Nothing’s louder than dissonance. When I’m presented with surveillance state glasses so I can record strangers in broad daylight, a discount plugin by a bootstrapped billionaire daughter that helps me save a few dollars on a Prada bag, or a device that tells me my sleep score was bad and I need to die whenever I’ve stayed out too late, my heart cools itself with cultural stasis and soulless emptiness in lieu of excitement, and the diagnosis is clear: I feel nothing. I feel nothing when I see these ads, when I touch the products, when I’m served content churned out at industrial speeds, when I interact with the very services supposedly tailor-made and catered to my distinct needs, which are nothing but self-contradictory.

The tech industry is notoriously bad at understanding women. But since the early days of an idyllic boys’ club where no one bothered us –with the exception of the amiable mid-2010’s # female in tech archetype hardened by the harsh reality where coming into the industry with a genuine mission doesn’t get you very far– things have shifted. There’s benefit within us: since finding out that understanding us results not just in profit, but in unlocking weighty cultural leverage in the great famine of taste, we’re no longer left out of the conversation. We get seated at the big kids’ table. Now that there’s a stipulation, everyone has seemingly put “cater to the female mind” on their Monday agenda. Things get repackaged for the girls. Celebrity ambassadors. Relatable content. Little do they know the closest a corporation has come to female solidarity was Novo Nordisk, but even that arrived with a long list of side effects and an unrestricted access, so we’re still a little bit resentful about that...

Is a woman’s mind such a mystery to solve, something so untethered and convoluted, even the greatest minds of Silicon Valley remain flummoxed and intrigued? They know that a young woman, sophisticated in her choices, is both an early adopter and a market driver – they know our attention, taste, and focus matter. What do they do with this knowledge? In front of us is an astonishing spread of ideas and projections about who we are, a sort of egalitarian canvas: no one in tech knows what a woman is for sure, but no one’s bothered to understand by asking us a question.

And to configure a woman’s thinking would be to take into account everything that anchors her to reality: the body horror she experiences on the daily, propped by the platforms where she grew up as the product, the customer, and the cash cow, add vigilance of self-surveillance and an inflated sense of responsibility for everything that surrounds her, then sprinkle with frantic spending to keep her complicated feelings at bay and managed creatively. She takes notice when things feel inauthentic, feels pixelated in the night and oversaturated in the day. She is far too fearful for her future to be subsidized by a better tomorrow. She’s in tune with her devices –and by that I don’t just mean that as soon as she mentions something in passing to a friend, two hours later timely ads appear on her screen– and navigates any new product beautifully, with discernment.

She hasn’t seen her own face through the camera lens in about a decade. Since 2017, to be exact, when Apple introduces the neural engine. The camera infers and reconstructs images based on guessing, applying targeted sharpening, denoising, and other means of enhancement it perceives the photo needs. She can’t turn it off – it is the default setting. She then goes on to make decisions based on these half-real, half-imagined images the screen puts out. Changes to her physical appearance are informed by a digital interpretation of it, the same way collective Zoom dysmorphia made beauty procedures skyrocket after the pandemic. But to put blame on her for being far removed from the physical reality would be conniving, because her reality no longer stops where going outside begins, but extends into it. Her phone is where she expresses her vision, her worries, her insanity, builds a world for herself, and while it’s ruthless and addictive, it’s also the most fluent authorship she’s experienced.

Tech is a promise economy: a lot of it hinges on the potential of a big return. Most of that potential is built on veiled theories and source: trust me bro economics. Everything is future-oriented and mission-driven and any other noun-adjective duo that rarely stands for anything. But young women have learned that a big and sparkly promise is a harrowing debt to pay: the same promise economy that gave rise to girlbosses, packaging hustle culture, self-surveillance, and putting yourself through the meat grinder of ladder-climbing until your last breath can’t be the economy that makes us happy. We’re so acutely aware of the systems that have failed us, distrust is our status quo, and the body is always scanning for mismatch. I have been in many tech circles over the years, and felt both dismissed and tokenized in many. My experience is not unique.

In the grand misunderstanding, there’s two things at play: first, minimization of the psychological fallout that is growing up online. What we’ve collectively maneuvered has made us tech-savvy and ahead of the curve, sure, but also neurotic, concerned, lacking a gravity center, miserably self-preoccupied. It baffles me when they analyze our atypical behavior on the same platforms they got us hooked on. Second, a general disdain towards a young woman’s intelligence. A young woman remains an underexplored and oversimplified subject in tech: her potential is endless, her beauty is unorthodox. From there, an assumption is made that her life is devoid of pain, comprehension, and her ideas are either consumerist or male-centered, but never original. But it’s an apparition of reality, not a convincing interpretation. If I’m tormented by wanting to connect deeply, my heart doesn’t beat faster at the arrival of a new retail app. If I don’t feel safe in my body and in the world, an advanced ovulation tracker that likely sells my data and an Oura ring aren’t going to change that. I’m still unsure why this is so hard to grasp. These personalized solutions, at best useless and at worst harmful, are offensive. They’re infantilizing, they’re boring. This is why things made for a “better personal experience” further remove us from ourselves, digitizing, fragmenting, and in the end nullifying our nature, and why no significant advancement happens.

Tech doesn’t owe us understanding, but I’d respect the people in the industry more if they stopped pretending that they do. Would they be curious enough to know we’re moved by the connective and the unique, not the pristine and artificial? That our starvation for intimacy isn’t resolved by a browser extension? That there are no insatiable empty pits of nothingness inside of us like in those who hoard exorbitant amounts of wealth and push their morally flailing products onto us? That not being able to write with AI assistance means one just —maybe— shouldn’t be a writer? We’re built different. Thank god we are.

Tech prides itself on its open collective mind, but it’s just as incomprehensible to them that one wants to swim in a lake without the hungry premise of scaling it into an ocean. Some are tormented by the idea of doing something for the sake of doing it, of being in tune with one’s ego and mortal limitations, that there are things born out of simplicity and pleasure. That I may be stuck in a hazy loop of sleepless nights because I like my process grimy, slutty, hallucinatory, justified. That I wouldn’t have it any other way: I love hard and unabashed work, I love my inconsistent rhythm, talking to strangers and ugliness of the sublime. My fealty to this life, imperfect as it is, is real and true.

Under a woman’s skin is surgically implanted hatred, panic, gore, but sometimes an earnest dream, too. Both her distrust and lust for life breed a certain depth of mind, a case for brave thinking, seeing the world for what it is. This depth is so appealing to the insolent tech elite because it’s unreplicable. It’s not subject to algorithms or strategy. It drives them crazy that graceful taste remains inaccessible to them. If they wanted to claim it, they’d have to get curious enough to talk to us first.

The hungriest of us are curious about our own desire: its novelty, its nature, duration. We want to know how it has morphed and changed from Sappho all the way to the intelligence age and algorithmic hyperawareness.

What is female desire as a theme and a structure? Is it ambivalent or direct, steady or ephemeral — and what’s that symptomatic of? Does it get flattened online or expressed more freely?

What does female desire look like today in a world where women are being sold Meta glasses and VC-backed shopping plugins presented as revolutionary tech inventions?

I invite you to join me on August 27 or September 1 for an online discussion/workshop to reflect on the above. (The sessions are identical and divided for time zone convenience — select your preferred date!)

We will be dissecting desire in the ephemeral digital through my favorite literature, media, and pop culture gems, from Anne Carson to Caroline Polachek and tech memes. Probably the only online event where you’ll get this range of references. Just saying….

All participants receive the syllabus ahead of the event to get familiar with the material, and everyone gets the opportunity to talk/chat/connect/reflect/ask and answer questions. Or simply listen with your camera & mic off if you feel like it — we’re in the ephemeral digital, after all.

RSVP for Session I

RSVP for Session II

$35

FREE for paid subscribers to club reticent — simply select “Free Entry” on the ticket page.

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, you can get 25% off annual:

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(it lets you access beautiful events like these & lets me keep the publication going!)

xx More info on the Club Reticent IG

See you soon!

The wanting itself is a restraining order against autonomy, a temporary suspension of life. Honoring the dead and the living in the land of untouchable proximity. Strip it bare, and under the layers of dirt, despair, undignified behavior, there it is – a flickering light of hope. Remaining moments are laconic vignettes in between: pale thighs marinating in the July sun, showing up first at the party, photographic memory, assembling mindless notes on paper, strawberry swirl, rethinking it over, trying to spread thoughts across days like jam on burnt toast so they don’t clutter. All measures suffice when you want and when you don’t want but mostly when you’re in the blissful between, a land of indifference, which I prefer because it means I get school holidays from wanting.

Desire was bad for me. It was grounds for cruelty. Family told me I was abrasive, rude, corrupt, like any word escaping my mouth and touching the room was there to disturb and batter. But my sternum was already showing and I had exhausted all the noble ways of getting what I needed, so why were they so upset with me?

The shortcut from wanting to getting is pleasing. Everyone knows the equation, everyone acts accordingly then pretends they didn’t. This is human.

Read more

I attempt to do just that in my latest essay, which you can read here:

The essay only goes so far, chained by limitations like word count and attention span, so I’d like to invite you to an online lecture/workshop I’m hosting Sunday, July 26. Anchored in the works of Annie Ernaux and Chris Kraus, with the eye on the ever-evolving “personal essay” genre, the discussion will go into what confessional really means as a label, “did the journal factory explode” and why preserving interiority as a woman writer might sometimes be more pleasurable - and more sovereign.

It’s a continuation of the themes already explored in the essay, but in a more playful/honest/conversational setting where we also get to chat, reflect, and ask each other questions. We’ll wrap up with two exercises to help you locate your own confessionality and understand your relationship with it. No writing experience needed! Curiosity required.

We’ll meet on Sunday, July 26 at 7 pm cest / 1 pm est / 10 am pst.

FREE to attend for paid subscribers to club reticent! If you’re a paid subscriber, kindly DM me with your email to RSVP. You can upgrade to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

If you’re a free subscriber and won’t be upgrading, a one-off ticket for the workshop can be purchased here: https://luma.com/uj77tjx1

All participants that have either purchased a ticket or RSVP’d via DMs will receive an invite link to Google Meet two days before the event.

I’m excited to see you! <3

As someone geographically removed from the American lit landscape, I tend to be, in a very European out-of-office sense, late to the game. Having given up on seeking new books via listicles and reviews, I stick strictly to my friend’s recommendations and spontaneous finds. I have a deep belief that if a good book is meant to reach me, the universe will find a way. A meet-cute did happen here: messaged me to see if I’d be interested in an advance copy of her new novel, Lovers XXX, about two aspiring artists Jude and Winnie who get submerged into the underworld of porn in 1980s Los Angeles. Beneath the drugs and sex, this is a novel about friendship, identity, and a woman’s continuous becoming.

Things have come full circle, and today Allie is our honorary guest. She walks me through her writing process, leather and lace truths of a plot, the importance of not rushing, assures me that my spiraling as a debut novelist is essential, and talks about distribution hangups that –shocker– still happen to an established, beloved author. Allie’s candidness is a gift.

Valerie: Congratulations on Lovers XXX. How do you feel about it now that the book is out in the world?

Allie Rowbottom: I feel so good. I loved writing it and I loved what came out. I felt very channeled in a way – the writing process was really fluid and easy. And I’ve had a great early publication cycle. But there are so many highs and lows when you put your work out there to be consumed. I sort of miss that time when it was just mine, when I was working on it and it was my world and no one else’s, and I was delighting myself with what was coming out. It’s obviously so amazing to hear people love the book and respond positively to it, but then I’ve also been dealing with some distribution hang-ups, which is not so fun. So the writing is the best part.

V: How would you compare the emotional, mental, and spiritual journey of writing this novel as opposed to your debut novel Aesthetica?

AR: I had published my memoir Jell-O Girls before Aesthetica, but writing a novel is so different from writing a memoir, and writing fiction is so different from writing non-fiction. So Aesthetica was my space to teach myself how to write a novel. And I’ll admit, I was in a rush to figure that out, to have a second book, because–again, with the highs and lows–publishing my first book was emotionally challenging. In a way, I really wanted a do-over. I was like: I just have to write another one so I can have a better experience this time.

With Aesthetica, the rushing held me back. It was a more fraught, tortured writing experience. It was: can I do this? Will I have a second book? Can I prove to myself and to everyone who I feel doesn’t believe in me that I can do this? All those chip-on-your-shoulder, negative voices were really strong. Publishing the novel silenced those voices (for a time) and cleared the way for me to write this one. Aesthetica had done well, and that success gave me the confidence in my vision and my ability to execute. I just rode that wave with Lovers, and I think it really served the book. It was such a fluid writing experience.

V: I’m working on my debut novel right now, and I think I can relate to your process with Aesthetica. Was the rushing more external or internal? I feel like I’m running out of time constantly, like I’m indebted to it, and it’s not the greatest place to write from.

AR: I think some urgency is good. It’s good to get things done, to have that fire under your butt. But then there’s a tipping point where it ceases to be useful.

V: Agreed. And how do you know when the draft is done? Is it a natural conclusion, an arrival, or a really hard deadline?

AR: With fiction, having a deadline can definitely be good, but in my experience you can’t really rush the ending, and you can’t rush something to being finished. A lot of the time what determines that the book is finished is an emotional aha, a moment between the book and its writer that can’t be manufactured. With all of my books there has been a memorable, tangible moment when I’ve written the ending – I can remember the feeling of writing the ending of every book and being like, I get it now.

V: That must be a beautiful feeling. I’ve never experienced that.

AR: You’re going to get there. You’ll feel it, and then you’ll know.

V: You’re someone who refuses to conform or mold your work to appeal to the masses. I find that very admirable. This must bring on a set of difficulties, too. Regarding the distribution hang-ups –Barnes & Noble not displaying your book in any stores– was it something you were prepared for?

AR: That’s a great question. I think I was vaguely, intellectually aware that this subject would be really activating for some people, media outlets and, in this case, booksellers. But I didn’t know it; I didn’t quite believe that in 2026 the topic of porn would be this taboo, because the porn industry is so omnipresent. Everywhere I go in New York, and even more so in LA, everything feels and looks like porn. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the cognitive dissonance of censorship in this landscape.

Nonetheless, I know that I’m getting a taste of something that adult film performers and sex workers, historically and currently, have to deal with all the time. It’s not as bad for me as it is for them.

V: I find it disingenuous and ignorant that there are so many books on bestseller shelves with quite harmful ideologies, but since the authors know how to bypass those guardrails and package dangerous subject matter nicely, it’s all good. Yet something more outwardly explicit is censored and penalized. I would hope the publishing industry –of all industries– possesses the depth and the nuance to understand these things, but seems like it’s still too much to ask for.

AR: I agree, it’s bizarre – you go into Barnes & Noble or any bookstore, and the romantasy genre is huge and, as I understand it, quite sexually explicit. Yet the covers are infantilizing. They look like children’s books. People want the pleasure of reading erotica–and no shame there– but want to be shielded from the larger machinations of erotic industries, or the realities of pleasure itself, or even desire itself. Culturally, it seems like people are retreating from critical thought: we’re getting more averse to nuance, because the internet foments black-or-white thinking. It’s easy to say something is good or bad instead of having to sit in the grey area between those things, which is where all good questions come from.

V: But then how do you evade that pressure to conform? When you know what’s digestible, what’s easy, what sells. How do you still maintain that integrity?

AR: I didn’t write this book thinking it was going to be a bestseller. I thought: this is what I want to write about. I might, in the future, not write about a topic as taboo as porn, or even plastic surgery. But I’ll never write about something in a simplistic way, or pander to a reader’s desire to moralize or judge a character.

It’s important to note I’m lucky to not have to fully depend on my publishing career to make a living. So I’m in the position where I get to choose what’s going to make me happiest at the end of my career and the end of my life. I would love to have the experience of having a bestselling book and enjoy interacting with tons of readers –I think most writers want that– but if it’s between that and compromising myself artistically, I’m always going to prioritize what I think has the most artistic merit. I’m never going to put the marketplace first. It wouldn’t matter if I had a million readers – if I’d written something I didn’t fully stand behind, it would feel dissatisfying to me.

V: I understand. In your recent interview for Cultured, you mentioned you feel less pressure now to be palatable, to be a certain type of author. Do you think that’s more of a “finally” career milestone, or a natural evolution as a person and as a woman – growing into yourself, discovering who you are?

AR: I think it’s both. I’ve been around long enough to see that sales and awards do not necessarily correlate with artistic merit. Many readers have the experience of sitting down with an extremely hyped book – and then going, this is it? If you see that happen enough times, you realize the things you maybe thought you wanted when you were starting your career don’t have the same meaning because they’re doled out politically, or they’re about marketing, or whatever else besides the work itself.

And then, yes, it’s also just the path my career has taken. I steered this ship. I didn’t always know what I was doing, but I steered it by following my intuition and wanting to write about things other people don’t talk about, or in ways other people aren’t talking about them. This is where I ended up, so I accept it.

V: You said something in an old interview of yours that moved me so much, I wrote it down: “the plot must do everything in its power to reveal and push from the character the emotional truth of the book.” Does that still stand true to you? And what were the particular moments in crafting the Lovers plot where that felt true?

AR: Oh, great question. Yes, that feels very true to me – it feels like the purest understanding of plot. There are books out there that are all plot, and those maybe fall more into genre categories, like thrillers (not to say there aren’t literary thrillers). In those super plot-heavy books, the plot can just be plot; it doesn’t require deep revelations from the characters, or push the characters to become their truest selves. But in literary, plot-driven fiction, the story and character are inseparable.

In Lovers XXX there were so many moments like that. It’s a pretty intricately plotted book. A lot of the pressure, especially in the first half of the book, comes from Jude’s relationship with Laird. He’s kind of an annoying character, but he does a lot of work to push her to figure out what she wants. He’s also the catalyst for her deciding to do porn, and that becomes a turning point as well. So maybe as an addendum to my quote: character and plot are inextricable. Characters not only drive plot, they kind of are plot.

V: When writing Aesthetica, you rewrote the ending multiple times to land on something you were satisfied with. Could you walk me through that journey?

AR: I had to write a bunch of different plots for that book – I was rushing and figuring out how to make a novel happen. What I discovered as I tried and failed is that I had to slow down and get to know my character: what was it about her that was compelling to me in the first place? Not just what she wanted, but what the characters around her wanted, and what that could tell me about what this book was deeply about. It’s about plastic surgery and influencer culture on the surface, but what it’s really about is identity, performance, and mother loss, the loss of girlhood, which is taken away from us by image culture and patriarchy too soon. Initially, the book was doing none of that. I was just writing a buzzy novel that pushed buttons a little bit with the plastic surgery stuff. Then I thought, that’s not the kind of writer I am. I’ve got to go deep on the emotional things that are sincerely compelling to me.

V: How do you approach the emotional truth in your writing? Sometimes I feel like I’m negotiating with my truth and its depth, keeping things safely on the surface. I’m not sure if it’s a fear thing or a woman thing.

AR: It’s probably a human thing. I suppose it depends on the kind of novel you want to write. I always tell myself: you’ve got to go there. Get down into it. But weirdly enough, depth and truth are subjective. I remember seeing a goodreads review of Aesthetica that said “she only scratched the surface of these themes.” And I thought that was such an interesting craft dilemma. If you really go deep on every subject of the novel, you end up with a very long book. Is that the best vehicle to deliver the story? Sometimes, the best mode of delivery means not spending quite as many pages delving into the emotional truth of this or that. And sometimes, keeping it briefer gives the reader space to start asking themselves questions that will help them get there in the long run.

V: Fascinating. That means we all have different expectations going into a book. So what is depth, really, and how do we measure it?

AR: That’s the question. I think the only person who can determine the answer is the writer. You, as the writer, have to feel like this book is the execution of your vision, that it is what you wanted it to be, that you’ve said everything you wanted to say about this topic, and you feel done. That’s the feeling when you’re done: I’ve said everything I needed to say. Reading is just so subjective, more now than ever, I think, because the internet has democratized taste. So there will always be people out there saying you’ve failed. Which just makes it all the more important to have that private moment before the book is printed, where you determine for yourself that it’s what you wanted it to be.

V: How do you feel about the fact that everyone’s a cultural commentator/strategist/tastemaker?

AR: Honestly, I have a PhD in literature, and I would never rate someone’s art on a scale of one to five. I find it bizarre. I guess it’s good that people are engaged and want to share their reading experiences, but I find the impulse to rate almost anything that’s not an appliance, strange. But, hey, everyone’s a fucking expert apparently.

V: I find this common thread across your career and the interviews you’ve given: you’ve always been pretty open about the publishing process. Agents, readers, reviews, the marketplace at large. Where do you think this transparency comes from?

AR: It’s funny – as a person, I’m actually very conflict-averse. But I do feel like a bit of a contrarian and a button-pusher when it comes to systems I see as disingenuous. I’m sure that’s just any industry predicated on selling art. When I published my first book, I played the game. I was so well-mannered about the whole thing, buttoned up and deferential. But there’s a lot of bullshit in the publishing industry not built around taking care of, protecting, or benefiting writers. It’s really hard to make it as a writer, and even harder to feel supported – in a way that to professionals in many other industries would be appalling. There’s a culture of silence around it because people want to continue being published. It becomes this thing where nobody wants to talk about the challenges or the difficult truths.

So if I can help other writers who are starting out, and speak a little truth to power, I’m going to do it.

V: I’ve had conversations with people in the industry who don’t get my vision, and they felt the need to let me know that in less than kind ways. As a young writer, I felt so disempowered. One of them on a call was like, “I don’t really see this angle of a modern woman. What is a modern woman?” And their own website hasn’t been updated since probably 2004. I felt like, man, what a waste of time to try and explain to you the concept of a modern woman.

AR: God. I remember somebody passing on Aesthetica and saying, “I don’t see how plastic surgery and feminism connect.”

V: That is the consequence of being ahead of your time. You mentioned that Maggie Nelson was your mentor – must have been the greatest time ever. Do you remember any striking moments with her, or something she said that made an impact?

AR: I was 23 when I studied with Maggie, and it was a two-year MFA program at California Institute of the Arts. I worked on this project about caretaking my mom when she was sick with cancer. Some of it ended up going into my first book, Jell-O Girls, but it was a completely different project at the time. I remember getting to the end of my MFA and asking Maggie if I should be sending the manuscript out and looking for agents. She told me, very kindly, “I think you shouldn’t rush to publish so young.” I’m sure “this book isn’t ready” was the subtext – but she told me to take my time, and not to look at publishing as the destination. It’s really about the writing, and developing your voice, and taking your time. I’ve held onto that one.

V: That is brilliant advice. What other women writers have made an impact on your career and your life?

AR: When I was in high school, I read Annie Dillard for the first time, and that was really mind-blowing to me, a transformative moment. Her ability to write with such detail, and take seriously so much minutiae of everyday life and childhood, was really revelatory. That set me into reading Mary Karr and exploring memoir as a genre. Those were the days when memoir, especially by women writers, was just becoming recognized as literary, and there were a lot of tantrums being thrown by critics, particularly male critics, about memoir as a lesser art form. The discourse around Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss is a prime example of what I’m talking about, and is still google-able. Or Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life. Then, in college, I got really into experimental women’s fiction: Carole Maso was very influential to me, and she brought me to Woolf and Duras. In writing Aesthetica I looked a lot at Mary Gaitskill, and in writing Lovers I looked a lot at Franzen, Eugenides, Denis Johnson, Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, and Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. That’s a partial list, but it’s interesting to me how over time your interests shift and shape-shift a little, and it all comes together in the end to inform a body of work.

V: What is something you wish you had known before you even started out? What would have eased the anxiety and the turmoil of it all?

AR: That’s a tough one. There’s a part of me that wants to say: it’s all going to be okay, you’re going to make it. But if I’d known that, I’m not sure I would have felt as driven to create good work. I think the not-knowing is part of what gives the work heat. So as much as I hate anxiety, I don’t think I’d take much of it away. But, sometimes when I’ve written something I really like, I have this feeling that I’ve done something wrong and I’m going to be punished for it. I think it comes from telling something really true. If I could take that away, it wouldn’t be a negative.

V: What’s next for you? After completing a big project, life always feels like a liminal space.

AR: I’m excited to take a little bit of a break. I’ve mentioned rushing so much, and that’s kind of part of how I write, so I’m sure the break won’t be very long. But I’d like to take a bit of a break and work on an essay that I started. I would also like to write a pilot episode about an idea my husband and I had that involves money laundering and horses.

V: How is it, collaborating with your husband Jon Lindsey?

AR: Collaboration is a skill we’ve developed over time. We met in that grad program I mentioned, and we’ve watched each other grow as writers, helped each other hone our artistic visions, and learned how to read and critique each other’s work without pissing the other person off. Jon is my most trusted reader. If I didn’t have someone I knew would be super honest with me, I think I would be a significantly weaker writer. I trust him more than anyone in the world. Even if I don’t like to hear it, I’ll take it, and I know it’s going to make the work better.

V: That’s incredible. I think that alone just crushed 99% of the heteropessimism articles coming out lately. Thank you so much, Allie – for your mind, for your fiction, for the grit.

Lovers XXX is now available everywhere.

Evidently, it’s easier for a woman to attract readership when she employs confessionality. This conclusion is not something I’ve come to lightly: it’s risen from the difference in engagement for my fiction pieces and ones with a higher degree of intimacy and locker room confession –a method I, too, used to employ shamelessly when I saw people have a near unanimous demand for women being #real on the internet– but also from the larger online trends I’ve observed while growing into myself as an author. When the stories of immediate virality are incredibly personal or present as such, sharpened for shock value and lively discussions, the inability to make headlines for a writer whose work is rooted in fiction, or, on the contrary, is theory-heavy, will be frustrating. The allure is understandable, as leaning more into the personal “I” is an obviously faster pathway to the beast otherwise known as ‘literary success’ on the internet. But is it more rewarding?

Take a look at what’s trending: any opinion piece from The Cut involving intimate details of a lived experience, often without consideration, the story about a woman finding out her boyfriend has been dissing their relationship through ChatGPT (in which she calls herself ‘too petite’…) or morally superior exposés of people’s roommates/sisters/girlfriends hiding their Ozempic use. It isn’t quite up to me to label what’s lowbrow and what isn’t –we can each make our private judgments– but I do find myself with a dwindling patience and an ick for violation of privacy in the name of inflammatory, urgently ‘honest’ content, served without the decorum, respect, and beauty that approaching it through fiction or well-researched cultural commentary would otherwise provide. It’s this kind of sensationalism that tickles the brain, allowing the author to evade analysis, responsibility, and sometimes even integrity, as nothing beyond entertainment will be required of them. Emotional relatability is one hell of a drug – I only wonder where ethics go when it’s used as a shortcut to attention. If the new criteria for a writer and a critical thinker is a clickable enough story, who would dare to abstain?

The desire to observe and understand oneself through another is natural; this voyeurism we need to keep us alive and breathing, the brain is primed to seek relatability. The problem takes residence where ‘honest’ content tries to pre-empt disagreement by turning an argument into a personal wound, and it’s not always so easy to tell. From here, a question: have we learned to value confessionality over craft? To prefer it even, as not only does the confessional provide an escape from objectivity and genuine exploration, making it easier for the author to make bold, universal claims (all men lie and cheat; Gen Z women are not okay; everyone is losing weight; etc — see ’s latest essay1) but can be dangerously siloed from its context and the fabric of the environment that propels such opinions to begin with. When you’ve got a high-stakes emotional tale presented as scandalously candid and based on real events, everything else, in contrast, seems watered down to nuance and boredom and lack of idiosyncrasy. And public dissection of self is poetry, no less. This creates a feedback loop, a hostile symbiotic relationship: the writer who feels the need to disclose private life for engagement they otherwise struggle to get and for perceived legitimacy, and the reader who insists on mining any text for the real, verifiable biographical subtext.

Yet we’re missing something here. What separates memoir from fiction isn’t the factuality or evidence of one’s experience, but the form it’s given. What is “I” in writing? And how does it function? In theory, it could be anything, couldn’t it? Our understanding of “I” is pretty binary: either the author telling the absolute truth, or a character being invented. What if it was an instrument of inward gaze rather than factual interpretation of real or imagined events? What if it contained within itself both real and imagined events in an amorphous mix? The self then stops being a content farm and becomes a case study – a way of looking, or searching, or even addressing the collective, as opposed to confession on the page.

Women writers transcending –at times flat out rejecting– the traditional understanding of “I” is not new. Annie Ernaux, known for her mesmerizing work that faces class, gender, power, and desire, that critics would always cite as autobiographical (and she would continuously argue with that claim,) wrote in her essay Towards a transpersonal I2: “the I that I use seems to me an impersonal form, barely gendered, sometimes even a word belonging more to “the other” than to “me”. Ernaux’s approach gives a new meaning to the personal-impersonal pendulum, creating a third dimension: an undeterred other-narrator. She lifts the structures of fact and fiction to move what’s underneath uniquely and masterfully, bending our understanding of what a woman’s personal experience means when used as a narrative device and not for navel-gazing practices.

Confessionality may very well have become a way of reading, not just a way of writing: it is the presumption that self-writing is always accurate, factual, and even earnest (people rarely believe women are clever enough to employ satire, but that’s a conversation for another day — has said this better than I ever could.) The way we engage with most writing today is to assume its “I” is the author, telling the truth and relaying an experience. This is prevalent and applicable to pretty much any woman creating today, from the backlash would have to endure during Girls to the hot girl didion’s pinterest disciple essayist archetype. In all this lies a presumption that women cannot intentionally speak of the world by speaking of themselves — that our narcissism, or foolishness, won’t let us. As Valérie Baisnée writes in her paper I am she who does not speak about herself3: “are narratives centered on the self and those centered on the world mutually exclusive?” My personal anecdote is that, to this day, with my publication listed under ‘Fiction’, I get comments from people thanking me for the bravery and honesty in my writing. Some have said things along the lines of “hope you’re okay…” It is common, albeit reductive, for the reader to assume that a woman’s “I” is always rooted in personal experience – Ernaux herself said, “...when I met readers who often attributed the narrator’s experience directly to me, and whom I gave up correcting: “not me, the heroine.”4 Anything else seems to cause some level of confusion or distress – partially due to the inflation of confessional content we discussed earlier, the “I” as the center of everything, and the subsequent discomfort where literacy and nuance are required.

Confessionality as a genre-bending practice is not exclusive to Ernaux. Take Marguerite Duras, for instance, who alternated between “I” and “she” in The Lover for narration purposes. Or Anaïs Nin, whose diaries bravely shattered (though by necessity at the time) the false barriers between fiction and non-fiction, diary and novel. The asymmetry in reception of confessional works by women versus men is evident, which is why I’m only listing women writers. Another stark, memorable example of confessional exploration to me will forever be Chris Kraus, whose disclosure, while not rejecting shock value and at times flirting with it, is a tool that weaves theory and commentary so compellingly, the “I” is absorbed by the collective and becomes the voice that speaks for us all. I Love Dick (1997) is an epistolary novel years ahead of its time, blending memoir, essay, and fiction. Kraus has spoken many times about confessionality: in her Interview Magazine conversation with Leslie Jamison5, she says: “The things that happen to me are things that happen to everybody. They’re not unique. So to talk about them candidly – there’s nothing confessional about it.” Earlier, she says “Confessional of what?” and quotes Deleuze: life is not personal. Kraus rejects the partition at its root, refusing to separate confession from criticism. To her, one is expressed through the other.

What we see united in the works of Ernaux, Kraus, even Dunham as a more contemporary example, is that the “I” is an instrument. It isn’t selfish. There is a deliberate attempt to transcend themselves, turning to the collective exhibit and pointing outward — high quality, considered confessionality does that. The most seamless and powerful cultural commentary always rises from the “I”, but the self is merely a portal to go further and deeper, a democratized hook weaving a myriad of elements together. The weight of self-awareness and objectivity hopefully holds the ego down. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about a lot of the writing we see trending online, where confessionality is wildly misused. Online, emotional relatability is simply the most efficient consumable — there is no denying it. Here, the female self as instrument and the female self as content become indistinguishable by design – the medium can’t tell the difference, and why would it? A loophole has been found: one in which this relatability is used to make a claim, any claim, unfalsifiable. The “I” online is a closed subject in which everything begins and ends at the same spot, where nothing can enter or leave, where objectivity goes to die. But it’s, well, disingenuous.

Important to note that none of this is a case against women writing about themselves: we’re historically deprived of the practice, so I’ll always cheer for us in doing it. It’s essential, in fact, for us to thrive. What I’m wary of is confessionality that asks nothing of itself and bears no responsibility. The personal “I” performs as universal far too often: once you see it everywhere, it’s hard to unsee.

I’m fascinated and excited by the prospect of using imagination, theory, and mythology to make sense of reality and relay it through symbols, plots, and creative use of language. I’d hope that recruiting yourself in a content farm of your own making is not the only way to build and sustain something longstanding. I have been lucky enough to find out, through trial and error, that my preferred way of using “I” as an instrument is highly fictionalized, with reality distilled for interpretation and theory as an invisible backbone, and that my private life shall remain private. Vagueposting, if you will? I have no desire to write about life occurrences directly — being overly confessional has always made me uncomfortable, which took some time to admit as I continued to gain readers by sharing too much for my liking. Now, when an argument arises from a personal event –as it always does for any writer, any artist, any person– it has to undergo dutiful processing and filtering and be worked on until it points to the world and every woman in it, and not just back at me. I feel a sense of responsibility to speak of the world and not just of myself. I’m aware not everyone shares it. Maybe not everyone has to.

But resisting the “I” curated as a cheap cry for people to look at me and love me immediately or judge the people around me has been crucial to my journey as a writer, and a much more interesting path. This recalibration might’ve cost me a faster route to glory and praise, but it has done wonders far more important: preserved my interior and the gravitas of my life existing as something sacred, whole, and not for sale, and equipped me with a more nuanced view of the world I want to cultivate in my future fiction and non-fiction. It is a stylistic choice as much as it an ideological one. The “I”, for me, now serves as a distant symbol of interiority, not a replica of interiority itself.

Many questions remain. Is confessionality expected of women – worse, have we let it become our default posture? Can we, as readers, feel intimacy and belonging with the author without demanding she earn it by stripping bare? And can we, as writers, find more interesting ways of using the “I” in our work? I don’t want us to see our interiority as anything less than the powerful instrument it is. Intuitively, this approach feels more empowering than equating empowerment to a tell-all story where I’m the hero, the narrator, and the critic.

Good writing searches. It seeks answers. It does more than simply spit out a confession and leave you there unable to respond, object, or engage truthfully. With that being said, I’ve joked a lot about spiritually selling out, and who knows if I’m actually above it. Depends on the check, I suppose.

There is so much more to dive in on the confessionality in writing: its gendered charge, confessionality in non-fiction VS fiction, who gets to be confessional and what it costs, “did the journal factory explore” – I’ve decided to try something new, so I’ll be hosting a hybrid online lecture/workshop on July 26th. It’s on a Sunday at 7 pm CEST / 1 pm EST / 10 am PST. Duration is about 1.5 hours, writing experience not required. Free for paid subscribers to club reticent – please DM me for access and link! Otherwise EUR 25. Tickets: https://luma.com/uj77tjx1

See you! I love you! I really do.

Eggleston’s Americana. Enshrined ideas. Everything is archaic and the websites are outdated, I say, but they will say it’s not their fault I’m talentless; they’re not wrong. Everything is either nuclear or unresolved, politics is both. Expecting a man to get it, and he might get close, but then he’ll boast and brag about it forever, which defeats the purpose. Fiona Apple’s There’s no hope for women. Flatlining over the canal. Flossing, drinking sake, going home. Fran Lebowitz is right about 99% of things. Fresh wind from the thunderstorm. Functionally and not masturbatory. Godard’s selfish dialogues. Gossamer lines on my skirt. He likes me, I have every piece of evidence. Heaviness of the body. High fidelity speakers.

I don’t remember any of my previous apartments or the faces of the people I was supposedly in love with, so I don’t have memoir material. I first found that book at the antique shop in Malmö right when I met him and then I didn’t read another book for ages, we were preoccupied. I shall lie on top of him in a fetal position forever and nothing can touch me, nothing including my relentless ambition. I’m not the girl who misses much. I want peace too, it’s not just them. In lieu of entitlement. Ingrown hair is the body protesting against its beautification. Is this all I’ll ever get to feel. It must look easy. It shouldn’t be hard. It makes me very lonely how preoccupied everyone’s been with success. It’s been just a little over four years, still nauseating. Jean Paul Gaultier print. Keeping good things. Kissing in arrivals then feeling embarrassed forever. Knowing that it’s too late in life for me to hone my skill through a competitive eating disorder and if I were to give into deep neuroses of the mind, I’d have to put that to socially formidable and respectable use and get married, run a marathon, or get a PhD.

Lacking sharpness. Leaving is the point. Macrocosmic disappointment. Making mommy proud. Maraschino cherries and Knots by R.D. Laing. He wants her to want him To get him to want her she pretends she wants him To get her to want him he pretends he wants her. My LinkedIn inbox. My music taste is never above whatever is trending on the internet because it’s probably good, and the same cannot be said about literature. My trivial knowledge of the world around me and everything weighing me down. Not washing fruit or berries, “I’m training my immune system”. Paris. Peptide ads. Realization no one will ever love me like I should love myself but I can’t love myself like that because I know no one will love me like I should love myself. Red fishes with their orange tails, swimming in circles, showing that another way is possible. Rejection practice. Selective forgetting. Self-evasion in a city. Simplicity of mind. Stardom preferences. Success is a magpie, blue tail. Surreptitious kissin’.

TBC: to be confirmed; TBI: to be impressed; use that when you’re reading something painfully boring. The blurred boundary between those coming home at sunrise and those heading to work, meeting along the way just in this only instance, there is no other way for them to meet. The characters in my novel inflated by their egos and subdued by the narrator’s empathy. The clarity in my face rises and goes like breathing, like the sun. The coerced line between thought and emotion. The ends that hang unprompted at the altar, waiting for me to rewrite them, but I refuse. The failure of neo-modernism. The joke doesn’t land and you’re left to this leathery heartache. The publishing industry bone marrow. The year he left. The year I’m writing about despite what the doctor said. Thicker skin is guaranteed when you’re in it long enough. Three what I eat in a day videos back to back and the girls all had very sad eyes. Times New Roman 12. Training wheels. What is my age worth. Whispering. Women don’t need to be warned about men any more than they need to be warned about themselves. You’ll benefit a lot from farming your fragility at the cost of fragility itself. You’ll be okay, please eat and sleep well.

1

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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