In 2022, I got paid for the first time in ten years when I was hired to teach a four-week “How to Podcast” adult enrichment class for my city’s community education program. During the first session, I showed a dozen eager adult learners how to record a conversation. I fairy dusted podcast knowledge all over my students until one of their hands shot up like a canister vacuum attachment, ready to suck up all of my sparkles.

“Yes, John?” I knew everyone’s name because I studied the registration list ahead of time.

“How do you bleep out a swear word?”

Fuck! I could import audio tracks, fade out theme music, and edit “um”s. But I didn’t know how to bleep. On the smart screen behind me, my cursor fumbled through menu options. The audio editing software I demonstrated was called Audacity, as if a patron saint of insecure community education instructors dramatic irony-ed the name. My shimmery confidence faded into matte insecurity.

“Uh,” I intoned, covering up my experience void. Then I showed John how to cut out a swear word. But John didn’t want a work-around. He wanted to throw a tonal blanket over a swear word, not eliminate it. Leaving profanity in a recording with a bleep on top can be funny, dramatic, and useful to the story, like a tiny toupee balanced on a bald head. I promised to show him next time.

Before the second week of class, I added a new visual aid to my slide presentation about how to bleep in Audacity. Then I recorded a few audio samples to play for my class. While I created my podcast curriculum, I gleamed with professional satisfaction glitter. Teaching adults to DIY their own audio was the perfect convergence of all of my life experiences. I earned a library science master’s degree in my twenties and taught database research workshops when I worked as a reference librarian. In my thirties, I developed active listening skills and infinite reserves of patience while parenting my three kids. Plus, I had co-hosted a hobby podcast with a friend for several years.

I wished it was a bigger job with full-time hours, but it was the only job I could get. A decade earlier, I became a stay-at-home mom, intending to spend a handful of years as a full-time caretaker to my children when daycare for three little kids cost more than my take-home pay. I thought I’d get to pause my career until they reached school age, then hit play right where I left off.

But careers don’t start and stop as easily as podcast episodes. In 2019, when my kids were all in elementary school, I applied for reference librarian positions, but my applications stalled in HR screening. Library bosses didn’t equate parenting with work. Even though I worked hard. All the time. Domestic labor never ends. My failure to finesse my unpaid activities into a bulleted simulacrum of a professional position dragged my thin resumé beneath the surface of the job candidate pool. Then, in 2020, the pandemic and distance learning drowned my fledgling search for a full-time job.

I got the part-time community education teaching job because it required a proposal, not a traditional cover letter and resumé. My submission included an outline for a four-week class and some sentences about my podcast. As for my lack of audio editing expertise, I didn’t lie about my qualifications. I just didn’t know what I’d need to know to teach podcasting. Maybe it was silly to worry about losing a job that paid me for just two hours per week. But it wasn’t the money that I was working for; it was the title. Having a job let me call myself something besides stay-at-home mom.

When it was time for the second class, I wondered what other questions my students might ask that I couldn’t answer. The media center’s shelves of graphic novels and picture books mocked my unemployability with their colorful earnestness, accentuating my inability to land full-time library work. I worried that my students would complain to my boss, who would realize that I was an audio engineer imposter, not a real professional. If he fired me from my consolation prize community education job, I didn’t see how I would ever get paid to work again.

My students liked the bleeping lesson and I regained some shiny self-assuredness. Then Margie raised her hand.

“How do I monetize my podcast?”

Ad revenue and sponsorships? Teaching the class was the only way I ever monetized podcasting. When I divided my wage by the unpaid hours I spent preparing my course objectives, lesson plans, visual aids, and handouts, I only earned nickels per hour. I told Margie about the non-monetary benefits of podcasting. How podcasting, for my co-host and me, was a fun way to spend our limited free time. Like most independently produced podcasts, we didn’t have enough download numbers to join a distribution network. But our recording schedule helped us stay in touch with each other while living in different cities, gave us a space to vent about our kids’ media use, and improved our ability to speak and joke extemporaneously. I promised Margie a better, more lucrative answer in next week’s class.

Before the third class, I made a robust slideshow about content creation and revenue. I didn’t want to feel like a phony, undeserving of my paycheck. Even if it was barely enough to cover a fraction of my family’s weekly grocery bill. Working so many hours for so little money felt like an inverse calculation to how, ten years earlier, I had decided to quit my librarian job and become a stay-at-home mom, rather than keep a job I didn’t like very much and spend my entire salary on daycare. Even though the takeout dinner I bought to feed my kids on the nights I taught podcasting cost more than what I earned from teaching, the paycheck wasn’t the point. I didn’t need to turn a profit on my time investment. The title was enough to make me work hard to keep it.

For my family, it made financial sense for me to stay home. But because there’s no status in domestic labor, I felt compelled to keep pursuing paid employment. Back in my twenties, when I was formulating my feminist identity, I bought into the idea that I needed to get paid for something other than housework and childcare to be taken seriously. I felt bad about being a stay-at-home mom not because I disliked parenting, but because I compared myself to my peers with distinguished and impressive job titles. While I was supporting my husband’s career as the primary parent in our family, my neighbors and friends earned tenure, made partner, and published books.

If we lived in a society without misogyny, with gender equality, with societal support and affordable childcare, I could have weaved in and out of paid employment to full-time parenting and back without being punished by a resumé gap or unemployment stigma. But instead, I had a hard-won, two-hour per week job that covered up my stay-at-home mom shame like bleeps hide profanity.

Before the last class of the four-week session, I pulled open the heavy school door. My boss stood in the hallway. With a clipboard.

“Can I talk to you?” he asked.

He must have discovered that I was a hobbyist without any ad revenue. A podcast poser. An unemployable former librarian. What would I do if I couldn’t say “I teach podcasting” anymore? I would have to go back to mumbling, “I’m just a mom.”

“I want to check on the winter session schedule,” he said. “Can you teach the class again? Everyone’s loving it. This will give the waitlisted people a chance to take it.”

A waitlist! With that kind of demand, my class would remain my class. I looked forward to hearing more student stumpers in the next class. The more hard questions I encountered, the better I got at responding to them. I could keep teaching the class! Maybe, someday, I’d even feel fully qualified. I added the winter semester dates into the calendar app on my phone, then skipped up the stairs to the media center.

I wished all the employers who’d rejected my librarian job applications could see how hard I was willing to work, how nimbly I learned new skills, and how deftly I taught them to other people. But was it work? Was I working working? Teaching podcasting took me away from my real full-time occupation—managing my household and parenting my kids. Teaching podcasting was definitely not work in the conventional making-a-living sense. I didn’t commute or get a hefty ACH deposit. Teaching podcasting, however, gave me a glinting confidence boost. It wasn’t diamond-level sparkle, or even costume jewelry gleam. It was a mirror-encrusted, dollar-store party favor version of a job. And I loved it.

Teaching podcasting made me realize that, for me, work isn’t really about money or time. It’s about dignity. I wish that being a full-time parent could be considered a real job, but it’s not, so “I teach podcasting” became the bleep that covered up my professional disappointment. It was a little noise that disguised my decade-long caregiving career break and all of the domestic labor that made me worthless in the conventional job market.

At the end of the fourth class, I flipped to my carefully prepared last slide, happy to wrap up the class, feeling like a low-paid, very part-time, back-to-work success story until Joanne raised her hand.

“How about theme music? What do you know about copyright law?”

Shit. Bleep!

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Deborah Copperud is a writer and podcaster in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has appeared in Current Affairs, Glamour, The Rumpus, HuffPost, Open Secrets Magazine, and other publications. She co-hosted the It’s My Screen Time Too podcast for seven years and independently produced the Spock Talk podcast in 2023. With degrees from the University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin—Madison, she has worked as a reference librarian and has taught for Minneapolis Public Schools Community Education and The Loft Literary Center. She recently launched the Read Minnesota Books podcast.

I love building things. That feels obvious to me now, but it hasn’t always felt like something I could claim with confidence. For a long time, I was self-conscious about how many ideas I had and how quickly I became interested in new endeavors. Once, a colleague made an offhand remark that hit me hard: “You like the idea of something.” I took it as a rebuke. We were standing off to the side of a local TV set, about to go on air to promote my independent bookstore, Old Town Books. I was rattled, red-faced, and thinking now only of my limitations. Did I just like the idea of something new? Had I lived only in the beginning of things, but lacked the work ethic it takes to carry them forward?

What I’ve come to understand, slowly and through experience, is that loving the idea isn’t where it ends for me. It’s where it begins. In graduate school at NYU’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study, I built my own major by combining classes from across the university. Looking back, interdisciplinary study was an early expression of how my mind works. I’m drawn to intersections. I like combining things, shaping something that doesn’t quite exist yet, and then figuring out how to make it real.

Opening my first business, an independent bookstore in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, gave me my first real experience of that process at scale. I had worked in retail or the service industry since I was sixteen, but this was the first time I had struck out on my own. It started as a small pop-up with secondhand shelves and a limited inventory. I spent long days rearranging displays, talking with customers, learning systems as I went, and slowly building something that began to take on a life of its own. The store grew because of community, consistency, and because I stayed with it through the less glamorous parts (e.g. COVID.) That experience grounded me in a way nothing else had. It showed me that I don’t just love the spark of an idea, I love the long middle where the real work happens, too.

Even with that proof, I still hesitated when a new idea took hold.

Ice cream didn’t start as a business idea. The spark began in the middle of an emotionally hard winter, when the days felt short and more than a little heavy. I needed something to shift my energy, something tactile and fun, so I began tinkering in my kitchen. I can still picture those early experiments clearly. Measuring cream and sugar, stirring at the stove, waiting for the mixture to cool, testing batches that didn’t quite work and then adjusting again. The first time I got the texture right, something clicked. It felt familiar in a surprising way, like I had tapped into the same part of myself that had built the bookstore, just in a completely different medium.

Books have always been my primary way of connecting to the world. Reading can be slow and reflective, restorative. I love that feeling, but I also started to crave something that operated on a different timeline. Ice cream offered that contrast. It was embodied, sensory, immediate. You could make something in a few hours, taste the result, adjust, and try again the next day. It gave me a feedback loop that felt energizing and exciting. It was also challenging. I hadn’t gone to pastry school, or even ever really made my own ice cream before. It was new, and that newness was inspiring.

There was also something deeper at play. I loved the nostalgia element. I have three young daughters and the idea of raising them as a mom with a bookstore and ice cream shop? Priceless. To say they were supportive is an understatement. Their enthusiasm for my new business idea was encouraging, even if it meant them rifling through the freezer at all hours sampling my test batches. Ice cream, for kids and adults alike, creates an immediate moment of joy. You taste it, you react to it, you share it with someone standing next to you. I found myself drawn to that immediacy, to the idea of creating something that could bring people together in a different, more spontaneous way.

Once I understood that, the project made more sense to me. It wasn’t a departure from what I had been building. It was an extension of it.

What began with curiosity quickly became an obsession. I found myself reading about ice cream late at night, thinking about butterfat percentages while driving, and paying attention to details I’d never considered before. At a certain point, I had to decide whether this would remain a hobby or become a project I took seriously. Choosing the second path meant committing to the full process, not just the creative parts but the technical and logistical ones as well. There wasn’t one clear moment when I decided to take ice cream from fun side project to a business idea, it was an evolution. The more time I spent in the kitchen, the more certain I became I wanted to make ice cream for a living, not just as a hobby.

I went to Idaho to attend Ice Cream School (yes, that’s a real thing!), and spent three intensive days immersed in a working commercial kitchen, asking questions and observing how professionals approached their craft. I also enrolled in coursework through Cornell University’s Dairy Foods Extension Program to better understand food science and safety, grappling with material that pushed me into a beginner’s mindset again.

Bringing that new knowledge back home introduced a different kind of learning curve. I decided to go for it and set up an ice cream cart inside my bookstore. The first pop-ups felt both exciting and slightly surreal, with books lining the shelves, shoppers browsing, and ice cream being scooped in the midst of it all. There were more than a few books damaged by sticky dripping cones. And the bulky cart and line of customers was a thorn in the side of my booksellers.

At the same time, I was navigating an entirely new set of systems than I had with selling books. Permits, regulations, storage requirements, production logistics. Sitting at my computer with multiple tabs open, trying to piece together what was required and how to do it correctly, was a whole new challenge, a crash course in a world that didn’t function on enthusiasm alone.

There were moments when it felt overwhelming, when it would have been easier to step back and stay within the retail world I already knew. But I’ve started to recognize that feeling as part of the process. That friction isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that something is taking shape. A meaningful moment came when I launched a community-based fundraising round online that raised $30,000 of seed funding. Pressing publish and then watching people choose to invest in something that was still in progress was both humbling and energizing. It reinforced the idea that building something is not a solitary act. It’s an invitation for others to participate, to believe in what you are creating.

I’ve begun to reframe what it means to be a serial entrepreneur. It’s not about being scattered or unfocused. It’s about being responsive to curiosity and willing to follow an idea far enough to understand its potential. It’s about trusting that the skills built in one project will carry into the next, even when the surface details are entirely different. The bookstore taught me how to create a space for connection through books. Ice cream is teaching me how to create that same sense of connection in a different form, one that’s immediate, sensory, but still rooted in a similar kind of pleasure.

So while that “you like the idea” comment has stayed with me, it no longer feels like a critique. Yes, I like the idea stage, but I also like everything that comes after it. I like the learning, the problem solving, the late nights, and the long stretches where things are uncertain and evolving. I like building something from the ground up and staying with it long enough to see what it can become. Most of all, I’m learning to trust that this way of working, of moving between ideas and following them into reality, is not something I need to fix. It’s the foundation of how I build, and who I am.

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Ally Kirkpatrick is the founder of Old Town Books, an independent bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia, and Fabled Ice Cream, a literary-inspired ice cream company launching in 2026. Her work centers around building community through storytelling, whether through books, events, or food. She writes about entrepreneurship, creativity, and small business ownership, and her work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications including Edible DC and Roxane Gay’s The Audacity.

I’m standing by the front door, coat on, purse slung over my shoulder, keys in hand. I’m ready to go. Halfway to the garage. My husband is…brushing his teeth? Tying his shoes? God knows. But obviously, he’s dawdling. Again.

There are only two kinds of people in the world: Those who seem perfectly happy taking their sweet time, as if time itself were merely a suggestion, and those who can’t wait to just get going already.

I adore punctuality, efficiency, time well spent—meaning, let’s get some shit done. There is a special place in hell reserved for people who can’t end meetings on time because they’re incapable of getting through an agenda.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a wee bit impatient—not with children or the elderly, thank you, but with functioning adults who seem to assume that time is an unlimited commodity, so why not waste as much of it as they can?

Nope. Tempus fugit, as the saying goes.

I’m impatient to get on with life, to make things happen, to get started on the next amazing chapter, journey, revelation that’s out there waiting for me. So hurry on up! Let me get to it!

I’m not ashamed of this personality trait, but it has gotten me into trouble. One time, I’d been selected to interview for an editing job with a big financial company in Manhattan that would surely have tripled or quadrupled my salary at the time, if I landed it. I wanted that job so badly. But the job-search company that led me to it was dragging its feet on getting me an actual interview.

Guess what Impatient Me did? I called the would-be employer directly to plead my case. This was a giant no-no and the woman on the other end of the call was furious with me for overstepping. (I would argue that I was showing strong initiative, but never mind.) Needless to say, I killed that job possibility on the spot, simply because I refused to wait for the gears to turn on their own.

Another time, a few friends and I hatched an idea for an online T-shirt business that would feature our topical, clever slogans. This seemed like a sure-fire winner and we ran, not walked, to form an LLC, trademark our logo, open a bank account, and set up a business that, well, didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of panning out because we hadn’t done nearly enough homework to figure out how online retail actually works—and educate ourselves about all the expensive roadblocks we’d encounter.

I feel responsible for that one because I was the elder stateswoman of our trio and I definitely leapt before looking. But not before we’d all kicked in a fair chunk of change and spent hours barreling ahead. No harm in getting excited about an idea, but launching a business from scratch as a neophyte may not play to an impatient person’s strengths. Ya think?

These days, however, I’m changing my tune. My patience is legendary. Here’s why: I became a full-time writer and learned the hard way that writing and publishing are perhaps the last really slow industries left in our post-modern world. There is so much hurry-up-and-wait in the publishing world that an author can literally grow old waiting for her name to show up on a book’s front cover.

I’m not kidding. It’s not unusual to spend two or three years writing a book, another year or two pitching it, and then—hurray!—somebody wants to publish it. But the clock will tick on, as editing and revising your manuscript can last another six months, until finally…wait for it…I mean, literally, wait for it…the book is scheduled for publication nearly two years after all that!

So many new gray hairs will have sprouted in the meantime! I have lived this slo-mo life, big-time. My new novel, Tent City, has taken seven years to travel from manuscript to publication. I’m practically a different person now than when I started writing the thing—older, yes, but also wiser. My chronic impatience has come smack up against the unbelievably slow-moving decision trees that make up the publishing world’s gatekeepers, from agents to editors, from writing contests to conference organizers.

And believe or not, I’m grateful now for the long slog because practicing patience has forced me to grind—by which I mean, to be persistent, to stay true to my vision for this book, to believe in it for years. I weathered countless rejections, yet I never was willing to let go.

Impatient Me would have quit trying and moved on.

I nearly did just that—until I learned to value the marathon over the sprint.

Time’s accretion has made room for me to become an astute reader of my own material and to value a protracted revision process that made my book better when I let the work marinate.

Learning patience has also made me a better listener, someone able to be present in the moment, even if the moment feels like an hour. That also makes me a better writer, especially when it comes to capturing the emotional beats of a scene.

The unexpected bonus that results from my novel taking the long way ’round to reality is that it’s more relevant now than when I wrote it; Tent City’s themes exploring the decline of the American Dream resonate in 2026 in ways they didn’t back in 2019.

Hurray for the slow crawl and the long slog!

These days, I’m still forced to hurry up and wait for my husband to get ready to go. I recognize that he’ll never change, and I’ve come to accept that. (Once a dawdler, always a dawdler.) Besides, I’m much better at waiting than I used to be. I’m grateful for the extra moment to think and reflect, for time will pass anyway, and it’s for the best that I can’t actually rush it along.

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Amy L. Bernstein’s new novel, Tent City, is at long last available wherever books are sold. And now she’s impatient to share it. Learn more at www.amywrites.live

Let me start with this: I’m ridiculously grateful that I can call myself a working actor. The odds of my being able to say that are, well, not good. The competition is fierce, the jobs are out of your control—and you have to be comfortable with hearing an endless round of “no”s, or hearing nothing at all, just sending auditions out there, and the pay is...not what you think.

But nothing comes close to the sheer joy I feel when I step on stage or I hear “action.” Isn’t that the point in this one and only life you get? To do what you love? I think so. But to make that work, I have to hustle and struggle to make ends meet because it’s worth it. All of this chaos and worry? It’s worth it. I’ve done the corporate job, I’ve done the creative design job, I’ve done all kinds of jobs. Acting is my first love.

Getting to this point has been a series of sacrifices, both financial and personal. When I came back to acting 10 years ago, I quit a good job working in the communications department at a liberal arts college making sixfigures a year and mentally prepared myself for some form of poverty while I got my career up and running. I live in a small midwestern city that has no outlets for acting so all of my jobs require me to travel far from home (god, I miss living in New York City these days) for extended times, taking me away from my amazing wife and equally amazing cats.

And the pay...it’s okay. It’s certainly not steady. But when you’re working you can almost scrape by.

I do lot of work in theater and I would say the typical paycheck there—not New York—averages out to $1,000 a week. I did a show called Prince Faggot Off-Broadway last year that started at $1,200/week and when it transferred to commercial Off-Broadway that went up to $2,000/week. That’s pretty good when it comes to theater! If I ever am fortunate enough to make it to Broadway that number goes up a bit more unless I somehow become a “name,” i.e., famous. That’s when the theater money really starts to get good.

Television and film work is far more lucrative but really only for a very small number of working actors—the people you think of when you think of actors, y’know, stars. That’s not me. A day’s work on TV will earn you over $1,000 and if you can string some days together consecutively or, even better, a couple of weeks, well then you’re starting to talk about the kind of money most people think of when they think “actor.”

I did two weeks on a television pilot and made over $10,000 (that’s the entire run of a play sometimes!). When the show got picked up, I did a day here and a day or two there and over the course of that eight-episode season I made maybe another $10,000. At some point I will see some residuals but they won’t amount to much.

We’re about to start filming season two and I’m hoping to see a bump in my rate because I’m a recurring character crossing seasons. But we’ll see. I don’t have a lot of leverage in these instances and that, too, is a thing you have to deal with. The currency in those negotiations is, frankly, celebrity—how much, what kind, and how big? And when you don’t yet have that particular currency, you end up way lower on the financial food chain.

Last year, 2025, was easily my most financially (and artistically) successful year yet: A hit TV show and a hit Off-Broadway play and all told, I made enough money to land in lower middle class territory. In Wisconsin, that is, not New York.

And that’s when the going is good and I’m working. The reality is that getting a gig is part luck, part hard work, and part some magic I can’t even quantify. It almost feel like I’ve won the lottery when I’m told I booked a role.

When you’re not acting—and that’s most of the time—you have to figure out some other way to make money while waiting to land another gig. Working a regular job is impossible, because no employer wants to hear you might leave for two to three months, which is about how long a regular theatre run is with rehearsals and performances. I had the best luck working at REI, whose management is highly tolerant of people taking time off to do cool things, but my constant departures even wore their last nerve, and mine.

So I hustle. I take headshots, portraits—basically whatever anyone needs a camera for, I do it. I cat sit. I write the occasional essay. I’ve consulted on scripts, helped people move, driven art from one city to another, etcetera. I depend on the kindness of others and the generosity and support of friends and family. This way of life makes it almost impossible to budget: one month I might make $6,000, and another $500. My wife holds down the health insurance, thankfully, so at least I don’t have to worry about that.

Filing for unemployment comes with multiple issues and being paid in all the weird ways I am—1099s to W2s that reflect three months of work plus an occasional residual—seems to utterly baffle the unemployment people. I believe the fact that I’ve worked in four states in the past year shows I’m all about the hustle, but unemployment somehow wants more “proof” that I’m out there trying to get work. Believe me, I am!

Maybe one day I’ll make it big and score that fabulous Hollywood paycheck. I just won’t count on that happening any time soon. But I will be happy and fulfilled and that’s what counts I think.

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Rachel Crowl is a two-time Obie award winning actor, musician, and photographer who has been creating one thing or another for a long time. She started acting after high school, eventually ending up in a repertory theater in New York City doing everything from Greek tragedies to Tom Stoppard verbal swordplay. After a time spent doing other things she found herself as a lead in an indie movie and started up again and has now worked in theater, film, television, video games, and scripted podcasts. She now lives in the Midwest (long story) with the best wife in the world and some cats.

My husband says the one thing they don’t tell you about parenting is that it makes you re-examine your own childhood. Your memories of the highs and lows of those developmental years are triggered at the oddest times, especially when you see your child going through their own growing pains. I had one of those moments recently with our 12-year-old daughter while helping her with her math homework.

Our daughter is a multifaceted overachiever. She plays soccer, is a proficient pianist, does beautiful sketches, makes straight A’s, and one day, she hopes to be an astrophysicist. She has that bright-eyed wonder about learning and trying new things that hasn’t been dimmed so far by life and its obstacles.

Partially inspired by the cult classic film Mean Girls, she joined the Mathletes team at her middle school so she could compete in local math competitions. (“We even get jerseys, Mom,” she told me excitedly. “Like the jackets in the movie!”) She’s always excelled at math, so her dad and I were supportive of her joining. But it turns out that support also meant dusting off our long-buried math skills to help her train. I was expecting her to ask us for help with a few algebraic equations that I would struggle to calculate. But some nights ago, she came into our bedroom with a worksheet that looked a lot more complicated.

“It’s pre-calculus. The high school teacher came to practice and taught us functions,” our daughter explained.

My husband, zoning out while listening to music in his earbuds, was admittedly exhausted from a trying workday. So I decided to “take one for the team:” I offered to help our daughter with her pre-cal homework. But she demurred.

“It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to. I know you failed calculus in college,” she said in the casual way that kids often do when their words are more savage than Fenty loungewear. I know that type of bluntness doesn’t come from malice but an unfiltered innocence that only children have. It still cuts deep though.

The truth is I did fail calculus in college even after taking the course twice. I also barely passed my physics and engineering courses although I was a civil engineering major. In fact, my grades were so poor my freshman year that I lost my scholarship and seriously contemplated dropping out of school.

It was a steep fall for an 18-year-old who was once like my daughter—a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed overachiever. I graduated third in my high school class of almost 200 students. I got accepted to Ivy League colleges. I was sure I was destined for greatness, and my extended family expected the same of me. I would be one of the first college graduates in our family. I would become a civil engineer and architect, start my own firm, make oodles of money, and make everyone proud of me. Before he died, my grandfather bestowed me with a construction hat with my last name printed on the front that he wanted me to wear one day on worksites. For Christmas, my parents bought me a drafting table and put it in my bedroom so I would have a proper place to draw schematics.

Because I knew I had these dreams to fulfill, I ignored the red flags that hinted at what was to come. I dismissed how lonely I was in my math and engineering classes where I was one of few girls and one of two Black students. I tried my best to find fulfillment in lessons that I found boring and uninspiring. I’d study for hours, only to freeze up during tests. When I got the test back later, marked in red, I’d be crushed, feeling the weight of expectations I was starting to doubt I could meet.

After a while, I began to dread getting up for school every day. I experienced panic attacks between classes that left me hiding in restrooms doing breathing exercises. After I started having fleeting thoughts of suicide, I couldn’t overlook the red flags anymore. I had to accept that no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to pass those classes. I wasn’t going to be the person I thought I’d become. So I quit. I dropped out of the engineering and architecture programs and shoved the construction helmet my grandfather had given me to the back of my closet, knowing I would never wear it. My parents gave the drafting table to a family friend.

With a low GPA and unable to afford my college tuition anymore without my scholarship, I transferred to a cheaper state college that was willing to accept me. Instead of seeing it as a new opportunity, I was terrified I’d make things even worse. I was starting all over again while grappling with the stinging reality of failure. I also had to create a new vision for my future and find an identity outside of being an “overachiever”— a role that I’d relished and now mourned.

So, who was I, and what should I study? Could I figure it out or would I remain a quitter and a failure? I wrote through my feelings and doubts. I expressed my frustrations on paper and in blog posts and fantasized about a reality filled with fictional characters with storylines that helped me escape, that kept me entertained and invested. As it turned out, those rants and scribbled stories created the pathway to my future.

I decided to write professionally and enrolled in the School of Journalism at my new university. I completed a short story that was a finalist for a national contest. It was later published in an anthology that appeared in bookstores around the country. After I graduated, I became an award-winning reporter and NAACP-Image Award-nominated novelist. I did succeed, but not in the way I’d thought I would.

Now, more than twenty years later with my daughter’s precalculus homework in front of me, I was not only unsure if I was ready to tackle the equations on the worksheet, but also the ghosts from my past. After all, this stuff nearly broke me when I was 18. It left behind years of insecurity and self-doubt. But time heals old wounds, as they say, and parenthood often pushes you past your comfort zone. I couldn’t refuse to help my daughter simply because I was worried I’d get triggered by functions.

“Yes, I failed calculus,” I explained to her, “but I think I remember some of it. I’m willing to try.”

That answer was good enough for our daughter.

A few seconds later, she sat down beside me on the bed and we began her homework together. The equations weren’t triggering, and they were nowhere near as challenging as I’d thought they’d be. By the third math problem, I was shocked at how easy they were. I could now quickly solve something that had stumped me as a college freshman.

“You’re better at math than I thought, Mom,” my daughter said.

She was right. I was better at it than we both thought I’d be. So why could I do functions now but hadn’t been able to do them back then? Had it been because of the overwhelming pressure I felt at the time, or was it because of poor instruction from my professors? Would I have done better on a more diverse campus? Or had there been some small part of me at 18 that was whispering, then screaming when I wouldn’t listen, “This is not meant for you! This is not who you want to be!”

I guess I’ll never know for sure.

My daughter and I finished most of the problems that night, agreeing to tackle the rest in a couple of days. I went to bed satisfied that I’d figured out her math equations but happier that long ago, I’d solved a much bigger challenge than functions, one that mattered more than calculus.

I figured out what I really wanted to be and what was right for me.

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L.S. Stratton is an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and former newspaper crime reporter who has written more than thirty books under different pen names in just about every genre from thrillers to romance to historical fiction. She has fully embraced her childhood self by writing her first young adult novel, Sundown Girls, a paranormal thriller, that hits shelves Jan. 27, 2026.

I’m the most forgiving person I know, but in my forties I had a manager at my job as a communications assistant manager that I still I can’t forgive even 15 years later. She was abrasive, invasive, petty, manipulative, and cruel. I don’t know how I reported to her for six years, and the why was purely economic. But when I’ve had an experience as difficult as that, I try to gain something useful from it. There’s always something to learn.

I learned quite a few lessons from my impossible manager. I learned that I’m a minimizer. I grew up in a chaotic household and was often the lone voice of calm in a volatile family landscape. My manager was a maximizer. When she panicked, I tried to calm her down by putting the crisis du jour in perspective. This was absolutely the wrong approach. Minimizing left her feeling abandoned, so I pretended to freak out a little. I’m not sure I was very good at it, but I tried so that she wasn’t out there alone, twisting in the wind while wailing about a missing shirt sample.

I’m extremely independent by nature. Asking for help is a big step for me, and usually a last resort. My previous manager, a gracious woman who never raised her voice, would invite me into her office whenever my to-do list overwhelmed me. We would have a friendly little chat while she put numbers next to the tasks, ranking them by priority. I thought this was what managers did, this…managing.

About a year after I came to work for the impossible manager, I was working under backbreaking deadlines on too many projects, so I brought her a too-long list for help with prioritizing. She shoved it back at me. “Don’t ask me,” she barked. “I’m not here to tell you how to do your job. It’s all important. It all needs to be done.” I learned an important lesson that day. I learned to never ask her for help with anything. Ever.

She might have refused to help me prioritize (wait, isn’t that actually a manager’s job?), but that didn’t stop her from micro-managing me. That is where she truly excelled. She would stand in my office doorway, verbally going over all the steps for projects I managed. As she told me in detail how to do what I’d successfully accomplished many times, my will to live would slip away. One day, I looked at her and said, “If I don’t know how to do this by now, you should fire me.” Obviously, I wasn’t a perfect employee.

The problem was, we were so different. Take the entire concept of a career. I have always regarded career advancement with bemusement. I worked in order to pay bills. I pursued promotions to obtain raises, to pay more bills. My career was simply a job, a way to avoid financial catastrophe. My manager’s career was her life.

This was only the start of our differences. Physically, she was a short, trim woman, a former cheerleader and homecoming queen with a mathematically precise bob and a rigid corporate style formed during the reign of the Power Suit. I’m a tall, stately ocean liner of a woman who dresses in an unapologetically feminine fashion. I bought most of my clothing from thrift stores. Most shockingly, I didn’t color my hair.

We differed socially. The social side of the office bothered her. She had no comrades, no lunch buddies, no gossip friends. She went to the gym on her lunch hour. By contrast, I spent mine eating and laughing with office friends, who would also stop by during the day, and send me emails that made me laugh out loud. She found this unsettling. Were we allowed to have fun at work? Was enjoyment permitted? She thought not.

Our personal lives were also a contrast. I was twice divorced and always dating. She’d been married forever and didn’t approve of my getting calls or flowers at the office, even though she received both from her husband. She had a grown stepdaughter who wouldn’t speak to her, and no children of her own. I had three daughters who occasionally needed attention. My manager didn’t understand my obligation to attend parent-teacher conferences, or the necessity of retrieving a vomiting child from the school office. She seemed to think my motherly duties were purely optional.

I’ve probably painted myself as a blowsy sort, a too-much woman, too tall, too romantically active, too maternal, too social. But I was a kick-ass employee when it came to the work itself. I did it well and quickly and correctly. I had energy and ideas and hustle. I took on more of her responsibilities, including all press placements (getting products into movies, shows, and press features). I built enough rapport with editors, costumers, and production assistants that our year-over-year product placement rate rose over 400%. I also met every deadline.

My undeniable competence allowed my aging manager to whittle down her duties, handing off many to me. Her days were often spent going to meetings, because our old-fashioned company had a lot of them. While she sat in conference rooms, I wrote copy, edited speeches, presentations and press releases, took calls, chased orders, handled returns, and disseminated our placement results companywide in memos with her name on them. I tried my best to make her look good.

Most managers would appreciate an employee who did their job for them. Appreciation never arrived. It was confusing to be treated with suspicion and nitpicking when I’d hoped for recognition. But even this taught me a valuable lesson. I learned to cheer myself on. I saved every single completed task list with date assigned and date finished. I compiled my accomplishments for twice-yearly reviews. I documented my performance so well that she didn’t have to. Working for someone that demotivating taught me how to motivate myself.

Maybe the biggest difference between us was in our levels of happiness. She seemed miserable at work. She was terrified of making a mistake, and every moment of the workday held the potential for calamity. I imagined her as a tattletale in school, constantly raising her hand and calling out, “Teacher? So-and-so is passing notes,” in a plaintive, piercing tone. She was obsessed with rules and procedures, and quick to point out any violations. This caused more trouble for her than the coworkers she reported for various infringements. I, on the other hand, was happy. I liked my duties, the company, and the members of my team who weren’t my manager. I enjoyed my job.

She’s not the only person I know who has had a heart attack, but she’s the only person I know who had a heart attack on the golf course. The heart attack didn’t make me happy, but the six weeks of mandatory leave she took were, comparatively, like an in-office vacation. I did both our jobs just fine in her absence. But there was one aspect of her job that I absolutely could not do, a duty that engaged and soothed her. This woman loved to pack. It was just like Christmas for her.

It started with lists. I imagine she laid awake at night, mentally composing long, detailed lists of what was needed for a trade show or sales meeting or photo shoot. This meant planning out the contents of each carton—what would go in with what, balanced and careful, lots of brown craft paper around the forms, the toolkit, the apparel samples, the steamer. Then, using a precise but lively printing that would have been at home on an architect’s sketch, she would put the lists to graph paper. Beside each listed item, she would draw a small, perfectly square box.

She’d go over these lists several times, erasing and arranging with great care and concentration. While she planned, I’d lay in supplies: large quantities of boxes, paper, tape, and tape guns (which of course she’d reminded me to do repeatedly—see micro-managing, above). After I reassured her that all necessary supplies had been procured, she would pick a morning.

On that special day, she would come to the door of my office wearing her official packing outfit of cardigan, capri pants, and sneakers, clutching her clipboard, eager to go. “Let’s pack,” she’d holler, as intensely as if we were headed to Paris and had a plane to catch. She’d walk quickly to the elevator, barely restraining her anticipation as we rode down to the first floor, where she would herd me to the prop room like a sheepdog and let us in.

It was just like Christmas for her. Her focus was absolute. Nothing could bother her while she packed, not even my placid lack of emotional engagement with the process. After she placed each item where she wanted it to go (or told me to put it there), she would stop, go to her list, and make a large, careful check in the box next to that item. She was in a flow state.

I wasn’t, but at least I was obedient. She wanted a hanging dress form in there? Fine, there it went. A double wrap on that same form? Double wrap for sure. She wanted things taped with four-inch overlaps? Four-inch overlaps it was. Not one steamer, but two so there was a backup just in case? Two steamers, coming right up. And each box needed a list of contents written on the side, and a large number.

I’m terrible at packing. It’s my least favorite part of any vacation. So I was happy to act as an automaton while executing her detailed packing strategies. She was happy too, so happy that while packing that she forgot to be awful to me. Her heightened focus and deep serenity lasted throughout the packing, sealing, numbering, and recording. And all those perfect little squares got their check marks.

Check. Check. Check. Check.

She went to the events for which we were packing and took her list along as a manifest. She always knew exactly what was in which box when it was time for setup. I would look forward to her being away at the trade show, sales meeting, or photo shoot, because while she was gone, I could breathe.

I took advantage of one of her absences by clearing every scrap of personal material from my office, every photo on the corkboard, paperweight, coaster and plant, right down to my favorite thumbtacks. I could pack what was left (Altoids, a tin of pocket change) in my Kleenex box and hit the road in two minutes. Her expression when she saw what I’d done was gratifying. I wanted her to understand that I was a flight risk.

So how did it all come out? Eventually, after a comprehensive departmental re-org, my manager began reporting to an executive creative officer. Her hall monitor demeanor wasn’t seen as helpful by the creative officer. One morning she flounced into my office and announced, “Apparently I’m supposed to bring solutions to her, not problems.” I clucked sympathetically, but solutions require creative thinking. I knew this was beyond her. She was doomed.

The day came when the creative officer could tolerate no more. My impossible manager was stripped of her management status, job title, most of her pay, and sole report (me). Along with this dramatic demotion, she was relieved of every single job duty. Every. Single. One.

Other people might have quit, but she was stubbornly holding out for Medicare eligibility. She had nothing to do. No planning. No packing. No little checks next to items on her long, long lists. For ten months, she sat in her office, pecking at her keyboard, answering personal emails, and pretending to read Women’s Wear Daily.

Occasionally, someone would remember that she existed and ask for help with fabric swatches or sales material distribution. These were projects I’d previously managed with workers from a temp agency, so I knew how to do them. But she would jump up and rush to my office door clutching a list, raring to instruct me on how she wanted me to go about doing it.

As the new lead for marketing copy, I would be crafting a blog post or naming a product line or polishing a pitch or working on the creative aspects of a marketing initiative. I’d look up and smile. “You’ll have to ask my manager,” I’d say pleasantly. “She can add it to my workflow if she thinks I have the time.” My former impossible manager would stomp back to her office, fuming and furious.

Let me tell you. It was like Christmas for me. Just like Christmas.

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Karen G. Berry lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in micro-societies, the strange and secret lives of children, and the heroic nature of everyday living. Karen’s work has been published by Inknest, The Offing, HerStry, Flash Fiction, Thin Skin, Rust & Moth, Parks & Points, The Gilded Weathervane, Hot Pot, Panorama, Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals and anthologies, online and in print. You can learn more about Karen at her blog, I am Not a Pie.

The idea sat in the back of my mind for years, like a box you move from place to place but never unpack. I could be a flight attendant. Technically, I had been one already, in utero when my mom worked as one into her first trimester.

But I pushed the idea away like a kid who doesn’t want to try a new food. I love being outdoors as much as I hate early mornings. My favorite place to be is in the mountains away from people. Most people know these two preferences go against the flight attendant job description.

It wasn’t until I had explored all other job avenues and got accepted to graduate school for mental health counseling that I finally followed the urge to apply. I did it on a whim after seeing an ad from a regional airline on my way to Mexico. Two months later, I landed an in-person interview and got the job offer the same day. It felt right to accept the role over school for reasons only intuition can explain.

Fast forward to two years on the job. Another crewmember and I stood in the first-class galley over a leftover pan of chocolate chip cookies. The trip marked my first time working an international flight, so naturally my crew member brought up the movie View from the Top. In his best Gwyneth Paltrow voice, he mimicked, “Paris. First Class. International,” as he painted the air with his hands. I laughed, crumbs falling out of the corner of my mouth. It was funny because Hollywood and the general public generally have no idea what our jobs actually entail.

He was referencing that scene when Sally Weston (played by Candice Bergman) stands behind Donna Jensen (played by Gwyneth) and has her chant those words in front of the mirror of Sally’s giant closet, reminding Donna to keep her eye on the prize.

As my crew member re-envisioned the movie, I thought about how most of the time I was shoving my lunch down in the back galley, hoping the curtain blocked the smells as the bathroom doors slammed and the toilets swooshed away.

Paris. First Class. International.

At first, the job was manageable. My seniority grew every week at my first base as new people pumped through training thanks to the post-COVID boost in travel. This continued through the fall, and winter flying died down with fewer crowds. Then us junior flight attendants were thrown into the jaws of summer flying. Reroutes, calls at two a.m. to report to the airport in three hours, work every weekend— you experience it all in your first few summers. I felt like a contestant on Survivor, Airplane Edition. When would I drop the proverbial coconut?

Another factor in all of this was that my marriage blew up three days before I planned to leave for several weeks of training, with reasons having nothing to do with the new job. After passing training and transferring to two different bases, I left Seattle and began a strange new existence in which I didn’t recognize my life. My job, marital status, home, and zip code changed in a matter of three days. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone showed me a glimpse of my life six months down the road. It took an entire year for my brain to catch up with my new reality.

With a mother as a former flight attendant and an aunt as a working one, nothing surprised me too much about the actual job duties. I did a deep internet dive before my interview, scouring Glassdoor, watching endless YouTube day-in-the-life videos, and scrolling through Facebook groups. I braced myself for sleep deprivation and long days in front of the public. I was already used to a strange schedule and living paycheck to paycheck from years as a seasonal and restaurant worker, so that didn’t faze me. But the twelve hours without fresh air or direct sunlight delivered a real gut punch.

When they told us in training that one of the items we’d need to keep on us at all times was a passport, I thought, Wow, maybe this job is for me! We could be sent to a foreign country at any moment!

When this actually did happen, it couldn’t have been further from the dreamland of View from the Top. It was during a set of reserve days, a period of time when scheduling can call you with three hours’ notice or less. You could be filling in for another flight attendant who called out, or for a myriad of other reasons: added flights, cancelled flights, weather, mechanicals, delays, the list goes on. Most of the time you end up doing red-eyes to Phoenix and staying at hotels by the airport on the trips that don’t get staffed because nobody else wants to work them. Most of the time you won’t be working first class to Paris.

On one of my last days of reserve, I thought I was safe. They scheduled me to deadhead back to base, which means getting paid to fly as a passenger. I knew this could change because I was technically available until midnight, but I assumed at the worst I’d be getting home late after a very early start that morning. Instead, scheduling added two extra flights ending in the Dominican Republic for a ten-hour layover, including drive time to the faraway hotel. The next day I’d be working two flights, one to New York and the other back to base, all on my day off. It’s technically legal for the airlines to fly you into your day off during IROPS, or irregular operations, which seems to happen about once a week during summer because of storms and the volume of flights. It’s a blanket scenario that means the airlines can use us to their advantage despite not being scheduled.

If I’m being honest, the trip wasn’t all bad. I did laps in the rooftop pool in the dark to get some exercise and fresh air, and sipped some tropical drink with my feet in the hot tub as I looked out onto the city lights. But I’d be getting less than six hours of sleep for the third night in a row, and I’d miss my therapy appointment the next day that I badly needed. The whiplash of feeling grateful to resentful and back again tired me more.

I can handle drunk passengers cursing at me. I can handle never working a set schedule and not knowing where I’ll be for days at a time. But the health aspect continues to irk me.

I find it funny when people are disappointed by my honest take on my job. It’s like they want me to fulfill some fantasy for their entertainment. They want me to say things like, You wouldn’t believe who was in first class, and, That layover was just fabulous, as I kick off my heels and grab a martini and a cigarette at the end of a long, glamorous day, sliding onto my plush couch that I bought with all my extra spending money. I feel I’m disappointing them when I tell them my job is sometimes just as challenging as theirs—and the lifestyle an added layer.

During the grueling training it takes to get on the line, a veteran flight attendant gave me some sage advice. In my sleep-deprived state, I remember her saying something like, “It’s more of a lifestyle than a job. If you can handle it, then it’s for you.”

There’s a quote often attributed to Charles Bukowski (the origins are a bit murky) that goes, “And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?” Many of my coworkers are single, unmarried, or divorced women. Flitting about the world, most seem financially solvent and put on an air as though nothing can tie them down.

If I’m being honest, I play into the stereotype. The flighty flight attendant who never knows what day or time it is, whose schedule is always changing. The lifestyle adds an air of mystery when my location on my dating profile changes multiple times a day, and my job title is probably why I interest some who might otherwise swipe left. If I get overwhelmed in a new relationship, I don’t need to manufacture a reason to skip town.

I can visit friends and family around the globe because of my job, and I’ve traveled to six different countries in two years. I finally started contributing to a 401(k) at 32, and when I’m not working I can focus on writing instead of hustling between two or three different jobs.

But then I scare myself when I look in the airplane’s bathroom mirror and I see my sallow skin and feel the cumulative fatigue. I’m sure I’ve lost my short-term memory from all the sleep deprivation. I spend more time solo than I ever have in my adult life. Being around so many people in a day wears me down, and my schedule often doesn’t match up with my friends. It’s logistically tiring to try to date.

It’s a job of extremes that few are built for.

For the ones that make it, a.k.a. the senior mamas with decades under their belt, or crew members that smile through it all, do you chalk it up to attitude? To toughness? To gratitude for a reliable job in a sinking economy? Or do you put the entire airline industry under a microscope and ask why it needs to be so physically and emotionally taxing?

Is it a matter of mental health, acceptance of capitalist norms, or generational work ethic, an idea the senior mamas would have me believe? Or reasons to do with privilege and my thinking that something better is always waiting for me around the corner?

These are the questions I ask myself daily.

If there’s two things I know, it’s that the job in Donna’s world only exists in Hollywood. The other is that it’s easy to mistake freedom for loneliness.

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This essay is part of Work Week, a series of essays related to work and career. Stay tuned for more this week, and see our Work section for past essays.

Megan Marolf is a flight attendant based in the Western US. She writes the Substack Flightlandia about the absurdities of airline travel.

by Christopher William Blackwell

How did I end up a prison journalist? That is a question I’ve asked myself many times. The prison part I understand. I always knew I’d end up here—or worse. I grew up in an extremely tough environment: multiple levels of abuse, a single parent home, extreme poverty, and in a community that was over-policed, full of street gangs and plagued with drugs and violence. So prison was always in the cards if I planned to survive my environment. It’s the becoming a writer part that has always surprised me, and still does today as I often suffer from imposter syndrome. I never did well in school and struggled to write even basic papers in English classes. So I often think, how the fuck have I written for places like The New York Times?

I remember sitting in those English classes as a kid, trying to string words together in a constructive sentence and create a decent paragraph. It seemed impossible. I was often so terrified and uncomfortable in those spaces, I would do anything to escape class. I made my poor teachers my number-one target. My verbal abuse wasn’t ever because it was something they deserved; it was merely my shame and insecurities spilling out onto them. The fear of reading to the class or having to finish a paper was too much to bear. The punishment from my mom for getting suspended was far easier to deal with. Plus, I was happy to sit at home and smoke weed all day, while my mom was at work, instead of going to school.

In my early years, I was living in what I now recognize as “survival mode.” But I couldn’t know all those moments were creating the person and writer I am today—molding and sculpting me into a storyteller. Those moments were giving me the experience I needed to tell stories that would educate and resonate with so many people. Most importantly, they would give me the skills that are necessary to help humanize people from communities like mine. Something in the universe was creating a role for me, a role that would help to shift the harm I—and so many others—had been forced to experience. I was being shaped into someone only something greater than I could understand at the time. But it wouldn’t come easy. I would have to step up and put in the work.

I entered prison no different than I was on the streets—angry and steeped in high levels of toxic masculinity (a term I wouldn’t even understand for years to come). Years went by as I refused to make anything of myself. I smoked weed, played prison politics, lifted weights, gambled on card and sports games, and sold drugs along with other scams and hustles to make ends meet while serving the 45-year sentence I was given for taking a human life.

One day, seven years into my sentence, Noel, this guy I saw around the prison, started to bug me to join the college pathway program he was a part of. I brushed him off each time he broached the subject. There was no way I was ever going back to school. I knew all too well what those days felt like. The scars of feeling like the dumbest person in class were still freshly imprinted upon my mind. They were a stain that refused to be removed from a crisp white t shirt. I wanted no part of it. But he refused to back down. Even worse, he got others I respected to start nudging me.

Against my better judgment, I gave in and decided to give school another shot. What did I have to lose? I thought. I was already in prison and, given the horrible crime I had committed, I was considered to be the worst of the worst. Not to mention, I needed a change. I needed to grow up and start acting like an adult.

My life was about to change in ways I could never have imagined.

The path wasn’t easy. I had never even learned the basic structures of writing and math growing up—I’d dropped out of school in ninth grade and had already checked out mentally around fifth grade. It took over a year to simply get those basic skills in place. But the foundation was eventually created through the kindness and devotion of many other men who had commitment to the same journey.

With each day that passed, my confidence began to grow. I realized it was never about me being dumb, it was about me evolving from living in survival mode. School—aside from math—became much easier after this revelation, and I soon had fun writing. I was creating and weaving stories about my experiences and opinions about the world and the environments that had created me. I loved getting to use my own voice. But most of all, I loved the intellectual conversations that happened in our classes. My new ability to think critically felt like freedom.

This brought me to the next stage in my life—becoming an activist, educator, and leader. I had learned how to expose the injustices I’d been forced to experience my entire life, and now I had the skills to write and talk about them. Eventually, I would learn just how mighty a pen and my voice could be. But I still had a long way to go. The foundation was being built, but the house was yet to come.

What I didn’t fully realize were the difficulties and ramifications that would come with being a prison journalist. My writing career took off at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and prison administrators weren’t happy when I began publishing and sharing their mistreatment of incarcerated people with the world. They hated the terminology I used to label them as “glorified babysitters,” or when I spoke of their lack of education or ability to act in a professional manner while doing their job. They didn’t like being held accountable, and it wasn’t something they were used to. But having the ability to get my words to the outside world drove me to another level. Before this, I simply was forced to experience whatever the carceral system threw at me. Now, I could expose the system and hopefully change it.

I quickly realized this kind of writing was my calling. I made a commitment to myself: I would expose any mistreatment, injustice, or harm against me or one of my incarcerated siblings, no matter who they were. If they couldn’t tell their story, I would. Later on in my career, I would realize I could teach others to share their stories, too. This would change everything for our movement against the carceral systems of oppression.

I was truly finding my voice. But I was quickly retaliated against. The Department of Corrections (DOC) accused me of dishonesty when publishers called to do fact checks, my mail and other forms of communication were blocked, delayed, or simply lost for weeks, and false investigations were thrust upon me and those connected to me. The DOC was wielding its power to try and suppress my voice. But I had come too far, and once you find your voice, especially living in such an oppressive environment for so long, you can no longer stand by and remain quiet. I no longer cared what the DOC had to throw in my path, my team and I would find a way around it.

The lack of technology incarcerated individuals have access to was often a serious blow to the stories I was trying to publish. Sometimes it made going back and forth with editors almost impossible. But my team and I always found a way around. If a message didn’t make it through on the prison email system, we would hop on a call and do edits line-by-line over the phone.

I challenged publishers and others who stood in my way or tried to report dishonest stories that worked to oppress or discredit incarcerated voices. I questioned publications and journalists in the free world who tried to tell our stories for us. I reminded them that we could tell our stories, and that those stories were ours to tell. And I reminded my fellow incarcerated people that we didn’t need opportunist people on the outside to share our stories. It was time for us to recapture our voices. It was important for us, as an oppressed population, to know that we aren’t voiceless, we just need a platform from which to share our voice.

After a couple years of building and shaping what my platform and voice would look like, with great support from so many incredible people, I realized the movement needed many more voices doing this work. The few of us who had figured out how to get our words out in the word would never be enough. We needed an army. We needed a mini-newsroom in every prison across the world sharing our stories and writing about the realities that led us to prison in the first place and everything in between.

The next stage was set. I would use my resources to create platforms for those around me. It became clear, if we wanted to disrupt this broken and racist system, we would need a thousand more people doing what I was doing.

I founded The Writers Development Program, currently The Narrative Change Lab, housed at Look2Justice, with freelance journalist Emily Nonko and law professor Deborah Zalesne and the support of many volunteers. It would quickly create a massive splash. We started with six men at my prison who had never published a single story. Within a couple of years, they had combined to publish almost 200 articles in the mainstream media. And not in just small abolitionist publications that had already agreed to support our voices, but places like The Guardian, The Seattle Times, The Nation, The Hill and many others. Incarcerated voices were starting to appear in places they had traditionally been shut out of.

This work expanded over time and continues to do so each and every day. Incarcerated people as a population are now showing the world that not only do we have voices, but our voices matter and will continue to grow as we expand this work by sharing our resources and platforms with each other.

I found my calling in this life. I realized I’m more than just the environment I grew up in, that I’m not worthless because I come from a poor community that’s routinely silenced and meant to simply exist in the world doing manual labor. I’m learning how to change the system by partnering with others to educate the world about it, the harm it has caused so many, and the damage that harm is currently inflicting upon all of our communities. Because as a society, we are a web, connected to one another in some way or another.

It may be easy to assume that what I’ve managed to accomplish is a sign that prison “works.” That the conditions inside have supported me in becoming the person I am today. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. My career wasn’t nurtured through positive support by the system; it was birthed from struggle. It was born from spite and my frustration toward a system that oppressed me and millions of others like me.

Writing and sharing my story has saved my life. It has helped me see my value as a person in this world. It has shown me that I don’t have to sit by and accept the oppressive environments or the people who’ve worked to push me and those from my commUNITY into the dirt. While the people in the system pushed our seeds into the dirt, others decided to come by and water them; because of this we have grown strong and sturdy. What started with me fighting to find my voice has led to me and many others building a movement.

Finding my voice as a writer has allowed me to become the person I was always meant to be—an activist, storyteller, educator, and strong leader. It has helped me better understand the value in those around me, myself included, while working to transform the many injustices I and so many others have endured. Becoming a prison journalist helped me find a comfortable place in this society, something I never thought could have happened.

This essay is part of Work Week, a series of essays related to work and career. Stay tuned for more this week, and see our Work section for past essays.

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Christopher William Blackwell, 44, is a Washington-based award-winning journalist currently incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center. He was raised in a mixed Native American/white family in the Hilltop Area of Tacoma, Washington. He currently is serving a 45-year prison sentence for taking another human’s life during a drug robbery—something he takes full accountability for. His words can be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and several other outlets. He has been incarcerated since 2003. His book, Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement, which he co-authored come out in September from Pluto Books and is being supported by a nation-wide Unlock The Box bus tour.

The winter after my first fire season, before the summer I turned 21, my soul mate died of an overdose. I had driven him to the dealer’s house, taken the small white pills he offered for payment, glimpsed the flash of bright orange plastic, a bottle of liquid morphine, before he folded the paper bag closed. The pills were morphine, too.

Peter was 24. Long, straight brown hair. He called himself a pharmacist, a drug dealer with ethics who refused sales if he thought someone was addicted or harming themselves. Nothing soft, like pot. Pills. Cocaine. MDMA. He cooked his own ketamine into powder, slivering the solidifying liquid in a cast-iron pan. Kept GHB on the kitchen counter in a big plastic soda bottle. It looked dangerously like lemonade.

I dropped him off at his house, watching him close the rickety front gate, the wood planks long stripped of paint. It was raining. Winter in Eugene, Oregon. I swear it rained every day that winter. This was December, right before Christmas. A week later someone called for my roommate, Jonathan. “He’s out east for another week,” I said. They asked me to pass along the message. Peter had died of an overdose. When I started crying, they gasped. “You knew him?” I hung up the phone, crushed myself into the smallest shape my body would take, pressing my back hard against a sharp corner, so I could make sure I was solid.

I had been the last one to see him. “He was doing his monk thing,” someone said. After Peter closed the gate I drove north, to Olympia, where I spent a terrible Christmas with my mom and stepdad, who were drunk the entire time. This instead of accompanying Peter to the coast, like he’d wanted. Just us, a bunch of drugs, and a rented cabin. The gray sea, gray sky, gray sand. I loved him too much to say yes.

That doesn’t make sense.

What I mean is: I said no because the full force of Peter’s love scared me. The only love I’d experienced required absolute submission. I didn’t know this at the time.

For a couple months I woke up early, standing in line with a bunch of mostly older men at Labor Ready, where you could find temporary labor work and end the day with a paycheck. My affection for drinking to blackout and doing hard drugs inhibited me from holding down a straight job.

Peter had kept his drugs in a safe. His girlfriend, Ivy, had found his body. Before calling the police, she stashed them at a friend’s house. A few of us divvied them up into several Ziploc bags filled with smaller bags of powders and pills. Me and Ivy got high together most days, shuddering or melting, making out and rubbing our bodies together. I loved her. I can’t say what she felt for me. We didn’t talk much about anything, except Peter.

I learned how easy it is to burn through thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs, how fast it happens, and how, when the drugs are gone, the body longs for them so sharply.

Ivy auditioned at a local strip club. Sex work, if you can call it that, was familiar to me. I’d sold my body for money when I was homeless and underage. Is it still called sex work if you’re a minor? Only the men who bought my body knew it had a price. They used different words to describe me. Whore. Sweetheart. Little girl. I didn’t set out to sell my body, but one is either a hustler or hustled. I’m not sure which category I fell into. Maybe both. But neither was an informed decision.

I longed for fire season, for something to steal me away from the overhanging clouds, swollen and bruised. For light. For warmth. But fire season was months away. I borrowed Ivy’s little wrap skirt and leotard and auditioned at the club. They hired me, but not her. Our paths diverged.

Stripping gave me something to focus on. Like fire, there were clear rules and paths to success. The girls, first cold, warmed quickly, each of them rays of light refracting throughout the grimy dark club. I was used to working with only, or mostly, men. Now I worked with women, but we all worked for men. Our bodies were for their pleasure. Peter would have disapproved.

April came. Fire season was close enough for the contractor to call us in for some seasonal classes. I arrived late, underslept after a night of stripping and partying. The room full of men stared as I entered, and for a moment there was no division between the men in the club and in that classroom, my face still covered in heavy makeup, body sparkling with glitter beneath my giant t-shirt and baggy jeans. I had learned to see my body as currency. Stripping sharpened my nose for men’s hunger. The room stank with it. I could feel my own revulsion. My power that was not real power, because my body was not my own in their eyes, or the world’s. But it was the only power I knew how to wield.

I visited my mother in June. Fire season was slow, not like the year before, which had started in May. After draping a red velvet dress on my childhood bed, I held up my sparkly silver four-inch Pleasers, clacking them against one another. My mom, who had danced in Alaska before I was born, sighed. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, turning away.

“But I like it,” I said, setting the shoes down.

A few days later the club manager fired me for having visible track marks. My path had crossed with Ivy’s once again, in early May, but I was luckier than her. I had fire. Once the season started in early July, I was gone long enough to change course. On my days off I drank with a new set of friends, some of them firefighters. No more heroin. Sometimes I prepared a big bottle of GHB, but that was as far as it went.

Until September, when Ivy invited me over for a drink. We sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor. “Want to do some ketamine?” she asked, and I said sure, why not, thinking we would snort it. Instead, she loaded two syringes and tied off her arm, her movements completely habitual. I held my syringe aloft, watching her until she disappeared, slumping over. After a moment I leaned over and took the needle from her arm, released the band. I sat with her body. She was breathing, but it felt like I was alone.

A month later I left Eugene without saying goodbye to anyone. The following summer I became a hotshot, dragging my past behind me, an invisible sea.

This essay is part of Work Week, a series of essays related to work and career. Stay tuned for more this week, and see our Work section for past essays.

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River Selby worked as a wildland firefighter for seven years, stationed out of California, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska. They are currently a Kingsbury and Legacy Fellow at Florida State University, where they are pursuing their PhD in Nonfiction with an emphasis in postcolonial histories, North American colonization, and postmodern literature and culture. They hold an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, and a BA in English and Textual Studies from the same institution, where they served as a Remembrance Scholar before graduating summa cum laude, with honors. River is the author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, published by Grove Atlantic in August 2025. Learn more about them here.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I think it has to be said: I used to be a bigoted speech therapist.

As recently as ten years ago, when I worked on teaching pronouns to children who demonstrated difficulties using them correctly, I used the most cringe-worthy methods. I presented a photo of a person with long hair and a dress riding a bicycle and said to little Johnny, “Is this a boy or a girl?” If Johnny correctly said, “It’s a girl,” I proceeded to explain that “girls use she and her” and say a sentence like “She is riding a bicycle.” We’d do the same thing with various photographs of people, looking at the photo and assuming the person was “a boy or a girl” and then practicing using “he and him” or “she and her” based on the response. I don’t remember learning anything beyond the gender binary in my schooling twenty years ago, and this method of teaching pronouns was what we practiced in our clinical placements. Any purchasable materials for teaching pronouns were structured this way (and many still are).

If this doesn’t make you feel icky, it should. I taught children to look at a person and make assumptions about their gender based on their physical appearance: the length and style of their hair, the clothing they wore, whether they were wearing makeup, and what they were doing. To be clear, these were people who weren’t known to the children. They were stock photos or other random photos printed on cards. The way I was helping children learn how to use pronouns was doing two very harmful things: teaching children they should assume gender from someone’s appearance, and reinforcing the gender binary.

I distinctly remember the first conversation I had with someone at work about singular they/them pronouns. “It doesn’t really make sense, though,” I said, “because they and them refer to groups of people. How can we make them refer to a single person? It’s too confusing!” At that time in my life, I didn’t know anyone who was non-binary or transgender. I had once come across a bank teller who had a nametag that said something like “Joelle”, and I thought they had a male-sounding voice. It confused me but I didn’t really think much of it. My husband told me about an artist we’d once met who was a man, married to a woman at the time we met them, but now had transitioned to being female. “Huh,” I said, “totally didn’t see that coming.” Again I didn’t think much else of it.

I was completely ignorant. And that ignorance meant I was perpetuating harm. As a cisgender woman, I had the privilege to stay ignorant.

The adage, “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist” really applied to me.

I grew up in a very Christian family, and a very small bubble of Christian culture. As a teenager and young adult, I attended Christian youth conferences where people would give testimony about how they had been shown the light and turned from gay to straight. My dad became a pastor when I was in junior high (and still is, even though he’s supposed to be retired) and I was an extremely zealous churchgoer into my twenties.

But shortly before I got married, there were political happenings at our church that led to my parents leaving and moving away. It was the first time I was confronted with the fact that the church was a man-made (emphasis on the “man”) institution and was essentially full of the same politics and grabs for power as any other institution. My husband and I got married in a different church and tried attending many different churches to find a new home, but never settled on one. Being away from the church bubble exposed me to the outside world. I started to see how the way I had been brought up didn’t actually reflect the real world.

However, my awareness of the existence of transgender and non-binary people was still extremely limited. As a speech language pathologist, I occasionally heard about therapists who worked on voice therapy for transgender clients, to help them sound more like who they felt they were. I never took the time to learn about it, though. I completely overlooked this population. I didn’t know, didn’t care, and couldn’t be bothered to learn more.

Fast forward to about five years ago, when I had a racial awakening. I’m a woman of Chinese descent, born in Canada, and I suddenly realized how much I had allowed my proximity to whiteness as a model minority dictate how I lived my life. I read everything I could get my hands on about antiracism, and was introduced to intersectionality. Thanks to this research, my entire mindset shifted. When I learned about white feminism and wondered how white women could understand sexism but completely ignore racism, it finally hit me I was doing the exact same thing with transphobia. I understood racism very well, but hadn’t considered other marginalized identities, especially queer and trans identities. I realized that I couldn’t actually be antiracist without being anti-oppression for everyone.

In my speech therapy life, I have changed how I work on pronouns with children. Now I emphasize that we teach children to use pronouns correctly when a person’s pronouns are known, and we don’t teach children to assume anyone’s gender or pronouns by looking at them. If I use a photo of a person with long hair and a dress riding a bicycle, I’ll introduce the person and their pronouns before doing any pronoun practice.

I’ll try to mix it up by introducing a person with pronouns that seem counterintuitive to stereotypes, and make sure to include singular they/them examples. If a child makes a comment like, “But they’re wearing a dress, so they must be a girl,” I do my best to dispel those gendered stereotypes by saying, “Anyone can wear a dress. Dresses aren’t just for girls.” It’s taken a lot of conscious practice to make these changes, and I still slip up all the time. I’m actively monitoring the language I use to make sure I catch myself when I make mistakes.

Ultimately, I want to demonstrate—to my students and myself—that I’m a human who is capable of change, who is capable of learning. I grew up thinking in a certain way because that’s what I was taught. I didn’t know any different, and I didn’t know any better. When I was presented with new information, I was open to considering it and allowing it to change how I think, and in turn change how I act. As Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” I believe this capacity to “know better and do better” is truly what makes us human.

This essay is part of Work Week, a series of essays related to work and career. Stay tuned for more this week, and see our Work section for past essays.

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Judith Lam Tang is a Chinese Canadian author, advocate, and activist. She writes about intersectional social justice at judithlamtang.com. Her forthcoming nonfiction book, Muted Colours, is scheduled for 2027 with Dundurn Press. Her essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Fiddlehead, The Festival Of Literary Diversity’s literary magazine, and Edmonton Public Library’s Capital City Press Anthology. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, her daughter, and many plants.

In June 2024, my novel, Assassins Anonymous, hit stores. Imagine John Wick getting into a recovery program for killers. As elevator pitches go, I may have peaked; that one is pretty good.

The book got some great reviews, but not a ton of press. It sold 1,800 copies in the first week, landing at 144 on the USA TODAY bestseller list. This was the first time I ever hit a list, so I was pretty psyched.

The paperback was scheduled to come out this past May 27, and I figured it’d be like any paperback release: I might see a small spike in sales before things settled back down.

But the metrics flipped when my editor reached out to let me know Barnes & Noble had chosen the paperback as their June 2025 mystery and thriller pick.

That meant a massive print order, and prime placement in every single Barnes & Noble in the United States. Google tells me there are 667 locations. That’s a lot. Employees would be handselling it and posting about it on social media.

It would come with an added bonus, too: in the back of the book would be a teaser for the sequel, The Medusa Protocol, which comes out June 24.

From a marketing perspective, the timing could not be better, and it created a seismic shift in expectations.

Penguin Random House has an author portal where you can log in to see how many copies you’ve sold of a given book. It breaks things down by print, audio, and ebook, and it updates every Monday morning, so I tend to start my week by logging in and looking at my sales numbers.

This is not a healthy thing to do. I don’t recommend it.

So, Assassins Anonymous came out a year ago. Between June 2024 and May 2025, it sold about 12,000 copies.

The following number probably isn’t exact, because there’s some lag in the reporting, but as of June 16, thanks to the Barnes & Noble promotion, Assassins sold more than 14,000 copies.

In June. In two weeks.

I sold more copies in two weeks than I did in a year.

The first week of the promotion, Assassins hit the USA TODAY bestseller list again, coming in at 18.

In response to some of this, a reporter for a publishing newsletter reached out to ask me about what makes a bestseller. They asked me what I would tell other authors hoping to hit the list.

And the best I’ve got is: get Barnes & Noble to pick it for a promotion.

I’m not even entirely sure how that happened. It’s not like I lobbied for it. The right people read it, decided they wanted to highlight it, and here we find ourselves.

Which has got me thinking about how hard we work, as authors, to move the sales needle. And how goddamn hard it is.

Social media doesn’t sell books. Neither does going to conventions, speaking gigs, teaching—all of these things can sell a few books, but they don’t help you make that leap to mass consumption, spreading through the public consciousness like a virus.

Based on my years working in publishing—currently as an author and formerly as the head of a small press—there are only a handful of things I can think of that ensure bestseller status:

o Get picked for a major bookstore promotion, or a book club, like Oprah’s or Reese Witherspoon’s

o Hope the media anoints your book, granting it so much placement and chatter, people feel left out if they don’t get it

o See it move quickly through the Hollywood crucible to a finished product (which is rare)

o Scandals work; see also: American Dirt, or whatever “literary outlaw” James Frey is currently selling

o Try already being a celebrity

o Get BookTok to make it a thing (I’ve got nothing on that, I don’t understand BookTok)

There are other pathways, for sure, but these seem to be the best bets.

And the thing they all have in common is: you can’t control them. All you can do is buy a bottle and run around on a sunny day, hoping to catch lightning.

Some folks say publishers ultimately decide which books get coverage and which don’t. And there’s some truth to that. Sometimes publishers will shift resources away from a book that isn’t tracking too well, over to something that looks like more of a sure thing.

But if you read the last piece I wrote for Open Secrets, my novel The Warehouse was supposed to be a bestseller. I did TV interviews, everyone covered it, the reviews were glowing.

And it didn’t click with readers.

Everything was right, it just didn’t make that final, imperceptible leap. I wrote another book after that, then got dropped by my publisher (which also happens to be my current publisher, so if you want the full story on that, go read that piece).

How did I turn things around?

How did I go from bomb to bestseller?

I kept writing; it was the only thing I could control.

The Medusa Protocol is my tenth book. That doesn’t count collaborations and other projects. Because I kept showing up, I’ve slowly built a small semblance of an audience. Among that audience have been some incredible sales reps and reviewers who have gone to bat for me.

Which is why I tell people—students of mine, other writers, anyone who will listen—that the common denominator among successful authors is not whether you have an MFA, it’s not who you know. It’s who kept showing up and doing the work.

There’s this saying that luck happens with preparation meets opportunity. But there’s another phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s Latin: Inveniam viam aut faciam. “I will find a way, or make one.”

For the last few years I feel like I’ve been holding on by my fingertips, and one sharp turn would send me flying. But I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. This is all I want. I almost quit a few times after major setbacks—but then I got back to work.

Seeing Assassins Anonymous find a bevy of new readers, knowing that the sequel will probably sell at a decent clip, I feel some degree of serenity, for the first time in a long time. I feel like I can breathe. I can take fewer editorial gigs, I can say no to projects and reclaim some of my free time, I can write the kind of stuff I want to write.

It took eleven years to get here.

But even though I feel good today, that doesn’t mean I’ll still feel this way tomorrow.

Last week, a Barnes & Noble in New Jersey asked me to come out and sit at a table and sign stock. I’ve done that dance before, and it’s usually a pretty lonely endeavor. I feel a bit like a dancing monkey, awkwardly sitting there, smiling and saying hi to people walking by who don’t really seem to want to engage. But my philosophy has always been that this is a game of inches, and if I sell one more book than I would have, then it’s worth the investment.

I ultimately signed four books over the course of an hour and a half.

Two things happened I want to tell you about:

The first is a young man picked up the book, read the first chapter while standing next to me, completely in silence. Then he asked me, “Do you kill people?” He said the first chapter felt very intimate in its detail. I said no, but I do fight train. He nodded, put the book down, and walked out of the store.

No matter how good things get, there will always be moments that humble you. This is a good thing.

But also, a young woman told me she’d just completed her MFA and was working on an Afro-gothic horror novel. I suggested a few authors she might want to check out, and we talked a little about writing, and I asked her if I could offer some advice.

She consented, so I told her some of what I wrote about here. I told her to be stubborn. I told her to keep at it no matter what, because this business will burn the heart out of you. Not intentionally, that’s just what happens when art meets shareholders.

I told her about that common denominator—the successful authors are the ones who keep showing up through failure.

And there will be a lot of failures.

I told her I hoped that wasn’t too heavy to hear, but she seemed relieved, and she thanked me for telling her that.

Which is why I keep saying this stuff. Social media is a lie—when all you see are the deal memos and the option announcements in Variety, it’s easy to think you’re the only one having a hard time.

The truth is, we all are.

Tomorrow, the day after, sometime later this week—something’s going to happen to fuck with my current state of serenity.

But over a long enough timeline, another good thing will happen to lift me up.

All this is to say: just keep going, and good luck out there.

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Rob Hart is the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Assassins Anonymous series. The latest installment, The Medusa Protocol, is in stores now. He also wrote The Warehouse, The Paradox Hotel, the Ash McKenna crime series, the short story collection Take-Out, the novella Scott Free with James Patterson, the comic book Blood Oath with Alex Segura, and the novel Dark Space, also with Segura. His next book, available in January, is Detour, co-written with Jeff Rake, the creator and showrunner of TV’s Manifest. He’s also a freelance editor and a writing mentor in Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA. Find more at www.robwhart.com.

I’m sure you’ve seen them as you’re scrolling along through your social media: the person brandishing a deck of cards who pops up on your feed and says that they have a very important message for you.

Hello! I’m one of them.

I’m a claircognizant psychic (meaning clear-knowing, or possessing an ability to know things beyond what is visibly shown) and spiritual educator who has been reading tarot for more than thirty years. I am also the founder of TAROT CHURCH, a movement that works to destigmatize false preconceptions of the tarot through education and empowerment. It’s an absolute gift to be able to connect with my community every day, and to help my clients navigate their life journeys from a spiritual context in order to build a deeper understanding of their relationships through innerstanding, personal path alignment, and intentional action.

I have a podcast and host a daily live show on social media where I address the energy cycles we are experiencing both in and out of relationship, within the context of the self and between others. I also read for my clients live on my broadcasts, and yes, that does include the occasional love reading. But there is one subject I will absolutely not read for, even when asked: the notorious phenomenon colloquially referred to as “twin flames.”

Twin flame is a term that was first introduced in 1999 by the controversial spiritual-leader-turned-doomsday-forecaster Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and took the online spiritual space by storm a little over a decade ago. It’s frequently used to describe an intense energetic connection with another individual that’s often characterized as possessing supernatural qualities beyond the normal faculties of a human relationship, and heralded with lofty designations by those who romanticize them as being preordained or written in the stars.

Those in twin flame unions will often describe a surreal, mind-altering connection they maintain to “their person,” a bond so intense it can border on telepathic. The one unifying characteristic I have found in working with clients describing twin flame connections is that the individuals in question are never in a stable relationship in tangible reality, but they can feel the energetic presence of their person; I have had clients describe strange, surreal occurrences that defy logical explanation, or messages that are being transmitted to them by way of signs and synchronicities. There are entire areas of the internet dedicated to unpacking these tumultuous connections, or sharing stories of the trials and tribulations of being in such a strange, star-crossed love affair.

I have worked with clients in the throes of being rocked by these volatile relationships for years. And I have individuals who come to me daily asking me to give them readings to clarify if a particular individual is their twin flame, or asking me if they will meet theirs in the near future.

I summarily shut them down.

This is why: I personally believe the designation of a relationship as “twin flame” is at best parasympathetically distressing, and at worst, romanticizing and encouraging cruel and negligent partnership dynamics.

As someone who has been reading tarot for over three decades, I can say with absolute confidence that never once has a client come to me describing a twin flame relationship that was in any way healthy, supportive, or loving. In many cases, when the flowery language is removed and the relationship is actually described, it is revealed to display dynamics that are toxic, abusive, controlling, and sometimes, downright dangerous.

A healthy relationship is built upon shared manifestation goals, clarity of intention, consistent energetic exchange, and open communication.

But in almost every circumstance I have ever had a client describe their twin flame relationship to me, it is anything but that.

Invariably, the individuals are in some form of separation (unbalanced energetic exchange), seeking support because they cannot have a conversation with the individual in question (poor communication), any attempt to seek clarity from their person is rebuffed or ignored (lack of clear intention), and conversations about the direction a relationship is headed are met with hostility, reticence, ambiguity, or silence (unmatched manifestation goals).

There was a client I worked with years ago, who we will call Andi. Andi had been in an on-again-off-again relationship with Max for almost six years, a constant cycle of coming together and breaking up, marked by emotional reunions and volatile separations. Incredible sex and passionate confessions, but no clear direction beyond the present moment. As soon as Andi brought up conversations about the future, Max would grow irritable and distant. Max’s distance would immediately trigger Andi, who recognizing the cycle, would once again end the relationship. Months would go by, and Andi would try to move on and build connections with new partners, but all the while, hoping that Max would return. Just as Andi would start to invest in a connection with someone new, Max would come back; the cycle would begin anew.

Whenever I have to read for individuals in these circumstances, as an empath I am viscerally barraged with the pain that they’re experiencing. Another individual has them in a state of spiritual or psychological torment. Often these relationships are extremely sexually charged, and the confusion, distress, and vulnerability create a very potent cocktail of emotions that are being expressed to me as unrequited love—but seem much more akin to a trauma bond.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological coping mechanism identified by Nils Bejerot in 1973, after a bank robbery in Sweden wherein hostages rallied to the support of the same assailants who had kept them at gunpoint. When in traumatic experiences, our body’s prime directive is to do whatever is necessary to perpetuate emotional survival of the self. This is often why it’s so difficult for those in abusive relationships to disengage and break away from those perpetrating harm. From the perspective of the unconscious mind, if one cannot escape an oppressor, the next best circumstance is to ingratiate oneself upon them, and this is why in traumatic situations the sympathetic nervous system begins to actually work against you, to make you love the thing that’s hurting you, in a desperate attempt to survive.

Andi first came to me asking if Max was their twin flame. Andi had been reading on the internet about them, and everything they’d found felt aligned to what they were experiencing in their connection. During their moments of separation, Andi would feel Max’s presence around them at times, to the point of smelling their scent in the air. They would arrive at events, and have an intuitive feeling that Max was there, only to learn they had been there just a short time before or after. Songs would come across the radio that almost seemed synchronized in answer to the thoughts they were having about Max. They believed that Max was their twin flame, and were absolutely distraught, fearing they were going to lose the person that they were meant to be with. They were desperate to understand what they were doing wrong, and worried that by not doing everything in their power to heal the relationship, they were effectively destroying their one and only possibility for true love.

Confusing situations create trauma, and frequently, limerence forms in the wake of that trauma. Limerence is a term first coined by Dr. Dorothy Tennov in her book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (Scarborough House Publishers, 1979). Tennov describes a third type of love, beyond romantic love and erotic desire: an uncanny pull toward another, bordering on obsession, that is frequently formed in unstable or unrequited relationship dynamics.

As someone who works in a spiritual space, my ethical duty is to work in support of what is in the best interest and highest good for my clients. And there is absolutely no context wherein giving an abusive, confusing relationship a desirable, romantic nom de plume is ever going to be something I condone or ascribe to.

Going further, the idea of a twin flame union feeds into the false narrative of a soulmate or “the one.” The concept that there is only a single individual who is made for us and that we must find this person or be doomed to a lifetime of loneliness and isolation fuels an almost hysteric approach to partnership. We meet people where we are at: spiritually, physically, and mentally. Our relationships change and shift and evolve as we do, creating a rich tapestry of varying but vital connections that make for a fulfilling life.

The idea that another is meant only for us creates unreasonable demands on a single person to fulfill all of our needs, and perpetuates possessive, unhealthy, codependent behavior. It also negates autonomy: to insist someone is ours—completely ignorant of their desires or choice in the matter—is barbaric and primitive, and fails to recognize that shared intention and mutual choice are the foundation of a healthy, strong, supportive partnership.

This “treasure hunt” mindset in relation to partnership has resulted in devastating consequences for the lovesick, often perpetuated by those who take advantage of another person’s desperation for their own ends. This is best exemplified in the documentary Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flame Universe (Netflix, 2023) that explores the Twin Flame Universe cult run by Jeff and Shaleia Divine.

The series deep-dives into personal accounts from former cult members who were originally drawn to the Divines due to the couples’ claims of being able to recognize and verify the twin flames of others. They encouraged members to seek out and remain in unhealthy partnerships to promote the organization’s touted success rates, and encouraged members to perpetuate unwanted advances toward their infatuations to such a degree that one member was incarcerated on stalking and harassment charges.

Our capacity to love is directly proportional to our ability to heal. Rejection, in any context, is a painful, traumatizing experience. As a spiritual guide and educator, I make it my mission to help my clients better understand the energetic nature and subtext of a difficult relationship, to clarify the source and nature of the wound, and by extension, come to understand themselves and their spiritual and emotional needs on a deeper level in the process. We work together to help ascertain if there is viability in maintaining a connection, whether the work needed is internal or external, what can be done to achieve better union, and in some cases, work toward moving away from unhealthy or toxic relationship dynamics, in order to begin the long process of healing.

I worked with Andi for over a year to integrate the work of healing from their relationship with Max. It was not easy: Andi set boundaries, and Max assumed that those boundaries were only gestures. Once Max discovered that Andi was truly no longer available for partnership under the conditions they had grown accustomed to, Max tried to appeal to Andi with communication that vacillated between emotional pleas and volatile outbursts, trying to have Andi admit that they no longer had feelings for them.

I helped Andi recognize that healing doesn’t require us to stop feeling love for those we must let go of, and helped them identify ways to carry that love forward in a way that recognized the unhealthy nature of karmic cycle on their own person, in order to break free of it. Andi let go of the twin flame narrative that made them afraid to sever the connection, and began the hard work of healing from a painful and emotionally draining relationship from someone who ultimately didn’t want the same things as them.

Names have power. When we give things names, it becomes easy to sanitize mania, to diminish the significance of what is personally occurring for what is socially trending. When we collectively choose to throw around the term “twin flame” and see it as some sort of enviable cross to be carried instead of a concerning distress call, we are tacitly agreeing as a society that love must be a pain to be endured instead of a profound miracle to be shared.

I’m saying this as someone who has navigated these rough waters in my own life. As someone who is a healer, I have learned that it is a natural consequence that I can attract partners who are in desperate need of deep emotional healing. Empaths in particular are very susceptible to volatile relationship dynamics, as our ability to recognize and feel the internal turmoil that is the source of another’s cruelty often leads to a desire to try to endure suffering in order to help another find the personal strength to overcome their own trauma. This unfortunately has the opposite effect: to endure bad treatment only solidifies the maltreatment. It rewards bad with good. In my role as mentor to other burgeoning healers, I help those with gifts understand the necessary significance of creating strong, clear energetic boundaries, and reinforce that their gifts do not obligate them to endure bad treatment. We are not each other’s salvation; but rather, we work to heal ourselves for one another.

I’m not saying there aren’t some emotional and spiritual connections we share with others that defy the context of logical description. Through my work channeling messages from spirit, I have seen the tangible evidence of love that permeates beyond the span of our lives, and energetic relationships that have bridged across lifetimes. Love can move mountains, and our collective desire to shape a better world in the face of perpetual adversity is evidence every day of the power of our unified desire, made manifest.

But, for the benefit of society as a whole, I think the term “twin flame” is one we would be better to extinguish entirely. While it may make for a good movie or a steamy novel, a conscious, intentional love isn’t a game of tug of war: it’s a walk we take together. It’s not a fire that utterly consumes us, it’s a campfire that sustains us. It’s not something we feel trapped within, it’s something we feel embraced by.

And the first step in the direction of moving toward mature, conscious coupling is to move away from romanticizing the pain we experience when we feel a desire for one another, but want different things from each other. This is how we heal, together.

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Cyn Grace Sylvie (She/They) is a queer-identified writer, poet, tarot reader and spiritual educator, based in Jersey City, New Jersey. In their work in the spiritual space, they are known as The Grey Strega, and host the Divine Energy Update podcast that airs live on social media daily. They are also the founder of TAROT CHURCH, a movement and educational class program whose aim is to destigmatize and educate upon the intersectionality of tarot across any and all faith practices. You can tune in to their live broadcasts daily across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and learn more about TAROT CHURCH on their Substack, greystrega.substack.com.

In the beginning I collected ties. Men’s ties.

Like notches on a belt, each one a token of a battle won, a new land conquered. I favored fancy places like Lutèce or Laurent. Places frequented by overfed men in expensive suits accompanied by velvet- and pearl-wearing ladies with perfectly coiffed hair and pancake to hide their wrinkles. Where conversations were held in whispers, and you heard the delicate ring of silver on silver as expensive cuts of meat were sliced into dainty pieces.

I liked those places because when I walked in, wearing something like my dark purple spandex, cut up to the hip on one leg, down to the waist on the other shoulder; when I walked in with my fire engine red Ziggy Stardust haircut and five-inch black spike platforms; when I walked in on the arm of a man in an expensive suit and tie, all eyes turned to me. I liked the shush of velvet as the ladies turned, then turned away, cutting their eyes at each other; the silence as the men turned, stopped eating, stopped talking, then turned away, avoiding the eyes of their wives.

It was power; I was on stage, center ring, and I loved that feeling.

It was a fight to the death. I was taking one of their own, but instead of a scalp or an ear, I took a tie. And the money as well, of course, but that I never could hang on to. The ties, I collected, and hung from the ladder of my loft bed, the way a hunter fills the walls of his study with the mounted trophy heads of his kills.

Men’s ties. I mean, I don’t blame him, they were there. They were handy and designed to be knotted, and there was a seemingly endless supply of them. In hindsight, I think it should have been enough to make me stop, those six hours. Six hours that have spanned thirty years. You’d think it would have been enough at that moment, to wake me up, make me stop drinking. Stop dating pimps. You’d think.

You’d be wrong. I just stopped fucking guys who wore ties.

I wrote a book about the ten years I spent working the hoochy cooch bars in Times Square. I peddled that book around and while most found it too brutal, even the people who liked it wanted to know how I got there.

You can’t just drop yourself into the middle of Times Square and start the story there, they said. People want to hear about what came before.

If I’d been able to talk about what came before, maybe I wouldn’t have found it necessary to find my way to the middle of Times Square to begin with.

When I arrived there, it was the end of the 70s, the beginning of the 80s. New York City was different than the city you know today. Times Square was someplace you could disappear, hide in plain sight—not a tourist destination. Neighborhoods were dangerous in ways they haven’t been for years. Pre-Disney, before NYU took over downtown, before silicone or lap dances, before even crack or AIDS, when pimps looked like Huggy Bear, taxi cabs wouldn’t go further east than First Avenue, and if you had breasts, of any size or shape, home grown or bought and paid for, you could get paid well to show them off.

If I could have talked about the things that happened before, the things that happened after might not have had to happen at all.

So, I wrote a book no one wanted to publish about my Times Square years. Well, wait a second. A book is something that’s been published. It has a front cover and back cover. There’s a binding, a spine, lots of pages.

I wrote a story. Some of which has been published, but not enough to warrant a front and back cover all its own. I’ve tried rewriting the story, in an attempt to fit into the shape it needed to fit between the two covers, what editors had asked for.

I only got as far as the rape.

I was raped. Burned. Beaten. Sodomized. Fisted both vaginally and anally. I was terrorized and tortured and bound both around my wrists and my ankles with ties that had been hanging all over my bedroom.

Men’s ties. I mean, I don’t blame him, they were there. They were handy. And there was a seemingly endless supply of them.

I wrote about that. Then I wrote about that again. And again. And again.

Then I stopped writing. I kept trying to go back and finish the story. I’d written about the years that followed, but suddenly, I couldn’t even do that.

You know, when I started writing this story it was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be what they’d asked for, it was going to be about how I got to that place in my life.

Not about how my life got stuck there.

And it is stuck. Like an LP with a scratch, the needle gets so far and then it just keeps repeating the same snippet over and over again. You get to hear a brief interlude that came before, but the symphony that follows? That remains unheard.

I backed away from the story.

I tried to look at it from a civilian’s point of view. Someone who couldn’t even imagine rape to be a “job hazard.”

It should have been enough, I thought in hindsight, enough to make me stop what I was doing. It was six hours in 1980something, six hours that’ve lasted more than thirty years. So, you’d think it would’ve been enough at that moment, to make me stop drinking. Stop shooting dope. Stop dating pimps. Groupie-ing for gangsters. Enough to make me find a job where the dress code involved more than G-strings, fishnets, and platforms.

Instead, I just stopped fucking guys who wore ties.

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Jodi Sh. Doff is a NYC based writer and caregiver. Her work appears in print and online, in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, and frequently includes autobiographical elements of addiction, alcoholism, and caregiving. Follow her on Substack at The Dirtygirl Diaries and The Long Goodbye.

An extract from Zahra Stardust’s new book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance, Duke University Press

It’s 2016. We are in a light-filled Airbnb in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Redfern on Gadigal Land. It’s midwinter, about 5 degrees, and I have visible goose bumps up and down my legs. I run my fingers through my long pink hair extensions, hold in my stomach, point my toes, and look over my shoulder at Jasmine. I’m excited about finally shooting for SuicideGirls, which has long been a dream of mine. After having my piercings removed from the cover of Penthouse, my armpit hair edited out of Picture magazine, and my labia airbrushed in People magazine, I’m excited to shoot for a site that claims to celebrate alternative beauty. My broken bleached hair couldn’t take much more peroxide, and I take the opportunity to go back to my rainbow roots.

It feels good to be shooting with another SuicideGirl. This is my third out of four shoots in four days. In one shoot, I won’t see the pictures until they go online and have no say over the editing process. In this one, Jas will send me proofs so I can select my favorite forty to sixty among them for a complete set. Working with a fellow model feels collaborative since we both have an interest in the set selling so that we can recoup our costs. I trust her to use flattering angles to get shots that she herself would want as a model.

The poses are familiar to me from glamour modeling. Some are replicas of mainstream magazine poses: on my knees, arching my back, resting my index finger on my bottom lip, pulling my bra strap over my shoulder. But the positions are slightly less brash—there are fewer doggy style and open leg shots and more peripheral shots of body parts: feet, hands, faces. The poses are more subtle, sleepy, modest. I turn my shoulder forward to protrude my collar bone. I bring my hand lightly up to my neck. I look at the camera seductively and then stare off into the distance. It’s what we call in mainstream magazine work “shy nude.”

It is a similar repertoire to what I perform for Feck’s alt-erotica site I Shot Myself, which also prides itself on its alleged distance from mainstream porn. The same way I learned to perform “sex eyes” and bold, dynamic poses from stripping, I learn to perform a doe-eyed, girl-next-door sex-kitten for these purportedly amateur sites. The pose is less-overt porn star but definitely borrows from and utilizes pornographic conventions, even if I am pretending not to be a professional. We run through a standard formula that we know constitutes a sellable set—in fact, we bring up a set from one of the most popular SuicideGirls and adapt each pose.

The model guidelines are prescriptive and titled “How to look good in photos, without (looking like you are) really trying.” They provide instructions on facial expressions (parted lips, smiling eyes, three-quarter profiles, tilted chins, and no duck face), posing (keep it “classy,” avoiding spread shots and positions that exaggerate rolls), hair (washed and lightly styled, no wigs), makeup (thin black eyeliner on the top lid only) and wardrobe (cotton tanks, tall socks, denim shorts, and sundresses). The guidelines include photo examples of what not to do: no stripper heels or stripper attire, including neon fishnets, metallic, sparkles, or “anything crotchless.” Damn.

The specificity reminds me of Australian amateur site Abby Winters, whose ceo had a pet hate for belly rings. Their guidelines instructed models to cover hair regrowth and not to shoot if we had pimples, scratches, or mosquito bites in order that we appear “healthy.” When shooting for Feck, I was told to stop wearing frills, to “tone down the eye makeup” and “maybe don’t talk about politics.” Similar instructions were given to me in a shoot for Hustler magazine: “The model shouldn’t look too tacky, like a stripper, but like a woman with mainstream tastes.” I had become suspicious of “redefined beauty” and “being yourself” as code for a specific class-based aesthetic, positioned against the mainstream but, in reality, equally conventionalized.

I am conscious of my age. My body has changed a lot in the past few years since retiring from pole instructing and as a result of recent ivf treatments. Jas tells me that, at twenty-nine, she is one of the older SuicideGirls in Australia, who are mostly between eighteen and twenty-two. I laugh and say, “I’m thirty-three” and joke that we are both veterans. I am competing with thousands of other “Suicide Hopefuls” all ten to fifteen years my junior and hoping that theirs will be selected as set of the day (sotd). When our set is edited, it goes into a four-month queue, after which it is posted in “Member Review,” where site members can comment and “like” it. Each day the company chooses a sotd, which means the girl moves from being a “Suicide Hopeful” to an official “SuicideGirl” and receives a $500 prize.

Jas tells me that a new set goes live into member review every two hours, so my chance of actually becoming a SuicideGirl and being paid for my set is one in twelve. It’s hard not to be disheartened by these terrible odds. Some models have been hopefuls for years. There are no clear criteria for what the company picks. Jas shows me sets in member review with thousands of likes that have never been chosen and other sets that were selected despite far fewer likes. The process appears to be less about the quality of the set and more like a mixture of popularity, taste, and company discretion. It’s a system that encourages competition between models and, in doing so, extracts more labor from us.

SuicideGirls encourages hopefuls to keep submitting until one of their sets is chosen. This means that the site gains a constant stream of free content for their subscribers. The $500 payment is pitched as a reward rather than renumeration. I have paid $330 for my shoot and location, so after recouping that cost, a sixty-picture, full-nude sotd feature would pay me $170, and this doesn’t include the costs of my wardrobe, transport, or the labor to promote my set. To boost my chances of being picked, I should promote my profile, interact with members, encourage comments, write a blog, and post teasers in special groups interested in feet, arses, or breasts. In the early stages of my career, I might have found this fun. After thirteen years, having done my share of eight-hour shifts in six-inch heels and cold air-conditioning, I’m tired. I have to embark upon the emotional and relational labor of being personable, sexy, and available, of convincing members that I am likable and SuicideGirls that I am marketable.

Regardless of whether you get sotd, Jas tells me, it’s a great way to “build and promote your brand.” With more than 4 million followers on Instagram, Jas tells me the hashtags to use to increase my visibility. Some girls have a hundred thousand followers, Jas tells me, and have been offered paid modeling jobs or have companies sending them free merchandise. It’s something I have heard repeatedly as a live performer and artist—perform for free in return for mass exposure, which rarely (but sometimes) translates into paid work. However, with the dim likelihood of actually being paid for my set, it seems silly not to make the most of this endeavor. Being a SuicideGirl would permit me to tour and diversify my income stream. Reluctantly, I reactivate my Instagram account. As I fill out my bio on the SuicideGirls site I produce a version of myself that seems creative, convincing, and noncontroversial. I select from the drop-down menu “artsy,” “homebody,” and “tree hugger.”

Copyright Duke University Press, 2024

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Zahra Stardust is a rainbow-haired, textile-loving writer, scholar and artist. Her book Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance builds on her 15 years as a professional undresser, award-winning stripper, pole dancer and porn star. With an international research portfolio spanning sex worker activism, LGBTQ+ health, sexual rights and sextech, she brings a cultural and media studies approach to sexual health. She passionate about somatic sex education, intimacy coordination and maximalist fashion.

When I first started writing about sex, people warned me it would ruin my career. I was in law school at the time, doing my thesis paper on queer pornography, and in their defense, most judges and firms would frown upon hiring an expert on such a risqué topic.

But I was fascinated by obscenity and queer pornography. Not necessarily the images and videos themselves—although those can be great when done well—but what sex means on a social and political level. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to the topic of pornography. And you can tell a lot about a society by how they try to regulate it.

Did you know that for a long time the legally deciding factor of whether something was obscene or not was “I know it when I see it?” Which meant that the United States Supreme Court Justices would go down into the courthouse basement and watch porn to decide whether it was obscene and should be banned.

Just imagine that for a moment.

Old, conservative, white guys in robes.

Sitting in a basement of a government building.

Watching porn that’s been deemed too obscene for the general public.

That’s the kind of hypocrisy that drew me to this topic.

So while my fellow law students found their niches of environmental law or trusts and estates, I did a deep dive into obscenity laws, specifically how they related to the super queer, hairy, kinky queer porn revolution that was happening around 2010.

I was good at this offbeat research—really good at it. My love and respect for this topic shone through and soon I had columns in multiple magazines, was being interviewed by news outlets, and received invites to speak at conferences and colleges, including Yale.

Yes, I was invited to speak about queer pornography at Yale.

Try explaining that to your grandparents.

The context changed depending on my audience—embracing your niche for the mommy bloggers, protecting yourself from lawsuits for the sex educators, the way obscenity laws adversely affect marginalized groups for the activists—and I found ways to make conversations about pornography accessible to those who would otherwise have avoided the topic.

I became the kind of success story they talk about in business school. I found a hole in the market, created a niche for myself out of that hole, and dominated that niche.

At the relatively young age of 30, my credits included writing columns for VICE, Huffington Post, and Curve magazine, and being featured in Cosmopolitan, xoJane, Jezebel, Bustle, and Glamour, to name a few, all because I’d chosen a topic no one else was talking about. That’s not to mention the conferences and colleges I was invited to speak at. That prestige and exposure led me to get jobs, launch programs, and speak at other conferences.

What people said would destroy my career ended up making it.

Eventually my curiosity about the subject was satiated and I turned my attention to other topics—writing about body image, starting my company SchoolForWriters.com, and publishing romance novels with a cast of diverse characters—but the connections and professional credibility I gained through writing and speaking about pornography still benefit me today.

I say all of this not to brag, although I proudly wave my hard-earned receipts. I say this because throughout all of this, every mentor, professor, career coach, and random person I met told me I was absolutely insane for following this path.

Never mind that I loved it. Never mind that I was making decent to good money from it. Never mind that it opened so many doors for me.

I just had to say “I write about queer porn” and the lectures would come. They never stopped to hear what came after that.

Sometimes, I felt like the “I’m a writer” part offended people more than the topic itself.

Once, about a year after law school, I attended the wedding of two fellow graduates. I was minding my own business, waiting in line for a drink, when an older lady behind me asked me how I knew the couple.

“I went to law school with them,” I said.

“Oh, my husband is a judge.” She glowed as bright as the giant diamond on her finger. “What type of law do you practice?”

“I’m a writer.” I beamed back.

“Why would you throw away your degree like that?” she scolded, her face stern. “You wasted a space in a prestigious law school that someone could have used to make a difference in this world, and you have debt you’ll never be able to pay back. How dare you.”

She didn’t care that at the table where I sat with eight other graduates, I was the only one with steady work. She didn’t care that I was working with the National Center for Lesbian Rights to help legalize gay marriage. She didn’t care that I was following my passion and full of joy for the first time after my brother died.

She heard “writer” and instantly assumed I was a starving, tortured, drain on society.

What do you say to someone like that? Do you defend yourself? Educate her on how wrong she was? Apologize for offending her, even though that would kill a part of your soul that was tired of people defining your worth to you?

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. Instead, in very Lauren fashion, I started to dance around her—literally.

It was slow at first, a tap of my foot and sway of my head. But soon I was cutting a rug, bopping and swinging and just letting all of that negativity leave my body through movement. Instead of responding, I just continued to dance around her, letting her words wash over and out of me, choosing to embody queer joy instead.

Now, whenever someone tries to put their own limiting beliefs on me—beliefs they absorbed from others before them—I just start dancing.

Yes, it looks ridiculous. Yes, they stare at me like I’m mentally unstable.

But that moment of pure embodied joy is worth it.

It’s the same pure embodied joy I feel when I teach programs through SchoolForWriters.com or promote my upcoming queer romance novel Because Fat Girl.

It’s that feeling of following your passion no matter how niche, risqué, or hard the road.

Now, 11 years later, I’m a full-time writer, speaker, and coach helping people and companies discover their unique stories and telling them to the world. Each time I take on a new coaching client, I tell them my history of talking about porn. I do this for a few reasons. First off, it eliminates people I wouldn’t want to work with anyways. But more importantly, it gives them permission to get specific, to go niche, and to be daring in their creative and professional pursuits.

It’s all about context, I tell them.

Find a subject you love and you’ll find a way to make others love it too.

So I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same, to dig a little deeper, go a little farther into your niche, and to have the audacity to follow your curiosity, wherever it might take you.

Because the world needs your story now more than ever.

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Lauren Marie Fleming (xe/her) is the author of the novel Because Fat Girl and the self-help book Bawdy Love: 10 Steps to Profoundly Loving Your Body. Lauren is also the founder of SchoolForWriters.com where she helps diverse storytellers thrive. Xe has been featured in prominent media outlets including Good Morning America, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, and has had columns for Curve magazine, VICE, and the Huffington Post. Xe is an entertaining and educating keynote speaker and has spoken at prestigious conferences and colleges including Yale, Brown, Wordstock, BinderCon, and BlogHer. When not traveling, Lauren can be found walking her dog on the beach in San Diego listening to a good audiobook. Learn more about Lauren's writing and courses at LaurenMarieFleming.com.

This is the thing I’m probably not supposed to write. But I tried to write it six different ways without telling the truth, and I couldn’t do it, so here goes:

My career has not been the success people think it is.

My first book came out from a small press in 2015. The advance was just enough for a fancy steak dinner after taxes. I wrote four more books in that series, and while I was getting some solid acclaim in the crime fiction community, I wasn’t anywhere close to quitting my day job.

And that was fine. I was doing the thing I loved.

Then I wrote a book called The Warehouse, which was pre-empted by a Big Five publisher for a ridiculous amount of money. I thought the book was unpublishable, because it was essentially a fuck-you to Amazon. Then I thought it would never appeal to foreign markets, but we sold it in twenty languages. It generated enough heat to be optioned for film by an A-list director.

All told, I made enough money off that book to become a full-time writer.

And I thought: This is it, I made it through the door, the rest of my career is going to be sunshine and smooth sailing.

It was not.

The Warehouse got a metric ton of promotion. The cover reveal was in Entertainment Weekly. I did a TV interview on CBS Mornings. It was on every “must read” list going into the August 2019 release. The reviews were glowing.

But it didn’t connect with readers—at least, not on the scale it was expected to. It sold good, but it didn’t sell great. It was supposed to hit the bestseller list and it didn’t, a fact pointed out in one of the major publishing trade magazines. Despite there being a bidding war for the film rights, when the pandemic shut down the movie industry, whatever momentum it had seemed to slam into a brick wall.

For my next book, The Paradox Hotel, my publisher offered me a little less money—still nothing to sneeze at, but a pay cut doesn’t feel good. It’s a mathematically-calculated reminder that you didn’t perform to expectations. Fewer foreign presses bought the rights. The reviews were fantastic, but there were less of them. There was no TV interview.

Again, it sold good, not great.

Hope sprang eternal when a high-profile actress attached to play the lead role in a potential television series. I thought, This is it, this will be my reversal of fortune. A TV show brings with it prestige, and an edition of the book with the actress on the cover, and hopefully, the job security I thought I’d had with the Warehouse deal.

Hollywood being Hollywood, it fell apart. The strike didn’t help.

Things were already looking dire before that happened. Because after Paradox came out, I went through three or four pitches for my next book with my editor, and nothing clicked. Finally, given the lack of an agreed path and my less-than-stellar sales, I was invited to find another publisher.

Essentially, I got dropped.

That’s the thing I’m not supposed to say. Because it conveys weakness. It’s an admission that my sales track isn’t where it should be. That there are cracks in the carefully-constructed facade. I told this tale of woe to writer friends, at conventions and book release parties, and they were shocked.

Optics are funny like that. Everything around the books looked so splashy that success was assumed. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been introduced as an award-winning, bestselling author. Neither of those things were true.

One of the more insidious aspects of social media, at least when it comes to publishing, is the way we only talk about success. The deal memos and the Deadline articles and the unboxings of finished copies. We don’t share the ten or fifteen or twenty failures it took to get us there.

Which is one of the reasons I wanted to write this, because maybe we should talk about those things more.

After I got dropped, I had a real dark night of the soul. I considered quitting—going back to the real world and getting a grown-up job, where I would wear a suit and sit in a box, in exchange for a steady paycheck and employer-funded health insurance. I wouldn’t spill my heart onto a page and then have someone tell me the market wouldn’t bear it.

That lasted about a week.

When I got back to work, it was freeing. I’d gotten stuck in a loop of trying to make a book fit my career trajectory. Something that slotted comfortably next to Warehouse and Paradox. Big idea, speculative, launching torpedoes at rich people and corporations. I was trying to write the thing I thought someone else would want.

 This time I figured, fuck it, I’m going to write a book I want to write. That’s why the dedication reads: This one’s for me.

Assassins Anonymous is about a John Wick-level hitman who gets into a 12-step program for killers. I wrote it in five months, the fastest I’ve ever written a book. My agent sent it out and within a week, we were on our way to an auction, and then it was pre-empted.

By my previous publisher.

It was a different imprint, and they had to go to bat to make an argument for why it was worth taking another book from me. It was branded internally as my “pivot” book. The deal was for two books, and it was worth less than what I was paid for Paradox. I’m okay with that. It feels less like a demotion and more like a recalibration, to the kind of advance that’s easier to clear, and doesn’t hang around my neck like an anchor.

It’s still enough to write full-time—though I’m hustling a lot harder for side projects and freelance editorial work. I’d like to not go back to wearing a suit and sitting in a box. If I have to, I will. But I’d rather not.

With a little distance, it’s easier to laugh at all of this. I laughed a lot when it happened, too. It reinforces that publishing is fickle and frustrating. It is not a meritocracy. Eventually art gets overshadowed by commerce. You’re asking a company, with shareholders, to make an investment in you, and if there’s not a return on that investment, well, that’s the way the capitalism cookie crumbles.  

But I wrote a book that was good enough for a second chance.

I don’t believe I’ll get a third chance. I’m still wracked with doubt and insecurity. I still lose sleep over the reviews I didn’t get, the lists I didn’t make. Assassins got a nice option too, from another A-list director, but most days I wake up and wonder when my film agent is going to call to let me know the whole thing has fallen apart.

Looking back, I thought a Big Five deal was the top of the mountain. But as 90s Christian nu-metal band P.O.D. sang: the top of every mountain is the bottom of another.

I’m teaching now, too, in an MFA program. Which is great, because I don’t have an MFA myself. It’s a pleasure, working with writers at the start of their careers. When I tell them I’m envious of them, they look at me sideways, but it’s true.

The truth is, I miss those days, when it felt like anything was possible, when the art was all that mattered and I hadn’t experienced the feeling of getting my teeth kicked in by the commerce side.

Yes, we should write for the love of the game, but it’s okay to want the stuff that comes with the major league of publishing: the chance to reach a wide audience, to see something you wrote on a screen, to make a life doing it. To channel all your time and energy into the part of you that wants to share the way you see the world, in all its beauty and tragedy.

When my students ask for the most valuable piece of advice I can impart, I always tell them the same thing: Be stubborn.

 Stubbornness is the most fundamental skill you can have in this business.

Maybe there’s better advice, but this is what’s worked for me so far.

Because when Assassins Anonymous came out this past June, it hit the USA TODAY bestseller list. I was at 144 out of 150. It dropped off the list the following week, but at least now, finally, one of the things people assume about me is true.  

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Rob Hart is the author of Assassins Anonymous, The Paradox Hotel, and The Warehouse, as well as the comic book Blood Oath with Alex Segura and the novella Scott Free with James Patterson. His next book, due in October, is Dark Space, co-written with Segura. Find more at robwhart.com.

“I wish I could draw,” I mumbled to myself. It wasn’t the first time I’d muttered those words, and it wouldn’t be the last. It usually happened when I was flipping through comic books, walking through a museum, or passing one of those weird 1970s New York City poster shops with framed Warhols in the window. In the summer of ’76 there was a place on 6th Street and Sixth Avenue that had a steady supply of Andy’s colorful prints of Mick Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, and the classic soup cans.

Although I lived in Harlem, what would years later be referred to as “the hood,” my mom was comfortable in every part of the city, from the Barrio to Bed-Stuy to the streets of the West Village, and she had introduced the various sections of town to me when I was a small boy. She read New York magazine and The Village Voice, and always knew of some cool arty event.

My first trip to Greenwich Village was many years back, when I was about six, and the annual sidewalk art festival was happening. For blocks and blocks and blocks there were paintings leaning against brick walls, hanging on fences or lying on the concrete. Some of the artists had seats like the lawn chairs old men sat in when they played dominos on Broadway. There were many different art styles on display, but six-year-old me didn’t know surrealism from modernist to pop, but simply loved staring at them all.

“He looks at these paintings like an old man,” one of the artists said and chuckled. “That kid has been here before.”

Mom smiled and patted my head. “He’s an old soul,” she said. Walking down the street there were long-haired hippies, guitar strummers, barefoot white women, and other oddities that I’d never witnessed in Harlem. Inside Washington Square Park there were folk performances, conservative white men reading The New York Times, bald Hare Krishnas dancing, and weed dealers of various nationalities buzzing through the crowd chanting, “Loose joints, loose joints, loose joints.”

Mother sometimes credited herself with my love of art, telling me how when she was pregnant in 1962 she went to MoMA to see the Pablo Picasso 80th birthday exhibition. Later, I read about the little Spanish man whose giant painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was supposed to be so brilliant. I could imagine mother standing in front of that massive image studying it closely as embryo me kicked inside.

“Working at Doubleday bookstore in the 1950s was my college and the gay men that worked there were my professors,” she explained years later. “They taught me about culture, books, and art. They got me into D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Picasso, and I took it from there.”

Though too bougie to go full bohemian, she had taken some of her bookstore check and bought oil paints. After a few days passed she painted an impressionistic picture of an ocean using mostly blue. “That was from my Van Gogh period,” she laughed. She repeated that line whenever we saw the picture, which hung on the wall of my godfather’s apartment. “I gave it to Hans for safekeeping.”

When I saw a real Van Gogh, I understood what mother tried to do with her swirls of blue. If she had stuck with it, perhaps she would’ve been great. Thankfully, her lack of artistic talent didn’t hinder her from exposing me to the great works hanging in the Met, MoMA, or the Guggenheim. Come Monday morning, when the teacher asked what the class had done over the weekend, my stories of Dali paintings, Rodin sculptures, or buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright were always the best.

Still, for me art wasn’t just about pictures hanging on museum walls, but also about the images I saw on the newsprint pages of the comic books I bought every Tuesday afternoon after class at St. Catherine of Genoa. Every week when the comics were delivered to the newsstand on 157th and Broadway, four blocks from school, I blissfully faced the front of the big box on the corner.

I got great joy out of seeing the many magazine covers, piles of newspapers and, inside on the left of the nameless man, was the rack that held the four-color amusements that were my hobby. While most boys stuck mostly with Marvel action heroes, I had diverse tastes that led to Archie, Richie Rich, and DC “mystery” comics, which were really horror stories.

Though some of my friends and classmates could draw any comic book character, I was never able to draw figures as sharp as theirs. The best I could do was a giant head man who looked like Fred Flintstone. “That’s not bad,” mom said when she saw the picture. I knew it sucked but appreciated the encouragement.

Five months into my last year, a Catholic school art contest was announced at the beginning of February 1977. Sponsored by Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), my teacher, Miss Barry, announced that anyone interested in submitting work should sign up after class. Miss Barry informed our class that their art was to be submitted by February 25th, the last Friday of the month.

“I’m going to do that,” I told my friend Tony Cafiero.

“Why are you signing up? You can’t even draw,” Tony laughed.

“Remember when we were in sixth grade and Miss Belina taught us about ‘where there’s a will there’s a way?’ Well, that’s my philosophy.”

 “I remember that stupid ‘Where There’s a Will’ record that girl brought in to play for class. I also remember you saying the concept was stupid.” 

“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.”

For the next week I wrestled with potential designs, but wasn’t connecting with any of the ideas drifting through my mind. Finally, I went to the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th between Broadway and Amsterdam and discovered the many coffee-table art books. After checking out books on cubism, surrealism, impressionism, and various other -isms, I was excited.

While smart alecks like to slough in front of a Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning or Piet Mondrian and declare, “My five-year-old could’ve done that,” they’re lying. As I soon learned, even art that looked easy was difficult. It also helped if you believed in what you were doing. I explained the dilemma to my godfather, Uncle Hans, the keeper of mom’s impressionistic masterpiece.

Although we were decades apart in age, I considered him my best friend and called him often. “I think you’re taking this too seriously instead of having fun with it,” Uncle Hans said. “Don’t think of it as Art with a capital A. Just loosen up and do what feels right.”

Seven days before the deadline, I returned to the library’s art section and came across a book of work by Wassily Kandinsky that struck me like lighting. Inspired at first glance, I couldn’t get the book home fast enough. I sat on the living room floor poring over the images, struck equally by the spectacle of the new as well as Kandinsky’s genius. His wild styled abstract works that included Several Circles, Composition X, and Swinging were chaotic and beautiful and more real than realism.

Having found my guiding light, multiple multicolored muses disco danced in my mind with each turned page. The following morning, I walked down to the Woolworth on 146th Street, where the air always smelled of frying burgers and popcorn, and bought a big pack of magic markers, two art pads with heavy paper, and colored pencils. I already owned a ruler, compass, and protractor, tools from geometry class that would come in handy.

Between chores, church, and a long walk on Riverside Drive, I spent the weekend in my bedroom making colorful lines, squares, triangles and circles. By Sunday night the Planet of the Apes trashcan was filled with half-hearted attempts at abstract greatness.

Two days before the deadline, sitting on the couch in the living room, I finally created an image I could be proud of—though when I brought it to school the kids laughed loudly.

“What is it?” one of the boys giggled at the mixed media abstract I had named 2001. A more sensitive child might’ve felt stupid from the brutal teasing, but when I saw the many superheroes, apartment buildings, racing cars, and Hudson River drawings by my peers I felt quietly superior.

The picture was framed in a neat black mat and when I told the teacher its name she wrote 2001 on a sticker. I hadn’t yet seen the Stanley Kubrick movie, but dug the trailer, the classical music theme song, and the Jack Kirby comic book adaption. “Remember, we’re competing with every Catholic grammar school in city, so don’t your hopes up too high,” Miss Barry said.

After the school turned over the work, I had no idea how the process progressed or how judgments were passed, but a few weeks later, Miss Barry told the class that the CYO. art competition had been decided. “We didn’t have any first place winners, but your classmate Michael Gonzales won an honorable mention for his picture 2001.” There were a few sore loser groans and a jokester named Tom Lowe screamed, “We still don’t know what the heck it is?”

Seven years later I went with my friend Sharon to the Greenwich Village Art Festival. After walking around for a few hours, the two of us went to Washington Square Park to rest and talk. Though it was still sunny, in the middle of our conversation an obvious junkie approached us, pulled out a knife, and pointed it toward me. “Give me your money,” he said.

Without thinking, I jumped up, held out my right arm as though I was a superhero, and screamed, “What the hell!”

Instead of reacting violently, the junkie ran out of the park. I didn’t get nervous until minutes later when the many possibilities of what could’ve happened occurred to me. “Damn,” I laughed nervously, “you see me over here throwing up my hand like Iron Man, like I could stop a blade. If he had stabbed me in the hand, I would never have drawn again.”

“I didn’t know you were an artist too,” Sharon replied.

“Oh yeah, I used to do a little something something years ago. I was really into abstracts, even won an award once.” Leaning back on the park bench, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could still see the red honorable mention ribbon pinned to 2001 blowing in the spring wind as I carried the drawing home.

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New York City native Michael A. Gonzales is a regular contributor to Oldster, CrimeReads.com, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and Alive in the Nineties. He has written fiction for The Oxford American, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Killans Review, Obsidian Literature & Arts and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. 

by Alizah Holstein

I had been trained as a historian. I had become a historian. Then I had become someone else. You would think I had thought enough about time.

Since college, I had read and discussed theories of time at length. Time as a circle, time as a river, time as a parabola, time as an endless upward trajectory. Yet here I was, at forty, railing against time itself.

It was as if I had blinked and, in that instant, life happened. Since leaving Rome in 2004, I had received my PhD, taught for two years, then had a baby. I held him in my arms, cooing at the sight of his ten fingers, his ten tiny toes. I stopped reading. For the first time in many years, I wore bright colors. With diminishing hope, and eventually diminishing interest, I continued applying for academic jobs. When none panned out, I started a business. Then I left academia for good and had a second child. Although the narrative had taken some hairpin turns, the progress of life felt mostly orderly. Time crept forward. The past was clearly the past, and the future, the future. During this long blink of the first years of motherhood, I stopped thinking about faraway places. Or more truthfully, that faraway place.

That Rome. Here was life and now was love. And that lasted. Until I went back. And remembered.

It was the remembering that split me into pieces.

At the end of my meeting with Paolo, I had thanked him for the many gifts he had given me over the years, the greatest of which was making me feel at home. That expression of gratitude was long overdue. But then came something I did not expect. On the coattail of my words rode in a decade of feelings. They emerged as I was walking back to my hotel, and all at once, as if they had been shuttered for years in a broom closet and suddenly freed. They buzzed around me like a great swarm. I could hardly breathe.

In Rome, and later, at home, I began to count, and to mourn, all the things I had lost. I grieved my beloved city and the unrelenting march of time that had pulled me from it; I grieved, finally, the dead end of my academic career; I grieved the impossibility of coming back, of going back, and wondered at the bristling contradiction between my happy home life and this sudden sad clutching at a time gone by. And most deeply of all, I grieved my lost self, the girl who had followed, even if by a wandering path, the unfurling thread of her own unlikely pursuit. At the same time, I brimmed with gratitude for the gift of this place that had almost been my home, and even for the grief, which, perversely perhaps, proved the worth of the loss I felt.

Acknowledging this loss was not easy. I was married to a man I loved. We had two small children. I had close friends where I lived, and a feeling of connection to the world around me, a home whose windows flooded with morning sun. Dwelling on grief felt indulgent, and potentially hurtful to those I loved. And yet I could see no way around it. The grief was everywhere. It grabbed me by the throat and stole my breath. It hunkered down in my stomach and spit out my food. It demanded that I listen to it, deal with it, barter and trade with it. It took up residence in my mind and in my heart, making infernal calculations and Faustian bargains about how to recover a self that existed only in the past. When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest. And the only way out, as Dante well knew, is through.

After the wedding but before leaving Rome, I walked back to the courtyard of Sant’Ivo. I sat down cross‑legged in the corner, in the same spot where the French mother in the striped shirt had sat almost twelve years earlier. I did not know what to do with the memory of that September day, with the sheer, monumental coincidence of it. It felt like a gift, and a torment. For the first time, I could see that in leaving Rome, in leaving academia, I had left an integral part of myself behind. But that person was still here, in the courtyard of Sant’Ivo, forever looking out over that balustrade. I counted the things I had. They were more than trivial. My husband, the man with whom I had glimpsed a future after only twenty minutes of conversation at a party. Never before had I believed in tales of instant love, but the universe, which often proves my assumptions wrong, had presented me with just that. And then there were our children. Our young boys, their shoulder blades as delicate as almond slivers, their smooth boy bodies that still sought mine in the night. All this—warmth and beauty and bodies nuzzled in sleep—was mine.

And yet. I was overtaken by the need to recover my old tracks, to step back in time. As illogical as it was, I struggled to reconcile the warmth of the present with the need to hold on to, to incorporate, to possess, an ever‑receding past. Past. Future. Present. Yesterday. Ten years ago. To‑ morrow. A thousand years ago. I considered these words, these concepts, from all sides, trying to understand what they meant. How is it that a historian can lose her sense of time? Feel young and ancient all at once? If only I could stay in Rome, I thought. To figure it all out. To calculate precisely what had been lost and what gained, what was dear and what had ceased to be. To be able to say that was past and this is present. For the film between the two had slipped away.

I longed to go on sitting in the courtyard at Sant’Ivo. I longed to stay in Rome. But I did not. I could not. Clutching my bag of tufa stone, tiny conch shells and pine nuts, my body strained its way to the train station. Roma Trastevere. Villa Bonelli. Magliana. Muratella. Ponte Galeria. Fiera di Roma. Parco Leonardo. Each stop farther from where I wanted, or needed, to be. Each stop cinching the elastic tighter, pulling my insides into knots. My mind rebelling.

At the airport, I waited at the gate, looking like anyone else, I suppose, though my heart had turned to lead and plummeted to my feet. When it was time, I dragged my lead heart onto the plane, sat holding it and examining it the way one might a sick child. Once again, incredulous at the fact of being on a plane whose nose was pointed toward the runway, with Rome behind me. And then the jet propelled me and several hundred others across the heavens and set us down gently in the New World, my old one. I stuffed my damp scarf into my purse, walked back into my house. Into the leaping embraces of my children. Into the arms of my husband. Into the pleasant joyful boring satisfying unsatisfying chaotic loving everything of our daily routine. Into the person I was in the present, whoever that was, rather than the one I once had been, or thought I might one day be.

From MY ROMAN HISTORY: A Memoir by Alizah Holstein, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Alizah Holstein.

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Alizah Holstein is an independent editor with a Ph.D. in History from Cornell University and an International MFA in Nonfiction Writing & Literary Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and children.

As the months piled up, I had to consider that maybe my mom was right. Perhaps I wasn’t doing my family any favors by being a job snob and turning up my nose at her fast-food openings. I started having flashbacks to all the times I’d been less than charitable about friends who were out of work. I kept replaying a lunch I’d had with two pals a few years earlier. We’d been discussing a mutual friend’s husband who’d lost his job and hadn’t had any luck finding another.

“Can’t he go work at ShopRite?” I said coldly. “Slice up a ham at the deli, just do something! At least then they’d have benefits.”

“I think she should leave him,” added one of my friends. The other nodded. “How much time is she going to give him? Seriously, either get moving or get out.”

This memory kept me up at night. Was it time for me to take my own advice? Why was I so resistant to restaurants and retail? Was it the thought of reporting to someone half my age for minimum wage? Or maybe it was the knowledge that I hadn’t exactly excelled at cleaning fitting rooms or folding chinos during my six-month post-college stint at Banana Republic. Still, others were embracing these jobs so perhaps it was time to reconsider.

Exhibit A:

During an afternoon last fall, I dashed into Starbucks for a quick hit of caffeine. When I got to the counter, the barista wasn’t a nose-pierced, angsty teen slam poet; it was a mom. A mom I knew—wearing the whole black hat and apron. And she looked happy, or as happy as one can while trying to process the complex orders—“Venti Soy Caramel Macchiato, not too full!!—barked by the impatient public above the roar and spit of the foaminator.

My reaction to seeing her smiling face was shameful. I lurched backwards, the way I imagine I would if I walked in on her sitting on a toilet, before fumbling through my, “Hey, how are you? I love this place!” gushing as if she were Howard Schultz, overcompensating for my initial shock. Clearly, she wasn’t being held there against her will, and Fortune consistently ranked the java giant among the best companies to work for, so why did I startle as if I’d just caught her licking all the coffee stirrers?

When I was back in my car, I felt so strange because:

a) It wasn’t like I was Christiane Amanpour where I had any right to feel like my own career was so important or glamorous... and...

b) If we went head-to-head in an hours vs. earnings battle, I was sure that woman was doubling my wage handily, considering some evenings I’d stay up well past midnight writing about a board of ed’s decision to ban students’ use of cell phones.

So what was my problem? I wish I could say this was a one-off; it wasn’t.

Exhibit B:

Later that year, I discovered my child’s former preschool teacher working at Old Navy. This woman, who’d expertly shepherded youngsters through cutting and pasting, wore what appeared to be five layers of cardigans as her register stood a mere six feet from the door exiting to our frozen suburban tundra.

As I waited in a line that snaked past colorful dog bowls and Hello Kitty underpants, I couldn’t help but wonder: How did she end up here? Gambling debt? A gripping denim addiction?

Though it was none of my business, I was dying to know what drove her out of the classroom and into the arms of the Gap’s low-rent cousin. I’m sure teaching the not-quite-potty-trained set gets old fast and maybe there’s an amazing physical release that comes from screaming out for a price check. Still, I was surprised.

When I left, a million questions spun through my mind: Was it a sign of the times that skilled professionals were now turning to retail? Were they simply supplementing their income? Was it a dearth of opportunity for those of us over forty? To paraphrase Jack Johnson, “Where’d all the good jobs go?” Or are these careers less stressful?

Let’s face it: In retail, when you’re done, you’re done. No one follows you home to ask for a peasant blouse in medium or to fix a Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino. You don’t have to deal with an editor calling at nine p.m. to tell you a body has been found behind the Staples in Morristown, “So get the police chief on the phone and head over there!”

In these positions, your email probably isn’t blowing up and you can sleep knowing what you’ll face tomorrow will be much like what you encountered today. Or did they take these jobs as a rest stop on the way to the next big thing? I knew that sitting on the sidelines waiting for greatness could backfire.

The summer after I’d graduated from college and moved back home, I held out hope of landing a job in the world of publishing. Books, magazines, newspapers, textbooks, I didn’t care, I just wanted in. While biding my time, I babysat for every child within a ten-mile radius, mainly because my dad had reduced our exchanges to sentences like this: “You’d better do something because I didn’t pay for you to go to college so you could sit around all day watching Love Connection.”

One afternoon, as I was wiping up puddles of toddler vomit at a house across town, he’d called to relay a message, “You have an interview if you want it.” At a financial company .. in customer service. It wasn’t publishing but it meant I could say goodbye to Barney and runny noses. In a moment of desperation, I dialed that corporation as fast as I could and ended up spending eighteen months in what turned out to be a crazy sweatshop of a call center, donning a headset that practically wore a bald patch into the side of my head.

I knew what it was like to make decisions from a place of fear and yet I was seriously considering going to the mall to try to get back my old job at Banana Republic despite never being entirely comfortable asking, “Do you need any socks today? How about a belt?”

I was skimming online applications when I heard from another website I’d applied to. The articles covered an odd mishmash of wellness, pets, the military, and medical marijuana, and the job description had been vague. But the company was based in New Jersey and I liked that I would be able to write and edit from home.

When I called the editor back, he offered me the job on the spot. It was part-time but paid twenty dollars an hour—substantially more than what my mother told me Subway was offering. I hadn’t been prepared to make a decision on the fly, yet with little else coming our way, I thought I’d be a fool to pass it up. I reasoned that I could still look for a full-time job while bringing in a little cash.

I accepted the job then and there, which prompted this editor to tell me about all the other candidates he’d interviewed. Many had failed to send writing samples. Others couldn’t follow the application directions. Even more never wrote back at all. To him, I was a long-haired Rupert Murdoch in sweatpants and lip gloss. It was nice to receive some positive feedback for a change. For a moment, I felt the tightness in my chest loosen by at least 20 percent.

Reprinted with permission from the memoir Sad Sacked.

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Liz Alterman the author of the memoir, Sad Sacked, the domestic suspense novel, The Perfect Neighborhood, and the young adult thriller, He’ll Be Waiting. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Parents, and other outlets. She was named Humorist of the Month by the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop in November 2021 and was selected as a Guest Writer & Editor at the 2023 Leopardi Writers Conference. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, three sons, and two cats, and spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms. For more, visit lizalterman.com.

My first mistake was not backing in to the “Reserved for Veterans” parking spot, displayed outside Home Depot. Everybody knows “real veterans” back into their parking spaces, I thought as I saw the grumpy-looking old man put his cart away with a bang and begin to march toward me. My second mistake was shifting my frazzled, whining toddler out of her car seat and onto my hip.

“This is not the day, my dude,” I muttered as he approached. I knew he would give me the what-for: parking was reserved for VETERANS, not their wives.

I was an Army wife. Part of the reason the toddler and I were so frazzled was because Daddy was deployed, again, to war in his role as a special operations helicopter pilot. I understood the dangers he faced daily, from my own former role as an Army intelligence officer deployed twice to Afghanistan, in the famed 101st Division.

I had been out of the Army for less than two years, and often joked that, in one day, I’d been demoted from “Captain Mestyanek” to “so-and-so’s wife,” name unimportant. I’d already become so tired of being what our culture has termed “invisible veterans,” a phrase that, when we dig down just a little, is a dog whistle for “the females.” We’re the ones whose presence is erased every time another politician talks about “our boys over there” or “our guys in green.” The term largely refers to the women who have fought and died for our country in combat since the Revolutionary War, but who couldn’t serve in full capacity for centuries. The combat ban was overturned in 2013, during my service—I’d even played a tiny part in taking it down, as one of the first women integrated onto deliberate ground combat teams in Army history. Oh, I was gonna let this guy have it.

But before I could finish formulating my plan of attack, I noticed that he was…smiling through his squinting. He held out his hand. I saw his VFW-studded ball cap at the same moment I recognized that I was about to be…recognized? I’d felt sure he was coming to scold me, but was this man about to assume that I was a veteran simply because I was the one getting out of the car parked in the veteran parking spot, as he would have done without question for my husband?

“I just wanted to say,” he began, his deeply rumbling voice exactly what I had expected, “I’m in awe of your generation for volunteering the way you have. Thank you for your service.” I know I shook his hand, and I think I thanked him back. As he walked away, I buried my face into my little girl’s curly mop of hair so he wouldn’t hear me burst into tears.

While volunteering at a Veteran Service Organization, I conducted an informal, two-year-long survey. With almost every veteran I welcomed into our program, I asked the same question: “What is the first thing people say when they find out you are a veteran?”

From the men, a singular response: the-almost universal, automatic: “Thank you for your service.”

The feedback was starkly different from women and nonbinary veterans. They received a variety of responses, most along the themes of: “Really?” and “Oh, you’re way too pretty to have been a soldier,” and “You don’t look like a veteran,” along with the leering “They didn’t make soldiers that looked like you back in my day.”

Many of the women I spoke to revealed that they almost never volunteer they’re veterans outside of a “safe space,” for fear of one or the other of these degrading responses; the constant microinvalidations are the thanks we receive for our service. Many of my veteran sisters have told me that they fear entering veteran spaces because “veteran” isn’t enough of an obvious part of their identity—we’re often not still wearing the visible symbols on our sleeves, t-shirts and hats the way the men are. The wounds we carry from our service are just as likely to be termed “invisible,” too.

“Thank you for your service” is a loaded phrase for most of us. As veterans, we have different feelings about this phrase. We can debate whether it represents real gratitude, and whether or not we deserve that gratitude. But we can all agree that it is a form of recognition. Our generation all signed up voluntarily to stand in the gap between American citizens and whomever our enemies might be, a choice most Americans do not make.

Changing the narrative—changing this stereotype—is essential for our community where, according to a 2023 survey by the Wounded Warrior Project, “Women veterans, especially those with lingering military injuries, struggle more with loneliness, anxiety and reintegration into civilian life than their male peers.” The survey found that more women than men suffer from thoughts of suicide, and that almost half of us report being sexually assaulted during our service. According to the National Center for PTSD, women are more likely to develop PTSD symptoms than men, even when we are exposed to the same stimuli.  Yet even though three million women have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since the Revolutionary War, most PTSD research has focused on men. And it’s not just in the research. It’s everywhere in our society, where veterans who look like my husband get to be acknowledged and feel accepted, even with something as small and unquestionable as a parking space.

Every time my husband and I attend an event where he is thanked for his service, while I am told that “I don’t look like a soldier,” I’m forced to justify my service in a way that he is not. It can be as casual as the couple next to us at a hibachi dinner being overtaken with surprise that I’m a former Army Captain, when they expressed no surprise at my husband’s two decades of service. It can be as threatening as the time Mike, a Southwest pilot and Navy veteran, threatened to beat me up in a bar after my book event, because he didn’t think I looked strong enough to represent the narrative of what women veterans looked like and could accomplish in combat. I’m grateful to the three generations of Air Force veterans eating nearby, who did recognize me as a veteran sister and had my back. Mike stood down.

Every year on Veterans Day, it looks a lot like asking for our free drip coffee, only to be told that the freebie is only for “real veterans and not just wives,” as we think, Really? Still? The truth is veterans look like America, and we all know how varied that can be. I look like as much of a veteran as my spouse, and so do my fellow sisters-in-arms. Woman veterans are all ages and come from all walks of life. You’ll find us in your churches, your preschools, your conference tables, your neighborhood groups, your Fortune 500 companies, your bookstores and even in your Audible account. We are directors and CEOs, teachers, mothers, daughters, friends. We are here working alongside you to better our communities.

We know representation matters. And we need our culture to stop erasing us into invisibility and see us for who we are: veterans.

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Daniella Mestyanek Young is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Uncultured and a scholar of cults and extreme groups, and extremely bad leadership. Daniella was raised in the religious sex cult, The Children of God. She later served as an intelligence officer for the US Army, making the rank of Captain, and became one of the first women in US Army history to conduct deliberate ground combat operations when she volunteered to serve on a Female Engagement Team, and received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award. Daniella lives with her husband and daughter in Maryland, and holds a master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the Harvard Extension School. Daniella is an organizational development speaker with the Macmillan Speaker’s Bureau, and you can see her TEDx talk here. Daniella is working on a second book called The Culting of America.