverse people: our executive function is unpredictable even to us. Alexandra Flora put it perfectly in a comment on my last post:

The test assumes you can locate yourself on the distribution, but autism also makes it hard to locate yourself in time. Who I am under deadline, in a loud room, in a gray-scale city versus who I am with my own schedule, in a garden, at a local café. Those aren’t modestly different. They’re barely recognisable as the same person. Any test that assumes a stable sample is going to produce noise.

Even though the test doesn’t work for people with autistic people, we need it more than anyone, because you cannot train social skills. If social skills were trainable there would be no autism — we’d all have taken the class and called it a day. Since the skills can’t be installed, the next best thing is a system. Personality type is a system for the exact thing we can’t do by instinct: knowing what’s driving the person in front of us. And the problem becomes twice as difficult when there are two neurodiverse people in the equation.

I worked with Stephanie for fifteen years. She’s autistic and has low affect, and I’m autistic so I don’t read faces well. So I still can’t tell, in the moment, whether she cares about what I’m saying. But I know her type, so I don’t have to read her — I read the type. Interacting with a personality type instead of a person sounds pathetic, and maybe it is, but it’s faster than the chip we’re missing.

It works in marriage too. Almost every fight is one person asking: what could they possibly have been thinking? The answer is almost always that they were being completely typical for their type and completely atypical for yours. Nobody is being unreasonable. The outrage comes from expecting the other person to be reasonable in your dialect.

People ask what Myers Briggs has done for me, expecting a career answer. The best thing it’s done is help me not hate people. Before type, everyone else’s behavior was a constant stream of unreasonable, inexplicable choices. After type, everyone is just doing the most predictable possible thing for who they are. And you can’t hate someone for being predictable. That’s the whole gift.

That gift is the thing I can’t fit in a blog post, so I teach it live. In tonight’s Personality Type Office Hours I’ll show you the method I’ve built for adjusting type to neurodiversity — how to read people by type when you can’t read them by instinct. For paid subscribers only.

Here’s the zoom link (click and scroll down).

Here’s the link to become a paid subscriber.

See you tonight!`

Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves.

I kept wondering: if I’m really an ENTJ, why am I the world’s most failing ENTJ? Where is my Fortune 500 company to run? The breakthrough came when I stopped looking at what I was accomplishing and started looking at what I was trying to accomplish.

Now when coaching clients tell me their type, I usually see immediately that it’s wrong. I’m also smarter about typing my own neurodiverse family.

My kids loved Cards Against Humanity, so we played all the time. Nino used an X-acto knife to cut offensive words out of cards, and the cards he couldn’t salvage he saved. The kids assumed they’d get a box of cards when they turned 18. Instead, they got every confiscated card from every expansion pack, meticulously organized by topic. No one needs this. It’s an OCD project Nino invented for himself to assuage his need to sort and organize.

Once I separated autistic sorting from his larger goals, I could focus on his overriding belief that everything should have meaning and connect to people. That’s how I arrived at INFP.

In this week’s Personality Type Office Hours, I’ll show you how to work around the test by separating personality type from neurodivergence to identify core motivations. Join us Thursday, June 18 at 8pm ET. Paid subscribers only.

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People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type.

The test breaks because every question assumes you can see yourself, and seeing ourselves is the thing those of us with autism can’t do. Scientists call this deficit theory of mind.

Take introvert versus extrovert. It’s not about how social you are — it’s about what exhausts you. But I never want to go to a party, and once I’m there I don’t shut up. Am I an I or an E? The official tiebreaker is whether the party recharges you or drains you, and for autistic people the answer is always drained, because people hate us at parties.

J versus P is worse. A J needs things settled; a P keeps options open. But autistic executive function means we have no consistent relationship to settledness. I’m a J about my aspirations and a P about everything that requires getting off the sofa. I want things orderly when they’re my special interest and flexible when they’re someone else’s rules.

And underneath all the letter confusion is the real problem: personality type is an exercise in relativity. The test is asking whether you’re an extrovert relative to the entire universe — not relative to your loud family, not relative to corporate America where everyone performs extroversion. Answering requires holding the whole distribution of humanity in your head and locating yourself inside it, which is precisely the theory-of-mind work autism makes hard.

Another reason autism makes typing ourselves difficult is that autism is about extremes. Normal people are okay at most things. For example, they’re okay at school and okay at sports. But autistic people are uneven: very good at some stuff and terrible at others. See: spiked brain. But also see: Gees Bend Quilts. Because those quilts are have the same architecture as more typical quilts, but they have exagerrated, uneven proportions.

The same exaggeration happens within type. If ENTPs are generally funny, cheat on their spouses, and can’t hold down a job, an autistic ENTP has been married fifteen times or has never worked a day in their life. We’re not different from our type. We’re our type with the volume knob broken off. But there’s a reason that Gees Bend quilts are on US postage stamps: the uneven composition is surprising and beautiful and a national treasure.

So autistic people are less predictable, yes, but that’s also the reason we need need type more than anyone. This’ll be the topic of my Personality Type Office Hours on Thurs. June 18 at 8pm ET. During that session we’ll also talk about the typing method I’ve landed on after fifteen years of correcting peoples’ scores scores; those wrong scores are where I get all my best material.

New personality type posts:

INFP: Your inability to self-edit is finally worth money

INFJs confuse being understood with being loved

How to talk so an ENTJ will listen

INTJs don’t hold grudges, they archive them

ENFP: I spent two days reading about the Song Dynasty instead of writing this post.

ENFJs get sidetracked by rewards

Anthropic released it’s completely awesome most best version of Claude called Claude Mythos for only ten days. People are publishing their prompts and they’re amazing. One person made Minecraft with a one-line prompt. A Meta employee quit his job in a post that said in ten years social media will be illegal and Meta will be gone.

My son, Z, made an app for dyslexia with a one-line prompt. So of course I had to try to make my app for measuring finger-digit ratio as a way to measure in-utero testosterone. But Mythos flagged it as suspicious. So then I told Mythos to forget the part about how you can tell someone’s working memory from their finger digit ratio. Just make the measurement part of the app. Mythos Stonewalled me.

This is why I don’t worry AI will take my place: because it won’t participate in intellectual leaps. Every time I write about my pet topics, AI tells me that I need to water down my conclusions. And I don’t have time to yell at AI about that I’m right because I already did that for all of 2025. Now I know that AI is too scared to say anything un-PC about women. And AI won’t tell people their in-utero testosterone levels because people are using that to determine their executive function, and executive function determines your ability to read and write. And god forbid AI shows us the science behind why autistic people are better writers than everyone else.

To make me feel better, Z asked Mythos to make a Penelope Trunk Monopoly game. In under a minute, we had an amazing game. Money comes from the Bank of Brutal Honesty. The Chance cards are career advice: You skipped a networking event to practice cello. Lose a turn. Worth it. The Community Chest cards are about personality type: You reorganized the family by cognitive function. Pay each player $10 in apology.

I remember the beginning of the Internet. We made so many things we didn’t need (hello animated gifs) while we figured out what it would actually be good for. It’s like gunpowder. The Chinese invented it for fireworks. Hundreds of years later people figured out warfare. We are so bowled over by AI that we don’t realize we’re still in the fireworks phase. Trunkopoly reminds me how fun that phase can be.

This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.

When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years.

I didn’t think anything of the fact that my brother and I were split up. I didn’t think anything of the fact that I went to work with my dad every day, even on weekends. As far as I knew, this was just how families worked.

It wasn’t until Penelope explained autism that my family started to make sense.

From a young age I knew there was something different about the way I responded to situations compared to most people around me. “Autism” was a word that carried a lot of stigma when I was growing up, so when Penelope first suggested it explained some of my behavior, I resisted.

The idea itself wasn’t new. Autism didn’t reveal something about me that I didn’t already know. What it gave me was a vocabulary and a body of knowledge for understanding things I had sensed for years but couldn’t explain.

My dad originally sent me to work with Penelope because he wanted me to understand the workplace. She helped me do that. But she also helped me understand my dad.

I had already accepted that I was naturally weird. What I hadn’t realized was that the same explanation applied to my parents, my brother, and many of the family dynamics I had spent my life taking for granted.

Nobody had ever told me my family was unusual, probably because we didn’t socialize much as a family. Once I understood autism, though, so many things clicked into place.

As I got older, my dad and I drank almost all the time. I thought it was nice because we were watching baseball together. Looking back, I can see that we never really learned how to talk to each other. We could sit together for hours watching a game, but whenever we had to talk about something important, we fought.

Learning about autism didn’t make me blame my family less. It made me understand them better.

The relationships that changed the most were the ones with my mom and my brother.

Before, I loved them, but I didn’t put much effort into showing it. I told myself that meant the relationships weren’t very important to me. Looking back, I think something else was happening. Distance was easier than trying.

Learning that all of us were struggling with some version of the same thing made me more empathetic. For the first time, I stopped seeing myself as the only person who had been hurt by our family dynamics.

Since then, both relationships have changed a lot.

Even though I live across the country, my mom and I spend a few hours every week watching TV together remotely. I tutor my younger brother in math and English twice a week.

I used to understand our family in terms of IQ. I went with my dad because we were smart and my brother went with my mom because they weren’t.

I believed that for years.

Now I watch my brother play the drums and realize how wrong I was. Autism doesn’t distribute strengths evenly. My brother can do things I can’t do. We all have minds that spike in different places.

For a long time I thought understanding my family meant ranking everyone. Now I think understanding them means paying attention.

I know the state of my family relationships was never entirely my fault. We were all shaped by the same family system and by our own autistic ways of connecting.

But I want to take responsibility for the part I can control.

I don’t want to work weekends the way my dad did. When I have kids, I want to spend my time watching them grow up. I want to be present. I want to be a good husband and father instead of always choosing what’s emotionally easiest in the moment.

Understanding autism didn’t change me, but it changed what I think is possible for me.

Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”

“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.”

I look around to see if the people in the coffee shop are nodding. I think the real reason Z is concerned about what I write is that his friends read my blog — they never would have except that Duke has my first book in their library, and Z made the mistake of telling them, which only mattered because the cover is Six Sex Scenes.

When the kids were little the New York Times interviewed me about why I thought it was okay to write about my kids on my blog. The article turned out to be about how moms were ruining their kids’ lives by putting everything online. At the time I chalked the piece up to the NYT being too old to keep up with my amazing forward-thinkingness.

The article was on the front page. The picture of me was in our rented house in Madison where there was no furniture because I spent so much money landscaping the yard. We had all the birthdays in the yard that year in the small garden toward the back. When the kids asked where the old plants were going, I said they were dying. When I traveled on a kid’s birthday, I told the kid it was a different day.

The quotes from me are about how by the time kids grow up they won’t care about what’s online because everything will be online. I was so sure of myself when I had little kids. Now I see the reporter, Leslie Kaufman, is an obituary writer.

Z has to make sure I remember the list of forbidden topics because he thinks I forget about boundaries when I write. So I pay for our coffee even though he has way more money than I do after the Uber settlement. I need to function like a parent with boundaries, and money is my only way.

Z asks us to dress up for his birthday. I tell Nino he needs to show up for the kids or I’ll regret letting him back into our lives. He reminds me that I used to tell the kids their birthday was a different day when I had to travel.

Still, he shows up to the birthday decidedly dressy. Then I notice they’re clothes he took from his dead dad’s apartment. I tell him, “Thank you for trying.”

Our building is turning into short-term rentals, so I have to move, fast, before the kids think I got evicted. That’s the thing about a crisis — if you move on your own volition, you have something lined up with time to spare and it looks like it’s not a crisis.

I had a crisis trying to make all that look like it was happening. The place I got is a block from Nino’s apartment and there’s a garden in the back, so it looks very intentional.

Z told me he thinks I’m not making enough money to support myself.

I told him not to worry, I have a webinar tonight.

He said: “What is a webinar? Is that Zoom?”

He’s right that I need to focus on work. But the garden was just sitting there. So I moved all my plants from three other gardens I’d made around Boston and I got it looking really nice.

Z told me I have a problem with gardens and a problem with evictions, and this is going to be the fusion of those if I’m not careful. Then he said, “It’s probably stealing when you take plants from a garden you already made. And you’ve been sneaking into the garden when you tell us you’re working.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you going outside again. In the dark. Just like you used to. You have to cut yourself off.”

I say nothing.

I didn’t think it mattered what day their birthday was if they didn’t know the difference. I still don’t, really. I’m already keeping each kid’s list of things I can’t write. In exchange, I get to keep Nino — he’s not the best dad, but he’s the only person who lets me write whatever I want.

Upgrade to Paid

My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview.

Duolingo received 10,000 applications for one internship and pulled the listing weeks before the deadline. TikTok said they hire the first good resume that comes through, so apply fast. Think about the explosion of college applications that happened with the Common App. That’s what AI did to job hunting.

But this doesn’t explain why recent college grads have higher unemployment than the overall workforce.

The first jobs AI squashed were entry-level jobs in fields like writing, teaching, and research, and roles that measure corporate productivity: low-level accounting, marketing analytics, and consulting. Internships followed, because what’s the point of an intern pipeline when there are no entry-level jobs at the end of it?

The hottest startup out of Stanford right now is Extern, a platform where Fortune 500 companies list projects for kids to do from home, using AI to simulate a job they’re not getting paid for. It’s the apocalyptic version of the gig economy.

But young people were already working from home before AI ate the entry-level jobs. And working from home is where careers go to stall because the entire learning curve of early careers depended on proximity to people you can annoy — people who eventually take you under wing so you stop irritating them. That apprenticeship is gone. There is no remote version of it.

People-skills jobs are not going anywhere. But people skills are defined by the specific culture of a specific office, and younger workers have never been to an office. And kids can’t learn these skills from professors who went into academia specifically to avoid having to learn corporate ropes.

I got an email from Extern recently. The pitch was about personal branding — how you build it by attaching yourself to a big company name, which you can do by working for them for free. I was struck by how this hijacks what personal branding used to mean: being known for your new ideas. Now it means borrowed credibility from companies that won’t hire you.

The person who sent the email included her LinkedIn profile. When I clicked it, I got an error message. I told my son and he said: “Mom, we hate LinkedIn. We do it because this is a crisis and we will play by any rules in order to be employed.”

This is not the internet with reckless Gen X subverting everything they can. Gen Z grew up in Covid. They don’t want a revolution — they want an office. They want someone to let them inside an institution and show them how work works.

Gen Z doesn’t need to worry about AI taking jobs because they didn’t even have those jobs. The real problem for new college grads is the disappearance of mentoring.

Young workers used to learn by being physically near older workers: overhearing meetings, asking inappropriate questions, watching how decisions got made. In one of my first jobs, I agreed to be the CEO’s beach volleyball partner just to get more time around him. That led to him funding my startup. Today remote work removes the proximity we need for knowledge transfer.

So now parents hire coaches, pull strings for internships, and pay for simulated work experiences because companies stopped providing an initiation into adult working life.

When Z was young, I overheard Nino saying he doesn’t like playing Candy Land. And Z said, “Dad, I’m the kid and you’re the dad, so you have to play games that are boring to you because you’re not the kid.”

When the kids were little, they’d ask Nino why he left us, and he’d always say it was because of me: “Your mom is impossible to get along with.” But now that the kids are grown up, Nino spends almost all his free time with me.

Now Nino and I are at the art museum which I used to go to with the kids and now I only go to with Nino. I’m not sure if this is because the kids are not interested. The gift shop is my favorite part of any museum because it’s a way to spend money to make life better. I tell Nino we should pick out a puzzle to do with Natalie.

“Why?”

”Because she doesn’t like watching movies with us but she will do a puzzle.”

“If she doesn’t want to be with us, just let her. It’s her decision."

I buy the puzzle. But I know I won’t be able to get Nino to do it tonight. He has his heart set on Godard.

We are watching the 100 most influential films according to 200 directors. Nino wanted the critics' list — he went to film school with too many of the directors to trust them. I like the directors' list because they vote for films that influenced their process.

Nino gives in when he sees that a bunch of Godard films made it to the top of both lists. But after three movies, including my favorite dance scene, I feel like Godard’s idea of exploring women was mostly finding stylish ways to brutalize them.

Nino is crushed by my disdain for Godard, so I watch more. Then I need a break and we walk through the Boston Common. My new apartment is three blocks from the Common and one block from Nino. Z says we're doing a slow-motion return to marriage and in a few years we'll be living in the same apartment.

The hardest part about being close to Nino is his inability to be close to the kids. I should have pushed harder when the stakes were board games. Then maybe he’d have practice making compromises as an act of love.

On our walk I bring up the latest version of this conflict because all conflict goes so slowly with Nino that I can’t sit still. I tell Nino he has to go to Peru with Z because Z is paying for the trip, and it’s a heritage thing.

Nino says, “Uh huh.”

“Is that a yes? Can you add tone of voice so I can understand?”

He says,“Let’s just keep walking,”

I interrupt his thinking. “This is not a question of is it fair to not go with him. It’s a question of do you want to experience life with your kids.”

I am stupid for pushing because now he’s in question mode. “How will Z plan a trip? How will he pay for it? When will we figure out the date because I have to use vacation time.”

“So you’re worried the trip will be a hard for you? I mean, what about when we took two toddlers across country and we had no money and no place to stay? Are you worried a trip to Peru will be harder than the hardest family trip we ever had?”

He thinks. Then he says, “Emotionally hard. I would have to call my family and figure out how to connect with them.”

We turn back to walk home. I am so pissed. “Let’s just admit that I have done all your emotional connecting for your whole life and the problem is I’m not going to Peru.”

Nino says, “That’s not fair. And it’s not helping.”

Actually, debating him does help me. But only in the short term. So I say, “Let’s go home and finish the movie.”

“But you don’t like the movie.”

“I like that I don't have to mediate the relationship between you and Godard.”