We've curated a list of our narratives that have the highest and lowest Doe Print scores for the Openness value. Read these to expose you to stories from a wide variety of authors.

Doe Print Value - Openness

Back in 2012, I started taking an interest in Tantra to learn about the capacity for our bodies to transmit energy in subtle and overt ways. As a cis, heterosexual guy, I saw the potential to alchemize my sexual obsessions into powers. I believed these powers could draw women to me and, when interested and open, could even bring them to ecstatic states with little to no physical touch. This was my deliverance, an evolution beyond the trifling games of dating and unfulfilling casual sex and into the mystical magic of deep, real human connection. I took myself, and this exploration very, very seriously.

I would go to workshops and meet Tantricas, breathwork guides, masculinity coaches and energy practitioners who would speak of orgasms occurring in non-physical ways through the sheer movement of energy. I would conspire in my journal and amongst friends to create group touch circles, where we could explore these realms in open, consensual ways. Looking back, I wasn’t sure how consensual I was in sharing these circles with other men but I was definitely keen to find a few ladies to “journey” with.

One day, I followed my curiosity down a Google hole of Tantric videos until I came across a demonstration of “Tantric massage.” I couldn’t believe what I was watching. Here was some schlocky guy, dressed in white, hovering over a massage table where a beautiful blonde woman—also in all-white spandex— was getting a “massage.” The man didn’t touch the woman in a sexual way at all—to my recollection, he didn’t even touch her. He moved his hands up and down her body about an inch to two inches from her skin, waving and pulling air around her, moving it with both hands like he was pushing water from her legs up to her neck, then pinching it away like he was sprinkling salt on her from afar. He held one hand over her head and another moved and swished around her torso and gut. It was all very surreal to watch.  

Slowly, but very clearly, the woman started to move and make noise. Her back arched and she started to moan. There was no doubt she was enjoying the experience and the massage was arousing her. I repeat: I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Without any real physical touch, this normal-looking guy was bringing a woman to orgasm by moving air and energy around her body. I was blown away.

I vowed to figure out how to do what this guy was doing. I wanted to learn how to use my energy to make a woman cum without touching her. This felt like the ultimate power. I began feeling this desire when I would talk to women, trying to energetically bring them into arousal through sheer will. When I had the opportunity, friends or dates would give me the chance to practice with them on the couch. I’d have them close their eyes and then mimic the motions and movements I saw on that YouTube video. After five or ten minutes of movement, I’d inquire, “Did you feel it?” Some said they felt something, or maybe they heard my hands moving around them; others didn’t feel anything. I persisted and kept practicing every chance I got.

One night, I was at my house with a new friend. We had kissed once before but she articulated that she just wanted to be friends and, though a little bummed, I let it go. Somehow in the course of the evening, I mentioned my studies in Tantric massage and her ears perked up—she wanted to try. I was a little hesitant at first, as she said she wasn’t interested in romance, but I thought I could keep things PG and maybe have some energetic success.  

She got on the couch and closed her eyes. I slowly and intentionally brought my energy into my hands by rubbing them together and orienting my attention towards them. Then I began to move them above her body. I swooped and pushed, drew back, held steady and continued for a while, my knees getting sore as I remained knelt over her. After what felt like a while, I saw her beginning to perspire a bit. She was moving and breathing audibly. I could sense a change was occurring. Excited by her body’s feedback and ignoring my physical discomfort, I continued to move my hands and circulate energy from her head to her pelvis to her heart and even her feet.  

Finally, she opened her eyes. “Wow, I really felt that,” she said. Then she asked if she could kiss me. I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I get the magic to have an impact on this woman but now she did want to make out. We began kissing and, while fully clothed, the physical touch seal was broken. Through the thick denim in her jeans, I was able to bring her fully to climax. I felt superhuman.

This wild experience motivated me to play with my energy while having conversations with women or just hanging out. Sometimes we’d both be interested in energy work but our definitions weren’t always the same. Maybe we’d move or meditate together and I’d start to raise this out-of-body strength. Once I was sitting in meditation with a friend and she stopped us by saying she felt my energy overtaking her. It freaked her out and she was uncomfortable.  

I realized at that moment that consent still matters when it comes to energy work. Just because we can expand beyond our bodies doesn’t mean we always should. In fact, it’s very important to know when it’s appropriate to use this kind of sensual energy in an interaction and when it’s not. Since that “call-in” with my friend, I haven’t really found myself “playing” with this sexual energy in random spaces.  

Now that I have someone I plan to spend my life with, we occasionally practice “sex magic.” We light a candle and bring intention, breath and our own focused energy into our intimacy. I feel grateful to have someone who is game to exchange energy with me instead of a one-way massage, and we can break the physical touch barrier to deepen our experience from the get-go. 

Nevertheless, I’ll always be proud of my ability to transmit sexual energy without touch.

Doe Print Value - Goodwill

Doe Print Value - Stability

Doe Print Value - Closeness

I Discovered the Joys and Limits of a No-Touch Orgasm

I was six or seven years old when I first learned that I was adopted. My siblings and I were playing in our family’s suburban backyard, equipped with a swimming pool and a clubhouse, while my mother and father gathered palm fronds and threw them in a garbage bin. When they were finished, my dad took off his gloves and corralled my two brothers, my sister and me over to a spot by the lake. As I sat crisscrossed and picked at blades of grass, my parents informed us that while they did not bring us into the world, they were our “real” parents in every other sense of the word. 

Then they offered to answer our questions, and that’s how we learned that we had three other half-siblings, and all sharing the same biological mother. I’ll call her Jane. Jane was unfit to take care of us, for reasons I wasn’t yet ready to understand, but my mom had assured me that one day I’d be able to meet her and find out for myself.  

Before we moved to the suburbs, my parents owned and operated a jewelry business together in the city. My mom and dad had been married for six months when they applied through the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to become foster parents. Shortly thereafter, they were in a meeting at their bank when HRS called to deliver news that there was a healthy baby girl in need of a foster home. Two weeks later, my parents picked up my five-month-old sister, Rita. 

My birth mom had attempted to take on the onus of parenting my older sister by herself, just as she had twice before, until the state eventually terminated her parental rights. This time didn’t prove to be any different. When Rita was 12 weeks old, Jane called the police sounding agitated and incoherent. When a squad car finally pulled up, Jane ran out into the street and set my sister on the hood. She told the police and an HRS protective investigator that she was at her “wit’s end” because my sister wouldn’t stop crying. Once again, Jane relinquished her child to the care of the state. 

My parents loved Rita. They’d bring her to work with them, keeping her in the back office of the jewelry shop and taking turns caring for her while the other worked up front. Photo albums and home videos from that time reflect the happiness and love that my parents poured into this new life. They nurtured Rita in the ways that my birth mom couldn’t. 

My mom stayed in touch with Jane’s brother John. Uncle John lived just a few hundred miles away, and would often drive up to see us, bearing gifts and bizarre stories. He’d spent his early 20s investigating some of the first American UFO sightings, and recounted his excursions to anyone who would listen. We all loved Uncle John, and his presence in our lives reinforced the common link between the siblings. 

One day, a couple of months after Rita’s first birthday, Uncle John phoned my parents’ townhouse in the city. My mom answered. “Jane had another baby,” my uncle reported. “It’s a boy.”

I was 13 years old when I first heard Julian’s story. At this point, I’d spoken to my birth mom over the phone a handful of times, mostly on holidays. Our conversations could at best be described as whimsical, but the truth was she was mostly erratic and difficult to keep up with. My mom, who worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, explained to my siblings and me that Jane had schizophrenia. My dad never tried to conceal his disdain for her. When she’d call the house, he would intentionally let the phone ring until it went to voicemail. 

We were in the family minivan one afternoon when tensions had begun heating up, as they often did. My dad was angry that my younger brother Tommy and I had been skipping out on Sunday school. At the time, my dad was being sued by a former business partner who was trying to steal the company, and it was wearing on him. After I retaliated by confronting him about forwarding Jane’s calls, he finally collapsed under the weight of it all. 

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he yelled. My dad is six feet, four inches tall, and a powerhouse of a man. When he raised his sonorous baritone to a shout, it was terrifying. Then, in a slightly softer voice, he said, “She almost killed your brother Julian.”

By the time Jane gave birth to Julian, there were numerous hospital records expounding on her mental illness, and the hospital staff was instructed not to leave her alone with the baby. But through cunning, Jane managed to exit the hospital with Julian in her arms. At the height of winter, she got on a plane with my one-week-old brother and flew across the country, living as a  vagabond and sleeping on sidewalks. She kept this up for weeks until she finally capitulated and called my Uncle John to bail her out. He pleaded with her to come back and grant parental custody of Julian to my parents. 

When Jane handed off my brother at the airport, she told them that he had a cold. His diaper was many sizes too large and desperately needed to be changed.

The next morning, as my parents got ready to take Julian to the doctor, he stopped breathing. My dad was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher as my mom performed CPR on my newborn brother. My mom went with him as he was airlifted in a helicopter to the hospital. 

At five weeks old, Julian weighed less than his birth weight. He’d contracted pneumonia while in my birth mom’s care, and spent a week in the intensive care unit as my parents waited for him to recover. 

“One more day and he would’ve been dead,” my dad said in a broken voice. He was behind the steering wheel, sobbing now as he finished telling Tommy and me about how our brother had narrowly escaped death. I felt a lump rise to my throat, and I couldn’t speak. I’d never been so angry in my entire life, sitting there reliving my father’s trauma, trying to picture my life without Julian. 

As the years went on, I began dissecting my own feelings of rejection and guilt. There were countless instances in which my mom came home from a 13-hour workday to hysteria and chaos. Many objects were broken or completely destroyed from us fighting, playing or a combination of the two. It was becoming more and more apparent to my mom that while all of us were healthy, intelligent children, none of us had passed through Jane unscathed.

When my sister Rita got addicted to drugs and started stealing money out of my mom’s purse, my mom didn’t give up on her. She did everything she could for Rita, paying for multiple stints in rehab until Rita finally got clean. When Tommy got kicked out of school, my dad added 40 minutes to his morning commute, without protest, in order to take my younger brother to school the next district over. 

But my parents didn’t just deal with our bad days. They were right there for the good ones, too. When Julian displayed an affinity for acting, my mom and dad were in the audience when he performed as the lead in our high school play. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve looked up to find my parents settling into the crowd at one of my gigs. 

My parents chose us and accepted us, and never gave up on us. They kept my siblings and me together, and a collective sense of camaraderie has flourished among the four of us. We all share a bond that will forever unify us, distinguish us and strengthen us. 

The continual selflessness and support from my parents encouraged me from an early age to begin cultivating a sense of gratitude. It continues to inspire me to act selflessly. And while I occasionally contend with feelings of guilt and imposter syndrome, I never lose sight of how grateful I am to be here, every single day.

Doe Print Value - Curiosity

Ancestry

Tearjerkers

I Was Adopted: My Parents and the Significance of Selflessness

When Grandma Regina died, I stood over her grave, my belly swollen with my son Joshua, who was born the following month. Some 21 years later, in 1992, while I walked the streets of Warsaw with Josh, now a six-foot-tall college boy, Grandma Regina’s life took on a new meaning for us.

Grandma Regina was one of eight siblings born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. All my life I was told by Grandma, in her broken Polish accent, that she’d lost her entire family in her native Poland in the World War II Holocaust. 

She escaped by coming to the United States with her son, Louis, in 1910. Long before the Nazi slaughter, there was the bloodbath initiated by the violent Russian pogroms throughout the region when Poland was part of Russia. In the 19th century, when Russia took control of Poland, things started to change for the Jews. During the devastating pogroms of 1906, Grandma was terrified for her life. The horrific massacres, violence, rape and slaughter of Jews never slowed down in spite of what government officials promised. 

She begged her family to leave Poland, take her advice and follow her to the U.S. When the Nazis set their sights on the country, they sought to destroy all that was there and build it up again as a colonial homeland for Germans. Regina was a stocky five-foot-one, with dark brown hair and blue eyes and an agitated personality. The Grandma I knew was short-tempered and highly sensitive to anything that could appear not to go her way or smelled of anti-Semitism.

While my relationship with Regina wasn’t close, I admired her for believing in herself and doing what she knew was right for her and taking that action. Leaving everything and everyone she knew to go to a new country far away—and learning a new language—took a lot of guts.  For that, I’m eternally grateful. I was always curious about her roots that were also my roots.

Josh had also developed a keen interest in his Eastern European roots and became fascinated with Slavic languages. So we included Warsaw on the itinerary when Josh had just completed a summer language program in Russia, where I joined him. We traveled to the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and then Poland. 

On a lazy morning after a large breakfast, we visited the Old Town Market Place, which is one of the oldest parts of Warsaw.  As we sauntered down the street, Josh stopped and dug into his backpack.

“Hey mom, I have this address from Grandma Dorothy.  It has these names and addresses of some relatives she thinks live in Warsaw. She said she found it in Grandma Regina’s stuff after she died.” 

“Josh, no one is left of her family. The Nazi’s killed everyone,” I said with authority.

“Well, let’s just see if we can find it anyway,” he replied.

We pulled out our city map and plotted our approach. The names on the paper were Januz and Joseph, with the same last name as Regina’s before she married. Clearly, these people had been relatives. After wandering around for an hour, we found an apartment building with the same address. 

When we returned to our hotel later, we asked the concierge if she could find a phone number that matched the name and address. She said the switchboard was closed at night and to come back tomorrow. When we returned, I stopped by the desk again and Josh went up to our room. The concierge called again, and this time someone answered and identified himself as Joseph.

To be sure it was a relative with this name, I asked the concierge to ask the man if Regina’s name meant anything to him.

“No, stay at the hotel and he will come to see us.”

I was shocked and excited and trying to stay realistic. This person might still not be a relative of my grandmother’s.

As we had dinner before we returned to the hotel, we waited in our room for what seemed like forever, but it was only one hour when the concierge called us and said:

“The man is here. He says to have your son come down with you.”

I held my breath all the way down the elevator. When the doors opened to the lobby, people were milling about. I scanned the crowd, unsure who I was looking for. After the crowd thinned, my eyes fell on one person, an elderly man standing by a wall, watching people step out of the elevator. He was someone who I would have recognized anywhere. It was clear he belonged in my family. I smiled, and he just looked back at me. 

He didn’t answer. He just stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a small photograph, pointed to the picture and looked at me. The photo was taken at my cousin Louise’s wedding. I pulled Josh close to translate. 

“Tell him that is me,” I pointed, “and that is Dorothy, Rose, Josephine, Louis, my cousin Louise and there is Regina.” I told Josh to tell him the photo was taken at my cousin’s wedding many years earlier when Grandma was still alive. Apparently, she or someone else had mailed it to him. 

Joseph had his arm around Josh and said to him in Russian, “What happened to Regina? The letters stopped 20 years ago. We kept writing, but heard nothing back.” 

I was wondering something, too. Why had Grandma never told us she was writing to her nephews all those years? Why had she said everyone had died in the war, yet clearly, these two people had survived? The only reason I could think of was her secretive personality. She never trusted anyone! I’m wondering if she thought there was danger? But to her family? Did anyone else know about this?  And, if she had trusted us, we could have enjoyed getting to know these men. And they would have been able to know us. 

It was obvious Grandma was writing to someone in Poland, her birthplace. What could they possibly do to her in the U.S.? And in terms of the language, Aunt Rose practically lives next door to the University of California at Los Angeles. I’ll just bet someone there reads Polish!  

Josh was as amazed, as I was, that this man standing in the hotel lobby was a relative, discovered across thousands of miles, and a Holocaust survivor. Joseph had asked his daughter Aleksandra, called Ola, to meet him at the hotel, since she spoke English. She was a scientist for Proctor & Gamble. Ola didn’t know about the correspondence, so it had never occurred to her to look up relatives in the United States.

The four of us spent hours talking about our lives, and I shared what I knew about my grandmother. 

A couple of days later, Ola invited us to Joseph’s home to meet what family members were in town. As it was summer, many were on vacation. Joseph gathered his younger brother Januz, Ola’s husband and her daughter, as well as close friends, to join together and share stories. 

I learned that Joseph and his brother Januz are my mother’s first cousins, the sons of one of Grandma’s brothers and the only survivors in the family. Some siblings and relatives fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and died there. Again, speaking with Ola’s help, Joseph told us he survived the war by serving as a colonel in the Red Army.  He was very proud of that service. As Joseph was in the army, he spoke Russian and some German and jumped between all three languages, sometimes within one sentence.  

Januz, who spoke a little English, told us he was 12 when the war broke out. He was taken high up into the Ural Mountains to work in a mine, which is how he survived. Today, he’s an attorney, but he’s not allowed to practice law in the city of Warsaw because he is Jewish. 

Ola told us that the Nazis devised ways to keep the camps as secret as they could—they crowded people into trains to write postcards to their families, sent them to work camps and told them they would see family again after the war. This way, they dispelled suspicion about the death camps. The family had some of these postcards written by cousins, aunts and uncles who died in the death camps. It was a different story for women, who learned when the soldiers were coming and that they would be killed. Instead of suffering their fate, some killed themselves before the soldiers arrived. We saw photographs of these beautiful young women—some relatives—before the war. 

In spite of the tragic stories, the gathering was very warm and welcoming. We sat in Joseph’s living room surrounded by nieces, nephews and brothers. Josh and I shared about our families and what we knew about Regina and her life. Josh’s connections to Polish Jewish roots were now a reality for him. It was normal for me to have a European grandmother to identify my lineage. But Joshua’s grandmother, my mother, Dorothy, was a modern woman with a career. My Grandma made matzo balls from scratch and created her own horseradish.

“It was amazing to find these relatives,” Josh said. “At the moment, I felt it was a blur. But once it was clear what had happened, and how haphazard and unplanned and really unlikely it was, I think it made it really incredible.”

While my mother was born in the United States, Regina from Warsaw gave me more of a connection to what happened to European Jews. Josh didn’t have that same connection, but his amazement at meeting his distant relatives, he said, brought it much closer to home for him. 

While finding these relatives was a gift for me, the real gift came from Josh’s appreciation of his lineage and his sense of being proud of his heritage. He and I have a new connection that we talk about and share. I’ve even been able to stay connected to Ola. In fact, when she came to New York on business and I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, I flew up and we spent a day together. 

Another generation that was touched by the Holocaust. It’s a family I never knew I had.

I Discovered the Family I Never Knew I Had

It’s normal to feel like your world is crashing when someone unexpectedly breaks up with you. So when my ex-boyfriend broke up with me over the phone while I was abroad, I went loopy. I sobbed in the bathroom and nearly messaged his mum to ask him to reconsider. Whenever something sends me spinning, I envision moving countries, growing a new identity, and becoming a whole other person who then can’t be bothered by something as futile as a shitty ex, so I started planning an escape to Singapore, and began looking for jobs there. I was, at turns, suicidal.

All of this over a relationship of just five months—which, in BPD time, might as well have been years.

I am a 24-year-old woman who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as EUPD: Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. Having a personality disorder does not, as you might assume, make me violent or manipulative or too crazy to function. But it does mean I experience life in more dramatic ways than most people.

The “borderline” there in the name makes it sound like I teeter on the edge, and to explain it, that might be a useful image for you. BPD is usually caused by childhood trauma involving emotional, physical or sexual abuse. Its symptoms can include a fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, unstable self-image or mood swings. Sufferers usually experience heightened emotions or a lack of emotion.

Me, I’m like two bottles of wine, an energy drink and a hug from a puppy wrapped into one.

People with BPD might tell you “I’m so unstable” and yes, they might be. Don’t mistake that instability for a short-term, quirky personality trait that they trot out for parties or road trips. My friends know me as a fun-loving, hyper person who feels affection for everyone I’ve met. They also know that the smallest trigger can turn me into a sobbing, unstable mess. Fun, right?

Outside of the debilitating anxiety and depression I experience as part of my BPD, you would think I’m a fairly normal person. I loathe mornings, like checking out new bars in London, love traveling abroad. I get up and I go to work, and later hang out with my friends and family. The big difference is that I don’t have thick skin. Every emotion I encounter feels like a third-degree burn. An inner voice constantly tells me that no one loves me and I’ll always be alone.

Sometimes the overthinking is right: People do leave. When a friend’s messages start to dry up—when they leave one-word replies and I start to feel like an afterthought—the alarm bells begin to ring. Are they ditching me? What did I do? Am I annoying? Should I change my personality? I have never had any thoughts of hurting them, but I use self-harm as a way of turning my emotional pain into physical pain.

BPD often spills into physical symptoms, such as panic attacks and crying. I cancel plans, burrow underneath my duvet, weep at the smallest thing and constantly check messages. But in the morning I get up and go about daily life, apparently functional as my mind yo-yos from one emotional depth to another. 

The depression in particular is frightening. It’s like being trapped in a black hole, unable to see or do anything about it. Add BPD to the mix and it’s a black hole constantly swirling and dipping.

When your self-image and personality shift constantly you never quite know which one is “real.” I’m constantly weighing my dialogue, interpersonal skills, my reactions—even my interests and hobbies. The constant check-ins with myself mean I can blend in, chameleon-like, with almost any group of people. I listen to a variety of music so that’s always a way to find common interests. I’m high-spirited when I need to be, quick to laugh, always painted as the happy one. At the same time, I am shy, quiet for long periods, and feel an anxious mess around people.

It gets lonely when people only know a certain part of you and you’re left wondering what part people will like best.

I feel a persistent sense of abandonment and need constant reassurance that people want me in their life. It’s hard not to be clingy. I try to come across cool and aloof, but warm and loving. It’s difficult to keep up appearances when you feel like you’re on fire half the time. Get to know the real me, though, and I’m an amazing friend. My personality disorder is traumatic. But it means that when I love, I love hard.

Collection

Mental Health

Short Reads

What It’s Like to Navigate the World With Borderline Personality Disorder

Three months ago I lost my father to cancer. Or, rather: I had to help cancer take him. I held his hand as he took his last breath. I felt his pulse slow until it came to a stop. I watched his chest, wasted to skin and bones, subtly rise and fall and not rise again. And I had to experience the trauma of giving him that peace.

My father’s cancer started in his esophagus, then it spread, to his stomach, his liver, his thyroid. Finally, they found a large brain tumor behind his left ear. The cancer in his esophagus made it extremely difficult for him to speak and to eat. He lived a month after his diagnosis. At the miserable end, no medical professional, no hospice nurse, could grant his wish to end his own life. Instead, it fell to his family. It fell to me.

I flew to Pennsylvania from Florida to visit him. He’d said he didn’t want me to see him. In health, he was very good-looking: six-foot-two, sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, 250 pounds of muscle. He could be proud, even vain. When I heard he’d lost 100 pounds, I couldn’t imagine what I’d find. He was always a strong figure in my life, literally and figuratively. I knew I could never live with the regret of not seeing him. He and I went back and forth over the phone about whether or not I could fly up to see him, because of COVID, because of his immune system, whatever excuse he came up with. He finally broke my heart with the truth. “Honey, I do want to see you,” he said. “I’m just scared it will be the last time.” I asked him if he was scared to die. Except I couldn’t say the words “to die.” He knew what I meant. “No,” he said. “I’m not scared.”

My dad had decided to leave the hospital and refuse more treatment. I was angry with him for giving up. That was, until I saw him. When I got to his house his girlfriend told me he was upstairs sleeping. She said I should pop my head through the doorway to see him before I went in to visit, so I could compose myself. She asked whether I'd seen Dallas Buyers Club with Matthew McConaughey.

When I looked through the bedroom door my body shut down. I fell to the floor, hyperventilating, crying. I couldn’t believe the person in bed was my father. He was shirtless, with a sheet partially covering his right leg and exposing the adult diaper he was wearing. His bodybuilder frame was boney and limp. His skin was a glassy, pale yellow. His eyes, sunken into his head, were ringed in black. His cheekbones were razors. His teeth protruded from behind his lips.

I caught my breath and wiped my eyes. I knew I had to be strong for him.

When I walked into the room, my dad tried to cover himself. I walked over to him and helped him with the sheet. I kissed him and felt his cheekbone on my lips. Neither of us knew what to say. I held his hand and told him Mom had sent some pictures for him to look at, if he wanted. He nodded and mumbled, “Sure, honey.” I took out the large white envelope my mother gave me with tons of old pictures from when he was younger. I pulled out a photo of him and his friend posing, around 18 years old. The back read “Sears Pose.” He laughed. I asked if he wanted to see more. He said, “No, not really.” I asked him if he wanted to hear about my cat Arthur getting into a scrap with a dog? “Not really.” He was defeated. He said he needed a minute. I left and told him I would be back to say goodbye.

Downstairs were my two uncles and my aunt. We talked about his will, his wishes, his cremation. I signed papers. My uncle told me that in the hospital my father told him after he saw me he’d be ready to “go.” Once I said goodbye, they thought, he might pass away: “He needs to know you’re gone so he can stop trying to hold on.”

I went back upstairs to say goodbye to my father, forever. I kissed him, this time on his forehead. I held his hand and told him I was going to leave now, and that I loved him very much and he was a good father. He told me to tell my brothers that he loved them. He couldn’t remember the name of my younger brother. I felt bad and reminded him. He let out a few tears and he lifted his fingers to his mouth, kissed them and reached out to give the kiss to me. “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “It’s okay.” I pressed his hand to my cheek and kissed it. I told him I loved him again and left the room.

As I was walking down the stairs, I knew there was no way I could leave. I told my uncle that I was going to stay until the end. My father had said he was ready to die. We needed to end his suffering. So how did this work?

My uncle had hired a hospice agency to make daily housecalls. The nurse would be there at 6 p.m. We figured we would bribe her to help us end his life. After seeing him I knew it was the only option. He was taking morphine and a fentanyl patch for pain, and Ativan for anxiety. I presumed that if he overdosed, he would be blissfully unaware of his heart stopping.

The hospice nurse had a different idea. She suggested continuing to give my father small doses of morphine until he passed on his own, perhaps in three days.

I was not going to leave my father lying in a bed waiting days to die. Desperate, my uncle offered her $1,000 to tell us what would stop his heart. The nurse, afraid of taking a bribe and losing her job, told us that we could give him a morphine dose every half hour instead of every hour. So we did that.

I always thought morphine was given through an IV in your arm, like you see in movies. The liquid morphine we had came in a square plastic bottle with a twist cap that reminded me of the Bubble Jug powdered gum we used to chew as kids. The instructions were to fill syringes and empty them into his mouth, toward the back of his throat. He moaned and cried as we did. I’d never seen my father cry. The brain tumor made him delusional. He mumbled about cranes at the port and weight loads, presumably from when he used to help his father at the shipyard as a teenager. My uncle told me my father had nightmares on morphine while in the hospital. He dreamt that he died and we buried him alive. He made my uncle promise not to let that happen to him.

He really was gone inside that body I didn’t recognize. It felt like a knife in my chest that I didn’t know how to help him. I was terrified he was suffering and unable to communicate. The morphine put him into a waking sleep. He was laid back with his mouth open and his half-closed eyes searching slowly and aimlessly around the room. When he focused on me, I could tell that he knew who I was. I locked eyes and told him that it was okay for him to go, that he didn’t have to keep fighting and that I wouldn’t be mad at him if he gave up.

It’s impossible to describe what it feels like, to want a person you love more than anything in the world to die.

I couldn’t take any more. We came up with a plan, my uncle and me. We would give him everything at once: the morphine, the Ativan and the fentanyl patch that was supposed to be delivered soon. My uncle crushed up anti-nausea medicine, mixed it with water, and put it into a syringe. We gave him that and a double dose of morphine.

We aren’t doctors. We didn’t know what to do. We waited on the fentanyl patch we thought would put him over.

Hours passed. No patch. We called and called. Finally, someone told us it was on the way. When the delivery came, there was no patch, just more Ativan. We called again and were told they’d made a mistake, we couldn’t get the patch until tomorrow. We needed a new plan. So we googled: How much morphine will kill someone? Turns out it depends on various factors. I was afraid my dad would vomit the morphine and we would have none until the nurse brought more the next evening. We decided to keep up the double doses and Ativan: from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., each half-hour. I held his hand and felt his pulse, hoping it would fade. His shallow breathing would stop altogether until he took a huge gasp of air. I hoped he wasn’t in pain.

For 12 hours, I tried to kill my father. Every time I gave him more morphine I hoped it would be the last. I could see the whites of his eyes roll back. His mouth hung open. When he took a large breath, his throat gurgled. I would never wish such grief or agony on anyone.

I began to have a panic attack. I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t catch my breath, felt like the world was ending. I grabbed Xanax from my purse and took one. (I’m prescribed a low dose for anxiety while flying.) My uncle had the idea: “We should give him those.” Yes. How many? Ten to be safe? We agreed. In the kitchen, my uncle crushed the Xanax, added water and filled one of the syringes. I made a syringe of morphine. We brought them upstairs. I held up my father's head as we gave him the liquids. I poured a sip of water into his mouth. Then I laid his head back down and sat on the chair beside the bed.

It happened fast. I held my father's left hand in my left hand and felt his pulse with my right. His heart beat slower and slower. His breathing softened. I knew he was going to die. I reached my right hand out to touch his face and said, “I love you.”

Then he was gone. I was relieved and devastated. I lay next to him for hours. I cried on his shoulder, held his hand, and closed his eyes when they opened. I told him everything I couldn’t say when he was alive. Then I watched two strangers take his body away in a bag.

This was not the way my father wanted to die. This is not the way anyone should have to die. With no help from doctors, hospice or anyone, my uncle and I were left on our own to end his suffering. Because euthanasia is not legal in Pennsylvania, my father and our family were subjected to insurmountable grief, grief that I live with every single day of my life.

Euthanasia is legal in only nine places in the United States: Washington D.C., California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii and Washington State. I hope no one has to know the excruciating pain of watching a loved one suffer needlessly. I know that many do and I hope that in the future this will not be a reality many are forced to face. The optimistic thing I can leave you with: These are only laws. And laws can always be changed.

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During the beginning of this social distancing season, I hit the ground running. I had just gotten back from facilitating a healing retreat in Utah. But, the “I miss you, I wanna quarantine witchu” texts from a lover grounded my reality of how soon quarantine was coming. The stay-at-home order was announced that night. I went grocery shopping the next day, stocked up on all of the things I needed and surrendered to the circumstances of this global situation.

Most of my time was spent in bed. After expending energy in large groups, I tend to heal by prioritizing time for myself to do nothing but masturbate, binge watch anime, eat and day-nap. I did all of these things, while spending a month trying to find a new pattern of communication with my lover through our phones (a method we usually don’t use).

So, it was a shock to me during our first conversation since staying at home that they thought it would be better for us to change our romantic relationship to a platonic one.

I’m a methodical person. My brain is most comfortable when I can trace the threads that connect my thoughts, emotions and actions to one another. This goes for understanding others as well. So, when they couldn’t give me a reason why they wanted to end our romantic relationship, I began to spiral as my brain tried to make sense out of something that didn’t. I had to take a bath and process my emotions in water. There was this numbness that came on during the initial phone call that helped minimize the amount of pain I later would express on FaceTime. I have never cried in front of them. In the water, I felt myself coming back to me. The protective numb melted away and revealed this angry being that kept shaking their head and laughing as if I would wake up from a dream, but no.

The reality was that I was experiencing my first breakup ever from my first relationship ever—in the middle of a global pandemic.  

What lay beneath was coming to the surface all at once. In this closing of a chapter, I noticed a dramatic difference between how I and this lover communicate. I feel like I am mourning alone. I replay in my head the last times I kissed this person, held them, were fed by them, massaged them, not knowing they even would be the last. I feel that the blocks or challenges that we have romantically would only carry into a platonic relationship and the lack of acknowledgment of this by them doesn’t give me any sense of comfort stepping into a friendship with them. I have no desire to go there.

Because I am new to the shiftings of a romantic relationship, especially one that I had been in for one and a half years, I battle a pattern of gaslighting myself and my emotions. But, releasing images, stories, my own witnessing of what a breakup could or should be through both friends and family, and centering my own experience in relation to a very dramatic shift in my life, feels aligned. What came to the surface was me asking to be taken care of—so, I did.

I unfollowed them on social media. Seeing their face unplanned, when I already was having trouble sleeping (playing in my head the conversations and feelings I wanted to share with them the next time we talked), was something I wanted to avoid. I’ve been honing my thoughts around relationship, commitment, discomfort, anger, communication and intention.

I acknowledge the facts. This happened the day before the start of Taurus season. The season in which I was born. This happened days before a new moon. The magnetic pull of ceremony as a place to process these emotions was undeniable. So, ceremony is what I did. I set my altars with intentions of release and forgiveness. I wrote letters that I would never send while reading them to the planets. I am preparing for the Venus retrograde period that happens right before my birthday and spans both my mother’s and grandmother’s birthdays as well. There is a shift taking place in relationship to what I deserve, what I desire and what I need to do in order to make these things physical. Everything in me keeps saying, “Heal.”

It takes a lot of energy for me to ask for help. I have a high tolerance for pain because I experienced heartbreak at a very young age. The pain and toxicity of paternal abandonment inform my relationship to my emotions. The pattern of seeing the femmes in my family navigating painful experiences with very little open communal support informed me as well.

It’s a generational response to apologize for crying, for inconveniencing someone close to you with the weight of your emotions. It is a response I am learning to drop. I acknowledge that I hurt, that my feelings are valid no matter if this person truly did not intend to hurt me and to ask for help. So, I have. I talk to others in my community who have experienced romantic shift, sharing conversation, receiving affirmation for how I’m responding and asking them to make me break up playlists. 

The mantra “There is no day, there is no day; there are only darkness, eternal sea of darkness” plays as I dance with the sun, thankful for the light and the shadow that my being casts in its presence.

I think about what love is. If it were only a physical entity created between two people, just because we no longer weave energy in that way doesn’t negate the existence of it. It is still alive. It dances outside of my general orbit while simultaneously is closer to me than before. This love is a paradox. I mourn the lack of closeness I feel. I did not anticipate my access to this love would expire so soon and in such a way. 

But I see the echoes of it paint my day-to-day in pictures in my phone, smells of peppermint black castor oil, hair stopping up my drain and meal recipes I was excited to share. This energy we created together brought me a lot of things and has a mind of its own. I will never meet this energy again in the same way, for I have changed, this lover has changed and the energy lives its own life dancing between the memories of them, me and the places and people with whom we shared this energy. We created something infinite that cannot be bound even by my expectations of what I wanted it to be. This is both beautiful and scary for me.

This experience has made me question many things. Was it all a dream? How could it be real if it were to end like this? It takes my friends to confirm that all of my feelings are valid. That paradox exists. That something can be so free and so limiting at the same time. This polarity has shined light on what experiences I want. What love I deserve, what relationships I desire—romantic, sexual, non-sexual—and what intentions I want to thread between this spectrum of intimacy, time and my own understanding of myself.

I want so deeply to love me, so that everyone around me knows what love I need, what love I desire and what love I am capable of receiving.

I want communication that is deeply rooted in truths that flow freely like a river, communication that nurtures many growing things in its path so that they flourish, blossom and attract many a pollinator to lick many a nectar.

I want equivalent energetic exchange that is balancing and abundant. I want emotional vulnerability that is so courageous it is not swayed in the face of fear and grounds its roots into the earth at any wavering sign. 

I want a magnetic, long-term dance that mirrors courting swans, birthing seahorses and leopard slugs having sex. I want access to an unconditional love orgy to which time, distance, my selves and any beautifully aligned partners are invited.

I intend to show up fully to receive these blessed things, so I am taking this time to release anything I don’t need in order to open my arms and embrace a dream so clearly spoken from my exposed heart.

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“I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you are / in case you don’t know,” Nico flatly croons on track number nine from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. There’s a menace in her ambivalent delivery, a clinical remove that still feels feverish. Heroin (and second billing) will do that, but so will a sense of fractured femininity. Nico had all of them. Thankfully, I only possess what often feels like the latter: a womanhood trained to soothe, to mollify any mufflings of uncertainty. This woman brings a lover close to her bosom, the pulsing void of her heart chambers echoing the paramour’s forgetfulness of their own light. That echo ricochets through her, dissipates into her skin, assuages the lover’s self-doubt with a steady rhythm. Woman-as-mirror, an object of comfort, a source of knowledge for other selfhoods to emerge. 

Mirrors are everywhere in depictions of trans femininity. Reflections are always shaking, shattered, or—as they’re employed most often—absolutely crystal clear. A truth that cannot be denied: You’re a transsexual. This strange duality is its own mirror to cis audiences’ outward liberal sympathies, which mask their collective internalized body horror. There’s Daniela Vega’s Marina standing before an undulating mirror in A Fantastic Woman; Isabel Sandoval’s Donna donning her sex worker alter ego Sofia before so many mirrors in Señorita; Lola Rodriguez’s Valeria in the bathroom confronting her pre-transition face in Veneno; and perhaps most famously, the honorable miss Buffalo Bill herself tucking her dick between her legs and murmuring, “I’d fuck me” in front of a camcorder as Q Lazzarus’s androgynous voice flatly croons in the background. (Poor tranny, the cis audience thinks, at least I’m not like that.) 

These are just off the top of my head. The list goes on, an infinitely refracted framing of our existence that I loathe. But inside that fractal lies a photon of light—a tiny truth that haunts me.

Kids on the bus in middle school used to ask me if I was gay, to which I would respond a beat too late with a nervously trained affect of remove, “No, I’m bisexual.” It felt good on my tongue, something cool, slightly French, untouchably beyond the binary logic so many of my peers held. Even back then, as I turned away from their stifled giggles to face my reflection in the rattling window, I knew I could not—and would never—commit to being straight. I saw past its trappings into a void of possibility, one I lost sight of as my environment crushed me up into a kind of faggot abjection even I felt alienated from. 

I’ve always loved women in a deep and sonorous way, but I never thought myself capable of fucking them or calling them my romantic partners. Yet during the earliest yawn of summer 2018, two years into my transition, I sat at a bar in Brooklyn with a friend, my knee wedged between her thighs and resting up against her pussy. There I felt my sapphic affections unfurl for the first time. No language needed on my tongue; I just knew. There’s that oft-volleyed lesbian saying that goes something like, Do I want to be like her? Or do I want to be with her? Did I want to be like her, newly crafted vagina a portal to my own future? Or did I want to be with her, one of the most dynamic, jubilant, and hard-to-pin-down people I’d ever met? 

Just last week the two of us were texting and the exchange went as follows: 

me: all the men who like me are 5’8” / time to find a 5’8” futch gf instead 

me: okay you get a special pass / also you give 6’0” energy

her: ugh i love these videos of men being towered over by women and i couldn’t find the one i *needed* / aren’t u 6 foot? :/ 

me: yes / i like that you don’t remember bc we mirrored each other so 

Our own kind of lyrics, sung euphorically from deep beneath our breasts. 

Today when I speak, “I’m bisexual” aloud, I often do so with a wink: I enjoy people like myself and not like myself—in the most literal sense. I conjure myself as Narcissus, staring into my own glorious image upon a mirror of shallow, still water. There I sigh and smile at myself until a suitor who mirrors my own impulses comes along, making ripples in my self-contained rapture. Artsy, stylish, electric trans women who wield words as their weapon of choice? Yes, please. I truly would fuck me, thank you very much. But what of those not like myself? How do I deal with them? The truth is, the pursuit of sex with men is easy. Capturing romance is something else, lost to me within that void of possibility I’ve been staring into since middle school. 

In Satoshi Kon’s anime film, Paprika, the bad guys capture the titular heroine and plot to destroy her. Still, one of the men cannot contain his feelings for her, even as he obliterates her body. “I love you, Paprika. I love you,” he says, literally plunging his hand inside her and sliding upward toward her face. He knows Paprika is the alter ego of a real human being, Atsuko Chiba, underneath, yet refuses to allow her chosen persona to exist undisturbed. Paprika is laid out atop a large table, her enormous butterfly wings spread out and pinned across the woodgrain like a prized specimen. 

“I love you just the way you are,” he flatly croons, lifting up his hand and ripping open her skin from crotch to forehead, revealing her human form within.

The forced exposition of that “other”—perhaps to some more “real”—entity inside, is the ultimate gotcha moment. To have one’s physical form splayed out to be analyzed and admired, defiled and desired all at once. That pain is palpable. It is mirrored, refracted and amplified until it sears my flesh through the screen. I have the same response in Tinder conversations with men-who-might-not-be-men. I feel their hands slipping inside me when their bios read, “Just looking for someone to be sapphic with,” while they sport full beards and all the trappings of flailing commitment to an illusion of manhood. 

I’ve been there before, though I hate to admit it. I thought of waxing my mustache like a debonair dandy before I made my way to the laser clinic, parlayed to me through the local trans whisper network, to have it zapped off. A sensitive abstract painter who admitted to me at the tail end of that same 2018 New York summer, “I’ve thought about being a woman every day for the past three years. I talk about it in therapy all the time.” Yet the beard still lingers today, at least from what I can see in the extremely rare selfie they post on their Instagram stories. 

A former lover told me over the phone that they've finally begun to take estrogen, that I inspired them, years later, to finally be themselves. An almost-lover telling me the same thing in an Instagram DM. (The first and only date between the latter and myself partially centered around my outfit: short overalls with black tights and Doc Martens. It happened to be a very specific visual trigger of theirs, and I squirmed in my seat as they fawned over my look. I wonder if the sight of me was their own knee-against-pussy moment, a portal to their own self-realization.) 

In almost every single one of these instances, these not-quite-men-not-yet-women tell me I’m the first person they’ve made their admission to. (Poor pupa, I often think to myself as I recoil, at least I’m not like that anymore.) But as their wings begin to beat of their own accord, they produce shockwaves that send me spiraling: Do my suitors see right through my inner flame of bisexual pride? Am I actually a lesbian whose sapphic lamplight glow attracts these transfeminine admirers, coaxes them out of their shells even long after I’ve left them? That thought pulls me asunder. 

We both peer into each other toward deeper truths we refuse to speak into existence. For some of the dolls, being trans is about being gay, becoming a woman rightfully addicted to her own vibes (with the heady musk of heterosexual validation not far behind), and then being gay all over again in the other direction. Just ask Gigi Gorgeous, mother of all blonde trans women. Splashed across social media, she’s willingly shared with her audience of millions her very public journey from eyeliner-obsessed gay to high-octane hetero bimbo trans girl to lesbian trailblazer to pansexual wife of a transmasculine oil dynasty heir. Praise be unto our patron saint of any and all transitions, be they social or sexual. She’s on some messy and miraculous galaxy brain gender shit I could really learn from.

In the meantime, I am trying not to let my fear of the unknown turn into exhaustion or resentment. Rather, couldn’t it be fun to ride the razor’s edge of curiosity and possibility? For if I am to be a woman, I am to be a mirror. That’s what tethers us together as women, even if the rope burns our hands until they bleed. Why not invert woman-as-mirror into something more expansive? A mirror-mother-lover-leader who begets yet more women into infinity. As I open my arms to hold space for these soon-to-be-women, I can see the reflection of my own face, of my own past and future, in the mirrored edges of my fingertips. I do not know yet if “lesbian” is the right word to describe how I feel, but perhaps it’s not about feelings. It’s about action. It’s about doing what must be done to ensure I have enough room to fly free and make sense of it all later. Just ask Gigi. 

“Let me stand to show that you are blind / please put down your hands / ‘cause I see you,” Nico sings again before the chorus hits, her delivery punctuated by the guitar’s staccato wink. An ethereal swirl of harmonized voices melds with hers, fading out together into the void as the song ends. Join me and sing along, won’t you?

Am I a Lesbian?

By no means am I an avid drug user. For most of my time as a student, my relationship with drugs has been like one with good friends—the occasional hook-up is OK, but never commit to a long-term relationship. Other than the occasional joint here and there, my drug life was quite honestly more than a little dull. I had a muted interest in cocaine, MDMA and ketamine. That was until my curiosity surrounding psychedelics grew, and my partner (having had a rather life-changing LSD experience of his own) encouraged me to try LSD. Little did I know that this experience would help me to come to terms with my own womanhood and set me on my path to understanding female empowerment.

The whole “female empowerment” trope had never resonated particularly strongly with me before. I would call myself a feminist by definition, but my emotional investment in the subject was limited, to say the least. While I could see the issues of gender and misogyny in societal life, my own relationship with femininity and womanhood was not something I’d spent much mental energy on. I’d never felt particularly feminine, nor had I felt like I could celebrate my “woman-ness.” In the past, I’d even had experiences questioning how much I felt like “a woman,” unable to really connect with that part of me. I had in no way intended for this to be the purpose of my trip, and it hadn’t really been something to dwell much on. Rather, I’d set out on this trip with an open mind and relatively low expectations for any last impact on my life. But how wrong I was.

As many other users of psychedelics will tell you, LSD has the capacity to completely alter your self-perception. Many report it giving them a “bird’s eye view” of themselves and their lives, and for many, it can be very helpful in overcoming issues of self-confidence and self-esteem. Although not the case for everybody, one thing people suggest is to not look in the mirror. The visual distortions that occur during a trip can be hugely unsettling when seen on yourself. Some people have even said they’ve seen themselves as older or visually repulsive. 

My experience, however, was quite the opposite. A quick trip to the bathroom rapidly became a drastic perception-changing experience—I looked into the bathroom mirror and I suddenly saw myself as this glowing ethereal being. My hair was flowing; my skin was positively radiant; and my breasts, quite frankly, looked fucking fantastic. More than that, I was somehow able to see an inner feminine strength, something that I hadn’t even come close to feeling when sober. But the most interesting part was the sudden connection that I felt to Mother Gaia, a figure that I had never had any affiliation with before, but now sat in my partner’s bedroom. It felt as though I was embodying her very spirit.

As anyone who’s ever taken psychedelics will tell you, there are certain thoughts and feelings you have during a trip that simply cannot be communicated to anyone else, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. I felt like I was a divine being, not only in spirit but also as though my physical form was as omnipresent and far-reaching as a God’s. As absurd as it sounds, it was the single most uplifting and empowering experience of my life, and to this day I can recall just how damn powerful I felt.

I could now understand the interplay between Earth, nature and femininity, and, alongside feeling irrationally unsettled by the TV in the corner of the room, I held a deep appreciation for the natural environment. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always thought that recycling was important and climate change is sad, but for these concepts to suddenly resonate on such a deep, personal level, as though it was a direct consequence of my femininity. It was enough to dramatically change my perspective of not only the world around me but the world within me.

Suddenly, all those articles, podcasts and conversations about female empowerment made sense, as if the social coding of feminine weaknesses had been removed from my life and all that remained was the beauty of womanhood. It was like the curtain had been pulled back and I was able to see and appreciate the full majesty of femininity and everything it stands for.

I realize that this article is at risk of falling into a narrative that seeks to define “women” in a certain way, or that I was only able to experience this because I am cisgender. In actuality, what I suddenly felt “enlightened” by was an understanding of what it means to be feminine, not female. There is a beauty in womanhood and a beauty in femininity, and although the two may cross over, they are not mutually exclusive. What my trip enabled me to see that day was my own, personal femininity, and to feel an acute appreciation for my being as a woman. As someone who is fighting an ongoing battle with anxiety and depression, it was a breath of fresh air to finally know what it felt like to have that self-love that millennials keep raving about.

Perhaps it was because I began my trip by watching Our Planet on Netflix, and David Attenborough’s soothing tones guided me along on my journey of self-empowerment, or maybe it was just that months of therapy had finally clicked within me that made this happen. Either way, the thoughts and feelings I experienced during this trip have left me in a much better place than I was before. 

Although the God-like feelings have sadly worn off, my new perception of my femininity remains strong, and the connection I felt with my inner feminine strength is present with me every day. As much as I would love to recreate this experience again, acid trips, unfortunately, don’t work like that. Still, I remain grateful that this was an experience I had in the first place. I doubt this will be my last time tripping, but only time will tell what life revelations psychedelics might bring me in the future.

How Tripping on Acid Helped Me Embrace My Femininity

It can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Especially when your life is going down the toilet. 

That’s what happened to me in 2009. Economic collapse was looming and my family was in danger of losing everything, but I refused to accept how serious it was. That would have made it real, and I had no intention of giving this fire more air. My marriage was breaking down and every day felt like I was wading through quicksand, while all my husband wanted to do was talk about the economy and how close to the precipice we were financially. So, like a child, I stuck my fingers in my ears (figuratively, not literally—although I came close) and blocked him out. 

He took to following me around the house constantly with this ever-present need to talk about our situation, and more than once, I found him waiting outside the bathroom to continue his monologue. This behavior was new for him, but as a couple, we weren’t doing well, and despite my unwillingness to listen, I knew we were in trouble. I wasn’t ready to have it spelled out by him. So I began to spend less and less time around him. Once the kids were asleep I got into my car and drove. Friends became used to seeing me arrive on their doorstep late in the evenings, desperately in need of a reprieve from my life. After a while, he stopped going to work and began spending all day at home playing Sudoku and laying around in his pajamas. I spent all my time being annoyed by him. 

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