I woke up pissed off this morning. No warning, no easing into it, just the sound of my alarm, the opening of my eyes, and then simmering irritation. Why? Not because of whatever plans I had for my day, not because of what I had been doing before I went to bed, but because of what I had dreamed of.

In my dream I was getting my haircut by some nameless, faceless hairdresser. She was looking at my messy, wavy hair and shaking her head in disappointment. “You know what you need? You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna book you an appointment for a keratin treatment this afternoon. It’s just what you need. It takes three hours but it is so worth it. You’re free, right? It’s really the best thing for you.” I responded with some sort of mumbled ascent, enough of a go-ahead for the hairdresser to whisk the cape off my shoulders and send me on my way, insisting that my hair wouldn’t be a problem after my keratin appointment that afternoon.

Once I walked through the door of the hair salon, I plunged into one of those gray, glitchy, time vortexes that seem to always plague my worst dreams. Every step forward brought me three steps back. First, I made my slow, laborious way to the homes of friends, family, co-workers, trying in a fumbling, squeaky voice to explain why I had agreed to the keratin appointment, why it probably was the best thing for me, why my hairdresser was right to push me away: Well, I didn’t have anything going on this afternoon anyway. I have nothing better to do. Surely, she must know best. She’s the expert.

It was exhausting. Every new person I tried to justify myself to looked at me with a more piercing, skeptical gaze than the last. Every explanation came out weaker and more warbled. I didn’t believe in my own reasoning. Finally, trembling and crying, I had to admit that I shouldn’t have let the hairdresser make the appointment for me. I was a fool, I was a fool. I should never have accepted the appointment. I should have said something.

So began the next, more arduous part of my journey. I had to drag myself back to the hairdresser and tell her I was sorry, but I had to cancel my appointment. I tried calling, but the call went straight to voicemail. I looked across the gray expanse of dreamland and saw her shop grow smaller and smaller. I marched towards it, but with every step, it seemed to retreat. I tripped over things. I was waylaid by other appointments I had forgotten about. I cursed myself over and over again for not thinking, for being a coward, for wasting the hairdresser’s time.

I don’t think I ever would have made it to the hairdresser, even if I’d slept hours and hours longer. Thankfully, my alarm dragged me out of the fog and into the real morning where my feet were on the ground and my hair was wild and wavy and I was mad.

I carried that anger through the morning, through breakfast and getting dressed and applying my makeup. I had planned to straighten my hair and, instead, I pulled it into a rageful ponytail, the humidity already fluffing up and curling the bits around my face that are too short to be tied down.

I carried that anger to the couch with me, where I sat it down with my coffee and picked up my journal. I wrote quick, without hesitating because I already knew—I was pissed at the hairdresser. I wasn’t annoyed at myself like in my dream—that was a sham. I was angry at only one person: the bitch who had decided that her perspective on my hair, her opinion on what I needed, was more important than my opinion, my needs, my schedule. I hope my psyche intended for me to land a few roundhouse kicks on whatever repressed memories that hairdresser represented because I wanted to taste blood and I wasn’t pulling punches.

God, it was so efficient. Three pages and less than 30 minutes later, and I eviscerated whatever psychic demon that was faster than any therapist I’ve ever worked with. It’ll probably never happen again but it was a rush.

And the hairdresser? The keratin treatment? Well-chosen symbols. Hair is everything, and there is nothing worse than a codependent relationship with a hairdresser who thinks her opinion on your hair is more important than the reality of your hair.

My hair is messy, it’s fine and thin and curly. It gets fluffy and dry the second I brush it out, and it looks like an oil slick within thirty minutes of applying curl cream. It’s impossible to make it look sleek.

And my hair is me. It has so much to do with my perception of myself, my presentation of myself, everything I wrestle with in the mirror everyday. It’s not a problem to solve because it will never be solved. Not for any extended period of time. But, damnit, it’s important. It demands respect.

It would be easier if I got a keratin treatment or straightened it every day. Not easier for me, but easier for a hairdresser, easier for the people who have to look at me every day. Tough.

The hair is both its own thing and a metaphor. And that’s the beauty of poetry and symbolism, isn’t it? It’s so damn efficient.

Daylight Savings

In this new slant

Of the light

I see the trail to the water

Stretched out before me.

The robin sings

And in her song

I hear the dirge

Of Latin prayers chanted

Over the swallowed bargaining:

“Not I, Lord.”

“But not yet, Lord.”

In the empty spaces

Between the robin’s notes

I hear the old, heavy pauses,

Throats clearing

Beneath dark looks;

The shuffling of feet,

The washing of hands.

Can nobody else hear it?

In this mud and debris,

Oozing and copulating,

Bringing Spring into this world

Kicking and screaming,

I smell cigarette smoke,

Bartlett pear blossoms,

Sweat and patchouli,

Undercooked eggs,

Boxed red wine,

and dried vomit.

In this watery iced coffee,

In the snacks stolen between meetings,

In this first sandwich eaten outside,

I taste the metallic residue

Of canned tuna,

The acidic film

Of coffee that has been burning and circulating

In the industrial machine

For hours,

And the dryness that only appears on your

Tongue

In moments of great fear,

Great despair,

And great longing.

In the comforting scratchiness

Of my linen shirt,

In the soft velvet of these

Newborn leaf buds,

In these heavy

Rain drops

On my shoulders,

I feel my own hands

Pinching,

Picking,

Pulling,

Wishing to make all the mortifying excesses

Of my flesh

Wither

Until only the purest,

Most translucent body

Was left for my soul to shine through.

I feel the tightening

Of my skin

Around my bones.

I feel the hard,

Scratched,

Slippery wood of the pew

Against my thighs

And I wonder where the hours

That we sacrifice to give our sun

More time to shine

Go in the end.

Does anyone count them?

How Many Aprils?

How many billions

Of Aprils

Have upturned the humming

Dormition of this earth?

Yet, upon the arrival

Of each one

We say, “Spring has really sprung!”

Without breaking beneath

The weight of our own self-consciousness.

How many Aprils

Have carved their initials

Into the grooves of my heart?

How many have added new dimples

To my stomach,

New spots to my face?

Yet each year

I remember, “April is the cruelest month”

With the same shock of revelation

As if this April

Were the first one to ever be so cruel.

Round and round she goes

Knowing each pothole

And fallen tree

Along the track.

Yet every year,

She trips

And scrapes her knees

In the very same place,

Crying out as though

This is the first time

She has ever seen blood.

Image credits: “Primavera” (Spring) (detail) by Sandro Botticelli

The dirt, laced with rocks and tough, leathery grass, digs into our round, 10-year-old stomachs while you tell me about the latest episode of Hannah Montana.

It’s dark out now, and we have bug spray, so the mosquitoes are easy to ignore.

With the disappearance of the sun comes the welcome embrace of your hoodie over your arms, tanned and freckled by hours and hours of summer vacation.

We’re here at the zenith: the Fourth of July, with just as much summer stretching before us as has fallen behind. There’s still time for me to earn my own freckles, still time for you to grow tired of my endless, rude questions and my ridiculous games.

Tonight, the land unfurls before us like a waterfall, great sweeping peaks of earth and granite.

Tonight, we’re still friends. This is the before: before boys and politics and high school. Before your dad’s death and your mom’s broken look in the grocery store.

Tonight, the fireworks are fresh and exciting, the bones in the ground beneath our bellies are just friendly, Tim Burton skeletons, and your mom packed ice pops.

Image Credits: “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” by John Singer Sargent

“You’re a hopeless romantic.” Someone told me this once. I took it as a remonstrance, reading into it this message: “…and that’s why you’re alone.”

For all I know, the remark could have been off-handed, practically meaningless. I take responsibility for whatever insinuations I have gleaned from it.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I have been puzzling for months now about my ideas of what love should be and whether they are, in fact, the reason I am alone.

Last week, a colleague and I were driving to an off-site work meeting. She asked if I’d gone on any dates recently. “Not since March,” I responded, priming her laughter with my own (yes, yes, isn’t it funny, how little I have been doing to meet people?). The topic soon trailed off into another as I offered up the usual explanations: “The dating apps suck, this town is too small, everybody knows everybody.” A quick, understandable synopsis. The car, the conversation, the status quo, kept on moving without further interruption.

Meanwhile, a light sparked in my mind, illuminating a previously shadowy, forgotten corner. I remember the last date, and the dates before that. I remember how each made me feel more closed off, rigid, and terrified of change than before. What these dates presented me with was really nothing terrible; it just wasn’t anything I found worthy of betting on. The prize was my idea of love, and the odds told me not to take the risk.

Now, I watch myself as I go about my day. I watch the way my eyes always seek the ground or the sky or any place else besides the gaze of the man walking towards me. I watch the brisk pace I keep, the way I turn around if I catch a glimpse of someone I recognize. I watch the frown plastered on my face, I watch the way it never forms a true smile.

If love is what I am supposedly searching for, I certainly am not ‘opening myself up to it’ in the way the Instagram gurus suggest. I watch myself, I notice the disconnect between my search and my actions, and I do nothing to change. I do not want to download an app again. I do not want to ask a man out in person again. I don’t want to ‘put in the reps’.

Why? Perhaps it is because what I’m searching for doesn’t exist. I know people who laugh at those who get married young. They applaud me for not dating, but then, when I do date, they shame me for judging too quickly, too harshly. Perhaps it is because they were once hopeless romantics. Perhaps it is because they never found what they were searching for.

But what are we searching for? Probably a love that does not devolve into self-betrayal, supported and praised by one’s partner. The failure of love that I have learned to fear and see everywhere is a relationship that perpetuates because one partner sacrifices herself, betrays herself, shrinks herself, while the other partner aids and abets. It takes two to tango: love fails because self-love fails first.

A wife needs to stay loyal to herself consistently, and the husband needs to make space for her to do so. But it’s more than just making the space: one can love oneself in an empty space without a partner. In many ways, it’s easier. If space is all a partner provides, then it’s not really a partnership, is it? It’s absence. It’s a half-relationship, half-life, more deficit than benefit.

There needs to be something given. Presence, not absence. Support, not space. To push a relationship in the direction of growth and richness, instead of decline and stagnation, deterioration or destruction, there have to be two active participants.

Women are often socialized from childhood to be the sole active participants: to show the most love, to care the most, to invest the most. When this socialization overrides your sense of self and hijacks your identity, what is to stop you from taking it too far? If you’re not 100% certain you’re the active participant, your sense of identity starts to crumble. Your morality comes into question, and your life trembles like the first rumblings of an earthquake. You have to maintain control, have to assert over and over again that you are an active participant, that you are a good girl, that you believe in love. You rush to fill the empty space, you conquer it, you grasp onto it and hold it in a death grip. It’s what you were taught. If you don’t do these things, aren’t you responsible for the death of love?

In the frenzy to fill the empty spaces, in the desperate fight for the identity you were taught to maintain, you wrench responsibility from the hands of your partner. You give up bigger and bigger pieces of your true self in exchange for the maintenance of this identity. You take choices away from your partner, you teach them how you are and are not to be treated; what you do and don’t deserve, what belongs to you, what is left over for them. You suck the air out of the room; you conquer all the space and sacrifice it to Big Brother (i.e., your parents, your church, the Super Ego, the Joneses). There is nothing left for your partner, nothing left for you, and nothing of yourself left. Does your partner aid and abet this colonization? Yes. Do you tell them that they must, while cursing them for doing as their told? Yes. Just like Big Brother does to you.

What is this love Big Brother tells us we must sacrifice ourselves for? Is it truly love, or is it just the only thing we have ever given the name of love to? It’s a war for identity, but an identity that was never truly yours. It’s a shadow identity, a puppet show identity, something you parade around the neighborhood in a lace-covered baby carriage. It’s dearly bought: you sacrificed your soul for it, you banished your partner for it. But it is so empty. Your partner doesn’t recognize it, your partner doesn’t recognize you. There is the thing that you have been taught to call ‘love.’ But there is no longer any you left. There is no person left to be a lover. There is no you left for your partner to support or destroy.

Can I actually trust myself not to play out this same sad story? Is there truly enough of ‘me’ left inside to fight against the colonization? I am closed off partially because I am so afraid to lose myself, so afraid of being ravaged by Big Brother.

I don’t think the love I search for is the lie. I think I believe in something real, something true and grounded, something ancient and mystical and entirely different from the sham Big Brother offers. I just don’t know how to ask for it, I don’t know how to sit with it. I don’t know how to talk about it or work with it in the world beyond my isolated little home. I know its shape, but I do not know how it feels between my fingers.

Image Credits: “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” or “Hellelil and Hildebrand” by Frederic William Burton

I scribbled the above quote on a post-it and stuck it to the wall behind my desk so I can see it, read it, remind myself each time I sit down to create. I’ve been reading through Zen in the Art of Writing for the first time and, unsurprisingly, I’ve concluded that I should have read this book years ago. I wish I had read this book when I was twenty, just before I began my undergrad studies, as a protection against all the unnecessary propaganda about discipline, logic, excellence, and grammar that warped my neural pathways. I’m grateful for my education, but I would have benefited more had it been bolstered by something more dazzling, more real, more purely joyful and life-giving like Bradbury’s essay collection.

Still, better late than never. I would say that each essay in this book is designed to make you want to write, but I think it’s actually the opposite: these pieces are capsules, snapshots, living symbols of what it is to write without agonizing about structure, outline, argument or presentation beforehand. It’s just writing, writing for the best (the only?) reason: because it’s fun. Reading Bradbury’s writing is fun, the kind of fun that makes you jealous, jealous like you were when you were five and watching the kids in the next pew in church enjoying their snacks, their coloring books, their toys. ‘I should be doing that. Why can’t I do that?’ you think to yourself, feeling your fingers twitch with restlessness.

This is not to say that college stole the joy of writing from me. Far from it: I loved writing essays when the topic was one I cared about, and I loved the opportunities to be praised for my writing abilities. There’s really nothing quite like the rush of seeing an A+ written in red pen on the last page of your essay. My ego is as big and fragile as anyone else’s, and it has led me to do all sorts of dazzlingly impressive and mentally destabilizing things.

If you get an ego hooked on the thrill of academic validation, it works overtime seeking a high: researching, resource guarding, analyzing, planning. Writing in college, for me, was still fun, but fun was not the priority. Good grades were the result of a high level of consistent, well-edited, well-structured production. They were the result of exacting time management that left little room for goofing off with friends. They were the result of outlines: outlines for drawings, for college events, for essays.

God, I hate outlines. I did back then, I do now.

Are they useful for mass-producing structured content under crazy time constraints? Sure. I still remember writing a seven-page essay on T.S. Elliott’s The Wasteland that earned me an A over the course of sixteen hours. The only reason I could accomplish such a feat? I outlined the essay first, and I quite literally didn’t have the time to stray from the outline. What a hit, what a rush. Running on five hours of sleep and a large black cold brew (this was during my intermittent fasting phase), my ego was elated.

Since graduating (and realizing that the intermittent fasting thing was really not healthy), I’ve chilled out a lot. Maybe it’s the absence of copious amounts of black cold brew, but I really don’t have the energy to plan everything out and then stick to said plan. At the end of the day, I can be as fickle as male writers make all women out to be (as if none of them ever hoed around like Zemfira), and I’ve learned that my brain is more flighty and scattered than it is objective and determined. For all my love of planner tour videos on YouTube, my Filofax is largely empty and untouched, with only two months left of 2025.

Rather than fight against this bent of my nature (who has the energy for that anymore, really?), I’ve decided to just work with it. I have no problem coming up with new ideas or catastrophizing and overanalyzing the future. Almost any disaster that arrives (and most of the ones I imagine never do) is probably something I’ve imagined a hundred times before.

I don’t need to outline my life to enjoy it. And if I try to outline my writing, I don’t ever get around to enjoying it because I spend the whole time preparing, strategizing, dreading, convincing myself that the finished product is just not going to be good enough. The argument isn’t sound (yet, because I haven’t written anything), the conclusion will fall flat (haven’t written anything), my research is inadequate (again, still haven’t written anything).

I get more value out of recording things, getting them out of my head and onto paper so that I can tread lightly through my days. The challenge is organizing what I’ve recorded so that I can actually find it again. It’s more a game of remembering and rediscovering, less one of perfectly strategized execution.

Lately, I’ve been trying to think of myself as an archivist, searching for systems that actually fit into the grooves of my brain. I haven’t narrowed down what those systems are quite yet, but it’s nice to leave an old, outgrown directive in the past and replace it with one that actually accounts for the present. One thing that’s been helpful is putting the important things on post-it notes, making sure I can actually see them every day, instead of consigning them to the black hole of my unorganized journal pages or the notes app on my phone. You don’t have to be precious about the idea, analyzing it and recording it in perfect calligraphy on nice paper, putting it in a frame you will never get around to hanging on your wall. Just get it down in such a way that you can’t forget about it, then move on to the next thing.

Image credits: close-up of Anaximander in Raphael’s “The School of Athens”

Two and a half weeks ago, I started a personal experiment. Tired of feeling restless, depressed, trapped inside my own life, I decided to try something other than escapism. I picked up my journal and a pen and wrote down the following:

The Burnout Experiment:

Duration: Sept 24th-October 22nd (4 weeks)

Hypothesis: Moving into a new, better phase of life will be easier, more aligned if I approach from a place of clarity and abundance. I.e., I will wake up with more energy, I will feel more passionate, less directionless, I will follow through on ideas and curiosity more frequently and faithfully if I care for myself now, instead of waiting for external circumstances to become more favorable.

Parameters: Must be fun and easy to sustain, must consume no more than 45 minutes to an hour total per day.

There are three areas that it would be beneficial to focus on:

1. Physical needs: nourishing food, joyful movement, sunlight, deep sleep, a clean environment.

2. Soul needs: creative expression, true rest, emotional processing.

3. Systemic factors: boundaries at work, boundaries with social media, boundaries in relationships.

If I only have, say, 45 minutes a day to focus on these areas, what will that realistically look like?

20 minutes outside each day. No headphones. Moving or standing still. Listen to your body.

20 minutes tidying up each day. Set a timer.

5 minutes + of unstructured, uninterrupted time for easy, creative expression: knitting, journaling, drawing, painting, origami. No phone, no pressure to produce, no time constraints.

Since that day, I’ve been trying my best to conduct this experiment faithfully, with an emphasis on listening to my body and trusting its need for rest. This, naturally, means that I have not been 100% consistent in my execution. Some days, I only manage to tidy for 20 minutes; on other days, I only manage to sit outside; still, on other days, I accomplish none of these things and lie on my couch scrolling through my phone or watching Abbot Elementary. But I don’t feel guilty about it. I consider it part of the experiment, useful feedback to include in my notes. If you can’t feel comfortable and gentle in your own body, in your own home, then what does any of it really matter? My frantic, college mindset, honed in on accomplishment, productivity, nobility, is slowly but surely melting away into the past. That’s one distinct benefit of growing older and learning, the hard way, from your catastrophizing tendencies: very few things in your everyday life are actually emergencies.

Now that I’m more than halfway through my little experiment, I’m sitting down to reflect on some of the revelations it’s brought me and some of the changes that have been unfolding in the background, filling my life with unexpected, crisp sweetness.

Observations:

9/24/25 (day 1 of 28):

I listened to my body. I lay on the floor in the dark for 25 minutes and I let the stress and the worries and the strife sweep me away and then retreat. After, I cried…. I have a chronic illness (type 1 diabetes). A progressive one. A fairly debilitating one, if you take an honest look at it. I ignore it, like someone in a burning house ignores the smell of smoke.

I’ve betrayed my body. I regret that.

Tonight, I drank extra water, made myself a sensible meal, bought myself new clothing, and took my vitamins.

It’s not everything, but it’s a start.

9/25/25 (day 2 of 28):

I go from 0 to 100 in 2 seconds as soon as someone criticizes me or implies that I have fucked up or inconvenienced them. I only know how to operate as perfect or an absolute failure. I was not taught flexibility or self-compassion.

9/27/25 (day 4 of 28):

Observation: a lot of my pain (physical and mental) comes from thinking more than doing or feeling. I can care for myself by opting for action, intuition, compassion, and movement.

10/2/25 (day 9 of 28):

Observation: I really do look for more problems when things are going well. I am uncomfortable being happy…. Everything I do and think is motivated by wanting to be better than those who have gone before me, wanting to not be ‘foolish’ like them. That leaves very little room for love, connection, or honesty.

10/4/25 (day 11 of 28):

Building evidence that I am not good enough to have a life I enjoy is a choice. It’s one perspective of many available that I have chosen to adopt. I can love myself more, and I can choose something else, something more aligned with my beliefs and values, and the messages of my body.

These are some of the things my body has told me. None of these revelations are truly novel, but they are finally integrated, aligned with the patterns of my sinews and the structure of my bones. That affects how I sleep, how I speak, and how I react to the world around me. Essentially, I have become capable of accepting more. I don’t feel the need to raise my hackles at every chance for misunderstanding among others, every delay in my schedule, every wrench in my plans. This is not an emergency, and I do not need to erase myself to get through it.

Almost unknowingly, I’ve made more space for connection with the people around me, for new, exciting opportunities, for the return of hope and vibrancy in corners of my life I had boarded up and turned my back on. Not because I have done anything remarkable, not because I have gained any great wisdom or spoken any deep prayers, but because I’ve decided that my body is wise and valuable, regardless of my circumstances, regardless of my mistakes. Being human, being lazy and foolish and short-sighted, being anxious and angry and joyous: this is the starting point, the essential first principle, not the problem to be solved.

“How in the world could our love for God be ‘groundless’ and ‘unmotivated’, let alone ‘sovereign’? It would indeed be ‘a bold and silly creature that came before its Creator with the boast, ‘I’m no beggar. I love you disinterestedly.’ Our love of God cannot help being largely if not entirely need-love…. But such need-love, whose goal is its own fulfillment, is also the nucleus and the beginning of all our loving. It is simply the elemental dynamics of our being itself, set in motion by the act that created us. Hence it is fundamentally impossible for us to control it, let alone to annul it. It is the ‘yes’ that we ourselves are before we are consciously able to say ‘yes’ (or even ‘no’).”

-Josef Pieper, “On Love,” Faith, Hope, Love pp 221-222.

Your need for gentleness, kindness, love, and compassion is not a weakness. It’s a beautiful, integral part of your humanity and a reflection of the nature of your particular soul. Cultivate these things everywhere you can: in how you care for yourself, in how you care for others, in how you commune with God. This need is the way, not the obstacle. Everything else that arises as an ‘obstacle’ is just an illusion, just an attempt to keep you small, to keep you in the hall of mirrors.

Your fear of abandonment is absolutely reasonable. It is the knife wound around which your heart grew and took shape. You’re not going to heal this wound by neglecting and demeaning it. You’re not going to heal it by fawning and grinning while you dig your heel into it to stop the bleeding. You’re not going to heal it by burying it in apologies. You’re not going to heal it by becoming nicer or prettier or more competent.

You don’t have to optimize your appearance or your endurance to hide every bad hand you are dealt.

Image Credits: “Sketch of Mother Looking Down at Thomas” by Mary Cassatt

I somehow unlocked a magical YouTube/Instagram/Spotify algorithm synchronicity that has brought me a stream of new, good podcasts to listen to. If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you might know that I love podcasts. I tend to be even more unadventurous with podcasts than I am with music, however, listening to the same three or four voices over and over again, suffering withdrawals when I run out of new episodes and back catalogues. In my defense, you spend a lot more time with a podcaster throughout a single episode than you do with a musician during the performance of one song. A podcast has to have the right mixture of episode run time, topic, non-annoying speech patterns, and authenticity to keep me coming back. When I was in my 2020 crash dieting phase, keto podcasters/bio hackers were my favorite. For a while, I wanted comedy and chill vibes, so I sought out Not For Everyone and Good Hang.

These days, I look for podcasts that give me advice on fostering my creativity, seeing the world in a more positive light, and navigating burnout (why yes, I am in the trenches—how could you tell?), so I feel perpetually grateful to have discovered three podcasts that both cover these topics and are hosted by creators with energy and passion that drive them to post frequently enough to feed my hungry heart. These podcasts are Wild Geese, hosted by Anna Howard, Internet People, hosted by Anna Seirian and M.J. Mayes, and Soul Gum, hosted by my favorite Instagram-lawyer-turned-poet-podcaster-and-yogi, Victoria Hutchins.

Listening to Wild Geese feels like stumbling upon a rainbow after a thunderstorm ruined your walk home. Anna brings so much warmth, curiosity, and openness to everything she talks about that it’s hard to stay depressed when I listen to her. She makes me want to do things, she makes me want to try something different. I recommend all of her episodes, but if there’s one that I think everyone should listen to, it’s episode 24, “how to fall down a curiosity rabbit hole and reconnect to your creativity.” I won’t summarize it; just go in blind and give it a listen.

Internet People is my most recent podcast discovery, one that came to me in a roundabout fashion. Turns out, I’ve been following one of the hosts, M.J. Mayes, on Instagram for months now, and I always enjoyed her content there. I had no idea that she had a podcast, however, until Spotify recommended it to me. It was only after a couple of episodes that I realized the “Bare Minimum Mondays” she was talking about were the same ones I watched her discuss on Instagram. This podcast is largely responsible for my reappearance here on Substack. Their most recent series, “Substack 101,” has been gently dismantling all the excuses I’ve so carefully constructed to keep myself from posting here. It’s given me encouragement and the priceless advice to treat creation as more of an act of “getting stuff down” instead of “thinking things up.”

Soul Gum is an absolute gem. I find Victoria Hutchins’s prolific creativity inspiring and energizing and I am so glad that she has put in the work not only to produce multiple podcast episodes posted in rapid succession, but to create Instagram reels filled with grounding advice and publish a debut poetry collection that I find myself turning to again and again when I feel down and out. Earlier this evening, in the middle of my weekly Sunday Scaries crash out, I turned on her newest episode (aptly titled “How to get Unstuck Post-Crash Out”) and cooked myself dinner. This episode was full of calming advice that brought me back down to earth, but it also gave me an image that I think I will be chewing on for quite a while. When discussing Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Hutchins summarizes the story: “It opens with the protagonist, who is a salesman named Gregor Samsa, waking up to find he has transformed into a giant bug, like a cockroach. And rather than his first thought being, holy shit, I'm a bug, where did my bones go, he is worried about being late for work.” She then goes on to explain how

This book is a metaphor for how we suppress the truth of ourselves to try to meet external expectations, because we want to continue being the version of ourselves that we think the people in our life need and want. And…at some point, no matter how much you're willing to sacrifice yourself on the altar of being what other people need, that becomes undoable. It doesn't work. You become so incompatible with the old version of yourself that you can't even play the role well enough to be what they need.

She concludes by suggesting that the listener ask herself, “Where am I a bug trying to still be a salesman?”. What a question. It’s no wonder Gregor Samsa didn’t want to ask it. It’s no wonder he chose to hold on to his role as a salesman rather than confront the exoskeleton staring back at him in the mirror. It’s a lot easier to stay inside the image you have built for yourself—with the help of friends, authority figures, and family—than it is to accept that you have changed irreversibly.

I’m turning 27 next month. I’ve been working on managing my anxiety for at least 20 years now. But it still gets the better of me, especially on Sunday nights and during my drive into work on Monday mornings. I try to manage it by swapping coffee for tea and limiting screen time, but these don’t really help me see the antennae and wings. The anxiety keeps coming back, and lately, it has been dragging out my old identity of people-pleaser, mother figure, self-effacer, and dropping it at my feet. I keep holding onto this worn-out coat, pushing my arms through moth-eaten sleeves that catch on my rings. It doesn’t fit, and the lack of proper attire leaves me jittery and frantic. Patching the coat won’t solve the problem. I have to learn to leave it behind.

Image Credits: “A Cockchafer, Beetle, Woodlice and other Insects, with a Sprig of Auricula” by Jan van Kessel

Your loneliness? It’s not just a mind’s trick or a test or a matter of perspective. It’s a fundamental human longing for the fulfilment of a fundamental human need. You’re not weak, foolish, or naive for being lonely. Your loneliness isn’t there as a reprimand, teaching you that you’re doomed, that you’re too damaged to give or receive the love you seek.

Your loneliness is there to remind you what this is all about. The loneliness flares up when you shine light on the broken pieces of yourself. You shine the light on them, not so you can assess the damage and cut your losses. Rather, you do it so you can learn what love is. And you start by learning its shape, tracing your fingers across the jagged edges of the holes that mark its absence. That vacancy is where you start.

After acknowledging the wounds, you learn to understand what they are saying, and you decipher exactly what it is they are crying out for. Once you make out what that is, you begin applying it in any way you know how.

You absolutely will do it poorly at first, and the majority of the time afterwards. But if you keep trying, you will learn precisely what you need (what you have needed for many, many years), and you will learn how to give it to yourself. You will come to understand that, although the word we have for this missing filling is love, it takes on a hundred thousand different meanings as it patches up a hundred thousand tiny cracks inside of you.

The more you heal inside yourself, the more you recognize the presence of both love and wounds like your own in others. Eventually, you will learn to accept the love others offer you, growing beyond the urgent, temporary need to only create it for and receive it from yourself. Eventually, you will want to give love, in whichever of its manifold forms is needed, to others. And you will give it. You will give it as someone whole, someone who is herself, not as someone collapsing inwards because there is too much emptiness that she cannot bring herself to look at. That is what the loneliness is for, that is what it is calling you to.

Love is the end and it is the means. It is the lesson and it is the teacher. It teaches even from the places it is not, if you are brave enough to look.

Image credits: “Automat” by Edward Hopper

Hello!

I didn’t realize until recently just how long it’s been. February does not seem that long ago, but here we are now at the end of June. I wanted to breathe a little life back into this publication, so here are some poems I’ve been sitting with for a while now.

I truly love this Substack, and plan to give it some extra love, attention, and potentially a new look. I’m in the process of re-designing the artwork and layout, so be on the lookout for new content. I noticed that I have quite a few more subscribers now (hello! I’m so glad you’re here!), so please feel free to comment/share your thoughts on my work and introduce me to your own publications! I love finding new creators :)

At its best, writing and reading poetry is a cathartic and revelatory experience for me. It sometimes feels like an illegal cheat code for making sense of our experiences. Like, the sentence, “April is the cruellest month” and all the meaning packed into the first paragraph of The Wasteland should not rise to the surface of my mind as often and as helpfully as it does. Yet, every spring, I get what Eliot is saying. I experience a connection with all the centuries of humans and animals and plants that have undergone the necessary yet brutal growth that nature’s cycles put us through every April. And I have a single, five-word sentence living rent-free in my head that encapsulates all that growth and connection and brutality, ready to access any time. Thanks to poetry.

Thanks to the poems below, I now have carefully-selected words that condense and crystalize whole oceans of murky feelings and memories, words that can stay fixed in my consciousness like north stars, easing the burden on my heart. Whether the poems are technically ‘good,’ ‘deep’, or ‘insightful’ isn’t the point.

Whether other people enjoy them isn’t wholly the point either, but I still hope you do.

Cherry Blossoms

The cherry blossoms are shaking

beneath the warm night’s

assault.

Their petals are

falling,

falling,

one by one

as each second

passes into

a minute

into

an hour

and the conversation around me

rises and falls

with the waves

of heat sticking my curls

to the base of my neck

and transforming

the chilled wine in my glass

into rivulets

running races

only to pool

in an exhausted heap

around my fingers.

You’re not here.

I should have contented myself with that reality

long ago

when the first forms of your image

demonstrated definitively

that they could not

(would not)

be here.

No one has ever been here but me.

So why is the red wax

melting,

sticking, smudging,

and fusing

between my locked lips?

Why do my eyes keep looking

at the door?

I’ve seen the cherry blossoms

fall year after year.

They never remember

to guard themselves

against Summer’s empty promises.

They turn pink and prim

every spring.

Do they, too, believe that things

can be different?

Even after you arrive,

late and unapologetic,

sweeping me into a waltz,

I remind myself

—while your hand rests on

the small of my back,

and you tell me some thing

light and funny and kind

—that you are just another Holy Ghost,

haunting me for a moment

and no longer,

like the breeze

besieging the cherry blossoms.

Still, I dig my nails into your coat sleeve

like the tree shatters the dirt

with her roots.

I feel your

skin against mine as

Spring gives into Summer’s

advances

and the wine goes to my head.

I’ll hold on just one more night

before I let go,

remembering

that you cannot

(will not)

be here.

No one has ever been here but me.

Lover

You are so much a lover that it eats you alive,

has been eating you

since you first gulped down

this earth’s air,

fiery red and small,

covered in your mother’s juices.

You tell yourself,

your boss,

your friends,

that you’re a thinker,

a do-er,

a strategist.

But we know the truth, you and I:

you are so much a lover,

spread open on the floor,

lost in papers

and books

and ribbons

and photographs,

while time loses its shape.

You are so much a lover,

your fingers caressing coffee cups

and pens

and stationary

with a hunger you pretend

is not tearing you apart.

It bleeds out of you,

drip,

drip,

drips onto the floor beneath you:

you love this world,

you love these thoughts,

you burn with ardor,

even as you let another friend leave,

let another leaf fall,

let another door close.

There’s no climbing out of it.

There never was.

You fell straight from between your mother’s legs

directly and irrevocably

into love.

Spring Wedding

At the wedding

there is music

and laughter

and dancing.

You knew

so many of the guests

so long ago.

The heat

of their smiles,

smiles you had forgotten the shape of,

burns like the fumes of the

citronella torches,

licking at the edges of your heart:

they curl and flake

and fly off

in a v-formation of ash.

But the heat cannot burn away everything.

For there is too much everything

and you feel its presence too keenly now.

So you smile back

from the perimeter,

humming a song

you don’t yet know the words to,

watching the guests

dance the steps

that only hurt your feet now.

Image credit: “Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase” by Maria van Oosterwyck

Perhaps it’s just my way of coming to terms with my dwindling attention span and abnormal (even for me) lack of energy (turns out I’m anemic!), but I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of mastery and the immense amount of patience and faith it takes to achieve mastery of any skill. As I write this, hundreds of cliches come to mind unprompted: statistics about how many hours it takes to master a skill or build a habit, reminders to keep moving forward, and declarations about the relative value of hard work compared to innate talent.

I don’t think I fully appreciated them before. I didn’t appreciate the Olympics or awards shows. I never understood why people made such a big fuss about sports and building muscle. Too much talk of ‘reps’ and ‘muscle memory.’ My perspective didn’t expand far beyond this: if you were good at something, you were good at it. Okay. But, ultimately, it was luck that decided whether or not you would be famous, whether or not you would be great. You had to be born with the right smile, the right way of talking to people, the right amount of fiery belief in yourself.

Greatness was something thrust upon certain people by virtue of their being born in the right place, at the right time, with the right amount of gumption. Maybe some of them clawed their way from rags to riches, but that was because they were born with the claws.

I only had claws in my dreams. In real life? It was better to save myself the disappointment and decide not to try. Or, if I had to try, I had better try in private, where my failures could be suffered alone, away from the humiliating gaze of those who know me.

But trying to master a skill in private forces you into a cramped, uncomfortable bind. For one thing, it requires you to take some of the time and energy you could channel into practice and use it, instead, devising schemes for hiding your practice, for guarding yourself from the gaze of others.

For another, practicing in isolation severely limits the opportunities for growth, creativity, and guidance that you are exposed to. If you only ever practice skateboarding in your room, you’re stuck with only the internet as a source of inspiration. You cut yourself off from opportunities to watch, up close and personal, someone more advanced than you performing that trick that you can’t seem to nail down. You cut yourself off from the possibility of having a more skilled skater give you tips on your exact form. You cut yourself off from another person to bounce ideas and questions off of.

Finally, when you hid your practice from others, you deny yourself a million possible, meaningful rewards. How long can your motivation last if its only source is your own private satisfaction? How long can you really last, telling yourself that you can and must answer to yourself for your own progress? Either you will become a taskmaster, destroying your relationship to yourself and your work, or you will let your natural leniency compound with the tide of endless excuses life affords us, eventually abandoning your craft altogether.

And if there is one thing mastery relies on, it’s longevity. You have to be able to continue practicing for days, even years on end, without abandoning your craft.

Now, I don’t think we should be practicing around other people for the sake of ‘accountability.’ That might be a fringe benefit, but looking for accountability can easily become another way to it small. We can spend hours looking for the right accountability partner, and when our search proves unsuccessful, or the partner we choose proves all too human, we can blame someone other than ourselves for our lack of dedication.

We need to practice in front of others because art suffocates if it is not allowed to participate in the ongoing give-and-take of human affairs. It does us little good to close ourselves off from people who can truly benefit from our craft and the story of how we are learning to master it. It’s counter-productive, in fact, because our calling is not just about us. It works in participation with the rest of the world, not in spite of it. We have to be willing to give our practice, not just our shiny finished projects, to the world, if we are going to receive the sustenance we need to keep going. This sustenance might literally be food and money, sure, but it might also be subject matter for our stories and paintings, it might be the defining, refining heartbreak that forces us to see our work in a completely new light, it might be the blessing of someone who else who actually takes our calling seriously.

Last week, I re-watched Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. As a child, I must have read Alcott’s novel at least six times, and now, as an adult, I watch Gerwig’s adaptation of it at least once a year. Every time I watch it, a new visual, line, or interaction jumps out at me and stays with me long afterward. This time, it was a dialogue between Jo and Friedrich Bhaer. After reading through Jo’s published short stories, Friedrich wounds Jo by critiquing her writing. Jo bristles, perceiving his words as yet another rejection, as a dismissal of her work as unimportant, but she misjudges his intent entirely. He asks her, earnestly, “Do you have anyone to take you seriously, Jo, to talk about your work?”

She deflects the question, asking him in return, “Who made you high priest of what’s good and what’s bad?” and continues to dismiss his attempts to explain. Jo’s reaction is completely understandable, and her insistence that “No one will forget Jo March” is inspiring, but I keep returning to Friedrich’s question and its implicit offer: what would it be like to have someone to take you seriously and to talk about your work?

It can be life-changing. The presence of a mentor might have been the deciding factor in the work of countless geniuses throughout history. We might never have had the works of Aristotle if not for the influence of Plato, and we might never have known Plato without the guidance of Socrates. Where would we all be, had Socrates not practiced philosophy in front of other people, even to the point of his being killed for it? Where would we be had he not allowed his art to participate in the give-and-take of human affairs?

From a thousand viewpoints, life is incredibly short. From a thousand more, it is interminably long. Regardless of how much or how little time we feel we have, we must spend it somehow. I’m not interested in spending the majority of my time hiding and shrinking and doubting. Rather, I’d like to spend it mastering something, doing all that mastery entails: trying and failing in front of other people, asking questions, sharing what I believe to be true, telling my stories where people can hear them, giving to the sweeping river of human affairs, and remaining open to what that river might bring me in return.

Image credits: Louis Garrel (as Friedrich Bhaer) and Saoirse Ronan (as Jo March) in Little Women. Photo: Sony Pictures Releasing.

“You don’t need to control everything, Miss Ruffing.” A professor said those words to me at a graduation party. I’m not sure if he was drunk, but believing he was has softened the blow, since he threw that statement at me with more vitriol than goodwill. I felt the wind flee my lungs like I’d been hit in the gut with a two-by-four. The background noise of thumping music, short tempers, and my desperate attempts to keep a situation from spiraling into chaos faded into silence. All I was cognizant of was this fact: I would remember these words for the rest of my life, and every event that unfurled afterward would be warped, forever catching, wrinkling, and tearing around this moment.

As the rest of the night unraveled and drove me to tears, as that night melted into morning and that morning melted into the long summer break, I retained the feeling of having been slapped across the face. Could others see the burning in my cheeks that still hadn’t faded months later? I felt like my eyes had been shocked open a half-centimeter wider and they’ve never returned to their previous squint.

All my life, I had been commanded to control myself, to take responsibility for everything I could, and to make every situation as comfortable for everyone else as possible. That was the example given to me by the saints. That was what the Church preached to me, what friends and family implied with passive-aggressive comments and heavy-handed suggestions. Control every situation that could possibly end with someone else being hurt, but when it comes to your own feelings and wants, be open. Be flexible. Have faith. You know what happens when you make plans? God laughs.

How many times have you heard that? I hear it every day; it’s a broken record that spins around over and over in my subconscious.

That was the delicate balance I had been striving to maintain my entire life. I urged myself: control your sleep, your appetite, your temper, control the fallout of others’ bad decisions so that you appear noble, while relinquishing control over the outcome of your own plans, over how pathetic and groveling you appear to others, over whether you eat enough or exercise enough or ever get what you want so that you appear humble.

I was so desperate to be good. I was so desperate to do the right thing, to make the most of a college experience at a school that was too small for me and my ambitions because I believed that experience was all I deserved and that if I was ungrateful, the little I had would be ripped away and I would never get anything better. I wanted my professors to like me, I wanted my fellow students to like me.

But nobody likes a control freak.

The thing is, up until that night, I truly believed I wasn’t one. I felt like I didn’t have control over anything. My semester abroad had been completely de-railed by COVID, all the weight I had so meticulously starved off of myself was coming back at such a fast pace my wardrobe could barely keep up, and events that I lost sleep planning for the student body ended in some students crying while others staged a hostile take-over (I wish I was joking).

Everything had been steadily falling apart for months and I had been bearing it with grace because what choice did I have if I wanted to get to heaven? I had let go of my desire to look beautiful, of my need for sleep, of my need for respect, of what I wanted to get out of my education. I was lucky to even be there, I told myself over and over again as I donned a mask to sit in a nearly-empty chapel for daily mass, as I watched my friends’ support turn to judgment and unease when I shared my worries over how fast our world was changing, as I fell apart in my dorm room every time I was alone. I didn’t need to control any of this; I couldn’t control any of it. What I thought and what I wanted didn’t matter, so I left it “in God’s hands.”

But, of course, my professor was right. I was trying to control everything about that hellish night because I didn’t want other people to get hurt and I didn’t want to get in trouble. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t avoid either of those realities. It was an excellent case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’

The absurdity of the notion of control: that is what haunts me every February. It stays with me through the long, cold days, stretching into March and April. As the years pass and I grow more independent, the tail-end of Winter brings me back to the verge of collapsing into fear and overwhelm because I am responsible for myself. I have to make the things I desire and the things I feel a priority because, if I don’t, no one else will.

If I continue to dissipate my strength by sewing it into everyone else’s business, by numbing my instincts with meaningless distractions, by censoring every uncomfortable thought I have, I will achieve exactly this: I will be more tolerable to the people around me. I will not overwhelm anyone, I will not make anyone uncomfortable. If I continue to relinquish control over fulfilling my needs and desires, I will appear perfectly pleasant and inconvenience no one except myself. That greatly increases the odds of everyone liking me, but it does nothing to turn the dial on people loving me.

And, even then, it does not rule out the possibility of one special asshole hitting me where it hurts and telling me I’m a control freak.

So, every February, as I get dragged back into this muddy, agonizing cycle, I remind myself that when I trade control over what I need and want for control over the opinions of others, I lose. And the forfeit is my soul. So, as much as it scares me, as much as it wears me out and sends my anxiety and depression responses into overdrive, I will dive into the waters of the people-pleasing cycle and fish myself out, over and over again. As often as necessary, I will remind myself that “it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world”1 and that responsibility for my soul is not something I can barter for a seat behind the pearly gates.

Image credits: (I can’t find the exact name for this piece, but it is from a painting by Edgar Degas, I believe circa. 1888)

I blinked and all of a sudden it’s February. December was sweet and poignant in the way only December, at its best, can be. January was dark, dry, bitter. I thought about writing here during those months, but I, too, felt dark and dry and bitter.

I started this Substack to tell my untold stories. These stories had gone untold because they were unseemly: they shot holes in the image I worked hard to curate and project to the world. They are stories lined with resentment, sadness, and confusion, elements crucial to the integrity of each story. To take the bitterness from them would be to take the truth from them, take the soul from them.

I’m proud of what I have written here up to this point. I’m proud of the anger and the ugliness. It is a great accomplishment of mine to be so publicly, so boldly human.

Since the publication of my last post in early December, however, I’ve felt like the bitterness, sadness, and confusion have remained while the story has fallen away. And I want to share stories with you. I want to do more here than just preach or vent.

Bitterness is not the whole of a story nor the whole of a person. It’s a piece that doesn’t make sense divorced from the whole. It sticks out and scratches at you like a plastic tag on a sweater you just can’t find. In the same way, gratitude is not the whole of happiness and positivity is not the whole of hope. For a couple months, I didn’t have the full story, just pieces. So I didn’t write. I sat with the pieces and waited for the story to unfold.

And so it is unfolding, little by little. Pieces that I thought most important have fallen away like dust, while others I had forgotten have turned out more meaningful than I thought possible. Ideas like hope and forgiveness—ideas that always evaded my understanding—have suddenly transformed from ideas to real things. Possibility, too, and love, have become less airy and cerebral for me. They have taken on more earthy forms.

All this to say—for a couple months, I had topics I wanted to write about, but no true story to tell about them. Every story felt fake and lifeless: something was missing. I couldn’t prop up these topics on a scaffolding of bitterness. Nor could I employ false confidence. Both would prove hollow and unsound.

Now, the bitterness is less acute. Now, I feel something more akin to wonder. Which is a marvel in itself, as I have thought for years that all I could do with authenticity was listen to sad music and read sad books and tell sad stories. For a long time, I forgot there was anything but the two polarities of sad stories and boot-strapping, forced confidence.

But there are, of course, “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” There are more stories to tell than simply sad ones or simply inspiring ones. For example, there are odes.

Ode is a slightly awkward, old-fashioned word. An ode, according to Merriam-Webster, is “something that shows respect for or celebrates the worth or influence of another,” like an homage, but not the same as an homage. Odes can retain fire and fury; they can carry ugliness without shame, without disfiguring it. Someone writing an ode sings simply of what is, trying to capture all that it is. He does not sing to persuade or dissuade you from an imagined future. An ode is more than cheap advertisement, more than propaganda, more than lip-service.

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The poet Pablo Neruda wrote a total of 225 odes throughout his career, and each one is filled with story and fire and life. A bilingual translation of them, entitled All The Odes, sits beside me on my desk. I’ve only read a few of them, but I am glad they exist. I am glad Neruda found more inside himself than bitterness and I am glad he devoted time and energy to condensing his wonder and fire and earthy appreciation into poetry.

As I grow as a writer and a human being, I hope that I can give others reason to be glad that I found more inside myself than bitterness, glad that I wrote some odes of my own.

That’s why,

Angel,

I sing to you,

I have sung to you

the way I sang to all pure things,

metals,

waters,

wind!

Everything becomes a lesson in living,

growth

through hardship and sweetness,

as in your poetry, the infinite

bread pregnant with the tears

of your passion, the noble

fragrant woods

your divine hands shape.

— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Angel Cruchaga,” translated by Ilan Stavans.

Image Credit: “The Cello Player” by Amedeo Modigliani

I’ve been coming down from a month of manic busyness, overwhelm, and inner conflict, trying to find my feet again, and it’s been hard to feel gratitude or make peace with my situation and my decisions. In darker moments, it feels like time is running out too quickly. It feels like the race began before I even made it to the starting line, so every effort to gain speed must be spent merely catching up.

If I decide to focus on practical matters, I feel guilty for wasting my time on tedious tasks that I should have gotten out of the way long ago, tasks that now stand between me and my creative work.

If I choose creative work, I must face an avalanche of expectations. I must create something brilliant, something that will tangibly improve my life immediately, something that will set my restless soul at ease (and impress everyone around me). If I can’t pull that off, why waste the time? Go back to your chores and make room for the real artists. Stop being so indulgent and delusional. Why am I letting my house get more cluttered, my blood sugars more erratic, my body weaker just to stare at my computer, wrestle with writer’s block for an hour, then give up and turn to a pile of books that I will flip through, take notes on, and then feel overwhelmed by? What is the use?

I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Everything is about the result and every result is so liable to fall short of my expectations that no choice feels right, no choice feels safe. So I resort to not choosing at all.

That’s how I spent most of November. I found excuses to go to bed early, to eat cheese and crackers in place of a real dinner, to ignore my journal and my dishes. I backed myself into a corner, depriving myself of patience, care, and acceptance, keeping out of the way, where no one (including myself) could be inconvenienced by my mistakes.

This engrained response of retreat and numbing should disturb me more than it does. That’s why I keep writing about it. Writing about it forces me to see what it does to me. It moves me from the role of subject to the role of object. My therapist encourages me to do something similar during our sessions: view yourself and your memories as if you are watching a show on tv. You are watching yourself as a character undergoing certain experiences. You no longer are the one undergoing. From that perspective, you find that clarity, empathy, and patience are much more accessible. Those three responses are essential, they are the tools you need to dig yourself out of whatever spiral you’re in. You’ve moved from the foot of the cliff to the top of the cliff, and now you have a rope.

From this vantage, I can see my situation for what it is: because I’ve admonished myself for my phone usage, thought about the disastrous ramifications so many times, I’ve become numb to all of it. The longer I spend inside my head, inside this loop of shame and cognitive dissonance, the more meaningless everything starts to feel. The more I trivialize the consequential things (the effects of spending hours every week hiding from myself and the world, the effects of neglecting my diabetes management, effects which include potentially losing limbs and eyesight and kidney function), the more everything begins to feel inconsequential. The energy, the light, the color drains from it all.

If I let the meaning drain from the big things, what chance do I have of ever appreciating the little things that compose 99% of everyday life?

This is not a great state to be in. Usually, it doesn’t last, but it doesn’t come around once in a lifetime, either. It’s a survival tactic, a way of staying alive and sane when life feels too threatening. But I’ve spent an absurd amount of time just trying to survive and I’d like to vouchsafe a few more of my future days for just being alive where others might see me, being alive without an incessant soundtrack of worry, shame, and conflict playing in my head.

So I’ve created a list of reminders for myself and anyone else who is tired of the numbing and retreat:

You’re not Crazy, You’re Being Controlled By Bluebeard (or those Who Fear Your Power)

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The first snowfall brings every feeling into sharp relief. Sometimes I think it’s just the effect of the thick, smokey cocktail of collective nostalgia that gets shaken up and poured out in generous portions every winter by marketing teams. But that doesn’t sit right: the clarity and intensity that the snow produces isn’t the result of overstimulation. It doesn’t feel like the relentlessness of summer humidity and sunlight and parties, of sweat pooling uncontrollably in the folds of your skin, of air so thick it’s hard to breathe.

The intensity of winter is not in the barrage of twinkling lights and elaborate recipes and shopping, shopping, shopping. It’s in the silence of densely-packed snow slowing traffic, in the early, deep darkness of 4:00pm sunsets. It’s the solid absence of instruments in the intro to AWARDS SEASON by Bon Iver, an absence that forces the lyrics into your psyche—you can’t turn away from them, you can’t dance them off.

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The light changes after the first snowfall. It’s brighter, but it’s not sunnier. The cover of the clouds has found a rival in the glare off the snow. For a time, it’s like we’re producing our own light, like the earth is glowing from within, even though it’s just reflection. After the first snowfall, waking up in the morning feels like a new routine to learn: the blankets on top of me are a different shade of blue than they were before. The houseplants in my window ask me to look at them. Is this the same coffeepot I’ve been using all year? What was I doing, again? There are questions and memories rapping at the doors of my heart, louder and more intent than before. I can’t help but hear them. It’s like someone took all the wool out of my head, but now there’s too much space: things are rattling around and I’ve been thrown off-kilter.

What have I been doing all year? What must I do now? I can’t ignore the questions. It’s too quiet. They’re echoing against the walls. The bulbs in my lamps are too bright. I want Christmas tree lights, I want candles, but I want nothing more. Anything more will give me a migraine. There’s too much to think about, too much to see, too much to love and miss. I can’t help but see it. I can’t help but hear it. Knock, knock, knock. The instruments have all cut out.

Image credits: Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Census at Bethlehem

Around this time last year, I was desperate to figure out what is the next thing for me? Desperate to carve out the defining step in my career, desperate to prove myself and impress the circles I had supposedly outgrown. I was good at writing, that much I knew. But how was I going to secure a job in that field when the job market was already awful, positions were either underpaid or highly competitive, and my previous professional experience was in the extremely niche field of college journalism? I had to be distinctive, the internet gurus told me. I had to be a linchpin. I had to build a brand.

But where? Well, the best place, I was told, was Twitter (X). Twitter is where people go to spill tea, to sound smart, to feel smart. If you could master the game of well-timed hot takes and engaging hooks, you could find your people, build your newsletter, and have something concrete to knock the socks off recruiters with (or you could monetize and just work for yourself). So, for a couple months, I gave it a shot, inflicting my followers with manic tweeting sprees that were always book-ended by spans of embarrassed silence. Unsurprisingly, the results were as inconsistent as my output. Some tweets earned a few likes, most went unnoticed. I gained a couple follows from relatively big names on Twitter, but I never really engaged with them.

Can you sense my residual discomfort? The whole exercise felt odd and vulnerable and embarrassing. But that’s my perception—a perception heavily informed by my unresolved insecurities—and it has almost nothing to do with the value of the advice I tried to follow. The opportunity to build a personal brand that connects you with people you never would have met in person is one of the internet’s few redeeming qualities. I have a deep admiration for people who have managed to do this by staying true to themselves. I follow the work of online personalities like Kieran Drew, Africa Brooke, Simon Sarris, Caroline Winkler, and Henrik Karlsson with excitement and gratitude. The willingness of these creators to be vulnerable and, at times, controversial is the very reason I know they exist. They show up to their work and they believe in their work, and they encourage others to do the same. Their advice is sound, but my belief in myself is not. And really, that belief is the one thing that makes all the difference.

So I’m trying to give the Bridget who existed a year ago, scattered in her efforts to find her vocation, grace. I’m trying to see my old tweets as more than outgrown opinions and failed attempts at connection. Because you can’t become who you’re supposed to be by abandoning who you’ve been. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t just tabula rasa ourselves whenever we get uncomfortable. We can’t disown who we’ve been and expect to be someone different. The only way we can change is by re-claiming who we’ve been, by going back and giving her the grace, the love, the understanding that she couldn’t get at the time.

Because what the Bridget of last year, and all the years before, needed was for someone to take her seriously. That need underlies all her efforts and is explicit in this Twitter thread:

The Bridget who tweeted this already knew much of what I know now. Having dreams and desires that come from your heart is simultaneously an enormous burden and the most vital core of our life force. And, as we grow up, we encounter thousands of voices who make the burden heavier and harder to carry while gaslighting us and dismissing its importance. It could be your parents, your friends, your political leaders, your teachers, the people you watch on TikTok every day. Maybe they’re upfront with their bullying, like the people I was tweeting about. Maybe they’re more subtle, putting all the onus on you to figure out what your calling is, to follow your dreams, but only to the point where their encouragement makes them look like a good person and your work doesn’t inconvenience them. These people are like cheerleaders who throw you in the air, chanting your name, then step back while you fall back to earth and break your neck. Why didn’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps? They then ask, shaking their heads.

There is immense, unspoken pressure from all sides not to follow your dreams, to tune out the desires of your heart, and to feel like shit while doing it. If you have cheerleaders professing their empty belief in you, every minute you spend not living up to their expectations feels heavier and heavier, because you are letting them down and (so they tell you), you are letting yourself down. The guilt, exhaustion, and confusion are crushing.

The danger is that nowadays we have the luxury of numbing ourselves to this weight with our phones, day in and day out, living vicariously through all the influencers who succeeded where we failed. You can while away your time in comfortable, shallow projection. All while the cheerleaders keep their moral high ground and you become increasingly disconnected from yourself. It becomes easier and easier to view the task of living as simply making time pass, rather than wresting the meaning from it. This is a ‘safe’, presentable addiction, one that allows us to maintain a decent standing in society. What an upgrade from more degrading addictions like alcoholism, eating disorders, drug abuse. What a luxury.

I’m being so heavy-handed because sometimes that’s the only way I can get through to myself. Because, at this point, it has to start with me. If I don’t believe in myself, viciously and doggedly, I will not have the strength to ask anyone else to truly believe in me. I will not have the strength to believe in others. Not taking myself seriously is a luxury my modern western lifestyle has given me access to, but it’s a luxury I can’t afford, because the price is my soul.

Image credits: Musical Party by Mary Cassett

Lately, I’ve been carrying around this uncomfortable, smoldering fire within myself. The fire says I must have something that is truly mine, something worth defending, something I am excused for protecting fiercely from anyone. I can’t keep pretending my life is not important, that taking it seriously is optional. It burns me up inside, this need to exist fully, to create things and impact the space and the people around me. I can’t just settle into a life of quiet mediocrity like I thought I once should.

For years and years, Catholicism had me believing that the only way to get to heaven was to hover outside your life, to commit to nothing (except an unwavering belief that the Church always knew best and that your own intuition was faulty at best, sinful at worst), to ask for nothing, to burn for nothing.

Teaching me that, hammering that into me over and over and over and over again was abusive. It kept me docile and asleep, it made me a good soldier, a good robot, but one with all the delightful, fleshy softness and insecurity and anxiety of a girl.

The Church kept my head scrambled 24/7 with worries about being good enough, about making one fatally wrong move, about the length of my skirt and the kindness of my words and the strength of my courage. Wondering day in and day out if I would truly have what it took, would have ever practiced enough, to be a real martyr, should the day ever come. Had I detached enough from my needs and desires and pain yet? Had I fully convinced everyone, convinced myself, that I was not important? That my life truly held no value apart from its being a testimony to my fidelity to Heaven?

Not to God, but to Heaven. I never had the time or the clarity to develop an authentic relationship with God; I just lived every moment in fear of hell, which, by default, was the closest I got to desiring Heaven.

Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look. Don’t feel, don’t feel, don’t feel. Feeling is self-indulgent, it leads you to question the hand that feeds you. It leads you to discontentment, to weakness and complaining. Don’t do it. It’s a trap.

That was how I stayed ‘holy.’ That was the monologue I let run through my head 24 hours a day. I was only allowed to look at things that made me suffer; I wasn’t allowed to look at my own suffering. If I did that, I’d eventually follow it to its origin, and I’d have to face the fact that someone else had made me suffer, had planted the seeds of it in my soul. I’d have to acknowledge how this suffering was leeching my life away and replacing it with fear and paranoia, with lethargy and trembling and racing thoughts. It was draining me of my ability to see clearly, to touch the ground when I walked, to own up to my heart, to make decisions or take responsibility for my belief that my decisions were right when others questioned them.

Every day I was tamping down harder and harder on my soul, trying to crush it into a tiny black box and the furthest back corner of my being where no one would ever look for it. All the while, I thought the thing I was polishing till it gleamed, the thing I was unfurling each day for the world to see, the thing I was putting through its paces, was my immortal soul. But it wasn’t. I’d been duped. The thing I was devoting all my attention to was my ego. I was puffing it up and making it shine while my real soul was shriveling and suffocating.

And, for so long, nobody told me. Many encouraged me to keep going, to keep polishing my ego, just so long as it didn’t outshine theirs for too long. When it did, they made sure to chastise me. But nobody told me the truth.

I don’t blame them: they were as blind to it as I was. If they saw my ego for what it was, if they saw my dying soul, they might then have to recognize the same within themselves. They would have to see their own dying souls, they would have to face the fact that they had also been lied to.

But doing that would mean tearing down the massive, shining foundation of ego we had built our lives on. What could survive that? What could possibly remain?

In her book When Food is Love, Geneen Roth masterfully describes what it would mean to tear down this foundation, to go on a search-and-rescue mission and pull your half-starved soul out of the rubble:

“Grieving means telling the truth to yourself about what you have lost. Speaking the unspeakable. Not protecting anyone from the complex being that you are. If you have lived your life as a ‘nice’ person, someone who takes care of others and never makes waves, telling the truth can be terrifying. Most of us lie, pretend, or hide because we learned very early that revealing ourselves creates distance, whereas pretending and hiding foster the illusion of intimacy.”

She’s right. How many people have become intimate with your ego while your soul was in hiding? What will be left if you let the ego recede and let the beaten, battered, broken soul emerge? How much distance will telling the truth create between you and everyone you know? What if the truth is that some of those people did real damage to your soul?

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This grieving and acknowledging is not a swift, tidy process. You can’t just forgive the people who hurt you and sweep it all back under the rug. Even if they didn’t know they were hurting you. That would be like showing a small, impulsive child the scissors they accidentally shoved into your side, pulling them out, then handing them back to the child, just trusting that he won’t stab you again. Such ‘forgiveness’ requires you to ignore the injury you are forgiving. It forces you to try to control the child with the scissors, to make his actions your responsibility. This does little to prevent you getting hurt again, and it leaves the child bereft of any real forgiveness and clueless about what he has done or what he ought to do instead. Roth explains,

“Many people want to fly past grief into forgiveness because grief is so uncomfortable and forgiveness is so sweet. Grieving looks self-indulgent; forgiveness looks holy. But there is nothing holy about faking your feelings, and unless you are willing to get angry with the person or people who hurt you so that you absolutely know you did not deserve their abuse, forgiveness will be a sham. You cannot forgive anyone with whom you never got angry.”

I have seen a few online discussions that speak about “Church hurt” in a derogatory fashion, aimed at Christians like me who did not suffer what we normally identify as abuse at the hands of the Church. I was, thank God, not sexually abused by any clergy members, nor was I beaten by nuns in a Catholic school. I led a fairly normal life within the Church and had some genuinely positive experiences in my high school youth group.

In the eyes of some, I suspect, I have made myself a victim for attention, parading around my Church hurt and making a mountain out of a molehill. Wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t my life have gone more smoothly, wouldn’t I be further along the path to Heaven now, if I had just continued looking the other way? Shouldn’t I have just gone to confession more, told yet another priest about my mounting paranoia and dissociation, rather than sought out a therapist who is an ex-Catholic herself? Why do I have to write these posts, to bring dark and confusing and potentially “soul-endangering” ideas to light? Why couldn’t I just pray more, read more, confess more and shut up about all of this?

Roth recounts how she was battered with a similar line of inquiry by her husband Matt:

“His eyes flashed and he drew a deep breath. I waited. ‘You know something, Geneen, not everyone in the world thinks that talking about buried childhood feelings is scintillating dinner conversation. Did it ever occur to you that this fascination with the dark side of life is not particularly healthy?’

Fascinated with the dark side? Am I really fascinated with darkness? Visions of myself wallowing in pain, globs of it stuck to my hair, webbing my fingers and toes. A woman in a workshop told me that her husband accused her of crying when she took out the garbage because she would never see it again. Is that how I seem to Matt?

Matt was waiting for my answer. ‘If I am fascinated with the dark side, as you call it, that’s because the dark side has had so much power in my life. It’s what I haven’t recognized and felt that has dictated so many of my feelings about myself and my work and my relationships. The more I move the dark side into consciousness, the less pull it has on me. I don’t like mucking around in the pain, but I’m willing to do it because it’s the only way I know to become whole. And who knows what would happen then?’”

What would happen then? What will happen if I keep facing the dark parts of me as they rise to the surface instead of looking away and pushing them back down like I used to? Perhaps I might come closer to being the person God made me to be. I may eventually become an active participant in my relationship with Him, one who stands before Him with her soul on display, patched-up and battered as it is, and not just her ego.

To find out, I need to acknowledge my Church hurt.

Image credits: “Supper at Emmaus” by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

I was recently stuck in a 9-month bout of unemployment. I moved back in with my parents and proceeded to spend hours each day drifting between the two islands of my bed and a tiny end-table-turned-desk in my bedroom, toting my laptop everywhere with me, alongside a pile of notebooks, printed off resumes and pitch decks, and a copy of What Color is Your Parachute? I enrolled in online courses that I didn’t complete. I asked for informational interviews and met some wonderful people in industries I previously had no ties to. I hired a life coach. I edited and re-edited my website, my resume, my LinkedIn profile. I journaled and journaled and journaled, trying to make the most of this time, trying to finally discover what I wanted, to make lasting contact with that vision of my Future Self who exists in my day dreams.

I worked my ass off trying to pin that Future Self down, to book her for a lunch meeting wherein I could finally pick her brain and uncover the secrets of her confidence, her beauty, her happiness. How did she do it? Was it pills? Magic spells? Religion? Was she someone I actually had no relation to, someone born under a luckier star than I?

I knew what this Future Self looked like, how she conducted herself, how she spent her time. I knew her in the way that you can come to know a celebrity: by reading every article written about them, watching every interview of them, consuming every biopic and biography. But I didn’t know her thoughts, her fears (if she had any) or how she overcame them. All I knew was that she was brilliant, she was dazzling, she was content with herself and her work. And I? I was none of those things. The chasm between us felt impassable.

I felt defeated and, as I finally found work again and had to struggle to stay afloat while learning a completely new role, I let my Future Self go. I occupied myself with smaller, daily battles against my anxiety, paranoia, and self-doubt. I worked and slept and cleaned and organized. I started lifting weights. I relived those uncomfortable experiences of being a complete beginner at something, of making mistakes, of dealing with conflict. It kept my mind and body well occupied for a while, but I knew that things would shift again soon enough.

They did. I settled into the rhythms of work and found that my anxiety, per usual, just needed me to stick with it, to show up strong and brave, over and over again. Reassured by my consistency, the anxiety finally ebbed away, taking a lot of my paranoia with it. The busy, humid, hectic summer collapsed into fall’s sure-footed pace, and I had time to think again.

Where had Future Self got to during those nine long months of soul-searching? Why was she so elusive? Why did she get to enjoy her wonderful life of books and writing and adventures and committed relationships under my name, all the while never speaking to me, never telling me her secrets?

After work one day, I sat down with my journal and wrote:

I wish I wasn’t so damn overwhelmed by the great, looming wave of my potential. I don’t want to look at it. I want to sleep and sleep for a thousand years until I wake up a completely new person. One with more ideas, more brains, more gumption.

As I thought more about this ‘completely new person’ I wanted to be, this Future Self, I realized that what I felt towards her was not connection, or admiration. It was resentment. I hated her. I hated the obligation she placed on me: become me—magnificent and capable—or else your life will be small and meaningless and you’ll have only yourself to blame.

I didn’t want to put in the work necessary to become her. That would mean overcoming a lot more fear, a lot more uncertainty, and waves and waves of inadequacy. Future Me wore cute clothes and went to museums. She wrote and she talked about what she wrote; she sent it to others and asked them to publish it. She explored new ideas despite fears that she was incapable of long-term commitment. Becoming her meant accepting that somehow, someway, all that she was came to be from exactly who I am now.

I (as I am now) have to be the one to decide to wear the cute clothes, even though no occasion feels special enough. I have to be the one to make time for the museums, even though it feels like a waste of time, because I am too slow and self-conscious to make the most of any inspiration I gain (and what if it’s a total loss and I don’t get any inspiration and then I’ve wasted a Saturday afternoon?) I have to be the one to write with the brains and bitterness I have now, and I have to be the one to talk about what I’m writing, to show it to others, even though I feel it is not ‘good enough’ yet.

I have to believe that this Future Me, who I feel so much jealousy towards, does not wish me ill. It’s a lot safer, a lot more comfortable to believe that, in the same way it’s easier to believe the cool guy you have a crush on is too snobby to ever even look at you. But really, you just cling to such an unfounded belief because it keeps you from risking rejection.

In truth, my Future Self wants to meet me, really meet me, as I am now, without pretense, projections, or show. The only one with the power to make that happen is me.

Image credits: “A Nude Woman Doing her Hair before a Mirror” by CW Eckersberg

I asked myself today why I have been avoiding writing.

“Because it feels icky.” Was the response that beat out of my heart.

Tell me more about the icky-ness, I asked, softly.

“It’s sticky and golden and sickly like honey.”

Like honey?

“Or melted sugar.”

Why melted sugar and not honey?

“Melted sugar eventually hardens and things get frozen in it; they can’t move.”

Tell me more.

“Thinking about writing feels like standing on a tiny scrap of land, surrounded by melted sugar on all sides, as far as the eye can see. Anything I write is a step into the melted sugar. By the time I hit publish, it will already have solidified, and I will be frozen in a pose that I have struck a hundred times. You know, one of those poses that impresses people, or shocks them a little bit, or makes them feel superior, or inferior.”

And then it clicked. As much as I hate the word performative and how over-used it is these days, I realized that it is more than just pressure to be brilliant that stops me from taking action. It’s actually a weariness. I don’t want to perform the same tricks. I don’t want to follow old recipes, adding a dash of humor here, a pinch of shock there.

But when did writing about myself, allegedly for myself, to the extent of potentially embarrassing myself with my vulnerability, become performative? What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Picking up on people’s perceptions of you, and the million tiny things that influence those perceptions, is a kind of alchemy. I see what story you’re telling yourself about me. Let me change that story from the inside out: I am so skilled that you won’t even notice the changes as they occur. I will perform the same scene you love so dearly, the one where the prince slays the dragon and rescues the princess, over and over again. I will perform it so well, you will not notice as the dragon changes color, one scale at a time. You will not notice when the princess slips a knife under her skirt.

I’ve realized more and more that I don’t want to be an alchemist in this way. I don’t want to be a certain character in other people’s stories, one who goes on quests for them, one who slays dragons for them, one who takes a leap of faith for them, all while they identify themselves with her. Right now, I don’t want my writing to be an instrument for other people’s catharsis, because that’s not entirely how catharsis works. You can’t expel the bad dreams of another by putting your own on display. You can’t heal another’s heartbreak by wrestling with your own before their eyes. You can’t redeem someone from their own despair by showing them yours.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. writes, “It is both a trap and a poison to have so-called friends who have the same injuries but no real desire to heal them.” I think there’s more to this warning than simply, “you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with.” I see in it a warning against tying your soul’s work up in the stories others ask you to tell so they can avoid telling their own. It does no real good to the people who live vicariously through you, and it depletes you and leaves you frozen in sugar candy.

I don’t want to be an alchemist. I want to be a woman, extraordinary and mundane and human. My stories are important because they’re mine. Everyone’s story holds a special importance to them. But you have to tell your stories, tell them with honesty, treating your real self with dignity, not hiding and punishing and contorting her into pleasing, palatable shapes. You can’t just read other people’s stories, can’t just listen. You have to use your voice. You have to give your true self space to exist, to be seen and heard.

Image credits: Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1862)

I didn’t mean to take such a long break from this publication. But I have been busy, I have been exhausted, and I have been ill-equipped to formulate my thoughts into coherent sentences. The latter two obstacles are the products of a thyroid condition that I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to manage for the past fifteen years. This condition inflicts me with sporadic bouts of extreme fatigue and brain fog that usually flare up during or just after times of busyness or stress.

The fact that I started working full-time again accounts for the lack of time and the Hashimoto’s flare. Most evenings involve lying in bed, reading a few pages if I’m lucky, and mustering enough energy and brain power to prepare for work the next day.

I offer this as a brief explanation of why I’ve been away and what I’ve been up to. It’s not the most exciting time in my life, but I’m grateful to have a job again and enjoy my work. The Hashimoto’s is, as always, a work in progress. Healing is not linear, as they say. Sometimes I feel almost like a normal, healthy person. Others, I’m reminded that my body asks more of me, and that’s okay.

Besides working and resting, I’ve celebrated my 26^th birthday, and I’ve had a variety of interesting conversations about religion and spirituality. A year ago, I would have been terrified to discuss these topics. The wounds I bear from my own experiences with religion were too fresh, and I would have quickly shut down any conversation that veered too close to any kind of debate. All I had available to me at the time were my feelings, my fears, my intuition, tangled up in a messy, knotted skein. I knew all that I knew—pages of Catholic social teaching, papal encyclicals, Church-approved interpretations of the Bible, the lives of the Saints, the major (and even some of the obscure) arguments of Thomas Aquinas—and it wasn’t enough to keep me in the place I had to outgrow. All the logic had turned to shadows—untenable, quick-moving, threatening. The only guide I could hold onto was the very one I had been ignoring for my entire life up till that point: my gut.

It called me forward, up, out. I felt like a bird shoved into the sky, surrounded by nothing but air. All I knew to trust was my wings.

Some may call the impulse to beat those wings original sin. I think it’s God, as He exists, however He exists, inside of me. It’s not an existence I can describe or argue with. It simply is.

My need to step out of the Church was an axiom, a first principle. It wasn’t something for me to dissect.

That’s why it’s so difficult for me to talk about: I don’t fully understand it. It’s not something that has revealed itself to me in words yet.

My belief in the existence of God, of a loving, personal God, is the same. I can’t dress it in garments of logical discourse that another can clearly see. I tried, a few weeks ago, during one of those aforementioned conversations. My interlocutor, almost a perfect stranger, grilled me about my beliefs regarding evolution, trauma, spirituality. I told him I didn’t think it was a mistake that human beings exist as we are, capable of what we are—like sitting here, discussing the nature of our existence. He wasn’t convinced. “If God is external to you, where is He?”

Where is He? Where isn’t He? How can He be hemmed in by even the furthest limits of this universe? How can He be excluded from even the smallest molecule?

“I think He exists in each of us, but He also exists outside of space and time,” I managed. The conversation didn’t go much further.

It was painful. I wanted him to see what I saw, to experience what I could never adequately describe. But the words weren’t mine to share. I can’t speak to souls like that. I can barely speak of my own soul.

Perhaps my new-found love for Mary Oliver’s work strikes you as predictable and cliché. Perhaps I seem shallow and feeble, substituting meaningful religion for flimsy sentimentality. But she gets it:

Image credits: Lieve Verschuier - Staartster (komeet) boven Rotterdam - 11028-A-B - Museum Rotterdam