(how much can i take before i reach for the codeine?)

so when i pass out from pain, the darkening of tunnel vision comes as a relief. a sicko’s verification. some proof (i always want cold hard proof) that the experience is, in fact, pretty bad.

in short: i don’t trust my own pain.

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last week, i visited “pain scale,” an exhibit by artist carolyn lazard.

as you enter, you pass six brown faces, all smiling like the most sanguine symbol on a rudimentary pain scale. then you walk down a long hallway into a dark room, where you watch a giant projection of what looks like a red strobe light. in actuality, this is a camera filming right up close to the artist’s skin.

the work is informed by lazard’s experience with chronic illness, examining how routinely “pain scales” fail women of color. (in clinical settings, the pain of women of color is underestimated by over three points on a 0-10 scale.) it shows how the act of translating a sensation into numbers will always fail.

the effect is strangely destabilizing. it’s a reminder that this is how we look at people: from the outside in. an incoherent and incomplete attempt to understand what’s inside.

when i’m trying to understand my own inner experience (literally every month), i watch the fleabag pain scene.

i rewatch that kristen stewart interview when she says that if you’re not embodied, then you’re “hiding your period blood and not cumming well.”

i try to remember there is freedom in feeling without shame. i cancel plans. i tunnel vision. i crash.

at first, yes, of course there’s a sense of relief. i turn my own pain into pearls.

but if i honor the story of my feelings, what am i then free to do? just lay on the couch, moaning and feeling rather sorry for myself?

at some point, self-validation slips into self-absorption.

and wallowing in my own pain doesn’t feel particularly liberatory anymore.

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lately, i’ve been doing these meditations for chronic pain. whenever i feel it, i am supposed to exhale.

i unlink sensation from my interpretation of it. i don’t make it part of me. i stop telling myself it feels bad. i just feel it.

when i do, quickly, the world begins to spin. air seems to rush past my ears and i feel straight up high. my body trips like i’m on psychedelics.

when i feel pain without calling it pain, my mind becomes strange. the pain is less like pain and more like the primal scream of life itself, using every body to make itself heard.

it roars through me and i feel without words. i feel a history of men in battlefields before anesthesia, women in childbirth before hospitals, tooth pulls, and lion attacks, and cancer in the bones. i feel heartache and separation and i feel how utterly banal my own pain is—and how so many people have been denied the basic decency of having their own pain recognized.

when i meditate and stop telling myself that i am in pain, just keep breathing out and succumb to the sensation as if it were drugs, i feel how pain is what we all have in common.

i feel how my pain doesn’t make me special; in fact, just the opposite. pain is what connects me to other people.

as one of those deeply annoying highly sensitive people (clinically diagnosed! yay!), i often, well, spiral. i cry at commercials. i cry in art museums. i literally cried at the sunset yesterday. and i do this shit when i’m alone, so it’s not like i’m putting on a Not Like Other Girls act.

but when i meditate, i feel how there isn’t anything special in my own sensitivity; just because i feel things more often than others does not mean that others do not reach my same depths.

i have to remind myself of this often. whenever i’m in a fight with my boyfriend, i can (very) quickly convince myself that he’s completely unfeeling. with one sickening looping thought, i start to believe he’s withholding or ignoring me or even lying about loving me. in other words: whenever i’m afraid, i convince myself that other people don’t feel pain. at least not the way i do.

when we make pain exceptional—believing that only us or people like us feel it—we become capable of inflicting immense cruelty.

we see this in our own cultural biases: period pain is often belittled, but so is the emotional pain of men. and i mean, descartes performed live vivisections on animals, literally nailing dogs to wooden boards and cutting them open, because he believed that only humans could feel pain.

when we believe that pain makes us exceptional, we lose the thing that binds us.

every time we’re in pain, we are brought to the limits of language. this is not some destabilizing mystical experience, but something that brings us closer to the reality of the world.

though it often feels like separation, pain does not render me an individual.

perhaps precisely because pain isolates me from everything i know, it connects me to everything i don’t.

liked this? there’s more! to read my theory of pain as translation, click here!

Also if you liked what you read, please leave me a like. Let me know how pain hits you. Let’s chat in the comments.

for a few seconds (or maybe, if you’re lucky, a very many seconds), language is not

there.

i call it “the moment my mind turns off,” though that’s not exactly right. what i mean more is that in those moments, i am not narrating.

i am not translating sensations into meaning at all.

eventually, of course, it always ends.

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i settle back into my body (or perhaps just my mind) and small dots glow in my vision, swirling around the tiled floor when i stagger to the bathroom to piss.

in this way, every time i cum, i think about st john of the cross: “silence is god’s first language / everything else is poor translation.”

i don’t think he meant silence as in “the absence of sound.” i think he was talking about that which cannot be strapped down with the language of words. instead, his silence was immediate experience—the moments when you briefly lose your tongue.

but maybe, i think as i wipe, this is just a cognitive trap. perhaps what we perceive as the loss of language in these moments is evidence of something more strange: perhaps it is proof that how we talk about the world cannot contain it.

in 1985, elaine scarry published “the body in pain.” (this is basically a sacred text for me and you’ll see it referenced over and over again in this newsletter).

scarry wrote that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

when you’re in pain, you’re reduced to baby-like levels of communication: words are just sounds you cannot use. the only thing to do is cry or howl or—

and almost a decade later, in 1993, kathy acker took this idea of the nonverbal to the gym in her essay “against ordinary language: the language of the body.” Attempting to linguistically strap down her experiences as a bodybuilder, she declared that lifting weights was an exercise in “that which rejects language.”

by repeatedly lifting weights, she attempts to bust beyond language. and when she does, like bodybuilders today, she is seeking failure: “i always want to work my muscle, muscular group, until it can no longer move: i want to fail.”

failure—for those who don’t lift, bro—is when your body physically cannot move anymore. failure is total exertion.1 “bodybuilding can be seen to be about nothing but failure.” acker wrote.

or as someone in the comments of this video wrote: “the feeling of not having strenth and your muscles not pushing or pulling anymore, like you lose control over your body.”

i’m tempted to believe that what bodybuilders call “failure” and what scarry called “destruction” is not necessarily so. or at least, what is failing and being destroyed is not much more than a facade.

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pain—or “the feeling of not having strenth”—is one of those vibes that recalls st john or, well, me cumming. suddenly, in these moments, the ways in which we understand the world (control, description, words) are…just…gone.

but what if pain is not a failure of language but a success of something deeper? what if pain is proof that we are more than what we can translate about ourselves?

in his 2018 book “technic and magic,” philosopher federico campagna takes a slightly more cynical (albeit mystical and ultimately liberating) understanding of language.

unlike scarry and acker, he does not believe that language is what builds our worlds—or rather, if it constructs anything, it’s only a partial model. our understanding of reality is always built upon our limited human experiences, along with the norms and morals of our times.

if you’re at all like me and experience full-body shudders when someone wants to talk data, you’ll recognize campagna’s diagnosis of our current time as the “technic.”

the technic believes that all reality can be measured and described. within this framework, “language reveals itself as a method of production,” he writes. in other words: language is data that makes the world understandable.

so what do we do about the unmeasurable?

if scarry is correct that pain is what breaks language, then pain is where the technic’s claim to universality obviously (and spectacularly) fails. the moments when the tongue fails cannot be measured.

(sidenote: this is why i’m skeptical that bryan johnson [boasting about his gf’s pussy microbiome] is actually having good sex. honestly, i keep thinking about this. is it sick that i want to know my own microbiome? this is what the technic does to us, people!!!!!!)

ANYWAY

instead of relegating the non-linguistic to the realm of impossibility, campagna argues that that which breaks our measurements should be understood as existing in the realm of the “magic.”

he doesn’t mean magic as in fairies and gods and rituals with wands. magic is about the ineffable. “that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic classification,” as campagna defines it.

this is where pain comes back in. and failure. and cumming. all of these profound human experiences reveal how partial the “technic” really is. they become, in campagna’s thinking, a portal to magic.

these moments when you lose your tongue reveal that lived experience cannot be exhaustively translated—at least not without something real and fundamental being lost in translation.

it offers us an understanding of reality more real than our own.

when i remember st. johnny’s wisdom that everything but the unsayable is poor translation, my mind is flung back to the one semester i took a translation course during my masters program.

i did all my homework at the restaurant of the ace hotel in shoreditch. (i was going to therapy around the corner, and because i never wanted to go home immediately after crying for an hour, i would mosey over to the hotel restaurant and order, like, beef tartare and green tea. can’t tell ya why.)

i was, apparently, on the same shift as this french waiter. he had the typical, tragicomic face of the french—half on the verge of laughter, half on the verge of tears. and once i found out he was french, i felt all my luck shifting.

at the time, i was translating the work of Anne-France Dautheville (which still hasn’t been published in english, btw). when he would stop by my table, i’d read him particularly inscrutable sentences and ask “how would you translate that into english?”

after a few weeks, we became friends. he would stop by my table to yap—how hard it was to meet women, how politics was rotten, the general global rot of morality.

“that’s all you see on the internet anymore,” he once told me. “it’s just asses. everywhere you look: ass ass ass.” (he meant this in the physical sense: women with their cheeks dangling below or hanging above fabric.)

i laughed. the internet is a fun-house mirror. nobody realizes what they see there is just a warped reflection of their selves. “that’s not what i see when i log online,” i told him.

“bah, you are just in dee—nile,” he flicked out a hand, ever the frenchman.

in class, we learned there are multiple ways to translate—it’s less a math and more of an art. are you translating to bring french culture to anglophones or to place the speech in the context of its new language? do you hold to the idioms of original publication or allow small shifts to modern speech? translation is as much a philosophy as it is a practice; it is the conviction that meanings can be rebuilt with different tools.

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when i think about the french waiter now, i think about all the different levels of translation we were doing. yes, it was from french to english and back again. but i think we both also wanted to talk about magic—by which i mean the ineffable. how did we choose to translate that? what philosophies were we working with?

perhaps st johnny was right and all we have is translation; of course it’s always poor. but that’s not a failure—at least not in the way you might think.

language means we’ll always be reaching for something we will never quite get. but like acker told us about failure in bodybuilding: that’s the magic of it.

Hey! If you liked this, use your body to leave me a comment. Or: literally like it! Share it with anyone you know who has a body! I love knowing who’s on the other end of my words :)

P.S. Made you a playlist for the weekend. Listen by clicking the button below:

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I exist somewhere between the two:

catcalls (almost invariably) feel shitty, but if I go a month without one, the gates of hell have opened and its fires have consumed me alive.

I know, I know. I’m shallow.

But I hope you understand when I admit:

I feel best when I feel hot.

I do not know where this feeling came from, all I know is that when I feel hot, my body adheres most closely to, well, conventional and commercial hotness.

My limbs are fatless and my skin is clear; jaw is sharp and teeth are white. I have found that alignment with ideals is a serviceable substitute for self-possession.

I measured my self constantly.

And other people’s reactions confirmed or denied the image calculation in my head.

For years, that was my entire relationship to my body.

I stared at myself through digital lenses and measured my health stats. I knew more about how to get the crunchy cast out of my curls than how to manage my cramps with anything but hard drugs. I have looked at myself as an object.

I lived in my body.

But I didn't know it from the inside.

The female form is dizzy with cultural ideals—Mother Gaia, actual mother, trucker mud flap. Yet the real female body (soggy and sagging, craving and cycling, bloated and bleeding) remains almost taboo, in this, the year of our lord 2026.

I get yelled at for mentioning cramps at my parents’ dinner table.

Kristen Stewart got shit for saying that if you deny your own lived reality, “then you’re hiding your period blood and not coming well.”

Despite oh so many Dove commercials, we still romanticize the female form without living in its reality.

We are incentivized — by beauty culture, by capitalism, by the male gaze, by social media — to know our bodies as images. Surfaces that face outward.

And for those of us whose bodies have become unreliable terrain (through trauma, through chronic illness or pain), that outside-in orientation can become the only way that we know ourselves.

The result is totalizing. Our surface understanding displaces another kind of knowledge — the animal, interior, first-person experience of inhabiting a body.

And even the most radical women I know exist within this bind.

A few weeks ago, one of my best friends—an artist whose work is about her body—was sitting on my couch telling me she’d just learned to “work with her luteal phase.” Had I heard of it?

I laughed and nodded. During the pandemic, I had fallen into an obsession with cycles, taking online courses about the moon and my body. I would wake every morning to a Zoom meditation, learning about my shifting hormones and the earth’s seasons. (Big shout out Merilyn Keskula for this work.)

Strangely, when I began paying attention to the cycles around me, my own chaotic and ever-unruly body finally fell into a predictable rhythm.

My moods stopped feeling so random. Exhaustion wasn’t a personal failure. My body became less of a problem and more of a rhythm to live inside.

But I never told anyone.

I kept this revelation hidden for fear of being perceived as one of those women who had abandoned all logic and personal responsibility in order to blame everything on eclipses and Mars placements.

I should have analyzed that fear more closely. Unwittingly, I had internalized the belief that to learn about my body through the lens of nature was sickeningly, embarrassingly woo.

But—doesn’t the body emerge from nature? Isn’t it part of the natural world?

The reasons the female body has been made illegible to those who inhabit it have been adequately problematized, book-clubbed, and adapted into Hulu miniseries. Please don’t make me go over them again.

Suffice to say, I realized that this wasn’t just a me problem. I became obsessed with our cultural relationship to our bodies. My browser was always open to tabs like:

• that study about how a hoe never gets cold

• polls about how 84% of women don’t like their bodies (which obviously leads a person to considering the orgasm gap)

• botox literally makes you less able to feel your own emotions and to empathize with those of others

• while women are overwhelmingly more likely to experience body dysmorphia, 51% of severe body dysmorphia cases are men (enter: looksmaxxing)

Regardless of gender expression, age, or size, we are incentivized to think about our bodily surfaces more than our bodily experiences.

We prioritize how our body aligns with images more than how our body feels to inhabit.

But consider, also, that embodiment is one of the strongest indicators of life satisfaction.

Personally, I’m sick of living a disembodied life—which is why I’m rebranding this Substack as Body Count. This biweekly newsletter will document my attempts (however awkward and contradictory) at becoming more embodied.

Here, I will write about the experience of living in a body.

I do not write for body positivity—that limpdick commercial movement, which only affirmed that every body could be commodified. I write from the body as a site of resistance; I write to remember that I am alive and that this is where I am living.

Sure, my body is the site of my sickness and my pain, but it is also how I dance at parties and laugh with my friends; how I hug trees, eat oysters, and open to my lover.

In many ways, I write to remember that my body is my own.

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While my writing will be rooted in my own bodily experience (early-30s, white, cis woman), I hope it will act as an invitation for everyone seeking to become a bit more embodied—which, in an increasingly digital world, may very well be most of us.

I write with full acknowledgment that bodies are not treated equally.

That’s why I want to bring in other people’s bodies. In Body Count, I’ll also highlight artists and thinkers who have worked with embodiment (whether or not they called it that), and share new learning about the body, particularly the female one. (Much like the bottom of the ocean, our insides are a scientific mystery.)

As this Substack grows, I also hope to interview artists, writers, scientists, somatic therapists, dancers, doctors—anyone I can talk to about their experiences with, and the wisdom of, their bodies.

This moment feels exciting to me—and I hope to extend this thinking to every body in my (digital) life. I want to know more about your embodied experiences and what it feels like to be you.

So let me ask: what does your body count?

As the backstage manager of a fancy burlesque theatre in New York, Michael had just been gifted all these samples of Mienne products for the brand’s launch—but this serum, he was simply trying to get rid of. The instructions specifically said “not for internal use.”

Instead, the product seems designed, mainly, to look good: it’s chic black, undulating glass. And it’s heavier than you’d expect; the rounded cap feels like an onyx marble. When you hold it, you’re brought back into the material world——reminded that you have a body and that body interacts with objects. Your body feels things. And some things feel good.

But again: the Sex Serum is not meant to go anywhere where friction or glide matter.

This, I think, is the premise of the entire Mienne brand (and the fatal flaw of American sexuality): we consistently conflate desire with pleasure, believing the two basically interchangeable.

But perhaps we conflate the two because sometimes desiring…hurts so good.

I’ve never felt more desirous than when I’ve lived in a different country from a lover; always imagining the next time we’d meet. Despite what I would have protested at the time, this hopped-up desire was never really about the other person. (Nor was it even really about the sex.) It was pure desire itself—unthreatened by proximity or the expectation of action. Desire could always be delayed and orchestrated; reality never had to intrude. It would never be satiated, because the other person was never really there.

Lacan thought this was the nature of desire itself: we’re all doomed to want only that which is out of reach. But in the words of Esther Perel, “Desire is an expression of our free will. Nobody can force us to want.” If both of these observations are true, what does this say about our selfhood? Does that mean we are what we reach for?

We all know the feeling of wanting something—how the stomach leaps and the nerves hum. We equate wanting with vitality; to be ambitious, aroused, desirous is to feel alive. We think, “this lights me up, therefore it’s truly mine.”

But, I hate to inform you that mistaking sensation for truth is nothing more than a marketing psy-op.

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People much smarter than me have unpacked this at length. Lauren Berlant calls it cruel optimism; Eva Illouz says it’s emotional capitalism. Both theorists describe a world where feelings are not just private experiences but guides. If we’re sad, it’s time for a “self care” night. If we’re not horny, we should buy mushrooms or toys or...

Even feminism gets folded into this capitalist logic: to be visibly desiring is sold as liberation. Politics fade into self-expression.

This creates a terrible bind; to feel autonomous, you must exist in a state of absence. You become defined by what you lack rather than what you are. Personhood is always oriented toward a future, fantasy version of yourself that will exist once you finally have/become/achieve the thing.

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In this wasteland of choice, desire still seems like our truest compass. To want strongly is to be certain of where you’re going. But beneath each urge lies a quiet dread: what if our desires don’t bring us what we actually want?

Those of us who have spent our lives following the compass of desire have learned that it never points to anything real. You look back after a few years and find that you’ve just been going in circles. You just keep spinning.

Emily Nagoski (author of the omnipresent Come As You Are and Come Together) offers another direction. In her books, she rallies against what she calls “the desire imperative”—the myth that we’re supposed to measure the value of sex by our desire for it. (Good sex is the sex you crave.) She insists this thinking isn’t just broken, it’s counterproductive; we shouldn’t be measuring sex by how much we want it, rather how much we enjoy it. And though Nagoski proposes this shift as a relational tool, I wonder its implications for our wallets.

This fundamental model shift—from “wanting” to “enjoyment”—is basically a practice in mindfulness and ego-checking. (It’s Lyotard’s “radical mutation of desire,” which I wrote about a few months ago.) It’s prioritizing your embodied experience over your ego ideals.

But this shift can cause panic. In a world where we confuse desire for direction (“If I know what I want, I know where I’m going”), you will lose the ability to claim desire as certainty. In a world where feeling autonomous is to feel yourself wanting, contentment can be easily confused for passivity. If you’ve stopped choosing, you’ve stopped being alive. Satisfaction becomes a kind of death of the self.

But this loss isn’t reason for despair.

Prioritizing pleasure over desire often has the consequence of often stimulating more pleasure and deeper engagement. (When my boyfriend and I instated some of Nagoski’s thinking, we were back to early relationship sex. Let me tell you: it was hot.)

Nagoski’s proposition is radical because it offers permission to exist without reaching. It reclaims sensation from the market.

Pleasure—by which I mean real, embodied, present pleasure—doesn’t require you to strive for anything.

You can feel good about what’s happening now without it becoming evidence of your personhood…or your trajectory…or your authenticity.

You can just sit still and enjoy it.

In the five months that the Sex Serum has sat on my nightstand, I have used perhaps four squirts. From what I can tell, my experience with the product is not unique. The company’s Instagram hasn’t been updated in five months. The massage candle says I can pre-order for when they restock; the restocking date was three months ago.

I look at the black, wavy bottle on my nightstand. Despite how little I use it, I can’t bring myself to throw it away. I think I’m waiting for the day the Sex Serum bottle is empty so I can fill it with something else—something I might actually use for sex.

And I catch myself in the big ironic trap: despite all I’ve learned of pleasure, I’m still wanting. My mind is still reaching.

Perhaps we can’t ever completely rid ourselves of desire, but we can pay attention to the direction of our wanting. We can start reaching for what will actually touch us back.

It really is a very sexy bottle.

remember: every like matters :,)

“Don’t call me American—I’m a New Yorker,” reads a tote bag across the aisle on the subway. The canvas seems to me like a modern crucifix.

Although cities may be a contemporary church, it’s not exactly a “new” function for them. Cities have functioned as sites of transcendence and belonging for thousands of years. After all, people waxed poetic about Rome and Sodom; to be from these places meant something.

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However, for those of us who define ourselves by where we live (experiencing our awe and transcendence in crowds and public transit), our religion is slipping through our fingers even as we’re performing our rites.

As we cling to our metropolitan identities, our cities are being sanded into smooth, cosmopolitan sameness: farmer’s markets, bike-share programs, luxury minimalist condos. It seems the more cities collapse into an interchangeable median of “good taste,” the more fiercely their residents cling to a unique sense of urban identity.

Perhaps we cling so tightly to these myths precisely because reality is hollowing them out.

You may ask yourself: well…how did we get here?

Ancient World

Friends, Romans, Countrymen: our devotion to our towns runs deep.

In ancient Rome, the cobblestones were charged with divinity—what they called genius loci, or “the spirit of the place.” To live in the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an, it was believed, was to live at “the center of the world.” Even Mexico’s Teotihuacan (“the place where gods were born”) was a cosmological map, aligned with astronomical phenomena. In antiquity, cities weren’t just practical settlements—they were physical embodiments of myth. Your town was a shorthand for your beliefs, values, and experiences.

And then it all changed.

Now, I don’t want to blame it all on Christianity but…Christianity changed things. With the rise of a monotheistic and universalist religion, divinity was no longer tied to specific sites or cities. God was everywhere—at least in principle. Which led to a new problem for local clergy: how do you set your parish apart?

Enter: cathedrals.

From the ninth through fifteenth centuries, geographer Keith D Lilley argues, “urban landscapes were symbolic, and that mystical meanings of the city were constructed and conveyed through its form.”

The medieval city was a place where the material world met the cosmos. Medieval cities often centered (literally) around the church, whose walls allowed “the divine mysteries to be conveyed to an uncultured people,” per Thomas Aquinas. The clergy was, in a way, franchising transcendence—wrangling down a universal god into their own particular local form.

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Bizarrely, this problem of “universal vs. local divinity” was simultaneously articulating itself outside of Christian Europe. Around the same time, the Maya began developing a networked sacred geography: temples aligned with celestial cycles that extended beyond one city. In Asia, pilgrims journeyed to Bodh Gaya or Himalayan monasteries.

Locations were no longer holy in and of themselves; they were places where the veil was thin, so to speak. In certain places (and in certain places only), you could reach out and touch the divine. It was no longer genius loci but axis mundi. (This, I think, was the start of tourism.)

(Thanks, Christianity.)

Twenty to Twenty-One

Axis mundi (a physical point that connects heaven and earth) may seem to have disappeared. But in 1912, as the world was grappling with the sinking of the Titanic and the birth of the word “hello,” sociologist Émile Durkheim declared that “in spite of the diversity of forms which [rituals] have taken, [they] have the same objective significance and fulfill the same functions everywhere.”

In other words: axis mundi (and even genius loci, for that matter) has never disappeared; it’s just changed form. We haven’t exorcised the need for our locations to be divinely charged or to mean something about us. We just changed how.

Perhaps it became trends—what the people in London were listening to in the ‘60s, what spiritual wisdom you could find at an ashram in India. The presence of a place became less about divinity and more about what the people there did—or at least what you could buy from there.

And, like most psychic trends today, we can trace it back to Freud.

Freud used the term “identification” to explain how we form our sense of self by internalizing aspects of others. Freud meant this for other people—like parents, friends, or authority figures. But his nephew, Edward Bernays (called the “Father of Public Relations” extended the thinking: people could also identify themselves through brands. A car wasn’t just transport, it was masculinity or status. Soap wasn’t hygiene, it was purity or beauty.

Eventually, cities and nations themselves, too, became branded. The ideals were perpetuated in movies and books, then in travel marketing. New York was ambition; Paris symbolized a blend of past and present; LA played out fantasy. Each metropolis proposed a narrative—or at least a structure upon which you could hang your own experience.

Cities now function not just as places but as ego ideals. Just as Freud described soldiers identifying with a commander or Christians with Jesus, modern people identify with the spirit of their city. It’s not just where they live; it’s what they internalize.

Moving to a city means that you have the freedom to narrate your own life—as long as you forget that that narrative has been commercialized. To quote Durkheim again: “We are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.”

But is this really so different from the Romans fighting under the providence of Apollo? Isn’t this just modern genius loci?

Well, yes and no.

Whereas the place-based identification of yore brought people together in something approaching transcendence, the branding of a city today is less about shared values and community than what this says about me. You don’t worship the city; you use it as a function of your self. You never transcend the ego; you supersize it.

So…shit’s bleak?

Even as cities became brands in the late 20th century, they still felt singular. Tokyo was a place where ancient wisdom met modern innovation. Berlin invited you to fill in the black-outs: of both history and last night.

But walk through an airport duty-free zone, a hotel in Dubai, or any one of the new “urban malls” and you walk through the new “smooth city.” The term, coined by architecture critic René Boer, describes the bland taste overtaking cities around the world: minimalist aesthetics, shoppable via app experiences, and perfectly paved plazas. Most of this built environment is (by absolutely no coincidence) black and white.

“The fact that ‘urban’ no longer means raw, edgy and conflictual but smooth, perfect and happy can be seen as a landmark shift in urban history,” Boer wrote.

He continues:

While neoliberal urbanism is in essence a political project, it has paradoxically given rise to the post-political city, in which ‘the urban’ has increasingly become a commodity and urban politics are deliberately undermined in favor of technocratic-economic measures. Its inhabitants are treated as consumers rather than citizens, who also need to work increasingly efficiently, which fuels the demand for smooth, friction-free urban spaces.

Boer’s “neoliberal urbanism” is city management that prioritizes profit and private investment over pesky things like public services and affordable housing. So as a city begins to conceptualize itself as a commodity, residents follow.

And to bring back Eddie Bernays: when “the urban” becomes a commodity, it becomes a reflection of the self. We move to places for the branding—encouraged to define ourselves through city-myths that rarely match reality, clinging to narratives of difference as the world collapses into a median of smooth “good taste.”

As we consider the city-sized self, we should remember that in his book “The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism,” Byung Chul-Han critiqued the modern sense of self as something isolationist:

freedom consists in a pure inwardness that is in no way entangled with anything external or other. In this immersion in pure thinking, human beings are wholly with themselves, only relate to themselves, only touch themselves. Nothing external disturbs this self-referential contemplation.

The smooth city extends this delusion outward: a perpetual continuity where nothing interrupts our psychic sanctity.

Contemporary individual identity may be illusory (or at least market-based), but sameness erases something vital, too.

So..?

It’s likely we’ll always derive something about ourselves from where we live. But as I walk around these newly smoothed environments, I’ve been thinking about what we worship and why. Is divinity universal or particular? Both?

A few weeks ago, I was visiting The Well, Toronto’s new mall-cum-food-hall-cum-office-space-slash-luxury-condo-building. And I never quite knew if I was inside or out. The ceiling rises from the ground via a few white metal trunks, creating an undulating, glass canopy. (Very church-like.) Amidst the buzz of people, the space was almost solemn. Almost serene.

I stopped and drooled at the windows of Le Creuset; I bought an overpriced basil-scented deodorant at Sephora; I considered getting one of those permanent anklets soldered around my leg. A mall for people who hate malls but also kinda miss malls, I thought.

A security guard in a bulletproof vest patrolled the perimeter, where the outside world collapsed into The Well. It felt like nothing I had ever seen before—but more than that, it felt like something you could see anywhere.

Globalization is like Christianity in that it is shifting our understanding of place-based identity. Once again, we are moving from something local to something universal—though this time, we don’t praise god, but the market. Whereas cities once lost their divinity, they’re now losing their distinctiveness.

Chul-Han suggested that the self is an ever-shifting thing—not something that can be discovered but something that arises naturally from everyday experience. It is not a stable product conjured through self-reflection, shopping sprees or meditation retreats, but a process that emerges in how we interact with the world.

If we only interact with a smooth world, we risk losing our tolerance for friction. We risk our ability to look at the world in all its particular strangeness, and marvel at the bounty of experience: personalities, birds, types of hummus. Life is glorious in its breadth. And we can’t experience transcendence without difference.

After all, we dissolve into the crowd precisely because it is a mass of people who are decidedly Not Us.

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I glance up but keep walking. The night turns on as the men howl at the horizon, the moon, the rare woman alone here. The sky is hazy because of the wildfires in the woodlands across the border. The sun sets orange then pink then purple night. Another block down the road, another man asks out the window of his parked car: “You got a light?”

“Nah, sorry,” I shrug at him and keep walking.

Then I hear: “What about a man? You got a man?”

I tell you this not to tell you that I get hit on when I’m alone. (Okay, I tell you this only partially to tell you that I get hit on when I’m alone.) More importantly, I tell you this because in that moment, I realized that a solid 99% of the conversations I have with strangers are with men and they’re usually about my body or my boyfriend. None of these conversations do or mean anything real. This is probably my fault.

Not in a it’s how I’ve been dressed way. But in a I should probably talk to more strangers way. I used to. But lately, I’ve been shy.

In The End of the Tour, Jason Segel (as David Foster Wallace) says: "I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people."

And I think about that a lot when people tell me they have social anxiety.

I think DFW was saying that this self-absorption (branded as “being shy”) is an act of honoring your threatening conceptions over your curiosity about other people.

Being in the world with other sentient beings—with their thoughts and opinions—can be paralyzing. In an interdependent world, we are only as free as our conceptions of The Other. If their thoughts and opinions are matters of judgment and shame, we are trapped.

But I’ve got another interpretation: shyness exists because we’re hyperaware of how interactions can change us.

To brush real shoulders is to risk being broken open. To talk to a stranger is to meet the chance that the world (and your understanding of it) is not what you think it is.

****

After a few blocks, I make it to the bar and climb the stairs to the venue on the musty second floor. Up on the small stage, the guitar player is pure soul, toiling away on a neck, away from the eye of success. (It’s local music, after all.) But he’s really good. His hair is long and his guitar wails clean. The girls in the crowd reach one finger down and shift the crotch of their denim shorts. They sweat. It’s practically summer.

In the front of the audience is a girl with kitchen-scissor bangs. She dances electric in her long denim skirt, flinging herself against the air. Flailing is the bodily hope of finding something solid—desperation for something outside of the self, even if it’s only air.

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I watch her dance and start to feel envious. Ten years ago, I used to dance like that. I used to feel freed from what other people were doing or thinking.

Yet when she comes up to me at the end of the night with a flyer, she leaps away before I can even read what’s printed on it.

“What is this?” I ask after her. I want to talk to a stranger. But she’s already gone.

When I do manage to flag her down, she’s nervous. She tells me she’s in the floating circus, then runs away again. I should have remembered from my early 20s: flail-dancing is only play freedom. It’s asking for attention that doesn’t require interaction.

You toss your guitar into the kitchen when we get back home and I unpack the junk food we ordered at 3am. I unwrap the shitty taco and run through what I might say to you before we fall asleep.

I’m still trying to pre-empt what you want from me. I’m afraid that each time I reveal myself to be who I am—actually quite simple, actually quite afraid—I fail your fantasies, which means failing you.

That’s why the borderland of strangers calls to me—they don’t know me, so they don’t require anything of me. To them, I can seem brave and interesting and it’s easy to play dance-down-the-street joie de vivre for five minutes. I can’t do it for five years.

I know this is just self-absorption: honoring my threatening conceptions over my curiosity. You’ve never expressed anything but delight at getting to know me. You insist that the most rare thing between couples is actual, transparent authenticity.

And this insistence brings up the distinct possibility that through all the years and all the people I’ve known, I’ve only been pretending. Your daily presence makes me question if what I’ve been calling my personality was only performance. No one’s been close enough to tell the difference before. Not even me.

You make me fear that I am, after all this time, a stranger to myself.

You ask what’s on my mind and I go quiet.

Perhaps there’s another type of shyness. It’s when you’re so absorbed by other people that it makes it difficult to be with yourself.

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Quickly, I did. Elizabeth Gilbert seemed cool. Feminist, even. She wasn’t happy in her marriage, so she took action.

And wasn’t that the whole point of being a woman in the 21st century? Weren’t you supposed to be constantly exercising your autonomy? (After all, how do you know you’re free if you’re not continually testing your freedom?)

Although I didn’t consciously think much about the movie “Eat, Pray, Love” after watching it (I mean, I was a teenager and didn’t really see the appeal of Javier Bardem), it must have subconsciously impacted me. I quietly internalized the idea that the best thing you could do when you were unhappy was: run.

A few years later, off I ran.

First to New York City. Then to Paris. Then London. I ran into becoming a travel journalist, then I ran around the world—landing in random cities for three or four days (just long enough to convince myself I had two different lives: one at home and one…everywhere else.) I ran and I ran and I ran, convinced that one day I would run to the perfect place or the perfect stranger and finally, everything would make sense. I didn’t know where I was running to (that was the great mystery) but I was convinced that all I had to do was stay moving. One day, I’d eat transcendent pizza in Naples or scrub floors in India or meet some healer in Bali—then, suddenly, everything would make sense.

I should have paid attention to those words. You must make sense, you never find it.

Whenever I read Elizabeth Gilbert, I see me: disappointed in bedouin tents of Morocco because the secret to life wasn’t there; lonely in the south of France after spending an entire week without speaking my native tongue; lost in Mexico City, aghast at how the healers were hired by Hilton and the sweat lodges didn’t even get that hot because they didn’t want tourists to sue.

There are almost 20 years between when Gilbert set out to explore the world and when I did. When she was adventuring, the word “overtourism” hadn’t yet been coined. Corporate imperialism was still just emergent. You didn’t have a smartphone.

Gilbert, undoubtedly, was more immersed in foreign cultures than the typical American traveler today. But despite profound changes in the global landscape since Gilbert’s year of self-discovery, travelers still follow her model like gospel, believing that leisure, in the right light, can become self-improvement. In their minds, Gilbert wasn’t taking a year off to fuck around and find out; she was taking a year to figure out how to live.

***

And Gilbert did end up finding some profound insights. “Eat, Pray, Love” the book is filled with some stunning reflections. The movie, however, erased them. (As movies tend to.)

Take, for example, the famous scene at an ashram in India when Gilbert is talking about her heartbreak to a fellow American. The movie goes something like:

The man affirms that Gilbert is special. Only she has the wisdom to one day love the whole world.

However, in the book, the scene plays out very differently. The man’s speech transforms from a specific you and into a royal you…the sort of “you” that’s more about humanity itself. He says:

“Don’t you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that’s just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That’s just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that.”

In the book, the point is not that Gilbert has a special, exceptional capacity for love; it’s that every human being who opens their heart does.

However, that’s not the message the movie would have you believe. Movie Elizabeth Gilbert is A Protagonist—which means that she is special. I wonder if this is how Gilbert the person began to see herself after publication.

***

Travel and love are often linked. There’s the honeymoon, sure. But more prevalent in culture today is the newly single solo trip, perhaps popularized by Gilbert herself. We have been culturally primed to replace connection with adventure. (Think of all the trips you couldn’t take when you were with that ol’ ball-and-chain.)

But the link between restlessness and romance is deeper than simply planning a vacation. Writing about seduction in 2015 (almost a decade after her runaway bestseller), Gilbert said:

“I might indeed win the man eventually. But over time (and it wouldn't take long), his unquenchable infatuation for me would fade, as his attention returned to everyday matters. This always left me feeling abandoned and invisible; love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me.”

Love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me. This is the sort of sentence only spoken by restless souls. (Hungry ghosts, the Buddhists call them.) Gilbert’s persona has come to epitomize this insatiable wanting. An existential craving displaced in lust and wanderlust. It is, not so coincidentally, also the basic premise of addiction: however much you have is never enough. There’s always another drink, another man, another country.

About a year after publishing that essay on seduction, Gilbert revealed that she was in romantic partnership with a close female friend, Rayya Elias. Some thought this a shocking reveal of sexuality for a woman who had now publicly left three relationships with men. It wasn’t. Anyone who was really reading Gilbert would have found this development inevitable. (She lives to push her boundaries; naturally, sexuality would eventually make its way onto her list of “previously uncharted terrains.”)

The most Gilbert-y part of this development was that Rayya was dying of cancer. Gilbert had written at length about only desiring that which she cannot have. Her friend’s diagnosis would have been erotic catnip. Gilbert had—finally—found a love that could never be quenched because that love would always be threatened by imminent death.

I do not doubt the sincerity or depth of the love Gilbert experienced. (In fact, I would wager that it was, indeed, a profound experience.) It’s just that after years of pushing yourself and crossing boundaries, the true challenge may be not in what you’re willing to burn for your desires but rather what you’re willing to build and endure—despite your wanting.

It’s probably no surprise that Gilbert is now in SLAA recovery.

***

Whenever I write about Elizabeth Gilbert, of course I’m writing about myself. I am writing about what I used to think possible. I, too, went to SLAA meetings after being brought to my knees by my desires. I, too, thought external adventure could transform me.

As a travel journalist covering a daily news beat, I was often assigned stories about “the power of travel.” I was encouraged to say that when you travel, you break down the walls of ignorance through direct, first-person experience. We were branding travel as something the traveler didn’t do for themself but the world at large—using the backdrop of the first Trump administration and its cultural ignorance to enforce the idea that travelers were, somehow, different. Good. Wise.

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But as I traveled around the world and met people who had journeyed to hundreds of countries, I couldn’t find any of that purported wisdom. In fact, it seemed the further someone had ventured into the world, the more they had lost the plot. Fellow travel journalists wanted to tell me what they had seen—but more than that, they wanted to tell me where they were going next.

Carl Jung wrote about this phenomenon in “The Symbolic Life” published in 1957:

On my many travels I have found people who were on their third trip around the world — uninterruptedly. Just traveling, traveling; seeking, seeking. I met a woman in central Africa who had come up alone in a car from Cape Town and wanted to go to Cairo. “What for?” I asked. “What are you trying to do that for?” And I was amazed when I looked into her eyes—the eyes of a hunted, a cornered animal—seeking, seeking, always in the hope of something. I said, “What in the world are you seeking? What are you waiting for? What are you hunting after?”

Over a half-century later, travelers haven’t evolved beyond this “seeking, seeking.” It is a restlessness that mirrors addiction and aligns with Gilbert’s definition of love: any place that can make me stop traveling is not nearly enough.

***

Gilbert’s insatiability — by which you now know means my own — is perhaps unproblematic in and of itself. You could just consider it one individual’s psychological patterning. However, this hunger for experience is complicated by the moral twists now emerging in contemporary travel.

As more of the world becomes over-touristed and corporations use the language of tolerance to bludgeon traditional ways of life around the world, there’s a vague feeling that to travel now is an ethically complicated act. The Swedish have a word for the guilt of taking a flight (“smygflyga.”) There are think pieces about how “The White Lotus” exemplifies modern colonialism. Despite your spending abroad, money is still funneled back to our imperialist home countries. (The U.S. and China own over $3.4 trillion in international real estate assets, well over half of the Top 100 portfolio.)

So what’s a modern traveler to do?

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Certainly, movement imparts some lessons — we are exposed to new ways of eating, dressing, and living. If we never leave the confines of our culture, we never look at it (and ourselves) through different lenses.

But this is the crux of the problem: with the rise of corporate imperialism and a culture industry dominated by the U.S., Americans can go all around the world and never really leave their culture. The world can bend to their desires—or at least their customs, behaviors, and ethics—and they never really sacrifice anything more than a couple of weeks without an iced latte. Yet, thanks to a narrative popularized by Gilbert, travelers still believe that what they’re doing is somehow noble or bold or transformative. It is usually, in reality, nothing more than experiential consumption.

***

Gilbert was an addict whose experience we accepted as wisdom. We can no longer afford to follow (much less herald) this type of narrative. Otherwise, we’ll be caught in insatiable cycles that sacrifice not only our mental well-being but the environmental and sociological well-being of the planet.1

In the most recent interview I’ve been able to find with Gilbert, she appears to be still searching.

“I feel like my 50s are the decade I am giving myself as a gift. When I am in a relationship, I give my whole self. I’ve done that all my life and I don’t want to have that leakage any more. It’s like a hole in the boat; it all pours out of me and I can’t seem to stop. I want to pour into myself, my work and my friendships.”

It almost sounds wise. It almost sounds feminist. Decentralized forms of care sound like growth for Lizzy! However, this idea of finally doing what she wants is the exact same way that Gilbert described going off for her year of “Eat, Pray, Love.” In 2006, she wrote:

“I was actually feeling kind of delighted about all the compartments of time and space that were appearing in my days, during which I could ask myself the radical new question: ‘What do you want to do, Liz?’”

Based on the fact that she appears to be asking herself the exact same question 20 years later, I wonder both how radical that question actually was and perhaps more deeply: what do we get when we follow our desires?

I’m asking that sincerely. I’m asking you.

I don’t know the answer. But there’s this line from “The Inner Light” that constantly jangles around my brain:

the farther one travels, the less one knows / the less one really knows

Refer a friend

A few years ago in early June—although the heat made it feel more like early apocalypse—I woke sweating as sunlight poured through my gauzy, tattered curtains. I was living in an apartment in Brooklyn without much furniture (so certainly without any air conditioning). Already, I was miserable. I rolled over, groggy and groaning, to turn off the alarm on my phone and tap open my emails, as I did every morning. 

With eyes half-closed, my muscle memory scrolled my inbox. Almost right past the email from my editor with the subject line: “TODAY.” 

I sat up and wiped sweat from the back of my neck. She never sent me emails first thing in the morning.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the news,” it started. “Could you write something up? Will publish ASAP.” 

I had no idea what she was talking about, so I searched online for what it could be.

Until, eventually, the headline found me: Anthony Bourdain dead. Apparent suicide. 

How? Just a few weeks earlier, we’d sat together in a dark restaurant uptown.

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What I needed was a smoke, I decided. So I took my laptop and went to the patio of the coffee shop on my corner. I sat, sweating and chain-smoking Marlboro Reds and tapping out a quick essay I hoped would convey something, anything about what Bourdain had meant to me and millions of others. 

I kept a lit cigarette tucked between my lips as I typed so if anyone saw me, I could say that I wasn’t crying; my eyes were just filling with smoke. 

***

After I filed the story, I returned to my apartment. As soon as the door shut behind me, I collapsed onto the floor in tears. My roommate came out of her room and rushed over to hug me. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Bourdain,” I sputtered—well aware that I shouldn’t be sobbing over a man I had only spoken to twice.

She put her arm around me, puzzled. Throughout our friendship, I’d had the reputation of being the stoic one. “It’s always so confusing when people do something like that,” she said, trying her best to console me.

“I’m not crying because I’m confused,” I straightened and wiped away tears with the heels of my hands. “I’m crying because I understand it. I understand it completely. And I’m scared.”

It was the truth. A few months before—with my head over a toilet in Morocco after eating unwashed fruit—I had come up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.

With Bourdain’s suicide, the reality of this plan finally hit me.

*****

When people asked how I became a travel writer, I’d usually smile and shrug with something like, “Oh, I just kinda fell into it.” But the real answer was: I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain.

Watching his show, “No Reservations,” as a teenager, I was instantly enamored. He was cool. And smart. And funny. He knew about books. And movies. And music. He was a rock star in a foreign correspondent’s body—or was it a foreign correspondent in a rock star’s body? After watching him, I knew exactly the type of adult I wanted to be: one who, like Anthony Bourdain, wasn’t like other adults. I wanted to swear like Bourdain. I wanted to live like him. And fucking Christ, did I.

Within a few years of graduating college, I was traveling to places like Vietnam, Paris, Mexico City. I was eating Michelin-starred meals—three stars!—and writing about them. Not only that, I was getting paid for that writing.

When Bourdain died, I was 24 years old. I had traveled to Montreal, Morocco, and Puerto Rico—and that was all within a month. It was the unhappiest I had ever been.

Though I was getting sent on trips around the world, my personal life looked quite different. All my money seemed to disappear in nights out. I woke up most mornings hungover. I couldn’t afford an AC unit for my bedroom.

Now, more than five years after Anthony Bourdain’s death, we’re still talking about him. On the internet, this meme keeps popping up:

Girls don’t miss their ex, they miss Anthony Bourdain. 

Friends keep sending it to me and I cringe every time I see it.

Is it true that I miss Anthony Bourdain? 

***

For years after his death, I received emails from people who didn’t know how to use the internet. “LEAVE HIS FAMILY ALONE!!!!!!” they all said. 

Thanks to the algorithm or whatever, these people had only just discovered the articles I had written on Bourdain when he was still alive. 

The website I wrote for commissioned me to write at least one Bourdain article per month. They published these quick-hit articles because people always clicked on Bourdain headlines. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know what he had to say—about Trump, about airport security, about cocktails. So I was often assigned stories like: write about what Bourdain said in this interview, write about what he tweeted, write about what he wore on vacation or who he got drinks with or…

The sorts of articles that would seem distasteful after a man died seemed like a normal part of the news cycle when he was alive. 

After enough of these articles, I’d become the website’s resident Bourdain reporter. And when his PR saw enough of these articles, they offered me an interview with Bourdain. 

It was over the phone while he was in West Virginia. I was shaking at my kitchen table as I dialed the number his publicist had emailed me. When the hotel’s front desk picked up, I collected myself and repeated the room number I’d been given. They patched me through. 

“Hello?” a deep voice answered. 

“Is this Anthony Bourdain!?” I practically shouted. 

“Yes..?” he answered tentatively. God, I wished I’d made a cooler entry.  My voice was so bubbly and unserious. He sounded tired. He stopped to pour himself coffee. 

Eventually, we settled into the interview. My editor had given me a list of questions to ask—packing tips, his favorite foods, favorite vacations. She knew the sorts of things that people wanted to read about. Bourdain answered politely and comically but half-heartedly. As if he were a musician on a reunion tour, playing the Greatest Hits he’d long since stopped caring about. 

I asked him about West Virginia. What was it like there? His voice changed. It became both more thoughtful and more animated. He told me that he’d sat down with war criminals around the world and shared meals with people he vehemently disagreed with. Why couldn’t he do the same at home? He was learning the complexity of West Virginians—despite their reputation as the land of “Trump, guns, and football.” He told me about their long-standing (and justified) distrust of the government. He told me how he understood America better by being there. 

After about a half hour, I hung up the phone, convinced that whoever said “don’t meet your heroes” must have had some shitty heroes. 

*****

Lots of people loved Anthony Bourdain but I think his most ardent fans were fellow addicts. Bourdain wrote openly about his heroin use and his early debauchery. He often said he was stunned he was still alive. 

At that point, I’d been suicidal—on and off—for years. The sort of suicidal that masked as a hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle. People who only saw me at night would call me things like “free-spirited.” But it’s easy to be free-spirited when you don’t care if you live or if you die. I went to clubs on a mission to erase my mind. I would go anywhere with anyone because I didn’t care if I made it back home. (Somehow, luckily, I always did.)

When I was on the road, this lifestyle manifested as “Bourdain style.” That meant, namely, binge-drinking on press trips but it also meant getting on the backs of strangers’ motorcycles in foreign countries and walking deep into medinas alone, hoping I’d find some Burroughs shit. (All I got was lost.)

Bourdain burned bright—which encouraged me to burn brighter. What I didn’t know was that a burning person must always be burning something. Every fire needs some fuel.

***

Tourism is a lot like addiction—it works until it doesn’t. Addicts rely on their substance of choice until, eventually, their lives become untenable. Growing cities rely on tourism until, eventually, they become overtouristed. 

As I visited places I’d visited before, I saw how they were changing. The streets were more crowded. Residents were being pushed out for Airbnbs. Delis had become trinket shops. 

There’s a phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome” that aims to explain how environments change—and why people often don’t realize how drastic the changes have become. We understand a location based on how we first saw it, not realizing that Manhattan used to be a forest. Each generation redefines what is “natural.” We forget that before places were tourist attractions, they were just places. 

That’s how the rhetoric of “everyone should visit Venice at least once” was turning Venice into more of a tourist attraction than a city. Machu Picchu was literally crumbling from foot traffic. 

Something inside me was crumbling, too. While fighting off thoughts about wrapping my lips around the barrel of a gun, I couldn’t seem to work up enthusiasm for anything. That great bowl of pho near Washington Square Park? I’d had better in Hanoi. The view from my acquaintance's apartment? Meh. I’d seen more impressive in Dubai. I was learning that a life of adventure doesn’t bring happiness—it simply tests your sense of wonder. 

I began to think that shifting baseline effect might work for addicts, too. When we meet a person in the throes of active addiction, we consider it their personality instead of a coping mechanism. We don’t think about the thing fueling their fire—or the maladaptive patterns that are handed off like some great generational relay race. 

I used to ask myself: was I drawn to Bourdain because I wanted to party my way through depression or did I party my way through depression because I had seen Bourdain? If I ever figured out the answer to this question, I’m not sure that it would have done me any good.

I kept traveling after he died because the only responses to life I knew were: fight, flight, or get fucked up—and I knew which option was the most fun. 

Perhaps girls don’t miss Anthony Bourdain. They miss how they once dealt with their pain. 

*****

Less than two months before he died, I waited for Bourdain at a German restaurant on the Upper West Side. On the subway ride over, I listened to guided meditations trying to calm myself down. I was electric with excitement.

I arrived before him, which was rare, his publicist told me. “Tony is almost always early,” she said. I sat in the dark and empty restaurant when the heavy, wooden door swung open and a large man—6’4”—strode in. I had never seen anybody actually walk into a room like a cowboy. He said, “Hello,” in a voice so deep and gravelly, it was almost cartoon. He talked to his publicist and other members of his team, then settled into the booth across from me. 

He was kind, albeit distracted and uncomfortable. But that was fair. He was at the restaurant to film—he had work to do that day—and I think the only people who are fully comfortable with journalists are almost always narcissists.  

I had decided I would ask him all the questions I wanted to ask last time. I wanted to know how this man thought, not what he packed for a weekend trip. With my phone recording, I asked how he picked the music for his show. I asked about his film influences. I asked about politics. He came most alive when he was talking about other people’s work—Wong Kar-Wai, Bernardo Bertolucci, Christopher Doyle—but it was talking about music that really seemed to animate him. I nodded along—knowing his references mainly because he’d written or talked about them in episodes, articles, or on Twitter. 

“Finally!” he smacked his palms against the wooden table. “Someone who gets it!” 

If it were possible to frame one moment of your life and keep it forever, this is the one I’d pick: to be branded by my teenage hero as “someone who gets it.” At the time, I interpreted this as the pinnacle of my life. (My hero approved of me!) It didn’t enter my mind that perhaps what he approved was the way I had followed his path. 

We wrapped up the interview and he smiled and shook my hand. He said he was looking forward to reading my piece. I was still dazed when his publicist came up and said Tony seemed to like me. Would I want to spend a day on set sometime soon? 

*****

There are many different episodes of “Parts Unknown” people point to as their favorites. The one where he eats pho with Barack Obama in Hanoi. The one where he has to flee Lebanon as war breaks out. 

Personally, I always return to the Miami episode when he gets lunch with Iggy Pop, aired just three years before Bourdain died. 

Iggy Pop was his hero. In an interview about the episode, Bourdain says of Iggy: “His music was incredibly important to me from early on. Responsible for—in many ways—many of the things that went wrong in my life.”

But when he gets to Miami, Bourdain finds a healthy Pop. At lunch, they share one glass of white wine each. Iggy orders the shrimp. 

You get the sense that Bourdain has come to this interview as a pilgrim comes to their guru on top of a mountain. The duo sits near a window with Venetian blinds. The sun is shining. 

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“As far as looking after my health,” Bourdain starts, grinning, “your music early on was a negative example.” 

“I hear you,” Iggy Pop looks down and smiles. 

“And looking at my own life and career, I’m pretty much known for traveling around the world and recklessly drinking and eating to excess.” He’s incredibly animated as he speaks. “What does it say about us that we are now sitting in a healthy restaurant—I just came from the gym—and we’re in Florida?” 

Iggy Pop takes a minute to answer, like he’s been searching himself with this same question. But he’s not tortured about it. His eyes are clear and blue and he looks directly at Bourdain. 

“Listen, if you just flame out, you’re in such voluminous and undistinguished company. And then all your works will flame out quicker with you.” 

Eerily, the YouTube clip of this interview freezes at this moment. You never see Bourdain’s reaction to his hero’s proclamation. 

But if you keep watching the episode, there are a few clues about how Bourdain may have felt. 

“You’re the template for the rockstar,” Bourdain continues. “Other rock stars look to you to figure out ‘How should I behave?’ [...] Given that, what thrills you?” 

“The nicest stuff right now, it’s really embarrassing,” Iggy replies, smiling and serene. “It’s being loved and actually appreciating the people that are giving that to me.” 

And is it just me—or does Bourdain’s face fall? 

*****

Bourdain’s death didn’t make me leave travel journalism. The pandemic did. But I can’t help but think of the death of my hero as the beginning of the end for me. If this man couldn’t find meaning in what he was doing—if he couldn’t outrun his demons in Hong Kong or France or Buenos Aires—what chance did I have? 

A few months after his death, I started going to therapy. I stopped binge drinking. When the pandemic hit, I stopped traveling. Then the work stopped coming in. During that time, I transitioned to writing about other things. Staying at home and editing. Taking long walks. Becoming excited about the people in my life and how they loved me. 

I do not hold Bourdain responsible for the culture he inherited. I do not blame the man for decades (hell, centuries) of a culture that repeated—sincerely, and with conviction—that it was better to burn out than to fade away. 

Bourdain was just a single point in the constellation of pained people—and you can’t blame the North Star for shining brightest for you. 

Still, I often find myself wondering what would happen if we could talk again. I would ask how it felt to meet his hero. I would ask the same questions he asked Iggy Pop—given that you’re the template for the rockstar, what thrills you? I wonder how he would respond. I wonder if my face would fall.

Using carrots as a (very subtle) visual metaphor for dicks, the commercial explained how this medicine could reduce bend “by up to ten percent.” 

It was a product to correct something called Peyronie’s Disease—a condition that can be, apparently, quite painful. But that wasn’t the main pitch. 

The commercial didn’t focus on pain; it highlighted the embarrassment of sporting a curved erection. 

There were—as always with any medicine advertised on American TV—certain caveats: penile fracture (casual!), anaphylaxis, and a mandatory month-long celibacy period after each injection (of which there could be four). 

“Who would do that?” B asked, incredulous. “No sex for a month just to straighten a dick by 10 degrees?” 

“I think it’s for insecure people,” I said, suddenly realizing how widely beauty culture has permeated society. Now the market is also encouraging men to mortgage their present realities for future aesthetics. 

***

Being inundated by marketing of physical perfection causes a host of mental health problems. (So much so that the National Institute of Health has named “body image” a global mental health concern.) And although men are newer to having their models photoshopped to oblivion, I think they understand this. 

Because the moment I begin to talk about body image, every dude I’ve ever dated has been quick to assure me I’m beautiful. Too quick, to be honest. (Is this a learned behavior from exes who consistently communicated this anxiety?) 

But these sorts of speeches never do much. I don’t want to be reassured that I’m beautiful—I want women to never have to internalize their reality as some ideological aesthetic failing. The great misstep of contemporary American feminism is to confuse support for liberation. I don’t need to be told what a boss ass bitch I am; I need to be told how to undo the shackles that keep me feeling like shit. (And to learn how to help other women do the same.) 

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Because I log online and I see that girl I met at that wedding last year and the face she posts looks nothing like the face I know. I hang out with friends and watch them stare at their warped reflections on screens, tilting their heads to find their angles. And then, suddenly, it’s no longer just the women in my life playing with filters. I turn on the TV and see men feeling bad about their bent dicks. 

I want to stand up and scream: the problem isn’t our realities—it’s how we measure them against some pernicious ideal and find ourselves lacking. 

***

The more I thought about it, the more ignorant it seemed to believe the pursuit of physical perfection was ever solely a feminine game. 

Just think about body builders. Fitness influencers and Hollywood actors. And even back in Ancient Greece, “Aristocrats portrayed themselves as beautiful to assert their supremacy as a ruling class deserving of power, as their moral righteousness was so clearly indicated by superior aesthetics,” Alexandra Kauffman wrote in The Emory Wheel. 

Beauty has always been a form of power—but we see it as gendered because until recently, it was one of the only forms of interpersonal power broadly accessible to women. (That’s not the same thing as women being the only ones who play its game.) However, as women gain access to different sources of power, beauty culture is disseminating. The game is becoming playable for different socioeconomic brackets and genders. Despite (or perhaps because of) my frequent trips to Sephora, I have my doubts this is for the best. 

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I once had a friend who believed in cosmetic communism (those of you who grew up with “Uglies” may recognize this philosophy). She acknowledged that beautiful people were given advantages in life. And, in order to counteract pretty privilege, she believed that when people turned 18, they should be provided free cosmetic surgery. If we were all beautful, she reasoned, not only would the world be a lot more fun to look at, people would have more opportunities to succeed. We would have more equality. 

It’s almost a worthwhile philosophy—and it makes sense on some level. (After all, we control and manipulate most parts of our experience now. Why not our physicality?) But the surgical pursuit of beauty has always left me feeling strange. 

Somewhere over the last few years, the beauty industry deftly (almost invisibly) co-opted the language of feminism. Then EmRata and Madonna and many more famous women were arguing that their plastic surgeries were a feminist act: if their operations helped them feel better and succeed in the marketplace, how very UNfeminist it would be to critique this action. 

If feminism is working towards the liberation of women, is it not regressive to hamper a woman’s choice of what to do with her own body? Is criticism of that choice not limiting her liberation? 

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If you were to ask me those questions, I’d say that you’re using a libertarian (and rather American) understanding of freedom—the freedom to do as one wishes. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin would have called this “negative liberty.” 

This is the freedom from—when no barriers sit in the way of whatever you want to do. It is the first step of establishing one’s freedom. And a necessary one. 

But, realistically, most women who have the money for aesthetic surgery are generally beyond the first stirrings of freedom. It would be much more interesting for them to establish “positive liberty”— to ask what they are now free to do and to consider the consequences of those actions. 

*****

On her Substack, Catherine Lacey recently wrote about the increasing prevalance of Botox—and what happens as more people opt in to the procedure. With each injection, she wrote, we “forget what a face of any age looks like without drastic intervention.”  And she called this an “absence of reality.” Although I get what she means, I think the more precise term may be an absence of the ordinary. (The unnatural is, after all, still real.)  

But she is onto something: beauty culture privileges the ideal over the reality. It’s a rearticulation of Grecian neoclassical morals: symmetry and eternal perfection. It is, at its core, an idealistic and perpetually dissatisfied understanding of humanity. (And we wonder why the pursuit of beauty is enough to drive people to suicide?)  

But on the other side of the planet, there’s wabi sabi. 

The Japanese Zen aesthetic philosophy of wabi sabi is an insistence that the brokenness and natural processes of life are what make it beautiful. In order for something to be perfect, it must also embody imperfection. 

This means a glorification of stretch marks and weak jaws and one eyelid that is slightly wider than the other. This isn’t the sort of weak-ass Dove commercial “We’re all beautiful enough to be consumers now!” brand of inclusivity. This is a rejection of idealism in favor of unaltered, imperfect reality. And you don’t need to buy anything in order to partake. 

Wabi sabi as a feminist philosophy has the potential to liberate us from the withering glances of social aesthetic Botox conformity—but perhaps more importantly, it can free us from the shame of our own minds. 

***

You would be well within your rights to begin wondering what wabi sabi feminism has to do with bent dicks. (After all, feminism tends not to talk about dicks unless as enemy.) 

If you’re wondering this, please allow me a bit of a digression that, I hope, will tie this all together. 

In her masterpiece “The Chalice and The Blade,” Riane Eisler writes of two different power structures: androcracy (patriarchy) and gylany (matriarchy). According to Eisler, gylany is not what you might think. In this matriarchal power structure, women do not rule over men. In systems where lineage is traced through the mother, everyone has their own role to play. Society follows a “partnership” model that honors life, birth and flourishing rather than violence, death, and suffering. Power, in this case, is not “dominion over,” rather “responsibility for.” 

It reminds me of a philosophy that underpinned the Mexican Zapatista movement. 

Leader Subcomandante Marcos (now Galeano) proclaimed in 2001 that he wanted to be a rebel, not a revolutionary: 

“The revolutionary says to himself: I’m taking power and from on high I’m transforming the world. The social rebel acts differently. He organises the masses and, starting from below, gradually transforms things without asking himself the question of taking power.” 

Eisler and Marcos both noted the failings of contemporary power structures. To fight power with more power is to stay stuck in the same system. (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”) 

Which is why I’d like to combine wabi sabi aesthetics with the Zapatista view of rebels. I don’t want to frame this as a revolution against beauty culture. We don’t need to take back power from the advertisers and companies and sponsored TikTok plastic surgerons. That method will only ensure that we’ll become warped with power one day, too. 

But we can use wabi sabi to liberate ourselves from the corrosive gaze of beauty culture. If we’re able to tear out its roots from our own lives, that impact could go much, much further than we imagine. 

This is not to say that women are responsible for male body image but to acknowledge the interdependence of human reality. What happens to one of us impacts us all, even across gender lines. 

The bent dick commercial was a wake-up call—a realization that gender issues do not happen in a vaccuum. What happens to one gender, inevitably, impacts the others. Women were the canary in the beauty capital coal mine. And, sure, we don’t owe it to men to adapt this zapatista wabi sabi thinking. But I do believe we owe it to ourselves. (Plus: do you want to spend the rest of your life reassuring your man he doesn’t need dick injections?) 

***

My friend who believed in cosmetic communism also imagined a future wherein men would understand the anxiety of living under the beauty gaze. They would look at their bodies and, like most women, find themselves lacking. She couldn’t imagine a world without neoclassical beauty not also including anxiety. 

In Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right to Sex,” she writes that a feminism worth having must be better than what came before. It requires that women in power be better than the men before them. She writes:

I am not saying that feminism has no business asking better of men—indeed, asking them to be better men. But a feminism worth having must find ways of doing so that avoid rote reenactment of the old form of crime and punishment, with its fleeting satisfactions and predictable costs. I am saying that a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better—not just fairer, but more imaginative—than men have been. 

Yes, it would be wonderful justice to see men riddled with bodily insecurities. (Ugh, wouldn’t it feel great to hear a man fret about the size of his thighs and share salad recipes?) But I remain skeptical on what justice ever solved. 

I want a wabi sabi zapatista feminism—one that doesn’t aim to take power but to imagine a new world. The future that I want to create is not one where we constantly reassure men that they’re handsome—it’s one where we show them how to live without an eye on the models. It’s one where we don’t let advertising and movies and magazines impact our relationship with our own bodies. Sustainable power can never be taken; it can only be built. 

The movement also requires participation from men. (Look around and see the links between Jordan Peterson and marketing of boner pills, please!) It requires us to lay down the shackles of gender and remember that our enemy is not people of a different gender but the system that made us shape and understand ourselves along gender divides. 

In the face of beauty culture’s growing scope, if we have any pressing duty as wabi sabi zapatista feminists, it is to embody and teach what Fabliha wrote in her Substack diary: 

“To be ugly is to be powerless from the systems placed against us, but to be beautiful is to be rooted in colorism, fatphobia, antiblackness, and colonization [...] To be ugly is to be exhilarating.” 

There’s a power in being ugly because there is real power in liberation. Sustainable change comes from forgoing power structures—not railing against them. And so I dream of a future of ugly rebels. 

I hope that makes us proud.

xxC

You could only enter the metal cage if you were beneath a certain weight and height. I stared out at my parents and my older brother, who gave small smiles and waves. The museum employees left the cage and locked the door behind them. And I stood there with my styrofoam arms held out, waiting for something to happen. 

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Beneath the floor, the giant blades of a giant fan began to whirl. Winds rose from below and started swirling around me, teasing the styrofoam wings and gently pulling up my arms. Until the rest of my body followed and my feet were a few inches above the ground. Then — it’s one of those memories so surreal that I’ve doubted its possibility — I saw the top of my father’s head.

At first, it was glorious. I was flying! Growing taller, higher. Then I felt the air beneath me. I kicked my feet and there was nothing there. Nothing but air. And everyone on the ground was looking up at me, smiling and laughing. And I was flying and it was a miracle but my body began to tighten. My chest constricted and my throat was next.

The ground was so far away.

A witchy lady once told me that fear is what emerges when we desire something deeply but haven’t built up the capacity to receive it. Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt therapy) once called fear “excitement without the breath.” This sort of rhetoric often emerges when you look into the science or guidance on how to handle fear: just lean in. 

These interpretations of fear encourage us to Brené Brown our way through it. There’s an utter Americanism to this: fear is something we must push through, some obstacle on the road to our inevitable success. 

But what about fear that emerges after success?

In “The Shock of Victory,” David Graeber wrote: “We are never prepared for victory. It throws us into confusion. We start fighting each other.” Sure, he was talking about politics, but I think the same might be true of, well, everything. 

Lately, I’ve been googling shit like “how to tell if someone is genuinely kind” and “love bombing or just being nice” and “trauma boyfriend??????” 

I once prided myself on my ability to read people—but these last few weeks, I’ve been doubting my reads. “Can someone really be this good?” I keep thinking. Which, if you read subtext, you’d translate as: someone this good couldn’t possibly like me. There must be something wrong. 

Tangled together on the couch, B says he’s thinking of that Neutral Milk Hotel line. I don’t have to ask which one because I already know, but I ask anyway. And reality confirms my mind when he says, “How strange it is to be anything at all.”

And so I told B not to talk to me until I figured out my shit. 

There’s this poem by Jack Gilbert that starts with the line: 

“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.”

It’s the only advice I’m willing to take and it’s not really advice at all. More of an observation. 

At the base of every emotion now, there’s a note of grief. I know that next month, I could be sulking and licking my wounds — even, perhaps especially, if everybody involved is good. 

Nothing makes me cry more than the moments when I feel the gaze of grace upon me. I think, if I was Icarus — up there so close to the sun — I’d freak out. I’d feel my feet kick at nothing but air and, knowing full well that the wax would melt, I’d soar even higher to speed up the fall. 

Throughout my life, I’ve often been told who and how I am. It was so dark for so long—then the second I gave up the dream, it emerged. Although B tells me how I am, the proclamations don’t feel facade-deep. He not only sees me but keeps looking. Where others would be convinced that they understand, he knows—quietly and deeply—that there’s more. He tells me to take my time, we don’t need to talk every day if it scares me. That little bit of understanding makes me rush back to him and then he’s sending the menu for the weekend and I’m praying that the storm traps us inside together for days. 

Perhaps Icarus just wasn’t prepared for victory. 

About twelve years ago, when life was more potential than kinetic, I used to listen to that song by The Gossip on repeat. STANDING IN THE WAY OF CONTROL. 

I never really knew what those six words meant. But I think I’ve learned or I think I’m learning. 

I think Beth Ditto was singing about what happens when you—to some degree or another—throw everything in the air and maybe some pieces fly and others fall. Who’s to say? When you relinquish control, you receive something beyond your imagination. 

Lately, it feels like I’ve strapped styrofoam wings to my arms and someone has turned on the floor fan. I can’t remember how to get down from this great height. Do I fly too close to the top of the metal cage? Do I crash back down to the ground? 

I recognize each moment as improbable now. It was stupid to let fear make me run. And as I’m curled against his chest, he’s thinking about how many things had to happen for us to be there: his chest against my curl.

So now I’m thinking about it, too. Not just the improbabilities of our own small lives—the opportunities we didn’t chase though we never quite knew why, the canceled invitations, the gut-punch of intuition—but the improbable webs that made and surround us. Friends, parents, ephemeral lovers. 

When I look into his face, his open face, I realize how closed I still am. “I thought I had already worked through all of my shit,” I tell him. How deeply I want to open for him. How badly I want to stop searching for the floor as I fly. 

But I’m starting to believe there’s grace in surrender. I believe reality is more interesting than our imagined futures. I believe life can be good—but more than that, I believe that I can let it be. 

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

I wasn’t a kid who dreamed of becoming an author. I don’t believe in the “power of language.” (Whatever that means.) I don’t even really believe in the power of stories, to be perfectly and cynically frank. I just did well in English classes and now, I guess, I’m here. 

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I started thinking about this over the summer, when I got lunch with a friend who’s also a writer. (And a good one, I should add.) At the end of the meal, she leaned her chin onto her palm and sighed: how lucky we were to get to do what we loved. I found myself having a difficult time agreeing. 

I don’t love writing. 

I love my family and my friends. I love the sunshine and Roy Ayers. I love oysters and sex and silk sheets. I don’t love sitting at my computer and bashing my mind against a keyboard for hours on end. 

And, to be honest, I’m highly suspicious of anyone whose idea of a good time is sitting at a desk for entire days, not seeing anyone, and muttering to themselves about rules of syntax, flow, and clarity. 

While others seem to wake up chomping at blank pages, I don’t really relish this thing that I do every day. But I don’t think that I should have to. 

As I was thinking about my spiny reaction to all this “I write because I love it!” chat, a friend sent me a clip from a documentary on Doug Aitken. 

 In the clip, Aitken said: 

“This idea that we’ve been living, for the last several decades, in a world which is accelerating faster and faster…that has brought us to a place where we really desire the tactile,” he says, and further explains that he wants his work to “amplify the experience of the real.” 

The “experience of the real” is, for me, impossible to touch when I’m holed up in a Word Doc. 

The reality of that moment is being alone in a room, hunched over a computer and throwing characters into white space. What is the physical difference between that and being an accountant or an analyst or a hacker? While we may all do different things on our screens, the embodied nature of our jobs is essentially the same. One could argue that the product is what sets these jobs apart—but I’m slightly more cynical about human nature.

When I was 19, I spent the summer in the kitchen of a retirement home in the countryside, working with a Korean War vet named Bob. Each day, when I arrived, Bob would have a sandwich ready for me. Usually a Cuban. We would go out back and sit on turned-over milk crates and I’d eat the sandwich and Bob would hand me a cigarette. We’d smoke and stare out at corn fields and he would tell me about the aches in his body, his days as a cook in the army. Then we’d go back in the kitchen and start working. There were parts of this job that I absolutely loved. Smoking on milk crates with Bob was one of them. The other was the physical act of washing dishes. 

I genuinely loved it. The unthinking, mechanical scrubbing and rinsing. I loved when exhaustion turned my body to machine. The satisfaction of dirty plates coming out clean. 

I felt better at the end of one of those shifts than I’ve ever felt at the end of a day of writing. (And to be clear: by writing, I don’t mean journaling. I mean shaping a story or article or essay—writing with the intent of being read, which is an entirely different thing than writing with the intent to clear your mind.) 

But I know that I’m not supposed to be a dishwasher forever. (People would call that “a waste,” like talent is a resource that can spoil.) And although I didn’t dislike the work, I disliked the job. The way the boss treated me, the way other people reacted when I said it was what I was doing that summer. The labor was physically satisfying. The social context, however, made it unbearable. 

And that’s the thing about writing: it’s the social context that makes it bearable. 

If I’m being totally honest, I became a writer not because I loved writing but for the carrot-on-a-string of freedom. The idea that I wouldn’t have a boss. No timecards or a schedule or a sad, small desk in a sad, small cubicle. 

I don’t know if this is just me being myopic and self-centered but I have my doubts that writers who claim to loooooove writing really get off on the act of it. I suspect that 99% of writers, if they’re being honest, are some version of Dorothy Parker, who once proclaimed: “I hate writing, I love having written.” 

The identity of being a writer is hot. That’s a fun thing to tell people at bars. 

But the act of agonizing over “that” or “which” and em dashes? I simply don’t see the appeal. 

It’s the meaning we load into jobs that makes them (in)tolerable. 

Earlier this year, I was at a Weyes Blood concert. It was one of those weeks when we were all breathlessly, nervously, sarcastically talking about ChatGPT: it was on the front page of news sites and NYT push notifications. 

Blood got on stage and began making grand proclamations about how AI wouldn’t ever take the jobs of artists and creators. Not really. “You like to listen to a human, right?” she yelled out to the crowd—who, of course, cheered back echo chamber agreement—before she started singing some amorphous, ethereal ballad under a harsh spotlight. 

As she sang, my mind stuck to her question. Like an anxiously attached partner, she was asking: Am I in danger here? Should I be worried? Do you still love me?   

I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “Doesn’t this feel like the start of a bad sci-fi movie?” 

At the time, I interpreted that moment as proof that AI was going to win one day. (Probably sooner than we’d think.) But lately, I’ve been thinking that moment aligns more closely with my writer friend at lunch. 

Both creators shared some insistence that there was something meaningful about their creations. That meaning may have been the finale of some childhood desire or some last revolt against our coming machine overlords—but each had some justification for why they spent their time creating. 

I really, profoundly, deeply hate this way of going about life.

To insist upon the meaning of one’s own work is to co-create a world in which the only things that are given value are those that can prove their worth.

Perhaps because I took the story of “Frederick” by Leo Lionni too closely to heart as a kid, I deeply believe that you shouldn’t need to produce something “of value” (much less defend it) in order to be valuable. 

(Sidenote: just learned that Lionni was a commie, which makes so much sense lol) 

When creativity is under threat of social devaluation, directly fighting its slipping socioeconomic value seems naive. And I don’t think that being grateful for your own lucky little life of mind x screen is any better—via that route, we’ll end up with an isolated industry of nerds writing only for each other. 

The artist Cai Guo-Giang once said: “Art is not as important as people think it is; however, what is important about art is actually the unimportance of it.”

Stories are not essential to the turning of the planet. (Hell, humans aren’t even essential to the turning of the planet.)

We shouldn’t defend human art because it’s better than robot art or because it makes lives better or the world more empathetic or whatever reason we’re telling each other that we make art now. 

We should defend human art because somewhere, some human has decided to spend their time doing something as completely banal as painting a picture or writing a song. That is a batshit crazy way to be spending your time. But the world itself is batshit crazy. Artists—particularly struggling ones—are people whose lives come closest to that pounding, constant truth. 

Good art should remind us that it is totally useless. Not just art. Life itself. A total aberration. Like—what the fuck! None of us was statistically likely to be here and yet here we are! Isn’t that wild? 

We don’t matter. Writing doesn’t matter. Substack doesn’t matter. This blog doesn’t matter. But here’s a fucking essay anyways—and I just can’t help but be bowled over by that beautiful uselessness every single time I encounter it.

In a society that requires purpose for worth, the only way in which we will begin to reclaim the value of creativity is to not just accept but lean into an uncomfortable truth:

Writing, like life, is utterly futile and completely meaningless—and that’s precisely why it needs to exist. 

xoxo 

UPDATE 12/11/23: JUST FOUND OUT THAT KURT VONNEGUT SAID WHAT I WAS GRASPING AT. “THE VALUE OF ART LIES IN THE PROCESS.”

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ALSO: PSA. 

BJORK IS NARRATING A MERLIN SHELDRAKE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT FUNGI. GRAB YOUR SHROOMS + YOUR HIGHEST FRIENDS. THEN HEAD TO THE CLOSEST IMAX. 

Increasingly, I’ve been having conversations with friends about people who turned down plans because they didn’t feel like going out, then later complained of feeling lonely. Others talk of people who moved out to the country during the pandemic, then found that it was kinda boring out there in the woods with no friends. On the opposite side of the spectrum, other friends complain that they are no longer able to handle others’ chaos and shut out that which “doesn’t align” or whatever therapy-speak we’re using these days. 

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You know how if you stare at yourself in the mirror for ten minutes you start to hallucinate? I think we’ve been doing that but with our internal experience. Under quarantine, there was nothing but our own minds to gaze into like reflecting pools. And now, somehow, we’re shocked when we look at the outside world, not realizing that our sight has been distorted from our previous staring.

Like, even just personally…I left my umbrella at home and, more quickly than I care to admit, understood it as some sign that the day—if not the week, if not my life—was screwed. I knew that in a day, if not an hour, that feeling would go away. I had learned the deep breathing exercises. Completed the emotional intelligence trainings. And yet, no matter how I self-regulated, I couldn’t seem to stop this overwhelming sense of me from bubbling up. 

I’ve allowed a grandiosity to my interiority that I’d find tedious in another person. Years of Instagram Therapists telling me that my emotions are valid or whatever has led me to consider each and every whim as some sort of case to crack. I’m convinced that a feeling is something to manage, acknowledge, or respond to. And once I “solve” the emotion, I guess, I’ll feel comfortable again. (?)

When I say “comfort,” I don’t mean hygge or heated blankets or warm showers, but an emotional sort. The kind of reaction we’ve come to know as “protecting your inner peace.” 

“Comfort separates you from reality in a very direct way…comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility.” 

Somewhere in the last few years, it seems swarths of us became convinced that not only is emotional comfort (here’s to feeling good all the time) possible, it is our right — achievable by self-care, by therapy, by “boundaries,” by if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else? 

As we embark on this mission, there’s some slight recognition that our interiorities are, to other people, somebody else’s interiority. And I guess that’s why we’ve been going around honoring other people’s emotions (their right to peace): so that, in turn, they’ll acknowledge our own. My friends parent their kid with the mantra: I can see that you’re really upset right now. I text friends: take all the time you need!!!!!!! 

And I’m not saying that feelings don’t matter at all. I’m not taking some kind of conservative “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” stance towards mental health here. Obviously, there is real psychic pain in the world. Obviously, I don’t believe that opening a window and going for a walk is the cure for depression. But I am doubtful that consistently prioritizing emotion makes us any happier. 

When emotion becomes both marker and judge of experience (“why do it if it doesn’t feel good?”), we become trapped by feeling. Anxiety becomes a boundary, as opposed to a signal. We’ll never have that tough conversation or make that move or crash children’s karaoke and half-rap Cake’s “The Distance” into a microphone. (Just a theoretical example, of course, that last one.) “Self-care” is now just a roundabout way of saying “self-soothing.”

The thing that intrigues me most about “self-care” (and its ever-elusive destination, inner peace) is that it came into contemporary discourse around the same time as trauma-speak. Last month, New York published a profile of Bessel van Kolk (author of “The Body Keeps the Score”), which aimed to explain how trauma became “the dominant way we make sense of our lives.”

In her explanation of van Kolk’s work (which I’m assuming you know and therefore won’t delve into — but if you don’t, click here), author Danielle Carr wrote: 

Widening trauma to include both acute and developmental stressors transformed it from a “you have it or you don’t” binary into a spectrum. The result is if everyone’s body is keeping the score, what that score actually adds up to starts to get less clear.

Basically, “trauma” has become so broad a concept as to become practically meaningless. In the words of one of my all-time-favorite tweets: peeing is a trauma response to drinking too much water. 

As Carr explores why the acknowledgment of psychic pain has proliferated throughout culture, she comes to the conclusion that: 

For a liberal politics of inclusion founded on claims of injury, what could be more useful than a way to turn that injury into biological trauma, something objective, observable, and measurable in the brain?

Van Kolk’s work, she asserts, was successful because it gave people validation of their pain — empirical evidence that could prove, indeed, Their Experiences Had Changed Them. But evidence of these changes didn’t make them go away. 

In her reporting, Carr spoke with an assistant at a van Kolk retreat who explained how this understanding of trauma (“trapped in the body as a reflexive wince stuck in time — manifesting as a shoulder spasm, for example, when someone hears a word that reminds them of the traumatic event”) could change the world. The assistant claimed that if we release ourselves from the cycles of “war, violence, and poverty” that induce trauma, “someday soon [...] finally, we will all become clean.” 

The twinning ideas of “someday soon” and “cleanliness” haunt me. As I read the New York piece, I was reminded of an essay by Will Self, published in Harper’s in 2021, with a similar subtitle (“How everything became trauma.”) 

In his swim around the traumasphere, Self writes that: 

part of what gives modern trauma theory its appeal is precisely its covert importation of Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology: a grand narrative of human moral progress in which suffering is an essential motivation for all the principal actors. 

And, uh, yeah, I second that. 

Not only is suffering essential in Christianity (cue: Jesus, cue: cross), redemption is just out of reach. Salvation is a thing that is coming, rarely something possible right this second. The Rapture can only be (*will always be*) a thing in the future. If it didn’t come when we predicted, we mispredicted. If the lord doesn’t answer your prayers in this life, you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. This “Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology” is a narrative, which means that it’s action unfolding over time. But, unlike other narratives, the end never quite arrives. 

In his book “God is Red,” Sioux Tribe thinker Vine DeLoria juxtaposes Christianity with native religion, calling the former a “temporal” religion, one more concerned with its history (the belief system’s existence through time) than the land on which it happens. According to DeLoria, “it has been the Christian contention that the experiences of humankind could be recorded in a linear fashion,” and that this timeline leads humanity directly from Creation to Judgment (or Rapture, depending on your level of doomsday fanaticism.) 

“If a religion is tied to a sense of time, then everything forming a part of it must have some validity because it occurs within the temporal scheme,” DeLoria wrote. The parts of history irrelevant to the great Western (Christian) timeline simply fall away — and so history and the belief system’s validity become mutually self-supporting. 

In one way, DeLoria is calling for a reckoning with complexity, perhaps similar to decolonization efforts in academia: recognition that there is much more story than the dominant one.1

Looping back to Self’s essay on trauma, we read: 

in our confusion, we try to reinterpret the experience so as to assimilate it into the ever-evolving narrative of our conscious lives, to make it something that has happened to a self-aware and thinking I, rather than to an inchoate and amorphous swirl of semiconsciousnesses.

Pinning this understanding of Self’s (bit of a pun there for you!) to DeLoria’s thinking on Christianity, I’d argue that when we inherit a Christian understanding of history, we inherit a Christian understanding of self. Like Christian history reinforces Christianity, our personal timelines affirm our sense of self. In other words: our stories support what we believe ourselves to be. And logic flows the other way: we believe that we are what we have experienced.

So perhaps it is our insistence that there is a timeline that can be followed, some clear and continuing sense of personage from Birth to Death, that makes traumatic events so … traumatic. When trauma (in its contemporary definition of *gestures broadly at everything*) inevitably interrupts that timeline, we cannot continue the story that once unshakeably informed who we were.  

Linearity becomes interrupted by an “inchoate and amorphous” haunting. You’re riding the subway and everything is fine—-until you remember what he did to you and then, mentally, you’re back there. That’s the vibe. It’s so common that we take it as a feature of life. “Time isn’t linear,” I drawl to friends, and they all nod along like yeah yeah, we already know. But talk of flashbacks is still relatively novel, in the grand scheme of things. And flashbacks that live in the body (as van Kolk’s spasms or winces) is an even newer conversation. 

Trauma theory emerged, as most things do, in reaction to what came before. Its rise is not because we’re all just quivering victim complexes looking for a quick ego boost. Somatic therapy and trauma theory are a rally against hard-line rationalism and the long-standing supremacy of Cartesian dualism (the assertion that the mind is quite separate from the body). Trauma theory has done excellent work in making us reimagine ourselves as an entire organism in which all parts — mind, body, spirit — work together. By asserting that the body has a memory, we begin treating “the whole person,” as some medics say. 

And, sure, this is good, I reckon. I suppose we’re making progress when we ask why our bodies keep the score. But I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps the more interesting question is: what keeps us from erasing the scoreboard? 

In his TED Talk “Is There A Real You?” British philosopher Julian Baggini seems to align with Self’s writing on the self, arguing in favor of this “swirl of semiconsciousness,” or at least the idea of a complex self, one that runs deeper than the dominant story. 

Echoing many a Buddhist, he considers the self to be what arises from the meeting of different processes: memories, desires, beliefs, external sensations or stimuli. In Baggini’s understanding, there is no central point that connects all these projects. No small man in your brain or heart that could be understood as a soul or some form of permanent fixture that defines you. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the self doesn’t exist. Refuting some thinkers who insist that the self is nothing but an illusion because it cannot be located neurologically, Baggini says “the fact that we are a very complex collection of things does not mean we are not real” and insists that this complexity is, in fact, something to be celebrated. 

“If you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence which is always the same throughout your life no matter what, in a sense, you’re kind of trapped,” he says. “But if you think of yourself as being not a thing, but a kind of process, something that is changing, then I think that that’s quite liberating.” 

I want to believe in this liberation. And I do think it’s possible. But in order to be free of our fixed understanding of self, it seems we first have to free ourselves from the project of understanding. In short: we have to admit that trauma-based narratives are not our whole story. 

Whenever I’m in a particularly self-indulgent mood, I think of one of my best friends, who constantly mutters, “The sooner you realize that everything in the world is covered in shit, the happier you’ll be.” He means this literally and he means also this as a sort of twisted Zen practice. Everything is covered in shit. Like, literally. And yet…we’re also covered in microbes, you know? It’s complex. There’s a lot out there that we don’t perceive.

I’m trying to approach my feelings (my self) the same way. 

Perhaps we can begin to view trauma not as an interruption of our personal stories, but an invitation to step into something more complex. The “cure” might not be some distant day when, finally, we all become clean. It could be today. Whenever we realize that though our personal narratives may be covered in shit, we are not the stories we tell ourselves we are.

just because someone can write doesn’t mean they should be perpetuating their mind online.

Of course that’s harsh. And I only half mean it.

(As someone who also writes online, I have absolutely no soapbox to stand on here.)

But I find myself increasingly troubled by the mindsets that we’re calling “literary.”

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The experience I had reading this author’s Substack was the same experience I had reading their books, which is: I found the narrator so smart that they became dumb. Paralyzed by their own abstractions, they seemed completely incapable of moving through the world in any meaningful way.

To clarify: this particular writer spends much of their time on the page ruminating on the failings of language. And to be sure: this is interesting stuff. I genuinely admire it as a line of inquiry. But ruminations on the failings of language keep a person trapped in their mind. It’s a miserly way to approach the world, I think. And one rooted in fear. (And, also, like: why write a novel if this is your chief concern in life? Go into theory, bitch!!)

So here is my big, general sigh at everything:

I just kiiiiiinda think that the majority of Good Contemporary Fiction Writers are Too Tightly Wound.1 I don’t care if the sentences are beautiful if the scenes aren’t beautifully observed.

By which I mean: I just want writing that has a generosity of spirit. An ability to engage with reality at every level, even the gross and the taboo. (And I’m not sure that I always embody this ideal but, really, I am trying.)

This is particularly on my mind after watching “Hallelujah,” the Netflix documentary about the Leonard Cohen song.

In the doc, Lenny’s girlfriend talks about him waking up every morning, having a cup of coffee, then heading straight to his notebooks to work out “Hallelujah.” It took him seven years to write “Hallelujah.” 

It’s not among my favorite Leonard Cohen songs — although, to be fair, that’s mostly because of its cultural context. If I’m able to separate the song from its position in society, I’m often stunned by the lyrics:  

Remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

I've done my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

“I COULDN’T FEEL, SO I TRIED TO TOUCH.”

c’mon now. fucking gorgeous line.

Anyway.

The song is praised for its mix of the spiritual and the sexual. But that’s not how Cohen wrote it. 

Some guess that he wrote at least 80 verses to the song. But when the song was first released, only the Old Testament verses made the cut. Famously, Columbia refused to release the record in America. So when Cohen went on tour, he retaliated by going into his vault of verses and singing a different version of “Hallelujah.” (The horny verses.) 

Then Bob Dylan started covering it.

Then John Cale did. 

And it was Cale who decided to combine the Old Testament stuff with the sex stuff. (He believed he couldn’t sing the most religious verses because he wasn’t Jewish, then someone was like “You know there’s a second version of the song that Lenny sings on tour?”)

Then Jeff Buckley sang Cale’s version and the song spiraled out of control. 

As I’m thinking about why literature often fails to meet its (my) mark, I’m also thinking about why it was only once “Hallelujah” mixed the ~secular~ and the ~spiritual~ that it took off. 

This is my conclusion:

Leonard Cohen’s lyrics stay in reality.

His thoughts are responses to reality. His veneration is for reality.

Whereas that unnamed author has the thoughts first, then tries to make reality fit them.

In an era of abstraction and increasing digital distance, there is something holy about reverence for another person’s body. The feel of skin against skin. There’s a profundity in the tangible that we never feel in symbols.

So, really, my problem with that famous author is as simple as a different attitude about life. They seem to treat reality as the playground for their mental experiments. I try to treat it as the road which disciplines my thoughts.

But also. I don’t know anything. Not one single solid thing. Like…sometimes, when I think about gravity for too long, I get dizzy and check out mentally for a couple of hours. I don’t know how any of this planet works — and if I ever claim to, it’s simply a regurgitation of what I’ve been taught. I don’t really get it. (If anyone reading this is from CERN and wants to take me to the particle accelerator so I can actually see how this all works…pls get in touch.)

So. Yeah. I don’t know anything. But I’m starting to believe that things like solid grasps aren’t the point of life. I’m starting to believe that slipperiness is a virtue. The less sense you can make of the world, the closer you are to reality. I think I believe that. Who knows if it’s true. I’ll probably change my mind next week.

Now, with a great digital flourish, I present:

LINKS, MY FRIENDS

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Eastern philosophy says there is no “self.” Science agrees. by Chris Niebauer

The self is more like a verb than a noun. To take it a step further, the implication is that without thought, the self does not, in fact, exist. In the same way that walking only exists while one is walking, the self only exists while there are thoughts about it.

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I walked around my apartment for half an hour, relieved to have emerged from the shitshow of my third decade on the planet with little more permanent damage than a scar on my lip. When it hit me that I was only twenty-seven, that I still had another three long years before I could leave behind my twenties, my soul sank. I had tied liberation to a date and convinced myself that I wouldn’t be free from the actions of my twenties until I was free from their number. 

I thought years could distance me from the worst of myself. That if I put enough time between me and who I was back then, naturally and without much effort, I would become a different person. Although you can try to tie shame to time, it has a funny way of sticking through the years. 

At that point in my life, I had been to more friends’ funerals than weddings. And during one of the funeral after-parties (they weren’t receptions, they were after-parties), I realized that the people around me weren’t living. At best, they were coping. (Which, logic follows, meant that I, too, was simply coping through the years.) I began dreaming about a normal life, one in which the stories I told weren’t about that acquaintance who crashed his car into a barrier on the FDR while driving drunk. I wanted different friends, ones who didn’t go missing for three days at a time on strange and sad benders. I wanted out of my scene. I wanted to be 32. 

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Last month, just a few months shy of turning 30, I was on a bus from Las Vegas to Los Angeles when I decided that I wanted to explore the middle of nowhere. So I got off in Barstow, California and dragged my suitcase up Route 66 to the Mexican cafe with the best reviews. A souped-up Audi roared down the highway, knocking up clouds of dust. The buildings were all squat and brown or burgundy or puce. It’s not true to say that there’s nothing in Barstow. What’s more true is that the locals don’t want there to be anything. They treat the desert mountains like a backdrop some stagehand was too lazy to put away. 

“Oh, mija,” the waitress at the cafe sighed when I asked her about town. “There’s nothing here. Some mountains a few miles away, if you’re into that sort of thing.” 

I couldn’t understand her flippancy. To me, the dusty town was glorious. Vultures cawed in slow circles above broken chainlink fences. The only landmarks were a luxury hotel that never got off the ground and the country’s first Del Taco. But then again, my favorite place is always “somewhere I’ve never been.” And I tend to find mundanity beautiful, particularly if it isn’t my own. 

The waitress at the Mexican cafe peered at me through tight eyelids when I asked about hiking to the mountains. “Mija, be careful,” she said. And she asked how old I was.

“Thirty,” I said, even though it’s not quite true.

I’m twenty-nine but I keep rounding up. I’ve been rounding up for years.

Around the time that I was washing dishes and convinced myself that I was 32 years old, I was dating this guy who was rail-thin and a wannabe rockstar. (Luckily, he was one of those musicians who had shows where you didn’t mind bringing friends because they would invariably give validation like “Woah, they’re actually pretty good.”) And one night, after a show at a beer-soaked bar in Greenpoint, I went to the wannabe rockstar’s mattress on the floor of his apartment. He had just painted the walls bright purple. Books were scattered everywhere — mostly rock biographies and Buddhist scripture — and between copies of Keith Richards’ autobiography and the Baghavad Gita, he told me that his dad had recently committed suicide. A few years earlier, his grandfather had, as well. He was angry at them. His jaw got tight and he said, “All I want is to have gray hair. I just want to go gray. I just don’t want to kill myself.” I thought it was one of the most poetic things I had ever heard a person say. I loved the idea of craving ongoing mundanity as retaliation against senseless destruction. (To rage, rage against the rage, rage.)

The relationship didn’t last very long. He wanted to talk about Milarepa and I wanted to whine about my world. And although I don’t think about him too often anymore, that moment on the mattress barreled back into my mind a few months ago when I looked in the mirror and spotted my first gray hair. 

When I saw the hair, at the front of my scalp mingled amongst my bangs, I had the immediate panic of “Oh shit, I’m losing some valuable youth-adjacent currency.” Then I tried to forget about Clairol ads. I tried to forget about the times I gazed at older, salt-and-pepper women in public and had thoughts like she’d be pretty if she just covered her grays. Instead, I thought about that skinny wannabe rockstar telling me his only goal was to have a whole head of these. 

When “gone too soon” becomes all too real, time changes weight. I’ve passed through enough time that I’m now older than some of the people I loved ever got to be. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with these years but I know that I don’t want to burn them. Age is an accomplishment that some people never reach. 

And yet, if you talk to most American women, age becomes the one thing you can never ask her about. It is shame in numerical form. (We’ve been taught to want time capsule bodies, something immune to life itself.) It’s easy to believe that we want women to look young because we love youth because it’s the opposite of death. But for so many of us in this ragey era, death isn’t linked to age and youth is only a reminder of the people who never escaped it. 

But perhaps I’m looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps all these attempts at reclaiming the appearance of youth are attempts at rewriting time. You might not be able to erase the shameful experiences of your early 20s, but you can erase the lines they left on your forehead. Perhaps Botox and hair dye and cheek lifts are half-baked attempts at distancing ourselves from who we were back then. We try to bring back the skin or the hair we had with hopes that this time it will be different. But this is a fucked task. Anyone living this logic is trying to cover the shame of their past with shame of their present.1

“But mija, you look so young,” the waitress said when I told her my age. 

“Thank you,” I smiled, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when people say you look younger than you are. 

“Yes, it’s a good thing,” she scrunched her face, “but also…” 

Her voice trailed off. And I figured the thought that rattled beneath her silence. Despite the cultural desire for it, (the appearance of) youth is a target. Or, at the very least, people believe that age makes you less enticing to corrupt. But a full scalp doesn’t necessarily bespeak innocence. And experience and age are never directly linked. When your youth flirted with finality, shame isn’t a thing you accumulate with sagging skin. It’s what sets you running towards redemption. 

So why do we continue to perform the Sisyphean labor of staving off the effects of time through surgery, exercise, dyes and potions? Why did I just spend $40 on a vial of serum for hair density? Despite knowing that gray hair is an accomplishment some people never reach, I feel like I should be proud of the fact that my experience doesn’t show. (I look like something without a shameful past!) 

I search friends’ foreheads with relief that mine is smoother. I say “thank you!” each time I’m IDed at a bar. But I don’t want to. I’ve already tied shame to my past. I can’t put it on my future, too. And so I bring myself back to the wannabe rockstar. I tell myself that one day, if we’re lucky, we’ll both have whole heads of grays.

I’m convinced that the appearance of purity is only valued and targeted by forces afraid of their own shame — by which I mean afraid of their own pasts. I’m starting to believe that it’s only through reckoning with our pasts that we learn to accept our futures: the disintegration and the sagging of them. Once we make peace with who we were back then (once we begin to unbraid shame from time), perhaps we’ll find a way to let go of our youth. We’ll let the grays grow in — and more than that, we’ll find them beautiful. We’ll flaunt them like medals. 

After I paid the bill and got up to leave, the waitress told me to be careful. (I looked so young!) I told her that I would be. It was only when I was back on Route 66, dragging my suitcase behind me through the dust, that I realized what I should have told her. I should have said that I’m not as young as I look. I’m not as old as I feel.

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I’m here for work, which is the truth but it feels like a lie. Travel journalism is a strange line of business and one that I thought I had left for good. I began the job about seven years ago, with the great delusion that eventually I would discover some essential insight into human nature, buried in some culture halfway around the globe. But the only thing I discovered was that most travel journalism today is rebranded marketing. PR companies give writers drinks and comp’ed dinners with the intention that they’ll write about them. And it sounds like a dream, but the whole thing feels performative and transactional if you care (even slightly) about pesky things like ethics.

In the months before the pandemic, I traveled to Scotland and Dubai and Lake Tahoe. I flew until the cities blurred and I became so jaded that if there was any essential insight into human nature, it seemed to be: don’t bother. It’s all just money. The only time I felt anything real was when I fell snowboarding and literally broke my ass. Then I couldn’t leave the hotel and while all the other journalists were on the mountain, I was hobbling around a Reno casino with an ice pack shoved down the back of my jeans. And on that trip, I decided that I wasn’t going to write about travel anymore. I decided that I was going to stand up for my ethics and that I wouldn’t take any more free trips in exchange for free advertising. Yet almost exactly three years to the date of that proclamation, I’m back on a press trip, writing about spas and restaurants and other places where people can spend money. 

Walking the Las Vegas Strip yesterday, I passed a man drumming on an upside-down paint bucket. As a very tanned man with a very large gut and a cut-off t-shirt approached, the drummer started chanting, “LET’S GO BRANDON!” The man laughed, fished his wallet from his pocket, and threw the drummer a few bucks. When he walked away, the drummer moved eye contact to the next group and started chanting, “LET’S GO BIDEN!” The man in the cut-off looked back in shock. 

Las Vegas doesn’t owe anybody anything except the illusion of a meaningful experience. It’s no coincidence there are so many magic acts in town. It’s a trick of a city. More of an idea than a real place. 

Each time I go down to the casino floor, I pretend that I’m playing slots but really I’m watching middle-aged men wander the neon circus. They walk slow, eyes panning the place with expectation. They’ve been told that fantastic things — unmentionable things — happen here. They come in packs, on pilgrimages, hungry for a weekend they’ll only talk about in close company. But none of these men seems to achieve it. The closest they come to transcendence is a blackout. 

***

Just a few days before my flight to Vegas, I was scrolling Instagram in bed when I saw that Michaela Coel had filmed a BMW commercial. Sure, it was under the guise of a statement about filmmaking, but it was still definitely a commercial and I was like cnbtebkktuiw5yiwbrwhebryq35g noooooooooooooo. 

When “I May Destroy You” premiered, I watched it over and over again. I loved the show’s ethical ambiguity, a reckoning with morality seen too little in pop culture, and began looking to Coel for career direction. In her acceptance speech at the Emmys for “Best Writing,” she delivered: 

“Visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear.” 

When I packed up my things and moved out of New York City a few months ago, it was with six words ringing in my mind: “Do not be afraid to disappear.” I was going to start taking my writing seriously. I was going to make something of myself, stop binge drinking until the bars closed, stop accepting every single invitation, stop spending so much time on the carousel of nightlife. And that meant that I had to disappear. 

Almost instantly, I felt better. My mind cleared up. So did my skin. I stopped drinking. I started writing more and started writing better. The things that happened every time I left the city happened again — but this time, I started to hold onto them. I wanted them to be my personality instead of my vacation. 

So I settled into a slower life in the suburbs. I started thinking about what it would be like to stay there, get a job at one of the local colleges, teach writing and tell stories about the person I used to be. I settled into peace with the idea of disappearance. I knew that I liked myself more when I disappeared. I didn’t think about what this meant — or that the message implicit in Coel’s speech was that disappearance was only okay if you eventually reappeared with a product. 

***

In my reappearance into the travel world after years away, the only thing I feel is slight detachment. Vegas doesn’t seem like a hotbed of sin to me. It doesn’t seem like much of anything at all, to be honest. It’s a hollow city for hollow experiences. The closest I can get to any emotion is, “Of course it is.”

You know, I haven’t even gambled here. Not once. There was one evening when all I did was lie in bed, eating leftover smoked salmon from the Giada restaurant and watching “The Banshees of Inisherin.” (Mumbling “that’s what you get for waking up in Vegas” to myself.) Every 15 minutes or so, I’d hear thunder from the streets.

It was the fountains at the Bellagio. I had seen them in action, of course, in all the movies and promotional materials. But I hadn’t realized that the fountains loudly rumble when the weight of the water smacks back down into the pool. Each wet fight against gravity is timed to music and so the crashes echo like thunder does in the summer. 

Earlier that day, I was walking by the fountains when the whole scene came alive to the tune of “Viva Las Vegas.” I stood next to a man who positioned his cell phone against the concrete barrier and started filming. When the song ended and the fountains disappeared back into the Bellagio pool, the man straightened up and looked around, phone still filming. “Was that it?” he asked. “One song?”

The show is always shorter than we imagined it would be, the Mona Lisa is always smaller. Tourism is never the adventure we tell ourselves it will be. 

Yet, despite this knowledge, despite knowing that the $9 black coffee on the casino floor is nothing short of a rip-off…it feels like we should travel? Or perhaps like it’s our right? 

Particularly when our daily lives are at the service of somebody else’s profit — when our time is not our own to manage — travel becomes the one place we can imagine freedom. We wander different cities and fantasize about how different we would be if we lived there. Our priorities would finally be set right. We’d find the group of people with whom we belong. We would take siestas! Travel is intoxicating because it’s the closest we can get to our imagination in real life. 

***

On a tangent that isn’t quite a tangent…I’ve recently become obsessed with Poverty Point (thanks to its appearance in “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow). The World Heritage Site in Louisiana dates back around 3,400 years and is home to the largest earthworks in the Western Hemisphere. What’s surprising isn’t just that this place is incredibly archaeologically significant yet most of us have never heard of it. What’s surprising is that although people traded goods at Poverty Point, it wasn’t necessarily a marketplace. It was a place where people traded ideas. 

The site is considered particularly rare because it was built by people who were hunter-gatherers. Most archaeologists considered it possible only for agrarian (farming) societies to build a metropolis of that size. In “The Dawn of Everything,” Graeber and Wengrow assert that this archaeological site is proof that movement, building, and trade are not reliant upon economic systems and that, in fact, we can divorce our understanding of what is possible to build from what is possible to fund. 

This aspect of Poverty Point haunts me: it didn’t grow from a surplus of crops but rather some mysterious urge to connect and exchange the intangible. It is proof that a city can rise without any business to sustain it. Or, at the very least, that at one point in human history, this was possible. 

According to Graeber and Wengrow, in many pre-colonized Indigenous communities, travel was seen as a form of mutual aid. You were obligated to welcome nomads into your home with the knowledge that if you set off on the road one day, you too would be welcomed anywhere. I keep thinking about this. What would travel look like if it wasn’t linked to capital?

Today, our adventures are hemmed in by what we can afford. Travel is a commodity, one measured and policed by wealth. This morning, I paid $30 for a medium black coffee and a breakfast sandwich made with what I can only describe as Velveeta cheese. Do we know how to travel without tourism? Will there ever be another Poverty Point? 

***

Upon further reflection, it’s not disappearance that makes me afraid. I didn’t need Michaela Coel’s reassurance when I left New York. In fact, I think I relish each opportunity to drop off the grid. It’s reappearance that scares me. I don’t know how to move in the world with integrity. I can’t hold onto my values (shaky as they may be) when I want to make money, when I want to eat at the Giada restaurant, when I want to see the world and try to understand it. In the name of economic survival, do we all find ourselves doing things we thought we’d never do? I’m writing generic copy about spas along the Las Vegas strip. Michaela Coel is doing a BMW commercial. 

I watched the commercial again, just to see if I had any right to be offended. 

Coel, in a pastel blue leather trench coat, walks by a BMW. And she’s almost saying something profound. She’s almost delivering some wisdom about the craft of storytelling. 

“That’s the beautiful thing about perspective, there’s always more than one,” she says. And she repeats it. And if you follow the prompted link, you find that BMW is giving away a few filmmaking grants. 

It’s almost noble. It’s almost a good cause. Coel’s words are almost insightful and the program is almost generous. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in Vegas — between the free cocktails and the comped dinners — it’s that nothing is truly generous if it makes sure you know its name. 

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But plans and rants change. A few weeks ago, I received a copy of a “How to Tell a Story to Save the World” by Toby Litt from Writers Rebel, the writer’s arm of Extinction Rebellion, and it’s taken over my brain. In the 138-page document, Litt deconstructs the “hero narrative” pervasive in storytelling and links the prevalence of this type of storytelling to the fact that we can’t seem to get our shit together and stop climate change. (I promise this will be relevant. Stay with me.) 

The hero narrative is basically what you’ll find in every major guide to story structure: you need a sympathetic character and that character needs a conflict. As the character moves against their conflict, actions rise, then actions fall. Badda bing badda boom, you’ve got a story. 

In his treatise, Litt argues that as a result of growing up with stories constructed this way, “almost all of us, whatever we do and whyever we do it, regard ourselves as sympathetic central characters.” Whether you’re wearing a face mask on the subway or fracking beneath the mountains of Appalachia, you consider yourself as the central character of your life and you have motivations and a backstory that support and rationalize your behavior. It is this inherited narrative structure that Litt believes psychologically allows the oil business to continue extracting oil, coal people to keep on coal-ing and politicians to go on allowing it all — despite evidence that their actions are creating the conditions for human extinction. 

There’s something compelling about Litt’s argument. It’s the answer to the questions: “why does history repeat itself?” and “how can he sleep at night?” and “why the fuck do cottagecore girls think that what they’re doing is meaningful protest?” According to Litt, it’s because we’re all repeating the same self-validating stories. 

Yesterday, I stumbled across a passage from the 17th century ranter (my favorite name for group ever, btw / i self-identify as 21st century ranter) Jo Salmon: 

“The world travels perpetually, and every one is swollen full big with particularity of interest; thus travelling together in pain, and groaning under enmity: labouring to bring forth some one thing, some another, and all bring forth nothing but wind and confusion.”

1651 that was published. 1651. And it feels like the type of thing I scrawl in my journal after a particularly disspiriting day with particularly disspiriting people. I take this as irrefutable proof that people have sucked for at least hundreds of years. Probably more. 

And it’s not changing. More recently, the editor-in-chief of TANK, Masoud Golsorkhi, argued that, partly due to travel restrictions, lockdowns and the prevalence of Zoom meetings, “No one is desperately seeking newness; the new finds it hard to be desirable when novelty is so accessible.” (Although it could be applicable to society at large, Golsorski is specifically talking about fashion.) 

So if people have always sucked, we’re telling ourselves shitty self-affirming stories and nothing is changing, what hope do we have? Let me approach this, like Golsorkhi, through fashion.  

Visual art experienced its most drastic change with the advent of modern art, when the point of making art changed from accurate visual representation to creative expression of thought. But there hasn’t been a major disruption to fashion since women started wearing pants and short skirts (both are symbols of rebellion and thus, an individual self-expression through style was born — this was, not so coincidentally, around the same time that advertisers began using psychology to market goods as lifestyles). So perhaps new fashion can’t emerge until we have a new purpose for dressing. But now that we’ve opened Pandora’s closet of individualism, can style ever be about something other than self-expression? Like Litt’s readers embody the hero narrative, now we’re dressing like we’re the Main Character. 

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Which brings me to cottagecore, if you will indulge me my originally scheduled rant. How do I loathe it? Let me count the ways…

1 — Cottagecore is a romanticization of a fundamental misunderstanding. (Fetishizing domestic labor isn’t the flex against capitalism that you think it is!!) 

1a — One of my great joys in this life is reading about cottagecore girls who were disillusioned with the reality of country living after visiting a farm for the first time. (Reminds me of another favorite thing: the fact that there are psychologists in Japan who specialize in “Paris Syndrome,” a condition [syndromes include hallucinations, dizziness and sweating] that some tourists experience when they visit Paris, city of their dreams, and discover that it is not a magical Disneyland but a real city with homeless people and overflowing trash cans.) Ah, I love this shit!! Glorious!! Chef’s kiss!! 

2- Despite beliefs that cottagecore is revolutionary because it welcomes queer and trans people, it doesn’t actually subvert anything about historically restrictive ideas of gendered labor. The visual still screams tradwife (which is, uh, why it’s been embraced by the trads). Perhaps if masc. folx were the ones leading the cottagecore movement or if cottagecore femmes were idealized whilst riding John Deeres and herding cows, I’d be more inclined to believe the trend’s transformative and resistive powers. But a good rule of thumb is: if it looks like a romanticization of gendered labor, it probably is a romanticization of gendered labor.

3- There’s also the whole thread about cottagecore’s relationship with settler/colonialist histories. I’m not going to get into that bc other people on the internet have already done it, I think, pretty neatly. 

4- This idea of “going back to nature” is rooted in a digitally privileged life, one in which a person chooses to go off the grid as Thoreau once went into the woods. It fetishizes the lack of access to resources that, for many in the countryside, isn’t a choice whilst simultaneously perpetuating myths that life in the countryside is simpler. (Newsflash: it’s not.) 

And now, drumroll please for how I tie this all together…

5- The fantasy of moving to the country and becoming self-sufficient is, like, a near-perfect embodiment of the hero narrative. A character (cottagecore girlie) faces an obstacle (the toil of modern, urban, digital life) and after collecting enough aspirational images of latticed peach pies, finally overcomes capitalism by moving to the country! (Except for the small fact that self-sufficiency is an illusion and we can’t opt out of capitalism.) (We’ll come back to this in a bit.) 

Anyway, this rant is becoming irrelevant because the trend is dying down, I think. Thank god. But then there’s that business of cowboy boots. After that, the trucker hats. When that disappears, there will be something else. This gets to my real problem with the aesthetic. These days, smart fashion folx know what they can and can’t appropriate. And they know that they’re not likely to be canceled for plundering the terrain of class. By raiding the emblems of working-class Americana for post-ironic referencing, followers of these aesthetics perpetuate the erasure of class consciousness in American society. The best way to placate the powerless is to turn them into symbols of virtue (which, in America = luxury). It’s the fashion equivalent of a priest being like, “It’s not so bad being poor! The meek shall inherit the earth!” But the meek never inherit the earth. At best, they die with some half-peace knowing that they can’t be held personally responsible for movements of mass destruction and that their image was held to the light as some innocent ideal. 

While writing this, I’m thinking of “Tombola” by Ximena Cuevas (2001), one of the most amusing video art pieces I’ve ever seen. The video starts as a Mexican game show and devolves into the sort of messy infighting that reality TV viewers adore: a woman in a short pink dress flashes the camera, a man pins his sexual exploits on a secret younger brother who just happens to look exactly like him, a mother protests that she’s not attracted to her son. 

From the noise, Cuevas appears in a straw hat and overalls and takes a video camera from her suitcase. She turns her camera on the one recording her and begins chanting, almost like prayer, “I want to find one person out there who has a life of their own, who is interested in their own life, who has a life of their own, who is interested in their own life, who has…”

Of course, this desire is complicated. In an era of globalized individualism, the questions from “Tombola” take on new meaning. What does it mean to be interested in your own life when we’re all playing sympathetic characters and repeating tired narratives? 

Listen…I’m not immune. Throughout my life, I defined myself by the fact that I was Different from other people and Did Interesting And Different Things. But after each Different adventure, when I look back, the path I have taken appears utterly smooth; each wild veer hors-piste turned out to be a paved road. And that’s because I’ve been using other people’s lives as guides. The trips around the world, the rides on backs of motorcycles, the parties and the meetings and the dating apps and even that summer I tried to cook my way through Ottolenghi recipes — all of them were, in some way, repeating an aspect of something that I had seen someone else do. And none of these adventures led me any closer to satisfactory answers about who or how I wanted to be — except letting me know who I wasn’t. 

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So maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the cottagecore girlies. Maybe it’s only through process of elimination that we learn to develop an authentic self. Maybe we must watch other people and fumble through fantasy recreations of their lives in order to figure out who we really are. If that’s the case, our stories depend on everyone else’s. 

In the spirit of seeking new narratives, I’m rounding up styles that are creating something entirely new. (Harder than you might think.) The ones I’ve got on my mind are brands like Fal-ash from Warsaw.

There’s also Hannah Jewett’s bubbly interpretations of intergalactica:  

And I’m letting Chopova Lowena slide in here simply for the ingenuity of hanging folkloric pleats from metal jump rings and carabiners. Lowkey genius. 

Collectively, we’re seeing a slide towards a Rick Owens-tinged slutty neo-grunge with sleek deconstruction, daring displays of skin and mirrored sunglasses that cover half our faces. The upcoming trends mimic the so-close-but-can’t-touch-it intimacy of social media and digital communication. 

On the other hand, this round-up could just be wishful observation on my part. Trend prediction may be a dying art. Maybe, in the future, the only collective trend will be dressing as the niche but main characters we think ourselves to be. (See New York Mag’s recent analysis of weird-girl aesthetic, a “look relies heavily on individuality” while being “keenly referential.”) 

All these style niches are individualized revolts against the last gasps of some barely-existent conformist “mainstream.” (Indie is the new pop, if you will.) Individual self-expression — insisting that there is some unique self entirely different from the other selves bumbling around — is the greatest mass trend of our time. 

Still, I have this fantasy that one day the kids with the wolf cuts will look up from under their shags and the cottagecore crew will put down their wildflowers and when they gaze across the internet at each other, they’ll find their different styles have been expressing the same thing. It’s no coincidence that fashion has been veering towards the theatrical as more and more people become more and more likely to self-identify as “anxious wreck.” Is performing a self such an anxiety-inducing experience that we need costume or armor to go out in the world? 

Maybe commercialized individualism is too enticing a concept to ever put back in the box. And maybe we won’t get rid of hero narratives in our lifetimes. But, despite the onward march of niche existence, I’m still hoping we’ll figure out a way to go from dressing like the main character to dressing like a person who realizes the interconnectedness inherent in simply being alive. Maybe there’s even room for wicker baskets in that far-off utopia. 

Okay, that’s it for this round. 

I’ll talk to y’all later,  

xxC

It’s 6am and I’ve been awake for the last, I don’t know, three hours, I guess. Got a few solid hours of sleep but then I woke up and started staring into the abyss, then staring at my phone until I remembered that nothing on the internet has ever successfully shut off my brain, so I got bored instead. Then I decided to start typing. But not in a productive way. God, no. 

I’ve been trying to embrace slacker lifestyle as anticapitalist revolt. Trying to melt into my bed for hours, not move, not stress. Live like an animal and forget that I have a credit score. But unfortunately my genetic makeup is, like, half anxiety-ridden people-pleaser and I was born to people who sincerely believe in the American Dream so often, I wake up in a sweat at 3 a.m. going “Okay but isn’t there something you should be worrying about?” or “You have a writing degree, how do we write about this? How are we moving forward?” 

Answer to nagging question one: Obviously. 
Answer two: newsletter. lol 

Remember that era of the internet when cool girls were defending their shoplifting with evolutionary theory, being like “it’s my hunter gatherer roots!!!” and other girls were like “yas bitch, i feel this in my pores. we stan a shoplifting QUEEN. winona 4ever. LiLo pls stomp on my face”? This is kinda like that. 

I need to gather. Idk if it’s compulsive or evolutionary but my impulse to shop browse is strong. These days I’m trying to ~bE f!sC@LLy r3sP0nsIbLe~* and N0t spEnD $$$ on Fr!v0lit3s (slacker lifestyle = slacker budget) and (SADLY!!) I’ve outgrown shoplifting, so the gathering impulse has just become kinda tragic. 

So I’m transmuting it here. Gathering shit from around the internet and presenting it to you for no real reason other than I need an outlet. And this feels better than doomscrolling memes for hours. 

I hate clever transitions so let’s just get right into this…

OKAY SO: what I want more than anything in this world right now is luxe goth knits. The vibe is best encapsulated by Rodarte’s F/W 2008 collection, which was inspired by Japanese slasher films. 

(Sidebar: the era of Agyness Deyn and Karen Elson!! What a spree! Who remembers!?) 

The dresses are fantastic. Particularly this red, white and black cobwebby number that is so fuckin impractical, I would wear it absolutely anywhere. With, like, stripper pasties and I don’t know, edible underwear or something. It’s slutty. It’s luxe. It’s moody. All the things that I adore. 

This dress has been on my mind since 2008. A few pandemic cycles ago, I told myself I was going to learn to knit, with the intention of recreating it. Obviously that hasn’t happened because obviously I haven’t dedicated the time to learning how to knit anything besides a basic-ass scarf. With impractical hope, I’ve had this pattern from Morph Knitwear open on my computer for weeks. But I still haven’t bought the proper needles for it. 

(Maybe I need a knitting circle? Idk. Cool knitters: any tips for making this less boring? I used to sew and kinda loved that because of the constant low simmer danger of getting ur fingers impaled by the needle. Is there any dangerous knitting??)  

I’m finally admitting to myself that I probably don’t have the focus (or desire, honestly) to complete this knit on my own, so I’m looking to other designers who are recreating the Rodarte hot slasher vibe on their own terms. 

First up is Kepler. Some seriously GORGEOUS pieces in pipedream budget. The pieces are this really unique blend of medieval knight and post-apocalyptic cool. There’s definitely some fencing school drop-out energy here, too. Like someone who used to sincerely shout “engarde” but now just kinda lazes at home all day with a beer and trauma stories that you’ve heard a million times before. (Or is this just me projecting…?) 

Last year, Marc Jacobs’ stole-all-their-ideas-from-my-mind-somehow? line Heaven began making webby loose knits. It feels like the natural answer to the Billie Eilish set seeing their queen at the Met Gala. We’re still moody goths, but we’re sexy and luxurious now. We still wear clothing with holes, only we’ve rebranded it as “negative space.” (We’ve become intolerable snobs!)  

There’s also Swedish knitwear artist MEGA MIKAELA, who has made some jawdropping iterations of the torn knits (particularly paired with this deconstructed-Paco-Rabanne-vibe disc skirt…holy shit, so good). If they ever remake “Blade Runner” again and I’m the costume designer, everybody is wearing some version of this aesthetic. Idk whether to call this post-glamour or dystopian glamour. It’s like walking through the streets of Soho and seeing that somebody used a Chanel shopping bag to throw out their trash. Incredible visual metaphor. 

And may the lord bless and keep V4K. This unreal “Holey Dress” has everything that I loved about the Rodarte dress, made slightly more wearable for an only-slightly-delusional person in the world today. It’s a look that says “society is falling apart and so is my dress!!” 

J’adorable is also churning out some sick knits recently. I’m focused on this pair of “Aetherius distressed flares” which I’m seriously, deeply, profoundly hoping are named after the Aetherius religious movement.  

According to the only source my lazy ass has referenced (obv Wikipedia), the new age religion emphasizes “altruism, community service, nature worship, spiritual healing and physical exercise.” And aliens. Of course there’s aliens. 

I cling to this hope because I don’t want to be the only one linking fashion to spiritual movements. 

Lately, I’ve been listening to Ram Dass lectures while trying to fall asleep because I’m caught up in meaning of life shit. And the episode I was insomniac-ing to last night involved him visiting death row, being surprised at how spiritual the inmates were and speaking about it to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (yeah, that Kubler-Ross) who responded, “We’re all on death row.” 

And yeah, my little macabre sweeties, the line keeps slapping my mind. I’ve realized that I miss being a goth teen and dressing with one eye in the mirror, the other on my funeral. Memento Mori 4ever. Skulls and black eyeliner till I die. Give me torn fishnets. Give me grown-up Hot Topic. Give me it all. 

I was going off about the podcast episode to one of my BFFs, Alicia, the other day and at the end of my spiel, she brought out her copy of “This Life” by Martin Hagglund. The book basically argues that as soon as you realize that everyone currently on this planet only has one life and This Is It (let’s disregard reincarnation for this discussion), you automatically should become at least a fucking socialist. Like, bare minimum. 

(Alicia is one of the only people whose book recommendations I trust, so I’m prob gonna pick this one up soon. LMK if you do too. [Is this a book club? Am I starting a book club? JFC.]) 

I’m obv intrigued. Slacker lifestyle for everyone. Make labor less of your life and enjoy your life more. (As a materialistic brat, I’m also prone to fully-automated luxury communism type of thinking.)

A few days ago, I spent two hours on the phone with my brother trying to defend decay, demise and doom. He’s very much of the “we should be using science to develop immortality” vein of thinking and I am very much not. That’s because we profoundly disagree on the point of life itself. He is a musician and finds meaning through writing songs. What’s admirable about his thinking is that it’s not the product that drives him (glory, immortality through work, whatever) but the act of creation itself. He wants to live forever so that he can keep playing music. 

I lack this drive. Most of the time, I absolutely hate writing. Loathe it. I only do it as catharsis or therapy — which I know people ridicule but whatever. Let me get this off my chest. 

I love parties. I love glamour. I love talking to funny strangers and just being alive in the spring, seeing the leaves burst back from the trees and men jogging without their shirts and women shortening their skirts. I love the pigeons who fuck outside my window in the morning, coming home at sunrise to the grisly cooing of their orgies. But what I love most is how despite all the reasons to stop — despite pain, loss, senselessness, violence and endings — life just keeps going. 

So I guess that’s why I don’t mind futility: I can romanticize anything. And I guess I do. 

Now we’re getting into the point of why I think I’m actually writing this newsletter…it’s not evolutionary and it’s not bc I’m bored………………….it’s bc I can’t resist using aestheticism/materialism as a route into less tangible conversations. Idk babies…the older I get, the less I am able to resist interpreting everything as a sign, signal or symbol. My most toxic trait is that I can’t resist the impulse to make everything a lesson. I could blame that on the fact that my mother was a teacher. I could blame that on my Virgo moon. I could blame that on a lot of things. 

But instead, I’m going to end this newsletter just as it’s getting good. (Gotta give u something to come back for. kiss kiss) 

In conclusion: someone pls buy me some slutty goth luxe knits. I think they’re cool. 

xxC