Sometimes, I’ll feel the tickle of a phenomenon before I have the name for it. Or I’ll hear the whisper of a feeling before it becomes a cultural scream. I’ve been sitting on this sensation for the last couple of months where I revisit all the arbitrary rules I’ve made for myself and ask, “What was the point of that?”

I’m an immigrant and a Virgo so I was always destined to be a control freak. My whole life, I’ve faithfully and questionably followed these Laws I’ve created for me and—unknowingly and unfortunately to myself and them—the other people in my life. I say laws because at some point, they became so monumental that breaking them felt akin to committing a crime. I certainly punished myself as if they were, at least. Someone had the good sense to name it for what it is: our inner cop.

@andreacomedy69Kill your mind 👮🏻

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It started out harmlessly, like a bargain with myself. If I finished my homework, then I can eat ice cream. If I win my tennis match, then I can go to the movies. But very quickly, the bargaining turned into threats. If I don’t get ahead of my readings, then I can’t have dinner. If I don’t win this art contest, then I won’t see any of my friends for a week. Over time, I cultivated a deep rooted sense of discipline through a steady diet of fear and threats.

It would be a lie to say it didn’t work. Through my late teens and early 20s, I was intentionally very, very hard with myself to get what I want—and I got what I wanted. Mostly. I’m sitting in my beautiful, dream apartment in Greenpoint, completely aware that had I not pushed myself in youth, I might not have any of this.

I was listening to a Formula 1 podcast the other day where Red Bull driver Max Verstappen recounted his own infamous childhood, one where he was abandoned at the gas station for losing a race and forced to drive in the rain until his fingers turned blue. But he said he wouldn’t be a 4 time world champion if he didn’t have that harsh environment.

Our similarities end there, but privately, I’ve always felt the same: would I have the same drive if it wasn’t for the reality of punishment?

In one of my first therapy sessions, I justified this mentality as so: if you hold a basket of warm bread out to two kids—one healthy, one starving—who do you think would run faster for it? Survival beats desire, terror trumps want. My therapist, unimpressed with my little metaphor, just stared at me and asked why we’re withholding food from kids in the first place.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So goes the law of physics. So rests the basics of our criminal justice system. From an early age, we’re taught that bad behavior means punishment. Nevermind the fact that carceral punishment rarely, if ever, fits the crime. Prisons don’t rehabilitate or repair. Increased police presence doesn’t decrease violence. On the contrary, they only exacerbate the harm—but we’ve been unable to break away from this system because the alternative feels unimaginable.

Even understanding the politics of abolition, it is immensely difficult to get people to break away from the mentality of, “this carceral system is what keeps us safe.” Without the cops, who will protect us from the bad things? Without a jail cell, how will we know to make good choices? It’s a compelling argument because it’s rooted in fear.

I know that fear because even holding these progressive politics in my heart, I was harboring a cop in my head. She ruled my life with authority, drawing clear lines of what was allowed and what wasn’t, who I am and could not be. And like our leaders in power, she was so convincing about how this is way things are. Even when it ruined my relationships or destroyed my body, I thought I needed her for my own good.

During a bachelor party, I told someone I can’t do something. It might’ve been harmless to anyone else, but it was such a vivid ‘absolutely not’ to me. Why? Because that’s the way it’s always been. Because if I broke that rule, then something bad would happen. Why? Because it’s happened before. And I’ve had enough bad things happen in the last year that in the moment, I’ve become even more risk adverse than I was before.

I’ve always thought that I had a good idea of who I was. I had such a portrait of myself in my head of my strengths, my weaknesses, my likes, my dislikes, what I wanted, what I didn’t. I was so adamant about being independent and never relying on anyone else that I developed this ultra rigid sense of self, never ceding to change or growth.

Over the years, these ideas of myself cemented into truth—or something that felt like it. Part of it is mild OCD, but most of it is conditioning. Having these rules for myself felt like protection. If I could jail away certain behaviors or thoughts, then surely, I could be the shiniest version of who I wanted to be.

An ex-friend cited one of the reasons for our falling apart as me only being able to see her as a caricature of herself, or who she had been when we met. I had frozen my identity in the proverbial amber and hers too. Months later, I realized she’s right. I don’t really know who she is—at least, not anymore than I know who I am.

I think all of us are hypocrites to a degree, but mine was astounding, even to me. Richard Siken said it better than me when he wrote,

“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.

Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”

I’ve loathed constrictions and authority my whole life. I was a bad student because I didn’t want to do what the adult in charge told me to do. I’ve never done anything the traditional way, not in my personal life, not in my professional life. I am loudly and publicly anti-police. But there I was, in a mental carceral world with a jailer and all.

I got very sick last summer and coming back to life was a disorienting experience. Every choice I made felt like trying on old clothes that didn’t fit anymore. I lived, but some part of me didn’t—it’s just been a long journey of figuring out what is worth resuscitating and what isn’t.

None of my rules saved me, not from myself or the people around me. My therapist asked me if I really lived by my politics and if so, why continue upholding a system that doesn’t work?

I’m just not someone capable of emotional intimacy, I almost told someone last month. Historically, that was probably true. I’ve withheld affection when I shouldn’t have. I can only write sentiments, but not verbalize them. I’ve always thought of myself as an Avoidant with a capital A because whatever instinct for closeness we’re born with, was stomped out of me. I thought all of this, but told myself I could still have the life I wanted. I was going to be rich and successful and fulfilled with a handful of close, even if somewhat distant, relationships.

It’s not a bad future. I don’t fear being alone (and as Whoopi Goldberg adequately once said, I don’t want somebody in my house). But I don’t want to be alone because I’ve made up a story about how it’s the only way I can be.

Over the last eight months, I’ve been trying to challenge myself on my ideas of who I am. I thought I hated animated animal movies, so I went through Pixar’s entire children’s roster. I thought I was too much of an essayist to be a screenwriter, then I wrote a feature film. I thought I hated cuddling, couldn’t do weights, etc. Some things held true (I still really, really hate beets) and that was okay too. I keep a Notes app list of things I’ve been wrong about to remind myself nothing is set in stone, even if I was the one setting those stones.

For everything I was wrong about, Nothing! Bad! Happened!

I broke a rule that I’ve sworn up and down I never would (and have held against other people when they’ve done it) and had one of the most beautiful, and healing, nights of my life. Is this what happens when the people realize they don’t have to be policed by fear? I told my therapist the next day and she asked me why I thought I couldn’t handle things even if they did go bad.

This is the truth of any police state. The other side of the unimaginable is just freedom.

I don’t know if I’ve fully killed the cop in my head. I’ve subdued her, at the very least. Even when she snakes through, I’ll find myself catching her now that I know what I’m looking for.

I’m enjoying my life more than ever because everything feels brand new. Life doesn’t feel full of threats, as it’s done for the last couple of years. My days are longer and better without some bitch (me) in my ear telling me that if I break a rule, then some imminent doom is coming. Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t. I’m having a lot of fun getting to know myself without all these restrictions nonetheless.

Having a relentless inner cop in my head never kept away the bad, it just gave the illusion it did.

A tortured artist creates nothing but misery for himself and everyone around him. I’ve written my way through certain wounds, but never a fresh one. I used to think some of the greatest works can be attributed to an artist’s ability to transfer their torment to pages—and maybe there’s some truth to that, but I also believe that time is the best editor. If I had published the handful of work I wrote over the last 3 years, I wouldn’t be able to stand by any of them now.

In 2024, I took a playwriting course to overcome my writer’s block. For a working creative, I was spending a lot of time just working, but not creating. When I submitted my pages, the instructor told me something I’ll never forget: “You have writers’ block because you’re not being honest in your writing, not because you don’t know how to write.” And he was right. You can lie to anyone, including yourself, but not to a blank page.

I wouldn’t have called myself unhappy in the most recent years, but I was in pain. I probably wouldn’t have called it that either. I just had a vague sense that something was off, but didn’t want to look closely to find out what. It’s taken the last eight months to get to a place where I could see exactly the choices I’ve made to keep the pain, not even away, but at bay.

I didn’t start writing again until a month ago. But where I used to stare at the keyboard, hoping the words will find me, it’s become like it was before. I know exactly what I want to say and constructing the sentences just feel like playing an instrument again. I can hear the note when its right.

I call myself a writer, but I’d be writing even if I didn’t. It’s the loving arms I come back to again and again, even if it’s been awhile. And like a lover, if there is no naked vulnerability, there is no relationship.

A few months ago, when I was in treatment, I told my doctor that I believe everything has meaning. Life has a small handful of coincidences, but life itself is not one. It can be a beautiful, but painful ailment: my magical thinking (OCD) and my romanticism love to play games on one another. Every experience and emotion is magnified. Like a little magpie, I hold onto everything until there’s no place in the nest, not even for me.

In the hospital, I talked to a Rabbi about the purpose of life. Halfway through the conversation, it occurred to me that no one ever approaches a Rabbi to ask for their opinions about the Knicks. But what a beautiful existence to be able to have these conversations about life and its equivalency without reservation. And what a beautiful choice it is to find someone just as receptive.

I told him that many of my loved ones believe that there is nothing special about our existence. That in the grand scheme of things, we’re all just tiny specks. But my mind refuses to wrap itself around the possibility that we’re here by happenstance. I’ll accept just about any answer but that one.

An elementary teacher once said (paraphrasing) that I can be immovable like a parked car and without a reason to go, I just won’t do it. She didn’t say it kindly, but she had a point. I can just be talked into anything if there’s a good reason. Curiosity alone is reason enough.

The Rabbi didn’t have a straightforward answer for me. I don’t know if I would have believed him even if he did. But in searching, I realized that I’ve been working backwards this entire time.

My whole life, I’ve believed all of this has to mean something. I just have to live long and big enough to find the why.

I’ve had a quote saved in my Notes app for the last 10 years, buried under a mountain of grocery lists and half scattered thoughts. It’s travelled with me like a compass; if I ever find myself too lost, it points me back to where I want to be.

Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate. Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met. “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll.

The little girl was comforted. When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: “my travels have changed me… “ Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary, it said: “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

It’s a running cosmic joke that I went to divinity school and got accredited as an expert in love theology, yet it’s as unknowable to me as outer space. When I presented my thesis to my panel, I told them that I don’t need to understand love, I just need proof that it’s the fabric of our existence. I’m not a religious woman, but I’m a woman of faith. I am choosing to believe that love, in all its forms, is fundamental to our existence.

I believe the lack of love is detrimental to our health and I believe that I have hurt myself, and others, the most when I’ve withheld it. I don’t care to write about anything that doesn’t have an explicit purpose and without love (not limited in the familial, platonic, or romantic sense), the pages stayed blank.

Love flows and ebbs and I have spent so much of my life treating it like a fixed object. Like water, it goes where it wants. I’ve tried to keep it and I’ve tried to conjure it and every time, all I needed was to wait for it to come back, changed.

I’m not in pain anymore, but I am still sore. I have betrayed myself so horribly for so many years that my muscles have atrophied. Every movement towards openness and authenticity feels like muscle being ripped from bone.

I write and study about how love is the center of our existence, but struggle to tell my friends how much they mean to me. I make art about desire and connection, but all of my relationships take a backseat to my work. I’ve closed the door on perhaps beautiful adventures because I’m running risk assessments over what’s real. Like religion, belief can be hollow. What does it matter that I can talk about all of this in the abstract, if I don’t move with it in me?

When I was a kid, heights had a fear of me. I jumped from tree branches and swing sets like gravity was a suggestion. I’ve taken big, stupid gambles on myself and hauled myself from city to city not even for promise, but for potential. I was the bravest girl in the entire world until I misstepped and landed wrong. Someone I loved blindsided me and I couldn’t accept it. Love might be everything, but just the feeling alone is not enough.

My friend Dylan called me earlier this week and reminded me that no life is worth living unless you are acting from your highest self, wounds and all. And thinking you’re bigger than heartbreak, is just being too small for love. I hope one day soon to be someone my 7-year-old self—who climbed everything she could find just because she could—could recognize again.

As I said in my 2025 op-ed: another day, another Sabrina Carpenter discourse.

ICYMI: the pint sized pop star made headlines (again) when she performed at Coachella and had a seemingly normal response to being interrupted mid-performance by a fan. The attendee in question did a traditional Arabic cry, which Carpenter mistook as a yodel. She made some flippant remark about Burning Man, which led to a 24 news cycle about whether or not she’s Islamphobic for not knowing what a Zaghrouta is.

Before I could even get my morning coffee and dive into the situation, she’s already apologized for the incident and clarified that she couldn’t hear or see properly from the stage. The whole situation is what you’d call a nothingburger—or at least an incident without real malicious intent. Yet, it’s being treated on par with more insidious, illegal behavior in Hollywood (or worse).

But of course, it was never just about whether or not Carpenter did real harm. While there is genuine reason to be upset by her misunderstanding the exchange (based on her apology), there is also a good fraction of her callout that’s being disingenuous about the intent behind her words.

It might look familiar and it’s hard to navigate. How do we engage with celebrity culture nowadays when everything feels overblown, distorted, or flat out fake? How do we make space for the real call-ins and separate the rest?

For the last couple of years, I’ve seen death threats, harassment, and plain inhumane language be used in the name of “outrage.” This is just misogyny repackaged in a way that looks socially acceptable now. As a society, we’ve evolved just enough to know hating women for their appearances, success, or romantic partners is a Real Bad Look. We look back on the Perez Hilton era of the early aughts with the right amount of shame to know better, but not enough self-awareness to see how insidious sexism is.

Hating women was always going to continue, because we live in a society that exploits and routinely takes away rights to their bodies. Of course that sentiment is bound to be reflected in celebrity culture. I just find myself (sometimes) missing the days of overt misogyny via the tabloids because at least then we can call it for what it is.

In 2023, I wrote a story for Teen Vogue about how celebrity bodies are not public property and the overfamiliarity of fans. Three years later, we’re still here. This is the other side of that same coin. People want to be awful online, but they don’t want to be obvious they’re being awful. They disguise their cruelty inside a moral Trojan Horse to be on the “right side.” But by weaponizing progressive principles, they’re actually making a mockery of the very real issues of discrimination and inequality.

You might be familiar with the infamous blog, Your Fave is Problematic. It did unspeakable damage to our sense of media literacy. It did such a poor job of framing real harm and accountability that the founder made a public apology. But her interview begs an interesting question: if we’re self-appointed judges and executioners, what is our end goal?

Jon Ronson wrote So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about shame and the internet and while I disagree with some points he makes, he does correctly point out that we don’t know what accountability actually looks like. And there is a worrying amount of people who don’t care to figure it out.

All day and night, I see people talk about holding people “accountable” but with nary an idea of what they mean. Take this situation: if Sabrina apologized and acknowledged she didn’t handle the situation correctly, then what more can we ask of her? What more can we ask of anyone who has misstepped and seems genuinely remorseful?

Last month, Odessa A’zion exited a project once it came to her attention that she would be whitewashing a story. It was what people wanted, but getting that result didn’t seem to make people happy. If taking actions to repair isn’t accountability enough, then what is? The punishment never fits the crime because it was never about that.

People are always going to behave in bad faith, particularly online and particularly with public figures. But it’s disconcerting when it starts become to the norm—and when the people who claim to care the most about community and equality are the same ones causing the actual harm.

Lately, it feels like the internet wants everyone to be a closeted MAGA freak. Taylor Swift is a member of the KKK. Sydney Sydney supports eugenics. I don’t know any of these women personally and can’t speak to their politics, but a quick glance of their history show years of donations and verbal commitments to progressive issues.

Yes, their harmful actions should be absolutely called out (Swift not denouncing ICE for using her music, for start). As white women with massive platforms, they should be doing more—particularly as they benefit from these systems that hurt others. But it feels like there is more hate driven their way than there is for the actual people responsible for policy and who are proudly awful in Hollywood.

Mark Wahlberg, for starters. Chris Brown is still a touring musician. The list goes on. I’m not a ‘Cancel Culture Ends Lives!!’ truther because it doesn’t and we routinely see that with men (and Ellen Degeneres). People who are incredibly found guilty of bad behavior have this playbook of posting a PR polished apology via a Notes app, waiting a few months, and then grifting their way back to the spotlight by talking about how “woke” everyone is now.

And the horrible truth is that those people start sounding sane when you see how moral outrage is being manufactured to green light witch hunts. When there is no shortage of terrible people being publicly and consistently terrible, what good reason is there to look for imaginary Easter eggs of bad behavior?

There is none. It’s letting our misogyny off its leash and bending backwards to invent reasons to let it loose. I believe that people, at their core, do care about the issues they claim to be champions for… but I also believe that progressive individuals aren’t above reproach when their politics are being weaponized wrongly.

We all know what happened with Amber Heard.

I’ve been a secret member of the f1twt (Formula 1 Twitter) for the last year and a half and I can definitely say Alexandra Leclerc has gotten more lashings than the man who was fired for sexual harassment allegations.

After she took her husband’s last name—which is admittedly less chic than Saint Mleux—there was a flood of hate for the woman who, as far as I know, seems to be a perfectly normal individual. Thousands of strangers accused Alexandra of setting back feminism by taking Charles’ last name and in case you thought they were joking, there were 🧵 threads on threads explaining how choice feminism isn’t really feminism.

And the thing is that they’re objectively correct. Not about Alexandra, but the critiques of mainstream empowerment. There was also a lot of very good points being made about respecting women who change their surnames as a cultural and practical decision. But as usual, the incredibly nuanced topic was flattened into something black and white.

Not to mention the irony of using “feminism” to call another woman “jobless”, “boring”, and “a stepford wife” that seems to be lost on the masses.

The complexity of feminism (and most social issues) is that there is inherent disagreement within the movement. It’s redundant to get every single person to see the world through the same exact lens, which is why all the serious people don’t waste energy on baseless in-fighting. I feel insane for even writing “a single action cannot determine whether a person is a feminist or not and a single person cannot determine if feminism is over or not.” Maybe I was wrong and we did need the Barbie movie after all.

The real tragedy is if we funneled all the fake outrage into action, we’d make some real change. If every single person who tweeted about Carpenter, Leclerc, Grande, etc donated a $1 to an immigration legal defense fund, lives would be changed. And yes, I’m using that fallacy flippantly, but I stand by the sentiment. We could be doing better.

I was talking to a popular f1twt creator a few weeks ago about the weird treatment (either pro or anti) of the WAGs in Formula 1 and she said that she just ignores it. I just wonder if not addressing it is just enabling this sort of behavior more. A practice I’ve been using in my day to day life more is just naming what’s happening (“I don’t like this because it’s manipulative”). As users on Jabookie’s internet, don’t we have an obligation to do the same?

I don’t know. I’m neither a social theorist nor Jia Tolentino, so my observations are purely just that. But knowing another misogynistic hate train is just the corner, it felt time to say something—even if it’s just to my little corner of the internet aka my Substack. If you’ve been reading my work for awhile, you know I’m not a doomist and I still believe that we can choose to not be shitty.

And the beauty of that is sometimes it really is that easy.

I’ve been trying to live earnestly for the last eight months, which is real hard for a girl who loves to deflect, desensitize, DECEIVE!!!, and delay. Like my mother and her mother before her, I come from a long lineage of women who see their feelings—good or bad—as an inconvenience. When this is the case, there is an easy magician’s trick to keep those pesky emotions at bay. They call this redirection.

Colloquially, it’s bullshitting.

When I was in the hospital last August, I had visitors who would ask me how I’m feeling. Rather than giving any real answer of substance (too messy, too revealing), I gave some anecdotes about how they played too much Katy Perry. While technically true, it’s not what your loved ones want to hear with doctors pacing back and forth behind them.

Yesterday, influencer and professional celebrity friend Jake Shane got backslapped by the Internet for his less-than-stellar performance at the Oscars. Even though he wasn’t nominated, Shane was still playing a role: the Gen Z contrarian with vocal fry who finds everything ironic and also meaningless. It doesn’t matter what they’re actually saying because it’s about how they deliver it.

It plays well online (sometimes), but it doesn’t make for a good interviewer. I know so little about Shane, so I can’t speak to his background or personhood, but I do know a lot about interviewing. Shane’s ultimate mistake was inserting himself into the conversation, where Jake Shane™️ is equal to the people he’s talking to. The actuality is that the person interviewing is just a conduit for conversation; it’s not a tennis match where we’re watching each player go back and forth.

For content creators without any journalism training, this is an easy mistake to make. Even with experience, it’s still easy to make. I, too, have forgotten myself and tried too hard to engage in banter with my subject at the expense of the interview. In Shane’s defense, his career is being a personality, and it is entirely likely no one told him that the Academy red carpet is not the same as a podcast studio.

But these are harmless mistakes. If he’s given another opportunity—which I’m sure he will—he’ll learn from this. What I’m interested in is his comment of “finding the child annoying” in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which moved Julia Fox to speech.

I don’t believe Shane actually finds the child annoying. I think he probably does have a real response to the themes of Bronstein’s film. It’s a piece of work that asks the audience to witness how society is continuously failing mothers. Rose Byrne’s performance is not underhanded by any means. The question then becomes: why didn’t Shane just engage Fox or Damson Idris in a real conversation about the movie?

Well, because it’s scary. Sincerity is scary. It’s safer to be cheeky and generate a viral moment in an ecosystem that rewards memes and, for lack of a better word, “gaggery.” But to engage with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in a real way means having to admit that Jake Shane, too, is tender.

I’ve never had a moment of vulnerability that wasn’t immediately followed by regret. Revealing how you truly feel about something, without disclaimer or minimization, is like getting naked in front of someone that can’t be unseen. I can understand Shane’s reluctance to be earnest when there are real costs to being sincere.

It stung at the time because when you put yourself out there, you’re opening yourself up to rejection, mockery, dismissal, and the like. And celebrities aren’t always keen to engage with sincerity, whether it’s because there’s not enough time or because they’re not in the mood or one of the many non-personal reasons they just don’t. Knowing this, I’m a lot more sympathetic to taking the safer route.

A provocative response (“the child is annoying, don’t you think?”) is guaranteed a response, whereas sincerity can’t. Having tried to be mostly honest these last couple of months, I can attest that earnestness is an ask: will you let me be tender? Sometimes it’s a swing and a fail. I’d be lying if I said putting yourself out here is always rewarding. But I can also attest that you can’t expect human connection if you’re hiding behind smoke and mirrors.

I’ve been having a multi-year writers’ block because I’ve forgotten how to be sincere in my day-to-day life, let alone in my work. This has cost me almost everything. I come back to this gem from my favorite podcast, On Being, when Marie Howe was the guest:

Just tell me what you saw this morning, like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist a metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

I’m appreciative of her use of the word endure. It is labor to be earnest and to resist deflection. There are so many painful moments in my life when telling the truth would have saved me. Instead, I put on a mask, which then became my face. It’s grueling work, Marie Howe. It is truly grueling work to live your life without all these defenses.

Days, weeks, months from now, I think we’ll look back at this moment and chalk this up as another example of why influencers shouldn’t be journalists. But I’m hoping that’s not the takeaway. I don’t actually care about how an interviewer gets their opportunity, just what they do with it. I just hope that we see ourselves in Jake Shane and recognize when we, too, step back in fear of revealing too much of ourselves.

And I hope we reveal the hell out of it anyway.

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I’ve never moved on from anything in my life, only how to retell it. I experience everything, at minimum, in threes: the time when it happens, my recollection of it in private, my exploration of it in writing. I’ve never been able to master detachment, largely because I chose to pursue the craft of translation instead.

Recollection is fickle. In a recent…

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In February (which felt like yesterday and lifetimes ago), I launched the Microdosing series. Here’s the recap:

If I felt everything my brain asks me to feel, there won’t be a person left. The other day, I wrote down: How much grief can we hold at once? Anger? Want? I’m almost always disembodied these days for one reason or another. Trauma—both personal …

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I’d call myself many things, but happy is rarely, if ever, one of them. I’ve curved my life around the blade of my ambition, hacking away anything that might stand between myself and my pursuits. The word “dreams” always felt so trivial for how I imagine my work; there is an implicit lightness, but I’ve never given anything else in my life more weight than this.

This essay is paywalled, and I appreciate those of you who are paid readers! In an ideal world, I’d love to write for free (which is why the majority of my writing is available to everyone). I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between ambition and stability, and how when I’ve found the latter, the former seems to be slipping through my fingers. If you consider yourself (or have been accused of being) a high-functioning individual, I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below!

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If I felt everything my brain asks me to feel, there won’t be a person left. The other day, I wrote down: How much grief can we hold at once? Anger? Want? I’m almost always disembodied these days for one reason or another. Trauma—both personal and collective—is stored in the body. If I pulled out every drawer at once, there wouldn’t be anything left to function with. I joke that I have to microdose my feelings, but it’s not far off from the truth. It’s a balancing game: if I want to access my empathy, I have to feel the grief, and vice versa. And I do—I just do it in bits.

I text myself a lot. They’re thoughts, musings, confessions that hit me so strongly that I have to get it out somewhere. I journal too, but the fleetingness of these emotions is faster than my ability to write them down. I tell myself, this will be a good essay. But when I come back to it, I can’t always muster up the energy to flesh it out.

Enter: Dispatches.

I hope some of these will eventually become long-form essays. But in the meantime, I want to share more frequently what’s on my mind as they’re arriving, even if they haven’t quite hit their destination yet.

001. The hedgehog’s dilemma refers to the human condition of wanting intimacy and nearness, but due to their (our) spikes, they must keep a distance to avoid hurting one another. Despite good intentions, mutual harm is inevitable. Despite how much I want to be close to people, I want not to be hurt more.

002. My mother’s husband drinks Diet Coke like water. I was re-examining why a beverage brings out such a visceral hatred in me, then I remembered. I hate to remember—I worked so hard to forget the smell of his breath. Funny how the door to the past is always just to our left.

003. In this global conflict (you know the one I speak of), what role does empathy play? How can we hold room for someone’s hurt without feeling like we’re betraying our politics? Do the two have to be mutually exclusive? I want to talk to the world’s leading smart people (philosophers, psychologists, writers, etc.) about this so they can give me something more substantial to chew on.

004. I have no natural talent. There’s no one strong suit of mine, not even writing, so I’ve treated my career like a Renaissance woman. Some years, I love to write more; others, I like film and the stage. I’m always half good at everything I do, then I have to shape the rest. I wonder what it’s like to be prodigal and not have to try so hard.

005. Wellness feels like another never-ending to-do list. I wish I didn’t feel this way. Taking care of myself feels like a chore, which can say something about our culture, but says more about my relationship with myself. Bummer. I tried to treat wellness like a job and then it felt exactly like that: a job.

This is not a self-help Substack, but I write a lot of (mostly) self-aware streams of consciousness. I write about what grabs my attention and what conversations I’m hungry for. I’ve been thinking a lot about the rebrand movement—another case of corporate speak bleeding into our existence (blech)—and how it’s doing us more harm than good.

It’s February a…

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Many years ago, I came across this “CV of Failures” from a Princeton professor. He wanted to show the other side of a résumé: all the opportunities that did not come to fruition and all the rejections that we do not publicize. It’s stuck with me over the years, and for whatever reason, it feels particularly poignant with increasing job uncertainty.

When you’re young and the world feels limitless, it’s easy to be possessed by that boundless fervor. In many ways, I miss being childlike. Being an adult and trying to be anything, you’re much more aware of the ways things can fall by the wayside. You start to gauge your potential by probability: what are the chances of XYZ? What makes me so special? There are millions of people doing this, etc., etc. The most talented people I know are plagued by self-doubt or burdened by just trying to sustain themselves.

By the time I turned 20, I hit one of my peaks. It’s taken years of retraining my mind not to hold myself to an idea of success from before my brain was fully developed. Despite all I have “achieved” (including a Webby Award, admittance to Harvard, a New York Magazine byline), I turned 28 last year, and I still felt horribly behind.

I’m writing my résumé of failures because my success stories are public, but they are marginal. My list of rejections is nearly double any list containing my awards and honors: projects that didn’t take off, jobs that I got fired from (more than four), etc. I’ve been called a high-achieving individual my whole life, but I do not think we have a clear idea of what that actually looks like.

In this way, I’m thankful for every rejection and flop. It’s shaped my way of thinking and, even more importantly, my work ethic.

Below is a detailed list of everything that didn’t work out—to offer some perspective.

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My Instagram bio reads “not an influencer,” not because I’m trying to be ironic, but because I’m trying to make a point. I tell people that I’m a writer, I’m a director, I produce, I act, and I consult, and I watch the specifics get scrambled in their heads before falling out the other ear as “creator.” It’s a zeitgeist marker that I hate because it’s r…

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I initially wrote this piece while studying the history of religious movements and reproductive justice at Harvard Divinity School; as we enter a second Donald Trump administration, let us not forget that reproductive justice—including, but not limited to abortion rights—is under severe attack beyond just Roe v. Wade.

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I have this friend (of a friend) who I see every day. I know what she had for breakfast, her preferred cycling studio, what client she landed for her agency, where she and her boyfriend went for their five-year anniversary, the dog bed she got for her poodle (use her code for 20% off your first order), and her mental health struggles.

Depending on how fr…

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I was looking for an adult, not God, when I made the commitment to attend Harvard Divinity School last year.

Some epiphanies are so obvious in retrospect that you have to wonder if you were stumbling through that year blindfolded; this is one of them. I was 26 when I applied, 27 when I got accepted, and 28 when I moved back to New York after graduation. …

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001. The human body sheds itself every seven years in a phenomenon called cellular turnover. Compared to most snakes, who go through ecdysis four to twelve times a year, this is an entire lifetime. In the shower, I scrub myself down to accelerate the process—in six years and 32 days, there’ll be a model of me that won’t carry your fingerprints.

In all of…

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during my sabbatical that wasn’t really a sabbatical (i went to grad school and gave myself more work), i took a course called playwriting: ritual practice and curious worlds from professor phillip howze. much like how my time off wasn’t really time off, the class itself wasn’t truly about playwriting.

it was about creative form. stagework was the medium…

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When I met my roommate—a literal decade ago—I was running away from someone and somewhere. There was no real destination in my teenage mind apart from far away.

When I met Adele, I didn’t know her well enough to flee to Chicago together like we did. But she was the counterpart (the anyone and elsewhere) that I desperately needed at the time.

I didn’t know…

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I’m so sorry for the lack of activity on Gut Feelings; for those of you following along, I’ve been getting my master’s at Harvard Divinity School and am finally surfacing from academia-land. My thesis is a draft of my second book, Love Is the Antidote to Extinction. It’s an anthology (lyrical essays, poetry, and vignettes) that chronicles my year at Har…

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