Each selection is either grounding in its cushiony soft support, or just immersive in a way that permits an escape from real life — which is sometimes what I need and not much more. The recs are fine-tuned and selected with great care, so consider upgrading because the full list is taken very seriously by me and goes beyond a listicle in small and big ways (this one contains a mini-interview with one of the authors!)

Find Sanity Reads part I here.

Rabbit — Sophie Robinson

Have you ever felt an acute need to go home at a party you can’t leave, so you manage to trap yourself in the bathroom for claustrophobic catharsis? This is what Rabbit feels like. Sophie Robinson uses human fragility as raw material for all kinds of indentations; some cruel, others kind. Walking the line between honest and vulgar without ever crossing it is no easy feat — any confessional writer and poet knows. It’s a voyeuristic read that soothed my mind and calmed my crazy, and though my general relationship with poetry is best described as a situationship where I consistently keep dismissing it and making space for prose, I loved every part of Rabbit. I’m excited to eventually get to Robinson’s queer novel Prairie Oyster.

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Erica, the sales assistant, has a soft voice and a relaxing presence as she urges me to try something on. She knows better than anyone that a confinement of three walls and a curtain is among the most vulnerable places to be. She’s my mother figure on commission and I’m her baby – helpless and naked and afraid and wishing the empty space between my tits had been filled by generative AI, because no matter how long I try to protest against perfection, I could use some of it here, today. Sweat drops collecting under my hairline reflect my readiness for humiliation, and it’s hard to tell if this tension headache between my temples is precursory or if it’s just really hot in here. The earth has been warming up faster than I’ve been able to do great things.

This isn’t Aritzia, where I would have to strut down the communal rug to stare in the only floor length mirror and feel a wave of collective shame wash over me, having to absorb my silhouette through the eyes of every size zero woman in SoHo coalescing. This isn’t Brandy Melville, where I could find solace and comfort in the confessional v <33 j written across thin veneer walls, or camaraderie with a thirteen year old in the cabin next to me that would agree I’m too geriatric for the store but have utmost respect for my attempt to spiritually calcify, which we both know is better than to age out of Brandy into Reformation. This isn’t a Paloma Wool ephemeral pop-up, where I’d have to scribble the items I want to try on with a borrowed pencil, and it’ll be the most sensible thing I’ve written in months.

This is an unknown, private equity owned concept store with 23,000 Instagram followers and thirteen items in stock made from recycled fabrics of unknown origin, all engineered to bring me to my most miserable, itchy self. The tops retail for 300 EUR and were made for women like me, women that feel we have a lot to say and not much left to care about. No better breathing representation of how consumerism intercepts womanhood and bends it to its will than a boutique with sterile and anemic aesthetics, and yet I’m here, ready to contribute to Eurosummer and Catalan chicslop economics1. I put these clothes on to feel gossamer and water-soluble, an Alka-Seltzer looking to relieve – or looking for relief.

To feel good in a dressing room requires a lot. It means being an active civic participant in your daily choices and radically accepting of what is. This is where we assess my quarterly human performance. In the world, on the internet, in the body. But admiring the body I’d been awarded would mean the world had to rotate backwards first and meet me halfway in this repulsion. I watched a girl grab four items off the rack, stacking them and taking them into the dressing room with enviable conviction. It was the most natural thing to her – an ordered sequence of events from curiosity to desire to decision. She must know an object cannot have control over a living thing, but exists to make this living thing’s life better. My fault is that I exist in service to the objects that I own, and I obey them in a way that is Derridean and truthful. I’m expecting the clothes to tell me what I’m worth and what size I am. I got the object-subject thing all messed up. Maybe by trying them on I’ll live out a fantasy of somebody less afraid of themselves, and then I’ll understand.

But I have been running rock hard and steady on the idea that I need deeper fixing. Since I was born I’ve needed deeper fixing. When I walked into this dressing room, I didn’t just want to try clothes on – I wanted to see if I could find some deeper fixin’ amongst the low-waisted beige trousers. It’s my subsidy of ruling out diagnoses and negotiating what exactly is and isn’t wrong with me. Standing here for the past fifteen minutes, I’ve stared at my exposed cleavage in this halter top and thought about life, death, rebirth, and pregnancy. Mostly pregnancy, and how scared we get of our bodies changing, but then we have to sandwich the human worry between acknowledgment of the privilege it is to grow a life inside of us, the sacred excitement that takes residence. Saying something is a blessing offsets the horrors that surround the blessing, maybe. And like anything with women, we can be applauded for hard things as long as we don’t admit those things are hard. “I’ve noticed that my tits don’t look as they used to,” I imagine saying to a woman with a newborn in her arms, “And I’m not even thirty. Is that normal…?” I’m simply looking for advice. She would eyeroll me, displeased and bored by my lack of imagination, she’d groan at how much I’m banking on mourning the trivial. And I’d feel ashamed for seeking unity. Girls shouldn’t be hopeless if they’re also fertile. I tie the halter top at the back of my neck in an attempt to give myself a lift. This isn’t all horrendous. There has to be hope for me in the world. I may just need to size down so it sits tighter.

The lights are fluorescent but dimmed, hospital-like abstraction creeps in, and then there’s this palpable buzz of the fan airflow against the mid-century teak chair and I’m suffocating between the mirror and the curtain and my own demands, capitulated by this pressure to fit better in the clothes I pay for out of my own pocket, but then I’ll have to tell the sales assistant, who already hates me because I don’t speak Dutch and don’t possess the right face or body card for the boutique’s Instagram stories (maybe they’ll pity-repost me but that’s as far as I’ll get) that I need this top in a smaller size. Erica is not going to believe me. “No, this fits just right, honey,” plays in my head in a condescending monotone. She’ll take me out back and put me out of my misery. Finally, I can be somebody then. Not an early Palantir employee or a Cybertruck owner on a lease, but someone equally metaphysically corrupt and self-convinced. Symmetrical. Structurally and cohesively attractive. There’s gotta be a way out of this sweaty claustrophobia attack that isn’t Backrooms.

The culprit of my suffering is unknown to me. God knows. The media. Unruly hair. My mother looking fifteen years younger than she is. My dad’s genetics. I’m going to purchase this top and walk out with one of these limited edition paper bags and feel excited for the next fifteen minutes. I belong to something bigger than myself. This top excelled at making me experience a feeling, even if that was disgust, and that means a lot. It shows solidarity with everything that doesn’t take me as I am, that sags against my hoping, the friction that distorts my efforts to hold it all in place. Pain bites back and I love it. I remember that the first step to getting what you want is saying it out loud.

“Could I please try this in Small?” I ask, head sticking out of the dressing room. Ready for my guillotine.

“Sure. I’ll bring that over in a sec.”

Watch the video, then go to….

🔮🫧💌 oracle.clubreticent.com 🍜🎟️🔮

I used to spend every Thursday alone and hide from those who told the truth. It’s not that I wasn’t ready to hear it, but it would’ve made me change my life around. And I preferred vaping on the couch. It was my wellness retreat. The pile of clothes tossed over the chair was growing, neglected on account of everything being claustrophobic, and though I had an empty closet and enough hangers to run a shop out of the studio, refusing to face anything beyond the immediate was a calmer way to die. I wore uncomfortable shoes and hung out with uncomfortable people. It caused blisters and distrust.

I had congeniality, but plans were still getting called off last minute. Boys. Friends. Vague parties. I always felt that people didn’t like me, and I was right about 75% of the time. It was a big secret I was holding close to my body, a stained inseam on trousers. It’s always better not to take these things to heart. I’d paint my nails green and walk around the city, preposterously dissatisfied. Green like emerald, like moss on a rainy rooftop. I’d heard green matches my zodiac sign. Taurus. We’re always described as boring and hungry and stubborn and good fucks. It wasn’t going to be easy to chisel something out of desiring nothing and going nowhere, so I decided to take a lot of planes and get familiar with the curriculum.

As a result of that I’d hardened on the edges. People loved it. They thought I was useful and rich when I was good at pretending everything came easy. They’d give me financial advice about the money I didn’t have. I’d nod. A girl once told me at a club she loved pursuing married men with ugly wives. You should try it. I nodded again because I was spineless. It made me feel dirty and so I scrubbed off every layer of cowardice together with my epidermis in the shower later that night. I felt the torment of every bright and ardent woman that grows up to be somebody’s ugly wife. My fate was closing in on me.

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Whether to punish me, thrill me, or make me sweat for it and prove I really want it, everything stretches and wraps itself around my 14” screen so I can’t stay focused. But I’ve learned how to get out of this thankless state – for the most part, anyway. Over the years, there’s been certain things uniquely helpful in restoring my creative strides when my brain feels like it’s being farmed for content and juiced for a cleanse. Follow instructions below.

1. Put on your most faded denim and lipgloss. Touch soft fabrics. In that order. Think about a time you wish you had been easier on yourself and harsher on the world. Imprint your frustrations on unlined paper. Be sullen. Use a red pen – this step is important. In red ink, even the most ghastly thought imaginable turns into a silk-and-lace intimate love letter, a confession stamped with a sultry, thawing kiss. Be very specific.

2. Kiss your partner. It tastes like cherries, grapes, fireworks, the memory of a funny stomach tickle when you’re on the biggest swing at the park and yet to scrape your knees. But not just that, it’s not just the pleasure. I find there to be unmistakable, charged, surreal energy, all earthy and ready for me. It brings you back to the ground and pries you open. This is good. If no partner, kiss whoever’s fit enough for the role. If no one’s fit enough for the role, imagine them, then go back to point one and write a love letter to them, wearing your faded denim.

3. Now ask the partner to go away. Just for a little. Alone time is crucial – creation is a force to be summoned, a symposium arranged in complete solitary stillness. It’s not forged through optimization, and often, to our disappointment, not revived through company.

4. Read fiction. Read it slowly, read it greedily, read it again. Put that self-help down. We learn ourselves through stories about people we’ve never met – people that are mirrors to the highest and lowest frequencies of our hearts. Fiction is the oldest form of knowledge, holding the most wisdom in its hands. You stop thinking about your own dreary problems and inhabit someone else’s entirely, and something loosens. Pick up Anaïs Nin, Duras, Henry Miller, and tell me you come away from that unchanged. Whoever said “nobody reads anymore” hasn’t read good fiction in a while; Book of the Month’s campaign Nobody Reads Anymore proves just that. Loving this antithesis to the exaggerated doom narrative, and I love marketing that feels stylish and makes me feel like not all hope is lost in the branding world even more.

5. Acknowledge your terminal averageness by blending in with your surroundings. Lay down on the wooden floor. Hear it creak. Bask in your mediocrity. Nothing groundbreaking is about to happen. Everything you want to create has always been created before, and better, more eloquently, easier, sharper. Breathe out. You’re not late to bringing value if no one’s been waiting for you to do it. Sometimes, I tell myself, “You can’t have writer’s block. You’re not a writer.” Harsh? Maybe, to some. To me, it’s liberating. My engine starts back up within twenty minutes after a good reality check. Where nothing matters, everything flows.

6. Chase an idealized outcome – of a landscape, a future penthouse, a thing you’re not sure why you’ve been told to desire, and the work in progress. You’re a prophet in the body of a tired person, it’s alright. We fall into these success traps because we need the warmth of acceptance. We want to hear our voices ricochet through the crowd every time we speak, and what’s not human about that? But there’s only so many stairs to climb, and everything you do is just a way of getting you closer to the 9 PM, silk dress, chasing dusk while walking twenty to thirty blocks feeling, and this life is restless but entirely yours. You don’t have to wait. You can do it all now.

7. If the above hasn’t helped, find an hour when the house is quieter, grab a journal, and use these exercises on Uncertainty from a writing workshop I hosted last year:

The prompts for Exercise I:

8. Call your grandmother or your most critical friend that doesn’t let anything slide – somebody you wouldn’t go to when you’ve done bad and need reassurance or an elixir of pity unless the possibility of scorn excites you. Tears will surface, probably. Egos will be torn down, likely. This is all good – in this one particular instance, at least. People that give us tough love have a certain function, perfectly fit for the occasion. You don’t need to be softened right now. No one brings you back to life like your inner critic externalized.

9. Remember what it’s like to exist in friction. Assume that friction will never leave. A life with its limits and edges, how tiring. A relic that rolls over into every new chapter. Sit with the weight of that. It’s not hard until it’s easy, it’s always hard because you love it enough to watch it come alive. Paint your nails as you envision a world in which money and opportunities and ideas are boundless. Money will be unlimited, always – it’s just something that grows on trees. I’m saying this as a working class girl. Opportunities wash up on the shore, some precious seashells, others just debris and marine litter. Ideas are rare, and most of them suck. A good one is worth millions. And you’ve had it before – you caught it. That’s not nothing, so go feel rich and powerful. Then go to bed.

This post was very kindly brought to you by Book of the Month.

And it has long fascinated me how dream means both a wish in the works and the vignettes you see with your eyes shut at night. Desire over the horizon and a low budget noir film that dissolves by the morning. In my native language, they’re different words. How can two notions, one so governed, requiring full awareness and agency, the other ephemerally surreal, a portal to the third world, be represented by the same name? “I had a dream,” you tell me. Were you at the beach singing karaoke, birdwatching, dancing in stockings lathered in perfume oil at the Shangri-La? Did the characters play hide-and-seek, blending into faces of everyone you’ve known? Or was it more disturbingly affixed like cheating, getting fired, dying in a battle, yelling at your father? Maybe what you’re saying is you’ve given up on a certain life path. There’s no way for me to know from that sentence alone.

Well, I had a dream, too. I dreamt that I had murdered somebody. My only concern, frankly, was people finding out – not that I had done it. There was a body to dispose of, the face of which I could only faintly recognize, and it looked familiar as it morphed by the minute. That’s how I knew I was dreaming. Too grotesque for the delicate psyche, the guilt and remorse lingered awhile.

The night before, I was putting together the About Me section on my website. An exercise in stipulated certainty — go tell the world about you, be aspirational, seem indifferent. The running message wraps around my head in red: if you’re a person with a dream, better know how to market this brain of yours. A kaleidoscope of a woman is described by titles and grants and a curated assortment of achievements: some inflated, some downplayed, others not mentioned for NDA purposes. Mostly, it’s all just a performative bouquet of particles held up by a hawser of voluntary self-flattening. Writer, author, somehow has nothing to say about herself in 150 words. If a Vieux Port fisherman cut the rope, and it all unraveled, slipping into the glossy water, what would float up to the surface? What would they really see? The truth of me?

They’d see that I have succeeded as a woman of scarcity and fear, not of abundance and joy. That whenever I feel unremarkable, when I’ve ceased to interest the public and it’s too late to reset myself to default settings, I’ll accelerate in all the breakable ways. That I long to be known intimately without having to spill my guts for profit. That I strip with hesitation, always leaning to the right, and sometimes adjust my hair in the middle of a conversation because the embarrassment of being caught performing doesn’t override the fear of being seen. That it’s not quite summer yet but I’m already dreading all the tops I’m planning to wear, which coincides with all the tops I’m never going to wear: my absolute belief in the existence of a speculative ‘perfect’ top that will, one day, irremediably change my life is always there, beaming with stubbornness.

They’d hear the clasp of my bra disconnect, and while it does the job of holding some form of attestation together, feminine sensuality and decay all come undone at the seams at the end of a long day. We know this. They’d hear the steady footsteps in rooms I’ve outgrown and undermined. They’d hear the sleepiness where I could easily spend my days stretched across the left side of the bed and not feel ashamed, if it wasn’t so ghastly, in social terms, to live a life of solitude and static motion. They’d hear the tap turning; a bathtub filling up, all feelings rising like sourdough, good and bad, where I can finally admit that I’ve lost more in vain than I’ve gained in experience, and that my integrity suffered at the hands of forgetting myself. They’d hear the radio silence of a lost friend to offhand miscommunication, in which neither of us can bring our egos down, as I count weekends to my birthday knowing, factually and intuitively, that a text won’t come. And if it does, it will be dry and neutral, and that’s even worse. That I want wealth and praise much like the next girl, but for all the wrong reasons; mostly so I can do fuck all and finally be left alone in my underwear and silk sheets, which is what I feel I was born to do, however sociopathic and lazy. It’s nice to know that my need for attention has an end objective contrary to attention itself.

But would they know the worst parts of it, ones I can’t bring myself to mention? Would they know that I hold my breath every time I call home? That I’m unbearable in the summer and a tryhard in the city lights? That asking people to spend time together feels like being at the mercy of a train schedule? And that I can’t sell this book if no one with real credentials wants it? I wanted to be something so bad, I forgot how to be anything. Describing myself is an apparition, an assault on structure, a sentiment of a desired image, and saying I’m done with pretense is only honest if you’re done, too – otherwise, we’ll just go on playing, jumping on the count of three. One, two, three, jump. Hey, why are you still standing on the ledge?

We all have things to put in our About Me. We get woken up by the news and lovers, brush our teeth and march into truth seeking, affluent and approachable, busy with overlapping lunches and the letup of a dinner cancellation; sometimes lonely, other times overwhelmed. Take liberty in forgiveness, draining substance until there’s nothing left in privacy and a big party is just another hurdle on the way to bed. Our big titles are fortresses of armor, the sticky floors of the dance floor. Maybe we need to be described so that we know how to feel about ourselves. About Me is both the perfect summary and the perfect severance. And as we brim at the heart with our overflowing knowledge of each other, we become more abrasive, sentimental, in need of a mother’s touch, sounding like a W-9 form. A glacier is moving through the icy water faster than I am able to admit I’ve made a monster by trying to build something special of myself. That should’ve been an afterthought. Instead, it was the goal. And then I killed her in my dream and it felt so good – all her titles, all her prizes to dispose of and wash away. Her face, only faintly recognizable and covered in dirt, looked familiar. I knew, deep down, that it was me.

Being known doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it startles me how fast it is, how irreversible. A ceremony of immediate repose. The stranger looking mysteriously solemn in a bar seat facing my good side, carving himself into the beginning of a beautiful story, is the sleepyhead whose worries are my worries, whose joy is my joy. The artist with a CV intimidatingly assorted, sharp as a needle, is the girl in front of me, barging into the coffee shop in sweats with her hair tied back, panting. “Sorry I’m late,” she goes. “No worries,” I say, and I mean it. The same tingling sensation meets me when the very real particles of a very real life of someone I admire clash with what I’ve managed to mythologize about them, when I get closer to understanding they’re no match to the precedent I’ve set. It doesn’t make them less alluring, it just makes me exhale. This is where we are, here and now, progressing in parallel, not flattened by the online or commanded by the letters pressed into empty spaces, and my head isn’t clouded by the advance assessment of you I signed off on insecurely. I’m taking you in real time, all your humanity behind the labels, your flushed cheeks and the tooth gem, the faint smell of drugstore shampoo, and your gaze glued to your right when your thoughts start drifting. How fast a circle grows into a sphere, fills up with warm air, how easy it is to breathe by the sea. We’re all just trying our best, and we’re all scared of being something. Of being anything.

And then About Me unfolds into I’m not yet who I’m going to be then scatters into Well, I just may never be. It feels so good to dig my nails into the soil behind your bio – it’s why I came here. I wanted us to be a mess together. You’ll share what keeps you up at night. I’ll tell you that I’m scared of my question mark of a career, my wide ribcage and my split ends, but, god, I’m dripping poems, I’m the funniest in my family, and, thankfully, always acutely alive.

“You know, I had a dream,” I’ll say to you. I’ll be referring to my nightmare. My deep silken desires are still intact, hidden under the locket, never in past tense. I don’t think I’m that difficult of a person.

Anyway. Every four weeks or so, the world blurs into one big dreary luteal nothingness, the sky paints itself cold, fathomless grey, and I’m in a one soldier battle with my vices of greed, envy, and extreme apathy, seasoned with some real disturbing thoughts, then sweetened with the total ambiguity of whether the ailment is temporary or I’ll just be broken forever. It always is temporary — just feels terminal every damn time. Those who get it, get it, I guess. Yet I’m appreciative: somehow, it becomes my most generative time. Previously inaccessible levels of psychological turmoil are at my service, fueling and nourishing the process, as mother nature intended. I retreat to my cave to ideate and make things, let things run their course, and don’t dare touch the alchemy of this delirious neurochemical state. I also become more receptive to the world around me, so literature becomes the activity de la semaine.

As this increasingly unstable, tender, and self-critical state proceeds to seep deeper into my tissues, I need extra literary support that brings me back to life. But not all reading is created equal, so this very specific category of Sanity Reads has to meet the criteria and tick all the boxes. First, it has to antagonize me or make me at least a little bit uncomfortable. Then, it must provide an escape and take the edge off my heightened emotional state. Finally, it should leave me with an aftertaste of relief. It also needs to make me ponder on my fragile human nature. Bonus points if it’s about a woman in distress. Solidarity! Here’s a very curated shortlist — each one of these books has gotten me through a rough night or two.

Famesick — Lena Dunham

Would any current book listicle be legitimate without everyone’s book of the month? Especially when & her team graciously sent me a copy?

I’m a Dunham fan; always have been, always will be. Chronic illness is not an easy feat to talk about without collapsing into the fragility of the experience, the surrender to no end point. It takes a certain tone of optimism and bravery, but also deep perceptual awareness. Famesick manages to encapsulate all the above. Told truthfully and lyrically, the memoir reads like an exhale and an arrival, which is the relief I need to make sure the erratic get-everything-done-at-any-cost nature of any adventurous woman’s twenties is not a character flaw. Famesick is proof that there is, in fact, solace on the other side of chaos; there’s also love and a better relationship with yourself and with your own capacity. Lena is, of course, at once incredibly wise and incredibly playful, a combination necessary to enjoy a tough subject memoir.

Also goes without saying, but Famesick is a multimedia experience – you can (and should) look up references and people as you go, and observe, retroactively, the precise ambiance and cultural climate of any given scene and chapter. And yet, the best thing is it doesn’t discriminate against those with a different media diet: my mother, a violinist residing in niche cultural fields far removed from the zeitgeist, who’s a big fan of Girls but has never heard of a ‘Jack Antonoff’, will still find this memoir hilarious, sincere, and resonant.

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It wasn’t all bad, of course. Loneliness could be balanced out with a hug, parental tough love, sometimes with a cup of OJ with some pulp – but, in the end, the boat would float back into my harbor, anchor itself politely. It followed me into all sorts of milestones and graduations, disappointments and revivals. It followed me into meeting rooms where I had to count minutes, one foot eager and the other already gone, into dinners where my instinctual overcompensation in response to slightly dirty –but mostly exaggerated by my paranoia– looks gave away my tryhard architecture. Into the cab, throwing my head back. Did you know gravity had tear-reversing properties?

It was never a question of whether there was something wrong with me. I knew there must be. I could never explain it properly either, because it’s not an ailment but a structurally invisible flaw: I can make small talk. I work hard. I can shut up and be good. I’m not offended. It wasn’t personal, sure. They’re just busy. It’s just a job. He’s just a guy. Things happen. But all these learned relief slogans come to me at a degree of labor so unlawful, they leave bullet holes. I go home and rethink everything I said that day, and then struggle to fall asleep until I remember my importance probably doesn’t advance in parallel to my misery. The only thing left to negotiate is the devotion to my unfixable nature, whether the threshold of too far gone to rewire has been reached, just how much I want to cling to this brokenness. Vanquished, I built a shrine to being understood someday, if not as a passive verb then as a distant dream, someplace I’d finally exhale.

When I think of loneliness and its shapes and forms, it helps to give her a name and a face and a slip dress she wears around the house. She’s a seductress, velvet gloves on. She sits down expecting nothing, hurls a big sigh at me because I’ve been resisting her arrival again, asking if I’m here all alone tonight. ‘I am,’ I say.

I say I’m at last perfectly desirable, a product of Hollywood sorrow and all the attributes a woman needs to be an object of fixation in a non-offensive way, something easy on the eye like a beige couch, but that doesn’t make it hurt less, didn’t make me better with words or on the stairmaster. All this pain, I tell her, has been compacted into a small frame that never thinks of itself as small enough. I was alone when I was five and I’m alone today, and I just don’t get why she likes to follow me around.

I think January, how the light in our faces dims when our jokes don’t land. I think about receiving a text defying expectations, a short “OK” in response to a warranted, bleeding paragraph, especially when the sender had been typing for a good five minutes. Where do erased messages go to die? Do they lay dormant in our conscious, clogging the empathy arteries, adjusting history? I think about crashing out in hopes for an apology only to be met with resistance, prompting me to apologize instead, not fully understanding how I’d just turned the tables on myself, but I say sorry anyway. I think the Subway zoomed-in tomato wall decor, my mom’s misunderstanding of who I’ve been, that grief and resentment go together like my favorite earrings. I think about the gap between being loved and understood, and that the gap is self-made, drawn out in circles and filled with sea salt, because we don’t let anyone crawl into our head and stay there long enough to get it, but we expect them to. We feel this gap every day, forever.

I think about being spoken to like a child, remarks so thinly veiled and merely alluding to my lack of expertise, that if I were to complain it’d be my exaggeration cross to bear. I think about a name that grinds my gears. The whole ‘wise beyond your years’ shtick really gets tired and tested hard, tightened like a guitar string. The elasticity of maturity can only last so long, and there isn’t enough collagen in my body to make them all shut up and understand we’re fighting the same battle, that my youth is not a threat but scaffolding holding my fragile bones together. I think about dissociating to the sounds of a conversation so unforgivingly beneath me, then feeling bad that I would interpret anything as ‘beneath’ me —who does she think she is?— but it’s an intrusion I can’t stop.

When I think loneliness, I think about being trapped in a nail salon with the chatter around me, wanting to go home. I think about the time I couldn’t afford a manicure. I think about everything contained under the dome of past shame, past survival, the remnants of what we weren’t allowed to scream. I think about the first time I realized we don’t always do what’s good for us, instead letting the inclination to follow catastrophe take the wheel, orchestrating the choice as some fateful pull when it was merely a decision. Everything in life boils down to a decision or its consequence. I then became more understanding of people’s grey morality, humbled with knowledge my righteousness was just as water-soluble as theirs.

And we can’t help but laugh when our loneliness is reduced to female constitution, our seasickness written off to something like ‘attention seeker.’ Sleeping Beauty is saved by a kiss and a woman is saved by being desired. But here’s where they get it wrong: we want to be saved by inclusion. Womanhood is a lifelong yearning for rendering ourselves compatible with one another, whispering secrets over tin can telephones and clumsily putting lipstick on each other, goosebumps on skin. And listening. Retroactive solace. That happened to you too? Really? Same.

So they barge into our world without understanding our fabric, they weaponize our isolation as if beauty and truth don’t belong together, as if our hunger for belonging is actually thirst for standing out. You know, when you’re hungry, drinking water doesn’t help. If they understood, they wouldn’t sell us peptide lip gloss and foxy facelifts, or consciousness-soothing listicles. If they understood, they wouldn’t come at us with the ‘I can’t believe you’re real’ when it’s not a compliment but yet another reminder that we have never been included, that we would die, for once, to be like all the other girls, that we will empty our pockets for that feeling. That confounds them. What’s being sold is a product of this fatal misunderstanding; they haven’t measured the pace at which we learned to walk alone, haven’t excavated to the start of our survival, an ancient wound. AI’s got nothing on the depth of our loneliness. It’s an intrinsic misunderstanding, a flaw in the system that lives to reproduce and breed itself until we’re running on empty.

Loneliness is a woman: she’s quietly in tune with nuance and doesn’t run around announcing her importance like a man. She knows why I feel so protected in knee-high boots and so damn vulnerable in ballet flats. She understands, without me having to say a word, why I once spent nine hours in the cold transit terminal of Charles de Gaulle when I could’ve gotten a hotel for the night. The same logic once applied to jobs, men, and my wishes. Something about unnecessary sacrifice appeals to loneliness, and I was summoning her. It was an open invitation. I needed a woman beside me, someone to stroke my cheek, and she was my best bet of equal complexity and anguish.

And all this nuance is not for nothing. It teaches me that love isn’t always equipped with unanimous understanding, but that doesn’t color it untrue. A voice note from my mother giggling about nothing in particular doesn’t negate her scolding my attitude. I can be good at small talk and eyeliner and still hide in rogue corners of a big party. I can be looked up to and respected without having done much. I can be sexy and disgusting, have my cake and eat it too.

I am lonely and I will never stop trying not to be, and that doesn’t make me a fool. It makes me a great nuance collaborator. We let our loneliness in, feel her in the food we haven’t eaten and the dreams we haven’t chased, in the photos we haven’t gone back to and the questions we haven’t asked. Distill her into words, then into feelings, and then back into words, and now you’re reading this.

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Saying I’m native to Paris would be a blatant lie, yet not much can stop me from inserting an unsolicited ‘You know, I lived in Paris for over a year…’ into every discussion. I was a transplant once upon a time, and not a very good one: my time in the city was defined by the WeWork in the 8th (the perks and pleasures of a remote tech job) and SSRIs (tough year. Next!…) It wasn’t very joie de vivre of me. But nobody needs to know that.

Coming back to the city as a tourist pins me at the perfect intersection of knowing and obliviousness. Knowing the right spots and the right people. The obliviousness of never staying long enough again to face the suffocatingly unforgiving, charming, inevitably brutal nature of this town. Whoever said Paris was romantic or, God forbid, a city of love, didn’t dig deep enough into its soil to be slapped in the face by its stature and indifference.

The problem with Paris is that most influencer recommendations make me groan. I don’t want a ‘hidden gem’ with 50 people on the waitlist, don’t want a ‘trusted’ Dua Lipa rec (not taking advice from that tax bracket) or another industrial brutalism-leaning coffee shop, and surely not Cafe Kitsune (sorry). I want reliable, local places I’ll return to, places that refuse to rush, places where I’ll feel comfortable. Luckily, as a failed transplant, I’ve gathered enough restaurants, bars, bookstores, even mirrors to take selfies in, and consider it my duty to share some here. And before you say anything, this is paywalled, so I’m not exactly making these places go viral and lose their authenticity badge.

Here’s everything we did in Paris on our latest 72 hour trip (culture, food, drinks) + alternative recs for every place. Realistic, tasteful, grounded, worth your money & time.

Day 1

The earliest, six in the morning Amsterdam-Paris Eurostar train is not unlike a toxic, reappearing ex for its magical ability to make you forget, every time, how horrible and soul-sucking the afternoon energy dip will be when you see that 35 EUR ticket price pop up on your screen. I keep forgetting that I’m not twenty anymore and need sleep.

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She entertains herself with various affinities: for men, for her career, for consumption. Her desire is a management problem. Her body is a vacant rented property, a concession, which explains the hatred she’s always had for it. It’s hard to love something in sterile conditions. She’s been shown, repeatedly, that before she is a woman, she is a performer, a worker, and a commodity, virtuously excelling in those domains of course, and though she’s trying to feel liberated, she never agreed to outsourced intimacy and pay-to-play self-worth. She finds herself duped by the discrepancy between what she’s been wanting and what she’d been told to want, and there’s no way to reverse engineer.

She is an everywhere girl: successful, stoic, beautiful, and she continues. She knows the power of restraint, smart propositions, and just how deep and dangerous female envy runs. Her everyday life is transparent. She feels the depreciation of her outer shell in real time, the devastating power loss of everything that is a milestone/setback double-edged sword: investment in her hair, face, body, memberships that trap her in, family, partner, the career ladder, all things deemed good and noble. Everything’s a big achievement, so how come everything’s a big mistake, a minute away from catastrophe? There’s so much loneliness in agency, and she knows this. Sometimes, when no one’s looking, she longs for her own helplessness, to be freed from choice, for somebody to tell her what to do, to give instructions and pointers in a leaflet.

She cannot stop because it’s all she’s known. She’s been deprived of the right background and pushed into survival, and, surely, has seen both edges of the world, the greedy and the generous, so now she takes advantage where she can. And she’s angry, so angry all the time, wondering if more anger will finally turn the wheel of fortune her way or just result in chronically high cortisol. All she needs is sovereignty, peace of mind, to be less of a product, and a lifetime supply of chocolate mousse from Chez Janou.

What she doesn’t know is that she’s just as much of a nowhere girl, no prospects, no tomorrow, chaos brewing underneath. It’s not a split personality disorder but a matryoshka doll: an everywhere girl gets slivered down the middle, snapped in half, and the nowhere girl is waiting her turn to burst through, to be surgically extracted, caesareaned even, so that she can run free. Cursed by the complexity of her afflictive, understructured life, the nowhere girl is inside each one of us, and if we try too hard to conceal and reject her, to keep her dormant, we fail. A woman that wants it easy ends up taking it the hardest.

The staircase paradox in geometry, a pathological example showing that limits of curves do not always preserve their length, teaches us that our perception only goes so far. We see ourselves as everywhere girls — sure we do, it’s needed for our personhood. It’s methodical. A woman can be many things, but she can never be a mess. And if she is, it must at least be partially intentional and curated, with a face card or endless charm to back it up. But the stories we tell ourselves don’t outweigh reality. I felt my whole life, the whole staircase, I’ve been winging it, pushing the nowhere girl further down my throat, setting her back just so she doesn’t show up in the mirror one day, writhing in knowledge, demanding a seat at the table. But she’s so good, almost too good, at tracing my steps.

The nowhere girl is a polar figure, contradictory with ease. She runs fast but barely catches up to the world. She’s a genius and a failure. She makes decisions, weighs them out, then acts on impulse, ruins everything, cries when she’s done bad. She’s been betrayed by the very system that promised her an eternity of belonging, by self-productization that wasn’t of any relief, by rationalizing everything hurtful that’s been done to her, and yet she writes by hand in cursive and sends big, explosive texts, picks people up from the airport, bakes birthday cakes, and stands on the train platform with so much hope, even at life’s most thankless, holding equal room for pain and revelations. Feeling is her prowess. We need the nowhere girl like a hot shower to wash off an ugly day.

My theory is, we can’t find ourselves until we reconcile with the nowhere girl inside us, welcome her, and make her tea. We can sit down and have a little laugh at the woman’s tragedy of being everything for everyone and everywhere. ‘Honey, that was worth giving up on long time ago,’ she’ll say. We’ll be surprised by how fun she can be, how undeterred, unstoppable in failure. She will be grateful then, and she might finally let us sleep through the night.

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We explored the nature and passage of time using some of my favorite philosophical & cultural frameworks and theories. The workshop was aimed at understanding the particular relationship each of us has with time — with our past, present, and future, because that relationship shapes everything: how we create things, how we love, grieve, process, build our world, how we decide what matters, and how we move forward.

My writing workshops are intimate and in-person by design, but I wanted to give you the materials in full. These exercises are great to dive into alone, or with your lover, family, or friends. Allow about two hours in total. A glimpse of what we worked with:

The full materials, along with the exercises and sources, are in the deck I made for the workshop. Find it below — available for paid subscribers.

(You can currently upgrade with a real good annual discount <3)

Subscribe now

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I’m generalizing, naturally, because I like to think that this is a universal thing we’re feeling, not an ailment I’ve been subjected to, it’s calmer this way. I like to imagine everybody wants to fall victim to the cruelty of affection, be looked at with equal hunger and curiosity. Don’t mess with the ratio: if it leans too much into the hunger, then, suddenly, your insides are on fire telling you to run, and whether you’ll stay or not depends on age and the degree of your confusion. If it leans too much into the curiosity, then it’s library talk, quiet and monotone, as in there’s no tension, you’ll feel like an old book at the back shelf and you’ve been here before, yawning through these lifeless matters. Therefore, hunger and curiosity, equal. It’s important.

And if it’s not everybody —let’s say some can do without the kissing— then it’s the hungriest of us, awoken from our slumber in the spring and fragmenting into fantasy. I’m trying to unite us in this mess, to find your pain points of desire and press into them with my thumb and you could do the same to mine so we finally have something in common. I’m tired of being more dependent on the oxygen that is kissing and everyone else walking around just slightly self-obtained, sustenance at an arm’s length, having better things of focus, bigger plans. What’s more important, really, than kissing? Only the anticipation of said kissing, or its dividends. I cannot think of much else.

I study my subjects, those who seem unaffected by the fever, involuntarily peering through the glass into one of those old Dutch houses that keep their big calvinist windows open, a scene inside is lively but subtle; a young mother on the phone over the kitchen table, her baby in the high chair staring at her like she’s the only thing in the world, in admiration of surrender, and to the baby, naturally, she is the only thing, shiniest hair and fragrant skin, the most kissable, the most admirable. What is motherhood if not a permeable entry point to eternity? A mesmerizing picture, especially when I’m the creep behind the window, studying the love, taking it in, wondering what it would be like to have this continuity, something beyond myself to allocate my labor. But the mother has so many earthly worries and the baby only has one —how to get more of her love, more of the attention— and I feel the asymmetry and it bothers me that in this moment, and for as long as I’ve known, I am more like the baby and not the mother. Does she feel free? Ecstatic, beautiful? How will I know that I can be a giver, not an endless receiver? Will I still have pity hours to myself?

And when I’m walking through the south district, with finance soldiers in matching vests spilling out of their open cubicles for lunch break, in groups of three or four, fraternity as scheduled, stretching the shiny noon hour into an infinity of restrained excess and burnt coffee, ready for Friday or the annual free trip, I study them even harder. They seem so untethered, exchanging saliva with the system by means of doing something right, even better if it comes with a slop bowl and a single-use wooden fork that will disintegrate in landfills faster.

If I sound mean, I can explain – you’ve already guessed I find myself so envious of this character type. The kind that capitulates to the system but not human desire, that needs many things moderately when I need just one thing very miserably. A kiss. I have long wanted to get inside their minds, to dissect the roads and the tarmac, to arrive at the conclusion they must be naturally less burdened by all the kissing and the spring, that it doesn’t rule over their waking heads like it does over mine. They flirt with their coworkers and pay too much for bad coke and some have ‘work wives’ they jack off to, desire like spare change, and probably have equipped themselves with everything it takes to build a decent life, the kind that doesn’t need a disclaimer or an outro, because their kissing isn’t sacred and it never had to be, never distracted them since they haven’t made a religion out of regular affairs, and whenever I’d try to inhabit this type of casualty, to agree more with the system and less so with my hunger’s altar, I’d get a foretaste of death and fall flat on my face and chip my front tooth and would have to excuse myself into the bathroom stall to cry my eyes out.

Their desire is part of the equation, mine is the sum of everything. And acute, too, clouding everything. That would explain why they’re strong and capable and ready to put extra hours in, and I’m always just on the very edge of doing something wrong. They’re lesser thinkers and better fighters, faster predators, they don’t let the carnal take over, and what’s even the point of a constitution like mine if all we are good for is shedding blood in someone’s war?

I once climbed a rooftop after school to impress a boy. He said he’d meet me there for a kiss, and he was vague about it, and I did it. I was young then, voluntarily sheltered —awaiting breast formation before I’d dare to cross first base— trying out novelty to make myself a more playable character. I wanted to kiss. And I stood on the precipice, heart beating through my nauseated chest, it was so high and windy up there, the restlessness resisted settling. He never showed up and I’d suspected it, miniatures of everything barely moving far on the pavement, I couldn’t stop picturing myself tripping and falling over the parapet. Life moves so slow and mistakes are so immediate. It occurred to me then I’d been cursed or blessed at birth and will spend my whole life risking it for kissing.

It’s fever season. Antihistamines and pollen. I’m spring-born for a reason, we’re matching and entwined in our hysteria of kissing and admiring, giving and receiving, losing our minds with hunger and curiosity. I used to think my heart would never grow wide, like I would always have to gasp for air, to hide in the abstract or climb rooftops. But the cup is full and overflowing, and I mean it literally, too, because I did grow boobs, and none of it took the effort I thought it would. It was a matter of another spring.

Don’t get too cocky; you’ll be in the clearance section one day, and not because you suck, which may be the case, but because the real democracy of the world is that eventually, unanimously, no one cares. Eternity is scarce. I once saw Dostoevsky and DeuxMoi paperbacks next to each other in the discount corner, sitting so neatly side by side you’d think one was a prequel to the other.

Love the life you’ve built without any help. Feel resentful there was no help. Be grateful you never had to ask for help. Born wise beyond your years, you’ll die responsible and jittery. Now turn to him and ask for help, grab help by the belly, drag it to your house, feast on it. People want to be needed. It’s what makes them care.

Describe things as they are or aren’t, in detail, from the moment they wreck you to the forgiveness, the dissatisfaction found in it. Love your nose, your job, and wearing heels in Paris. In that order. Do lunges. Inhale deeply. Use your soft heart to prepare for braver times. You may never feel deserving —a built-in ancestral feature from your long lineage of Eastern European Jews— but a good lip liner and a blowout, the put-togetherness of both, will delude you into readiness. They were stingy with approval, so now you do just what it takes to feel safe: red light therapy, an expired Lexapro blister for good luck, ClassPass points, excessive sex and food. See yourself as an intricate creation, Vermeer’s Lacemaker when you’re hard at work. Even if others see you as dismissive and whoring yourself out for something vague and underpaid.

Believe in everything, be defined by nothing. Get hate comments, sleep on them, tossing-torning like a rotisserie chicken in the sheets. Make an elevator pitch, call yourself ‘talent’ unironically, find an agent, sell out and blur into evaluation, your juicy existence resting on numbers and equations. Appeal to the masses or reside in the crevices of niche taste; both are pathways to hell, one is just longer. You are a marketer, you are a shark — you’ve got an eye and hunger for this. Bragging feels like having your tits out in public. It is the only way. Don’t fear.

Find your dad’s poetry from when he was young. Unsure how you should feel about the one on Hitler. His empathetic take, contrarian. Not the first jew to do that, not the last one. Wish you’d inherited this trait, his endless need to sympathize extending to everything except your attitude, but shaming your vices is just about your favorite thing. You’d have nothing to think about if you woke up with no enemies. Feel beauty on your fingertips as you wrestle with hateful words. Every parent fucks up, every child gets to use it as a write-off for their own shortcomings. This is the order of things.

Embrace being no one; there are things scarier than flatlining in the public eye, such as the inevitable timebomb of a call about one of your grandparents or catching a fold of loose skin in the gym lighting on a fine Saturday. Is that deliberately fluorescent? You’re not even thirty, time is flying by, taking with it everything you’ve claimed as yours-to-be. Get carded at the wine store, feel better, exhale. Today you are a princess, tomorrow a dragon or a gargoyle; it’s all fluid and pure.

Buy more Agent Provocateur, dip in your savings if you have to. Political unrest sure makes you want to spend. Kiss lustfully, with authority. Stare in your lover’s eyes with childlike admiration. Sleep naked. Wake up in the morning. Feel eternal. Get head and get ahead. We all want to be overloved and underquestioned. There are public affairs and states of knowing, and unfair demands emptied of significance such as Am I the best? Are you the most in love, like, ever? My girl, you’ve been in love since you were five. You didn’t need the best from anyone, just the unflinching fountain of your smothering affection. Trace your ribs. Pinch skin between your fingers. Feel what it’s like to be wasteful and vacant like an off-season beach resort.

Walk to the nearest bar that doesn’t do reservations, get an Amaretto Sour, feel washed up and adult, think about botox, Paloma Wool, an upper bleph. Your mind is an assortment of targeted ads delivered freshly to your inbox. The bartenders are always flirty when your heart is heavy and eyelids clearly too droopy to let the face exist as is. Everyone’s getting work done except for you — for unknown reasons, you’re fighting to be the very last miserable girl. Lie to your doctor, and your boss, and to yourself. Walk home and rest.

Reside in what feels wrong to logic and right to the heart. Don’t feed yourself illusions. Take many pictures but few of your face. Sink into yourself like Venice, like a reply guy that had lost all hope for getting some, like a lifelong friend that went astray and doesn’t call. Be wise and difficult. Meet deadlines. Stop posing in front of those who see you out of the shower every day. You’re not scoring extra points. You wish you were.

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When has it ever? You’ll say, and I’ll tell you ok, fair! Consider this my International Women’s Day contribution, diving into the most uncomfortable.

It seems to me there’s virtually no polite way of pointing out emerging cultural patterns if the discussion involves a woman being visibly underweight. Talking around it is allowed, under the scaffolding of “trends” and “statistics”, big frameworks and abstract terms only, but abstaining from using any specific woman as an example is necessary. Otherwise, you’re partaking in bodyshaming, attacking the individual, or, one of my personal favorites, “you don’t know these people or what they’re going through.” You’re not wrong – I don’t know these people; but a spade is a spade, and saying that my feed is full of dangerously malnourished celebrities en masse is hardly controversial.

A problem doesn’t just go away if you refuse to look at it. Talking about what’s being presented as the new norm is the only way of getting closer to any resolve or understanding at all.

I also respect you, the reader, enough to not hide behind the “I’m scared for the impressionable young girls” facade. I am the impressionable young girl. Aged 27, scared and uncomfortable. The current landscape of ultra-thinness will make the gold medalist of remission flirt with behaviors they left behind, or fall face-flat back into them. Shall we all say good riddance to whatever our newfound, finally somewhat sustainable, non-extreme definition of health was, and be welcomed back by our disordered habits, arms wide open? Or, maybe, there’s still hope?

(Disclaimer: This essay is about the pursuit of extreme thinness by healthy people, not about medically necessary and mandated weight loss/management. These are two completely different conversations, and nothing below is about the latter.)

I feel like I’m perpetually getting don’t-worry-kitten’d. Okay. Yay. Problem at hand: women are shrinking. Then getting procedures and modifications to offset the unpleasant effects of rapid fat loss. Then shrinking some more. The trickle-down effect of GLP-1s becoming widespread, coupled with a lack of proper regulation around the drug, making tweaking one’s healthy BMI to underweight accessible and effortless, is palpable and bitter in the mouth. Restriction has always been there, but what was once exclusive to a disciplined few, physically demanding and unsustainable for most body types, is now a matter of a weekly needle ritual. There are structural societal changes happening at a light speed, and the refusal to engage with what’s happening –really engage with it, not just comment on it lazily and move on– does us very little good.

Saying anything about what you’re seeing with your own two eyes is met with such disdain and resistance, you’d think people are getting paid. It seems they feel virtuously holy and tethered to the ideal body themselves when they blindly defend it. An army of Bella Hadid’s unpaid interns are waiting to tell you that skinny people exist! and don’t comment on other people’s bodies! Sure, because you’re not missing the point at all. They remind me of Elon’s reply guys binding to his wealth by safeguarding him on X. I’m a big fan of transparency, but when celebrities attribute a visibly malnourished body to pilates and intuitive eating –which is exactly as much as they’ll disclose– they make it seem like the new extreme is nothing but a casual byproduct of good choices and sound decisions. Suddenly, your own healthy lifestyle of exercising and eating well, which likely has given you a healthy, supple, energetic body, feels like it isn’t working anymore because your clavicles aren’t sticking out enough.

What we’re seeing is a big old mess, and it happens to be quite Foucauldian. It is a large particle of what Foucault coined as biopower – “power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”1 Power over body, essentially. Modern systems do an excellent job at control through optimization. By making us more useful, our bodies more docile, increasing our efficiency, making it all feel like an active choice. When big pharma offers a quick fix solution for us to escape our flesh, we will take it. Once it finally offers us a drug that enables us not to feel anything, we will take that, too. We crave being chastised and reprimanded for wanting: in turbulent times, all we need is to be absolved of such frivolities. To want it to exist and demand, and we just can’t afford all that right now, so the switch must be turned off. Existentially, it is a little humorous that the number one drug currently sweeping the globe is one that works by eliminating desire. Can we sit with the gravity of this? Who benefits from an obedient body that takes up less space and is cheaper to maintain, at once more economically viable?

The modus operandi of these control systems is so effective because it puts you, the individual, in a position of play-pretend choice. Starting Ozempic, specifically as a woman that doesn’t medically require any weight loss, can feel good – it signals agency; it’s a noble act in favor of your “health and longevity”, a cheat code to something you have most likely naturally and rightfully struggled with achieving. Maybe even a little secret you keep to yourself since you don’t technically need it and may be judged – everyone’s doing it, why shouldn’t you? You’re only following protocols of the new norm arranged with biopower. People need to feel as though the systems of control they succumb to are an exercise of free will. A questionable thing is not so questionable if we opted in ourselves. We crave a sense of control, an illusion of intentionality; the only thing standing between us and questioning the system.

Why do we do this? Simone Weil described the psychology of this impulse in Gravity and Grace2, published posthumously: she saw that human beings, when succumbed to something hard, will not just tolerate their own deprivation but build entire belief systems around it. Suffering needs appeal, but it also requires a deeper meaning. The alternative would force a confrontation much more frightening: we will have to ask ourselves just how much of the social contract is written (and currently being rewritten with stricter rules) for women to be malleable, to fit into the framework that wasn’t set by us, one that actively incentivizes us into our most miserable, weakest versions, getting further away from the empowered notion of health we claim we’re in pursuit of. Further from Epicurean life, closer to indigence. We’re left to defend what we’ve suffered for because the only alternative is admitting that our suffering was, and is, pointless.

Here’s the challenging part of the new norm: no sovereign decrees that women must be size 00, no law requires it. But you’re given a new template. It’s subtle, but visual and undeniable. The new norm of what the divine feminine looks like is being pushed down your periphery from all sides, award shows to couture to social media and fitness. For instance, reported that plus-size body representation at fashion week has dropped 93%. Every incentive to pursue it is in your hands, loaded and ready to shoot. But no one’s forcing you to get skinnier, right?

It’s incredibly convenient to hide this nonsense under the guise of health and wellness. But being medically underweight takes a toll on the body, requires an extreme amount of control to achieve and sustain, and carries potential long-term health damage with it – this is obvious, science-backed truth. We’ve known this forever. So, why the anger, the secrecy, the defense?

Probably because any woman who has spent years and decades in a one-sided relationship with her appetite can’t hear “thinness culture is a tool of control” as neutral analysis of a situation. She takes it to heart, as though the central project of her adulthood is a lie, a product of biopower. This is also why GLP-1s are scrutinized in ED communities; a girl that suffers for her thinness in perpetuity now watches someone else achieve it pharmacologically and easily if they can afford it, and rather than questioning the value of thinness itself, she doubles down on defending it or flat out denies its widespread use. If thinness isn’t even worth the suffering she endured, then her hunger is retroactively emptied of its meaning. There’s an inherent wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering, as Weil put it. This is, naturally, both an ego and a class thing.

***

The altar of an undernourished body is a woman’s own domain of prayer, perhaps the only one we have left. Untouched by men, not fully understood by them either. By challenging it, we’re challenging the cosmology we’ve arranged for ourselves, and all the things we think thinness brings with it. Acceptance, validation, being wanted, acknowledged, and heard, or, at the very least, having a purpose in an increasingly hopeless environment. Give it too much meaning, and slowly but surely we can’t go without. “We are drawn towards a thing because we believe it is good. We end by being chained to it because it has become necessary.”

Judging anyone for wanting to lose weight, whether through Ozempic or the good old methods, is senseless.3 I’m no higher power, and I notice this in myself, which saddens me. It’s not even about my body anymore: as our physique is shrinking, so is our culture, an interest in partaking, creating, or contributing. There’s less inventive spark I remember growing up with, when the whole wide world felt available, wide open, at my fingertips like clay. No dream was too big then, no ambition too extreme. My desires have gone from big, juicy, audacious to just the new norm basics: get thinner, save more money, bite a little more of people’s attention on the impossible content conveyor belt. I’m feeling tunnel vision forming and walls of deprivation closing in on me.

That is, perhaps, the thing we’re not ready to admit. When we shrink ourselves, the smallness we acquire isn’t limited to our physical body. We think it opens up new horizons of power, but what tends to happen is we just end up wanting less. Less food, less sex, less comfort, less culture, less invention, less daydreaming. Less change. A woman who doesn’t want anything is a cheaper, more governable subject, yet to herself now more desirable and spiritually fuckable, finally freed from appetite and other mortal waste. She’s gracefully negligible, lightweight and otherworldly, takes no space at all, doesn’t raise her voice, would never cause a scene. And it should surprise no one that the drug everyone wants to get their hands on is one that shuts off hunger, essentially numbing most vital parts of the human experience.

It’s not a matter of asking how the GLP-1 era is going to change the way we exist in the world; That has already occurred, whether we’ve been partaking or not. How it will shape the years to come and just how much we can take before we start asking ourselves why we’re letting this health and wellness masquerade become the new norm, I don’t know. Again, I’m just a woman, and I’m not immune to what I’m seeing. What I do know is that honest conversations are the first step to better conversations.

I have certainty in two things: One, I’m not the only one sick of seeing people so intentionally malnourished. Two, in the most hopeless of times, when succumbing is the easiest way out and resisting feels futile and even lame, it is precisely our responsibility to do better. For ourselves, for our girlfriends, sisters, mothers, future daughters.

Finding something you love and making sure it flattens you into the ground. It’s a delicious, disruptive, devoted death rehearsal. The more ungratefully slow and complicated, making you question why breaking your heart at labor’s hands is something you signed up for, the better. Fasten your belt en route to success or failure! Not that the destination matters more than input, it’s too late to turn back either way.

When you’re good at something, you’re going to want to offer it to the world. You’re going to want the world to listen. But its readiness to respond is not under your control or growing in parallel to your efforts. This readiness to engage with what you have to offer is alchemical, uncontrollable. Stars have to align, things have to fall into place, cosmic treaties have to be written and signed behind your back. Your offering needs to make sense at the right time to the right people with the right frequency. And sometimes, in the early stages of a process, things make sense exclusively to you.

Work in progress. It’s in this state I find myself reeling, hands on knees, knees to floor. Ecstatic humiliation. What day is it today? Building a universe around elements that so far only exist in my satellite view, its vitality kneeling at the mercy of some vague self-promise, is madness. In the complete succumbing to the unknown and allowing hard work to touch me, slaving away at something on coffee, shaky potential, and wishful thinking, I find the most misery and joy available. As the weight of it grows, I try to sell the effort to myself under the guise of trusting the process, pretending to detach, and whatever else. I lied, okay? I’m bitter, tired, overdressed for the occasion. There are easier ways of interacting with the world, why the stab wounds? Annie Dillard in The Writing Life compares the process to taming an animal: “A work in progress quickly becomes feral.… It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room."

Friction. Turbulence. Hesitation pointing cold metal at your temple as you get pestered with questions that seem to lay out a quicker path to giving up than they incentivize you to keep going. It works and then it doesn’t again. Damn, thought I’d cracked it. The drawing board knows your face better than your own family. Frustration-weighty setbacks and timeline delays, obstacles that prevent you from walking straight and force you to dig sideways, becoming oppressed by your own ambition and allergic to the success of others, all feel like evidence that you’re more of a bitter, backwards bitch than a forward prodigy. ‘Success’ is, of course, fluid rather than a strictly defined structure (What does it look like? Finite or infinite? Will it run out? Do we have the right to keep it? Is it sustainable?), but it feels spitefully quantifiable through comparison. The wins of another cease to be a moment of proof and celebration but expose your naked skin to broken mirror glass.

The jealousy subjection isn’t personal, of course, plus we’re all adults, so it’s a dirty secret you keep to yourself. We’re better off not pretending we’re always loving the journey, head held high. Sometimes we’re screaming and kicking and begging for relief and willing to rip our skin off just to not engage with someone excelling. Relief, perhaps, can come with knowledge that everyone you hate or admire probably experienced suffering of the same caliber. They won’t disclose it – you won’t either. Most times nothing is readily ‘offered’ to anyone – it starts with begging for it, carving it out of sand, finding small pieces where you can to build a ship that somewhat sails. It takes a year, it takes a lifetime. Some have just mastered the art of begging subtly. You’ll get there, too.

And then, of course, the friction. My oldest enemy. I’d best describe it as an imbalance of input and output: so much of you goes into something and not enough comes back. At times, it’ll drive you up the wall. But our relationship with effort has to be challenged, friction reframed. It is a testament to caring: I give it my all because I care – because I deserve to care – because the world deserves to watch me care about it. The friction is not a gravel road to shiny pavements of merit, ease, talent. It’s not to be overcome. Difficulty is a consequence of serious work, its essential engine. Hard work and friction aren’t just necessary conditions for output, they’re the mechanism by which the work develops integrity, a coherence with itself. As you iterate and scratch your head in distress and look for pathways that send you into panic and resentment, you just so happen to oil up the very wheels that steer you into the right direction, flowers, palatial accolades, everything you want. To try and smooth the friction away means smoothing away the thing that makes the work worth receiving – one that calls for the surroundings to embrace what you’ve crafted in their big and ready arms.

Could we get humble enough to allow the friction to convert into something essential? Would I treat it gently if I knew it was the very flame to the world’s readiness, slowly heating up the fuel to the boiling point of reciprocity? Let’s say that friction is not some brute force provocation. Let’s say friction is evidence it’s going your way. Let’s say without it, you should be concerned. The lightness in the doing we’re seeking has to be found within the friction itself, not through it. Beyond existing with the friction there won’t be much of a reward. And through this, the worth of having something is measured in the difficulty of its attainment.

And friction is an honest friend, too. As it undresses you to the very underlying instincts and bare intentions, bruises and lingerie, it doesn’t shy away from asking you the hardest questions: all of this doing, this labor, is it for yourself, for others, or attention? If it’s for others, nothing but misery’s in store. If it’s for attention, you won’t retain the energy to sustain it. You’re safe and golden, but only if it’s for yourself.

It stings, man! It hurts to stay up late, to not be lucky, to run short on breath and unaccomplished, to bite your nails over the emerald greener grass. But you know better than anyone why this path, why now, why you. Because it would hurt more to turn your back to the one thing you wanted most, however safe everything else. Let’s not pretend it’s some heavenly punishment. Everything is a product of your agency and sacrifice – we pick our battles and befriend them. You chose not to lay a graveyard route to a life full of what if’s and envy for the reckless minds who had it in them to bet on their big clumsy dream. You couldn’t have it any other way, so now you’re here, paying with dedication.

Recounting her experience of meeting Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag writes in Pilgrimage: “The zealot of seriousness in me, because it was already full-grown in the child, continues to think of reality as yet-to-be. Still sees a big space ahead, a far horizon. Is this the real world?”. Much like your life’s work without friction is never an arrival point to reach. The fantasy of it can stabilize you for a moment, sanitize your worries, but it is just that: a fantasy, something to softly moan to under the covers and put your head back down. Is success an arrival, really, or just a brief exhale of alignment before the next challenge grows tall in front of us?

Assume that friction will never leave. A relic that rolls over into every new chapter. Sit with the weight of that. It’s not hard until it’s easy, it’s always hard because you love it enough. Still, a life spent picking at something you know deserves every tear of your devotion is worth the blind path. You’ll do it slow, you’ll dig at it from every angle, you’ll be humiliated. Sometimes, you’ll be awake and sparkly, lungs full, heart pumping with momentum. But those nights are rare. Not just for you, for anyone that lets hard work ruin their life a little. Take all this pleasure and the fantasy, the sublime, luck and glory, the endless, the important, the sleepless. What else is there to get ruined by?

An essential READ/WATCH LIST (for paid subscribers) on working hard, doing it chic, dying for it. Essays, interviews, journals, movies, internet gems that moved me enough to inspire this essay & helped its structure and formation:

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one for each

leave what resonates, take the rest

send to a sweet lover or a mean ex

Love letter 1, for the crushing

I see the whole world in you. I did yesterday, I do today. Some will say it’s a codependent danger zone, entitlement, laziness, salvation-softened imprisonment, abstinence from decisions, foolishness; my therapist has nothing to say upon my disappearance because she hasn’t made me feel better about my body or the state of the world, and for the weekly direct debit going out of my account, venting for an hour with no resolve just doesn’t fit my margins of a good strategy. I don’t care about psychology or taxes. Or doing my hair. I just dream about you now, retreating to my pillow, and what a sight. I love your hands and how they move me. Your outline is how I’ve seen the world, merging with the ocean of you. Oxytocin surge. Like a prism, we dissipate the light. I love your walk and all your navy sweaters. I love how I sometimes borrow your clothes but you keep track because you’re just as attached to your objects as I’ve been since I left forever. It was a whirlwind, sure, when I felt like I had nothing to offer but some words on a napkin, squeezed between your fingers. What’s lost in ambition is gained in softness. We both carried the baggage we assigned each other and it was so tender in the middle of a shaky fire escape. Timing is always right but rarely kind to me. It takes more than courage and a pinch of salt to make a thing work. Let’s make it work.

Love letter 2, for the hurting

Psychedelics, microdosing, floating, infrared sauna, deep tissue massage, breathing exercises, leadership books, CBT and CBD in sequence, a spending problem, a cocktail problem, a travel problem, a meeting up with men I barely know problem, a meeting up with men with the same name or nose or dimples as you just for proximity problem, over the counter solutions for the one amnesia instance I just cannot solve. Try it all I did. The worst, by far, was EMDR. Look to the left, look to the right. Repeat until healed. I’d go on to have vivid recurring dreams of our last coup, each time getting more defensive and pushing you closer to a breaking point, and you still stood there, unaffected. Come morning, I was meant to play house with nonchalance too: pack my lunch, brush my hair, go to work. Calling in sick because you’re stuck in a dream loop about an ex that’s hardly an ex isn’t reason enough for PTO, apparently. Call the insurance. Call the priest.

from: the day he changed his profile picture

Love letter 3, for the disappointed

There is the me that does things and the me that feels them. They’re two different women. They’re both audaciously kind, but one is always begging to go to the wrong place. Castles, palaces, freshly baked bread, whatever. On one of the nights, you weren’t there and I felt like throwing up, undoing calories and loving. It wasn’t much different in velocity than dragging my feet through the snow. Humiliation breeds resilience. Still, hope was there. Hope? For a dozen misspoken texts and something left unsaid on purpose and many other grudges you were too busy to repeat to me? Something is always off in the air right before the bad scenario. Let’s play a game, two truths, one lie. This city is too small for our beating, daring, grand hearts. We were made for something bigger. You and I see our futures intertwined in bliss and lustful Sundays. Today, I’m looking at three lies staring back at me.

Love letter 4, for the jealous

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Wanting. So much to say about it and even more to feel. I was appointed Chief Wanting Officer when I discovered my very first crush at the age of five, and knew then and there I was probably made for that feeling. Sparkly, dizzy electricity impulse running from the brain into the heart that takes over your day. Through decades, I have since been careful and careless, protective of feelings that weren’t my own, keeping desire on speed dial, walking the goodbye line, setting fireworks to my pride, climbing over the fence of the impossible, and playing my clandestine part well. In all of this, I’ve wanted – which, like a big protruding flaw, seemed too grand to bring into the scene. Can’t do things casually. Can’t go on a date without a future in mind. Can’t undercommit. Just can’t want in a casual manner. What a liability for a girl just trying to date.

In all of it, I had a mission: to find out if my wanting was a prison to escape from or a signal there’d be something waiting for me on the other side. Something that wants my wanting back, sneaks up on me like an avalanche, something I can fall into with my full entire self, no pretense, no arenas; just pure bliss and knowledge of a higher state. Parched and tired, I was out to prove to myself that looking for a larger-than-life love wasn’t a dead end street. But confirmations of the reverse were everywhere: an unlucky number on a cancelled date, a bad habit, an eyeroll, an afterword of something not entirely truthful. A bad text here, a good enough walk home there, dissatisfied, inauthentic, lifeless. Dating apps made this more acute: curating myself into punchline prompts, adjusting my tone to maximum casualty, a perfectly timed reply. All of this felt like showing up as somebody who had no resemblance to me the slightest. Could it be that the wanting itself was leading me astray? That it was no friend of mine, a product of fairytales and entitlement? Was I trading something in? I knew a type of love existed that would embrace me in its arms with midnight sweetness, and my ability to find it was dependent on chance or courage – maybe both.

Our beliefs and notions of love can get tinged with our own cynicism, propped by the echoes of the past. Like ink in water, the fear spreads thin and fast. In a world prompted by ironic misbehavior and good faith armor, it’s understandable that strategy is lionized: it guarantees bulletproof walls against heartbreak and embarrassment. A permission to find love exists within some sort of impartiality margins and careful thinking. The best way, I thought, was to pretend that I flat out don’t care. But care I did, on repeat, endlessly. There’s only so many times you can lie to yourself. After another “Don’t get attached” from a trusted friend, a nerve was struck. Though the strategy-oriented warnings meant well and probably wanted me to keep my sanity, I couldn’t listen: the wanting was too loud. What’s a girl to do when she’s graduated with honors from scheming-waiting-needing to get love right? When her whole being rejects the whole project management approach to dating? It was just so tiring to hold back. There had to be another way, I knew that much.

Sometimes you ought to take yourself out for a candlelit dinner and an honest intervention, because even the most hopeful girls turn to mad men if our wanting is kept in captivity too long. Dissolving in soft lights and elevator music, I grabbed my wanting by the hand and asked: what are you, even? Have I been kind to you? Have I listened to your needs and showed up as myself? Have I been patient, solemn enough, sat in the darkness of it all without interrupting? Or have I been carelessly smoke-signaling something that isn’t there? Looking to climb my way out of what needs my attendance? Saying yes when no was due? Caring more about how my photos come across than what I’m looking for? Being mean to the one that loves me most by virtue of pretending, settling, faking interest?

I made a pinky promise pact then to never water down my wanting. It’s this enormous, all-consuming thing, slightly careless but always true, a constant – everything else variable. An infinite resource. Has to be honored as such. It’s been beaming out of me, right at the very core, requiring to be attended to by none other than myself. That’s where wanting is metabolized into seeing and being seen, and from there, over the horizon, it can’t be mistaken for something half-real. Now we’re getting somewhere.

It’s easy to get cynical in dating. But self-respect that blooms out of honoring your wanting is a force of nature. Trees bloom differently when you know with certainty the gravity of your desire is what makes you, well, who you are. The ground is firm but tender, politics of attraction stand no chance. And while I waited for something tangible to love, I said I wouldn’t bide time yearning for better endings I haven’t allowed myself. There would be pitfalls and no one’s safe from disappointment, but no effort’s wasted when it’s honest, no attempt’s detonated when it’s true. Who am I to gatekeep my own love from myself? That night, nothing was imminent and everything was worth it.

This isn’t a story about getting dating right – I don’t think there’s such a thing. This is a story about letting yourself want and the self-trust that emerges from it. Unshakeable self-trust, the sparkling kind, the kind that changed everything about how I dated on Hinge: no stalling, self-erasure, buffering, assessing myself. First message, real questions, an honest yes. I let wanting set the dating pace, met the moment as it was, stopped auditioning for safety. Presence was infinite, and fear started to dissipate. Slowly, then all at once. From there, it took so little to see the wanting ricochet. I didn’t have to prove, bargain, plead, change, mold myself into a more desirable outcome.

And, honestly, what a silly thing to think that love is a sacrifice to who you are. Not the kind that makes you understand why you were given two hands to hold, two eyes to see, and lips to kiss. A girl that wants deserves that much and maybe a dozen more. Nobody told me what miracles awaited on the other side of giving it my all, so I’ll be one to spread the word. Could it be different this time? What would dating look like if you let yourself want plainly, urgently, strongly? If you just asked them out, sent that Hinge message, asked the real questions, allowed for errors of the human heart? All’s fair in love and wanting, and if I were to go back, I’d do it again. A thousand times.

You’ve been there too, right? Desolate and frazzled, unable to step forward, nauseously pitiful, just drowning in acidity, lingering feelings of applause. Too sensitive to move?

And now we’re here. Wet hair, high socks, post-shower scrolling, lotioned up. I’m feeling very girly, a little fragile and alone, but with a solid backbone still. Reaching for a snack warranted by late afternoon. Thinking back on a time where ‘snack’ was not part of my vernacular, yet I’d gladly reach a state of armageddon and pay interest instead. Like that one time, my 23rd birthday, Stockholm, I bought a twelve-piece lemon cheesecake and some candles, presumingly for the next day’s party. It was aligning in the stars then, bubbling from within, imminent trouble and malnutrition. Who doesn’t feel alone on their birthday?

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When I was younger, I thought it was my parents letting me stay home from school on snow days. I’d replay cartoons and have endless snack plates at my disposal, eternity is just pajamas and a warm sofa. Later on, a note passed under the classroom table meant just for me. Boys took their pleasure in confusion, going from mean to overly kind, but never neutral. I found it in the chaos and the tension, some relief. Savored it as much as one can, and thought I’d finally deciphered what aliveness means. A few years down the road, all grown up and newly noble, picking my brother up in the early afternoon, him turning seven and myself seventeen, he held my hand so tight and told me all about his first day at school. He was so hopeful then and I was salient to him, my heart swelled into something fluently beaming that transcended time and space. This has to be the best day of my life, I thought, I will remember this until my hands go numb and wrinkly. That was love. Of course it was. So affluent and present, demanding nothing back.

Other times, I’d blur into it, dissolving at the self. Forever altruistic, just not fully there. It’s always airports where things come to the surface – altars of mundane truth. I caught it then, again, this time siloed between departures 1 and 2, trying to pick you out in the crowd. My heart was beating through the picket sign because, well, again, this feeling of doing something you know wouldn’t be done for you if it came down to the reverse. Palpitations of he, she, cyclical nature. I was a nuisance in the bright life of it all, or a silent savior giving out placebo pills to ease the pain of whatever. The beautiful part is that I needed nothing back, not at the time. You can’t be mad at your own insignificance, but you can drink it away. Every ounce of love given was theirs to keep. It was fine then. I was fulfilling some higher mission – but who signed off on it, and who’s to file for refunds now? We all want to die for something, we’ll take the first opportunity to do so.

And then, what comes up on the other side is naturally rotten at the root. Being treated bad makes you bad, it’s only the laws of physics. Contaminated, I’d go on to be ruthless. Selfishly biting off the juiciest part, spitting out what I dislike, disappearing in the midst of it, becoming greater than the worst day, sending a nasty text and tossing hearts around like they belong to no one but myself. I’d gotten filthy and prudent with it. What happens outside my own skin was not a concern of mine, and if there was a right way to live that surely wasn’t one and I knew it, but bandaids drag skin with them if you rip them off too fast. I had to do three steps back to understand the damage wasn’t fun.

Now, it hits me on a random Sunday that I am a lover; a diligent one at that. Not bitter, not dwelling on the past, devoted to my present. My love is not an extension of my body; my body is the extension of my love. We are defined by how we touch the other. It’s communal, platonic, romantic, sisterly, sterile, naive, it’s everything and nothing. It’s in the neck breathing, in the public claiming, in the quiet help, the sibling shittalk, in the heart-shaped cake – it feels good, feels right, we do it well because it is the one thing we’re naturally good at. I crash, you lift me up, make time for me, I offer help, we pick up the slack, apologies when things go sideways, you hold my hand, he assembles records, she disappears, they don’t respond, protective of you, gentle with myself, we patch it up and it goes on and on and on. Sometimes it ends, intimacy turns to formerly acquainted. Sometimes it stays forever. The trick is in not counting time. We ruin it when we demand gravity punch above its weight or ask too many questions. I’ve stopped asking what’s in it for me when every cell in my body knows how to do it. Molecularly ingrained.

Assembling love like seashells on the shore, I think of it in flashes. Little moments of tenderness, of reciprocation, of service, of apathy, of my cruelty, all branching out and blooming. How does one live when everything is ocean? When we’re so vast, explorable, enticing on our own? Never good people, never bad either, no killer and no prey. I loved it all, leaving and being left, in every ripple there was something to swim under. Love dangerously, love softly, easy and hard, love safely, love for something, love against it, love after being proven wrong. There is no closing of this chapter, there was no wrong way for us to do it, to undo it. To grasp a feeling, let it run its course, knowing some things are better off not being theorized about, just lived through. If I was made for the other, I plan on making the best out of my time. Let’s always be loving, so loving that the earth takes on a heart-shaped axis, rotating towards the magical. Yeah, let’s do that. And so much more.

Someone I barely speak to DMed me a new photo of Charli xcx looking mysterious saying they “thought that was me.” All things and intentions considered, in my luteal, a compliment is something I won’t take in vain or in honesty, so it seemed they were deliberately out to hurt my feelings in some backhanded somersault way. They weren’t, of course. I’m feeling exposed and shut off at the same damn time, with two stitches in my back and a silent walk home. Take it easy, the surgeon said. I’d done a due diligence background check on him the day before to make sure his rating was good enough. My concern wasn’t his qualifications or lack thereof, but an intrusive fear that if, unfairly or not, somebody left a review that he’d subjected them to disfigurement, I have to at least know my chances. Everyone was praising him – I gave up. No horror stories of mole removal gone wrong. Fine, I’ll find elsewhere to allocate my worries.

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