In 2006, when the hit Disney Channel series Hannah Montana premiered, I was a Bermuda shorts-wearing, boy-obsessed 12-year-old on the verge of puberty with a mouth full of braces. Like thousands of girls my age, I tuned in regularly to watch then-14-year-old Miley Cyrus navigate the fictional (and not-so-fictional, as it turned out) challenges of her pop star double life, marveling at how a quirky, accident-prone girl like me could transform into a beloved, glittering celebrity. If she could have “The Best of Both Worlds,” I thought, maybe so could I.

Recently, now as a cargo-pants-wearing lesbian on SSRIs, I decided to rewatch the show’s first season in anticipation of the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special, which aired March 24 on Disney+ and Hulu.

Just as I’d hoped, the series welcomed my return like an old sweater worn in all the right places. The lyrics to “If We Were a Movie” and the “sweet doggy dog” lines of Robby Ray Stewart surfaced from my memory with ease, transporting me back to the bright green walls of my childhood bedroom as if I’d never left. At the same time, however, I noticed a dark truth wrestling in the show’s underbelly that I’d previously lacked the hindsight to see.

“The Best of Both Worlds doesn’t exist,” I thought to myself at the end of episode two. Something is inevitably always lost in between.

In kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Newman, asked my mom and me to come into school early one morning. “I’m worried she’s not engaging with the other students,” she said.

Seemingly unconcerned by the impact of her words, Mrs. Newman spoke as if I wasn’t there. I followed suit, sinking back into my chair, but I absorbed every word and concerned look she tossed my way. It became clear I had done something wrong.

“Do you think you could talk to your classmates today?” Mrs. Newman asked, finally including me in the discussion.

When school started, I peered about the classroom with a new awareness that I was being watched. I set my target on the girl next to me wearing a gray sweater with two little pink cats, but as I tried to work up the courage to speak, a stiff lump, one I would come to know well, anchored itself in my throat.

“I, um, like your sweater,” I sputtered. I felt the tension in my body release as she smiled, but the exchange left a sour taste in my mouth. Even then, a part of me must have known that becoming what others wanted of me would mean losing something of myself.

This scene repeated itself all through middle school and high school. Whenever a teacher called on me in class, my cheeks would turn bright red and my mouth would go dry, even if I knew the answer. During my audition for high school choir, my voice cracked and I didn’t get in. When I asked my crush to senior prom, he said no and told people it was because I was awkward. I avoided him on the elliptical in gym class after that, embarrassed because I believed he was right.

I wished many times during these years that I could invent a new version of myself the way that Miley created Hannah. I fantasized about becoming a bolder, more confident person who others admired instead of the quiet girl who embarrassed easily. But an internal force held me back from evolving past who I’d always been. When I tried to push against this force, it usually backfired. I’d say the wrong thing or inadvertently make myself a target for criticism. It’s sometimes better, I learned, to not say anything at all.

I sometimes wonder now if it weren’t for all the people—the teachers and classmates and coaches—who called attention to my quietness, if my social anxiety would have escalated the way it did. My mom says I was always quiet but not necessarily shy. “You had no problem talking when you wanted to,” she says. There’s a story she likes to tell of when I was four and refused to take the antibiotics prescribed to treat my strep throat. Exasperated by my resistance, she called a friend for back-up, who, when she arrived, gave me the option of the easy way or the hard way. “The hard way,” I answered to both her and my mom’s surprise. “You were very sweet, but you were also incredibly stubborn,” my mom says.

When I left for college, I vowed to no longer be the quiet girl, or to at least become a better version of who I’d been. At a big school three hours from my hometown in Pennsylvania, I seized every opportunity to reinvent myself. I even signed up for the crew team despite my lack of rowing experience and upper-body strength. But after one excursion where I continuously knocked the rest of the group off pace while struggling to maneuver an oar twice my size, I decided crew wasn’t for me.

I bonded with the girls in my dorm over shots of Burnett’s vodka before trekking three miles to a party off campus (there was no Uber then). Buzzing from the alcohol and excitement of newfound friendship, I found myself singing, even yelling, alongside them. Together, we laughed until there was no air left in our lungs. I remember looking around and thinking, “This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

By the end of senior year, my resume was filled with leadership positions and internships. I was a senior reporter at the student newspaper and a homecoming committee captain. I co-founded a student organization dedicated to covering global news and interned at a notable public relations firm outside Philadelphia. I was proud of my accomplishments, but most of all, I was proud of how far I’d come from the quiet, apprehensive girl I’d been before. I’d succeeded at becoming someone else, or at least I thought I had.

Six months post-graduation, the lump in my throat returned like a gobstopper lodged in my esophagus. I worked at a travel marketing firm in New York alongside a handful of sleek city women who embodied everything I’d wanted to be since I first visited the Big Apple at ten years old. These women were trendy yet practical in their low-heeled boots and blazers. I bought low-heeled boots and blazers while studying the effortless way they floated between conference rooms and each other’s desks. But no matter how much I wanted to be both like them and liked by them, I couldn’t stop fixating on all the ways I fell short.

As if no time had passed, I once again found myself trying to work up enough courage to tell the girl sitting across from me in the office that I liked her sweater. I rehearsed full monologues in my head before speaking out loud in meetings, only to still fumble my words. I scrutinized even the briefest of interactions for mishaps. Surely, I must have offended my boss during the three seconds we stood next to each other at the coffee machine. It was like high school speech class all over again. The only upside was that this time I didn’t break out in hives.

I became so afraid of saying something wrong that I resorted, again, to rarely saying anything at all. Whenever my coworkers swapped celebrity gossip or summer travel plans, I pretended to be an active participant by nodding along, hoping no one would notice my lack of actual contribution. The last thing I wanted was attention.

What I lacked in social charm, however, I made up for by working hard. When I absorbed the workload of two people on my team who’d left and were never replaced, I didn’t complain; I just worked harder, always with a smile on my face. As long as the work was good, no one could criticize the unfavorable parts of me, though I always wondered what they truly thought. “What riles you up?” a co-worker once asked me at a company happy hour. I could tell she wanted to get a reaction out of me, but I refused to unravel so easily.

In 2013, when Miley emerged on stage at the Video Music Awards with her newly cut blonde hair pulled back into two tiny space buns, admittedly, I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe child stardom had gotten to her just as it had gotten to Lindsey Lohan and Amanda Bynes? But as far as I was concerned, her album Bangerz held up.

While rewatching Hannah Montana, I couldn’t help but recall the disapproving headlines and panic from middle-aged mothers, including my own, who sneered in disgust at the “new Miley.” Each episode filled me with dread. The young, bright-eyed Miley on my TV screen had no idea what was coming. Or did she? Had she expected the public to resist her transformation so fervently? Did she know that upon removing Hannah’s golden wig, so many would mourn who she used to be, even if this version had only ever been a fantasy?

This kind of rejection, I realized, is what I always feared. It’s the reason I felt compelled to hide for the better part of 20 years. It’s why I became a master at masking my anxiety, afraid that if I revealed it to those around me, they’d respond by saying they liked the other version of me better. In my twenties, I learned to conceal my worst parts: the maddening intensity of my self-doubt; the anxious, intrusive thoughts; the shame I felt for reverting to my child-like self, and the disappointment I carried for realizing I’d never outgrown her at all.

I can see now how I internalized my quiet nature as weakness and compartmentalized myself to control the image I projected. To my friends and family, I was a thriving 23-year-old living out my New York dream, exploring the city’s endless offerings, frequenting Broadway shows and drinking overpriced cocktails on the Lower East Side. To my coworkers, I was a reserved but dedicated employee who funneled all my energy into work and had no time for small talk at the water cooler. But in truth, I was entirely lost and unknowingly struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which I was diagnosed with a few years later.

While rewatching the Hannah Montana series provoked an unexpected sense of dread, seeing Miley embrace her former Hannah persona (blonde hair and all) as the strong, successful person she is today in the anniversary special created space for me to appreciate my own growth. As much as I’ve changed, I know the quiet girl I was is still with me and always will be. Like Miley, I’ve made mistakes, but through this, have become more comfortable with who I am. I’ve learned to embrace the parts of myself I once judged and grant compassion toward my younger self. The Best of Both Worlds may not exist as I initially imagined and that’s okay. I’ve created my own version. It’s by no means perfect, but I’m proud to call it mine.

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Kate Warrington is a queer Brooklyn-based writer whose work explores the intersections of identity and culture. Her writing has appeared in HuffPost, Pangyrus, Fruitslice, Querencia Press and She Explores Life, where she authored the column “Overthinking Everything,” about her experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She is currently working on a memoir about queer identity and OCD. Find her on Instagram @warrington_kate and at katewarrington.com.

“I got the X,” Alex said.

“X,” short for ecstasy, or MDMA—known today as Molly—was the hottest new illicit drug in 1990.

“Great,” I said. If one was paying attention, they would have heard the tremor in my voice.

I’d experimented with some psychedelic drugs in high school and junior year of college, and despite having fun, the idea of taking them always made me queasy. What if I had a bad trip and went crazy? It happened to a college roommate of mine. I returned to our apartment one morning to find our beige phone receiver hanging out the window by its curly cue cord. While tripping on LSD, he realized that the telephone was the source of all evil (mind you, this was a landline—not even a smartphone!) and decided he had no use for it anymore. What he saw about humanity on his acid trip had radically changed him, and that scared me.

But ecstasy didn’t have a reputation for inciting psychosis. It was known as the heart-opening drug, and I was looking forward to tripping with my college boyfriend of two years, who was about to graduate and move to L.A. while I stayed in Chicago for my senior year. I wanted to say all the things and hear all the things about how much we’d meant to each other, and then have mind-blowing sex. I craved that kind of open-hearted contact, and I was embarrassed by just how much. In my vision of the trip, X would give us permission to luxuriate in sappy, soft-eyed gazes and in the amazement of our connection. We planned to take the X and play house one weekend at his parents’ New Jersey home during spring break when they were out of town.

Alex’s family home was quiet, with a brown kitchen that smelled like SpaghettiOs. At dusk, Alex handed me a pill and a peach Snapple, and we sat on the floor in the TV room with a bag of Doritos between us. We waited. And waited. The air started to feel stale, and I was getting antsy.

45 minutes later, I was coming back from the bathroom when I noticed a mild feeling of peace. Maybe it wasn’t peace. Maybe it was just the absence of the gnawing, gaping hole I’d learned to live with. A tensed jaw. The ever-present sense that something bad was about to happen, that had become so relentless I’d stopped noticing it. The X-fueled sabbatical reminded me of its constancy.

I turned to share this experience with Alex, and found him slumped on the floor, leaning into the couch.

“I’m not feeling well,” he muttered. He didn’t look good. He was nauseous, had a headache, and a greenish glow. I’d heard of this kind of thing with mushrooms and peyote, but not X; X was the happy drug, the love drug, and I hadn’t planned on or even considered the possibility of one of us having a bad reaction.

“I’ll be okay. I just need to stay here for a while,” Alex said. “I’m sorry.” He looked like he was trying to crawl into the couch.

“No problem. Whatever you need. I’m here,” I said.

And I meant it. Which blew my mind.

I wasn’t putting on a people-pleasing show to mask my disappointment; I was entirely content to just sit around and see what happened, clean up his puke if need be. While he tried to become one with the sofa, I kept feeling around for my resentment like a lost contact lens. Although we were nowhere near the lovefest I had envisioned or wanted, I realized that I could be okay, and he could be not okay; there was space for it all. What a revelation. He didn’t throw up, and we ended up watching TV and cuddling. I said to myself with all the agency I could muster: “I want this. I want to be this free without drugs, and I think it’s possible.”

These days, Molly is more available than X was back then, although according to USA Today, it’s reportedly gotten up to 50 percent stronger than in the days we used it. I’m now more aware of the medical risks, including severe dehydration, overheating (as it’s often taken in dance clubs), the possibility of complications from being mixed with other drugs like fentanyl, as well as electrolyte imbalance and kidney issues.

Still, Molly, technically known as MDMA, along with other psychedelics, is being used by psychologists on the down low to treat intractable psychiatric conditions such as PTSD. I can see why. To say a drug trip changed my life is not an overstatement.

Yes, it was my drug-addled mind that made that declaration about wanting to feel that free without drugs, but my straight mind that remembered it. Back then, I shared the experience with my Jungian therapist. “I’m so affected by others’ moods,” I said. “But when we were tripping, I wasn’t. Is that possible in real life?”

“Yes,” she said, adding, “if you can learn to quiet all the chatter, you can learn to let go of expectations and accept what is. Maybe not with that level of contentment all the time, but close.”

I started reading books on spirituality and trying to meditate, which I found nearly impossible to do. Then, six months later, I was drinking cappuccino in a hip coffee shop with my best friend, a graduate theater student, on a bright fall day.

“So, are you going to date anyone now that Alex is out in L.A.?” she asked. She had fallen in love with a gorgeous grad student and her blue eyes had a dreamy sparkle.

“Well, there’s this one guy I keep thinking about,” I said, fingering the foam off the sides of my mug. “But I met him almost a year ago. And we’ve never even spoken.”

She leaned in.

“He was the set designer for our show last winter. He’s not at all my type, but when he walked from the back of the theater to the stage, my heart flipped. The only thing I know about him is that his name is James.”

My friend’s face went blank for a moment, and then came to life with an expression of awe.

“Blair! James is my boyfriend’s best friend. You would love him! He’s so spiritual!”

She set up a couples’ date. And she was right, I did love him, though not in a romantic way. During our two-month affair, he introduced me to his guru and spiritual practice. I was skeptical at first, and thought it was weird, and we broke up. But then, when I found myself alone in Los Angeles and depressed after college, I tried some of the practices. Surprisingly, they had a similar effect to the X: I got a break from my constant anxiety, and for a little while after meditating, I felt buoyant and peaceful, much less bothered by things.

Two years later, I would move into his guru’s ashram, where, for 16 months, I trained. I chanted, meditated, became a meditation teacher, and felt a lot better about navigating life by the time I left, which I wrote about in my memoir about that time.

More than 30 years after tripping on X, I’m still working on being that free. The work is slower than slow, but also entirely rewarding. Even though the feeling of anxious dread still comes and goes, it’s no longer the underscore of my life, and I’ve learned to see it as a signal. Some of it is a result of age, but much of it I do attribute to regular practice.

A few years ago, my red-eye flight to visit a dear friend across the country was postponed due to weather. The departure time kept changing until they decided to put us on another plane in the morning. I wandered around the airport at night when most of the restaurants had closed. I felt annoyed and disappointed that my vacation was slipping away. But then, having nothing else to do, I decided to meditate. I found an empty corner of a gate waiting area and sat on the floor. It was deeply uncomfortable to sit there and breathe through it all, with my inner stress and the loudspeakers blaring departures and the beeping noises of various airport vehicles. But after about an hour, a feeling of calm washed over me. The flight ended up boarding earlier than expected.

When I arrived, I hugged my friend.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “What an ordeal!”

“It was,” I said. “But I’m here.” And I meant it.

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Blair Glaser is an executive leadership coach and author of This Incredible Longing, Finding My Self in a Near-Cult Experience (Heliotrope). Her essays have appeared in Fortune, The Los Angeles Times, People, Oldster, and others, as well as literary publications such as Brevity and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. You can find more about her at blairglaser.com.

A heathered sweater dress gathered in a little heap at the crown of my belly and that, along with an old pair of riding boots, made up the entirety of my outfit. I don’t even think I wore earrings. But that was fine—it was only lunch. There was no need for bright, oversized florals, there’d be no games, no densely-perfumed older ladies, no lush centerpieces or cutesy favors. I wanted none of it. The suggestion of a baby shower was something I’d rejected emphatically over these nine months; to agree to it seemed unthinkable, given all the years in which motherhood had rejected me.

By the time I’d reached a sixth round of IVF, the ninth embryo to be released into my uterus, the shine of it all had worn off. Not off the baby itself, mind you—that remained the purest goodness this life had to offer. Likewise, the notion that I’d get to be another human’s mom, the fact that this person would shapeshift my husband and I into our own little family—all of it was beauty beyond comprehension. But motherhood—not the job but the construct, the way it took up tangible space in the world, a connective tissue binding women who had a proprietary knowledge of love itself—I’d come to see it all as a sort of exclusionary performance art. And the costume, I was sure, didn’t fit.

During infertility, The Mothers were everywhere, sorority sisters I idealized and resented and would’ve given anything to join. Down the street from my Brooklyn apartment they paraded around the playground, effortless in their unkempt way, their hastily looped top knots, pushing a toddler on a swing with one hand, caressing a cylindrical belly with the other. They whipped out their boobs at the coffee shop, motherhood positively spilling out of them, performed, it felt like, for my benefit alone, the embodiment of everything I wanted and couldn’t have. Now, though, I was being initiated, and I didn’t know who or how to be among them.

At my non-baby-shower shower, my childhood friends and I talked about my baby. It was quiet and normal—just lunch!—but everyone was excited for me, in the sort of way you can actually feel. I repeated a version of this lunch—same restaurant, same sweater dress—with another friend, then again with my mom and sister and grandma. Everyone genuinely wanted to celebrate this person none of us were sure would ever come, all the moms in my life extending such warmth, welcoming me into the club, which I accepted in the only stilted, mildly suspicious way I knew how.

In the weeks after she arrived, baby Hazel and I set off on never-ending walks through the park so she could sleep in a sweaty curl against my chest. I’d pass other women in whom I recognized a familiar bleariness, and watched as they convened at mom meet-ups, earnest and hungry for connection in this disorienting new phase of life. As they sat sprawled on blankets in the grass, their babies and their open hearts reaching for one another, comparing notes on the intimacies of yellow baby poop and the soul-crushing reality of the 20-minute nap cycle, Hazel and I walked on.

For months my sphere of motherhood remained remarkably narrow, encompassing only my daughter and me, alone together, every day. I’d prop her up against my thighs and we’d stare at each other, crinkling a book, chewing a rubber necklace. In the park, my favorite bench was planted within a grove of trees where I’d sit amidst the blooming branches, Hazel’s head tucked beneath my chin, lost in its little swirl of baby dreams. While she slept, I’d scroll through Instagram’s filtered portraits of motherhood, which were annotated in a romance language I did not speak. These mama bears with their kiddos and their babes. It was all so soft and warm and squishy, nothing that reflected the harder truths of how Hazel and I got here.

I found the role of being her mom easy to claim back then, even if the idea of being a mom continued to feel like a distant half-truth.

It wasn’t until my daughter started a two’s program at a nearby preschool that I found myself in regular, direct proximity to other mothers. Women for whom I was, before anything else, Hazel’s mom. By then we also had eight-month-old twins at home (infertility is wild that way), so to this new community of strangers I must have seemed a capital M sort of mother, embodying a motherhood of the highest order, juggling three children under three!!! There were no indicators of the motherhood denier I actually was.

From the “juice party” kicking off the school year all the way up until Thanksgiving break, I sat on a wooden bench outside the Yellow Room while the other parents adhered to the instructions we’d been given for an efficient, choreographed drop-off: Perhaps start a goodbye ritual such as giving three kisses and a hug. There was no tolerable goodbye ritual for Hazel, who came unglued at the point of separation, so I waited within her line of sight while she got to work washing dolls in soapy water and taking turns at the easel. The other moms would pass the bench, flashing me a smile, their eyes sympathetic, or offering up a funny aside about how comfortable I’d gotten in that spot. Little missives, across the void, stranger to stranger, mother to mother.

We weren’t yet familiar enough to laugh about the myriad absurdities and indignities of raising children: the toddler in full Elsa attire shoving her friend, a bowl of blueberries resting ominously between them. The small boy, apropos of nothing, biting the finger of a stranger one sweaty day on the playground. The airplane bottle of booze that somehow made it into someone’s backpack. We didn’t get into the weeds of it all in our small talk at birthday parties and Disney on Ice. But we said enough, exchanged sufficient glimmers of realness that I could feel something hard inside me start to soften.

At the end of the year there was a fancy event for the parents, and I wound up seated next to a mom from class named Annette. She replenished her glass of table wine as eagerly as I did, and I found just about every word out of her mouth hilarious and quick-witted, barely able to catch my breath when she missed her name being called as the big raffle winner of the night. The next morning, as my three babies woke me in the dark, the echo of alcohol refracting across my skull, it occurred to me that maybe I, too, was a winner, because I was pretty sure I’d just made my first mom friend.

The following year concluded with no such party because the pandemic had brought an end to real school and everything that came with it. What remained, though, was the people. We traversed vast stretches of loneliness to gather six feet from each other at the park. When school resumed, it seemed as if every parent was jockeying to do drop off, now a welcome opportunity for connection and conversation, an assortment of eyes above masks determined to find things to laugh about. We texted things overheard from our children in their little squares on Zoom school: “O is for Oreos and…orecchiette!” All these women whom I would have loved as a kid, or in high school, or college, or at work, but who happened to arrive at this specific phase of my life. Mothers, yes, but really, just friends.

Today, what began as the tightest of threads encircling Hazel and me has expanded into a vibrant tapestry of community. Countless circles of women stitched together by our children: a quilt offering comfort in some of the most vulnerable and joyful moments of my life. The connections feel deep and real, more meaningful than the term mom friends could ever possibly convey. We band together, forge a sort of collective, because there is power in numbers and that is precisely what moms need. We are frequently shit on, overlooked, underappreciated, the keepers of schedules, the knowers of details. If we don’t unite then what chance do we have?

Despite the richness of these relationships and close to a decade of motherhood, still the tug of longing, of being Other, is something I can summon in an instant. It surfaces every Mother’s Day, a phantom limb pain when I scroll through all the loving smiles and tender expressions flooding my feed. The woman in that sweater dress contained the baby that was coming as well as all the ones that never were. I will always be both people: a mother, as well as a woman clawing her way toward it. In a way the sides are at odds, foils with an existential tension between them, but they’re both me. I got what I so desperately wanted, but I won’t betray the person for whom it could have gone a different way. I’ll take care of her always. After all, I’m a mother.

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Amy Gallo Ryan is a Brooklyn-based writer and former Condé Nast magazine editor whose personal essays have appeared in Vogue, Lit Hub, Hippocampus, Motherwell and Literary Mama, among other publications. Her infertility memoir, You May Feel a Bit of Pressure, was released last fall.

Like many kids of the 80s, I used to hop off the school bus each day and make the mad dash home to watch General Hospital, sitting on the couch beside my mom. My friends were loyal to whichever network of soaps their parents watched, and in my house, it was ABC for the triumvirate of All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. As an impressionable 8-year-old, I followed the affairs, switched births, and wealthy families. I was confused when characters were angry that two people “slept together,” which seemed innocent enough—after all, I slept beside my brother in motels on family trips. At one point, I asked my mom what the big deal was. Mom told me the truth; she never minced words.

Something about General Hospital shifted around 1980.

Suddenly, the soap was part thriller, part comedy, part sci-fi adventure. This mirrored the hour-long shows I devoured in prime time: the “character-driven action-adventures” with quirky protagonists, from The A-Team to Remington Steele. The snappy dialogue, resourceful heroes, and suspense kept me glued. They also provided happiness while my parents fought, and while school bullies made me want to hide.

Like the night-time thrillers, General Hospital provided riveting storylines for me to lose myself in: Lovers Luke and Laura went on the run each summer from various crime families. The pair had great chemistry and clever dialogue. Laura was smart, and delivered her witticisms with a shy smile. My mom and I bonded every day as we talked about the show. It even gave me something in common with the popular kids (possibly the only thing): They talked about the show, too, but mainly about their crushes on stars John Stamos and Rick Springfield. I found both actors handsome, but didn’t have crushes because I didn’t know whether they were kind in real life (clearly I thought about everything way too much).

After the death last weekend of actor Anthony Geary—who played Luke—my social media feed was a frenzy of memories from other fans who talked about watching the show daily with their parents, classmates, or partners, because it was unavoidable: Luke and Laura’s November 1981 wedding drew 30 million viewers.

I’ve been watching old episodes for a year on YouTube, particularly since my mom died 18 months ago and we had spent hours glued to the program. To my surprise, the old episodes hold up. I’m still charmed by the dialogue (the writers will probably never get enough credit).

Both Luke and Laura were funny, resourceful, and rescued each other in unusual ways. Between Laura’s shy strength and Luke’s cautious energy, the chemistry was palpable.

Inevitably, each discussion in person or social media about the show—and the “supercouple” —invites comments, as it should, about how Luke raped Laura in the episode that aired October 5, 1979. This was early in the storyline, around when I started watching.

Luke’s boss (who was also the mob boss) ordered him to kill a senator. He didn’t want to do it. Believing his life was over, he cried in the disco that he managed. Laura, a young newlywed who’d taken a job there in order to put her new hubby through law school, saw him sobbing. Luke believed he was in love with her and about to die. Then he raped her.

On subsequent episodes, he apologized, and she threw his car keys away so he couldn’t kill the politician. The two of them went on the run, donning various offbeat identities.

Most people will point out that a rapist wouldn’t be a hero in any mainstream pop culture today, and it shouldn’t have happened 46 years ago, either. It’s been noted many times that Luke was expected to be on the show for 13 weeks, a villain, but his work with actress Genie Francis was so popular, the producers and writers scrambled to change the narrative.

Explaining (Not Excusing) the Popularity of Luke and Laura

There’s a specific reason fans like me have been able to swallow what happened for 46 years and keep rooting for Luke and Laura: The made-up rape was so bizarre, so fictional, it couldn’t have happened in real life—which doesn’t make airing it on TV any less dangerous. In fact, the plotline gave people the idea that there are excuses for rape, along with the usual tropes, like that she was secretly in love with him. But for those of us who watched daily, it was clear that what played out onscreen wasn’t remotely like real life. Here’s why.

After I finally got to college in the 1990s, I frequently heard my male dormmates cite studies about how women fantasized about being raped. The young men saw this as some kind of proof that deep inside, “no” really meant “yes.” (In the pre-internet era, college was the first time lots of us got to interact with so many people close to our age, and we hashed out male/female issues constantly.) The men on my floor tossed the survey around in conversation quite often. And yes, numerous surveys about rape fantasies exist; for instance, a 2009 study says 62 percent of female college undergraduates have had some sort of rape fantasy.

But here’s the thing about fantasies: The person creating them is in control, not the rapist or criminal.

A fantasy rape can involve whoever the fantasizer wants, with no danger, no disease, no pain, no trauma, no therapy.

Luke and Laura’s storylines, before they intertwined, were individual Cinderella stories. Luke’s parents died when he was young. He and sister Bobbie grew up poor, and Bobbie became a prostitute. Luke found success in their hamlet of Port Charles, New York, working for the mob.

Laura was handed to the wrong woman at birth (of course!) As a teen, she was seduced by an older man, whom she accidentally killed while defending herself. After serving probation, she finally found a sense of normalcy by marrying law student Scotty. In fact, there were so many scenes of them making out at first, my mom said at one point, “I’m getting sick of these two.”

But Laura wasn’t totally in love with Scotty.

After Laura threw Luke’s car keys away, they went on the run. Their adventure was full of iconic moments: dancing in a closed department store (before security sensors), Luke being shot to death (or so we thought, but he revealed that while Laura’d been buying blue jeans at the mall, he’d snagged a bulletproof vest!)

“Now let’s get out of this town. It bores me,” he said as he rose from the dead, a line I still quote 45 years later.

Should a soap opera have started a relationship with a sexual assault? Of course not. Should they have had a space alien flirt with a main character a few years later? That was just as unlikely as a “nice” rape. The writers created a scenario that didn’t mirror real life. The show did address the aftermath of the rape in a serious way, with one female doctor even telling Laura that she could get an abortion if she thought she was pregnant, something that surprised me when I recently rewatched. I can picture bored housewives like my mom imbibing those messages. The assault was sanitized for television, as a “soap” would do.

When I watched these episodes at age eight and asked my mom what rape was—I’d never heard the word before—she told me the truth. I didn’t for one moment find it acceptable. I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t take away the wrong lessons.

People are right to criticize dangerous messages, and nothing like that should be written again. But we wax nostalgic for the show for other reasons. Perhaps a few of us lonely nerds, without the internet to connect us, just wanted two underdog characters “from the docks” to get together and succeed.

When Anthony Geary died on December 14, I remembered Genie Francis saying in interviews that the actor had repeatedly checked in with her throughout the filming of the rape storyline, to make sure she was okay. That’s a good man.

But my first thought was that I wanted to call my mom to talk about it. Not long after the Luke and Laura adventures began, she started struggling with mental health issues, and eventually lived on the street for several years. Perhaps the soap helped her cope with life the same way it helped me. Whenever someone mentions General Hospital today, what I picture most isn’t its most infamous story line. It’s my mom and me sitting together on the couch, waiting for our next summer adventure.

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Caren Lissner’s nerdy first novel, Carrie Pilby, was adapted into a rom-com film on Netflix. She’s currently writing a memoir, How We Became Homeless. Read more of her writing and reach out at carenlissner.com.

From far too close, a man’s voice asked, “Anyone sitting here?”

I turned my head, keeping my parts held down to the towel, to see two guys standing over me, a bucket of beer in hand, blocking out the Caribbean sky. They were older by about a decade, at least in their thirties, and, although they were topless, too, something about their manufactured smiles gave me the impression that they had booked this cruise as part of their search for those co-eds they saw in American Pie 5.

The one with the rainbow-tint reflective Oakleys pointed at the two lounge chairs next to me, right next to me, lounge chairs I had assumed would remain empty or, if needed, dragged away in observance of the unspoken personal space radius that I’d seen as the norm among the women in this sacred sanctuary I’d come to calling the Boob Deck.

Stomach down, I reported the truth. I had come to the Boob Deck alone, so no, no one was sitting there.

They creaked into the lounge chairs, and Tinted Oakleys now lay as close to me as he would have been had we been lying in bed together.

I stuck my face back in my book, tucked in my arms to cover any side-boob, and prayed, “Please don’t talk to me. Please don’t talk to me.”

“So...”

Here we were, no doubt, at Step 2 in a fool-proof plan hatched in their room and sealed with a high five.

They asked me questions—about my hometown, work, the cruisey b.s. that you let sail into the air and off with the breeze, and I answered then put my face in my book each time. But the cruise was winding down and, obviously, they hadn’t had their orgy yet, so they wouldn’t give it up. I relented, put the book down, and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to let these douchebags think they were getting somewhere.

Oakleys offered me one of their beers. Here we go with Step 3, but I took it anyway because it wasn’t $9. I put it to my lips and tipped it up while keeping my chest pressed to the chair, as if I were a participant in a main-pool deck drinking game where I had to lay across the bar like a snake and take a shot without choking.

More questions, while I looked at my face and bare shoulder reflected in his mirrored Oakleys. It dragged on, me stuck there in a conversation that belonged on the main deck, cutting into my Boob Deck Me Time. Holding my face up with my head turned to the side, while keeping the rest of me flush against the chair, started to hurt my neck.

Soon, I noticed another kind of pain, an ominous prickling I knew well.

My back was burning in the sun.

But I can’t just flip over, I thought. My boobs are under there!

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Only the worst kind of person complains about a free vacation, even if it is on a contrived lap around the same ports filled with the same trinkets, a guided tour caged into the roped-off areas that are only foreign in the technical sense, a conveyor belt of tourist transports arriving even before the wake of the last cruise ship has settled, in a factory of safe entertainment painted up to look like travel. Therefore, on this family trip, I put on a smile, so as not to be the worst kind of person.

Already in my early twenties and not yet having left North America, I had dreamed of being a great international traveler since I was 3, when I told my daycare my mom was taking me to Europe, which she definitely was not. I longed for somewhere real and un-branded. No logo or tagline, just life.

Instead, I felt trapped on a buoyant shrine to all that I longed to escape in America.

Inside our cabin with a single porthole window, I didn’t feel like I could breathe in all the way. Outside our cabin, with the ads and the announcements and The Others, I didn’t feel like I could breathe out all the way.

As soon as the cruise started, my family and I claimed lounge chairs with towels on the main pool deck, just pecking distance from the strangers herded in next to us. Kids squealed as they ran through the narrow passages between chairs, and everyone tried to look like the people in the brochure.

The crew intrigued me, as they were mostly international hires, and I felt the desire to give them a knowing nod as we passed in the halls, as if to say, “I hate these people, too.”

I circled the ship like a penned-up dog, looking for a way out.

It wasn’t until the end of the second day that I finally found something new: A little swinging door, marked with an all-caps sign, “ADULTS ONLY,” with a no-cameras symbol underneath, blocking a stairway that led up to open sky.

Being an adult, I climbed those stairs. I found a near-empty deck wrapped around the smokestack of the ship, where, sprawled across one of the lone reclining chairs of this deserted island, lay a woman, face down in nothing but the sunshine and a thong.

The next day I recruited my sister and we pushed back the little swinging door, climbed the narrow stairs. We passed half-naked women and dragged lounge chairs to a generous distance, like normal people.

The steel drum music from down below was nearly carried off by the wind as we reclined and, with the nonchalance of French women on the Riviera, we untied our tops and dropped them to the deck beside our chairs. I introduced the skin of my bare chest to the sun and the Caribbean breeze wafted past parts that had never felt the air in a public place, and that expansive feeling—any feeling you’ve never felt before, those that promise that the world is so vast and life so short that the surprises will never run out—told me that after all this sightseeing, I was finally traveling.

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That was days ago. Now, under the hot blanket of my burning skin and the stare of the Tinted Oakley sunglasses, I tried to calculate how long I had been in that position: too long for a moley person whose ancestors evolved their melanin levels on the arctic line, now even closer to the equator than in Florida, a person who had already spent her youth crisping her skin at the beach.

These guys were nowhere near leaving.

“Oh really,” I said. “Ohio, huh.”

Yes, burning, burning flesh.

My options were:

A. To pick up my bikini top, inch those two triangles of dignity between me and the towel until they were hopefully covering everything, fumble for the dangling strings with my fingers and, with my face smashing into the chair, squirming on my belly like a fallen baby penguin, trying to tie my top back on. Then rolling over, and, after a nip check, seeing Tinted Oakleys looking down at me like I’m the weirdo.

B. To let my back sizzle and pop like a slice of cheap buffet bacon, for whatever amount of time it would take these Boob Deck sightseers to drink through their bucket of beer and use all their internet-researched tactics to try to get me back to their room, then buy a $26 bottle of aloe in the gift shop and spend the rest of the trip trapped in the dark of my room screaming into the service phone, “More ice, dammit!”

Or, C. There was option C. (Option C-cup)

While I weighed the fate of my skin, the sunshine bit down.

I thought about the horror stories my mom texted me from her dermatologist’s office.

I thought about how, in life before the Boob Deck, I had so carefully doled out permission to see my bra buddies. Multiple dates…usually. Proof of non-creepiness. Must be funny, at a minimum.

Here these creeps were going to get front-row seats when they hadn’t made me laugh and I would rather puke up that morning’s margarita than think about them enjoying the sight of my nipular neighborhood.

But the moles! The cancer seeds sprinkled across my back, soaking up ultraviolet radiation like Melanoma Miracle-Gro, ready to burst and kill me dead in my thirties before I even had a chance to see lava or make out with an Italian guy.

But I couldn’t just flip. Could I?

As if to answer, the pain singed again. I’d have to decide soon or the sun would decide for me. A few more minutes and it’d be the $26 aloe and the blister popping. Think of the pus. The oozing. My nephew was just a boy.

So, fine. Fine! This was the Boob Deck, after all. I was a certified boob-decker. I was a traveler, I was adventurous, and my boobs were, too.

Therefore, in the middle of our casual conversation, in between an “uh-huh” and a “huh!,” I steadied my resolve and casually raised myself up on one elbow, then I rotated my body, laid my back on the shaded relief of the towel, and my breasts flopped into the conversation.

The reflective sunglasses and the guys’ conversational tone stayed steady while, not two feet from his face, my nipples squinted in the sun. I stayed steady as well, as if this was who I was and had always been—someone who didn’t mind discussing the merits of last night’s lobster dinner while seeing all of my own Creation reflected back at me in the mirror of a stranger’s sunglasses.

But inside, the person I had always been squirmed under the bright light, beating down on me and exposing me at such a short distance in front of two guys who were worse than strangers. Whereas the sun was burning me at my back, the stare from behind those Oakleys was burning even harder in the front. I wanted to cross my arms to cover myself, and, like a suspect in an interrogation room with a one-way mirror, yell, “I know you’re in there, watching me!”

My squirm didn’t dissolve, but I stayed long enough for it to seem that it had never been there, to show them that yes, I was brazen. Yes, I was international. I was a Boob Decker.

As soon as that was clear to everyone, I thanked the reflective glasses for the beer, stowed my breasts, and walked down the stairs, to the door that had no warning from the inside looking out, and I swung it back from whence I’d came. But I still had that original feeling I felt before this experience had been desecrated, one I knew I wanted to chase.

----------

Eventually, I did see lava. I did make out with an Italian guy, underneath the Milky Way in the middle of the Bolivian Salt Flats, no less. I traveled enough to see I was a total spoiled brat for complaining about a cruise, even to myself. And I grew into my womanhood enough to be able to say, “No, no one’s sitting here, and no one’s going to.”

I have made my own way, neither by leaning fully into corporate travel, nor fully rejecting it. An all-inclusive in Costa Rica here, a grungy couch surf in Colombia there. Up all night in a grass hut in Thailand and sleeping in at a boutique hotel in Paris. Most recently, when we hit up the easternmost island of the Bahamas on the deserted tail end of shoulder season, my best friend and I would skinny dip at sunrise, two women, in our freedom, in our world, under the gaze of no one but the sun.

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Paulette Perhach is a writer and coach whose work regularly appears in The New York Times. Her essays and journalism have also been published in Vox, Elle, The Washington Post, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. She is the author of two viral essays that reached millions of readers worldwide. Her book Welcome to the Writer’s Life (Sasquatch Books/Penguin Random House, 2018) was named one of Poets & Writers’ Best Books for Writers. She is the founder of Powerhouse Writers, home to the Writer’s Mission Control Center software and The Finishing School for Writers.

During summer vacation as a kid in the late 2000s, my brother and I would fight over who got to play on the Wii. When I won, I would play Animal Crossing for hours and hours until bedtime, every night. Weekends were the best because I would play from 1 p.m. to about 7—and yes, I would be playing only Animal Crossing that whole time. Occasionally I’d play other games too, like some fashion games, but Animal Crossing reigned supreme.

My brother, when he got the Wii, would play things like Sonic the Hedgehog and Spider-Man. I wasn’t always super interested in his choice of games. I liked to watch sometimes and make comments while he played, but some of them simply seemed too difficult for me. Action and fighting were a lot; I’d rather spend my time planting flowers and dressing up my character.

When a fight wouldn’t be resolved and we were forced to play together, we would take turns on our games. I’d play Marvel with him, and he would play my fashion games with me. We’d also play Mario Kart, Wii Sports, Wii Music, and Wii Play together—games that I considered both of us to like equally, as opposed to “my” games and “his” games.

One time, both my grandpa and my mother saw us playing a fashion game together (it was Imagine: Fashion Party… the girls who know, know), and sternly told us that I shouldn’t force him to play those types of games. I was confused and angry and kept asking why. We were taking turns playing games we liked; why wasn’t he allowed to play this dress-up game with me? I never got a clear reason, but that was that. We stopped playing the fashion game and played the Marvel one instead.

Video games weren’t always this gendered. In their birth, there was no gender. Pixels were pixels in the late 70s. Pong and Tapper were for everyone. By the 80s, however, the video game market was starting to saturate with boring, low-quality games. The video game crash of 1983 was a turning point for video games as companies were left with tens of millions in unsold inventory, reported The New York Times in October 1983. In other words, video games were over.

And yet! Nintendo single-handedly brought video games back in favor with the NES. Now retailers and companies knew they had to be more careful and strategic with marketing for video games. Market research showed that boys played video games more than girls, so marketers leaned into that heavily. Masculine ads during the 90s influenced the creation of more male-targeted games. And more masculine ads were created for them. It was an endless cycle.

In the mid-90s, however, there was the “girls’ games movement,” in which some companies and game developers thought to target girls. For older Gen Z and Millennial girlies, this movement resulted in games like Barbie Fashion Designer, Chop Suey, Rockett Movado, and the Nancy Drew series from HeR Interactive. While they’re not officially part of the movement, I consider the girlie games for the Wii and DS to be important parts of girlie game history. The fact that there had to be specific games made for girls said a lot about the state of the video game market.

Marketing played a huge role in why “video games are meant for boys.” It’s this marketing that created a need for girlie video games, since most of the already-existing ones are for boys. The entire history of video games and video game marketing led up to my Imagine: Fashion Party incident in 2009. My girl video game wasn’t meant for my brother, because the rest of the entire video game industry was already for boys anyway.

When my brother and I were allowed access to a computer, even our tastes in browser games were different. We would have games in common like Poptropica and Club Penguin, but he was playing things like Marvel Super Hero Squad Online and fighting games on Newgrounds, like ripoffs of Marvel vs. Capcom and King of Fighters. I was enjoying Pixie Hollow and Barbie dress-up games.

Becoming an awkward teen made things worse. After I graduated elementary school, my mom decided to send me to a private middle school in the hopes of giving me a better education. My classmates were stuffy, snobby, and rich. Really rich. Since I was one of the few middle class kids, they looked down upon my interests—including my video games. My male classmates, who rarely played games anyway, preferred sports games like FIFA or NBA. My female ones didn’t play games at all, and instead read books or just took more classes after school. I would get, “Huh? What is that?” in response to Animal Crossing.

Crushing. I was alone. This is what led me to be heavily involved in the video game community online. With a mix of genders and ages, I knew to keep my mouth shut to avoid predators and unnecessary attention toward myself. They weren’t talking about my games online. I had to especially seek out those communities. It’s because of these communities that I added some computer games to my repertoire, like Stardew Valley, visual novel dating sims, and, surprisingly, turn-based JRPGs (Japanese-style role-playing games).

My brother, who attended a normal, public middle school, found his tastes affected by his classmates there. His classmates introduced him to their computer games, which widened his tastes exponentially. He was playing first-person story-driven games, like Dying Light and Grand Theft Auto, or expanding to shooters like Counter-Strike.

Because of my involvement in the video game community online, and as a way to continue bonding with my brother despite our diverging taste in games, I liked to be on the pulse of gaming news. If there was a new Zelda, or Halo, or entirely new games like Fortnite, I was there and excited along with gamers online even if I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna play them.

Those games involve using a game controller or a keyboard like a Rubik’s cube, and having to memorize button combinations is stressful and time-consuming. My current favorite games are simple to learn yet provide me flexibility in how long I can play them. I can choose to play for hours like I did as a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old, or I can play in 15-minute spurts when I can squeeze them in during a busy day as a working 24-year-old.

Despite video games being one of my most consistent hobbies since childhood, video game marketing and my experiences online have shown me that my games weren’t my brother’s games, that my games were starkly different from what was popular, that my games were barely represented in mainstream video game news.

Nothing much has changed in the 14 years since I was an 8-year-old playing Imagine: Fashion Party. In 2023, the top genres by sales revenue were shooters, adventure games, and battle royales, according to Newzoo’s Global Games Market Report. Because of their popularity, only games that fall under these categories are considered “real” video games within the gaming community.

Outside the gaming community, these games are also considered “real” video games because of the moral panic over video games in the 2010s due to school shootings being linked to Call of Duty and other violent video games.

I remember hearing about this and rolling my eyes. They’re just video games. They wouldn’t be the sole cause of someone causing such violence. I was on the side of video games, and I debated with my privileged classmates in middle school about the issue.

I promptly shut up when someone said, “Why do you even care? You don’t even play those games anyway, right?”

Right. I was defending a community that didn’t claim me.

In the eyes of the media and the general public, only the violent ones are considered video games and the ones who play them, gamers. Both inside and outside video game culture, the non-violent games that women tended to play weren’t considered “real” video games. I guess it was a relief to not be connected to violent people, but what would I call myself?

Definitely not a gamer. The nail in the coffin that led me to never identify as one was my own brother. He was playing those top video game genres. I wasn’t.

“You wouldn’t like this cuz it’s a real video game.”

“Just go play Animal Crossing or some shit.”

“You’re not a gamer, though.”

Passing comments and moments blurred together to only add to the feeling that Animal Crossing, browser games, and dress-up games don’t count as “real games,” so therefore I’m not a “real gamer.”

Whenever I would ask him and friends online what exactly my favorite kinds of games were classified as, they could never give a straight answer.

So I buried my very real love for these types of games deep into me, something forbidden that I could never proclaim. I could never answer with “video games” when someone asks what my hobbies are, even though I spend hours on those games every night—just like my brother does on Overwatch and Marvel Rivals.

I never understood how my brother was impressed by my 1600 hours on Animal Crossing: New Horizons. He said himself that he’s never hit that hour count on any game he played in the same time period that ACNH has been out, regardless of the COVID-19 lockdown—yet he still made me feel that my video games were inferior to his.

To put the cherry on top of this gendered video game mess, women have been playing games just as long as men have. The Entertainment Software Association’s earliest report on the industry in 2001 stated that 57% of gamers were male, and 43% were female. In over 20 years, the population of women who play games has barely changed—it’s always been 50/50. Marketing has lied to us.

Despite this, women are much less likely to identify as gamers, with a 2015 Pew Research Center survey finding 48% of American women play video games, yet only 6% of them identify as gamers (whereas for American men, those stats were 50% and 15%).

I’m done with this. Women deserve respect as gamers, and stereotypically feminine games deserve their kudos.

Because of a more pronounced girlie culture that has emerged in the last few years—as shown by the popularity of Hello Kitty and blind box trinkets—I think my brother naturally eased up on his vicious video game discrimination. He stopped assigning the value of “real” or “not real” to any video game. And acknowledged that I was a gamer. Only recently did I ask him if he remembered anything he said to me about my video game habits, in order to inform him of his portrayal in this essay. He just nodded vaguely, and said, “Oh, I think I did say all that stuff…It’s whatever, though. You’re a gamer.”

I didn’t need my brother’s permission, but I’m adopting “gamer” for myself. I no longer shy away from stating what video games I adore. Even if people’s responses are a disappointed, “Oh, cool,” I don’t let it diminish my joy for my games.

My thousands of game hours are worthy of awe, even if it’s on cozy girlie games. The genre doesn’t diminish the value of the time I spent playing those games. I’m done pushing aside my own games because they’re called “shovelware,” pushed aside for being too pink, pushed aside for not having enough action. Our games are real games.

So yeah, girlie girl. You’re a gamer, too.

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Shainna Alipon (she/they) is a freelance multimedia journalist from Las Vegas. They love writing about women’s culture, especially feminine people in nerd spaces. Their works are featured in indie publications like Devoid Magazine and Handbasket Zine. They’ve also started a YouTube channel to talk more about girly games. This disaster bisexual Filipino-American wants you to know that you are loved and their cats give you kisses!

My 6-year-old eyes scanned the shelves of the store next door to our house, locking on the colorful packaging of a new candy bar. I turned to my dad with desperate eyes, begging for just one coin. His scolding crushed any hope. “No!” he said, reminding me I’d already had enough sugary treats for the day.

As soon as his back was turned, I walked back into that store. This time calculated. Greeted the same old familiar face of the shopkeeper. I looked at the candy bar again. It was a soft shell of wafer biscuits, with a gooey chocolate center, and covered with more chocolate from the outside. I knew I could take it, slip it into my hand, and no one would stop me. The thought didn’t feel dangerous or thrilling, it just felt possible. So I took it.

That quiet possibility would follow me for decades.

When I was 10, I often stopped by a stationery shop on the way home from school. I had a twin sister, the only twins in our small town. We would always strike a conversation with shopkeepers in our neighborhood. “We got a new collection,” a fresh graduate girl in the shop would tell us. I scanned the shelves until I saw it: a notebook with Pikachu, my favorite character, on the cover. I wanted it. I knew I could wait for the girl to turn her back, slip it into my bag, and leave without paying. The idea sat there in my mind, planning to do it on a day my sister wasn’t in tow. In a way, I knew I shouldn’t and that if caught, there would be consequences, but I didn’t feel guilt, nor a rush. I just wanted that Pikachu notebook, so I went ahead and made it mine.

At 15, I was at a friend’s house. Their house was spacious but cozy, with three bathrooms, five bedrooms, and a big terrace. Passing one room, while we were going out to the terrace, I spotted a small soldier figurine. It was chapped, green, sat up high on the shelf, and proud. I wanted it. Maybe because it looked like it would be a great fit for my collection of figurine soldiers. Later, when I said I was going to the bathroom, I passed it again. I looked up at it and thought, I could take this right now. No one would know. All I had to do with make sure that my friend and their family was not in sight. I turned my head around scanning the room and that thought was all I needed.

Fast forward 20 years from that first candy bar, and the pattern was still there. At the office, near the end of my shift, I felt a casual pang of hunger. I saw the fridge tucked into the corner, dimly lit, with shelves of gourmet sandwiches and candy bars. I could wait till I got home and cook something. I looked at the bagel sandwich. I could take it, and no one would notice. I already knew where the cameras were watching. I didn’t have to cook myself dinner that night.

I went into a grocery store to get my weekly groceries. I had a note of all the things I needed to get to stock up. I passed by a bakery aisle; the intense aroma filled my nose. I eyed the full section. I saw a pastry filled with minced beef, a pie. I got hungry on the spot; I wanted it. I picked it up, ate it, threw the paper package away, and didn’t pay for it.

In an antique shop, I was looking for a vase for my mom. I found one but also saw two interlaced swan figurines that would look good on my nightstand. I paid for the vase, but the swan figurines left in my pocket, with no one the wiser.

The bigger the prize, the better the planning was. Sometimes for seconds, hours, days even. I didn’t grab things hastily. I would make a few laps, think over the most discreet way to get the thing or play a mini movie in my head about who was watching and how easy it would be. I knew I could do it and not get caught; sometimes I acted on these calculated decisions. These thoughts weren’t loud or obsessive but were small, neutral, like checking the time. For years, if someone had asked whether I’d stolen anything, I wouldn’t have said yes. Not because I was lying, but because the moments didn’t even register as “stealing” in my mind.

I never told anyone the whole shape of it. At most, it came out in childhood anecdotes, dressed as mischief, stories that made me sound clever instead of compromised. Stories that you can laugh about from childhood. But I never handed them the thread that tied them all together. To share it outright would have meant letting someone else decide what it made me: a criminal, a liar, a broken person. The secrecy itself began to feel less like concealment and more like a polish, a way of carrying something dark in daylight without it looking dark at all.

It never felt like a weight. The secret lived with me the way breath does. Some people spill; some choke on silence. I never did. Keeping it was natural, almost easy, like remembering to blink.

I didn’t have the regrets other people might experience when they think about a wrong choice. The idea of “consequences” seemed like something for other people, not me. When it happened, it wasn’t that I thought I could always avoid getting caught, I just didn’t think about it much. Sure, I could’ve been punished for taking that notebook, or that candy bar that my old man denied, but somehow, it never felt like I was in any real danger. It wasn’t defiance, but more like an act and no second thoughts. I just did it, and that was that.

It wasn’t until I was 25 that I suddenly remembered a string of these moments. The candy bar. The Pikachu notebook, the figurine, all the extras I took. I realized they were all the same shape. It was all about noticing something, meticulously planning how to get it, and take it. Still, I didn’t stop.

That realization I had in my mid-twenties came randomly to me, not while I was doing it, but while I was in the middle of eating a sandwich. Perhaps because it was a bagel sandwich? It happened so suddenly that I remembered many scenarios that weren’t even in the back of my mind. It wasn’t like an epiphany but a moment of reflection. For the first time, I paused. Not out of fear, or shame, but because I understood something about myself that had been in the shadows: How did I plan that far back? How was it so natural as breathing and from a very young age. And now what?

I didn’t feel the regrets that usually accompanied such behavior. I didn’t feel a rush either, so why was I doing it? I asked myself this not in a self-pitying, existential way, but more like I was solving a puzzle about myself. For a long time, I didn’t think of my actions as part of a “problem.” They were just things I did. You could call it impulse, habit, or maybe just a personality with a tan: the shade that hides in plain sight, between flaw and feature. I wasn’t Robin Hood, or even a petty crook in my own mind. It felt as automatic as flipping a light switch. But I never stopped to ask myself: What was I trying not to see?

I searched online to look for clues to my behavior. I never searched the words “Petty theft” or “Shoplifting” because my activity wasn’t limited to only those actions. Instead, I buried myself in personality tests, lists of traits, descriptions of psychopaths. I read them all, noting what fit, what didn’t. The search itself wasn’t mine to begin with. A girl I once dated, sharp enough to notice both the charm and the edges, calling me something I’d never thought to look up. “Check it,” she said, as if the answer to me could be found in a word. So, I looked. As if she’d handed me a puzzle piece. I devoured the books, late nights under the glow of the screen, absorbing Cleckley, Hare, and others. Then Dutton’s book on the wisdom of psychopaths: I read it like a mirror. Recognition crept along. This wiring, these patterns, they were mine.

Then, I came across studies about brain development and how impulsivity can linger well into your mid-twenties because the prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain responsible for self-control and decision-making, is still under construction until then. That also clicked for me. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was an explanation. My actions weren’t born out of defiance or malice; they were a byproduct of a brain that hadn’t finished wiring itself.

Knowing why I did it didn’t erase the urge, nor the calculation or weighing if it’s worth it or not. But it did give me a pause I’d never had before. Standing in a store with something in my hand, or when I see something that I’d like to have, something that I could easily afford, yet the ritual of payment seemed unnecessary, a hollow barrier I could fold away with a single act. I’d feel the old calculation kick in. The certainty that no one would notice and then the quieter, newer thought: Do I really need to do this? That question was harder to walk away from than any security camera.

I don’t see it as “fixing” a flaw but fine-tuning my personality, a personality with a tan. It never felt like crime in the conventional sense. It was more intimate, a way of carrying a secret that only I knew, a private lens on the person I was becoming.

Like adjusting the brightness on a screen so the picture is clearer.

Still, often, I feel the thought slide in, slick as ever: I could take this. I turn it over in my hand, almost letting the muscle memory win. Then I put it back.

Usually.

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Adam T writes about desire, identity, and the moral gray areas of human connection. He draws from personal experience to explore how relationships shape, expand, and reveal who we are, often delving into the spaces between societal expectations and personal truth.

The first time I took a pregnancy test I was 36 years old and ready to be a mom. Leading up to that point, with each friend that announced a pregnancy, I felt the pull and noted in myself a hint of envy. It was time. I had pre-purchased the test at the CVS down the street from my house so that I had it ready the second I suspected I needed it. We had decided the month before that we would “start trying”, a phrase that lacks significance until you realize that “trying” isn’t always as fun as you’d assume.

I was living with my partner in a little brick row house on a quiet street in Astoria, Queens. After seven years in New York City, we had found a place we could afford that wasn’t a one floor apartment. It was spacious enough for a deep couch to watch movies on and bright enough for a variety of tropical plants—ferns, palms, and, ironically, one called the mother-daughter plant—to care for and love. It reminded me of the cozy home I grew up in, in a city just two hours south. It was a place I could picture sharing with more than just the two of us.

Best of all it was a four-block walk to the N train, which took me directly into Manhattan and dropped me off at Union Square, where I could head south to Washington Square Park to read my book and be distracted by the eccentric people watching or go west to Greenwich Village to admire all the brownstones, something I particularly loved to do at dusk when people started to put on their lights but had not yet pulled down their shades.

When it was time to take the test, it was an early weekday morning in late August. I woke up anxious and before I so much as rubbed the muck from my eyes, I was on the toilet trying to avoid peeing on my hand. When I was done, I balanced the stick on the edge of the blue porcelain sink and waited in anticipation, flooded with excitement and already sure it would be positive.

I was wrong.

I walked into my bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared out the window. I didn’t know what to think or how to respond to something that I wasn’t at all expecting. I hadn’t prepared a pep talk. No words of comfort. I thought, That can’t be right, can it? Should I take another one?

I had been so sure the test would tell me what I wanted to hear. What else could explain the week before when I had an immediate need to barf and shot up off the couch to run to the little half bathroom next to the kitchen and spit up in the toilet? Or the time that I was on the bus, a detour because my precious N train was down for the day, slinking through the streets of Queens on my way to Manhattan and I had to actually get off the bus because I was so nauseous? And then there was all the mid-afternoon sleeping that I couldn’t stop doing. What was that all about if not a positive pregnancy test?

But I was still living in a headspace where I was likely to get anything I pursued doggedly. I believed that when I wanted something all I had to do was work on it until I got it. I had control. I would figure out how to make it happen. I was good at that. I was born in 1980 and grew up with boomer parents who believed deeply in the power of hard work. The “anything is possible when you’re willing to work for it” mentality was etched into me.

When I wanted to get my own apartment in one of the coolest—and most expensive—parts of Philly at 18, I made it happen. I used to get up at six, take the bus to college for morning classes, leave in the afternoon to work my office job, head back to school for late afternoon classes, then work my evening waitressing job. I did all of this because it made it possible to have something that I craved deeply. When I wanted to move to New York City, I made it happen. When I wanted to travel the world, I made it happen. When I decided to start my own business, I made it happen. It was exhausting, sure, but to me it meant I had control of my life.

Never easy, but always possible. Why should becoming a mother be any different? If I wanted a positive pregnancy test, I would work on it until I got one.

I remember thinking that all those symptoms I felt throughout that muggy month of August were a sign that something had begun in my body, it just hadn’t completed. To me that meant it was only a matter of time. I would get that double line in the little window of the stick eventually. Like all the other things I’d desired in my life, I really did believe I had control over making this happen.

So when the negative test told me otherwise, I bought a few more boxes of tests to keep in the bathroom under the sink because I knew I’d be needing them again soon. These were still the days of trying “naturally” where every menstrual period that was even 12 hours late gave me butterflies of anticipation, every unsettled stomach wasn’t the week-old rice from Chinese takeout sitting in the fridge that I nibbled but certainly the beginnings of new life stirring in my insides.

I liked seeing the boxes in my bathroom. Pregnancy tests represented what life would soon be. I could see it already in my mind: Balancing business ownership and self-employment with an infant, creating traditions as a family of three, setting up my mom in the guest bedroom so she could help with childcare. I heard myself proudly making naive statements like “oh, we’ll still travel a lot, we’ll just bring the baby with us” at dinner parties with friends who already had kids so smiled politely while likely laughing on the inside, and having three Christmas stockings hanging from the banister of the blue carpet-covered staircase of our little Astoria rental house.

I smiled upon seeing the pregnancy tests under the sink—until six months later when I was still staring at those same fucking boxes every time I opened the cabinet to get the tampons I needed each month. Each time I spied them felt like a punch in the stomach. I was bent forward, wind knocked out me, breathless with disbelief.

“Nope!” they yelled at me. They mocked me, their pink boxes that for so long provided a sense of excitement, possibility, and happiness now created disappointment, sadness, and rage. They actually made me feel stupid, like I had believed in something that wasn’t real. Unused, unneeded pregnancy tests were my adult version of Santa Claus; they represented a fantasy, a story of joy and hope and magic. But not real. Nothing to believe in.

When I was six years old, I walked into my kitchen that December, looked at my mom, and said, “Mom, I’ll pretend since I’m the oldest, but don’t lie, it’s you and dad, right?” So matter-of-fact, so accepting. So sure.

But not this time. Now the magic that was being taken away left me curled up on the bathroom floor crying like I’d experienced a death, one that occurred every single month, leaving me in a constant state of mourning. My tears were so intense and plentiful that instead of being doubled over the toilet with morning sickness, I was contorted around the seat, gripping, dry heaving, snot and saliva dripping from my face. Another month passed, another negative, another fragment of hope taken away.

Words from my partner: “We’ll keep trying.” “It’s only been a few months.” “We have no reason to believe there’s a real issue yet.” I knew he meant what he said but I felt deep down that something was wrong.

And I was right.

I didn’t want to be right. I wanted to be pregnant.

But another six months of opening the cabinet to retrieve a tampon and seeing the pregnancy tests nestled under the bathroom sink went by before they finally got tossed.

Not because I was strong enough to do it on my own but because the doctor told me to. I was sitting in the gynecologist’s office, staring at her solemn face, hearing her say, “You’re 37 years old and it’s been about a year of trying naturally. I would suggest not waiting much longer to explore other avenues.”

My eyes immediately filled with tears hearing her words, but she seemed unconcerned. She said it not with warmth but in the most straightforward way. I immediately hated her.

How was this information not breaking her like it was breaking me? She was my doctor; didn't she care? Wasn’t I the very first 37-year-old woman sitting in front of her with this problem? If not, I certainly wanted to be treated as if I were.

Instead of empathy, tenderness, and understanding, I got practical, realistic, rational. At first it pissed me off. But eventually I started to appreciate her approach. The unemotional started to feel sensible. And I kind of liked that. Hope had a place in the story again.

When we started going to the IVF center, I didn’t need the pregnancy tests to give me that hope. The time of peeing on a stick was over. Determining whether or not I was pregnant would be through a visit to LabCorp, a needle prick, and drawn blood.

We now had science on our side and it was going to help us become parents. We are taught to believe that science has answers. I believed it would tell me exactly what the problem was and then it would suggest exactly how to fix it. Check and check.

After months of painful, invasive tests where long cold ultrasound wands were shoved inside me, maneuvering at unfathomable angles, looking for problems, I learned that there wasn’t anything obviously wrong. Nothing to point to for why we couldn’t have a baby. I decided this was great news! I was back to having reasons to smile. I could now see ads featuring babies without my eyeballs brimming with tears.

I remember telling my best friends, “There’s no real issue. That means we just need a little help making it happen.” I was back to calculating due dates and adjusting travel plans to accommodate my fertility.

While the need for IVF pulled me away from the belief that I personally had control over the outcome of our efforts, it pushed me toward the comfort of a more learned control—clinical, provable, deductive. I didn’t have to work so hard on my own; the experts were now involved. Someone else was responsible for making this happen. I could exhale.

I should have been more careful about what I wished for.

Because over the course of three years, my positive turned to a negative, more than once. I was angry yet unwavering that I wasn’t going to give up. I had become like a gambling addict. Broke but adamant that I just needed one more try. Just one more; it would work and I’d hit it big.

I never did.

And after two more years, I had to put the hope of a lasting pregnancy to rest. I could no longer stand to sit on my couch Googling “signs of pregnancy,” reading the long list, analyzing myself one more time—Are my veins more visible? Am I peeing more than usual? Do I taste metal? I was done. The hope I’d experienced over the years was the hardest part because it made it so easy to visualize what I wanted. With hope came the tendency to rub my flat stomach, choose my favorite names, believe I could actually feel an infant in my arms.

When I knew it was really over, when there was nothing left to try and nothing more in my bank account, I was sure that the only way to live with this grief of not being a mother was to live a life of intention. I crawled onto the window seat that my partner built for me in my home office, notebook in hand, slowly pouring out my ideas for all the things that would make life magical that didn’t involve a baby. The list was surprisingly long. Things like using my savings to buy a second home abroad and flitting back and forth with nothing but a backpack, closing a still-successful business that I had outgrown in order to start a new one from scratch, and spending entire days at a coffee shop writing a book. These were things I’d once dreamt of but hadn’t allowed myself to fantasize too much about once I hit my mid-thirties because motherhood would have erased their probability. Looking at the list, I remember thinking, This isn’t a bad consolation prize.

With that I had to start writing the next chapter of my life even though I hadn’t been able to close the last chapter the way I wanted. I now lean hard into the things that I wouldn’t have been able to do as easily, if at all, had I become a mother. A life of travel and freedom where I spend months at a time in Europe, where my daily morning routine allows for an hour of uninterrupted reading, and where money is spent guilt free on Barolo, hardcover books, and trips to the fancy cheese store. A life where I accept how little control I really have and one where I acknowledge that hope isn’t always the best strategy. Because hope is expectation—and can be its own form of suffering. Once I let go of hope, I was set free to be a new version of myself.

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Nicole Giordano is the founder of Revel + Verve, a creative wellbeing studio supporting women in midlife and beyond. She writes about the grief of infertility, her multi-cultural identity, and the rollercoaster of midlife womanhood. You can usually find her exploring a new country, cooking something elaborate, or being cozy with a book at home.

“DON’T FEED THE BASICS.” This was the warning posted around the Air Force Academy the evening of July 4th, 2000, one week into basic training. Apparently, we’d become the exhibit.

Of the 1369 brand-new basic cadets, about 180 of us, myself included, were women. With no outside influence, it had been easy to conform. We were blank canvases, told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Each day, the military institution added another brushstroke to our new identities, and we absorbed each one.

We’d come from all over the country, and all had different reasons for choosing a service academy for college: some had lifelong dreams of becoming fighter pilots, some had legacy to live up to, others aced the ACTs and SATs but couldn’t afford tuition so chose the academy where academic standards are high and all cadets are on full scholarship. Still more were recruited to play Division 1 sports. I was in the last camp, recruited for soccer and basketball.

I’d grown up a military brat, so attending a military academy seemed like a reasonable next step. When I received my congressional appointment in my senior year of high school, I was ecstatic. About a month after my high school graduation, I showed up carrying nothing but my worn-in combat boots, laced with all the naivety of a motivated teenager. The rest would be issued to me, because at service academies, the first matter of business is basic training.

On that Independence Day, we were let loose to watch the fireworks. It was our first night of freedom since arriving. It was also our first time seeing—and being seen by—outsiders.

We were put “at rest” for the night, which meant we could talk to the people whom we’d marched next to in tight formations since arriving. I’d laughed with the people who lived across the hall, felt their breath on my own face during shoulder-to-shoulder push-ups in long sterile hallways. I’d locked eyes with them each morning while sounding off, “Yes, Sir! No, Sir! No excuse, Sir!” We’d encouraged and supported one another, held one another’s rifles, carried each other up hills, but never exchanged a word.

I knew who most people were by the sound of their voices, but probably couldn’t have pointed them out in a lineup. It sounds a bit brutal, but there had been good times too. One morning, a female upperclassman was whispering in a basic’s ear, berating him. No one could hear what she was saying but him. Then, he suddenly blurted out, “No, I will not make out with you!” Our expressionless faces curved into smirks until we all exploded into laughter. Her rage, and the hour of push-ups and sprints that followed, were worth every illicit giggle.

It felt surreal walking around freely for the first time in the cadet area—a large, square cement slab of the Air Force Academy campus called the terrazzo bordered by our dorms, the academic building, and our cafeteria. One side had a tall cement wall, leading to another level where the cadet chapel stood, and the ever-present Colorado mountains served as the majestic backdrop to it all. It was at the top and the other side of the wall where visitors made the habit of coming to watch the cadets. We were a tourist attraction in Colorado Springs.

On the Fourth of July, they come to watch the basics watching the fireworks. We were like animals in a zoo. The posted signs said not to feed us, but they did anyway.

Onlookers watched, captivated, as we foraged through the Starburst and Snickers bars they dropped for us, watching us frantically fill the cargo pockets of our camouflage uniforms like squirrels on crack. When our pockets reached capacity, we found room in our undergarments to hoard our treasures (sports bras for storing contraband were a rare advantage for the vastly outnumbered female cadets).

It felt like Christmas in July. A really weird, fucked up Christmas.

Some spectators brought Big Macs or Chipotle burritos. These were the most sought-after, causing outright brawls between the starving cadets who, very often, didn’t get a chance to eat enough at mealtime due to so many rules that made it difficult to actually take a bite of food. Just a week in, many of the guys, especially the larger football recruits, had become shadows of their former selves.

Some visitors even dropped down porn for the male basics, who had nothing to look at but girl basics who looked like boys. This was back when they would chop females’ hair two inches from the scalp upon arrival, a practice that has long since been abandoned.

There was one casualty amidst the chaos. One basic looked up at the wrong time and got hit in the face with a six-pack of beer. For weeks after, he wore a patch and became both a legend and a cautionary tale. Rumors floated that he’d lost his pilot qualification because his vision was permanently damaged.

My family lived just 20 minutes away, in the house where I’d grown up. What seemed like a comfort, though, ended up being more of a hindrance than a help during basic training, and throughout my four years at the Academy. I was like a dog being dragged away from its owner: As long as the owner is still in sight, the dog resists. But once there’s enough distance, the pull weakens, and the dog eventually moves forward. I was never far enough away to stop resisting. The pull of home never let go.

I knew my mom would be there on the wall that steamy July night. I hadn’t been a rebellious teenager, never went through the stage where I resented my parents. After school, if I didn’t have practice, my mom would rebound basketballs for me as I shot in the backyard, and we’d go for long walks with the family dog, talking about everything. I scanned the crowd and eventually spotted her, peering down, searching for me, her youngest daughter. I screamed up at her, and she finally saw me. This was her first time seeing my butchered hair and uniform. It was clear she didn’t recognize who I’d become since she dropped me off seven days before. I don’t remember the fireworks or flyovers that night, but I remember the way her face changed when she saw me, how it sent my stomach into my throat and tears into my eyes, and how I suddenly didn’t want any candy anymore at all.

I was saved by a loud horn. Like robots, we straightened our backs, stopped talking, stopped scavenging, and ran to find our flights—otherwise known as our new “families” of about 36 basics each that we’d been assigned to on our first day.

Falling into formation as if we’d been doing it all our lives, an upperclassman then called cadence and marched us back to the dorms. Forward…harch! Left, right, left, right.

Once out of sight from the prying onlookers, the rhythmic “hup two three four” turned into chaos: unrestrained screaming, aggressive pat downs and, of course, push-ups.

All my candy was confiscated immediately. All except one piece that had slid down to rest at the bottom of my issued white underwear. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

That night, after the lights went out, I ate a fun-size portion of freedom, rebellion, and triumph. I squeezed the partially melted bar straight from the wrapper into my mouth to make sure no chocolate touched my hands. I held the bar in my mouth, only swallowing when I ran the risk of salivating all over my pillow. Not even my roommates knew what was happening under those stiff white sheets. I didn’t know if they could be trusted.

Was I worried about the cleanliness of my little stowaway? The answer is no. That never crossed my mind. Basic was a time when I’d have eaten a forbidden treat regardless of whose undercarriage delivered it to me. Having been a basic, I can confirm that we’re desperate, hungry, and very gross.

The next morning at 4:30 a.m., reveille blared. Cadre screamed and banged on doors, and we jolted out of our beds.

I marched down the long, stark hallway toward the bathroom, my heart pounding as I waited in line to pee. Shoulders up, back straight, eyes forward, and one sweet secret. Once I locked the stall door behind me, I reached into my underwear and pulled out the hidden wrapper.

Adrenaline surged through me, and I smiled widely as the evidence of my defiance disappeared down the toilet. I mentally tallied up a point for myself and thought, Maybe I’ll get away with a few brush strokes of my own. Maybe this is how I make it.

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Melonie San Pietro is a writer and business owner in Washington, DC, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a scruffy terrier. She’s written for The Los Angeles Times and Ms. Magazine, serves in the Air Force Reserves, and is currently at work on a memoir about her time at the Air Force Academy. She’s drawn to stories that sit at the intersection of identity, power, and everyday absurdity—especially those concerning women and institutional expectations. Find more of her work at her Substack, Suck Less Tomorrow, and at wanderpups.com.

It started with an occasional game of Scrabble on Facebook. The choices were between two- or five-minute matches, or one playable over twenty-four hours. I experimented with each, alternating between snap retrieving a word from the corners of memory and loading it as fast as my fingers could type, and having all day to contemplate the best possible move. Unlike playing someone in person, being able to come and go meant I could take on several games simultaneously. I was hooked.

The more often I played, the more proficient I became. I learned that words like “adze” and “qintar” would score more than a hundred points if engineered in a certain way across triple-letter and triple-word squares. My ratings rose with every high-scoring word, edging me to that part of the Scrabble stratosphere where the Mensa types dwelt. Without realizing it at the time, wins, especially consecutive ones, were sending dopamine rushes at a dizzying speed to my brain’s reward system, fueling a craving for more.

Unbeaten runs were critical to ratings, and the easiest way to stretch a winning streak was to play low-ranked players. The rush of trouncing someone with an inferior vocabulary, however, soon palled. My inner competitor wanted to acquire unbroken runs by beating players who were either as good as or, preferably, better than me, people whose lexicons of esoteric words I could later look up and learn from. I knew that a time would come when I’d be dethroned because that was the reality. And when it happened, I’d reset my stats to zero and start again.

Some players liked to chat between moves. While I had no time for diversionary tactics during two- and five-minute games, there was ample scope to engage in small talk over the course of a day-long match. We exchanged banter about our cities, favorite sports, movies, travel, food, and more. It was pleasant, lighthearted and non-threatening. I became Facebook friends with some of them.

But not everyone was nice. When a player asked me to give him head, I felt dirty and vulnerable. Another accused me of cheating. Who, me? I had never cheated at anything in my life! Complaints to the game moderators were met with stony silence, reinforcing the perception of Facebook’s variable attitude toward maintaining community standards. The only way to stop the flow of allegations and abuse was to block the offender and forfeit a game, which terminated my unbeaten runs. So I’d reset my stats to zero and start again.

Out of the swamp of dirty talk and false accusations, a grain of sand started to scratch away inside the oyster of my thoughts. With another window open showing a word scrambler (an online tool that takes a set of letters and turns them into words) I, too, could conjure up the magic required to stay on top of the pack. No one would know about my little secret, nor was there any way they could prove it if they suspected. I was careful to avoid words not in everyday usage and reasoned that if the game’s rules were silent on Scrabble solvers, then using one was legitimate by default—even if it didn’t quite feel right.

One day Facebook announced that it was terminating its Scrabble provider and, with it, the fast-paced games I loved. I joined the chorus of outrage at having to wait hours for another player to take their turn. Facebook couldn’t have cared less. I should have quit then. Instead, I migrated to Lexulous, a Scrabble imitator with quick turnaround times.

I abandoned the word scramblers, having decided there was only one honor in winning and that was by my own wits. A streak of early wins powered up my addiction and for a while I felt happy, knowing that I was being true to myself. But, like Facebook, Lexulous had its own brand of vitriol. You’re violating the rules, opponents would say, spitting at me like angry cobras. I played through months of bullying and harassment before pleading with—even begging—the administrators to ban me.

With nowhere else to go, I thought, for the first time, about breaking the habit. If it was impossible to play an honest game without vilification being heaped upon me, where was the satisfaction? More importantly, why was I wasting time on internet games when I could be cooking a meal, tidying the house, or working up a piece of writing? Where was the reward for spending vast tracts of my time on an activity that produced no benefit other than to make me want more of it? I felt ashamed of what I had become. Then I went back to Facebook’s Scrabble.

As I waited for a player in a different time zone to make a move, I’d start a new game. Then another. And another one after that. I’d wake up during the night to see who had taken their turn, shielding the glow of my phone under the comforter to avoid disturbing my partner. Interruptions for meals and conversation were greeted with unbridled resentment; “I’m busy,” I’d say, the hollowness of false conviction echoing in my ears. I stopped reading books, my concentration levels shattered by screen time overload.

I remember the day friends who live up country invited us to stay for a week. It was spring, a time for bush walks, whale watching, and fresh air. I visualised myself walking on the headland near their home, watching kangaroos nonchalantly chewing grass while surf pounded the rocks. Holidays have always been a time for getting distance and perspective. But what would I do about the sixteen games in play, three of them barely started? How many would become void due to my lack of moves, ceded to players I might otherwise have beaten? I thought about taking my laptop but knew that even if I put a time limit of ten minutes a day on Scrabble, the temptation to duck out every so often for an update and quick move—or to start a new game—would be impossible to resist. My absences wouldn’t go unnoticed either. I’d have to invent lies to explain them, reinvigorating a cycle of deception.

I threw the lot. This time I didn’t reset my stats to zero and start again.

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Rose Saltman is an urban planner, writer and editor who lives in Sydney, Australia. Her short stories have been published in The Guardian, Overland Literary Journal and The Brevity Blog, among others. More about Rose is at rosegsaltman.wordpress.com and bsky.app/profile/rosesaltman.bsky.social.

by Ariel Anderssen

I’m eight years old, crying onto the fuzzy beige fabric covering of our car’s backseat. I’d been invited to tea by a girl at my new school, who’d phoned up the week before and asked my mum if I’d be allowed to come. Today, we’d driven there, as asked, for four p.m.. There, we discovered I hadn’t been invited, after all. Neither she nor her mother had been expecting me. Because of course this popular student in the year above mine had never wanted me, the new, weird, religious girl in homemade clothes, to come to her house.

Some other girl, probably from my class, probably with the whispered, giggling support of a group of friends, had phoned us as a hoax. And tomorrow at school, everyone will know that I’d believed it; that I’d gone there, hoping for friendship. “You’re never going back to that school,” says my mother from the front seat. Perhaps she is as hurt and humiliated as I am.

But I know that I will have to go back. We’ve just moved to the village, and this is the only school. In any case, it won’t be different anywhere else. I’ll still be the girl with the wrong clothes, standing outside during school assemblies, not permitted to go to birthday parties or the school disco, visibly, conspicuously, embarrassingly different.

At my previous school, it’d been the same. “I am your friend,” Alice had said, “but not at school. If anyone here asks me, I’ll say I’m not. Okay?” Alice doesn’t want to be infected by my unpopularity. I understand; neither do I. I long to be normal. I can’t be normal, but I can be quiet. I'll go back to school, and I’ll be quieter, I think. Maybe that will keep me safe. Maybe there will be no more hoax calls.

I’m eleven years old, wishing school break times didn’t exist. Still a religious cult member, still in homemade clothes, but now, apparently, a snob, too. Boys from the other, hated class, sing the opening phrase from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony when they see me on the playground, and the girls put one hand on their hips, stick their noses in the air, and pass me with a model’s walk and affected sneer. This is meant to replicate how I walk, the music that I like. I don’t like Beethoven, but I’m not allowed pop music or TV so I’m cut off from the sea of popular culture they swim in.

From this, other children infer that I must be an eleven-year-old culture snob who’s looking down on them. I’m not. I want to be anyone but myself—different, weird, and too sensitive to hide my feelings when their mockery hurts me. I can’t change, so instead, I shrink; I become less visible. I hide.

I’m thirteen, in ballet class. I’m not the one being mocked today. It’s the new student. “Why’s she doing that with her face?” sniggers Natasha, loudly, to the others. The new student is expressing the music, not just with her body but with all of herself. That’s what we are all meant to do. But as I listen to the others, and watch her dancing, I know that I don’t want to be laughed at like this for loving the music too much, for showing emotions through my performance. Not now that I know it’s wrong. Now that I know it’s “gay” to be expressive. I don’t want to be gay as well as posh, as well as religious. I practice an expressionless face, as the months go by, and the ballet steps we dance become more advanced, more beautiful. I learn to dance from the neck down, blank-faced, as though not hearing the emotion of the music. I dance on, loving every step, every class, but scared to show any of that on my face. It’s cooler to dance the steps like they mean nothing. Between us, we make them mean nothing, because safety from mockery is more valuable to us than art. I don’t shine; it’s safer to be dim.

I’m fifteen; English literature. We are reading a Shakespeare play aloud. By common consent, we read as badly as possible. No inflections, no characterization. Dulled, blank, reciting of the words as though they’re strings of random numbers. No one is allowed to like Shakespeare. It’s my turn to read; I turn my voice flat and dead. I snigger along with everyone else at words I pretend not to be able to pronounce. It’s better to be dull than to be correct. It’s better to hate the play, the class, the teacher, than it is to appear to be learning, or worse, enjoying learning. I’m not being bullied so much an more. I wear ugly, baggy knock-off designer clothes like the others. My trainers are Reebok. I wear my hair in careful copy of the other girls: scraped back, lacquered and stiff. I’m finally just about invisible enough to be left alone. I hate who I’m pretending to be, who I’m becoming. But I’m safer—it’s safer to conform, to be stiff and lacquered.

“Sad” is an insult. “It’s so sad.” “She’s so sad.” It means “pathetic.” It means “loser.” The opposite of sad isn’t happy. The opposite of sad is bored, because bored is cool. I’m bored. Shrunken, sullen, blunted, cynical, dimmed, bored, and safer.

Not everyone is safe. The girl with the shiny dark hair, two years below me, whose father brings her to school on his bicycle. People laugh at them for being weird, and old-fashioned. They call him a pedophile. It sickens me, but I say nothing, because I no longer show kindness. I think about how her father is perhaps too poor for a car, but loves his daughter enough to give her a ride to school every day anyway, rather than let her walk alone through this hostile town full of teenagers who’re so talented at hate. It makes me want to cry, but I don’t cry now—not at school. It makes me want to tell her not to be ashamed, but I don’t. I don’t want to be infected by her unpopularity. I understand now, that’s how it works. I’m not kind anymore. It is safer not to be kind.

“You’re ugly, aren’t you? Why are you so fucking ugly?” says Robert, to Catherine. We’re waiting for the school bus; Catherine has done nothing to deserve this attack from nowhere. She looks down, wretched. I want to smash Robert’s face into the chain-link fence we’re standing by. I want to tell him that his cruelty disgusts me—that he deserves to be alone forever. I want to curse him with being alone forever. But half a year ago, it was me being called ugly, and I can’t bear to have that happen again. I stand next to Catherine, silent like her, ashamed like her. So angry that I want to scream and never stop. Thirty years later, I’m still angry. Angry with him, angry with sixteen-year-old me, for valuing invisibility over chivalry.

“That’s the boy who shat himself when Russell beat him up.” It’d happened two years before, and people are still pointing him out. I’m disgusted. Not by the boy who’d defecated in a simple animal fear response, but by Russell, the big, confident, loud bully in my year who’d scared a younger boy that badly, on purpose, for fun. I want him to know what it’s like to be afraid, and ashamed, and to try to be invisible because only that is safe. But I don’t want him to notice me. I never speak to him, and wear my carefully constructed camouflage. I’m quiet, and dull, and small. It’s safer to be invisible than angry.

I’m eighteen, at drama school in London. Everything is beautifully, shockingly different here. In play-reading class, we read with every emotion we feel, and when that isn’t enough, we manufacture more. We cry, performing Shakespearian monologues; we attempt accents, we share our bad memories. If any student laughs at, or is unsupportive of, another’s performance, they’re made to leave the class. We strip naked, we applaud each other for sharing more, and learn not to judge ourselves for anything except being inhibited. It’s safe here; we’re meant to be sensitive. Vulnerability is an actor’s obligation. If we don’t emote sufficiently, we risk being removed from the course. I notice how the mature students aren’t embarrassed to show vulnerability, and the way our overseas students aren’t scared to be seen to work hard. I feel myself begin to unfurl. I stop calling things “sad.” I begin to want to be seen. My voice gets louder, and I start to want to be heard again. I begin to want to be kind again.

I’m twenty-five, striding down a catwalk at London Fashion Week. Hand on hip, nose in the air, like those long-ago girls on the playground. Perhaps they were prophesying. I am a model now, and a professional actor. I sometimes work nude; I find freedom in the vulnerability. I discover the BDSM scene, and it becomes home. I model for bondage photographers; expressing pain, and pleasure, and arousal, and every emotion, is how I make a living. There is nowhere to hide, and when I begin to pay my mortgage by bondage modelling, I know my conformity is in the past. I don’t hide, and I’m not quiet, and I’m no longer invisible.

Now, I’m forty-six, and I wonder how many of us spend our adulthoods trying to unlearn what the cruelty of other children taught us—to conform, to shrink, to hide our passions and manufacture disdain for anything that might touch our hearts? I have unlearned, because it’s been necessary for my job. Having done so, I’ve discovered its value in the forging of real friendships too. The act of growing older has felt like archaeology, cautiously uncovering my innate kindness, my natural enthusiasms. Discovering the things I love, and what makes me cry. It’s been an act of daring to let other people see these things clearly, and thus see me. To be known, all the way through, is such a privilege, and I wish for it for us all. Be kind, we admonish each other, but many of us learned young that it’s safer not to be kind, least of all to ourselves.

Now, I know who I am—who I always was. I am a little strange; formative years spent in a religious cult will do that, and I accept my strangeness. I do walk with my back straight and my head up; that’s what ten years of ballet gave me and I don’t try to hide its influence. I do love reading Shakespeare aloud, and I like to express my emotions without inhibition. I want the people around me to know how I’m feeling, as I want to understand their feelings in return. Perhaps growing up, growing up well, always involves the unlearning of the strategies we used to stay safe, when we were surrounded by people who hadn’t learned compassion or tolerance yet. Perhaps it takes some of us many years to rediscover the qualities that our uncynical, childhood selves had in abundance.

What my bullies taught me, eventually, is that they were wrong. Being quiet, small, dim, invisible, cynical, and unenthusiastic isn’t living, and safety is ’t happiness. If happiness is to be found, it’s in the vulnerability we once didn’t know that we should hide. I believe it’s worth seeking out.

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Ariel Anderssen is a BDSM model with a lifetime’s interest in submission and masochism and author of Playing to Lose: How a Jehovah's Witness Became a Submissive BDSM Model. The daughter of a nuclear physicist, Ariel was brought up as Jehovah’s Witness by her devoutly religious mother, and to a lesser extent by her father, who was busy with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the wake of the 1986 disaster. She has a YouTube channel about “How to be a Really, Really, Really Old Model,” and tweets daily about her kinky life. She lives in Wales with her husband. Her hobbies include dressmaking and collecting antique swords.

The older I get, the more I think about the Sony hack.

On November 24, 2014, the Monday morning before Thanksgiving, Amy Pascal—then fifty-six, the co-chairman of Sony Studios—went to log in to her computer and discovered it had been hijacked by a sinister red franchise-worthy skeleton twisting its fingers and snarling its fangs on the screen, as reported by Vanity Fair. The headline was: “Hacked By #GOP.” The hacker group responsible called themselves “Guardians of Peace” and they delivered an ominous warning, which read in part:

We’ve obtained all your internal data including your secrets and top secrets.

If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.

The hackers had given Sony a deadline of about eight hours out to meet their unclear demands. The deadline came and went without incident—Amy and the rest of the top brass at Sony Pictures breathed a collective sigh of relief.

But by the end of the week, the hackers began to release thousands of confidential documents, terabytes of stolen data. Private emails, Sony executive salaries, and performance details were sent to journalists, tipping them off. Julian Assange published the entire archived Sony leak on WikiLeaks. Nothing was spared, no matter how mundane. There was something perversely delicious about all this behind-the-scenes information coming to light.

There was a very on-brand email from Channing Tatum dunking on Seth MacFarlane’s Ted in a gleeful celebration of 22 Jump Street’s success as it became the second highest-grossing R-rated comedy movie of all time.

"F YOU TED !!!! SECOND OF ALLLL TIMMMMME BEEEOTCH!!!! COME ON JUMPSTREETERS WE GOT CATE BLANCHETT WIT DIS BOX OFFICE BITCHES!!!!!!!!”

Of course, Tatum was a victim too, but in a winning sort of way. Not everyone was so lucky.

Everything down to Amy Pascal’s orders from Amazon was exposed. Journalists churned out roundups of Pascal’s order history. Even my favorite feminist news source, Jezebel, got in on the fun, offering breathless commentary on her ‘Hair Down There’ Pubic Hair Dye: $14.99, Color: Brown Betty.

More than anything related to the Sony hack, I remember Amy Pascal’s pubic hair dye. Pascal went from the creative head of Sony, one of the most influential people in entertainment, to Twitter laughingstock overnight. Nobody was dwelling on the Amazon orders of Amy’s work partner, Sony Pictures’ CEO and chairman Michael Lynton. I remember how sexist that seemed.

A few months post-hack, Pascal was dethroned from her co-chairman position. She stepped down or was dismissed, or as she said, “I think I should have gotten fired much sooner.”

Even after she was fired, I thought about Amy Pascal a lot. In the shower, I looked down at my brown pubes and wondered when they would turn gray and what would happen then.

To me, the media about Amy Pascal proved not only that you must remain youthful at all costs, but also that you must never reveal the mad science happening behind the curtain to achieve it.

******

A few years before the hack, I’d started writing essays, scripts, making a web series, a podcast—all sorts of comedy. I’d found what I truly loved to do. After the success of Bridesmaids, it seemed like maybe female-fronted comedy could be on the precipice of a moment… Hopefully, a moment here to stay. In my late twenties, it felt like I was finally figuring some shit out. Still, I was a million miles, probably years, maybe a solid decade or two, from the career that I wanted, yet the power of brown pubes felt fleeting.

Even then, I knew that the equation of desirability and time didn’t add up. I was getting better—smarter, cooler, more empathetic as a person—more of a force. Yet, I was constantly reminded that the sands of my desirability hourglass were slipping away, down, and out of my favor.

In the back of Cosmopolitan magazine, there was a recurring classified that always caught my eye. It was a graph of collagen depletion. On the X-axis was age, and on the Y-axis was collagen, a much-touted requisite for beauty. As the X-axis moved through its thirties, the Y-axis took a precipitous fall from which one could never recover (especially not without needles and intense medical intervention). The ad wanted to inform you in no uncertain terms that the supple fat that keeps you looking young and fresh will quickly yet imperceptibly evaporate from your cheeks until one day it’s as obvious as falling off a cliff—you are destined to look like a crepey witch by forty, probably sooner. “But we’ve got a product that can help with that!”

Since I was eighteen-ish, I’ve typically waxed my whole bush. It’s called “a Brazilian” and it’s quite painful, involving tearing the hair follicles out at the roots on one of the most sensitive regions of the body. Yeah, ouch. I can’t tell you exactly why I do it. I like to think it’s because I don’t have much pubic hair, and it looks less pathetic/more intentional to wax it all off. It’s hard to argue the sexiness angle due to the pubescent implications of the whole thing, though I still think it’s sexier on me. Perhaps also out of habit? I don’t know. I like how it looks, but part of me knows (yet likes to forget) that it’s patriarchal oppression that I’ve inflicted on myself and helped to uphold for the better part of two decades.

Sexism is bad, but the self-inflicted kind is especially insidious. I do it. Cosmo does it. Jezebel does it. We all do it, even if we’re trying very hard not to.

******

Today when I think of rich, powerful women in entertainment, instead of Amy Pascal, my mind goes first to the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty. Led by a matriarch so shrewd she “works harder than the devil,” according to the popular meme. But how many hours of surgery, facials, and makeup were amassed on their way to the top? I don't ask as a criticism—I’m a fan, I watch every episode of their Hulu show—I ask because I want to know what it takes to win as a woman. Are we going to let them get old? Will they let themselves get old? Kim's ex-husband Kanye's mom died on the operating table during an elective plastic surgery procedure. Grasping at beauty and youth is not without its risks.

Recently I got busy with work and could barely keep up with the Kardashians, much less my Brazilians; instead, I let my bush grow for several months until I’d sprouted a pubescent goatee on the front of my pussy. After a shower, I was toweling off and something caught my eye. I hunched over, squinting, and twirled my pubes under the harsh bathroom light to inspect the color. For a moment, I was fear-stricken. Was this half-inch strand of coarse hair blonde… or gray?! Was it just bad lighting? I couldn’t tell.

I twirled for another minute as I tried to solve the riddle of the blonde-gray pube—it was my own personal version of the blue-gold dress viral meme and it was driving me crazy—and then it struck me how silly it was to care even if the whole bush was gray.

What I’m certain of is that I feel like the most powerful version of myself now, at forty. My agency and abilities have never been stronger. I’m so proud of all the lessons I’ve learned every year on this planet, and I imagine that feeling will only continue to grow. Frankly, I don’t care what society thinks about my age or my pubic hair; I shed a little more of my give-a-fuck every day. It’s ecstatic—I feel like one of those orgasmic women in a shampoo commercial after a really good wash, without the need for the magical shampoo.

Beauty and feminism have a complicated relationship, and aging makes it even more so. I just turned forty, and I already have a laundry list of maintenance—microblading, Botox, occasionally filler, facials, hair dye for my head hair, et cetera, et cetera. Aside from my Brazilians, which are becoming more and more infrequent, I'm going to leave my bush alone. I only have one maybe-gray now, but I look forward to the future. When my bush is fully gray, I will probably be the wisest and most amazing version of myself to date.

I wonder if Amy Pascal dyes her pubes these days. Maybe she still does because she likes how it looks—it allows her to write her own story, see herself in the mirror as she wants to be seen—or maybe she could never muster putting it into her online shopping cart again because it was such an absurd, misogynistic part of her kryptonite. Or perhaps she's just over it because she’s realized it's all a big sham. Either way, I hope Amy Pascal is very happy doing whatever she wants with her pubes these days.

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Courtney Kocak is a writer and podcaster based in Los Angeles. She wrote for Amazon’s Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs and Netflix’s Know It All. Her bylines include The New York Times and a viral essay for Cosmopolitan. She’s the host of the Private Parts Unknown podcast, and she’s currently working on a coming-of-age memoir.

These days, the TV shows I watch fall into two categories: shows I watch while washing dishes and shows my wife and I watch together. If we’re lucky, our five-year-old goes to bed on time and we have about an hour to watch something for grown-ups that we both will enjoy, something thoughtful enough to be engaging but not too heavy or depressing. I had heard a little bit about a show on Netflix called Baby Reindeer, about a guy and his stalker. We heard that it was interesting and unexpected, that it had a twist to it, that it was based on real life but there was, as always, some dispute over its truthfulness.

From that description, I expected it to be good, if overhyped. What I didn’t expect was to be drawn in so completely, to be deeply moved and driven to tears.

Years ago, long before I was a 55-year-old married, heteronormative, middle-class suburban dad in Los Angeles, I was a denizen of the NYC avant-garde experimental demimonde, an avatar of polymorphous perversity, an actively bisexual downtown experimental performance artist and writer. I was also, perhaps not coincidentally, a hot mess. Trying to quiet the voices in my head, I turned to drinking, drugs, sex, and drama, but they only made it worse. Going out for drinks after an open mic soon turned into pre-show drinks, turned into skipping the show to focus on the drinking, turned into benders almost every night. That time I went to a cast party at Lucky Cheng’s and got lost in a rabbit warren of backrooms, coked-up and frantically seeking the exit at 4 a.m. That time I fell in love with an alcoholic, cocaine-and-sex-addicted coworker. Stories abound.

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven’t yet seen or heard about Baby Reindeer on Netflix, it is, at first, the story of struggling comedian and bartender Donny Dunn, who gets entangled with a stalker, Martha. But it’s really about shame and self-hatred. It’s about the insidiousness of abuse. And it’s about being attracted to staying in (or returning to) a familiar situation, no matter how painful, because you’re afraid that the promise of happiness, safety, comfort or love is just another cruel trick.

It’s a simple enough premise that gets deeper and more complicated as we delve into Donny’s psyche, his attachment to Martha, the sexual abuse Donny experienced, his self-hatred and confusion, the way it all conspires in a toxic stew, the way he can’t escape his situation or himself.

After three episodes focusing on Donny’s growing entanglement with the mentally ill Martha, episode 4 focuses on a humiliating trip he took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years prior. He had booked himself into a pub as the venue for his comedy act where he faced a room so hostile and indifferent that the bartender at first wouldn’t even turn off the television during Donny’s set.

One night, Donny receives an invitation to a hip club where all the successful comics hang out. There, in an awkward meet-cute, he is befriended by a famous writer and showrunner by the name of Darrien, a self-described “Buddhist, polyamorous pansexual with a taste for the finer things in life.”

It’s worth noting at this point that Donny calls his comedy “anti-comedy.” It is, indeed, weird and even unsettling. Watching it, I was reminded of NYC’s early-90s alternative comedy scene, Lower East Side venues like Surf Reality, Collective Unconscious, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, Fez Under Time Café, and Eating It at the Luna Lounge, that programmed both avant-garde cabaret/performance and stand-up comedy. There was a lot of crossover, but there was a pretty significant divide between the stand-ups and the performance artists; navigating that divide to become commercially successful was tricky.

So, I could relate to the elation and appreciation that Donny feels when Darrien takes him under his wing and helps him polish up his act. By the end of the Edinburgh run, Donny is playing to enthusiastic packed houses in the pub, really killing it.

Back in London, Darrien invites Donny over to his place with the promise of writing opportunities and mentorship. Over the course of many weeks Darrien grooms Donny, drugging him, sexually assaulting him and, eventually, raping him, all while stroking his ego with promises of creative success.

Donny starts to fall apart as he begins to realize what’s happening to him, and when his girlfriend leaves him, he really veers out of control. He narrates his downward spiral as follows:

I started to feel this overwhelming sexual confusion crashing through my body.

I thought it might pass, but it became an insecurity, which grew into a raging madness within me.

I could never tell whether these feelings were because of him or whether they always existed deep down.

Did it all happen because I was giving off some vibe I wasn’t aware of?

Or did what happened make me this way?

I started having reckless sex with people of all genders in this desperate pursuit of the truth.

Watching this, hearing this—I felt a chilling sense of recognition.

As a kid, back in the early 1980s, I did a few shows at a local community theater in Baltimore. I performed in a musical and worked the spotlight for another show when I didn’t get cast in a role. I was too young to drive so my mom would drop me off and pick me up, but sometimes the cast and crew would go out after weekend rehearsals and I would need a ride from an adult.

The light board operator, an obese, unkempt but jocular guy in his thirties or forties—let’s call him Lazar—was always friendly to me. When I operated the spotlight, we joked around over the headsets. Kids gossiped about him sometimes in rehearsals or the dressing room. “Don’t go to his place,” they would say, “he has dirty pictures, he’s creepy.” But he was always nice to me, so when he offered me a ride, I accepted.

I remember his Ford Pinto was filthy inside, the floor littered with soda bottles and fast-food wrappers. I saw a little case with a MedicAlert logo on it; I asked him what it was. He told me was diabetic and injected insulin, he joked about being a card-carrying junkie. I was maybe eleven years old and it made me feel like a grown-up to be spoken to like an adult, to be in on some kind of grown-up joke that I didn’t actually understand. I imagined myself mature, able to take care of myself. And it wasn’t a big deal, I thought, when he started massaging my thigh, his hand slowly working its way up my leg.

I was lucky. He stopped. Maybe he had a moment of self-restraint or clarity, maybe he never intended to go further, maybe he chickened out. I’ll never know. But what I know is what I felt in the moment: the helplessness and fear of being the object of someone else’s inappropriate desire.

For years I didn’t give this event much thought; it was just a thing that happened this one time; I’m reluctant to ascribe years of dysfunction and emotional chaos to a single childhood incident. I certainly never talked about it with anyone, or wrote about it, which is notable because I used to write about sex all the time—for example, my go-to, guaranteed-to-win Poetry Slam poem in the early 90s was literally called “Good Sex vs. Bad Sex.” I experimented with all kinds of sexual scenarios and got into some magnificently dysfunctional, fucked-up relationships. Polymorphous perversity. All the time trying to get to some elusive truth, a moving target that vanished as quickly as it came into focus.

But I had pretty much forgotten about that moment in the Pinto until I started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix.

There’s a scene in episode 5 where Donny is talking to his girlfriend, a trans woman named Teri, that really hit home for me:

[Teri] How do you identify sexually? If there was a gun to your head.

[Donny] Oh, please, pull the trigger.

[Teri] Shut up, asshole.

[Donny] I don’t fancy that funeral. All the speeches.

[Teri] “Donny was a top lad with great banter.”

[Donny] Will my gran be the only one that’s speaking?

[both chuckle]

[Teri] Answer, idiot!

[Donny, sighing] I don’t know. Like, bi, maybe.

[Teri] And what makes you bi?

[Donny] Because I feel like a fraud no matter who I sleep with.

Touché.

For most of my adult life I felt like a fraud no matter who I was having sex with. It wasn’t about sexual orientation, but about some kind of damage, absence, a loss of self that goes way, way back.

The series ends with Donny alone at a bar ordering a drink. He has forgotten his wallet and the bartender extends him the kindness of buying his drink, the same kindness Donny showed his stalker Martha in the first episode. We don’t know what the future holds for Donny, and that ambiguity seems right.

It’s a cliché, to be sure, to say, “I felt so seen” when watching Baby Reindeer, but I did. I was shocked, surprised, and thrilled to see a story that, at long last, seemed to actually represent my confused experience of sex and sexuality; my magnetic attraction to dysfunction and drama, to emotional abuse disguised as love; the feeling of being embattled, the self-hatred that made me want to obliterate myself in a persona, or the pursuit of fame, or, failing that, just sex, drink, and drugs. It took me years to extricate myself from myself, and even though I would never go back, I still feel the lure, from time to time, of chaos and oblivion.

Many, many, times over the years I found myself, like Donny, alone at that bar, never knowing what the future would hold, always feeling on the threshold of figuring it out, but feeling that it was my work alone, that I couldn’t put this burden on anybody else, couldn’t truly share my life with someone else.

Then, in 2012, I met a woman who felt, miraculously, like coming home, as if we’d known each other for years. She wasn’t afraid of the hot mess that I was, saw the good inside me, and decided to stay. We got married. We left New York and moved to Los Angeles. We have a five-year-old son. We look to all the world like normal people. And I suppose we are.

But some days, when I’m at pre-K pickup talking about playdates and Pokémon, I feel like an impostor, or a spy, like Kerri Russell in The Americans, undercover in the suburbs. Wherever I go I am carrying with me that inner Baby Reindeer, that outsider looking in, that damaged kid who feels as if he’s just pretending to be normal, pretending to fit in, pretending that he knows what he’s doing, who is always on the edge of falling into chaos. I guess that’s just what it means to be an adult human in the world.

It says something about how far we’ve come as a society that a show like Baby Reindeer could not only get made, but be a critical and popular hit, nominated for multiple Emmys.

In 1994 I recorded a spoken word piece called “Getting to Know You” which includes the observation, “I read that 90% of this country is dysfunctional, abnormal, but if everybody’s that way then it’s normal. Seems like somebody somewhere made up some ideal functional function that never existed and nobody can live up to and then made everybody feel rotten about how worthless and dysfunctional they are.”

It's been thirty years now since I wrote that and I’m still learning what it means to embrace the brokenness in myself and others, learning how to be in the world with forgiveness and compassion toward myself and others. Thirty years of living later and I’m finally starting to understand what Leonard Cohen meant when he sang, in his song “Anthem,” “Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack, in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

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Andy Horwitz is a writer based in Los Angeles. His cultural criticism has been published in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian (UK) and other outlets. He started his career writing about pop culture for The Stranger in Seattle and the now-defunct Nerve.com. He is the founder of the website Culturebot.org and a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He is currently working on an essay collection about live performance and two memoir projects. andyhorwitz.com

Ron came home with a bag of cassettes from Tower Records. “I found a cool-looking guy in the store,” he said. “I asked him to tell me what I should buy.” I didn’t give a second’s thought to the guy in the store. I heard “Presents.” Upstairs at Eric’s by Yaz. Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. Avalon by Roxy Music.

As he walked to the stereo with one of the cassettes, I saw Ron silhouetted in our expansive view of Lake Michigan. It was magic hour, the time of day I’d learned about in film school when the light glowed soft and romantic at dusk. As Roxy Music’s saxophone echoed off the linoleum, I watched him from my end of the sofa: sculpted face, thick dark hair with an early shock of silver. I even loved his feet. Yet I couldn’t reach over and touch them as tenderly as I wanted to do. We were just roommates, his invitation to stay just helping out a friend from church.

Also, he was gay.

Ron wasn’t the first gay person I’d known. But unlike my friends from art school, he was actively fighting it. He flat-out told me, “I came to church to be saved. Set my old life aside. More than anything else I want to marry a woman and have a family.”

Hearing those words, I felt the kind of certainty that’s only possible at 24: God had put me in his path. I was that woman.

At our church, the pastors preached that God wanted to give us everything we asked for. Didn’t that mean, for both of us, the perfect Christian family? With God, all things are possible?

One afternoon, a thunderstorm brewing over the lake, he gave me his journal and asked me to read his poems. His father shouting at teenaged Ron after throwing his clothes into the driveway. Giving blowjobs to older men in their BMWs, wiping his mouth and pocketing the cash. Strung out in the sun at a bus stop wearing only a Speedo, mink coat, and cowboy boots.

I could see that Gold Coast bus stop, feel the heat of the sun. But he no longer wore a Speedo, and I didn’t see a mink coat or cowboy boots when I peeked in his closet. I also didn’t want to know these things about him. I just wanted to smell his cologne in our bathroom, keep using his shampoo, imagining he was there in the shower with me.

One evening he showed me a scar on his torso, telling me about the night he’d gotten stabbed on an El platform along the Eisenhower Expressway. I imagined how cold he must have felt as he lay there in a pool of flickering light, bleeding and shivering. I shuddered a little, but couldn’t see that this violence, random to me, was targeted at him because he was gay. I was sure if I ran my fingers along his scar, I could kiss it and make it better.

I wasn’t a virgin, but my fantasies about Ron stopped at kissing. I didn’t want to think about him having been with men since he’d said that part of his life was over. In our summery bubble above Lake Michigan, we could love each other chastely. It wasn’t living in sin if we never touched each other. Sitting in our pew at church, I could smell his scent, the mixture of cologne and laundry soap that thrilled me. I loved being on his arm. He turned heads wherever we went. If he chose me, that would mean I was special.

One evening in early August—because all my memories seemed to be evenings—Ron put on Roxy Music and asked me to dance in the space between the living room and the kitchen. I stepped into the perfect fit of his arms, feeling the strength of his biceps, the squared-off fingers of his hands.

We started to slow dance, my head on his shoulder. I didn’t dare do anything, just followed his lead, hoping against hope. I was sure he was going to kiss me. Maybe he thought he was going to kiss me. The hallway phone rang.

“Saved by the bell,” he said, as he stepped away from me.

After he went to bed that night, I lay on my rock-hard futon staring at the wall between us, longing for him so deeply that all I could do was bury my face in my pillow, muffling my sobs.

“Did I hear you crying last night?” he asked over coffee.

“No,” I lied, face hot, “maybe I was dreaming. I don’t know what you heard.”

By summer’s end, everything he’d told me, the impossibility of both our desires—his to be straight, mine to have him love me—filled the apartment like stacks of prickly boxes. It was time for me to go. When the door closed on moving day, we both exhaled. I didn’t realize how quickly we’d drift apart.

In September 1985 I started a master’s program in public health, traveling to school past the El platform where Ron had been stabbed. We learned about a virus that was killing gay men. Sitting in the fluorescent light of the classroom I worried about him, parsing my memory of his poems as the professor lectured. He couldn’t have used condoms if he was giving blowjobs. Did strung out mean he’d shot up? How much danger might he be in?

I studied him on Sunday mornings from across the church basement, looking for signs of Kaposi’s sarcoma or weight loss. But I couldn’t possibly ask if he was HIV-positive over Styrofoam cups of coffee.

By 1987, the year I finished grad school, Ron had moved out of state. One day I recognized his handwriting on a letter postmarked San Francisco. He wanted to explain everything: our summer, why he’d moved, how he was doing. He wanted me to know that he’d tried everything, even going to a Christian retreat center to “cure” his homosexuality.

“I couldn’t take more than two weeks of it, Steph. I only felt shame from them. But now I know that God made me in his own image, so God must love me exactly the way I am.”

My heart broke for him again, the hard work he’d done to come to a place of peace. Holding his letter, my soul finally understood that he was gay. He’d always been gay. Yes, he wanted kids, but he also wanted to reconnect with his family and the father who had disinherited him. My feelings for him may have been real, but they were built on a fantasy.

Five years after our Avalon summer, Ron died of AIDS while I was overseas. I didn’t even know he was sick. I missed his memorial service. I missed it all.

Ron’s death shocked me out of my dreamy relationship with Christianity. I’d seen cruelty toward him and others at church. Felt it myself as I shared my own unwelcome truth: my church-deacon father had sexually abused me as a kid.

I swapped Sunday services for working in my garden, eventually giving up church altogether. I no longer felt certainty about anything. Black-and-white believers made that more painful. Once I stepped outside the church box, I discovered a world in color. It turned out that having no answers wasn’t scary, but a beautiful relief.

Over the years I stitched Ron’s name into the AIDS Memorial Quilt, walked the labyrinth at the cathedral where his ashes rested, stood vigil after the Pulse massacre. I thought of him every October when my husband and I set up our Dia de los Muertos altar, his photo showing off his lovely eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed, hair silvered too early.

Thirty years after Ron died, Bryan Ferry was touring to celebrate Avalon. I bought tickets for my twentieth wedding anniversary, planning a fun night out with my husband. As he and I walked toward the venue, his hand strong in mine, the magic hour light of mid-summer bathed the city. I breathed in his aftershave, excited to share music with him that I loved.

I didn’t expect to weep through the entire concert.

I cried for Ron’s short life, for the husband and children he never had. I wept at the pressure I’d put on him to join my fantasy, realizing that I’d had the chance to know him and missed it altogether.

I never told him that I loved him exactly as he was, perfect and beautiful and gay.

My husband handed me his handkerchief in the darkened theater.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m okay.”

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Stephanie Weaver, MPH is a writer and TED-style speaking coach. She's currently working on a book about family estrangement, faith, and forgiveness. She lives in Southern California with her husband and their Golden Retriever, Daisy May.

Whether I claimed it or not, I’ve been a bit of a witch for most of my life. 

I was fourteen years old the first time I bought a spellbook. A friend and I stumbled upon the spirituality section of our local Half Price Books, and my pocket money for the day covered the cost of a used copy of Everyday Moon Magic. I hid it under my bed in the hopes my parents wouldn’t find it. It thrilled me, holding this book full of magic potential in my hands. And it terrified me. 

Though I wasn’t raised with particularly strong religious leanings, my parents were vaguely Christian in that we celebrated Christmas and they generally agreed we all believed in God. My paternal grandparents were more hardcore in their religious leanings, so sometimes, we went to church with them. Perhaps sensing the woman I would become, this grandmother once gifted me an envelope with nothing but a printed Bible verse inside it for Christmas. 

So, the spellbooks stayed under the bed for safekeeping, coming out only in quiet, secret moments. Like the time my friends and I snuck out into the woods behind my house at night to cast our first spell. I confess I don’t remember what it was, or whether it worked. I just remember the thrill of leaving the house after dark, surrounded by the sounds of night. The experience settled into my bones, where it would remain for many years.

Throughout college, I identified as agnostic. I enjoyed learning about religions and the ways people built their lives around them, but as for me? None of it fit. 

The spellbooks from my youth were gathering dust back home when I bought my first Tarot deck. As I flipped through that tattered old copy of the Tarot of the Cat People, I felt that familiar feeling of power, of rightness, verging on overwhelm. It was the way I’d felt all those years ago, lighting candles in the woods with my friends. 

Tarot became my gateway back to what my child self had always known. Deep down, I was a witch. 

When I first began to explore what it meant to be a practicing witch, I kept firmly in what some witches call the “broom closet.” I took a few Tarot classes, and then a more in-depth class about magic and witchcraft. If it came up, I would say I was “spiritual but not religious,” a term I’d learned from survey options. 

The word “witch” carries a lot of weight, a cultural stigma that dates back centuries. Using it feels like conjuring up the Wicked Witch of the West, just asking to be tied to a stake and burned. For a long time, I didn’t use it, not even for myself. I was “interested in witchy things” but I was not a “witch.”

Yet as activities like following the phases of the moon and celebrating the seasons, pulling a Tarot card, and collecting crystals became parts of my daily life, this began to shift. These elements added something important to my life, enriching it and empowering me to step into my true self. Witchcraft, unlike so many belief systems I’d tried on for size, felt right. Softly, quietly, I began to call myself a witch, if only in my mind. 

It wasn’t until a trip to Salem in 2018 for a weekend witchy retreat that I really felt this identity settle into me. I’d recently finished grad school, and I could barely afford it, but something told me I had to drive from Pennsylvania to Salem, Massachusetts and spend the weekend in the company of witches. Perhaps I was trying to see whether I might be one of them. 

The weekend was nothing short of magic in every sense of the word. In our group, we explored the city’s magic shops and talked about astrology, made our own candles, and performed rituals for self-discovery and empowerment. I learned so much, but most of all, I learned what it felt like to fit in somewhere spiritual for the first time. 

Unlike when I’d visited a Catholic church with my father, not knowing how to follow the routines and patterns didn’t feel like a cause for panic or shame. It was an exciting invitation into a world I wanted to explore, to know. I arrived home with a bag full of magical goodies, including crystal bracelets, a personalized aura photo, and far too many candles, and a heart full of the feeling of finding your place. I arrived home ready to embrace the word “witch” even if I still called the weekend a “women’s retreat” to friends and family who asked about it. 

Over the last few years, I have slowly abandoned the broom closet, mostly by accident. As I got more comfortable thinking of myself as a witch, I hid it less. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I started wearing crystal earrings and openly making references to astrology and Tarot and the moon, even at work. If I was reading a book about witchcraft, marking it on Goodreads no longer gave me pause. I settled into learning and practicing my witchy ways, and those ways settled into how I showed up in the world. 

I began to realize my witchy ways were no longer a secret when colleagues began making comments about calling me in to smoke cleanse offices with bad vibes, or asked me whether Mercury might be in retrograde. I had become known as the office witch, without even trying. 

Of course, I assumed my family still didn’t know. I’d never proclaimed it to them, and while they knew I’d gone to Salem, I hadn’t mentioned it was a trip to hang out with fellow witches and cast spells in an old house there. Then one day while I was visiting home, my dad casually glanced out the car window at a strange wooden structure in someone’s yard. 

“Hey, you’re a witch,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

It took me a moment to respond, I was so shocked at his casual mention of something I always assumed would be a big issue for my family of origin. But there it was. My converted Catholic father who kept old Bibles tucked around the house apparently knew that I was a witch. And he seemed…fine with it? Not what I expected, but okay. 

I still don’t go around announcing to strangers or neighbors that I’m a witch. For one thing, my husband and I live in a relatively rural area, and I’m nervous the Trump flag crowd won’t so much enjoy knowing they’ve acquired a village witch.

But even without this wrinkle, the word “witch” is still a complicated word to own, like it’s too powerful and too misunderstood all at once. Something from fairy tales and horror stories, an accusation hurled at women with too much power and too much independence so that men might be able to burn them.

Yet here I sit in a room full of crystals and spellbooks, of Tarot cards and candles anointed with essential oils. I’ve studied moon phases and goddess archetypes, honored the changing of seasons and the Wheel of the Year. 

I am, day in and day out, a modern witch. A woman living her life, hoping that there’s maybe a bit of magic left in this world, if only you stop to let yourself feel it. 

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Amanda Kay Oaks is a freelance writer and practicing witch who lives in a cabin in the woods with her husband and their dog. Her writing explores relationships, with ourselves and with one another, as well as how the media that surrounds us intersects with these relationships. To read some of her work and learn more, visit her website.

“Hey, are you Guy?” was never a question I felt comfortable answering. The obvious response was yes. Especially when I was currently at a book event, where I had been on stage reading something I wrote and published under my pen name, Guy New York. Yet my response was typically along the lines of, “Yes, that’s me, but please call me Ben.”

A pen name is a strange thing.

It’s a shield, it’s a personality, it’s a disguise, it’s freedom, it’s a limitation, and it’s a character. At times it’s all of those and none of them. In my case, it let me write erotica without worrying about someone from the rest of my life finding out about it and asking awkward questions. It also let my family avoid the same awkward situations.

When I began sharing my work in 2013, my pen name felt like a necessity. It was the thin protective layer between my desire for privacy and my willingness to splash the most intimate parts of my life on a page. It was unlikely that someone thinking of hiring me for a job would google my name and find something titled, “Teasing Daddy’s Friends” or “My Wife Shows Me Where He Came.”

With that protection came freedom: the freedom to write the stories I wanted to write and the freedom to publish personal anecdotes while maintaining some plausible deniability. I could write my little heart out, send my thoughts out to the world, and never have to field questions about sex, kink, or my relationship style from people I’d rather not discuss any of those topics with.

The more I wrote, the more I published, and the longer time I spent in sex-positive spaces surrounded by sex-positive people, the easier it became. As I immersed myself in a life that embodied my writing, I let myself slip deeper into the name until I began to feel like someone else. And I liked that someone else! He was more free than I was. More spontaneous and, let’s face it, hotter than me. When I was Guy, I could do anything.

But moving into a name isn’t the same thing as becoming a whole person. While it often felt like myself, my pseudonym was still a name that let me hold up a barrier between me and my work. It left me with an escape hatch in case things went sideways and I needed to pretend that all the messy porn I had written wasn’t me.

That is not what I meant at all!

For many authors, I suspect the question of a pen name is not an overly existential one. It’s a tool for work to let them publish books, articles, and stories under a name that allows them freedom in the rest of their life. At the end of the day, they can put that work in the drawer with the laptop and go to sleep in their own bed with their own name.

The struggle for me was that  using Guy New York instead of my real name wasn’t just about writing. I dove into crafting stories about sex parties and going to sex parties at the same time. I was writing about open relationships because I was in them, and I was writing about kinky sex, messy breakups, and sinful fantasies because those things were deeply embedded in my life. And my entry point to those events was always Guy New York.

If I wrote stories about rock climbing I might have named myself Cliff. If I decided to sink my teeth into food writing maybe I’d have used Oyster Ben or Gormandizing Gary. But alas, I was stuck with Guy New York, a noir sex detective with a nose for whiskey and bad habits.

If you find yourself at a sex party, you might discover that nearly everyone there has at least two names as well. When it comes to sex, most of us find it easier to explore under the guise of someone else. Someone not quite us but not entirely another person. Maybe someone who lives next to us, a shadow of sorts.

It might take a few months or even years to discover those layers. I’ve had friends for many years without knowing their given names, and don’t get me started on last names. Who needs them? But you can only spend so much time in a make-believe world before some amount of exhaustion and feeling blasé take over, leaving you just as you are. A real person sitting on a couch after the orgy, too tired to sleep, mildly hungry, surrounded by people you know intimately even if you don’t know which boroughs they live in.

At that point, maybe at the diner at four am, another layer of truth comes out. The woman you’ve called Mary for six months might turn to you over disco fries and a milkshake and say, “Oh, by the way, my real name is Stacy.” You might smile and nod and say something like, “It’s nice to meet you, Stacy. I can see why you changed it. Bloody Stacy just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“Yeah, Ben New York isn’t quite the same either,” she’d say as you sunk into the vinyl booths too exhausted to pretend.

Of course the guy named Spider was given that name at birth and the woman named Holly Water got it from her grandmother. Truth is always stranger than fiction, and some folks are lucky enough to be who they are no matter where they go.

I’ve never been quite so lucky. I’ve found myself donning a new mask for every social setting I find myself in, whether it’s work– or sex-related. The struggle to fit in requires an attempt to act the right way, look the right way, and speak the right way. As I lost myself in these costumes, I became less certain of who was doing the pretending.

I’m a writer, I’d say to one person. I do freelance graphic design, I’d say to another. I make porn, I’d declare if the circumstances were right. But most often I’d mumble something in between as I attempted to balance too many shifting parts. They’d all be true answers. Incomplete for sure, but true nevertheless. But that truth isn’t the same thing as being whole, and that was never something I allowed myself to be.

Shedding my pen name has not been some great reveal. Back at the end of April when I decided to put down the mantle of Guy and pick up something else, something yet unknown, it was not an unveiling. It felt much more like a funeral.

In the ten years since I published my first collection of stories (taken from my Tumblr), I’ve put out almost exactly 100 titles. Most of them are collections of short stories, but they also include at least fifteen novellas and five novels. Most of them under the name Guy New York. While I can pat myself on the back and say job well done, I can also recognize that it’s time to move on.

For that to happen, though, Guy New York had to die. Not a grisly death (and certainly not a sexy one) but a death all the same. I had to let go of a mask that no longer served a purpose and hopefully awaken to something more integrated into my sense of self. In order to let go, I had to announce it, mourn it, and then move on from it.

Which brings me here, to Ben Goodwin, a writer in Brooklyn with a taste for oysters, NYC politics, and other dirty things. Guy New York isn’t buried, but he is on a high shelf where he can be what he was without having to be what’s next.

There are good reasons to hide and good reasons to don a mask. There is liberation in anonymity and freedom in stepping back from oneself to see what else resides within.

But at least for me, there is also a time to let go of that protective layer and settle into something more transparent and authentic. Ideally with less fear and worry. Ideally in a way that no longer requires the mask because I no longer have something to hide. I no longer need the safety of distance to explore the parts within me that I’m not certain I like.

Pen names are a funny thing. Which leaves me with one final question to myself: Will Ben Goodwin be a pen name too or can he be something else?

I suppose there’s only one way to find out.

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Ben Goodwin is an author, designer, and publisher in Brooklyn. He was born in New Jersey, went to college in Indiana, traveled to Japan, and finally settled back in NYC where he rediscovered his love of writing. When he is not writing he enjoys thinking about what he should be writing.

He’s the author of three novels, Portraits of Alice, The Island on the Edge of Normal, and The Beertown Twins. Until recently he wrote and published erotica under the name Guy New York.

He lives in Brooklyn with his dog Zelda and his partner Veronika.

Every year my children get a school assignment to build a presentation about where we’re from. But the paper always ends with “and unless you’re Indigenous, don’t tell us you’re from the U.S. or Canada.”

The assignment infuriates me because it’s overly simplistic, reducing the complexity of race and belonging to a reductive racial purity test. Like many Mexican-Americans, my personal lineage is a mixture of Indigenous and Spanish peoples. How much Indigenous blood do I have to have before it’s okay for me to claim California as the place I’m from? 

And more importantly, by what right does my kids’ school get to decide this? There isn’t much difference between a liberal pundit asserting that only Indigenous people are genuinely from North America and a racist on the street yelling, “Go back where you came from!” Both put the speaker in the decision-making seat.

In the case of the liberal, the statement is a performative mea culpa—look at how enlightened I am!—that ignores how other people of color have had to fight for belonging in society at large. 

The first year I swallowed my outrage and helped my son cut out a cardboard picture of a little boy in a poncho and sombrero. I didn’t point out the ridiculousness of allowing my family to be from a place that was also colonized, and as late as 1821, had its northern-most border just under Oregon. 

I have a lot of experience letting these things slide. I’m a light-skinned Latina whose married last name is Douglas. My dad used to tell me I was lucky that I looked so white. He was right—I don’t worry about the police gunning me down as I go for a run or sleep in my house. 

As long as I don’t stop moving, I can pass through predominantly white spaces as if I were white. But linger too long, and I’m reminded, over and over again, that I don’t belong. 

About a month after I moved to New York in 2004, I was at the Walbaum’s in Howard Beach, chatting with the checkout person ringing up my groceries, when she leaned in and asked in a thick Queens accent, “Where you from?”  

Hoping that she was talking about my accent, I replied, “California.”

“No, Hollywood, I mean, where’s your family from.” 

“They were also born in California.” I wanted to leave it there. But Waldbaum’s was the closest grocery store to my apartment. And Howard Beach was known for two things when I first moved there. First, it was the former home of the organized crime boss John Gotti. Second, twelve years before I showed up in that grocery store, it was the place where a group of white teens beat three Black men outside of the pizza parlor next door and chased one of them into traffic, where he was hit by a car and died. I needed to know if my race would be a problem, so I added, “But our background is Mexican.”

“Oh. You speak good English.”

“It’s my first language,” I said before collecting my plastic bags and walking out.

The truth is, I don’t know how to react when someone says stupid stuff after finding out I’m Mexican. I think, You’re lucky it’s just talk, and why do I need to be grateful for this garbage, and my face locks into the pleasant smile that I use to protect my thoughts and feelings from other people. I’m always sure I’m handling the situation wrong. Not like my Grandpa Pete, who moved his family into an all-white neighborhood in San Jose. When a neighbor said he didn’t want to live next to Mexicans, Grandpa recoiled in horror and said, “There are Mexicans here? Where?!”

When he found out a petition was going around to “get the Mexican family out of the neighborhood,” he insisted on signing it in big letters: Pete Hernandez, like he was a brown John Hancock. 

Grandpa always knew what to say. He was charming, ballsy, and utterly implacable in his worldview. From him, I learned that most people are deeply insecure and unwilling to look foolish, so if you walked like you knew where you were going and stood like you owned the room, people would fall in line with your version of reality. Grandpa Pete was the first person in his family to finish high school. I was the first person in my family to go to college and then move across the country to get a graduate degree. I spent a lot of time trying to look like I knew where I was going. 

It was all a lie. 

But I could maintain the fiction until someone asked me where I was from as if I was too alien looking to be a real American. Then I had to deal with the fallout. Like when my soon-to-be mother-in-law talked in an artificially bright voice about all the wonderful flavors in Mexican cuisine. I smiled and nodded along like she wasn’t revealing how uncomfortable she was with the prospect of a Latina daughter-in-law.

In 2014 my husband, two children, and I moved to Vancouver, Canada, so he could get a Ph.D. My children are growing up culturally Canadian. I thought I knew what that would mean. They would pronounce certain words differently than I do and think putting cheese curds on fries makes sense. Back in the U.S., this seemed a small price to pay for subsidized healthcare and lush forests.

But there are other costs. We can’t go to my family’s tamale-making parties during American Thanksgiving unless we spend seventeen hours in a car and a thousand dollars in travel costs. The kids can’t absorb the family stories and the Spanglish the way I did, listening to the grown-ups talk at the dinner table. They won’t see Ballet Folklorico or Mariachis in school. I’m solely responsible for connecting my children to their Mexican heritage in California. When we first moved here, all I could think about was how completely inadequate I was to the task. 

I don’t need strangers telling them they aren’t from where they’re from.

The first year I let it slide. We were immigrants, and I didn’t want to make waves. The second year, after the kids went to bed, I shook the paper at my husband. “We live in the Americas! Everyone came from somewhere else. Some of us just got here sooner. By this logic, we should all be talking about Mesopotamia!”

I went to bed thinking, What would Grandpa Pete do? Just as I fell asleep, my brain answered, You go in there and own that room.

So I showed up at my son’s classroom at the appointed time, laptop in one hand, a container of pan dulce in the other, ready to do battle. When the teacher asked which country we were going to talk about, I said, “California.”

She said, “Ah, the United States,” and wrote that down.

I smiled and corrected her. “No, California. We’re California Mexicans.”

The look on her face said she wasn’t sure what to say to someone whose response to “What country are you from?” is the name of a state. My son and I launched into our presentation. We talked about the people who walked to California before it belonged to the U.S. or Mexico, the Mission system as a tool of conquest and assimilation, and the proud people who are from nowhere else. Then we fed everyone a traditional Mexican dessert with ties to French cuisine.

Did I change anyone’s mind about where we’re from? I don’t know. After our presentation, my son’s teacher said, “I never knew that about California.” 

So maybe.

If nothing else, I hope some of those second graders went home and told their parents that their classmate was from the country of California. Because even though I love people and am full of good intentions, I’m also capable of being petty. 

More importantly, I proved to myself that I could own the room long enough to transmit my cultural identity to my children. I am not the perfect Mexican woman. But I can share all of the family stories, and the kids are learning how to make the foods that I grew up eating. 

Grandpa Pete probably wasn’t born knowing the exact right thing to say to people who thought they could define where he was from. He built that toolbox of strategies bit by bit, one unwanted encounter at a time. It’s an idea that gives me a lot of hope.

I shouldn’t have to fight against people negating my family’s cultural identity. I’m not grateful for the opportunity. But it’s a fight I’m going to win, because I’m the only one who gets to decide where I’m from. 

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Teresa Douglas is a Mexican American woman living in Canada. She has an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Flashflood Journal, Epoch press, and (Mac)ro(mic). She is the editor of Latinx Lit Audio Mag.

My seventh-grade English teacher, Mr. McGrane, was really cool. When I sat in his classroom for the first time, I felt as though I could finally take a deep breath, putting my anxious first-day jitters to rest. The space offered a sense of safety I so desperately craved in an uncomfortable environment that was swamped with hormones.

Middle school was painful for me. I was drawn toward “emo” musicians and bands, which were not entirely popular at my school. I wore eyeliner and had side bangs, and, per a timely Twilight obsession, started shopping at Hot Topic, resulting in being labeled as dark, scary, and goth. But that coincided with Mr. McGrane taking a liking to me when I would come into school wearing band tees.

“Hey, I like your shirt,” he’d say when I sat down for class. I would blush with enthusiasm—Mr. McGrane knew who my favorite bands were?! How cool! 

Mr. McGrane also took time to learn about other musicians I liked, even ones that he’d never heard of before. Paramore was my absolute favorite band who, at the time, had just come out with their third album, brand new eyes.

One day, Mr. McGrane told me that he was going to a festival and Paramore was headlining. Of course, I already knew that my favorite band was going to be nearby, but I was so excited for him.

“I don’t know any of their music, though,” he said. He'd summoned me over at the start of the period while everyone was doing their required independent reading. “Do you think you could make me a mix CD?” 

I don’t even think I let him finish his sentence before I was nodding eagerly, pledging to make one tonight and bring it to class tomorrow. He seemed pleased.

I don’t remember what I put on the CD. I don’t remember making it or giving it to him, or what I most likely scrawled across the reflective surface in Sharpie. I just know that I did it because I was so insanely happy that someone cared about a thing I loved. 

The following Monday when I bounced into class, he told me he really enjoyed Paramore’s set, and he thanked me for the CD. He liked it so much, in fact, that he asked me to make him another one. 

“I just don’t really know any of the popular music right now, and I would like to,” he explained. During class, when he was writing out that evening’s homework assignment, he typed up a special note for me, though it was seen by everyone: “FOR MELLEE: MAKE ME A NEW CD.” 

By now, Mr. McGrane had taken to calling me “Mellee,” a combination of my first and last names. I don’t remember how this nickname came about, but I know that it made me double down on my appreciation for Mr. McGrane.

The following year, I moved up, while Mr. McGrane stayed as a seventh grade English teacher. His classroom became a hotspot for lunch. He had off the same lunch period as many of his students from last year, so word quickly spread that you could hang out there if you wanted; it was an open-door invitation.

I didn’t go to Mr. McGrane’s room every day for lunch, but I went often enough. I had one friend, Lea, who I spent lunch with. We would meet in the hallway after class and decide where to go for lunch. Sometimes it was the cafeteria and sometimes it was Mr. McGrane’s. She didn’t love going to his room, so when we’d arrive, we would split up: She would go chat with peers, while I would make my way to Mr. McGrane’s desk to catch up with him. 

His desk was usually swamped with other students—like I said, he was popular and charismatic. To get his attention, I would usually pipe up about a musician we had in common: “Mr. McGrane, do you like Brand New?” I knew the answer was yes, but I just wanted the attention. He would give it to me, even if it was just for a few moments. We would lock eyes and it would be like this secret interaction, just for us. I felt content with just being acknowledged. 

Throughout eighth grade, my tastes developed a bit more, and so did the outfits I wore. I became much more experimental with my style instead of just wearing t-shirts every day. My cousins, who were on the edge of graduating high school, always gave me cool hand-me-downs that looked like they were for going clubbing. I excitedly accepted them, thrilled to wear heeled suede boots, clunky necklaces, and patterned tights to school. 

The last time I remember hanging out in Mr. McGrane’s for lunch was a day toward the end of the year. I was preparing to graduate and go to high school, which was coincidentally in the same building.

I remember his classroom being sticky with humidity. To cope with the heat, I had a dress on. It had a tank top-style bodice that went down to right above my knees. Our school wasn’t entirely strict on the whole dress code thing, but I know it wasn’t inappropriate. It was just a dress.

With eighth grade being on the precipice of yesteryear, I didn’t really care to hang out with Mr. McGrane anymore. My musical tastes were evolving. Emo was suddenly so childish, and I was onto much more mature things now. I was exploring bands like Coconut Records and The Postal Service, excited to move on to a new era of my youth. 

That day, I didn't hang around Mr. McGrane’s desk. I ate my sandwich at one of the desks next to Lea. Lunch was ending soon, so I got up to throw my garbage away, when Mr. McGrane crossed my path. 

“Hey, Mellee,” he said. Slowly, he looked me up and down. His eyes scanned over my body, starting at my feet and going all the way up my body, taking in my legs, my newly developed curves and budding breasts that were enveloped by my new padded bra from Kohl’s. I remember feeling such discomfort under his gaze. It couldn’t have lasted more than 10 seconds, but I recall it feeling so much longer.

I didn’t say anything in response and felt a sudden urgency to leave, even if I had five minutes before the bell rang. I smiled tightly and reached past him to toss my tin foil ball in the garbage can. 

“Mellee, you’re looking good,” he said from behind me, making me freeze. I turned around to look at him and make sure I was hearing right. “I like this whole… new thing you have going.”

That was it. He went back to his desk, probably to engage with other students. I grabbed my backpack and left. 

I didn’t go to Mr. McGrane’s classroom ever again. I didn’t have a lot of experience with boys, but I knew enough to know that older men like Mr. McGrane shouldn’t be complimenting me like that. I felt so grossed out. I didn’t tell anyone, but I knew it was wrong. I never wanted to be in the same room as him ever again. 

When he said that he liked my “new thing,” I assumed it had been my change in wardrobe. Looking back, I don’t think that’s what it was. Eighth grade is the year I went through puberty, got my period, and lost baby weight. 

—

I didn’t have Mr. McGrane as a teacher again. I started ignoring him every time I saw him in the hallways, so he did the same to me. By the time I was a sophomore, I didn’t even look in his direction when I passed by him. We never spoke again.

Last year, I decided to look him up. Nothing came up on the first search, so I tacked on the name of our school in the second go, but I only received some outdated email directories. I was terrified that his picture would appear on my screen. I can remember exactly what he looks like, but for some reason, seeing his face as an adult woman in the comfort of my own home seemed awful. 

When I Googled him, I think I secretly wanted something bad to come up. Maybe an obituary. Maybe a full-length investigation concluding that he had inappropriate relations with young girls and was in jail for life. Neither popped up. There was barely any digital trail of him at all.

Mr. McGrane was someone who existed briefly in my youth, but I’ve never forgotten him, not even 13 years later. The fact that he didn’t even materialize in a search engine with infinite results somehow seems laughable. 

It was like he never even existed. In his book, I probably never did.

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Melissa Lee is a writer and editor based in Pittsburgh, PA. She is passionate about mental health and wellbeing, sexuality, and beauty. When she isn’t trying to keep her house plants alive, she can be found adding new books to her ever-growing TBR list. You can connect with her here.

“You know, if you want to be a Catholic priest, you might make a trip to Notre Dame or something like that. But if you dream of being a bohemian weirdo, then your mecca is the Chelsea Hotel.” --Ethan Hawke, 2002

In 1993 my girlfriend Lesley Pitts and I moved into a first floor flat in Chelsea. A full-figured woman with braids, mad style and a wicked sense of humor, Lesley had lived with me for two years. We had previously resided on the Upper West Side where, we subleased a studio from a crazy poet. Though we gave her the rent check every month, the shady scribe stopped sending the money to the landlord.

After Thanksgiving dinner in Irvington, New Jersey with Lesley’s parents, we came home to an eviction notice. “You gotta admit, it’s the perfect metaphor for Thanksgiving,” I said. Lesley glared at me. “That shit isn’t funny,” she replied. Luckily things went well in housing court after a friend schooled us on the system. Still, we had to vacate within three months.

The apartment search was tedious and included checking out a one-bedroom where a roach the size of Gregor Samsa was floating in the toilet. Finally, we lucked upon an apartment house on West 22nd Street between 7th and 8th. I’d been in love with Chelsea since I was a teenager taking the subway from 145th and Broadway to 23rd and 7th Avenue and walking a few blocks to Danceteria years before.

We moved into apartment 1-E in February. The one-bedroom was small, but just right for us. The former tenants had split the living room with a wall and made a nursery. “We can turn this into your office,” Lesley promised. Another reason we chose the place was because Lesley’s job was a few blocks away; she was employed by Jive Records, where she was the publicist for A Tribe Called Quest, while I worked in the recreation department of downtown homeless shelter. I also wrote hip-hop articles for The Source, Billboard, and Vibe.

Many mornings I walked Lesley to work and then went to the coffee shop on 22^nd Street and 7^th Avenue. Sipping from a large cup, I’d flip through magazines while people watching from the window. It was during that time that I began noticing actor Ethan Hawke walking through the neighborhood. As a native New Yorker, it takes more than fame to make me excited, but it was kind of wild when I realized he lived in the infamous Hotel Chelsea.

Passing by one afternoon, I saw Hawke coming out the door and thought, How cool. When I was younger, I mythologized the boho badness I believed many of the former residents shared, especially writers Virgil Thompson, William Burroughs, and The Lost Weekend novelist Charles Jackson, who committed suicide there in 1968. The Chelsea was “nearly a slum” according to playwright Arthur Miller, who moved there after his divorce from Marylyn Monroe, but the building represented a level of hip that remained steady for decades.

I’d long thought about checking in, but I never did. However, one night after having a few carafes of sangria at El Quijote, I waltzed into the hotel’s lobby and checked out the many paintings on the wall. Like a tourist in my own town, I took a deep breath and thought about the numerous artistic achievements that had happened within the twelve stories of that red brick building.   

After leaving the theater one cloudy day, I spotted Hawke outside, smoking a cigarette and looking very much like a Chelsea man. Born in 1970, the former teen actor was still in his twenties, but no longer the wholesome kid from Explorers. He had that scruffy artist look of a person who read Dylan Thomas at breakfast, studied Jackson Pollock paintings at lunch, and made love to the sounds of Charlie Parker.

“He always looks like he needs a bath,” Lesley observed one morning when we saw Hawke as we stood on 23^rd Street waiting for the light to change. “Be nice, he’s going through his Kerouac phase,” I replied. Beat boy Jack was another veteran of the Chelsea. As a former English major, Lesley knew exactly what I meant.

Hawke crossed the street with a swagger that exuded a tortured masculinity and existential angst; I could easily imagine Ethan drinking and smoking too much as he scribbled profound thoughts, notes, and meditations into a notebook, hoping they’d be fueled into some brilliant project.

Writers often believe in the superstition that there exists one place that will inspire progress and literary greatness, a location infused with creative spirits of past residents or patrons whose genius will somehow seep into our DNA and make us brilliant. However, one night, while taking the long way home, walking beneath the hotel’s neon sign and wrought-iron balconies, I realized I had already missed the many movements that had jumped off behind the Chelsea walls.

The party was over at 222 West 23^rd, but around the corner we were just getting started.

***

The Hotel Chelsea has a reputation for being haunted, but I believed that those creative spirits soared around the neighborhood, creeping through open windows and settling on comfortable couches like the green leather one in my office. Arriving home from work after 11, I went into night owl writer mode, knocking out profiles and a weekly column (Black Metropolis) for New York Press.

Though I’d been publishing since I was a teen, it wasn’t until Lesley and I moved in together that I felt like a “real writer.” I credit Lesley with being a wonderful in-house editor and motivator. She also kept me grounded while also discovering cool places for us to hang such as Ciel Rouge, an intimate spot two blocks away where we often met for cocktails and cigarettes. One night in the summer of 1997, she threw me a party to celebrate the Erkyah Badu cover story I’d written for Essence. Two hours later there was a conga line of friends back to our place.

If those apartment walls could talk, they’d have tales of after work parties, Thanksgiving feasts, loud arguments, date nights watching The X-Files (with takeout from Noodle Corner), intoxicated Friday nights with our friend Sheila Jamison, hungover Saturday mornings with Big Cup coffee, and Sunday morning shopping alongside hulk-sized firemen at the A&P, followed by a daytrip to the flea market. Finding cooking to be therapeutic, Lesley prepared wondrous meals on Sunday evenings while blaring Al Green songs.

Once I suggested listening to my favorite rock group and she laughed. “Do you want the food to taste like Al Green or Led Zeppelin?”

I kissed her on the forehead. “You win.”

In the six years we dwelled in that space, our apartment, much like the Hotel Chelsea motto, became “a rest stop for rare individuals” who included writers Darius James and Frank Owen, artist Matt Reid, filmmakers Marjorie Clarke and Jerry Rodriguez, rockers Tricky and Daniel Chavis (The Velt), journalists Amy Linden and Robert (Bob) Morales, publicists Wendy Washington and Audrey LaCatis, photographers Alice Arnold and Carl Posey, and magazine editors Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Danyel Smith, who spent countless hours there when she was going through a divorce.

At some point, Ethan Hawke disappeared from the neighborhood. We were surprised when it was announced that he was marrying Uma Thurman. “She cleaned him up,” Lesley joked. They were married on May 1, 1998. A few months later, Lesley and I ran into him at a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. Lesley thought he and a buddy were sitting in our seats and started a small squabble.

Through it all, Hawke was pleasant. “I have season tickets; I sit in the same seats all the time,” he said with a smile. In the end, Lesley realized that she was wrong and apologized.

“Did you recognize who that was?” she asked as though I’d suddenly been struck blind.

“Of course I realized who it was; I told you before about giving Ethan Hawke a hard time.”  

***

Fast forward to the summer of 2002, and I’m sitting alone in a quarter full movie theater. It was a different millennium and, post- 9/11, a different world. Tragically, Lesley died suddenly on August 3, 1999 from a brain aneurysm and I left Chelsea for Brooklyn. Weeks after the second anniversary of her passing, I saw a newspaper ad for Ethan Hawke’s directorial debut, Chelsea Walls. Based on an off-Broadway play by Nicole Burdette, from the title I knew what it was about and felt obligated to be in the audience on opening day.

Overflowing with anticipation, angst and the joy of yesteryear memories, I sensed the Chelsea spirits surrounding me as the house lights slowly faded.  

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Michael A. Gonzales has written essays for Wax Poetics, Catapult, Oldster, CrimeReads, The Paris Review, Longreads and LitHub. His fiction has appeared in Killens Review, Oxford American, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.