These are some of the main songs we inevitably return to when we think of the legendary Dolly Parton. But since her passing, it’s been beautiful to see people digging deeper into her enormous discography and resurfacing songs that reveal just how much more there was to her work.

Truth be told, I hadn’t heard her cover of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” before Tuesday. The protest song was originally written as a poem by folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie after a 1948 plane crash killed 32 people, including 28 migrant farm workers who were being deported from California to Mexico. Guthrie was disturbed by the way reports of the tragedy stripped the workers of their individuality, referring to them simply as “deportees” rather than by name, as they did for the Americans who died.

“What made Dolly Parton’s version so significant was the fact that she included it on her album 9 to 5 and Other Odd Jobs, which recounted the stories of day laborers in the U.S.,” journalist Tomás Mier said. “Dolly Parton was so conscious that including a song like ‘Deportee’ on an album like this could be taken the wrong way, but she did it anyway because she understood that this was the American story too.”

While there’s so much to rediscover in a career that spanned more than six decades, and each and every one of us likely has a unique connection to some aspect of Dolly’s life and work, for me, there’s one song in particular that resonates deeply: “Better Get to Livin’.”

Released in 2007 as the first single from her 2008 album Backwoods Barbie, it’s not one of Dolly’s most iconic tunes, but it’s one that has always stood out to me for the way it strikes a balance that so much motivational advice fails to achieve: tough love and compassion.

“I get down like everybody else, and I try not to wallow in it too long if I don’t have to. But I think people love to wallow in their misery and not try to make the changes necessary,” Dolly told The Boot in reference to the song in a 2015 interview. “So I think “Better Get to Livin’” is a good inspiration to a lot of people.”

It’s certainly been a good inspiration to me. The song serves as a reminder that while so much is outside of our control and life can be unbelievably challenging, we have to be “willing to make a better way” to the best of our ability.

I get really frustrated sometimes by a lot of motivational content I see out there because it strikes me as one-dimensional — either focusing entirely on thinking positively (“The world is abundant!! You need to change your mindset; that’s why things aren’t shifting and you haven’t quantum leaped yet!,” grifters try and tell me before selling me a course) or on overriding your emotional life for the sake of achievement, i.e. “If you wanted it badly enough, you’d pick yourself up by the bootstraps, but clearly you don’t want it, loser” (bullying is also a good sales tactic, apparently). Both of these approaches require us to deny reality and struggling at all costs.

Call it an offshoot of hustle culture, but we live in a world that increasingly seems uncomfortable with — and even hostile toward — suffering that hasn’t yet been resolved. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote in a recent article for New York Magazine, our vulnerability is often expected to come packaged with evidence of our resilience. Very rarely do we ever talk about active struggle; we’re only permitted to talk about it in the context of some faraway thing that’s been conquered. Society champions the lessons we learned afterward, not the experience in the middle.

If you stripped “Better Get To Livin’” of its context, it might fall into the same camp. Dolly is, after all, telling us to “stop whining” and pining and get our dreams in line (and her line about pulling out a violin while her friend’s talking is an absolute zinger). But this wasn’t advice coming from someone who believed that suffering could be thought away or that people simply needed to work harder and do better to overcome their circumstances.

Dolly knew pain and never tried to sell a brand of inspiration that didn’t account for it. She spoke publicly about experiencing a period of depression in the 1980s so dark that she contemplated suicide. She later described sitting and writing a final letter when her dog, Popeye, came running up the stairs, an interruption she interpreted as divine intervention.

“Everything was just confusing to me and I was just angry and I was hurt, and I was unhappy and so I just said ‘You’re going to have to get me some answers or I’m getting out of here,” Dolly said on a podcast, recounting that moment in her life.

Even in the “Better Get to Livin’” music video, Dolly makes clear that she isn’t dispensing advice from some moral high horse, as though she were somehow above ordinary human suffering, when she says, “Don’t think I don’t see what you see or feel what I feel, but I’ve got a little voice down inside of me that keeps me right on track.”

An invitation to take ownership

What’s within your control? It’s a question I ask nearly all of my clients.

Some people, according to the psychologist Julian B. Rotter, are more inclined to think of their life circumstances as determined by forces outside of their control. And given the increasing destabilization of the world, it’s no wonder why. It genuinely feels like so much is out of our hands and that bad things just keep happening.

When this song was first released, Dolly compared modern life to a “pressure cooker,” with its exacting expectations around money, work, family, aging, beauty standards and trying to get ahead.

“I think this song says some things to let people know they’re not the only ones in that fix. And this song offers some advice for a way out,” Dolly said.

If there was this level of pressure in 2008, it’s hard not to feel like someone has cranked up the heat nearly two decades later. But just as it did then, “Better Get To Livin’” tells us where we can find relief. Dolly’s prescription is straightforward, if not always easy: feel what you feel, take responsibility for what you can, surrender what you can’t control, and give what you can.

Maybe that’s why the song hits so hard, especially in the wake of her death. As she sings, “The day we’re born we start to die / don’t waste one minute of this life.”

Dolly wasn’t asking us to live by a philosophy she hadn’t practiced herself. She knew life could be painful and still, she lived fully and generously.

She launched the Imagination Library in 1995 to provide free books to young children, inspired in part by her father, who could not read or write — a program that has since gifted hundreds of millions of books to children around the world.

She also donated $1 million to COVID-19 research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center — funding that helped support research connected to the Moderna vaccine — and over the years, she gave and raised millions more for disaster relief, among many other philanthropic efforts.

“I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving,” Dolly once told PEOPLE. “Knowing that I’m doing something good for someone else.”

As we revisit Dolly’s music and honor her extraordinary legacy, I’m making the case not only for putting one more song high in your rotation, but also for trying our best to live by its lyrics.

“Share your dreams and share your laughter / Make some points for the great hereafter,” she sings in the outro.

She maxed out those points.

May we all be so lucky — and so willing — to do the same.

When the Lindsay Clancy trial first started coming up on my feed, I avoided it. I knew she’d been accused of killing her three children and that was enough for me to not dive deeper. But then the trial started, and if you’re on my side of TikTok, you’ll understand me when I say that I couldn’t look away. (And if you’re not, the tl;dr is that a Massachusetts woman is currently on trial for allegedly killing her three children, one of whom was an eight-month old baby. Clancy and her defense team don’t deny she killed them, but they’re arguing she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and are pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. The trial’s been underway since last month).

Bleary-eyed at 1 a.m., I watched video after video, consuming people’s reactions to the day’s testimonies, and before long, I started getting served conspiracy theories.

People pulled up screenshots of Lindsay’s ex-husband’s supposed Strava account and suggested that his review of a hike in Costa Rica mere weeks after his children were murdered indicated something more nefarious. They also questioned whether Lindsay, a former Labor and Delivery nurse, would have crushed her own psychiatric medication if she were trying to take her own life rather than simply swallowing the pills, and why someone already familiar with human anatomy would have needed to search “carotid artery” online.

Other “evidence” abounds: some people say Patrick Clancy changed his shoes while running errands before coming home to the death of his children. Others speculate that because Lindsay’s fingerprints weren’t on the murder weapons that the killings might have been done by someone else (note: there were no usable fingerprints found on the exercise bands or knife, but Lindsay’s DNA was found on the exercise equipment). A number of other theories have popped up around Lindsay’s Apple Watch and body temperature as well as the timeline of Patrick’s relationship with his second wife.

There are several reasons why people are heavily invested in this case to the point where there are a not-insignificant number of articles dedicated to recounting the growing list of social media theories. For one, there’s an element of dissociation; an interest in true crime often requires a belief that something like that could never happen to someone like me, and so, people come to view cases — even those rooted in real heartbreak, violence, and tragedy — as fictional stories to be picked apart.

There’s also genuine ambiguity at the heart of this trial. The defense isn’t arguing that Lindsay didn’t kill her children; they’re arguing that she was in the throes of psychosis when she did. The prosecution, meanwhile, must convince the jury that she was legally sane. When so much hinges on how the same actions and evidence are interpreted — and when public attention has helped expose real injustices and pressure authorities to re-examine wrongful convictions — it’s easy to understand the impulse to scrutinize every detail for an answer.

And of course, talking about high-profile cases online gets you views, as we’ve consistently seen in other instances.

But whether people are genuinely engaging with the legal analysis or simply capitalizing on the attention, there’s another reason these theories are seductive to audiences.

Conspiracy theories give us something that the reality of postpartum psychosis doesn’t: a sense of control. With screenshots to analyze, timelines to reconstruct, and inconsistencies to uncover, we continue down the rabbit hole, thinking that if we look hard enough, maybe we can find the missing piece that makes everything make sense.

They also give us distance. If someone besides Lindsay was involved, if there’s some medication conspiracy, or if there’s some overlooked evidence that makes everything click into place, then this becomes a recognizable true-crime story with a villain, a motive, and a clear-cut answer.

Postpartum psychosis offers neither the control nor the distance. Acknowledging its reality asks us to sit with the possibility that a person can love her children and also become so profoundly mentally unwell that her understanding of reality changes.

It also asks us to acknowledge that childbirth can be followed by something far more frightening than the culturally familiar idea of the “baby blues,” and to confront the possibility that someone can seek help and still fall through the cracks of a healthcare system that may not be equipped to recognize what’s happening — even when she has access to resources many women don’t.

The grave reality of postpartum psychosis

To be clear, I don’t know what happened inside the Clancy home beyond what has been established in court, nor am I suggesting that scrutinizing evidence is inherently illegitimate. But regardless of what the jury decides, the conversation this case has opened up about postpartum psychosis is one worth having.

For many of us following the Clancy trial, this is our first time learning about postpartum psychosis (PPP). And perhaps unsurprisingly, given how little public awareness there is, the condition itself remains relatively under-researched.

A condition that is estimated to occur after 1 to 2 of every 1,000 births, PPP is a rare and dangerous medical emergency that can cause hallucinations, delusions, mood changes, and thoughts of harming themselves or others, according to The Cleveland Clinic. Its onset has been associated with factors like sleep deprivation, hormone changes, and a history of mental health conditions — though at least half of people with PPP have no history of previous mental illness, reports the Washington Post. Psychosis in the postpartum period can also have underlying medical causes, including autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

The gaps in our understanding extend to treatment and diagnosis. There’s limited research on how to best treat PPP, though treatment can include hospitalization, antipsychotic medications, mood stabilizers, and electroconvulsive therapy. And PPP is frequently misdiagnosed because its early signs share symptoms with conditions like depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, reports the Forensic Psychiatry Institute at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton.

Additionally, the condition does not exist as a standalone category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which some experts say contributes not only to limited research and public awareness, but also to gaps in psychiatric and medical training.

“Without appearing in the DSM, trainees in psychiatry and other medical disciplines may not spend time learning about postpartum psychosis,” Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a reproductive and forensic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, told Psychiatric Times.

So, what can we actually do?

I write a lot about how broken the mental health care system is, and there’s always a part of me that goes: yes, we know. How do we change this?

It’s not like Lindsay didn’t seek help. She was under the care of multiple psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, was prescribed and took medicine, told her ex-husband that she was having intrusive thoughts of harming her children, called the suicide hotline, and checked into a psychiatric hospital weeks before her children died. That’s more touchpoints with the mental health care system than many people are able to access. And yet, the tragedy still happened.

I’ve seen people express the sentiment online that because this happened to someone as well-resourced as Lindsay, there’s “no hope” for other women — and I understand that sentiment. But if conspiracy theories appeal to us, at least in part, because they offer a sense of empowerment in the face of an incredibly disempowering healthcare system, I wonder if there are better places to put that energy.

Of course, this is in no way easy to do, but we can advocate for specific changes: more comprehensive perinatal mental-health training for clinicians, strengthening existing postpartum mental-health screening, follow-up, and pathways for urgent psychiatric evaluation, more funding for PPP-specific research and specialized perinatal psychiatric care, and recognition of postpartum psychosis as a distinct diagnosis in the DSM. We can also continue to educate ourselves about what this condition looks like so we can look out for it and better support the mothers in our lives.

Some of this work is already underway, with organizations like Postpartum Support International advocating for PPP to be included in the DSM, and practitioners sharing public health information about signs to watch out for. One sign that I learned about recently is that a mother does not have to be experiencing full-blown auditory or visual hallucinations to be considered psychotic, a reality that runs counter to many of the stereotypical portrayals of psychosis we see in the media.

“The mom may just present as paranoid or confused or just very irritable and that can escalate very quickly especially with intense sleep deprivation,” Dr. Uruj Kamal Haider, medical director of Massachusetts Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, told NPR.

This isn’t the first time a case like this brought postpartum mental illness into national conversation. More than two decades ago, Andrea Yates’ case drew widespread attention to postpartum mental health after she drowned her five children while experiencing severe mental illness and was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. Years later, we’re still confronting some of the same gaps in awareness, research, and recognition.

Whatever the jury ultimately decides about Lindsay Clancy’s state of mind, postpartum psychosis persists. And the next woman experiencing it doesn’t need more speculation after something terrible happens. She needs the people and systems around her to recognize what’s happening before it does.

But more honestly, I don’t want to do the hard work of trying to summate this book with some sort of neat critical analysis. Is it because I’m a burnt out former English major who spent years stretching authors’ words to fit my argument, and who was trained to see symbolism where there wasn’t any? Perhaps. Is it because it’s my newsletter and I can do whatever I want? You’re getting closer.

But there’s also something about someone who’s been so vilified by the public shining light on some of the most painful moments in her life that makes me want to say: let her words, so artfully chosen, speak for themselves.

When the book was first released this April, the bits and pieces that were picked up by social media and press centered on Dunham’s experiences working on the set of Girls with Adam Driver and her previous romantic relationship with Jack Antonoff. I saw far less, if anything, excerpted from any of the other parts of the 394-page memoir, including any of her writing about living in a body that receives incessant judgement and requires constant care, dealing with medical trauma, and managing addiction and OCD.

But as someone with UC, a quote from a 2024 New Yorker interview with Dunham has stayed with me the past couple of years: “I do not believe that being lazy is actually a personality trait. I believe that, if people are lazy, they’re depressed, sick, scared, traumatized, or disconnected.” (OOOOOF, go OFF).

And so when I saw that Famesick would speak to Dunham’s experiences with chronic illness, I headed to Rizzoli Bookstore, the closest one to work, and picked up a copy even though I swore I wasn’t going to buy any more books until I made a dent into the unread ones my shelf.

How memoir heals us

When I was in college, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on women with physical disabilities and deformities and how they used memoir to take up space and reclaim their voices in a world that tried repeatedly to silence them. The thesis was partly borne out of my own experiences; a few years previously when I had what was supposed to be a routine chemical peel for acne gone wrong, temporarily leaving me with a deeper burn on my face.

One day I was coming home from spending time with friends when some men on the train harassed me. I remember feeling livid and distraught, not so much because I thought their harassment said anything about me, but because even at the young age of 18 I recognized how small they wanted me to feel and how they thought that they had the right to mock me just because I was a woman existing in public imperfectly.

During that time and other vulnerable moments, I turned to other women who were using self-expression as a vehicle for community building, recognition, and healing. Writers like Lucy Grealy, who recalled the aftermath of having cancer of the jaw as a child and the intervening facial reconstruction surgeries she had in her memoir Autobiography of a Face, made me feel recognized because they spoke honestly about the hurt of being reduced to one singular thing: the way you look. YouTubers like Cassandra Bankson, who revealed her severe cystic acne in a viral video, modelled vulnerability in allowing themselves to be witnessed with their imperfections. I wrote about these texts and other media in the thesis, naming it “Dually Denigrated: Women with Physical Deformities and Their Autobiographical Narratives,” because there was a sense that these women were being silenced in multiple ways, both in the physical realm and in their writing.

I had taken enough classes in my college’s traditional English Department to know analyzing YouTubers wasn’t part of the core canon curriculum and had heard I should “just write about it in my journal” enough to get the idea that autobiography wasn’t considered serious business. But I believed then, as I do now, that first-person storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have for healing. As a writer and a therapist, this is why I gravitate towards narrative therapy, a type of therapy focused on identifying and rewriting the limiting stories we have about ourselves. Even if you’re not a writer yourself, you’re someone who organizes their life into some sort of story. The practice of reorganizing and sharing that story with someone else can help us release any shame attached to it, identify the plot holes (also known as cognitive distortions) we’ve been holding, and become freer in the process.

Equally as powerful as writing our own stories is reading stories of people who’ve gone through some really difficult stuff. They show us we’re not alone nor are we hopeless, weird, or broken. Instead, we’re deeply human.

So that’s why I often write from personal experience here with Your Self-Help Bestie even though it’s CRINGEYYYYYY and that’s why I encourage you to in whatever way, shape, or form seems right to you to express part of your own story. Whether you decide to write in a journal, post to an anonymous account, share with a friend, go to therapy, speak at an open mic, or all of the above, let your story live outside yourself. In doing so, you will allow someone else to feel seen by those parts of you that you think need to be hidden and kept away and your sharing will expand the possibilities of collective healing.

In the memoir, Dunham writes about a group therapy session in which she was told to write down her primary values. She writes: art, family, making people feel seen.

Famesick, well-crafted, self-aware, hilarious, and willing-to-go-there, does just that.

In her own words

So without further ado, *some* of the lines I highlighted from Famesick (because I can’t be copying full pages here):

• “I wondered what kind of life I wanted, and choosing the right apartment seemed to be the key to living it.”

• “It’s easy to set fires in a life that seems like a simulation.”

• “As a little kid, every time my father would raise his voice, I’d mewl, “Please, Papa — don’t hit me!” This was something I’d probably seen in a movie, and it was incredibly effective at getting us to leave boring museums, and fast.”

• “I watched a comedy on TV and congratulated myself for smiling at Will Ferrell, like any red-blooded human would.”

• “I sounded delusional and petulant, like someone who wanted to have every version of my life happening in tandem.”

• “Chronic pain may feel like an emergency, but it’s actually a complex web of intersecting factors that requires a level of time and interrogation that the emergency medical system is not designed to support.”

• “Never mistake maintenance for care, attention for love, or even love for empathy.”

• “Nobody talked about the complexity of the nervous system, the connection between stress and inflammation, the ability of physical pain to be compounded by emotional.”

• “She was still angry at me for leaving our tour of India a week early three years prior, which I blamed on side effects of malaria medication and she blamed on me being a selfish whore.”

• “Why did the modern world ask that every artist be a businessperson and every woman be a mogul?”

• “I interviewed them, dozens of them—about how they spent their days, their medical neglect and trauma, the things they needed and the things they didn’t get. I still have all these interviews, recordings labeled tidily in a folder, but I never wrote the articles. I wasn’t interviewing them to “scale” my media company. I was interviewing them to survive.”

• “I smeared myself in tinctures and tonics and slipped between the sheets to read novels about women in pain.”

• “‘What are you so fucking guilty about?’ my father once asked. ‘Since you were five, you’ve been walking around like you killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.’”

• “The newsletter was still chugging along, churning out articles about self-care and friendship hygiene, unsung heroines of the aerospace industry, and how hobbies can reframe your sense of worth under capitalism.”

• “I was, during that time, under the illusion that healing began and ended with a decision to shift a single behavior.”

• “I had become the person I once hoped to be—not perfect, not blameless, not shameless, but total.”

• “But I had been sad. Maybe I wasn’t anymore, but I would be again. And that was okay.”

• “Later, he explained: ‘I knew those were the stories you were telling yourself.’ He also knew, very wisely, I wasn’t ready to be disabused of them. We cling to our tragedy just as tightly as we cling to the things we love the most, airtight explanations for what ails us.”

• “I apologized from my gut. I stopped saying sorry when I didn’t mean it. I got married, but it didn’t heal me. I made art again, and people were kinder, and still I ached.”

• “I finally started to believe that being honest, kind, and passionate was enough, and that I was allowed to ask for what I needed so that I could make things and still survive.”

So I decided to do something I’m loath to do: admit I didn’t know what I was doing and ask for help (do as I say, not as I do, readers: put aside your foolish pride and hyperindependence and always ask for help).

I turned to the couple several feet behind me and asked them if they knew where to go, and because we were all walking in the same direction, we sauntered off on the path together.

After an hour or so, Dariia and Andreii decided to stop for a coffee. Did I want to join?

Sure. And after that, we could have a clean break and go our separate ways.

I’m friendly, but sometimes the aloof New Yorker and the introvert comes out in me. You know when you had a fun night, but your social battery’s tapped and you finally say goodbye to the people you’re with, ready to breathe a sigh of relief and be with your own thoughts, and it turns out they’re taking the same train as you? Not to be dramatic, but that’s one of my worst nightmares.

So you can imagine, that there was indeed a moment of panic when I realized there was not necessarily a clean break to be had when you’re completing a days-long hike on a narrow path. After coffee, I tried to address the elephant in the room.

“Hey, I don’t want to encroach on your time together, so if you want to go ahead of me, feel free! I will not be offended, whatsoever.”

“Oh no, we’re all good,” they said. “Let’s keep going.”

Their unguardedness and openness took me off guard.

As we continued on the path, I took comfort in the fact that I had already booked my accommodations for the night, which was three miles further than they’d planned to end the day and that we’d break off in a few hours anyway. (I swear I’m not as antisocial as I sound; I just really do love my alone time. Even when I’m with some of my closest friends, I need to have pockets of time where I can do my own thing).

We hugged each other when we went our separate ways, stating the requisite, “Well, maybe we’ll run into each other on the trail.” I fully expected to never see them again. The experience in and of itself, this one day of serendipitous hiking and spirited conversation with this lovely couple was enough for me.

The Snickers that solidified our friendship

The next day, I set out and a few hours later, encountered an incredible bakery with a double chocolate chip cookie. I was devastated when I dropped half of it on the ground as a grown adult who no longer believes in the 5-second rule, and I messaged Dariia that if they were in the area today, they had to stop by and try it. Andreii loved sweet treats and had ordered two slices of cake the day before.

When I reached my final destination for the night and saw her reply, we discovered we were both staying in Caminha and made plans to take a boat from Portugal to Spain the next morning at 6am. When I arrived at the dock — nearly late — Dariia, who I’d come to find out is a major planner (thank God), had gotten me an espresso and shared half of her Snickers bar with me.

I don’t know how they were feeling about it, but after that Breakfast of Champs, our friendship was officially solidified in my mind and we finished the whole rest of the trail together. From staying in what I’m pretty sure was a haunted convent to dancing to Hollaback Girl to pump us up to repeatedly lamenting why we decided to go on this hike in the first place to getting lost and walking five miles out of the way to me faceplanting over rocks on the very last day and Dariia bandaging up my leg, we spent time together in the way you only can when you have nowhere to be but there.

It reminded me of summer camp: the nature, the yucky bunk beds, and most of all, the reminder that it doesn’t always take years of shared history to feel deeply connected with someone.

By the end, Dariia called me her Camino Bestie. I call her a soul sister.

I who have known wonderful people

When I first met Dariia, she reminded me of another friend of mine, Giulia. Two distinct people, two different contexts in which I’d met them, and yet, both brilliant and bighearted.

Which got me thinking about other amazing people I know, which got me thinking: wait, I know a lot of great people.

What strikes me most is how serendipitous these friendships are. The friend I met who supported me through a UC flare while traveling, the friend(s) I got tattoos with shortly after we’d met (yes, this happened multiple times 😅), the girl I kept running into around the neighborhood that winded up becoming a friend, my hype squad at the gym, the friends near and far — from school, work, and other randomness — who, even if I don’t talk to them regularly, lift my spirits whenever we catch up and whose very existence brings me peace and hope.

The word connect has been made into something unholy and corporate, but these people have shown me what it’s like to be and feel connected, and each hold a piece of my heart. Each and every one is a reminder that when we get granular, when we actually look at the people around us, we can find something to be hopeful about. I might feel disheartened when I look at the things more broadly, and that’s understandable. But when I overhear the guy at the grocery store checking in with a customer he hadn’t seen in a while or experience moments of connection like this myself, it grounds me in the world’s inherent goodness.

“Believe in conversations you have in real life. Believe that most people are good,” actor Simu Liu wrote, and I think about that quote often.

My mom thinks I go out too much (lol), but here’s my defense: apparently good things happen when you say yes to coffee with strangers on a trail. I still have times where the lone wolf mentality takes over and I’d rather keep to myself. But every so often I say yes when my inclination is to say no, and it keeps reminding me of the same thing: there are so many good people just wandering around out there, if you stay open and let yourself find out.

Sorry if that’s a bummer, but what can I tell you? Death’s a bummer.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard in the wake of John’s death is to speak about him and the good times we shared often. I’ve also heard that we should try and embody his best qualities. As Yung Pueblo writes, “It is possible to keep their great qualities alive through your own choices and behaviors. Use their life as a point of inspiration for how you would like to show up in the world.”

I’d add something to this sound advice: stop living as if you’re too old and as if it’s too late. Stop going through the motions of your life as if you’re not a living, waking miracle, as if a thousand different things didn’t have to come together for you to be here on this earth in this moment of time exactly as you are.

There’s so much cultural pressure surrounding birthdays. I saw and experienced this leading up to 30, but with some of my clients, I see this fear about being too old and it being “too late” for them, show up as early as 18. It’s perplexing to me now; where on earth are they getting this idea from? They’re kids. But I’m sure I held some version of this when I was younger; I remember always reading the Wikipedia pages for famous actors religiously because I wanted confirmation that even if I wasn’t a child star, I could still make it after college. And so I try to hold their fears with empathy and care, while at the same time, wanting to yell at them: YOU ARE NOT OLD. YOU HAVE TIME. YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT TO BE. YOU’RE DOING BETTER THAN YOU THINK.

Well, I can’t yell at my clients for obvious reasons, but I can keep repeating myself until it gets through to them and to you and to even myself: as long as you’re still breathing, you have another chance. Don’t succumb to these societal constructs and demands that tell us you have to have your life locked in by a certain age, that you can’t grow and transform at any moment, that you need to follow one narrow trajectory and timeline to be valid, and that after a specific number your value as a person decreases.

I remember talking to my dad a year or two ago and him saying to me: “I just don’t get where people got the idea that they had to be married and have kids by 30 and have a house by 40.” And I shrugged him off and said, “Ok, dad, easy for you to say. You did all that. You met those milestones.”

I return to that conversation often because my dad probably looks at me the same way I look at the 22-year-old client who thinks he’s aging out of his dreams, with the perspective that no, it’s not too late. There is so much life for us all to live.

Whenever I’m reading obituaries (I’m sorry, did you think we were shifting away from the dark part of this newsletter?), I’ve noticed that anyone who passed under the age of 75 to me is young. 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. Young. 28, indefinitely, without a doubt, young.

I was recently watching the Sex in the City episode where Charlotte turns 35 and everyone starts calling her an old maid, and I was dumb-founded the whole time. What? This doesn’t even make sense. 35 is young! Or deeply resonating with the part of Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, where Lori decides to become a therapist in her early 40s and is counting down the years until she’s finally licensed. Someone who overhears her doing this essentially says, “We’ll you’re going to get older either way, so you can do it as a therapist or not.”

When we’re in our twenties or younger, we don’t have a well-rounded concept of age. We consider people in their 30s and 40s our elders. But the older I get, the more I realize that age really is just a number, that even if there’s this societal expectation that we should have it all figured out by a certain age, no one really knows what they’re doing. This is all of our first times on this earth and in each stage of our life, it’s the first time experiencing that season. Whether that’s high school or college or being a parent, etc., we’re so young in experiencing that thing. We are so young compared to the age of the universe.

My brother John was so young. He was smart, personable, charming, 1000x cooler than I’ll ever be, and on the edge of world domination. So am I going to sit here lamenting getting older when he didn’t have the chance?

I’m not saying I won’t ever fall prey again to the manufactured pressure placed upon me or that every fear I’ve had about the future has suddenly evaporated, but what I am saying is that I’m grateful to be alive. As challenging as life can be, as sad as I get when I look around and see all sorts of messed up stuff happening, I’m thankful to have this gift of life for however long that I have it.

I don’t believe it’s a random accident that you and I are here existing in the same timeline. We’ve been planted in our families, friendships, and communities for a specific reason, to fulfill a purpose we alone can fulfill. And so my greatest wish for us is that we can accept the mission that we’ve been given: to show up fully, to leave this broken place a little bit better than we found it, to love freely, and to do the absolute best we can each and every day of our lives.

Death is coming for us all, but while we’re here, while we still have the chance, what are we going to do with this one precious life? If I’m lucky, I’ll be climbing mountains well into my 60s or like my friend Debbie from the gym, who’s rounding 70, lifting. And if I’m even luckier, I’ll be grieving, because the older we get, the more we have to lose, and if loss means having experienced profound love for the people around me, including my brother, then I’m ok with that.

We have life left to live.

We have experiences left to experience.

We have places left to see.

We have people left to love.

We are here, we are alive, and that means something.

Let’s live like it.

When Covid brought on the biggest global sports shutdown in history, I started to understand just what a big deal a world without sports was. But when things relaunched, I continued to roll my eyes whenever anyone talked about them or woke up at 3 am to stream a race in another country.

Who cares that much? Look up the highlights later and call it a day.

And yet, secretly — underneath the disdain — was intense jealousy.

I wanted to have fun and to be deeply invested in something that, all in all, is relatively low stakes against the backdrop of this often heavy world.

Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to care when the NBA playoffs began. In fact, I was actively annoyed when my friend suggested we should skip The Devil Wears Prada 2 to watch a Knicks game against the 76ers.

Then something shifted. I found myself reading articles about what bandwagoners needed to know, rearranging my schedule to watch them play, sitting on the edge of my seat in emotional distress every fourth quarter, and trashtalking my friends who are Cavs and Spurs fans (ok, that last part is actually not so surprising).

I even had a dream that I was talking to Jose Alvarado about both of us being Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn.

The energy was electric and the gatekeeping minimal; the long-term Knicks fans, the ones who’d been waiting 53 years for this moment, welcomed us bandwagoners with open arms (even though some of us literally just learned what a flagrant foul was).

And that’s what’s the most special to me about this moment: the way it brought people together. Just like the Olympics or the New York Marathon, people rallied to watch this team with so much heart (Hart?? hehe) fight for that ring.

The word community gets thrown around a lot, usually by businesses capitalizing off the loneliness, segmentation, and isolation of modern life. But what a treat it was to take for granted that a couple times a week, we were going to grab a beer (or three) with our friends and family and watch this team — representing a city we all love and belong to — play.

There’s so much more to say about underdogs, and being underestimated, and never counting yourself out; about friendship, and teamwork, and Josh Hart’s faith, about Jalen and Rick Brunson’s decades-long dedication and work towards this moment. And most importantly, about a city that never gave up and that — despite the corporate hellscape and the slow erosion of the people who actually built it — is still home.

But another Knicks fan, MD Ahnaf Hossain, already said it best: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in 4.” FIVE! 💙🧡💙🧡

See you at the World Cup?

I replied: That would have worked on me 😅.

And it would have. I was ferociously Team Edward before I had the context to understand that he was actually kind of toxic.

We exchanged a few messages before he asked for my number, and through texting, it came out that while he was attending school in New York, he had recently left for California for the summer. Did I want to FaceTime?

I agreed because I was 24 and thought he was incredibly cute, smart, and had a smile to boot. And so we FaceTimed that first night for 3 hours … and the night after that, and the night after that, and the night after that about relationships, family, being half Latino, politics, and our hopes, dreams, and fears until summer was nearly over and we started planning to meet this other person we’d been calling babe.

He was going to take me to a beloved Salvadoran spot in Queens and teach me to drive. He hadn’t felt like this for anybody in a long time, and neither had I. He’d tell me he was proud of me when I published a story; I worried about him while he completed Army training in the heat. We sent each other articles – a journalist’s love language. We were going to be a power couple.

Until the day we were supposed to meet and he texted me to say he didn’t think he could anymore, with no explanation and no attempts to figure out an alternative.

We were finally in the same place after several months, but he didn’t want to meet? I couldn’t understand it.

What ensued was 3 weeks of back and forth to try to figure out a concrete plan forward. His school was upstate, so there were genuine challenges to visiting, but I also got the sense that things had shifted. Even coordinating a basic phone call felt like a monumental task. And when I tried to end things cleanly, it seemed like he wanted to keep one foot in, one foot out. We finally agreed to talk on the phone for a “closure conversation,” but it never happened. Months later, he texted me about a story I wrote – not acknowledging anything that had happened.

On the surface, this was a summer fling that wrapped up come fall (the August lyrics “Will you call when you’re back at school? I remember thinking I had you” were written for me). But for me it stirred a deep sadness, one that predated the whole connection and one I’d mostly been able to stuff down and cover up through relentless achievement and movement. Underneath it was the perennial question of whether I’d ever be good enough as I was.

So I did what I always do when I need relief. I left work on my lunch break to go to the nearby Barnes and Noble — my happy place — cried in between the aisles before picking up a copy of Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, and sat at my desk reading articles about attachment theory.

I didn’t know what was happening, just that the jack was out of the box and there was no putting it back.

Therapy hadn’t worked for me previously. I had seen one for a few sessions three years beforehand when I was struggling in college, and I was completely turned off. Raquel was your typical “blank slate” therapist; the one who listened but didn’t offer much in response, who asked “How’d that make you feel?” when you already said you were depressed and felt horrible. Aka the opposite of me as a therapist, who puts on no airs about being in the trenches alongside you and trying to figure out how to be a person in this world.

But out of other options, I decided to give it another shot. And now six and a half years later, Danica (name’s been changed!!) and I are still going strong.

What started as “this guy I cared about bailed on me” spooled into a years-long journey of uncovering emotional patterns, limiting beliefs, coping with difficult emotions, releasing shame, and cultivating greater acceptance for myself amid a litany of life transitions. And while there were moments along the way where I doubted whether any of it was actually helpful — especially in the beginning — it became evident it was because two years ago I put in a few applications for mental health counseling programs to become a therapist myself.

By that point, there was no denying the power of the therapeutic relationship; of having someone see you in all your unmasked glory, challenge you when you’re being ridiculous, and validate you when you’re being unnecessarily harsh with yourself. Someone who’s a steady figure in your life through periods of uncertainty, and who holds your insecurities and fears and the things you’ve kept inside with care and nonjudgement.

So did I become a therapist because of a boy I’d never even met? Technically, yes. Not ever meeting him forced me to confront my mental health head-on in a way that I had been in complete denial about, and through the process of my own therapy, I realized its value. I wanted to help other people do the same, and to see that sometimes people come into your life, not for the long haul, but to break you open — if you let them.

Nearly a year later, he texted to me to apologize, a text I’ve only come to appreciate more recently. Admitting you acted in a not-so-great-way and hurt someone takes courage and the ability to look at yourself clearly, something a lot of people lack.

I didn’t respond at the time, but 7 years is better than never, right? 😇

Apology accepted and thank you.

If you or someone you know is looking for a therapist in NYC, I’m accepting new clients through the ATTN Center.

Carl Jung would have a field day with this one.

We could chalk the dream up to being in disbelief that I’m actually graduating and having some good old-fashioned anxiety about whether I actually submitted everything on time, but there’s something else going on.

You see, I thought I’d be happier than I am right now. I thought the relief would set in as soon as I sent in that last assignment, that I’d be riding a wave of euphoria. The hardest part is arguably over, including me taking 6 classes while working full-time and doing an internship last spring just so I could graduate this June, and accumulating 700 clinical hours while navigating health issues, heartbreak, disconnection from friends, financial strain, limited free time, and the heaviness that can come with holding space for others’ emotional health.

I’ve been eager to close this chapter. If that sounds like I’m complaining, that’s not my intention, but everything it took to get here was as challenging as it was rewarding. I joke about being a perpetual student, but this program was the most difficult one I’ve ever attended — in large part because of the emotional demands of the work, the way mental health counseling forces you to confront yourself in ways other subjects may not, and the reality of being an adult with adult responsibilities.

Yet as relieved as I am to be done with this degree, I’m realizing once again that a degree doesn’t mean everything is tied up neatly. School provided me with the container of my life for the past two years. As long as I did my assignments and saw my clients, I was “succeeding.” But without it, it’s time to confront the things I’ve put to the backburner, to take ownership over those aspects of my life that I’ve postponed, to sit with and address the loneliness that creeps in on a Wednesday night when I’m not in class for four hours straight and commuting for two others.

And then there’s the doubt, and the fear, and the existentialism. Can I do this? Am I good at this? What if AI takes over therapy? What happens when healthcare becomes even more inaccessible and therapy becomes even more of a luxury good? Why are they constantly trying to pay therapists less money for their work (my whole feed lately has been Aetna cutting rates with Alma-contracted therapists)? Why are we the only healthcare providers who are expected to provide services out of the goodness of our hearts?

Navigating the neutral zone

Graduation may be making current me more emo than the 13-year-old me dramatically listening to Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid” and Gavin DeGraw’s “I Don’t Want to Be” on repeat in my room, but I know from my work as a therapist in training that I’m not the only one feeling this way. Although my clients are navigating completely different life transitions, we’re all collectively trying to figure out how to live life in the neutral zone.

Coined by change consultant William Bridges, the neutral zone is part of a transition model that looks at how individuals within organizations navigate change. Within the model are three stages: endings, neutral zone, and new beginnings. The neutral zone is the in-between space when something has ended, but you’ve yet to see the new beginnings. According to William Bridges Associates, the organization that carries on Bridges’ work, “this is the time between the old reality and sense of identity and the new one.”

While the model is most often applied to companies undergoing transition, it also makes a lot of sense as a way of thinking about the “in-between” transitional space in our lives. Whether we’re graduating, going through a breakup or divorce, moving, looking for or starting a new job, there are many moments in life where something has ended, but we’ve not experienced the new yet. We’re left with this gaping space that gets filled with our doubts, fears, and discouragement.

Even if it was the right decision and we knew something needed to end, there’s grief that comes with being in the neutral zone. We know theoretically there will be something new, but it has not materialized for us yet.

It’s an extremely uncomfortable and challenging place to be, and yet, there’s no avoiding it. You have to go through the neutral zone to get to the new beginning. You have to sit with the uncertainty, fear, and collapsing of what was — the old identity and routine and assemblage of your life — to move on to the next phase.

But hey, it’s not all bad. Even though these moments of your life may cause confusion and distress, they can also be the “seedbed for new beginnings.”

“The essence of life takes place in the neutral zone phase of transition. It is in that interim spaciousness that all possibilities, creativity, and innovative ideas can come to life and flourish,” Susan Bridges writes.

The dust may not have settled yet, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is the space to think, hope, and dream. Maybe this is the moment to stay open to what’s coming, instead of rushing on to the next, and to know that new beginnings are inevitable, even if they don’t happen on our timelines.

Regardless, someone please check in with me in the next couple of days to make sure I’ve picked up this cap and gown.

P.S. If you or someone you know is looking for a therapist in NYC, I’m accepting new clients through the ATTN Center.

They taught us in school that the most important thing is the relationship you have with your clients and that it’s often less about the specific therapeutic interventions you use and more about you just being there, bearing witness to your client’s pain and giving them the space they might not otherwise have in their lives to express themselves without judgement.

But if I fit any therapist archetype, it’d be the Fixer Upper. I hate seeing my clients in distress; it’s so bothersome to me. I want them to feel better. I want to help them find solutions for their struggles. I want them to become empowered and to take something useful and meaningful with them from our sessions. I want them to know they are good and worthy beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Here’s a tool, here’s a book, here’s a pep talk. Now go off and feel good.

It’s a dangerous game I play, basing my emotional wellbeing on how useful I am or how well I perceive my performance as a therapist, writer, friend, daughter, colleague. That was initially going to be the focus of this essay, how when you do this — measure your worth off what you give and your serviceability — your self-acceptance is not built off of a firm foundation, but is as flighty and fleeting as the wind because you will never feel like you’re doing enough. (If you’ve been here for a while, you know me and productivity are chronically in fisticuffs).

But instead, I wanted to shift gears and write about what to do when you can’t fix it. This is one of the most difficult lessons I’m learning as a therapist in training; I don’t have a magic wand where I can wipe away people’s heartache and agony or transform the systems that are crushing them. Sometimes there’s no right thing to do or say. Sometimes it’s just me sitting there with you.

Still, that’s difficult for me to accept — and not purely for selfless reasons. Yes, I hate seeing people struggling … and also I hate admitting my own futility and limitations. And yet, this is what I have to do, because the focus on problem-solving and fixing is actually getting in the way of the care I seek to give and the connection I want to foster.

The desire to fix things isn’t completely misguided, but often — and especially when the problem is bigger than any one person — the question isn’t how do I fix it? The question is how do I let you know that “you’re not alone” is not an empty platitude?

I’ve often convinced myself that simply being there doesn’t count, that if I’m not actively doing something, I’m not really helping. But reflecting on my own life, I know that’s not true. I’ve had countless conversations with friends and family where nothing changed by the end of them, and yet I felt better. Not because anyone fixed anything about my external circumstances, but because I felt supported. There was no agenda, no solutions, just pure, full-embodied presence.

So as we enter this Mental Health Awareness Month, that’s the reminder I want to leave you with. When you feel frustrated and useless, don’t forget the most important gift you can give someone else: your attention, time, and space. In a world full of frequent disruptions and a culture that commands isolation for the sake of striving, it matters more than you’d ever think.

You don’t have to fix the world. You just have to show up for someone in it.

“Did I stutter?” Oh yes, I did, several hundred times, Stanley.

I didn’t always recognize my limited capacity to communicate. I remember a friend came over and spotted Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, a book that had been sitting uncracked on my bookshelf for a year and a half, and asked if she could borrow it. I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

This was a big deal because one thing about me is that I don’t lend my books out. Like, ever. If I do, I must have an affinity for you or must not care about this particular book (for example, I gave my own sister my copy of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, but held on tightly to my copy of Normal People). In the case of this friend, there was a third reason: I thought I didn’t need to read Nonviolent Communication, a book about communicating in a clear, direct way that fosters connection, because I’d already mastered communication as a professional writer.

Not too long after that I lost an important relationship partly because neither of us could speak honestly to one another. And so, I promptly bought another copy of the book.

Why it’s so hard to just “speak your mind”

If you feel like you’re not great at communicating, consider that it actually might not be your fault.

One of the things the book illuminated for me is how we’re discouraged from having direct communication with one another.

We learn to speak in a roundabout way, to hint at what we mean and hope the other person figures it out so we can avoid doing the hard work of being vulnerable. And when we’re not hinting at something, we might take a more aggressive or accusatory stance in our language, ready to tell others what they’re doing wrong and enumerate all their faults, instead of allowing ourselves to be fully seen and admit that we’ve been affected by something.

Never let them see you sweat, cry, or care. And by them, I mean everyone from the stranger on the train to the closest people around you.

It’s an exhausting way to live, but one we stick to anyway. Anything to avoid actually saying, “I feel scared. I’m anxious. I’m hurt. I feel worried. I feel brokenhearted” or to open ourselves up to potential hurt.

Sometimes it’s not even that we’re trying to put on a cool face; it’s that we’re been conditioned to avoid conflict or that we’ve learned to equate our natural human needs with being needy, so we stuff down everything we’re feeling inside so as not to cause any friction.

No matter the reason, a communication-style marked by indirectness and self-protection prevents us from getting the connection and intimacy that we want, according to Rosenberg.

“It has been my experience over and over again that from the moment people start talking about what they need, rather than what’s wrong with one another, the possibility of finding ways to meet everybody’s needs are greatly increased,” he writes.

When you’ve spent a lifetime of beating around the bush or communicating in a guarded way, it’s difficult to adjust. There’s also growing cultural acceptance around ghosting/not communicating at all in various situations, whether that be dating, jobs, or even therapy (please don’t ghost your therapist 🙂), so a lot of us are rusty when it comes to communicating sincerely.

But communication is a skill, just like any other, that can be improved upon with practice. And even small changes can strengthen the quality of your conversations.

One actionable step you can take today is challenging yourself to only use the word “feel” when you’re stating an actual emotion. Rosenberg notes that one way people distance themselves from uncomfortable feelings and muddle their communication is by not distinguishing between language that evaluates and language that describes how we actually feel. He gives the example, “I feel ignored.” In this case, you might think you’re stating a feeling, but instead you’re stating a judgement. Sometimes you might feel relieved to be ignored because you wanted to be left alone; other times you might feel hurt. Relief and hurt are the actual emotions.

“Words like ‘ignored’ express how we interpret others, rather than how we feel,” Rosenberg writes.

He also suggests building a vocabulary for feelings so that we may better communicate them. Our generic go-tos like “good,” “bad,” and “fine” don’t give the listener much to connect with. Building a more specific vocabulary for your feelings is the first step to actually sharing them.

Another shift you can implement immediately is taking responsibility for your feelings in the language you use. So, for example, instead of stating “You disappointed me by not coming over last night,” you might say, “I was disappointed when you didn’t come over, because I wanted to spend quality time with you.”

When you take responsibility for our own feelings and lead with openness, you’re better positioned to have an honest and fruitful conversation instead of a defensive one.

Rosenberg also encourages you to be direct in your requests. While this doesn’t necessarily mean someone else will respond exactly as we want, it makes it more likely that common ground can be found. Rosenberg cites an example of a woman told her husband, “I want you to let me be me.” No one really knew what that actually meant because it was such a vague statement, but with Rosenberg’s prompting, she was able to formulate an actionable and explicit request: “It’s kind of awkward, but if I were to be precise, I guess what I want is for you to smile and say that anything I do is ok” — a much more honest appeal.

What I tell my clients

There’s much more useful info in Nonviolent Communication (if you’re interested in reading more, I found a free PDF here). But what I don’t want you to do is get so caught up in communicating things in the “perfect” or “right” way that you don’t say anything at all.

If I’ve learned anything it’s that you can read all the books, but integrating what you’ve learned into practice is a messy, non-linear process.

When I’m working with clients, I try to empower them to practice these difficult and uncomfortable conversations, especially with people who are emotionally safe for them and people who know they have the best intentions.

We’re not going to say everything perfectly nor are we going to avoid every conflict (and let’s be real: you never really avoid conflict, anyway, you just postpone it, because it always comes out). These are not realistic goals.

But allowing yourself to be seen and heard, to make yourself clear, to be able to take off the mask in settings of your choosing, and say, “This is how I really feel” is much more attainable.

And if you choke or stutter or stumble along the way, all that means is that you were brave enough to reveal a part of yourself and try to connect with another — when it would have been easier to keep your mouth shut.

As many do after breakups, I found myself seeking answers. Why did this person somehow put a damper on every single holiday or special occasion? Why did they make comments connected to the insecurities I had confided in them about? Why did they constantly compare me to other people negatively or make “jokes” that were really just insults? Why were they so concerned about how others perceived our relationship, instead of how they actually treated me?

I might not be so confident in labeling my experience this way if my friends hadn’t also witnessed it; my empathy, denial, and this person’s constant gaslighting kept me in a relationship that was actively harmful and from seeing the true extent of the emotional abuse.

Therapy, an extensive reading list (which I’ll include at the end of this newsletter), my friends and family, and reconnecting with my own sense of self allowed me to understand what the actual dynamics were. I had been dating a narcissist a person with narcissistic traits (for the purposes of this newsletter, I will not be diagnosing anyone, but you get my drift). ‘

And although I would prefer to pretend that it never happened, I share part of my story here because I will always remember telling a friend I hadn’t seen in a while about my experience, and her being surprised that “someone like you” could find herself in a relationship like that.

Because that’s the prevailing stereotype: that to be in an emotionally abusive relationship, you must be weak or uneducated. But neither being an outspoken nor educated person will necessarily protect you from those things, even if those qualities can be protective factors.

I want people to know that a relationship like this can happen to anyone, and especially to empathetic people, as those with narcissistic traits are often attracted to them because they provide a source of validation.

That’s why I was so glad to see the topic tackled in a recently released movie called You’re Dating a Narcissist!

The movie stars Marisa Tomei as Judy, a psychology professor whose life work is dedicated to educating others about narcissism. Judy is convinced that her daughter is marrying a narcissist and goes to great lengths to try and break up their relationship — to the point where the viewer questions whether she’s actually the real narcissist.

“I was trying to make the audience feel a little gaslit and confused, because that’s what it’s like dating a narcissist,” Ann Marie Allison, the director and co-writer of the film, said during a recent screening of the movie at Quad Cinema in New York City. “Maybe Judy’s the narcissist and Theo’s great. That’s what you’re doing in your head.”

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a prominent clinical psychologist known for her work on narcissism, added that the dynamics can sometimes be so difficult to untangle or believe that “we even question ourselves as experts.”

And yet, there’s still so much shame attached to being in a relationship like this.

“The more empathetic you are, the more you’re drawn to relationships like this,” Durvasula said. “That makes you kind and open to love, that doesn’t make you stupid.”

Signs you’re dating someone with narcissistic traits

You may never know for sure if someone has Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). This is because most narcissists never seek therapy themselves; it’s usually the people who’ve been harmed by them who seek therapy to try to make sense of their reality or cope with a current relationship. Additionally, narcissistic traits can exist on a spectrum, making the disorder difficult to recognize if a person operates in a more covert manner.

Regardless, what matters more than a diagnosis is how a person’s behavior makes you feel.

It can be helpful to know signs to look out for, including:

They make your emotions about them. You share something difficult and somehow the conversation ends up being about their feelings, their experience, their needs.

They regularly make backhanded comments that don’t feel good. Whether they’re comments about your insecurities, “jokes” that are really just digs, or comparisons to other people, there’s something that just doesn’t sit right with you about the things they say. When you call it out, it becomes a “you” problem: you can’t take a joke, you’re too sensitive, and you’re being dramatic.

They attack your character when they’re angry. Conflict doesn’t stay about the issue. It escalates into a character assassination and a judgement against your entire worth as a human being.

They triangulate. Triangulation is a manipulation tactic that involves pitting a person against a third party — like a friend, an ex, or a coworker — to make them feel insecure, spark jealousy, or shift the power dynamic. It puts you in a position of feeling like you need to on prove yourself and measure up to this outside person instead of evaluating whether you’re being treated well.

They cycle between idealization and devaluation. Early in the relationship, you may have felt uniquely seen and valued, or at minimum, chosen. But as the relationship continues, their behavior shifts into criticism, dismissiveness, or indifference. The contrast is disorienting and keeps you chasing the version of them and yourself that existed at the beginning.

They gaslight you. “I never said/did that.” Over time, you stop trusting your own memory, perception, and judgement. You must be overreacting or acting crazy.

They take and very rarely ever give. You constantly feel drained and depleted, made to feel like your purpose is to live in service to them and their needs. They convince you that you’re an inconvenience and that they’re doing you a major favor, even when you’re the one pouring energy and resources into the relationship.

They escalate emotionally when you try to leave. The relationship may have felt consistently low-effort or one-sided, but the moment you pull back or suggest ending things, suddenly there’s a declaration of love or a grand gesture. It’s less about you and more about control; they want to keep you in their orbit.

Healing from narcissistic relationships

If you’ve been in a narcissistic relationship and/or with someone who has otherwise been emotionally abusive, I want to be clear: you did not deserve to be treated like that. No one deserves to be treated like that.

Per an article from Rula, narcissistic behaviors can stem from personal trauma. But that doesn’t mean it’s ok. As Durvasula said at the screening, “We’re all wounded, but most of us don’t abuse other people.”

In my case, I believe this ex sincerely did not like himself, so he tried to make me feel as small as he felt. Still, his behavior was inexcusable.

Healing’s not an overnight process — a bit cliche, but I say this to underscore that if you find yourself missing this person, especially in the beginning of a breakup, when you may be so utterly confused and disoriented as to what you just experienced, please don’t blame or shame yourself. You deserve relationships that make you feel supported and ones that uplift you, instead of leaving you feeling like a shell of a person. There is beautiful, wondrous life on the other side.

Resources

If you’re currently in an emotionally abusive relationship and need support, The National Domestic Violence Hotline offers 24/7 confidential and anonymous help by phone, text, or even online chat at thehotline.org.

For those processing a past relationship or looking to better understand these dynamics, here are some resources I found to be particularly helpful in my own journey:

*Therapy: Working with someone who can help you make sense of your experience and validate and support you can be essential.

*It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People by Dr. Ramani Durvusula

*Was It Even Abuse?: Restoring Clarity After Covert Abuse by Emma Rose Byham

*Why Did You Stay?: A Memoir About Self-Worth by Rebecca Humphries

*Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

*The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist by Debbie Mirza

*In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by Dr. George K. Simon

The public relations manager had found me through a story I’d written four years beforehand about Daniela Soto-Innes, who at 28 years old, became the youngest person to be named World’s Best Chef. The story was short; I hadn’t even been able to interview Daniela for the piece, so it was strictly a writeup of the award announcement. Compared to other stories I’d written, this was one that had taken a fraction of the effort. After it was published, I didn’t give it a second thought.

That is, until I received the email about the trip. Was this some sort of joke or scam? The trip was happening the same weekend as my ex’s birthday, when we were supposed to go to a wedding together. I’d planned to be holed up inside, crying over not spending his birthday with him, torturing myself with thoughts of him meeting someone else, with a huge tub of cookies and cream ice cream.

Instead, I was getting paid to visit a beautiful place, interview an incredible chef, and hang out with other writers. And on the day of his birthday, the culmination of the weekend, I found myself having a delicious dinner cooked by Daniela in an agave field instead of dancing to Uptown Funk at a catering hall in Connecticut — needless to say, it was difficult to be bummed about that!

It was an experience I never could have planned for or envisioned. And it happened — not because I cover food or spirits regularly, not because I had an at-length, groundbreaking interview with the chef, not because it was an opportunity I had applied for or that was even on my radar — but because I pitched a quick hit about an award.

I recently learned the story about the development of “The Climb,” the lead song from the 2009 Hannah Montana movie, that has since been used at events as big as presidential inaugurations to those as routine as high school graduations. One of the writers of the song, Jessi Alexander, is a country music singer-songwriter who before this song was popularized by the movie, was struggling in her career. In fact, Jessi was dropped by Columbia Records in 2006, a year after releasing her debut album Honeysuckle Sweet, because of its lackluster performance.

She’d moved to Nashville at 21 years old with big dreams, but after she was let go from the label, she wondered if maybe she should give up music. As she describes in TikToks about her s​tory, she thought it might be time to accept her career had come to a halt and put her main focus on her family. While driving to the studio one day, a melody came into her head. Someone called her, but she didn’t pick up because she didn’t want to lose the tune. She dashed to the studio and wrote the chorus to “The Climb.”

“My [now] husband, Jon Randall, had just won song of the year for ‘Whiskey Lullaby.’ I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, he’s killing it and I’m washed up and not getting anything accomplished over here,” Jessi told Billboard. “It was through that period of time, the frustration I was going through, I was writing a lot of stuff about that. And that’s when me and John Mabe wrote ‘The Climb’ for Miley Cyrus.”

At least a year after writing “The Climb,” Alexander’s song plugger at Disney invited the director of the Hannah Montana movie to the studio to listen to some music. Jessi played some songs for him and he asked her if she had a CD he could take with him.

“He calls me, maybe a week and a half later and says, ‘I’m crazy about this song,’ — he was calling ‘The Climb.’— ‘And if you will rewrite it for a 15 year old, I will put it in the movie. Not only will I put it in the movie, I will rewrite the script around the song,’” the now four-time Grammy-nominee and American Country Music awardee said.

Be open to the unknown

The Mexico story is one of my favorites to tell because even I, someone who’s always scheming and who has traditionally had a fearful relationship around uncertainty and the unknown, could not have planned for it. It was a moment where life caught me off guard in the best possible way, and it also reminded me that you never know where the seeds you’re planting now could lead. The fact that I was found through a random story that I’d written four years previously still blows my mind after the way I’ve chased down so many opportunities in my life, constantly trying to make things happen, with various levels of success.

Similarly, Jessi wasn’t workshopping “The Climb” around thinking that was going to be her breakthrough song. She wrote something that felt true to her experience and moved on. And it clearly resonated. (Like that line, “There’s always gonna be another mountain / I’m always gonna want to make it move” SPEAKS to my stubborn soul).

Both of these things happened because someone put something out there, then let it go — which, if you’re anything like me, is easier said than done. We plan, scheme, optimize, and in the process, forget: some of the best moments can’t be manufactured.

And when we’re not actively planning, we’re caught up on the treadmill of life: work, eat, scroll, sleep, repeat. We think tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday because yesterday was just like the day before. But sometimes there’s these incredible moments that make you go, “Wow, I would not have thought of that or could not have predicted things would go that way.” They’re not an everyday occurrence and they’re very rare, but that’s what makes them so special when they do happen.

So keep showing up, keep planting those seeds, keep living according to your values, and be open to being outschemed by life and to some *good* surprises along the way. You might be in the midst of something magical right now, and not even know it.

I needed a story to write, I pitched something I thought was genuinely cool about a talented Latina chef breaking barriers, and I continued living my life for four years. And as a result, I didn’t spend that weekend mourning the past, but celebrating a surprise sweeter than agave.

And yet, here I am, biting my nails and stress-eating snap peas as I try to rework a meandering introduction. As of last week, it’s been two years of writing Your Self-Help Bestie, and it hasn’t gotten much easier. Each piece brings with it new considerations and challenges, including another gap between the piece I envisioned in my head and the one that winds up appearing on the page.

Given the emotional rollercoaster that is writing and the understanding that I will never be a faster writer than AI, why do I continue doing this? Why not just sidestep the slog, doubt, and sometimes even the self-loathing that appears during the writing process and cash in on some good ol’ AI slop? Perhaps even start training AI, which according to this dystopian New York Magazine article might be one of the last available career pathways for journalists?

I’m not anti-AI, for the record, and I do use it as a thought partner in the editing process of these newsletters. I also acknowledge that many of the problems that plague creative industries, including exploitation and devaluation, predate its rise. However, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this tech is displacing people, myself included. As it further disrupts industries, it’s causing me and my clients to ask: what are we here for? What’s our purpose if a machine can do things more “efficiently” than we can, in a world that values speed, productivity, and profits above all? What’s even the point of writing anymore, especially a mental health newsletter, when you easily look up some clinical info online?

The compulsivity of writing

I write, mostly, because for me there’s no alternative. Because as much as I sometimes feel like I’m banging my head against a desk trying to get words out, it’s my lifeblood. As my girl Virginia Woolf wrote, “I walk over the marsh saying ‘I am I’ and must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living.” Writing is as essential a part of me as anything else. I don’t know how not to do it, but I do know the urgency I feel to share, and communicate, and bring what’s hidden out into the light. There’s no greater feeling than when I’ve had a great interview or connect some seemingly disparate ideas or when the words are actually flowing. As I type this, I have 7 other newsletter ideas circling my mind. I’m the embodiment of that emoji of the girl whose face is half-covered by her laptop.

I also write because I hope that by talking about mental health publicly — which, not gonna lie, sometimes feels super vulnerable and cringe — I can make someone feel less alone, help people reconnect with their inherent dignity, and share resources that can bolster their mental health. This world tries to grind us down. Your Self-Help Bestie is my offering in an attempt to push past that, to help people rediscover who they are before the world tried to tell them: worthy, deserving, and good.

“Nurture your hobby and your passion.”

While receiving the Artist of the Year award at the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards, Taylor Swift reflected on the beginning of her career, specifically those moments early on when she would rush to her room so she could write her songs. She said:

“When I was 12 years old, I had the luxury of spending thousands of hours working at my craft, practicing, making mistakes through trial and error. And that was all completely unobserved, right? So that was just me and my craft. And I’m looking out into this crowd, and I’m seeing so many ambitious, cool, smart, awesome people who have dreams.

We live in this world where there’s so much immediate feedback constantly. You get feedback for everything you share with the world now. Everything you post, you get feedback, whether it’s good or bad or whatever. I just want to say, if I had one hope for you, I would say that I hope that you get to nurture your hobby and your passion just between you and that craft. And you give yourself time. Give yourself time to make mistakes. Give yourself some time to hone your craft.”

When it seems that the world mostly judges value through money and clout, it becomes difficult not to measure yourself against those same standards. But I really want to encourage you and myself to see the value in producing your art, whatever it may be, beyond these limiting metrics. I know that intangible things like being able to hone your craft don’t pay the bills, and I know you don’t want to produce art that no one ever sees. Same.

But at the risk of sounding like a MasterCard commercial, there are certain things that are priceless and cannot be measured by the usual standards capitalism throws upon us.

As I reflect on two years of writing Your Self-Help Bestie, I want to share some of my favorite pieces over the past year, pieces I would not have written if I allowed that little voice inside my head to convince me that because there aren’t hundreds of thousands of eyes on my writing then it’s not worth putting out there. And I also want to say a whole-hearted thank you to everyone who subscribes and reads my newsletter. Some of you I bullied into signing up 😅, but some of you are genuinely here of your volition, and I deeply appreciate you.

Even if the world doesn’t always see the value in what you’re doing and even if AI can do it faster than you, keep doing your thing. Keep listening to those bursts of excitement around starting a new project. Stay the course. That you feel the urge to be creative is enough reason in and of itself to do so.

2-year anniversary faves 🥳💜

• The first edition of the Your Self-Help Bestie advice column on the heavy demands the world places on us – Looking for advice? Fill out this fully anonymous form

• This essay on not being as lost as you think you are

• This essay about perfectionism and productivity

• This essay on old limiting stories

• This essay on coping with uncertainty

• This essay on being worthy of love, regardless of mental health struggles

• This essay on asking for more than the bare minimum

“There’ve been a couple of times I’ve said things and you’ve closed your eyes,” Kiersten said. “I don’t know what your moment was, but I know it affected you and I know it was deep and I know how much that wound can hurt.”

Suddenly I was flooded with a familiar feeling of being seen, much like I had while reading her book. The last few years have felt like one thing after another: health troubles, relationship grief, layoffs and an industry in collapse. All the while I kept convincing myself this was just a character-building exercise for the triumph and glory that was sure to come. That’s what we’re trained to believe: that rejection and failure will automatically be followed by unending success, little dots in the distance, soon to be forgotten once we finally arrive.

But what happens when the heartbreak just keeps coming? When you take a step back and realize that nothing has gone to plan, and the life you envisioned is so different from the life you’re currently living? What happens when you realize that there’s no larger lesson to be gleaned other than the fact that sometimes life is really, really hard?

These are the questions I was quietly asking myself, both as I navigated my own life and as I sat with clients carrying their own grief. And I had never seen them asked honestly in a book until Crushed.

@kierstenlyonsReply to @sterling.stars The third Sunday in May… #heartbreakhope #klcrushed #katespadenycabana #taylorswiftwhitehorse #taylorswiftedit #brokenengagement #Godstiming #christiantiktok #TopGunMode #wholesomeplottwist

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It started with a gut punch

Kiersten was tying bows on her wedding invitations in ignorant bliss when her fiancé told her he wasn’t sure if he ever really loved her and that he had cheated. As if that wasn’t enough of a gut-punch, within a matter of months, James (who came from a wealthy family and had a trust fund) won $100,000 on a reality TV show. Meanwhile Kiersten struggled to pay rent while building her acting career in Los Angeles. If anything were to destroy the illusion that your ex is out there living a worse life without you, that’d be it.

We tell ourselves stories to survive heartbreak: that karma will have her way in the end, that once we’ve “made it,” the pain will be worth it, that we just need to knock hard enough and the door will open. As Kiersten puts it, we grew up marinating in a cultural myth — whether from the church or celebrities like Oprah — that if you dream it and believe it, you can achieve it.

“It’s so damaging,” she told me. “And it is so hard for me to watch girls get swept up in that, because I know what’s coming. It’s one of two things: either you’re going to get everything and then you think you’re better than everybody else, or you’re not and then it’s just self-hatred.”

The latter is what happened to Kiersten after her breakup. She didn’t immediately find the love of her life. She didn’t shoot to global success in her acting career. And as of today, she’s still trying to get her book into people’s hands without a major publicity budget. As recently as a few months ago, she went through a period of depression and spent time walking around a lake, listening to the audio version of her own book.

“I didn’t just write this book for other people,” she told me. “I wrote it for myself because I have to be reminded of the goodness. Despair comes. Hopelessness comes. Darkness comes. And I have to be reminded that I’m not alone, that people have come before me. That hope isn’t in an outcome.”

Grieving Ambiguous Loss

Grief is never clean, linear, or easy. But as ill-equipped as we are as a society to discuss and support people dealing with “traditional” grief (if the 3-5 days people receive for bereavement leave is any indication), we’re somehow even less capable of speaking about the kind of ambiguous loss that features prominently in Crushed.

Coined by Dr. Pauline Boss while treating spouses of soldiers missing in action, ambiguous loss is the kind of grief that lacks closure: breakups without explanation, careers that never took off, the version of your life that never came to pass. There’s no resolution, just a quiet grief that buzzes in the background as you continue the project of living.

Kiersten knows this grief intimately. Eventually she realized that the feelings she was carrying weren’t just about James. They were about something deeper, a lifelong belief that she needed to prove herself, to earn her worth, to get the person who didn’t love her to finally love her so that would be the proof she needed.

“As much as I showed up in that relationship fully as myself, I still completely walked on eggshells with him,” she recalled. “I completely distorted my boundaries. I started to realize this wasn’t so much about James as it was about the whole freaking system of wanting to prove myself. I wanted the boy who didn’t love me to love me and then that would prove my worth.”

That’s why crushed is the perfect word for this feeling: it’s not just disappointment or sadness. It’s the devastation and defeat of unmet expectations and broken dreams and the feeling of continuously getting flattened and being diminished by life.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Unfortunately, even when we recognize we’re dealing with ambiguous loss, there are few places in society to process it. We have therapy (and as you know, I’m a big fan of that space). But beyond it, we live in a world that doesn’t give us room to grieve. So it’s no surprise that even the most well-intentioned people in our lives struggle to hold space for grief that has no clear ending.

When Kiersten first started dating her-now husband Bradley, her sisters couldn’t understand why she was still processing everything. They kept telling her she’d won because she was with a great guy, but she still needed to grieve. She brought up a scene from Parks & Recreation that she thinks about constantly: when Leslie is recalled and her best friend Ann tells her, “This sucks. And you can talk about it for a year.”

“What she’s really saying is: you have permission to grieve this,” Kiersten said. “I’m not going to say to you in three days, come on, get up. There’s no timeline. I see you. You’ve got all the space to feel how you want to feel and not feel like you’re doing it incorrectly. And I hope I can be that safe space for people.”

The healing arc of Crushed isn’t a dramatic breakthrough. It’s the slow recognition that the things you placed your bets on might not be coming, and even if they are, they may never do the thing you need them to do.

Kiersten is living this in real time. Some readers who stumble across the book don’t get it. The readers she’s speaking directly to — the ones DMing her to say they finally left an abusive relationship and that they refuse to be in toxic situationships anymore — can barely find it.

And she’s sitting with it, the pride and disappointment living side by side, unresolved.

“I wrote this book. I’m really proud of it. But it’s not going to get into a bunch of hands, and can I be okay with that? Can I accept that? I have to. I don’t have a choice. But can I find other people that are also living in the small, living in the goodness, living in the hidden?” she said. “I hope whatever happens with this book, I can sit in the knowledge that I’ve had a lot of heartbreak, but I’m also worth something, and I’m really proud of who I am. You can be crushed. You can be heartbroken. You can persevere, pivot, and do other things. It doesn’t mean you’re going to become a bestselling author or a famous actor. But it also means you can have a beautiful life.”

If Your Heart Is Broken Right Now

It may feel like you’ll always feel this way and that the details of this loss are permanently burned into you.

They aren’t.

“I don’t remember James’s number,” Kiersten said. “I couldn’t tell you what his middle name is. I couldn’t imagine not knowing those things. And now I can’t. And that feels pretty spectacular.”

And if it’s a version of yourself you’re grieving, honor and mourn that loss as fully and as long as it takes, but know that goodness can still exist in the wreckage of that previous dream.

There’s a quote I love attributed to the Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burned down, now I can see the moon.”

I know this wasn’t what you planned, but I hope soon enough, you’ll see the moon.

“Person to person, I think you’re expecting too much and I want to suggest you taper your expectations,” the broker told me. “This is an old building, not everything’s going to be perfect and it’s not going to be a modern style. It’s part of the charm.”

My antenna was raised. I’m familiar with things from Brooklyn that are incredibly flawed and rough around the edges but still manage to be charming. (I’m one of them 😜.) And as a result, I’m not someone who seeks perfection. But my hesitation about the place wasn’t just cosmetic, it had to do with habitability. And I interpreted his tone as suggesting I was being naive and superficial, particularly after I asked if the wood underneath the stove was covering up a hole, to which he responded, “Even if it was, would it matter? It’s not like you’d be looking at it everyday.”

His words put me on the defensive because all of my life I’ve been told by various people to lower my expectations. Yet something about hearing it said in this specific context clarified for me that this guidance wasn’t being given because my expectations were objectively inanely high and unrealistic. It was being given because the person who said it would benefit from me believing that I was asking for too much.

So now I’ll direct the question toward you: who benefits from convincing you you’re asking for too much? I want you to ask yourself this the next time you receive similar feedback to what the broker told me – especially if you’re a woman or a person from another group that’s been traditionally marginalized, because we’ve been conditioned early on to accept the scraps we’ve been offered. We’ve been taught to make our needs as small as possible and that’s it’s not ok to have higher expectations beyond what’s being provided. We’re instructed to doubt and question ourselves: Who are we to ask for more or to set a standard higher than the one someone or something is able to meet?

I’ll tell you who you are. You’re a person with worth and dignity and you have the right to ask for more than the bare minimum. And I guarantee you if you’re the kind of person who regularly probes whether you’re asking for too much, there’s a chance you’re not. It may just be that you’ve been guilted and manipulated into believing you’re being outrageous to someone else’s benefit.

It wasn’t always clear to me that this is what was happening. When I’d ask for compensation that matched my experience or for greater reciprocity in my relationships and received responses that I was being difficult, I’d backtrack. But now I recognize that an inability to meet expectations doesn’t automatically mean they’re unreasonable.

@gwennyfaJust a reminder that making women feel like they’re asking for “too much” is a strategy to get them to accept less than they deserve. #therapistintraining #mentalhealth #lifeadvicetiktok #forthegirls #relationships

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The difference between discernment and defense

Okay, but what if you might actually be expecting too much? It’s difficult to parse through whether your expectations are realistic, especially when you have people in your ear trying to convince you they’re not so they can reap the rewards. Add a dash of self-doubt and a dollop of lacking self-trust and you create the perfect conditions for settling for something well-beneath your initial standards.

I’d love to say that I immediately wrote off the apartment after seeing the extent of its dilapidation, but I didn’t. I waffled. I went back and forth. I almost convinced myself that I might not find something better and that I was being too demanding.

If you, like me, are good at talking yourself out of your standards for fear of being unreasonable, something that may help is understanding whether you have a boundary or a defense. A boundary is a standard put in place to protect your overall wellbeing, while a defense is an expectation you stick to avoid vulnerability. So in the case of an apartment: a reasonable boundary is not wanting to live somewhere that hasn’t been well-maintained, whereas a defense might be passing on a place that checks nearly all the boxes, aside from one minor feature, as an excuse to avoid the process of moving. Or in a relationship: A boundary may be getting clarity before getting emotionally invested, while a defense may be ending things prematurely to escape the discomfort of ambiguity.

When you’re still unsure of whether you’re asking for too much, another consideration is whether what you’re asking for is rare and whether you would be willing to do the same. For example, wanting your friends to take initiative sometimes and make plans so it doesn’t always fall on you isn’t you asking for a rare thing or something you’d be unwilling to do yourself. It’s asking for balance.

You’re allowed to ask for more

The broker told me they would fix the floors and repaint the bathroom and asked me if I wanted to see the apartment again. I decided not to because my hunch was that the apartment needed more work than a cleaning and a quick cosmetic fix.

But not everyone agreed, because a couple of days later, that same apartment was rented out just as it was.

That doesn’t mean I was right and the other person was wrong or vice versa. What it means is that we’re all allowed to hold whatever expectations and standards we want. There’s no universal rule book about whether a standard is reasonable. What’s workable for one person might not be workable for another and what one person might think is asking too much might be no big deal to someone else. If people think you’re asking for too much, maybe it’s because you’re asking too much from them.

Of course, it’s worth checking in about the reasonableness of your standards. But if you feel deep down that you’re not asking for too much, then trust that. I left that apartment and other situations in my life almost immediately knowing they weren’t right for me. But it took me a lot longer to stop questioning whether I was right to ask for something different. You deserve to skip that part. You deserve to ask for more.

I was thinking specifically of the song “The Optimist” when I gave the rec. The track, as Hilary states in her CBS News interview, is about her estranged relationship with her father. It opens with her at a hypnotist, asking her if she could teach her “not to dream.”

“I wish I could sleep on planes and that my father would really love me,” Hilary sings in the chorus, a line that feels particularly gut-wrenching: the first wish is so mundane, the second so loaded. “He’d show up on my wedding day and tell my family they’re all so lucky / He’d tell me how he wished he stayed / And that he never meant to disappoint me,” she continues.

Hilary, or the main character of this song, knows that that’s unlikely, as so she’ll keep hoping that one day these things might actually come to pass and that her father will be invested in her life.

The song also talks about her becoming an “emotional architect,” learning the dimensions of her father’s psychological makeup and which “bottles” made him feel in control of his emotional pain.

WOOF. Yeah, it’s definitely a different vibe than “This Is What Dreams Are Made Of,” but it achieves something we don’t often see discussed, and certainly not in pop music: estranged family.

There’s a particular kind of shame that comes with family estrangement — not just the grief of the loss, but the embarrassment of it. The sense that you should be over it by now, or that it reflects something broken in you rather than something that was done to you. “The Optimist” sits inside that shame and refuse to look away from it.

And it’s not the only song that touches upon this theme, either. “We Don’t Talk,” which Hilary said is about her fractured relationship with her sister, Haylie, is about the “emotional eviction” of no longer being connected to someone who was once so important to you.

“It’s definitely about my sister and just absolutely the most lonely part of my existence. It’s [about] not having my sister in my life at the moment, and I really struggled with thinking about including that on the record,” Hilary told CBS News.

In both of these songs, the self-judgement of carrying that sadness, is clear. This is most obvious in “The Optimist” when she sings, “I wouldn’t have to feel such shame / Around how often and how deep it cuts me” and in “We Don’t Talk” when she sings, “So sick of being / So sad about it.”

So why did I direct my client towards it? Well, I could have recommended Lindsay C. Gibson’s “Adult Children of Emotional Immature Parents,” a pioneering work written for people who have been parentified by the authority figures in their life, as I often do.

But I also think it’s so important to have cultural touchstones that shed light on these taboo topics from a public person in pop culture who is generally well-respected and revered. As powerful as it can be to read anonymized stories of people who shed light on your experiences via a clinical text, it hits different when someone like Hilary Duff is open about the pain of family estrangement. It destigmatizes it because if someone as beloved as Hilary isn’t immune to the pain of being a human — through no fault of her own — then the same is true for all of us.

Paranoid of “new girls”

Family estrangement isn’t the only taboo topic that luck… or something covers. Hilary also talks about the pressure of remaining interesting and intriguing to a long-term partner and a fear of being replaced by a younger woman across several tracks, including “Roommates,” when she sings, “I’m paranoid of new girls / All the shiny cute girls / God, it makes my head swirl” and “Future Tripping,” with the lyrics, “2028 / Will you skip the headachе? / And settle somewhere out of state / With a younger heart? / Will your crisis be a car / Or some bitch at a bar.” The theme appears yet again in the song, “Holiday Party,” with the lyrics, “In my head, you live another life … And wish someone else could’ve been your wife.” And again in “You, From the Honey Moon,” with “I know it’s so unfair to compare / But let me know that you still love me,” which I interpreted as the main character comparing the current relationship to when it first began and needing reassurance that she’s still loved, even if it looks differently.

One reference to this dynamic would be striking on its own, but the fact that it’s recurring makes it more impactful, particularly when we’re living in a moment where numbness, unaffectedness, and smallness in both spirit and physicality among women is being encouraged yet again (assuming that there ever was a moment when we were out of the woods, which ya know, might just be me, like Hilary, existing as the optimist).

In a recent TikTok, creator talks about how emotional suppression has become intertwined with our current understanding of femininity. She ties this phenomenon to the rise of “lobotomy chic,” an aesthetic “that focuses on exploring femininity through meta-irony, detachment, and nihilism,” and deadpan internet personalities. She cites Rachel Sennott, the creator of I Love LA, who’s been regularly asked about her use of beta blockers in press interviews, as an example of this phenomenon. “Numb is in,” one interviewer proclaims alongside Sennott.

@whatzaraloves6🚏⭐️Taboo on the Bus, episode 73: the politics of numbness. Who chooses to be emotionally suppressed, and how is this intertwined in femininity…? Reference within to @DTS 👄⭐️💌 #rachelsennott #lobotomychic #coolgirl #brat #charlixcx

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If it’s true that there seems to be a celebration of the perception of unaffectedness, then luck… or something is the opposite of that. There’s no cool girl aesthetic to be found here. The fear of being replaced, the expectation to remain shiny, and the oppression and suffocation that comes with living in a patriarchal society is evident. And when Hilary Duff sings about it, she gives it credence. Yes, we would love to live in a world where we could free up some brain space for the 1,000 other things that undoubtedly matter more. We would love to not carry the emotional labor of wondering if someone you love is going to wake up one day and pull a little switcheroo and want something uncomplicated and unburdened by history and expectations.

This was why the Internet was shooketh when Hilary said in a Rolling Stone interview that she was worried her husband would leave her for “some coolio indie songwriter that he works with.” There’s a similar parasocial logic here that plays out when celebrities get cheated on. Well, if Hilary Duff who is the epitome of accomplished, attractive, etc., is concerned about this, then there’s really “no hope for the rest of us.”

But I would argue that if Hilary is anxious about being replaced by someone perceived to be cooler, then all that shows is how deeply entrenched objectification of ourselves has become. The fact that she names it in her record shows how inescapable this pressure is, and maybe, in some twisted way, can help us get closer to releasing it or at least accepting it. You are not a failure for holding some fears about your perceived worth and desirability – even if you think you should be above that – when you live in a world that thrives off you feeling like you’re never good enough. It’s just shocking to hear Hilary of all people admit something to that effect or even give it credence.

I guess you could argue: what’s the alternative? If you’re going to start performing after a 10-year hiatus, then your music should have some punch to it. But the combination of topics you wouldn’t normally hear on a pop album and the repetition of anxieties lends luck… or something an unexpected vulnerability.

Stars, they’re just like us!!

Nostalgia is a powerful force; if there is in-fact a concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hannah Montana later this year, you can rest assured that getting tickets will be a blood bath (PICK ME, CHOOSE ME, LOVE ME, TICKETMASTER 🥹) and that same nostalgia has certainly created an opening for stars like Hilary to make their comeback.

Because Hilary’s main audience is older and is now collectively wistful for that period in our lives when we had less responsibility and less awareness of all the messed up things happening in the world, she could have coasted. I’m sure people would still show up just to scream-sing “Why Not?” with a group of strangers even if she didn’t release new music.

But instead of just harnessing nostalgia, Hilary showed she grew up with us on luck…or something. We may not have gotten the age-appropriate Lizzie McGuire reboot we deserved (Hulu/Disney, I will never forgive you), but we got songs that reference “texture on our skin,” “greyish highlights,” and the “heartbreaking and reassuring” passage of time. And that’s what I think makes the album more impactful: we’ve been given the gift of growing up alongside Hil and having her name some of the fears and anxieties that live within our own minds.

Shame thrives in darkness and isolation. It relies on you blaming yourself for your own feelings and pretending to be unaffected even when something is weighing you down. But healing comes with the admission and witness of that which is taboo; those honest conversations with a friend where you acknowledge that everything’s not actually fine, or that rare pop album that speaks on complicated family, grief over people growing apart, and anxiety spirals.

The news hit home for a few reasons: first, because Dawson’s Creek, obviously. After binging the show on winter break in high school via YouTube (because yes, at that point in time whole shows were posted to YouTube by some good samaritans before streaming made everything accessible), I cried. I was with these characters for 6 seasons, and now it was all just over.

But the news of Van Der Beek’s death also stirred me because he was only 48 years old and because he died of stage 3 colorectal cancer. Rates of colorectal cancer are rising among people under the age of 50 and it’s expected to become the leading cause of cancer deaths by 2030, according to the American Cancer Society. As someone with ulcerative colitis, which can increase the risk of developing colorectal cancer due to chronic inflammation, this is an even more concerning stat.

So before we go any further — as a person with lived experience and not a medical professional — I do want to encourage you to listen to your body, read up on symptoms of IBD, and go to a doctor to get checked if you suspect something isn’t right; I very much brushed off my UC to having a “sensitive stomach” for years, despite having a lot of pain, and it can be managed with treatment.

But Van Der Beek’s death isn’t just bringing awareness to this phenomenon of colorectal cancer increasing among young people, it’s also stirring controversy. Shortly after his death, friends of Van Der Beek published a GoFundMe to support the actor’s surviving wife and six children. The fundraiser surpassed its initial goal and its donations have almost reached $3 million at the time of writing this newsletter.

Initially, the general online sentiment seemed to be in support for the Van Der Beeks and ire at a medical system that crushes sick people and their families and puts them in debt. The discourse seemed to focus on how messed up it was that a successful actor couldn’t afford his cancer treatment and that he was auctioning off memorabilia to pay his medical bills, with people remarking: If he can’t afford treatment, how are “ordinary people” able to?

But reactions seemed to shift after news broke that the Van Der Beeks had closed on a $4.76 million ranch they’d been renting about a month before the Varsity Blue actor’s death. Whereas people were once directing anger toward the medical system, they began directing it toward the actor and his family. Suddenly some were insisting that the Van Der Beeks should downsize their house and questioning why someone with their resources and connections should be soliciting money when there’s so many less privileged people and no one cares about them.

I’m not going to lie — and I feel embarrassed to admit I felt this way toward a family in grief — but I myself had a moment of dismay and judgement. I spent not an insignificant amount of time in a TikTok rabbit hole, reading comments about how shady it was that they were buying property yet soliciting donations, the angry remarks reinforcing my outrage, to the point where I had to question: why am I so angry about this? Why am I so engulfed by this “controversy” that I’m losing precious sleep?

Well, the first answer to that question is easy. The sensationalist headlines and TikToks were functioning exactly as they were meant to. By tapping into our collective anger at all the injustice happening around us and leaving out key details (it was later revealed that the Van Der Beeks borrowed money for the ranch’s down payment), they successfully garnered engagement and distracted me into thinking I’d found a valid enemy.

But secondly, I was so engrossed by this back-and-forth because it made me feel like I had an appropriate outlet for anger. You see, I am that mad. Just not at the Van Der Beeks.

Displaced anger as a means of coping

You’ve likely heard of displaced anger as a defense mechanism before; it’s a phenomenon where we unconsciously redirect intense emotions away from their true source and “take them out” on someone else. Let’s say you had a terrible day at work. You might not be able to express your anger to the person responsible for inspiring your anger, likely a manager or coworker, but you can express it to a less threatening target, like a partner who might be more likely to forgive you.

This same phenomenon is playing out in response to the Dawson Creek’s star’s (and more recently, Eric Dane’s) GoFundMe and it’s something that plays out with a lot of social issues. We direct all of our anger at one particular person, instead of an issue, because things seem more manageable and productive that way. We feel like we’re actually doing something about it when we can put a face to the so-called enemy.

But James Van Der Beek isn’t the enemy. He was a guy, just like us, who was functioning in a healthcare system that is so beyond broken. He surely had more resources to navigate that system — even post-death with major celebrities donating to the GoFundMe — but the fact remains that healthcare in the United States is so prohibitively expensive that even people with more privilege than most are suffering.

We’re not really mad that the Van Der Beeks have a GoFundMe; we’re mad that this is what it takes to stay financially afloat when a loved one gets sick. We’re mad that people are going bankrupt over medical bills. We’re mad that it’s already so terrifying and stressful to deal with illness, but then you have to worry about how you’re going to cover your care too. We’re mad that healthcare is treated as a privilege, not a right, that there are quite literally prices being placed on our wellbeing, and that insurance companies get to dictate whether we are in fact worthy of care.

Everyone has a healthcare story. We learned this after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. People from all sides were coming together to share stories about how they’ve been screwed over by this system.

In a moving essay for Slate, Rachel Chapman writes about navigating her husband’s acute leukemia and complicated feelings about starting a GoFundMe, writing:

It doesn’t feel morally right for us to ask for help when we could, in theory, sell our Los Angeles condo, withdraw our son from his private preschool, and, hopefully, cover everything we’re going to be up against in terms of medical bills. But in the richest nation in the world, isn’t it enough that we are terrified for my husband’s life? Cancer treatment is physically and mentally brutal, and we are navigating this difficult path with a very young child. It also doesn’t feel morally right that we have to be scared about losing our home and child care setup, too. The state of health care in America is shameful. James Van Der Beek’s family reportedly purchased a sprawling $4.8 million ranch in Texas just before he died, a property that they had previously rented for years. It’s where James lived out his final days, and probably the home where his children—his younger ones, especially—have the most vivid memories of their time with their father. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to fight to maintain some sense of normalcy, even if their “normal” has more square footage than most? Are we all supposed to live our lives spending as little as possible in the first place, so we can be prepared to be absolutely walloped with unexpected medical bills?

When you look it that way, it’s ludicrous. You know those memes that are like, “I should have started saving for a house at 5 years old”? Well not to make it any darker, but should someone start saving for cancer treatment when they get their first job? Chapman also notes that cancer treatment “requires more than a simple emergency fund.” “Does anyone go into adulthood truly understanding the toll of seemingly endless medical bills?,” she asks.

While the question is rhetorical, of course we don’t. It’s not just one big bill that people are slapped with when they’re sick. And the lack of transparency when it comes to the costs of care make it even more difficult to conceptualize the price of illness unless you are directly in the situation yourself.

What’s even more infuriating is that costs don’t necessarily have to be that expensive. As many of us already know, the investors of insulin sold the patent for $1, yet nearly 80% of U.S. adults who have diabetes or care for someone who does have reported taking on credit card debt to cover the medicine’s expense, per one 2022 survey.

And in a recent blog, Joel Blackstock, an LICSW-S and Clinical Director of Taproot Therapy Collective, unpacks why Cuba has access to drugs that are less expensive and in some cases, more effective. The whole blog is worth a read, but here are some things that stood out to me: One of the drugs approved to treat Alzheimer’s in the U.S. carries serious safety risks and treatment costs that can exceed $90,000 annually, while showing modest effects in clinical trials. By contrast, Cuba’s NeuroEPO, a nasal spray people can take at home, is priced for Cuba’s public healthcare system and has shown dramatically larger improvements in a clinical trial (though Blackstock notes the trials tested different populations and used different outcome measures). Additionally, CIMAvax-EGF, a vaccine that has shown promising results for lung cancer, has been made available free for Cuban citizens since 2011 and is widely available in Colombia, Peru, and Paraguay. But because most Americans who could benefit from it can’t get access to it, they are instead limited to treatments that can cause serious autoimmune effects and cost more than $150,000 a year.

“A small island nation under economic embargo—with a fraction of our resources, cut off from global capital markets and advanced technology—has developed treatments that may work better than ours for some of the most devastating conditions humans face. They did it by orienting their research around public health outcomes rather than profit maximization. They designed for accessibility rather than market exclusivity,” Blackstock writes. “This doesn’t mean Cuba’s healthcare system is superior overall—it faces enormous challenges, many created by the embargo itself. But in these specific cases, the ‘closed cycle’ model of public research producing public goods has generated innovations that the ‘blockbuster’ model of private research producing private profits has not.”

Who else wants to scream?

I saw a comment that said nothing was ever going to change, and honestly, I don’t have a great argument against that. The greed runs deep. But as long as we’re angry, there are people who’ve been redirecting that anger into action for a lot longer than I have (if you’re looking to join them in this work, Patients For Affordable Drugs Now could be a good place to start. It’s the only national patient bipartisan advocacy organization focused exclusively on lowering drug prices and it doesn’t take money from pharmaceutical companies).

Because underneath all of the GoFundMe discourse, there’s widespread hopelessness and collective grief. There’s also a more fundamental question that this system forces all of us to reckon with: whether we’re worthy of care simply because we exist. It’s the same question James Van Der Beek found himself asking, alone in an apartment with cancer, stripped of everything that had once defined him. He found his answer. We’re still waiting for the system to find ours.

And so I’ll leave you with Van Der Beek’s final message to the world, recounting how he had to shift his understanding of his identity and worth when he was no longer well enough to do the things that once brought him satisfaction:

“If I’m just a too skinny, weak guy alone in an apartment with cancer, what am I? And I meditated and the answer came through. I am worthy of God’s love, simply because I exist. And if I’m worthy of God’s love, shouldn’t I be worthy of my own? And the same is true for you. And if the word God trips you up...you can take the word God out and your mantra can simply be ‘I am worthy of love,’ because you are.”

Eight states now have higher disability rates than any country in the world, driven largely by mental health and substance use disorders. Depressive disorders increased nearly 60% and drug use disorders surged by almost 300% between 1990 and 2021, per a global analysis.

What gives? We’ve seen many psychiatric advances in the past several decades including new medications, evidence-based therapies, and reduced stigma; shouldn’t there have been some decrease in global incidence of mental health disorders, even after accounting for lack of accessible care?

The answer is complex, but a growing body of research confirms what many in the mental health field have long known: social, cultural, and economic factors — including unemployment, housing instability, food insecurity, and structural racism — play a critical role in both the onset and persistence of psychiatric conditions.

It makes sense. A benzodiazepine might be able to allay a patient’s anxiety symptoms, but if they’re not sure where they’re sleeping that night or going back to a toxic workplace the next day, the anxiety is bound to persist. Similarly, an antidepressant can help lift some of the heaviness of depression, but if a person was laid off months ago, with no signs of a job in sight while the bills keep piling up, then it’s natural that their depression would continue. And yet, despite how obvious this seems, psychiatry’s diagnostic system has traditionally treated social, cultural, and economic factors as footnotes, rather than fundamental components of mental health. But proposed changes to the next version of the DSM could shift this: social determinants may finally become a core part of diagnosis and treatment, not just optional data collection that goes nowhere.

What’s being proposed

Exactly how social, cultural, and economic factors would become a concrete part of the diagnostic process is still being deliberated, however a committee within the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has outlined multiple potential approaches. One option would integrate social determinant screening directly into routine diagnostic workflows: assessing housing, employment, discrimination, and community support as standard practice, then linking patients to appropriate resources and monitoring these factors over time alongside clinical symptoms. In this approach, screening for social, cultural, and economic factors happens during the diagnostic process, potentially shaping what diagnosis is given and ensuring social factors are tracked and addressed throughout treatment.

Another approach would assess social determinants after establishing the diagnosis. Patients would complete a screener for housing, employment, discrimination, and social support. Those facing significant challenges would be flagged for enhanced care — including case management, connection to housing and job programs, more frequent follow-up — while those with stable circumstances would proceed with standard treatment.

Across approaches, the key shift remains the same: social determinants wouldn’t be separate from mental health treatment; they’d be integrated into it.

Can this lead to real change?

As a therapist in training, I complete a comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment with every new client. My goal for this evaluation, which includes questions about medical history, family relationships, housing situation, support network, substance use, etc., is to collect as much relevant information as possible to inform a client’s treatment plan. I want to get the most holistic perspective on the client so that I can best support them, including by recommending or connecting them with additional resources, if necessary.

I'm not alone in this; many clinicians already use biopsychosocial assessments. But making it a standardized part of psychiatric diagnosis — not just therapy intake —could be meaningful, particularly as mental health funding shrinks. If the APA, which is widely regarded as a credible authority, takes further steps to formally recognize that social context and resource connection are essential to mental health, this could add legitimacy to programming and resources in the eyes of policymakers and funders. It might also enable us to continue moving beyond the biological model of mental health in practice, because as it stands, pharmacology is often the only form of treatment offered to patients, particularly in underresourced settings.

I still have a lot of questions about what these updates will look like in practice and whether they can lead to meaningful change on a systemic and individual level. The APA itself acknowledges several challenges to implementation in the proposal, including resource shortages, and states that in “underfunded settings where mental health services are already stretched … individual clinicians may have no programs to refer to.”

The committee also recognizes that checklists run the risk of becoming “symbolic” and performative, rather than leading to substantial follow-ups, i.e. a practitioner could check a box noting that someone is experiencing housing instability, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure the patient will be connected with additional resources or that the additional context will affect their care (especially if that practitioner is overburdened, as many are in community health and hospital settings).

Despite these challenges, naming social, cultural, and economic factors as a focus point in their revision of the next version of the manual marks an essential step towards more integrated care. Mental health doesn’t exist in a silo. The more we can make room for its complexities, the better equipped we’ll be to support patients across all domains of care and to connect them with resources that could save their lives. And after more than 30 years years of stagnation, perhaps addressing the full context of people’s lives — not just their symptoms — is what we’ve been missing.

He thought she was being inconsiderate or that she just wasn’t all that invested.

But as their relationship progressed, he learned that his wife was always late because she has time blindness, an inability to measure time. A common trait of people with ADHD, time blindness impacts their capacity to see how much time has passed and to gauge how long something might take.

When it’s a friend you see occasionally who’s always showing up late, it’s easier to write it off as no big deal. But when the person you’re dating is chronically running behind, it feels more difficult to not take it personally, which can lead to mistrust and fissures in the relationship.

But the couple figured out a way to work with the wife’s time blindness. The therapist will tell his partner they need to leave 20 minutes earlier than they actually need to leave, that way when she’s inevitably running behind they still wind up arriving at their destination on time. This one act minimizes resentment, blame, and shame.

As a therapist in training, I work with clients who struggle with their mental health in various ways. And one of the presiding fears I hear, particularly among clients who either have a clinical mental health diagnosis or are neurodivergent or both is: will someone ever love and accept me for who I am?

And so I wanted to share this story of the therapist — who by the way, went on to found an ADHD-focused practice in part because of his relationship — and his wife as evidence of partnership that can meet you where you are.

Often people who struggle with their mental health carry so much emotional shame. We live in a world that values perfection and idolizes trudging forward even when you’re suffering. As far as we’ve come in destigmatizing mental health conditions, it still sometimes appears as though there’s a limit of what we’re collectively able to accept. We’re able to accept the theory of mental health: we can accept you getting sad sometimes, but not the disaster zone your room has become while experiencing a depressive episode. We can accept your ADHD as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us or require too many accommodations.

This limit on acceptance can lead people to think of themselves as a liability, And so, in an effort to not burden others, they often learn to mask.

The thing is though, you can’t really mask in a healthy relationship. If you’re going to allow someone into your life in that capacity, the only way for intimacy to grow is to let them see you in all your depressive, anxious, compulsive, messy glory — which is absolutely terrifying.

So what do people do? They hide and they put up walls. They start believing that they’re not worthy of love — a malignant and wholly untrue idea — that may have gotten reinforced by early caretakers, teachers, and previous partners.

It’s been years since I’ve read relationship coach Matthew Hussey’s book “Love Life,” but one story from it has since remained with me: There was a woman named Angela who was struck by a car in a drunk driving accident and lost her leg from the impact of the vehicle. Since then, she’d been wearing a prosthetic leg.

She spent a long time thinking that nobody would want her because of her prosthetic leg. When she admitted this fear to Hussey, he responded something along the lines of, “So what?,” which sounds a little dismissive, but actually winded up setting her free.

Angela thought her disability made her unloveable for years, but this “so what?” response allowed her to see herself in a different way. It empowered her to understand that her prosthetic leg did not prevent her from finding love — and in fact, she did find a beautiful relationship.

Note: I don’t want to glamorize or skirt over the added difficulties that may come with dating with certain lived experiences nor do I want to suggest that these limiting stories we may hold come out of thin air. Often, they’re a manifestation of internalized stigma.

Still, as the day of love approaches, here’s what I want to remind you:

You are not a liability. Your mental health does not disqualify you from experiencing fulfilling love, and you are every bit as deserving of experiencing that love as anyone else.

Now that doesn’t mean you don’t try and take care of yourself to the best of your ability. You can’t offset your care completely onto a partner, especially when dealing with chronic mental health issues.

But you also don’t need to be perfect or continue thinking that love doesn’t exist for you because of your struggles and the added challenges you face.

The right partner will show up for you and together you’ll develop systems that work for your relationship that incorporate your mental health.

Don’t deny yourself love because you think your mental health or neurodivergence or something physical or whatever it is that you’re self-conscious of makes you undeserving.

The therapist’s wife still has time blindness. Angela still has a prosthetic leg. But they also have partners who see them fully and love them anyway — not in spite of these things, but as part of who they are. You deserve that too.

And until then, I hope you can see your own brilliance and worthiness, even on days it feels impossible to believe.

Happy Valentine’s Day! 💜 May you know how loved and important you are today and always.

I could end the newsletter there, but something I’ve reflected on over the years is: why do I care so much? Why do I have this immense amount of pride for Puerto Rican culture?

I come from a multicultural family — my mom’s Lebanese and Irish, my dad’s Puerto Rican. Sometimes I’m not even registered as Latina, and as an actress I once interviewed told me, “It’s not like I wake up every morning being like, ‘Ok, I’m going to be my Puerto Rican self today. I wake up and I’m just me.”

Why I care is multilayered; there have been so many factors that play into my understanding of and my embrace of my boricua side: one being that I had a close relationship with my grandma before she died, another being that visits to the island have marked some of the happiest moments of my life. Thirdly, I went to a high school in Brooklyn with many Latinos, who repped their culture and who encouraged me to understand it as a significant part of my identity (does anyone remember those cloth bracelets with your Latino country’s name???). And yet another reason is that when I worked as a journalist, I wrote various stories focused on Latino communities, and developed a political understanding of our collective positioning to add to my personal one.

As I wrote those stories, including those about how Latina women aren’t counted in missing person’s data or how the Latina pay gap endures, and I started having more experiences where Latinos were not the majority — including moving from a diverse city to attending college in upstate New York — having pride seemed more urgent. Suddenly I was able to connect why a professor kept getting me confused with the other Latina in the class and why FEMA’s response to Hurricane Maria was marked by neglect and inefficiencies that cost thousands of Puerto Ricans their lives: there remains an expectation that we will continue accepting marginalization.

And so, Bad Bunny’s rise and his halftime show isn’t just a cute, feel-good story about representation. It’s a story about integrity. A story about not having to compromise your values, roots, or culture for the sake of your art. A story about self-love and love for your community. A story of faith and resolve and standing up.

“Mi nombre es Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio y si hoy estoy aquí en el Super Bowl 60, es porque nunca, nunca dejé de creer en mí y tú también deberías de creer en ti. Vales más de lo que piensas,” said Benito at the show, which translates to: “My name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and if I’m here today at Super Bowl 60 it’s because I never, ever stopped believing in myself and you should also believe in yourself. You’re worth more than you think.”

Though these words hit differently for Latinos who have been historically forced to assimilate or even for artists who feel the pressure to appeal to a narrow-minded industry’s expectations, you don’t have to be Puerto Rican or a creative to feel inspired by them. You don’t have to have the experience of getting into a heated game of dominos with your family or to have enjoyed a piraugua on a warm day or to even understand half the nods to Puerto Rican culture during the show to understand the significance of what it represents.

Because while the show was laced with so much specificity, it was also a message about unity, perseverance and the things that can be appreciated and striven for across cultures: joy, acceptance, connection. From Lady Gaga singing “Die with a Smile” with the salsa band Los Sobrinos and wearing Puerto Rico’s flower on her dress to the line of flags and the various country mentions during “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” the message was clear: we all belong.

Yeah, sure that sounds nice, but have you looked around lately? We don’t all belong — another part of me says. There are people who are hiding in their homes, scared of being targeted and killed, all because they wanted a better life for their family. There are people who deal with hate and discrimination on a regular basis, because of the way they look and the language they speak.

Yes, and there are also many, many others, who believe wholeheartedly that what makes this world so beautiful is the joining together of people from all backgrounds. And when we have someone with the microphone acknowledging that, on a stage where even objectors can’t look away, it’s hard not to feel chills, hope, pride, and dare I even say, joy.

When Bad Bunny gave a little boy, meant to represent his younger self, a Grammy, it reminded me of the children within us all — regardless of how old we are — who just want to exist and who long to be loved and accepted.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with success stories. We love the underdog who made it, the person who clawed their way through with everything they had to see that dream to fruition.

I’m sure you’ve seen the meme floating around underscoring the fact that 10 years ago — before becoming one of the most popular artists in the world — Bad Bunny worked at a grocery store and posted his music to SoundCloud.

But what makes his story even more compelling than most is that he’s achieved the success he has without capitulating on his values or identity.

And as a Puerto Rican woman, how can I not take that as an invitation to take up some more space, to stand for what I believe in, to be unapologetically myself?

I wasn’t going to write this newsletter. I often hold myself back from creating and posting, the scared voice in my head that asks, who cares? What does it matter?

But as Bad Bunny said so perfectly: I am worth more than I think I am.

You are worth more than you think you are.

So let’s create our art, stand up against injustice, allow our presence to inspire hope and offer comfort, take up space, take pride in our roots, and never give up on ourselves.

And most importantly: baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo, and eat some tostones.