Ephemera plays a role as The Doe turns its gaze backward: knick-knacks but probably not paddy whacks since we’re not sure what those are. Our authors look at decades of yore, Americana, loss and more.

Open your mind to new perspectives while looking back at decades of nostalgic narratives on Americana, yore, loss and more with The Doe.

Looking Back - Decades of Nostalgic Narratives - The Doe

Nostalgia

The clear, sunny sky and unforgettable sounds of the waves crashing into the shore always had a way of humbling my existence. The city by the sea felt so peaceful as kids ran through the salty breeze and into the cool green water while innocently squirting each other with neon-colored water guns. Long Beach was never known for having the cleanest beaches, but that still didn't stop this from being home.	

Everything has ups and downs, and Long Beach was no exception. The city is known for being diverse and embracing other cultures—which politicians would proudly highlight—but this wasn’t the truth in the ’80s and ’90s. The murder rate was high, crime even higher, and the idea of unity between the Black and brown community was a far-fetched fantasy. Violence, rage and hate fogged up the city with the perspective of “that’s just how it is.” Kids roamed the streets as parents battled through their own struggles of making ends meet by working multiple jobs or fighting their addictions that the prettier side of the city just didn’t understand or simply didn’t seem to care to understand.

Eventually, I traded my hopes and dreams for the belief that life was just unfair and was constantly trying to murder me. I normalized the severity of my environment by telling myself, “That’s just the way it is.” With that belief came my strong need to survive and do anything necessary to achieve it. Instead of questioning or entertaining other options, I went on to what I knew. I joined a gang at the age of 13. Not because I wanted to be labeled a member of a disruptive group but because I wanted to feel fully appreciated, acknowledged and supported. No matter how violent the act, I was willing to do it for approval.

I was a teen when I was arrested for three counts of attempted murder. A law was passed that allowed the Long Beach court to charge a teen from the ages of 14 to 17 as an adult. That’s exactly what happened. I was sentenced to multiple life sentences and sent to some of the most violent adult prisons in California to serve my time.

I spent my first decade in prison blaming anyone and everyone but myself for what felt like the result of my life. The gorgeous city of Long Beach was at the top of my list of what I considered the reason for choosing to harm and traumatize human life. I couldn’t explain my “why” and I was lost in not being emotionally intelligent enough to put into words the emotions that I was taught to bury deep within myself.

Then, the Success Stories Program came into my life. It gave me the space to speak about what’s most important to me and taught me that vulnerability is not a weakness but a strength. Most importantly, I was finally empowered by being able to address my “why,” and the transformation began. I learned that my distorted definition of what a man was stopped me from me being my truest self. It’s this important knowledge that led me into a life of building a better community from within prison walls.

I served 18 and a half years in prison before Governor Jerry Brown commuted my life sentences. The first thing my fellow inmates asked me after receiving the call from the governor was, “Are you going back to Long Beach?” I responded, “No,” with firm confidence. At that point, I realized that I hadn't dealt with the resentment that Long Beach brought up for me. I felt that the city I grew up in had turned its back on me and threw me in a box to be forgotten.				

I’ll never forget the day my brother picked me up from the prison entrance that I never thought I would exit. It felt so unreal. Driving down Route 101 with no cuffs or shackles overwhelmed me with emotions. I traveled California throughout the majority of my life being escorted by prison guards and for the first time in a long time I was free. The highway seemed so familiar. No matter how far I was from home, it always felt close.					

The night was coming and my brother had set up a motel room. He asked if I would like to go to Long Beach. I declined. But he insisted, pointing out that times had changed. I didn’t have it in me to say no. The day felt dreamlike. Why wake up? I stood in front of the ocean that forever humbled me and tears ran down my face as I stared in awe at the Queen Mary ship. I made it back and couldn’t help but feel at home.

For so long I was blaming the city, along with the people in it, for the many choices that I decided to make. The truth is, there is goodness in this city that is bettering itself through the people that live in it. There was a point in time that I never wanted to see this Long Beach again because I was ashamed to face the communities that I once destroyed. But I’ve fallen in love in so many different ways with this city, and that has led me into dedicating my life to being a part of the solution, especially when others may be quick to label people “the problem.”

I once thought that life was about being a man, but thanks to the many lessons that I've learned in prison, I now know that life has nothing to do with being a man. It has everything to do with being a human and valuing others as such.

Insiders

Best of 2021

New Beginnings

After 18 Years in Prison, I Rebuilt My Relationship With Home

At a young age, I learned that sometimes the meanest remarks are made out of naivete.

“I heard that Black people are that color because they’re dirty. I wanted to see if it was true.”

My classmate knew that what she had done was wrong, somehow. She looked sheepishly at her fingertip, still clean and pink, and then back at me. We were eight, waiting for the gym class warm-up to start.

“Oh, well, I showered yesterday…” 

I probably tittered nervously as I said it. It’s a habit everyone in my family shares. And then class started, and I never told anyone about the exchange.

I grew up in a small town on the East Coast. It had less than 5,000 people, an "excellent school system” and a development that mixed cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs with 200-year-old farmhouses (sometimes with the farms still intact!). The town has great beauty. Driving down county roads, you can see rolling hills stretching out over the horizon dotted with trees and houses and fields. You understand why some folks stay there forever. Other times, driving down the same county roads, you come across a stop sign with a swastika spray-painted onto it. You understand why some folks are desperate to leave.

At 25, I like to say I'm a New York City “seven” and a hometown “three.” It took me a long time to realize that attractiveness is not an objective quality.

At 14, I started overhearing the boys in my class, who were all white but one, asking each other whether they liked blondes or brunettes. This was a little puzzling to me—are Black girls brunettes? My dad asked, a little harshly, why I cared what they liked. Was I trying to attract white boys? 

At 16, I looked in the mirror and generally liked what I saw. I wasn't "hot" (if you can even apply that word to a 16-year-old kid), but I thought I was cute! And I had a group of friends whom I loved and who loved me. I was having a good time going to football games and school dances, even if I overheard things I didn't like while I was there.

“I can’t believe Melissa’s dating a Black guy. You know how they get at this age.”

“On Friday, someone at Brett’s party called Rachel and her sister the N-word, so they left! I thought the two of them were being a little dramatic, honestly.”

“Well, of course, she’s super good at track; she’s, like, the only Black person on the team.”

By 17, I had a driver's license. My friends had driver's licenses and boyfriends or girlfriends with whom to drive around. Behind the wheel, I had a sneaking suspicion that I would never get a date in high school (I was right). I was starting to realize that race does matter, actually. Not just in a macroscopic, societal sense but very personally. 

When I was 18 and applying to college, my mom and I went away for a weekend to tour schools. I was one of five in my friend group who had never been kissed. That Saturday night in my hotel room, I looked through Snapchats from friends, dancing and drinking and getting up to general shenanigans at a party in someone's barn. “Wiggle” by Jason Derulo pumped in the background as they twerked across my phone screen.

"I hope I get to go to the next one," I thought as I drifted off to sleep. 

The next morning, I woke up to a text from my friend Liz. Four of the five remaining unkissed had paired off and made out with each other at the party. Obviously, I was devastated. I was the only Black girl in the group, and now I had the only virgin pair of lips. "Omg no way, congrats!" I texted them. 

"What the fuck, why doesn't anyone want to kiss me???" was the message I wanted to send. I was irritable and rude to my mom for the rest of the trip. Also, by now, I knew why no one wanted to kiss me. It was because I was “other,” strange, taboo—Black. Good enough for a friend, but not enough to be let into a family. 

I think I always understood that separation on some level, but it flashed into sharp relief during my senior year. I stopped thinking about who I could date or who might like me. I focused on platonic friendships, leaned into sports and hobbies that I liked, learned that I loved going to concerts. Basically, I found the contexts where the internalized racism of others had the least impact on their interactions with me. It was a great survival tactic.

However, I see it was doable because soon, I would go to college in a city, and I hoped that there, I would get to date people who found me and my Blackness to be acceptable. I always say, "My town is a great place to grow up," and in the same breath, "Thank God I don't live there anymore."

Black Voices

I’m a Black Woman From an All-White Town; These Are My Memories

“If I had to offer up a one sentence definition of addiction, I’d call it a form of mourning for the irrecoverable glories of the first time. This means that addiction is essentially nostalgic, which ought to tarnish the luster of nostalgia as much as that of addiction.” —Ann Marlowe, from How to Stop Time (1999)

It wasn’t my first drink that I kept trying to recall. When I drank, in my late 20s, I wanted an entire stretch of time to come back: the years leading out of my teens into adulthood. Why wouldn’t I want it all back? This was when I could get drunk after shows, during shows, on the way to places, coming back from places and then sweat it all out only to wake up with only a faint headache. But I didn’t miss the physical resilience most—what I wanted back was that feeling of infinite time, a relation to the world that has nothing to do with the drinking. But the drinking was the only tool I had to mess with time.

Drinking did not, it turns out, make me younger. I did keep trying to drink myself into a state where I thought I could replay certain memories, soak my brain to the point where the associative properties would allow me to drunkenly slide across the border back into a better drunk with a younger self.

As I drank into my 30s and 40s, I found myself hoping for very specific states of mind: the plaza in Rome where we sipped rosé after a day of walking; the dive bar on Houston where it was always dark and crowded even when it was high noon and only two people were at the bar. I began my drinking career a lightweight and found myself later becoming a full-blown alcoholic simply by trying to remember the easy, breezy days when I did, in fact, drink without disaster. The heavyweight got heavy by chasing the light.

One of the confusing things about addiction is that not every story is a straight line, and not every subject falls down over and over in increasingly embarrassing circumstances, progressively getting worse after starting from bad. Sometimes an addict walks through the world, more or less blending in— normal as a sandwich—until the light cuts on and bang: The slide begins.

Part of the nostalgia in drinking is wanting back that choice, the act before the first drink, where a clean person was choosing to get dirty. In this, one both feels the world before drinking and simultaneously recaptures the ability to believe in choice, to remember being a person with will, not somebody helpless before their urges. A drunk will always look to the past because, with enough oomph, and enough drinking, it feels like the past can become as immediate as the drink itself, that fast-acting medicine. The weepy, melancholic effects of drink encourage a sort of misty-windowed time travel. That it isn’t real is, of course, a distraction diminished by the drink itself. Why do we think war stories are the love language of bars? We brag not only of our triumphs, but we also brag of not being drunks, of being able to stop doing the thing we obviously can no longer stop doing.

I often thought of a specific time we were touring in England (when I was in a band, five lifetimes ago). One night, we took to the basement of a pub, which was essentially a bar under a bar. A band of small men from Glasgow decided to drink competitively with us. I’d be lying if I said that it was an enjoyable night, or that I felt good the next day, but I want to go back to the moment of drinking as if it were a harmless sport, the time of not knowing I was an alcoholic. Back then, I was able to think my relationship to events was simply a matter of willpower and stamina, that my misdeeds and adventures were all actions under my control. And we never really know if, maybe for a few moments back there, that this was actually the case.

There is also a very powerful ambient nostalgia, one not tied to specific memories but to a sort of psychic buildup. It happened recently in a most powerful way. I was bicycling up through Lower Manhattan, moving onto Pitt Street when the golden hour sun hit the front of a building to my left. Some wooden chairs and a table were in front of a closed restaurant, and the overall effect was calm, quiet, open. The sweating side of a wine glass filled with rosé popped into my mind’s eye. Was it from three years ago in Brooklyn? Was I remembering 10 years ago on a roof in London? Had I still been drinking, I would have wanted to chase the possibility that I could Lego my way into an association, attach a new drinking memory to a better, older one and somehow become as calm and happy as I was that late November afternoon in Boston, just watching my friends do nothing much at all other than be with me.

Because the alcoholism has to push us backward. Who’s ever sat at a bar and thought, “Man, I’ll be even drunker in two weeks!” (I should add that maybe someone has, so let’s soften that idea.) When we drink, we want to kill time, fool it into looking elsewhere and let us not think about every rotten thing we’re drinking over. Within that airy state of denial, anything but the present will look good. The appeal of the past is that it is not today, and a hard drunk will eliminate the pesky truths, perhaps the fact that the day in question was no better today but four drinks in, who can really say? The past never arrives with all of its tags and details and full transcripts. It’s always a fragment, soaked in whatever we had in hand.

But the pernicious nature of drinking is that, of course, even the sober alcoholic knows it was never all bad—hell, some of it was the best. And so were I to drink a beer today, let’s say a middling beer, I’d want to recall the evening on the eastern coast of Turkey in a small fishing village in 1992. We had driven all day in a half-operational Mercedes, its transmission wrecked by mountain roads. We were arriving at sunset, and there was only one place to eat. We found a parking spot on the hill under the dining porch area. The restaurant was set into the side of the steep hill that carried on down to the sea.

We could not yet speak even the simplest Turkish phrase, so we simply mimed fish and a can that one drinks from. Miraculously, we got grilled sardines, caught that day, and two cans of Efes. The fact that I was drinking had nothing to do with the magic of the moment. I was there with my beloved, exhausted and dusty and entirely at peace. But for the longest time, I thought the Efes had something to do with it.

Drugs & Alcohol

Addiction Is Nostalgic: How Time Was Structured When I Was Drinking

Giggsy, Teller and I had been enjoying a spring evening driving around the darkened countryside. It was a crisp and clear night, and we shared stories and laughs and tales of female conquests, as lads do.  But our mission was incomplete. Our plan had been to find a quiet, rural pharmacy and liberate its dangerous drugs cabinet and register.

We’d been knocking around together for a month or two. We had a penchant for narcotics that no end of pharmacies could satisfy. We were in the fortunate position of not being in a hot car for once, though to describe it as strictly legal would be stretching it. None of us held a license, but these were the pre-digital record days. We had even been pulled over by the local police at around 11 p.m. They said we seemed to be in a hurry away from somewhere. It proved to be something of a fool’s errand when their bemused faces receded into the dark of the rearview mirror. They were for sure looking for other vagabonds; otherwise, their search and interest would have carried a little more voltage.  

They knew us all by name and face and we gave them a half-hearted routine on police harassment.  They did go as far as to say, just as they turned away, “You do have a license, don’t you Johnnie?” I smiled and never skipped a step as we remounted our wreck of a Ford Escort steed. The car was barely drivable, let alone safe. After this near miss of sorts, we decided to cut our losses and invest time in smoking the little hash we had, drinking a few beers and sleeping in the car in a hidden lay-by, just off a back road in the local mountains.

Giggsy was as close as you can be without being blood, perhaps closer (as life has taught me in the many intervening years). He was like a little brother, and I, in turn, was close to the rest of his family. Teller was a pal. I’d gotten to know him when I got wind of his plot to steal my real brother’s motorcycle. Punches were exchanged, but, as is the way, we found each other tolerable, fun and useful to be around. We were young but carried monkeys on our backs the size of small houses. The three of us had ended up working together on some pointless government scheme, earning £29 a week. The high life was not available at that pay rate. No life was available. But we weren’t interested in money, just punk and politics and drugs. Yeah, drugs!  

Usually, we worked away from our locale. We’d steal a hire car from the Manchester Airport, then rob a pharmacy or two, then “plot-up” in a hotel on the funds taken from the registers for as many days as the drugs and cash lasted. Depleted, the dawn of sickness came, and need forced us ever onwards.

Fortunately, on the night I speak of, the pressure was mediated by the fact that, in my pocket, I had a generous Rx prescription for methadone ampoules and Valium, plenty to keep us going for a few more useless miles. The more useless, the better, I thought. We spat in the eye of conformity and were unapologetic users. Trust me, you’d have liked us but would never have chosen us as matches for your daughters.

If you’ve ever got drunk and stoned in a car you intended to sleep in on a chilly April night, you have some idea of how we felt in the morning—other than, perhaps, the egg timer of opiates running down, the early morning melancholy described by Burroughs and the visceral need of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” a song conceived the year I was born. We were getting sick and, as I now recall, my sister’s then-boyfriend happened to pass. He was a local jock, to coin an American term—a big, tough, drunk motherfucker and the father of my nephews and nieces. He looked at us sideways and quipped as he leaned in through the window, “You fuckers smell.” He told us to stay out of trouble.

My assigned pharmacy was a 25-mile drive. For the sake of discretion, I kept my medical shit as private as possible for the sake of my mom and family. Another fool’s errand. If only I’d picked the one three miles away.

We were driving a difficult country road, strewn intermittently with city dwellers that had no idea of how to drive winding, faster roads I was driving fast but not beyond the 60 mph speed limit on that road. All I recall is coming to a right-hand bend, not too steep but able to slip away from you. Just as I hit the apex, the rear right suspension collapsed and we slid, hit a concrete bollard and then the car tumbled over and over. The noise was infernal and the whole incident seemed to last an eternity. I had my seat belt on. I felt Teller hit me at some point in the roll. Giggsy was in the back.

As the car came to a rest, I was in a daze. People came running from stationary cars. Someone grabbed me and sat me in their car. I was trying to shake them off but went into some kind of shock. I turned back and somehow Giggsy had ended up in the boot of the car. Teller was unconscious in his seat. I fucking wailed. I knew this was as bad as bad can be. Pale, worried faces pressed against my peripheral vision and scared the shit out of a few tourists.

I won’t labor the details here. I could see passersby swarming around Giggsy and Teller. I was ensconced in the front seat of a Samaritan's Jeep, getting so sick I almost stole his car to get to the pharmacy. I can never forgive myself for that thought, but it showed me the depth of my dependence. My prefrontal cortex was completely hijacked. I was fucked.

Two ambulances arrived within around 30 minutes. I’ll never know if their timing would have made a difference. A kind old paramedic strapped me in my seat. I was unharmed but in shock and going into withdrawals. I begged him for information. He looked me square in the eye with nothing but compassion and said, “The lad in the back didn’t make it. The other in the front is touch and go.” Giggsy was dead. Teller was in a coma for nine long days but survived. I felt my soul darken, and yet another part of me broke.

Needless to say, no one seemed to give too much of a fuck aside from friends and family. I’d just killed one of my best friends, and as the process worked itself through, I had my day in court and was fined £400 for careless driving and driving an unroadworthy vehicle. I went mad—literally mad. The guilt was endless. I would rage at the moon screaming, “Why not me, you fucker, why…not…ME?!” I drank and used and fucked and on and on and on until the pain disappeared as I ended every night unconscious. About a year later, I was convicted of robbery at a pharmacy. I got five years. I fucking laughed and deserved every minute of that time.

Four years later, I was sitting in my office in London, opposite my then-partner. She helped me get a job and interesting stuff to do straight out of the jail gate. I never told her about the crash. She told me she was psychic and consulted a spirit guide, and one day, she jumped up and shouted. “We have to go—now!” She took me to the “spooks” place as I would call it, gently mocking. I remember sitting in the cafe, waiting for her, reading the NME about the formation of Black Grape.

She came down an hour later. “I was told I was sent here for someone else, someone not ready to be here for himself because he still has a black aura,” she said. That frightened me but rang true. Then she asked me, “Did you know a guy by the name of Giggsy?” I nodded, went cold and felt a wave of nausea. She said the message was from Giggsy. He said, “There is only love on this side.” She caught me as I fell.

The Car Accident That Changed My Life, and Killed My Best Friend

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

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Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

When I moved by myself to London, I thought I was running toward a new life. In a way, I definitely was—but I was also running away from my old life. I had been going through a very rough patch with health, love, financial and work challenges. More specifically, over the last year, I’d had a couple of emergency surgeries that led to significant debt, went through a difficult breakup and, on top of that, I got fired from my job. 

When, against all odds, I got offered a new job in an amazing city, far away from home, I didn’t think about it much and accepted. At that moment, I was only looking forward, imagining what I would gain: a new career, new friends, new romantic prospects and trips around Europe. I was definitely not thinking about all that I would lose: being present for a family member’s passing, the death of my dog, the birth of my nieces, weddings and the more routine things of daily life, like Sunday family lunches. 

I really like the new life I have been able to build for myself here in London. But somehow, this decision to move made the time-space continuum break and I am now two people living two parallel lives.

I go back home quite often, and when I’m there, it feels like I never left. I speak in my first language, eat what I grew up eating, go to the parks I went to every afternoon for a walk. I sleep in my old bedroom (which my mother has kept exactly the same), and suddenly, I feel like my London life or self doesn’t exist. 

Then, slowly, I start to notice the cracks in the surface that remind me that I do have another life. I realize my friends have changed gradually, and it makes me feel like I don’t know them that well anymore. I start to miss my London independence and lifestyle. I talk about things that my family has no idea about because they have not yet come to visit me. 

Whenever I meet someone new in London, I have the chance to choose what sections of me they can access and get to know. I select what parts of my history they can learn about because they weren’t there to witness it. This feels empowering, as I get to cherry-pick and tell my own story, designing who I want them to think I am. But it’s also sad because they will never fully know the real (or whole) me. Some things get lost in translation; they won’t understand my culture; they don’t know any of my friends or family or imagine the things that I considered normal back home. 

I also noticed that my personality changes when I’m in London because without making a conscious effort, I adapt to my surroundings. I am less loud, more “proper,” less confident because I feel like a guest here and need to behave. 

Back home, I talk faster and I laugh more because I am with friends I’ve known for what feels like forever. We can collectively get nostalgic when we remember our school times, and we relate to and complain about the current problems of the country. I can go to a stand-up comedy show and truly understand it. In London, I have tried, but I don’t get half of the jokes because I lack context.

London has given me the freedom to explore new things I never imagined: eating food that I can’t find back home, taking rowing classes on the Thames, participating in creative writing classes, meeting people from every corner of the world and figuring out who I really am without any limitations or pressures. I love the city so much. 

But as time passes, I do feel more and more homesick. When I’m with new groups of people, I become extremely shy because I often can’t contribute to the ongoing conversations and feel like an outsider. I wonder what my family is eating, what music my friends will be dancing to this weekend and feel guilty that my mother worries and misses me. 

I think about going back because I miss everyone and I miss small-town life. I miss the kind of nature that doesn’t exist here in the U.K. But I know that professionally, I will feel frustrated, as there are fewer opportunities back home. I think about how I will become bored quickly because there aren’t many entertainment options either. I know I will miss London because it has become such an important, intangible character in my life. 

And so when I’m here, I spend a lot of mental energy thinking about home and a part of me is always a bit sad. When I go back home, I feel like a tourist. It’s helped me learn to live two parallel lives, both with amazing things that never feel fully complete.

I Moved to a New Country—Now I Live Two Parallel Lives

As an only child to an only parent, my mother was my best friend growing up. I’m thinking about her extra today because as I write, it’s beautiful outside for the first time in what feels like months. The dreary London weather, hundreds of miles from my sweet home of Chicago, never gets me down. The nice days, however, light me up. In honor of the occasion, I am dressed like a cowgirl in a purple-patched prairie skirt with the boots we bought when I first moved to Boston. I’m currently basking in the rays of St. James’s Park and listening to the country music that I grew up on. Albeit a bit unwillingly, it has become a welcome invitation of momentary nostalgia. 

As I lay in the grass, staring at the sun, I feel especially grateful that my mama has always called me her sunshine. I wonder how my simple existence could ever earn such a consistent compliment. The kind of comparison that encouraged my 6-year-old self to believe it when she told me how my keen ability to attract bees was merely due to the fact that they believed me to be a flower. The kind of love only a mother could have for a daughter. She let me be soft and took solace in how easily I took comfort in her presence. 

Sipping my tropical crush smoothie, the phantom warmth of my mother’s love seeps into my skin. Once again, I’m as content as I was as a small child, running through freezing sprinkler water, blades of grass between my toes and rainbow droplets misting the air. I remember riding bikes together through the cemetery and treating ourselves to raspberries doused in lemon curd in similarly summery scenes. The air is warm, and I miss her extra today. 

But being the one diagnosed with chronic depression—then with PTSD and severe anxiety soon after—as young as age 12 did not lead to a well-adjusted individual, let alone to a functional family. It was almost instantaneous how I stopped answering my mother’s well-intended inquisitions about my day. How those momentary refrains from mundane situations led to an entire shutout and shutdown. She screamed at me for years to come back, hoping to see a spark flicker. While an entirely misplaced plan of action, it was understandable nonetheless.

These ponderings of the past have turned me to dreams of this upcoming summer and our plans for our shared maternal country, Italy. A tour along the Amalfi Coast presents a long-awaited return to the food she made me nightly in my youth and the wine she taught me to love (far before my recent 21st birthday). Dolce far niente, something we do better than anyone. These hopes for long-awaited travels, safe returns to our matriarchal lands, pain me ever so slightly. 

Like all of our interactions, it feels almost bittersweet. For now, every time we laugh over lunch until my cheeks hurt, I feel guilty for how easy it is to enjoy her presence and how I used to take our time together for granted. Guilty for the years in my adolescence when I shut out the world, which revolved entirely around our friendship in my earliest memories. To picture the only sun in your world going out, as my mother experienced when I was diagnosed, is haunting at best. 

Especially when you know it’s your fault. 

My mother had to watch her daughter disappear into a husk before her eyes, and then watch her blame her parenting, which must have felt nothing short of complete shit. She was right to be angry with me when I talked back with reckless abandon. After residing in between the divided homes of an alcoholic and a mother who was never there, being angry was all that she was taught to be when scared. Effective communication is something hard-won. 

All things considered, it was an act of kindness when I was banned from wearing long sleeves after a stint with self-harm in my early teens. She ignored what she couldn’t understand, which was much easier than engaging me. My mindset during lost years is entirely unimaginable to me now, but I have mourned for my younger self and now must mourn for my mama.

Every good parent does what they can to see their child smile. For her to lose hers—the one who doctors said was impossible due to infertility—to severe swings of emotions that she had no framework with which to understand is worthy of the kind of empathy I strive to maintain and am embarrassed to have not had when she needed me to understand her most. There is no excuse for any of my behavior that ensued. 

With easy access to the trouble associated with a Chicago adolescence—getting drunk on the lakefront, running from the cops for trespassing on rooftops, skipping national-level swim practices—I attempted to force my mother’s hand, to do what I thought was inevitable, to get her to leave, just like every other person had. I thought that if I acted out enough for such a thing to occur, then I could blame the actions instead of myself, as I had for so long. It made me angry that she cared so much, albeit in her own way, because if she cared, then it meant that my father should have, too. 

It’s frankly embarrassing to detail the way I thought—to realize the utmost denial I was in while maintaining perfect grades at the city’s top school. Not to mention all of my shenanigans, which I now look back on and wonder how I managed at all. I own those narratives because there should be nothing embarrassing about dealing with your situation with the tools that you are given. My mom reacted in anger as she was taught, and I sunk deeper into sadness as I thought I deserved. By acknowledging the narratives that we are given in this life, we can address how we wish to be better and strengthen our most meaningful relationships through understanding—both for our younger selves and for others. 

Things are better now after many years of working through my issues, but sometimes, I can see her fear that I am falling apart again. Sometimes, she still reacts as though it’s the middle of my worst years. But every day, she calls me sunshine. And every time she can see the blue in my once cloudy eyes, she declares to the world how happy her baby is and the winds sigh a gust of relief.

Mental Health

I Feel Guilty for Weighing My Mother Down With Depression

I don’t remember exactly when I started burying memories of my childhood, but it was around the same time I moved halfway across the country from the sparsely populated and deeply conservative Western state where I was raised.

I do remember when I began realizing that looking back on my childhood was painful. It was around 2015, when the internet became obsessed with nostalgia, and every social media platform was inundated with “only ’90s kids remember this” memes. 

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It promises comfort—a brief return to the beauty and simplicity of youth before you were corrupted by the realities of adulthood. But in order to be tempted by nostalgia, you have to have something beautiful to look back on, and revisiting my childhood means opening a thousand doors I purposefully closed a long time ago. 

Memories from my childhood, even the good ones, are like threads sticking out of a sweater. I know pulling on one will be disastrous, unraveling a past that I have no interest in revisiting. I have purposefully built a new life for myself in a different city, surrounded by a community of people who helped me create a life as an adult that looks nothing like my adolescence.

I grew up in a deeply religious, working-class family in a small city in a mostly rural state—the kind of place people stop at on their way to a national park. My family bobbed at the surface of the poverty line my whole childhood. Some years we treaded water, and other years we drowned.

My dad worked long days at tough jobs, coming home with rough hands and tired eyes, but we still had endless family conversations about budgets and making food stretch until the next payday. The constant stress of living in financial limbo as a child, worrying about losing your home or not having enough to eat, is a fear that lingers well into adulthood. Poverty is its own trauma. I was aware of the cruel and callous nature of the American economic system before I had the language to describe it. 

My siblings and I weren’t protected from the reality of our financial situation. We began contributing to the family financially as soon as we were old enough. Because we were homeschooled, this involved spending time every afternoon helping with a home-run business, starting in our tweens.

My parents decided against public schooling smack in the middle of a homeschooling boom among evangelicals in America. Whether or not my parents were even aware that they were participating in this trend at the time, I don’t know, but their goals were the same. They wanted to educate us in a vacuum, sheltered from the evil influences they saw around every corner in the secular world, with the goal of creating godly men and women who would bring honor and glory to God. 

Everything from sex to drugs to liberal ideology was a threat to our souls in the most literal sense, and my mother especially became paranoid about their potential effect on us. She saw demons around every corner. The devil was hiding in the details: the music we listened to, the movies we watched, our conversations with friends. She would spend hours scrolling through our family computer’s search history, writing down websites we visited or the names of songs we listened to, trying to root out the evil that she felt was seeping into our adolescent lives. 

We didn’t have the ability to set boundaries with her, and she regularly reminded us by going through our phones or ransacking our rooms without our knowledge. When she did find evidence of wrongdoing—a text about a boy, a forbidden CD—she would seem almost triumphant, as if the find proved that her constant vigilance was not in vain.

Our conservative Christian homeschool curriculum varied year by year. We had “science” books that said the earth was 6,000 years old and watched docudramas for history class. We all fell grades behind in math. After I had fallen so far behind it couldn’t be ignored, our dad would come home from his long workdays to spend hours trying to explain complex algebraic formulas to me until I was frustrated to the point of tears. We tried “unstructured learning” for a while, which in function meant we learned little and studied almost nothing. My older siblings begged our parents to let them go to public school, but they were told public schools didn’t offer a quality education.

As we aged into our teen years, it became clear that we were on our own. The majority of our education was self-taught. Knowledge was a resource we were starving for, and because we were so far behind, we were desperate to learn any way we could. 

My siblings’ reaction to our parents’ overbearing strictness was absolute rebellion. After all, if they were going to be punished for the most minor of infractions, why not really push the boundaries? They snuck out late at night to meet up with friends, drank when my parents were away for the weekend and smoked weed in the park after dark. They were often caught, of course, which resulted in a total upheaval. Whenever a wrongdoing was discovered, the house would be filled with yelling and slamming doors. There was crying, there was screaming, there was literal wailing and gnashing of teeth.

For my part, I became a straight-laced do-gooder with an anxiety disorder. I went to youth group weekly, two separate Bible studies and church. I never touched alcohol, I never lied to my parents about where I was or what I was doing—and I was a complete mental wreck. I struggled with depression and was constantly afraid of stepping out of line. I carefully followed my parents’ rules, but in my heart, I began questioning the church’s oppressive theology, and I couldn’t shake it. 

In my late teens, I discovered something about myself that made my relationship with religion even more fragile: I was queer. Looking back now, it was obvious and had been for years, but at the time, it was a terrifying discovery. What was I supposed to do with the knowledge that one more thing about me didn’t fit into the world I was brought up in? It would take me years to tell anyone and the better part of a decade for me to be open about it with most of my friends. 

It took until my early 20s for me to leave the church, but the day I made the choice, a weight was lifted off me. I no longer had to contort myself into the mold of the Christian woman I was told I had to be. I didn’t have to wage an internal battle between what the church believed and what I knew was right. I was free. 

Now that I’m older, I’m able to see that my parents were motivated by an all-encompassing fear of the world. I truly believe that although their actions did damage, they knew no other way, and their intentions were good, however misguided. I wonder how much of my trauma was caused by trauma they were never absolved from. 

Still, a part of me mourns for the lost childhood I could have had. I wish I had been allowed to be carefree in the way so many of my peers were. I don’t relate to many of my friends’ formative adolescent experiences: first romances, school dances, field trips.

For a long time, I struggled to understand the pop culture references that came up in everyday conversation at work or parties, and it became my mission to consume as much as I could to make up for it. If someone made a reference I couldn’t parse out, I would immediately find out as much as I could about the subject online. I watched every season of Friends, I binged RuPaul’s Drag Race, my Spotify filled with ’90s grunge and early-’00s R&B. I fell in love with horror movies, which had been strictly off-limits in my youth. 

In my early 20s, “You don’t seem like you were homeschooled,” became a common refrain from people who would find out about my background. It felt like a small reward for my anthropological efforts. “I try not to,” I would reply. 

But these cultural points, which were so meaningful to others, held no sentimentality to me. The usual markers of American youth are foreign concepts to me, experienced only vicariously and in hindsight. I’m jealous of my friends’ rose-colored retellings of their own pasts and their capacity to long for that period of their lives instead of trying to ward off memories. 

The things that do remind me of my childhood—the car radio that was permanently set to a Christian station, yellow-tinted Sunday school rooms with walls covered in Noah’s Ark characters, the empty lot where my family’s first trailer sat—are like the first layer on a bandage over a still-healing wound. I could try to peel it back, but I know what’s underneath.

I wish that looking back on my life was appealing instead of painful. Many people in my generation find nostalgia bewitching, but it holds no such allure for me. But there is a bright spot: I love the life I’ve created for myself, and I know my best years are ahead of me. 

My Conservative Christian Homeschooling Ruined Nostalgia

There was never a dull moment in my grandmother’s house.

Built in the 1960s, the place was always crackling with energy and buzzing with the hustle-bustle of four families, its staircases and floorboards creaking under the stampede of running toddlers. Growing up, I saw my four uncles live there with their families, each of which consisted of three kids. My cousins, siblings and I—ranging in age from 5 to 15—spent our childhoods running around the three-story house, playing hide and seek and numerous games behind its stairways and inside its many rooms.

My mother, aunt and uncles had extremely fond memories attached to their birth home. At times, when the entire extended family would gather there, the house would get so loud that neighbors would sometimes complain of the ruckus we were creating. All of this changed in 2018, however, after my grandfather passed away due to old age. He was followed closely by my grandmother, who was the heart of the place, six months later.

The house still had 20 residents, but the place lost its charm. Even with so many people living together, the energy of the house fizzled out. Eventually, two of my uncles lost their jobs and, after leaving no stone unturned to make their ends meet, had to resort to selling our ancestral home.

That was a turning point for our entire family. We had all grown up listening to the countless stories preserved in each nook and cranny of my grandmother’s house. To have all that history taken away from you in a moment shook everyone. To add insult to injury, the new owner of the house demolished the residence, since it was an old structure. It was like someone had set fire to the only family album we had.

As time went on, all my uncles settled into their separate homes with their respective families. However, it was as if the entire family had lost its anchor. For one reason or the other, they all relocated four to five times in a matter of three years, which was a lot of moving for people who had lived in one place for the majority of their lives. In their free time, my uncles, one of whom is a creative director at an ad agency and the other a writer, wrote several nostalgic poems and drew sketches of the house.

Its sale also opened a Pandora's box of seething resentments between the siblings. Long-buried, years-old bitterness came to the fore. It used to be tradition for the entire family to descend on my grandma’s house each Friday. Now, months would go by, and no one would meet. No one could peg down exactly what went wrong.

After about three years, one of my uncles brokered a huge business deal which resulted in him suddenly having a lot of cash. Since he and my other uncle’s children had grown up living together and were extremely close, he decided to build a house for both the families. When it came to architecture, the ancestral home was used as the blueprint.

There was a lot of excitement for this project and everyone contributed to the design of the new family home with great zeal. It was almost as if everyone was chipping in to mend the broken pieces of our family. After two years of planning and toiling, my uncles finally succeeded in rebuilding their childhood home.

The entire layout of the house was an exact replica of their childhood home. Their families were giddy with excitement to be living together in their old (new) house. It was a strange feeling to see nostalgia resurrected in such concrete terms. When the house was completed, my family and I also spent a night there. The house seemed familiar but still weirdly alien.

Eventually, my uncles settled in with their families. Things were going well, and it seemed like things were back to normal after a long break.

However, this feeling fizzled out after about six months. Once the initial excitement died down, it sunk in that a replica couldn’t replace the actual house. A replica also couldn’t be a Band-Aid solution to fix issues between the siblings.

My uncles eventually realized that while they had recreated the house from their nostalgia, they weren’t able to recreate the memories. Where the hallways and corners of the original house were crammed with stories, the identical hallways of the replica housed no such nostalgia. It was a heartbreaking epiphany that nostalgic memories couldn’t be conjured by recreating remnants. The past can be replicated but not resurrected.

My Family Recreated Its Ancestral Home, but Couldn’t Resurrect It

During a whirlwind Twitter flirtationship last fall, I mentioned that I was a prolific hoarder—of stolen stickers, journalistic quotes, monuments I've licked, proverbs, heartwarming porn outtakes and stamps, to name a few. In a gesture of true altruism, my virtual belle asked for a sampling from my collections, thus stroking my ego to near bust.

Over the course of our brief romance, our flirtation fell into a pattern in which exposing our taste became a shorthand for exposing ourselves. It was hot, and I choreographed the striptease with according care: Dress up just to get undressed with a few lines of copied-and-pasted prose; build the tension by name dropping an Austrian expressionist; wink cheekily with a pornographic blooper; tickle a niche French proverb up her thigh.

The cymbals rolled. I was aroused by the eroticization of my taste, by stripping myself of the seemingly endless layers of personality that separated the real her from the real and, more importantly, really interesting me. As my date DMed me photos of her DVD collection and slipped me passwords to watch paywalled lesbian documentaries, I’m sure her body temperature was rising, too.

In her 2019 book, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations, sociologist Eva Illouz speculates that choosing a partner based on common taste is a fairly young tradition, birthed by a consumer culture that encourages singles to seek out partners with whom they can engage in leisure activities—such as long walks on the beach and brewery crawls—rather than general companionship. As taste is formed by both personality and class, it is actually a pretty good indicator of a couple’s compatibility and ability to form lasting bonds. So, far from being some sapiosexual kink, I imagine the peep shows my date and I performed for each other must be a common and more or less productive mating dance.

But were we turned on by each other’s dances, or the stylized performance of our own? For me, the answer is without a doubt the latter.

The whole ordeal slaps of autoeroticism. As with any get-to-know-you activity, trading tastes presents the opportunity to enhance—or at least refine—the “you” that there is to know, with the added advantage that curating a personality out of favorite albums and a signature drink is simpler than building from scratch. This idealized version of yourself shifts based on who exactly is on the receiving end—it turns you into the version most likely to be hired, befriended, respected or perhaps the most alluring, loved.

In my mind’s eye, the woman I conjure when I share my eclectic collections with a potential partner is a fuzzy, nostalgic persona, like the wives that movie protagonists capture on home video before they die or go missing. “There’s this one scene in a foot domme clip I found yesterday that warms my heart,” I imagine her whispering through the camera. “I just added it to my list of uplifting porn outtakes.” How am I supposed to create her and not be turned on by the fantasy of becoming her or at least being perceived as her, the perfect product of my perfectly-distilled self?

I imagine this must be the root of my love for collecting: a fantasy of being appreciated for my taste. This, in turn, I would blame on my well-buried aspirations to be a character in a Sally Rooney novel, which is to say Sally Rooney herself, which is to say a Mary Sue, which is to say an exceptionally normal person who is exceptional in her normalcy. Incidentally, I don't think Sally Rooney has good taste. I simply believe that, if I were appreciated for my taste, it would signal that people really get me, without having to put my own words to whatever there is to really get. 

There’s a part of me that wonders if this autoeroticizing of taste is a gendered phenomenon. After all, Mary Sues are just Manic Pixie Dream Girls written by women who had the gall to romanticize themselves on their own terms. Womanhood is nothing if not a Sisyphean self-help project to become these archetypes, which we consume, modify and regurgitate into aspirational “That Girl” TikToks. “These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image,” writes Jia Tolentino in her 2019 book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. As a woman, a bachelorette, someone with whom could be fallen in love, my taste is a testament to both the elusive, authentic, classic me that existed—fuzzy and nostalgic, at some unnamed before-time—as well as to the idealized me that could be in an alternate future, should the right partner view the right iteration of me, given the right light and playlist murmuring in the background.

The persona that emerged from the collections I sent my Twitter sweetheart was inherently half of a pair. “Look,” I was saying as I explained the origins and proper use of avoir le melon. “These are the kind of culturally astute conversations I believe we are capable of; this is the kind of couple I believe we could be.” Nostalgic past or idealized future, we were hot together. I suppose that if she were equally turned on by that version of her, and the version of us that I reflected back towards her, we would have become the earthly iteration of that couple. Or perhaps, as Illouz suggests, I simply didn’t choose the right taste around which to structure our intimacy.

History would suggest that the cultural commodity best suited to seduction is the mixtape or its successor, the Spotify playlist. Unlike other collections that flaunt an individual’s personal taste (like, for example, a list of world monuments you’ve licked), this collection comes the closest to owning up to its agenda. “He wanted to give Diane things she couldn’t get herself, to turn her on to new things, to share his access, to provide, to shore up his girlfriendable-ness,” muses Paul Polydoris as he records a mixtape for a lover in Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. 

In theory, one could curate any collection into a relationship proposal—my virtual belle’s tailor-fit film and literary recommendations seemed to attain a similar goal of providing and definitely shored up her girlfriendable-ness, not least because Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl was among them. But I’ve yet to see anyone parallel the emotional impact of a mixtape by collecting stamps with a special someone in mind. “This is the mashup of your tastes, my tastes and what I think we would sound like together,” the mixtape says. “This is my proposed soundtrack to our partnered life.”

I have received two mixtapes in my life from a cousin and a long-distance friend, respectively. Notably, I didn’t listen to either of the mixtapes, which are technically mix CDs, until almost seven years later. One in particular isn’t quite my style, and as I cringed through my first listen this summer, I wondered what kind of dynamic duo my friend had in mind when she burned two and a half hours’ worth of Demi Lovato and the Ready Set to send across the Atlantic. I imagine that, just as I do with the snippets of my taste that I dropped into my fling’s DMs, she returns frequently to the version of her that she dutifully queued and finds a vain pleasure in seeing a perfect persona reflected back.

My Personal Tastes Are My Key—and Bizarre Obstacle—to Romantic Connection

In 1964, I graduated from high school. Like many teenagers, I was faced with the puzzling question of what to do with the rest of my life. Although I was popular in school and had been president of my senior class, I was actually a remarkably poor student and hated anything related to the classroom. An academic career was most definitely not in the cards for me. 

I had four older brothers, but none of them had ever left home for their higher education. For my parents, sending them away to study was unthinkable. The boys remained in the Midwest where they were born and raised. But when I came along, the first girl in a large Catholic clan, my parents were faced with a dilemma. Besides being a poor student, I was also an immature flower, lacking in any self-discipline and filled with an untamable sexual curiosity. It was decided that I should be enrolled in an exclusive women-only college in Manhattan (back in the day known as a finishing school) run by the same nuns that had tried to educate me from the beginning. 

I had never been away from home, not even to summer camp, so the prospect of this move to the East Coast presented a monumental leap forward. I was both thrilled and terrified. Looking back, I realize that there were numerous considerations for getting me into some sort of educational environment with adequate supervision. I can’t help but sympathize with my parents. What else could they do? 

I had grown up in the privileged suburban community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. My father was a hard-working M.D. in private practice. He was financially well off but by no means affluent. My classmates and friends, by contrast, were mostly from superrich families with fortunes that had passed down through generations. Growing up, our playgrounds were the sailing, golf and tennis clubs where our parents were members. Eventually, most of my childhood friends became debutantes and were introduced into polite society at balls or tea dances. As expected, they married well, created lovely designer homes and produced the two children that society expected of them. Leaving town at 17 saved me from this predictable fate. I will be forever grateful.

All my life I had been sheltered in a private school run by a traditional order of French nuns. The Society of the Sacred Heart was established in Paris to educate daughters of wealthy and privileged families. There was no thought of a career in my future. In the late ’60s in the Midwest, feminism was just a distant siren’s song calling from a faraway time in the future. Since I was not cut out for university studies, it made sense that the next step on my agenda was to do some serious husband-hunting and for that, my cultural boundaries needed to be expanded. What better place than New York City? 

One of my childhood friends was an heiress to the Scripps publishing fortune. Anne and I had played together as schoolgirls, and she was now attending a distinguished finishing school in Manhattan. She had an elegant and sophisticated grandmother that I had always adored. Over the years, she had encouraged my friendship with Anne, entertaining us with wonderful events that were far beyond the scope of my more modest home life. To keep our girlhood friendship afloat, Grandma Ruth suggested that I join Anne in New York. She wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to Reverend Mother on my behalf and sure enough, I was invited to New York for an introductory interview. 

My mother booked a flight to New York and reserved a room at the Plaza Hotel. I had never been out of Michigan, so this first visit to the exotic city on the Hudson River was thrilling in the extreme. One of my fondest memories is from our first evening away from home, just the two of us, in the palatial grandeur of the fine old Plaza. Toward evening, my mother reserved a table for two in the hotel bar. We sat ringside listening to a handsome Broadway heartthrob as he sang love songs from the stage. My mother ordered her usual dry martini and I, dressed up in my best dress and feeling quite mature, sipped an alcohol-free Shirley Temple through a straw. It was sheer heaven!

The following morning we took a taxi up Fifth Avenue to East 91st Street for my first view of the elegant residence that was to become my home for the next couple of years. This magnificent neoclassical villa had been built in 1908 and, upon the death of the owner, had been gifted to the Sacred Heart Society. 

Reverend Mother greeted us as we walked through the large double doors that led into the grand entrance hall. She was a round little woman dressed head to toe in the official black habit of a nun. Her head was encased in a fitted white bonnet with a sheer black veil. A small, gleaming, silver crucifix hung on a cord from her neck. Of course, I never saw her dressed any other way. Nuns always looked the same. Only their radiance was allowed to be individual. To my surprise and delight, she turned out to be a jolly, fun-loving woman. Full of energy and enthusiasm, she welcomed us warmly and took us on a tour of the magnificent house. 

I will never forget my first view of the elegant marble staircase that rose up through the center of the house. I had never seen this kind of grand architecture. The walls were clothed throughout in beautiful complementary shades of green and pink Italian marble. Built in a grand Rococo style, the building expressed the kind of lush excess that seemed perhaps fitting for a budding princess on her way up in the world. The red-carpeted steps of the staircase led from the ground floor all the way to the huge ballroom at the top of the house. I gazed up at the massive skylight at the top surrounded by moldings of flower wreaths and golden cherubs. I was lost in a world of wonder.

Regardless of my poor high school grades, I was accepted into the school. Like so many things in life, it’s all about who you know. In early September, I packed a large trunk full of dresses, shoes and matching handbags and flew into a new life in New York City. I would never return to the country club life of suburbia.

So what did one do in a finishing school in the ’60s? Well, for one thing, we were expected to learn how to play bridge. I skipped the first lesson and to this day I have never really understood how the game is played. I watched all year long, as most of the girls played obsessively at all hours of the day and night. Eventually, a house rule was established forbidding bridge before 7 a.m. Perhaps this is where I first established a lifelong distaste for table games. 

Another more distinctive memory is of the many sweet boys who showed up for the weekend dances in the grand ballroom at the top of the stairs. Reverend Mother extended her invitation only to boys from Ivy League schools, like Princeton and Yale. The carefully screened young men would travel by chartered bus for a few hours of non-alcoholic small talk, music and innocent flirting. These mixers happened several times a month and had a high priority on our social calendar. We were expected to show up and chat politely with an ever-evolving selection of distinguished young gentlemen. Socializing and ballroom dancing were essential skills that young women were expected to master.

Other important activities on the menu were cultural events: classical theater, Broadway plays, concerts and ballet. We were fortunate to take part in all the great things that New York had to offer in those days, but I think most of us took it for granted and didn’t realize what a gift this was. We also had weekly French lessons and a visit now and then from Miss Freemantle, a professor from NYU, who tried to instill an interest in us in Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. Not much luck with that part of the program.

After graduation I stayed on in the city, working for several years at one poorly paid job after another. Through sheer youthful persistence, I survived the slings and arrows of daily life in the city and with time, evolved into a stylish, sophisticated New Yorker. Eventually, I landed a cool job with a Madison Avenue ad agency. My boss was a handsome Swiss man and together we moved to Europe, made a life and I never returned. 

I lost touch with my friend Anne. She died in 1994, and I read the details of her murder in The New York Times. In a jealous rage, her husband smashed in her skull with a claw hammer before committing suicide by leaping from the Tappan Zee Bridge near their home in Brownsville. She was 47 years old. I was glad that Grandma Ruth, the much-loved dowager queen of my youth, had died peacefully several years before and was spared the sordid details plastered all over the newspapers.

And yet, my journey from Grosse Pointe to finishing school in Manhattan lives on in my memory as a nostalgic dream that has never lost its luster.

I’ll Never Forget My Time at a Manhattan Women’s College

I entered it exhausted and thrilled, needing to stop and ready to go. It was my top choice; it was Harvard. It would be fantastic. I’d done what I was supposed to. Two weeks in, I had a messy breakup, one I should have seen coming and should have initiated. I was least prepared for how it affected my academics. I expected it to have no effect. The highs and lows of my grades were a cycle somehow independent of my disastrous mental health, but they always averaged high enough to keep my educators impressed.

But I was worn down by burnout, living alone with a liquor store or bar on every corner. I got wasted nightly and blasted music through my headphones like I was a kid drowning out the school bus with emo-pop again. I rewatched the same sexy teen TV shows over and over, tracking the plot through a wine-soaked fog only because I’d seen them so often. I lay under the shower for the white noise, made physical against my skin, and tried not to think. 

It was a kind of awfulness I hadn’t experienced for years. Everything between then and the breakup surged to the surface in lists of my faults, memories of awkward moments and misspoken words, flooding me every second of the day. I couldn’t think about the breakup, or I’d stop being able to delude myself into believing it was temporary. Then I might really be miserable.

Not allowing yourself to think is bad for an academic career. I dropped the first class in my life. I showed up in other classes with alcohol still sloshing in my head. I lost track of my thoughts every few seconds and saw in the faces of my professors and classmates every expression on a range between pity and disdain. I pretended not to know where my headaches and stomachaches were coming from and successfully deluded myself into ignoring the red hands printed in purple stains around my apartment. I wrung every bit of serotonin I could out of YouTube and video games, Netflix and old favorite albums.

Down that drunken hole, alone in my apartment and having run through all the old favorite TV shows and movies and music I could bombard my senses with, I resorted to scrolling through my external hard drive. After a series of half-written first chapters of derivative novels, I found an embarrassing amount of my Glee fan fiction.

Maybe because it was high school, maybe because I was desperate to be good at singing in spite of my lack of talent: This was the only fan fiction I’d written with a self-inserted character. I hadn’t thought much about that character for a long time, but I read through all the eloquence of a 15-year-old fangirl, mostly copy-pasting song lyrics, and I found myself attached to the character from the outside. I look back at high school and never stop cringing. But for some reason, this character drew me in.

So I went and I found the original three chapters of something I’d written that had given my character an original story and read those before I passed out. When I woke up, I got through the routine of barfing and taking some meds, then I found a different half-finished version of the story I’d written, one I’d whipped up during a midterm season I wanted to ignore. I read it during my classes, trying not to vomit on the floor of the classroom. I slept off a migraine for two days.

I had old fan fiction and a half-baked idea. I hated being in school. I hated the idea of it ending, of having to figure out a new me at the end, of having to figure out what job I was going to get with a useless degree from a prestigious school that didn’t involve getting a doctorate.

I spent November of my second year writing a complete story based on the skeleton I had. 

It sucked from the get-go. It was malformed and built out of a corpse of something I would have no longer liked living. So I started again, and as it came together, so did I. I remembered what it felt like to want to do something. To want to do anything. I let myself become the obsessive writer, with all the alcohol and suicidal ideation. 

Now, I’m supposed to tell you it made me a better student. Or that it helped with my alcoholism. The latter is marginally true—paying attention to the writing kept me from thinking much about what made me want to drink and kept me distracted from the idea itself. And, it turns out, in the space between 14 and 25, I had become a better writer.

The brightness of the spark in the story threw my burnout into higher relief, and I became a worse student. The manuscript was a nightmare, unruly and refusing to work, made of pointed edges. When they cut me, I bled a sludge of fermented teen angst. It was grueling and demanded all my time. I never transformed into a better student; I became a worse one. Hands caked in the muck of bad prose, terrible characterization and a boring plot, I began to realize the breakup didn’t help, but it didn’t matter. The fight I’d been losing was between who I should be and who I was. Between what I wanted and what the world wanted of me.

I’ll spare you the rant on the destructive nature of the academy as it is and leave you with this: I had to become a shitty student to become someone whose life I liked.

There’s this idea that when you do well in school, you owe it to the world to keep going up—in academics, in industry, wherever. You can do anything, everything. Or so you keep being told. If you don’t, if you aren’t always at the top, you aren’t living up to your potential. It’s wasteful. 

Encouragement from teachers and parents so easily becomes disgust. But why does having an option mean you have to take it?

Well, turns out I couldn’t take it. Trying broke me apart. But stripping a story and a character down and watching them come together stronger, into everything I always knew they could be, made it a little easier to believe I wouldn’t stay in pieces.

My High School Fan Fiction Saved My Life

It never crossed my mind that I would live anywhere but on the American land that I loved—in a farmhouse surrounded by weeping willows, enclosed with a white picket fence. Why would I consider living anywhere else, when my family, my history and my comfort were here, in this country brimming with diversity and determination?

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