I found out I’m half Italian on the last Sunday afternoon of February 2022, and now I’m the kind of person who tells secrets.

Sitting at the dining room table, frustrated with the extent of plagiarism in the third-year sociology assignments I’m grading, my muscles twitch when my phone signals a message from my eldest child. I search for the sound’s source, wondering if something’s wrong. I find my phone on the kitchen island, shoulders relaxing when I read Ezra’s random question about family history. Welcoming the distraction from reading other authors’ words students have passed off as their own, I text confirmation to Ezra that my parents have English and Scottish backgrounds, curious about why they’re asking.

Ezra: Hmmm. I did a DNA test and the results show only 17% of my DNA from you is British, the rest is Italian – 30%.

Me: What? Weird!?!

I think there must be a mistake, but my estranged birth mother, a woman pressured into marrying her 19-year-old fiancé (my dad) fifty years ago to have a child she didn’t want (me) is right there in Ezra’s results, having done the test too. Since this woman, who left Dad and abandoned me as a baby, is accurately identified as Ezra’s grandmother, the lab results must be correct: A woman we don’t know, an aunt with 100% Italian DNA, shares half her genes with my father. How can that be? Ezra tries to make sense of the DNA data while I try to understand how this unknown aunt could be Dad’s sister. I run through mind-bending theories of possible scandalous behaviors in my grandparents’ past. Adoption? Affairs? Switched at birth? How can my dad be Italian and not know it?

“You know, there’s another explanation.” Ian’s standing at the island, face fashioned like a doctor giving bad news to a patient—steady, sorry, and a little scared. He’d been quiet for 45 minutes waiting for me to figure things out on my own, while Ezra and I scrambled around in confused circles. I stop pacing. My blue eyes look into my husband’s kind brown eyes holding the magnitude of what he wants me to understand.

Dad’s not Italian; I am.

I sit with a clang on the metal stool across from him. My head drops onto my arms and I forget how to breathe, but I must be breathing because my glasses become foggy and my face too hot. Childhood memories and Dad’s stories of my early life flip fast and frantic across my closed eyelids. Time speeds up and slows down, goes backward and forward. I don’t want it to make sense, this other explanation, but it does. When I open my eyes and sit up, I ignore the buzzing in my ears and fuzziness of the room that remains even after wiping my glasses on my shirt.

Me: What if Grandpa isn’t my father?!

It’s like I’m talking about someone else as I share Ian’s theory, the only plausible one, with Ezra. Reality fades. I grasp for what I know. My kids come from me and Ian; we haven’t betrayed them. This truth is the only thought that grounds me.

Me: I’m questioning my whole existence!

By nightfall, after hours of online searching, we find social media accounts and pictures of Unknown Aunt, who looks like Ezra. Most informative, I find her mother’s obituary. She had died the prior year at 97 years old, a juxtaposition to Dad’s parents who had died decades ago. Unknown Aunt is named as the youngest of three sisters and a brother—my suspected DNA father. He’s harder to locate online, but by the next day, I’ve collected four pictures of him at various ages, three found in his sisters’ social media photos and one from a 1975 newspaper article.

In one black and white family photo, he and his older sister stand between their parents in front of a Christmas tree. He’s about 6. He looks like I did when young. In the newspaper photo, he’s smiling from the driver’s seat of a car, wearing a wide-lapelled winter jacket and knitted scarf, arm resting on the open window. I stare at a male version of my twenty-something face, left eye more lidded than the right, crinkles spreading from their corners, a high forehead, cowlicked hair, and a familiar jaw, prominently squared at the back, softening into a rounded chin.

My brain churns along with my stomach, keeping me awake four nights straight. I float around the house, watching my unfamiliar body from above, with its heart hammering hard, forgetting to eat. I no longer know myself, seeing strangers in the mirror and in my children’s faces. I grieve the biological connection with Dad and my sisters, the identity I thought was mine. I grieve lost time with Italian relatives who look like me, time I can never get back. I grieve my trust in family and known place in the world.

I find a therapist specializing in adoption, finding no one with experience in, “Your dad’s not your father” trauma. Technically, since I was raised by two parents who share DNA with my sisters but not me, it was like I grew up with an adoptive family. It takes eight months before I begin to allow myself to feel what this means to me instead of framing my reactions around everyone else, worrying about my birth mother, Dad, sisters (I have four now, two new ones), birth father, and his wife. Eight months before I start crying and don’t stop for a week. Eight months before I’m cracked wide open and start letting the world in.

Had I not discovered my birth mother’s secret and where I come from, I would never have met my Italian father, sisters, and aunts, with their hair, eyes, smiles, and teeth like mine. I understand them in ways I never understood the family I was raised within. I notice we share mannerisms and personality traits, like arriving at the last minute (or sometimes later), an attribute that made me feel different from my always-very-early family, like I didn’t belong. I may have never sought therapy, never addressed decades of PTSD I didn’t know I had from maternal abandonment and childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, kept hidden from my parents.

I may have continued making passive aggressive comments, simmering in misplaced anger at Ian and the kids, too insecure and anxious to identify and say what I really mean or want. I certainly wouldn’t have learned Italian and prioritized traveling to Italy, or realized high quality slow-dried Italian pasta and fresh cheeses don’t hurt my stomach, or how much I love the tang of fresh-pressed olive oil and the scent of Mediterranean mountain air. And I wouldn’t have discovered my love of creative writing while letting the secrets spill.

I’m content with the person I’m becoming. I think I’m a better mother, partner, colleague, teacher, and cook now that the secrets hidden in my body for 50 years are finally out. I wonder if my love of preparing and sharing simple, wholesome food has been passed down in my genes and I strive to replicate cacio e pepe, knowing the signature pasta can never taste as good as in Rome. I pay more attention to the beauty and pain of life. I let emotions move through me. I swim in lakes and oceans and seas, less afraid of the unseen, and wear a bathing suit no matter my shape. My body delights in the feel of new and difficult things, like lifting heavy weights, hiking high mountains, and being honest with myself and others. I give compliments generously and work on accepting them without objection. I free my grown children from my anxiety-ridden interference, or at least I try. I talk more and say what’s on my mind, and I write and write and write. I’m Italian now and I’ll tell you how I feel.

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Tracey Ciccone Edelist has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator, constantly questioning what we take for granted in the world. She’s also worked as a speech-language pathologist and a fine chocolate entrepreneur. Her creative writing is published in Severance Magazine, The BlueBird Word, the upcoming premier issue of Carmalarky and won a Weekly Writer’s Hour contest and been shortlisted in Flash Fiction Magazine’s summer 2025 contest.

On my first day joining the queer chorus CHARIS, my rib was broken from playing roller derby, I was diving headfirst into divorce litigation, and I couldn’t reliably tell the difference between a quarter note and a half. The last time I’d interacted with sheet music was sixth-grade choir, when my teacher suggested I quit because she could hear how out of tune I was no matter where I tried to hide in our warmup circle. Walking into the first rehearsal at age 30, I knew that I craved a deep connection, but I didn’t realize what I was in for.

I’m perceptive enough by this point in my life to notice a persistent pattern I’ve established, which is joining things for which I have absolutely no skill. I have always loved learning, loved being in training, a student, a mentee. When I joined roller derby in my early twenties, I had no prior knowledge of roller skating, weaving, spinning, or hitting, but I was familiar with the competition structure based on my years of competitive swimming. Though I wasn’t a beginner in writing when I started my creative nonfiction MFA, higher education often felt like a completely unfamiliar subculture. It wasn’t the world I came from. Grad school in particular was utterly mysterious to me. Still, I imposed the team mentality on my small cohort when I felt camaraderie between us because I had the language for it. I told one visiting writer at a private conference, “I don’t know how to be a person without a team.” She said I needed to explore that on the page.

After grad school, when college swimming was a distant memory and my time in derby was wrapping up, I started performing drag. There were many reasons I was drawn to the artform, such as realizing it was a way to find a new kind of team: one where I wouldn’t risk another concussion or breaking another bone. I couldn’t dance. I had no inherent talent in costume makeup—not without a lot of help initially. But I understood what it meant to compete. The same went for pageants, where contestants vied for titles by participating in categories like talent and formal wear. I learned from my mentor, previous title winners, and the King of Pride at the gay bar. My mentor reiterated at the end of every show as she announced the weekly winners, “Take what you need, and leave the rest,” which was an important reminder, along with a little push to splurge on the no-budge mascara. “My God, you’re worth it.” I had my coach, I knew the game, and I was surrounded by my team.

The first time I heard CHARIS sing was at a queer event at the Missouri History Museum where I was reading from the manuscript that would become my book, Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors. CHARIS was advertised as “a diverse group of women united in our mission to perform music that celebrates and encourages women and the LGBTQ community.” They performed several songs, including “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield. I was close enough to the performers to see their faces. There was a butch singer in the front with rolled-up sleeves showing off her shoulder tattoos, boogying to the campy choreography. There was a younger person with pigtails clapping to the rhythm. There were septum rings and gray hair. Diamond rings and cheap plastic jewelry. It was as if The Breakfast Club and Glee had a baby.

As I watched the choir sing, I felt fully present, but I was also being wrenched back in time. I could practically feel the heat in the back seat of my mother’s Ford Festiva en route to a 12-and-under swimming competition where I had my eyes set on a 200-freestyle record and insisted on playing “Unwritten” on repeat until we arrived. I had the same feeling in that Ford Festiva before diving into the pool as I had on the side of the stage watching CHARIS for the first time: I was about to make something amazing happen.

Showing up on the first day of rehearsal, I bypassed the choir director, who was sitting at the piano doing voice classification tests to check singers’ ranges and just plopped down in the Alto II section. I had no idea if I was a soprano or an alto, but instinct told me I could hit the low notes. One of the alto singers had a bearded dragon on her shoulder and I wanted to hold it. Also, the alto II chairs were set up closest to the door, so I figured it would be convenient to escape if I realized I’d made a huge mistake. No one was about to convince me to sing by myself in front of the choir director. It didn’t even help that she was wearing a Bikini Kill crewneck and yellow-tinted John Lennon glasses and we looked like we could run in the same queer circles. I was so used to lip-synching I didn’t know what would happen if I tried to emit sound. I hadn’t received any feedback on my voice since I was a kid, except for the time I got carried away performing a drag number to Melissa Etheridge’s “I'm the Only One.” I won the whole show that night, which made me feel fierce until my friend whispered she could hear me over Etheridge when I leaned in to accept her tip.

At CHARIS we were working toward a nature and environmentalism-themed show called “Wild,” with choral arrangements that were new to me and some songs I did know, like, “Lovely Day,” by Bill Withers and Skip Scarborough, “Pocketful of Sunshine,” by Natasha Bedingfield, and “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle. As much fun as I had during the first few weeks and months, they were also full of tiny humiliations. The sheet music itself was useless to me, though I befriended a progressive paster who sat beside me and ran her finger along the staff (a term I learned from her) so I could at least watch the notes rise and fall as I tried to emulate the director’s sound. In a particularly difficult song for me called “Wild Embers,” by Melissa Dunphy and Nikita Gill, I leaned over to the paster and asked, “What is this mark here?” She stared at me and told me it was called a rest. I asked how many seconds I had to wait before I started singing again. She stared at me blankly and then quickly tried to suppress her grin. “You can’t measure it in seconds,” she said. We both burst out laughing.

I sang softly in rehearsals. I drove around the city every morning with my old dog and listened to the practice tracks, which was the primary way I could learn my music: by emulating another alto II singer and then integrating those notes into the rest of the chorus. I showed up to every rehearsal and almost always left feeling lighter than when I entered. I learned people’s names, and their stories. There were two married women who had been in CHARIS for as long as I’d been alive. There was the section leader of the alto IIs who also happened to be a pinball champion. There was the self-trained artist and tech guru who said joining CHARIS had quite literally saved her by giving her access to her people—queer people, passionate people—and scratched an itch to make the kind of joyful music from her childhood and adolescence that had been dormant for decades.

What I was recognizing through my participation in CHARIS was that my definition of “team” was evolving. I felt the same sense of camaraderie, synergy, and collaboration that I had in my previous experiences of teams, not all of which were sports. Those whose names and stories I learned, like I did in roller derby and drag, became crucial people in my life. I saw intergenerational models for what I wanted for myself as I grew into new seasons of life. I gave and received support. My relationships with members of CHARIS blossomed. Notably, what was absent from CHARIS was a sense of competition, whether real or self-imposed. We were working toward a goal together: a concert with songs and choreography and set design, but there was no opponent this time. It often didn’t even feel as though we were competing against ourselves, or past iterations of ourselves singing the very same versions of songs, since before each try, our director literally implored us to “Make loud mistakes,” and then celebrated when our voices shook with uncertainty or half the chorus missed the moment she cued us in.

We celebrated when we nailed a song in its entirety: “Labour,” by Paris Paloma, in which our collective anger reverberated off the cinder block walls of the basement where we practiced, or “Mashed Potato/Love Poem,” by Sidney Hoddess and Paul Carey, an operatic-sounding choral arrangement that declared if there was ever a choice between our partners and three helpings of mashed potatoes…we would choose the mashed potatoes. There were challenges and victories—which sometimes my old conditioning still framed as wins and losses. Many of us were going through hardships in our personal lives, not to mention the national and international upheaval we were experiencing. Even the smaller setbacks and breakthroughs we faced as a choir were stepping stones to putting on a dynamic, resonant concert. As someone who was used to being yanked around by the emotional highs and lows of competing, it was a relief to have this group of people around me as a steadying presence, and even be the steadying one myself.

I couldn’t tell if my singing was improving, even during my third concert cycle with CHARIS, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t worried about gains like that. The singing wasn’t the point. I was far too invested in the people standing beside me, what had brought us all to this place, and belting out Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” while snapping rainbow fans or closing my eyes and performing “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson. I used to ice skate to “Breakaway” on the lake in my hometown, a very conservative place in the palm of Michigan that made coming out one of the most difficult challenges of my life. Maybe, at 30, I needed a change from what I was used to: playing games, taking my mark, and measuring my success against other people. Maybe I had been working toward this moment since I was 9 years old, diving into the pool to compete, or crunching my small body into the leg press machine at the gym to constantly strive for a new personal record. At CHARIS, the kinds of personal records I grew up knowing didn’t exist.

Sometimes, when I meet a new member of the chorus, I tell them my secret. “I’m not a good singer.” They stare at me quizzically; they don’t know if I’m joking. “Trust me,” I say. “I’m almost 32 now. This is my third concert. I can’t even read music.” Some of them don’t believe me, even though they should. Some of them laugh it off. The ones I like automatically say some iteration of my favorite thing in the world: “Who cares? You’re here. Let’s sing.”

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Gabe Montesanti (she/they) is a queer writer and artist who resides in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of Brace for Impact: A Memoir (2022), which chronicles her time skating for Arch Rival Roller Derby and Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors (2026). Gabe has been a competitive swimmer, a drag artist, and an educator. She was raised in the working-class Midwest.

I was 15 the first time I dyed my hair. It was the early 90s, back when it wasn’t commonplace to see a teenager with three-inch black tips on the end of otherwise naturally sun-kissed blonde hair. At the time, my motivation was pure rebellion, teenage angst turned outward so I could see a different person in the mirror. But 20 years later, when I decided to dye my blonde locks brown in the midst of a painful divorce, I realized the act of changing my hair was less about defiance and more about manifesting positive change.

A few years after my 15-year-old self got tired of the black tips and cut them off, I felt the urge once again to do something drastic to my hair. I was about to turn 18 and had just accepted an athletic scholarship for swimming at an out-of-state Division I college while nursing a shoulder injury from overtraining. Every single aspect of my life was about to change, and despite my brave face, I was terrified.

Could I handle living so far away from my family? Would my shoulders heal enough to perform as I was expected in the pool to keep my scholarship? Would I be able to make friends at a school where I don’t know a single person?

As I contemplated these self-doubts, I drove to the drugstore and bought myself a bottle of wash-out black hair dye. This time, instead of just coloring the tips of my blonde hair, I slathered the color over my entire head.

I’m pretty sure I thought I was being rebellious again, basking in the attention classmates and teachers gave me for suddenly showing up at school one day looking like a completely different person. But more than anything, , I remember the sense of confidence I felt. I’d dyed my hair black! If I could do that, I could thrive moving ten hours away from my family. I could be the MVP of my swim team, maybe even MVP of my conference. I could find my friend group in a sea of strangers.

Months later, long after the black had gradually washed down the shower drain, I accomplished every one of those things, my fear of those life changes long forgotten.

Of course, dyeing my hair didn’t cause me to mature as a young adult away from my parents, swim well, or make friends. But what it did do was give me a boost of adrenaline, a shift in perspective, a new image to see in the mirror reflecting a person whose confidence I could borrow until I could fully absorb it.

The hair dyeing continued from there. I went for black dye again right before my college conference swim meet. I opted for strawberry blonde when I was having relationship issues with a boyfriend. I used grape Kool-Aid mix to attempt a purple hue as college graduation drew near and I still had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. My hair dye method never let me down.

But soon enough, the hair dyeing stopped. I met the man who would become my husband. He joined the military, and I became the wife of an officer in the Navy. I gave birth to a son and then a daughter. I was a grown-up, a mother, a military spouse. There didn’t seem to be space in those roles for spontaneous drastic alterations to my appearance. I had a certain image to uphold. I had to fit in with the other mothers at playgroup, the other officers’ wives at potlucks and our husbands’ work events. I couldn’t show up on the arm of my husband in his military uniform with magenta hair. So my hair remained the same for years, the familiar palette of blonde highlights on the agenda at every salon visit.

Until my marriage ended.

I had just moved out of my marital home and into an apartment, and after a grueling seven-month in-house separation, I was living on my own for the first time in my life at 37. Even though we were finally living in different homes, my husband and I were still dwelling in the limbo of a yearlong legal separation, a state-mandated requirement in no-fault divorces when minor children are involved. Not divorced, but not a marriage. I felt stuck in so many ways.

Despite the fact that I wanted the divorce, that I wanted to end my thirteen-year marriage and start over, the struggles of being a single mother of two elementary school-aged children hit me hard. Alongside the breakup also came an unexpected search for identity as I realized I had spent most of my marriage trying to live up to the varied expectations of being the wife of a service member. My entire identity revolved around my husband’s career as a Navy officer, and I no longer knew who I was without my title of military spouse.

That’s when I found myself at a salon.

Maybe it was the adjustment to co-parenting after my move into the apartment. Maybe it was the series of panic attacks that seemed to hit me out of nowhere. Or maybe I was so desperate to get unstuck that I needed to do something extreme. Whatever the primary motivation was, the result was exactly what I needed it to be: positive change.

I had never met this stylist before, but she came highly recommended by a friend who knew I was struggling. When I told this stylist I wanted to chop six inches off my long blonde hair and dye what was left brown, she did exactly what I asked for. I walked into that salon a blonde and walked out a brunette.

I admit the change was shocking at first, my initial look in the mirror bringing me to tears as I clutched a half-foot long strip of my blonde hair in my hands and fought the urge to beg the stylist to immediately reverse what she had just done to me. But as the days passed and I grew less and less surprised when I looked at myself, I fell in love with my hair. I saw myself with fresh eyes. I saw the woman I was becoming. I saw that change, no matter how scary at first, could be beautiful.

There were countless things out of my control because of the divorce, but my hair was one thing I had complete control over. I couldn’t change my custody schedule. I couldn’t change how my husband was parenting our children in his home. I couldn’t change where the military was sending him. But I could change my hair. I could change who I saw in the mirror. I could change the identity I had lost in my marriage and find the sense of self I needed in order to move on with my life.

I eventually grew my hair back to its original length, and that same stylist eventually colored me back to blonde. But my hair dyeing days to induce change continue to this day. While I haven’t had to face the drastic life changes that I did during my divorce, I still periodically feel the itch to switch up my hair color.

What began as rebellious black tips progressed into something more meaningful than I could have imagined at age fifteen. I got a splash of delicate pink after my six-week recovery from a hysterectomy. I chose blue tips when things were getting serious with the man I was dating and there were thoughts of moving in together. I swirled pink and purple during the pandemic and all the uncertainty it created. I went a sassy red when tough emotions resurfaced while I was writing my memoir. And while sometimes I dye my hair because I tell myself I simply want a pop of color framing my face, I usually look back later and realize the salon visit coincided with something bigger, like a tough decision or work burnout.

Whether I wanted to cope with change or induce it, the color of my hair has acted as my driving force, my motivation, my strength, my confidence.

Regardless of the reason, my hair colors are usually temporary, a reminder that whatever emotions I’m connecting to the life changes inspiring the dye—nervous excitement, discomfort, fear, downright dread—will be temporary as well. They say that change is the only constant in life. For me, that means life changes come with a little added color.

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Heather Sweeney is the author of the memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Business Insider, TODAY.com, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Healthline, Reader’s Digest, Electric Literature, and Military.com, among many others. She lives in Virginia. Camouflage is her first book.

Like Lindy West, I have a polyamory memoir out. Unlike Lindy West, I am a total nobody.

Like West, I am a millennial woman who wrote a book about her experiences transitioning from a monogamous marriage to an open one. Like West, my story was published by a Big Five publisher. Like West, I consider myself a feminist, and where I’m from, people would definitely consider me fat. But that’s where our similarities seem to end.

Unlike West, I changed all the names in my book except my own, in order to keep the people I care about—my husband, daughter, (then) boyfriend, plus a few close friends and former lovers—out of the public eye.

Unlike West, I’m not the center of controversy. In fact, you’ve probably never heard of me or my memoir. That’s because my book was never published in the United States. And while I’m guessing you, dear reader, are American, I am not.

Outside the American bubble: a different polyamory origin story

I’m from a world out there where the Sexual Revolution never happened and probably never will. Where feminist blogs didn’t set the Internet on fire or toss match after match into a generational gas tank of feminine rage. Where polyamory is unspeakably taboo and could never be described as common.

I was born and raised in the Philippines, a staunchly Catholic nation of 121 million people, the last country in the world apart from Vatican City where divorce remains illegal. The angry Gen X/millennial feminist voice of my generation was Jessica Zafra; instead of Jezebel, I read her column Twisted. If you haven’t heard of them, that’s okay. I had no idea who Lindy West was, either—until a few weeks ago.

As West’s name began to trickle into my consciousness via Threads, a friend sent me an Instagram reel by Dan Savage. In it, Savage dives into the buzz around West’s new memoir, Adult Braces, by questioning opinion writer Emma Camp, who wrote: “Almost always, when a straight couple opens up their relationship, it’s because the male partner is using the polyamorous label to launder his desire to cheat.” Sure, Savage says, it seems so in “the memoirs that get published,” naming three titles written by white American women. (“Why are these authors ‘almost always’ from Brooklyn?” wonders a commenter). He declares, “The next poly memoir should be written by a man” to “balance the scales.”

Interesting, I thought. Savage takes “memoirs that get published” to mean “memoirs published in the U.S.” This assumes that mainstream publishing has exhaustively covered women’s perspectives on polyamory, and that the only perspectives that remain excluded are those of men.

Um, hi.

I’m a brown, queer, Filipina-Indian author of an open marriage memoir. My book, Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently was published in 2025 by Viking Books/Penguin Random House UK in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, and has been translated into Dutch, German, and soon into Albanian. This year, my book was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction in the UK, alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy and Lea Ypi.

In my story, the wife (that’s me) incites the shift from monogamy to an open marriage. Nobody becomes polyamorous (or bisexual) overnight. It’s four years before a boyfriend appears on the scene. No one is in a throuple. No partners are involved in publicity. The husband doesn’t crash out publicly over coverage of his wife’s book. In fact, the husband is pretty great. Readers love him. As do I.

Due to a frustrating quirk of territorial rights, not getting picked up by a U.S. publisher means my book isn’t available for distribution in the Philippines, which is considered under U.S. territory (ahh, colonialism, the gift that keeps on giving!).

Despite this, the press I’ve received in my home country has drawn ire from people who accuse me of having traded my Filipino values for Western ones. But the idea that polyamory is only practiced by white Western folks comes from the prevalence of published polyamory memoirs by white Western folks, especially by white women from the U.S. This in turn cements the white American experience as the experience of polyamory that exists and widely held to be true.

What about women, authors, people like me? Shouldn’t our voices, experiences and stories count, too?

From a six-way auction to 31 rejections

In September 2023, my agent Jo in London and her co-agent Deborah in New York went out on submission simultaneously with my memoir. Within 24 hours, my book had multiple offers from UK publishers, and was in a six-way auction by the end of the week. The same book was rejected by 31 editors in the U.S.

I remember the frustration in Deborah’s voice as we spoke on the phone. She told me she was “stunned” and “disappointed” by what she was hearing from editors: that no one seemed willing to take a risk on a non-American story by a non-American author. Also, she was told, Open marriages are old news. Everyone is doing them. Several editors already had a polyamory book on the list; one was enough. No one really wants to read about open marriages anymore, they said.

So I was surprised to hear about the new memoir that was stirring up controversy about polyamory in the U.S. I thought nobody wanted to read about open marriages anymore? I thought this was old news?

Clearly, people still want to read about open marriages—and gossip about them, except when it’s literary we call it discourse. But the majority of readers want to hear from voices they know. Publishers bank on this. If they do bet on an open marriage memoir, they want it to be from a certain type of author: one with a name and a platform, who will sell books. A sure bet. Like Lindy West.

West worked hard for her platform, and her hard graft deserves respect. Publishing simply did what publishing does: made a business decision in favor of lower perceived risk and greater perceived return. Polyamory memoir by a millennial feminist icon with a massive platform, or polyamory memoir by a nobody? It’s a no-brainer, even for me.

An unknown author like me needs only one person to see their potential. But that champion has to be capable of transmitting what they see—that spark of something special—on to others. In my 18-odd months in the waiting room from acquisition to publication, I saw how many times that spark of excitement caught on for my book. A whole chain of sparks catching becomes people feeling things, which moves them to make things happen. Seeing it changed something in me; I feel lucky and grateful that it happened to me. How could I begrudge any author the same?

As authors whose memoirs touch upon the same topic, Lindy West and I are at the same party—we’re just talking to people in different corners of the room. It’s a huge party, full of life and chatter and movement, with plenty of nooks to explore, and I know I can only reach so far with what I’ve got. I still can’t believe I’m here, still having the time of my life, even though I need to step out for a breath of fresh air every now and then. Just enough to slow my heartbeat and cool my sweat, until I hear a new tune calling me in to dance.

I intend to stay until I wear my dancing shoes out. And I hope you’ll wander over to my corner of the party sometime. You might just like it here.

Publicity, crashouts, and what my open marriage taught me about boundaries

From where I sit, the controversy over West’s memoir is like hearing a fight break out in one corner of the party. You’re not entirely sure what it’s about, but it’s loud and noisy and almost drowns out the music. You’re glad you’re not at the center of it and hope that whoever it is will make it out okay.

Online, West’s life choices have been ripped apart, her loved ones criticized, and old social media posts dug up and dissected. A seasoned catastrophizer, I could easily picture myself drowning in the same online vitriol West faced as a woman speaking openly of sexuality and questioning norms around love, commitment, and femininity.

I understood I would be judged for my choices by people who didn’t agree with them. I knew I could always shut off the laptop or put away my phone. But mostly, I worried about the people I loved. They didn’t write this book; I did.

I worried that trolls would find my husband and (then) boyfriend on social media and harass them online; that my daughter, about to enter high school, would be bullied by her peers; that my ex’s conservative Irish relatives would ice him out or make life difficult for him (not that they needed my book to do that, but that’s another story).

Neither my publisher nor I could stop media outlets from sensationalizing my story for clickbait, because sex sells. But opening my marriage had taught me something important: that I could understand my fears, discuss them with all involved (in this case, my partners and publisher), and set boundaries around them. I know from experience that boundaries help make the leap into uncharted territory a little less scary, and give me agency in a situation where so many factors lie beyond my control.

My publisher organized private media training to help me navigate interviews, live radio, and TV appearances. A friend helped me archive over a thousand Instagram posts featuring the clearly recognizable faces of my child, husband, and ex. I wiped their real names from Instagram captions and Substack posts. Most importantly, I categorically declined all press requests to include my partners in photo shoots and interviews.

“Your book stands on its own. Your writing speaks for itself,” my husband said. “Why do they need a man’s voice to legitimize a woman’s story?” I love him for that.

When West’s husband, musician Ahamefule Olou, sent a scathing email to Slate journalist Scaachi Koul for her profile of West, the public crashout made me glad to have decided on these boundaries in advance. I may have missed out on publicity, but I know I can stand firm about what’s important to me, and that the people who are truly behind me have always got my back.

Perhaps national media doesn’t have quite the grip on mass attention as it used to. Perhaps my corner of the party over here is a little quieter, a little less angry, a little less invested in parasocial relationships with online personalities. The online noise was nothing I couldn’t switch off or unplug from at the end of the day to return to my offline life, a life and people I loved. I could laugh off comments like “filthy beasts” (The Daily Mail) and “hot horrible garbage’ (Goodreads) by joking about turning them into merch. Side note: If I ever get published in the U.S., “Banned in Florida” will look really cool on a baseball cap.

Following the release of her memoir and the press that followed, West postponed tour dates indefinitely, with online speculation that publicity blowback played a role. Meanwhile, despite the proximity of my memoir to my life and that of my family, our lives have gone on undisturbed, uncontroversial, maybe even wholesome. My teen and her friends’ online lives revolve around K-pop and skincare, not Mom’s interviews in the Times of London and The Daily Mail (that’s for old people). Two of her primary school teachers follow me on Instagram. A class mom sent me a wonderfully warm message after devouring my book in two days, and several of my neighbors have read it. The only way I could really blow up my Dutch neighborhood Whatsapp chat group is to leave the trash out on the wrong day.

I can’t wish for controversy or believe that it’s directly related to my success, when I have peace, which directly underpins my sanity. Peace in which I can live a life worth writing about. Peace that creates the conditions I need as a memoirist: to process the events of my life and write—the next book, the next essay, the ideas I explore on my Substack.

This is writing I live for—writing that happens in the quiet, away from scrutiny and hot takes and crashouts. What nurtures and protects my writing, nourishes and protects me, too.

More than a headline, the quiet parts matter

From the coverage I’ve read, Adult Braces is about more than just polyamory—it’s about identity, the aftermath of public success, and the disillusionment and disorientation that happens when “living the dream” becomes all too real. In her Slate profile by Koul, West says she “worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever written,” and seems aware that polyamory might overshadow the other themes she set out to explore. Things that aren’t as prurient or salacious, that won’t draw as many clicks or drive as much traffic as polyamory or throuples.

And honestly, I get it. Because while I’m comfortable calling the book I wrote an open marriage memoir or a polyamory memoir, it covers much more than that. It’s also about marriage, migration, and motherhood, and how life changes can cause seismic shifts in our identities and relationships. It’s about realizing that the woman I was becoming was different from the girl I’d learned to be, and that I could trust the man I loved to love her, too. And it’s about realizing, with some relief and plenty of joy, that daring to live and love differently really can work out in the end.

My polyamory might be a clickbait headline, but to me it’s one identity woven into the fabric of a life of many colors, threaded through with mistakes and messes, pleasure and desire, but also with tenderness and joy.

Maybe it’s like the way that one Substack post you pour your heart and soul into gets the least number of likes and restacks—the quiet parts may not skyrocket us into controversy, but they’re the parts we fold our treasures into: our joy, our love, our wounds, our humanity. All we can do is wrap them in words chosen with care, before we share them with others in the fragile hope that what we have to offer will be received with kindness.

And Lindy, girl. You don’t know me, but this nobody sees you. If you’re reading this, call me.

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Deepa Paul is the author of Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently (Viking Books UK), longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-fiction.

Gillian Anderson describes Ask Me as “stunningly vulnerable and poetic… if this doesn’t change your perspective on relationships, nothing will.”

Deepa has written for Seventeen Magazine Philippines, The Philippine Star, Philippine Daily Inquirer and Singapore Women’s Weekly, with essays in Vogue Australia, RED, Cheex, Gal-Dem, Rappler and more.

Born in Manila, she lives in Amsterdam with her husband, daughter, and black cat, and writes Letters by Deepa on Substack. Find her on Instagram as @storiesbydeepa.

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.

-------

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.