It’s 7 AM, and I’m wide awake from the sheer adrenaline of slamming off my alarm before it can wake up a dorm full of 13 other women. A yellowed ball of tissues sits inches from my face, but they have nothing on my headache, pulsing like a bass track. I want to cry, but I’ve chosen this life, so I don’t. Instead, I peel my head from the Hello Kitty pillowcase on my dorm bed, its matching comforter kicked to the bottom soaked with sweat. This $7 purchase was supposed to provide me ease, a small gift for when I arrived to Hanoi late the night before, giving me a place to sleep for a few hours while I waited for my actual hostel check-in the following day. But the Hello Kitty bed is so hard that I regret not sleeping on the bus ride here and just staying up all night. Honestly, it’s not that different from many of the other beds I’ve encountered in Vietnam, the equivalent of a yoga mat on the floor, but this shit hits different when you have the flu.

At least there’s free breakfast; at least the Vietnamese people love phở first thing in the morning. I slurp the broth with the intention of healing. It does its best. Hostel kitchen pho is definitely not the top bowl of noodles I’ve encountered during my time in Vietnam. I can barely taste it anyway. It’s so early in hostel time (9 AM) and I tip toe around the room as I pack up, aware that each time I zipper my bag, someone wakes up and thinks about throwing something at me.

With my bags in luggage storage, I find my way to a pharmacy. I’m not comfortable in Hanoi yet. Having arrived only hours before, I’ve only seen the inside of a McDonald’s. But I’ve been so excited to explore the Old Quarter after days on the Ha Giang Loop, to sip salt coffee in one of its many coffee shops, to find a familiar ease in the streets after a full day of walking. Cities are my favorite place to be; I need this medicine to redeem the weekend. The nice man at the pharmacy “prescribes” me something for the flu that I take right there in the shop. I shove the rest of the pack in my bookbag alongside my tissues, and it does kick in enough for me to explore for a few hours. But another two pills later, I’m weak and clammy and trying to convince myself I’m not miserable.

Because I still have to change hostels, I head back to luggage storage, strap my giant bookbag to my back and my smaller bookbag to my front, and begin the trek across the city. The whole walk I convince myself that this new room will be great, better than the last one at least, the bed with enough cushion for the good night’s sleep that will heal me… Plus, it’s only three more nights. We got this, diva.

But of course—because nothing about this trip has been easy—I’m so wrong.

I had the urge to book a trip to Vietnam on some late-night scroll in a hotel in Italy this past December. The viral Ha Giang Loop popped up on my algorithm, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this 4-day motorcycle trip through the hills of Northern Vietnam. Every other reel proclaimed that the Ha Giang Loop litttterally changed their life, and I was desperate for change—so desperate that I took these bitches word for it. (The 2026 of it all is not lost on me.) Southeast Asia had never crossed my mind as part of The Plan when I left my teaching job in December to travel and write. El Camino was on my mind, more of Europe, maybe Mexico again, but after 10 days in Italy, I knew I needed something so different than what I was used to. I needed to be stripped down to my essentials. I needed to backpack again.

In February, just two months after the Ha Giang Loop graced my IG feed, I went back to Southeast Asia. It was almost nine years later to the day of my last backpacking trip, as if re-entering a door left ajar. I know to some people a trip is just a vacation, but in my early 20’s, backpacking had changed everything for me. I needed to be delivered the Life-Altering-Adventure I was expecting. I didn’t have a back-up plan. I had just one decision after another, their validity riding on nothing but my gut instinct and the past.

There are legitimate studies which show that travel experiences can actually help you heal more than years of talk therapy. Traveling forces your brain out of autopilot and into new challenges, shifting your neural pathways in real time. It helps you see your life (and all its problems) for what they really are: both unique and universal at once. Minuscule in relation to the whole ass world. I knew that being pushed out of my comfort zone into a culture I’d only ever seen on a screen would jolt something awake inside of me; it always does. I was determined to meet parts of myself I couldn’t easily access in the comfort and routines of the US. Or at least, I thought, the severe contrast between backpacking and my current life could illuminate some hidden truth.

In fewer words, I booked a trip to Vietnam because I thought it would make me feel alive again. I couldn’t wait to bike through rice fields, to get spun on coconut boats just like in those reels, to eat lots of phở and bánh mì and shit. I thought, I’ll share it all with the internet. Tell anyone who will listen that I found the answer: backpacking. I pictured myself returning home, invigorated and buzzing.

But, of course, these things never come packaged in the ways we expect.

By the end of week one, the person I brought with me on the trip was headed home after a blow up so big, I knew we’d never talk again. This was one of the closest people in my life, someone I trusted deeply who was connected to my entire life back home. I was gutted and stunned, and suddenly, my trip was solo. Even if I was certain it was always meant to be that way, the realization that the life I was returning to was not the same life I’d left behind was a lot to hold out there alone.

That was just the beginning. There were accommodation scams and massive overcrowding for Tet and no access to my bank account, and on. One thing after another. But in each moment, I found myself grounded and capable. Still, I laughed with strangers, and I stood in awe at what I was so fortunate to see and experience, aware that most people will never have the opportunity to travel like this (or take the opportunity). Still, I got on each bus to each city, so hopeful that the next place would give me the “aliveness” I was seeking.

By the end of the Ha Giang Loop, I began to recognize that what I thought I came to Vietnam for wasn’t what I came to Vietnam for at all. The country, though a beautiful backdrop, was never the point. 8,000 miles away from home, without the proximity of friends and family, situationships and familiar chaos, material possessions and routines and constant phone access and soft beds—all these things I’d been (consciously or unconsciously) relying on, reaching towards for relief—I could now rely only on myself.

Without access to all I’d been clutching for comfort, clear of distractions and delusions, it was clear: what I’d been clinging to could not come with me into the life I was been begging for. How could I receive with my hands so full?

I can’t understate how hard this understanding was. How hard it is, still.

Getting sick after the Ha Giang Loop, a week left in my trip, felt like the physical manifestation of all the healing that occurred in the days I was gone. One final detox before I returned home. One last humbling kick to the ground. I took a nap that afternoon in the coffin beds, woke up to UK girlies showering and blow-drying their hair and shuffling their bags around the room. Instead of feeling better, I felt worse. So much worse. And I knew there was no way I could stay in this godforsaken hostel. From my coffin, I booked an Airbnb all to myself, just a 10-min walk away, and I left, my heart bursting with gratitude.

It may seem obvious—even the only moral option—to book myself a private room while I have the flu. But the version of myself who started that trip in Vietnam wouldn’t have purchased it. The version of myself who started the trip a month before would have told herself: It’s only three nights. You already paid for this dorm, and you can’t get a refund. Think of all that money you’re wasting. You can get through it.

This new version of me, sick as hellll with three final days in Vietnam, knew she deserved more than just “getting through it.” She knew she could actually afford it. She knew she deserved comfort.

That I had to give it to myself now.

What did Vietnam really show me in the end?

How much I already had.

With every last bit of bullshit that wasn’t working anymore ripped from my greedy grasp, I saw just how much comfort and capacity I could provide for myself within. Already. With all the external distractions removed, there it was: my steady resolve. My trust in the divine. My patience. My hope. A grace for myself, for my mistakes, even for the mistakes of those around me who thought they could hold me—but could not. An acceptance for that because of my newfound certainty: I’ve got me, no matter what.

And not in a hyperindependent-traumatized-I-don’t-need-anyone-ass way. In a way that I have spent years cultivating alongside god, in a way that compliments the support I receive from those who truly see me and love me but does not grip and demand and squeeze. I thought that shit was gone before I took this trip. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I was living so out of integrity with what I really wanted for my life, I couldn’t trust myself anymore.

I don’t know why it takes what it takes for us to see the truth. I’ve always believed that god knows how to get our attention—our specific, individual, self-obsessed attention—and will use whatever is needed to wake us up. In my case, god knew I thought there was something crucial for me on the Ha Giang Loop and helped me get all the way there. Of course, the loop was magical. I met such an incredible group of people. I ate the best food in all of my time in Vietnam; I danced and sang every night. I saw some of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in my life. I spent 4 days on the back of a motorcycle—so fucking free.

But the Ha Giang Loop didn’t have the power to change my life. Vietnam didn’t either.

What changed my life was every step I took with two backpacks strapped—one to the front and one to the back—when all I wanted to do was give in and go home to people who could hold me. What did was the kindness of a woman who saw me crying on a tiny blue stool in her fruit stand in the dark, and instead of shooing me away, invited me to stay while she went back to sleep on her hammock nearby. What changed me was each night on a rigid bed alone, each 7-hour sleeper bus where I was unable to scroll, the realization, over and over, that running didn’t work anymore.

The crying on the back of Grab bikes, the excursions with strangers who had no clue what I was grappling with behind my smiles, the pineapple cut and wrapped by a woman on the corner. The friend who helped me carry my bags when I was weak, teaching a local a card game, a group of aunties dancing in sync in the city’s center.

Each day that I woke up and decided to make the best of a trip I’d given myself, despite, despite, despite. That’s what changed me. My own resolve. Vietnam, so bursting with life, reflected back what I already had: a lantern heart glowing with hope, hands willing to open and let go, the courage to keep walking.

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1. Cooking for my damn self after a month of not cooking!! Cleaning my apartment after a month of not cleaning!! It’s the little annoying things I end up missing because my Cancer Rising does, in fact, love tending to a little homey life. I’m very happy to be hermiting myself right now and enjoying my routines.

2. The community of women I joined this year who are also dedicated to their goals and living their most authentic selves online. I really, really needed people in my life who matched my ambition, and this group and our weekly calls have given me so much, especially when I was in the thickkk of this solo-traveling. Shoutout sarahhguerra_ on IG for leading us. Love her down.

3. The Puerto Rican artist RaiNao’s album, CAPICÚ. So unique and interesting and exactly what I needed to start dancing in the mornings again. A few favorites: naval point, road head, pero.

4. Also the songs “I Run” by HAVEN. and Kaitlin Aragon and “Doja” by Central Cee.

5. “Shrinking” season 3 is so fcckkinggg good that I just keep rewatching episodes while I wait for the next one to drop each week.

6. Shooting film! I am super proud of the photos I took in Vietnam and Taiwan (all throughout this issue of 👻), and as someone who infamously says they don’t like photography, idk maybe I do a little bit? Film only. 😤

7. TAIWAN, period. Will maybe write about this country at some point but I don’t know if I have enough to say besides how enchanted I was by it. THIS was the point of my trip where I (finally) felt alive… like a little gift for all my hard work. Arguably the coolest city I’ve ever been to, most interesting and delicious food, kindestttt people. Cannot, will not, get over it.

Vietnam, Thailand, & Taiwan, 2026.

And if you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for being here. <333

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It’s been awhile since I shared on Substack. The end of 2025 was all analog: my notebook, my junk journal, crafts, reading, and collage. Plus, my video project for The Artist Residency really reminded me how much I love video and editing. (Queue full sending Instagram reels. 😉) Writing hasn’t been my primary form of creativity lately—which is some mixture of “okay” and “unacceptable” in my mind.

I’m trying to allow myself to play, to take the pressure off of my creative work, but it’s hard when there is a constant voice looming in the background. “WRITE YOUR BOOKS,” she screams at me. And she is mean! But she is right!!

Since my decision to take a self-funded sabbatical from teaching, there’s even more pressure to work on these manuscripts… But I know pressure and worry stunts creative work. [If you haven’t seen this video about taking a semester off, it’s here. But long story short, I decided to not teach this semester to focus on travel and my books and other creative pursuits ❕❕]

I didn’t take this route just to stress MORE/about NEW THINGS so I’m trying really hard to trust. But here is the vulnerable truth that doesn’t appear in the quick IG content: I don’t make enough without teaching to pay my rent. I’m fortunate to have a safety net that I’ve been building for years, plus the curse/gift of being accustomed to frugality, but the money will run out. I live alone, I pay everything alone, flights must be purchased alongside packs of chicken and heads of broccoli, all with US prices at an all-time high. This constant money worry virtually depletes my creative resources. It ups the stakes on every single decision I make. The privilege of savings doesn’t last long in 2026.

Here’s a few things I’ve been contemplating regarding this career pause:

1. When we’re resourced, it’s much easier to make these kind of leaps into the unknown. If I didn’t have this savings, maybe I wouldn’t have done it. Also, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe you can do it without the savings because I do lowk believe in infinite possibilities.

2. However, it’s easier to believe in possibilities when you’re resourced…

3. When you take a risk, it’s only important that you believe it’s justified. Risk-taking doesn’t have to be impulsive or erratic. It doesn’t have to be logical to make sense to you. But you must keep the faith!!! And ignoring people’s logical opinions can be really hard.

4. A risk is still a risk, even if vantage points differ.

5. The more risks you take, the more you believe in taking them! I’ve found proof in the universe rewarding audacity with pretty much every risk I’ve taken—but never before. It’s the action that creates trust. Even when it’s been hard for a while, it has always brought me someplace I needed to be.

6. Leaving my fairly secure position at a university for something as uncertain as travel and creative pursuits in the current state of the world is highkey illogical, and I do understand that. I believe in paradoxical moves when you’re ready to get somewhere new.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that I started my first blog (when those were cool; it was early 2017!) the first time I solo-traveled in Thailand. I’d booked my ticket on a sobbing whim three weeks before I left. I arrived to Bangkok with culture shock beyond imagination after a 30-hour trek. And before I could fully panic, I crashed at 7 PM.

From a hostel kitchen at 3 AM the following day, I created my blog in one sitting, one tab open with another blogger’s instructions on how to make a WordPress and another tab with my brand new page. I posted my first blog around 7 AM that morning to zero readers before going out to explore The Grand Palace, paper napkin with scribbled directions in hand. I had no idea I’d come back to a furry of comments and likes and actual people reading my stuff. I was literally so excited.

The other day, I read through the blog for the first time in yearssss. I didn’t realize it had been so long. 9 whole years!? I still think about and reference that trip so much that I never would have guessed it had been that long. 9 years ago, I bought a ticket to Thailand with absolutely no clue why I wanted to go there. 9 years ago, I sat in a café in Bangkok and overheard a girl mention that we were in Southeast Asia—and realized I didn’t even know that. 9 years ago, I showed myself what it means to listen to that overwhelming I’m-going-to-cry-or-throw-up-feeling that only hits us when we have to take a chance. I showed myself what trust really looks like. That actually, faith is an action.

When I think back to that first trip out of the country, I deadass can’t believe I did it. There were no reels or Tiktok to inspire me or help me plan (just my precious niece who had done it before me!). I had no clue e-sims existed and not enough money for an international phone plan, so I could only use my phone when I had wifi. You couldn’t even download Google Maps yet, so I relied on paper maps and locals every step of the way. I’m in awe of my courage. I’m in awe of my fortitude to stick it out despite my fear and uncertainty and complete solitude. Because all of that was there. But I did it anyway. And because of that courage, I was changed forever.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about Southeast Asia since.

Reading those blogs written by younger-me who listened to the call of the unknown (when it’s so easy to ignore) inspired the hell out of me. Who is she!? So fierce and open. So brave.

Maybe it all sounds melodramatic and cheesy. I mean, sure, I guess it is. But it’s also just true. Because of the moves that younger-me made, I have since made sure to provide myself with the flexibility to go when I’m ready to go again (inevitable).

So if you’re hoping I’ll tone down the Eat-Pray-Love-ass storyline, feel free to unsubscribe now, because I just bought another one way to Bangkok.

Next stop… Vietnam.

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I hope you’ll follow the journey here and on socials (@lizzdawsonn on IG), subscribe to this Substack for a small monthly fee, throw me a night of accommodation via Venmo (which in SE Asia is like $10-15?), or share my work! A share goes so far. I’m sososo grateful for every subscriber. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

venmo: @lizzdawson for a coffee/night of accomodation/little treat <3

A note…

“DOESNT WATCHING THIS STUFF MAKE YOU SO DEPRESSED OMG ID BE UNABLE TO EXIST IN THE WORLD.” This is a DM I received last week after sharing my umpteenth reel about the murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE. First: I know that the statement was well-meaning, albeit ignorant. Because it was from someone I dearly love, I’m not writing about it with shade. (I know nuance is hard to see in these situations, but I am actively looking for it… Where it can be found. That this was a murder, there is no nuance.)

But look, I get it. Watching the news and reels and women being shot in the face is super depressing. I sobbed the other night in fear and grief until I couldn’t anymore; this murder was not the only time I’ve been brought to this place re the state of the world. But I can’t look away because these things affect so many people I love; they affect me, as a woman and a queer person—and beyond the ways they touch me or my world, they are against my highest value: that all human life is of equal importance. That all humanity is worth open eyes and an open heart, worth respect and dignity, etc and on. (All my traveling has only reaffirmed this over and over again.)

The US is an absolute wreck right now in a way that is affecting the entire world—and many of my international friends/fellow travelers I meet are more informed than some people I know back home, which is really unfortunate. And grossly American.

Ignoring the news and the internet doesn’t make what’s happening go away. Ignoring it just makes you privileged and uninformed. So I’m imploring you to please pay attention—at minimum.

The state of this country is just one more reason to gtfo for a minute.
(Just one more reason to feel conflicted about it all, too.)

thot pudding

snuff film political economy

An ICE agent executed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday while she was halfway through a three-point turn. Renée Good was a legal observer, as multiple of my loved ones are and have been. Originally from Colorado, she lived in Minneapolis with her spouse and children; she was a…

Read more

5 months ago · 228 likes · 13 comments · Sarah Thankam Mathews

May I suggest Sarah Thankum Matthews’ Substack for my favorite political writing.

Talk soon. But in the meantime… 🖤

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One afternoon, a student asked me if there were any communities or classes downtown that mimicked my classroom atmosphere at York College. I told them regretfully that there wasn’t, that I wished there was, too.

But it sparked something in me immediately. On my walk home from class, I called Vito, and within 20 minutes, we created The Artist Residency on my Notes app. The details came out clear and certain. We pitched it to The Grotto (who graciously donated their space!!), and within a few meetings, we received funding to pilot the program from The Cultural Alliance (an incredible non-profit in York providing funding to artists, cultural organizations, and creative entrepreneurs). We couldn’t believe it—but we could. When something is meant to be, it finds its own way.

For 10 weeks, Vito and I hung with a crew of incredible artists—sculptors and collage artists, writers and painters, photographers and seamstresses and more. Every Wednesday we met for two hours and worked on our projects together in pursuit of an art show at the end where we’d show the public our work.

It was so sick and so grounding to be around artists who cared about their work as much as I do, to watch them work and hear about their process and laugh amidst hella art supplies.

In the end, it felt like the residency created itself, as if Vito and I turned a porch light on, and there they were, waiting to hang in the back room of a warehouse and make stuff with us. All we really did was open the door.

I started the residency expecting to work on my manuscript, and in the process, I came across a 40-page essay written the months after my gramma died. I was in grad school at the time, and though I had a thesis to finish, I couldn’t write about anything else. The Artist Residency was the first time I looked at the essay since 2023, and after finally getting the courage to reread it, the film, in many ways, started to create itself.

My mom found a cassette that my grandmother left me (the yodeling and singing), and that recording became the inspiration for the film. I wanted a piece of art that combined her spirit and my own, so I included my voice reading parts of the essay. (Only maybe 4 pages of the 40 appear in the film.) The visual media comes from old home movie clips from the ‘90’s and 2000’s, videos from my iPhone in the past few years, and recent footage filmed on a digital Polaroid camera she left behind. She left behind the schoolhouse featured in the film too. Now, a sort of family heirloom, my gramma attended school there in the 40’s/50’s, and eventually, my grandfather bought it for the family to live in out in Wellsville, PA. It was one of her dying wishes that the house stay in the family, so I wanted to memorialize it in the project.

If The Artist Residency proved anything to me it’s that consistency—showing up despite how you feel—and devoting yourself to something IS the magic. What was created was more than I could have ever expected—not just my own project, but our showcase. And it was more than I ever could have done alone.

Days after I finished this silly little video essay and showed it to my sister, my gramma visited me in a dream. When I showed it to my mom, it all felt complete. Finished. In a way my art never really does. I know the project was really just created for her, for us, but maybe you will get something from it, too.

Happy holiday season or whatever <3

August is the Sunday of my life. September begins, and I start teaching again, and I wonder each day for the first few weeks if I’ll make it through to Thanksgiving break. I sense a chill in the morning air, wear one singular hoodie at night, and there it is… The familiar pang of transition—that awful space between one season and another.

When I started writing this issue of Hangry Ghost it was the beginning of September. I wrote, “The dread isn’t hitting like it usually does.” A few days later, the dread proceeded to hit. Hit hit. Shoutout to the luteal phase and that old, familiar babygirl—lurking behind the York College library, creeping through the creak of a porch swing, smashing those fight/flight buttons in my nervous system with a vengeance. You thought you were safe, the dread whispered.

Transitions are tough for me generally, but that spring/summer-into-fall/winter changeover is truly diabolical. My schedule fills by the first week of September, and I can no longer pick up and go wherever my heart desires, and it’s getting dark out sooner already, and I am once again wondering why I’m still here in York County…

Let me stop myself there.

I’m trying to channel the sentiment of those pre-packaged mindfulness meditations… Imagine your thoughts as clouds. Imagine your thoughts as buses you don’t have to get on. Imagine your thoughts as Post-it notes you can sort into categories. But I do wonder if these bitches have the same type of thoughts that I do. Because my thought-bus? She’s coming back around.

Last fall, I got hit with the final boss of seasonal dread.

It begins like this: I’m sitting behind the counter at Apricity (a candle shop where I was working at the time) just like any other day, when I start to cry. I don’t know what I’m crying about; I try to suck the tears up quick; I’m worried the next customer is going to walk through the door any minute. But the tears are relentless. No matter what I do, they just keep coming, and it continues for the whole shift.

This becomes a sort of ritual. Every Tuesday, every Thursday. Sometimes Sundays. I tell Micah (the owner and my childhood best friend), and it becomes a joke between us; she often checks the cameras from home to see if I’m crying again. Usually, I am. I’m grateful she thinks it’s funny, but the truth is I feel guilty being paid to crash out multiple times a week. And the bigger truth is that I can’t stop. When there’s no customers during my shift, the crying begins. I throw my glasses on between sobs, sell a candle or a tie dye shirt, and worry someone will question my puffy eyes—or worse, give us a bad review on their Google page.

I am sad af. It feels like I’m crying about nothing—or maybe about everything at once. All things past, present, and future. All things submerged and awake. I am so sad, and worse, I’m so scared of the sad, so I’m fighting it—a deep uncertainty at the edge of the grief: Where does it end? What happens if it doesn’t?

For a while, it doesn’t. For a while, it gets deeper and deeper, lodges itself permanently at the base of my chest. I don’t see friends much or answer texts or do anything, really, except teach and show up at the candle shop, sobbing quietly behind the counter. Each week, I beg my therapist for hope that I’ll ever actually be okay. She assures me that I am, that she isn’t worried. But I'm worried. It’s a low that feels bottomless. It’s the darkest my world has felt in a long time; I see no end in sight.

But it does end. Eventually. Like this: I’m in the bathtub one night after my shift of tears, and I can’t seem to lift myself out. I’ve been crying for so long that nothing’s coming out anymore. The water I’m sitting in is cold, and the water from the faucet is cold, but I barely notice. I’m so dissociated that my racing thoughts are quiet. There is only one singular thought, and it is clear: I think I need to go to the hospital. This is my best plan. I still don’t understand what’s wrong with me, but it’s been wrong for weeks, and probably years, and suddenly I see no other option than being thrown into some sort of treatment, away from everything.

But here’s what intervenes that night:

1. I have a best friend who I can text who happens to be a licensed therapist—but more than that, she’s known me since we were 12. She takes my pain seriously and still knows how to handle it with care. She also knows that I have a psychiatrist appointment in a few days (which I thankfully booked a few weeks prior), and she suggests I find a way to not be alone that night instead of running to the hospital

2. I have a therapist (earth angel) that knew how to talk me through booking that psych appointment, as I’d been adamantly against mental health meds since I got sober

3. I have someone I can call so I’m not alone, someone I trust enough to sit there with me and not try to fix anything. When they get there, they help me out of the bathtub and into my bedroom, where I lay for two hours, completely silent. They sit in my living room and wait until I can speak. Then they get me pizza and wings, and we watch Wicked until I fall asleep.

If you know me in real life, you know that I’m as neurotic and Type-A as I am wild. I cling to routines as much as spontaneity, and I cling to these routines so that I can function effectively in the world. This functioning is not automatic for me (or for anyone with a lot of traumaaa). I work out regularly; I watch what I eat. I’ve been in consistent therapy for more than a decade. I have a spiritual practice and a recovery community and really fucking great friends. I feel confident in the fact that I have found effective ways to take care of myself.

And yet I still felt so sad that I couldn’t imagine continuing with my life as it was.

That night in November was pivotal for me—in both my ability to accept help and to accept the reality of my mental health struggles and diagnoses. I woke up the next morning in my own home, in my own bed, with genuine hope that my psychiatrist appointment could help. So many people lose hope before they even get to their appointments—if they ever get one at all. Many people don’t have access to professional help. Many people don’t even think they have a loving person to call.

I look back on that month with so much gratitude now. I know it took that level of desperation for me to be willing to try mental health meds for the first time. Within days of my first dose, it was as if some metal claw came down and yanked me out of the depression machine, sent me home to another fate. It worked that quick, that well. I couldn’t believe I went that many years without allowing myself this form of help. There was—there is—a sort of grief in that.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, really. It’s been on my mind as I navigate this year’s bout of seasonal dread + fear that it will get that rough again. Maybe, I’m writing to assuage the little crumbs of shame left about my medication. Maybe, I’m writing to give someone hope who, like me, thought they didn’t need that sort of help.

I asked a friend in recovery if they were on medication before my appointment, and they told me they were.

“How is it?” I asked them, and they looked me in the eyes like I wasn’t the most desperate bitch on the planet for hope.

“It changed my life.”

It was the moment I decided I would try.

They changed my life too. We can be so good at just getting by. Most people in my life didn’t even know I was struggling as bad as I was. I’m an expert at masking and I have that cute little hyper-independent trauma response. So maybe, this is just an attempt to write more vulnerably about my mental health struggles. I’ve spent my life fighting to accept them. But the truth is, learning to be okay has been—and continues to be—a massive part of my life.

A year later, and I’m in such a better place—and yet. There she is. That feeling of life as ‘too much.’ The frustration of functioning when it can take so much to function. The harrows of the world that just keep getting worse. (How do they just keep getting worse?) Right now, there is legitimately so much to be sad about. I often find myself wondering if things are this heavy for other people too. Are they this heavy for you too?

There is no quick fix, but I’ve found that I can be happy and sad all at once.

That life can be both exhaustingly frustrating and beautiful.

I know that holding this duality is a sign of healing.

Allowing others to help me when I need it is a sign of healing too.

Because what saved me from my desperation that night in the bathtub was not the mental health meds. What saved me was that someone answered my text message. That someone knew me enough to know how to calm me down. That someone came and sat with me for awhile.

Community is so crucial for our well-being right now, and for many of us, it’s crucial for our survival. Please find your people and let them pull you out of the bathtub of tears you find yourself in. Let them feed you sloppy chicken wings in bed. Let them watch you sob on the security cameras and tell you it’s okay—that actually, they’re glad you find their store safe enough to cry in.

I know that being seen can take all the courage we can muster. But the amount of times the people I love have saved me is every time. And one day, when you return the favor for them, it will somehow save you all over again.

The antidote to helplessness, to powerlessness, to loneliness is its opposite: reaching.

What if you grab for the handle and open the door? What if you let them come inside? What if they see your puffy face from all that crying and still believe you’re beautiful? (They will.)

1. The baggy, low-rise men’s Tommy Hilfiger jeans I found at my local thrift store on a cute little night walk the other night. Also the baggy, low rise Wranglers that Joel gave me when I visited Texas that I forgot about until like five minutes ago when I cleaned out my jean drawer.

2. My niece Lainey, who just turned one year old. I never thought I could love someone the way I love Lilly, but she proved me so wrong. Love is bottomless, and I’m grateful for another reason to remember that.

3. This listening room/café called Silence Please that I found in New York the other weekend that I can’t stop thinking about. Listening rooms in general.

4. This playlist I made last year.

5. Slothrust’s two new songs: Wildcard and Spill the Juice. EP release any minute!!!

6. And ofc, I have to shout out Dave & Micah’s candles at Apricity. Not only are they two of the most genuine, kind, and badass people I know, but I will not buy any other candle. And you shouldn’t either!! (May I recommend my favorites behind steamy, tear-hiding glasses: Cashmere Sugar and Tomato Garden.)

Just an FYI that I’m not sure how much I will publish this fall, as I’m cooked with three classes, The Artist Residency, and a new side gig. I can’t wait to get to a place where I can make real income on Hangry Ghost (and therefore, publish more).

If you’d like to help me get there, hit the lil subscribe button and choose an option. You can subscribe for a coffee-priced amount a month. You have no idea how much that supports a little striving artist like me! <3

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I cling to the handrails on the jet ski as we ride through canals leading to the ocean. Slow, no wake. The marsh beside us dances in the soft breeze, so close I can almost reach out to touch it. Too close, the anxiety in my head tells me. We might hit it. I want to get out to open water, away from the edges of land. Despite the beauty of the bay, the safety of the person driving, the purr of the jet ski under my legs, I feel claustrophobic. Where there is normally thrill, trepidation lingers.

I attempt to push it out of my mind. We coast closer to the ocean, passing boats packed with waving passengers and fisherman in matching floppy sun hats. Reels cast lines from the edge of land into the same water we ride in—which feels like a moment to relish, like it should conjure a sense of unity or something. But when I’m in my head, I’m alone. I breathe deep, try to bring myself to presence. I notice the clouds covering the sun. I exhale. Still, the white grip of my knuckles.

We’re headed to open water in search of dolphins. I’ve seen so many this summer—on a sunset boat cruise in Ocean City, from the shorelines of Maryland, then Jersey—that I’ve looked up their spiritual meaning. Joy, playfulness, harmony. I’ve learned that they always swim together in pods, at least two but up to twenty, thirty. I’ve learned they know compassion and practice empathy with one another and even other species. I’ve learned that experts still don’t know why they jump out of the water as they travel; some say it’s for speed, others for observation of their surroundings, many think it’s just for fun.

We take a right out of the bay following a giant boat with WHALE, DOLPHIN, BIRD WATCHING in red letters across the side. The boundaries of the water blur, the bay’s surface so calm compared to the rolling ocean, though nothing separates them. We were there, and now we’re here. I feel better as the jet ski picks up speed and takes us into wide open space. Water on all sides, tiny houses and beach-goers dotted along the shoreline. I’m relieved to leave the slender canal behind. Many people fear the magnitude of the ocean; it feels just big enough to hold me.

We’re ready to give up on our dolphin hunt an hour in. The skies are turning grey. Goosebumps pop up on my body limb by limb. I try not to complain, but I’m shivering. The ocean waves are choppy, and he tries to pretend he feels in control. I close my eyes for a moment as we head towards the canal’s opening: god, please give me dolphins before we go.

Dolphins have come to feel like my summer companion, a sign from somewhere asking me to embrace the part of me that thrives in pods too. I’ve often clung to solitude for safety instead of my community. Fear tells me that depending on friendships and partnerships means I’m weak. I know logically none of this is true. But with C-PTSD, intimacy can make me feel flighty, like the jet ski’s potential to hit the bright green marsh. Developmental trauma taught me that others always let me down, they leave or they die, so I find myself in perpetual preparation for ‘aloneness.’ Better to leave before I’m left here alone. Before I’m disappointed. Better to not get too close so when the end comes, it won’t hurt as much. The fear can be so strong at times that it makes resting in love not just difficult, but impossible. I am always thinking of endings. Better to get out there on the open water where nothing can touch me.

Of course, I know my fears are not truth. They are desperate attempts to protect me from harm. Over a decade of healing and recovery has taught me that my fears keep me isolated, inauthentic, and alone—all the things I actually fear the most. But trauma doesn’t abide by rules of logic. Healing goes on and on. New anxieties crop up when I least expect it. Some I don’t understand: Going slow on a jet ski down a canal versus going fast in open water? Some reel in endless loops: What if I hurt this person I love when I make a mistake? What if I hurt this person I love when I take care of myself? What if this person I love hurts me? Take the masks off each fear, and their faces are the same: pain, grief, more loss. Fear that my feelings will swallow me whole. But certainty is not possible. There is no way to know if the dolphins will appear.

Of course, they do. It takes only moments. So many dolphins. So many that we are trepidatious, that we suddenly understand how small we are, how human, how vulnerable on the water. We inch closer to the creatures, the motor slow and quiet. We imagine the dolphins are putting on a show just for us as they leap in perfect arches. There are five and then there are ten and then there are more; we are surrounded by their bodies, slick and supple and glowing in the subtle sun. I consider reaching out to grab a fin, consider letting them take me wherever they’re going, the anxiety replaced with the release of gratitude. A swelling behind my ribs that feels both like a bursting and a hollow bone.

We circle the dolphins for a few minutes as the storm rolls closer. A layer of salt covers my sunglass lenses; I taste it on my lips. I shiver as the sun disappears, but still, I’m content, in awe of the sight we just so happened to catch, the one I prayed for. On the ride back through the bay, I lay my head on Vito’s back and finally let go of the handrails. I’m exhausted from all the anticipation, all the hanging on. I close my eyes and say a prayer of gratitude to this god that I believe in, this god that has led me to this moment, this god begging me to open. Thank you, I pray. Thank you. Thank you. Tears start to come, and I let them. They come harder, and I let them. I know that he probably hears me as he drives us through the bay, but I only let my body sink deeper. I have spent so long feeling safest as an island, surrounded on all sides by water.

Eventually, the full weight of my body rests on this body in front of me, this body who has held me through years of becoming, who has taught me unconditional love in ways that are as spacious as this ocean. The metaphor is tired, but it’s accurate. I never knew love without limits or conditions; I never knew love so vast as this. I’ve been told over and over that you can’t heal attachment trauma in isolation. I tried for a long time regardless. I wanted—I still want—to fix myself before anyone can see how much is under the surface…

I don’t consider god some parental figure who either gives me what I want (when I’ve been good) or punishes me and withholds (when I haven’t). I don’t think my momentary, half-assed prayer brought the dolphins to the surface. But I do think, like the fable about god sending boats to the drowning man, that help comes to us in wordly forms. That it comes to us in beauty and in kindness and in love, that it comes to us in the mundane and the carnal, that there are divine and unique ways to get each of our attention. How often we miss it, I miss it, looking instead for punishment or struggle.

Yet there: another boat. More radical acceptance from a friend. Another lover who adores me with no expectations. A moment of vulnerability with a stranger that reminds me that god is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Doesn’t god eventually send a helicopter to the drowning man? Whatever it is he sends, the man ignores that too. He drowns. He thinks he was abandoned.

This day in July, I am sent a jet ski and pastel blue water and a pod of dolphins. I’m sent a person who loves me and others back on land who wait for my arrival. All of that at once. All of that at once. The dolphins, I learn, travel in pods not for fun, but for survival. They guide one another safely from one expanse of water to another. They understand that they are such small creatures compared to the ocean; they accept that they could never make it alone. I understand, too. I do. As the marsh closes in around us and the dock comes into focus, I close my eyes. My chest tightens. I grip the rails again.

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If you’re in or around York, PA and looking for artist community…

The Artist Residency is an 10-week program bringing adult artists of different backgrounds and mediums together to work on individual projects in a community atmosphere. Think: accountability, inspiration, and connection. Fellow student/professor feedback & creative workshop opportunities. Snacks and music and a giant wooden art table. People who care about their work as much as you do!

Accepted artists (all mediums, all levels of experience welcome!) will work on a singular project with the end goal being to showcase their work to the public at the close of the residency. This is flexible! An intro workshop will help residents decide on a goal/project, so feel free to join even if you're not 100% on the direction of your residency. The point is to join an art community and get to work on making something!

The residency will be guided by Vito Grippi and I! Check out some of his work here.

And here is a link to apply with all the details if you’re interested: JOIN US!

[The Artist Residency is included in a series of new programs being powered by the @culturalyork as an investment into artists and creative entrepreneurs. community, accountability, and opportunity have emerged as key needs of the South Central PA art community; in response, CAYC is partnering with organizations and creative leaders who have developed programming to meet these needs.]

I want to make a formal statement that it’s FREE PALESTINE forever here. In lieu of my ‘Current Obsessions’ column for this issue, I urge you to inform yourself about the current stage of gen0c!de in Palestine—intentional starvation. If you can’t donate money, you can inform friends or family, flood famous people’s Instagrams with urgent calls to action, or call your reps. I don’t know what actions will end this, but what can we do but try? I do know that we have a humanitarian obligation to care for others—especially those who have less privilege than we do. I do know that every human on earth deserves a life as beautiful as mine. I do know that we are not free until we’re all free.

• Here’s a link to a nonprofit doing great work in Palestine.

• Here’s an initiative a friend is a part of.

• You can always read work by Palestinian poets and writers. Stories create empathy and empathy creates change. I love Mosab Abu Toba, and he also reports in real time on what’s happening in his country.

• Eye On Palestine is an IG who reports regularly as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of my life I used to share on the internet. I miss naïve me who did not think about “cringe culture” or “sincerity on main” or mean people on Tiktok. I am sincere—and nonfiction writing requires it. I miss my inner lover girl—so true to herself and ready to lay her life bare on the internet. I hope you’ll join me in a more vulnerable space as I move forward in my art and in my writing. And maybe even pay for my work if you’re about it!? So much more to come, and I hope you’ll stay tuned.

Lately, I’ve been waiting for the rain and grey skies to move along so that summer can really begin. There it is, that familiar feeling that life is about to happen for me, just over there, when…

“You always say that everything is about to change,” a friend said to me recently. I cocked my head towards him, lips pouty with indignance.

“No, I don’t.”

When I thought about it further, I changed my answer. “Yeah, I guess I do say that a lot.”

But I feel like that a lot. I wonder if maybe the feeling is hope. It’s all about to happen. Other times, fear. Because when change does happen—because it does inevitably, always happen—I cling to what I know with the grip of a small, tantruming child, even if it’s what I wanted.

What plagues me is the feeling that if I would just get the cog out of the machine, or put in the right cheat code, or open door number x, the perfect, authentic life would be there for me, laid out like a feast. I could run towards it, stuff it into my gluttonous mouth. There would be no more wondering; I could know for certainty I had arrived.

Living in this waiting game, time flies. Moments crack and fizzle out. There is always a next but never a now.

I love summer because its atmosphere welcomes this novel idea that nothing much matters beyond what’s right in front of me—a solace for my constant need to Try V Hard.

Pride Pop-Off kicked off summer for me for the second year in a row. I spent weeks of my energy exclusively on the pride block party I organize in my little hometown, and it ate. Besides even more people than last year attending, we raised double the money for the local LGBTQIA+ center (with a Dunk-A-Straight fundraiser in a dunk tank), and I was able to pay all of the drag queens a great rate.

As a white cis queer women (I feel most comfortable with the label queer but could also be called bi or pansexual), I questioned myself often this year as I planned and marketed the event. Who am I to throw a Pride event? Who am I to write on this topic? I don’t want to center myself in the conversation, so I haven’t written much about my queerness publicly. However, I also see how invalidating my own queer experience further feeds the division within the community, a division I’ve seen worsen this year—probably because the current administration has the LGBTQ community under constant fear and stress.

Unfortunately that stress has pushed queerness into the arena of the oppression Olympics—everyone arguing over who has it worse. (Lesbians vs bisexuals is my own personal dreaded arena.) Of course, each one of us deserves to be seen and acknowledged in our specific struggles. Queer people are not a monolith, and there are absolutely some queer people that experience greater burdens than others (trans folks and queer POC for example). Certain presentations of queerness have more privilege because they are more palatable to the public. Certain (straight-passing) relationships are afforded a respect that obviously-gay relationships are typically not. I could go on, but none of this is groundbreaking discussion.

And as we obsess over our differences, the exact systems we’re desperate to separate ourselves from get stronger, better at opposing us all. This binary and divisive thinking, born of the hetero-patriarchy, wiggles its way into homosexuality in unsettling ways, and it hurts us all.

This is why queerness is inherently and systematically political.

This is why living your queerness out loud is revolution.

This is why I don’t want to hide, and I don’t want you to hide, even if your queerness is messy and still evolving—like my own.

What gives me the most hope is that at the many Pride events I’ve attended this month, the division I find online is nowhere to be found. Only love and celebration and so much fun. The threats I received in the comments of the ads I ran for Pride Pop-Off were empty (and pathetic). The officer I contacted to make sure we were safe was not needed. No one asked me to get out the imaginary slideshow presentation for proof of how many women I have slept with/dated in the past. I promise you, at real-life pride events, there is no proof-of-gayness to register for.

Lizz, I know you’re gay, my ex texted me once, years after we dated. The relationship was short, but it was my first in sobriety, truly confirming what I’d denied for years about myself. My thought process was mostly this, again and again throughout our time together, Wait, I am gay?

So when her message came through years later—in its obvious, matter-of-fact sarcasm—I felt it like a strange aftershock. I recognized that I’m still doing that to myself sometimes, all these years later.

Often, it’s just me that needs to affirm me—not anyone else. And I’ve come to know this as a pretty common queer experience: that need to be validated after years spent hiding and questioning and undermining what we know deep inside to be true.

And living your truth is terrifying (!)—especially when society defaults to a very different lifestyle.

My friends and I’s running joke is that I threw Pride Pop-Off last year as a public coming out party. In some ways, it’s accurate. I moved home from New York more certain than ever about who I was, and I was ready for people to know about it. I wanted to capture the queer joy I had experienced in New York, bring it to my hometown. Brooklyn block parties were my inspiration. The help and the funds came seemingly from the divine. I expected to disappear behind the curtain of the planning, but in the end, I did not.

However, this year, it felt so much less about that and more about our queer community in downtown York. A community that I found through throwing Pride Pop-Off last year. The event was a true labor of love. It was a protest. It was proof that queer people are not going anywhere—even if we’re scared. And by the end, as I shouted ‘Love you, bye!’ to returning queens from last year and new ones I had just met, I recognized that the work of it had granted me what I was missing all along.

It was community I was hoping for when I found the courage to walk into the change waiting for me. When I finally grabbed the mic in a crowd of two hundred queer people and said here I am too. No one was going to hand it to me. I had to get offline and show up in the world. I had to trust that as I evolved and changed and grew, I could be loved too.

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This is the first book I’ve read by a straight man in literal years, and I only picked it up because Vibha recommended. She has yet to steer me wrong. Still, I was skeptical for the first 50 pages or so. By the end, I was stunned at the book’s ability to keep me captivated despite simplicity of plot. A family story, a love story, a story about being lost. What he did most stunningly for me was the tricky dance of holding both love and disdain for where you come from. A great writer of place; a book full of tenderness. I’ll be thinking of the ending for a long time.

Happy Pride. Support your local bisexual bitch with a monthly subscription to Hangry Ghost. <33333

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I sit at Prince Street Cafe while I write this as a swirl of white petals encircle the building. They come from the flowering Bradford pear trees down Market Street, fallen from the branches to their withering death on the sidewalks. Stomped and bruised. Yet outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the cafe, they’re given new life. So many white petals it looks like a snow shower in spring. They spin in frantic spirals until the wind settles, scattering them back into piles across the concrete. We are in a snow globe, only us; a collective awe erupts inside. I think, there is something so much sweeter about experiencing a moment like this with strangers. Moments before, we’d been engrossed in our own technology. Now, something shared.

The petals are familiar. I think my family had a tree like this out front of my childhood home, but as memory does, the facts are skewed. It could have been a dogwood or a cherry blossom or a tree I don’t know the name of. I only remember with certainty that I loved it.

I find my sharpest memories come from extremes: love, grief, epic novelty, trauma. This is probably common. I’ve studied memory for more than a decade—in therapy, in my memoir writing, as a nonfiction teacher. And the only thing I’ve really nailed down is that they’re slippery creatures. Complicated and fallible. Untrustworthy. Warped by time. Really, just a stamp of our perception of a moment. (It’s been found that trauma is not even solidified by the moment itself but by our experience of it, our reaction to it.) As a writer whose primary medium is memory, I’ve started to consider them almost like dreams—warped and unwieldy. Some scenes feel slanted in my mind, or like I could mold them with my hands, make them into something new. (This doesn’t bode well for someone writing two memoirs, but I digress.)

My sister always says I “only remember the bad stuff” from our childhood, but that’s not true because I remember the tree. I remember the vines on our trellis. The smell of my mother’s bread machine. I remember the day she pulled us out of school early (or was it an early dismissal?), and we went to a movie and to a pizza shop downtown. According to the weather in my memory, the trees would have been in bloom. Or was that all just a wish… It’s hard to say. I’m scared to ask.

I don’t know where I’m going with this short essay except that when I researched what kind of trees produced the white petals outside, I learned that the city is cutting them down after this year’s bloom. They’re too large now, apparently, posing a threat to buildings and pedestrians, the roots unwieldy underneath. The article explains that they’ve been growing since the 70’s, though I don’t remember them from my childhood; in fact, I only remember the trees from the past two years upon moving back into the city.

I don’t know where I’m going with this short essay except that I can’t believe they’re cutting these trees down. And I can’t believe York County natives seem content with the decision.

“They have lived their life,” someone from the article proclaims. Typically, any sign of change in my small-town invites vocal disapproval, but I guess we’re just cool with this? These trees!, I think. We must leave them be! Where is the conviction?

There could be no argument that the Bradford pears are stunning, lined from Pershing to Duke. They overflow into the one-way like a canopy; they make our little city feel as romantic as a film. But I guess that’s not enough to keep them in bloom. That damage from the roots…

Anyway, I am probably clinging to some sort of consistency—love, grief, trauma, novelty. Something as strong and sturdy as the trees; the antithesis of a memory. I’m probably just clinging to anything to prove to me that we’re covered by something greater than us, something solid, something very alive.

1. Hacks season 4, obv.

2. My Artists Way book club, which has honestly become the sun in which my life revolves around. It’s a group of people that my best friend put together, none of which I knew super well—and now, week 5, they feel paramount in my life. I didn’t expect to devote myself to this program the way I have, but it’s been so lovely and grounding.

3. My friend Rob’s verse drama, My Love Is Water, is my favorite thing I’ve read this year so far. Stunning and innovative.

4. My new tattooed heart freckles on my stomach. Jess Bobrow at Ink & Arrow slays! Here they are.

5. The bleach out I got from my stylist Lindsey who I adore (Did I pay more for it than a round trip to Mexico City? Maybe. But to feel this much like myself again!? Fck it.)

Unfortunately, no book recc this month! Can I ask you all for a one instead? My reading life has been dominated by student work and a novel for a prize I review.

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It would mean the world to me if you subscribed for a cup a coffee a month ($5)! I will prob literally use it for a cup of coffee! In fact, I’m going to get one right now. Buy it for me? Subscribe, subscribe!

It’s a Tuesday, and I don’t have to teach, and it’s the first over-60-degree day of the year, the sun emitting a sort of magic. I wake up with a plan to take my laptop to Lake Williams, a spot only a short drive from my city apartment. Truthfully, I find the lake too familiar in a way that’s almost depressing, but I know I need its body of water. How lucky I am to have a lake fifteen minutes from home is not a thought.

My sister calls as I’m getting ready to leave, which isn’t typical for a Tuesday. I ask her to come walk with me. To my surprise she says yes, the sun clearly infecting us all. Her and Lainey, my 6-month-old niece, pull up beside me in the parking lot shortly after, and I feel the immediate ease and comfort of home. We walk along a paved path with the stroller, Lainey in awe of the outside world, and even Liv seems present—so present she notices a woodpecker’s knock. “Can you imagine going so fast into a tree that you make that noise?” She imitates the woodpecker, and I try not to cry it’s so precious. (Not exaggerating, unfort.)

If somehow you sense something underneath this precious late morning is awry, you are right. The weather is stunning; I have the flexibility in my schedule to be here with them, but all I can think about is the work I “should” be doing, the hours passing by, my laptop burning a hole in the tote at my side. (Yes, the only problem is me.) I beg myself to be present as we walk. My to-do list responds with a late-night infomercial-esque scroll through my brain. I actively soothe myself: You have time. You have time. You have time. I’m pretty sure, though, that this isn’t presence either.

I am so not-present lately that any mention of the word makes me cringe. Like, I gettt it. Of course, that’s what’s best for me. Of course, the past is history and the future’s a mystery, and all we have is now. Tell that to my intrusive thoughts, to my spiraling ruminations, to the fifty student papers waiting on Canvas to be graded. The thing is, I want so bad to let go of this obsession with productivity, but its grips in me are ruthless.

And I’ve only just admitted the full reality of the obsession.

What would more stillness look like? Feel like? What would be there, waiting for me?

Enter: Fear, stage left.

One thing I know for sure about me is that once I see, I can’t unsee. Once I know, that inner gripped up body-knowing, that twisting in the chest and in the throat, action has to follow. Once awareness is shed on what isn’t working anymore, what’s directly in the way of my growth, I’ll have no choice but to respond with some version of letting go: kicking and screaming, dry heaving, sobbing, claw marks, etc. Surrender isn’t graceful (I mean if it is for you fckoff). Still, it’s inevitable. In fact, once I acknowledge the truth, surrender is already on its way.

There is a moment on our walk by the lake that my sister mentions god, and I’m so caught off guard that I’m there with her—presence activated. She doesn’t normally talk about these sort of things. (She’d never read this newsletter.) She is a mother of two and seemingly runs her life by self-propulsion: home-making and cooking and breastfeeding around the clock. She still manages to work two jobs. Her weekends are full of parties and cookouts and time with the girls, whose lives are so much fun. She does not complain as much as I would. So among all of that, I guess I see why she doesn’t worry about god… I mean, she’s got it.

But it keeps coming up, she says to me. I don’t think I want to, like, go searching; I just want to open my heart to it. What she doesn’t know is that’s the perfect starting place: easy, roomy, soft. My own heart balloons.

I try not to say much as she talks about god because if I do, I’ll activate Preacher Mode^TM. I’m just excited she wants to explore this part of herself—a part I truly believe is in all of us, a part that seeks the comfort of something greater than ourselves to lean on. Call it god, call it creator, call it creative flow state; it’s all the same. That unexplainable thing that guides us. That feeds us ideas and forward momentum like gumdrops. The force that allows me to go about my responsibilities, instead of just stalking my sister’s house all day to make sure they’re okay in there. This, I do say to her: God allows me to trust.

But here’s the truth: if I’m obsessing about anything (productivity, clarity, & my hair are my Greatest Hits), trust isn’t there. God isn’t there. It’s just me and me and me and me (each me is same fear, different font). What my sister says to me that day by the lake is this: Yeah. I just want to have that trust.

So simple. So clear. So antagonistic to my experience as of late.

So what did I have left to do but throw caution to the perfect, sunny breeze and follow my sister everywhere she went that day. First, to her neighborhood where I walked for blocks as she tried to put Lainey to sleep (never happened). Next, to her partner’s baseball game with the girls, a blanket laid out on the grass with snacks packed in plastic bags and Tupperware to share. Then, back to her house for homemade grilled chicken Caesar wraps. Liv grilled the chicken outside with Lainey strapped to her chest. Lilly and I kicked two balls around the yard. I still somehow remained underlying stressed about the work I didn’t get done that day. (I know; I’m rolling my eyes too.)

What I realized that evening at my sister’s kitchen table was how much she already embodied the trust she was seeking. I watched her rest in it as she packed the stroller a third time into the trunk of the car, as she tossed green grapes into a plastic bag, as she rocked Lainey to sleep on a chair by the window. I was in awe of her—in awe of the enoughness of her home in the borough with these precious, perfect girls. In awe of her resolve to do all the tiny tasks to tend to a family, to a home. In awe of the bravery it takes to commit to not one, but two children of your own.

Teach me how, I wanted to beg of her. I just want to open my heart to it.

I knew that she couldn’t.

I recently joined a little book club of people going through this book’s program together. I have read (and loved) it in the past, but I’ve never actually followed through with the 12-week tasks. So here’s to this changing my life, as promised. Maybe it’s the aries-szn energy talking, but for the next twelve weeks, it’s WWJCD? (Am also considering documenting the changes that occur to keep myself accountable either on Tiktok or IG so follow me?!)

1. When the Twelfth House’s newsletter hits my inbox I set everything else aside.

2. Walking to and from campus every day is single-handedly carrying me through the spring semester.

3. Morning pages, a la Julia Cameron’s program. I have tried these before (3 stream-of-consciousness pages every single morning) and hated them, so I was surprised to fall into them so quickly this time. They provide immediate relief to my day.

4. Pink hair. (It always comes back to you.)

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In fact, let’s start our V-Day Mewdbored there. Watch in its entirety.

I fell in love with Marina Abramovic after seeing her 2012 documentary “The Artist Is Present” (highly, highly recommend), and this moment makes me cry every single time.

Bonus track: Last February’s Substack which is still strangely resonant below.

What if?

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Sue me; I really love the little gift guides that all my favorite newsletters do at the end of the year. But I tried to design this more like a *~favorite things~* round-up from the year. Some are pulled from current obsessions and book recs from past newsletters (tried and true!); some are new. I also included concepts and ideas that I’ve adopted and held onto this year. It’s categorized! Enjoy.

*Reminder that I do get a v small kickback when you purchase the books via my Bookshop link, but otherwise, I get no affiliate $$ from this stuff. Just sharing things I love and pretending I’m some sort of influencer.

Happy Holidays, ya’ll. I hope it’s truly the best it can be for you & yours.

Books

nonfiction: Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosby

fiction: All Fours by Miranda July

poetry: The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

winter rec: Bluets by Maggie Nelson (a reread!)

alien rec: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

a classic: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

gay rec: Couplets by Maggie Milner (a reread this year! gift to all your bi besties!)

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Beauty/Heath

copper peptides & glycolic acid from the ordinary — Immediately noticed my skin improve adding these two products. It’s giving glass. Make sure to incorporate only as often as directed. My (religious) skincare routine also consists of an alternating rotation of snail mucin (still!), retinol, vitamin c, lactic acid, jojoba oil, and this moisturizer which I’ll die for.

chillhouse chill tips / olive & june press-on nails — Press-on nails entered my life this year, and these brands have the cutestttt for $8-$15. Outfit feels complete with them. They also go really well with hand tattoos.

mouth tape during sleep! — Grabbed a random brand. It’s strangely comfy. I have a lot of allergy and sinus issues, so I’m hoping this helps. Also supposed to help with face puffiness in the morning!

suede clogs — Brought these back from my childhood and have worn them into the ground. Birky dupe.

Writing/Stationary/Craft

SPACIES pad — Obsessed. Covers my whole desk. Has little portals and quotes and the most perfect layout.

unlucky wishes — I love her stuffff, especially this bag. I also subscribed to the monthly postcard club.

paperage dotted journals — Knock-off Leuchtturm (which IS my fav brand but they’re a lot when you use notebooks as much as I do). So many good colors!

Misc

squishmellows & mini verses — Squishes… Obv. & I can thank my niece for the love of Mini-Verses. Lifestyles are my favorite, but Lilly and I have made an absurd amount of these things.

light therapy lamp — I’ve only had it for a week, but I carry this bitch around with all through my apartment like I’m a little moth. Love her.

tj’s chili onion crunch — OG pantry staple. You can put this on ANYthing. I will never have eggs without it.

Concepts

junk journaling — Yes, the internet taught me about junk journaling. It’s like scrapbooking but chic. I’ve successfully kept at it this year (not weekly but fairly regularly), and I plan to continue! I love collaging, and I love proving to myself that I can make dope shit out of literal scraps of my week or trash.

lymphatic drainage & facial massages — I tell anyone who will listen about facial massages. I started them last November and have incorporated them into my morning routine at least 4x a week still. I cannot express to you enough that they transformed my face. (Check out anastasiabeautyfascia & sagefacialtensionrelease on IG for a ton of free vids.)

daily city walks — This year was hard, and some days, it was only these city walks that saved me. Think hike, but on city streets. Devoted time just to walk. At least like 45 min to an hour. I prioritized them and found that there was always more time in my days because of having committed the time to myself.

That’s it! Short & sweet. I’m so grateful for all of you who read, who subscribed, who pay (!) for me to do this work. It is the coolest thing. I really committed this year to getting this thing out monthly, and I plan to continue into 2025! (Plus a book deal, perhaps!?!?! 🙏🏽)

Right now my yearly subscriptions are still on sale, but they’ll go back to their normal price in the new year. Get them while they’re hottttt.

Endlessly grateful to be in your inbox. All my love. Happy holidays 🖤

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I’m trash at being vulnerable.

This is always something people are surprised to learn about me. An artist whose primary medium is splaying my insides via paragraphs, an Internet over-sharer since Xanga days, a therapy regular, and yet—

Perhaps my propensity to wall up irl is the reason I turned to art in the first place. Me and my Lisa Frank notebooks against the world (third period math class).

The truth is this newsletter is late because I’ve been depressed. I don’t use that word frivolously; I don’t connect with depression as a regular part of my mental illness symptom rotation. No shade—I’ve just worked really hard to hang on to my passion for life. Depression, or sadness, is my least favorite feeling. And sag season is a real unfortunate time for years of grief to catch up to you.

I’ve been trying to tell people how I’m doing, but an offhanded “I’m unwell” is also something I say when my favorite coffee shop is closed for the day. I don’t know how to get the words out: I’m desperate for myself? I’m so sad that daily life feels like wading through water? I could use the right buzz words: my nervous system is fried; my dopamine is depleted. All of it would be true, but what can anyone do? Feel sorry for me? (Please, please don’t.)

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At the beginning of the month, I thought it was an election hangover. Or that perhaps the weight of the state of the world had finally pummeled my sensitive ass heart. I have suspicions that the holidays have stirred up some stagnant, buried grief, or that all the sly ways I was avoiding certain feelings have stopped working. It’s probably all of these things.

And the deeper, truer things: I wish I could go to my grandparents’ house for Christmas with all my cousins, cosplay Real Family. I wish I was celebrating the holidays with the two children I lost before they even had a chance. Sometimes, ten months later, I still wish I didn’t leave my relationship. I miss my ex’s kids with a secret anguish I haven’t found the words for. The last time I spent a holiday alone in an apartment, it was my first year of sobriety, and it was the closest I ever came to drinking. I want my loneliness to feel good, like it has in the past, but it rarely does. I am terrified of aging, of time passing. I am terrified of losing another person, anyone; I worry I wouldn’t survive it. I have no idea where my life is headed, but I know my time in York is coming to an end.

There. There is some of what my sadness sounds like. It is so desperate. I’m trying to let it be desperate—

Grief claws at the past; it is ravenous for relief.

The other day, I realized there will be a stocking with my name on it that surfaces from a Christmas décor box in a house I don’t live in anymore. I have been thinking a lot about how, after my gram died, my pappy didn’t come over with us to celebrate the holidays no matter how many times we called. I wonder what he did; I wonder how his heart felt. I’ve been thinking about how sometimes, I casually mention my second miscarriage that happened the day after Christmas last year, and I’m met with a stunned look from a friend, and I realize I never really told anyone.

At some point, the sadness pills on so thick it almost feels ridiculous. It almost feels invasive to spread all that news of loss. (If you’re still reading, know that I’m feeling that now, already.)

I’m tempted to wrap this ending up in a gratitude bow: But there are McDonald’s fries and dino nuggets waiting for me downstairs, where one of my best friends lives! But my sister and nieces are coming over to decorate! But there’s a Charli xcx party this weekend! My birthday on Monday! Ru Paul’s Drag Race! Earmuff season!

I’m beyond wrapping this shit up, unfortunately. These feelings linger alongside attempts at joy. There is saran wrap over my heart. There are so many sad things, and I have rarely just let them be sad. Just let myself be sad. I’m still struggling to do that, even as I see the grief building under my eyes again, a pocket of tears no amount of facial massage can eradicate. I know they call it “through,” but I’m so scared of submersion.

This is not a cry for help; I am grateful and lucky to know where to find that in my life. This is just a glimpse at my holiday season this year. This is just some sort of attempt at vulnerability. This is just a bunch of jokes in a heavy ass trench coat.

And now, there’s a knock at the door, and a little girl with chocolate chip cookies in her hand, and I must start the Pop Christmas playlist.

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sag szn book rec

Grief Is For People, by Sloane Crosby

“Grief Is For People is about how we live without the ones we love.”

My favorite nonfiction of the year. I’ve never reading such stunning and pointed prose on losing someone to suicide. But it’s really about all we lose, even the jewelry Sloane searches for after her apartment is burglarized.

Order it at the link above!

I made a zine!

It’s just a silly little thing inspired by one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver, a poem I’ve loved for so many years, I mostly have it memorized.

I’m selling these for $6 each with half of all profits going to The Trevor Project, a national support nonprofit for LGBTQ+ folks. I can ship for an extra dollar! They will also be available for pick up and in a few shops in downtown York.

Please email, DM, or text for one!

The poem, by Mary Oliver:

In lieu of this month’s installment of Current Obsessions, please read these from two of my favorite writers:

thot pudding

every day is all there is 🫡

Read more

2 years ago · 143 likes · 11 comments · Sarah Thankam Mathews

How To Cure A Ghost

Where Do We Go From Here?

Read more

2 years ago · 59 likes · Fariha Róisín

I’d love to see what’s giving you hope this holiday season in the comments.

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The oversharing begins with the most vulnerable piece I’ve ever published, a piece I’ve been working on for over 10 years (I mean it), which just so happened to be published the first day of Scorpio season.

Instead of writing something new this month, I’m going to ask that you read this piece on losing my ex to suicide and addiction.

This essay was once longer (it’s now two essays), and I have dissected every line, every comma placement. The ending itself took me about eight years to realize, and two more years to craft into just the right words. I have changed some sentences so many times I have them memorized; I have mothered it through something like 15 rejections. And I never stopped believing it would find its place. Here it is, pubbed in my dream publication—The Rumpus—home to some of my absolute favorite writers’ works (and my favorite column ever, Dear Sugar).

It is slightly unnerving for this piece to be out in the world after all this time spent on my laptop. The event I detail affected a lot of people in my small world back in 2010; it’s one of the most universally taboo, fragile topics in general. I have worked tirelessly to do it justice.

I can only pray it will find the right hands; I can only hope you will like it. <3

Read it here.

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scorpio szn rec.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

I read this for the first time last year and vowed to read it each October. This novel is so good it makes me want to carry it around and read it aloud, shouting at people about how much I love it. Highly recommend for people that enjoy psychological horror, but as someone who never reads the horror genre, I really fell in love with this because of the writing and character development. Also, the queer undertones.

Basic plot is this: four strangers meet at a haunted house, called there by an occult scholar studying the lore. Some irl spooky stuff does ensue, but the greater terror occurs in the characters’ psyche. Hill House combines psychological thriller and horror elements; it’s a ghost story, but where are the ghosts?

Sidenote: it’s nothing like the inspired Netflix series. The novel is slower, less “scary,” more character-driven. If anyone else has a similar obsession with this novel, plz DM me.

1. This pair of camo cargos that I’ve worn too many times since I got them.

2. My new cutting mat for collages and lil exacto knife set!! I am slowly making my apartment an art studio that I get to live in. The other day a friend saw it for the first time and described it as a “dreamy museum in NY or something,” which I’m also obsessed with.

3. Brat remix album. If you think brat is overrated, this is not a safe space for you—and also, there is still time to change your mind. I was once you. SOMEHOW Charli xcx made a perfect album liiiiterally even better. Top tracks: everything is romantic with caroline polachek, girl, so confusing with lorde (obvi), apple ft japanese house, club classics ft bb tricks, and I think about it all the time ft bon iver.

4. The espresso machine I bought myself—a prouder moment than when I bought a brand new car.

5. This quote from queen Chani Nicholas, which I will make my mantra this season: “Avoid the allure of unnecessary drama and make art out of high-voltage feelings instead.” It reminds me of an IG post I think about nearly every day that you can find here.

Thank you for reading. Please share my essay published above on your social media. Reads and clicks on a piece in a literary magazine are a writer’s LIFELINE. And if you got it like that, consider paying $5 a month to support my work on Substack! Love you.

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1. We ate raspberry and chocolate peanut butter ice cream at Perrydell, and just before we pulled away from the farm, I caught the cows coming in. A staggered parade of ten or so, sauntering slow towards their silos. Look, I said. You did. We were quiet. Behind our girls: a valley of grass, a nascent corn field, an oil painting—one I would surely find boring in a gallery. Rush right past. Those cows. Even the moon watched them, and us—you, my niece, and me—unmoving in my car besides tongues licking fresh cream. It was 7 PM, everything coated in amber light and warm, autumn breeze. From the front seat, I used the word ‘presence,’ though the sentiment usually feels flimsy and cheap. Or maybe, I didn’t voice it aloud; so often with you, I only assume I’ve said things. So close, my thoughts feel like your thoughts. So close, the words feel redundant. My niece watched the cows come home just behind us, no longer asking for more ice cream, for anything.

2. A Sunday evening, you and I, a city walk. We live just blocks apart. You wear an oversized tee with bright yellows and long socks and a bun, messy and high, and I swear you’re the most beautiful girlie I’ve ever walked a street alongside. You show me a section of the rail trail I’ve never visited, despite walking it for years. I say aloud: God. You giggle because. Because. Because. We find a porch swing in a park overlooking the creek that feels like it was put up that Sunday just for us. In fact, I know it was. Families and strollers and basketballers orbit, say hi, but I barely notice. Mostly, there is your feet curled up on the swing as I rock us. There is the pink and lavender of the sky. There is a hawk you mistake for a bald eagle; there is your laugh piercing the quiet, your knees dropping to concrete. There is this stillness inside me. Usually, I’m anxious about Mondays, but tonight, we walk back to my apartment, and your fingers weave two braids in my hair on the balcony as the sky goes dark.

3. You are speaking for your six years sober in the church where I used to celebrate my own sober-birthdays. I don’t go here anymore; there are too many ghosts; they know I struggle to let go. I give you a hug at the door, go to find my seat, but you grab me, say, Come pray with me in the sanctuary. We walk back the hallway and into a room of the church where the meeting commenced when I first got sober, now a decade before. It’s pitch black, ceilings far away and burning white. The plush pews only shadows in front of us. When the door closes, I am dizzy with memory. Slick with longing. Without a thread of self-consciousness, you drop to your knees, your hands reaching for mine across the dark. Words come, but all I think about is how lucky I am to feel your palms in my palms, these knees on treaded carpet, the squeeze of your fingers as I whisper, hi god, it’s us.

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4. My baby niece, just weeks old, feeds in my arms while my sister showers. A bottle of her breastmilk warm in my palm. Her tiny lips splay around the nipple of the bottle like fleshy petals; I watch their pulse. My other niece, Lilly, sits on the floor eating a bowl of goulash (which I think must be a made-up dish from my childhood); my soon-to-be brother-in-law sprawls out on the other side of the couch. America’s Got Talent is on the TV, a show I haven’t watched since I had my own family. I tune into the current act: a young boy with autism doing magic tricks. Whatever, I think, before tears start rolling down my cheeks, so uncontrollable and hurried that I announce it to the room before anyone notices. I feel silly, even though Lilly is jumping up and down, cheering; even though Jordan is quiet, so quiet, a sliver of a smile across his lips. Lainey is slurping the milk too quickly because I’m forgetting to slow her down, and I’m sure that love exists because of how it presses in on me in this house. Where they all live. The shower shuts off; my sister calls down the stairs as if to make sure we’re all still there with her. The baby spits up because I didn’t time her feeding well enough. I sigh. Lilly begs me to stay as she squeezes me goodbye, but instead, I close the door and walk out towards my car, tears still coming though the magician’s act is long over. I wonder if I’ll ever have what they have, here on Orange Street.

5. You tell me you get it. You tell me your favorite thing about me is how human I am. You count down a list of more favorite-things on all five fingers of your hand. You make a corny joke about magnets, and I laugh. Car after car pulls in and out of the parking spot behind us. 9 to 10 to 11 PM. I lay my head on the steering wheel, worry if my hair is a mess. What you mean, I say, is that I’m vulnerable. You argue with me until you realize joy is as vulnerable as sadness. The clock runs in the background, and I feel like I’m fooling both of us. What you mean, I say, is I allow you to be yourself. What you mean, I don’t say, is I hide my nerves around you well. I ask for a sip of water, but it’s out; you shake your metal jug willing the ice to melt. If you go inside to fill it, you’ll break the spell, and I’ll drive off, and who knows when I’ll feel comfortable enough to let you see my heart again. The phone tells us it’s midnight, and you tell me that nothing I’m doing is bad or wrong, and I beg myself to believe in unconditional love. The stoplight at the end of your street flashes green, then yellow, then red, then green again. I ask for signs, and I get them. 12:22 PM. I ask for signs, and I don’t listen.

“I have to leave York soon,” I say to one friend and then another friend and then another. This is my way of pretending I can predict the future. This is my way of convincing myself I know what I want. I have no plan to go, no concrete reason why, no destination in mind. Only this feeling in my gut that I recognize: a seed of knowing, a nudge that it’s time to begin collecting courage. This part is almost worse than the instant where I will, inevitably, jump. Is it nostalgia if the moment happened only days before? Is it nostalgia if you miss it in real time? Lilly used to hug stuffed animals in the store when we told her she couldn’t take them home. I miss them, she’d scream, tears running down her face. I worried for her; I understood the feeling.  

I’m so tired of loving things most prominently in the wanting. Transitions are too hard for me. I will them to be easier, but even the hours of 3-6 PM every day make me feel woozy. Even sleep too late into morning is jolting. Even Fridays, their hinge into the weekend. Nothing quite like a tree with all its abundant green leaves, only a few pops of yellow, red, orange to make me queasy. Pick one, I beg. Change already. Leave. I take my laps around the park like exposure therapy.

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Libra Szn Book Rec:

All Fours by Miranda July

A women sets off on a road trip, but stops at a hotel 30-minutes away from home and stays, instead. A book about family and domesticity and the reality, the vulnerability of desire. I borrowed this book from the library and ended up purchasing it thirty pages in because I had to make marks all over it. Miranda July is the sort of raw that I PINE FOR in art. Evocatively vulnerable. So funny. Able to turn small moments into something tender and desperately alive. Unforgettable lit!!

"July's novel is hot and weird and captivating and one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I've ever read." —New York Magazine

1. This slightly lame hat from Target that I’ve been wearing with everything

2. Hour long walks alone through the city on week day afternoons. I am a shoving the “city walk” down everyone’s throats. Imo, this is peak bliss. Drive to a hike for why?

3. This playlist tagged earlier that I began early September: transitions are too hard for me. These songs, specifically, are on repeat the past two weeks: Dirt May by Sadurn, California & Picture You by Chappell Roan, Constant Headache by Joyce Manor and Tigers Jaw, and Crush by Ethel Cain

4. Euphoria. I’m so late on this, but when it came out, I was too sad to stomach the pilot. I’m obsessed with the artistic direction on this show and, like everyone else, the cinematography. Of course, the writing is phenomenal!! The jokes; the dialogue. The portrayal of addiction is the best I’ve ever seen! My bisexual ass cannot decide who’s hottest on this show. Top contenders are Jules, Fez, Elliot, and (ugh) Sydney Sweeney. Let’s argue this in the comments. But it’s Jules. It has to be Jules.

5. TJ’s does it again with their Chicken Soup Dumplings. How tf are these bitches frozen and microwaved? Paired with their Crunchy Chili Onion, obv, which is my (and everyone else’s) forever obsession.

Honorable mentions for the catalog of presence: a 4-hour birthday meal for my best friend at The Melting Pot; a slushy at Sheetz; Gettysburg alone, early morning, resenting a psychic; the sunrise I saw on old 30; any moment roller-blading with Lilly; a new tattoo from an old friend; getting thrown to the ground in a mosh pit; Knoebels on a Saturday afternoon; Spirit Halloween on a Friday evening; writing this from bed mid-week like a love letter.  

See you in Scorpio Szn. <3 Sharing, liking, commenting, and subscribing to my work literally feeds me!

My niece, Lilly, leads me to a tiny door on the side of the wall in her bedroom, a cubby used for storage she has transformed into her new secret hideout. She rips the door open to show me, proud of her work. Blankets and a lavender sleeping bag cover the hardwood floor.

Come in, sissy, she says, her guppy eyes fluttering.

I give her a look that says I won’t fit, but she doesn’t buy it. Come onnnn, sissy.

Lilly doesn’t see me as adult-sized. She sees me as her-sized, and this is apparent in our hang outs. Because I rollerblade alongside her, hit splits and cartwheels and headstands, and color in notebooks down on the floor, she thinks I will definitely fit with her in that crawl space.

I sigh and climb in, like I knew I would. I shove my body across from hers, my back hitting one end of the cupboard and my feet hitting the other. She smiles across from me. Inside with us is a rainbow maraca, a small drum, a pair of cookie-sized cymbals, and a tea set. Lillyana is not typically a tea party girlie, but today, in the teeny crawlspace, that’s what she wants to do.

Wait here, sissy, she says. I’ll get the water for us.

She leaves me with a lantern and shuts the door. It is 6 PM in the summer evening, but the space is pitch black, only the greenish glow from her toy as my light. And despite being so stuffed inside that I can’t move my legs, despite being ready to go eat dinner with my sister, despite my disinterest in a child’s tea party, I wait. She knows I will.  

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Lilly comes back in two child-minutes (child-minutes are slower than adult-minutes, though sometimes they’re faster; child-minutes fill more time no matter how long or short they feel) with two plastic water bottles that we will pour into the tea kettle to then pour into teacups the size of shot glasses. A plastic tray holds the set. My legs operate as our table. Lilly fills, she pours. She fills, she pours. She fills, she laughs, her eyes brighter now than the sunlight seeping into the cracked door from her bedroom window. She has an idea.

Let’s see how many we can drink! she says, giggling as water drips from the tea kettle’s spout.

This is three, she counts. Cheers! We chug.

This is four!

Four, I repeat, chug. She pours.

Five!

Five, I say.

Six!

Six! We down the sixth teacup. She’s laughing again, and I am too, harder with each shot of water we throw back in succession. There is seven; there is eight. I gulp mine down easy. Lilly requires multiple sips. I wait for her to finish. There, in the tiny crawlspace with my tiny bestie, I’m reminded of a game I used to play with my friends in basements and in spillways and in grass clearings surrounded by trees, a game we called Shot-For-Shot. But the glasses were not teacups, and the water bottles we filled them with were not filled with water. They were full of vodka or gin or rum or whatever we could scrounge up that day from our parents’ garages, too young to buy for ourselves what we needed.

For me, Shot-For-Shot was not really a game, though I often proposed it as such. Let’s see who can last the longest. But it wasn’t about winning for me; it was a way to feel less alone as I drank the way I wanted—quickly, recklessly, deliberately for effect. Though my friends would listen to their body when it told them they were nauseous or drunk, the only thing ending the game for me was an empty water bottle.

Nine!

Nine. Laughter explodes from the secret hideout, and Lilly clutches her stomach. I’m so full!

One more, I say. We got this. It’s the end of the bottle.

Ten, she says, as she fills our cups again.

Lilly doesn’t know about this game I used to play, despite it being identical to the one we play now, water sloshing all over my cramped legs and her blankets, water spewing from our mouths as we giggle and swallow. She doesn’t know the version of me that used to carry plastic water bottles around in her bags, sans water, the version of me who knew, even at 16, 17, 18 years old, that she could not quit until the liquor ran out. Lilly doesn’t know that today, shoved inside this cupboard taking shots of water with her, I have ten years of continuous sobriety. Of total abstinence from alcohol and all substances. She doesn’t know that as I watch our water bottle dwindle, I am not wishing for more. I’m not longing to be somewhere or someone else (anyone but who I am)—I am content. I am present. I am happy.

I am sober.

I silently cheers our tenth shot of teakettle water, full of black specks and mystery dust, to that.  

The details of my sobriety journey don’t matter in this silly little Substack; they are long and arduous and slightly boring (to me, anyway). But I will say this: the foundation of my sobriety is not based in willpower or grit; it is built of god, my recovery fellowship, and a bulky black SCRAM bracelet administered by the state of Pennsylvania on August 14, 2014 (serving jailhouse cvnt on my ankle and doubling as a tangible form of the divine, warning me with a vibrate every thirty minutes: bbg if you drink, I will know, and you will be locked up).

I tell Lilly none of this, though I have faith that I will someday. That as my niece gets older, she will still have me, sober. (My niece number-two, on her way to us any minute, she will have me too.) I hold back tears in the cubby as I realize that at six-years-old, Lilly has never seen me drunk. She has never had to wonder where I am or when I’ll be around again as I sit in a rehab. I have never had to say, no, sorry, I probably shouldn’t pick her up—or worse, picked her up despite my intoxication. Our bond is genuine and palpable because I’m able to be a reliable, trustworthy, safe adult; she shares with me her accomplishments and her sorrow and her love. She pours us another cup of tea; dumps hers (deliberately, suddenly) all over me. She laughs and laughs as she makes her way out of the secret hideout, leaving me with the mess.

Though a congrats is normal on a sober birthday, it always feels strange to me. I know who I really am. I know I didn’t decide this. Drinking was, I would have told you, enough for me. I would have told you it was what I wanted for the rest of my life. But thankfully, god does not bend to our feeble expectations and desires: it loves us more than that.

Ten years ago this month, I was gifted a part two of my life. My life. I hang onto it now with the grip of a six-year-old and her tiny teacup. I’m still learning to receive what this new life has to offer. I’m still finding the courage to walk down the path meant for me. Little sugary gumdrops leading right here to a Wednesday evening with Lilly. Water pours from the spout of a teakettle from somewhere unknown, spilling over the edges of my cup. It covers my fingers, my hands, my legs, my wrists. I laugh; say I’ve had enough. But god doesn’t listen to me (of course they don’t). Just pours more, more, more

.

Virgo Szn Book Rec:

Death Valley by Melissa Broder

I have loved everything I’ve read from Virgo author Melissa Broder (Milk Fed, So Sad Today). She has such a distinct voice; when I read her books I have that satisfying feeling that no one else could write the same book. She is also a fellow alchy in recovery and so writes in a subvert language I recognize. Cheeky, calculated, lol-funny. The sort of shameless that it both tactful and liberating. If you like barefaced, gritty female narrators, this is a book for you.

From ‘The Guardian’: “Death Valley is a modern fairytale about a Los Angeles writer who seeks refuge and creative inspiration in the desert while her father fights for his life after a car crash. Death hovers, and drapes the delicate psyche of our protagonist's mind at every turn with bleak, obsessive and self-absorbed thoughts.” (I would call it a mushroom trip before I’d call it a modern fairytale, but okay! Definitely weird and surrealist, while still remaining deeply tender and true.)

1. Franny Choi’s poetry book, The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On. Stunning. Favorite poetry book I’ve read in some time.

2. 💚 Brat summer 💚 Okay, I must rebuke my earlier statement about not loving Charlie xcx’s album. It got me so good with Apple. (Shoutout Sewanee Writer’s Conference divas.) But the chaos of brat summer is what I’m truly hooked on. Not ready to let it go. Not demure. Not mindful!!

3. My August has mostly been class curation and prep, in which I read/perused three books for my nonfiction class I’ll be teaching for the first time in the fall: The Art of Memoir, Body Work (the official textbook for the class! my fav craft book of all time!), and The Situation and the Story. Highly recommend them all to nonfiction writers and essayists.

4.        The new Trader Joe’s noodles.

5.        Hacks, season 3, which I’m finally getting around to watching. I do not want to let Hannah and Debra Vance go; adore this relationship and this show.

Okay, see ya’ll for for now. Happy Virgo Season. Happy back-to-school to all who celebrate. I am so grateful for your readership.

And to my queenie, if you read this one day, thank you for a love which has taught me love. <3

It has officially been a year since I’ve moved back to my hometown. I expected to be gone again by now; I expected to be throwing my savings at a shared apartment somewhere in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. I expected to be discontent and restless, rummaging the internet for teaching gigs, scrounging up money to gtfo. These expectations are such a stark contrast to where I sit, satisfied at an old Singer sewing table as my desk, three stories above Green Bean Coffee in downtown York where angel-white wafts of coffee bean roasting steam crawl up the brick every Tuesday morning.

A heat wave blanketed the county the other week, temperatures 90 degrees plus, bath water atmosphere, no breeze. I spent my mornings and evenings in full suburban cosplay at a house-sitting gig: watering garden beds and drinking coffee on a blistering pool deck. The suburbs are not a place I’ve ever felt I belonged, and yet there was something about my friend’s cozy, 90’s-esque raised rancher that made me feel achingly at home. Just a 13-minute drive from my city loft are roads flanked by fields of grass and four-leaf clovers, where the moon rises over different horizons, where I am threatened with dormant desires. In just six days there, I could almost imagine a different life. Another fig to grasp at, just out of reach.

But there’s always another. One fig is a second summer waitressing and bartending in Ocean City, stacking money and entering full Florida Leather Grandma mode; and another is back in NYC with Vibha and infinite opportunities for unexplored city blocks; and another is in some LA neighborhood where all the hot lesbians seem to live without me, with a wifey and a couple of cats; and another fig is life as a big-five author sellout who all my grad school friends talk shit on in group chats; and another is a live-in nanny for my nieces with my sister’s cooking for dinner every night, and another is my own little family, maybe we would road trip the country…

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” -Sylvia Plath

All of that to say that I am still here, stationed in York, PA with no sign of leaving anytime soon. All of that to say that I am trying my best to let go of my little plans. I wouldn’t dare trust this contentedness not to change; I can only trust myself to listen when it does. But for now, I am busy on backroads bumping Noah Kahan, cows outside of both windows, their smell soothing somehow. For now, I am eating the best black raspberry ice cream in the country (I swear to you I’ve tried so damn many ice cream places), made fresh in a pasture a short drive away. For now, I am lounging in a living room full of boys who love god like I do, in my bestie’s new apartment just a flights of stairs below me, in the bookstore I work in down the block. For now, I am heading a half hour out of the city to a shitty club in cargos, where I can dance so hard my clothing are soaked with sweat.

For now, I am grateful that life doesn’t bend to my expectations and desires; that there is a god that knows and loves me more than that, who softly hands me, instead, what will fit sweetly into the palm of my hand.

I hope you, too, are experiencing that specific, special feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be this summer.

Cancer Szn Rec:

I just read The Argonauts for the second time and at this point half of my book is marked with underlines and brackets and hearts. It’s the perfect Cancer Szn rec for its shameless exploration of motherhood, as well as the most arresting and authentic musing on stepparenting that I’ve ever read. The ending made me full-tears cry both times I read it.

I love Maggie Nelson generally, but I believe her writing really thrives when it is finally vulnerable—probably because of the withheld quality it has at other times. And though The Argonauts is still laced with her signature autotheory and dense intellectual exploration, the personal narrative of this book—her honesty about queerness, about motherhood, about womanhood—is stunning. She takes us from the beginning of her relationship to a childbirth—a “typical” arc which she dissects and queers and makes entirely her own.

Purchase your copy here.

1. Jorts and cargo shorts, just like my dad wears. Some of my futch summer outfits are giving boardwalk-drifter-who-hasn’t-worn-shoes-in six-summers, but I’m so about it.

2. Billie Ellish’s entire HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, but especially the transition from BITTERSUITE to BLUE. Sooo good bro.

3. Watermelon & tajin.

4. The long-lost joy of straight HANGING OUT with adult friends. I should write an essay on the joys of this; it has me falling in love with my life, reminding me of New York, where some of my greatest times were big chillin’ in someone’s shitty apartment for so many hours it started to feel juvenile and ridiculous, but no one even thought about leaving.

5. Noah Kahan! The country girl in me adores this Noah dude. Stick Season, obvi. But Orange Juice and All My Love wreck me. (Unrelated/sort-of-related side note: there are three good songs on Charlie xcx’s brat, and I mean they’re fire, but I’m not totally seeing the hype on this one—besides the green brat album aesthetic.)  

6. This GIANT desk pad from Holisticism called Spacies. I am a Michelle Pellizzon fan girl for years now and would likely buy anything she released, but this pad brings me so much joy and there’s little portals on each page via QR code. It’s giving Kim Krans oracle cards (my fav) meets creative baddie meets my apartment’s exact aesthetic. It’s literally as big as my desk. Highly recommend.

Side note: For about two weeks in July I’ll be traveling to Tennessee to attend the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, so I have doubts about getting to the Leo Szn edition of the newsletter. We’ll see. I’ll be focusing on my book while I’m there, with the highest intentions to have the first draft of the manuscript done by the end of this year. Send thots and prayers; there is a lot of work to do, and the only consistent writing I’ve been able to achieve is here. But this book must! exist! And it will.

Thank you for reading. If you love Hangry Ghost, tell a friend to tell a friend. Or consider subscribing this month, as this will be my only opportunity for income throughout the second half of July! Did you know adjuncts don’t get paid over the summer? And we don’t get paid nearly enough during the semesters to be able to survive on it in the summer. This little newsletters $5 a month or $55 a year make more of an impact than you think! <3 I love you! Thank you for being here! 👻

A doctor told Sarah’s mom that her cause of death was “rarer than getting hit by an airplane walking down the street.” I have forgotten the exact year she died—but I’ve never forgotten that. Friday night, Sarah sent a text saying she was too sick to come to the mall; I told her I would see her next weekend. Meanwhile, she and her mom visited hospitals and doctors’ offices, assuring them she had Toxic Shock Syndrome. They told her it was strep throat, but Sarah insisted. Had anyone ever actually called the hotline on a tampon box? She did. Still, no one believed her. The weekend passed and by Monday, completely untreated for TSS, Sarah died in a helicopter en route to a hospital, her skin turning a color skin isn’t meant to be.

A few weeks ago, a childhood friend lost her partner tragically, and she said to me, eyes dark and vacant, I’m just trying to figure out how you’ve done this so many times. I was so surprised at her comment. She mentioned Sarah’s name. Then Tyler’s (a partner I lost only a few years after Sarah’s death). No one ever mentions their names anymore; I let the sound hang in the air. I think of them nearly every day, but as time passes, it’s hard to justify the weight of still-existing grief.

There have been so many since them, was all I could muster. Seven. I felt so ridiculous when I said the number aloud. I’d made a list recently on a page in my notebook, spelling out each name, grouping them into threes. What sort of masochist makes a tally sheet of their grief? I told myself it was to soothe this anxiety-of-forgetting. The graphite curves made it all feel tangible, like maybe it really happened.

Wow, my friend answered. Seven. She was far away as we spoke. So was I.

All of these years later, I still remember how the snow fell in piles outside my bedroom window as my mom told me Sarah was gone. I’ve thought often about what that took of her as a parent. I can remember the sob that snuck from my dad’s throat (even my passing thought: This is the first time I’m seeing him cry). But I can’t be sure of the exact number of years it’s been since we lost her. 13? 15? More? Does it matter? American culture evades the concept of mourning and instead focuses on “moving on.” Flimsy rituals involving balloons and thousand-dollar caskets. Maybe, a day of paid-time-off for the funeral. A few flowers or meals sent to your door if you’re lucky. We’re even told that this is what the dead would want for us: to get back to our lives. Of course, some of that sentiment is true, but grief refuses to be compartmentalized. It seeps. It sucks up all of our energy. I told my friend that night, I don’t believe the grief ever really gets smaller. We just grow larger around it; we have to. Or we’ll lose ourselves too.

My friend admitted she, too, recently made a list of the people she lost—specifically to overdose. I laughed; I’d made that list too, alongside the aforementioned. I’d consulted another friend to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anyone from our recovery community. Sixteen names filled the page; some of the two lists overlapped. I considered a venn diagram. Decided against it. We talked about comparing, both assuming there were still others we forgot.

I have never told anyone I don’t remember the death dates of the people I’ve lost. I’m slightly ashamed; still, they allude me, and I don’t consult anyone or look it up. I just let myself forget. My mind holds on to scraps of their language and their laughter and their silhouettes, instead. It holds onto the dreams where they visit me and try to bring comfort and familiar touch. It holds onto their stories, their secrets.

I planned to write about my gramma for this month’s newsletter—it’s Gemini season after all, hers—but I can’t stop thinking about all of them. Sarah, Tyler, my cousin Robert. Ashley, Ty, Chris. My gramma. My pappy. My baby, who I held inside of me for almost 12 whole weeks. They are a part of me—even now, maybe especially now—in a way that aches and stretches and transcends physicality. It is a specific fate to know death as intimately as I do, and I don’t take it lightly. I hold onto the years where there is a lag in the tragedy with a viper’s grip; I wait for another set of threes to begin. (My grandmothers superstition. Now my own, too.)

I compile pictures and memories and lists. I write about our relationships. I let myself cry. I pray that they visit me in my dreams or in little signs that only I could recognize. I do what I can to soothe another’s grief. I let the brain get heavy with remembering.

[In honor of my grandmother’s birthday on June 1, I would love for you to check out something I wrote about her last June/July on Hangry Ghose here.]

Gemini Szn Book Rec:

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins

I received a galley of A Good Happy Girl from Marissa Higgins last December and devoured it. 🍔 This novel is unlike possibly anything I’ve ever read, with an expertly woven double plot that’s Gemini AF. The main character, Helen (who’s prob a Gemini too?), is bored of her life as an attorney and indifferently succumbing to her own self-destructive habits. She joins an emotionally and sexually intense married lesbian couple while taking care of her grandmother in the hospital and actively avoiding her incarcerated father, who is begging for her help. I don’t want to give anything away; you’ve got to read it. I was in awe of the juxtaposition of tenderness and shameless, grotesque pleasure. I can’t wait to read it again.

I really love Catapults description of the book: “A Good Happy Girl is interested in worlds without men—and women who will do what they can to get what they want. In her exploration of twisted desires, queer domesticity, and the effects of incarceration on the family, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who often don’t receive it, with unsettling results.”

Get it at a discount here!

1. Chappell Roan, obviously. Loved her entire The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess album—no notes. Top five songs in no particular order: Red Wine Supernova, Femininomenon, Good Luck, Babe! (I know this isn’t on the album but it must be here), My Kink Is Karma, Casual. But also Kaledidoscope is underrated! Naked in Manhattan! Pink Pony Club. <3

2. Hats. Forward and backward. Currently obsessed with a vintage dark blue and red Pabst’s trucker that my sister’s fiancé gave me!

3. Making my unstable city balcony a summer oasis on the tightest budget you’ve ever seen ($30). Taking donations via subscriptions.

To my York and surrounding areas people: With the help of some generous sponsors and caring townies, I’ve been planning this event to kick off Pride in Downtown York. It would mean the world if you could spread the word and COME OUT!

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Helen and I sit in a coffee shop that we’ve never been to before, though it’s just ten minutes from the city blocks where we spend all of our time. It’s spotted with racks of handmade earrings and one too many plants-for-sale, the most endearing a floor-to-ceiling Bird of Paradise that unfortunately cannot go home with me. I rub its seaweed green leaves, each larger than my face. Squeeze its stalk like a handshake. I tell Helen, as she shuffles chairs around, how much I love all giant-sized house plants, you know, like the ones in that other cafe or in your kitchen and did you feel these leaves sis feel them blahblahblah, as if there’s any response to such self-indulgent rambling—yet she finds one. This is what true friendship allows: a soft space for the insignificant parts of us to land.

The café is better than expected; we came just for the small hit of novelty we knew we’d receive walking through fresh double-doors. It delivered the dopamine alongside a watery americano; we take what we can get in York. Helen is starting her taxes two days before they’re due, opening each envelope into a pile on the table like it’s our living room, and I am grading literature reviews in the same begrudging manner. But because we have one another, it’s not so bad. We take dance breaks and IG video breaks and laughter breaks; we are too loud and recklessly ourselves for a public space. And I feel a gratitude well up inside of me like an iridescent bubble. I think: if this is the only love that’s meant for me, I accept it. I think: I am so lucky to have her. I think: enough, enough, enough. Minutes later—when I receive a text from a cute girl that I hope might go somewhere—the bubble pops. There it is: the familiar pining for more.  

This past month, as I’ve trudged through a tough season of letting go, my friends have shown up for me in a way that is hard to translate here in these few short paragraphs. Daily, I syphon from them every ounce of love I can. I am a slimy parasite for their hours, their bad jokes, their sympathetic eyes, their 7-minute voice memos as background noise for my skincare routine, their gaping mouths, full of laughter. I have become someone who says yes instead of no, despite work days and lack of sleep and unwashed hair. I go dancing every Saturday, drag bingo every Thursday. I go to AA meetings like I just got sober. I know that grief this size can only be quelled by love as deep. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to know where to find it. I tell myself: I will heal with fun. I prove its usefulness. Sometimes, still, I cry myself to sleep.

No matter how exhausted/fulfilled/bored/grateful/devastated I feel when I fall asleep at night, I am met with something unsoiled in the morning. I feel it in the way the sun hits my many disco balls—even the three on the bottom tier of my coffee table, a place that seems inaccessible by sunlight. I feel it during the tedious process of making coffee sans electric machine. In my quiet 8 AM pilates. I feel it when I hit my knees, thanking my precious, gracious god for—still—more.

These are my stepping stones towards possibility. I find I am just learning a lesson I’ve already learned (and learned and learned): if I allow the space, god will fill it. And it will be filled with more than I could ever even dream of asking. Period. It will be filled with the kind of love so good it aches in the chest, almost like the Something That Hurts. It will be filled with the kind of grace so strong it floods all other emotion. Suddenly, the dopamine hit I thought I needed doesn’t quite hit anymore. Like, shit. I thought I wanted that? What about this softness that covers my puny heart like a chocolate shell? What about this beating strawberry of certainty? Enough, enough. Enough.

Taurus Szn Book Rec:

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

There are good books—I mean incredible, awe-inspiring books—and then, there are books-as-portals. Beautyland, about an alien girl sent to spy on Earth, transported me to an inner space so rooted and certain of the preciousness of life that I found myself forgetting about anything in my life with rough edges. The novel is about growing up and finding your way and waitressing at a diner and friendship and fax machines and a mother’s garden and New York City and feeling alone and feeling not-alone. It is witty and funny alongside a sappy sincerity that I would die to be able to pull off. Of course, Marie can. (I threw her other book, Parakeet, across the room when I finished it, tears in my eyes because I didn’t want it to be over.)

I’m on the last section of Beautyland still, savoring it as much as I can, but it’s a perfect Taurus Szn pick for the way it prioritizes beauty and tenderness. A Venus-ruled book to its core; a 300-page prose poem. An absolute joy to read. I fell in love with it quickly; I recommend it to literally everyone.

1.     “Junk-journaling”—a practice I found on an IG account (@sebs.journal). I’m obsessed with his journal, and I’ve found my own adapted practice so grounding. I’ve been making a weekly-ish collage primarily from “junk” and polaroids.

2.     These leopard jeans (in various big pants/small shirts combos)

3.      Made It Out podcast. I love the host and literally every episode has taught me more about myself and my queerness.

If you’re still here, be sure to click on the links below and share or subscribe to my work. Either one helps me fulfill my dream of all dreams: to share my writing with anyone willing to read. Thank you. <3 <3 <3

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It is officially Spring! Aries season! The astrological new year! As an avid astro girlie, this time of year has always been my favorite. Obvi because our babygirl the sun makes her great return, but also, spring symbolizes rebirth, a personal obsession of mine.

There is an Aries-esque quote I keep thinking about this month from Søren Kierkegaard: “The instant of decision is madness.” I have no clue where or when I came across it; it’s been saved in a pinned section of my Notes app for years, amidst a list of clothing item must-finds and movies to watch even though I hardly watch movies. The quote comes to me not in moments of decision, but in torturous bouts of indecision—that in-between place where the answer is gestating. The space, pre-madness, in which you only believe your life might change, but cannot yet decide that it will. This micro-moment where the bud unfurls and reveals its true color; not the jump, but the quick inhale before the foot steps forward.

You are gathering gumption here; it might take A Bit.

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I have spent many months of my life in this limbo, many recent months as well, and though my friends have listened to me go on and on about “literally going crazy” here, I recognize this tumult as a necessary part of my process. It is one thing to have clarity and another to be ready for said clarity. Perhaps my hesitation is my respect for the madness: I believe in its magic. I know what the instant of decision might bring. I know that there is great responsibility there, great change.

And when that instant of decision hits. Cue the belly drop, the throat welling, the breath catch. Cue the squad screaming to Yes, And? by Ariana Grande in the club. Cue your Brand New Life.

Madness: the courage to muster authenticity and bring it into every scene of your one silly, precious life.

As we enter eclipse season (March 19^th-April 8^th ish) and this big, wide open Aries season, trust that madness is ready to deploy. No more in-between; now is the time for action. On the Notes page with Kierkegaard’s quote is also a list of reel ideas that I never get around to (but I’m about to!!), some half baked essay ideas, a string of cute emojis, and this list of questions that I archived from Women Who Run With Wolves (a must read). One of which I will leave with you here: “What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so?” This season, I chose to leave indecision behind, to just make moves!! To trust in what happens.

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Aries Season Book Rec:

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

I’m a long-time fan of Leslie’s work, and of Leslie as a human; I had the opportunity to study with her in Colorado for Lit Fest last summer. She was so knowledgeable about the creative nonfiction genre and so gracious. I heard her read from Splinters that weekend, and I’ve been awaiting its pub date since. Happy to report that the book was so worth the wait.  

I loved this review: “In Splinters, Leslie Jamison tells the story of her navigating her divorce with a young child. It’s a book about motherhood, but at its core it’s about love: falling in love, falling out of love, a mother’s love. I was in awe the entire time.” 

I, too, found myself in awe again and again. Her prose is a stunning example of the way specificity illumes the mundane. She’s willing to call the whole world enough, to not shy from sentiment, to embrace it even. In a vignette form that is quick and alive, the memoir cuts to the core of universal experience: love, but also doubt. But also indecision. How hard we try.

1.     The sunshine in my apartment in the mornings. The sunshine.

2.     The L Word is my long-term obsession over the past few months; it’s the only thing I’ve watched (besides brief reality TV intermissions). Please respond to this email with your favorite L Word character and why. This is a compatibility test.

3.     Mini-verses. Does the adults-without-kids world know about these? They are little tiny food items that you make from resin. My niece is obsessed and has roped me in with her. Our quality time includes the mystery balls from Target.

4.     This poetry book by Paige Lewis. Space Struck is a whimsical, magical-realism-esque exploration of relationship.

5.     “Cool About It” by BoyGenius. This song is not new to me, but I listen to it most days and just never get sick of it. (Unpopular opinion, I think Pheobe Bridgers is overrated but her verse in this is the peak of song-writing.)

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There is still snow lingering in dirty grey scoops along the sidewalks and roadsides of the East Coast where I live. I am aching for sun; I am missing any season but this one—a season from another state, from a neighborhood I hate, from a future that I cannot yet see. The world, the whole ass world, feels heavy, and I convince myself that the burning heat of the sun could soothe me.

In front of me in this bookshop where I write is a woman and her baby. The child’s eyes as hopeful as twinkle lights—the cliché warranted, that bright. I write a sentence, delete it, write it again, try to add a joke, delete the joke. There’s nothing funny about how it feels to be alive in a time where life is being taken so quickly one would think it could just come back, as if it can ever come back, as if these “soldiers” have not heard of the concept of forever, of gone. I want to grasp the wonder in this stranger’s baby’s eyes; I want to bottle her little smile. I want to squeeze, to syphon the ignorance from her heart to mine. I say a prayer for her safety, but it’s doubtful she will need my prayer here, in Pennsylvania, where we don’t worry of genocide.  

I listen to this tiny child coo at a sound decibel that might soothe a heart while other tiny children are bombed in Gaza. Tiny children. I see them on my phone each day; I try my best not to look away. Sometimes I do. Today, my phone sits in front of me, buzzing and buzzing as a friend and I speak about grief, about others’ ignorance, or disregard, or or or. It is easy to talk about them and not all the ways we too cannot do a damn thing. Not really. The shred of a fortune from a Chinese cookie winks at me from the back of my phone case: Only you can change your life, it says. No one can do it for you. I wonder, for the first time, at the privilege of the sentiment, how I have recently changed my life in such a way that these people, worlds away, cannot.  

My heart breaks and then it breaks and then it breaks. Daily it does this shit. I do believe pain to be relative and I believe it all to be valid. We can feel our first world problems, our personal heartbreaks, alongside deep devastation throughout the world. At least in my own heart, there is room for all of it. It shoves itself in there. The child in front of me coos again, reminding me of my cat’s purrs, which I have been told via an Instagram reel, are healing. Their frequency: somewhere between 25-100Hz, a rate said to be curative for our bones, our tissues, our hearts. I do a lot of Google-research on this. Try to find An Answer, The Truth about the purring. Decide the truth is clear enough when my own cat heaves himself onto my chest, my heart beneath his weight, beating at just roughly 1-2 Hz comparatively. His purrs are a little engine jumpstarting this thumping thing when it feels incapable of going on.

It has been unnerving, here in my hometown, to see the lack of mere mention of the genocide in Palestine. I brought it up in my college classes and my students, all 60 of them, told me none of their other professors had mentioned it before. I have not seen a single sign in a shop or restaurant; I have frequently been nervous to ask friends and acquaintances their stance—scared they may response with something like, “It’s complicated.” Or worse: “I just avoid all of that stuff.”

Earlier, two women with something like twenty-years age difference sat in chairs near my table and talked about God for a long while. The younger mentioned that when she was little, she once spoke in tongues. The older took the next thirty minutes to go on about her personal experiences with their God, in what seemed like an effort to bolster the younger’s spirit, increase her faith in herself and her abilities. It was A Lot. I was distracted by them; so was everyone else. They were loud, and we were all in close proximity. The older woman kept yelling: ”I learned heaven is inside of you and nothing can take it from you! No one can take that from you! YOU control that!” I was surprised that this concept—personal and internal control—was seeping into an otherwise humbler and more submissive concept of the Central PA Christian. Typically, you could only pray to visit a place such as heaven; inside yourself, only sin and the hope of forgiveness.

We listening were three frequent regulars at the bookshop and York locals. When the couple left, we all let out audible sighs, then nervous laughter. One of them mentioned feeling “triggered” because of their own religious upbringing. The other discussed a mission trip from when she was younger that she now regretted. I mentioned my fascination with speaking in tongues, tried not to judge the women. Of course, I was. Not because of their faith, but because of the ferociousness of the delivery. Because of their need to shout through the space, the older one’s need to talk over the younger instead of listening, the urgency of a message without a mention of the atrocities of faith throughout the world.

I wondered how this woman would tell the Palestinians to change their life. I wondered if they believed heaven was inside them. And if so, what of the taking? Inside me, a queer woman with stacks of sins and my own, very personal faith—a faith they would not believe to be ‘the truth.’

The truth. It was not in this women’s bookshop-sermon, as far as I could tell. The truth, though it does sometimes shout, though it sometimes has every reason to, does not commune with messages of control. It does not need guns and bombs and shrapnel. It does not look away. The truth: it heaves itself onto the heart. It purrs.

Babe look, Hangry Ghost 2024 vibe just dropped!

Continue below for a book rec!

Hangry Ghost will now operate on a zodiac season schedule. Each new phase of the sun, I’ll drop you a little love note (like above) along with a book recommendation that coincides with the current zodiac sign. Each newsletter will also include my “current obsessions” because I love these on any newsletter—and I’m always obsessing over something. Also! Stay tuned for a return of Hey Sis, my dormant advice column inspired by the way my aura seems to beckon confession like a Catholic pope. See an old version of this column here. Ask a question here!

A link to buy each rec and any others will direct you to my Bookshop. Bookshop is the place to buy books to support independent bookstores—plus, I’m an affiliate! This means I get a very small commission on the books you buy via these links. (This is a cool way to support me with your purchase.)

Pisces Szn Book Rec:

Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix

Pisces szn is the season of letting go. The last sign of the zodiac, Pisces carries with it the energy of ALL the other signs: it is wise and experienced, but it is also begging to be liberated of all it carries. In this way, it has a propensity for addiction and clinging to delusion—anything to keep itself on its little pink cloud. No matter how you break it down, Pisces is a sign of being in our FEELS. And there is nothing that will put you in your feels like heartbreak.

Devoured in 24 hours. A package of tight and poetic vignettes that attempt to calculate heartbreak. I was in awe of its bravery; Camonghne reveals all, and she does it with a poet’s sensibilities—aka it’s stunning and made me love my own messy humanity a little more.

Publisher’s blurb: “When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything—from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics—shows up in the tapestry of her healing.”

And below is a page excerpt! Also this book cover is DÉCOR, honey. Perfect in Pisces pastel pink. If nothing else, buy that shit just to lay it on a coffee table.

1.     This has been a thing for months now, but those facial massages you see all over Tiktok and Reels? Obsessed. They are so grounding and luxurious. They have helped with my sinuses. They have drained my lymph in noticeable ways. And they feel like one small step towards defeating the beauty industry’s obsession with Botox.

2.     Another book for you: Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear by Mosab Abu Toha. I know that poetry cannot literally affect change and we need to take real action, but I’m convinced that by reading Mosab’s work, anyone would have to succumb to their innate humanity and agree with a ceasefire. You know what, I do believe that stories can affect real change. Gift this to all of your ‘it’s-complicated’ homies.

3.  These ear plugs, which I wear to sleep because my neighbor is loud af. But I’ve also been wearing them in public and it’s honestly a gamechanger when looking to mitigate annoying cafe music and women yelling about heaven. Noise sensitive girlies, tap in. (Also they’re cute!?)

4.     This poem, sent to me by my bestie, has made me cry 15 times this week.

I feel such a specific gratitude for those of you who have continued to spend your $5 a month on supporting my work, even without consistent essays, even with the rising Cost-Of-Living everyfuckingwhere. (An essay is brewing in this paragraph about the way that survival mode inhibits creativity. This is one small way I’m acting to combat that in my own financial-fear state. For now, my work continues to survive on my incredible gift for hoarding, a kink for masochism, and a bow to trust. Thanks for being a part of that.)

And if you can’t pay to subscribe, consider sharing my posts with a friend or book lover. This kind of support is crucial to emerging writers! Thank you, thank you!

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June was a big silver Honda Pilot full of my New York certainties: a queen-sized mattress, a cheap bookshelf, toiletries, boxes of hard pasta noodles. It was a quick goodbye on the street corner to my dearest friends; it was a “you’ll be back next month anyway,” and a knowing that I wouldn’t. It was a final drive across the Manhattan Bridge, through the Holland Tunnel, towards Pennsylvania by way of Jersey, knowing I would never take this route the same way again because when you know a place like home, a visit is not the same. Because when you leave a place, you never come back in the same way again. A surreal, anti-climactic goodbye to a city that changed me forever. The pop of a child’s confetti cannon with no sparkle—empty, a dud.  

June was a trip, just a few days after unpacking boxes, to Lit Fest in Denver to work with an author I could have only dreamed of meeting a few years ago (Leslie Jamison?!) Vito came along, so we could make an adventure of it (and because I was to be almost twenty weeks pregnant by then), but thunderstorms and snow the size of tiny pebbles quickly washed out our ideas for day-long hikes. We didn’t pack the right clothes for them, anyway. I was desperate to make something of the short time we had, but I found myself collapsing in our Airbnb bed each afternoon, falling asleep from the exhaustion of full-body sobs. Grief stalking me, clawing at my limbs.

There was, finally, a moment of reprieve in a private hot spring hot tub in the Colorado mountains. And on the final day, just before a 2 PM flight, I wore a thrifted pair of jeans, mauve lipstick, and gold hoop earrings to hike a spot near Boulder rated “Hard” on All-Trails. We were naïve and lulled by the promise of a giant arch at the end. It turned out that the hike was hard, admitted a mile and a half in, but if there had been an inkling of giving up, a man hiking with his aging father and a newborn strapped to his chest gave us our final push near the top. On the way down, it was the dude accompanied by his two toddlers who cried out in excitement over my high-top Converse that filled my heart more than the foggy arch view ever could. “You too!” he yelled. The exhale of an outsider.

June was redecorating Vito’s home—a townhouse in a neighborhood so opposite of the city that I swore I’d never move back into it, but there I was. It was an attempt to make it feel more like ours; it was a desperate undertaking. I started with the entryway and the kitchen, then the living room, and soon every other room all at once. June was a yard sale in my sister’s front yard to get rid of the old; it was Facebook marketplace scrolling to find new. It was buying and returning and reselling lots of furniture, design plans that turned into redesign plans, DIY frustrations, and some killer successes that made it all worth it.

“You’re nesting,” a friend said to me—and my heart leaped in recognition. Nesting for a new life no longer coming… But she was right. It was hands at work through grief.

June was my beginning back to blonde; the immediate relief that comes with feeling more like yourself. (Hair might seem trivial to include, but I assure you, it’s not.) It was a lot of time doing anything but writing, the act of which, after completing my thesis, felt physically nauseating. It was receiving my official MFA in the mail one random afternoon and feeling my first smidge of accomplishment, like something about the past two years might have been real. A summer-firefly of a feeling—neon and hasty.

June was a quick beach trip to Cape May with my sister and our families, where Milo and I made a sand pig colony in a lime green bucket. It was officiating my first wedding for one of my oldest friends at a stunning lake house, rain soaking my paper to a limp shred. It was a Shania Twain concert for my mom’s birthday, where the heavy summer air sat on our skin like a too-warm bath and Lilly sang every word to all the songs that I loved at her age, too.

June was five days with just Vito and my parents, where I learned for the first time how stupid good my dad is at pinball. Where I settled into their company with more ease than maybe ever, cracking crabs and dunking chicken into vinegar for hours, fingers cut and lips cracked. We came inches from wild horses at Assateague Island; we rollerbladed each day on the boardwalk, to the inlet, by the bay. June in Ocean City felt like my first glimpse at relaxation in a long, long time—maybe since my move to New York.

While there, I made a visit to the concrete cottages my family rented for our yearly vacations when I was growing up. These tiny shelters along the bay hold my dearest childhood memories: the hum of the motor of my Pappy’s boat coming to dock, my sister and I’s feet hanging from the edge of the rocks, crabs ripped from nets to cook for dinner in large metal pots, Blackjack in my grandmother’s hands on the porch over the water. I pulled up to the point on Gum Point Road to find the cabins torn down, replaced with mansions on stilts, the saws and wood still thrown about in the sandy grass. I almost didn’t recognize it.

A woman rushed out of one of the new houses and approached my car. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “This is private property.”

My heart pounded. I thought about sobbing or screaming or jumping from my car, running towards the water, telling her off.  “I grew up coming here,” I said instead. And before I knew my plan, “My grandparents passed away this year. I just wanted to visit. It reminds me of them.”

“Oh,” she answered. She looked struck by something; there was a long pause. Maybe, she was just uncomfortable with the tears in my eyes. A tiny bag of my Pappy’s ashes sat in my glove box, though she didn’t know that. I had planned to throw a pinch of them in the bay, send a part of him away where we had been so happy, so held, so safe.

“Could I just walk out to the edge of the point for a minute? I won’t stay long.”

“Okay,” she said, storming off with a huff and a flip of her hair, and my eyes welled with heavy tears at the crack in her composure. I walked to the point, hands over my heart so it wouldn’t burst. It was exactly as I had remembered it twenty years before. I heard my Pappy’s laugh, clear as June’s sky, when the ashes blew back all over me and into Vito’s mouth.

June was layers of grief as deep as all the bodies of water all over this coast.

June ended in a ferry across the Atlantic to Cape May, New Jersey to meet Vito’s family for his annual July Fourth vacation. The trip took an extra hour due to a treacherous storm, lightening that lit up the pitch-black ocean below. Cape May was a settling into the travel, a hope that maybe we’d never go home, that perhaps the ocean could hold me forever.

During one of our beach days in Ocean City, I jumped into my lover’s arms while we fought waves in the ocean, my breath labored and short. I clung to his neck for a moment of reprieve from their push.  

“I’ve never felt so beautiful than I do in the ocean,” I told him. My eyes tingled from the salt.

“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” he answered, and I could sense some relief in his voice, as it had been a lot of months of me not feeling anything but bloated with grief, a specific crawling out of my skin that comes with not being able to disguise the internal on the outside.

The next wave carried us back to shore, our bodies floating atop its foamy tongue. Spit us out onto gritty sand-teeth, cackling and grabbing for each other’s limbs.

There had been days of storms up and down the East Coast before we arrived, and that afternoon’s waves held the aftermath. Rip currents reigned. The previous day held ninety lifeguard rescues along the beach, some sort of record that we heard tossed around all week among families in restaurants. The 10^th Street lifeguard even held a meeting around her chair to make sure we were safe. All the beach-goers craned their necks as she mimed the swim-sideways technique to use if we felt ourselves being pulled out to sea. “And don’t ever be ashamed to call to us for help,” she yelled over the breeze. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

She pointed to a rip current in the ocean just ahead. It was a crystalline blue channel where Vito and I had just been swimming, where I’d went on about the clarity of the water, so clear, we could see the bottom—not typical of Maryland’s beaches. Where we thought we had felt the slight pull of something strong, but nothing had taken us out.

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