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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famesick — Lena Dunham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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one for each

leave what resonates, take the rest

send to a sweet lover or a mean ex

Love letter 1, for the crushing

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

Love letter 2, for the hurting

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

from: the day he changed his profile picture

Love letter 3, for the disappointed

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

Love letter 4, for the jealous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I am a 1998 child, hopeful and bright, raised on privatization and neologisms, glorifying the American mind through the post-soviet picket fence, edged for positive change that never comes. A child that knows the price of milk and eggs and the effects of cultural ambivalence. That knows presentation prevails over substance. Something looks good and new, so it must be good and new. In 6th grade, only four people in my class had smartphones. A few years down the line, we were putting the Valencia filter over our Instagram photos each on our individual iPhones, shaping the early look and feel of the very platforms that would later become surveillance playgrounds and techwealth goldmines. It was all cute and communal. I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, now even the most surreal dreams are pestered with my clicking through some sort of user interface.

We were both early adopters and raw material for learning, unknowingly helping write the new social contract. Our brain formation was parallel to spaces that taught us the world is to be viewed through the perceived self, not experienced directly through the senses. The symbiotic tie of desire to action was broken: there was a third party to consider beyond just yourself and what you wanted. Yourself, the world, and the computer. I want the whole entire world, but what does the computer want? And when I get there, will it still feel like sitting in my room with just my face lit up? I hope the computer is sentient enough to have my best interest. When I’m online, I feel surrounded, warm, included. Merged and tethered, degrading together.

To be visible on the internet today is to occupy a unique domain without the pursuit of uniqueness. Effortless vantage of an unpainted being with a painted life. A ‘distinct voice’ must be divorced from all the desperation and attempts it takes to carve one. At the same time, we’re obsessed with authenticity, with its deployment – often disguised as a certain unseriousness and afterthought of labor. The result is more output, more accessible intellectual commons, less focus on digestion and ownership. First come first serve, no edits, low stakes. Things wither before they’re fully metabolized, so even when we claim we want slowness, the winning solution is more of everything. “The rhetoric of authenticity partakes of notions of pure beginnings and implicitly denigrates what comes later, which is marked as corrupting or contaminating,” Erika Balsom writes. “The desire for authenticity is no escape from commodity fetishism but its apotheosis.” But it’s just the internet, it’s not that deep!

Of course it’s not that deep. Except it is. When anyone can put my essay through ChatGPT or Claude and replicate it in their own tone of voice with okay quality, I’m not convinced spending hours arranging thoughts and letters is the best use of my time. No one would dare to catch a cheat amidst en masse AI slop. “The word on the page may not reveal (may conceal) the flabbiness of the mind that conceived it,” Sontag once noted in her journals. I am no victim - I know what I’m trading. But it’s not like the fruits of my labor come in anything but pride and moral superiority: the human touch on things doesn’t make me richer or more talented, doesn’t grant access to anything beyond keeping my own cognition intact. Quality is hard to come across, but in itself doesn’t guarantee attention. I guess we crave a chokehold to a certain standard.

On the flip side of the pressure, something worse resides: being offline. You’ll be relentlessly advised to log off to preserve sanity. Disconnecting is the new luxury – that’s what a content creator with a tripod told me. If it’s a luxury, then I shouldn’t be too spiritually broke to afford it. The advice sits with bitterness in my mouth as many of us are still trying to carve a space for ourselves on the internet, tending to our work like it means something beyond content. ‘Going offline’ implies the existence of two independent self-contained spaces, the online and the offline, where one can be forsaken in favor of the other. Any person relying on their work being online will tell you that is not the case. They’re intertwined mediums: my presence online determines what offline looks like tomorrow. My trying is not for nothing, posting not optional nor a guilty pleasure. I can’t succumb to a line of thinking that leaves a lot to the imagination and nothing to reality.

Writing is the most selfish-selfless communication form there is. Words have a firmness and permanence to them. Art surviving in growth optics requires a healthy distance between thought and product, between the self and the computer, the boundaries of which are incredibly blurred. I’ve spent the last two years on Substack, watching the platform scale and change trajectory in real time, just like I watched Instagram scale and change over a decade ago whilst unknowingly serving as raw material of data, behavior, attention. My envy for those who managed to exit (or diversify) the rollercoaster strategically is green as ever. A lot of us are getting there or failing to – the balloon of grandeur has deflated. Yet, it’s not entirely up to us to ‘hack it’ – in fact, I think it’s harder to break through for the kids who, building the culture, perpetually helped build the machine itself. The algorithms are trained on our sensitivity, on our seeing ourselves as an extension of the platforms we say we want to abandon. We’re inherently at a disadvantage.

Beyond all this, I’m no complainer; I like being alive and grateful, residing somewhere between deep research and Ozempic ads, negotiating with the machine, not really understanding if I’m making something truthful or just nibbling on my own tail from one platform to the other. And if this is what it’s supposed to feel like, no matter the medium, then at least I can say I tried.

A tale as old as the web: woman is crushed under the weight of political unrest and microplastics. Woman is vain enough to care about money and popularity. Woman needs to log off, but woman wants to be famous on the internet. What’s woman to do? Roll around outside in the dirt? Or push through the chest pressure, reach her arm wide out for a 0.5 photo? Well, for starters, woman is to take a breath. She’s to decide what comes next. A manuscript, an exhibition, cultural decline, apocalypse, irrelevance. She needs to understand why she does what she does and keep her dignity away from the machine. Maybe to live generatively, maybe to outlive collapse, maybe just to demand a better process of herself. Maybe to find out one of her most beloved artists is a subscriber. Little things can be big things. Long live, woman of the internet! Stay with us, stay online, stay safe.

P.S. I’m hosting another workshop in Amsterdam on January 24th with my friends at Pilot Magazine to celebrate the launch of their new issue You Are Here, which features my essay what the hell, sure. RSVP via my DMs - it’s free to attend!

Life happens in the middle of what could never go your way despite your best attempts and what goes better than you could ever hope for. Nestled between truth and imagination, our prediction compass is hopeful but unmistakably incorrect. A resolution is an assumption, and an assumption, even a positive one, quickly becomes a source of great annoyance over not having lived up precisely to what you set out to do: circumstances change, people change, you change, rapidly and with no remorse, all to a point where you become emotionally disconnected from your own goals, probably with a bitter aftertaste of failure and high yield responsibility. But to transgress the unknown and its limitless opportunity means to first allow for more uncertainty than we’re comfortable with. And act from there.

To my heart’s content, my philosophy for 2026 is minimalism of the exterior and maximalism of the interior, and learning to sit comfortably in that polarity. Without passing out.

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A year of getting it all wrong and doing it alright. A year of hometown praise with an incision of a dreadful, necessary past. A year of skating on thin ice, rule bending, rewriting scriptures of playbooks that don’t work, unable to decipher all the cursive secrets and burning pages on the stove. A year of going back to where it all started to find yourself no longer tethered to what it was, what it is, what it will be, what it could be. Not terrified of it either. It’s just a building, a biblical name, or a song, it yields no power. A year of inflated costs of trouble and paying the price for saying yes too soon. A year of being one with the motion, split in half by the applause. A year of running from the punchline into the arms of a joke.

A year of realizing ones who used to jump to your salvation may themselves need saving, consequently coming to terms with not needing to be saved, not anymore, not now, not yesterday, not ever maybe. A year of learning that some people want to play with you because you’re unwell, wondering if the regenerative cells where a new tail grows out will bring an ending, too. A year of questioning who you are when there’s no bone in your body that needs immediate resolve, a year of grief over the fact that you’re not in distress, wishing you’d get lower before you’re ready to go higher. A year of pointing to where things went wrong enough precisely enough to change course, but not enough to find the root.

A year of withdrawing from lowlife spiritual activities like social stalking, aura farming, LinkedIn inboxing, beige gossiping, corporate speak, and jumping ideological ships to save face. A year of dumbing it down for the blazers and the girlbosses. A year of repeating yourself to those who didn’t hear the second or the third time. A year of not looking at things from a different perspective when said perspective is made of cardboard held up with paper glue. A year of running down the stairwell of some soulless Upper East Side studio because climbing the belly of somebody’s status is not what it’s cracked up to be since you wanted to be a woman, not a parasite. A year of quitting when it’s time, quitting too early, quitting too late, quitting with no footnotes, quitting under a fictional rationale, out and through, to hell with victimhood, quitting on ferry boats in Noord and over lousy texts in Bedstuy, quitting upon the gripping force of intuition and knowing that if your gut has yet to fail you, the chances of it leading you astray are close to zero. A year of dismantling fairytales, mirroring assumptions, working hard, dreaming late, resting forced, being guilty, being good.

A year of tender summer and untouchable spring, a year of yearning for something that awaits around the corner and repents good girlhood. A year of mishandling responsibility and drifting. Accepting change, accepting rehabilitation. Accepting that if you can gather a room full of New Yorkers that love you, you can surely get up in the morning and exercise free will and maybe there’s no need to die. A year of laying down, becoming what you wanted, going rogue, working slow, coming up glad and lustful.

A year of rewriting decades of not being an angry person. Being angry, being unjust, lashing out. A year of walking the soil of where you shouldn’t be to find yourself exactly where fate itself sketched out a silhouette-shaped space for your uneven body. A year of looking forward, looking back, making a misstep, then making it count. A year of sweating for it and from it, physical, visceral, hungry, demanding, a year of damn good bagels and honest-heartful fucking.

A year of expansive, truthful, confronting, lucky love, love that gives, love that fits in the closet and beams through the raw material, love that wouldn’t know selfishness if it dressed itself in admiration, love that gets you supine and naked and presses on the bruised parts of you, lifts up the abscesses and pushes the liquid out, forcing chaos into healing against its familiar judgment and greedy defenses. A year of seeing in someone’s eyes, for the first time, a steady future with a playful tune, not a cemetery, an abandoned house, or a problem to solve. A year of crying-laughing gratitude nothing else stood a chance. A year of falling harder and growing softer under sun-drenched confessions, bar seat kissing, telepathy under Bernini’s David, smiling in Retiro, four in the morning proclamations, denying a safe space then decking it out for holidays. A year of knowing that a ghost of an unknown woman is not a threat unless you make her one, that a sword only haunts you until you call it a spade.

A year of overnight bags, mysterious stains, losing grip, homemade dinners, dragging your feet through Greenpoint, knocking doors off hinges, making a house a home, false alarming into the megaphone. Voicing what you need and fighting for yourself, knot in stomach, tooth and nail, knife in hand. A year of overexplaining where it matters and going rightfully nonverbal where it doesn’t. A year of disappearing before scrutiny’s first call, but everybody already knows why you’re gone and it’s not like anything needs to be said. A year of being rough, grateful, noticed, ridiculous, hot. A year of being an impossible woman having impossible fun.

Once in a golden moon or a sweet century, not predicted by a fortune cookie or a lucky number sequence, you will cross paths with somebody willing to see through your defenses. With their laser-sharp eye and attuned intuition, they’ll get to know the quirks, the off-key shower singing, the shortcomings of your own ambition, the different shades of angry you get depending on the day and instigator, and how to deescalate your bad day. They’ll want it all. You will blossom into who you’ve always longed to be. Am I overpromising here? Not quite, but read the fine print: this connection can only bind to your essence, not the image you’d spent years building around yourself.

As a retired Olympic champion of mind gymnastics, I used to trick myself and others with a polished, hollow shadow that would put on the Valerie suit and go out on dates. The resemblance was uncanny: same voice and mannerisms, just way more nonchalance and less intensity. No one disputes the human tactic of presenting as your best version. The trouble lies in our definition of best: mine equaled a woman that has few requests beyond the socially approved minimum. Needs? Forget about it! The deep obsession with presenting as what I’d labeled ‘normal’ would justify the lengths I’d go to mold myself into something that was not only a fabricated story, but a curation that failed to sustain itself. When ‘Sure, I’m open to just seeing where things go’ is code for PLEASE PLEASE COMMIT TO ME I’M NEEDY AND LOUD AND HAVE SO MUCH LOVE TO GIVE, pretense reigns and potential goes out the window. The reward? Lukewarm, fleeting dating I deemed defective by pattern or accident, not understanding that my approach was the very thing rendering connection impossible. Denial loves company, and this extinction of my truth naturally attracted people equally as disconnected from themselves. I wasn’t bad at keeping people around. I was just bad at honesty.

This isn’t individual failing. We’ve worked ourselves into chronic disinterest, even when said disinterest is an array of a thousand unmet needs in a coat. In the ironic detachment trenches, being earnest is hard. That requires stepping out of yourself and taking off your performance review glasses, and that’s already too big of an ask. I’d argue that this milieu is generational, not gendered, which is why it appears across genders and sexualities. And research proves this: according to Hinge’s 2025 Gen Z D.A.T.E Report, 48% of Gen Z men hold back from emotional intimacy because they don’t want to seem ‘too much.’ 43% of Gen Z women wait for the other person to initiate deep conversations. Even the seemingly harmless discourse around dating, like whether having a partner is embarrassing, is a small but telling symptom of the pathology. Are we just doomed to be cool and lonely?

Collective change starts from the individual within. Boring, I know. Stepping into my truth wasn’t a beautiful metamorphosis, but a shift more yawn-inducing than that: I got exhausted. There’s only so much inauthentic disappointment and I-don’t-think-this-is-going-to-work’s a girl can take. It was around date number #24473 that the scale tipped and my fear of both rejection and misunderstanding was no longer outweighing the pain of self-erosion and pretense. If I hate it here anyway, I might as well be radically myself, steady in my solitude. Show up or go home. I decided that my unfiltered essence would no longer pose a threat to connection, but instead serve as the very filter for the kind of person I wanted by my side. What must be cultivated? Honesty. Weirdness. Exposure. And must be surrendered? Weaknesses. Assumptions. The terror of rejection. Absolved of a consolation prize, I no longer was interested in competing with anyone to be the most detached and unaffected in a relationship.

Something else emerged on the other side and took me by surprise. The most delicious breath of freedom I’d felt in a long time, upon permission to no longer let other people sway my authenticity, brought this newfound lightness and self-trust. With my brain freshly rewired and ready to be seen, I went on an unassuming date. All you need to know is my defenses were down, my humor unfiltered, expectations zero. Not at the hands of dread, but out of safety within myself. I wanted to let myself be weird, which ultimately meant I wouldn’t be calibrating for ‘normalcy’ and scanning for risk in the moment – weirdness is nothing but enough exposure to yourself to meet your truth. Vulnerability then becomes an invitation, not an assessment or a battle to win. I told him I was bringing out my clown suit. I was upfront about my disdain for casualty. I sprinkled in some deep and heavy stuff. Lay it all out on the table, mess it up, and you just might score big time. Our collection of inside jokes has been growing ever since.

Gen Z might be inconsistent in dating, but we’re very consistently misunderstood – notoriously seen as disconnected, irresponsible, cynical. I reject the notion that we lack the social skills to date, the necessary resilience to nurture, or the empathy to see beyond the flaws in one another. We’re not inept at building worthwhile things or immune to love at large. Our problem, rather, is one of permission: permission to show up as ourselves against the cognitive pull that breeds withdrawal and detachment. Permission to keep abreast of our needs, to feel deeply, to fill up the empty space with everything we don’t say out loud. Let’s skip the talking stage, for instance. Permission to take down the coolness scaffolding and be complete and utter weirdos with one another.

I could’ve spared myself a lot of sadness in a decade of devotion to being palatable and acceptable at the expense of my wholeness, but you live and you learn. Truth is, I’m a better person when I’m not concealing, a better lover when I’m not trying at all. When we get good enough at asking ourselves the wrong questions, eventually we’ll get to the right one: if not to be seen in all our bare weirdness and still be met with “Yes, I want exactly that!”... What are relationships even for?

Understanding others helps you understand yourself. Cheers to better, healthier, honest dating. Check out and download Hinge’s 2025 Gen Z D.A.T.E Report to know what’s going on with us, both as individuals and as part of a broader landscape.

Everything’s flat. Not in the mood for Christmas or salvation. Had to undress in front of a man who isn’t my boyfriend today. A dermatologist. Felt invasive, necessary. The story behind it is a suspicious mole in the middle of my back scheduled to be removed in January ‘just in case’. To lay there in a thong, fully familiarizing yourself with your own mortality, zooming in on the inevitable. I’m twenty seven! I had one job: to be invincible! Promise that I will be known as the woman with the least appropriate underwear, the worst convictions, and maximized shareholder value. The doctor’s eyes are cold and lifeless. Minimal empathy, rigid Dutch healthcare at its finest. It’ll be a 10 minute procedure. You’ll be fine. He probably delivers way worse news every day. I wonder how often his verdicts are met with a whiny ‘Am I going to have a scar from this??’ As if aesthetics come before vitality. They do. They always have.

But then the reconciliation comes. I think life jolts you awake with a health scare to remind you wouldn’t want to be remembered for your lifelong voluntary malnutrition or the number of emails sent or the petty who-what-where’s tagged in an Instagram story. All of this, however, is exactly what flashed before my eyes. The mind is no better than a recycling bin... It’s our desire to claw out of uncoerced misery that keeps us alive, maybe.

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