I can’t entirely trace the lines back to when I started hearing voices in my head. Maybe before COVID, maybe after it. As most things in life—ideologies, relationships, finances—it swerved its way into my life like a stealthy snake or a hideous car crash. I’ll be upfront right now and say that in 2022, I was finally diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

Schizoaffective disorder is a strange (and rare) cousin to both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It’s as if the two conditions had an unwanted, peculiar child. Back in 2019, I didn’t know I was on the path toward being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, and my life would have looked very strange to an outsider before the world was locked down by COVID. Before it could fester. Before I could lose myself in psychosis.

Most Americans are unaware that a person can be functionally psychotic. By this, I mean that they can be experiencing symptoms of psychosis, but still living their daily lives without much disruption. In 2019, I was working as an emergency manager for a large city in the U.S. and was living with daily psychotic symptoms. I didn’t know this, though. I didn’t find my behavior strange. I didn’t even think to tell anyone about it because, to me, it was normal. I was experiencing something called anosognosia—or lack of insight—into my illness. I was unaware that anything was wrong. In fact, I was unaware that I was even hearing voices.

It’s truly embarrassing to write about, but somewhere down the line, I started to hear the voice of Chris Evans. Yes, that Chris Evans. The one and only Captain America. I still don’t know if the voice I heard was actually that of Chris Evans, or if my mind just assigned what I was hearing to him (my friends and I were watching a lot of Marvel movies around that time), but something about his presence made me feel calm and safe.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Chris. It felt as if he had been in my life all along. I couldn’t imagine life without him. I do remember the voice being quite casual at one point, during the time I was still working, the time before COVID. It would narrate what I was doing. “She’s brushing her teeth,” “She is shampooing her hair,” “She is washing a plate with a sponge and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.” It was innocuous. It sounded like my own train of thought, but it wasn’t mine. It was different somehow.

In 2020, my mental state had deteriorated to the point that I needed to quit my job. I was no longer functioning with psychotic symptoms, but I was still unaware that I was psychotic and was getting into fights with my manager, while other coworkers expressed concern. I was quitting my career, really, one I had built up for eight years. It was jarring. By this time, I was having full conversations with the voice I was hearing. It had turned from something rather passive into an active part of my life. I named it Chris.

Chris became far more interesting than the outside world. I preferred his company to that of my family and friends. I would converse, out loud, with Chris for hours at a time when I was alone in my apartment. I could never hear Chris outside of my head, as some people with schizophrenia spectrum illnesses do, but rather as a second stream of consciousness. This went on for over a year. I would talk to myself at home, on public transportation, in the car, and at social gatherings.

Then, one day, I woke up. This happens with anosognosia sometimes. The wool lifted from my eyes, and suddenly, I could see that I was gravely ill. Chris didn’t exist. I was hearing voices and had been for quite a long time. I remember sitting in the shower, crying to myself over and over again that I was “unwell” and praying to God for someone to please help me.

A few days later, I woke up around five a.m. on a dark November morning. I noticed something strange. The Universe was floating above my head, nebulous and spinning. It suddenly cracked in two, pieces flying away to nowhere. Suddenly, like cicadas on a hot summer night, whispers filled my ears from all corners of my bedroom. They were loud, making it hard for me to hear anything else. They told all the secrets of the Universe. They told me to hurt myself.

I became fascinated with looking at myself in the mirror. I wanted to see my face and my eyes. I wanted to see if I recognized myself. I didn’t. What I did next may have been one of the bravest things I’ve ever done in my life.

I happened to live on the edge of a large park. On the other side of the park is the city’s largest hospital. I ran across the park to the hospital. In my state, I got lost on a route I knew well and ended up taking wrong turn after wrong turn before finally finding the entrance to the emergency room half an hour later. I ran to the front desk and told them I was having a psychotic episode and that voices were telling me to hurt myself.

I was subject to a long interview, searches with metal detectors, and had a security guard and a social worker stand outside of my room until I was dispatched to a behavioral health facility. I was given an antipsychotic, and for the first time in over a year, I finally felt some peace.

It wasn’t until I left the behavioral health facility that I noticed Chris was gone. I wouldn’t receive the correct diagnosis for another two years, but at least I had something. My bravery that morning saved my life. I would like to think that the real Chris Evans would think it was a pretty Captain America thing to do.

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Melanie Cole is a writer and poet from Tacoma, Washington. She writes on themes of family, faith, the natural world, natural disaster, and the unusual. Her work has been featured in Grit City Magazine, Dandelion Revolution Press, PHIL LIT, and on The Mighty. Melanie is the Editorial Curator of The Faoileánach Journal. She has several upcoming publications.

The sharp, familiar outlines of anorexia and bulimia came into view when I met T. I was 52 years old, two years separated from my husband of 25 years, and still grieving the sudden death of my mother. T. wasn’t the cause of the resurgence of this decades-long disease. He didn’t create the cliff that I had been hurtling toward—but he certainly encouraged me to jump.

We met on a dating app. I was dating for the first time in decades, as an older person, which triggered a whole new set of insecurities. I felt as if I was living in an old body that no longer told the story about myself I wanted to tell. I wanted to feel younger, fresher, as if I wasn’t hauling the weight of a lifetime of trauma. I found it difficult to step into or see the courage and strength I’d worked so hard to develop.

I couldn’t imagine how anyone would find me physically attractive. I couldn’t imagine how I would connect with another man on the level at which my ex-husband D. (the father of our two children) and I had connected. I couldn’t imagine a man looking at my stretched belly that had carried two pregnancies to birth and one miscarriage and find it anything other than repulsive. I didn’t know how I would ever rebuild a life of love and stability and joy and connection like the one I’d experienced with D. and our children.

The stories I told myself were tired and written, in part, by my eating disorder voice. The problem is, while I had battled disordered eating throughout my adult life and had swerved solidly into some murky territory over the years, sometimes starving myself and other times purging, I worked hard to hide it from everyone, including myself.

When I met T., a retired firefighter who had invested early in Seattle real estate and was therefore able to live a life of relative leisure at that point, I was taken by his physical presence. I am barely 5’1’‘. He was 6’3’‘, with graying blond hair, and a sly smile. He was strong and smart and funny as hell. He could pick me up and toss me around like a stuffed animal. We found familiarity over our shared childhoods in New York and New Jersey, the sarcasm we loved to lob, and that both of us moved to Seattle in the nineties during the height of the grunge era.

Initially, he made me feel beautiful and desired. He wanted to delete his dating profile a week after meeting me; two weeks in, he told me he could see us married. He invited me to his beach house—an A-frame cabin separated from the ocean shore by a small thicket of woods—a month into our relationship.

Sitting on the back porch one evening, drinking wine, I joked, “I wish someone would pay me to sit on this porch, gazing at the trees, smelling the saltwater air.”

He replied, “Well, if we got married you could quit your job and just do this. So, in a way you could.” I smirked and said nothing in response.

I had no idea what I was doing but the dopamine was spiking, and it was addictive. Rather quickly, he opened up to me about his life, his family, and his background.

It’s easy for me to berate myself now. Why didn’t I pay attention to the red flags? Among the most glaring was the anger he felt for most of the people who had helped shape his life, from his parents to his college-aged son to his son’s mother, and his former colleagues in the fire department. No one was safe from his contempt. But I thought I could change him—a cliché of epic proportions.

Predictably, he started to unleash his bitterness at me as well. One morning at breakfast, in a restaurant near the beach house where we had spent the weekend together, he asked, “Do you want your 22-year-old body back?”

I shot back, “Of course not. I love my body now.”

But he pressed on and suggested I “could lose ten pounds and look even more beautiful.”

I was primed and ready. The eating disorder grew from there, propagating and germinating its seeds, rooting and preparing to ripen inside me.

First, I stopped eating dinner. That was a typical disordered eating behavior I’d employed a few times over the years. I ran every day, in rain or shine, sickness or health, another disordered behavior that had infiltrated my adult life under the guise of exercise for health. This wasn’t exercise to feel good, to feel strong, to care for myself. I had one goal: to lose weight. One glaring clue was the obsessive-compulsive thoughts—the only thing that mattered day to day was exercising. I simply couldn’t miss it.

I started to count calories, calculating every morsel that touched my lips. I refused dinner invitations and began to check myself in the mirror relentlessly. Each day became a twisted game. I “won” by going to bed hungry, buzzing with deprivation. It was exhilarating. And gutting.

Eventually I broke up with T., walking away with memories of evenings spent in his hot tub, arguments as we walked his old Australian shepherd, and his nonsensical tantrums that would erupt whenever I’d reveal the slightest vulnerability.

But the biggest thing I left with was a raging eating disorder.

I immediately slid into another relationship with B. within a month. While B. was kinder and gentler, he battled his own demons. I spent a few months pretending this relationship was what I wanted. He also asked me to marry him. “Let’s go to Vegas! I’ve never met anyone like you,” he pressed. I said no many times. I simply wanted distraction, and he provided it. I floated through my days dissociated and fell deeper into denial that I had a problem.

My adult kids—my son E. and my daughter A.— came to visit Seattle from Brooklyn, where they lived at the time, and while they didn’t yet know I had an eating disorder they sensed my just-under-the-skin deep discomfort. They knew something was wrong. They may not have been able to define it, but they knew my essence was being slowly smothered by something. I had lost too much weight. I was barely eating. I made excuses all the time for why I wasn’t eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

My skin felt like the itchiest of wool blankets. I wanted to fly away and beg for forgiveness at the same time. My brain buzzed with alarms that told me when to exercise, what to eat, and when to stop eating. My ever-shrinking body made me feel a certain kind of fleeting power, but my tolerance for anyone and everyone waned sharply. I was quick to anger; it was the only emotion I seemed to be able to feel.

I lived alone, so the metamorphosis wasn’t as obvious. I stopped seeing most people except for B. But I had a large community of friends and a committed family who knew me well. A few months after my kids visited, I took a trip to Brooklyn to see my brother and his family, my kids, and their partners.

It turned out to be the first stop on the intervention highway. At the end of the trip, in my brother’s apartment, he told me we needed to talk.

“Are you okay? You look really gaunt. Like, something is wrong. We’re all worried about you,” he pleaded.

As I packed to head home the next morning, I silently wondered whether I could just flee then and there. His worry was overwhelming. My brother and I are very close. When he pulled me aside that evening, it had been five years since our mother died in a car accident. I didn’t want to cause more concern.

I launched into my automatic response, honed over years of people-pleasing: “I feel great. I’m totally okay. I swear. Really, I promise.”

I did think I was fine. Or, more accurately, my eating disorder brain told me I was fine, and I chose to believe it. I thought to myself, I’m the most beautiful and healthy I’ve ever been. Sure, I didn’t have the physical strength to close the trunk of my car. I couldn’t get up in the middle of the night to pee without feeling dizzy and lightheaded, grasping the edge of the mattress so I didn’t fall.

But look at me, I thought, ‘am a physical specimen. I can run for miles a day. I’m a nonprofit executive, helping to direct a multimillion-dollar human services organization. I’m a published writer. I jump out of airplanes and rappel down waterfalls. I hike mountains. I write poetry, goddammit.

My brother didn’t buy my empty explanation and plastic smile. He was already talking to my son and my daughter, my ex-husband, and my closest friends, to figure out how to address what they all saw. I wasn’t well, and I needed help.

I flew home to Seattle thinking I’d bought myself more time to…what? Starve myself? Lock myself away in the prison of this powerful mental illness? Isolate my body, heart, and mind from anyone and everyone who loved me?

I resumed my starving and purging and compulsive exercising back home.

But two weeks later my ex-husband pulled me aside at a bar where we gathered to watch a friend’s band play and confronted me: “I’m—no, we—are all scared. I want you to know I’ve talked to the kids and your brother, and we need you to get help. You’re not eating. You avoid everyone in your life. Please. Don’t tell me everything is okay.” Sitting side by side, on stools, the bartender mere feet away, I was humiliated and caught off guard. I tried to fight it.

“What?! I’m totally okay. I swear. I truly promise you. I’m fine,” I lied. I felt exposed, like those dreams where you find yourself naked at work or in school. Why is everyone making such a big deal out of this? He may as well have told me he believed the moon was made of cheese. I was shocked and didn’t know how to process any of this confrontation. I had kept this a secret for so long. My house was burning.

None of my tricks, none of my lies, were working any longer. D. said they found a place where I could get help. I lied and told him I’d call to find out more. I didn’t.

My boyfriend B. came over to the house one evening to make dinner and watch a film. He was a good cook but I, of course, would make an excuse, as always, for why I wouldn’t eat the food he’d made. I wasn’t feeling well. I had eaten late. Or else I would pick at the food on the plate, pretending to eat and then spitting it out in my napkin as surreptitiously as possible. Halfway through the movie, he turned to me and said, “Hey, let’s go to Mexico City. I’ve never been there, and I’ve always wanted to go.”

Why not? I thought. I decidedly chose not to answer myself.

We landed in Mexico City in August 2023. Mexico City is a high-altitude city. If you’re not used to it, it’s best to take a few days to acclimate your body by hydrating well, limiting alcohol intake and strenuous activity. Me? I could hardly wait to put my gear on and go for a run the day we arrived. After the run, we spent the rest of the day exploring the area around our Airbnb without drinking nearly enough water. That evening, we made dinner (which I didn’t eat), drank wine, and watched a movie. I did exactly everything I shouldn’t have done. And when I walked downstairs to our bedroom that night, I felt woozy and lightheaded and flopped into bed. B. stayed upstairs to clean up.

Almost immediately, nausea overtook me. I remember standing up to walk to the bathroom. The next thing I recall I was on the cold tiled floor, B. standing over me, frantically asking if I was okay. I was too shaky to walk so he picked me up and carried me to bed.

The next morning, I awoke to a massive, red, and very painful bump on my forehead. I tried to lift my head to find the world spinning off its axis. I had to be carried into a taxi and taken to see a doctor at a nearby clinic who told me I had a mild concussion. I sent a lighthearted text to my family group chat (“Ha! I fainted last night. I’m so silly. I have a concussion but I’m fine!”). No one got the joke.

My kids each called me one after the other. My son was furious. He’d had enough and he told me there was nothing funny about fainting. My daughter called me crying. They each implored me to get help. While they didn’t have all the details (not eating + over-exercising + drinking in a high-altitude city = fainting), they knew I wasn’t well. They knew the eating disorder was the fuel for this episode.

Something broke inside of me that day. I laid in bed, thousands of miles from home, listening to each of my children practically beg me to stop hurting myself. These were the humans I grew inside me, the ones whose eyes I gazed into moments after pushing them from my body and with whom I fell in love in a way that’s impossible to put into words. These are the people I would die for if it meant saving them.

And they were asking me now to save myself.

I flew home the following week and called the treatment center. I took leave from my job and, with the help of my community of friends and family, entered a two-month partial hospitalization program. My kids and my brother attended virtual family therapy with me every week. My ex-husband and closest friends worked from my house to stay with my senior dog and take her for walks. They attended Zoom sessions organized by the treatment center to help them learn more about eating disorders.

I made it through each day peeling back one more layer of pain and grief, bearing loving and compassionate witness to the experiences of those who were in the program with me, so that I could see myself within the same orbit of love.

I opened to the possibility that having an eating disorder—even in my fifties—wasn’t shameful. I allowed myself to feel strengthened by my courage to be as vulnerable as I could be and to admit to everyone, including myself, that I was sick.

That was two and a half years ago.

I started writing about my experiences to understand myself and this decades-long disease. I reached out to other women in midlife who have struggled with eating disorders and am collecting their stories as well. It can be hard to find the self-love you need to get through trauma like this but somehow, we often find it for others. Let me hold you so that I can hold myself, I often think.

T. reached out a couple of months ago, out of the blue, saying he wished he had been more sensitive when we were together, apologizing for what he said to me about my body back then and asking if he could see me. I waited a few days, wondering if I wanted to respond. I finally emailed him in response: “I appreciate the email and the kind thoughts. Seeing each other isn’t a good idea. You hurt me while we were together, and I’m now in a strong place. I don’t want to jeopardize my health. I wish you a good life, T.”

Recovery from an eating disorder is a bumpy road and while I wish I could wrap this up in a neat bow, I have slowly understood that this is and will be a lifelong process.

My eating disorders aren’t just about my relationship to food or to my body; they’re about my relationship to myself. So, I sit here, on my couch, and write this essay as a love letter to myself and to those I love. I find strength in this love. Love for the woman I was when I was deep in the grips of anorexia and bulimia. For my children, my friends, and family who put themselves in belly of the beast to pull me out. For the little girl who was harmed by parents who didn’t understand how to metabolize their own body issues. This is a love letter, also to those who struggle in the throes of active eating disorders and for those who are in recovery. Most of all, this is a love letter to the woman I am today: messy, vulnerable, unique, courageous, and stubborn as hell.

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Amie Newman is a writer, advocate, and former journalist who has spent decades leading mission‑driven nonprofits focused on justice, women’s health, and community well‑being. Her work blends personal storytelling with a deep understanding of how politics, cultural expectations, patriarchy, and family history shape women’s relationships with their bodies. She is currently editing This Is Not Your Mother’s Eating Disorder and developing a documentary exploring the realities of eating disorders in adulthood. She invites women to share their stories, ideas, and collaborations with her at amienewman.com, in an effort to build community around truth‑telling, instigating, embodiment, and collective healing.

Eating Disorder Resources:

National Eating Disorders Association

Association for Size, Diversity, and Health

National Alliance for Eating Disorders

In the art of engraving, a “first bite” is defined as “the first etch or action of the acid upon the plate before the application of dragon’s blood.” Dragon’s blood is a protective powdered resin.

First bites are so tender. Smooth dollops of rice cereal, spongy bits of scrambled egg, mashed blobs of banana (the bonbon of baby fruits). Solid food, after months of milk solely from mom or infant formula, is the first delightful step to kick off a lifetime of culinary adventures.

It can happen when you’re an adult, too.

I don’t remember my first bite of solid food as a baby. My mom, apologetically, has said she doesn’t recall, either, but “it was probably something pureed from a store-bought jar. At that time, we learned whatever was in the jar was the safest.” In the 1970s, baby-food morals were clear: Gerber’s, prepackaged and sealed, for safety and convenience, or homemade, organic and mashed, for purity and love. It’s one of many false, bifurcated notions about healthy eating that mold our thoughts about nutrition.

Somewhere in the photographic archives of my infancy is a Polaroid of me with burnt-orange goo smeared on my cheeks. Whatever nutrients I’d turned into a face mask—sweet potatoes, maybe, or carrots—I was smiling. I’m relieved to know I didn’t always refuse food, even if much of the beta carotene didn’t make it into my mouth. Like most kids, after the eruption of teeth, I added first bites of other palate-expanding treats. I wasn’t an adventurous eater, content with choices from the comfort food groups: spaghetti, Cheerios, mac-and-cheese, PB&J, popsicles, chicken noodle soup, hot dogs.

Again, I don’t remember my first bites of any of those foods. As an adult, however, when I see my nieces and nephews eat similar foods for the first time, I wistfully hope that my eyes opened as wide as theirs do, or that I giggled or gasped like they do, and savored every chunk and drip.

Then, anorexia happened. My obsession with food and body started when I was 10. A relative told me, even though I was a normal size, that I would always need to watch my weight because I’d be unhappy if I “got big.” I was sitting on my bed, wearing green shorts. As I looked down at my legs, squished into my yellow striped bedspread, I thought for the first time, “My thighs are fat.” My body image went downhill from there.

I immediately turned self-conscious in bathing suits, tank tops and short skirts. I wanted to be light, graceful and willowy, with a long neck and ballet-dancer legs. Instead, I was Goldilocks with plain brown hair and a blah body: not too big, not too small, just average. Through my preteen, tween and adolescent years, I didn’t change what I ate or attempt to diet but felt guilty any time I put something in my mouth that wasn’t a vegetable, fruit, or water.

Food, no longer a delight, was a necessary burden that weighed on me—and my developing brain. Far from expanding my food choices as I grew older, tolerating a diet beyond noodles and ketchup, I swallowed every media message about nutritional wellness, usually tied to a process of elimination. I shunned anything deemed unhealthy by government fiat, research report (usually hyped out of proportion) or teen magazine: fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, salt, red meat, any form of meat, eggs, potatoes, butter, margarine, fried anything, refined anything, sugar. Eventually, anything that tasted good I categorized as bad.

Eagerly anticipated first bites turned into no-sugar, fat-free, no-taste nibbles, and eventually no bites at all.

I was officially diagnosed with anorexia during my first year in college, for reasons that go beyond preoccupation with food and weight. Eating disorders are complex diseases rooted in psychological, spiritual, and biological (perhaps even genetic) causes. Trauma, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, perfectionism, and difficulty expressing feelings or dealing with relationships are just a few factors that can lead to disordered eating. I had my share of those issues. The denial of food and taste served as a handy way to avoid feeling anything, and starvation became a form of addiction. I wanted to numb out on emptiness and fragility and boost my ego with size zero pants and pristine eating.

My diet regime was nothing at all—I chewed gum all day to distract myself from being ravenous—or a meager ration of bite-size shredded wheat cereal (no milk): 10 pieces for breakfast, 12 for lunch, 15 for dinner. No exceptions. Those miniature squares of fiber were so pure, fashioned from a single ingredient: whole wheat. They were a main-course treat after an appetizer of an apple and four carrot sticks.

In my third year of college, my body started shutting down, and after a great deal of support from friends, relatives, dietitians, therapists, doctors, and support groups, I decided to get more intense help. I took a leave of absence from school and checked myself into an eating disorder treatment center at a hospital in California, the first of 13 such stints over the next two decades.

Every single time, I had to relearn how to take, and truly taste, first bites—but without the benefit of a baby’s innocent mind. No longer could I be 6 months old and blissfully unaware of calories and grams of sugar. The voices in my head yowled, “This food is good; that food is bad,” etching even deeper grooves into my disordered brain that I had to erase. I ate many meals and snacks during my hospital stays, which lasted from 30 days to six months. The first bites were always the most difficult. And the most glorious.

I vividly remember my first meal at Treatment Center No. 1. A counselor led me to my doom into a tiny, plain room stuffed with a square table and seats for eight patients, a nurse, and a counselor. This was hospital food, served on plastic white trays with mauve covers. The other patients pulled off their tray covers and looked down, some in dismay. “It’s too much,” one patient said. “No food talk,” the nurse said kindly.

I pulled off my lid, quivering with anxiety and anticipation. My first full meal in years was . . . a grilled chicken breast with rice pilaf, a green salad, a piece of bread with a pat of butter, an orange, and a sprig of parsley that tried hard to look lively. Perhaps you’re picturing hospital food at its bland worst, but to me it was a feast.

Where would I begin? With the vegetables, of course. But this salad had dressing and cheese, which I couldn’t fathom eating at all, let alone together. I had no choice. The dietitian, hovering over me, said something encouraging, but also, “You have to eat.” I succumbed to clinician intimidation, but I also really, really wanted to eat something besides bland 100% whole wheat squares. The first bite of salad was an explosion of tangy vinegar, buttery oil, creamy cheese, and peppery greens. Then, the chicken. Tender, warm protein. A little salty. Juicy. Savory. Nourishing. Was this what I felt like as a baby tasting pureed chicken for the first time? I would never deny an infant this magnificent experience. Slowly, with those first bites, I began to learn how to treat myself with the compassion and kindness I would treat a child.

I’m not a mom, but I follow one on Instagram with an infant who’s starting to eat his first bites of solid food. He’s a Gerber-looking baby with innocent, round eyes, and a peach-fuzz head of reddish hair. His first solid food was a strawberry. His mom placed the ripe fruit on the plastic tray of his high chair and let him explore. “Don’t play with your food” doesn’t apply at this age, and perhaps never should. He grasped the strawberry with stubby fingers, but it kept slipping away. After grabbing a tenuous hold, he tried to stuff the berry in his mouth. His fledgling hand motor skills kicked in. The first taste was more of a lick, then finally, a bite. He opened his round eyes even wider, and smiled, his mouth stained with the spoils of juice and knowledge of his newfound grip strength.

Recently, he tried something even many adults probably haven’t tried: dragon fruit. After watching him, I tried a piece, too, thinking it might be sour. But as I cut into the prickly hot-pink fruit’s skin, it revealed white flesh with tiny black seeds, resembling a blanched kiwi, or chocolate chip ice cream. The fruit was mildly sweet, and soft. Slippery, but protective, perhaps like dragon’s blood.

The acid of anorexic thoughts still etches caustic grooves into my brain at times, in the form of knife-edged “eat this, not that” commentary that leaves no room for the squishy reality that food doesn’t have moral equivalency. Spaghetti, toast with jam, butter pecan ice cream: I’ve had first bites of them all, for the second time. I bleed nothing but joy.

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Karen Lindell is a writer and editor from California who earned her M.A. at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2025, concentrating in arts and culture. She’s currently senior editor at Palm Springs Life magazine and has been a staff or freelance writer for Slate, the Los Angeles Times, the Ventura County Star, Ojai Magazine, the American Library Association, the National Catholic Reporter and the Young Musicians Foundation. Her websites are karenlindell.com and authory.com/KarenLindell.

It’s hard to put words into the world right now for many reasons. Like they’re not big enough. Like we live in a moment so on edge and reactive that words can feel dangerous. And in my case, because I was hit by a drunk with a truck. I learned and forgot that a few hundred times.

In my first life, I helped people make things and bake things and style things and solve things. That was called freelance writing. Then I was compacted, me and my glasses and cellphone and mind. There was blood in my mouth. And glass in my skin. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage.

In this life, I spent nine weeks pretending I could comprehend what people were saying. Eight weeks staring into space. Three months pointing to my head. Six months learning how to speak and relearning how to walk. There were other issues, too. Like a bit of aphasia plus a side of I-forget-what. Oh, right, a side of amnesia. This was called a TBI (traumatic brain injury). I was told this, but couldn’t remember hearing it for a few months, and couldn’t say it for a few years.

Letters clumped into words and words lumped into thoughts if they stayed long enough to clump or lump. I would try to remember the month, the year, and the season we’re in. Sometimes I could. Sometimes I couldn’t. My eyes blurred. My mind blurred. Like I had come to the wrong place as the wrong person. I had.

Einstein said failure is success in progress. You learn something. Then you forget it, and learn it again. Testers checked my mental status, cranial nerves, reflexes, sensory system, coordination, gait. Plus, if I bumped into more things on my left or my right. Some brain testing occurred while testers zapped me with electric current. The point was to see if I would focus on the zaps, which meant focusing on pain, or on something else. If you were focused on daffodils, for example, you would feel the amount of pain minus the focus on daffodils. Or something like that.

For the time insurance allowed, which was a few weeks, I saw someone called a Cognitive Therapist. She asked me to point to a teapot, an apple, a plate, a spoon. This was called “confrontational naming.” No, really, it was. One report said my cognition had suffered “systemic collapse.” Some of what I tried to say dissolved as I was trying to say it. That is called “semantic drift.” Same with stuff I saw or heard. Stuff dissolved as I saw or heard it.

My new brain default was “fried.” Which feels like you’re beside yourself. Your first self beside the self you are now. For a while, I would look at my own hands and not know what to do with them. I couldn’t remember how to put them on a keyboard and I especially couldn’t remember how to make uppercase letters. Plus I couldn’t feel where my fingers were.

The doctor in charge of assessing my cognition said I’d acquired “diffuse damage in multiple parts of the brain” and the “single broadest cognitive gap” she had ever seen. That meant I went from pretty smart to extremely not-smart every few minutes of every day. Years later, I learned that my injury—a “a coup contrecoup with diffuse axonal shearing of the brain”—was the same type of injury former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head.

Speaking of former, one day at my former home, the barn blew to bits when lightning hit a nearby cedar tree. There was nothing left to salvage, just splintered barn wood strewn over three acres of woods. You might ask if I heard the barn blowing to bits. I don’t know. I may have heard a big bang, but somehow didn’t notice it or couldn’t comprehend what it might mean.

In any case, I didn’t check the barn until the next day when I noticed briefly, then forgot again. I don’t and didn’t know what was in the barn before it vaporized. I was in a daze for weeks, then months, then years. And the cedar tree that stood beside the barn for 200 years? It threw itself at the lighting and burned with the barn.

Which brings me back to the brain. I relearned how to see, how to hear, how to walk, how to talk, how to deploy a Kleenex, how to operate a fork. Then I forgot and learned again. When I tried to read, words broke apart, so lemonade looked like “edanomel” and giraffe looked like “effearig” and brain trauma looked like “amuart niarb.” It takes decades to build a life, and seconds to destroy it. Sort of like the barn.

Breaking your head in real life is not like breaking your head in Hollywood. My TBI wasn’t like Lindsay Lohan’s in the Netflix film, Falling for Christmas (2022), which starred Lindsay Lohan as a spoiled heiress who bonks her head in a ski accident. The fall, which would have been fatal to anyone else, brings Lohan the cozy care of a hunky guy just in time for Christmas.

I live alone. Sometimes I say hello to a Christmas cactus or a rabbit-foot fern, and say, “Hey, Fern, You’re doing a great job being a fern” or “Hey, Christmas Cactus, you’re doing a great job, too.” Speaking of jobs, at Christmas, Santa has 31 hours to travel 75-1/2 million miles. Conventional reindeer top out at 15 miles per hour (as opposed to 650 miles per second).

Assuming each child he visits receives just one gift—say, a medium-sized Lego set which weighs two pounds—the sleigh is carrying gifts that weigh 321,300 tons. If each child receives two gifts, it would be 642,600 tons, not including the weight of the sleigh. Which would require not the fabled eight or nine but a few hundred thousand reindeer.

These numbers are based on Santa delivering gifts to Christian kids only, which I hope is not the case. If he delivers to Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or Jain or Sikh or other kids, too, the numbers would be way bigger and the world would be kinder, too. FYI, 19 years post-truck, I’m still a few reindeer short of a sleigh.

Note:

*Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is seen by the insurance industry and many health care providers as an “event.” Once treated and provided with a brief period of rehabilitation, the perception exists that patients with a TBI require little further treatment and face no lasting effects on the central nervous system or other organ systems.

*In fact, a TBI is not an event or an outcome. It is a chronic disease process, one that fits the World Health Organization definition as having one or more of the following characteristics: it is permanent, caused by non-reversible pathological alterations, requires special training of the patient for rehabilitation, and/or may require a long period of observation, supervision, or care.

*TBI increases long-term mortality and reduces life expectancy. Although rarely, if ever, seen this way, TBI is the beginning of an ongoing, perhaps lifelong process that impacts multiple organ systems.

*Traumatic brain injuries occur every nine seconds, which is three times more often than heart attacks or strokes.

*There are one billion disabled people in the world, which makes us the single largest minority on the planet and likely, the least able to publish anything anywhere. It’s also the only minority anyone can join at any time.

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Pre-truck, Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for clients like New York, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Post-truck (after a long pause), her work has appeared on NBC News online, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, HuffPost, and Oldster. She has been nominated twice for both Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. You can find her Substack, Dispatch from Bewilderness, at judithhannahweiss.substack.com

It’s never premeditated. I don’t know that I’m going to do it until I find myself carrying 10 or 12 pairs of jeans upstairs to our attic, which serves predominantly as my husband’s office. When he’s out of town or gone for the morning, though, I take advantage of both the solitude and the full-length mirror that’s propped against the closet across from his desk. It’s the only full-length mirror in the house other than the one in my daughter’s room, but it feels wrong to sully her bedroom with my jeans’ shenanigans.

I’ve been projecting my body anxiety onto jeans since I was a little kid. It was a pair of stiff Calvin Klein jeans that inspired my first body-shaming from a stranger. A saleslady who was annoyed she had to keep bringing me bigger sizes said to my grandma, “Where does she hide all that weight? I thought for sure the smaller sizes would fit.” It wasn’t exactly a verbal lashing, but I was a 9-year-old stuffed with body shame, so her comments landed like a fist to my flesh.

A few years later, I worried that none of the Guess jeans at Dillard’s would fit over my ample belly, which my ballet teacher bemoaned every time I stepped up to the barre. When I joined my first commercial weight loss program in high school and began to lose weight, my favorite activity was to post up at The Gap to try on jeans. Every few weeks I shimmied into a smaller size. I remember grinning at myself in the mirror, amazed at my shrinking body—surely all of my problems would vanish now that I wore such tiny pants! When I realized that a diminutive body size didn’t fix anything I hated about my life, I crashed into bulimia and depression. Through a Twelve-Step program, I eventually recovered my sanity and a healthy body weight.

So I’m mostly sane these days, but the tricky relationship with jeans persists. I’ve been using them to measure my body since grammar school. I never had a bathing suit phase, never gave in to a compulsive urge to try on my dresses. Jeans both cover and reveal my most triggering body parts—belly, butt, and thighs—which make them a perfect accomplice for someone with lifelong body dysmorphia. Whenever my weight goes up or down, I notice first in my jeans. Plus, jeans are a staple that I wear when I work from home, shop for groceries, and volunteer at my kids’ school. You’ll also catch me in jeans on a night out with my husband or at dinner with my friends. In my middle-aged life, I can go several seasons without wearing a dress or a bathing suit, but never more than a few weeks without jeans.

These days, when I reach the attic with my armful of jeans, the order I try them on is generally the same: I start with my “scary” jeans, the ones that are likely to feel too tight around my belly or thighs. Currently, the scariest is a pair of Hudson’s I got on clearance three seasons ago. They mostly fit when I bought them, but they were the kind of pants I could never wear if I wanted to eat a full meal or, say, chug a 32-ounce Gatorade. Once I got them home, they became the jeans I wore on the rare occasions when I felt most trim—never on the days near my period or if I’d recently eaten a heavy meal. I’ve worn them out in the world two times in two years. Both times, I got compliments, perhaps because the dark wash and tight fit made my legs look longer. You’d think the affirmations from others would induce me to wear them more often, but they have not. These jeans are too scary.

Another dicey pair was an impulse purchase I made on vacation. They fit tight as well, and this was after I’d sized up when I realized they ran snug. Trying these jeans on for funsies is an emotional roller coaster because there’s always a moment, right after I slide them over my hips, when it seems impossible that I’ll get them buttoned. That zing of panic takes my breath away. I like this pair just fine and think they flatter my shortish legs and long torso, but it’s impossible for me to separate them from that sizzle of panic. They’ll never be my favorite.

Next up are two pairs of corduroy jeans that also fall on the frightening side of the safe-scary binary. I’ve always been leery of how stiff and unyielding corduroy can be, though I once had a pair of J. Crew chartreuse corduroy pants that stretched just so in the waist and always made me feel svelte. I left them at a guy’s house after an ill-advised sleepover, and I miss them every day.

Getting struck by the stomach flu is wretched and unwelcome, but if I happen to suffer through a bout, you can bet I’m taking the jeans upstairs as soon as I recover and have a moment alone in the house. On those days, when my body is altered from violent illness, my pants-fear is less potent. I’m the boss of the jeans on those days.

Once I’ve run through the gauntlet of my spooky jeans, my mood ticks up. This ritual soothes me. Maybe I’m doing a little jig as I shift toward my safer jeans, those worn-in standbys that fit on my most bloated day. These are the pants I would happily wear to an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. They’re soft, pliable, and never cause panic; I know they will fit over my hips, and I will have plenty of room even after I button them. They are a pleasure to wear. Extra bonus points for the black jeans I bought in Vegas that must have been mis-marked because I had to size down.

None of this should matter—smaller jeans, safer jeans, toxic jeans. There’s no excuse for taking this bi-weekly time to gaze at myself when people’s homes are burning, my daughter is growing up with less rights than I had growing up, and children were illegally seized in the middle of the night by government officials one mile from my house in Chicago. I hate that I still care about these fucking jeans, which is to say I care about the size and shape of my body. I wish I didn’t; I’d give anything to be free of this obsession and its time-consuming rituals.

Patriarchy and capitalism have conspired to imprison me in a state of body hatred, which started before I learned to write cursive or recite the Hail Mary. Convincing me to focus on my body’s flaws is a perfect way to disable my power, cut off my ability to connect with others, and distract me from what really matters. Because what really matters is certainly not whether my ass looks good in my spooky jeans.

I’ve never had the courage to tally all the time I’ve lost to my eating disorder and body hatred. While I’m grateful I no longer lose days at a time, I want to be more protective of the time I have left; I don’t want to lose even more precious hours to a lonely ritual that looks an awful lot like chasing my tail.

Of course, this habit is about more than vanity; it soothes me. When I get through the top half of the stack, sometimes I do a little happy dance because it’s joyful to wear pants that are soft, pliable, and never induce panic.

I’ve read articles urging me to get rid of clothes that don’t fit or don’t make me feel fabulous. I think they’re talking about my scary jeans, and yet, I can’t let go. The ritual doesn’t work without them. If I had to guess what my therapist would say about this habit, I imagine he’d conclude that I’m not actually looking for comfort; I’m looking for torture. I can hear his baritone voice: “That’s why you bought the jeans that don’t feel comfortable in the first place: torture.” We’d end up exploring my lack of trust—in my body, my appetites, my Higher Power, my recovery.

I also know the draw of this habit is partially that it’s a secret.

No one knows I do this. I would never pop upstairs and install myself in front of the mirror with an armful of denim if my husband was sitting at his desk four feet away. If my son was up there swinging a golf club or watching The Office, I would camp out in my office one floor below checking email and paying bills.

The most ideal conditions for my try-ons are when no one is in the house, though I’ve been known to take my jeans for a spin in the attic if my teenagers are asleep—nothing wakes them up, including their mother jigging upstairs because her scary jeans still fit.

The rub here is that I’m anti-secret. I believe what my therapist told me in 2001 on day one of my treatment for binge-eating, suicidal ideation, and anxiety: Secrets are toxic and take an emotional toll that you can’t know or understand unless and until you air them out.

Like anyone clinging to a secret, I have some solid defenses. Namely, this secret doesn’t cost money (I already own the jeans), hurt my relationships (no one knows!), or jeopardize anyone’s safety (it’s not Russian roulette). I’m not cheating, stealing, or lying. So what if I frantically try on my own pants to soothe my deep, lifelong anxiety about my body?

Of all the habits I’ve had over the years related to my disordered eating, trying on my clothes while alone in the house isn’t the worst. It’s not even in the top 15, given my history of bulimia, laxative abuse, compulsive running, and other troubling behaviors I was able to leave behind once I got into recovery.

But this jeans thing. I know too much to assume it’s meaningless. Shining a light on it, I suspect, will illuminate where I’m still stuck, where I’m still that lost girl in the dressing room, so very alone, so very deluded about the size of her body and its relation to her worthiness. I know what to do—open my mouth and tell someone. I know what’s on the other side of disclosure—freedom, peace, and connection. So what am I waiting for?

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Christie Tate is an author and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Carve Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Her debut memoir, Group, was a NYT best seller and has been translated into 19 languages. Her second memoir, B.F.F., was named one of the best nonfiction of the year by Amazon.

“We’d love it if you joined our spousal support group,” the wife of an attending physician said, handing me an advertisement. I was 23, and my soon-to-be husband was about to begin his medical residency. I’d been warned repeatedly that I couldn’t expect to see much of him anymore.

I glanced at my fiancé across the room, shoulders hunched and smile wide as he laughed at colleagues’ jokes between sips of champagne. His sharp blue eyes didn’t yet have dark circles beneath them. Soon, he would be more than exhausted, clocking thirty-hour shifts, working one-hundred-hour weeks.

“It’s challenging adjusting to all the hours they work. So many late evenings—and so many weekends,” the physician’s wife continued. I smiled politely as I folded the flier and tucked it in the back pocket of my jeans.

Even though I loved my future husband, part of his appeal was that he wasn’t always around. His extended absences allowed me to continue a kind of side affair.

I met Billy Blanks the same time I began studying the calorie counts on the backs of cereal boxes. It was the year 2000. I was 12, and I’d hit puberty hard. Each day, the straight lines of my girlish body seemed to be erupting. I feared the power of my womanhood. I sought a solution to tame it.

Billy’s workouts offered a solution. In the lunchroom at school one day, a friend told me about Tae Bo. “It’s like kickboxing and martial arts combined,” she said as she hesitantly picked at her sandwich. She pulled up her shirt to show off flexed, near-visible abs. “It’s a great workout. You know, in an hour, it burns over 800 calories. Plus it teaches you self-defense. Get good enough at it, and you won't have to rely on some man to protect you.”

Intrigued, I used my allowance money to buy a Tae Bo VHS at the Walmart on the hill by our house. Billy’s bulging muscles appeared in black and white on the cardboard jacket, a contrast to the bright blue background of the box.

I had a quiet affair with his videos through the rest of my adolescence. But it wasn’t his body I was attracted to. It was everything he promised. His most powerful seduction was the assurance that I would burn more calories with him than I would with anyone else.

He was just the kind of guy I’d been looking for.

Our “dates” were short initially: a half hour before dinner, a nightcap after dessert. To meet him on the screen, I descended into my parents’ unfinished basement. The room was dark, illuminated only by the glow of the television set. His video began with rhythmic clapping, music meant to manipulate your mood. My heart raced at the sound of it. A camera zoomed in on Billy mid-jab, muscles shining with oil and sweat, bright white smile gleaming in a crowded room of tightly toned middle-aged women and men with dad bods.

“I want you to be a conqueror,” Billy called out to the group of forgettable looking people. “Visualize. Vi-vi-visualize.” Everyone in the room responded with an animal scream. Then the workout began. For an hour, the crowd punched, kicked, and jabbed the empty air.

At the beginning of our relationship, I lost a few pounds.

“You look great! Have you lost weight?” one of my classmates asked. And even though I knew I had—I thought more about my weight than I did anything else—I knew the correct answer was to say, “No, I don’t think so.” It meant that I seemed carefree.

I tingled with exhilaration. This was my first time experiencing the high of weight loss.

To keep that high, I began to need Billy more and more. I snuck away with his videos after my parents were tucked into bed. I set my alarm early to spend sleepy, sweaty mornings in his care.

One evening, there was a thunderstorm. A tree struck a line, and our power went out; I couldn’t complete my workout video. I sat in my bedroom hugging my legs to my chest, rocking back and forth, back and forth. What would I do? I began to cry as I considered the consequences.

Then I heard it: the soundtrack to the video, Billy’s repetitive counting to eight. I’d recorded it in my mind. I could hear Billy’s voice as if it were my own, he a part of me. He and I were one. Wearing only an oversized grey t-shirt and a pair of ratty cotton underwear, I began to perform the memorized motions of the workout in the dark.

At the height of our relationship when I was 15, I was doing Billy four, five, six times a day. I punched and kicked and jabbed for hours. After the climax of each workout, breath heavy and sweat glistening, I raced to the bathroom. I stepped on the scale. Then I stumbled back to the basement for more.

But eventually, I grew tired of him. It felt like he made so many demands. I missed parties. I skipped sporting events. I said no to dates. I even quit basketball, an extracurricular I loved—all because I believed more time with him would lead to less of me.

Years passed. In college, I ventured out a bit. I didn’t want my roommates to see how abusive this relationship had become, so I mixed it up. Some time at the gym. Many runs outdoors. But also, of course, the videos; I would always have a particular affair with those videos.

Eventually, I met the man I would marry. Our relationship began after we danced together for hours at a mutual friend’s wedding. I’m sure this time together burned many calories—but with him, I wasn’t counting.

I loved his body, his sense of humor, his smile. He was a med student. He had to study long hours—and you know? I loved that, too. I loved that he left me alone, that his absence allowed for my long-standing side affair. I never would have fallen for a man who needed all of me full-time.

On Valentine’s Day that year, he was scheduled to work a long shift. When I returned from work in the evening, I was tired from my long day, too. I saw he’d left a card, a box of candy, a bunch of roses on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” I texted him as I sniffed the petals of a red rose, turning to our bedroom to change into a sports bra and running shorts. I noticed my legs, not how they looked, but how they felt—achy and sore.

And for a minute, I heard it, his voice in my head as if it were my own. The words of the one I truly loved, the one who loved me in return. And for a moment, I believed him. I believed I could let myself go.

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Anna Rollins's forthcoming memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, (Eerdmans, December 9, 2025) examines the rhyming scripts of evangelical purity culture and diet culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, NBCNews THINK, HuffPost Personal, Newsweek, and other outlets. She is a 2025 Tamarack Foundation for the Arts Literary Arts Fellow. Follow her on Instagram and Substack @annajrollins or at annajrollins.com

Sixteen weeks into my second pregnancy, I had a miscarriage, alone at home on an otherwise unremarkable autumn afternoon. I had officially entered the supposed “safe zone” of the second trimester, the point in pregnancy where risks of fetal complications and loss drop dramatically. By the time I saw bright red blood, I was certain I was “out of the woods.” I had finally begun to wrap my mind around the idea of having another child. My husband and I were excited to introduce a newborn into the confident rhythm we had established with our three-and-a-half-year-old son. It was the beginning of one of the most devastating and profound experiences of my life.

As a clinical psychologist who specializes in reproductive and maternal mental health, I was well aware that up to 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I knew the heart-wrenching reality of that experience as well as I could without having yet lived through it myself. Throughout my own pregnancy, I’d listened to heartbreaking stories of pregnancy loss, including chemical pregnancies, ectopic pregnancies, twin loss, infant loss, stillbirths, and terminations for medical reasons. I’d sat with countless women as they processed their grief, how their histories and experiences compounded those feelings, and how the unfortunate silence, stigma, and shame that so often follow pregnancy and infant loss heightened their pain. Now, however, my theoretical knowledge of the experience became corporeal.

Despite the fact that up to 25 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage (the actual number being likely much higher due to chemical pregnancies and underreporting), research shows that a majority of women feel a sense of shame, self-blame, and guilt in the aftermath of pregnancy loss. Cultural ideas about women’s bodies and patriarchal messages have wormed their way into women’s own perceptions of themselves, firmly planting the idea that if we haven’t “successfully” carried a healthy baby to term, our bodies must be somehow defective or inadequate, or we must have done something “wrong” to cause the loss. However, most miscarriages are the result of fetal chromosomal abnormalities, not the result of anything a woman did or didn’t do. Despite this, a national survey found that people believed miscarriage could be caused by going through a stressful event (76 percent of responders), lifting a heavy object (64 percent), previously having an intrauterine device (IUD) (28 percent), or taking birth control pills (22 percent). The misconceptions surrounding miscarriage get even wilder: The survey found 21 percent of people believed it could be caused by getting into an argument, 7 percent thought it could be caused by moderate exercise, and 4 percent thought it could be caused by having sex.

In my practice, I’ve found that the impulse to blame ourselves is often about perceptions of control. If I did something wrong and this is my fault, that means maybe I can do things differently the next time around and therefore change the outcome. There is shame in those thoughts, but perversely, there is also a sense of agency. That grasp for control is closely related to the cultural stigma attached to pregnancy loss that prevents women from talking about it openly and breeds isolation and misinformation. But when women know the facts about miscarriage and why it happens, they are less likely to blame themselves.

We live in a culture that tells women that so many of the challenges they face are somehow our fault and that whatever we’re feeling about those challenges should be kept quiet. That cultural message often keeps us from talking about the most important and real experiences in our lives, overwhelmed by the fear that if we do speak our truths, we will be met with stunned stares or awkward lapses in conversations. But in the absence of real, nuanced, and sometimes messy conversations about the truth of our experiences, we feel ashamed and often end up turning our pain inward, convinced we should be able to swallow it and push through.

Even as someone who fully believes in the importance of talking about stigmatized issues like pregnancy loss, sexual trauma, anxiety and depression, and aging, I know from experience that doing so is hard. There’s no single source of the pressure to stay silent about these taboo subjects; it’s in the water, so to speak. Women go through so many potentially momentous transitions over the course of their lives, inhabiting many roles and navigating continually changing bodies while fielding messages from a culture hellbent on telling them how to look, how to feel, how to act, how to be at every available opportunity. In so many moments in a woman’s life, there’s an insidious whisper: This is too messy. Don’t talk about it.

It is no surprise that shame is often woven throughout the details of my patients’ stories, adding an additional layer of pain to their experience. Time and time again, I’ve seen women open up about insecurities, anger, loneliness, trauma, and other complex feelings they haven’t shared widely before, for fear of how their emotions would be received. In my work, I am privileged to have the opportunity to help women sensitively untangle their stories from the shame that so often surrounds them. I am privileged to see—and even more so to feel—the revolutionary power of what happens when they break through the pressure to stay quiet and instead normalize talking about their experiences.

I experienced this firsthand after my miscarriage. Throughout the ordeal, my innate impulse was not to stay silent, but to connect. As the miscarriage was happening and in its immediate aftermath, I texted my family and closest friends: I had a miscarriage. I was open about the emotional and physiological pain of navigating what turned out to be full-blown labor alone at home, having to cut the umbilical cord myself, hemorrhaging, and undergoing an unmedicated dilation and curettage (D&C). I was candid about my milk coming in, looking pregnant for days following my loss, the bone-chilling all-day anxiety. I didn’t keep it in; I let it out.

In the years since my loss, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on why I didn’t feel the searing sense of shame and the impulse to self- blame that so many women do in this dark and disorienting period. Part of it, I’m sure, was that I knew I had sturdy support around me: my husband, family, friends, colleagues, a therapist. My training as a psychologist may also have helped bolster my natural rejection of the shame that so often surrounds pregnancy loss, not to mention the years I had spent talking about this very shame with patients in my practice. I had learned from the hours upon hours of hearing women’s stories and helping them process their feelings about the full spectrum of emotions surrounding loss: anguish, anger, fear, dread, hopelessness. Through working with these women, I saw firsthand that we bring our own personal histories to our grief—in other words, it’s learned. The fact that I didn’t reflexively feel the impulse to blame myself for the miscarriage underscored that this shame is not necessarily innate.

But while I knew my miscarriage was not a failing of my body, that I hadn’t done anything to deserve or bring about this outcome, this knowledge could not protect me from the societal stigma. My need to connect over it was instinctual, but reactions from other people made me second-guess myself. Should I not have shared? Were the details of my loss too much? Should I be over this by now? In the weeks after my loss, a friend inquired about how I was doing, and I asked if she wanted to see photos of the daughter I’d just recently lost—another friend, a midwife, had met me at my doctor’s office amid this torturous event and had the foresight to take photos following the D&C procedure, knowing I might one day cherish the images as a testament to my child’s brief existence. She was here. She was mine. My friend said she did want to see the photos, but upon seeing them, she recoiled, a look of horror and fear on her face.

I was blindsided by her reaction. At the same time, I found strange comfort in knowing that I was not alone in experiencing that prickly sense of alienation. I knew that millions of women worldwide were familiar with that deep ache.

Fortunately, I had a dedicated place in my life to talk about both my experience and the societal stigma around it. One of the first phone calls I made the day after my miscarriage was to my therapist, Valerie. Therapy offers a space to fully unpack feelings, understand the roots of those feelings, and feel seen and understood. It can also be one of the most powerful spaces from which to begin normalizing these stigmatized issues, and not only because therapy is a safe place to talk about them. By harnessing the power of neuroplasticity—the process by which experiences and feelings influence the actual structure and functional ability of the brain—talking with a trained professional can literally change our brain chemistry, allowing us to better handle fear and difficult emotions and gain confidence.

Exploring my multilayered grief with my therapist on a weekly basis was nothing short of sacred. She bore witness to the ebb and flow of the ever-so-sharp feelings that poked and prodded my days in the aftermath of my loss. I was technically postpartum but my arms were empty, and I was hit hard by my body’s hormonal changes. Valerie was with me every step of the way, validating the spectrum of feelings I experienced, empathizing with the intense pain that washed over me, listening to my outrage as people spewed ill-fitting platitudes. This ritual of 50-minute sessions strung together over weeks and months was vital to my healing and emboldened me to honor my loss by talking about it.

The antidote to the shame and stigma that shapes women’s lives is to replace silence with telling our stories. Intimate conversations like the ones that take place with a trained mental health professional are among the most essential ways we can address stigma and shame in our own lives, whether we go into the session with that objective or not. But what if we could create safe spaces to talk outside the walls of a clinician’s office?

Talking about our experiences and addressing the complex feelings that surround them doesn’t necessarily have to be shouted from the rooftops. You don’t have to blast it out on social media or write about it in a book with the hope of shifting the cultural landscape. I’m simply advocating for us, as women, to begin talking about the things that we don’t talk enough about, to normalize conversations about the things that make us feel alone. Mustering the courage to crack open the door to the unpolished truth of our lived experiences has the potential to be both personally and culturally transformative.

When I got on the phone with Valerie the first time after my miscarriage, I felt numb. But as I recited the heinous details of the experience, my initial numbness morphed into something else entirely: relief. I articulated my chaotic feelings and discussed how best to care for myself emotionally, and for me, talking felt like a lifeline, an essential way to process the trauma I’d been through. Although I’d never know the baby I was no longer carrying, I wanted to acknowledge her brief existence, the moments when I’d held her in my window-clad, blue-tiled bathroom after my doctor instructed me over the phone how to cut the umbilical cord. This meant something to me. How could it not?

What I didn’t expect, however, was how much talking about this experience in therapy would help normalize these conversations with other people in my life, including conversations with people about the unintentionally hurtful comments that came my way in the wake of my loss. There was one friend in particular who’d gone down the “at least” rabbit hole with me mere hours after my baby fell from my body—At least you have a healthy child, at least you know you can get pregnant, at least you’ve got a thriving career. I knew she’d been well-intentioned, but I didn’t want her lack of knowledge about what I was feeling to create additional hurt for me. When I spoke to Valerie about this interaction, I was allowed the space to really think through how I felt, what I wanted to convey to my friend (and others like her) and why.

This preparation gave me new insight into the roadblocks to vulnerability that stop women from sharing their stories. I could articulate how the “at least” cycle of thinking undermines the legitimacy of a traumatic experience and shuts the other person down, even when that was not the intention. I could express what would be more supportive: being present, checking in to ask how I was doing, not trying to make me feel better or hurry my process along but just being with me in the whiplash of it all, side by side, relating over the hard stuff.

My friend got it and appreciated the feedback. She thought focusing on the “good” things happening in my life would help balance out the excruciating anguish of the loss. I explained that I was still very aware of the wonderful things I had in my life and that this loss didn’t erase that beauty, but I had to sink into the pain because the pain was searing. She understood that. Following our conversation, she showed up in such sensitive and loving ways.

I knew talking about my miscarriage was a necessity for my personal healing, but talking about it also changed the course of my professional life. The trauma was seared into my psyche in the same ways that so many other women’s experiences shaped them. I wanted to somehow make a dent in the societal silence, to investigate why women were prone to blaming themselves and thinking their bodies had somehow failed. I wanted to reach women who wouldn’t necessarily sit in my office. I wanted a zeitgeist shift.

I know from my own experience and that of my patients, as well as a well-established body of research, that when we don’t allow ourselves to feel whatever it is we are truly feeling, we suffer more. Moreover, I’ve learned—through reading piles of books, sitting in seminars en route to completing my doctoral degree in clinical psychology, and through day-to-day life—that feeling our feelings in their entirety and speaking those feelings out loud makes space for essential insights, new pockets of peace, and, ultimately, the eradication of silence, stigma, and shame. The more we speak up about our hardships, our struggles, and our pain, the sooner we usher in the change we need . . . and deserve.

Adapted with permission from Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women's Lives by Jessica Zucker, PhD (PESI Publishing, Inc.).

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Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the author of the award-winning book I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, a Movement. Jessica is the creator of the viral #IHadaMiscarriage campaign. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Vogue, and Harvard Business Review, among others. She’s been featured on NPR, CNN, The Today Show, and Good Morning America and earned advanced degrees from New York University and Harvard University. Her second book, NORMALIZE IT: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives, is out now and available everywhere books are sold.

My first thought in the morning is, “What if I accidentally killed my cat?” Once I’m sure she’s alive, I check her body for injuries and her food for parasites, convinced I’ve done something to cause her harm. Checking once isn’t enough. I have to do it multiple times in intervals of five. Five is a safe number. I will do this ten more times today, minimum. The checking provides a temporary relief, but I need to do what’s necessary to prevent a total meltdown.

It takes several hours before I’m ready to start my day. I worry constantly about everything: money, illness, homelessness, incarceration, ending up alone. Each time I try to make progress, the thoughts begin again: “What if I can’t get a job? What if I’m actually dying? What if I have a rodent problem and lose my home? What if I get sued?” The only fix comes in endless rumination, mentally reviewing the possibilities until I find a thought that makes me calm. Sometimes this involves Google searches: “Who can legally take my home? What are the signs of a stroke in animals? Can I go to jail for failure to pay student loans? Can I get sick from one day old bread?” I will read pages upon pages for peace of mind. Nothing is certain, and this means I never get the answers I’m looking for.

I know this research does more harm than good, but I can’t help it.

Sitting around will only fuel the rumination; after all, the first rule of recovery is to get up and do something—anything but think. It’s a Herculean effort, but I eventually get out of bed. Working from home is a blessing and a curse; I work on my own terms, but it gives my disorder more leeway. More often than not, I have to force myself to do what is needed.

Mindless television programs are on in the background at all times: 60 Days In, Hoarders, My 600-lb Life, My Strange Addiction. Other times, I play Lifetime movies, or shows from the Game Show Network. Anything to fill my head to block intrusive thoughts. If not television, then music. There will be no silence in my house. This also does little to help, though some compulsions are tamer than others.

I wash my hands after touching any surface, lest my body become “contaminated.” With what? Invisible germs, imaginary viruses, mold spores that aren’t there. I can’t leave a room without touching the doorframe five times. When I’m more wired up, I have to flick the light switch on and off five times two. If I don’t, bad things will happen. What bad things? I don’t know. Just really bad things. I’ve grown superstitious as well. Moving or discarding certain items will bring bad luck. I pick at my skin and pull my hair, sometimes I even hit myself in the face or head. I tell my brain to shut up. It doesn’t listen, and the cycle repeats.

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Five.”

…and if it doesn’t feel just right, I start again.

Concepts like “it” and “bad” remain undefined, yet my fear of them drives the compulsions to continue. It doesn’t matter that the thoughts are nonsensical; they’re intrusive, never-ending, and urgent. I have to feed the monster. It’ll eat me alive if I don’t. Momentary reprieves are the smallest consolations.

All of this worrying gets me nowhere other than exactly where I started: anxious out of my mind, repeating the same tasks that don’t serve any real purpose. By afternoon, I’m exhausted. In the evenings, I have chest pain. In the night, it grows harder to breathe, let alone sleep. I can feel this taking years off my life. I never thought I’d see thirty, yet here I am. Still, I can’t imagine doing this for another ten years.

My resolve for recovery is getting lower. If this is how it’s going to be, why try so hard to fight for a marginal improvement? The only break I get is sleep. I need my rest so I can wake up again the next day. This brings more anxiety: what if tomorrow is the same, or worse? These kinds of thoughts follow me into my dreams.

This is an average day living with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder, also known as OCD, is a mental health disorder marked by recurrent thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive actions (compulsions). It’s a distressing condition that preys on a person’s deepest fears, turning potential into uncertainty, and the unknown into catastrophe.

I’ve been living with OCD since I was eight years old, and the illness has only intensified in the last two decades. Medication has helped, but the biggest “what if” lurks: what if this stops working, or I can’t afford treatment, and I end up exactly where I was?

As burdensome as my current symptoms are, it was much worse before I entered treatment. Back then, OCD consumed my life in irrational ways. I can laugh now, but at the time, it felt like hell on earth.

For three years, I was convinced there were rodents living in my apartment. I would spend entire nights with my ear to the wall listening for the most minute noises. The sound was actually from rain and wind in the gutter, but my brain would say, “What if? Listen one more time, just one more time, then you can go to sleep.” The cycle would repeat until after five a.m. when I’d get up for school and work.

Somewhere around my twentieth birthday, I developed a shellfish allergy. In response to this, I would avoid food just to avoid contamination. When forced to eat, I would purge afterward because I didn’t ever trust the cook to keep food clean enough. My senior year of college, someone brought shellfish into a class I was in. I locked myself in the bathroom and refused to come out until class was over. Even after that day, I refused to sit in the spot where she had been.

Later that same year, upon flu season, I locked myself in a handicapped bathroom stall and wouldn’t come out until I’d washed my hands in four intervals of fifty-five to guarantee that I wouldn’t get sick. I didn’t care about being clean; I cared about dying—a fate sealed by the lack of clean hands.

As I grew older, my compulsions became more mental than physical. I fell into a pattern of rumination: repeatedly replaying and analyzing a thought or event in an effort to analyze it. This was due, in part, to the intensifying intrusive thoughts. I worried I was a bad person. I was terrified of hurting someone, or worse, making someone die. In fact, I was convinced I was violent, or a deviant. There was no factual basis for this, but OCD liked to say, “Yeah, but what if you are? What if you are and everyone knows? What if you’re that kind of person who doesn’t deserve to be happy?”

The conversation around OCD is heavily sanitized, dressed up as “quirky,” “neat,” or “overly anal” character flaws. The reality is far more draining. It has nothing to do with neatness or order; it’s about what happens if things aren’t “just so.” My hand-washing compulsion isn’t driven by cleanliness but a fear of contracting an illness I may or may not have come into contact with. Compulsions are performed in a vain attempt at repose.

OCD isn’t kind to its victims. Even the best of therapies can fail as this disorder is difficult to treat. The “brain lock” of anxiety you get stuck in is incredibly hard to overcome.

A common colloquialism these days is, “I let my intrusive thoughts win!” when the person is talking about something trivial like dyeing their hair or buying an unnecessary item. Everyone has intrusive thoughts from time to time, but the difference in OCD patients is the frequency fixation of the notion itself.

In a sense, I give into my intrusive thoughts each time I perform a compulsion. However, if I were truly to give in to the nature of these thoughts, I’d likely be institutionalized or in jail. My intrusive thoughts are sometimes violent or sexual in nature. This is a little-talked-about byproduct of OCD, either out of shame or stigma. People outside of the OCD world seldom understand that these thoughts are unwanted and involuntary.

For years, I resisted getting help not because of the stigma around psychiatric medication. Eventually, I knew if I didn’t seek treatment, I’d take my life. I’d already tried to kill myself too many times before to doubt the intent.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and was put on medication.

Most of the time, the meds I take help, though this doesn’t come without a new set of worries. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the main type of treatment for OCD. It took years to find a medication that was actually helpful. Fluvoxamine is the only thing that’s worked for me, but I’m already approaching the maximum dose. After this, there are no more options. I’m worried about that day coming soon. I’m only thirty now; I likely have fifty-plus years left to go in life. The medication is also not a cure-all. The thoughts are less loud, but they’re still there every day. So many hours are wasted worrying, or checking, or trying to fix what (probably) isn’t there.

It occurs to me that I can’t spend the rest of my life living this way. It’s impractical to rot in bed when I have to work. This spurs thoughts of homelessness: what if I can’t work, and lose my job, can’t pay my bills and ultimately end up on the street?

I have to work harder to have a normal life.

And such a thing may never come.

During my late twenties, I hit a bit of a plateau. Things weren’t perfect, but I was doing better than I had in ages. All of the pain and anxiety resurfaced after the concurrent deaths of my mother and grandmother. My grief was superseded by a spike in my OCD symptoms, and I’ve been coping with the changes ever since. I don’t know what recovery looks like for me now. It seems to have only gotten worse with age. I’m hoping for a miracle, but this is the reality: I may be dealing with a severe version of this disorder for years to come.

There is still a real chance I will die young. Suicide rates in OCD patients are higher than the average population. I wish more than anything I didn’t have this disorder. It’s ruined my life, and I can see it taking more though I have nothing left to give.

Only one positive thing has come from my OCD experience, and that’s been the ability to help others.

I talk very openly about my OCD experience; the good, the bad, and the unforgivably ugly. It didn’t start out as an altruistic act. I have a hard time shutting up when times are tough, especially when this disorder is such a large part of my life. In talking about my symptoms, I’ve helped people close to me recognize it in themselves. Even among medical professionals, OCD is an understudied illness that isn’t well understood. It can take years to receive a proper diagnosis, and treatment itself involves hard work and enough mediation to take out a rhinoceros.

In an age of mental health awareness, OCD is still stigmatized in a different way than other illnesses. OCD is underestimated by the general public, leaving its destruction unrecognizable to most. It’s only after talking about my more severe spikes have loved ones recognized when their own thought patterns aren’t normal. Many are still reluctant to seek treatment. This is understandable to me. A doctor who isn’t familiar with the nature of OCD can do more harm than good.

I once saw a therapist who specialized in general mental health but knew very little about OCD. When I relayed the nature of my harm-related intrusive thoughts, they said they didn’t believe in intrusive thoughts, and that this was my own intuition. It fucked me up for months. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, terrified of ostracization. The worry never goes away; no fear of mine ever does.

It’s been ten years since that appointment. I know now that I’m not a predator, and I would never hurt a soul. I will not die of any diseases, and my cat is still purring by my side. But in the rare tranquil moments comes a whisper, a clot of doubt in my mind: “Well…what if?”

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Anastasia Jill (they/them) is a queer writer living in Central Florida. They have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several other honors. Their work has been featured or is upcoming with Poets.org, Sundog Lit, Flash Fiction Online, Contemporary Verse 2, Broken Pencil, and more.

Therapy can be hard. You go in expecting breakthroughs and wisdom, but sometimes what you get instead is a weird question or a strange assignment that makes you roll your eyes before it makes any sense. And yet, in the middle of the emotional heavy lifting, something unexpectedly funny can happen, like being asked to name the voice in your head that tells you you’re not good enough. I wasn’t prepared for the answer that came out of my mouth, or the memory it unearthed.

“So you’ve said there’s a voice in your head. What does it sound like?” my therapist prompted during our second session. I’d reached out to David at age forty, desperate to figure out how to quiet the self-loathing that accompanied me through every waking moment.

“Well, it’s me,” I said after a minute of thinking. “I mean, it’s my voice telling me how much I suck, how I’m not skinny enough, or successful enough, or smart enough, over and over. It’s like a tape or film strip that keeps running from the time I wake up in the morning until I go to bed.”

He nodded. “Is the tape running when you’re at work?”

I almost laughed in response—it never stopped. “Oh, it’s running all of the time in an endless loop,” I said. “So even when I’m doing a presentation or leading a meeting, I have to try to quiet the voice on the tape and do the work I need to do. It’s pretty exhausting, and I wonder what it would be like if it wasn’t running. Imagine everything more I could do then. Just think about all of those gold stars I could get!”

I had told David about the gold-stars thing early on, and he knew how much I liked to achieve. As we got to know each other, I always tried to make him smile or laugh during every session, especially when I needed a little break.

He paused, considering. “Well, why don’t we try to give the voice a name, because even if it’s coming from you, it’s really just a side of you, and it might be helpful to name it,” he said.

“Like, a real name?” I asked. “What kind of name? Like Susannah or Percy or maybe Fleetwood Mac? How do I know what to call it?”

I was a little annoyed by this exercise because I wasn’t yet comfortable with our seemingly random circles and didn’t know to trust David’s methods, and sometimes I wanted those handy mile markers of progress.

“Can you think of somebody you don’t like, somebody who wronged you in some way? That could be a good way to give a name to the self-loathing for our purposes here.”

“SCOTT KENNEDY!” I shouted like a contestant on a quiz show. David looked surprised that I was so certain this could be the right name, but I knew it was.

Scott Kennedy. The red-headed boy from second grade at Chandlersville Elementary. He picked on me all the time, teasing me and chasing me on the playground.

One spring day at recess, I was on the monkey bars and he kept pulling my legs from below. I asked him to stop. He did it again and I asked him to stop again. The third time, I jumped down, pushed him to the ground, and pinned his arms down the way my brother did when he tickled me, but instead of tickling, I punched him right in the face as hard as I could. I’d asked him to stop picking on me, and he just wouldn’t listen. So I punched him again. Maybe three times. Mom had to come pick me up from the principal’s office, and she could barely keep a straight face on the way home. She again had to stifle a laugh when she shared over dinner that the youngest Gormley was sent home from second grade for beating up Scott Kennedy by the monkey bars.

I hadn’t thought about that kid for thirty years, and here we were, sitting in my therapist’s office in Manhattan talking about Scott Kennedy. I was laughing so hard at the memory, I forgot we were supposed to be working on something important.

David smiled. “So how do you feel about Scott Kennedy—the voice, not the kid you beat up on the playground?”

“What do you mean, how do I feel about him?” I asked. “He’s just always there, reminding me that I’m not good enough. I guess I’ve gotten used to it, and I’m still getting everything done in life. It’s just—God, it’s exhausting sometimes.”

“Well,” David prodded. “Do you think Scott Kennedy is right about you?”

I paused. “I don’t know. I mean, yes,” I answered. “I think he must be right even though I hate it—hate him—and wish the voice—sorry—that he would shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

“Why don’t you stand up for yourself?” David asked. “Can you tell him to fuck off and leave you alone?”

It was a good question. “I don’t know,” I responded. “I’ve never tried, because I don’t know what I would say. I guess I agree with him when he tells me I’m ugly and not smart enough, that I’ll never really succeed, so I just try not to listen, but it’s always there. And yes, I know that by most measures I’m doing okay, that I’m attractive and successful yadda yadda, but I just wish I could feel good about myself. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, that makes sense,” David said, “but I think you’re missing something by not standing up to him.”

I sat there silently, wishing I could give David what he wanted but getting frustrated because I didn’t know how to do what he was suggesting, didn’t know how to feel something other than what I’d been feeling for so long. He saw my furrowed brow and after a few minutes suggested another method of understanding.

“So,” he said. “We know what Scott Kennedy thinks of you. What about other people who know you—really know you?”

“You mean like work people?” I started. “They all think I’m great—smart, funny, successful Sarah, the one you want to be your boss and the one you want to have drinks with after work. But I don’t think they count because they only see me at work.”

“Well, who else might you trust?” he asked. “You’ve told me about your DePauw friends. Do you think they really know who you are? I want you to picture them walking into your apartment, how they would greet you, and how they might describe you.”

I couldn’t talk because the tears started coming fast, hot streaks burning down my face, snot starting to drip from my nose. There were no words to describe my friends to David, what they meant to me, the feeling that came over me when I started seeing their faces one at a time as they came into my fancy apartment on West Twenty-Third, the one my Martha Stewart salary helped pay for, with the big terrace and views over the High Line and the Hudson River. Brooks, then Nancy and Tippett, Shawna, Hegman, and Fran. Fran with her sweet smile and “Hi, Gorms,” as she rounded out the crew. I could hear their voices, these friends of mine, my girls, and I could see them light up when they saw me, feel Brooks hugging me extra hard with one of her special squeezes at the end.

I was crying because David brought me there, right up to the place where I was going to have to acknowledge that the people who knew me best actually adored me. What I didn’t know yet was that even if you understand something intellectually, it can take years to let yourself believe it and even longer to let yourself feel it. And while I still have moments of being too hard on myself, I’ve learned to quiet my persistent self-critic, and I love that little girl who beat up Scott Kennedy more every day.

Parts of this essay are reprinted from The Order of Things: A Memoir About Chasing Joy (Salt Creek Publishing, 2024).

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Sarah Gormley is a writer and art gallery owner living in Columbus, Ohio. Her undergraduate degree from DePauw University reinforced an early love for literature and writing, while the heavy sprinkling of liberal-arts fairy dust taught her how to analyze and articulate a clear point of view. She rounded out this foundation with concentrations in marketing and operations from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Today, Gormley owns a contemporary art gallery, Sarah Gormley Gallery, that operates from the belief that original art can be a source of joy for everyone and actively eschews pretense of any kind. She opened the gallery in 2019, twenty-five years after her Grandma Cameron gifted her with her first piece of original art.

June 2011

I didn’t know what to expect from the True Happiness Company—crystal healing? bloodletting?—but I didn’t expect Bob Lyon.

Amma first found Bob on one of her infamous late-night Google searches. Amma—my very sweet, very bright former cancer research scientist mother—has two master’s degrees, in biochemistry and biotechnology. She also once nearly accepted a job scooping eyeballs out of dead bodies, despite the fact that she faints at the sight of blood. People think it’s easy to know yourself, your boundaries and fears and limits, but decision-making is a convoluted process. Necessity has a way of overpowering all other considerations. A frequenter of Tony Robbins seminars and an inspirational speech addict, Amma has a long-standing history of finding sketchy people on the Internet and paying them too much money to do whatever they promise to do: turn our sad, dying lawn into a lush blanket of green, teach her how to get rich quick in the stock market or, in this case, save her daughter’s life.

She called Bob on her way to work.

“Pull over,” he instructed. “Pull over right now.”

Alarmed, Amma pulled over on a side street of Baltimore.

“If you do not bring your daughter here, she WILL be dead.”

It is one thing to have a worst fear nebulously haunt the back of your mind and quite another to hear it pronounced as an inevitability by a strong, commanding voice who has published more than a dozen books and hosted seminars worldwide. Emails were exchanged. An appointment was made.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Amma hadn’t found Bob’s website on her own; she’d first found a blog written by a woman whose son had been suicidal. Amma called her, and the woman said, “Take your daughter to see Bob Lyon now.”

If you are a parent, if you have ever been confused and desperate and aching for your children, then you know the tug of a fellow mother’s heartfelt advice. Amma made all her parenting decisions based on these kinds of recommendations; I ended up playing the violin because she sat next to a woman at my first orchestra concert who insisted that once you allow a child to quit one thing, they become a quitter for the rest of their lives. I was in the third grade and spent the next ten years taking private violin lessons in the home of a woman who collected hot sauce and owned eight cats. Shelves and shelves of hot sauce filled the entryway, the living room where I had my lessons, and the kitchen, of course. This teacher fed squirrels out of her hand on her back porch during my lesson while I dreamed of playing the flute. When I asked Amma years later why I hadn’t been allowed to switch, she shrugged and answered, “I sat next to this woman who said . . .”

If the confident word of a stranger could dictate what instrument I played, imagine how much more weight it carried when Amma was faced with a suicidal daughter she could not seem to save.

The first thing I said to Bob Lyon was, “I don’t have to do shit,” as I flounced into the soft corner creases of a once-white couch in his living room.

At least, that is his version of our first meeting: me waltzing into his home in back-country Georgia and cursing before he can get a word in edgewise. Though I’m certain he spoke first, I’ve since forgotten what he said that put me on the defensive. At age nineteen, I didn’t typically curse at adults—part of that Indian “respect your elders” thing—plus cursing tended to go over poorly. But Bob Lyon was unperturbed.

“No,” he said. “You really don’t.”

I flinched. His response was disconcerting because he was the first adult I’d met who I couldn’t unnerve. Had he not spoken first? Was I making it up? Was I the kind of person who dropped expletives unprovoked? This feeling of disorientation—this constant second-guessing of myself—pervaded our entire relationship. My memory buckled under the force of his confidence.

Bob Lyon looked like a giant, unamused teddy bear when I showed up in his living room that day. “Living room” was a misnomer: nothing about that room inspired the will to live. Instead of the framed diplomas you’d find on the walls of a typical psychologist’s office, his walls boasted gold-framed animal prints—one of a Siamese cat and another of two intertwined peacocks. The two couches formed an L shape facing the center of the room. A plastic chandelier was fixed to a stippled ceiling overlooked by the past two decades of decorating trends. To my left sat a textured gold floor lamp that looked like it worked weekends at the Olive Garden. A tiny statue of Jesus on his fireplace was the only indication that he was Mormon—but I wouldn’t learn of this fact for another four years.

In the center of the room sat Bob, this big, old white man in a rocking chair. The chair was wooden, the kind you’d expect to find on a wraparound porch with Buffalo Bill kicking up his cowboy boots, resting a rifle on his lap. Bob wore an untucked plaid shirt and blue jeans. He wore no shoes, just thick, white socks. My first impression of him was “redneck.” This is also my final impression, though my feelings toward him have taken a wild detour to arrive back where they started.

“You’re right. You don’t have to do anything. But,” he said lightly, “I know something you don’t.”

“Okay.” I knew I was being set up. Still, I wanted to get to the punch line more than I wanted to fight. “What?” I conceded.

His eyes bored into me with such intensity that I felt like I’d been caught naked on the shoulder of the expressway. I wet my lips and averted my eyes.

“I know how to be happy.” He spoke quietly now. “Look, kid, you’re stuck here for three days. Your parents won’t let you leave. You’re welcome to go back downstairs and watch TV. Or go outside and walk the grounds. We’ve got some nice woods out here and a lake behind the house. But you are so miserable that your life couldn’t possibly get any worse. You’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.”

That was it. His big pitch. Looking back, I did have things to lose: my agency, my values, the sanctity of my body. How could I have known that a shot at his version of happiness meant trading it all in?

In the eight years that I was in his orbit, he would recount this story of how we met so many times, to so many different people, that it became canon in the True Happiness community. He’d emphasize how I “flounced” to convey my spunk and how much he liked it: She didn’t just sit, she flounced. He’d flick his wrists to illustrate my miniskirt bouncing onto the pleather surface of his couch. Then he’d point to the corner where I sat. Here, he’d interrupt himself to observe how he remembered exactly where everyone had sat the first time they’d met him. He always phrased it that way: they met him. There was an air of immutability and pleasant anticipation in his telling. The meeting of two great minds.

But very different feelings pervade my memory of our first meeting. Anger, as I climbed into the back of my mom’s minivan in our Maryland suburb. Resentment, as the ride progressed, and I approximated how far south we had traveled by averaging the number of Cracker Barrel signs on the roadside. Fear, as we pulled into a nondescript driveway in the middle of nowhere at midnight. Disbelief, as my mom fished a crumpled piece of paper out of her handbag and smoothed it against the dash, insisting she had instructions to “follow the lighted stairs to the basement guest quarters.” Unease, as I watched my parents disembark and do as they were told.

I did not choose to be in his living room, but choices become limited when you have spent the past three and a half years sort of trying to die. There is some debate over whether my actions were suicide attempts or suicidal gestures. I am unclear on the distinction here. All I can tell you is that killing yourself is harder than it sounds. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, I swallowed pills over and over. I drank ant poison (doesn’t work on mammals). I tried to hang myself but didn’t know how to secure the rope to the ceiling.

Living is hard and dying is harder.

People assume that when you attempt suicide, in that moment, you have reached rock bottom. This is not the case. Attempting is an act of hope–that the pain will end. Those who wronged you will repent. Your eulogy will be delivered by a tearful boyfriend who realizes too late he was in the presence of greatness. Or, okay, ex-boyfriend.

It is after you’ve attempted and failed too many times that you hit bottom. Your cries for help are the stale potato chips abandoned at the bottom of the bag after all the good ones have been eaten. You’ve swallowed the pills (“I am going to start her on twenty-five milligrams of Zoloft”), swallowed the other pills (“Give her these vitamin D supplements and we’ll retest her blood again in a month”), agreed to the acupuncturist’s tiny needles (“Are your feet always this cold? How bad do your menstrual cramps get?”), consulted the environmental therapist (“Have you checked the basement for mold?”), and been subjected to a slew of plain old regular psychologists that speak to you as though you have the IQ of a cantaloupe.

Rock bottom is a beige couch in an old man’s living room in the middle of nowhere, Georgia.

Please note: Bob Lyon and the True Happiness Company are pseudonyms.

Reprinted with permission from The True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi (Random House).

The True Happiness Company was our January 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick. Purchase the book via our Bookshop storefront or wherever you buy books, or check it out from your local library.

Watch our Open Secrets Book Club interview with Veena Dinavahi:

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Veena Dinavahi is an Indian American writer who divides her time between Connecticut and New York. Her personal essays have appeared in The Rumpus and Pulp Magazine. She holds a degree in psychology from Columbia University and currently works in the fashion industry. Her memoir The True Happiness Company: How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That is out now from Random House.

2001, Age 20 - Beijing, China

I arrive in Beijing in late August. The massive city is hard to wrap my head around. The students in my program are transported by a small bus from the airport to the international student dorm. To my surprise, my home for the next several months is more like a duo-occupancy hotel room with daily cleaning service than the actual dorms where local students stay, packed seven to a room.

My new classmates are mostly from Stanford, Vanderbilt, and other fancy private liberal arts schools. Only a few are from giant public universities like mine—a nice, freckled hapa boy from University of New Mexico and a spunky girl from University of Washington. No one cares what a Flinn scholar is and I don’t mention it, so most of my new peers assume I’m an unremarkable, “State School” student.

Because my Mandarin is good enough to pass for a native speaker in Beijing, whenever I ask for directions, no matter how polite or deferential my manners, I am always met with open hostility instead of the kind patience offered my white or even Korean-American classmates. Like stereotypical New Yorkers, Beijing locals have no moment to spare for me. I look and sound Chinese enough—I should know how to figure out my own way instead of interrupting their day.

Mere weeks after our arrival, local students trample through our international dorm hallways late at night, pounding on each door. “Turn on your TVs!” they shout, echoing down the hall.

I am startled by the interruption in what had been a quiet night. “What’s going on?” I ask. We all ask the same question. Somehow, I wander into a classmate’s dorm room where several students are gathered around a small television. We huddle together on the edge of the two beds and watch in shock as replays of planes crashing into the Twin Towers is displayed on the screen. Is this real?

In the coming days, we’re told that the home we’d left behind would never be the same again. America would never be the same. What does this mean? How can such a big change happen while I am away? What will it be like to go back home?

The hostility from locals, the cold shoulder from many of the program-mates, and the stress wears me down. Homesickness for Arizona sinks in too. I miss having people I can relax around. I struggle to close the distance with other students in the program and I don’t know why. Are people spreading rumors about me? They all hate me, don’t they?

I become hypervigilant.

Luckily, David is studying abroad in Thailand this same semester. He sends me dozens of sweet handwritten letters, which help me feel less alone. I respond to each one on delicate stationery I scour for in street markets and crowded shops. In his neat script, he writes of his hilarious mispronunciations that land him in hot water, making me laugh out loud. David tells me of the vibrant countries he visits and the hospitality of the people he encounters. His postcards of floating markets, ornate temples, and lush scenery fill me with longing as well as nostalgia for the creosote-infused breezes of home. Pinning each of his letters above my bed, I dream of being by David’s side, exploring the world together. Each envelope glows, spinning yarns of yearning, tugging at me. Other girls in my program comment with envy that even their boyfriends do not write as often.

“Are you sure he’s just a friend?” one asks.

I blush, beaming inside. Even on the other side of the world, David’s friendship is a life raft.

For our semester-end final writing assignment, students could choose any topic they want but it required approval from the program director. Fascinated by portraits of Chairman Mao which hang inside taxis and restaurants in place of a Buddha or a Christian cross, for protection and prosperity, I decide to research the deification of the political leader for the assignment.

I am proud to have thought of such a clever topic. I can’t wait to interview people about it and get started, but I’m surprised when our normally kind and sweet program director asks to meet with me in her small office.

“You can’t write about this,” she says with an ashen face and darkened eyes.

“Why, Director Hwang? It could be so interesting. I can’t wait to talk to people about their beliefs.”

Her eyes begin to water. The lines of fatigue, frustration, and age on her face, which I hadn’t noticed before, emerge. “The people are not ready,” she says. She does not want to fight any longer.

I feel ashamed and I don’t know why. The rejection burns. My American privilege, the naïve assumption that I could pursue any intellectual curiosity, is one I long take for granted. My privilege and foreignness are on full display and I never feel more American.

I procrastinate on selecting another topic as long as I can. When I can’t put it off anymore, I choose what I think is a safe, easy, and crowd-pleasing topic—Yeh-Yeh.

I write the paper on my family history, about how my grandfather is a self-made man who left Northern China penniless and illiterate to start anew in Korea. This tale of his entrepreneurial spirit and perseverance, of how he worked tirelessly to build a small empire, never failed to garner positive reactions in the US. I had won the Flinn scholarship in part thanks to a similar essay in English.

When my designated Chinese language partner, a local Ph.D. student in political science at the university who until then, I believe to be my friend, reviews my work, she grimaces. “Your Yeh-Yeh,” she spits with a sneer. “He was a landlord!”

Landlords are a class of people systematically executed during the Communist Revolution.

She laughs to show me how unimpressed she is with my Yeh-Yeh. In her eyes, Yeh-Yeh was a traitor, a deserter.

Blindsided, I recoil. I failed again, even after a drastic change in subject, trying to write something uncontroversial. I’m colliding headfirst into a China that does not celebrate my thinking, does not understand or embrace me. No more than I could celebrate, understand, or embrace it without reservations. The rejection from my ancestral land ruptures my already murky identity—not Korean, not quite Taiwanese, not this kind of Chinese.

As an ethnic Chinese person who had always lived outside the country, I had hoped to reclaim a piece of my heritage here. Instead, I lose my tenuous grasp, more alienated than ever. My indelible Asian American identity reinforces itself. I ache for my adopted home country of immigrants.

As the winter turns more bitter, I venture outside less and less. My sleep wanes and mood darkens. The negative spiraling vultures that haunt my nights are back, returning to feed on my brain, convincing me that everyone hates me. Many students in the program are homesick, on top of the usual college drama of fights among roommates, hook-ups and breakups, and idle gossip. I imagine conversations halting when I enter rooms and hushed whispers as I walk down hallways. How am I going to survive until the end of the program?

Skipping meals, I live off the Costco box of Hershey’s chocolate bars I brought to give out as gifts. Save for the cleaning ladies, I have no one to give them to. I hadn’t made any local friends like I thought I would. Our program is very isolated from the rest of the campus.

I fall into the familiar, dreaded state again, too nervous to sleep. I don’t deserve food. My thoughts race. Too much work… not a minute to spare… I must study, study, study. But I sit, useless, reading the same passage over and over, retaining nothing. My mind refuses to be tamed into focus. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why am I so worthless? I am a fraud. Maybe this time, I will be found out.

Days slip past and my final project and exam dates near. Night after night, I fight for sleep that never comes. Paranoid thoughts race in furious circles through my brain. I am accused of being a spy. Am I a spy? Exhausted but unable to stop the racing dark thoughts, I am certain everyone loathes me and is plotting against me to expose me.

When the phone rings, it jolts me from a zombie-like state. “Beautiful Jade,” Baba’s urgent voice meets my hesitant greeting into the receiver.

A semester of my life needs to be packed up for transport back home, but I haven’t organized anything. I am grossly inadequate for the simplest of tasks. I feel like a trampled worm—body flattened, trying to lift my head or tail, not knowing which end is which. Writhing.

Baba is still working on his Chinese medicine degree and is trying to become more expert at acupuncture. He learns of a university in Shandong Province that produces instructional DVDs on acupuncture techniques. Baba is determined to get his hands on those and asks me to travel to the other province by train to buy them for him.

“Baba… I can’t,” my feeble voice quakes like tiny, coarse grains straining through a sieve. Turning my neck to peer outside necessitates Herculean effort. Grey and black slush covers the sidewalks—my skin constricts at the thought of the biting cold. How am I supposed to do what Baba asks when the program ends in a week? How am I to fit it in with my exams, final projects, and packing?

“You must. Ni Yi Ding Yao,” Baba booms on the telephone. His outrage at my hesitance multiplies each mile it crosses from Arizona. “Go to Shandong and buy me those DVDs. You must do this. You must!”

His determination to have a doctor in the family, no matter the cost, obliterates any reason. I am already unfilial for rejecting his first command to become a doctor, I could not reject this simple request too.

“Yi Ding Yao,” Baba doubles down, commanding again, in his toughest, scariest voice. He breaks through my fog. “No one else can do this. It must be you.” My father’s authoritarian roar, a constant in my twenty years of existence, possesses unmatched power over me. His bellowing mauls me like a grizzly bear.

My hairs stand on ends in salute.

“I must.”

Pushing, willing myself. I rock myself for hours, back and forth, trying to work up the courage. I may be worthless, but this task I must do, even if it kills me. My life is worthless anyway. The end will be here soon.

Putting on my coat and shoes, I stuff all of my emergency cash in my small shoulder bag and run into the darkness at two in the morning. I sprint into the icy mid-December night, severing my remaining ties to reality.

Excerpted with permission from the memoir, Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love by Michelle Yang, (Fifth Avenue Press, 2025).

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Michelle Yang is an advocate whose writings on the intersection of Asian American identity, body image, and mental health have been published in NBC News, CNN, InStyle, and Reader's Digest. Michelle has also been featured on NPR, Washington Post, and The Seattle Times for her advocacy. She loves exploring new parts of her new home state of Michigan with her family and smoking up the kitchen with spicy recipes. You can find her on michelleyangwriter.com or on Instagram @michelleyangwriter.

Hear John at Open Secrets Live May 3!

I met a stranger on a train from Virginia to Texas about twenty-five years ago. We talked for hours. I was practically broke, afraid of flying, and in no rush to move back in with my parents in Austin, so I bought an Amtrak ticket with my credit card and took my time.

It was a long two-day journey on a diesel-electric locomotive. I bought a couple of magazines and read them both twice within the first few hours of the trip.

I told myself train travel was an opportunity to meet interesting characters. I told myself that’s what writers are supposed to do — and he was an interesting character. Tall, lanky, long black hair. Elegant. He introduced himself to me in the observation car, which had big windows and comfortable swivel seats.

From the observation car, you could watch the trees, fields, and industrial rubble for miles and miles. America is an undead colossus, a shambling corpse of a nation held together by train tracks like stitches.

He bought me bottles of beer and pre-packaged hamburgers that the attendant behind the snack counter would microwave until they were soft and hot. When I announced I was moving to New York City, he said I was taking the long way to get there.

He told me stories—entertaining stories. I have no idea if he was lying to me. The train is a perfect place to pretend to be a different person. He said he was French. He was on his way to work on his Ph.D. in Art History in San Antonio. He had grim opinions on organized religion, having been a member of one in a previous life. He could have been flirting with me, but more likely, he was just bored.

When he mentioned he’d lived in Manhattan for a few months, I lit up. I wanted his advice and he gave it: Never make eye contact on the subway, never ask for directions, and never get off at the wrong station if you can help it.

Then there was this story: He used to venture into the subway tunnels underneath New York City when he was a student at a Catholic seminary to feed the homeless, who were mostly addicts and sufferers of untreated mental illnesses. On one occasion, he was instructed to go deeper into the tunnels but to wear a clerical collar because the people who lived in the endless darkness were less likely to attack a priest. He agreed and slashed at the shadows with a flashlight for hours until giving up and returning, his bag of sandwiches and fruit still full. 

I didn’t believe any of it—urban legends. Morlocks? Mole people? Please. But he didn’t seem to care what I believed. Shortly afterward, we found our way to our seats, each far away from the other.  

At one point in his tale, he said these unfortunates were lost but he didn't sound like he meant it in the spiritual sense. No. They were lost as in they’d somehow found themselves in sunless depths and didn’t know how to get out. A wrong turn was made, maybe. And they’re still down there, blinking in the darkness.

***

It is a little-known fact that the New York City subway is haunted. Of course, the Metropolitan Transit Authority would never admit this. It would scare off visitors and their money. It’s a secret that only we subterraneans know.

If you live in this city long enough, eventually, you’ll step onto a train that takes you back in time. If this happens to you, whatever you do, don’t step onto the platform at the next stop. No matter what you see or what happens, stay on that train until you get where you were going. It can take a long time to find your way back again.

I made that mistake recently. I was on a downtown 1 train earlier than usual on my way to interview for a job I wouldn’t get. The sun had just risen. Save for a few night shift folk just trying to get home, the train was mostly empty. I was committed to my phone with its direct connections to all the information in the world, but by chance, I looked up, and there I was, 20 years younger, passed out drunk on the seat across from me. Or, at least, a young man who looked like me was sprawled out on a subway seat, a splatter of vomit on his shirt. He looked peaceful. I looked peaceful.

I could tell that I, or he, or we, were sleeping off a real banger of a night. I remember those mornings after—the reckless hours. Barroom boilermakers, fights in bathroom stalls, failed erections on unfamiliar futons. Pandemonium in a paper bag.

A young woman’s tragedy is that the world asks too much of her, and a young man’s tragedy is that the world doesn’t ask enough. I shook my head in disgust. I am older than I think I should be. When I go to my meetings in church basements, I’m not one of the old-timers, but I’ll be there soon enough, stirring my coffee and nodding along when some kid talks about getting loaded and dynamiting his life. Time usually travels in one direction, forward, until the end of the line. So the spectacle of me, younger, or someone who looked like me in my twenties, soused and pathetic, made me angry.

I was angry that I was ever like this boy: anxious and ambitious. Chubby. But we survived, didn't we? We never toppled onto the tracks, though one time we fell down the stairs that led to the N/R; we were in a hurry and buzzed—spraining our ankle. We spent so much time underground, riding up and down Manhattan and into Brooklyn and all the way to Coney Island.  There is an old Zen koan that time spent fishing is not time taken out of your life and I feel the same way about trains.

***

A car is freedom and responsibility. A plane is speed and incredible, shrunken distances. But a train is none of these things. It safely races, single-mindedly, from A to B while gently rocking its passengers to sleep—a benevolent robotic centipede. I have taken trains cross-country. I have ridden trains in London and Chicago and Los Angeles and Boston and Washington D.C. I love trams and monorails. Commuter rails.

Most of all, I love the New York City subway.

The New York City subway is a living room. It is a magic carpet. On occasion, a moveable sewer. And yes, there are times when it is hell’s waiting room. I have cried on the R train. I have had a first kiss on the L. I have laughed on the 7 as it thundered toward a baseball game.

It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There are 472 stations and 840 miles of tracks and I have spent approximately 17,000 hours of my life riding it. The subway can go as fast as 60 MPH unless you’re late for work. It is crowded and loud. It never arrives when you want it to and then it takes its sweet time getting you where you want to go. The entire system is 120 years old but feels older, a ruin past its prime. The MTA is a 19th-century idea of the future.

There are times the subway makes me want to scream. Like when the trains stop, for no reason, in the tunnels, or crawl from stop to stop, or never show up. It's true that the subway is a test tube on wheels and, once, I watched a man in a suit suck the meat off one chicken wing after another. He left a pile of bones behind. 

During the summer, the subway platforms are so hot you feel like you’re wearing a coat made out of tongues. Sometimes, when bored on the platform, I watch greasy rats scurry along the tracks and think, “Hey, free zoo.” People beg for money and food. Tourists wander around confused. Elbows stab left and right. I don’t make eye contact, and I don’t give directions. I try to avoid wet surfaces. New York is the center of the universe, and, like a peach, the universe rots from the inside out.

The subway doors chime bing-bong before closing and now and then, especially when I’m exhausted, I’ll sing along. “Bing-bong.”

Once, drunk, I woke up on a train that had stopped at a station because of a vicious fistfight between two men. I was on the wrong train heading into a part of the city I was unfamiliar with.

This must have been between 2 a.m. and dawn. During those weird hours, you’re likely to see anything: a half-naked accordion player counting quarters, a shadow eating a potato like an apple, a skeleton in a trenchcoat.

They punched and pushed each other out of the train and back into the train, and out again. A woman sitting across from me turned to the woman next to her and said, loud enough that I could hear it, “If this was two white boys, the police would be here by now.” Her voice was sad. She was right. I stumbled off the train, carefully avoiding the two combatants, and it took me the rest of the night to get home. Everyone is born on the wrong side of someone else’s tracks.

And so, on the 1 train, barreling underneath Sixth Avenue, I watched myself flinch in my stupor. I felt like standing up and slapping myself awake. “You don’t know what’s coming,” I’d shout. “We wasted so much time.” But I said nothing. I just stared at this young man—a stranger—intensely until he stirred, his whiskers twitching. His eyes weren’t crowned with wrinkles like mine. The thing about haunted trains is you never know who’s the ghost and who’s alive.

When confronted with a creep who stares, you have two choices. You can fight them—karate chops and cursing—or get off at the next station, and that’s what he did. Without thinking, in an almost panic, I followed him, slipping through the doors as they shut. My heart raced. I wanted to tell him things work out, more or less.

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Open Secrets Live is May 3 in NYC

John DeVore is an award-winning writer and editor whose funny/sad memoir about grief, friendship and jazz hands, Theatre Kids, is now available.

The first time I hit the trail, a bike trail, was for our tenth anniversary. My husband and I decided it would be our gift to ourselves. A ten-mile ride for ten years of marriage. We, two adults, signed up, on the easy trek which happened to be ten miles for a guided tour of greater Palm Springs.

Palm Springs in the early spring is paradise. Cool blue skies. Breezy weather. We were in great physical shape. We both worked out at least four times a week and ate and drank our wine responsibly. The road bikes were purchased after being sized for our particular bodies, male and female, seat height adjusted, weight measured for tire pressure. We were strapped with the latest gear. Helmet. Gloves. Compression socks. Padded cycling pants are not for the faint of heart.

Then came the cycling shoes. These particular shoes clip onto the bike pedals. The guy who sold us all of the equipment suggested strongly that we practice unclipping ourselves so as not to land on the pavement at a stop sign. It took a lot of practice. Our neighborhood rides included short hills and having to slow down and eventually stop, which took concentration and prayer. Lots of prayer.

Eventually, I mastered the slowing down and unclipping one foot before coming to a complete stop where my landing was already decided. I’d chosen the left foot for no particular reason. Practicing on my right foot seemed redundant. Why force it? My natural inclination was to unsnap the left while braking, then coming to a full stop with the right foot next. No one can explain these things. The brain wants what it wants. Left. Right. Left.

The ride in Palm Springs hosted about one hundred riders. Cyclist afficionados came from all over the state as well as Arizona and Nevada. To see all of those riders in one place, from babies attached to their parent’s rolling apparatus to individuals eighty and older who liked their tandems. There was no age restriction. The great thing about cycling is that it’s low impact as long as you’re not riding up too many hills. This kind of ride wasn’t made for competitive drivers. Fast friends were made. Good luck wishes were offered.

After the check-in and receiving our numbered plastic identification, we piled up at the starting corner to the Rolling Stones’ greatest hits. No shortage there. We were pumped up, ready to go. As soon as the ribbon was cut, we pulled off slow and steady to create a safe distance between the many wheels gliding along the smooth pavement.

This is where the rubber meets the road, literally. So many like minds and different bodies pedaling in the same direction. We followed the two police officers on their motorcycles who made sure the traffic was stopped before the herd moved through. We hadn’t stopped for the first two or three miles. Just gliding along. My mind traveled to a soft easy place with the wind in my face. Letting go and letting God, as we say. No stress. All blessed. Yep, another one of those good ole’ sayings.

When the whistle blew, or more so, a sound of a tiny trumpet tooting its horn, I was oblivious. All I can remember is my husband yelling, “Wait. Wait.”

My mind was elsewhere. In my own world as we writers do. Ferrying into faraway places. Thinking about my characters was my happy place. Always in motion with a project ruminating. Were they likeable? Was there enough dialogue?  Why hadn’t my agent called? Where were we going to eat dinner after this? What book would I write next if my agent didn’t like the story I’d pitched? Tranquility, nonetheless.

Between the wait, wait, honey, stop, and the mini trumpet blowing, I waded through the intersection. Cars honked and screeched to avoid running down the lady in her own world. I braked, came to a stop, and went down hard. I hit the pavement hip first, elbow second, and shoulder last. All on my right side.

Concerned cyclists as well as motorists who’d witnessed the tumble came swiftly to my aid. Arms reached in to lift me out of the middle of the street, but my right foot was still attached to the pedal. Even down on the ground it was still stuck in the clip.

It took a tiny twist of my foot to release me. Everything hurt. My right ankle throbbed. The impact on my hip from hitting the asphalt sent visions and fear of long-term recovery. A medic, assigned to the bike ride for just this kind of incident, assessed me and determined nothing was broken. I only had minor scratches. Beneath the surface, however, my bruised ego, sore hip, knee, and elbow were all reminders of how I’d fallen and embarrassed myself in front of hundreds of onlookers. The medic then asked if I wanted to finish the ride?

The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. Failure felt final. I hadn’t even considered I could get back on the bike, act like it never happened, and keep on riding. The crowd dissipated and were back on their bikes, geared up and relieved their ride could continue. Getting back on the proverbial horse meant I had no time to wallow. The group was moving forward whether I rejoined them or not.

There were seven more miles to go. When I told my husband I wanted to continue, he shook his head. No way. I nodded. Yes. If I can stand, I can ride. I didn’t want to give up just because of one errant fall. Lesson learned. I had to focus on the road in front of me. Everything else, the waning decisions, the doubts and to-dos, would all have to wait. While my padded butt was on that bicycle seat, all of my attention had to be on the ride.

I was back, gliding along. The cool wind in my face. The sun on my back. I focused on breathing and pedaling. Any pain became a distant memory. Being forced to stay in the here and now doesn’t happen often in my life. As I said, being a fiction writer means most of the hours in my day are spent in transference with my characters and stories. Being somewhere else, walking in their shoes, is a professional hazard.

Now, I’ve learned for those precious minutes on my bike, I have the right to spend time with only myself and nature. The ride becomes a serene and peaceful place. A safe space to breathe and rest while pedaling 15 miles per hour.

Fast forward to 2024, twenty years later: I’m an avid cyclist. I look forward to my weekend rides mostly on designated bike trails with nature. This is where I get to bask in the sun and quiet the zoom of voices. The fret of anxiety and worry have to wait. I have no choice. I wouldn’t want to fall again. Concentration on the birds chirping or leaves wrestling in the breeze is far more pleasant. Sometimes, there’s simply silence and that’s all right too. With every mile, I get a little closer to serenity.

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Trisha R. Thomas is the author of Nappily Ever After, chosen by O Magazine as a Book That Made A Difference. Nappily Ever After was adapted and released as a feature film on Netflix. She is a Literary Lion Award honoree by the King County Library Foundation. She's written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, and used her depth of insight on national platforms such as CNN as a Cultural Analyst. Her latest novel is The Secret Keeper of Main Street (William Morrow 2024)

reposted with permission from Beyond Liquid Courage

My relationship with substances changed when I got sober in 2015. And now… it’s changing again. 

Several friends in the mental health space, my hubby, and my therapist reminded me that I don’t need to discuss this publicly, reminding me that I’m entitled to privacy. Learning the difference between privacy and secrecy helps me differentiate Tawny the Human from Tawny the Persona. I’ve kept a lot of what’s in this issue private for a few years while I figured out what worked best for me and my recovery. 

As someone called The Sober Sexpert, who’s built a career around reporting on the sober and sober curious scene since 2015, I want to discuss what sobriety means to me today. Several recovery and mental health advocates use anti-cannabis rhetoric, which keeps plant medicine stigmatized. So, I wrote this piece to bring some nuance to the conversation.

Essentially, my relationship with substances is evolving—just like me.

Content Warning: This post discusses cannabis, substance abuse, and mental health recovery. If these topics feel triggering, please enjoy this cute cat video, then have a lovely day.

Section Summary:

• Mental Health is Physical Health

• Why Suffer?

• SSRIs

• Weed… the Illegal Seed

• Hiring a Cannabis Doctor

• TL;DR

Mental Health is Physical Health

A fascinating part of publishing a book is hearing which parts of your work resonate with readers. I’m learning which lines are randomly appreciated and which are popular among readers. I also look at the Kindle highlights on my eBook to see who’s highlighting which passages (Do other authors do this???).

I’m often asked about the line in chapter one where I say, “I have no idea if I’ll ever drink again.” The people who like that line are usually those who still drink (and usually people who want to cut back on booze in some way). They find comfort in the fact that I, a publicly sober author, state that I have no idea if I’m done drinking forever. Shifting your perspective to one day at a time is a novel concept that can have profound effects.

However, that line isn’t a shock for those of us in recovery, meaning those of us who work on our mental health every. single. day by going to therapy, reading self-help books, and streaming recovery-themed podcasts, all to understand why we abused substances in the past and to learn healthier coping mechanisms. We know that one day at a time is the only approach that actually works because how we show up today and how we react to today are the only things we can control. 

I was completely sober from all substances for five years—including several breaks from caffeine. I rarely took Advil or cold medicine. I didn’t want any substances in my body unless absolutely necessary. I even procrastinated on wisdom tooth removal because I was terrified of pain medication. 

Then, the time came when I seriously considered anxiety medication. My anxiety turned into rage, which turned into even higher anxiety, which often turned into bedridden depression. I could no longer handle the heart-racing, impending doom that created an incessant sense of urgency that sat on my chest. I quickly learned that asthma + anxiety = pure hell. I even got an EKG because I was *positive* that my chest pains were a sign of a pulmonary problem. 

Mental health is physical health.

I tried everything to alleviate this chronic mental and physical discomfort: acupuncture, massage, supplements, yoga, meditation, weight lifting, tarot, self-help seminars, and fill-in-the-blank-I’ve-tried-it. Those tools are still regular parts of my mental health toolkit. They just can’t change my brain chemistry.

Why Suffer?

Lisa, my incredible podcast co-host and mentor, has a great line that she frequently repeats to me when I come to her in a panic. 

“Why suffer?” she asks. “If there’s medicine that can make your life easier, why would you choose to suffer?”

I think about this advice daily. 

I even brought that advice to my therapist, asking how much emotional pain I’m “supposed” to feel as a “normal” human versus the pain I feel as a human in recovery from PTSD, C-PTSD, an anxiety disorder, and substance use disorder. What level of emotional pain is part of the human experience that I “should” know how to handle without needing something to make life more manageable?

SSRIs

I was on Lexapro for a full year, and it helped. A lot. My anxiety kindly removed itself from the driver's seat and cozied up in the passenger seat. Sometimes, she even rolled down the window and enjoyed the fresh air, fully embracing the present moment. But sadly, my body got used to the Lexapro. She stayed in the passenger’s seat but kept jerking the steering wheel, swerving into lanes I didn’t know existed. But I didn’t want to increase my dosage or try other pharmaceutical meds. Anyone who’s been on an SSRI journey can empathize with this constant battle. 

It was clear that my body and mind required some “as needed” relief, like Xanax or other benzos. I had a Xanax addiction in high school, so that option was out. I desperately wanted to take life one day at a time; I just needed help. So, I took a harm reduction approach and hired a cannabis doctor—a process I discuss on this episode of Recovery Rocks.

Dr. Chin and my therapist worked with me to find the right strains and dosages to alleviate my anxiety disorder. I also had to find a new primary care doctor because mine wasn’t cannabis-informed. She spoke down to me when I told her about my new prescription for plant medicine. But that’s a story for another time. 

The emotional side effects of my anxiety would make me over-commit and people-please until I was completely destabilized and couldn’t get out of bed, having to back out of all the things I promised to do for others. I constantly struggled with emotional regulation. I punched walls. I tore down shower curtains. I screamed and sobbed. It was hell. My anxiety was back in the driver’s seat, going full Ricky Bobby mode… until I rebooted my relationship with cannabis.

Weed… the Illegal Seed

My relationship with cannabis began as a 14-year-old reporter for the Waco Tribune-Herald, my local newspaper. I wrote the op-ed in the picture below before ever consuming cannabis. It never made sense to me that a plant was illegal when an extremely dangerous drug like alcohol was not only legal but encouraged by societal norms. So I went to the library to research my forthcoming article: Weed the Illegal Seed (still my proudest headline!). I smoked weed for the first time a few months later.

Weed was my first drug and probably my first love. I loved how light it made me feel, a lightness I desperately needed as a teenager with symptoms of what I now know are PTSD and C-PTSD, but as a child, those symptoms felt like anger and sadness and confusion and resentment. I honestly wish I had kept my drug use just to weed. But I didn’t have the emotional intelligence or mental health vernacular that I do now. Being high felt better than the constant heartache.

All I knew was that if two puffs of a joint made me feel better, LOTS of puffs would make me feel GREAT, right? I abused weed until it led to harder stuff. It's super cliche, but that was my story.

Cannabis isn’t always a gateway drug—in fact, researchers disagree on this, and the best studies we have put it at less than 50% chance of a lifelong cannabis user progressing to other illicit drugs. I’m sick of people dismissing cannabis as a gateway drug instead of properly educating their children or themselves on mental health and emotional regulation. That level of chosen ignorance causes way more damage than hitting the occasional joint.

I stopped smoking weed a few years before I stopped drinking because weed made me anxious, or should I say, I thought weed made me anxious. It turns out I didn’t know which strains were best for my brain chemistry, and as I mentioned before, I had zero mental health resources at the time. I had no idea I even needed mental health resources at the time. 

A lot of my life as a frequent college dropout, caretaker for my grandmother, and career bartender made me anxious, but it was easier to blame the plant in my hand than make any significant lifestyle changes.

Eventually, as many of you know, I made that significant lifestyle change a few years later.

On November 30th, 2015, I took a public departure from alcohol. I started a blog called SobrieTeaParty, where I very publicly documented my first few years of sobriety. That turned into a podcast. And a book. And a drink. And a card deck. And a keynote speech. I even met my husband in an AA meeting.

Hiring a Cannabis Doctor

I visited a dispensary in 2021 to learn more about today’s cannabis landscape. I truly had no idea where to begin.

“I want anxiety relief without getting high,” I told the budtender. He smiled and assured me that this was a common request. He suggested a few products, one of which was a tincture. I’m already a big fan of herbal tinctures, so I was drawn to this approach. “This is a great way to start since you can add as little or as much as you want to whatever you’re drinking.” He was right! Tinctures are still my favorite way to consume cannabis today because I like knowing the exact amount that I’m using.

I had hesitations about bringing cannabis back into my life. Can I use cannabis safely after I abused it in the past? Am I still sober if I become a regular cannabis user? Am I comfortable taking an SSRI *and* plant medicine every day?

Those hesitations were quelled by arduous research and hiring Dr. Chin, to show me the ropes. I attended Dr. Chin’s six-week Chemistry of Cannabis course at NYU to learn about the problematic history of cannabis prohibition and how to responsibly use my new favorite plant. I read study after study. I had long talks with my therapist to see if cannabis was the next right action in my recovery.

For over a year, I had anxiety about my anxiety medication. Per my therapist’s suggestion, I wrote MEDICINE on the tincture bottles and gummy packages to remind myself that each dose is just that… medicine.

Working with Dr. Chin was refreshing after hearing countless recovery advocates stigmatize plant medicine. She understood me! She understood plant medicine! She understood addiction and harm reduction and mental health and how cannabis fits into all of those categories! Most importantly, Dr. Chin assured me that I could use plant medicine and still be a person in recovery. 

Because I believe that destigmatizing plant medicine can save lives and ease suffering, I’m sharing my microdosing prescription from Dr. Chin:

2-5mg of THC as needed for anxiety relief 

• Indica is preferred as it has more calming effects, which works best with Lexapro

• Use a 1:1 ratio of CBD and THC (CBD is a whole other important discussion!)

• Take Cannabis in gummy or tincture form, as I prefer not to smoke because of my asthma

• Start “low and slow,” which means taking very small doses to see how your body and mind react to the plant. This approach also helps patients find medicinal relief without feeling high

The term microdosing has become a bit of a joke at this point, but this approach helps me tremendously. As someone with no desire to get stoned who still wants anxiety relief from plant medicine, microdosing works for me. 

There are plenty of videos that show how cannabis can instantly help someone with physical ailments like seizures or Parkinson’s, but I can’t snap a before and after selfie of my brain on generalized anxiety disorder vs my brain on plant medicine.

The best way to describe my post-dosed feeling is that my anxiety is no longer in the driver’s seat or the passenger’s seat. She’s living her best life in the backseat, reading a romantasy novel, legs stretched out while her bare feet dangle out of the window, tapping along to Khruangbin.

I have my life back.

Full control of my brain and my thoughts has finally returned.

TL;DR

Through this journey, I stumbled into a great paradox: If the point of being sober is to be fully present for life happening on life’s terms, what do I do if the only way I can be fully present sometimes is by using cannabis?

I’ve wrestled with what all of this *means* to both Tawny the Human and Tawny the Persona. I’ve dealt with guilt and shame due to the cognitive dissonance of being a mental health advocate who destigmatizes mental health support while beating myself up, thinking I “should” be able to tough these symptoms out without help. 

My therapist thinks that I’ve never felt true relaxation until now. I always used substances to escape reality by black-out drinking or getting extremely high. This is my first time using a substance in moderation to feel closer to reality and closer to myself. 

Where my relationship with alcohol pulled me away from myself, cannabis helps me embrace myself.

I’m not sure how much I’ll write and talk about cannabis overall. I don’t want to become The Cali Sober Girlie. While my commitment to mental health recovery encapsulates every fiber of my being, my relationship with substances is such a small part of who I am.

In the same way that I don’t know if I’ll ever drink again, I also don’t know if Lexapro and cannabis will be part of my daily life forever.

My job as a journalist is to observe what’s happening, to see the objective truth from all angles, not just my opinion. That’s how I’m treating this new era of recovery. I’m observing my own behaviors, not labeling them or assigning value. I’m studying and reading published research on plant medicine while documenting my own data, one day at a time. 

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Tawny Lara is the author of Dry Humping and co-author of The Sobriety Deck, co-host of the Recovery Rocks podcast, and co-founder of the vinegar-based botanical beverage, (parentheses).

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re sharing personal essays from our archives dealing with various aspects of mental health. We hope these vulnerable stories help you feel less alone.

If you are in crisis in the United States, you can call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, 24/7. Click here for international suicide hotlines.

Hear Rachel at Open Secrets Live May 3!

Listen to the audio version and commentary by the author on the Open Secrets podcast.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined I’d ever not have the urge to take to Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis—often multiple times a day—to divulge everything momentous or mundane that happened to me in a given 24-hour period. A weird dream? A new laptop? A trip? A date? An epic fail? A good meal? All of them were details I was eager to reveal to friends and strangers alike.

Posting about my life felt like a natural extension of the Tripod blog I’d made over 25 years ago to splash every thought I felt was worthy of sharing with anyone who wanted to read it, and to being a writer of revealing personal essays. For me, the actions and the postings were a seamlessly intertwined pair, ones I never had to overthink because I was always myself—warts and all—on the internet. I didn’t think of myself as having a persona, or try to write in some voice other than my own.

But last summer, when I suddenly became a caregiver for my mother, and had to find her a new home and take over dealing with her healthcare, I was utterly overwhelmed. Not only did my day-to-day life now involve that of someone who’s far more private than I am, but none of it felt shareable in soundbite format, or even rambling paragraphs pecked out in hurried stolen moments on my phone. I lacked the emotional energy to deal with any potential responses, even supportive ones, when I could barely make it through each extremely busy, often emergency-filled day.

I could barely make sense of what was happening, of the role reversal of making major decisions for my mother and getting up to speed on aspects of her life I’d never had to handle or even be aware of before. I not only didn’t have time to post about that aspect of my life, I had no desire to; nor did I want to post lighthearted, ingenuine tidbits about what I was eating or pop culture responses just to be able to say I’d “engaged” with my “audience.” I reposted things here and there, quickly bashed out a few assorted items related to promoting my work, but my heart was no longer in it. What had previously felt like an electronic lifeline to the outside world now felt like yet one more thing to add to my already overflowing to-do list.

In her song “Radio” featuring Sharon van Etten, sings, “I think I need to take some time out/And I wanna turn my phone off/I just wanna be alone.” In an interview, Price said that “…the song is very much about freedom. It’s about shutting down everything until you’re standing naked in your own truth.” The first time I heard “Radio,” many months before caregiving got sprung upon me, I immediately related. I’d already started feeling rumblings of wanting to get off the social media merry-go-round, of keeping some of my thoughts for myself, or at least saving them for venues like this one where I had more time and space to explore them, rather than the warp-speed pace of online life.

Despite that, I’d assumed that once the most crisis-filled time had passed, I’d return to blithely posting online like I had before. But when that time came, I no longer felt like I had much to say. When I saw new follower notifications, I cringed, sure that all of them were doomed to be disappointed by my lackluster output. After four months of barely using social media, the idea of posting filled me with dread, like anything I shared should be totally momentous to warrant taking up space in people’s feeds after so much time away. Not only was I coming up empty, the only reason I was working so hard to brainstorm what to post was because it had been drilled into me that, as someone who makes part of their living with words and has books (and an upcoming book proposal) to hawk, that’s what I should be doing. After all, the internet is filled with tips on how to build your personal brand; I’d even purchased Aliza Licht’s book On Brand in order to learn how to reach a wider swathe of readers.

I’m not the only one who’s over feeling obligated to post online. A recent Vox article explored artists and writers who go through the motions of online self-promotion and building a platform but find the whole exercise tedious. Tech journalist explored the trend of resentment reels, which are exactly what they sound like: People posting online about how much they resent having to post Instagram reels online to please the app’s algorithms in order to court viewers, with increasingly diminishing returns.

I’m fortunate that I have enough steady freelance gigs outside of trying to sell books or classes or newsletters to make a living, so that I can choose to step back from social media, sharing fun photos when I want to rather than asking people to comment on Instagram to get some freebie of mine, or whatever the latest annoying engagement gimmick du jour is.

I miss the days when I loved posting online, when I was too busy being myself to think about my “personal brand.” But I also think it was easier to do that when I was younger, more carefree, and wasn’t facing some of the heavy adult issues I currently am, ones that don’t feel suited to summing up in a caption or limited character count.

It’s hard to recall a time before social media, but I’m grateful that, at 48, I can do so if I try hard enough. In lieu of posting, I’ve been reaching out to friends and family for one-on-one catchups where I can go into more personal detail about some of what I’m up to than I would feel comfortable doing in a public forum. I’ve been reading more books, rather than a page or two here and there, letting my mind ponder what it’s taking in more thoroughly than when I was scrambling to find a good quote to whip up in Canva to show off my reading prowess and taste. I still write my occasional newsletter, but I’ve morphed that from an onslaught of self-promotional babble that bored even me to include more philosophical musings.

I don’t hate social media, but it’s come to feel like a language I was once fluent in that I no longer speak. For a little while, I felt guilty about that lapse, like I should dive into it like people do with Duolingo, relearning how to keep up a steady output. But the idea had knots of dread forming in my stomach, making me realize the only reason I would be doing it was out of misguided obligation.

I’m not going to go so far as to delete any of my accounts, because they are a part of my past, and may be part of my future someday too. For now, I’ll likely have my head in a book rather than hunched over my phone. If that means I get an F in personal branding, I’m okay with that.

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Open Secrets Live is May 3 in NYC

Rachel Kramer Bussel (rachelkramerbussel.com) is the founder and editor of Open Secrets. She’s a New Jersey-based writer and editor, and the author of craft guide How to Write Erotica and short story collection Lap Dance Lust. She writes widely about books, culture, and relationships and is currently editing an anthology about our attachments to our belongings.

To get to the place where I bury my bats, I walk a broken, concrete path through my backyard. The scant weight I carry feels heavier than the body of a mammal smaller than my palm. Rose bushes direct me to soldier on to the lemon tree that perennially bears fruit. Above the thorny citrus is a redwood jungle gym for the squirrels. They never hush for my funerary rites. Below all of this is the graveyard for my bats.

When I first started volunteering with a wildlife rehabilitation group specializing in bats this past year, I didn’t foresee that I would inter more than I release back to the wild. Though the eclectic women of NorCal Bats are kind and supportive, though I know that their bats die just as easily as mine, I can’t bring myself to disclose to them the specifics of all my failures. If I described the detailed circumstances of my mistakes, I fear two things could happen: What if they make assumptions about my ability to keep humans alive at the hospital where they know I work? Worse yet, what if they took the bats from me? Caring for the bats has been so enriching that I changed the patterns of my daily life to accommodate them, which inspired me to keep rearranging my life so that creative writing could take precedence over my unsatisfying medical career. 

After practicing as a physician assistant in emergency medicine and intensive care through the direst parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, I suffered from burnout and post-traumatic stress. Before the pandemic, I could lay my hands on the newly dead and wish them well in their new journey. Two years into the pandemic, the beep of monitors in the ICU made me sweat and the tremor in my hands was no longer a secret. I saw more death in those two years than my entire thirteen-year career. I entered the pandemic passionate about the healthcare needs of my community. I exited the pandemic feeling that my goodwill had been misunderstood, and with the new existential conundrum that perhaps nothing we do in medicine matters in the end. During those endless, sad nights in the hospital while the sick grew sicker and patient numbers peaked, I watched internet wildlife feeds and webcams for comfort. The bat content was my favorite. I was drawn to them because I understood what it was to be misunderstood—and we both enjoyed the dark.

Even if I had comprehended the dismal statistics of wildlife rehabilitation, I was so desperate for a new purpose in a post-pandemic world that I know my overconfidence would have superseded that knowledge. I didn’t yet realize that my involvement in medicine would sour even more, and in the end, I would seek a new career. My whole life I had been writing prose; but I still felt that writing was a hobby, and that I owed it to some greater entity to practice medicine. I was shell-shocked, lost, and disenchanted when I discovered that I too could doctor and foster bats in need.

To become a heroine to bats, I first got vaccinated for rabies. Then I joined a permitted group and took their requisite class about our local species: Mexican free-tails, canyon bats, big and little brown bats. I studied Amanda Loller’s gold standard manual, The Rehabilitation and Captive Care of Insectivorous Bats, and naively thought that, paired with my medical training, I was sufficiently prepared. I painfully learned that human medicine doesn’t equate to animal medicine. Keeping tiny animals alive can be tremendously difficult.

A few months ago, I got a pair of canyon bats who had both fractured their arm bones high up near their shoulder joints. I had just crowdfunded a handsome, zoological incubator and I was proud to have it for them to lay up in. The pair had almost identical breaks on their left sides, so I called them collectively The Broken Bats. They didn’t live long enough to get individual names.

I didn’t have any of the glue that I use to set fractures that first day I got them, so they both careened around the incubator chirping and squawking and dragging their left wings. I studied the repair of their fractures in the rehab book. There is a single veterinarian in my metropolitan area who will see bats as patients, but I didn’t want her help. I thought I could give The Broken Bats a better chance to fly again, to return to the wooded smell of crevices and to the stiff crunch of hunted down insects. I believed that I would one day walk them back out to the wild where they belonged. At that time, I was under the impression that amputation was a terrible life for a captive bat, which I later learned was wrong.

I brought the glue home from the hospital the next day. Canyon bats are about the size of a half-dollar coin, and I knew that it would be tricky to not get glue all over them when I set their fractures. It was so myopic of me to have thought that accidentally gluing the tail to the toes or even my hand to theirs was a worst-case scenario. To isolate the broken wing and prevent this, I devised a set of slings out of gauze strips. I considered waiting for my partner to come home to lend her two hands to the situation.

The first bat thrashed, shrieked, and spit, so I loosely covered his head with a towel and then started gluing. Eventually, he stopped. As he grew still and quiet, I panicked. When I threw off the towel, he looked like he was trying to wretch against an obstruction. After he went limp, I laid him on his back and compressed his tiny chest over and over. His mouth was stuck wide open; I couldn’t figure out why he was arresting.

When the bat finally died in my hands, I examined his small tongue closely. The glue had gotten into his mouth. He had inhaled it. Then the glue expanded as it dried in his airway, and he asphyxiated. Devastated, I apologized repeatedly as I wrapped him up in the towel. I walked the path out the backyard with the bat held to my heart. I felt like I was suffocating as I dug another grave under the lemon tree. I was so ashamed, and I told no one but my partner what had happened.

I didn’t work on the other Broken Bat that night. I let him pace the incubator and tried to distract him with the softest mealworms I could find in the bin. I did successfully set the fracture the next day, but he stopped eating after that and soon passed. 

Ever since The Broken Bats, I’m more hesitant, less presumptuous. I take the stable bats that don’t require heroic measures. Perhaps I cloud the truth of this to my group, using the graduate writing program I recently started as my excuse.

Though I’m not the heroine that I hoped to be, bat rehabilitation has been crucial in helping me change my life. Two years ago, I was so burned out and traumatized in my career that I needed something to help me see the path out to a different life. My routine felt immutable, and I was overwhelmed by my dissatisfaction with medicine. But when pup season came in the spring, I joyfully woke through the night to feed the pups. In the dark, I warmed their formula, put on my magnifying glasses, and then dripped it into their mouths from a pipette. I started leaving work on time so I could retrieve bats in the field. I made small changes so that something else could take the forefront in my life besides medicine. Then I realized that I could let my old ways die, and that my service to medicine could be over. Bat rehabilitation helped me to see that it was acceptable and possible to prepare for a new career, which led me to my literature and creative writing graduate program. 

The path out my back door is flanked by false orange shrubs. Moss overgrows the concrete in the rainy season. There is a small meadow of golden poppies newly speciating the landscape. Into each tiny grave I dig with my spade under the lemon tree, I keen for what I couldn’t save. I cover each dear, dead bat with earth. The ground is knobby and pocked with their burial sites. The squirrels host a never-ending wake above them. The Broken Bats are side by side, and when I sit down cross-legged to visit them, I’m grateful they showed me a new way back to the wild.

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Jessica Harvey writes memoir and literary fiction. She is pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing and literature at Harvard Extension School. Jessica lives in northern California with a menagerie of bats and dogs. You can find her on Instagram or at her website. 

The one-liter glass wine carafes in the bottom of my mother’s closet taunted me. Filled with change from her bartending tips, each one was dedicated to a particular coin. Quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies were all encased in glass. In a row. In order. My mother was nothing if not tidy. Painfully tidy. Everything in the house was always neat and organized. Everything, that is, except me. I was the soup can turned sideways on a shelf of properly faced canned items. The sore thumb. The odd duck.

I wasn’t a latchkey kid, but I was latchkey adjacent. My mom would be there when I got home from school. About an hour later, she’d leave for work. I’d make my dinner, do my homework, watch TV, or read, and then go to bed or, once I was about 14, I’d go out and get into whatever trouble I could find. I was bored, mostly ignored, and often angry.

By the time I was ten, my clothes no longer fit me. Being the fat kid left me open to ridicule, practical jokes, and physical bullying. I occasionally hid in my room and cried, as tears weren’t acceptable in my house unless you were physically sick or injured. I sought solace in the depths of fiction. I voraciously read fantastic stories about strong and fit heroes, magical warriors, and noble scholars. These stories let me, for a few hours, be someone other the fat kid. I couldn’t stop the tears from falling as my mother sighed in disappointment when I came out of the children’s dressing room of a local department store, handed her all the clothes she’d had me try on, and said, “Nothing fits.”

Within two weeks I was dressed in a paper gown, uncomfortably perched on an exam table in a cold room at a children’s hospital. I don’t remember a word spoken between my mother and the doctor. Looking back, I draw a blank and wonder what was said about me. All I know is I came home to a 1,200 calorie a day diet.

For almost two years, my life was filled exclusively with dinners of skinless chicken breasts that had been boiled, broiled, or grilled, iceberg lettuce salads with fat-free dressing, and vanilla ice milk for dessert. Have you ever tasted vanilla ice milk, a lowfat frozen dessert that’s like when ice cream gets freezer burn, but worse? It tastes like sadness.

Raw carrots, turkey sandwiches and, for a treat, six vanilla wafers comprised most of my school lunches. Breakfast was bland cold cereal with artificial sweetener and skim milk. The food was uninspiring, and I was continually hungry. The grumble in my stomach was an audible counterpoint to my growing anxiety about food. Everything I ate was measured, and every calorie was counted. We had a special scale to weigh certain food items and a food diary to track every bland morsel that passed my lips. I started to dream of delicious foods I wasn’t allowed to consume. At that time in my life, this deprivation felt like torture.

My mother was on a perpetual diet, constantly complaining about being fat, although she was quite thin. She seemed to exist on diet soda, coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol. She was my first example of a disordered eater. My mom couldn’t understand what I was going through. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure myself. I never brought up how I felt. I know I desperately wanted to be accepted and loved by her, but being thin seemed to be the only way I would be deemed acceptable in her eyes. I was deeply lonely. My few friends couldn’t relate to what I was going through and the other adults in my life thought my shrinking body was worth any cost. Being skinny was valuable, at any price.

I paid that price. At 12, I was taken off the diet as I was now considered too thin. Skinny. Hungry. Tired. Hurting. This was how seventh grade began. Junior high can be a hellscape for a lot of kids. For me? It became a love/hate experience. Since I was no longer on the diet, my mom began giving me money for lunch, admonishing me to make good choices. Ha! That was funny. I hadn’t been taught anything about good nutrition. I was simply expected to fall in line and be obedient so I could have a body that wouldn’t embarrass my mother. How could she possibly have a fat girl child?

I was deprived of much more than just food, though. My older sister left home when I was ten and my mom and stepdad divorced when I was thirteen. I rarely saw either of them. It was just me and mom and she was seldom home. I made the most of this sliver of financial and edible freedom. When I went to buy my lunch in the cafeteria, I excitedly chose from a bevy of bakery snack cakes, soda, chips, and candy. I indulged. Daily. My lunch money was spent on Ding-Dongs, Zingers, Pepsi, Doritos, and Snickers bars. I quickly learned to binge. The surfeit of sugar was my first high, filling me with manic energy and a reckless attitude. I felt full for the first time in what felt like a very long time. I finally understood what being satisfied meant, maybe even loved. I’m not saying it’s logical, I’m just saying it’s how I felt. Soon my sugar-laden lunches weren’t enough. I wanted more. However, more meant more money. Extra cash was something I didn’t have.

Enter mom’s wine carafes. It took several weeks for me to work up the courage to go into her closet and steal some of her tips. I started small. I took six quarters, ten dimes, and ten nickels. I didn’t bother with the pennies. Two hours after my mom left to work at the bar, I left our apartment and walked down the block to our corner convenience store. I’d nervously walk the few aisles, worried I’d somehow get caught.

Snack selections were made with considerable care. One can of soda. One candy bar. One small bag of chips. I’d carefully take them home, acting like I was carrying contraband. In a way, I was. Once home, I’d turn on the TV, set the snacks on the coffee table, and settle on the couch to consume all of it as quickly as possible.

During these food binges, I was awash with competing sensations. Pleasure and shame. Contentment and anger. My feelings confused me at first, but within a month’s time, I simply stuffed all my feelings down with every bite I took. Snacks create trash and the detritus of my thievery was never tossed in our home’s garbage can. The risk was too great that my mom would see it, question me, and my disordered eating that had quickly morphed into an eating disorder would be discovered. Instead, I walked the trash across the parking lot to the dumpster, wrappers buried deep in my pockets and the Pepsi can crushed tight in my fist. I made certain no one was looking as I threw the proof of my twin crimes away.

From that point on, my binge eating escalated. I felt like a tornado, wildly out of control and unpredictable. I grew bolder in my stealing. I would take more money. Not enough to be obvious, but I’m still surprised she never noticed—just like she rarely noticed me.

Being thin didn’t make her appreciate me more, as I’d hoped. I was left, for the most part, to my own devices. My behavior grew reckless in other areas of my life. I stopped caring about getting good grades, and they began to slip, resulting in my first D. As time went on, I started skipping school, and I failed as many classes as I passed. I started getting in trouble, serious trouble, for the first time in my life. I was caught shoplifting at our local mall. My mom didn't come and get me from the mall's holding cell. Her best friend did. Mom picked me up from her friend's house in the middle of the night, after she got off work. I was grounded from going to the mall for six months. I found I could capture my mother’s attention for brief moments by acting out. I did anything to be noticed. She never really did, though, not in any meaningful way. Once, I gave myself a mohawk. Her response was "That better grow out, and it better grow out fast." She wouldn't take me anywhere and it was clear she was embarrassed of me. Again. 

I never told my mother what I had done. I never expressed how I felt, or the effects it had on me, even decades later. Now that she’s dead, I never will.

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Kelly Varner is a self-professed “word nerd.” She’s a creative writer who is equally at home writing about mythical beings, space jockeys, or deeply personal facets of her life. She resides in San Diego, CA with her spouse, a clowder of cats, an ever-expanding library, boxes of photographs, and a bevy of hats for every occasion. You can find Kelly on Twitter @VarnerPhotos, Instagram @kellyavarnerauthor and @varnerphotos as well as at kellyvarner.substack.com

Six months into therapy, I was grumbling, as one is prone to, about my mother. Despite the fact that I’m a surgeon, a mother myself, and almost forty, I exclaimed in utter frustration, “My mother just won’t listen! Whenever I talk to her, she jumps from one topic to another and then another, before I can complete what I’m saying!”

My therapist eyed me thoughtfully. “Have you considered the possibility that your mother has ADHD?”

That brought me up short. My mother is a remedial teacher for children with learning disabilities, and she’s prone to toss about the phrase, We’re all a little bit ADHD! Her trivializing conditions like ADHD, in spite of being a remedial teacher, was yet another infuriating thing about her.

Now my therapist, in one of our weekly sessions, most of which revolved around my mother, was suggesting she might actually have ADHD?

In the hopes of understanding my mother better, I went straight to my favorite expert on parenting, trauma, and all the things, Dr. Gabor Maté. Right away, I dove into Scattered Minds, Dr. Maté’s account of his experience as a person with ADHD that went undiagnosed until well into adulthood. He also describes the working of an ADHD brain. I read it almost straight through, pausing only to tend to the pressing needs of my then toddler.

The first few chapters made me feel sympathetic toward my mother. If she has undiagnosed ADHD, she must be struggling so much internally, I thought, softening in a way I hadn’t in several years when I considered her POV. But as I read further, it was disquieting to find the book strangely familiar, and not in a secondhand this-is-the-way-my-mother-behaves kind of way. No, the book described the inner workings of my own brain extremely accurately. There were whole sections in that book which revealed openly the way I thought about certain things, stuff I hadn’t dared to share with anyone (not even my therapist!) for fear of how odd they would make me seem. (For example, there’s a passage about how an ADHD-er, the term I prefer, can over-identify with another person’s problems to the point of experiencing acutely discomfiting shame. This bit particularly resonated with me.)

Although I finished the book before my next therapy session, I waited until the last ten minutes of the appointment to bring it up with my therapist. I felt hesitant to share with her that the book seemed to describe me as much as or even more than it described my mum. Being a surgeon, I didn’t want to stray out of my lane and step on my therapist’s toes or challenge her expertise. She was the one with a degree in psychiatry, additional diplomas, and fellowships. Surely, she would have diagnosed me as ADHD in six months’ worth of interactions if I truly had it?

Her response surprised me. She just smiled and said, “It’s highly likely you have ADHD.”

Umm, what?

It shocked me because, at that time, I didn’t know self-diagnosis was a valid way of diagnosing ADHD. I was amazed that she didn’t reprimand me for over-thinking.

Would you believe it took me an additional six months, during which I lurked on Facebook pages and groups for and about ADHD, laughing in sheer relief at all the relatable memes and stories, before I asked my therapist for a formal evaluation? Of course, my logical surgeon’s brain wanted proof. Once again, she floored me by telling me she was now certain of the diagnosis based on our year-long interactions. No further evaluation was necessary. 

Sharing the diagnosis with my parents was odd. On the one hand, I felt a strange compulsion to tell them, as though I needed their approval to really be ADHD. But there was an equally strong reluctance in me, as though I was afraid of disappointing them, as though the diagnosis would tarnish the glow of my academic achievements that they basked in.

My mother was surprised. “You’re not like me, though,” she insisted.

Indeed, we aren’t alike! If she has undiagnosed ADHD, as I strongly suspect now, we are certainly very different flavors. But eventually, the diagnosis gave her a sense of kinship with me.

My father, on the other hand, was furious. Like a typical Indian father, he roared down the telephone line.

“Who’s this therapist? How dare she diagnose my doctor-daughter to be… to have… ADHD?” He was so angry, he was spluttering. I’d been dreading his reaction the most.

When I tried to explain some of my struggles in school that pointed toward ADHD, struggles we had missed because I was a typically well-behaved girl, always a top-ranking student, he said, “It’s like that for everyone!”

My issues included daydreaming in class to the point that I lost track of which subject was being taught, time blindness to the extent that I ended up not completing examination papers in time, and doing homework on autopilot with no recall whatsoever of what I had just studied. I was pretty sure everyone didn’t struggle like that!

Initially, I felt frustrated that my father couldn’t see this struggle of being unable to complete a third of an examination paper, just because I also ranked second in class that year. It felt as though he was furious because he had always assumed that I “got my brains” from him. We thought alike, our minds made similar leaps of logic so much so that when we spoke, we often interrupted each other, anticipating what the other person would say, and impatiently responding to that (often correct) assumption. My mother and brother would stay away from our conversations, because neither of them could follow our train of thought, nor match its speed. Our similarities made him proud. But now ADHD loomed like a spectre between us.

Then the penny dropped. We are similar, dad and me. He possesses yet another flavor of undiagnosed neurodivergence!

I have had several differences with my parents but after my formal-ish diagnosis, I look back and see not only my past struggles, but all the little workarounds my undiagnosed neurodivergent parents have supplied me with, hacks that eased much of my struggle. I tear up thinking of how my mother taught me to engage two senses while studying so that I read aloud to myself well into medical college. She also taught me to walk while studying to aid focus. When it was impossible to haul heavy medical tomes and walk, I tried to concentrate by hopping from one foot to another while standing at the table.

My father taught me time-blocking, a tool I use even now, although he didn’t call it that. It was just something he had stumbled upon himself and found useful. My diagnosis has made me look at my parents and their actions through a neurodivergent lens, and that makes me more empathetic toward them and more understanding of behaviors that previously seemed unforgivable to me.

When I came out to a friend from medical college, she was confused. “How do you focus during surgery?” My answer: ADHD hyper-focus is real, and it’s the closest thing I know to a superpower.

Yet another doctor friend told me, “You don’t have ADHD. You’re just hyper, like me!” I thought, Yes, my friend, I am like you because we both have ADHD. My sneaky agenda in telling her about it was the hope that she would recognize how similar we were and pursue her own diagnosis of ADHD. I was certain it would be as life-changing for her as it was for me. When she didn’t take the hint, I dropped the topic, although I was conscious of feeling disappointed at her curt dismissal of my self-knowledge. Of course, this may either be projection on my part, or defensiveness on hers because she subconsciously realizes we are similarly wired. (See how self-aware I can be!)

I have now stopped outing myself to people who already know me. At one level, the dismissal still stings. Although I don’t feel it quite as keenly as I used to (bye-bye Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria!), it’s still unpleasant and I would rather avoid it as far as possible.

Online though, I openly share my diagnosis and the experience of being a late-diagnosed ADHD-er, especially since I’m part of several parenting groups on Facebook, where more and more mothers are discovering that they are neurodivergent. The biggest gift ADHD has given me is a lens through which my actions and my past make sense. I make sense. I hope that through my writing, I can show people that although ADHD may be a significant disability in some situations, acceptance of the diagnosis leads to self-acceptance, which has been precious and life-changing for me.

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Nimisha Kantharia is a surgeon and writer from India. Her work has been published in Lunch Ticket, Hot Pot Magazine and addastories, the online literary magazine of the Commonwealth foundation. Her essay, “The Girl with the Turquoise Eye-Shadow,” was awarded the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She writes fiction under the pen name Faye Coutinho and can be found at www.fayecoutinho.com.

I seriously consider suicide at least once a week.

This is the first time these nine words have ever externalized, outside my head, in this particular order. I feel like I need to type them again.

I seriously consider suicide at least once a week.

And I have, every week, 52 weeks a year, since I was about eight years old.

I’m fifty now. That’s approximately 2,184 times I’ve intentionally contemplated ending my life. Like, weighed the pros, the cons. Deliberated means and methods.

Daydreamed about how completely sad people would be. Feared no one would notice.

Then, gone on with living. A week at a time.

I live with chronic suicidal ideation. It’s an important component of who I am, and how I move through the world. It saturates how I see myself, so it commands how you see me. I want to cease to exist, on a regular schedule.

But I’ve never done it. Never attempted, unless we count youthfully, willfully placing myself in situations—following the after-after party long after my friends tapped out, jumping from a jinky rope swing without knowing the water’s depth, walking alone to pick up White Castle at two a.m. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, all in the name of a good time, of fun, of experience (things that now, with the benefit of hindsight, seem miraculous I escaped, hale and whole). But everyone’s done that sometimes, right?

Or l’appel du vide—the call of the void—so common psychologists estimate that fully half of us have felt the fleeting urge, unexplained and unsettling, to leap from the cliff, the bridge, the balcony; to veer straight into traffic; to drive the steak knife straight into our hand.

Right?

I’m just like everyone else. Except that I think about killing myself. Four times a month.

There’s not a regular schedule. It’s not on my calendar, a repeating task on Google (“Suicide?” POSTPONE. Not this time.). It probably enters my mind, on average, once a week. Some weeks, a few times. Others, not at all. I’m only thinking about it right now because I’m telling you. Because I’m talking about it. For the first time.

I’ve not kept quiet from shame. Not entirely, anyway. I work as a peer counselor on a crisis line, and I talk to folks all day, every day, about suicide. I encourage them to be open. I tell them to combat the stigma. And I spill, freely, generously, about my anxiety and depression, the fact that I’m Autistic, and how I’ve been sober for more than a decade.

It’s made me a hypocrite. I have never told anyone, openly, about my suicidal ideation. And if I really want what I tell my callers I want—a world where mental health is integral to health as a whole, a world where asking for help is neither defeat nor evidence of a moral flaw—then I have to step out and say it. I have to be brave, even if I’m not sure I want to.

Because, yeah, I’m scared. I know, from being both a patient and a mental health worker, that the s-word is a shortcut to getting sectioned or forced on medical leave. Go straight to no control. For my own good.

Even though, really, this is just a thought I have, a thing I carry: no sound, no fury, signifying nothing, even if it’s weighty. If I was going to do it, I’ve had approximately 2,184 chances, none of which I’ve taken. If it was gonna happen, it would’ve. It’s real and unreal, like my soul—another thing I tend not to mention in conversation, if I can help it.

That’s the other part: imagine it in conversation. To anyone I feel close enough to mention it to, it’d be like handing them a backpack full of lead. Casually (“Here. Carry this. Forever. Thanks!”). It’s a responsibility I wouldn’t wish on anyone outside my profession, even in righteous vengeance. We’re already so unskilled at loving one another well, in healthy ways, when no one involved is considering death.

Even my husband, to whom I spare no detail (up to and including pops that smack the mirror, new body hairs in unexpected places, what I ate as a snack while he was at work). I can’t imagine the pain this would cause him, so I don’t. Imagine or say it.

Rather, I haven’t. I guess it’s out now. I have to be brave. I have to own it. Everywhere, to everyone.

Hi, I’m Caren. I have lifelong, chronic suicidal ideation.

I know I’m not the only one, too. I know one of the beloveds I’ve chosen to protect from the backpack full of lead is doing the same thing for me. Sometimes, I think I see a tell. A look. An expression. A joke, gallows humor, left swinging, untended, ignored, dismissed. Recognition (“You too?), then back onto living, week by week. I speak to people on the crisis line—mothers, brothers, cousins—who talk to me about how they, too, think about ending their life, but have called me instead.

That’s the thing about ideation. It matters, even as it doesn’t. I’m fine—great, even. I like my life. I have a partner who’s still, after 20 years, into me. I publish books. By day, I have a gratifying career supporting people in my community going through the worst days of their lives. I have invisible disabilities, but nothing that curbs what I can and do accomplish. I wake up, I won’t say ready to slay, but I wake up, and most of the time, I’m happy to have done so.

Except when I’m not. That’s when I start thinking maybe things would just be a hell of a lot better if I didn’t exist. That I should end my life. So I think about it.

Sometimes I plan. I research ways to die. I’ve read about poisons and drug overdoses, about hypothermia and drowning. I can point to most of my major arteries. I’ve stood too close to the rooftop’s edge.

I’ve watched video simulations of the 1,600-foot euthanasia roller coaster.

Making myself dead makes sense in those moments when I feel like there’s no difference between being invisible and going dark, when all I want is to just disappear.

Invisible, dark, disappear.

But 2,184 times, that’s as far as I’ve gone. And it’s as far as I’ll ever go.

I stay there awhile. Sometimes hours, sometimes days. You look at me, and I’m smiling back at you. I have a coffee in one hand. I’m cleaning the litterbox, I’m shopping for groceries. But just underneath, I’m thinking hard about killing myself.

And then, I stop.

My husband will make an offhand joke. My cat will plop dramatically in my lap. A spear of sunlight jabs through the mostly-closed shades, and the dust in the air catches the light and sparkles.

The dryer buzzes, and my clothes are warm, clean.

Something happens and I stand up. I walk away from images of death and walk back toward life. I’ll put on those clean clothes and go to work; I will talk to other people like me.  I’ve done this frequently enough to trust the process.

I’ll be back here again, like I’ve been so many times before. When you see me next time, I’ll seem the same.

I want to die. I stand up.

I don’t stand up because I’m magically happy. I don’t stand up because I’ve suddenly remembered the fragility of life, or how we only get one. I don’t stand up because I know in my heart that death is more than being invisible, going dark, turning invisible.

I don’t know why I stand up. I just do. I always have.

I stand up.

If you are in crisis in the United States, you can call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, 24/7. Click here for international suicide hotlines.

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