Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

(Thanks for bearing with me while I did some project analysis and new subject-finding. This the 31st interview, and the plan is to publish the next 19 interviews weekly, without any further breaks, bringing us to a final tally of 50. At that point, I’ll also have some cool announcements about what will be happening next with “Is Anyone OK?” and with Social Cohesion Lab more generally. )

For now though, we’re talking with Abbie about getting rides in L.A., Hair Politics, and Star Trek.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

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Abbie

Abbie is recently retired. She just moved back to New Orleans, her hometown. She first left shortly after high school, eventually living in California, Texas, Tennessee and South Carolina, before returning home 40 years later. She’s married, has two adult children, and her father has moved in with her and her husband, so she is navigating a multigenerational home.

I got a home with a pool, which I love, and my kids are both out of the house and grown. So kind of starting a new chapter, I guess. Since we moved back here, I’ve already had people visit us. When I lived in South Carolina, in the 20 years we lived there, we might have had three people visit.

My dad, he’s pretty good right now, health-wise. But, you know, cognitively he’s declining a little bit, it’s kind of like having a toddler with a bank account, because when he needs something, right away he comes in like, We’ve got to do it now.

My parents got divorced when I was in about seventh grade. And we lived with my dad and we saw my mom infrequently. After I graduated from high school, when I was 19, I got pregnant and had the baby and gave the baby up for adoption. After that, I wanted to do something totally different. So I moved to California. I lived in L.A. from 1986 to 91, and then in San Francisco from 91 to 99. Loved California, beautiful. Liked San Francisco better than L.A. And everything you hear about people who live in L.A., it’s true: There were a couple of times where we were going out, just meeting for drinks, and I would say, you know, you want to swing by and pick me up? And they were like, Oh, no, no. People just didn’t pick each other up.

I worked in hotels when I was in high school, so when I got to California, I wound up going back into hotels, wound up getting a job for a hotel software company, traveling and installing computer systems. I traveled for four or five years, basically not being home more than a weekend at a time. And then I met my husband at a hotel in Florida, a hotel where I was installing.

When I got pregnant, we wanted to be near family, so we moved to South Carolina, near where Michael’s sister lived, so we could drive to New Orleans or drive to his family in Tennessee, because South Carolina was kind of in the middle. So we stayed for 25 years while we raised our kids. And then as soon as our youngest graduated from college, we moved back to New Orleans.

When my parents divorced, that was a pretty big thing. The reason being that she had gone to college. I mean, they got married in the early sixties, so women weren’t doing things other than being parents, for the most part. In the seventies, things were happening and she wanted to go back to school, to get a degree in commercial art, and she wanted to start her own business. And that’s not what my dad wanted. He just wanted a wife. And so that whole thing was pivotal for me because I thought, Well, I’m not going to get married until I’ve done all the things that I want to do, you know? We didn’t get married until I was about to turn 35.

My dad started dating somebody when I was a senior in high school. She didn’t have kids and she didn’t really know what to do with the kids you know? But I moved away pretty quickly after that. I abandoned my brother, he says, went to the other side of the country. We took the cushions off of the couch one time, put them on the floor to lay on them to watch TV. And she freaked out, you know, we weren’t supposed to touch her stuff. It’s not like we took them outside or anything, you know?

What was the experience like, being pregnant at 19, giving the baby up for adoption? Has it stayed with you?

New Orleans is a pretty small town when you really look at it, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to leave because, you know, a lot of people saw me pregnant. And then I didn’t have a baby afterwards. It was just wanting to have a little more anonymity, not having to answer that question all the time.

Strangely… not strangely, ironically… whatever, about four years ago, Eileen is her name, the girl that I gave up, she found me. And so we have reconnected and have a relationship now. I wasn’t going to do anything to find her because I didn’t want to screw anything up if her parents never told her. Adoptions were not really very common back then, you know. The baby-daddy’s mom wanted to raise the child and be like, Oh, this is Aunt Abbie. And that was just a Lifetime movie waiting to happen, you know? So I had to be strong, I had to tell people, this is what I’m doing, I’m not going to do it any other way.

Eileen, when she was about 18, started looking but couldn’t find anything about her parents because the agency was gone and the records had been lost in a fire. And then apparently at some point, her father’s sisters were like, We need to find her, you know, they got the 23 and me in an attempt to find her. Many years later, Eileen was about to foster a couple of kids, so they gave her free DNA tests. And so Eileen just thought, Well, hell, I’ll just do it. And she matched with her father and reached out to him and then he gave her my information, without even talking to me or consulting me or anything. We went to high school together so he gave her my Facebook information, from a reunion. That’s how she found me.

But it’s been really good. We’re very like minded. We have very similar parenting styles, you know, it’s been an interesting sort of “nature versus nurture” kind of a revelation, I guess.

What was life like in South Carolina?

It’s a small town outside of Charlotte, so nobody visits. I mean, there’s a NASCAR track. And the number one tourist attraction is the Billy Graham Library. We were in Nashville when I got pregnant, my husband kind of freaked out about being a dad and was worried about money, he started doing some online gambling and ran up some pretty big debt. We worked through it, but I didn’t want to live in Nashville. His sister had just moved to South Carolina, and she had a nine year old. So that’s why we moved without even really looking into the town.

Turns out it was a little more Bible Belt-ish than I would have liked. But it was an okay place to raise kids. I mean, not as open minded as I would have liked, I guess. We’re not church goers. And so every time you would meet somebody, they would be like, Oh, have you found your church home yet? It’s like, No, we’re still looking. Couldn’t very well say we’re not going. If I’m in a grocery store and somebody says something, I’m surely not going to be like, Ooh, don’t talk to me about God, you know?

But my kids found their way to meeting different people. You just gravitate to people who think like you. And my kids are not straight. They’ve found other gay friends, you know, and it worked out okay for them.

I’d love to hear how you feel things are right now for you.

Well, for me, they’re great because, you know, I’m back home, got a great house, near my family. The only real issue that I have is that my father is an 85 year old man who probably hasn’t watched any news other than Fox News for 20 years. He really has not had much exposure to anything other than his little bubble, you know. We got married in the French Quarter. My stepmom almost didn’t come because she thinks people die in the French Quarter. Which they do, but they die everywhere. But after the ceremony was done, we went outside and we did a parade in the Quarter. She didn’t come, she stayed in the hotel to be safe. I never had a conversation with her about it, but it pretty much has to do with Black people. And, you know, it’s hard to say my stepmom is racist, my dad is racist. It’s hard to know that. But it’s a weird kind of thing because my dad has all the talking points of a Republican, a serious Trumpster. But one of my daughters is dating a Black person and he doesn’t have a problem with that. It’s like, “Not the Black people I know, it’s those other ones” kind of a racism. How can you do that?

And when I try to have conversations with him about politics, he only listens to one thing. He’s just been so sheltered. Like, my oldest got a septum piercing, you know, and he was like, Oh my God, why would she do that? Why would she mar her beautiful face like that? My youngest came out as non-binary and that has just, you know, blown his mind. He can’t even understand it at all. And so it’s a struggle to have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell kind of relationship.

At my age, I’ve seen a lot of different things happen. You’ve got a lot of young people that are the driving force that may not understand the best way to communicate with somebody who has a completely different view. They’re pretty much like, Fuck you if you don’t like me, you know? That may not be the best way, but it takes people like that to get things moving.

My dad has told me, as recently as a couple of months ago, that his biggest regret is not raising me to be a better Christian. And I said, But obviously you must believe I’m a good person? He’s like, Well, yeah... That’s the kind of conversation that I have with my dad. I kind of made a conscious effort starting around December, that I was not going to get sucked into it, because I have a lot of friends who are just so worried about the state of the world that they can’t, you know, talk about anything else. So it almost feels better to be like, Okay, I am not going to DC and making a stand at my age. So I almost feel like I have to pretend it’s not happening, you know, like La La La La La.

My father is anti-abortion. He sure is. But ironically, and this is the point that baffles me, apparently right before my parents divorced, my mom had an affair and got pregnant and they didn’t know who the father was so my mom got an abortion and my dad recently told me about this. I don’t know why. He saw a picture of me that he had never seen before on our digital frame. And it looked like a photographer had taken it, and apparently the guy that my mom had the affair with was a photographer. So he thought that the photographer had taken this picture. That’s what started the whole conversation. And so, he tells me about it and I said, Dad, you’re anti-abortion. And he said, Well, there were extenuating circumstances in this case. And I was like, That’s kind of why it needs to be legal, right? Because there’s always extenuating circumstances. He’s like, Well, I don’t want people using abortion for birth control. I’m like, that’s not really what’s happening. If I had to guess, more than anything, he wants to be a good person and he wants to go to heaven and he needs to believe these things in order to go.

My cousin is gay and my dad accepts her 100%, you know. But we were watching Downton Abbey the other day and the very first episode, two guys kiss, and he was like, Uhh, and I’m like, I thought you said you’re okay with gays. Cousin Lisa is gay. Well, that’s different. So women gay is different than male gay? He doesn’t want anybody to think that he is. I’m like, just because you’re not repulsed by two men kissing doesn’t mean you’re gay. Although, you know the chances of you being 100% straight are pretty, pretty low.

There is definitely something to the sundowner thing, where at night he gets way more anxious. I’m on his bank account now, so I’ll get a message that somebody requested a password reset on his bank account at midnight, you know, and I go into the room and he’s like, Well, I just wanted to get in and look at this and that, I want to make sure I have enough. And I’m like, Yeah, let’s wait until the morning, you know?

Tell me a little about your relationship with your children and your husband?

My kids, we’re very close. I mean, they came for Christmas. My oldest is a teacher and my youngest works at a dance studio. They’re off at Christmas time, so they came on December 21st and stayed until January 7th. I feel like, Oh, my kids love me. I mean, for them to come and stay for two weeks, during the holidays, I think that says a lot.

There was a bumpy teen high school time with my husband that they kind of had to get through. We all had to get through. He kind of had a little bit of, I don’t know, a midlife crisis. But we’re on the other side of that now.

Right before COVID, my friend, who’s also our hairdresser, had told Michael something about his beard, like, oh, just grow it out or something. And then COVID happened and his hair started growing. He became part of this Facebook group, he was obsessed with this whole concept of growing his hair out and growing his beard out. He always had it very short. And, you know, all of a sudden he was like, I don’t give a shit what you think about my hair, my beard, I’m growing it out. He was just, I don’t know, pushing back on everything that we were saying, he was arguing with the kids. Finally we got him to go to a therapist, because us talking wasn’t helping. He kind of discovered that he had been a people pleaser all his life and has never really told people how he truly felt about stuff. And so the reaction with the beard and the hair was kind of like, I’m going to do what I want to do. And who knows where that stems from, his childhood potentially.

I had a conversation with my dad about hair. Both of my kids have a tendency towards being on the hairier side. They both have, like, some facial hair that they have to shave off if they’re going to be a girl and, you know, shaving their legs and under their arms and things like that. My dad was just like, Why doesn’t she shave under her arms? Things like that are so foreign to him. He was like, why does Jamie (my child) want to come out as non-binary? It doesn’t make sense. When I was a kid or teenager, one time he said something like, Oh, you have a little bit of hair on your lip there. He said, You should shave that. And I said to him, that made me feel terrible. Like there was something wrong with me.

What I think the gender movement is trying to say is some women have hair, some men don’t. To have to put everything so neatly into one particular thing, I don’t know why people want to do that.

I have a therapist I see once a month, my husband does too, my kids too. I mean, we’re big on having somebody to talk to that is not that close, you know. I feel good about my mental health. I feel good about my husband now that he has been, you know seeing a therapist and working through that.

Do your finances take up space in your head?

Not really. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to retire at 60 if we didn’t have the savings. And honestly, I tried to get my husband to do it, but he’s a little more worried. Ironically, the thing when I got pregnant and he put us into debt, he kind of did a 100% turn around, of not wanting to spend money ever, you know, he struggles. I wanted him to retire as well, but he wants to wait until he’s 65. We really only need the job for health care. But he isn’t unhappy, so we figured, keep that job for as long as it’s not stressful. It’s just a few times we’ve argued where, you know, I wanted to get tickets to Jazz Fest and he’s like, Oh, that sounds expensive. Yeah, it’s $300. And there was a time when $300 was a problem, but not now, you know?

Sometimes when I decide I don’t want to do anything but sit in the pool all day, I do feel a little bit guilty even though we had the conversation before, like you’re not going to be resentful of me being retired? And he isn’t. So I don’t feel like I’m a mooch, for lack of a better word.

Do you have a circle of friends that you see regularly? Do you have a crowd or a community of people now that you’re back?

I see my brother and sister-in-law a bunch, and then one of my brother’s friends, he and his wife we’ve hung out with a couple of times. I have four people, you know, that I can hang out with, and then a couple of ancillary people, you know, here and there. I’m not lacking for social.

I did put on Facebook that I was retiring and moving back to New Orleans. And so a couple of people that I went to high school with and knew said, Oh, when you get here, look me up. And I haven’t done that yet. I’m kind of getting into a bit of a routine, I suppose.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being you’re living the perfect life, you’re the exact person you want to be, in the exact place you want to be, what would you say you are?

I would say, probably eight, nine. I mean, I could lose 15lbs. I could possibly do a few more things around the house, you know. But, right now I’m pretty high up there because I have made a change, I was down, I was not happy, so I found a place where I can feel happy. I mean, there’s a pool behind me. You get the idea, I found a place that makes me feel I’m on vacation. I’m helping my dad, even though there are frustrations with him, it is definitely a very satisfying thing to be able to provide that for him. And so I would say eight. If you ask me how I thought the country was going politically, I’d probably be a three, you know. If you separated those things, I think that would be way different.

Do you not feel proud of America?

I mean, not so much anymore. I guess the world in general, you know, it’s hard to reconcile what’s going on in the Ukraine and what’s going on in Iran and what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, you know. You think, thank God I live here. But would I be more proud if I were Swiss? I don’t know. From a distance, it seems appealing. I guess if citizenship and money were no problem, I would probably pick something like New Zealand, you know, because that seems more my personality. I’m not a gun toting person.

We’ve been watching a documentary on Star Trek. And it’s kind of interesting because, you know, they wanted to talk about race. And it was difficult, they had to do this alien thing so they could talk about the topic without actually, you know, having other races, they could have species. So it was kind of interesting to see that as a vessel for social change potentially. But I don’t know.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

A couple of weeks ago I explained that I was going to take a break from the publication of “Is Anyone OK?” to have myself and readers think about the kinds of stories or people who may be missing from the current batch of conversations which have so far been released.

Your responses and my own instinct aligned about one key thing: If we are going to get to the heart of how people are doing, we should probably be looking for people who are at financial extremes to reflect on their lives.

We all know the adage that money doesn’t buy happiness. But my father-in-law says that money solves 80% of your problems and 100% of your money problems. Are rich people flourishing because of their wealth? Are poor people flourishing in spite of their lack?

If I look back at all the interview subjects so far, there have been a range of ages, cultures, politics and locations, but I would estimate that almost all of them fall somewhere between the top 50% of earners and the top 5%. That’s basically households earning somewhere above $75,000 per year but below $350,000. (Some may have substantial debts and some may have substantial assets.) On the whole I would say that there has not been a glaringly obvious correlation between those who are more affluent feeling that they are doing better than those who are less. We have seen plenty of people with relatively modest incomes who say they are doing very well, and several well-paid professionals who don’t.

But does that all change when we look further to the end of the spectrum? Maybe it is obvious that someone who is experiencing extreme financial hardship is going to rate themselves as ‘less OK’ than someone who isn’t. But I suspect there is going to be nuance to this, and I have been surprised already by this project. (This feels like a good time to remind everyone that I am not a social scientist, that there is a lot of quantitative data about this question, but that I am much more interested in the narratives behind this data.)

So, for the next short while, we will be focusing on finding subjects who are in the top 1% or in the bottom 20%. For reference, the top 1% in the US is someone in a household with an income above $650,000–$800,000 or someone who has assets above $10 million. The bottom 20% would have a household income of less than $25,000, and might have zero savings or in fact be overall in debt.

I hope you don’t think it crass to so explicitly use this demographic for directing our conversations — it just seems naive to not be honest about how important this one factor could be in determining how people feel their lives are going.

Once more I will turn to you our readers for some creative support. If you are, or know someone who lies in either of these categories and would be willing to talk to me, please get in touch. Like all of our interviews, we will change all identifying information to protect anonymity. It will take a little while to gather some of these subjects, and as always, we appreciate your interest in this project.

Ben

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PS: For those of you who are paying supporters, while we do this story-gathering, we have paused charges. You can still subscribe though. I deeply appreciate all the engagement.

Through Social Cohesion Lab, I have been conducting long-form interviews with regular people for the last 7 months, and have just completed the 30th published conversation. I’ve done roughly 60 hours of direct interviews, and have published over 90,000 words worth of personal narrative. Jess has done more than 100 unique portraits and illustrations.

Doing this has been a real treat and an extraordinary window into the varied lives of people across the country. Click here for the full list if there are any you missed or want to revisit.

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The goal I set at the beginning of the project was to complete at least 50 interviews over the course of about 1 year, and with about 5 more already in the pipeline, we are coming up to 2/3rds of the way through. But as the end comes into view, I’ve realized 3 things:

1. I haven’t paused to look at the cohort of interview subjects as a whole, and reflect on who might be missing from a semi-representative sample1 of American lives,

2. I haven’t paused to consider whether there are any key questions which might be missing from my typical roster of interview prompts,

3. And I haven’t asked our readers to weigh in on these same questions.

   

This project, by definition, will be incomplete. Behind the scenes, I’ve considered things like age, gender, geography, race and political ideology in trying to construct a meaningful (if not statistically complete) narrative sample. But honestly, I could just as reasonably choose to consider things like religious beliefs, employment, family size, financial status, education or many other factors. There are infinite ways to construct a sample group from which to draw meaningful conclusions about how people feel their lives are going and why they feel that way.

And even if we did have a fully representative sample, lots of people are mixed bags (and that becomes more apparent through longer qualitative conversations, in contrast to quantitative surveys, which sort of flatten opinions into specific clusters.) People have complex, sometimes apparently contradictory beliefs about all sorts of things. So even if you have a really “representative” group of people, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to fully infer general feelings about something as broad as life satisfaction. Two people of the same race, age, geography, and income might have totally different opinions about their parents.

Still, maybe you have been reading along and wondering, Why has he not asked this or that person this or that question? Asking new questions isn’t that hard: I usually have a few initial prompts and ideas, and then let the conversation be led by the interest / emotional enthusiasm of the interview subject, but others can usually be raised organically.

In short, I know that by conducting 50 interviews we will never cover the full range of American life-satisfaction, but I want to take time for a vibe check to suss out any glaring omissions. Are there people or ideologies or histories or stories or topics which you think would enrich this project?

You can help in two specific ways:

1. You can send me a private message, or comment on this post, if you think of any person or questions you’d like to see. “Not enough Cowboys are interviewed!” or “Ask people whether they like mayonnaise!” You can also fill in this form.
   

2. You can send me a private message with a specific person you’d like to recommend for an interview if you think they might bring a perspective which is missing. As a reminder, the interviews are anonymous and you can also volunteer yourself: info@socialcohesionlab.org

I have my own ideas about who is currently missing. I plan to take a few weeks now, to give you all a bit of time to send over any suggestions, combine them with my own instincts, and track down subjects who fit the bill.

As always, I really appreciate the interest and enthusiasm I have felt from readers while producing this project, and look forward to continuing soon!

Ben

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Perlah about mission trips to Pennsylvania, and dancing with her mother.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

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Perlah

Perlah, 23, is a university student at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. It’s her second semester, she’s hoping to become a speech therapist. She’s originally from Manilla, in the Philippines, and lived as a child in Malaysia. Her mission with the LDS (Mormon) Church was in Pittsburgh.

About 10 million people live in Manila, it’s very diverse. I do feel like I have big city kind of vibes. I don’t think I could live in a small town, 30 minutes away from civilization. All my life up until I was 20, was spent growing up in Southeast Asia, and I love it. I want to move back there. Utah is great, but I love Southeast Asia.

I was homeschooled and I took the high school diploma test in the Philippines. I served a mission for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; for a year and a half I was out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the first time I lived in the US. I became a much more outgoing, much more sociable person and it gave me a lot of life skills and really prepared me for university, I would say. I spent nine months back in the Philippines and then came out here to Provo for fall semester.

My dad’s American, my mom is Filipina. My dad was a member of a church mission in the Philippines but moved back to the Philippines to work because he fell in love with the language and the culture and met my mom through a mutual friend. It’s me, and two younger brothers under me.

We visited the US, my dad’s family, kind of intermittently up until 2010. So I didn’t know much about the life and culture of my other half. My parents are separated now, maybe ten years or so, it was just my mom who raised us. I haven’t had contact with my dad for years. No idea where he is or what he’s up to. My mom is in the Philippines.

What’s your relationship like with your religion at the moment? Where does it fit in your ranking of things that are important to you?

I’d always had belief in God, I was raised in it. There was that sense of community, which I think really helped anchor me. But it was kind of secondary growing up. It was after my mission I saw the value of it. I saw how I changed because of it. I had amazing spiritual experiences and many things (that people could call coincidences that I don’t see as coincidences) that were just perfectly aligned with what I needed, and reaffirmed my faith that, okay, this is important. It changed my life and continues to change my life for the better.

I actually didn’t want to go to BYU, I didn’t want to live in Utah. I thought, it’s dry, cold, the opposite of the Philippines. And BYU is known to be a pretty academically rigorous school. And I like to challenge myself, but I was like, How rigorous are we talking? I applied to six different schools. Things were not working out. Out of the several schools I applied to, it was only BYU that was working with tuition, with my living situation, and I thought, Well, that’s God’s way of letting me know I need to go to BYU I guess.

I love it more than I expected. It’s definitely very different from a lot of schools. Classes, whether it’s statistics or geography, they often start with a spiritual thought and have a scripture verse that comes from the Bible or the Book of Mormon that is relevant to what we’re going to talk about, to just kind of set the tone for class.

It’s growing more diverse in terms of the student population here, but mostly it’s White folks from all over the US. It’s just something I’m not accustomed to because I was used to growing up with a lot of different races, a lot of different opinions, a lot of different religions.

What was your relationship to America growing up in the Philippines? Did you feel connected?

I visited in 2010, I was about seven years old. We went to Colorado where my dad’s family’s from, and they had a summer parade and water parks and I really enjoyed that. They don’t really do that in the Philippines. Wide open roads, no real traffic, I think maybe a simpler lifestyle compared to the hustle and bustle of Manila.

America was more a concept or an idea growing up than an actual place. I didn’t really know much about it. Americans tend to be more individualistic because of the landscape, the climate. How people live and work and flourish, the American dream, a subset of those ideals is probably individualism. It’s my space, my home. In the Philippines, where you have lots of extended family, it’s very close, even if you’re far apart.

They don’t really have music as an everyday part of life, don’t enjoy singing karaoke, I feel like they’re not as carefree as Southeast Asians.

Even though I lived in the Philippines for a total of 14 years, I still don’t really speak the language. It’s embarrassing I suppose, or just unfortunate but it’s just the way we were raised. We were home schooled. Both our parents spoke fluent English and also fluent Tagalog, but I guess it just wasn’t an emphasis for them to carry that over. I don’t know if they anticipated that we would all want to study in the U.S. or it just wasn’t something on their radar.

So there was some separation there from people who didn’t speak English. Now that I’m in the U.S. I speak the language, I’m exploring the culture, but there’s still a separation because I don’t look necessarily like other Americans. You’re not fully at home no matter where you go, even if you’re in both home countries.

How do you feel you’re doing, how do you feel things are going in your life?

I truly think this is one of the best seasons of life right now. I finished my mission a year ago, it was hard, but very rewarding. The way I developed in my faith set me up to explore and to establish myself wherever I choose to. I just finished my first semester, and I’m making friends, meeting new people, seeing old friends, getting to reconnect with my family that I haven’t really connected with, my dad’s side. I live with my grandparents right now, my dad’s dad and his wife. And so it’s just been truly a season where everything’s new, there’s just a lot of good. Things aren’t always going to be great, that’s just how life is right now.

What about your mission was so rewarding?

I was very shy, very closed off, very picky with who I chose. But after going out and talking to people, being pushed way out of my comfort zone every day, it offered me a lot of growth. And when I think of who I was before versus who I became at the end, it’s like night and day. Now I seek out people. I want to be more vulnerable, be more open.

We believe in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, that testifies of truth and helps guide you in good ways and good things. And I would feel that good feeling, like this is why I was called to Pennsylvania, of all places in the world. There’s like 400 different missions, I could have been called to Mongolia or Florida or Chile. We have no say, I could have been called anywhere, but I was called to Pittsburgh.

How’s the college experience so far?

My mom was like, You can live with your grandparents, it’s going to be great, it’s very nice of them. You might get bored, they’re older people and your phases of life are very different. But honestly I haven’t felt that. We play boardgames and card games together. I’m able to kind of help and serve in different capacities.

The two best friends I had in the Philippines are both guys and they’re both out here in Utah now. One is married now, so it’s a different dynamic. But I sleep over at their house, I’m good friends with his wife now. I think the one that isn’t married still likes me. So it’s like… I don’t know about that. But yeah. (Laughs.)

How did you decide on your course of study, speech therapy?

I think it’s a good culmination of all my aspirations. My mom, even years back, was like, We should consider it. And then after my mission, I had a way better idea of what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to do law or international relations, I wanted to minor in Mandarin, work for the State Department, work as an interpreter. But my mission president, in one of my last interviews, he’s like, I could see you being a good lawyer and sitting in a corporate office, making good money, being good at it. But I don’t see you happy in that job. I was like, Huh, I don’t think I see myself happy either, now that you mention it. And so it kind of redirected me.

Tell me about your relationship with your mom? It seems solid.

She is my best friend. She is a source very much of strength and also very much of joy. Being a single mom, having to be the rock of the family for years on her own, I am who I am because of her. I would love to become a fraction of who she is. We would dance together. She taught me to sing, taught me to love music and to love learning and language. She’s awesome at everything, which is kind of frustrating. (Smiles.)

She’s not looking to move from the Philippines right now, but she’s thinking of maybe coming to the US because all her kids are probably going to be here. So once we’re a little older, probably a little more established here, she’ll want to come and be closer to us.

Living in a third world country for most of my life, you see a lot of dichotomy. You see a lot of hardship, and it’s blatant. It’s out there, it’s open. There’s people living in ramshackle makeshift houses along the side of a polluted river, and the living conditions are hard. You also feel the heartache of political corruption, the rich getting richer and then withholding from the people who really need it. And so, coming to the US where arguably the hardships are not as extreme, what people think is hardship is different from what I’ve seen. It’s not necessarily something that weighs on me… like, I wish it was different, I do. But also, I don’t have the power to change that.

When my dad split, he lived with his relatives in New Mexico for a year or something. He began to estrange himself entirely from my mom’s side of the family and his side of the family. I think he changed his name, was just really going off the rails. And we didn’t expect it. He was a good guy, really respected, a very intelligent man. He befriended the lonely, he was engaged in service. And yeah, I would have loved to get to know him when he was in his right mind.

But he didn’t choose that way, and I haven’t heard from him in years. I’m really grateful that his side of the family kept that love for us, even after having been gone so long and living thousands miles away, all these years not really having contact

I felt a weight a lot of the time and felt very isolated because of the separation. My mom, she took it in stride, went through a lot of very hard things and I was young, didn’t really understand what she had to go through to get us to where we are. Now that I’m older, I see she took the brunt of it so we didn’t have to.

And she’s never said a bad thing about him even after all he’s done. She’s like, Yeah, I pray for him. If he turns around, I hope for your sake as his kids that he would have the chance to reconnect with you. But I don’t know.

Do you read the news? Are you politically motivated?

My mom and my other relatives are very politically savvy. She’s very up to date on what’s going on here in the US and in the Philippines. I don’t really seek it out on my own. Probably could be good for me to understand more about it, but I just don’t really follow the news. It usually has to come from other people or if it’s really the top headlines somewhere, then I’ll hear about it. I feel like the politics in the Philippines are a mess and there are a lot of messy aspects of US politics as well. I guess with college students, it doesn’t seem to take much of a focus.

I think I prescribe more to conservative political views. I’m not extreme one way or the other, but things that Trump tends to do, I tend to agree with more. I don’t agree with all of them, but I agree more than probably with what Biden did or would do or any of the Democratic Party.

There’s a lot of progress to be made, like being a good steward of the environment. I think we have a long way to go with that. But yeah, I’m a single woman, but I can walk around in a college town at night when it’s dark and be relatively safe. So that’s a good thing.

Often these views are presented as extremes. When I think of liberal ideals, there is an abandonment of religion, there’s an abandonment of absolute truth. It’s more an emphasis on “you do you” or… What was it? Am I correct in that? I don’t remember. I think we need concrete ideals. I think we need concrete plans, guidelines which people should morally abide by.

I think with the illegal immigrant thing, it got out of hand in a liberal sense. But I don’t know if I’m accurate in my understanding of their views or what have you, but I think that’s where I’m at.

Weighing up your mental life, personal life, your family, where you live. You weigh it all up in whatever combined way which feels natural to you, how satisfied would you say you are? Out of 10?

At the moment I’d probably say nine.

Wonderful. Last question, what’s your relationship with personal technology, being online?

Growing up, as a teen, I was very, very much online, YouTube, games, social media, hours spent on it. And I still to some degree spend hours on it. But going back to that mission — it was very formative for me — we weren’t allowed to use social media for a year and a half. People would just focus on traditional proselytizing. I saw my relationship with social media change like, Oh I can live a life without it. I’ve uninstalled Instagram. I’m still on it, I post on it occasionally, but I keep the app uninstalled so I don’t use it mindlessly. There are some mindless moments for sure, but compared to how it was as a teenager, I think it’s a lot better. I am more out of the loop.

During COVID… We believe in prophets… And one of the prophets at the time, his direction was to try a social media fast for I think seven days, try not to get consumed by it. And I did it. I was a teenager at the time, and I felt great. I loved it. I aim to do it twice a year, take a month off of social media, just not really be on it. I think some of that attitude and mindset carries to members of the church, to the faith generally: We have the aspiration to use things for good and be mindful of what we use.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Terry about fungal communities, and the tears of clowns.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Terry

A freewheeler who likes to stay put, Kenny has lived in the Bay Area his whole life, and has pursued several professional paths, like a long period in which he was producing aboriginal musical instruments, or his 20-year-plus career as a falconer. Given his various lives, he’s not always easy to pin down to a single narrative thread.

Two years ago, a friend of mine nominated me to be King of Fools in Southern California. So I was King for a year. The King designs parties, and helps to promote The Fools Guild. Sometimes it’s helpful to share that information. And sometimes people are just appalled that I’m so foolish.

Do you feel like that’s an accurate reflection of the person you are, King of Fools?

I don’t think that there’s any one aspect that defines me. For the last 20 years I’ve been a falconer. I was born in Redwood City, California, and I’ve got four sisters. My father was an architect and my mother was a homemaker who then also got involved in real estate. I haven’t left the Bay Area for more than four months at any time. I’ve traveled a bit and was in the military, in the reserves, for almost eight years.

What was your life like, growing up?

I can’t claim to have grown up. There’s always been a certain light-heartedness. My father was in World War Two and was pretty stern. (He also had a good sense of humor that we didn’t always understand.) But mom helped us to foster a sense of fun. School was a huge change, it sort of nailed us down. We had to be somewhere. We had to, you know, comply.

I liked showing up. I liked being part of what was going on. So I joined the military when I was 24. I had gotten to a point where I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, where I was going to go. Sometimes we were marching with a thousand people, you know, three or four companies together on a parade field, troop movement.

I’ve got a really nice cactus. This cactus was given to me, it was about eight inches tall, well over 30, 35 years ago. We moved into this house and I put it in the ground and now it’s over 20 feet tall and I think of it as a really interesting accomplishment. All you do is watch it and it just expands. I’ve had some really good feelings about it.

How does your foolhardiness manifest itself?

Back in the early nineties, I started making a musical instrument called a didgeridoo, which is basically a simple horn, but with an irregular amount of tones. I started making and playing didgeridoo, and I met a gentleman who was a drummer and a flute player, and he suggested that we, you know, form a group and start working at fairs. He was a gypsy, you know, Taj L. Magick was his street name. James Wilmington was his birth name. He had a big effect on what I was doing, but I didn’t want to go and start roving around the country, playing at fairs. My wife was kind of like, You want to do what now? One of the ideas that Taj had was if you make eight albums of music, you may not need to work again. We put out two albums. We were involved in the metaphysical communities, doing sound healing, doing soundscapes, it was a lot of fun.

I’ve always had a science background. When I was younger, my folks were like, You’re so fond of the ocean, maybe you should be an oceanographer. I’ve studied some aspects, bathymetry, you know, the shape underneath the water, but also studied animals. I had a conversation with one of my older sisters, she had posted a reference to Alan Watts talking about dogs. I said, I don’t consider Alan Watts a saint. And she said, Well, who wants to be a saint? But what she did say was that she had always considered me sort of a Buddhist in my ability to change. As a kid, I was running around, sort of a child in the wilderness, you know, trying to be a biologist, an oceanographer, and then became a soldier, started making didgeridoos (I can definitely say I’ve made more than a thousand didgeridoos), became involved with the metaphysical community, picked up surfing and from surfing shifted into falconry. I consider myself lucky that I’ve been able to change focus so many times and have been successful in so many.

How do you feel you’re doing?

I’ve been reflecting over the past couple weeks very strongly that there’s something I’ve always been seeking, something that I’m trying to find, but I have not yet found. I question my value a lot. Am I good enough? Am I evolving or am I just existing, you know? I’ve always had, overall, the idea of fixing things, making things right. But I’m trying to figure out how much of my attention should go into recognizing the positive.

What is the positive right now in your life?

My wife and I have been together this month, 40 years. She’s a lovely human and a very positive thing. She’s been retired for a year and a half. So I’ve been able to work harder when I need to and bring in more prosperity into our lives. She was in the silicon chips industry for, gosh, I don’t know, a very long time.

What do you guys like to do together?

My wife and I have both been involved with the Gilroy Fungus Federation. It’s a scientific group. And we do collecting, foraging. We like to be out in the woods or hills or wherever and pick berries and mushrooms. She loves to fish. I’m more of a tide pooler, you know, like I’ll go to the beach and surf and then grab a bunch of mussels and bring them home and we’ll have mussels for dinner, that sort of thing.

Is being a father on the positive side?

If you’ve ever had kids, you’ll know that it’s always a mix: You’re the good guy, you’re the bad guy, you’re the good guy again. She lives in the Bay. She also became a falconer. And she does educational work with animals. So goes into schools and teaches and such.

OK, you’re a falconer. What does a day of work consist of?

So I do pest control, with birds of prey chasing other birds off.

I’m usually up at like two till four in the morning, working on night roosting bird projects, scaring birds out of areas by flying a hawk, you know. During the day I’ve been working on a transfer station and a landfill the last two or three years. I’ve got three, four, five falcons, I’ve got three Harrises Hawks and a couple of owls. The owls are more for educational stuff. Sometimes we’re on the defense and we’re trying to break up groups of birds that come in. Crows, gulls. Pigeons are another example. We’re trying to displace their forward movement, you know.

Most of it is industrial or agricultural work. I’ve got a contract with the water district here. That’s a project where they just had gulls that were coming in and messing up a whole neighborhood well. I worked on a project with Santa Cruz, we were trying to keep nesting birds out of a group of trees, second growth timber that was planted 50 years before the project.

You’ll have an animal that’s doing great, then one day you go out to fly it, it gets hit by a car or flies off and gets eaten, you know. So, it’s funny, I’m kind of resistant to the state right now of the world.

What you’re saying is you’re not very politically engaged?

I’ve got my head wrapped around projects that I’m working on. And so I’m using that as an excuse to not be more political. I’m juggling birds all the time. And so I push politics aside because it’s uncomfortable and I don’t see the machinery turning in a way that I could effect, even if I put more time and effort into it.

As a military man, we have this commander-in-chief, our president, that is not supposed to be questioned, you know, with the chain of command. So I’ve got a different, more right wing approach on the military side, but I also am a humanitarian in many aspects. I want to see people thrive, and I’ve never liked the idea of using a steamroller to create a path, climbing up over friends to achieve what we want to achieve.

I have plenty of, you know, super bad habits. I hoard things, I like possessions. I’ve got almost 80 surfboards. So there’s a point in time where I need to go through it and just, you know, pull out the boards that I want to ride.

We live in the suburbs and some neighbors I get along with great, some people think of me as a celebrity because I do a lot of public speaking and presentations. And then some people don’t like the way I do things, you know, my hoarding issues. I’m staring at, let’s see, five, six, yes, seven bicycles right now. And I haven’t ridden a bicycle in probably a year.

Tell me a little more about this Gilroy Fungus Federation.

It’s a group that’s been going on since the seventies, I think. And it’s an amazing crew. The only problem is the cadre are getting older, they’re dying off, retiring or having to move out of the area for financial reasons. But it’s a lovely group. One of the members said, We’re a food and wine group with a fungal problem, which I thought was very funny.

We have a ministers meeting, making decisions, and then we’ve got a general meeting where we have a speaker that talks about propagating mushrooms, mycological studies, DNA sampling, so there’s a lot of science involved. One of the main members is a toxicologist. If somebody gets mushroom poisoning and is in the hospital, they bring him in.

A typical meeting is about 30, 35 people, probably a dozen ministers. I’m a non-elected minister. I’m the Minister of Fun. Self-appointed and recognized on some level when it comes to the voting.

What is your ambit of responsibilities as the Minister of Fun at a fungal group?

One interesting aspect of what I do is, if there’s a tense situation, I’ll make a stupid joke just to get people to laugh and try to redirect. Laughter is a very important tool. It changes our brain chemistry. We should always be able to laugh at ourselves a certain amount.

That connects with the Fools Guild. We are a bunch of foolish people, but it doesn’t negate that we’re trying to do some serious things while fooling around. Carlos Castaneda talked about a fool or clown as a very powerful position: You can maneuver around more easily, be it in a battle, be it in a political situation. To have the fluidity to move around is important.

But you don’t want to be a complete fool. You don’t want to be the village idiot. You need to have a certain level of standing.

Does the fool get a chance to care for themself?

I get depressed easily and you know, the tears of a clown, when there’s no one around, that’s very real. We’re human, we’ve got a positive side and we’ve got a negative side. And to not recognize the negative side would be a huge mistake.

I know a lot of fools. And I see them as being productive rather than just being foolish. Productive at being foolish. There are some playwrights. There’s some actors, there’s a couple of lawyers. One of the guys has a doctorate in humor and performance. So it’s a diverse group.

Is there anything else taking up space in your head?

One thing that I think I was trying to avoid talking about, I deal with a certain level of anger. Being young and dealing with my father’s PTSD also inflicted a bit of PTSD on me. I passed a bit of that along to my family. So my anger issues are something that I want to work on. I wish I had a bit more control over that. I guess there’s a lot of dark and light in a human’s life. I’m considering going to a hypnotherapist to try and work on that, you know.

I don’t think that humans can or should go by without being angry… We need driving force. We need it to move forward and change our environment with passion. I don’t think we’d be much without passion. But I also think that balance is really important.

How satisfied would you say you are with your life, on a scale of 1-10?

In some ways I want to put it as a six. There’s a lot of things that I want that I don’t have. But in reality, I think I’m between an eight and a nine. I’m constantly going, What do I want to do next? I write a lot of lists.

Before I go, I feel like I have to ask… You’re in a fungal group in the Bay Area. Are people tripping? Is that what the group is really about?

So there are a certain number of people who don’t. It has a kind of scientific aspect. There’s a gentleman (I don’t know if I should name him) but he’s a scientist. He spends half his life in Mexico and he is tripping on a regular basis. There’s a certain amount of people that experiment with these substances. I’ve experimented with some, I haven’t done all these things, I like having a certain amount of control. But yeah, no, the fungus federation is based on education. Because you could study mushrooms for your whole life and, and still have more to learn. So there’s plenty of people involved with the fungus federation that have, you know, let’s say played around with psychedelics, but it’s not a tripping group. They’re more foragers than anything else. Foragers and scientists.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Hector about deployment in Afghanistan, and being a proud American immigrant.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Hector

Hector, 35, is originally from Southern California, now living between Florida (where he is completing his Masters degree) and DC (where he works closely with the Department of Energy). He got his start as an engineer by enlisting in the Marines. He served in Japan, Afghanistan and North Carolina. We couldn’t help ourselves, we got deep into politics.

I come from a mostly immigration background. My dad is the first person to be here, from Mexico. My mom has a bit more history in America, my great-great-grandparents were here from her side. I grew up in a very bad part of Los Angeles. A lot of gang activity, a lot of teenage pregnancy. My parents encouraged me and my siblings to avoid that lifestyle. They wanted us to be successful. They didn’t really care how we did it as long as it was legal. I also kind of had a sense of duty from my mom’s side of the family – we have a good history of military service, and I wanted to continue that legacy.

Tell me a little more about your childhood.

Pacoima, I remember the gangs would get kids to do stuff for them because kids don’t really go to jail unless they do something bad. Some of the people I knew from elementary school sadly lost their lives. Some of them are in jail right now. My dad, he said, All right, you have to do something besides school, we’re going to have you guys play soccer, maybe boxing, music lessons. We were in a program where they would teach us how to play formal Mariachi music and every once in a while, we would have trips to Tucson, San Jose, San Diego, and we would perform. They would have these rules where if you’re getting in trouble, you’re not going to take the trips.

I had some opportunities to go to some colleges, but it was a money issue, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford great schools. I was about 20 when I enlisted. To enlist, you usually talk to a recruiter. I still occasionally talk to my recruiter, he’s also a civilian now, Sergeant Ramirez. He told me the benefits, he told me what the minimum requirements are of the Marine Corps: You need to be able to do at least three pull ups, run a mile and a half in under 14 minutes, and do 30 crunches. I was easily able to do that.

You take what’s called the ASVAB, that classifies the jobs open to you based on your intelligence. I picked a combat engineer because I liked the work that they did, and I had been working construction for a few years. You swear in, but you’re not getting paid until you actually go to boot camp, and that can take anywhere between a couple days to a year.

I was the first person in my family to join the Marines. It was mostly Army before that, so I had an idea of what to expect, but not really. The physical exercise, I would say, wasn’t that hard for me. It’s just kind of moving fast, doing what you’re told, doing things exactly as they want. Some people might tell you that was like the worst time of their life because they were getting in trouble all the time, other people that were really in shape, they maybe made an impact on a drill instructor. I didn’t really stand out, in a good or a bad way, I was just sort of there.

I went over to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, they teach you the process of being a combat engineer, all the equipment you’re going to need to know how to use. And then after that, I got stationed in Okinawa, Japan for about two years and some change.

My shop was sort of mixed disciplines. I learned a little bit of electrical (which is why I went into electrical engineering, because I really enjoyed working with the electricians.) I learned a little bit of AC repair, water purification, bulk fuel. We were sort of a jack of all trades kind of group.

I never really drank before the Marine Corps, but everyone in the Marine Corps drank. After a long day, you just go to a bar, have some drinks, have a good time. I met some of my closest friends there. I’m still kind of close to those guys, even though we don’t talk too much.

There were parts of the Marines that did suck just because, I mean, it’s a military, you kind of expect it to suck. The training, some of it is just to keep you busy. But for the most part, I would say it was more positive than negative.

How do you feel your life is going?

Career wise, it’s going great. I’ve been talking to a lot of people while I’m working in Virginia, trying to get some job offers. I’m becoming a better rounded engineer.

Socially, it’s okay. Still kind of single after I’ve been here for about six months, been on dates here and there, but haven’t really clicked with any girl. But still looking. I’ve been single for close to two years now, so that’s probably the only area I would say I’m struggling with.

I tried going back on the dating apps. They did not get any good results, so I don’t really use them anymore. I try to go out, meet people, happy hour work functions. The hardest part about trying to date women out in D.C. is they’re a bit too career focused. There was this one girl a few months back that I was trying to set up something with, but it took about a month and a half before I actually went out with her just because she was always just rescheduling.

What kind of partner are you looking for?

Probably more family oriented, you know. My brother, he’s got two kids. I was looking after them while I was visiting over Christmas and Thanksgiving. I really enjoyed just spending time with them, taking care of them, playing with them. I kind of decided, right, it’s time I focus more on family. Before, I wasn’t really serious about dating. But now I’m getting older, my career is starting to actually go where I wanted to be.

Would you consider yourself political?

I sort of do my own research. My politics change, they’re not set in stone. I would say I’m slightly right wing, but I do have some left wing positions. I’m more socially conservative, but they don’t really define who I am. I have non-religious friends, I have friends in the LGBT community, friends that are Democrats, friends that are a right wing of me.

What’s your most right wing position and what’s your most left wing position?

We need to be more harsh on crime, which I believe the right wing does better. I’m not a big fan of, say, rehabilitative justice, where there are people, they’ve arrested like 20 times and they never really do jail time. If they break the law, they need to be in jail. If they cannot function in a normal society, they should not be let out.

A guy I knew in elementary when he was 11, he did a lot of stealing. He didn’t really do jail time. When he was 14, got involved in gang activity and a judge like, felt bad for him. They finally sent him to juvie. Once he got out at 18, back into that criminal lifestyle. And I’m like, there’s just no fixing some people. I grew up in these areas, a lot of these people just are criminals.

Something needs to be done about this system where a judge can say, Yeah, I know you’re guilty, but for my own personal political reasons, I’m not going to put you in jail. Which has just sort of soured me on the criminal justice system. Republicans are a little bit better, when it comes to physical and blue collar crime. (Both parties sort of let white collar criminals go if they make the right donations.)

I would also say I’m a little bit against the welfare state, because I grew up poor. There were a lot of people I knew that were on disability, but I’ve seen them, they are not disabled, they’re just too lazy to work. So those would be my more right wing positions.

However, I do believe in a universal health care system. I ended up getting new glasses a few months ago and I’m paying all this health insurance every year and I still have to pay out of pocket. Like, why am I still paying? Every system has its issues, but at this point, it’s probably going to be better than what we have now.

Are your political opinions shared with your family?

My parents are like Reagan Democrats, every once in a while they’ll vote for a Republican they like. My brother is more right wing than me just because he’s been robbed at knife point. When he was a musician, he had one of his trumpets stolen. So he feels absolutely no sympathy when a criminal gets shot. He’s more into guns than I am, I really only have two guns in my name. My sister’s a bit more liberal, a bit more progressive, but we all get along.

I didn’t vote for Trump in 2020. But I remember watching gas prices go up, watching my groceries go up during the Biden years, so I thought, All right. I’m just going to vote for Trump, what’s the worst that can happen? He ran on nonintervention, policy wise, which I kind of agree with. I understand why he did the things in Venezuela, I’m kind of 50/50 on that. I am not a big fan of involvement in Iran just because it really is none of our business as far as I’m concerned.

NATO hasn’t been doing what they’re supposed to be doing. When I did some deployments in Afghanistan, some of the other European countries would deploy with us, but they really never left the fence. They were always just, well… they were a bit more bureaucratic. And I kind of thought to myself, Yeah, they’re out here, they helped out a bit. But America’s doing the fighting.

I didn’t vote for Obama because in 2008, it was obvious he was going to win. 2012, that was when I was in Afghanistan, or close enough to it that I really didn’t care to vote. Then 2016, you know, I was a student, there’s all these different organizations trying to get you involved. Looked into both Hillary and Trump, I didn’t care for either of them. Voted for Gary Johnson since he’s not going to win, you know.

I want to buy a house, I kind of see that it’s going to be a long while. I look at my parents, you know, my dad, he doesn’t even have a high school education. My mom, barely working, we bought a house in California. I could not buy a house in California. With my paycheck, good salary.

I have never been a big Charlie Kirk fan, but I saw how some people reacted to that and I’m like, there is a powder keg in this country where something is going to happen, where violence is going to be the only option. I grew up during the Bush wars, there was definitely a divide, but I still felt that lots more people were able to talk about their differences. I’ve had friends that stopped talking to me just because I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. I’ve seen some friends, people that I went to undergraduate with, advocating for killing people. I had to unfriend them on Facebook because one of the jobs that I’m looking to has a security clearance.

You’re from an immigrant family. What’s your feeling on immigration right now?

My dad migrated here legally. We’ve always been against illegal immigration. And I did just sort of see it happening during the Biden administration where I’m like, you guys are just making it obvious that you want people here, you don’t want to vet these people. My sister in law, she got T-boned by an illegal immigrant, ended up in the hospital and she had to pay out of pocket for that because the guy obviously didn’t have insurance. Was a Venezuelan immigrant from what we’ve been told.

I know the majority of them are good people. I’m pretty sure if I was, say, in Venezuela, living through the Maduro regime, I would want the best opportunity for me and my family, I get it. But at the same time, we have rules, we have a culture. I am not a big fan of when people say America is not a People. We are a People. My great grandparents fought in World War Two, fought in Korea. I’ve had uncles that have died for this country.

A lot of these people have no respect for our country. So when people are saying we do not have an illegal immigration problem, go to El Paso, okay? I know people that work there, they’re mad. These people are causing problems. When I visited Tijuana, I saw a lot of people just waiting to try to get in, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not Mexican. They have a different accent that you only hear if you know Spanish.

I was at Cal State Northridge. I see these students from, I want to say, Kuwait. They would pay someone to take tests for them. And I’m like, it’s literally just cheapening my education. They do not care about this country, whereas someone who has blood in this country, someone whose family’s been here, this is all they know.

Do you care a lot about this country?

I do. I mean, it treated my dad well, it treated my mom’s side of the family well. It’s given me a lot of opportunities that I know, if I was still in Mexico, I would not have.

There is a group of people that are just ignored by the American political class, young men especially. Obama talked about how for the first time in history, there are more women than men in college. But then sometime later, he said it is not right that STEM degrees aren’t 50/50. You cannot have it both ways. You can’t celebrate that women are outperforming men in college except for this one field and say, Oh yeah, but we need to make that 50/50. If World War three were to break out, young men are going to be the ones that fight for this country.

When Trump won in 2024, when Latino men went for Trump, I just saw this vitriol against Latino men. You’re not going to try to understand where people are coming from. During the riots in 2020, Los Angeles, I was walking, I just saw people boarding up their place. I read a sign from a small store that literally said, This is all we have, please do not tear it down. Americans should not have to live this way. We should not be begging our own countrymen to not attack us.

We should not have a political class that panders more to people outside this country. Beto O’Rourke, when he was running for president, went down to Mexico to campaign. I’m like, Why are you in Mexico campaigning? Your constituents are Americans.

I get why they’re here, but I don’t have to support them because of my race. I’ve been called a race traitor by some of the whitest people I’ve ever met. You have no right to tell me that.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied do you feel with your life, when you weigh up the state of the country, the state of your work, the state of your relationships, the state of your health, your finances, if you weigh it all up..?

I would probably say seven. Things have been going better, but could improve, in terms of, a relationship and owning a home.

Last question, how do you engage with the media? Where do you get your info?

I get most of my news from social media these days, since I commute to work. I usually just see what’s going on on TikTok, YouTube and Twitter to see what’s trending. I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch CNN.

What happens if someone is reporting, there is a chance they’re going to leave stuff out. If there is, say, a shooting with a cop, I would prefer to see the police footage first before anything, just so I can make up my own mind. If someone gives me their opinion, then that’s going to affect me going forward. There’s a YouTube channel called Law&Crime. They show a lot of justice footage. Sometimes I get a bunch of random YouTubers that talk about the news that I’ll just listen to while I’m on a train.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Vanessa about the community and culture of rural towns, and recovering from an affair in her marriage.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Vanessa

We have our conversation at the local library in rural Greene County, New York, where Vanessa works part time. She lives a couple miles down the road with her husband, adult son and his wife. She is soft spoken and contemplative.

I’m very involved in the natural world, and I eat very differently than most people. Once I learn that something is not healthy, I almost cannot put it in my body. My husband says I’m one of the most disciplined people he knows. I guess I feel like there’s an onslaught of toxic matter in the world to begin with, so I’m not going to compound it by, you know, putting poor quality fuel in the gas tank. I commune with nature on a daily basis – I live in the woods and it’s very important to me to be able to go outdoors on a regular basis, and so I walk, I swim, I ski, bike, etc.

I don’t use a cell phone. I have one, and if I was driving to work and I was to break down, I’d have a phone. But I guess it’s similar to the food, right? I can’t willingly put something in my body that I think is unhealthy. I read a book called The Invisible Rainbow, and it’s a very thorough examination of how electricity affects our bodies and the planet itself. (The author did have a hypersensitivity, I suppose, to electromagnetic fields.) But when I read his book, I was like, I agree. He has an exhaustive bibliography where he backs up his claims. People use cell phones, but they don’t question, Are they safe? Are they good for the planet? It just becomes second nature.

I guess I am somewhat iconoclastic in many regards. I don’t know what a typical American is anymore, but it’s certainly not me.

I’m originally from New York, White Plains, Westchester County. So a very large metropolis compared to this rural environment. With my family, I lived in the South, in Florida and Georgia, and then as soon as I could choose where to live, I came back to New York because… I don’t know if it’s a myth about elephants, they go back to their home… I just always felt tied to New York State.

I visit my family in the South and it’s very beautiful and geographically similar. But there’s a different political leaning, I feel like a fish out of water. I came here to go to college, and I started out in a suburb, and then it was sort of divine intervention if you will, that landed me over in this part. I live on 20 acres, on a river, a mountain, very private, very private.

I’ve been married for a really long time, been together about 40 years and I have a son who’s 29 and he lives with us and he recently married. Instead of moving out to live with his wife, he moved his wife in, which was not my first choice. She’s a lovely person, so she’s easy to be around, but we want to help them to have their own space. Maybe a dome or, you know, convert part of our barn.

My town doesn’t even have a stoplight, and I love that. It’s like going back in time. People come to this library where I work and we know almost all of the regulars by name. Even before they ask for their book, we’re handing it to them. It just feels very special to me to be immersed in this world of families, I get to see little children growing up, middle aged people and elderly people, I get to see the whole cycle of life in this job.

It’s not culturally rich, and intellectually it’s not rich. I’ll never forget when I first moved here, I was in a hairdresser and I overheard a woman say to the hairdresser, Well, my son, you know, he’s doing okay in school, he’s certainly not the smartest, thank God. And I thought, what? That you would revel in your child not being the most intelligent. Said a lot about the area, intellectual pursuit not valued and that it’s actually something to be ashamed of. That I don’t subscribe to that at all.

I was a photographer, a self-employed freelance photographer for many, many years in Westchester. And when I moved over here, I couldn’t find photography work here, so I had to commute back to my clients. Then after COVID and after people got their camera phones, photography was less in demand. And so I started just working at after school programs with kids. The library came out of that, just trying to find alternate part time work. My husband is an artist, a graphic designer and a website designer. But then his work fell off too.

Kahlil Gibran said, I learned silence from the overly talkative and I learned calmness from the chaotic. And so when I experience people who seem oblivious to what they’re doing or saying, it reminds me, don’t be like that. I’m never mean to anybody. It’s just important to me to get along, to have harmony. Having said that, it’s not always a given. My son has been very challenging. And so I strive. I want that and I strive for it. But I’m only one part of the equation.

My parents were both together for forever. My mother set a really good example of including people. When I was a teenager, I was naturally sort of critical of her. You know, very self-righteous. But looking back and having learned more about my mother and her struggles growing up, I really admire her. She was always very inclusive. Even though she had four children, whenever we went to the ice cream parlor or the movies, she would always invite neighborhood kids, and often kids who didn’t have a dad at home. And as a kid I’d be like, Oh, why does she have to always invite them? As an adult, I look back and the puzzle pieces fit together. My mom’s dad walked out on the family when she was eight, and so she saw children like her and tried to help them. So I go out of my way to never hurt people, even to the extent where, like when I was younger and say, you’re dating a guy and you don’t care for him, I could never tell him, you know, I’m sorry, I just don’t feel that for you. It’s real hard for me to do that.

There’s energy points in your body. So there’s a throat chakra and a mind chakra and a sexual chakra. And when I went to somebody who read chakras once, she said to me, Your throat chakra needs some help. And I was like, Yes, I get it, it’s always been hard for me to speak up.

How do you feel you’re doing?

I think things are great for me right now. I feel very grateful for the things in my life, I feel grateful to have a wonderful husband. He’s so good and so kind and so helpful. And I love where I live. I love my job, I never watch the clock. In addition to my library duties, I teach art classes and I love kids, so I love that role. My son, he’s a very headstrong kind of person, obstinate at times. But a year ago he met a young woman and they quickly got married. And I really love her.

You feel grateful for your relationship with your husband. Can you tell me more?

We have a lot of similar interests. But it’s more just feeling that this person really values me and respects me and has the best intentions for me.

It wasn’t always like that. I mean, I’ve known him for a really long time. When we moved here, I was having such a hard time making friends and was also trying to have another baby… I did get pregnant, but I lost it. So I was kind of unhappy. And I met a man. I had an affair. And so, it might sound a little contradictory, saying how much I love my husband, but the fact that we weathered it… And he did sometimes say, I’ve had it with you. I kept swearing off this guy who I had… we called it an addiction. He would say, I’m addicted to you. And I felt the same way. And so, of course, my husband, when he found out, I’d say, All right, all right, I won’t anymore, I won’t. And I would not keep my word, like a drinker saying, I won’t drink anymore, and then they’re hitting the bottle again. So I certainly tried his patience, and there were times when he said, like, That’s it, let’s just call it quits. But it’s hard to describe if you haven’t been there. It wasn’t so much about my husband and being dissatisfied with him. It was more about, I needed to experience this. And I know that sounds selfish, but there was just something in me that had to have this very intense relationship. It’s never like I wanted to go from one to the other. No. But it was very hard to deny what it was. I am very passionate.

And so my husband stuck it out and I’m grateful to him for that because I could be in a very different place if he didn’t. And he seemed rather forgiving and even almost understanding. It was a rather long affair. And it was very, I call it torrid. I wouldn’t see him for a year and then I’d see him for six months. It was over a period of probably ten years. But it’s been probably ten years since. It’s totally in my past.

I have lots of independent projects. I’m writing a book of poems and so I need to work on that. There weren’t a lot of artists in my family, but ever since I was a little girl, I would draw. I’m an Aquarian, okay? I’m into astrology and Aquarians really value freedom. And to me, the arts are very much about freedom. When I teach the kids, I never tell them, make the pumpkin orange.

Do you feel that you are a free person?

Yeah, yeah. My husband, he’s kind of shy. I like to sing and dance and he could never. Long time ago, his mother said to him something like, You’re singing out of tune, and that forever shut him down. One line when you’re nine years old can affect you for the rest of your life. He will not open his mouth to sing. And I feel bad for him because I know it’s very freeing. He probably sings in the car, you know, but he won’t sing in front of me. (Laughs.)

There used to be less than a thousand people in the town. Maybe there’s more now, I don’t know, but it’s very small, spread out. We have no neighbors. Our driveway is a quarter mile long, and we’re surrounded by nature. I often think rock stars would be desirous of this location.

I don’t own a TV. I’m not a watcher, I’m a doer. It’s the same with sports. Like, I can’t understand people who say, I’m going to watch the game. I’d rather play a game. I’m not a passive person. Our TV broke years ago, got an electric surge, I mean, a really long time ago. And we said, Should we get another one? Nah, forget it. There’s a term, Neo-Luddite… It means we’re not dumb about computers, we just choose to not incorporate them so readily into our lives. I mean, I feel like there’s an onslaught of toxicity. I’m just trying to hold the tide back.

When the COVID vaccine came out, for instance, I was scared, like most people. And there was a big shaming going on. If you chose not to get a vaccine, you were looked at like a leper or an evil person. And I was aware of that. But my son insisted. He does a lot of research. He’s a lot like me, he goes even further. But he said, Do not get it, don’t get it, don’t get it. And I listened to him and I swear I never once got a cold. And everybody I know who got the vaccine got COVID. So we were very guarded.

Tell me a little more about your relationship with your son?

I did often feel very sad when he was growing up. He went to college just for a little while, and when I would witness him with people his own age, peers, I would be disheartened sometimes thinking that he had maybe social anxiety or was perhaps too different than others.

I guess the main thing that’s been concerning me and has been confounding me and my husband, is that we want our son and his wife to live independent from us, because as we get older, you know, most parents kind of look forward to… I want my child to launch and be able to fly on his own. And that means living in your own place, and even though he and his wife are rather easy to get along with and all, I would just prefer to have my own kitchen. If I have to go to the bathroom and somebody is in there… So my husband and I have just been pulling our hair, we just don’t know how to enact this change.

But he loves where we live. He’s embedded himself by planting orchards of trees. And he has this belief, families should not go scatter to the winds. He has a lot of old-fashioned notions and he likes that notion of a family staying together… and I have no problem with that.

Several years ago he did leave the nest, he said, I’m going to, it’s actually called a Rainbow Festival, and it’s a yearly gathering of hippies in a national park. And there he met a young woman, and then he followed her out to Colorado, and he ended up in Hawaii. He basically was a vagabond and he met people, some of whom he didn’t like. He has a kind of dark view of people, like where I would be inclined to give somebody the benefit of the doubt and just assume they’re a good person until they disprove that, he tends to be more cautious or suspicious about people and the government. And so the Rainbow Festival, that he enjoyed initially, he started saying, Oh, they’re all government agents. And I’m like, No, they’re not, they’re homeless hippies (Laughs.) I think being out on his own reinforced some of his views about people, so he doesn’t want to be out there with them. I don’t know.

Do you feel financially comfortable, secure, or worried about that at all?

No, I don’t worry. I don’t make a lot of money here because I only work part time and so I’m always very short on funds, and my husband and I keep our money separate. I don’t know why, we just do. Soon I will take Social Security and that will help a lot, that will almost double my income. My husband, when his father passed away, he had a house, so my husband sold the house. I just sort of feel like that’s my husband’s family’s money, and even though I’m married, I feel like I’m not so entitled to it. So I don’t like to call the shots with the money. But certainly my husband takes up the slack, I could not pay for all the expenses. No way. And so I always trust that he, you know, pays the electric and the propane or whatever.

When payday comes around, I’m usually checking to see if I got paid cause I have $20 left to my name, you know? I’m not going to be out on the street or anything, but what I do make, it just goes very fast.

The irony is that I’m the only one of my four sisters who graduated high school. I’m the only one who graduated from college. And yet they all have so much more money than me. And so I said to them recently, Hey, gee, you’re all so successful (They own properties and things) and I said, I wonder why. And one sister said to me, Well, you know, I think it’s just never been that important to you. I don’t care about a fancy car or jewelry, a vacation. It just was never a priority to me.

If you were to rate your life satisfaction, where would you say you are on a scale of 1 to 10 at the moment?

First thing comes to mind is eight.

Because I’m certainly up at that end of the spectrum, but there’s, you know, certain things… Like I wrote a book and it’s languishing. I made an initial attempt to get a literary agent before a publisher. And I just know it’s something that I should be putting more attention into. But the daily quotidian tasks tend to take up more time than the more difficult creative pursuits. And yeah, eight’s my favorite number, too.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Chelsea about Zoom classes during her daughter’s basketball practice, and managing expectations of her parents.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Chelsea

Chelsea, 29, is at community college in Minneapolis, taking night classes to be a paralegal. And during the day she works at the same community college, as a parent support navigator, helping parenting students through their studies.

I am a single mom. And I have always been a single mom. I have a girl and a boy, my daughter is eight and my son is four. So a lot of my work and time and dedication goes to my children. I am a social advocate for anybody that needs it, especially the voiceless.

I was born and raised in a small town about an hour south of the metro Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, far enough from the city where I didn’t come this way a whole lot, but close enough where I knew that someday I wanted to.

Once I got to a certain age, I would say probably in my teenage years, I knew that I wanted to get out of a smaller town and go where there was more opportunity, more diversity. When I was 17, I graduated high school and moved out of my mother’s house. Throughout my childhood, my mom was married to a man, and I was told that he was my biological father. But when I was 11, I found out he was not. And that is when they divorced. So at that time, my mom became a single parent and I found out who my biological father was.

I was in college for about two years, and then I had my daughter. I moved back home for a year, just to have the baby, and figure out life. I applied and was accepted to the Jeremiah Program, a nonprofit for single moms. Basically they have housing, they have safe and affordable child care onsite. And you live there while you complete your college degree. I lived there for more than three years as I got my business degree in Minneapolis.

I entered a pretty toxic relationship with my son’s father. I spent a majority of 2022 in fight or flight survival mode and ultimately took the opportunity to pick up and move to Florida to get out of that situation. It didn’t go exactly how I had hoped, although it did help me find peace, find safety, find stability, and kind of regain my inner voice. So I ended up coming back to Minnesota at the end of 2023. And I’ve been in Minneapolis in this apartment I’m in now since 2024. I went back to school and I’ll be graduating again here in a couple of weeks.

I think my parents (I say parents because I called that man my dad for so long) were always able to provide physically, financially, but that’s kind of where it stopped. I didn’t have a whole lot of mental, emotional, spiritual support. So once I stopped needing the physical and the financial from them, it kind of felt like there was no relationship, because all the things that a child needs when it comes to our emotional well-being, just never really existed.

I don’t have a partner, and that’s been tricky. I wasn’t born and raised here, so I don’t have a lot of physical support. I mean, if something were to go wrong and I need to leave one child with a babysitter so I can take the other to the emergency room, that’s not really an option for me — I end up taking both children. There’s been many times where it’s like, Oh, this is when the support of another person is supposed to come in, because all the things I have been doing in my almost nine years of parenting, they weren’t made to do alone.

Tell me more about your decision to study law, to become a paralegal?

I was 28 and I was like, I want to make more money and I want to go to school again.

It’s all been online, scheduled times. I’m at home in class, on Zoom while my kids are also home, while I’m having to cook dinner. Just last night, my daughter had basketball and I was in class at practice while also having my son with me. And that is how a lot of our nights have looked since 2024.

I’m looking forward to graduating, but also just getting my evenings back with my kids. My daughter is in third grade. She has grown up with me. We’ve done a lot of life things together in her short eight years. Both of my kids are in swimming. My daughter is in basketball and dance as well. So we’re busy, but they enjoy all the things they’re doing and I’m really happy with where they’re at. I just wish I had an extra set of hands sometimes.

And during the day you work at the same college where you’re taking classes?

My job is centered around being an extra support to parenting students, because I am a parenting student and I’ve gone through it and I know how it is. It’s something I’m really passionate about because I know how needing that extra support can feel. We’re hoping that as time goes on, you know, students and the community in general will normalize bringing your children with you to school.

If you look at your life, how do you feel you’re doing?

In general I’m doing very well. I have a lot going on and I often feel very overwhelmed. But I’m able to recognize that a lot of the things that I feel overwhelmed and stressed about are things that I once prayed for and really hoped for. And what keeps me grounded is it won’t be forever. There’s things in my life that kind of suck, but I would much rather be in the boat that I’m in now versus the struggle I was in when I was in a toxic relationship and felt trapped.

My hope is that my future career would look something like restorative justice, alternate dispute resolution in some sort of a nonprofit that supports families, victims, some sort of community support. It’s just kind of something that I’ve always wanted to stand up for, like if you can speak for the voiceless and stand up for what you believe in, then do it. I might be trying to create a safe space because I needed a safer space at home and didn’t have that.

I’ve also done a little bit of research into who’s working at these law firms. Is it, you know, 12 white men attorneys, or is it a diverse group of men and women and different races and nationalities and beliefs? Because that’s important to me and I want to be around people that are like-minded and just kind of know that I’m accepted and comfortable.

I grew up in a family that was all white. I grew up in a town where I think the white population was over 80%. And that’s really all I ever saw. My children are biracial. So I was the first one to bring biracial children into my family.

I’ve heard you mention your faith. Are you religious in any way?

Growing up I was Catholic. My mother, she was raised Catholic, so she pushed a lot of, Second grade you get your first communion, when you’re a baby you’re baptized. She did those things to me so that she looked good for her parents I think. It wasn’t like we went to church every Sunday, it wasn’t like I ever really read the Bible. It was almost like, Let’s take the picture.

So after I became an adult and I realized I’m not Catholic, I then kind of wondered, Well, what am I? And I struggled with not knowing how to label it. Then I realized I don’t have to label it. I do believe in God, but I also believe in a lot spiritually as well… I practice a lot of manifestation, meditation, you know, I burn incense, I believe in the power of tongue, where you speak something and it happens. And people could say, Oh, that’s God. And I’m like, Yeah, it could be, or it could be that I just spoke it out into the universe.

When you first became a mom, you were about 20?

I was 19. I was studying criminal justice at the time, which is funny because now ten years later, I’m also doing some sort of criminal justice. I thought I could be a probation officer. I found out I was pregnant during that time, so I stopped going to school and I moved back home.

I remember I called my mom and I said (I wish I hadn’t said it because she guessed it right away) I said, Are you going to be home tonight? I need to talk to you. And she’s like, Are you pregnant? And I said, Yes. And she said, I won’t help you. And I said, Okay. She’s like, Are you keeping the child? I said, Yeah. She said, Okay. She loves my daughter now, but I was told, you know, I’m not raising another child.

My daughter’s father stayed in college. He basically denied her from the beginning and I didn’t spend a single day of my pregnancy with him. My mom did come around to the idea that, this is what’s happening, this is reality. So she helped me move back to her house and that’s where I stayed for the rest of my pregnancy and for about the first year of my daughter’s life. So she did make sure we were safe and taken care of, but I’m sure it crossed her mind at some point, like, Am I going to be stuck raising this child?

I must say that pregnancy, the time spent essentially by myself in my mom’s house, just kind of preparing for my daughter, was one of the most peaceful times in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. She was born in February, so I was pregnant for a lot of the winter and I stayed inside, you know, just stayed warm and watched TV. And I just remember it being a very peaceful time. She was such a good baby. She’s still a great kid, but she was such a good baby. And I always tell her, we made it through. We’re still making it. But we made it so far.

When I was trying to get out of the relationship with my son’s father, at that time my daughter was four, turning five. I’m trying to leave, I’m trying to become safe again, and having to bring her with me through this. And, you know, she’ll be almost nine, we have had a lot of conversations like, Why did things go that way and what can we do differently now? And aren’t we so happy that we’re not living that life anymore? And she’s been in therapy as well, just to kind of work on anything that comes up in her life, you know, the absence of her father, watching me as a single mother be in a relationship that was pretty toxic. I want her to always have that support because I did not.

How is your relationship with your parents now?

The man who raised me, he’s still a part of my life because he raised me and he’s my siblings dad. But I just felt like so much of my childhood was based on a lie. And it’s interesting, my biological dad knows the man who raised me. But the man who raised me has never said anything to me about it. He’s never said, you know, I’m sorry that this has happened to you, I’m sorry that we didn’t, you know, go about it a different way. And it’s been 17 years since I found out. So trying to understand, like, why did you not acknowledge it for so long and then just assume that I would just take the news and never feel some type of way about it?

Talking about things, emotions and thoughts, and being supported in that way, it just never existed. You see in movies how families are supposed to interact and then you realize, Oh mine doesn’t interact that way. Man, I’ve spent so much time in therapy, just time, trying to see how to heal from all of that. But also, what do I want from them going forward? Do I never speak to them again? Do I speak up? Do I just not, you know, involve myself?

I wanted to try to move forward when it came to my mom. So I’ve done a lot of deep digging, healing boundaries a little bit. But I think in general, over the last ten years I’ve spent so much time on it where I finally was like, Enough is enough. So when it comes to her, I have set different boundaries. I’m an hour away from my home town and when I would go back there, I would spend the night, you know, just for the convenience, not having to drive home if I came for a holiday or a birthday. Well, I stopped doing that in July. Because I would leave there feeling like crap, like there’s no substance to our conversations. She doesn’t ask how I’m doing. She doesn’t really care. She doesn’t ask me about work or school or what I’ve got going on. She’s just so uninterested in my life. For a while I used to search for that, I used to think, What can I say to my mom right now that will make her interested in me? I don’t want to put myself in a cycle of trying to get her approval when nothing works.

Anything else taking up space in your head? Stuff you’re worrying about?

The piece of the puzzle that, I have a biological father too, who lived in the same town as me my whole life and just allowed everybody to kind of live this lie. That too, I’m like, What do I want out of that? Navigating relationships with people who were supposed to be my people, I think that’s just been a really big struggle, figuring that out.

I’ve gone back and forth over the years of communication with him. When I was 14, I came to my very first Christmas with his family. And I think I went again when I was 17, and then I never went back again until last year. I got a text from him saying that his sister, who I had met twice, was sick and probably wouldn’t make it much longer. I had a little bit of hope that it would be kind of like, my dad is losing his sister and now his daughter, who he never had a relationship with. I thought that would kind of prompt him, like, Wow, life is short and this is my bloodline, let me make this work, let me have the conversations, let me figure it out. And unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The conversation from him was like, Hey, how’s it going?

In April I decided to stop replying to him. I had a conversation with his mom, that’d be my grandma, cause she’s always been more involved than him. I told her that I was happy to have a relationship with her, but that I did not want a relationship with her son. She kind of made some excuses for him like, Oh, we didn’t know if we were overstepping. Well, I was a child you know. Just telling me like, Hey, when you’re ready, I’m here for you, it could have made a big difference, and nobody ever did that. Now I’ve done 29 years without it, I’m good. I don’t need to come around on Christmas and then that’s it.

If you had to say how you’re doing, out of ten, what feels right?

Yeah, I think about a seven.

Did that seem obvious to you? You answered very quickly.

Yeah, yeah. Because I think I’m on my way to kind of all of those ‘best of the best I can be’ things. So I can see it, but I’m not quite there. But I also feel like I still have some healing and learning to do as well.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Ross about steering a family of 9 — financially, morally, practically.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Ross

Ross, 43, lives in rural Texas, about an hour from Austin, near where he grew up. He works in tech, but his passion is fostering his and his family’s relationship with the land. He has 7 children from one past and one present marriage. Raised as an evangelical Christian, he is now a “bit of an anarchist”.

I am part of a family that migrated to Texas around the turn of last century, my family has been here making a living and growing. I have worked in agriculture, because my family did. I spend all my time with my kids and we’re always out in nature, learning and being healthy.

We grew up around our grandparents house, we weren’t in the city. So, you know, pop culture, I have a hindrance. I almost feel new to America in a weird way, even though we’ve been here a long time. And if you look in Texas, you’ll see these pockets of German immigrants… My generation, we’re not first generation Americans, but it kind of feels that way.

We grew up on bicycles and horseback, and we left the house early, went out either into the woods or rode into town and kind of did whatever we wanted with whatever money we could scrounge up. It was a great place to grow up. Very quintessential Texan, very quintessential American. Lots of friends whose parents knew each other.

My dad, he’s a big figure in my life, in that he’s just so out there. He’s sort of put upon himself the Renaissance man mantle. Both my parents were veterinarians, so a big part of my memory is being drug around with them, delivering calves and picking up dogs that are broken and all of that stuff. I broke rank after high school and went and studied computer science, but before that it was a real rural existence.

I have seven children, from two marriages. One ended in dramatic flames after ten years. We had four children together. And then five years after that, I started a new marriage. And we have three together.

My immediate family, it’s like a party every weekend here at this farm. Like, bring the kids together, give them some food, and then just kind of stand back. They’re getting into all kinds of stuff and they love each other a lot. They’re all really supportive of each other, from ages 18 to one and a half.

Four of them live in Longview, Texas, which is about 70 miles from here… No, what am I talking about, that was the set up years ago. I forget the two oldest ones moved in with me.

Tina, my wife, she helps me run the house and the farm. We have construction projects around here and she is much more handy than I am, or at least focused, anyways. She’s also really our community outreach, like she has tons of friends come over from the homeschool group. Some of the younger kids are in this homeschool group and they gather here and elsewhere. She really facilitates a richness of life for the kids that by myself I wouldn’t be able to.

As a child, I was really told that the reality was, you know, the Bible Belt Christian belief system. And over time, more so than anyone I knew, I really tried to validate the things that I was hearing. I went as far as to go to Bible College. I go there and I begin to see the reality of it, in terms of the money, where I said, I don’t know what I believe, but this certainly isn’t righteous. Like if there is a God, he didn’t want anything to do with this.

And so even to this day, I don’t fit in well with traditional evangelical groups. It’s not like I’m unchurched, I’m just in this space where the things that interest me about gathering with people, I find those connections outside of church. Like, having friends here, talking about what we think about the afterlife, or what we think about our spiritual responsibilities here on Earth.

My ex-wife, I believe one of the primary reasons the marriage ended was over this issue actually. Her new husband is a pastor and she always wanted a pastor for a husband or something. But she is very into the evangelical scene, and my children that live with her are as well. And it makes for sort of an interesting existence in being the dad who… ‘Why don’t you go to church?’ Well, I do go to church, but it’s out here when I’m walking in the fields.

My mother died when I was 15, and I think it had these big effects. I mean, they did grief counseling and stuff, but no one ever said, you know, there’s going to be these holes in your life that you’re going to need to fill, so you might need to compensate somehow. Like, what about a graduation party? Moms tend to get involved in that kind of stuff. And so I didn’t have one. I wasn’t really thinking, Well, I’m going to have to do a little extra work because Mom’s not around. Dad’s more like the stoic hermit, if you will.

Help me sort of visualize a typical Saturday at your home.

Funny thing is, the day starts the night before, because I work with groups from Pakistan and they come online at 10 p.m. So I’m usually making sure at 10 that they don’t have any questions for me. I get up pretty early, like five or six. Get outside, go straight to the top of the property, to where I can kind of see everything. I have someone that lives here on the farm, I call him my farm roommate. He lives in a camper up at the top and helps me with different maintenance things. I hang out up there for a couple of minutes and just kind of watch the house and do chores at a distance until I see people moving around down at the house. And I’ll kind of tell when breakfast is ready, so I’ll come down to the house and eat with them. I will try to get them all corralled and get some tools in their hands and head out to whatever we’re doing, digging a hole for some utilities or working on a fort or something. And we do whatever until the afternoon, and we’re all hungry. Then I’m trying to hustle up dinner, if we’re not going out. (Sometimes we go out on Saturdays, which in rural America, there’s not a lot of options, it’s like five places we’re going to choose from.) We smoke a lot of meat here, so barbecue brisket and chicken and stuff. We’re pulling it off the smoker, we’re sitting down as a family at the table. In the evenings, we have some people on YouTube that we watch sometimes, like there’s this crazy guy that traps coyotes and stuff, and he’s just hilarious. The two older ones are always going somewhere. And the younger ones and I, we’ll play some board games, read some books, do something without screens, because we try to get the blue light or whatever you call it out of our face for a couple of hours before we go to sleep.

How do you feel your life is going? How do you feel you’re doing?

I don’t have a lot of anxiety about hardly anything in terms of material things. I have no food concerns, health and safety for my family, nothing beyond the normal. Primarily I feel at a fork in the road, because of two things: One, my age. This is a time, supposedly, when you’re at your peak, like supposedly it’s going to go downhill from here. So how can I extend my health as far as I can, you know? Am I going to be lively and sharp at 65? At the same time, I’m beginning to come up with ideas to settle all the accounts. I mean, I can see the end… not trying to be bleak, but I will die, and I can feel it in my hip. You know, my hip is sore, what is that? That is death and it’s coming.

And, you know, professionally, I write software for a living. And supposedly in this middle age, I’m supposed to reap a bunch of rewards from all my work, and bless my children with free education and somehow give myself and my partner this graceful retirement. And in my case, my industry is being turned on its head in real time. I mean, it’s super exciting, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just a ton of pitfalls and opportunities to miss out on when you could be shining. It’s like someone that just happened to be born in Detroit and just happened to be a machinist at the turn of the century when Ford was making cars. And you get to decide, are you going to find the right place to fit into the automotive industry, or are you going to wind up accidentally working on something that gets outsourced to China in the next 20 years, who knows?

Me and my family, we have this sort of almost verbal history, this built in knowledge of how to grow vegetables, of how to husband animal herds. But we haven’t worked it into our schedule. We haven’t dug the pond out and set up feeders to grow our own fish. We don’t have the pen set up for beef, we don’t have the processing. And it might sound unimportant to younger people, but for me, I think it’s such an important piece of a legacy, to leave a farm that’s being worked, by family members. To say we’re a participant in this, we live the struggle, we know the seasons. These things leave a mark on your life.

I spend so much time working at a desk producing this money stuff that goes into a bank account, and then we take it to the grocery store. But I’m working very hard to shift things so that we are going out in the morning and tending to the plants and tending to the animals and then taking it easy until harvest and then picking it and storing it all and eating it and then repeating the cycle again. And that’s probably going to take the rest of my life to get perfected. That feels sort of like my marathon.

How do you feel about your relationship with your wife?

I think that we’re great friends. We’ve been together seven years now and I think we’ve gotten into some good habits. In terms of correcting the ship when we get into arguments, I think that we’ve developed the sort of rhythm where you can tell when we’re not big super fans of each other, and instead of being anxious about how we are going to come back together, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s like, Well, I know what’s going on here, we’re going to take a breather, I’ll see you tomorrow.

It’s definitely not all roses, but we both say things like, I choose you regardless of what’s going on. And one thing that’s really nice for me personally, is to have someone say, I choose you because I love you, as opposed to, I choose you because that’s what Jesus wants me to do. We are really on the same page on the religious thing. And that’s nice. Like two humans talking to each other. Not like you’re talking to me because Jesus told you to.

Is that different to your previous marriage?

Definitely, yeah.

Anything taking up space in your brain, that’s worrying you or stressing you out?

My oldest daughter, she changed her name in high school. Not legally, but just says, I want to be called Hunter. Her name was Emma. We call her Hunter. And she is, she dates women. She is a lesbian. And it’s really tough to wrap my head around what that means for me and her and for our family.

In a lot of ways, her and I are unaffected by that. But in some ways we are. For example, Hunter is very smart. She had signed a contract with the Navy to go into their nuclear propulsion program, and she was really set for some exciting things. Then during high school, kind of as part of this whole, I’m a lesbian, non-binary thing, she signed this thing called a 501 plan, where the independent school district will allow you to basically formally say that you have mental health issues that you want to be recognized and you want your teachers to recognize, and I want to work on them together, I suppose.

But I’m sort of an anarchist, antigovernment type, just because, it seems like everything they touch gets a little messy. And I told her, don’t do that. Be you, but don’t sign that paper. Like, don’t let them into your personal life. But she signed that paper. And she had this contract with the Navy. Then Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, very explicitly wrote a memorandum to all branches saying that a number of new things would be disqualifying characteristics, and one of those was 501 plans. We’d already had a party, you know, Welcome to the Navy. She had no other plans, no college fund, nothing, just, I’m going to the Navy. And then two weeks before she shipped out, they tell her, it’s all off, everything’s off.

She lives here now. And to make it even more interesting, Tina is not a fan of Hunter’s lifestyle and in a lot of ways I’m not either. I mean like on the weekends Hunter will go to Arlington where some of her friends go to school. And I’m like, first of all, isn’t it strange to be hanging out with people that are going to school and you’re not going to school? Don’t you want to go to school? Little anxious about that for her.

And then also, she has a girlfriend. My background, when people are dating, their families know each other. Like, Okay you have a girlfriend, who are her parents? But I don’t know, I mean, that’s probably not unique to her.

We’re here for her. I’m just like, Stay here at the house if you want to. She was asking me how to get a job, I was kind of coaching on her resume. She started a job today, so some of that anxiety is melting away.

And the lesbian part of it, is that a religious stress of yours?

The root of it for me, actually, is pretty natural because like, I look at nature and I think, That’s that’s the way it ought to go. And in terms of lesbianism, I just don’t understand the sexual aspect of it. And maybe it’s not for me to understand, which is where I’m at. I’ve told her, I don’t understand that and I’m not going to try to understand that, but one thing I am still going to try to get is honor and valor, you know. Like it’s honorable to tell the truth. So even if you’re a lesbian, don’t lie, don’t cheat, that should still be a thing, right? Where honor can be found, it still should be sought out, in my opinion. I’m not faulting her, that’s just where I’m trying to find common ground.

I’m really pessimistic about the American dream and its future. I’m very optimistic about something new happening. I don’t know what that new thing is, but I want to take my family to a place where we can ride out the end of this capitalism and be prepared for whatever’s next. And that would be something that my children or grandchildren get to participate in.

But yeah, I hold no hope that there’s going to be some middle manager job at Caterpillar USA that is waiting for my son. That’s not going to be there. I’m just hoping that they will latch onto my teachings about mathematics and really latch on to getting their hands dirty.

There’s old country songs where it’s like, in the Depression, we were so poor, we didn’t even know the Depression was going on. I’m not trying to say I want to be poor, but there’s a type of living where market fluctuations don’t impact you… Let me try to land this plane: I think that there’s power in the American people that hasn’t been tapped yet. And I think to tap it, we’re going to have to somehow get our hands dirty, building roads locally, building machines locally, taking ownership of the means of production, not like as a communist, but I don’t know, something that doesn’t fit into either one of the parties right now.

Weighing up your life, how satisfied do you feel about who you are and where you are, out of 10?

9.5 - Like I’ve been fired from the bow and I haven’t hit the target, but I’m at the right velocity, I’m headed in that direction. Everything’s going that way.

I’m optimistic and I get that. If you’re not optimistic, you can’t really dream all that well, I guess.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Beatrice about growing up the daughter of a Black pharmacist in Selma, and how to communicate with mathematicians (who you’re married to).

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Beatrice

Bea, retired, after 25 years as a delivery driver, has lots of hobbies: Radio, motorcycles, guns, model trains, drones, video games. She’s married to a math professor named Lena, and they live in Upstate NY on 40 acres.

I’m a Southerner, you know, born and raised, Deep South. I’m Black, so I can go on and tell you how it feels to be Black in America, because it is a big part of who we are. And a lot of how I move through the world is being a product of slavery and being a product of the beginnings of America. White people can brag about how they came over on this boat and that boat, but I feel like being from the South, being from a slave area where you know the plantation that your family’s from, you were taught to not mention those things. Whereas now, I feel like, not that slavery is cool, but it’s kind of cool to have been here for as long as some of the original people that came and colonized. My family has been here for that long, but there’s no history to it. This is why I fight so hard for America. Like, we built this, you know, and where am I going to go back to? This is my country, you know, like blood, sweat, tears. Labor has been put into this place, so I don’t want to give it up.

Another half of me is being a transplant to the world of Yankees. I have lived in New York State for the past 15 years, so I still feel foreign in this land up here. But it’s a welcoming land. Down south I don’t fit in because I’m gay, I’m Black, I’m female, you know. And then you move up here where you were told you’ll never be accepted because they’re Yankees and they’re snobby. So it’s a weird thing.

I had a pretty major life event about two months ago, a tick borne disease, and I almost had a heart attack, had to be in hospital. So how I would have done this interview three months ago is completely different from how I’m going to answer these questions today.

I’m newly retired. Best decision I ever made. I’ll be poor but I’m going to be poor no matter what I do. I worked for 25 years in one place and I worked prior to that for 15 years, and I’m still not rich. So I just need to survive with less. I used to think, you wake up, you go to work, you get married, you die, you know? But now I’m kind of like, Well, I want to actually live a life.

I worked for a big courier company for 25 years and when you get started, they’re like, we’re your family. And I bought into it hook, line and sinker. Now I’m out of it, and I tell my wife every morning, I’m so happy.

We grew up in very rural Alabama, we had 100 acres of land. I was the youngest of four girls, my dad was a pharmacist in Selma during the sixties, during the march across the bridge and all of that, a businessman in a very, very, very racist place. His business was in the Black community, so we lived in that community. My family is… my wife calls it tribal. The family is the core. And then other people outside of the family are secondary. They can be pulled into the core, but that can be taken back if you act an ass, you know.

Other kids would go to sleepovers. We weren’t allowed to do that, because of the world we lived in. In Selma, everything was so segregated, so the Black people were crazy poor and the White people were middle America (nobody was rich there, but the White people acted like they were millionaires.) So we couldn’t go over to the kids that were super poor, they were my dad’s customers, it would be complicated. And we couldn’t go over to the White kids’ houses because literally their parents didn’t want Black people in their homes. And with having four girls and my dad knowing his community, he absolutely did not trust people. Not White men, for us to be spending the night at their home, and definitely not Black women, because men would be coming in and out. So my dad had a controlling way. He was an incredibly quiet and kind person, but you were kind of raised in this very paranoid environment. Like my dad would always say, When we leave the house, have a plan C to your plan B.

My mom was not from there, she was from Louisiana. She’s from a different culture, she’s Creole. So she had a different mentality, kind of like, Everybody can kiss my ass.

My dad thought all women should be educated, and be professionals. I wanted to go into the military. Absolutely not allowed. You have to go to college first, then you can go do whatever you want. Nowadays I think people would call guys like that feminist, right? Women should be empowered and not ever depending on men.

I did have that rebellion in my thirties, a feeling like my parents were really negative, always looking over their shoulder. I fought against it. But what winds up happening, I found not everyone is on the up and up. There’s a spectrum of people out there. I definitely feel like it does not hurt to have some boundaries, you know.

Tell me a bit about your wife and your marriage?

We met at university back in the nineties when I was 20 and she was 30. We did not date, because she was older. Fast forward 12 years, I see her on Facebook. And I was like, I don’t know if you remember me, you tutored me. And she was like, Of course I remember. And we got reacquainted, you know, back in 2008 or something. We got married in 2014.

She’s a professor at a fancy little liberal arts college right down the road. And she’s got the premium life, you know, three miles from work, no traffic other than the Amish cart. She’s from Boulder. So my family, we call her Whitey McWhiterson, because she’s about the Whitest person we’ve ever met. (Laughs.) She’s had the life that we would watch on TV.

How would you say you’re doing? How would you rate how your life is going?

I would say that I’m doing maybe the best that I’ve done in my life in a long time, you know, because when you do see that life almost might end, it changes you. I know it sounds hokey and all of that, but when you are laying there thinking, I might not wake up in the morning, you really start to put a lot of thoughts into how you want to live. Before you’re trying to just get through the fucking day without breaking down, get the energy to go to the grocery store. And then you realize that none of that shit has to actually be done. Like, if you die tomorrow, nobody’s going to give two fucks about whether or not you cleaned out that closet or went to the grocery store or paid the bill. So how I’m doing today is excellent.

My anxiety level has decreased, being able to see the beauty and not be negative because I’m not having to wake up and deal with grumpy fucking guys and try to make sure that they have a nice day, you know. Instead just waking up and being like, Wow, today’s really beautiful. I feel more connected with what I want and who I want to be than I ever have allowed myself to feel, you know?

I feel like I’m a little bit unflappable. Like I’m sturdy in my shoes. And if it’s made my relationship with my wife better, it’s made my relationship with my family a lot easier.

Your career seems like it was a source of stress?

There’s no reason for me to have been a truck driver for 25 years. I could have been in management, but I love blue collar work. But the people I worked with, as the times have changed, their mentalities have changed. I would say nowadays, the men that I work with are more racist, more misogynistic, more xenophobic. I’m seeing humanity get more disgruntled, you know, and I think that wore me down, after years where every time you say, Good morning, the guy next to you goes, What’s so good about it? Or when you get out on the road and your customers are in a crap mood because they’re working a shit job.

I hate to say it, but not having to deal with men… and White men… every day, it’s like a gift from God. Who knew that they controlled so much of my unhappiness, you know? I am realizing how much masculine toxicity I lived in for 25 years. Even if your boss loves you and is your brother, these kinds of jobs make it known to you that you are replaceable. So when your body starts to give, they don’t really want you anymore. It’s like staying in an abusive relationship. You keep making excuses for this really shitty person, but they’re never going to change and they’re getting shittier every year. When I was in the hospital for a week, not one person even reached out to say, Hey, are you still alive? I’m not disgruntled about it, but it is a reality check of where you stand.

I’m only the second Black person that station has ever hired. And I was the second woman that they ever hired. Don’t get me wrong, the men, they’re nice guys. These are good husbands. These are good dads. But they’re not there for me, you know. And in the South, the delivery companies are almost all Black. So when I got the job back there it was different. And I’m not saying these men are racist… I kind of feel like White men in general are low level racists, because the whole world is your fucking oyster. How do you walk around when everybody’s kissing your ass and not feel like the king?

So after your health scare, you retired. What actually happened with your health?

Lyme disease. It just went from small aches and pains to, I couldn’t catch my breath when I was walking. And one day my wife was like, What is your heart rate? My heart rate in the middle of the day was 40, the Lyme disease just went to my heart and killed off one of the beats. I was just living on one beat.

It’s so cheesy, the shit you hear when you’re 30 and you’re like, Oh, come on Auntie, nobody wants to hear about how happy you are about your health, you know? But it’s true.

Was your relationship affected by these big changes?

We are absolute opposites. We joke about how nowadays if we had to meet online, there’s no fucking way I would swipe right on her. And there’s no way she would swipe on me. I’d be like, Oh, she’s cute, but do you see what she’s into? Shit, who wants to go snowshoeing? Not me. Who wants to go for a hike? Not me. I want to play video games. I want to go on my boat. But what does work for us is, and we say this all the time, it comes down to having the same moral compass, you know,

I would say she’s on the spectrum, very highly functioning, but something is definitely not connected, because there is something where she just doesn’t grasp the seriousness of something unless it’s affecting her. She really is only thinking about math 90% of the time. So there’s a lot of social or emotional cues that she’ll miss.

Some of my friends would say she’s just selfish. But I know she’s not selfish because I know when there’s a selfish moment and when there’s a moment where she just doesn’t see how it really looks. When I had the heart stuff, my wife went with me to the hospital. But when they said I had to spend the night, her response was, I have class tomorrow, I can’t be here. So I had to sit her down like, Look, babe, this isn’t a deal breaker for me, I can go through all of this on my own or I can call a sister, you know, but every time somebody calls me in the hospital and they say, Is Lena there with you? and I have to say no, I’m not going to cover for you. I’m just going to say, you chose to go to work now. But I’m going to tell you, it makes you look like an asshole, to my family, my friends, your friends. But if you actually do care about looking like you love me the way that you claim you love me, you should be with me. And you know, she listens.

So you have to kind of work through it. And I think she’s been with me long enough now to know that she’s got a good thing with me and if she wants to keep it, she has to give something.

When it comes to relationships, the only thing that I have seen that actually makes a difference is communication and physical love, like touching each other, sitting next to each other on the couch. There’s so many couples that I know who sleep in different rooms because, My husband snores. And I’m not saying that’s wrong, it’s just if he kisses you goodbye and you’re like, Your beard hurts, you’re not going to be married in five years, you know? At some point you have to be okay that he walks by and smacks you on the ass, even if it’s annoying, you know? Or be okay that she wants you to open the car door even though you kind of think it’s stupid. It’s just this constant, like, trying to figure each other out. You know, you’re dating for the rest of your life if you’re married. That’s what it’s supposed to be.

Tell me about your family dynamics, with three older sisters and an aged parent.

One sister lives on Capitol Hill and worked for the Department of Justice. Another sister lives in New Orleans near my mom. She’s a medical doctor. Another one lives in Baltimore, she has an education doctorate. I am close to them, but I do defer to them to make the decisions and then I’ll implement. I don’t want to be the boss, but I do want them all to know that I have their backs.

My mom made the rule years ago that she does not want more than one of us at a time to visit. It stresses her out and there’s too much jostling for power, you know? And my mom is kind of a narcissist so when you’re with her, she wants to be your focus. And honestly, they do fight when they’re together. I let them pamper me and treat me like a little sister, and then I get out. That’s what I figure is the best situation, only because all of them are very specific about their lives. And I am not rich, nor do I want to be and I have issues with rich lifestyles, and all of them kind of live rich lifestyles, you know, where you have help and one of them has a chauffeur, and one of them, her husband has a bodyguard, he’s a big time lawyer guy.

You’ve mentioned a few times that you’re not rich. Do you feel stressed financially?

No, I purposefully make myself not be surrounded by money. I live a comfortable life. When I say I’m not rich, it means like, I can’t go out today and just buy a car right off the lot, you know. When I think of rich, I think of expendable cash, and that is something I don’t have. And when you live around academia, especially around people without children, I’m always reminded about where I am, meaning if they want to go out to dinner, the cocktails are 20 bucks a piece. I have 20 bucks for a cocktail, but I also could sit my ass at home and have just as good liquor here at the house. So when I’m with them, I have to remind myself, their world is not my world.

One thing that’s kind of a passion for me, that absolutely will change your life, is being in your community. And I don’t mean volunteering and all. I’m talking about literally being in your community: You want to go eat, you go to your local place. You need groceries, you go to the one in your community. You go outside of your community for the extras, but you need to spend your money where you live or else you will have nothing. And I think it’s because we live in the country, and I was raised in the country, and I’m from a family owned, corner store type of place. And that’s what literally paid for all of us to go to college. If we didn’t have our community go to my father to get their medicine, to buy their toilet paper, to buy their six pack of beer, we would have never been able to be successful.

Are you ever thinking of national, or political things? Do they worry you, stress you out?

Of course. I mean, who wouldn’t be? But I’ll be honest, I don’t let it really affect my day to day life. I mean, I vote. I’m not going to run for office. I know that. I’m not even going to volunteer to help somebody run for office. I think the world ebbs and flows, into shadiness and good. The yin and yang. So we’ll have four years of everybody being accepted. And four of everybody being treated like shit, you know? That’s just life. I’m not going to sit and stew on it because I have way too much other stuff to do.

I’m going to be dead in 40 years. Tops, you know. And if this is where humans are going, then we deserve every single bit of the shit that we’re going to get. It just sucks for people who have kids, you know? It doesn’t seem to stop straight people from giving birth, and I love the people who’ve had kids around me and I love their kids. But I just look at the world and I just think we’ve done enough to this planet that it’s time for the planet to go down a different path than humans.

I just really want to be present, you know, like I’m a big Star Wars freak. And it’s not for the sci-fi stuff, but it’s truly for the Jedi mindset, which is, you know, to be present, to not let your emotions guide your destiny. You don’t let fear drive you, you don’t let worry drive you. You don’t go into the dark side, right?

If you had to rate the satisfaction you feel with your life out of 10, what seems about right?

At this moment, on this day, I would say, I don’t want to ask for more because I think that’s greedy and I don’t want to belittle what I have, so I would say an eight. Yeah, if I fall, I’m not going to fall that far.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Sam about coming out to his father, and the joy of handing over keys to first-time homebuyers.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Sam

Sam, 41, is a realtor living in a mid-size city in Washington State, which feels like a small town to him, having lived in Maryland near DC, and Chicago. He, and his husband Mark, love the Northwest, but Sam struggles with how they are perceived as a couple. Through a lot of hard work, they have built careers which make them feel financially secure.

I take pride in being a good friend. I love meeting people. I’m a chatty person. I’m the person at the office who makes the rounds every day saying hello to everyone. I try to be someone that can listen, someone that can help. I definitely would put myself on the ‘people pleaser’ side of things.

I have a really solid core, a big group of friends that I’ve known since I was ten years old. But then, I’ve also moved a couple of times. I grew up in Maryland. In Maryland, a lot of people, their next step is New York, stay on the East Coast. I didn’t want to do that, so I went to Chicago where I knew nobody and met a lot of amazing people. From there I moved to Indiana for a year and a half, and then made my way to Washington State. Moving has actually been a great way for me to gather friendships.

I lived in Maryland for the first 26 years of my life. The move to Chicago, a big driving factor was I had come out. I had, you know, told family and friends that I am gay and for me, I felt I needed to just start anew. Because you live your whole life one way and then it’s a big change. So it was like a fresh start.

The move to Indiana was because I had gotten engaged and my now husband was finishing up a grad school program at Notre Dame. And then he got a job in Washington State, so I came along. And we have really settled down here and have been here for nine years now. I’m about 3 hours from Seattle, close to the Oregon border.

The coming out process in Maryland, it kind of flipped my world upside down. You have this built up fear inside of you. And I was older, you know. My sister was the first person that I spoke to and she wasn’t bothered at all, she was very supportive. The harder part was probably just breaking it to my parents. My dad, you know, born in the fifties, the initial reaction was not the most positive.

At the time I had been living at home just to save up money and in preparation for what could happen. And then it was kind of encouraged that I find somewhere else to live. So then the move, I had no job in Chicago. I sold my car just to have extra money to pay rent. I think that a big part of the excitement for me was, I’m going to move with nothing and make something of it.

I think the move was a true defining moment; I was like, people are going to meet me for the first time as I really am. And I think that was a really freeing feeling, a brand new beginning even at 26 years old, which is hard to truly feel.

When I moved to Indiana to be with my now husband, I worked for a radio station and did advertising sales. My husband got the job in Washington and real estate was something that always interested me. But it was hard to jump into because you don’t necessarily get a paycheck right away

I’m lucky in the fact that I hope that this is my last job. I have found great success in it. I found a passion in it. I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.

The first question that a lot of people ask us is, if we plan to have kids. It’s something that we had tried to do at one point with a surrogate, it just didn’t work out.

But, we have two really good friends in Minneapolis, and my husband actually was the donor for them. They had their baby in June and that’s been a really cool experience because they do want us to be involved. They came to visit with the baby recently and we’re going to Thanksgiving with them. We didn’t necessarily create a family, but now we have this kind of alternative family dynamic, which has been a really fun, unique experience.

It’s a lesbian couple, both from the south, very religious, heavy Southern upbringings. Mark met one of them through grad school. They were at Notre Dame together for grad school and became best friends. They were workout buddies, you know, study sessions together. And so when it was time for them to try to start their family, we were the first call.

The process started as just monthly visits, you know, trying to get her pregnant. And it worked on a second try, but unfortunately that one was a miscarriage. And so it took about another year before it really worked, but we did have to go the in-vitro route and go through a sperm bank and everything. We were all in, we were all committed to it and wanted to see it come to fruition.

One of the wives carried the other wife’s egg and Mark’s donation. So I was just the cheerleader. For me there was a lot of excitement in making this work and being able to, you know, be part of helping someone else realize their dream of starting a family. But there was also a lot of fear for me in how Mark would react, meeting a child that has his DNA, like, Will you be able to meet this child and just say goodbye? I think he’s done a really admirable job of having that distinction of, you know, My role is to help them create a family, and that’s what I’ve done.

Sam, how are you doing right now?

I think there’s my compartmentalized, day to day life, where I am very busy and at times stressed and sometimes anxious, but in a weird way that just kind of plays into my success. And then I think on the broader scale of things, I think fearful would be a great word. You know, we are a gay couple in a very, very conservative area. So there’s the fear of, you know, being out in public. There’s the fear of, what’s the government going to do next? My overall feeling would be kind of fearful of what’s to come.

It seems like your relationship is something that is going well?

In most aspects of life, we’re just both open books. You know, there’s nothing that I would ever feel I need to hide from him. And I am grateful that he feels the same way.

We also just enjoy having fun together, right? We’re always looking for new activities. Right now we just got those paint by number kits and we like to have a glass of wine and we sit down at the table together, we’re both painting, good conversation, it’s just a time to connect.

Has your relationship with your parents improved since you initially came out?

There was a bit of a healing process. And a big part of that is, I’m not hiding anything. For my father it was really hard, you know, when first coming out. But I think he just kind of had a stereotypical idea of what that would look like. And through time he has seen that it’s okay.

He actually took the time to apologize to me. I mean, probably 11 years after the fact, we had gone to visit my parents, it was a summer trip. It was probably the second day of the trip. And Mark and my mom had gone outside, I think they were looking at flowers and plants and stuff. And we were making breakfast and he just said, You know what, I have to get this off my chest. He was like, I’m really sorry about the way I reacted. I realize how incorrect I was, in imagining what this would be, and we love having Mark as part of the family, and we can’t imagine it without him.

That was nothing I ever expected him to do or even considered happening. That was a big moment and a surprise to know that he’d truly come full circle. And now we talk on the phone probably two, three times a week, I would say this whole process made us closer than we’ve ever been.

Once it happened, I was like, Wow, maybe I did need that, it really lifted me up.

When we started, you said you take pride in being a good friend. How does friendship fit in your life?

We actually just had this conversation recently with some other people. They’re like, how many different people do you talk to in a day? Probably 10 to 12 on any given day. For the long distance friends, anything that reminds me of them, you know, I don’t just think about it, I act on it.

A lot of my friends have kids now, so I’ll check in, see what’s going on with their kids. For the people that I’m around, it’s really just making sure that it’s never a one-sided relationship where people are asking us to hang out, but we’re not asking them. I’m ‘the more the merrier’, I have a fire pit in my backyard and I’m like, hey, it’s Friday evening, open invite.

I feel good when people check in on me, so I like to know that I can make other people feel good by checking in on them. I do remember my mother in my elementary years, stressing the fact that, Nobody’s weird, they just have their own personalities. She was like, Be nice to everyone and that will get you far in life. I think there is no truer advice that I’ve ever received in my life.

It translates into my work life. I’m in a very service-oriented job where I’m assisting people make probably the largest purchase of their life. I get to hand people keys when they buy a home and see the joy on their face.

Financially, do you feel satisfied?

The last four years have gone in a very positive direction. My husband has a great job, he’s in management now. And that’s kind of the steady guaranteed income, whereas I’m commission-based. But I’m at the point now where I built up the clientele, I work for a fantastic company that supports us. And so yeah, I would say financially we are very comfortable.

We bought a new house this summer, we can travel, do things that we enjoy, not have to truly worry. So it’s a very different from where we started, you know, when we first met. But it was very intentional. It was a lot of hard work and tracking spending for many years.

I grew up middle class. My parents, I think they worked extra hard because neither of them went to college, so they knew they had to make up for it. My dad worked two jobs until he was 70 years old and was probably working 50 to 60 hours a week the whole time I’ve ever known him. And my mom worked full time my whole childhood.

My dad managed a lumber store. He worked there six days a week. And then on the side, he actually designed kitchens. He was constantly going out on appointments, getting the measurements for cabinets and kitchens and meeting with people.

Now that he’s retired, he still plays pickleball and then he goes to the gym to do some lifting and then he has guys over to play pool in the afternoon. So it’s just who he is.

How do you feel about where you live?

I love being in the Northwest, but in a perfect world, I would be in a different part of the Northwest. We’re close to a lot of things that we love, but it’d be nice to not have to worry about, you know, going out in public together or… politically, we are very much not in the majority.

I wish I didn’t have in the back of my head, like, Would somebody do something to us, would somebody try to hurt us in public? Nothing has happened but I think that’s the hardest part, you feel like an outcast in the area you live. Like, we could never just, hold hands in public, and I think there’s a sense of jealousy in the fact that we can’t do stuff like that.

I sometimes let that jealousy turn into anger, but also, the part that kind of messes with me internally is the fact that when I am working, I just don’t really talk about myself. I make sure I ask questions that gear everything towards them. Because it actually could cost me business and money if I am open about who I am. You kind of never really stop hiding who you are. Or if you are comfortable with the people, you never stop coming out. And I think that takes an emotional toll for sure.

Then there’s also a sense of guilt where, you know, I’m talking to people and they will say like, What’s your favorite restaurant to go to with your wife? And I’ll overlook the wife part. I’m not denying Mark or my love for him, but I also feel like I’m being protective. And I think that’s kind of an emotional struggle to find a balance with.

We’re in a highly, highly religious area as well. I feel like a lot of times, Christianity is being used as an excuse to be hateful rather than to be good.

I’m really intentional about interacting with people and forming a bond, and I’d like to say getting them to like me before they find out, because I think if somebody establishes a relationship with you and they enjoy being around you and talking to you and being your friend, and then they completely switch because of that information, it tells me everything I need to know about that person, right?

I’ve seen people become a little more standoffish, just kind of shocked by it or something. But it kind of works in two different directions, because there’s also the people who are like, Oh, I’ve always wanted a gay best friend, so we’re going to be best friends. And I’m like, Well, I have to like you as well, you know? (Laughs.)

Are you and your husband aligned on how you present in your community?

Very different. I’m very safe and a little more closed off, whereas he is the Treasurer of our Pride Foundation in the area. They put on the Pride Festival every year. He’s more like, We’re going to make sure that we’re celebrated and that we’re recognized and, you know, creating a safe space for those that need it. I support that fully, but I’m kind of hiding a little bit because it could cost us a lot of money.

A lot of the LGBTQ community is very young here because there’s not much for them to do or resources that they have, so as soon as they’re old enough, they leave. So we don’t really have a strong friend group from that community.

And I mean, politics right now is kind of scary. We had to meet with a lawyer and ask, How do we protect our marriage? If we don’t know if our marriage will be recognized, what steps do we have to take? We got legal documents saying that, yes, we can visit each other in the hospital, Yes, we can be decision makers even if our marriage is no longer recognized. That weighs heavily on you; you think you’ve built this life that you’ve wanted, and now there’s this dark cloud over you that’s saying, Yeah, maybe they can erase that.

Are you or your husband politically active in any kind of way?

Not really. I mean, active in the fact that we always vote. But I’m not necessarily a protester. I would like to be more engaged, but I need to figure out what that looks like because, again, it always turns back to work, I guess that’s what’s instilled in me. I am more of a public facing person, you know, there are signs out there with my name and my phone number on them. I feel like I need to be a little more careful when all of my stuff is public. So I do tread lightly that way.

If I asked you to rate how you’re doing, on a scale of 1-10, what feels right to you?

I give myself a strong eight.

I think that I’m a very calculated person and I think that we’re truly hitting our stride. And I think we are thriving and moving in a really positive direction here. So, yeah, I think an eight because there’s always room for improvement, but I would say I’m genuinely happy and proud of, you know, what I’ve been able to create.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Faisal about the big relationships in his life — with his fiancée and his brother.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Faisal

Faisal, 24, is an architecture student in Eugene, Oregon, and he is in love. He and his partner, talked online first, then got semi-formally engaged after their first in-person meeting. He’s originally from Bangladesh, his brother lives in Seattle. Faisal’s fiancée studies in Vancouver, but she is from Bangladesh too. They’re working out where their future will be.

First of all, I’m Faisal, I’m Bangladeshi. 21 years of my life I lived there and studied there. And now I’m doing college, studying architecture here at the University of Oregon.

It’s just me and my older brother, he’s 12 years older than me. And my mom and dad, all of them are from Bangladesh. But in 2015, my brother left to study in the US, he got work, so he stayed and whatnot. Went to Bangladesh to get married, came back here, kids and everything. And I happened to also go to the same uni. My mom was like, If you do study abroad, you’ve got to be close to your brother. Every break I do come to Seattle from Eugene, you know, free food, free stay. Also for my nephew, he’s a big fan of me now.

Are you in a partnership of any sort?

Yeah. You could say, for us, it’s like an unofficial engagement. It’s almost going to be a year. I did have a six year relationship in high school, and I had a two month relationship here in the United States. I feel like I’m kind of unique, so I can’t really connect with everybody. I need that chemistry before I can be like, Okay yo, let’s give this a shot. It’s going good so far.

I was a people pleaser. For example, in my high school I was kind of the class clown. Everybody knew me, everybody loved me, it was always fun and jokes, but, I would never show that I’m depressed or sad. There was no room for me to really express my emotions. That it’s not all funny and jolly and whatnot. I’m going out, I’m code switching, and inside, I’m normal. It’s like, I can’t be myself fully with everybody, so to my partner I’ve got to be fully myself.

So you’ve been in the US for about four years? Are you going to try to stay?

Yeah, architecture is a five year degree, one last year here. It’s very common for people to study here and work and then either decide to stay or not, mostly to stay. But I never really had the intention that I would be staying here. At the time of choosing colleges, I really didn’t care if it was Canada, U.S. or even back home. It’s leaning towards not staying for many reasons. Not because I have had a bad experience here. Eugene was really nice, everybody was nice to me and whatnot, but yeah, I would like to see life outside the U.S.

I’m allowed some work experience here, so I’ll see how the one year goes and see the opportunities abroad and then go on from that. I don’t mind going back to Bangladesh, but I do think it’s better for me to go back after gaining some global experience.

Tell me about your partner, and how she fits into your global plans?

Right now, it’s long distance. We met online and she had a similar route of studying abroad and whatnot. She just graduated, she’s job hunting. Right now she’s in Singapore.

I love talking to her. She hates the word ‘settle’. She wants to, you know, experience all the world, she doesn’t want to stay in one place. I buy that idea and I’m all in for that. Bangladesh, for us personally, we would rather be somewhere else.

I’m not religious. I’m not, you know, all into religion. But I was born into a Muslim family. So I do say I’m a Muslim, but I don’t practice deeply or anything. But I do have faith, I do believe in the religious foundation of Islam. There’s many parts I don’t really believe in, but it’s more about committing to one thing rather than all aspects of that one religion being perfect, you know?

How do you feel things are going for you right now?

Better than ever, really. There is some, what’s the word, friction, between my family members. But other than that, education wise, career wise, relationship wise, perfect.

I kind of took a two year time of solitude, just focusing on myself, focusing on studies, and really not engaging in social interaction. I put all my time into me, and that really helped.

I came to the United States to study. A lot to learn, you know, living alone and eating and talking to people. Like there was a lot of digesting at that point. The first year of college was really figuring out what’s going on. The second year was adapting.

The third year I did, just for fun, talk to one or two girls online. So the solitude was gradually breaking then.

Is that when you met your now partner?

When I came to the United States, before my classes even started, just randomly, she, I don’t know, commented on one of my posts and we started talking there, but I didn’t have a Canadian visa, I can’t go there and I was just getting myself settled. We both got busy so it died down. Then years later, we started talking again. And that’s how I learned about her growth. And she learned about my growth and we were like, Yeah, let’s just keep going together now. Like, let’s not make the mistake of going apart.

So far it’s going really, really good. Almost like a constant honeymoon phase, there is, you know, deep love and deep communication. I learned from her, she learned from me. And we are excited to break off that long distance. But it’s going to take a while because she’s on her own journey, I’m on my own, we are respecting that. Being together is not the main thing right now. It’s more like establishing ourselves, and then intertwining our paths slowly,

How did you decide to meet up in person?

I got a Canadian visa, so I was like, Yo, I can meet you. It was all online before and that really heightened our expectations.

It may not make sense to you, but she came back into my life July 5th and I met her July 26th. Three weeks later. I got that gut feeling. Because I was not in the mindset of like, I’m going to date or even have a close partner. I told you, I was in solitude.

What happened the very day you met?

It’s July. I’m having my July break. I’m in Seattle visiting my brother and it’s like a two hour drive. And my brother and his wife do drive up there time to time, like to check out some restaurants because, you know, it’s diverse there, whatnot. That evening, they dropped me off at her, she was in UBC campus, like dorms, basically.

So the first time I met her, I’m driving up and I could see two girls, her friend and her, she was behind, they were walking out of the building and I’m like, okay, I’m shitting myself. I got out and she, she had some gifts for my nephew and my brother and his wife. But I could sense she’s shaking. I’m also kind of shaking. But we hugged. And the first thing is like, smell, you know? Like her smelling me and me smelling her. It was like, I don’t know, it was like a different experience because, you know, obviously online, you don’t get that at all. So that was like the first instinct for her, for me, like the smell of each other. If we are even going to like the smell of each other. Right.

I end up staying, yeah, almost nine days.

It was mostly light. But I did buy a promise ring and I didn’t tell her, obviously, and I’m kind of a romantic guy, Vancouver is a nice city, you got water, you got mountains, you got the city life, everything, really. So I did plan a little boat ride and stuff. And then, you know, a fancy sushi place. She also got a ring, and we kind of exchanged it that moment. To me, in my mind it was like, I’m all in. It was good that it was mutual.

So after that, I was like, okay, I’ll come every time I can. So far I’ve been like, I don’t know, five, six times, but none of them lasted long. The most time I had with her was 25 days. And that went smooth. Yeah, it’s just me going there every now and then when I can, basically depending on my courses, if there’s a break.

Compared to Bangladesh obviously it’s not common. Like, you would first tell the parents of each family. In this case her parents didn’t know our family. And it’s somewhat taboo dating before marriage, especially for parents who are really religious. Our parents are somewhat religious so that’s why we kind of kept it from them. It’s not like they’re fully against it, but yeah, that’s why I say informal, because it’s really between us and it will come out later in life when it’s time. That’s when it’s official. But, you know, it’s pretty official to us. Like we we have decided and that’s what matters really.

You seem like a positive guy. Are there things which you worry about or wish were different?

It’s probably not the best place to talk about it because literally where I am, I have those problems. But yeah, I’m not really fond of how my family’s living their lives.

It really is mostly my brother and my brother’s wife. Even though they love me, you know, giving me a place to stay, they buy me socks, you know, I’ll take it. But it’s hard to really talk to them, you know, just being the youngest. All my life I did face a little bit of being singled out, almost like I’m not a part of the family. Even though I’m getting this love, I’m not really feeling it, you know?

I can still sense that he has this view of me that like, I don’t know shit. And there’s a sense of disrespect at this point. You can’t just joke around about everything I do. And I just don’t know how to confront or, you know, really engage with this matter that, Hey, I’m not okay with this. Because he’s also going to take that lightly and that’s going to bite my ass, you know? The best thing to do is just stay silent and go with the flow.

It kind of has been my idea to break off from this family. I’m kind of tied because they’re all helping me financially, but once I’m graduated and established. Once I have some sort of power to just, you know, leave this place. I mean, in the suburbs, without a car, I can’t go anywhere. So it’s just different kinds of shackles.

Have you ever tried to seriously talk to them about it?

I haven’t really. I would say it’s also the way I kind of live my life as well, I’m complicit. I’m most myself in solitude or with my partner and also in my work or studio. And there are good times, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they’re always disrespecting me. And I take in the love they give me whenever they do. But they also don’t understand the boundaries. I have to find the right moment to have a say, and I’m just not in a state to really do that because they’re not going to take it seriously. So I just stopped. It’s like, why is my brother becoming my third parent? Right?

How much space in your head does this stuff take up? Like, do you think about it sometimes? Often?

When I’m in Eugene, I’m not thinking about him or anything. It’s like a switch. I turn it off and on. On and off, which is not good I know, but you kind of compartmentalize. You put it in a box, I’m not going to think about it awhile.

I did have a reflection recently about why there is this negative energy towards me from him. The age gap is huge, and when I was born, my family was more financially stable. When he was born, they were figuring out their lives, first child and whatnot. So he might have resentment towards me because I’ve gotten better things in life than he had when he was growing up. He went to Bengali medium school, I went to English medium school which was more like a private school, right? He did college in Bangladesh and then got a scholarship and made his way here by himself, you know, like fully funded and whatnot. So really never getting the help from my mom and dad. Whereas me, I’m being funded even now by my mom and dad. And I don’t know, all of this could create a slight resentment towards me.

Following on from school funding, how do you feel about your financial situation generally?

I feel like once I’m graduated, slowly everything’s going to be good. I don’t know how to answer that really. I’m not too scared about finances because I’m optimistic. Everything just works out, you know?

Are you politically engaged at all?

I’m becoming a little more world focused and America focused, especially now. And in both cases it’s in a negative manner. It’s also a little personal or selfish… asking where I would want to live my life, you know, because things aren’t looking good in the U.S. to me at least. Hopefully it’ll get better, but I don’t see myself living here, you know, spending the rest of my life here.

But also, I’m not at all a fan of like, gun rights. Like it shouldn’t be a right to a person in any country, I shouldn’t be able to just get it randomly, you know, even if I show my identity or whatever, it shouldn’t be that easy. It’s just crazy to me how that’s a right, like, the Second Amendment, you know, it’s the second thing. Like, I don’t want to live in that fear.

Do you follow specific news sites or blogs or anything?

No, not really. I guess, Mehdi Hasan There’s also Healthy Gamer. There’s no specific source. But I’d say YouTube has been a really big part of my life. I’m always kind of watching something while I’m eating and stuff.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you feel you’re doing in your life right now?

Can I put in decimals? Okay. I’m closer to ten, but obviously not nine. I’d say like 8.5. Yeah. 8.5 is a good. There is a lot to learn still and there is a lot to fix or escape from. But yeah, I’m close to where I really, really want to be.

How do you think the people that you know in your life are doing on that same scale?

I mean, I know my family the most. So of them, I would say it’s around 5 to 6. My dad probably is more like a 7 or 8 but yeah, most of them it’s not good, not bad, kind of average.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Lana about flourishing at a new church, and the perils of Disney friendships.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Lana

Lana lives in rural Georgia, in a small town with no traffic lights. She drives an hour to her job at a local community college where she’s the Assistant Vice President of student affairs. She’s been there for 18 years and has her hands in everything from admissions to financial aid. Next year will be her 25th being married to Dan.

We do not have any children, but we have a little Jack Russell terrier. He is definitely our baby and he goes everywhere with us. We like to travel a good bit down to Florida, my husband and I are both annual pass holders for Disney so any time there’s time off from work, that’s where we go. And there’s only been one year since 2016 that we were thinking about not renewing, and I told my husband, Nope, we’re not going to let that go. Because I need that sometimes.

I am one of four siblings. My youngest sister lives in Alaska. I have a brother that was in the military, he’s now retired. And then another sister that’s a nurse. And we’re a close knit family. My parents live 25 minutes away, the house they live in is the house I grew up in. My great grandfather built the house, so it’s family land, about 15 acres that it sits on. My dad’s brothers also live close by and they have about 15 acres of land also.

There’s maybe, I don’t know, 12,000 people in this area. There’s one restaurant that stays open at night, and that’s only on the weekends.

What was it like growing up?

It was a positive experience. I grew up around a lot of cousins. We all went to church together. I guess it was somewhat of a strict growing up, because we all just kind of knew the things that we did not and could not do. And nobody crossed that line.

It was dirt roads. So we were, you know, riding our bikes, playing in the woods. If we ever came in the house too early, our mothers and aunts would say, What are you all doing? Go out and play some more. They were having their own time, in the kitchen where they didn’t want to deal with us.

I did kind of grow up in a very sheltered background, very naive about things. I went from my parents’ house to literally getting married and going to live with my husband.

How did you meet him?

He went to the same church as I did growing up. So we knew each other when we were younger. When I was in college, I worked at a local video store. You know, Be Kind, Rewind. He had come in there and I wanted nothing to do with him. Nothing. (Laughs.) Some of my cousins were like, You need to go out with him. And we ended up together. But yeah, he’s from the same area I am.

How do you feel you’re doing at the moment?

Within the past year and a half, I’ve started going to a different church, completely different from the one I grew up in. I guess the word is flourish. I’m flourishing because of this church and just being around individuals that, whenever you walk in the door, they’re glad to see you and they want to help you grow. So it’s like my whole outlook of life has changed in the past maybe year and a half or so.

I grew up in a very religious background. But as I got older, I just started hanging around different people. There was a group of friends that I have (or had I guess, because I don’t have any contact with them now.) Their lifestyle and the things they participated in, I thought were okay, but now I don’t. One day, my cousins asked me if I wanted to come to this new church. At first I was like, No, but then I did, and I got the opportunity to kind of see firsthand what it all was.

What I grew up in was Primitive Baptist, old school Baptist. There was no instruments, no Sunday school, basically 30 minutes of singing, then an hour of preaching, then you go home, that’s it. And you did that one day a week on Sunday. But this new church here, it’s more about having a relationship with God.

I’m definitely growing as a person. In the past, I have been very anxious and little things worried me. And now things are different. Things are settled. Like when I come home from work, I know my husband’s going to be there. I know my pup is going to meet me at the door. I know that we’re going to, you know, sit down and watch TV together. There’s a routine of how things are. When I go to bed at night, I feel at peace. It’s almost like I listen to myself now, and it’s a good feeling to be that way because before, it was just a constant anxiousness that would cause me to either not participate in things or just worry myself sick.

How do you think you got this from the church?

When I walked in that door, there were all these people that welcomed me as if I had been going there for years. They didn’t know that my cousins went there. It was almost like, Here’s someone that is coming to us, may or may not need us, but we’re going to make sure she is loved on, as they say. And that’s really what I got. There’s a rich worship service, someone that plays the drums, a bass guitar player, you’ve got someone on the keyboard, and they’re singing all these songs, Christian music. You listen to the words and the meaning behind it, and it was just an overall feeling of peace. When the pastor talked, there was certain things that he would say and I was like, Yeah, I’m experienced in that too.

What happened with that group of friends?

These are people that we met going to different Disney events. They’re all over the country. Some of them live in Florida. One group of ladies live in Connecticut.

Just the way that they communicated with each other and the things they participated in. And I have no issues with this per se, but you know, frequent drug use, frequent alcohol use, I saw how it affected them. And I saw myself almost participating, as if I’m trying to fit in. And I didn’t like how it was making me feel. The way they would talk about each other. You know, one minute you’re nice to this person, next minute you’re going to talk to them so mean. And I knew they’d probably do the same thing about me. I guess it hit me one day like, this is not me. Sometimes I’ll still get messages that I don’t answer, and I know there needs to be a conversation eventually as to why, but I just don’t want to participate in that anymore. I’m a better person with not having to deal with them. So that’s really it.

Before church, did you feel you were lacking in community?

I was lonely in a way, because a lot of times it would be just myself, my husband. And of course, I had work… but those are my coworkers, I’m not friends with them. I go to work and I come home and you have to separate that. Yes I had my family, but as far as anybody besides… no, I didn’t really have a lot of people in my life.

My husband does not go to church. At first, I was only watching the online services. The Sunday routine, I would cook us breakfast and then at 11:00 I was getting on YouTube and watching the services. And one time I was watching YouTube on TV, and he’s like, How long you been doing this? I said, A few months now. He said, You didn’t tell me? And I was like, I thought that you would, you know, judge. He’s like, Why would I judge you on that? So I said to him, I think I want to go to the actual church. And because it is a distance away, I told my husband, I won’t go every Sunday, I’ll go every other Sunday. So that way it’s not using so much gas. That’s kind of the agreement we have right now.

It’s just helped me in a lot of different areas. In the past, I would have shied away from a conversation like this. What are they going to ask? Why do they want to know this? What are they going to do with it? There were so many different things that I would not participate in for fear. I don’t really know what it stemmed from. If my mom was 5 minutes late picking me up from school, I would get so emotional, like, oh, my God, I’m left. She’s left me. And the teacher that was there, they’d say, Oh, no, she’s coming, she’s just a few minutes late. But by the time she would get there, I was like, Where were you? You left me, you left me. And it was just a few minutes.

Did this change somewhat when you got married?

We dated for about two years, got engaged. We got married, then we moved in together. We really had to get used to being around each other. He would pick up on certain things, he’d say, You’re holding things back, what are you not telling me? And so he would pull for me to really say how I feel. Now there was somebody that I could do that with, somebody that’s not going to think bad about me regardless. Just finally having a person that I could just talk with openly.

How is your relationship with your husband?

So, he does not work. He did for a while when we first were married, of course. He was a general manager of a restaurant. He started to get that burnout feeling. He quit and he was going to go to school and be a paramedic. But then he saw that it was not for him. So I sort of freaked out because I was by no means able to support a household. He ended up going to school for criminal justice, was going to go work as a probation officer. But he had some family issues come up. (Pause.) His sister was murdered. And so he had to go and stay with his mom. And he actually stayed with her for almost a year. I would drive up there to see them, but I was still staying at home during the week so I could go to work.

Things calmed down. And he was going to start going to work. But by this time I had been promoted enough, getting the hang of things. We started learning how to budget our money. (It’s by no means where we have a lot, we budgeted to the point that our bills were paid.) So I told my husband, Don’t go back to work, let’s just continue what we’re doing. Because it was kind of nice for him to be home. He could take care of things. It was a good feeling. So I told him just to continue.

No children?

Because of my fearfulness, we were not able to have children. I never went to the doctor, even though I should have. I was just so afraid that they were going to tell me something’s wrong.

After college, I told my husband that I wanted to maybe work for about a year before we started thinking about having children. Life got in the way. My husband would bring it up sometimes and say, you know, get to the doctor, nothing’s happening. And I was like, no, I don’t want to. And he was not going to force me. So I didn’t go. We tried for about five years and nothing ever happened. And that caused a lot of hostility at home because it’s just a constant of up and down, up and down. And then, someone at some women’s group started talking to me and that kind of pushed me to go to the doctor. And that’s when we found out, you know, I wasn’t able to. But if I had gone sooner, we might have done some things. After I did go, we did try everything. But when it got to a certain point, well, we could not do IVF. That was just too much money. We just can’t afford that. Finally I was like, you know, if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be. We’ll be dog parents and that will be fine. And that’s really where we are now.

I still sometimes think about it and I think I probably always will. And it did cause problems for a while because if I had gone to the doctor sooner, things might have kind of worked out in our favor. Sometimes my husband would bring that up and it would cause a lot of pain, like he’s blaming me. His father was an alcoholic, so my husband always said, I’m going to be the father my father was not. He said a lot of times that’s what he wanted. But things are better now, we try to talk about things instead of holding them in.

How do you feel about the state of the country at the moment?

The Charlie Kirk assassination, that affected me a lot. Because I thought about my nephews, my young, early twenties nephews, they’re just getting started in their careers. They’re newly married, they’ve got small families. And Charlie Kirk, same thing. He was just doing what he loved to do. My nephews, I think about how they’re just doing what they love.

For the first week after, I watched the news. And I’ve never been like that. I’ve never been a person that wants to sit there and watch the news. But I did with this. But then I saw that it would make me feel a certain way that I wasn’t liking. Negative thoughts were coming back. And I’m like, I can’t do this. So I just had to focus on me, and focus on my family.

In terms of political parties. I’ve always been like, let me see the issues and decide, how does it affect me? I’ve never been one of those people who is like, I’m going to vote this way because I always feel this way.

What would you say are the most important issues that you’ve been paying attention to?

Health care. Because where I’m at now is trying to eat better. Whenever you try to eat better, it costs more money.

And then also education, with the government trying to decide where they’re going to put different emphasis. How does that affect me in my role now? We used to get funding in this area, now we’re not. And if we have to cut, what does that mean?

Who do you feel is the best equipped to handle those two concerns?

I like the way the Republicans typically do it. Sometimes they are so rigid, but then you’ve got the Democrats that’ll be willing just to give everything to anybody. And you know, we end up having a huge, huge deficit, we owe a lot of money. So I’m on the fence. I think for right now, I want to see how the Republicans can pull it all together.

Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Disney.

My dad was a fire chief, he was purchasing a new fire truck. And where he was going to purchase it was close to Disney. And because he was buying such a large, you know, machine, they said, well, what can we do for you? He said, I want to take my kids to Disney, can you make that happen?

Probably 2015 or 2016, we started going regularly and that’s when we started talking about getting annual passes. And you know, it’s a whole different experience when you have an annual pass because you get to experience other things than just rushing, rushing, from one ride to the next. Now you can actually just sit back and enjoy. You go up underneath those gates, they have this huge arch, and then you’re on Disney property. It’s like, you have all this noise in your mind, and now all that stress is gone. Like you’re a kid again.

I love the fireworks, the castle at Magic Kingdom. Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen them, I always go. I’ll always cry, every time. It’s like the music hits and oh, I’m blubbering. If there’s stressful stuff going on, we need that, you know. Something that’s completely different than our normal.

No one is worried about me there because they don’t know me. They don’t know who I am. So if I want to wear ears and a silly Disney shirt, no one cares because they’re doing it too. But if I do that here, then it’s like, she is a 40-something year old woman, why is she dressed like that?

How satisfied would you say you are, with your life, a one being, I’m not at all the person I want to be, 10 is you are exactly the person you want to be?

I would say I’m a five. But I don’t actually think that. I think I’m more like a six or seven because I’m definitely on a journey and I am higher up than I was before. But I’m still a work in progress because I feel like, just when I think things are going really well, something happens. It pulls me right back and then I have to fight to pull myself back to positive again.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking who they are and how they feel their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Lamar about Cyber Threats, and Children after 40.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

If you would like to be interviewed, click here. If you’d like to learn to be an interviewer, click here.

Subscribe now

Lamar

Lamar’s work gives him a uniquely informed perspective on the state of the world, so that’s what we spent a lot of our time talking about. His parents were activists during the civil rights movement. He’s been married and divorced, and is now in a new relationship. He’s serious, and has a methodical manner of constructing his dense thoughts.

I’m a professional in the cybersecurity space. I value intellectual curiosity. I was born in New York but only lived there for a few years, then I spent a year in Africa, and then I grew up in Rockville, Maryland.

I enjoy Northern Virginia. I’ve been in this area for about 15, 16 years. It is close enough to D.C. to allow for easy trips over there to experience new restaurants and museums and happenings. But it’s very quiet and walkable and provides a nice environment to call home. Over the weekends, if I’m not going out with my girlfriend or friends, I’m usually watching something, an F1 race… Silverstone is on right now.

Do you like your work?

I’ve been in cybersecurity since 2000. With the same business that I started at when I graduated college. I was an associate intelligence analyst, basically an intern, and I worked my way up. Now I manage a bunch of analysts and operatives who are a lot smarter than me and hopefully make me look good as I lead them through the threat landscape, as we call it.

Obviously, going on almost 26 years now, I must get something out of the work. It’s stimulating, it’s never the same thing. And I enjoy helping people solve problems and making sure that folks get their needs taken care of, as it pertains to keeping their people and assets safe.

We do open source, deep, and dark web intelligence. So we’re looking for content that may pose a threat to an organization, either to their cyber assets or to their physical assets, like their executives, their employees, their physical locations. Usually it’s a Fortune 500 organization, but we also have a healthy public sector client base as well. It’s protection of information, physical security, as well as brand and reputational issues.

We will have organizations reach out and say, Hey, I’m going through this thing, I’m being DDoS-ed, or this data has leaked out of my organization, help me find who did this, or we have a bunch of executives going to our shareholder meeting in Barcelona this year, we need to know what to care about from a geographic standpoint, from a cyber threat standpoint, from a business standpoint.

Does it make you feel like there are threats everywhere, behind every digital bush?

Everybody sits on their phone and looks through all the horrible, horrible news. And the job needs you to know about this on a constant basis, you need to put it into a conceptual framework that your customers can understand. And sometimes that will wear on you a bit. It’s important to have outlets, things that you do that help to help you reset.

Does your industry do better if the state of the world gets worse?

There is kind of an inverse relationship, as things get bad for our customers, they come to us more and there are more things for us to do. When there’s global conflict, typically that means we’re going to see an uptick in activity.

How do you think you are doing at the moment?

I’m good, things are fine. But everybody knows there’s a lot more to dig into than just saying that.

From a professional standpoint, anybody on the outside would say, Hey, things are going really well. You’ve accomplished some good things over the past few years, you’re the type of lunatic that would stay in the same job for 26 years. But there are things going on globally, and here in the States, politically, that definitely weigh on you. And it can be difficult to know, can I contribute? Is it just something that I have to think about internally or are there things that I can actively do to help?

I try to compartmentalize as much as possible. And I also try to worry about the things that I can control. There are any number of times where somebody has come to me and been like, Hey, I’m really worried about this news headline. And I’m like, Listen, this happens every single day. Assume that your data has been compromised. Assume that your P.I. is out there, that somebody can buy your Social Security number for $5. Just worry about the things you can control. Like if you need to freeze your credit, go ahead and do that. But try not to work yourself into a coronary because you read some headline.

You kind of have to think, is it really the end of the world? Most likely it’s not. Somebody said, we’re all rotting sacks of meat on a rock, flying through space at insane speeds.

Do you ever use that kind of justification to a client who phones up and says, I’m worried about my bank account?

Absolutely not. (Small smile.) I think my career would be very limited if I took that approach. But I do not want to fear monger. That is a tactic that’s used a lot in my industry and I am really against it.

Are you proud of the work you do?

Our job is to remain objective and to protect folks. You don’t necessarily have to agree with what an executive does or what their company does – you can have thoughts about that – but at the end of day, you’re there to protect this individual or this organization.

In one particular case, an executive’s daughter had posted a picture of her hospital bracelet online. Her account was set to private, but that image got on to a public-facing aggregator. And the bracelet contained her Social Security number, address, all of her sensitive information was out there in the open. This executive happened to be one that was not particularly well liked, something was going on that had stoked anger in the public. So we were able to advise them: This information has been posted, you should work with us to get it removed as quickly as possible so your daughter and your family are not at risk. So that was something that I was proud of my team for finding, and for being able to contextualize and put it in front of their security folks as soon as possible, to minimize the risk to that person and their family. Because no matter what you think of that executive, this was a daughter who could have been collateral damage.

Do you feel okay about the state of the world at the moment?

To be frank? I think the world has gotten progressively worse over the past few months. I also unfortunately don’t see it getting better before it gets worse. That’s not to say that the sky is falling and everybody should be stocking up on ammo and food. But I think there are negative forces at work, and very negative things that are happening as a result of people not taking into consideration the planet and groups of folks trapped in global conflicts. There’s been a shift in what a significant portion of the population cares about. We often push innovation without thinking about what harm it can potentially do, because you have a very short window to innovate and put new stuff out there.

I grew up in a very supportive and very loving family. But like any family, it had and continues to have its complications. I’m definitely somebody who doesn’t wear their heart on their sleeve. I’m not super outward with emotions. Some guy says, How are you doing… I’m doing good, how are you? And not going deep can cause issues. My thing is not wanting to be a burden to others. Like, you have your problems, why would I layer on my stuff? In relationships that has caused quite a bit of tension.

How has your current relationship been going?

It’s been a year and four months. Having been through a relationship before where not sharing emotions easily became one of the issues, I was very upfront, like, I’m happy to have those conversations, but you’re probably not going to get it out of me by default.

I was working with a therapist. The way she explained it to me was, You like helping your friends and giving advice when they come to you. Well, your friends and your family want to do that same thing for you. And that’s something that you’re depriving them of because you think that you’re burdening them. They want to be there to help you as well. So that’s where I’ve tried to think about it and conceptualize it but… work in progress.

Are you getting married anytime soon?

We’re moving in that direction. I’m comfortable saying that I can see that happening, I’m not comfortable putting a date on it.

I do want children. It’s something that I would have liked to have done many, many years back. I have friends who now have kids going to college and have been through that experience. I’m more financially stable but I don’t have the energy that I had at 25 or 30.

Your parents were activists during the civil rights movement. Do you engage with your race in any kind of socially active way?

I would in no way equate what I do today to what my parents and grandparents had to go through or what they did growing up. I think there is absolutely a part of me that likes to help people and solve problems, but the vast majority of our customers are Fortune 500 companies, people looking to preserve the bottom line. (There is absolutely a moral line that I will not cross. So I’m not like, They’re paying me enough, I don’t care if you operate a diamond mine and you chop off kids hands.)

There are systematic reasons why there have been more black people, more African-Americans who haven’t been able to achieve the American Dream. These things still exist, they may have gotten better, they may be hidden better, but they still exist. And if you achieve a certain station in life, it’s important that you remember that you are fortunate, you were lucky. And I think what you’re seeing with these ICE raids and just the way that society is going right now, these things are starting to bubble to the top and be more evident than ever, which is in one sense terrifying. But in another sense, it’s very obvious that these things do exist.

I know folks who are very, very tied into the federal government. They’re trying to hold on and continue to do the right thing even though there are any number getting fired or taking leave. But they see it from the inside. They’re trying to fight the fight.

My parents take this type of stuff really hard. They, along with their parents, had to fight through some very difficult things. Nobody’s going to be naive and say, hey, we’ve solved racial justice, because we haven’t. But they thought that we had gotten past what we’re starting to see resurge. I try to instill hope in them, let them know that it definitely won’t be like this forever. And you guys have seen it much worse, much, much worse.

What I stopped doing is (and this really happened around the Trayvon Martin case) I stopped trying to change people’s minds. I had a handful of conversations that ended up being really disappointing for me around that case. People who took a completely different view than I thought was the obvious view to have. They were absolutely not willing to view this from the lens of an innocent child who was killed because somebody followed them with a weapon.

So that taught me, Hey, you’re probably not going to change somebody’s mind who’s really set in their ways. And all it’s going to do is make you angry and disappointed. And there are a lot of better ways that you can spend that emotional capital.

Break down for me where you spend your mental / emotional capital?

It’s a little bit difficult because work and the broader world can be so intertwined. But if I was to pull those apart I’d probably put work at about 40%, maybe thinking about the world at around 20%. And then family, another 20 to 30% and interpersonal relationships, community stuff, another 20 to 30.

Overall, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days in general? Out of ten?

I’d say about seven and a half.

Do you feel free?

To an extent. You can interpret freedom in multiple ways. Money isn’t the most important thing in the world, but it does give you a sense of freedom if you’re not burdened by bills. I’m not going to jump on a yacht tomorrow, but I think there’s a level of economic freedom you get if you’ve been somewhat successful in your career, that I definitely didn’t have in my twenties and thirties. So there’s a part of me that feels a lot more free now than I did back then. But also there’s the sense of these countervailing forces that have unfolded since the elections, where now there are very real problems coming from some of the policies being enacted.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are edited for clarity and readability

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Happy New Year and welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK?

We interview regular people, asking how their lives are going.

As the year progresses, look for new types of storytelling from us, and new ways to engage.

But today, we’re talking with Georgie about Marina Abramović, and feeding pigeons as an afterwork activity.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

Subscribe now

Georgie

Georgie, 22, is learning what it means to be an artist in New York City. At the same time, she’s paying the bills by being a dog walker. She’s coming down from a hyped couple of months.

I’m from Minnesota, I was raised in the Midwest. My family’s super Irish Catholic, we’re like fourth generation Irish immigrants. I moved to Seattle for college and then recently moved to New York because my degree is in art and art history – I did that because I love art and movies and music.

So you’ve moved to New York to be an artist. How’s the experience been so far for you?

Good. Really good. It’s busy and it’s very fast paced and that’s been kind of hard, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

How did you end up studying in Seattle?

There was like, no process to it. I just applied anywhere and they offered me the most money and I knew I didn’t want to go to school in Minnesota. It took me a minute to get the hang of things, but I liked college, and the structure, one or two classes a day and then you can hang out.

I’m very, very close with my mom, so, you know, that aspect of it was hard: I remember the first time I got sick and I was like, Oh my God, I have to walk my ass to the grocery store and buy some soup and Emergen-C because nobody’s going to do it for me. And I have to lay here sick in my bed, it’s miserable. And so, that was a wake up call.

But it was really rewarding. My last year of college was amazing. I finally figured out who I was and what I wanted to do. And that attracted the right people into my life. I started college with a long distance boyfriend I had had since forever, and as a marine biology major, and both of those things lasted like one quarter. (Laughs.)

I was like, okay, I’m not going to have a long distance boyfriend, and I’m not good at science or math. I don’t even know why I did that. I think I was like, Oh, I like animals so I’ll just do marine biology. So I switched to art and that was a great decision because that’s what stuck. I had so many shitty friends in college and so many shitty boyfriends, and by the end of it, I kind of was like, I know what I want now.

You said you’re close with your mom. Tell me a little about that relationship.

My parents got divorced when I was in second grade and it was super messy. They hated each other. Then I had a crazy custody schedule after my parents had a court battle, and it was a disaster. My dad had a girlfriend before my parents got divorced. I was like six, so I didn’t know what that was, but my brother and I would go hang out with his girlfriend, which was really bold of them, thinking back. They ended up getting married and had kids probably three years after meeting, but the whole vibe was, they are going to start their own family and we’re not very welcome, we’re only kind of here because we’re court mandated to be here. Once I was old enough to drive, I was like, I love my mom, so I know where I’d rather be.

My mom, she’s just always been a rock in my life. I know the divorce was very, very hard for her but I don’t remember ever seeing her sweat, even though she has now told me like, Oh my God, it was so hard for me. I don’t even know if I ever saw her cry, she’s just a very strong woman. She had one boyfriend for a month and then was single for 15 years. She was like, I’m going to live in this house and I’m going to do my own thing. She’s a badass, honestly… I didn’t grow up with a single mom, but I grew up with a mom who definitely took most of the weight, and still does. Even emotionally, I don’t really have any memories of connecting with my dad growing up. And all my fondest memories are with her. I’ve never felt afraid to talk to her about anything, and I could call her and be like, I need you to be here tomorrow and she would stay for three weeks if she needed to, would do anything for me. And vice versa. And she’s just super cool, she took me to my first concert. It was Weezer, and that’s awesome.

How do you feel things are going right now for you? Take a moment to think about it if you like.

I don’t need that much time to think because I literally have been thinking about it for all this past month. So basically, I just very recently got out of a very interesting hypomania episode. My first two months living in New York, I was depressed, because I didn’t know anyone and would just go to the park and like, feed pigeons and go home. I was subletting with these randoms, I didn’t even really like to talk to them, and our place was gross. Go to work, go home, go to bed, not shower, not eat, wake up, go to work, go to bed.

And then I got on my feet, probably in July. July was a really good month for me. And then August, I was like, Oh my God, there’s so much to do socially now that I’ve made friends. Especially in a partying sense, there’s so much of that here, there’s just so much shit to do that I was like, I can literally go to work, come home for 30 minutes, go meet someone for dinner and then go to some like fashion pop-up fucking thing, and the next day I’m not going to go home, I’m going to go to like some book signing, there’s just always shit happening here, because everything is here. And so I got really caught up in the fact that there’s so much to do and I need to do it all now because it’s going to get cold, and so I was like, I’m never going home.

And you know, I’m not really a big drinker, I like to party maybe twice a month, but I was like, Wait, I can stay out late and get drunk lowkey every weekend because everyone does that here. So that’s what I was doing, and I spent so much money. I don’t even want to know how much. My therapist was like, do you know how much you spent? And I was like, No. I’m not going to look because I was so incredibly irresponsible, that I thank my lucky stars and should knock on wood that I’m not pregnant, that I have money to pay rent, and that I’m not dead in a ditch somewhere.

And then, a week and a half ago, I didn’t have anything to do after work and I sat down and I was like, What the fuck? Like, when was the last time that I went to bed after work? And I had a total freakout and I was like, I’ve literally been in the middle of some sort of mania and I didn’t even know. I also have ADHD, so I take Adderall, and that was just like putting gas on a fire, just exploded the whole thing. I was like, oh my God, I need to stop taking stimulants.

Now my cards are shut off. I did that. Except for my one credit card that has a $300 limit. But last weekend was really good. I took some time off work so I could chill and go home early. And then this week, work is busy, but I took time to be mindful, I guess, which was very helpful.

The pendulum has a hard time sitting in the middle. So I think I’m kind of gearing up to be a little depressed again. But I think that is okay, that is really okay. Like, Girl, get some sleep and eat.

I always liked art class and I was always sketching. It was never really like, Oh, now I know I want to be an artist, it just was always something that I felt drawn to. When you’re a teenager, shit really matters, I would get a lot of validation from teachers being like, You’re actually really good. And I’m like, Wait, what? But I still obviously didn’t think I was good enough to do anything with it. Hence, marine biologist.

What made you decide to come to New York to focus on your art?

I hate having a car. I don’t want to sit in traffic and I don’t have crazy plastic surgery. So I don’t know if anyone was going to enjoy me in L.A. So that was off the table. So I was like, okay, I can go to New York or I can go international, but my mom is literally my best friend, I don’t want to go international. So I applied to a bunch of stuff here and I got this residency where I got studio space for a discounted rate. So that’s why I moved.

I graduated and I was like, I’m good at painting, but now what? So I was trying to experiment with painting on different surfaces. Like bark. So I did that. And then I really liked painting on plexiglass. But just this past month, I’m like, I’m sick of painting because, okay, I did the damn thing, and now I need a break from it too.

I actually recently have been doing a lot of research on performance artists. I read Marina Abramović’s autobiography and it was incredible. And one of my favorite artists is Ana Mendieta. So that’s kind of the next thing I’m heading into gradually, because I love painting, but I kind of hate painting. And in college, you have to make art under a certain set of rules, there’s a final product already in mind from your professors when they assign something. And now it’s like, Okay, I’m creative, there’s just so many different ways you can make art.

You’re paying the rent by walking dogs, right? How’s that going?

That literally was the first job offered to me, and that’s why I took it. The money is not in dog walking. And it’s really exhausting, I walk probably 25,000 steps a day, I think it’s like 11 miles. I love animals and I worked at a dog daycare in Seattle, so I was like, I have this experience. We’re a private company, so I walk the same dogs every day. Sometimes I’ll have like an hour break, sometimes I don’t have time for a break.

Can you describe an idea or art project that you’re excited about?

Yeah, I’ve been talking with one of my old painting professors about this proposal, basically talking about women in domestic spaces and how hazardous it is to be cooking all the time. You know, you’re around knives, glass, fire and so I thought about this piece – I have yet to decide if I want to use actual glass or sugar glass – it’s basically a bunch of shelves, putting glass on the shelf, and then having it fall off and break, then kind of getting down and cleaning it up, not using a broom, like using your hands and throwing it away and then, just kind of the keep putting the glass on the shelf and then it keeps breaking and then cleaning it up, and I’m really excited about that.

Is that connected to anything personal?

Oh, totally. I’m angsty about my dad, you know. Like, as much as I’ve healed from it, it’s such an easy thing to make art about. I think I have such an obsession with men, how much they subject women to things, that I can’t stop creating stuff about it, you know? Also, I mean, Roe v Wade got overturned, you can always keep making art about something if it’s still happening.

And it’s stuff I experience every day, and getting older, you get more of a sense of, Oh, this is real, what they were talking about in all those books. Especially moving to New York, just on the level of being a woman… the amount of freaks here. I mean, I got catcalled in Seattle, but nothing like here. I don’t know if it’s just the sheer amount of people, but the behavior that I’ve faced here from men is genuinely crazy. It was such a shock, somebody will jerk off across from you on the train. And there’s just so much of it. Because there’s so many people it makes so many social issues very apparent.

How do you feel you’re doing out of 10?

I’m not a person who’s like, Everything is perfect right now and I’m doing great. Even when I’m doing really well, there’s always things that I wish I could change. I’m happy being in New York, I’m really excited creatively about what I’m doing, but also like, hello, I’m in credit card debt, and I don’t like my job at all and, I don’t know, my head is in a weird spot. I’m just really excited how I’ve realized that the doors are open creatively. I have a little notebook that I write ten things in a day and my manager gave me his old guitar that I don’t even know how to play and I was like, Oh my God, I can literally learn how to play guitar because I have free will creatively. I can just do that.

My brain is telling me to say five, and I say that because I’ve worked really hard to be who I am and get here and I have so much more of a sense of self than I did even since last year. I feel like I started at zero and now I’ve climbed up to five, but I’m not at ten yet because I do feel like there’s so much I haven’t figured out that just comes with life experience. So I hope to be at ten when I’m like 40, you know. If you say you’re a ten at 22, you’re lying.

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are lightly edited for clarity

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity.

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons.

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

This is a post about why we’re producing “Is Anyone OK?”

Many of you have been reading “Is Anyone OK?” for the last 5 months without much explanation about what we’re trying to achieve with it. Oops! I did this partly because I find publicly expressing my own opinions about things tough.1

I’ve tended to prefer just focusing on the words of other people. Ideally people actually living through a thing, rather than experts or professionals giving opinions about a thing.2 My first short documentary that I was proud of was about a small town in California called Johannesburg, named after the city I’m from in South Africa. My second was about my dad. Then there was our doc series tackling environmental opinions by speaking to climate change skeptics in rural Utah. All of these were built around kind of casually chatting with a semi-random cast of people.

And now it’s Social Cohesion Lab — a media organization focused explicitly on using the words of regular people to help audiences understand and care about each other, by revealing what we have in common when we talk candidly about our lives.

But I’ve had it mentioned to me that readers are probably just seeing a weekly interview with a stranger pop up in their inbox, without much editorial, narration or context, and not really knowing what the point of it is. So, this is an attempt at giving that. Here goes, in two parts:

Point 1: There’s community in being kind of, not quite, OK.

The question, Is Anyone OK?, is obviously partly bullshit. I know that almost everyone is sort of OK, and sort of not. No one is perfectly healthy, perfectly financially secure, perfectly satisfied with their relationships, perfectly safe and free, and perfectly optimistic about the state of their communities, governments, leaders and institutions. I don’t think many people really feel like a 10 out of 10 on the human flourishing scale, but no one I’ve spoken to says they’re at a zero either.

Most feel satisfied about some things in their life, and dissatisfied with others. A lot of people are kind of OK at the micro level, but feel worried about the macro level (“I think my life is going OK, but I think my community or country or planet is not so good.”) And even the people who are in personal crisis, usually seem able to give themselves a few points here or there.

The flourishing studies being occasionally published paint a picture of us that is a mixed bag, and I am partly interested in revealing the rich narratives behind these important but incomplete graphs and surveys. But more ideologically, I am also interested in illustrating, through the words of the interview subjects, what seems to me to be obvious: That many of us are feeling pretty worried about the state of things, and in a funny / sad / twisted way, that’s something that unifies us. There’s a togetherness in our shared not-quite-alrightness. This is how the project has fitted within the larger “bridging” space, even though it’s not explicitly political.

Point 2: Division is useful to entrenched power, but good media can do something about that.

The other thing I want to convey through this project is a more radical opinion: There is a battle going on3, and on one side is bad media: Algorithms and attention-hustlers who are rotting our brains with divisive content, which makes us feel alienated, furious and scared. The media (and its dominant platform, the internet) usually presents us with the angriest person of the day saying the worst thing they’ve ever said. It’s killing us that this is our primary way of interacting with other people.

I want to suggest that on the other side of this battle, is an as yet underdeveloped media ecosystem which refuses to adhere to the false narrative that most people who live differently from you, or have different opinions from you, are doing it because they’re evil, they hate you, and they want to see you suffer. Every person I have ever interviewed, whatever their beliefs, is actually focused on some version of the same thing: Their emotional, social, financial dignity — which means their work, their family and friends, their neighborhoods, their lungs, their knees, their churches, their children. They are not focused on pursuing a sinister plot to take down people who live differently from them.4

Here’s me sounding a little conspiratorial: CNN, Reddit, FOX, Facebook, the New York Times, Breitbart, whoever… they are not telling us this clearly or regularly enough, and that is on purpose, because there are very powerful people and institutions which benefit from our distraction and division.5 They benefit because rage is good for holding our attention, which means they can keep us focused on what they want, and away from what we want and need.6

We truly should fight against this distraction / division machine, because people are struggling, but it’s not because most other people around them are out for their blood, it’s because there is tremendous, intentional pollution in our brains, pockets, feeds, alongside instability in our homes, workplaces and communities.

I believe that the ammunition we have in this fight, are the words of regular people. You could call it populist media ( or something else, pick your preferred ideological leaning) but it’s really just the words of everyday people, not grifters, not podcast bros, not news pundits — just regular people, talking about their lives.

That is what Social Cohesion Lab is trying to do, and “Is Anyone OK?” is a version of that. This kind of content will lead to the feeling of shared humanity I mention in point one, which will keep us focused on trying to get the things that matter, not distracted by and angry at our neighbors.

TL;DR: Curiosity about people who are somewhat (but not so) different from you is a radical act that destabilizes the forces which benefit from our division.

None of this is entirely my idea, none of this is mind-blowingly profound. But I guess it’s good to be on record trying to explain why we’re doing it at all. Next year, we aim to expand to other projects which do more of this.

I don’t know if this clears anything up. If it didn’t ignore it. If you’re convinced, please support and join us by sharing this project with others, becoming a paying member, learning to become an interviewer, or letting us interview you.

Special thanks to Jess Stillerman and for their creative input and insights as this project has got going.

Thanks also to all the people who have helped by supporting financially, and especially, thanks to those who have been reading and enjoying.

We’ll be taking a two week break from posting interviews over the holiday season. When we get back, we’ll also be conducting a focus group with readers, to hear your thoughts about Social Cohesion Lab expanding beyond a weekly interview series. If you already know you’re interested in that, you can sign up here.

Thanks!

Ben

Subscribe now

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK? We interview regular people, asking how their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Ivy about leaving behind your home town, and AI tax preparation.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

Subscribe now

Ivy

Ivy has just uprooted from San Diego, where she had been working as a creative producer for 5 years, to move to the UK. She’s worried that her profession is disappearing, or at least rapidly changing so, along with her move, she’s trying to figure out what to do about that.

You’ve caught me in a transition period. I’ve left everything behind, including my favorite thing in the world (my dog). I’ve popped across the pond to England, and I’m currently staying with some friends here in a beautiful place called Devon, just kind of trying to figure out what the next step looks like.

I studied abroad six times between middle school and university, lived in Cape Verde, Africa, and worked for two years in Guatemala. I’m originally from Texas, but lived in New York for five years, then was in San Diego for five years. And other than my dog, I don’t really have any roots anywhere and nothing that ties me down. No partner, no children, no mortgage, not even student loans.

I grew up in Austin which, especially in the eighties and nineties, was such a family friendly city, lots of outdoor activities, live music capital of the country, great food, good schools. I had a really wonderful childhood. I ended up at an in-state school in East Texas called Stephen F. Austin, and I hated it my first year because I was so mad that I was in this little podunk town in the middle of nowhere. But looking back, I’m really grateful for it: Because it was so affordable, I could afford to study abroad three times, which shaped my future. And I was able to kind of try everything; I joined every kind of club – sports, academics, you name it. My first job after graduating college was in Cape Verde, working in sea turtle conservation, because why not?

The university, being where it was, was sort of a bastion for any creative soul within a hundred miles, right? If you were a theater kid, like where else were you safe except at this college? I had this amazing screenwriting professor, his name was Jack Heifner and he had done some impressive work, he’d written a play that Kathy Bates was in, he’d actually sold screenplays, and he was really transformative to my experience because I remember he once said, Don’t ever quit writing… (Pause. Tears up.)

Sorry, I haven’t talked about myself in a really long time. So this is weird. I don’t know why I’m emotional. I guess you just think about all the potential, all the things that could have been?

How do you feel you’re doing at the moment?

I think one of the reasons I get so emotional so easily right now is because things are weird, right? The state of the world is weird. And weird is a very broad term. I mean, I think I’m doing personally okay, I’m a very lucky person. I’m living rent free in the UK, I have a supportive family, I’m very healthy, very capable. I’m struggling to find a job, but I think that’s more a reflection on the state of the market than on my capabilities. I hope. But also, I did this to myself, it was a risk that I told myself I was willing to take. And it’s terrifying not knowing what comes next, but I do know that I will be okay, I have the safety net that so many other people don’t. I could always move back in with my mom.

At the same time I am very in tune to what’s going on in the world and specifically what’s happening in the United States under Trump and the effects that that is having on places like Palestine and Ukraine. You know, living in Guatemala was really hard. It was not a fabulous experience. I think it cured me of any white savior complex I used to have, and it cured me of religion. And it taught me so much about what poverty and hardship and violence actually look like. One of my best friends from Guatemala, she actually ended up in San Diego with me and she has two sons who are now my godsons. She fled horrible violence in Guatemala and she came to the United States for a better life, and now we’re trying to villainize people like her. I’m so scared for her. So I don’t know, I feel like if anyone says things are okay, they’re either not paying attention or they’re a sociopath.

And I know that compassion fatigue is real, and I know it shuts a lot of people down. But I’ve never been able to turn it off. And I feel a little guilty being on the other side of the planet, like am I running from this? Or am I just recognizing that things are kind of awful and we don’t know where it’s going or how it’s going to end?

The odds of us existing in space and time are so minute, you’re just a speck on an iota on a modicum of some cosmic luck. And that scares a lot of people into wanting to believe in a purpose and a god that has a plan. But I’m like, No, there’s no reason, but all the more reason to savor and appreciate every moment because we are just stardust and one day we’ll be stardust again. And so yeah, live your life and live it full of love and positivity and constructively, to add something good to the universe.

It’s a good thing that there’s not necessarily some puppeteer in the sky who’s telling you what’s good and what’s bad and right and wrong. I think we have the freedom and potential that we get to decide what to do. And we’re all better off when we’re kind to one another. When we work together, when we lift each other up. We’re pack animals, programmed to work together, to exist in community. It’s just so strange that a small group of people seem to be so hell bent on going the opposite way.

The fall of the American Empire is not unique. It goes back to the very beginning, of Mesopotamia, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages in Europe. This is a natural cycle in human civilization, which is simultaneously comforting and infuriating, like why do we keep making the same mistakes every few hundred years? But I think the big difference this time is climate change. I think, yes, we’ve been able to recover from massive societal shifts in the past, but the difference now, and what scares me so much, is that we are so rapidly, callously, bullheadedly, destroying the environment that has sustained us through those cycles. I don’t know if we get to come back from this one. I hope I’m wrong. I really do.

I’m a big postcard sender. I got it from my grandfather. Before he passed, he said, Just collect postcards. My mom would dig them out of a box and send them to us while we were away, either at school or abroad. And now I do it, too. The woman I’m living with now, I sent her postcards for over a decade. I don’t really like phone calls, I’m a classic millennial, but I’ll write you a postcard like it’s 1949. I’ve been able to maintain special friendships with people through gestures like that.

I don’t have a romantic partner, I haven’t for a long time. And so I invest all of my love into my friendships, and I’ve got friends all over the world, as far as New Zealand and Portugal and Guatemala and wherever. We tend to reach out to our friends when we have major life updates like, Oh, I bought a house, or I’m pregnant, I’m engaged. But I saw this video talking about how you should reach out to them, you know, when you have a really funny sneeze or when you see a dog do something ridiculous. Platonic love is the most important love in my life.

Are you the nexus between a lot of your friendship groups?

That is one of my greatest achievements, when I bring friends together. I just had some friends back in San Diego text me. I introduced them to each other and now they’re at a festival together. That is the thing that makes me happiest in the world. I host an Oscars party, I like Halloween parties, Kentucky Derby parties, I just love to get people together. Like, let’s have a picnic, let’s rent a boat. It’s a short list, but I do love that about myself.

I do also need to be physically surrounded by community. I’m a hyper extrovert. I’m one of those people that ramps up energy the more people I’m around. Like if we go out to do anything, I need 2 hours to come back down, because I just draw so much energy and joy from being around people.

Are you close with your parents and your siblings?

My parents, yes. I call pretty much every weekend. My siblings and I have drifted apart in our adulthood. They’re both married and own homes and have kids. So I’m just the weird black sheep that’s still globetrotting. I wish I was closer to my siblings, but we’re very different people and that’s okay. I know my mom wishes we were closer. But we have really different ways of responding to things like stress. And over time, it’s sort of worn us down and pushed us apart, I guess.

I’ve always been someone who needed to like my work and to have a creative element to it, and I was really fortunate the past eight years to have been working in a creative industry and doing some really cool projects. I’m very proud of my work, and I’m good at it, and I don’t mean boastfully, but like, I’ve had people tell me that I was their favorite producer to work with. And I think it is because I love it. I worked specifically in making commercials and marketing campaigns for various brands.

And now you’ve left all that to move to England.

The agency I was at was about to stop growing. The economy got really tumultuous with the tariffs. We almost immediately lost a massive client because their products were all aluminum based. So the company was already starting to dial back and by the time I left, they had actually let a handful of people go. And then, I’m just a restless, hopeless wanderer. I was like, okay, there’s so much more world to see. Five years is a good amount of time in a place where you can really get to know it, to establish a community, to live the life.

Do you like that you’re a restless person?

I like it. It comes with certain sacrifices. Obviously, things like long term romantic relationships are really difficult. And, you know, I’ll probably never own a home, which I’m okay with. I don’t want to own a home. But you leave people you care about behind. And it’s harder to make and save money when you’re constantly moving around. It’s one of those things where people are like, That sounds amazing, but I could never do it. But it’s the right path for me. I have no interest in settling down somewhere or having a mortgage. I would love to be in a relationship but I don’t know where I’m going to be living next month, so it doesn’t make sense. But that’s another reason why it’s important to me to invest so much in my friendships, to make sure that I am getting that love and that companionship and affection elsewhere.

And do you feel like you do get that love from your friends?

It’s different. It’s a different kind of love. There’s lots of kinds of love. But yes. Every once in a while you go, I just want someone. But, yeah, I’m pretty happy with my decisions.

I was reading about how AI’s being used to help translate for displaced refugees, helping them get the emergency services they need. That’s awesome. Like, that’s what I want it to do, the things that we can’t do or that we don’t want to do. But there’s a small group of people who have seen that AI can make them rich by replacing human beings. I cannot tell you the number of job listings I’ve seen that were “creative jobs”, but that are actually to train AI, which is essentially like, Come teach our computer how to steal all your ideas. And every kid these days can do video editing, motion design, sound mixing, it’s just part of the social media world. And so the industry is simultaneously so much more competitive and there are also fewer jobs because so many of them are being replaced. And it’s heartbreaking because that’s not actual art. It’s theft of intellectual property that’s being chewed up, spit out in a slightly different format, recycled. And that’s not what I want AI to do. I want it to do my taxes. That’s why it’s so hard reading these job descriptions that are like, Must be able to leverage AI to boost content. And I’m like, No, I don’t want to do that.

I feel like I’m a lot more aligned with the social and economic values that Europe displays, everything from the way that they value the environment to the way that they value health care, labor unions, even diversity.

I’m a history nerd, so the fact that I can pop down the road, to this 13th century pub that Charles Dickens stayed in, and before that it was a monastery, and it’s on a ley line, so there’s this granite monolith that was carved out by prehistoric people that became a part of the monastery wall, which is now part of the pub wall… I love that stuff.

Then the fact that there are people in this town where I’m living who own their own shops, they work like, Monday to Thursday, 10 to 4, and they’re fine. Like, they can make a living on that. I’m coming from America where everyone has second and third jobs and is barely scraping by. But there’s a lady that owns a macrame shop on the main road here and her hours are like, “I’m around, come shop”. That’s revolutionary.

What does it feel like, to prefer somewhere else to where you’re from?

Humans want to progress. We want to learn, and grow from that learning, and work towards something. And for me, the learning that I’ve done is traveling the world and seeing how different people live and deciding what makes sense to me, what feels good to me. I mean, sometimes I feel a little guilty being so far away from my mom, you know, she’s on her own. And as she gets older, that will get harder. So I can see a time when I would move back to the States, just so she’s not alone. But she’s always supported me, you know, she was the one that said I could go abroad as a kid.

Human beings, on some fundamental level, want to seek out a better life. Like, why do you think we have immigration in the first place? So I think it’s normal. I think it’s healthy. I would be okay never living in the United States again. I mean, it’s hard to acknowledge that you don’t want to go back to where you’re from because things are awful there. The way that the government is treating people, ICE agents kidnapping human beings in broad daylight, women’s reproductive rights have been taken away, and now they’re talking about undoing LGBT rights as well. How much worse is it going to get?

Getting a daily job rejection in my inbox, it leaves you wondering, like, what’s not good enough about me? Am I not working hard enough? Are my skills too outdated? Is my resumé boring? Why is it so hard to get a job and why does nobody want me, Boohoo. (Laughs.) So there’s that insecurity for sure, and being fearful about, what do I do if I can’t get a job in this industry again? And feeling a little stubborn about having to learn something new.

Physically just getting older is also hard, new gray hairs, wrinkles, new bulges in places. And especially being single, for me, especially working in this industry, I recognize that beauty isn’t just about attracting a partner. Beauty is a currency. People who are beautiful are more likely to be hired. Beautiful people get served first in crowded bars. They get listened to in large groups. It opens doors. And so just watching yourself kind of get older, it gets harder.

I feel like I talk about negative things too often. I did actually lose a friendship over that a couple of years ago. She just thought I was too negative because I was always trying to talk about all these horrible things happening, from climate change to political corruption, whatever. And I have to be very intentional about turning it off sometimes and making sure I’m not being the Negative Nancy in the room. I need to process them somehow, but I don’t want to only be the harbinger of doom.

Are you active in combatting these issues?

My favorite quote of all time is Jacques Cousteau saying, “We only protect what we love, We only love what we understand, We only understand what we are taught.” And I think everything from racism to xenophobia to, you know, climate change is coming down to a lack of education, empathy, compassion. Those things have to be taught. Curiosity, even to an extent, has to be taught or fostered. Of course people are afraid of people who look or act or worship differently from them; they’ve never been exposed to it in any way. And with the book bans, I wanted to do something, so I started tutoring English, and I just try in small ways to have stories and anecdotes and poems and things that teach you over time to feel empathy, to care about people who look different from you. I’d like to think I’m trying to do something.

One of the challenges I face every day is, What am I working towards? How do I make it better? Because if, like me, so many others are not okay, at least on the macro level, does that galvanize us into some sort of change? Or is it just too intimidating? Is it just too hard? I don’t know. But I certainly hope not.

Thank you for sharing all of this. Last question: How do you feel you’re doing on your journey to being the person you would like to be? Out of 10?

This is going to be annoying, but I feel like I’m a five. But moving. Like I’m not stuck. Because I am in this transitionary period. I’m unemployed and I’m terrified of that. But I am moving forward and I’m in a good place. So yeah, maybe, maybe a six. (Laughs.)

Some last things:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are lightly edited for clarity

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity.

* Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons.

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK? We interview regular people, asking how their lives are going.

Today, we’re talking with Adam about his work in international development, and the void. Be aware that this interview does discuss suicidal ideation.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

Subscribe now

Adam

Adam is 36 years old and introduces himself as “a straight white American man.” He’s from Long Island. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Ukraine for several years and now lives in D.C. He works as an international affairs professional, but because he’s not salaried, his job has felt extremely tenuous. There is some family history that weighs heavily on him too.

I currently work as a contractor at a large development bank, doing a combination of disaster risk financing and urban reconstruction work. It sounds cooler than it is, but so do probably a lot of things?

I’m the middle of three brothers. My older brother is 39. He just found out he’s going to be a father, which I have ambivalent feelings about. I have a girlfriend, her name’s Loni, we’ve been seeing each other for three years, she’s a lawyer.

I’m a saxophonist. I identify as like a jazz-rock-fusion saxophonist. I’m meeting a friend after this for our first jam session on a new music project we’re starting, which I’m excited about.

I stare at the void, which is a shorthand term for, I’m very philosophically skeptical and I pick everything apart, which probably contributes to some of the mental health challenges I have.

I’ve been trying to transition from my job for over a year and it’s been difficult in general, but now it’s more difficult that a certain president has destroyed a certain economy in a certain capital city. So I’ve spent a lot of time and energy networking, which is exhausting and frustrating.

While I am not monetarily rich per say, I think I am rich socially. I have a lot of friends and loved ones that I keep in contact with, even if they’re not always where I’m currently located. I’ve done a good job keeping in touch with the people I’ve met in different phases of my life, from high school and college and a summer camp I worked at, and Peace Corps and grad school and after. My friends and I started a fantasy football league. I had not given a shit about any sport at all until this. And I’m now not only an avid football watcher, but I’m also a dedicated Buffalo Bills fan.

Is work the thing that takes up the most space in your head currently?

The easiest way to describe my employment is that I’m underemployed – I’m employed but not enough, and it keeps me in this constant state of trying to keep that ball up in the air, which takes a lot of effort, while trying to find ways to leave, which takes a lot of effort, which is to say those are stressors.

Work takes a lot of space, but other things do too, like what I want the next thing to be. I recently said to my new psychiatrist that I don’t know if I have ADHD or OCD, but I fixate on certain topics and try to problem solve them. A recurring one is the seeming likelihood of existential nihilism, and what that means for living a life that is, you know, soul crushing and isolating and increasingly on fire. Or life can be those things, you know?

How would you say you’re doing at this moment?

I’d probably say I’m overwhelmed. I’m what is unofficially diagnosed as an anxious fuck. That’s always been true for me. There’s anxiety, but there’s also like, a feeling of heaviness.

How’s your trajectory? Like, are you holding steady? Are you getting more anxious?

My girlfriend Loni often talks in terms of Spanish verbs. There’s like “Estar” and there’s “Ser”. My “Ser” is always anxious. My anxious fuck is my “Ser”. That’s just how I am. But then my “Estar” is like, how I am doing right now? Well, I mentioned mental health practitioners, of which I have both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. I’m on two antidepressants. I had a major depressive episode in October last year, until the meds started working in late January. So that was very bad. I have complicated feelings about antidepressants, and whether there are other substances that would work better if they were legal. (Wink.). But the antidepressants do a good job of putting a bottom on so that you can’t drop off.

I also just drank coffee and I shouldn’t have. One of the meds I’m on has a negative interaction with caffeine so my psych told me to stop drinking coffee which has been a problem, because I love coffee, my girlfriend and I drink coffee all the time. I’ve been drinking decaf, which is like a psychological substitute, but doesn’t really do anything. Ironically, he’s like, well, if you can’t have caffeine, and you need to be productive, I can give you some Adderall. So I can’t drink coffee but I can have Speed.

I’m not really worried about another depressive episode right now, so that’s nice.

How did you decide to do the kind of work you do?

There’s an Arthur Schopenhauer quote. “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” I think a core facet of my identity is this sort of do gooder stuff. This probably starts with my brother. My older brother has had, from a very young age, Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I was the middle child but I had to be like the older sibling because he was different and needed help. Whenever he walked in public, his brain would compel him to scream the most socially unacceptable thing possible. So we would go to church and he would occasionally scream, Fuck God, at the top of his lungs, or we would walk by a synagogue and he’d yell, Heil Hitler. It sounds crazy. And my dad was not the best with my older brother. He was very harsh on him, would constantly be angry with how he was doing. And my mom would do the opposite, she sort of compensated by being as helpful and nurturing and accommodating as possible. So I think I learned a lot from her. So I think ultimately it comes from a sense of trying to help my brother, probably.

I also always liked the idea in Role Playing Games, of forming a party and exploring the world and fighting evil and saving people and stuff. It’s probably not a coincidence that that’s sort of what my work is.

I’m actually trying to pivot from from the do goodery. I just need more money at this point but also, working at this place hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be. I’m trying to sell out, but sell out in a way that doesn’t cross certain moral lines I have, which have to do with capitalism and fulfilling some kind of responsibility to other people, or something like that.

Do you feel that your do-gooding has done good?

The work I’ve done at the bank is probably a Schrödinger’s cat of meaningless and impactful. I’ve been a contractor for eight years and there’s no upward advancement that’s guaranteed. And I’ve rolled the dice for eight years and Lucy keeps pulling the football away. It’s always like, maybe if you interview this time, there won’t be a preferred candidate they already have and this won’t be emotionally devastating to you for the 20th time. Which is to say, like I kept wanting it to be something that hasn’t turned out to be yet. But I’ve seen my peers have it work out for them. I do feel like I’ve done things that have contributed to making an impact, like there are two Yemen projects that I think helped. But most of it is paperwork and only occasionally you go on mission, so I don’t necessarily see the fruits of my labor. But I have been part of things that have mattered.

Your relationship seems like it’s a positive in your life. Can you talk about what’s working?

We’re very comfortable with each other and supportive of each other. She’s a corporate lawyer and she’s just getting back from a trial in Delaware this afternoon. We understand each other very well. We make dumb noises at one another. Like when she’s tired, she’ll make pterodactyl noises at me… A friend said to me, you need someone who acknowledges that you stare at the void, but won’t stare at it with you. And Loni’s really good at that. Last summer she wanted to go somewhere in Europe where there are beaches and was like, What about Croatia? And I was like, Oh, if we’re going to Croatia, does that mean we can go visit the other war-torn parts of the former Yugoslav Republic? And she’s like, I guess. And so for my sake, we went to Bosnia and Sarajevo. I took her to like four different war crime sites. And she tolerated it, right? She was very accommodating of that… And also the food in Bosnia was good. (Laughs.)

Was she around during your depressive period?

Yeah. She was definitely a positive. I don’t think it was fun for her. I mean, she was good. She was very supportive, understanding. And it reached a point where I was like, Oh, I think I just I need to go on meds because this just isn’t stopping. It’s like three months of this now, and I cry every day and I don’t think you’re supposed to cry every day. And she was like, Yeah, this is getting to be a lot for me.

What is the nature of the depression?

So, 2019 was a big deal for me because, it sounds kind of absurd to say out loud, but my older brother tried to sue my mother, who was very caring and nurturing, for emotional abuse. And he convinced my dad to sue her as well. And my dad is an emotionally stunted man-child. When I went to confront him about it, he stood me up at a diner and I couldn’t get a hold of him and it sounds dumb, but that was probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. I went into Christmas having cut out my brother and my dad, it was just me, my mom, my grandma, my younger brother, we were trying to make the best of Christmas. And then my younger brother, who was really upset about this really fucked up thing, he kind of kicked the dog and yelled at us and stuff, and I was like, Oh, this is what family is now. And I went for a drive and I remember for the first time in my life on that drive, having a thought like, Existence just doesn’t feel worth it anymore. And that’s a problem because I’ve never quite been able to disabuse myself of that notion.

Do you have moments when you just don’t think about the void?

I think it will always be there. I try. And I’ve joked that part of the reason that antidepressants work is they make me more forgetful. But yeah, there are times where I’m like, Oh, this moment right now is perfect, right? One of the things I’m grateful for, I have a bunch of people who stare at the void too, that I can talk to and think about it with. But the void and knowing that I can always kill myself is there. And I don’t want you to worry, I don’t want to kill myself. And every day I try actively not to wake up and do it. But I don’t think I will ever be able to disabuse myself of the idea that like I could always stop playing the game if I want to. But I don’t want to.

What do you get out of your music?

I always liked performing , I was in college jazz band. I love gigging. When I was in Ukraine, we had a band for a year and a half and that was fun. I don’t know, it’s about expression, and I mean, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the artist as someone who suffers and then makes art. And I was like, I should lean into that more. (Laughing.) Since I have all this suffering, I might as well make some art. I told the bassist that I wanted to make an album called Cheers to the Void. Cheers could mean goodbye or, like raising a glass with. The bassist was like, I know a drummer who I like playing with, but he goes to church every Sunday. And I have no problem with that, but the nihilistic things I talk about, it’s going to harsh his vibe.

How would you rate you’re doing out of 10, on a scale of actualization? 10 is maybe you being the you-est you possible.

You haven’t seen Rick and Morty, have you? Rick is described as the Rickest Rick at one point. It’s definitely not zero. I mean, I’m trying to get there.. But get where? It’s probably at least a five. There’s a bunch of things I don’t appreciate about myself or choices I’ve made, I think a lot of my angst comes from the shoulds, like the things I think I should do or what society expects of me. It’s probably not possible to get rid of the shoulds completely, unless you’re going to be like the Dalai Lama, completely renounce everything and sit under a tree. But I don’t know, maybe it’s a… 6.73?

Some last thoughts from Social Cohesion Lab:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are lightly edited for clarity

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity. Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons.

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK? We interview regular people, asking how their lives are going.

Happy Thanksgiving week to our US readers! It’s a good time to be engaging with the shared humanity of the people around us.

Today, we’re talking with Yesenia about going to couples therapy (or, thinking about going), and President Reagan’s unexpected place in her mother’s heart.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

Subscribe now

Yesenia

Yesenia lives east of Los Angeles with her husband and her son, who is seven. She would like to have another child. Her large extended family lives nearby, and the recent death of her mother has been a core punctuation point in her and her siblings’ lives.

I’m the youngest of eight kids, my parents were undocumented immigrants from Mexico. We grew up in a very traditional Mexican household. Same mom and dad. And we all went to college. We all have at least a Master’s, we have an M.D. in the family, we also have two Ph.Ds. So education has been really important for us.

There’s only 11 years between me and my oldest sibling. And all our kids now are pretty close in age. I forget what number of first cousins we’re at, but it’s in the twenties. We see each other really often. We’re very close, and I have unique relationships with each of them, all very positive.

I have a family of my own. I’ve been married for, oh, gosh, eight years. I always dreamt of a very big family. (Pause. Tears up.) I have a son. I have a seven year old, and he’s amazing. I’m obsessed with him. He’s really sharp, he’s super athletic. He’s artistic, he’s creative, he’s fun. He’s really thoughtful. Yeah, very fortunate to be his mom. But with him, it was so easy, and then people always ask, is he your only one? And my response is still like, So far. I still hope that we can have more kids. We weren’t quite ready when he came along, and then when we were ready for more, it’s just been a struggle.

I work in education. Because education has been so important for my family, it’s also really important for me to support other students having access to quality education. I grew up in a little city just outside of East L.A. I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad and I got my Master’s in New York. I lived in New York for seven years, it was always part of the deal that once we had kids, we would move back to California. So we moved back once when I was seven months pregnant, we did a cross-country road trip.

I live in a little city outside of Los Angeles. We just bought a house a few months ago, it’s where my son started school, and we really enjoy the community and know a lot of people. I think we’re probably staying put here.

A “Bizarre Club To Be In”

My mom passed a few years ago and we were very, very close. (Cries.) And I feel like it’s this bizarre club to be in almost. It’s not a thing that I lead with about myself, but it feels like an important part of myself, to not have a living parent. My father is alive, but we don’t have a relationship.

All of my siblings live in Southern California. There are so many siblings and there are so many kids of the siblings that I would say we see each other only on special occasions, but the special occasions happen at least once or twice a month because there’s always a birthday, a graduation, you know, a Holy Communion.

My mom was very religious and was very deep in her faith. I went to Catholic school, so I know a lot about religion. I feel like I’ve just always had a lot of skepticism. I think I believe in God, I enjoy giving something up for Lent, I really enjoy a lot of the customs, and the traditions just feel kind of nostalgic. But I don’t know that I subscribe to all of the underlying beliefs.

I’ve been a very responsible, focus-on-the-things-that-really-matter type of person since I was a kid. When I had a job in high school, I saved up a bunch of money and I bought myself my own braces. Maybe a little vanity, but I feel like I still play that role. Even with my own little family, I’m in a constant state of, What needs to get fixed around the house, hiring people, managing bills. I feel like I’m in this perpetual state of catching up.

How do you feel things are going? How do you feel you’re doing?

I think about this a lot. I have so many things that are like, beyond what I imagined I would have, beyond what I know other people have. I have a very flexible, well paying job that I enjoy. We just bought this beautiful home. My son is amazing. I have great relationships with my family. I have a few very close friends that I appreciate very much. And sometimes I feel like we’re sort of living the dream. But with my mom’s passing, I was not okay for a very long time. It was just a very hard concept to wrap my head around. I also feel like I’ve sort of disassociated from the world in some ways. There’s times when I engage and I want to be active, and then I don’t feel like I have the capacity to, like there’s just too much, and then I feel guilty and just try to squeeze that down.

“Stranger Danger for Child Care”

My relationship with my husband could be better, I think, it could just be a lot more fulfilling. The connection that we have is not quite what I imagined. I mean, we don’t pay attention to each other very much. We don’t prioritize our relationship as much as we could. We have a lot of highs and lows, but a lot of it does have to do with, we don’t carve out the time and space to really connect with each other. He puts a lot of energy into his work and his creative passions. And we’ve also just struggled not having consistent childcare that we can rely on to be able to spend time with each other. If my mom were living, I know that she would enjoy as much time as she could get with my son. I’ve not ventured into babysitters, like I have stranger danger for child care. It’s just not how I grew up.

I would say that self-care is pretty nonexistent. I think it’s because in all the orders of priorities, I definitely put myself very last. Like, I don’t sleep very well because I’m trying to take care of things. My husband is willing to do what I ask, but I have to ask, and I want him to just take things without me asking. But then, I often don’t like it if he’s not good at doing something. So I feel like we don’t quite understand each other’s perspectives, and it takes a big toll because it’s a big source of resentment between both of us. Because I think I view it as, I’m taking on the mental load, you’re not doing enough. He views it as, You’re never satisfied.

Do you ever participate in couples therapy, anything like that?

You know, we haven’t. The last conversation that we had about it, I told him, I am very willing to do therapy sessions, tell me when and where and I’ll be there. And so I kind of put it on him, like I’m not also taking on the load of coordinating this, doing the research and finding a therapist. Like, Show me that you want to invest in this, and he hasn’t. I do think there’s a lot of love and a lot of positive things in our relationship. But when the ugliness kind of creeps up, there’s very concrete things that we can kind of point back to.

I was diagnosed with diabetes a year and a half ago. I was diagnosed because I was going through all these fertility treatments. And so that’s a whole source of disappointment, especially because my son’s already going to be eight. I always dreamt for him to have little brothers and sisters that he can play with. And he tells me, I wish I had a brother. So that’s really hard. I just imagined a busy, thriving household, similar to how I grew up. And I feel like I keep trying to remember, okay, I have my son who’s amazing and I need to count my blessings there. Hopefully we’ll still have kids, or we’ll have the family that we have and that’ll be fulfilling enough.

To be honest, a big part of my satisfaction with my job is that I get paid very well. I get paid more than I ever thought I would. I’m considered part of the leadership team in my organization. And so I really appreciate that I have a lot of decision making abilities and I feel appreciated for my skills and for my knowledge and experience, in ways that I haven’t really felt in other organizations.

And I do feel like our organization is pretty unique in the sense of how supportive they can be. Like when my mom passed, well, essentially I ended up just abandoning work basically. I was very easily able to take a six week leave. And even when I came back, it was like, What do you need? Do you need to be part time? Like, Are you okay?

I grew up very, very low income. My dad working a minimum wage job, no way that my mom could work until we were older, with eight kids. We got fortunate with a couple of good decisions that they made, they bought a house in the eighties, so we did always have a stable house to live in, but yeah.

My sister and I have this ongoing joke like, God will provide, which is silly because it’s not like we really believe that, but we keep talking about like, Man, I have all these bills come up and then I just pay them and like, I’m not strapped for cash. I mean, I try to draw boundaries with my son in terms of like, not being so much of a consumer, but if he wants to play the afterschool chess program at school, if he wants to play soccer, baseball, all the things, I don’t have to even think about it. I know the money’s there and we can use it for that. We’re not paycheck to paycheck. I would say money is not really a source of stress. We can afford fertility treatments. I have a retirement fund. My son has a college fund.

My mom was just so good. A big part of it is also the contrast between my mom and my dad. My dad struggled with mental health his entire life in a bunch of different ways, mostly undiagnosed. And he’s just, he’s a pretty awful person, honestly. And I think, that’s a big part of why my family is so bonded, by this trauma in our household, you know, abuse. We just have this unique, shared experience. But my mom was such a light in all of it. She was just always so loving, we talk about her so much.

“This plate is for Yesenia”

I think the fact that we grew up so low income, and that we were all able to go to college and kind of carve out these pretty successful trajectories for ourselves, we attribute a lot of that to my mom and her kind of being a source of balance and comfort and safety. And like, she was not so expressive; she wasn’t constantly telling us she loved us. But she lived to be a mom, like, she would tell us that ever since she was a kid, that’s what she wanted to be. And there are eight of us and we’re all pretty unique, and she knew each of us so deeply. Like, we always had home cooked meals, mostly because it was cheaper, but it would be like, this plate is for Jose because he doesn’t like eggs, this plate is for Yesenia because she likes it spicy. This plate is for so and so. She valued being clean and organized and not chaotic. She contributed a lot to our security as kids, and then as as we grew older, she just really embodied the concept of a growth mindset; she just let us be ourselves, but she was always seeking to learn, like, Oh, I think I made a mistake in this area, and she would kind of want to talk about it.

I was always the one that helped her in the kitchen. That was our thing. The first Mother’s Day, after she passed, I just felt the desire to be in the kitchen and cook. And so I convinced my sisters to cook one of our favorite dishes that she made that takes all freakin day. And it was funny because it was Mother’s Day and we’re all like, why are we all working so hard on Mother’s Day? I was cooking so much because I was cooking all of the things that we used to cook together. Even now I’m kind of realizing that I was channeling the things that we did together.

How do you feel about the state of your community and country? Are you politically engaged at all?

I struggle with how different people’s values are than mine and how visible it is now. There was a ‘No Kings’ protest and I thought about going and I thought about taking my son, showing him, if you see injustice, you should be vocal about it. And then I was really hesitant because the city that we live in is very conservative. And so I didn’t know what it was going to look like, whether it was going to be safe, whether there were even going to be people there… I don’t want to engage in conversations that can get tense and that I just don’t think are going to be productive, I guess, or that are going to make people engage with my son differently or might cause tension.

Even just growing up in a predominantly Mexican community, and with my parents being undocumented, I feel like I’ve just wanted so much for people to get the same opportunities that we’ve had. And so for them to just be treated like they’re subhuman, it’s just so heartbreaking. I feel like I have to protect myself from thinking about it too much because I would just be kind of frozen and depressed. There are times where I engage and then I just try to think about like, what can I do from where I’m at? We kind of convince ourselves, like next time we see a street vendor we should just buy all the things they have, or carry $100 cash to give them, just help people out.

Both of my parents got permanent residency in ‘86 with the Immigration Reform and Control Act. My mom used to pray for Reagan every day of her whole life, because he was in the presidency when she got her permanent residency.

And do you feel a connection to Mexico?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. My dad was one of 14. My mom was one of 13…

Woah.

…Yeah. And all their siblings lived in Mexico. My grandparents, they all lived in Mexico. Some have immigrated now, but most of my cousins live in Mexico. We went maybe three times before I turned 18. So not a lot. But even after that, I studied abroad in Mexico City. And then when my mom was sick, we took her twice to be with her family. As kids, we weren’t allowed to speak English inside the house, so I grew up with Spanish. Yeah, I feel very, very connected to Mexican culture, Mexican traditions, Mexican food, being Mexican.

Quick last question: If I asked you to rate your life at the moment, with 10 being that you are exactly the person you want to be, living the life you want to live, where would you put yourself now on that scale?

Um hmm. I would say maybe a six-ish. Six or seven.

Thank you for sharing.

Some last thoughts from Social Cohesion Lab:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are lightly edited for clarity

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity. Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons.

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org

Welcome to another post asking, Is Anyone OK? We interview regular people, asking how their lives are going.

The interviews reveal a lot of common ground about what matters to people and what they’re going through.

Today, we’re talking with Alice about going cruising with Rosie O’Donnell, and a change of opinion about abortion.

This is an ongoing project from Social Cohesion Lab. To get more info about this series, click here.

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Alice

Alice is a psychiatrist, but has just retired at age 61 from a long career at a veterans hospital. She still occasionally teaches at an affiliated medical university. She is gay, her spouse is named Jan, and they have an adult child with special needs – Lee. Alice is Black, was born in the South, and enjoys watching professional tennis and college basketball.

Even prior to college, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. And that had a lot to do with the fact that my mother had a severe mental illness, bipolar disorder. And I thought that for the most part, she functioned extremely well. So I thought psychiatry was doing a good job. As I’ve gotten older and more into the field, I realized that it takes more than medication to do well, and that being surrounded by a largely supportive network, our community, our church, in our home, that really made a difference.

I am a physician first. My first love is taking care of patients. My close second love is education and teaching, and a distant third is research. My research is on schizophrenia, often co-occurring with substance use disorder. Working in an acute inpatient unit, we mainly have severe disorders. Oftentimes it’s pretty major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, an inability to tell what’s real and what’s not real. The VA population, we see a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder and often all of those co-occurring with substance use disorder.

It was really sort of the patient population and the socio-demographics that drew me to working at the VA. Philadelphia used to have a county hospital, it certainly had been long shuttered way before I got there. I really enjoy giving outstanding care to people who, you know, are not necessarily upper middle class, but are people who served our country. So I like that patient population and making sure that they’re getting the best of clinical care.

“Every Damn Work Party”

I had a very, very active career. Jan went to every damn work party with me, to the point that I think people knew Jan as well as me or maybe even a little bit more. Now that we are retiring, Jan is very active, president of the garden club, taking tap lessons, she’s in a variety show, etc. And people try to get me to do a number of those things. I’m happy to be a supporter. I’m picking back up the piano. And I’m still teaching some, because in medical school nobody gets truly paid for teaching. We actively travel, we have our bucket list. In April (even though it’s called March Madness) we went to the NCAA college women’s semifinals and finals in Tampa, which was lovely. We are Dawn Staley fans, being from Philadelphia. So we followed the South Carolina Gamecocks because she’s coaching them.

We’ve been together since 1991, 34 years in September. We had our commitment ceremony before we legally married, in 1994. And then we legally married in 2013 in Delaware, because that became a state that you could be legally married in before Pennsylvania. We were thrilled in 2015 when it became legal nationwide. We were together eight years before Lee was born. It was pretty challenging for Jan to become pregnant because of course we were using a donor’s sperm from an anonymous sperm bank. Unfrozen sperm doesn’t swim nearly as well. It took us three years and 18 times trying before Lee was born. People in the LGBTQ+ community really want their children.

We didn’t learn until Lee was 24, a couple of years ago, that Lee has autism. They are a female-body child, who’s biracial. We knew there were things that were struggles, but they did well enough in school to get an early decision. And then in college it became dramatically clear that that level of adulting was too much. At first, Lee was diagnosed with ADHD, which we had a little inkling about in high school, but there was no real intervention to be done and we treated the ADHD. But that did not accomplish the full goals that we were looking for, and then autism in retrospect made a lot of sense. So Lee lives with us right now.

I lived in a fairly small town in Arkansas. It was 25,000 people because we had an Air Force base. We were very active at our church, I felt like our church doors couldn’t open without my family there. I did very well in school. We integrated schools when I was in the third grade and I graduated second in my class, and was student council president as well as being the drum major of the marching band. Sometimes I say, I peaked in high school. I’m kind of joking, but that’s probably when I felt the freest and least anxious in my life. And after that I felt a lot of ongoing pressure of, you know, how do I meet this next goal? I studied a lot in medical school. I am amazed now when medical students talk about their work-life balance and I’m like, What is that? You know, I see medicine as a real profession. If you say medicine is a calling to them, they’ll get upset with you, “What do you mean, this is what I do for work, other things are important, too”. And they’re right, we do need a balance in life. But that was a lifelong journey for me. Finding a balance with work and the rest of my life.

“The Defining Part Of Who I Am”

I think if I were to identify myself and, you know, I do these sorts of exercises often, the first thing you see when you look at me is that I’m a Black woman. And so, often I think when we’re talking about marginalized populations, women in particular will be like, Things are challenging as a woman. But being Black definitely is the defining part of who I am. And it just doesn’t get a whole lot better. It’s been amazing to me in my lifetime to see how far we’ve come with LGBTQ+ issues, just leapfrogged over racial issues. Of course, we’re seeing a bit of a backlash of that now. But the racism in America is so entrenched and it is seemingly so invisible to so, so many people who don’t have to deal with that.

In my home, it was five of us, with my mother, my two brothers, my grandmother and me. My mother was married twice and she and my father separated when I was a year old and divorced when I was four. And he went back to Jamaica, which is where he’s from. I met him when I was about nine years old. And I think that genetically, you know, him being an immigrant, there is a lot of ambition that comes from that. But I wasn’t raised with him. I grew up with the idea that education is the great equalizer, that if I can get a great education, then I can move beyond these backroads of Arkansas. My mother was a schoolteacher. My grandmother was a schoolteacher.

We grew up in a Missionary Baptist church. And our church was very fundamentalist. And my mom was very fundamentalist. When I went to college I majored in biology and I thought that those two things could exist together. Going to college, we were about ten years into abortion rights. And of course, that was antithetical to my religion. And I remember thinking, I don’t believe in abortion. And then every time one of my college friends gets pregnant, I’d say, You have to get an abortion. I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m not really practicing what I believe. So I just sort of stored that away. And of course, being gay, lesbian, I really worried how that was going to affect my mom. She eventually managed to really square that, too. She could see the love that we really had for each other as we raised our own kid.

Jan and I actually used to go to a Methodist church together. Jan’s Episcopalian, I was raised Baptist, so Methodist is in the middle. (Laughs.) And the church I went to was a real big church for civil rights, and the minister at the time, he’d been there for a long, long time, even marched with Martin Luther King, you know, as a White male from Yale Divinity School. And the church itself was very, very diverse. And I remember thinking that I’m not sure if these folks pray to Jesus Christ or is it really Barack Obama? I guess it was quite political as well. But there was a lovely spirit of helping the community, helping each other, helping people in foreign lands.

I think getting me in a phase of retirement has brought a lot of self-reflection. I always knew I would retire as young as I possibly could. I have ongoing, chronic illnesses that I deal with and manage. Then I discovered that I have a child with special needs. And I’m really glad to be able to have this time for me and my family. As a physician, I’m a good listener with patients, but I’m not a very patient person. I need things to move along. You’re a teacher, you’re a researcher, you take care of patients, you’re an administrator, it’s really hard to keep all of those balls in the air. And so I am glad to have the time to be patient and give space to my spouse and to our child, our adult child.

I think this is a particularly hard time for us, since we are trying to identify resources for Lee. And so, you know, cuts to this, that and the other bring a level of anxiety that I’ve never experienced before. I feel like I’ve done a really good job of being able to retire younger, being fortunate enough to have health insurance that will bridge me until we’re 65. And, we’re not so wealthy that we don’t have to worry about our budget, we definitely do, but to be able to plan to do things together as a family and see the world, you know, feels good. It’s a little bit limiting because, Lee doesn’t like to travel as much, but we can still do vacations a couple of times a year, that feels like a real freeing part of our life. I don’t have to get up to an alarm clock. I like that. I like getting up in the morning and having my cup of coffee and being able to sit there as long as I want to until I’m done. I don’t have to have somebody say stop and smell the roses.

“I’m not expanding into camping”

Lee has a theme for trips: Lee is death positive. So we went to Austria so we could see the catacombs. And they’re beautiful. That would not have made my bucket list, but we get to do those things. And now Lee wants to go to Portugal so we can see the bone churches. So we’re planning that next March. So, you know, I’m slowly expanding. I’m not expanding into camping, though. I’m not one of those people. Not a bit. (Laughs.) Jan is very outdoorsy. She likes to be outside all the time. We had some friends over swimming, and this couple were talking about how they’ve been on seven continents. They sleep outside, he’s a Boy Scout, she’s been everywhere. They like to travel and be with people who, like, cut down palm trees and cover themselves up with it when it rains. That sounds like hell.

When Lee was little we used to go to Provincetown. They started having the Rosie O’Donnell cruises, so that was really awesome for Lee in terms of development, of being around families like ours, extended family members, etc. That was something we did for six years in a row. Some of the people that we went on cruises with are actually people that live in our area and we’re still friends with.

Rosie O’Donnell cruises? I think I missed hearing about that?

Well, it only really happened for about six years. They had these yearly Norwegian cruise line vacations. It was for the LGBTQ+ community and their extended family. So it was basically 2000 people on a ship for about a week. And it didn’t matter where we went because it was really all about being together. And the fact that Rosie brought all of her friends from Broadway meant the entertainment was spectacular.

We didn’t know we had a special needs child. Everybody says, parenting is the hardest thing to do and it’s the most rewarding thing you do. And that’s very, very true. We have very different parenting styles. We come from very different backgrounds. And I finally understood why parents initially want you to marry someone who’s from similar demographics. We have a lot of love for each other and we have a lot of the same values, but the way we go about things is really quite different. And that comes out in parenting the most precious person to each of us. And it’s been challenging to be like, how do we accept that this is what Lee can or cannot do? And yet create room for Lee to do things that they want to do. So we’re still in the throes of that, even though Lee is 26. It wasn’t, We drop you off at college at 18 and you never live with us again, you know?

I’m a very anxious person, I’ve come to realize. I catastrophize a lot, and I think that at its core it’s about safety. You know, are the doors locked, is anybody drowning in the pool? But it definitely goes beyond that, you know, forever trying to anticipate problems and make things better because it does feel like the deck is not necessarily stacked with me, and that I need to get ahead of things. It’s probably always been there, having a mother with a severe illness who was sometimes psychotic. Sometimes she was fearful, sometimes she felt like people were trying to kill her. Things could sometimes feel pretty unpredictable. For the most part it wasn’t that way, but it was enough that way. And also, when Lee was really little, two or three years old, I’ll never forget this name: Samantha Runnion. She was five years old and she died in California because one of her neighbors in this nice middle class community kidnaped her and killed her. And that just took over my mind. What a scary world it is. Obviously those things don’t happen all the time, but they only need to happen once, you know? And so, yeah, I have a lot of fear of making sure we’re safe.

“Insurance That’s Going To Actually Work”

You know, I realized maybe 20 years ago that nothing can wipe you out worse than health care. I mean, health care just rules our life. So health care is definitely something that I am forever trying to make sure we have and maintain, you know, and again, as we have these cutbacks to things and as I recognize that my child is going to need resources, how do we prepare things for when we’re no longer here? That’s occupying my mind much more than ever. That we have insurance that’s going to actually work. And it’s crazy, I mean, I’m a physician and I feel as vulnerable as the next person when it comes to healthcare. You know, since I’ve been Black my whole life, I’ve been fearful the whole time. But, you know, so many Asian people are so fearful. So many Jewish people are so fearful. It’s endless, you know? And that is the point, for everybody to be scared to death and terrorized.

Do you feel like you are scared to the point that you don’t do things? Like, would you be more politically active?

So, I mean, I actively campaigned, I was a door knocker, and I don’t believe that I get to sit on my ass and things will magically get better. But yeah, it gives me pause. I think about things now that I would have never given any thought to before. Yeah. It feels like you could be harmed at any moment. These are thoughts that I’ve never had. I mean, I will, in my own neighborhood, go down the wrong street, pull into somebody’s driveway, go, Oh, my God, I can’t pull into this driveway, what’s going to happen to me? I lived in the South, and I didn’t have those concerns growing up.

I just feel like things are really simple, you know? We just need to treat each other’s children well. I mean, God, we all really want the same thing, you know? We can bond over the little ones we’re trying to bring along, and have empathy for them and joy in a way that maybe we don’t for adults. But, you know, we’re all children. We’re all people trying to make our own way. I love to tell my trainees, we’re all 17 years old, we’re all trying to figure out what the hell to do with our lives, no matter how old we are. I mean, maybe at 60, I’m not doing that anymore. But, you know, I was doing it at 50.

Some last thoughts from Social Cohesion Lab:

* Illustrations are by Jess Stillerman

* Interviews are lightly edited for clarity

* Names and some details are changed to maintain anonymity. Occasionally, we change small details after publication if subjects reach out and request it for personal reasons.

* If you would like to be interviewed, or to nominate someone else, email info@socialcohesionlab.org