Hi subscribers,

Sorry for the probably redundant message! I wanted to send one final note from Substack reiterating that I recently moved What’s Helping Today to another platform called beehiiv. I wrote about my decision here.

I’m reaching out because I’ve realized some of you are subscribed only on Substack. If you are such a person and want to keep receiving this newsletter, I hope you’ll take a moment to sign up instead on beehiiv.

Otherwise, all other subscribers should have already been transferred over. So if you didn’t get my first two messages since the move, check your spam / promotions folder.

Apologies for any inconvenience!

Thanks,
Sandy Ernest Allen

Hi all,

After last week’s Skrmetti oral arguments, I had this tab open and kept looking at the above photo of Chase Strangio walking into the Supreme Court.

I do recommend the post itself, which is by the great legal reporter Chris Geidner (a former colleague from my BuzzFeed News days). Unsurprisingly to me, Chris’ coverage of all this has been excellent — in such great contrast to much of the mainstream media’s continued failure to humanely and accurately report on trans people and how we are being terrorized.

Even after I finished Chris’s piece, I kept it open, kept stumbling into the photo. I just liked seeing this image. It would bring me a flash of joy, seeing Chase in his sharp suit and his stunning blue coat.

Everything is fucking grim! And yet! How totally brave and cool is it that a trans man argued before the justices of the Supreme Court!

I couldn’t help but linger there a beat. I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude of this achievement. I feel such gratitude to Chase for doing it. (Maybe a version of me deep inside that did once dream of being an attorney also felt stirred. Perhaps, I wondered, in some alternate reality where I’d seen a lawyer who looked like him back in the day, what might have been?)

I kept being reminded of an exchange I had some weeks prior with a trans friend of mine. We’d been talking about everything going on when sorta out of the blue he had commented, Chase is one of my heroes.

“Same,” I replied.

So that’s What’s Helping Today, Chase Strangio making history. This gives me a small hit of happiness — a break, however fleeting, from the otherwise all-consuming tide of dread.

I fortunately was able to schedule this surgery, which is now coming up super fast, like in-just-over-a-week fast. Contending with everything I must therefore now coordinate and figure out, it’s a lot. And I’m not doing great either, tbh, given every day seems to bring more cause for grief. Given how outraged I feel at so many. Given how alienated I can feel from most all cis people, right now. Hard to not fall apart. Sometimes I just do.

But I try to focus on what I can control, on what concrete steps I can take. I try to lean hard on my own best advice for surviving hard times. I’m trying to remain ridiculously devoted to my self-care routines. I’m staying connected with loved ones. I’m asking for help.

Alright. If you all don’t hear for me for a while, it’s because I’m focused on surgery and recovery.

One of my aspirations with my remaining days pre-surgery is to cook a bunch of food for afterwards — soups and stews and other (nutritious, protein-rich, easily-reheated) meals to freeze. Cooking calms me and it’ll be helpful for my caregivers and I to have good options on hand. Anyway if you have any favorite such recipes you wanna recommend, please feel free to let me know.

Especially if you are trans, always feel free to write me. I’m here. Maybe tell me what’s helping you, today.

Sending you strength as we together survive this dark season,
Sandy Ernest

This is a little essay I began before the election. Since the election I have found myself occasionally consumed with (terrible, irrational, all-consuming) rage. My rage is sometimes directed at obvious suspects. Sometimes it’s directed at other random, unrelated stuff. Anger’s everywhere of late — and understandably. As has begun for some of you, this time of year can involve congregation with people whom you may find upsetting. Every day in this country, as a trans person, I feel more and more cause to feel enraged. Therefore, I thought I’d share this reflection on my own anger and the other parts of myself I do not like.

I am not an angry person, not all the time. That said, if prompted and if circumstances are right, I can absolutely become enraged. The why and the how of me having such a propensity inside, it is and it isn’t relevant. I’m someone with a domestic abuse background, someone whose young life was absolutely set in the key of screaming. So to me it’s zero surprise that I am this way. But these days, attempting to live life in a very different mode, my sometime rage can be pretty inconvenient.

Me going into Hulk Mode, it helps nobody. It doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help my relationships. It doesn’t help my career. It doesn’t help my pets. It doesn’t help whatever situation has set me off — a shitty driver, an unresponsive printer, a cat abruptly stabbing me in the thigh. How quickly I will shout and scream and swear, how thoughtlessly. Or if someone (some fool!) has suddenly engaged me in an argument, I’ll feel the quick temptation to really go there, to become irate, to fight. My I’m especially likely to just snap if I’m feeling already depleted or emotionally maxed out.

I went to a new doctor’s office a few months back and to my dismay was immediately presented with an ACE worksheet. As some readers will know (and others will not), the Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACE questionnaire is a way of tabulating basically how fucked up you got as a kid. This helps measure how impacted you might be, therefore, mental health-wise and health-wise. So goes the lasting damage of stuff like abuse and neglect.

I’ve never liked such schema, probably because when I fill out such forms I know I come across looking pretty doomed. My score will be high, no matter if I try to shave off a point or two in my mind, perhaps mentally scanning through terrible memories and trying to downplay how bad some actually were. I have a high score because of my experiences and there’s no real way around it. My body and mind indeed reverberate with the impact of all that trauma, even today (as indeed is often the focus of these posts). The ole body keeping the score.

What to do, therefore, with my rage? What to do with any other parts of ourselves we don’t like, however we came to be as we are? My annoying parts are myriad — the anxiety, the depression, to name two. How does one live even when one faces many challenges (internally)? This is the question I have followed for much of my work, and you could say this question has been a great focus of my life. Those of us with high ACE scores, we’ve often survived a lot of hard shit. However crazy-sounding, our internal experiences are often perfectly reasonable responses to our lived circumstances. For a long time — arguably starting with the eight years I wrote my first book — I have been contemplating the question of how people like me might encounter a more compassionate world, given this whole situation.

I have found that the work starts at home, by which I mean, inside my own head. Hence over one thousand days ago, I finally sat down and started meditating. Previously, I had long found meditation unbearable, more or less, as I’ve written about here before. The full story of what I went through and and why I finally began meditating will be told in this book I’m writing about the future of my mental health care. But long story short, I finally sat down and stared into the internal darkness. I listened to the chaos inside.

Which is to say: I finally took myself on, including my terrible interior, with a sort of determination I hadn’t ever previously mustered. Now I do not let a day pass when I do not meditate, as I’m often writing about here. Every single day I make time for this pause, usually for fifteen minutes or twenty. Sometimes only ten minutes, or even just five. As I’m often discussing here, I do a lot else in the service of self-care, by which I mean, trying to calm myself down and to really tune into myself and get embodied and all that whatnot. But my self-care routine’s central pillar, always, is that daily meditation. That reset.

Last winter I watched a lot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, research for the electroshock piece (I was specifically interested in Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier, who receives shock). My friends would be surprised when they heard I was watching the MCU, much less so when they heard it was for research for a piece. Maybe because suffice to say I’m not really the watches-superhero-movies type of nerd but I am the type of nerd who happily will watch anything if I’m taking notes for research.

Anyway I was surprised by how much I enjoyed particular aspects of the MCU. I was especially a taken with Mark Ruffalo’s portrayal of Bruce Banner aka The Hulk.

In particular, I found myself attached to the struggle Bruce has throughout the movies. He is a split self, attempting at times to cement himself in one reality or another, feeling it challenging to oscillate between these two extremes. In the earlier Avengers movies, Bruce learns to summon Hulk on command for the sake of world-saving. After such instances, though, Bruce feels tremendous shame about the destruction this aspect of himself can cause.

During Thor: Ragnarok, it’s revealed that Banner has become trapped on an alien planet in Hulk mode for two years. After being rescued and summoned back to himself, Banner is totally disturbed by this lapse of time and reality. He now resists summoning Hulk at all, even for battle. He confesses he fears that if he allows himself to become Hulk once more, there will be no more going back. He fears if he turns towards Hulk, the Hulk will finally consume him.

Ultimately, though, the character of Bruce Banner comes to a sort of truce with his Hulk. In the final movies, his look is one that marries both Bruce and Hulk, a sort of midway-through-the-Animorphs cover. He is still green but softer, wears the glasses and a giant cardigan.

I admit I got emotional the first time I saw this combination Hulk-and-Banner. To me, it’s such a visual metaphor for the only path forward I do see, as regards my internal rage, and all the other parts of myself I don’t like.

More recently I put on the older The Incredible Hulk with Ed Norton (which incidentally features a sequence wherein the Hulk is summoned using electroshock-like-technology, a tidbit that, like so many, didn’t make it into my piece). This movie also really underscored this relationship between mindfulness practices and staying in relative control of our sometime Hulks inside.

It begins in Brazil, Banner having fled the States and a lot of mayhem in his wake. He has now commenced a many-consecutive-day streak of meditation in an attempt to remain himself.

I can’t shun my less flattering parts. I can’t ignore them either. Attempting to do so will only make them more uncontrollable, I’ve found. Instead, I must work to fully accept them, which is to say I must accept myself as I actually am. Which includes coming to terms with my past and my present. Which means continuing to learn to sit with my actual self.

From a psychological perspective, anger is a ‘secondary emotion’ (as one of my therapist-type-people sometimes reminds me). By which is meant: Anger is often masking for another primary emotion, namely sadness and/or fear. I find this is true when I dig down into whatever I think angers me. When I pour it a cup of tea and ask it to calmly speak its mind, rather than attempt to shut it out or shout at it to beat it, scram.

This is hard of course. Especially if I do not have time to catch the Hulk before he awakens and overtakes. Again, daily meditating helps because helps slow oneself down, in general. And it builds that skill of being mindful of how one actually is doing, for real. Turning inward, whether in therapy and / or a JournalSpeak practice and / or deep exchanges with (trusted, willing and emotionally capable) friends is all stuff that, slowly, over time, can help one live less reactively, more consciously.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not perfect, these days. But I am better. As JournalSpeak creator Nicole Sachs is often saying, life is a choice between what hurts and what hurts worse.

Meditation is hard, yoga is hard. Doing JournalSpeak, this unfiltered type of writing, it’s a total pain in the ass. Most days still I don’t really want to do such practices. I’ll spend hours avoiding them, puttering around finding excuses to not. It’s all hard, but I know that for me, living life as I did before, that was way worse.

What’s Helping Today: I’m still feeling the wonderful afterglow of our glorious (very trans and queer) Not Thanksgiving celebration last weekend. I roasted a goose raised by our farmer friend, who brought porchetta. I mashed rutabagas and made stuffings and salad and three pies. Many joined, connections new and old.

I was reminded, as ever, how coming together for such occasions is healing. Especially during these days that feel so dark with cause for fear and for sorrow.

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. Surprising even myself, I did join Bluesky the other day. I admit I’m pretty anxious about joining a social media platform again, but I know there’s reasons for someone in my line of work to be on one as well. I had initially quit Twitter largely because of transphobes, but also because the site really provoked my anger. So we’ll see how I do now, phasing something like this back in. My thought is I’ll try to be intentional about how I approach it, this go around (not unlike driving, which I’m also doing more of these days). Anyway if you like, you are welcome to follow me on there.

p.p.s. I was on People First Radio, a show out of British Columbia, discussing my aforementioned Believer piece about electroshock.

p.p.s. As ever, thanks for reading this newsletter. To send in a question for a future advice column email whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. If you feel so inspired, I’d appreciate if you shared or forwarded this to a potentially-interested friend.

The friend who I mentally consider my trans older brother reached out from the rural Midwest earlier this week. He’s not a huge texter; this was the first I was hearing from him, since. ‘Prepare for fascism,’ he instructed, and asked if I’d dealt with my passport and social security stuff yet. I was out in the garden and cringed, taking off my gloves to reply.

Passport yes, social security no, I confessed, explaining I was waiting on my birth certificate stuff to come back from California before I could deal with the latter, alas. I felt ashamed, knowing it was my bad I had put this all off for years to begin with. I definitely can be one to avoid stressful nonsense such as tedious, gender-related paperwork-type tasks.

My friend said he didn’t think I should need birth certificate done to deal with the social security stuff, if I had my passport. I now felt silly and grateful all at once and looked online, which I thought I had before. It said to call my local social security office, who said to just come in. Just bring that certified copy of your name change order, I was told (which I had mailed to California for my birth certificate change months before. That wouldn’t come back for “28 weeks,” I’d been informed via email after).

But, I figured, I could get another copy of the name change order from my county clerk. So I now called there, and purchased one, paying the extra dollar to do so using a credit card over the phone. A few days later it arrived and I drove to the social security office, an hour away through the countryside.

Before walking in, I sat in the parking lot, my hands shaking. Loved ones texted encouragement. I felt scared of whoever I might confront inside, I suppose, of whatever their attitude might be about someone like me making these sorts of changes. Even though I’d read that this social security one was relatively easy, as these wretched tasks go. That they wouldn’t even ask for any money.

Out of an abundance of caution, I had brought an old passport along with my new passport, because I’d read having extra stuff could help if whoever you spoke with isn’t cooperative. I reasoned I had my new driver’s license as well, and of course now my new certified copy of the name change order. I had put it all in a blue folder, perhaps thinking it’d help me look extra prepared and masc.

In sum, everything went fine. The woman I spoke with was young and amiable, she mostly seemed pleased I had already printed and filled out my form. She helped me through the various slight snags she seemed to identify looking at my papers and her computer. She eventually said my new card should arrive in about a week. Like that, it was done. I walked back out to the parking lot.

You finally slayed the final dragon! another friend congratulated, because this was my fourth of the four big things that one might want to change (license, passport, birth certificate, social security; BTW if it’s helpful, here is a great explainer of all such stuff via Assigned Media).

I admit it feels surreal to have this awful queue of tasks actually “done,” in part because I am still waiting for two of those components to still arrive in the mail. Also because I dunno, what if such things are somehow reversed now? Scenarios I fear more than ever? I’m a constantly anxious dude, for many reasons. I’m not only looking at the wave cresting right now on the shore but also at those two or three sets back.

My friend who’d prompted me to get my shit dealt with in the first place, he is doubtless right that it’ll be easier to get this sort of stuff done now than later. I’ve legally lived with this new name for five years, besides. I’ve been on Testosterone for nearly four now (a fact I’ve been recently stating to various health and mental health professionals this week, as I try to finally get myself a long-desired and long-delayed hysterectomy scheduled as quickly as possible — another very practical thing I’m rushing to deal with right now, for reasons).

Just last evening, in fact, I was doing a last-minute session with one of my mental health care providers in an effort to obtain one of those terrible letters they make you get if you want to be considered for insurance coverage for such a procedure. Cis people maybe do not realize this, but trans healthcare tends to be rare to begin with, as in not many providers know how to even work with us, and then our healthcare is also gate-kept when it comes to getting insurance coverage for example, even for those of us who are lucky enough to have insurance and the means to afford care and to live in states where our healthcare isn’t already under full-blown attack from the state.

Just to repeat this: Trans healthcare is so gate-kept! You wouldn’t know it, perhaps, given the fantasies Republicans spend so much time repeating to themselves, these dreams about how they’re handing out sex changes in public schools or whatever. Nonsensical bigotry. Distraction.

Meanwhile, actual trans people, we’re totally fucking scared. And rightfully.

A winter storm is finally hitting here today, precipitation our parched (and in parts burning) earth very much needs here on the East Coast. So yesterday, in between doing everything I could to get this surgery scheduled ASAP (like answering a litany of various and totally invasive questions over the phone), I also tried to attend to the last of what I could in the garden.

High gray cloud-cover and the air felt like snow approaching. I chopped back the forest of asparagus fronds, yellow and frail now, and heaped them onto the compost. I pulled the last of the leeks and carrots and a ton of rutabagas.

I even braved driving to the hardware store to buy a bale of straw. I wanted to cover the asparagus bed, and also the one where I’d planted garlic. It had been quite tempting to skip actually buying the straw, but, I don’t know. So much to fear right now, I had thought to myself as I jumped in the car, I might as well try to do what I can that’s concrete to spare myself future regret and misery.

The guy behind the counter was of few words, as such men tend to be (I now find), but he called me “buddy,” as we ended our exchange, and my insides swirled with joy of passing, I suppose. He walked me out to the parking lot to show me where to grab my bale.

I got home in the mid afternoon as scant sun remained. I shook the straw over the beds. As ever, lots of uncertainty in doom out there in the unknowable future. But hopefully soon I get a social security card with my name on it. And hopefully next spring I’ll have happy asparagus, and come summer, garlic.

Given the not-at-all surprising but oh-so-depressing performative transphobic workplace bullying happening in congress right now, I wanted to re-share this 99% Invisible story I reported and produced back in 2020 on bathrooms themselves, called “Where Do We Go From Here?” The story investigates: Why do we have sex-segregated bathrooms in the first place? And, how could we do better than this?

The story features my pre-Testosterone voice (which, wow, so surreal for me to hear now) but otherwise remains, in my assessment, all too relevant.

What’s Helping Today: Making a big pot of white bean stew, an Ina recipe, as I watch this rain shift to snow. I love that this soup contains the aforementioned leeks and carrots, and also homegrown celery, onions, garlic, and rosemary. It smells divine.

Love,
Sandy

p.s. Here is a playlist I have on called call for winter.

p.p.s. Periodic reminder that you can send in a question for my “Dear Sandy” advice column by emailing whatshelpingtoday at gmail dot com. ICYMI, here were the first, second, third, and fourth installments.

p.p.p.s. Thanks for reading! If you’d like to further support my work, consider buying my first book (for yourself or someone else) and / or forwarding this newsletter to a friend and / or sharing about it wherever you share such things.

“Spirally,” I replied.

Heightened times, almost goes without saying. The grocer saw me last week and hugged me. A deluge of random texts, sympathy like somebody died. I admit never have national politics felt so intensely personal.

A farmer friend brought some ribs, a gift along with my order. We stood sighing a moment in my mud room.

Nobody knows what we’re actually contending with, I know. I imagine various scenarios. My head offers myriad hellish fantasies. My sense of time feels warped, these last days. The calendar reminds me we’re but a week in. And I know we’ve also not yet begun.

*

I’m someone who has to take the daily work of staying alive on earth very seriously, all the time. And I do, every day, have for some years now. Those who’ve read the entirety of my Believer piece will have a slightly fuller sense of my actual deal now, when it comes to my own so-called ‘mental health.’ By which I mean, what I contend with internally, and why, and how I get by. In brief it’s a lot, my story, one I’ve still mostly yet to tell.

Suffice to say, these days I am very prepared for hard times in the psycho-spiritual-emotional sense. For periods of heightened feeling, for times of extreme activation and distress. I am fortified inside to withstand severe storms, you could say.

And yes, this weather feels especially scary, even unprecedented.

How am I? I am hanging in there, it’s true. I am good at bad times, it’s true. Sometimes I’m overcome, seized by fury or by crying. My sleep is crap as is, often, my mood.

But my mind weighs whether it’s a good thing, for example, that lots of cis people seem to suddenly have sympathy for the likes of me. Being trans in America is no cakewalk, as was certainly true before last week. If anything, in terms of the result itself, count me among the not-surprised-but-nonetheless-profoundly-disappointed. But I’m not surprised, probably because I’m trans and aware how much animosity remains in so many American hearts.

I mentally outline my relative advantages, if some nightmare or another should transpire. But I know, like everybody, I’m just guessing right now, when it comes to what will now come, let alone how to prepare.

The day after the election, wrung out, I stumbled into my garden. I turned a pile of compost and hauled over a big wheelbarrow-full to spread over the beds for next spring. I ripped out corpses of tomato plants and artichokes, shriveled bean vines and papery corn stalks. I pulled weeds for hours, until my palms were sore and my back said enough.

Over and over I thought versions of, well, I don’t know what’s coming except I guess next spring, I’m planning on being alive, and here, and planting a garden.

Couldn’t fall apart last week, besides, because we had a friend staying with us. I did dishes; I made coffee. I baked scones. I made a big pot of turkey sweet potato chili and another of black beans, mostly for the freezer. Food for our future selves, I thought, for when and if I am even sadder, even more depleted, even further out of fucks.

*

Last weekend I hiked another mountain, a 3500-er as we in the Catskills call them, I’m told. I have become one of those people who’s hiking all such peaks now, I suppose. I have hiked my whole life, especially growing up in West Marin, and then studying abroad in New Zealand long ago. Though I’ve always hiked some since moving to the Catskills seven years back, this fall my hiking habit has escalated, which pleases me. Hiking more has given me yet another new appreciation of this especially beautiful place where I live.

Summiting some peaks, I’ve remembered that mountaintops are unusual places — wind-beaten and gnarled, pretty and strange. Vast rock outcroppings and ambitious mosses. Last weekend’s mountaintop had many yellow birches, which I learned grow atop boulders and other hard surfaces. Their old broad roots stretched downwards like white piano keys.

Last weekend I also went to a bunch of local bookstores — several in Hobart, a village in the Catskills that has a surprisingly dense outcropping of mostly used stores, and another I enjoy in Delhi called The Last Bookshop. I bought a few books, including a physical copy of Braiding Sweetgrass just to have around. The bookseller informed me Robin Wall Kimmerer will be speaking nearby next spring. In my mind, I updated my future plans to include, go see Robin Wall Kimmerer speak next spring.

I realized this activity, mentally calendaring positive activities in the future, this was helping me not merely slip into wells of despair, as is quite tempting these days.

What else am I looking forward to? This winter I am hopefully getting a long-awaited surgery; I finally have a first appointment next week. During my recovery, I’m aspiring to do an unreasonably enormous and challenging puzzle I already purchased, one so big it’s going to take over an entire room.

More friends will visit, we’ll gather when it’s cold. We’ll eat meals and be with each other. Snows will fall. Eventually it will be spring. Otherwise, what comes next, who can say.

*

For now, the focus is surviving today, which again I am practiced at. This newsletter is, if nothing else, my sharing some of my strategies for precisely that.

So, I’m still doing much of what I mentioned in last week’s edition, which wound up feeling like advice for myself in the aftermath. I’m leaning harder than ever on my own daily self-care practices. Keeping myself present or trying to. Keeping connected with people or trying to. Listening to my own limits. Trying to stay grounded. Trying to soothe myself, especially when I do just feel overwhelmed, bereft.

What else is helping this week:

A fire in the woodstove and my dogs splayed asleep beside it.
Trying to detox from news consumption, especially of the future-prognostication sort.

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. Here’s an excellent cornbread recipe I’ve made twice recently.

p.p.s. Here’s a playlist that is chill and piano-y.

p.p.s. Cannot stop thinking about this line from the Martha doc…

Gonna be candid that for me at least, being a trans American these days can feel overwhelming and bizarre and sad. Millions of dollars are being poured into transphobic ads being played in swing states right now, as you’re maybe aware. I read numbers of how many millions have been spent— an estimated $21 million here, an estimated $50 million there.

My head despairs about this. My sleep’s been fitful and nightmarish. In public, I’ve found myself on edge. I even nearly had a panic attack while driving the other day, something I’ve spent the last few years carefully avoiding having happen (again).

That time when I did have a panic attack driving was four years ago, the fall of 2020, during the lead up to the last presidential election. I was going 55 MPH when the panic attack began and was fortunately able to pull over before I was fully incapacitated and the situation might have been much worse. The experience was nonetheless terrifying and scared me off driving for a few years. This year I’ve regained courage to drive once more, and do so with caution.

Once again, yards and houses and businesses boast Trump flags and signs. Only now the flags in support of him are all the more zealous, all the more full of rage. This time, when the panic attack threatened as I drove, I pulled over before things got to an actually bad place, my relationship with my anxiety much changed.

I will also say, where I live in rural upstate New York, there is much more visible Democratic support than I have seen in my seven years here. Many more Harris Walz signs than I’d ever expect to see in these parts. Even some “Republicans for Harris Walz” signs (!).

Driving around this region right now, there are also lots of signs in favor of and against an equal rights amendment on our ballot in New York State. The signs against it lean on thinly-veiled transphobia. Some refer to ‘protecting parental rights.’ Others say ‘Protect Girls’ Sports.’

I admit that seeing these signs all over my community dispirits me. These signs make me feel unwelcome. They make me feel afraid. I try to remind myself that the vast majority of people who are voting for Trump or feel they agree with such signs, they probably do not know much about actual trans people. They probably would feel differently if they knew we aren’t some hypothetical bogeyman. Rather for example if they had a conversation with me, their literal neighbor, they’d probably see I’m just a person who just wants to live my life (same as them, I assume).

I nonetheless worry about all this transphobia that’s been pumped into peoples’ screens and eyes this election cycle, all this hate that’s been encouraged in so many minds and hearts. All that hate won’t just disappear, I fear, regardless of the tomorrow’s outcome.

What’s Helping Today:

1. 1,107 consecutive days of meditation

2. Drinking water

3. Soaking in hot water

4. Crying

5. Coffee

6. Weed

7. Walks

8. Hiking, for example recently hiking the tallest peak in the Catskills.

9. Last week, making three sorts of vegetarian soups and also some loaves of bread for a friend who’s recovering from surgery.

10. Being extra fastidious about all my usual daily self-care whatnot — as much as I can be, anyway, during this mega stressful time.

11. Especially JournalSpeak, the unfiltered writing practice (and preamble to meditation) I am frequently recommending here.

12. Also being kind to myself if I don’t get to all these self-care practices every day. Forgiving imperfection in myself, or trying to. As JournalSpeak creator Nicole Sachs often says, a pillar of this work is having patience and kindness for ourselves.

13. The really top-notch veterinarian I was able to take my dog to last week when he had an emergency. (He is okay!!)

14. This season of The Great British Bake Off

15. Texts and voice messages and calls from friends

16. And hanging out with friends IRL

17. Sade’s apology (in song) to her trans son

18. Each and every day I am grateful the decision I made, over 7 years ago, to quit alcohol. I’m grateful I’ve stuck with that choice every day since, particularly during times such as these (when no doubt some part of me would like to drown in gin martinis or a bottle of good bourbon).

19. I’m profoundly lucky to work with arguably one of the best ‘mental health’ professionals on earth. Who he is and what we do together is a whole matter that I’m discussing in this book I am slowly writing about the future of mental health care. Suffice to say, I’m always very grateful I get to work with him, and especially glad that we could meet this morning.

20. Singing at the piano, playing Joni and Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan.

21. Stress baking lemon poppyseed muffins and chocolate chip cookies.

    

22. You all, and I mean it genuinely: You supporting my work by subscribing here, by reading my stuff, it does mean so much to me. I can sometimes feel so sad and discouraged given the state of the society and media and much else. So thank you.

23. Kind messages from readers responding to my new feature about electroshock. For example this one: “I just finished reading your ECT piece in The Believer - so well written and thorough and important. I, too, live with a complicated head, ‘caught between this life and something,’ and ultimately choosing life (although mostly in the form of Dar Williams’ words on it: ‘And when I chose to live/ There was no joy it's just a line I crossed/ It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost’)…”

24. Today’s episode of We Can Do Hard Things with Pete Buttigieg, which I recommend if you are feeling despair.

25. Having voted early last week.

    

I’ve been debating whether to even write you all. My own despairing head weighs whether anything I might say here matters now (or ever). And perhaps it doesn’t. And yet, I dunno, here I am, saying hey to you all anyway. I do hope you hang in there.

Feel free to reach out, if you like; perhaps tell me what’s helping you get through this week.

Love,
Sandy

p.s. Once again, here was the link to the Believer piece. Thanks to those of you who read it.

p.p.p.s. Here’s a very chill playlist I made called “sometimes life is hard and so we should help each other.”

My big feature about electroshock/ECT for The Believer is out now. This story has been in the works for many years, for me; I started reporting it way back in 2017 (though, as the piece discusses, my interest in all this began even earlier, as it’s a bit of unfinished business from my first book).

This topic is one that can be very contentious and maybe even off-putting to some. I’ve nonetheless stuck with this story for years, even when giving up on it did greatly appeal. I guess because I felt in too deep and like I had to try.

I’m extremely grateful to my editors and all the staff at The Believer for their hard work and support. What we’ve published here is something I’m extremely proud of; it really exceeds my wildest dreams of how deep and nuanced a piece I might eventually get to publish about this thorny but vital subject. Immensely grateful to Andrea Settimo for the stunning illustrations that accompany it.

You can read the story here (be advised you only get one free click a month). Or you can subscribe to The Believer of course, or likely pick up a copy at the coolest magazine rack near you.

Thanks so much for reading.

My best,
Sandy

p.s. Random but I did want to say somewhere: I didn’t get into Sylvia Plath only because writing this piece made me realize I have way too much to say about Sylvia Plath, so will probably save all that for another day. But in case one of you nerds wonders, for the record, that’s why.

What’s Helping Today: Will & Harper on Netflix, the new documentary about Will Ferrell and his friendship with longtime collaborator Harper Steele. I’ve watched it twice now and cried both times. It’s a beautiful effort, and one that I assume will change many lives for the better.

The movie captures the awkwardness and courage of sometimes merely existing as a trans person, as well as what cis allyship can and should look like. I’m a lifelong lover of comedy and SNL specifically and of course Will Ferrell, and therefore have felt such joy that this project exists. Also my beloved Iowa City features in such a perfect way.

Hope you’ll watch it, if you haven’t already. The song will be stuck in your head forever; at least that seems to be the case for me. (Not complaining.)

Much love,
Sandy

I thought I’d share a handful of the lovely responses I’ve gotten to this latest Esquire essay about my time at Camp Lost Boys. I find the range of them delightful.

Subject: Your Esquire article was amazing

Message: As a 60+ Cis man I really loved that article!! I hope you keep on writing on your experiences so that the hate that is out there will disappear..

I enjoy the way people talk about their own lives as well, when responding to me.

Message: Thank you, for a thoroughly enjoyable read. As a cis gay male, I can certainly empathize with the sometimes uncertain feelings about how your authentic self may be received. Since my youth, despite despicable treatment, from the fearful, I chose to always be myself. It has served me well. I got emotional reading of your feelings of joy, at being surrounded with other trans men. For me, they were tears of joy! I’m delighted that you had a great experience. I’m hoping, too, that you will carry those feelings, with you, EVERY day, and EVERYWHERE! Thank you, for sharing this deeply personal and moving experience.

(It does give me hope, to hear from cis men especially.)

Subject: Great article in Esquire

Message: Aloha Sandy,

Great article in Esquire. I'm cis male, and we need to hear all kinds of stories like this. Thanks for opening up and being vulnerable. …

I enjoy hearing from cis women as well of course.

Subject: Beautiful Esquire Article

Message: Sandy, thank you SO MUCH for writing such a beautiful article in Esquire about your experience at camp. I am a cis female who grew up feeling like camp was my safe place and to know that there are opportunities out there for trans men to feel this sense of belonging as well just warmed my heart. Sending you all the love and light as you continue to share such beautiful talents with this world. Thank you.

And as I mentioned last time, I super appreciate the messages I get from trans people and our families. I’ve loved in particular hearing from fellow campers. Like this note sure gave me feels:

…Your article really captured the feeling of camp, and I got teary reading it. Thank you so much for writing it, for my sake as well as for the sake of communicating these things to cis people. I've shared the article with my girlfriend and family. Thank you, and thanks for existing and going to camp and writing! Take care, brother.

But I admit particular pride when I seem to have gotten through to folks who perhaps aren’t as closely connected to these topics already.

Hi,

Wanted to reach out and tell you how much I enjoyed your interview today with Krys Boyd on Think. You sound like such a nice person and are so articulate and well spoken. I hope the world becomes more accepting of all human beings …

I'm a 67 year old mother/grandmother/etc and all I want for all children is to live in peace, safety, acceptance and love. They should all still clean their damn rooms and cheerfully do their chores, but the devil is in the details. :)

Or as this one, which made me grin.

Subject: Interesting

Message: Hi! I was driving from Tennessee to Oklahoma, bored, tired and hoarse from having a solo car concert when I came across your interview on some radio station, so I decided to see what it was all about. (The camp episode) I was so intrigued, interested and just all around glad I stopped the dial on this particular station when I did. I absolutely loved the interview. As a 'straight female' (if that's what I say, I apologize if it's not) I am a total believer in everyone should be able to live who they are without judgement or being condemned because it doesn't fit into everyone's box, but honestly, your interview opened my eyes even more. Just everything you said really made me stop and think how being trans can be mentally draining. I never even thought about that. I feel like I left the interview with a whole new outlook and learning on someone being transgender. I really appreciated your interview and look forward to your Esquire article and to read your book.
Thank you for sharing your story!

So again, thank you to everyone who takes the time to read and to maybe share my work, if not to write me. I admittedly can’t/don’t respond to most messages I receive these days but know it means a lot regardless when I hear from you.

For the last several years, I’ve printed off my favorite messages I receive. I keep them in a folder on my desk. I don’t really look back at them, but if I’m ever feeling despondent or unconfident for example, the folder is there and its presence helps.

Nice messages dull the pain of the transphobic bullshit that does land in my inbox — as has increased in recent weeks with this piece doing well for example. This is the predictable downside of finding any success these days while trans, I suppose.

So anyway, thank you again to everyone who’s offered support and kindness. It really is what’s helping me today.

One correction: I was mistaken; the issue of The Believer is actually a few weeks away still! It publishes on October 17. Again I have a big feature story in it, a cultural history of electroshock. (!!!) You can pre-order it here or even consider subscribing.

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. Here was the podcast of me on NPR’s Think talking about the camp essay, in case you wanted to listen.

p.p.s. What’s also Helping Today: My tomatoes, which as I mentioned during that interview more than once (LOL) are perfect, perhaps the best on earth. Sure I am biased but yeah.

This is the fourth installment of my advice column, Dear Sandy. To submit a question for consideration, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. Here were the first, second and third installments.

First, just a couple of quick housekeeping announcements…

One correction: My episode of NPR’s Think talking about the Camp Lost Boys essay airs this Friday afternoon, the 20th.

And! I’ve got a big feature in the new issue of The Believer — a cultural history of electroshock, an effort many years in the making. It comes out next week. I’ll say more about this piece and what it means to me but, in brief, I am immensely excited for this one. Consider subscribing.

Alright, onto the letter…

Dear Sandy

I am new to gender dysphoria and my role is a parent. I am the Mom of [Deadname/Name]. I absolutely loved your article on Lost Boys Camp. I have not been able to explore all of your writings so perhaps you have already written about this but I find myself feeling very lost on how to navigate this new situation. [Deadname/Name]] is 22 and I just don’t want to lose her. I feel like I am not doing anything right. I have come to acceptance that this is what [Deadname/Name] needs to feel authentic and live her best life. There has been fall out a few friends that [Name] has have not been able to stay on board. I am crushed and worried and sad and I guess looking back I have felt this way for a long time worried about the loneliness. [Deadname/Name] is going on a solo trip on Wednesday for 10 weeks …. I have let fear take hold and I have been very worried. Hoping for some guidance for parents and maybe some messaging to those transitioning that there are well meaning parents that just don’t know how to support their kids through this

Keep writing Sandy

You are wonderful

[Mom’s name]

Dear [Mom’s name],

I admit my first reaction to your letter was I felt real annoyed, as I’ll discuss. My second reaction was I felt a lot of compassion for you. As you say, and is abundantly clear, you’re new to all this — and you mean well. My third reaction was I felt gratitude to you. I often monologue in my mind to some hypothetical parent who has views such as your own, and so I’m grateful you’ve written and given me this opportunity to respond. A warning / apology that my answer’s gotten both pretty long and pretty candid. I guess I’ve just felt moved to say quite a bit to you, and honestly, because I feel the stakes are that high. Namely, you love your daughter and as you say, you don’t want to lose her.

Your child’s allowed you to know her truth and that is a huge gift — and a sign that she does want you to come along with her as she enters this next, more genuine expression of herself. You mentioned she’s going on an extended international trip (I removed her specific destinations just to anonymize your letter further). That trip, those places, it sure sounded rad to me.

Traveling the world, let alone at twenty, is a privilege in this life. It also takes guts; I find it so admirable she is attempting something like that. I imagine visiting other cultures as one is coming out as trans would be quite powerful. I’m not a parent but you worrying as she does all this also sounds very reasonable to me. It’s understandable one might fret about a young woman traveling to foreign countries, especially perhaps a trans one. There are real safety concerns trans people must have when we travel, depending on where we are in our medical transitions and with our paperwork and so forth, and depending on our destinations.

I did travel young but I didn’t come out back then; I didn’t know trans people were a thing, really. An old friend — we studied abroad together in New Zealand, when I was twenty — told me much later that I did come out to him back then. Apparently I once confessed to him that I was basically a gay guy, like him. How drunk was I? I wondered. No doubt very; I don’t remember this exchange specifically and back then I tended to often be very drunk.

My situation has its own specifics, but when I was your daughter’s age I certainly avoided sharing my deepest truths with the likes of my parents. To everybody else and especially to myself, I tried to avoid my Big Secret inside, my gender, even though it was also always unavoidable — to me, at least.

So I escaped, or I tried to. I drank. I slept with people. I traveled, really as far away as I could manage — Bosnia, India, Philippines, Antarctica. I had many fun times and also many bad ones. I was often lonely, sometimes near-perilously so. Inside I’d known I was trans since preschool, though again I didn’t know anyone else had ever felt as I did. I now realize it’s not uncommon that trans people in such situations think we are the only one.

All to say, I do envy trans people of your daughter’s generation for example who get to experience their trans youths as actual youths, more or less, more commensurate with their cis peers. Not the further delayed and quite mournful and messy experience somebody like me, who comes out further into adulthood, has to have. I did write about my missing my trans boyhood and that’d be another essay of mine I recommend you check out.

So. You’ve come to me for advice. My main thought is you need to worry less about your daughter, who we both know is an adult. It’s plausible she is in college and / or that she is still reliant on you financially or emotionally or however else. I don’t know how close you two were or are or what your family’s cultural expectations are regarding adult children and their parents. But in general I’d assume someone like you, with a child of this age, is in the process of letting go of one role and accepting another.

It’s apparent to me you do feel distress about her being trans, even though you may be frustrated with yourself about this. Your choice to mostly call her by former name in addition to her new one betrays this (which is called ‘deadnaming’ and, as I’ll further explain, is highly discouraged; it can also cause confusion, as it certainly did for me in this case initially).

Your email emphasized how you feel — “crushed,” “sad,” and “worried,” a word you used repeatedly. You didn’t really describe what this change has meant to your daughter — like for example how she feels now compared to before. Perhaps she feels relief? Joy? No, you focused on the downsides and on yourself, because you’re kinda freaking out right now. And that’s okay. I assume you’re in shock. You were sold on one reality and now you’ve learned everything is some other way. It’s possible you felt okay with trans people in theory, but deep down you’d prefer you didn’t have to deal with this scenario. This is prejudice, anti-trans bias, transphobia — whatever we want to call it — and it is the product of the skewed perspective our society has led you to have about sex/gender itself.

Just to spell this out, in case it’s helpful: Your entire life you’ve been propagandized, you’ve been steeped in belief in a binary vision of sex/gender that isn’t as real as one might suppose. If one investigates sex/gender in terms of history, or in terms of biology, for example, this becomes evident. In addition to sexual and gender diversity long existing within the human family, throughout history and culture, if we want to widen our scope even further: across the animal kingdom, sex and gender are not binary, not at all.

What also varies greatly, according to time and place, is how those we might at present call ‘trans’ are regarded by everybody else. Whether our societies shun and even kill us, if we dare admit our truths. Or whether we’re deemed ill and submitted to treatments and cures. Or maybe we’re made into freaks, or jokes. Or perhaps we’re even regarded as gifted, for example with spiritual insight.

That a parent might feel as you do about your child being trans is a bummer to me but it’s hardly surprising either, given our society right now. In general, I feel so much compassion for you and for everybody in positions like yours. My response to your question, as alluded to by your subject line, “The Role of the Parent,” is now it is time to parent yourself. Some part of you is throwing a tantrum at present. I hope you’ll investigate the source of your own discomfort inside, and work to soothe yourself.

I’d advise that you start working with a therapist about this immediately. Ideally find someone who’s not cis and / or who’s queer and made working with trans people and their families a professional focus. (Here was a post I did on finding therapists.) I additionally hope you’ll consider connecting with others who are parents of trans people, whether that’s through a support group at a local LGBTQ+ center or online. Ideally you want to connect with fellow parents of adults. But find other parents who’ve been in a situation like yours already, ones who’ve had more time to get used to this premise; they will help illuminate paths forward that right now you cannot see.

I’d strongly suggest you take up other practices that’ll enable you to safely express what you are feeling — like the sadness and great worry, perhaps also confusion, surprise, disappointment, betrayal, fury, maybe even jealousy. (I sometimes do think cis people are indeed envious that trans people know and trust ourselves so deeply that we take on all the hardship that can come with being out as trans. I commend you for raising someone so brave.)

My point is you absolutely need get these yucky feelings out — just not directed at your daughter. I frequently recommend and myself rely upon a practice called JournalSpeak, which I’ve described at length before. In brief, it involves very unfiltered writing for twenty minutes that you then destroy, followed by ten minutes of meditation. It’s recommended done daily, at least at first, and usually in conjunction with therapy. I mention a practice like JournalSpeak because if you just try to ignore how you feel, your actual feelings won’t just go away, but they may become more powerful and find other ways to express. JournalSpeak is like a method for cleaning out the attic and basements and forgotten drawers of our hearts and minds.

Regardless, consider getting into meditation or another mindfulness practice. Take up anything that’ll encourage you to slow down, to get embodied, to calm your nervous system. Take walks. Take deep breaths. Finances permitting, maybe you should even go on a soul-searchy trip of your own? Or start some new hobby that’ll give you something else to focus your energy on? Maybe like go to a spa, soak in hot water, get a massage?

You spoke of your worry about your child’s loneliness, which, sure, being trans can invite loss of connections (as indeed I’ve written about and certainly have lived). But being queer and trans also invites much connection as I’ve also written about, especially with other queer and trans folk. And: When we as LGBTQIA+ people lose relationships with friends or family members who do not actually see or accept our authentic selves, what are we actually losing?

Sure I’ve been rejected by friends and family — however directly, however brutally — but oftentimes those rejections were done in such a bigoted manner it did thereafter become challenging for me to grieve whatever I supposed our connection to have once been. Because if what these people loved was merely my performance, my costume, my pretending to be something I never was, again, what have I really lost? (Not that it doesn’t all hurt; it totally does, which is one reason I’m also very into the sorts of practices I’m recommending.)

It’s your loneliness I am thinking about, and that of parents in positions like yours. Especially if you are inadvertently damaging your relationship with your child because of your unexamined bias and refusal to understand that it is your issue. So again, I hope you’ll work to find yourself some peers, as in other parents of adult trans people. And don’t turn to anyone who’ll do the opposite, as in, any friends or other parents online for example who will just flame the embers of your own internalized transphobia.

Transphobia is real popular right now. Hate, generally, is real popular right now. But these last few years especially as regards trans people, we’re experiencing an old fashioned moral panic. I’d speculate that one appeal of transphobia — this frightened, ignorant over-reaction to our mere existence — is to do with the fact that everybody else also feels discomfort at being placed into these pernicious little boxes we’re assigned at birth and all that’s then assumed. I’d guess that for many who are newer to learning about the existence of trans people, it’s probably easier to imagine we are the problem than to really investigate the whole rotten setup (especially in terms of what it’d mean for oneself, if somebody does not want to go there).

I want to be clear that I hear your concern for your daughter, about her loneliness for example; social loss is indeed terrible. I’d also offer it’s probably pretty normal for people of her age to shed some friends. And yes, it’s quite common that trans people lose friends and others when we come out, though my sense is sometimes some estranged people do eventually evolve and return and try to make amends.

I’d also imagine your daughter is making new connections during this time, and again probably will do so during her adventures. Or she won’t… Maybe she’ll be lonely and she’ll write poetry about it or play video games or go to metal shows or hike extensively or sit in silences at monasteries. I don’t much about her, though the little that I gleaned from our exchange, she did seem cool. And like she has a family that does genuinely care about her, which is great.

In sum, my advice to you is to put on your own oxygen mask first, so to speak. This may sound unappealing, what I’m recommending, hard work like therapy and daily unfiltered journaling and meditation, this project of trying to get real about your own unexamined (hateful) views and how they’re not helping you. But you can’t control your daughter. All you can control in this life, at best, is yourself. Your own choices. Your own level of self-awareness. Whether you accept reality as it actually is right now and try to grow to meet it.

I do highly recommend you continue to educate yourself about trans people and our humanity, whether that’s by reading my work or anything else created by us. This is because your information diet has no doubt been highly malnourished when it comes to our actual representation.

When you wrote that you’re “new to gender dysphoria” you chose to name the medical diagnosis associated with trans people rather than saying, ‘My daughter recently came out to me as trans’ or something like that. In general I’d suggest you move beyond medical ways of seeing us (because the medical establishment is largely controlled by cis people) and because, in general, such a framework assumes we are deviants, compared to some norm. I’d encourage you to instead get to know trans people on our terms. If you don’t know any actual trans people other than your daughter, you can again at least learn about us through our work, on the page, on the screen. I recommended an especially good handful of books, movies and podcasts in this previous newsletter. So, yeah, follow ALOK and pick up a copy of Transgender History and watch Disclosure on Netflix, really whatever appeals to you, and go from there.

It’s true right now that in this society trans people are forced to go get ourselves “gender dysphoria” diagnoses in order to receive the medical interventions we want and need. Perhaps learning about the concept of “gender dysphoria” may benefit somebody like you who perhaps hasn’t experienced it; I can’t be sure. (Another whole other tangent, one fortified by fifteen or so years of this being my professional focus, but in my opinion: Pathology-based ways of conceptualizing internalized diversity are probably counterproductive, as was the topic of my first book and a sequel I’ve long been working on.)

It’s also true that individual trans people may speak in terms of their own “gender dysphoria”; even I sometimes find this a useful shorthand when I am having a particularly tough time with some part of my body for example. But my point is that a medicalized framework is just one way of seeing us. You can try on that lens, yes, but there are other ones through which we can also be viewed, ones that may be more accurate and may instill in one more hope, less dread.

What else…. Tell your kid you love her, often and eagerly. And then I dunno, parent her as you would any twenty-year-old globe-trotting child whose choices perhaps you don’t fully get or perhaps candidly even like. Again I’m no parent, but isn’t that kind of a point of having children, that they aren’t actually you? I’d guess when you were twenty you also did things that perhaps confounded your parents that were nonetheless vital to your own becoming. And I dunno, if she calls at 3 a.m. because she needs money or she lost her passport or got her heart broken or whatever, I hope you’ll support her as you would any other young adult who’s gonna no doubt have moments of hardship or make some mistakes.

You expressed that you feel like you aren’t doing anything right. I hope you can take it easy on yourself given this is all new to you and you’re in the middle of a big activated response. It may take some time for that initial reaction settle out and then for you to adjust. You shouldn’t be expected to figure this out magically and perfectly and on your own, hence again my first recommendation is get some people, find that therapist and / or support group.

Believe me, I deeply envy those who have family who react as well as you have. Like you did use your daughters’ pronouns correctly (as I confirmed with you). The awful fact is that when faced with such situations, many parents do far worse than you are. The bar is super low right now. It’s subterranean.

And sure, I bet you can do better.

One final but crucial point: Whenever someone intentionally uses a trans person’s deadname or pronouns, that hurts. I had to like, walk the fuck away and cool down when your email initially landed in my inbox, because I was so irritated by someone referring to trans person as you had, no less their own kid.

Didn’t matter you also said nice things about my work, which, sincerely, thank you. Didn’t matter you had only good intentions. Intentions don’t actually matter when it comes to these innate biases, especially when someone is in a privileged — therefore ignorant — position. No assumptions being made here, but especially if you are white for example and haven’t ever done such work, I’d encourage you to become more aware of this concept of innate bias itself. Maybe in 2020 or whatever you already read books like this, but if not, please consider actually doing so. Or there are tests one can take online that will demonstrate how deep prejudice itself runs, whether we’re talking racism or transphobia or ableism or whatever else.

This work — deprogramming the category-based prejudices we carry inside — it has to be intersectional. Again we all carry this crap in us, to varying degrees. Because our brains are lazy and make quick shortcuts — like x is bad and y is good, or like this better than that that. And because, in general, ours is a cruel society, one fixated on comparative of worth and dehumanization (often for profit’s sake).

I’ve said it before and no doubt will again: Strictly enforced binary conceptions of sex/gender are so often in cahoots with their close cousin white supremacy. Hence right-wing politicians worldwide are so obsessed with transphobia in addition to racism and other more familiar forms of categorical oppression. How freely such bullies make a bogeyman of trans people — and in particular trans children — just like they do other highly powerless and voiceless groups, like psychiatric patients, like undocumented immigrants.

Especially before I started coming out, I used to be much more unaware of my own transphobia — in part because that hatred was a useful prop holding shut my own closet door. These days, I still labor to scrub the transphobia out of my thoughts and soul, work that I gather is standard amongst trans people. My head still sometimes deadnames and misgenders me, as do my dreams.

Also: we all mess up. I mess up peoples’ names or pronouns sometimes, if only in my mind. Or like the other day over email I accidentally misgendered a cis person I was discussing who had a gender-neutral name. When I make such a mistake, I acknowledge it, apologize when appropriate (like when if it’s done to someone or in their presence), and then I quickly move on.

We can’t expect perfection. But we can all do better, is my refrain.

Good luck to you both — especially to your daughter on her big trip, which I think is underway. I hope she has a blast. I’m totally jealous.

My best,
Sandy

p.s. What’s Helping Today: this episode of We Can Do Hard Things about breaking intergenerational trauma.

p.p.s. This question had me thinking about the comedian Fortune Feimster and her mom, Ginger Feimster, in particular the encouraging words Ginger shared for fellow parents who struggle at first with their kids’ identities (as she once did) at the very end of this episode of the Handsome pod.

p.p.p.s. It also made me recall this passage of Lucy Sante’s new memoir about coming out at sixty-seven, after a lifetime of trying to remain closeted to herself and everyone else (a book I recommended on here recently):

Just wanted to say that I’ll be on NPR’s Think soon, this afternoon at 1 pm eastern. We’re talking about my latest essay for Esquire about Camp Lost Boys. Letting you know in case you wanna try to listen!

What’s Helping Today: I grew my first actually ripe cantaloupe! 😍

It was delish!

Once again, thanks to all who’ve read and shared and sent me messages about this essay. I particularly appreciate the notes from trans people and from those who love us.

Like this, which read: “Thanks for your articles helping those of us to understand from the PoV of a trans man. As a mother of two trans men, I have been accepting and supportive, but your articles really help me to understand and feel what they have gone through and are still undergoing in this life of theirs.”

My best,
Sandy

What’s Helping Today: This summer I’ve spent a lot of time by streams and rivers — meditating, reading, hanging out. A friend’s gotten real into fly-fishing and I go along.

Turns out such waterways have been all around me the seven years I’ve lived here in the Catskills but I’ve seldom paid them much mind. Now I see them everywhere, for all their beauty and variety.

I find myself a good bank to sit upon, or a sufficiently flat and dry rock. Streams are fully magical places, good for contemplation, good for zoning out.

Also helping today: Lucy Sante’s new memoir I Heard Her Call My Name, which I finished this weekend by some water.

It’s a quick read and I’d recommend it to all people — both those who will resonate with her portrait of gender dysphoria and the glory of finally seeking relief from it, as well as those who will find such topics less familiar.

Thank you to everybody who has read my new essay on Camp Lost Boys for Esquire. I feel especially grateful to those who’ve taken the time to share the piece or to reach out to me. It means so much.

I admit I’m pretty overwhelmed, as can happen during such moments. I try to become even more thoughtful about where I put my energy, and I try to remain devoted to my daily stress-reduction routines. Speaking of, gonna go do some yoga.

Sending you love and thanks.

Sandy

p.s. Reminder that if you want to hear me read the piece, you can do so on the Apple News app (one can free trial the subscribers-only audio offerings for a month).

p.p.s. As ever, to send in a question for my advice-ish column, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com.

p.p.p.s. Here is a playlist.

So … a few months ago I drove down to Pennsylvania and attended a three-day summer camp for trans men. I wrote about the experience in my latest essay for Esquire, which I’m immensely excited to share: “150 Trans Men Walk Into the Woods.”

If you subscribe to the Apple News app, you can also hear me read it on there. It was super fun for me to get to record this one.

Hope you enjoy!!

My best,
Sandy

p.s. As a reminder, to send in a question for my advice-ish-type column write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com or you can always contact me here. ICYMI, here were the first, second and third installments. (Again, questions can be long or short and about anything. I won’t publish your name.)

p.p.s. What’s Helping Today: Late summer harvests and flowers. Happy goldenrod and aster season.

A short newsletter — and maybe I’ll send these shorter ones more often — but I wanted to give a belated artichoke update.

In brief: I harvested some chokes, ate them fried, and they were utterly delicious.

I’ve also given away several artichokes to friends who are into cooking, what a delight. Here was the recipe I used. Here is a helpful artichoke primer.

What’s Helping Today: Our beloved, iconic peach tree Belvis is having her most productive year to date.

ICYMI, Belvis and her showdown with a bear were once made famous on Radiolab. Nowadays, Belvis has a robust, tall fence and some younger peach, apricot and sour cherry neighbors. This season for the first time the second peach tree also has a bunch of fruit! Send me your favorite peach recipes please?? Or other go-to late-summer recipes?

A favorite around here is giambotta, which a friend told me about a few years ago. In my interpretation, this is many late-summer vegetables and sausage cooked until they lose all sense of themselves, then eaten with bread. Or frozen until winter to preserve memory of summer. It’s heavenly. And it uses up lots of potatoes and zucchini and green beans and tomatoes and corn and such, hell yeah. I had a pot of it burbling on the stove all day yesterday.

Speaking of using-up-zucchini, this Smitten Kitchen summer squash pizza was absurdly good.

I’ll hopefully be back with more shortly. I also have a few big pieces coming out soon, ones I’m very excited share!

To send in a question for potential future advice column response, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com.

Take care,
Sandy

What’s Helping Today: Baby artichokes!!!

For a few years, I’ve been dreaming of growing artichokes here in Upstate New York. The artichokes one tends to find in East Coast grocery stores, on the occasion one indeed finds them, are often a bummer — in my admittedly snobbish Californian opinion — bulbous and bland as styrofoam.

As a kid in the Bay Area, some of my favorite meals involved fresh artichokes — steamed, their flesh dipped in mayonnaise. On special occasions, artichokes with Dungeness crab and clarified butter and a loaf of sourdough.

This year I finally decided to give growing artichokes a try. I bought the seeds from a Vermont nursery and started them under lights, very early in the spring. Last weekend, I noticed the alien-looking plants had sprouted, well, miniature artichokes! I shrieked with delight.

Soon, hopefully, I will harvest and eat homegrown artichokes. What joy this brings my Californian heart.

I often wind up recommending certain previous pieces of mine to people wanting to go deeper on one topic or another, especially related to mental health and to gender. I therefore thought I’d (re)share some links with you all, in case anything’s of interest.

When it comes to my work about mental health… I tend to recommend my essay published by The Cut introducing the movement for psychiatric patient rights. I frequently share my interview on the TED podcast How to be a Better Human, on which I discussed a lot of my core ideas about our ‘mental health’ and how we might better care for it. This episode of 99% Invisible I produced about a forgotten chapter in the history of American mental health care is a bit older but remains recommended. I also always encourage everyone to read (or listen to) my first book, AKOMP.

When it comes to my work on gender and being trans and such… I highly recommend my essays for Esquire — about mourning the boyhood I never got, and about learning to talk like a man. I often share my Them columns about deciding to get top surgery and recovering from it. I still hear from people who’ve resonated with my essay for Them about Marie Kondo inspiring me to admit I wasn’t cis. And of course the This American Life story about my singing voice and Testosterone.

My aforementioned latest essay for Esquire about speech therapy was one of the most popular on Apple News+ audio after its release, which was rad! The essay is for subscribers-only on Esquire itself. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out, you can subscribe there of course, or, to hear me read it, you can free trial Apple News+ for a month.

Some recommended podcast episodes: Maintenance Phase on the bullshit that is The Cass Report aka the latest in anti-trans moral panic. I enjoyed Taylor Lorenz on You’re Wrong About discussing how phones are good, actually (???). I appreciated these eps of We Can Do Hard Things on friendship. Great TAL episode: Children of Dave. I’ve enjoyed the new cooking show The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, which just completed its first season. I am often found chuckling at the Handsome pod. I adored Hacks’ Poppy Liu on Why Won’t You Date Me. Speaking of, has anything ever been more iconic/cringe than Hannah Einbinder just bursting into genuine tears when she started her Las Culturistas interview? Why do we have so many big feelings about big jeans?? Did PJ get into Berghain???

Love,
Sandy

p.s. To send in a query for a future advice column, email whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. Back with more of that soon.

p.p.s. A new subscriber asked how to support my work, which I appreciate. The best way still is to buy my first book. Otherwise, if you are a fan of this newsletter, consider sharing it on social media (if you do that kind of thing) or forwarding it to some potentially interested friends. Thanks so much.

Hi everyone,

Excited to share this new essay for Esquire, about my working with a speech therapist to figure out how to talk like a man.

I’m also thrilled I got to record the piece for Apple News+, so if that’s something you subscribe to, you can listen to me read it on there.

Here was a selfie I snuck at the end of the recording session this week. Also the guy at the studio called me “brother” on my way out, which was extremely euphoric for me.

Hope you all enjoy!

Take care,
Sandy

p.s. As ever, you can send in a question for a future advice column to whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. ICYMI here was the most recent one, about feelings.

p.p.s. What’s Helping Today: Chappell Roan’s Tiny Desk Concert.

I wanted to share a few audiobooks with you, in case anyone’s got a long drive or plane trip ahead and wants something more substantial to listen to. Some of these I’ve no doubt recommended before.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey – Mariah Carey’s absolutely singular audio-memoir (only on Audible), featuring much singing. A powerful story about surviving trauma.

Second Nature and A Place of My Own – Michael Pollan’s earlier books, about learning to garden and learning enough about construction to build himself a writing studio, respectively. Both are delightful listens.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a life-changing experience for many; certainly was for me when I sobbed through the audiobook some years back. Probably not the best for public consumption, at least if you are liable to sob and care about that sort of thing.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the audiobook read by the actor Joe Morton. What a masterpiece. Morton’s performance is also excellent.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. A singular book one does not ever forget. I appropriately paired it with some of my earliest attempts at gardening after my rural move. Recommended especially for all lovers of plants and fearers of apocalypse. This is a work of sci fi adored by even people like me who don’t tend to read much genre fiction.

Awakenings – Dr. Oliver Sacks’ astonishing nonfiction account of a ward of patients whose lives were transformed by the introduction of a new drug. Recommended particularly to those lovers of medical and science tales.

The Bluest Eye, Beloved and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. As I’ve probably mentioned here before, I started listening through her books after her death and plan on getting to them all. These three are three of the best books ever and listening to her read them is about as good as literature gets.

The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown. More a recorded talk than a book proper, this is a great introduction to the researcher’s insightful work on shame. I’ve listened to all of her other books (other than the latest) and recommend them all as well. If you’re the type who’s super into mental health stuff and you haven’t already, I highly recommend falling down the Brené Brown audiobook rabbit hole.

Pageboy by Elliot Page – I enjoyed listening to the actor’s memoir, especially to do with having to come out as trans as such a famous person.

Braiding Sweetgrass – Read by the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and poet. I am deeply inspired by this book, on so many levels. Highly recommend to anybody but especially to: plant nerds, poets and artists, lovers of nature, lovers of story, and anyone who refuses to give up hope. The audiobook is a wonderful companion; what a pleasure to listen to her share this material.

I’ve lately learned my own audiobook is now available on Spotify (it’s also on other platforms, e.g. Audible). Back ahead of the book’s 2018 release I read it in part (I read one font, and an actor playing my uncle read the book’s other font). So, if you want to listen to my pre-T voice partly read my first book that’s an option as well. The voice caveat notwithstanding, I obviously recommend the book itself. One listener recently shared they’d listened to it all basically in a single day, so that’s always fun.

Sending you all love. If it’s hot where you are, stay hydrated!
Sandy

p.s. I’m listening to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger right now. It’s great; I both cannot stop and find it totally terrifying.

p.p.s. As ever, you can send in questions for a future Dear Sandy advice column into whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com.

p.p.s. What’s Helping Today: During this heat spell especially, I’m immensely grateful to be able to walk around wearing nothing but boxers, what joy.

p.p.s. Also, hooray it’s lettuce season!

I want to share about a practice I’ve been finding helpful lately.

Over the last few years, a dear friend and I have reconnected deeply. She’s a therapist and also someone who’s working on her own healing journey. We often exchange voice messages about the contents of our hearts and minds and days.

I was inspired recently by a Jack Kornfield meditation wherein he included the idea of a gratitude friend. The idea was share a few things you are grateful for with someone else — two or three things daily, he suggested.

I’m not someone who needs to be further convinced as to the potential benefit of gratitude practices and yet I admit I can find such practices hard to maintain, on my own. It can be challenging, to stay in a grateful mindset, especially amidst the churn of life, whatever washes in on your shore.

I told my aforementioned therapist pal about this ‘gratitude friend’ idea, keeping my pitch light. Speaking for myself at least, I know if anything can feel too much like an obligation I might wind up avoiding it altogether. So I tried to be like, let’s share gratitude every day, two or three things, unless we don’t get to it, which is also fine. No pressure. Low stakes.

So far it’s been nice. Nice to have my mind tasked with looking for things to be grateful for to report back to her. I’m confronted with seemingly endless gratitude-inspiring stuff, besides, here in the Western Catskills in May.

My gratitude friend and I text each other or we exchange voice memos, sharing what we’re grateful for. The sound of thunderstorms overnight, she’s said. Great British Baking Show. Coffee! Cucumbers germinating, I’ve said. Mint chip ice cream. Blossoms on the apple trees.

We’re grateful for our pets. We’re grateful for our partners, the ways in which we navigate life together and show one another care. We’re grateful for our own mental health care practitioners and other supports we invest in for ourselves.

We often express gratitude for each other as well, for our exchange. It can feel so vulnerable, to re-fortify a friendship in adulthood, especially at a distance. But we’ve put the work in for a few years now, have felt that effort take root and bloom.

I’ve lately felt lots of gratitude for my garden. Especially during moments when so much else can feel uncertain and tumultuous and just plain scary, I am grateful to the garden’s daily gifts. I’m grateful for its constant transformation into itself and the way in which we are in conversation. It reminds me how little and how much one can ultimately control.

Best to try to feel joy about what one does have right now, at least.

Anyway, that’s it. If the notion appeals, perhaps try it out… enlist a likeminded buddy in a ‘gratitude friend’ practice. Share a few things daily.

But like, no pressure.

Tell me about it you want.

Sending you love,
Sandy

p.s. Highly recommend the latest episode of Maintenance Phase, a thoughtful and thorough debunking of the “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” bullshit.

p.p.s. Excited to announce I’m teaching for The Workroom this summer, another round of my fun new two-part craft seminar on revision for advanced writers of literary nonfiction. I had a blast teaching this experiment of a class last time and am looking forward to doing it again. I’m keeping the group pretty small, so if you’re considering enrolling, probably better to do so soon. It meets online on two Sunday afternoons in mid June and July.

p.p.p.s. Periodic reminder that you can send an anonymous question for a potential future advice column to whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. Here are the column’s first, second and third installments.

Thought I’d send along a few links and such, on the occasion of one of those days when we’re meant to remember about trans people. Our lives, our deaths. Our tenacious visibility, our precarious existence. Important causes. Also a valid exercise any day, to remember such realities.

So, here are some pertinent links to stuff I’ve enjoyed or found of use lately, for your consideration, whether today or any day. Especially if you think (still) that these conversations about gender are about others and not about you, too.

Highly recommend ALOK’s latest appearance on We Can Do Hard Things.

I appreciated this episode of Chris Hayes’ podcast with Judith Butler, whose new book I’m excited to read.

I am grateful for the newsletter Assigned Media, which covers all things trans(phobia).

From a previous newsletter, here are some other gender-related podcasts and other media I recommend.

And to (re)share a few relevant works of my own … my appearance on This American Life about my singing voice. This Esquire essay mourning the trans boyhood I never got. This reflection on being trans out here in a rural place.

Visible, if mostly to birds and trees,
Sandy Ernest Allen

p.s. What’s Helping Today: the new Adrianne Lenker album. Also it’s the beginning of seedling season. 🌱

p.s. To send in a question for my advice column, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com. Otherwise to contact me now, see here.

Hi all,

As you may already know, I’m a journalist whose main focus is mental health care. Not surprisingly perhaps, people tend to ask me questions to do with mental health — whether their own or someone else’s or their interactions with particular mental health care institutions.

The books and other resources I recommend to people wishing to learn more such topics tend to be fairly consistent. Therefore I thought I’d share some of them with you. I’m going to keep this list intentionally brief.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Joanne Greenberg’s autobiographical novel from 1964 remains, in my opinion, one of the best renderings of mental illness/madness in literature. See also: The new Penguin edition includes a foreword by Esmé Weijun Wang (whose The Collected Schizophrenias I also recommend).

Mad in America

Pharma journalist Robert Whitaker’s groundbreaking book investigating the role that money plays in shaping our ideas about mental health. See also: his media organization of the same name, as well as his subsequent book, Anatomy of an Epidemic.

The Gene

A thorough examination of what’s known (and not) when it comes to the genetics of mental illness, by physician Siddhartha Mukherjee. Highly recommended to those wishing to deepen their knowledge of the science side of these issues.

The Hearing Voices Network

Non-clinical, non-judgmental peer support groups for those who’ve heard voices, seen visions or had other “unusual or extreme experiences.” You can find a group in your area or they’re also online.

The Wildflower Collective

An alternative mental health care infrastructure in Western Massachusetts that’s been created by people with “lived experience” (with mental illness/madness and / or receiving psychiatric treatment). The group offers trainings as well as online support groups and resources. I wrote about them in this piece for The Cut.

I do also recommend my first book as a way into these conversations.

If you want to hear an overview of some of my ideas about our mental health and how we might better care for ourselves, individually and collectively, listen to my interview on the TED podcast How to be a Better Human.

Check out this previous newsletter for some self-care focused recommendations.

Okay that’s it for now; I wanna go start some seeds. 🌱

Take care,
Sandy Ernest

p.s. What’s Helping Today lately: Beyoncé’s country tracks (also enjoyed this analysis of them).

p.p.s. Hey look I have a new website.

p.p.p.s. To send in a question for my advice-type column, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com

p.p.p.p.s. An urgent and powerful essay by Zaina Arafat.