Inside me there are two wolves: one with a fervent love for classic literature, especially the Brontës, who desperately wanted a film that did this incredible, complex story justice. The other is simply thrilled at the prospect of watching a gold-toothed, cravat-clad Jacob Elordi on his hands and knees professing his undying love for Cathy. Neither is wrong, and both can be true.

Haley Larson, who writes Closely Reading, recently observed that the press surrounding “Wuthering Heights” was similar to the press surrounding the initial release of the book itself. I very much like this observation. Wuthering Heights is a novel that transcends genre, and while most would agree it lives primarily within the gothic literature tradition, it has whispers of romanticism, bildungsroman, and tragedy. Readers were unsure what to make of the novel upon its release, much like people don’t know what to make of Emerald Fennell’s film now. Since watching the film last weekend I’ve found myself swinging back and forth between binaries and attempting to puzzle out whether I loved it or hated it. But the answer to that question is both. The film pissed me off, yes. But it also delighted and thrilled me.

What I did not like.

The entire second half of the novel is left out. This is common in many adaptations, but I’m tired of it because it leaves out the redemption arc for everyone caught in the crosshairs of Cathy and Heathcliff’s tumultuous relationship. Cathy dies in childbirth in the book. Her child, also confusingly named Cathy, has a brief fling with Heathcliff and Isabella’s child, a pale, sickly, tantrum-y child named Linton Heathcliff, which concludes with his death. Cathy II is then reunited with her cousin Hareton (yet another character left on the cutting room floor, along with the hot-goss-loving Mr. Lockwood) and they fall in love.

The second half of the novel is pivotal, because it exceptionally illustrates the destruction of generational trauma. Cathy ultimately only married Edgar for security. Heathcliff, in response, married Edgar’s sister Isabella out of spite. Their respective children then bear the weight of these hasty decisions that now make up their shared reality, one they didn’t have any say in at all. After Cathy II and Hareton unite (and the original Heathcliff dies), they inherit everything, both material and immaterial. This moment signifies their opportunity to break with the inherited trauma and start anew. Without this ending, Fennell has made a love story—a dazzling one yes, but a love story nonetheless—rather than a film about what trauma and obsessive love destroy and leave behind.

Also, Heathcliff wasn’t white. This is perhaps my primary criticism of the film. It glosses over one of the most important themes of the novel: race, and the consequential trauma associated with a lifetime of being othered and looked down upon. Heathcliff became a successful man out of pure vengeance. His ethnicity in the book is only somewhat ambiguous, which is most likely why Fennell was able to take the creative liberties she took in casting Jacob Elordi without having to justify herself. But, similar to Bertha’s portrayal in Jane Eyre, he is explicitly othered several times throughout the novel. Heathcliff is described as having dark skin and black hair, is problematically referred to as a “gipsy” and an “imp of Satan,” with eyes “full of black fire.” Heathcliff’s othering was the impetus for the entire plot. The decision to remove this critical aspect of the novel left a gaping hole in the narrative structure of the film, one that had to be filled somehow—or with someone. With whom, you ask?

What I was (reluctantly) okay with.

Nelly Dean, of course, brilliantly portrayed by Hong Chau. Far from villainous in the book (more of a meddler and an unreliable narrator than anything), Nelly becomes the force that pushes the plot forward where Heathcliff once was. Her character bears the burden of a lifetime of being othered as an “illegitimate child of a lord.” This reframing works far better than I expected, and Hong Chau is incredible in the role. Still, it doesn’t entirely fill the hole left by flattening Heathcliff’s racial identity, it merely redistributes the wound rather than addressing it.

What I loved.

My queen Jacqueline Durran, I could never hate you. Durran has proven to us throughout her career that she clearly has range. We know she can deliver historical accuracy because we saw it in all of Joe Wright’s heavy-hitters: Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), and Anna Karenina (2012). We saw it in Little Women (2019), and even Barbie (2023). But here she has given us a modern spectacle wrapped in the delicate threads of a period drama, and that is no easy feat. Durran is that girl, and she will always be that girl. She outpaced her own legacy, proving that she isn’t just a master at producing something historically accurate but that she can push the limitations of the medium even further. I thought all of the costumes were beautiful, daring, and original, and I love that many of them were inspired by art history, mixing elements of baroque, rococo, and neoclassicism.

Also, Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights album is insane. I am a massive Charli xcx fan. This comes with the territory of being a millennial who grew up on Tumblr. Much like Durran, Charli is a visionary who consistently pushes herself and her creativity into new territories, giving people things they didn’t even know they wanted. The legendary John Cale contributed to this album, and so did Sky Ferreira, yet another millennial icon. I cannot stop listening to Dying for You, a sparkling and frenetic record-skip of a song. I have no notes here. Charli delivered, as always. I am not surprised.

So where does that leave me?

Somewhere in the middle of the moors, I suppose. Fennell created something bold and strange and genuinely difficult to categorize, which is, ironically, exactly what Brontë did. I just wish she had trusted the full weight and complexity of the source material: the race, the wreckage, the second generation picking up the pieces of their idiotic forebears. But I’ll still be listening to Charli’s album on repeat, thinking about Jacqueline Durran’s Mugler-inspired iridescent costume and Jacob Elordi’s gold earring for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t Wuthering Heights, it was “Wuthering Heights,” and I suppose I’ve made peace with that. The film was a campy, glittering, bodice-ripping spectacle full of beautiful people, costumes, and sets. Much like spoiling your dinner with movie theater popcorn and candy, the film had little nutritional value, sure—but boy, was it a pleasure to devour. And you are full, are you not?

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When I was a little girl, I obsessively watched a Beatrix Potter VHS tape that had animated versions of her stories, like The Tale of Tom Kitten. One particular story I still think about is the Tale of Samuel Whiskers. Samuel and his wife Anna Maria, two humongous cat-sized rats, kidnap little Tom and attempt to turn him into a “roly poly pudding.” I’d feel panic rising in my throat as I watched them cover Tom in butter and tuck him into dough, sealing the sides with a rolling pin. That dread would instantly melt into relief as soon as I saw Mr. Joiner, a Scottish terrier, and his wheelbarrow of tools coming to the rescue.

I loved the stories, but what I remember most vividly is how mesmerized I was by the introduction sequence of this tape, where an actress portraying a young Beatrix Potter paints plein air on the property of her Lake District home flanked by all her animal friends. When she’s suddenly caught in a summer downpour, she packs up her supplies and runs back home with her dog to the warmth of her perfect little cottage. There, she makes herself a cup of tea and catches up on her correspondence. I watched this wide-eyed as a child, enveloped in the dry and unforgiving heat of Southern California, a sharp contrast from the lush landscapes of the English countryside, and wished someday to live a life just like hers.

I have yet to realize my dream of living in the English countryside, but I always find myself returning to the heart of that wish, which is really just a desire to live freely, among nature, surrounded by my animals, with ample time and space to let my creativity and imagination run rampant. That was my dream as a little girl, and it remains my dream today.

For now, I seek ways to suffuse my life in Los Angeles with the naturalist’s perspective. It is my way of attempting to answer a question that has likely been on all of our minds at one time or another: how do you find stillness in a world that runs much too fast? How can you slow down enough to enjoy the precious gift of time in a world, by design, that never leaves enough space for that to happen?

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1. Befriend some animals.

I talk to my dogs Rosie and Hank probably as much as I talk to my husband. I love to give them a good scratch on their heads and stare into their warm chocolate-brown eyes, watching their ears lift slightly in recognition when I say I love you. There is a small rabbit who occasionally makes herself known in our neighborhood. Sometimes I’ll catch a glimpse of her nervously chewing on a flower in our front yard before she darts back into the dark unknown of our neighbor’s hedges. I’m still trying to convince our neighborhood crows to trust me and bring me shiny objects. Once I lured them all onto our front yard using dog treats (our neighbors definitely think I am unwell), but my dogs caught sight of them and lost their minds and scared them all away. Baby steps.

I highly recommend investing in a bug-catcher. Yes—one of those plastic ones for kids with the magnifying glasses. I have one and I love it because I hate killing bugs. I’ve never understood the logic behind squishing bugs.1 Spider guts are so much worse than the actual spider, and you’re saving an important part of our ecosystem. They eat all the other gross insects you don’t want to deal with. They eat mosquitos! We hate those guys! Spiders also adapt to your routines which I find so polite and endearing.

2. Plant a garden.

A few weeks ago I ordered nigella, rudbeckia, cupcake cosmos, and catnip seeds (to lure cats, because we have a rat problem—I can’t be having a Samuel Whiskers situation on our property). The joy I’ve felt watching those seedlings sprout is unparalleled. Gardening is slow and demanding work. You are bent over soil for hours in the sun, lifting and pulling and pruning and tilling. But each time I emerge from it red-cheeked and filthy I am reminded of how essential that proximity to soil is for my wellbeing. Every time I lovingly tend to my little patch, I am acutely aware of my place in nature. Man has tried to deny and conquer nature for thousands of years. I try to be a steward, living in tandem with it as much as I can. This is keeping me hopeful about the future in the present moment.

3. Do something you never got to do as a child.

What was something you were never allowed you to do as a child? I know for many people it was eating in their room. For me, it was jumping on a trampoline. My mother was terrified by the horror stories she’d hear on the news and was worried I’d break my neck if I ever set foot on one. I was in my early twenties when I finally experienced the joy of a trampoline.

What is your trampoline? Dessert before dinner? Permission to make a mess and not immediately clean it up? Treating each morning like a game of dress-up and make-believe when you choose your outfit for the day? Find it and savor it.

4. Become a luddite.

Pick one day a week that remains sacred and refuse to engage in a specified list of modern technologies. It is important to figure out what triggers you the most, because otherwise it won’t be useful. I know people who genuinely do not struggle to curb their phone use. They are anomalies, but they exist. They do, however, struggle to limit their reality television intake, and I get it—I’m addicted to The Traitors (US and UK). Reality TV only becomes a problem when you’re using it to avoid your feelings, or that book you’ve been meaning to read, or that creative project you haven’t started yet. It is important to give your mind time and space to wander, and it very rarely has the opportunity to do that before the glow of a screen.

I also try to force myself to do something in the least productive way possible at least once a week. Sometimes I will stand in the longest line at the grocery store just because. We need to experience friction sometimes. Not everything should be glossy and streamlined and seamless. This is how you build the tolerance to stumble through the discomfort of a creative practice, or to learn affect and emotion regulation. It is good for your brain and your nervous system, and doing it regularly teaches your body that slowness and non-productivity are safe.

5. Develop a journaling practice.

It’s one of the most recommended self-care and mental health practices, yes. But it comes so highly recommended for good reason, and that is because it works. Most of the criticism for journaling is that you don’t need to write things down when you’ve already thought them through. That is not true. When you think about something, the thought process is cyclical. It is rumination, not constructive thinking. Writing your thoughts down alchemizes the nebulousness, stringing the abstract fragments into complete sentences so that they take up less space in your precious mind, which expands your capacity for creativity and resilience. Even if you think you’ve thought it all through, just try writing it down. I guarantee you will come away with something new.

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6. Do something just for yourself.

Make a date with yourself once a week, Julia Cameron style. I’ll be the first to admit I’m terrible at keeping up with this, but I am recommitting to the practice of the weekly date-with-self. Even if you think it’s silly, keep the date. Carving out intentional time just for you is one of the most effective ways you refill your cup. When I don’t make time for myself, I revert to survival mode. I have often found myself in the middle of a particularly hellish week wondering how I got from point A to point B, and why I am bothering to do any of this at all. That “why bother?” has become a signal for me. The creep of burnout is insidious, and recognizing your warning signs is critical. Take yourself to a movie, a museum, out to dinner, on a coffee date with a book, and remind yourself of your why.

7. Write letters.

Real, pen-to-paper letters. The kind that require a stamp and a return address. Preferably written in cursive. My thoughts on the dying art of cursive can be read in a bit more detail here. The implications are more severe than you’d think. There is something so wonderful about receiving a beautiful handwritten note. My father was in and out of prison and detention centers for a great deal of my childhood, and he would often write me long, elegiac letters with drawings, usually on yellow legal-pad paper. I still have some of them saved. Confusing as they were for a young child, I enjoyed them and remember them fondly. I think this experience contributed to my love of the art.

I just made Valentines for my entire family, individually addressed (even though they all live in the same house), each lovingly folded and illustrated. It took hours, but I loved it. I briefly had pen pals in my Tumblr days and I so looked forward to receiving those letters. I want to start a pen pal club again. If you’re interested, please let me know. I will write to you. Do not underestimate my love of old-fashioned correspondence.

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In Sophie Strand’s memoir, The Body is a Doorway, she quotes the poet Linda Hogan: to enter life, be food. I started this letter last week and have been tinkering with it daily, but something was always misaligned. What I was trying to communicate I didn’t yet have language for, and this quote kept lingering but I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I went to a screening of Hamnet yesterday and sobbed in the dark. Chloe Zhao spoke afterward with director Daniel Scheinert about her experience making the film and it invigorated me. She described the somatic impact of the actors internalizing so much grief, and so she required them, before and after particularly painful scenes, to pick a song and dance to it. Physically shake out the grief so they weren’t carrying it after filming. She used the words ritual and container often, which made my ears prick up in recognition. It sounded alarmingly similar to the therapeutic process: containing, integrating, releasing.

The Q&A itself opened with a dance. Zhao encouraged the audience to stand and shake out the grief we were holding after witnessing such a miraculously lush film of love and loss. And so the audience danced to “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place” as it blasted through tinny speakers. It felt particularly apt to bookend such a film with joy. Grief and joy are two sides of the same coin.

What wouldn’t come together when I started writing was this: the juxtaposition of grief and love. I knew they were inextricably linked, but I couldn’t yet verbalize why. Hamnet and Zhao helped me understand. Grief is love. To celebrate love we must also celebrate loss.

So my associations: mourning rituals and grief traditions, hand-fasting, mourning jewelry. The mythopoetic retellings of Orpheus and Eurydice, Cupid and Psyche. The cosmic irony of Romeo drinking poison, thinking Juliet dead, only for her to wake minutes later, too late. The gothic tradition held the two close—morbidity and mortality. Heathcliff, wild with grief, frantically digging up Cathy’s grave to hold her one last time. Faulkner’s Emily, the grey hair on the pillowcase beside the bones of her beloved. Mary Shelley preserving a piece of Percy Shelley’s heart, wrapped in poetry, in a box on her desk.

If death is the foil for life, grief is the foil for love. You cannot speak of one without the other. So when Linda Hogan says to enter life, be food—I think: to enter love, feel it all. Like life, love is a contract in which suffering is almost certainly guaranteed. I say this not with pessimism, but from the understanding that we are soft and finite. All things end. To accept love is to accept that your beloved will end, that you will end, but that is all part of the cosmic dance. To shield yourself from grief and pain is to shield yourself from love and joy. One cannot exist without the other.

Films About Love (& Loss)

• Bright Star (2009), Jane Campion. John Keats is my favorite of the Romantics aside from Mary Shelley, perhaps because his life was cut tragically short before he could do anything gross and chauvinistic like Lord Byron. I first fell for Keats in high school after reading Ode on a Grecian Urn, my favorite AP lit teacher pulling out all the theatrical stops in his recitations. Since then I’ve dreamed of visiting the Keats House Museum in Hampstead and seeing all the letters and gifts exchanged between him and his greatest love, Fanny Brawne. You can also see the engagement ring Keats gave to her, which she wore until her death in 1865.

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Céline Sciamma. Sciamma is an incredible director. Heloise, who has just left the convent and is to be married soon, is to have her portrait painted by Marianne—only, it must be done in secrecy without Heloise knowing. It’s been a minute since I’ve watched it, but so much of the symbolism and imagery is seared into my mind. Sciamma masterfully uses the female gaze as a device to explore what it meant to be a queer woman living under the patriarchy in 1770 France.

• Beginners (2011), Mike Mills. A semi-autobiographical film by Mike Mills about his father coming out and embracing his sexuality near the end of his life. The film parallels two love stories: one of Oliver and Anna, and another of Hal and Andy. It handles the beauty and complexity of grief and love (and what happens when the two occur simultaneously) so tenderly. It will always be a favorite.

• Black Orpheus (1959), Marcel Camus. A retelling of the classic Hellenic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that takes place in Brazil during Carnival. Camus beautifully captured afro-latino culture and life in the favelas through the vessel of this tragic love story. It is vibrant, joyful, and tender, even if tragic. The score is also wonderful, featuring the music of Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

• Moonstruck (1987), Norman Jewison. Incredible for so many reasons, but here are my top two: number one, Cher. That’s it. Number two, this may be the only film where I am attracted to Nicholas Cage.

  “We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and love the wrong people.”

• Romeo + Juliet (1996), Baz Luhrmann. I always associate this version of Romeo and Juliet with my childhood. My mother blasting the soundtrack in her car as we zoomed around Southern California, visiting places frequented in the film like the Venice Beach boardwalk. It will always hold a special place in my heart. Another incredible soundtrack that does not disappoint.

• L’Avenir (2016), Mia Hansen-Løve. Watching this film feels like writing a love letter to yourself in ways I can’t quite explain. It follows the story of a philosophy professor (Isabelle Huppert) forced into upheaval following an unexpected divorce from her husband. I included it here because it decentralizes romantic love in the most wonderful way. The film is about the love you give yourself following tragedy, the love you pour into your family, and the cycles that continue after rupture.

• Paris, Texas (1987), Wim Wenders. Lost love, time, longing. Sun-drenched montages of VHS-taped memories. The colors: hot pink cashmere, hardened earth, a sun-faded blue sky. The cinematography is astounding, and Wim Wenders is just the best. It couldn’t be left out.

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Books

• The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. This is the book that first introduced me to the genius of Anne Carson. She is one of my very favorite poets, and her translations are works of art. This book tells the story of Geryon, a red winged monster, who falls in madly in love with Herakles. Part myth part coming of age story, it is moving and tender and strange.

• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. The story of Cupid and Psyche told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister, Orual. We know the famous love story of Cupid and Psyche, but the lesser told story is the love between two sisters. It is a beautiful book, and is considered by many Lewis fans to be his most underrated novel.

• Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. This book is delightful. When I finished it I had that same warm and fuzzy feeling you get after watching a Nancy Meyers film. It takes place in 1970s New York and focuses on two separate couples within a group of friends. It reads like Nora Ephron with a slightly more dry, satirical edge and observational eye.

• All About Love by bell hooks. Including this is a requirement. hooks’ definition of love expands far beyond the romantic, taking it from passive longing to a state of active embodiment. Love becomes radical, a requirement for a more just, ethical, and free world. If you haven’t read it yet, now is a great time to start.

• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I remember first reading this book at nineteen and being blown away by how stunning it was, how gorgeously Krauss’ writing flowed from one storyline into the next. It follows the stories of Alma Singer and Leo Gursky, the two arcs beginning separately and joining later in the book. Alma is determined to find a cure for her mother’s loneliness, the answer to which she believes will be found in locating the author of a mysterious book her mother is translating.

• Writers & Lovers by Lily King. My feelings about this book are nearly identical to those of Ann Patchett’s: “Writers & Lovers made me happy. Even as the narrator grieves the loss of her mother and struggles to make art and keep a roof over her head, the novel is suffused with hopefulness and kindness.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Crafts, Curios, & Courtship

The Chansonnier de Cordiforme (France, circa 1475), a beautiful heart-shaped hymn book laden with gold leaf and a velvet cover from medieval Europe. Between its pages are 44 love songs and chants of courtship and romance. It is divine. Apparently you can buy it a facsimile of it here.

Victorian Love Tokens

I love puzzle letters. My best friend made me one for Valentine’s Day last year and I have it taped in my journal because I’m a sentimental fool and I save everything. But my most favorite recent discovery is the Cobweb Valentine, a delightfully macabre declaration of love and devotion.

Lover’s Eye

I wrote about lover’s eye jewelry in last year’s Valentine’s Day themed letter and I’m writing about them again. I am bewitched by these. They feel like sacred objects, relics imbued with the sweet memory of your beloved.

Afternoon Tea in a Rose Garden

If you’re in the Los Angeles area (specifically Pasadena), the newly-renovated Rose Garden Team Room at the Huntington Gardens looks absolutely gorgeous. I keep meaning to visit and still haven’t found the time, but it would be the perfect place for a sweet date or Galentine’s day celebration followed by a leisurely stroll through the gardens, which are likely in full bloom right now.

I leave you with one of my favorite love songs: “Where or When” by Peggy Lee & Benny Goodman. You just can’t beat Benny Goodman.

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I have noticed a distinct correlation between my impulse to capture something with my iPhone’s camera and a lapse in my overall sense of curiosity. It has become my canary in the coal mine: when I no longer feel the urge to stop, capture, and examine, I know that I am moving through the world in a blunted and numbed state. This has been true for reading, as well. I’m ashamed to admit my progress with Wuthering Heights skidded to a near-halt in my last few weeks of the academic quarter as I hurriedly finished my last research papers and final projects. I finished it just a few days before Christmas. It isn’t a very large or particularly challenging book, and still I dragged my feet, continually putting off the pleasures of reading for the very mundane act of mere survival. Cooking, cleaning, my other job (the job I work for money, outside of my unpaid internship), and express nervous system repair took precedence over life’s pleasures.

This happens to me occasionally, and comes in waves more frequently since starting my graduate program. Each academic quarter brings a new wave as I push and overextend myself to the absolute limits of my capacity. Although I initially thought these “slumps” were a sort of depression, I’ve come to understand them as a form of severe burnout. I wouldn’t have come to this realization without the help of Blind Boy, who examines his own burnout often on his podcast, which is the only podcast I really listen to these days. It has been instrumental in helping me gain a deeper understanding of the mechanics of my own neurodivergence.

Autistic burnout can look and feel a lot like a depressive episode, especially if you aren’t used to seeing it through the frame of neurodivergence. It is a kind of numbness that isn’t always accompanied by despair, although that can occasionally be a part of it. I begin to lose interest in everything around me — for me, that is books, writing, creativity of all kinds. It’s precisely this kind of anhedonia that makes it so easy to self-diagnose as depression. I become forgetful and make mistakes that seem careless to others. I go through the motions on autopilot. Focus is slippery, dedication is nonexistent. I stumble through mornings, afternoons, and evenings in a haze, doing just enough to string my existence from one day to the next.

This letter is not solely about autistic burnout, but I found it important to start here because I’ve come to know it intimately, and because it helps contextualize the sacred pause, the titular concept I’d like to discuss here. It is something we all must partake in, neurodivergent or not, in order to continue living well. Neurodivergent folks are more sensitive to burnout because our processing is different. My experience of moving through the world is to be inundated by constant sensation: strong emotions, loud noises, cross talk, and bright lights are just a few things that I am sensitive to that can deplete me. It is a lot like running a large program like Photoshop on a Macbook air; space runs out quickly and causes the most basic functions to glitch and crash, making them nearly impossible to complete. I have significantly less capacity than most, and this is something I am still learning how to live with.

This is why, like clockwork, I begin pining for winter around the same time each year. It typically starts in September around my birthday, after nearly 3 months of dry, blazing wildfire heat and the kind of active social calendar that only summertime entails. The shift from summer to fall, then fall to winter, is always a welcome respite from life’s mad dash. It is supposed to be this way. It encourages a pause — one that affords us an opportunity to identify the discrepancies between how we currently live our lives and how we actually want to live them. You can’t decipher this without a pause. And by forgoing it you run the risk of working yourself into oblivion toward a goal you may realize you don’t even care all that much about.

According to numerology, 2025 was a 9 year. In the tarot, this coincides with the major arcana card of The Hermit, a card I have always felt a deep kinship with. I was born on September 9th, 1993. I am lousy with multiples of nine. The impulse I feel to turn inward, to seek solitude, and to reduce external input enough to hear my own inner dialogue is instinctual, almost feral. I need it in order to be myself. Collectively, this year was marked by tragedy, despair, and the intense upheaval of old systems. Nines are also endings — a breath of air before a new cycle begins. This entire year my body has been screaming at me to slow down, and I ignored it almost every time. I had a deadline to meet, a social obligation I couldn’t miss, a research paper looming. I spent nearly a year ignoring my instincts, my nature, my rhythms. It’s no wonder I am ending 2025 feeling as I do now: depleted, in physical pain, my hope frayed but not entirely obliterated.

I learned my limits this year. I learned what I am capable of. I learned what I value, how I long to spend my days, what energizes me, and what depletes me. I shed skins I didn’t know I had, reduced myself to the most essential aspects of my being. What I let go of were mostly scripts I inherited from years and years of sociocultural influence, of navigating a world that was not built for me on so many different levels. I see this not as defeat, but as a return to myself.

I started reading Sophie Strand’s new book, The Body is a Doorway, after experiencing my own chronic pain. Her prose is dazzling, and I love how she interfaces with the world around her. She describes her chronic illness as something that forced her to return to her body after years of disconnection and survival. I feel similarly, as I continue to wake up sore, as pain regularly radiates throughout my neck, shoulders, and back. There is no ignoring it. There is nowhere else to run, because you are no longer physically capable of running. You must sit with yourself and the spectacular burdens of being a fragile, finite human. In order to heal, we need rest. Otherwise, much like bone, what’s broken sets incorrectly, catalyzing a series of adaptations within the ecosystems our bodies.

“Survival mechanisms save us in the moment. They are badly built bridges that support one brief, harrowing trip. But they cannot be used again and again, indefinitely. The problem becomes when these survival mechanisms outlive their usefulness.”

— Sophie Strand, The Body is a Doorway

Continuing when we no longer have the energy to do so is an unsustainable survival mechanism, one that I’ve employed for the better half of this year. Like so many of us, I’ve been sprinting since the starting pistol fire of 2025. If we aren’t careful, there won’t be much left of us.

To deplete ourselves would be a tragedy, because I want to do so much in the new year, and I’m sure you do too. I want to write more. I want to read. I want to draw and paint. I want to play my piano and strum my guitar. I long to flex those creative muscles and rekindle my dormant curiosity. I can feel it re-emerging now, which is where this letter came from. But I worry the start of a new year and another academic quarter will snuff it out prematurely before I’ve had the chance to enjoy it. And so my first task of 2026 is to figure out how I might abate this. I have some ideas, ones I might share in a future newsletter. But for now they marinate, and I must rest.

P.S. — Somewhere between October and now I hit 700 subscribers, and so I want to extend a massive thank you to everyone who has read, subscribed, and supported this little newsletter, both this year and in years prior. I’m so grateful. It gives me hope.

I hope everyone has a safe and restorative New Year’s Eve, and that you are able spend the first day of the new year doing something you love. Until next year. x

Grappling with untenable speed of the digital world is a recurring theme here on Another Realm. In an essay I wrote earlier this year on the visionary Marta Becket, I briefly mentioned the Jumi Bello plagiarism scandal and the circumstances leading to the author’s untimely demise, which ultimately ended in the loss of her book deal. Author Carmen Maria Machado, who wrote Her Body and Other Parties (a fantastic book of stories and very seasonally appropriate) wrote about the business of publishing and the havoc it wreaks on the actual process of writing, which is, more often than not, an arduous and time-consuming task.

“None of the trappings of literary success—which can be quick, and flashy, and very exciting—can substitute for the (singular, difficult, slow, and at times unbearable) work of writing.”

This is in response to the publishing world, yes—and yet I’ve observed this rings true for other written mediums: poetry, investigative journalism, editorial pieces, reviews, and even Substack posts. The problem is that we’ve become so accustomed to the immediacy of the short-form digital world that writers are struggling to keep up with the demands of our voracious appetites. The vast majority of us do not crave long-form writing in the ways we did before. Unfortunately, what we crave almost constantly is content. And I wouldn’t necessarily rush to call a novel or a well-written and researched article content. They feel much more like art forms, and in order to develop something as beautiful and meaningful as a work of art, you must be willing to sacrifice inordinate amounts of time and energy.

To echo Machado, publishers are not affording authors the conditions necessary for good writing. Instead, writers are beholden to abusive and unrealistic deadlines that flatten and demean the processes that make it all possible, hence Bello’s choice to circumvent this labor and lift full sections of other writers’ work for her own. As I stated above, this phenomenon does not stop at novels and the publishing world. It’s bled into the online world of writing as well.

Lauren Sands, the writer behind A Whimsical World, appears to agree with this sentiment. “Evolution doesn’t happen overnight,” she writes.

“It needs space, room for failure, and above all, time. It happens when you know your work, your product, or your narrative, but allow for change. When you embrace discomfort and explore new ideas. When you trust that the essence of what you’re building will carry through.”

Given the abundance of exceedingly talented writers, artists, curators, historians, and archivists on this platform, the process of finding and developing your voice, of carving out a space for your words to exist within this vast digital echo chamber, can be quite daunting. I certainly rub up against this insecurity every time I publish something here. And as more users flock to the platform, each one eager to receive their own slice of the pie, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself among a sea of equally talented human beings.

Some, however, become so daunted by this fact, so pressed for time and the need to put something out right now as if their lives depend on it, they resort to outright plagiarism. Glenn Mae, who writes Trash Panic, a wonderful Substack about sourcing beautiful vintage and secondhand goods, was recently a victim of this. Mae provides immense value and beauty to the online world from a distinct perspective that many have come to recognize her for. The same Lauren Sands I quoted above, who waxed poetic about her own creative process, was one of them. She clearly loved Mae’s voice and perspective so much that she decided to claim it as her own.

Sands also did this to me, although admittedly more subtly, lifting some of my writing and tweaking the words slightly to avoid any fingers pointing in her direction. Her Substack title, A Whimsical World, bears a strange resemblance to my own, as if she fed it through ChatGPT and asked it to generate a list of title ideas that rang with a similar, watered-down timbre. Sands’ color scheme and overall branding is also a little too familiar. I ignored it at first. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, because I like to believe the best in people. But after seeing this note and its striking resemblance to my own publication’s tagline, “Oscillating between the profound and the mundane,” I changed my mind. My subsequent discovery that Sands had also copied Glenn Mae’s work and not just mine was the final nail in the proverbial coffin. She was likely doing this to countless others, and I decided enough was enough. I felt obligated to say something, fool’s errand it may be.

Sands-gate is merely the tip of the iceberg here. Plagiarism is rampant on this platform, just as it is out there in the real world. My dear friend Kelsey, a brilliant archivist at the Eames Foundation and art history aficionado, also writes a wonderful newsletter called Absolument! chronicling her love for art, design, and architecture, and the life she is building abroad in France. She shared a similar experience of being copied and plagiarized recently. Like me, Kelsey wanted to give the person in question the benefit of the doubt, but the evidence continued to accumulate. It was all a little too coincidental. To add some levity, it seems this person in question and Sands are friends, often praising one another’s work publicly. The punchline writes itself.

The unfortunate reality of our situation is that people steal and will continue to steal. I do not know how to stop plagiarism and copy-cats, but I do know one thing: my perspective, my voice, my words, and my natural inclinations are entirely unique to me. That is my only solace at this time. Creativity is a mysterious process that belongs to the creator alone, and it cannot be replicated. Trying to do so is as fruitless as trying to replicate the Big Bang. It is informed by the phenomenology of the person who created it: all their trauma, lived experiences, and creativity, all encoded neatly within their DNA. Try as you might, another person’s creative process can never be yours. Only yours can be yours.

We can easily see through a flimsy disguise or façade. It isn’t hard to spot when someone uses AI to generate a piece, or when someone’s post looks eerily similar to another’s. We notice when something feels two-dimensional, unfinished, and missing some essential piece. Like when a soul leaves a body, it is not that person anymore. It is just what remains—their corporeal form. The light that once inhabited it is gone.

It is devastating when you are shamelessly copied and plagiarized. It has happened to me and my friends countless times. Kelsey’s essay written for The Metropolitan Museum of Art was plagiarized nearly word for word by prestigious outlets you’d think would know better. My dear friend Preston, a talented industrial designer, has been ripped off several times (one time by his previous employer, pictured below). This has happened and will continue to happen largely because there is no consequence. The speediness of the world we live in has accidentally created a culture of entitlement, one that emboldens people to copy and steal, almost involuntarily. And I understand the impulse—I really do. It is, quite literally, my job to empathize and understand human behavior. In a world of infinite choice and possibility, it can feel as if everything already belongs to you. But there’s a darker side to this. I don’t know for certain whether their actions were driven by the false assumption that they wouldn’t be caught, but I think they all had something else in common: they knew it wouldn’t matter.

To recount and analyze how many times this has happened throughout history would be futile; and yet, I cannot help but think of all the famous husbands who have stolen the work of their brilliant, lesser-known wives. How many Mary Shelleys or Sylvia Plaths or Lee Krasners have been overshadowed by the Percys, Hugheses, and Pollocks of this world? Do you really want to follow their lead? Is your own world so droll and vacuous that you had to steal someone else’s? Do you have such little faith in your own creative imagination? The impulse to steal and deny the world of your own unique perspective feels like a devastating waste of a wonderful opportunity.

It is particularly disappointing because we have, unfortunately, come expect this kind of pillaging behavior from men. We have seen it before. Their reputations are so often scaffolded by the work and brilliance of others. But when women (women who claim to support other women, no less) adopt these methods of deceit, it reveals how deep the foundations of this architecture lie.

With the limitlessness of human potential, surely you can do better than this.

It took me a long time to understand that not everything I publish needs to be fit for The New Yorker or The Paris Review. I’m flattering myself a bit there I suppose, because I’m not sure if anything I’ve published here thus far is fit for either, but that certainly doesn’t stop me from subjecting everything I post to this platform to the same editorial scrutiny. It took me even longer to understand that I don’t ever really need to explain myself as it pertains to my presence on the internet. This is a leftover reflex from childhood adversity solidified by a lifetime of being a woman, where I internalized the need to continually justify my existence whenever anyone paid attention to me. As if existing alone weren’t enough.

Perhaps it was the musical and lyrical atrocity that is Miss Swift’s latest album that emboldened me and prompted a much-needed shift in perspective, but an important lesson has finally begun to sink in: there are thousands of people bravely putting themselves “out there” every day, many of them far less qualified, talented, and significantly less self-aware than myself. With that in mind, very little should stop me from publishing and posting and creating whatever my heart desires.

I’ve been slowly decoupling from my previous career as a marketing strategist (just typing that gave me the ick, so I’m sorry if it also gave you the ick), meaning I am trying to approach everything I do from an intentionally un-strategic point of view. I feel a certain sadness when I think about how wildly creative and prolific I was in my late teens and early twenties, at the height of platforms like Tumblr and Blogspot. When I revisit those archives or read through my old journals, I am struck by the maturity, intelligence, and talent I carried but didn’t seem to believe I had. As I grow older and technology advances, I can’t help but feel like I am moving backwards — my talents and creativity atrophying as everything becomes more convenient, efficient, and strategic. I touched on this phenomenon last year when I wrote about the importance of engaging with the physical world, quoting Kurt Vonnegut and his famous quote about envelopes and farting around.1

I can pinpoint the moment I stopped having fun on social platforms like Instagram. It was in college right after Trump was elected in 2016, and it coincided with the onslaught of updated algorithms and the collective silent agreement to treat the platform as a marketing tool. I adopted this approach and unknowingly entered what would become one of the most tumultuous relationships of my life thus far: my relationship with my online identity, and its subsequent conflation with my worth as a human being. I wasn’t posting for fun anymore. Everything had to have a purpose, convey something, do something. It became even more pre-meditated than it was before, and this mentality crept into every area of life. I’m not using hyperbole when I say that I genuinely haven’t enjoyed using Instagram since then, nearly a decade ago. I owe it to myself to ask why I feel the need to continue voluntarily subjecting myself to generally feeling icky when I have the choice to just not, and why I keep expecting something to change when it’s only become exponentially worse.

While it isn’t always possible due to capitalism and our uniquely dystopian age, I try to opt for the less convenient route when possible. I love public transportation because it allows me to read and observe. I bought a bike with some birthday money I got from my grandparents and have been pedaling around my city. I prefer to call the restaurant directly when ordering takeout, picking it up myself instead of using an app (it’s cheaper that way, anyway). I’m making the intentional choice to watch movies instead of resorting to television. I’m trying to become a regular at my local diner, sitting at the counter and savoring my coffee and pie. I never leave the house without a book and my notebook, so when I find myself waiting in line or with some time to spare, I reach for them instead of my phone. I force myself to engage in the painful awkwardness of small talk with strangers when I have the mental bandwidth to, and to tolerate the unavoidable discomfort of being perceived. I am, in a way, trying to turn back time for myself to return to the state of mind and set of conditions that enabled me to create like I did when I was young.

As I sink deeper into the autumn and winter months I love so much, I am also sinking deeper into a new reality I’ve created: soon I will be done with school and will have my associate number. Soon, I get to make a living doing something I love so much, and didn’t even know I could love so much. I don’t need to exist on the internet in the ways I did before, the ways that were so normalized and without interrogation one might think they had been written into legislation. I don’t need to optimize and monetize and build. I can just be, and share what I love, and continue following the curious and unpredictable tug of inspiration when I feel it — just as I did before all of this.

And so, to quote Vonnegut for the umpteenth time, “[i]nto the world I go, with my pages. And what a figure I am.”

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Buy me a coffee

On the long drive toward Yosemite for our annual lake trip with friends, my husband and I listened to an episode of the Blindboy Podcast. It’s an enduring favorite of ours, most likely due to the meandering deep-dive structure of the episodes, which mirrors the switchback-like pathways of my own brain. Blindboy narrates it softly in his thick Irish accent, waxing poetic while musically punctuating every other sentence with the word “cunt,” which adds levity and charm to otherwise dense topics like religion, psychology, and myth.

The episode we listened to discussed how Black Sabbath’s sound was shaped by the industrial accident that took the tips of guitarist Tony Iommi’s ring and pinky fingers when he was just seventeen. Those missing digits forced Iommi to adapt his guitar-playing style, contributing heavily to the dark, sludgy riffs that became Sabbath’s trademark. Blindboy compared this adaptation to Queens of the Stone Age, who similarly had to adapt their sound, not due to finger loss but due to the echoing landscape of the Sonoran Desert where Josh Homme grew up. In the band’s early days, any attempts to cover the classics were foiled by the dry desert earth because sound ricocheted against the landscape and made it nearly impossible for them to keep time. This adaptation was made for practical reasons, but it contributed to the synthesis of the band’s signature sound, later referred to as “stoner” or “desert” rock.

Just the week prior, I read a Stanford study from 20141 about schizophrenia. It discussed how those diagnosed outside of the U.S. experience psychosis differently from how it is experienced here in the States. In India, the participants reported benign and familiar voices, some of which spoke to them kindly. In parts of Africa, what we often jump to pathologize as “psychosis” is considered mystical, like hearing the voice of God. Participants from America, however, reported violent and threatening auditory hallucinations that spoke of terrifying things, profoundly disturbing those affected. These voices are fueled by paranoia and a pervasive sense that someone or something is out to get them, hence the now outdated term paranoid schizophrenic. The study revealed that not one person from America experienced a benign, familiar, or kind voice in their auditory hallucinations — not a single one.

On the surface, these anecdotes have little to do with one another; but they reveal something important about how influential a person’s surroundings are to their development. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t screaming from the rooftops about the Stanford study or why it wasn’t considered a health crisis here in the States, because this was clearly proof enough that something about our culture was undeniably wrong. The vast majority of us living in the States already knew that, of course, but this was tangible proof. It felt like the kind of discovery that could be a catalyst for new social and health policies — policies that would prioritize people over profit.

America is fraught with an almost pathological sense of individualism. We are taught that accepting help is a weakness, and that community and altruism are flawed, zero-sum games that lead to laziness and deceit (e.g. the accusations rooted in harmful stereotypes many conservatives enjoy hurling at the recipients of welfare or unemployment insurance). We are told that what benefits the collective means less for the individual, and so we have learned reject opportunities that create a more just and secure society, even when we have the statistics to prove that democratic-socialist paradigms (like those of Denmark or Finland) lead to healthier, more productive, and happier citizens2. Alas, we want that fleeting chance at becoming billionaires, even if that chance is a scant 0.000032%.

To grow up amid this culture means that selfishness, the me-versus-them mentality, is engrained within us in one way or another. When you consider that, it’s no wonder so many people supported the current administration. It’s not surprising that we don’t care about providing free school lunches, or student debt relief, or free health care. It’s no wonder our foreign policy hinges on exclusionary tactics rooted in xenophobia that enforce the false hierarchy positioning America as the greatest country there ever was. Most American citizens don’t want their tax dollars paying for someone else’s hungry child to eat, and they don’t want to pay for someone else’s “poor health decisions,” let alone provide aid to foreign countries, some of which are experiencing the cruelest forms of violence and mass suffering we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes. Not my problem, Americans say. I understand why people think this way from a sociological and psychological perspective, because the only way we can dismantle this kind of binary thinking is to understand it backward and forward. I don’t agree with it, but when you are raised with the belief that you are the most important, that as long as you are fine nothing else matters, what other outcome could we have possibly expected?

This made me think about the exceptions to the rule. Not all Americans adhere to this mentality. I certainly don’t, and I wondered if this has something to do with my neurodivergence. It’s common among those on the spectrum to have a strong sense of social justice and moral clarity. In fact, a recent fMRI study3 found that autistic participants were far more likely to refuse personal financial gain if it meant supporting a bad cause, regardless of whether anyone was watching. Neurotypical participants, on the other hand, often chose the immoral, self-benefiting option when they believed their decision was private, and only shifted to the moral choice when observed by others, less out of principle than out of fear of condemnation and ostracization. In other words, the moral consistency that comes with autism spectrum disorder is typically not performative. It isn’t contingent on surveillance, but rooted in a deep, internal code.

From a Narrative perspective, we are shaped in one way or another by the dominant narrative of the culture we live within. My desire for something greater, a collective, a support network, was born from my experience of living in a culture that feels like a wasteland devoid of community and mutual aid. We have no social support here, no safety nets, nothing keeping us from falling into the depths of debt and financial ruin in America, and we are all so much closer to the edge than we realize, caught within the vice-like grip of corporate greed and exploitation. My sociopolitical views were shaped by growing up in this country, which inevitably shapes my work as a training clinician. My ability to grasp this phenomenology of seeing the world through the perspective of another is second nature to me, so much so that I thought it was a capacity everyone had. But this was blind optimism on my part, and it became abundantly clear how mistaken I was in 2016 during that first hellish term that set the stage for all that was to come in the next decade.

But just like Tony Iommi, I have learned to live with what I do not have. This is where Fellini thrived, how Godard and Truffaut’s French New Wave came to be. How modernist movements like arte povera and dadaism emerged. How water pie, a depression-era confection4 made primarily of water, found its way into the cultural zeitgeist. It’s why African women braided seeds and rice5 into their hair during the transatlantic slave trade to feed their children and preserve their culture. Human beings have been tested and forced to do without for as long as history has been recorded, and still we find ways to continue.

Each of us has what is called an actualizing tendency, an innate desire to thrive and grow toward the light, to continue even when conditions do not allow us to. And while I desperately wish we did not have to do without, that we lived in a society that provided us with all we needed to flourish, I find a devastating beauty within this tendency. Humans, despite all odds, have an incredible capacity for resilience. Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers developed his theories around resilience and human potential after remembering his discovery of a potato sprouting in his basement during his childhood. The dark, damp environment was not conducive to growth, but the sprouts found a crack of light in the wall and grew toward it despite the unforgiving circumstances of its surroundings:

“The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing … under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish … The clue to understanding their behaviour is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming … the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life’s desperate attempt to become itself.” — Carl Rogers

Most of the generations following Gen X have not been set up for success. I turned thirty-two yesterday and have no savings, barely an income, and more student debt than I can fathom. My husband and I got married last year by the skin of our teeth, relying predominantly on family and friends to help us pull it all off. It was wonderful, and I’m so grateful we could have that experience. But we have no plans for a family or home ownership anytime soon. It isn’t possible right now because we live in a country that doesn’t believe in distributive justice. It’s every man for themselves here, and I am so profoundly tired of being told the lie that if I just work harder, stretch myself further, and sacrifice more, everything will fall into place. I don’t think I am alone in feeling that much of what we were promised in life feels put on hold, and it's difficult to find hope and motivation amid such dark times of political tumult and despair.

And despite all of this, somehow, I still have hope. As dark as the world gets, I cannot help but continue to hope, and it is an instinctual, almost feral kind. Perhaps that is just my innate human capacity for growth and resilience, my own little bizarre sprouts reaching outward and upward toward the light, toward something greater for all of humankind. I witness small and dazzling moments of hope and beauty every single day. I see it every time I sit with clients at my internship. I see it in my friends, my siblings, my parents, my grandparents. I see it in my husband and my dogs. I see it in nature, in literature, in art. Hope comes in variable shapes, and we can find it if we know how to look for it. It is a muscle. It is the mortar that holds our days together and gives us the strength to live through the present.

The loss of Tony Iommi’s fingers gave us metal as we know it. Poverty was transmuted into freedom, rebellion, and immediacy through handheld 16mm cameras in France, giving birth to French New Wave; and when fascism left Rome in ruins, Fellini built his black and white world of beauty against a backdrop of despair. The poor and displaced sailors and prostitutes of 19th century Portugal birthed the yawning arc of saudade in the form of the fado, an expressive style of music from Bairro Alto which comes from the word fate. The heartbreaking hymns of spirituals and Blues were born from the grief and devastation of slavery and colonization, alchemizing into jazz, soul, rock and roll, and altering music’s trajectory forever. I don’t recount these in an effort to excuse suffering. Every morning I wake up and wish it didn’t have to be this way, that there was more I could do to change things, because so much of it is the result of man’s hubris and so much pain throughout history could have been prevented. And yet the kind of cultural praxis I’ve described above is impossible without constraint. At least, if we must suffer, we can create something beautiful that future generations may look back upon and say: look what they endured, everything they created. They continued. Maybe we can, too.

Our instinct to reach toward the light is the only certainty history has given us: that out of destruction, grief, hunger, and ruin, we continue to grow. What comes of it may look strange, much like the tiny white shoots that Rogers describes, but it is always a form of becoming. It is what neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl refers to as man’s endless search for meaning — the force that keeps us moving forward, filled with the vibrancy that comes from an innate desire to live. The story doesn’t end with the tragedy. It transmutes, giving way to something larger and more spectacular.

I have complicated feelings regarding organized religion, particularly as it is increasingly wielded as an instrument of oppression. I tend to hover somewhere between agnostic theism and atheism; even at my most skeptical, the absurdity and hopelessness of atheism has always felt too final. Writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil saw suffering itself as the crucible of faith. What Carl Rogers saw in the pale potato sprouts in his basement, Weil calls grace: the mysterious force that fills the hollow spaces carved by affliction. Constraint, loss, and devastation prepare us, making us permeable to hope. But the void must come first.

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void,” Weil writes.

That’s how the light gets in.6

I have hidden for as long as I can remember. In classrooms, I avoided the eyes of my teachers and professors, instead looking down at my hands in my lap, terrified I would be called on and inevitably make a fool of myself in front of my peers. This behavior seeped into social situations, manifesting in a deep-rooted fear of unstudied speech. I was afraid that if I revealed too much, I would be singled out and promptly discarded. I carried this behavior into adulthood and lived behind a series of masks, shape shifting until I no longer recognized myself. I still carry this with me. And still, I am untangling it. Showing up as yourself in a world that rewards homogeneity exposes you to the risk of being othered. Being othered is terrifying, and there are centuries of historical data that point to why that is.

The witch wound, a psycho-spiritual theory that people still carry trauma from the sixteenth century when witchcraft was punishable by death, is potentially one of these data points. I want to highlight the limitations of this theory — it has very white, Eurocentric roots. But this wound is present across cultures as most, if not all, have their own forms of witchcraft, from Santeria to Brujeria to Voodoo. The persecution of witches, however, is deeply rooted in colonialism and the policing of marginalized bodies, particularly those of women or those who do not identify as white cis-het men. Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch, wrote in depth about the through-line that carried us from feudalism into capitalism, how it contributed to the witch hunts of the sixteenth century and beyond, and was weaponized to reinforce the ridiculous notion that women were inferior, as was all the free labor they did that kept daily life conveniently humming along.

What’s less focused on when learning about the witch trials is that most of those accused of witchcraft didn’t practice any witchcraft at all. Everyone accused had at least one of the following characteristics in common: wealth, poverty, knowledge, power, beauty, or were elderly. It isn’t mere dramatization in The Crucible, the finger pointing and blaming, the jealousy and hatred. John Proctor screaming, Give me my name! Overwhelmingly, this persecution was the ammunition used to codify the puritanical ideals of misogyny and oppression that would go on to shape much of American society and culture today. But many men were also persecuted for standing up for the women accused. Mothers, wives, sisters, aunts — they all had husbands, sons, brothers, nephews. Each “witch” had families that were entangled in the accusation, marking anyone who chose to speak out as an accomplice. This subconsciously taught anyone who witnessed their plight that speaking up was unsafe. It wasn’t the first time this dynamic was present in history, and it certainly wasn’t the last.

What I find most difficult to accept about this is that thousands of women and men were sentenced to death simply because they had something someone else either wanted or feared. I find this difficult to accept not because I don’t believe it, but because of the sheer ludicrousness of it all. Roughly 40,000-60,000 people were sentenced to death for witchcraft in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries. The Salem Witch Trials paled in comparison, with 200 accused, thirty sentenced, and nineteen people killed by hanging. Some inherited properties from fathers or husbands, or had a wealth of knowledge about herbalism, midwifery, or simply knew how to read. Others too loudly and freely spoke their minds, whistleblew, outed abusers, and others found that threatening. Some were simply beautiful, which caused those around them to spiral into jealousy and spite. And some were impoverished, old, or isolated, as was the case of poor Lilias Adie in Scotland, whom I think about often. None of the cases had any tangible evidence, of course. It all hinged on eyewitness accounts and word of mouth. And the “trials” often consisted of double-bind situations like fixing weights to the accused and throwing them in a body of water to see if they’d sink. If they sunk, they weren’t a witch, but still died by drowning. If they didn’t sink, they were a witch, and would then be hung.

The silence of those around them, the bystander effect, became a learned affectation, the only response for safety in these situations. Psychologically, it is a form of dissociation. It’s the only way our bodies know how to proceed when confronted with such horrors, our minds unable to comprehend them and still continue on with our lives. When your thinking mind is overidden by fear, and you react instead of respond. Witnessing tragedy and oppression on this level perpetuated the notion that it was unsafe to do anything that drew too much attention to oneself. In the case of the witch hunts, it was unsafe to know too much, to have too little or too much money, to be pretty, or to simply age. During the Holocaust, it was speaking up for your neighbors as they were ripped from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Presently, it takes the shape of remaining silent as ICE invades your town and makes people disappear. This is how generational and ancestral trauma takes root. These are the seeds that hold the potential to breed more cruelty and hate if unresolved.

Whether or not this tendency actually can be traced back to the witch wound, its existence functions like myth, carrying cautionary tales of what happens when hubris prevails. In this case, it warns us of what happens when we ignore our inner voices, teaching us to tamp down our intuitive gifts and talents because of this pervasive fear. I see how these themes take root within my own life: my deep, ancestral fear of being seen, of choosing to write in depth about tarot, of using my voice for activism. I will continue to do it all, but I am terrified all the time.

Those who embody this wound are often people-pleasers and self-erasers who do everything they can to appease those around them at the expense of themselves. They grow up learning to be hyper-vigilant and fearful of attention because, subconsciously, there is a fear that this ultimately leads to persecution and death. They internalize the belief that in order to stay safe, they must remain silent and away from the watchful eye of anyone who might be offended by their existence. And I won’t refute this internalized belief, either. Much of it is rooted in lived experience, or witnessed experience. Queer and trans folks, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, women, and so many other marginalized groups — they all have very valid reasons for their fear of being seen, and I want to make that abundantly clear.

In college, an excellent professor called me out for hiding. At the end of the course, we had one-on-one critiques for our final projects. My final project was a zine called “EMPATHY IS PUNK,” a sentiment I still stand by. I was proud of it, because it was the first time I allowed myself to be publicly angry. To risk being seen in a way I had never been seen before. This professor told me, point blank, that I need to stop hiding. He was kind about it, but it was a wake-up call. When I followed this thread, I began to see its presence throughout my life. I minimized myself constantly, was anonymous, overly modest, afraid of my own potential, ashamed of my anger. I spent most of my life waiting for permission to exist and be myself.

I wish I could say that, following that advice from my professor, I lived my life without fear, but I didn’t. I wrestle with this fear every day, and our current administration has only amplified it. Sometimes, this fear wins. Showing up on social media, posting videos speaking to the camera — every fiber of my being wants to wipe myself from the internet and never be perceived again. Part of this is due to my secretive nature (I am very Hermit-coded, and I am a Scorpio rising, after all). But another part is due to a very valid fear of exposure, and I am not nearly as vulnerable as other identities in America currently. I understand the enormity of my privilege, and still I am scared. Every day, a new legislative measure is passed that violently polices marginalized groups, makes people “illegal,” and strips us of our basic human rights. If they’re willing to write that into law, there’s no telling what they’re willing to do behind closed doors. We’ve seen what people are capable of, the cruelty and hatred that runs rampant, and outright nazis are given platforms to spew their hatred. All of that unfolds in plain sight.

Now, at thirty-one years old, I am stepping back into the realms of play and magic and curiosity. I am still terrified, but aware of all at risk if I don’t unapologetically be myself. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like. I don’t know what next month or next year or the next decade will hold. At our current rate, history will continue to repeat itself, and we could very well see our own modernized version of the witch hunts. One could even say we’re in the midst of one right now, with many fearful of voicing dissent and losing their citizenship.

I suppose this is my own personalized way of conceptualizing the term YOLO. We do, indeed, only live once. And unfortunately our one wild and precious life is taking place concurrently with the rise of fascism. It would be tragic not to have sucked the marrow from life while I had the chance. I am not saying we’re doomed, that we must do everything we can in a frenzy before it’s all over. I am saying that nothing is guaranteed. Not tomorrow, not next week, not our health, or our freedom. And so it becomes an essential act of resistance to continue showing up as yourself, and not what society has deemed acceptable. Being seen, witnessed, perceived in any form will always require some risk, just as any act of creativity requires the creator to accept that failure is a possibility every time they make something.

I understand the fear because I pay attention. Because I read and understand history and see patterns in everything. Centuries of tragedies have consolidated this fear. It is woven into our DNA, influencing our thought processes and shaping our very lives. But we can be terrified and still continue. One of the prevailing reasons why those on the wrong side of history are so full of hate and rage is because we aren’t giving up and admitting defeat. Women have not ceased calling out abuse, assault, misogyny. LGBTQIA+ folx are not going back into the closet or obscuring parts of their identities. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and AAPI folx have not stopped calling out the pervasive structural racism and bigotry that scaffolds American policy. And the allies fighting alongside all of them have not fallen prey to the temporary sense of ease that complicity falsely promises. The refusal to be invisible is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal right now. It is in our best interest to use it.

Today’s summer solstice marks the longest day of the year, when the sun’s rays linger long into the evening. Even after sundown, whispers of summer heat hang in the air, enveloping you in a warm embrace. Dusk becomes infinitely more magical and charged as the world rushes into stillness and silence, when all you hear are the rustling of leaves and crickets singing from the shadows. When the summer solstice arrives, everything is brought into full light.

Truthfully, I have always dreaded summertime. Perhaps it’s because of the shedding it entails: clothing, values, past versions of self. It was the bardo-esque season of our youth before we entered a brand new school year, feeling like entirely new people after two months in the sunshine. There’s nowhere to hide in the sun. Not in Southern California, which feels particularly poignant as we bear witness to one of the greatest political reckonings we’ve had to face in our lifetime. Cruelty and hatred are on full display with those who perpetuate it no longer afraid condemnation, instead receiving laurels and praise. This is a moment of undeniable clarity. The veil is thinner, the truth is louder, and the ugliness that’s taken root in our country is exposed.

This solstice is at once a beginning and an ending. It’s the longest day of the year, with the sun shining at its peak. But it also indicates that from today onward, the light will slowly wane until we find ourselves carried gently into the milder temperatures of fall. It’s imperceptible at first, like a waning gibbous moon after reaching its fullest phase.

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In my most recent episode of Both/And (which I’m sending out early next week) I discuss this particular moment in history as a “pause before rupture,” a collective Two of Swords moment imploring us to make a decision. Do we continue perpetuating a system that is dying, or do we compost what remains and rebuild? On an individual level, this solstice also marks an opportunity to shine the sun’s brilliant light upon ourselves, looking inward to see where our own beliefs, loyalties, or fears are stoking the flames of old patterns and automatic behaviors. It is an invitation into personal and ancestral inquiry. What are you carrying that isn’t yours? What will end with you this season?

Transformation goes hand-in-hand with fire and heat, and we are reaching prime fire season just as Los Angeles is recovering from the devastation of the January fires. Fires that engulfed entire neighborhoods and displaced hundreds of families. Now, our community is once again put to the test as our friends and neighbors are ripped from their homes and families, and sent away without due process. People all across Los Angeles showed up in solidarity to protest peacefully. We made our voices heard and it was beautiful. Los Angeles, or El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, was built by the very people being targeted. They come for one of us, they come for all.

This political upheaval requires us to ask ourselves: what must burn? How can we harness this sacred fire energy and catalyze change, individually and globally? What is essential, and what must go? As we celebrate today’s solstice, tune into the turning of the wheel. Hear the creak of the passage of time. Remember that nothing lasts forever. Not the sun’s warmth or the sweetness of stone fruits, and certainly not the bitterness of hatred and authoritarianism. We may be called upon again to act and resist very soon, but that doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy our time outside of our activism. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.1 Bask in it.

In case you missed it:

• I sent out the inaugural episode of my audio series, Both/And, last week. I’m loving sharing in this new format and grateful for the kind words of support it’s received thus far.

• Wrote about Sisyphus and existentialism and tarot the week prior.

• Shared some meandering thoughts on La Chimera, phenomenology in film, and the Hanged Man.

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“This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus

“Don’t read today’s headlines,” my friend warned. Of course, I did. Like clockwork, I was pulled into that familiar, gut-churning vortex where everything feels futile, collapsing, and on fire. A sensation that leads to an intimate understanding of the depths of Sisyphus’ despair as he pushes his boulder up the hill again and again. When will this circus end? When will we be free from this reality, this horrendous news cycle, this war against knowledge and compassion and human decency?

It is a particularly difficult time to be alive, and Sisyphean is a word that frequently comes to mind as I live through it, often when I am at the very end of my rope. Why am I pushing this boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down again?

Perhaps, for Sisyphus, his motivation came from the fact that it was his boulder. Maybe, as he contemplated the slow, dull work of pushing against something solid and insurmountable, he noticed the earth beneath his feet, felt his muscles working and strength developing, heard the birdsong and animals skittering around him, and felt deeply in tune. Suddenly, you understand what Camus meant when he said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. There’s a particular absurdity to trying to stay hopeful in a world like this, to keep showing up, pushing the boulder anyway. But perhaps that’s where the richest work is right now: in finding that flicker of meaning, or at least tenderness, inside the mundane.

Following that brief moment of panic, I drew some cards, quietly asking: what is the collective energy, what is my action, and what is the result? I pulled the Five of Pentacles, the Queen of Pentacles, and the Page of Swords. This particular sequence felt deeply personal and timely, and I didn’t anticipate writing about it in such depth, but it poured out of me. My hope is that someone might find solace in these words.

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My largest and most difficult wound comes from growing up in scarcity. I spent much of my childhood and young adulthood functioning from the idea that there wasn’t enough and that I had to spend the rest of my life making sacrifices (often at the expense of my happiness and well-being) just to have my most basic needs met. But the deepest wound, one that quietly reverberated beneath the surface of all my actions, was this idea that I didn’t deserve to feel safe.

I’m certain countless others share this wound, especially if they exist within our millennial cohort. We’ve been given very few opportunities to feel abundantly safe and secure, apart from our blissfully internet-free childhoods when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. When you grow up with that kind of programming, it’s hard to unlearn. That maladaptive belief echoes throughout every room in your life: relationships, mental and physical health, your career. It impacts the positions you put yourself in, the things we settle for. We learn, over time, to accept very little because we think that’s all there is. And you really can’t blame us for that, because it’s all we’ve been taught and shown.

Energy: Five of Pentacles

This is the energy of the Five of Pentacles. It’s a card of abandonment, lack, and scarcity. It embodies the internalized belief so many of us share: that we are locked out of the lives we so deserve, forced to watch as others enjoy the warm glow of abundance, safely protected from the cold, barren landscape of lack. It’s not just about money: it’s about belonging, security, and support. And if you, like me, have stared longingly at a meager 700 sq ft (lol) property listed for 1.2M and felt homeownership of any kind to be a pipe dream at best, you know acutely the feeling I am describing here.

This is the rhetoric we often hear, and it’s difficult to navigate because there is so much truth in it: the generations before us, the ‘Baby Boomers’ and Gen X, had the privilege of knowing the world when it was exponentially easier to obtain that now-elusive American dream. As soon as we became of age and started thinking about futures and families of our own, the scaffolding that supported those generations before us evaporated. The proverbial ladder had already been hoisted back into the rescue helicopter, leaving us to tread hopelessly in deep, terrifying depths that threaten to swallow us whole.1

There is a lot working against us. And don’t get me started on the structural, the institutional. The way entire systems, from the carceral state to student debt, were designed to keep us out. This becomes inifinitely more true for those who belong to marginalized groups: people of color, women, the LGBTQIA+ community. I’m not here to spiritually bypass you: I’m here to validate and be furious with you.

Action: Queen of Pentacles

This is where the wisdom of the Queen of Pentacles comes in. She isn’t here to deny your experience, because that is very real. She is here to remind you of all the wonderful things you do currently have in your life. She emphasizes the importance of somatic awareness and intelligence. She doesn’t ask you just to recognize when you feel activated, but when you feel grounded and present.

Where are the portals in your life that open up this kind of experience for you? For me, it’s been through meditating with the windows open. Closing my eyes and snuggling my dogs and breathing in the oddly comforting doggy smell of their fur. Pressing and changing my bedsheets each week (worth it, and life-changing). A good, deep stretch. An ugly, genuine belly laugh, the kind when you sound like a witch. Making time to see my friends, even amid deadlines for school. Walking in nature, listening to the birds. All of these things make me say, internally: I’m rich! And I do feel rich. Rich in love, experience, and sometimes even softness, although my current workload and responsibilities often threaten to take that last part away. These things won’t look the same for everyone, so the work is finding what feels good for you specifically. Is it a nap in the afternoon? A gratuitous scroll on TikTok for some laughs? Is it getting a full tank of gas to get you where you need to go, or being able to afford groceries this week? Whatever it is, savor it.

And most importantly: remember, in these moments, you are completely safe. Hand on your heart, right now — it’s all we have. I can’t promise you the next moment, but odds are if you are here, reading this now, you are safe. There is so much heartbreak currently happening in the world, unimaginably hideous atrocities unfolding each day. I’m not denying that. I’m asking you to notice, right now, when you feel good. Attune to the sensations moving through your body. That is embodiment, and that is the energy of the Queen of Pentacles. That, for now, is our task.

Result: Page of Swords

Swords are psyche, intellect, logic. The page is a beginner: a student, protégé, mentee. Pages typically indicate beginnings, the sort of wide-eyed curiosity we often have when we first begin a project or approach something unknown. We are a little raw, shaky on new legs, but brave enough to speak the truth, even when we’ve only just found our voice. It’s through this newfound perspective of noticing and savoring the richness of our internal resources that we now navigate the world. How differently do you see it?

This is the reward: sweet clarity. A brand new way of thinking, a sharp tool where there used to be a blunt instrument. You don’t yet have precision, but you are lit up again, asking questions instead of spiraling and navel-gazing. Swords are the suit of air — movement, forward motion. Cutting through noise instead of internalizing it. The noise that used to distract you from the knowledge that comes from knowing the body and tuning in.

The Page doesn’t need to have all the answers yet, or ever. She only needs to stay awake, alive, alert to the landscape around her. To not shut down in the face of the tragedies of our modern world. To continually seek the signal within the static. One of the most radical things you can do right now is tune in, because the current state of our world thrives on distraction — from ourselves, from what’s going on politically, and from our purpose.

When you begin seeing the world from this perspective, you are infinitely less easy to control, and right now, I implore you to be ungovernable. I leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from the brilliant Eve Ensler:

A truth I return to again and again is that beautiful things require time, space, and contemplation, qualities that often feel incompatible with the frantic speed of our world. The sooner we accept this, the gentler life becomes. I know I write about it often, but that’s because it’s true. I may always feel like I’m lagging behind, watching others lap me effortlessly. But I want to make beautiful things, and that means I must move slowly, carefully, deliberately.

In other words, I had to pause, recalibrate, and remember why I started writing here in the first place. Thank you for letting me.

Below I mention plot points from both La Chimera (2023) and Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles. If you have not seen or read either, please proceed with caution. I’d hate to spoil the dazzling experience of watching and reading these two beautiful works of art for the first time.

I began this essay shortly after watching Alice Rohrwacher’s incredible film La Chimera. It’s been almost three weeks since I first watched it, and still it continues to roll around in my mind like a bright glass marble knocking around a wooden drawer. When the vast majority of what we consume has a shelf life of about twenty-four hours, it is an incredible feat to linger.

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I have a compulsive habit that many of us share when watching films: reaching for the phone, googling the cast, the location, the director’s previous films. Perhaps it’s an unconscious desire to anchor the fictional scenes in fact, to gain a deeper understanding of what’s unfolding in front of me. Maybe it’s neurodivergence or anxious energy. It’s likely a cocktail of all three. But I didn’t reach for my phone as I watched, not this time. It steadily held my gaze as the scenes flickered past like a bright flame. Still, quiet, so mesmerized that I gasped and clapped a hand over my mouth as if someone had been shot when they cracked the smooth alabaster neck of the statue of Cybele, the Great Mother. It felt criminal. It was supposed to be. A beautiful sculpture, which took hours of someone’s life to create, defiled within seconds before our eyes. It mirrors the same cursory flattening of dimension we see today as artificial intelligence trawls and regurgitates our published words, our paintings, our photographs. We’ve seen this before.

Just a few weeks prior, I gave up television for my Assessment & Treatment of Addictive Disorders course, my classmates and I required to either give up or reduce the use of one of our vices for the remaining ten weeks. I had just spent an embarrassing amount of my one wild and precious life binge-watching reruns of The Office as a makeshift numbing salve leading up to this assignment, pathologically procrastinating and avoiding all responsibility, burnt out to my very core. This assignment was a gentle nudge, like the cold, wet snout of one of my dogs eagerly reminding me to go outside, take a walk, touch some grass. I decided shortly after that it was time to let television go for a while.

Films have taken on new meaning during this experiment, becoming portals to other worlds. The dissociative ways I used television feel vastly different from how it feels to watch a film, especially when watching them from a theater and sharing a collective experience with an audience. Films feel more active and involved, a deliberate choice that requires more of you. Most television is passive, or at least that’s how I used The Office. Even the word ‘used’ makes television feel like some psychoactive substance. Framing it this way made it a little easier to give up.

I first became aware of this active state at a screening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Mesmerized, enchanted, disgusted, experiencing the full gamut of emotions and visceral reactions Lynch intended to elicit from his audiences, I sat there in the dark for two hours, phone off, just watching. Houses in flames. Blood and gore. The halo of Patricia Arquette’s platinum blonde hair glowing in a muscle car’s headlights, all to a soundtrack of Rammstein and Marilyn Manson. It was sublime. It’s not hard to see the influence of transcendental meditation on Lynch’s work, how well he’s distilled his personal practice within his films in his own uniquely Lynchian way. They force you to sit and witness, to give your full attention or nothing at all.

Watching La Chimera felt similar, even if I was watching from the comfort of my own home. The films are vastly different, yes. But Rohrwacher creates an immersive and contained world that makes you aware of your body as images of ancient artifacts, decay, crumbling architecture, and hands digging in hardened earth unfold before you. It is tactile, which is all the more impressive for a visual medium. The film draws you into a phenomenological experience, where the act of seeing becomes an act of feeling. You hear the music and the laughter and see the joyous dancing, the whispered rustling of silk taffeta skirts, and remember that you have a body, that you aren’t just a nebula of consciousness functioning from the neck up.

Arthur’s world, liminal, suspended, aching with memory, inevitably conjures the archetype of the Hanged Man. His work as a graverobber feels less like theft and more like an attempt to unearth what’s been buried within himself. In tarot, the Hanged Man teaches that wisdom often requires surrender. That to truly see, we must let ourselves be undone, inverted, disoriented. He is held, not by force, but by choice, in a state of stasis and suspension. A tension both unbearable and necessary.

Arthur, unshaven and dirty in his rumpled linen suit, is cut from the cloth of Shakespearean tragedy. Upon his release from jail, a jocular merchant ridicules him on the train in front of three women — an act of humiliation, salt in the wound, stirring pathos and solidifying the story’s exposition. Arthur’s attempt at righting this wrong is to assault the merchant, making everyone in the train car frightened and uncomfortable, and so they leave him one by one. Soon, only Arthur remains, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, encased within his train car as if under a shroud, a thin veil between himself and the rest of the world. That distinction is made clear from the beginning: reintegration into his old life and ways of being is impossible.

Parallels to the myth of Orpheus are heavy-handed, but not to the film’s detriment. Arthur cannot figure out how to live without looking back, the loss of his great love Beniamina snuffing out all purpose, all drive to live. He briefly finds joy with Italia, who in the film acts as a stand-in for Hades’ warning to Orpheus not to look back. I curse you! she screams, upon realizing what Arthur and his friends are: graverobbers, thieves. When he ends the film entombed by his own work, it is almost an act of mercy. He couldn’t continue living as he did before, but he could never quite figure out how to move forward.

The presence of the red thread further cements the Orpheus and Eurydice reference. Arthur’s flashbacks of Beniamina in her crimson dress, following a piece of red yarn caught on a branch. He looks back, over and over again, both in his work as a renegade archaeologist and in love. He cannot love Italia because she belongs to the present. He eventually succumbs just as Orpheus did, unable to resist the gravitational pull of grief and nostalgia.

Is it possible to devastate and inspire hope at the same time? I think so. That’s life, after all, joy and sorrow, braided together. Beauty that arrives not in spite of pain, but often because of it. The real trick, the elusive key to life, lies in the acceptance that happiness will rarely appear in isolation. It’s not a permanent state to be achieved but a fleeting sensation that often sits at the same table directly across from despair. And perhaps it’s just the enduring existentialist in me, but I believe those who chase happiness as something pure and uninterrupted may only suffer more in the process.

Arthur’s fate mirrors the crux of the Hanged Man archetype: a figure caught in suspension, not by chance but by choice, reaching an inevitable transformation through stillness and surrender. His nostalgia and grief hold him, but they also unlock a deeper understanding, one that might have continued eluding him in life. It’s not so much that he couldn’t live, but that he had to die in order to understand life in a new way. He is forced to let go, to unravel. In that unraveling, something profound emerges, mirroring the same metaphorical death-rebirth-death cycles we mere mortals go through repeatedly, each time emerging with new wisdom and information about ourselves.

Even as Arthur is buried beneath the earth, something luminous remains. A pinhole of light, a sense of peace. A reunion, much like the devastating beauty of Patroclus and Achilles in The Song of Achilles, two lovers reunited in the afterlife. It’s my favorite kind of ending, one that doesn’t rush to explain itself; an open question that lingers at the edges of your psyche like a bright red thread, impossible not to follow.

We were all born to seek, to lean toward the sun, pulled by something intrinsic and deeply human. This quality can feel at odds with our reverence for the past, our tendency to linger on the versions of our lives and ourselves we can never return to. We may be boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past and all that, but we’re also wired with an unflinching resilience, a hunger for what lies ahead. We can’t help it.

To be human is to endlessly contradict ourselves, to live inside that tension. Like the Hanged Man, we inhabit dual states: stasis and suspension, longing and stillness, sorrow and joy — the exquisite, unbearable tension of being alive.

I met Carlee when I was 24. She needed a roommate, and I needed a place to live. I had just begun my very glamorous 30k-a-year job as a gallery assistant (lol), and I was still commuting from my parents’ place nearly fifty miles away. Yes, it was miserable. I was staying a few times a week with my dear old friends Jessica and Preston at their place in Los Angeles, joking that they were my parents. I slept on an air mattress on their studio apartment floor, and I would often wake with their sweet, neurotic cat, Bella, sleeping on my head.

I knew it wasn’t sustainable for any of us. Gracious as my friends were, I knew they probably didn’t love having an extra body in their space, disrupting the natural flow of things, so I searched for places whenever I could—between exhibition openings and making coffee for the unfathomably wealthy people who showed up at the gallery, often expressing interest in buying a $20,000 painting via an apathetic one-shoulder shrug. Sure, why not? I’ll take it. Throw it in the Porsche/G-Wagon/Jaguar. I made $1800 a month and often worked ten-hour days. Perhaps it was this job that radicalized me toward anti-capitalism.

Jessica knew Carlee through work and introduced us, and from there it’s history. That introduction to Carlee was a godsend, as it indirectly liberated me from my unintentionally nomadic life, providing fertile ground for the roots I so needed to put down in Los Angeles—roots that felt necessary to begin my young adult life. It was my first real home in the city, and it was perfect: a little house with noisy wood floors, ample sunlight, and lived-in charm. Even our landlord was an anomaly. He was delightfully friendly, self-published fantasy novels about werewolves, and always fixed what needed fixing promptly. I lived there for about four years with a rotation of different roommates and pets. Carlee was there the whole time, a permanent fixture in our home with paper-thin walls, where I had no closet and had to keep all my clothes on a rolling rack. Nothing is perfect, after all—but it was all worth it.

Seven years later, all of our lives—mine, Jessica’s, Carlee’s, and everyone else’s in our social group—look vastly different. Our friendships are the same, though. Even amid all of adulthood’s trappings and inconveniences, we manage to stay in each other’s lives. Weeks may pass without speaking or seeing one another, but we always come together as if nothing’s changed. Perhaps it’s a naive wish, given the unpredictability of our current world and life in general, but I hope it stays this way for as long as possible.

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Two weeks ago, I spent an early afternoon at Carlee’s sweet apartment as the midday glow filtered through the linen curtains, little dust motes floating like glitter in the warm sunlight. Beanie, Carlee’s pocket-sized chihuahua, made occasional dramatic entrances, stretching and happy-sneezing and pawing at our shins, demanding we pick her up and hold her like a baby. She weighs about as much as a ball of dough, and is just as easy to carry around. Carlee and I chattered and moved through her space, past garment racks, antique mirrors, stacks of linens, and dresses that looked as though they had survived not just decades but entire past lives, in a good way. I brought my camera, and Carlee brought her tenderness, her humor, and her particular way of seeing the world.

We began, naturally, with clothes. Carlee has recently launched a vintage bridal collection, which I was lucky to be on set for, capturing behind-the-scenes shots on film. We talked about lace, silhouettes, the surprising strength of antique silk and cotton. But as always, the conversation didn’t stay there. It veered into questions of value, nostalgia, capitalism, and the quiet rebellion of choosing to wear (and care for) things that have already been here, rather than trying to create something new through wasteful and often destructive practices.

What follows is a portrait of Carlee in her element: thoughtful, funny, slightly chaotic, and wholly devoted to beauty and the preservation of history through clothing.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Carlee and I own Something Special Vintage <3 I worked in production for 7 years and have bought and sold vintage for 10 years! I’m from the Midwest, which is where I go often to visit family and source a lot of my inventory. I’m obsessed with “The Dig,” cleaning and mending clothes, and bringing them back to their former glory.

What first sparked your love for vintage?

I’ve been obsessed with costumes and interesting clothing my whole life. I wore the same pink slip and big floppy hat every day for a summer when I was 5. I thrifted and antiqued in high school, and then worked at Free People at the end of high school and into college. I then worked at Raggedy Threads in Little Tokyo through the rest of college, which gave me a real bug and increased my collecting and selling.

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I asked if Carlee’s time working in production has influenced the way she approaches vintage now—if it’s helped to see where brands compromise their visions for profit and cut corners, and she said yes. In bygone times, even as recent as the 90s, clothes were just made better. Even clothes from department stores and malls, although it is now clear in hindsight that era marked the beginning of the end. I have a blue trench coat from Sears from the 90s that’s made better than most things you could buy brand new today. The profit margins erode the integrity of clothing, often compromising a brand’s original ethos and vision, which is a heartbreaking thing to see. You don’t get that with vintage, though. Not if you’re looking in the right places.

We discussed this phenomenon with brands like Free People, which seemed so magical in our young adulthoods, and even Doên, which began so beautifully but seems to miss the mark for us both these days. I’ve offloaded a lot of my clothes from brands like this, instead holding onto the real stuff—the vintage, the pieces that serve as the blueprint for these contemporary brands. I believe that, somewhere along the way, many contemporary brands develop a misguided desire for exponential growth. This becomes a runaway train, because now these brands have massive overhead: employees with salaries, buildings they work from, and the factories they work with. It’s hard to scale back once you’ve gone too far, once others are relying on you for an income and livelihood.

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Do you have any non-negotiable daily or weekly rituals?

Floss, moisturize, sunscreen, drink lots of water, make my bed, walk Beanie 4-5 times because I’m a guilt-ridden mom, get in a few TBM meditations.

If you had to put three things in a time capsule that defined your interior world right now—not for posterity, not to represent “the times,” just to represent you in this exact moment—what would they be?

Beanie my dog, daughter, soul mate, spirit guide, familiar. My horribly embarrassing journal. My 1960s pink pipe cleaner poodle air freshener that I’ve had in its original packaging for 5+ years and finally took out to put on my rearview mirror (which felt like a big step in the right direction for me).

Tell me one thing that’s overrated, and one thing that’s underrated.

• Over: TV, even though I love it, it’s my little evil numbing tool.

• Under: Jeni’s Ice Cream.

Last book you read and film you watched?

God of the Woods, A Complete Unknown.

If you were a ghost but could only haunt one thing, what would it be?

Beanie!

The last thing you underlined, highlighted, or annotated?

Daily to-do lists.

Something you ate and/or drank this week that you loved?

I had some very good Khao Soi tonight.

What is a sensation—a smell, a taste, a texture, a sound—that has unexpectedly transported you back to another time in your life? What memory did it unearth?

I walked by the middle school I live near today and got a whiff of Abercrombie or Hollister—hard to determine which these days. It transported me to the mall, back when they were just malls and not Westfields and everything seemed nicer.

What’s a project you’re working on right now, or something you’ve done recently you’re proud of? Be as shameless and indulgent as you’d like.

I just launched my Bridal Collection! This is very exciting because it was an idea that came to fruition by magic. You and our other beautiful and talented friends encouraged and supported me in every way possible. We got to use my dream location. We were guided by your husband to a magic estate sale right before where I found all the additional pieces I needed for it to come together. It feels great to do something you've said you want to do someday and have it come together so beautifully. <3

Carlee leaves us with her magical stain-removal recipe for whites, which can allegedly get decades-old blood stains out of vintage wedding dresses. Fantastic news for sweaty girls like me, who previously thought I couldn’t buy antique whites because I sweat too much and ruin them. No more ~

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Every year, as the weather warms and the air begins to hum with life, a quiet dread takes hold within me. The layers I rely on—wool, cashmere, a heavy blazer to anchor me to reality—become suddenly impossible. Don’t get me wrong, I love spring. I love the way the world turns green and unruly, the violent fecundity1 of it all.

What I can’t stand is what follows: the dry, punishing heat of Southern California summer. Sweat, dehydration, the threat of heatstroke, the wildfires, the Santa Ana winds tearing through the city as everything—trees, hillsides, my sense of style—dries out and catches fire. By mid-July, even my imagination feels sunburnt.

I don’t want to be this way. I want to meet each season as it comes, to appreciate what it offers, even if my internal landscape is more aligned with the cooler climes of autumn and winter. Of course, my resistance to summer isn’t just about the heat. It’s about control and comfort, the subtle ways I tether myself to reality through clothing. To me, dressing feels similar to the ritual of lighting a candle or luxuriating in the slowness of a weekend morning: it adds romance to the mundane.

And so when summer takes hold, I unravel a little. I believe in rotating one’s wardrobe seasonally to avoid staring longingly at coats that won’t see daylight for months. It’s a simple strategy: fewer distractions, fewer reminders. And yet, each April, as I pack away my layers, I can’t help but throw a childish fit. Not this year, though. This year, I’ve made peace with it. This year, dear reader, I am prepared.

If I must endure summer, let it be in featherweight layers of silk, gauze, chiffon, and organza. Fabrics that move, breathe, and barely exist. I want texture, asymmetry, and for every so-called “basic” to carry intrigue. Think: Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Lemaire, Jil Sander.

The silhouettes remain rooted in menswear, anchored and deliberate, but reimagined in lighter forms. Still touched by that slight gothic romanticism I can’t seem to shake, only pared back, heat-adapted, softly undone.

The operative word is sheer.

You can wear pants and long sleeves in the summer; they just need to be light or, ideally, sheer. This is where I’ve been lately. All I want to wear are translucent layers over something unexpected: bike shorts and a tube top, a swimsuit, oversized trousers. I love the tension: structure beneath softness, opacity beneath air. Sheer pants with a mini skirt layered over like the beautifully styled Maryam Nassir Zadeh gauze pair via Bona Drag, or the outfit experiment I conducted earlier this week: a thin layer of burgundy chiffon that fell to my ankles over low-slung split-hem trousers. It just worked. I felt strange, intentional, alive. As I walked my dogs through my very WASP-y neighborhood, the chiffon took flight behind me in the breeze. I felt like a crow among doves.

Silhouettes I’m loving:

Paloma Wool Brown Silk Archive Pants / St. Agni Sheer Silk Leather Trim Top / Silk Laundry Organza A-Line Dress / Ali Golden Paneled Mesh Dress / Ann Demeulemeester Semi-Sheer Maxi Dress / Paloma Wool Cream Sato Camisole / Na Nin Brown Silk Elliot Dress / Paloma Wool Zanic Dress / Rachel Comey Daas Dress / Mijeong Park Organza Skirt

Everything but basic.

In summer, basics work overtime. With fewer layers to rely on, every piece has to earn its place. Simplicity is fine as long as it carries a point of view. A simple silk skirt calls for a tank with something extra: an unusual texture, a twisted seam, a silhouette that carries some element of surprise. Brands like Baserange, St. Agni, and Paloma Wool excel at this kind of elevated minimalism, the kind that makes getting dressed feel effortless but never dull.

Silhouettes I’m loving:

Baserange Turn Tank in Black and White / With Jean Kia Top / St. Agni Knit Scarf Top / Baserange Pama LS Tee / Atelier Delphine Boat Neck Top / Twin Boatneck Tank / Brooke Callahan Tie Skirt / Deiji Studios Split Top

The real deals.

I have a longstanding habit of spending hours on Depop, Poshmark, The RealReal, and Vestiaire, hunting for vintage treasures and designer gems until my eyes cross. I seldom buy anything unless it’s an outrageous deal. Sometimes, I save them for some future, more financially sound version of myself, but usually, I send them to friends with bigger budgets so I can live vicariously through them.

Below, you’ll find an edited selection of pieces organized by category: tops & blouses, dresses, sweaters & jackets, bottoms, and shoes. Most fall in the $50–$150 range, with a few exceptional pieces edging past $200 (only where the deal was too good or the piece was too special not to include). Enjoy. x

Tops & Blouses

Ann Demeulemeester Sheer Silk Tunic, (M, $199) / Totême Cream Plisse Tank (34/S, $125) / Dries Van Noten Yellow Muslin Tie Blouse (34/S, $54) / The Row Knit Crop Top with Silk Ribbon Ties (S, $147)

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Mixing colors.

I initially saved this because that purple (pictured bottom left), a gorgeous warm, dusty, mauve shade, is one of my favorite colors. My favorite colors are highly specific so I rarely see their shades in the real world, but every now and then I’ll stumble across them unexpectedly and become utterly mesmerized — the soft dusty pinks of evening primrose on a walk, a Shirley Temple made perfectly bright red from its mixture of grenadine and Maraschino cherries, the rich and luminous green of emeralds in a vintage Georgian ring I’ve aspirationally saved on Etsy for some ambiguous future where I have expendable income.

When I dug into this book a little more, I discovered it’s actually quite an incredible publication very much ahead of its time. Dubbed the “pre-pantone” guidebook for watercolorists, it’s “an 800 page guidebook to mixing every colour that was known at that time,” according to Ben Strak, who writes Design Lobster. You can read more about it here.

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Lamps by Analuisa Corrigan.

Discovered from this Note by Alana Fallon. I’m in the process of (slowly) redoing my office space, and I’ve been looking for lighting solutions. Defaulting to glaring overhead light is always out of the question, so a small desk lamp is the ideal solution. This pearly, beaded confection from artist and designer Analuisa Corrigan would make a stunning addition to any space.

I love the use of soft textiles commonly used in clothing or curtains, like fringe and taffeta. These materials associated with apparel and domesticity starkly contrast the more severe materials associated with buildings and structures like plaster, metal, or stone. They are beautiful, perfectly balanced utilitarian objects.

Flowers in Cinema.

Iris Diane Palma started an excellent Instagram account several years back that is now a Substack called Flowers in Cinema. Her recent post about orchids, the “diva” of the flower world, is fantastic. Bits are gathered from film, television, and culture, everything from the iconic orchid-centric film Adaptation to Halston’s legendary $40k orchid habit. I also love that her name is Iris — it’s so fitting. She really was born to write about flowers.

Conservatives hate Miranda July.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Sarah Hoover’s episode of How Long Gone, in which she discussed her book The Motherload. Jason, one of the show’s hosts, joked about his reading experience, describing how his reactions alternated between “I can’t wait for my wife to read this book” and “my wife can never read this book.” Chris, the other host, posed the question: which book would be more dangerous for your wife to read, All Fours, or The Motherload? To which Jason responded, without missing a beat: All Fours, because it was a “step-by-step guide for how to cheat on your husband.” They both laughed. I laughed, too. The exchange was in jest, of course, but there was a shred of truth there. July’s book is dangerous, depending on who you ask.

July recently posted on Substack a response to the article, Ladies, Miranda July is Not Your Friend, an incredibly problematic piece from the Institute for Family Studies, which heavily criticizes All Fours essentially because it permits women to think for themselves. The article framed this freedom to think for yourself as a “burden,” which I would find hilarious if it weren’t so bleak. If the freedom to control my life and narrative is a burden, I will carry that weight. If a vague societal construct makes my decisions for me, that isn’t a life; it’s a sentence. Adhering to “norms” and “shoulds” is one of the most effective ways of relinquishing power. Reading the IFS article may have given me a mild case of brain rot, but it also reignited my love for All Fours — this strange, chaotic, and indispensable book that allowed so many different kinds of women to feel validated. It brought to mind one of my favorite Deborah Levy quotes from her book The Cost of Living:

It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.

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Writer’s blood.

I bought a new ink for my fountain pen called Writer’s Blood, which I’ve since learned (thanks to a kind person who responded to my note) was created in collaboration with the /fountainpens Reddit community. It’s a deep burgundy, almost brown at first glance, revealing a richer tone upon further inspection. It’s my new favorite shade to write with.

My inspiration to write with burgundy ink came from Jessica Le, who writes Ex Libris. She posted some excerpts from her calligraphy journal, and I was floored by how beautiful they were. I had to share them.

Caitlin Kotula, who writes Ruminations, also recommended Diamine’s Red Dragon, which is a slightly lighter shade of deep red and so beautiful. It seems I’ll be slowly making my way through all of Diamine’s ink offerings now.

Knausgaard’s Seasons Quartet.

I’m keen to start this series because I read Michael Rance’s interview on Petya K. Grady’s Substack A Reading Life, in which he mentions his love for Knausgaard. The interview is chock-full of wonderful recommendations, including the ideal pencils to write with, annotation methods, and reading suggestions. I highly recommend reading it if you have the time.

This quartet appealed to me particularly because it is “addressed to his unborn daughter, capturing the world she will soon enter,” a premise I found poetic and sweet. Given my own existential concerns surrounding motherhood, I felt drawn to it. I’m starting with book 1, Autumn. Send me a note or comment if you’d like to read along together.

In case you missed it:

• I wrote a bit about my ideal office space, and what makes a ‘study.’

• You can read the first edition of Elements of Style on Anaïs Nin here.

• Resharing this essay on Marta Becket, because it’s one of my favorite essays I’ve written, maybe ever.

• Week 09’s Annotations on Nan Goldin, Faulkner, Middlemarch, and Bright Eyes can be found here.

A few updates:

I’m working on a handful of offerings for free and paid subscribers, including another Elements of Style essay, which will be ready next week, and the beginnings of a makeshift cinema club. I’m still ironing out the details of the latter, but I will provide more information very soon! I hope you can join in on the fun.

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I’ve given considerable thought to what my ideal office space might look like. I just started my practicum earlier this year, so I’ve also had to consider my background for virtual therapy sessions. Green screens and blurred backgrounds aren’t ideal for psychotherapy—they instill a subconscious sense of unease and mistrust, and understandably so. It also might raise concerns of confidentiality with clients. Why can’t I see what is behind you? a client might think. Are you in a dungeon? Outside, free from the office environment altogether? Can anyone hear the deep dark secrets I’m telling you? Environments must be carefully considered for this reason. But we also must consider our workspaces because we spend so much time within them. Roughly 70% of our weeks are dedicated to work. That’s a lot of time to spend in a space, let alone one that fails to make you feel comfortable and inspired.

I dream of a plush high-pile Moroccan rug, an antique desk made from time-worn wood, a window to let in ample natural light, a bright vase of supermarket flowers to sit cheerfully on my desk. I’d also love to have a day bed or couch someday—the height of luxury, in my opinion. Our office has a door that leads directly to our tiny backyard, and I can imagine leaving the doors open in the summertime, lying down on a plush loveseat or daybed to close my eyes for a few moments of rest or to read a few pages. Feeling the breeze, listening to the birds twittering in the trees between classes, meetings, or therapy sessions.

Workspace Non-Negotiables:

A comfy chair. I spend hours in front of the computer, between work, school, and writing. For this reason, I am a little lenient on aesthetics here. You need a comfortable chair, and sometimes what is most comfortable is just ugly, much like running shoes. I like to sit cross-legged sometimes, so I need a wide chair without arms boxing me in. Remember the TikTok chair? That’s my office chair. I bought it secondhand from a friend before she moved out of her place. It isn’t hideous, and it’s exceptionally comfortable. No, it may not be a chic Thonet bistro chair or a leather and chrome Eames office chair, but it gets the job done without being too much of an eyesore.

A carafe or reusable water bottle. After resisting for years, I got a Stanley. My mother got me one for Christmas last year. I only use it at home, and it lives on my desk in perpetuity. It keeps my water cold, and the 40oz capacity ensures I drink enough water throughout the day, both essential for skin and mental health. There are much chicer options though, if you prefer. A nice glass carafe would look lovely desk-side.

Tea and/or coffee supplies. Hasami makes this wonderful teapot with a mesh strainer that I use often for my loose leaf teas. I like to keep it on my desk and refill my cup as I work. It’s a lovely ritual to partake in during virtual classes to help keep me awake, present, and engaged.

Sticky notes and flags. Last month, I went on a sticky note bender and bought so many different kinds while I was figuring out my note-taking and annotation system for my books. I’ve settled on the small plastic Post-It flags and clear sticky notes for library books and textbooks. This system has worked best for me so far.

A variety of writing tools. I toggle between my fountain pen, highlighters, a smooth ballpoint pen, and water-based marker pens with thin felt tips. This usually depends on the paper I’m using. I’m a sucker for Kaweco. I have a sport—it’s terrific, and I use it every day to write in my journal. I also love the Uni Ball Vision Elite and Zebra bLen Retractable Gel Pens. You cannot go wrong with Muji gel pens, or the Marvy ‘Le Pen’. I only use Frixion Erasable Highlighters. No—they don’t really erase. But they aren’t super wet like most highlighters and therefore do not warp extra-thin pages, and they come in soft pastel colors that are much easier on the eyes.

Several notebooks. I have my two Paper Republic notebooks (passport and XL), which I refill regularly. You can buy the Paper Republic refills, or find some in the same size. Anything works as long as it fits. I’ve seen decent options from Leuchtturm and Midori. Moleskine works too, but I typically write with water-based inks and I can’t stand the bleed. The pages are usually much too thin in their notebooks. I’ve been curious about Stalogy and hope to check those out in person soon to see if they fit. As a lefty, I also love legal pads for quick, messy notetaking during client meetings, shopping lists, etc. Again, options—I need many.

A vase of flowers. As a student, I’m on a tight budget, so I have to be careful about where and how I spend money. This, however, does not mean I must go entirely without. I plan for my frivolities, like getting a coffee or a pastry, buying fresh flowers weekly from the supermarket, or cutting some from my backyard. Either way, I like to keep the blooms fresh to inspire creativity and make me want to spend time there. If you’re sensitive to your surroundings, it helps, so I build it into the budget. It brings a little life into the home. If you prefer something a little more sustainable than cut flowers, consider hanging some plants.

A pair of slippers. I wear a pair of thin leather babouches (side note: do I need a silver pair??) most days since I work primarily from home. I find this silhouette helps me feel less like I’m wearing pajamas, which helps with my overall productivity. Sometimes I just wear shoes—typically a thin-soled ballet flat. Something about having shoes on helps my brain work. I’ve heard this is common among neurodiverse folks like myself. Don’t knock it until you try it.

An inviting candle. It isn’t absolutely necessary, but it makes everything a little nicer. And if you conduct a decent chunk of your life in front of a computer, you must make that process as enjoyable as possible. It’s hard for me to stick to it, but I’ve been trying to make a little opening and closing ritual each time I sit down to work to clearly delineate work time versus everything else. Lighting a candle and settling in for a few hours helps keep things moving. Conversely, blowing out your candle, closing all your tabs (hard, I know, but you won’t miss them, I promise) and putting your computer to sleep also helps me “close” for the day. Maison Louis Marie’s Bois de Balincourt, P.F. Candle Co’s Teakwood & Tobacco, and Boy Smells’ Cowboy Kush are a few of my favorites.

In case you missed it:

• The first volume of Elements of Style featured Anaïs Nin and her dreamy Los Angeles hideaway. You can read it here.

• You can read Week 9’s Annotations here.

• My long and rambling essay about time, Proust, and reading habits in the age of optimization.

I recently came across a remarkable article in the London Review of Books about Nan Goldin. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how little I knew about her history—especially the story of her sister, Barbara, institutionalized for years before taking her own life at eighteen. Goldin would later dedicate her film Sisters, Saints and Sibyls to Barbara, but her sister’s presence is unmistakable across her entire body of work. Once you know to look for it, you see her everywhere.

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Elements of Style is, of course, a nod to the iconic writing manual by Strunk and White—a guide that champions clarity, concision, and the ruthless elimination of excess. In many ways, personal style is no different. Whether in writing, dress, or design, style is about distillation, paring something down to its most essential, intentional form. It becomes life’s scaffolding—a language, a mythology, a way of being. This series explores the visual and material worlds iconic figures have built around themselves and their art, examining how style extends beyond just fashion and offering a brief glimpse into the psyche of those who mastered the art of self-presentation.

Joan Didion famously understood the power of aesthetic control. From the sparse economy of her prose to the deliberately crafted image of the writer in dark sunglasses and a white Corvette Stingray, Didion’s style, both literary and visual, was an act of precision. She played what Lili Anolik, in Didion & Babitz, describes as a man’s game, idolizing Hemingway and wielding a clipped, surgical voice that held its own against the likes of Mailer, Capote, and Thompson. Her restraint was deliberate, her clarity a form of power.

Anaïs Nin, much like Babitz, leaned into excess. If Didion’s approach was a studied exercise in withholding, Nin’s was an indulgence in sensation. Whatever your opinions about her, there is no denying her predilection for beauty. She was a poster child for sensory-driven living, evident in both her writing and the lush, decadent dwelling she built in the hills of Los Angeles. While Didion weaponized restraint, Nin curated a mythology of eroticism, decadence, and dreamlike fluidity. But both, in their own ways, understood the performative nature of style and used it to shape their literary legacies.

Nin’s self-mythology was not without strategy. Like Didion, she played within the limitations of gender constructs to bolster her place in the literary world, though their methods diverged. Didion became the man, while Nin used the man to her advantage. She lived a life of deception, famously committing bigamy and remaining married to two men on opposite coasts for nearly a decade. Even her harshest critics can acknowledge that her bigamy became a defining scandal—one that, had she been a man, would likely have been praised rather than condemned.

Of course, Nin remains a contentious literary figure, lauded and vilified in equal measure. After learning more about her history, I now see her for what she was: a deeply traumatized and flawed individual who was never able to process her grief, leading to a pattern of self-destructive tendencies framed as hedonism. But to be human is to be deeply flawed, and her experience with despair led to the creation of some of her most beautiful and influential works. Her style, while enviable, was inevitably informed by all aspects of her history: her life, her trauma, her faults, and most importantly, her self-mythology.

A house like a velvet-lined jewel box.

Style is more than just aesthetics. We are long past the notion that an interest in fashion or design equates to frivolity. Style is an extension of the self, an immersive world one creates through the careful selection of clothing, artifacts, and curios for no other reason than because they bring a particular kind of pleasure. The way you dress, decorate your home, and move through the world is part of a dance between beauty and practicality. Nin’s life and work followed this same choreography. Her home and personal style weren’t just reflections of her artistic ethos; they were expressions of a worldview that prized beauty and pleasure above all else.

Her Silver Lake home embodied this philosophy, a space both opulent and intimate, where the drama of her life unfolded in jewel-toned rooms draped in velvet. I love the use of purple here, a hue that evokes mystery, femininity, and creativity, all prominent themes within her life. When I first encountered these photos, I was stunned. It was as if the dream home that had only existed in my mind had suddenly materialized. A space designed for both creative solitude and seduction, for writing and for hosting salons. Every detail—the candles, the incense, the draped fabrics—was a mise-en-scène for the theatricality of domestic life.

This belief in beauty as necessity rather than indulgence is one that I share. Nin made a distinction between material excess and true beauty, suggesting that beauty itself is not an indulgence but a fundamental ingredient of a life well-lived. There is a distinct influence of Parisian salons, Eastern mysticism, and surrealist sensibilities in her curation, a world of tastes and artifacts collected from her travels.

Dressing the part.

Her aesthetic sensibilities extended to her clothing, which functioned as another layer of self-mythology. Her wardrobe, silk robes, block-print textiles, intricate lace, deep jewel tones, is evident in every photo of her across the decades. In her youth, she embraced the opulence of the 1920s—silk brocade, velvet, and lace confections—later transitioning into the turtlenecks and richly patterned textiles of the 1960s. Her style, like her writing, was fluid, an evolving manifestation of her personal narrative.

Clothing, for Nin, was storytelling. Sensual, layered, evocative of the eras and cultures she inhabited, her aesthetic was curated at every level, not just for herself, but for those who entered her orbit. There was an intentionality in the way she balanced softness with intensity, ethereality with control. Her life and environment were a myth of her own meticulous making.

This feels like a stark contrast to a figure like Sylvia Plath, who was denied the ability to shape her own mythology. After her death, Ted Hughes carefully revised and controlled how she was presented to the world, conveniently leaving out any incriminating mentions of his affairs and abuse in Plath’s poetry and diaries, ultimately distorting her legacy for decades. Discovering the extent of Hughes’s role in shaping Plath’s posthumous reputation made me reconsider Nin’s self-mythologizing as something powerful rather than deceptive. She crafted her own narrative, refusing to let the world dictate how she would be remembered. It makes this quote all the more haunting:

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

Nin’s life and work were inseparable from her aesthetic sensibilities. Her surroundings, her clothing, even her handwriting fed into the mythology she scrupulously built around herself. Whether one sees her as an icon or an illusionist, her commitment to having autonomy over her reality was absolute. She understood what some might dismiss: that style, when taken seriously, is not frivolous. It is a language, a narrative, a reclamation—a way of bending reality to fit one’s vision. And while many writers, particularly women, have had their stories rewritten for them, Nin seized control of her own in many ways. Whether you see that as disingenuous, empowering, or both, one truth remains: few bent reality quite like Anaïs Nin.

Suggestions for further reading:

Delta of Venus: Erotica by Anais Nin • Henry and June • A Spy in the House of Love

I have a few names in mind for the next month’s feature, but I’m always open to suggestions. As always, thank you for being here and supporting my work. Every like, comment, restack, share, and paid subscription is meaningful, and it goes a long way in helping a writer continue doing work she loves. x

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I’m still reading Swann’s Way. And as the world rushes past me, I sit and read a handful of pages at a time when space forms around my work and school assignments. It’s difficult. I probably should have waited to read it when I was under less pressure and could luxuriate in the beauty of the writing. I thoroughly enjoy it, but I probably would have absorbed more if I were more… regulated. That’s the point of Proust, I think: to lose yourself in the words. To get lost in the beauty of the prose, forget your sense of time and space as early afternoon light slants into late afternoon. Proust has a way of slowing down time that our current world is at odds with. It’s a fascinating dynamic, one that feels similar to why people enjoy psychedelics. Your brain slows, but the world around you doesn’t. Not that I’ve ever done hardcore psychedelics; I’m far too anxious—just a harmless therapeutic psilocybin microdose here and there. I’ll stick to literature instead.

Our world doesn’t really allow us to get lost like that, and so we must be intentional with how we carve out our time. I declared that 2025 was my year of classics, and it seems many others are also dedicating themselves to a similar cause.1 Haley Larson, who writes Closely Reading, has created a whole book club and community of close readings of the classics. And you can easily type Middlemarch into your search bar on Substack and scan through the results teeming with mentions (and memes) of the hefty tome. We are all sidling up against the mysterious draw of books that hail from bygone times. I yearn for stories that aren’t peppered with mentions of the internet or smartphones. Stories that delve deeper into the quality of the human soul and its connection to other souls, and tell cautionary tales of hubris as forms of protest and rebellion. Several books written in recent years have done this. I’m not so pretentious as to ascertain that everything written in modern times is shit, but they remain the minority of what is published. Literary fiction, after all, only makes up about 1-2% of the market, a statistic that feels staggeringly low. I’m hopeful there will be a shift as AI dominates more of the written content, especially online. This will become a new form of social currency, a brilliant observation posed by Ochuko Akpovbovbo in a post I can unfortunately no longer find, but she quotes in this one.

Modern culture has an obsession with numbers. Profit margins, reading goals, calories burnt, miles covered, words written—numbers dominate everything. And I slowly began to notice that hyper-fixating on these numbers was sucking the joy out of everything I did. I went on a run a few weeks ago and started hating every second of it only five minutes in. Why? Because I was too focused on how slow my pace was, how much time I spent running, the miles I covered. This preoccupation with quantity made it miserable. Instead of enjoying it for what it was—moving my body, being outside, feeling the sunshine—I drank a cocktail of shame that poisoned the entire experience.

When I was in high school, I was personally victimized by the MyFitnessPal app (we should be entitled to compensation), which forced me to categorize and calculate the caloric value of everything I ate, exacerbating my already significant body dysmorphia as my young, easily-influenced mind and habits began to shift toward a disordered eating pattern and concerning preoccupation with weight gain. Around the same time, I started using Goodreads, a friendly-looking app that promised to keep track of all the books I’ve read and wanted to read, taking book discovery to an entirely new level. I promptly categorized all the books I read, marking them as either good or bad with little in-between, which I now realize aided in obliterating the possibility for nuance and meaningful discussion. I now refer to this dichotomous concept of categorization as the Goodreads Industrial Complex.

The common denominator among everything I’ve recounted is the constant quantification of what brought me joy and the consequential misery this quantification caused. I used to be able to run six miles at once, but now I hate running because I saw how few calories were burnt on shorter runs, and pushing myself to my limits every time I stepped foot outside became too exhausting. I misjudged books because I felt forced to rate them between 1-5 stars. And we all know that food becomes infinitely less enjoyable when you must constantly consider the caloric amount of everything on your plate.

Psychology was long considered a pseudoscience because its results aren’t easily and readily quantifiable. Mood disorders continue to be pinned under the microscope, with therapy-averse critics claiming these disorders are fictitious because they do, in fact, live in our heads. But whether or not something resides in our minds doesn’t immediately make it real or not real. Are your thoughts real? Let’s do some mental gymnastics around that for a second. On second thought, let’s not. I will spiral.

CBT and DBT, both excellent theoretical frameworks used to bend and shape human behavior, have become the norm within the clinical field because progress is easily quantifiable and, therefore, justified to insurance companies. But research shows that 95% of the success of therapy lies within the therapeutic alliance. That lives in our heads, too. Is that real? Seems pretty real to me.

Our lives are constantly measured, counted, and defined by numbers and objectives—hard data, “real” results. But most fail to recognize that the vast majority of the beauty of life, innovation, and creativity happens in between, when we force ourselves to think beyond the binary and explore the murky depths of a gray-area. Numbers and quantities are undoubtedly necessary. We want correct medicinal dosages and portions for our food. Even in creativity—committing to writing 1000 words daily is how you get to the good stuff. But our happiness and enjoyment begin to wane when it becomes too restricted or regimental. Always Be Optimizing culture isn’t really for me. Maybe I’m not supposed to be doing as much as possible, making sure I don’t waste a single second. I could drag my feet a little. Maybe that’s all part of the fun.

I won’t make the sweeping claim that social media introduced us to the concept of quantifying our lives because many things have contributed to that, and I think capitalism is the chief culprit. But social media’s introduction to the minutiae of daily life certainly didn’t help. In early days of the apps, we used them to socialize with friends and post pictures of our pets or breakfasts. Very wholesome and sweet. Now we collect likes, followers, and social clout via vanity metrics, tie entire livelihoods to it in some cases, which has (for me, at least) sucked all the joy out of whatever initially drew me to them. Forced to contend with my subscriber count that teetered between 275-290 for about four weeks straight last month, I was demoralized and disheartened by the writing process, stalling me and making me reluctant to write at all. Substack almost became a numbers game for me too, but I thankfully snapped myself out of that.

It’s difficult to slow down and be intentional when your life is as chaotic as mine is right now. Internships and punishing courseloads leave little room for a mind to wander. Even when I am idle, I am never not doing something: mentally outlining an essay, thinking about this week’s groceries, making note of the prescriptions I need to pick up from the pharmacy. But I try very hard to slow down time whenever I can. Proust has helped immensely. Has it taken me four weeks to read a single book? Yes. Does that even matter? No, it does not. Nobody cares except the mean, fictitious voice in my head—which, in this case, is not real, and therefore I do not have to listen to it.

Aside from being a wonderful exercise in the art of slowness, committing to thoroughly reading the classics has made me a noticeably better writer. I counted several extra-long, comma-laden sentences in my last few posts, something I feel I owe to Marcel himself. But I still have not read Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin, or Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors. I have yet to lose myself in Didion & Babitz, despite them all sitting prettily on my bedside table, each title imploring me to crack them open and devour them like a pistachio nut.

I’ll get to them, all in good time. I’m in no rush. Sometimes, the moments leading up to the thing—all anticipation and excitement—is the best part.

I will never shut up about the saturated visual potency of this film. Initially a box office disaster (which baffles me, because it is gratuitously beautiful), The Fall —one of my favorite films — is finally getting the recognition it deserves. It pays homage to visually striking art films like The Color of Pomegranates and The Inner Scar, but with a more tangible plot. It is stunning, but I don’t need to convince you. It speaks for itself. It’s available to stream now on Mubi, which has a deal right now where you can get three months of the service for just $1. (This isn’t an ad, I’m just really excited about it and had to share it with others.)

I watched it again with Ed last week. I’d been trying to convince him to watch it for months, and he finally gave in. He agreed: it is, indeed, a visual masterpiece. It made me a little emotional, realizing that a film like this could never be made today — not with our obsession with budgets, efficiency, and immediacy. This film took four years to make, and Tarsem Singh insisted on minimal CGI, a bold choice that paid off tenfold. To me, The Fall represents over-the-top, almost self-defeating dedication — it cost $30 million to make and earned just $3.1 million — to authenticity and beauty. Singh said he went bankrupt making it, and that he’d do it ten times over. That kind of attitude feels almost rebellious in today’s landscape of half-hearted, corner-cutting projects, where directors and producers prioritize speed and profit over excellence.

Just commit to the bit! Be excellent, or don’t make it at all. If it’s crap, start again. There’s nothing worse than watching something and knowing it was rushed, that creative pressure came from the need to turn a profit rather than the desire to make something meaningful. I’m more cynical than usual these days, but can you blame me? In a world hell-bent on automating and flattening the dimensions of everything beautiful and life-giving, these are the films I want to see — films that torment and nearly destroy their creators, who put everything on the line so the rest of us can partake in their beauty.

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A perfect podcast.

This podcast brings together all of my favorite worlds — fashion, literature, art, and psychology — into one. In some ways, discovering it has given me permission to talk more about fashion here. I’ve avoided the topic in the past, worried that it would undermine my credibility as a "serious writer," whatever that means. Yet here’s Karl, arguably one of the greatest writers of his generation, doing exactly that: talking about clothes.

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This, to me, is how writing characters should feel. Through these fragments (or “informational breadcrumbs,” as I affectionately call them) a reader gathers a sense of the whole. Or perhaps not the whole, but something close. Like ephemera, these vignettes are fleeting. But for a moment, they feel simultaneously universal and entirely ours.

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‘Under Your Spell’ by Desire, played loudly through bass-heavy speakers and heard muffled through a wall, is the heartbeat of this post. It’s one of my favorite songs, something that feels like longing distilled or a dream you can only half-remember. This feeling inspired the vignettes below. You can listen to the song here—I hope you do as you read through the rest of this post.

It’s dark outside when you wake, and the remnants of the day’s diffused light bleed softly through the window like an afterthought—an addendum to a day well-spent. The TV hums its ambient song quietly in the corner, casting a faint lavender glow that flickers across the room. You shift slightly, feeling the imprint of the couch’s fabric delicately etched into the soft topography of your cheek.

Through the walls, you can hear the faint murmur of voices—your family’s, familiar and comforting, their words indistinct but warm. An abrupt peal of laughter crescendoes and recedes. Your homework is done. The comforting, savory smell of dinner creeps up the stairwell, beckoning you toward the family table. You’re disoriented, unsure of how long you’ve been asleep or what you may have missed, but the disorientation is gentle, not alarming. Because you know, as surely as you know your own name, that you are safe. That the voices, the incandescent glow, the couch cradling you in its soft cocoon all conspire to remind you of this simple truth: there is nowhere else you need to be and nothing else you need to do.

On the cold tile of a stranger’s bathroom, you slump against the curve of the bathtub, its porcelain edge hard against your back. Your head spins as though you’re adrift, a ship in a storm, the room creaking and tilting around you, its fluorescent light casting everything in a dull, washed-out haze. You can’t recall the exact sequence of events that brought you here—the drinks, the laughter, the joy of being just shy of your most uninhibited self—but you know, or maybe you hope, that it was fun. That it was worth this moment of surrender to your undoing.

The knock comes softly, hesitant and small like a pebble against glass. Then, your name. Not a question, but a reassurance. A voice you know before it even registers. The door opens a crack, and she steps inside. She kneels beside you without hesitation, her knees pressing into the unforgiving tile, gathering your hair in her hands and away from your face as you bend and wretch over the toilet bowl. Her touch is methodical, careful, and kind. She doesn’t ask if you’re okay, doesn’t fill the silence with platitudes, questions, or shame. She stays, holding your hair, steady as a lighthouse. You’ll remember her hands, her silence, her presence, and how it made even a stranger’s bathroom feel, for a fleeting moment, like home.

You are out after dark for the first time, air humming with freedom and possibility as the world stretches open before you. The roads are empty, and the street lamps shine through the foliage that lines your streets, casting friendly outlines of leaves in the faint yellow circle of light. The quiet rhythm of your legs as they pedal further into the night matches the beating of your heart. Pure exhilaration—you’re still too young to feel afraid. You have no frame of reference yet for the things that prefer to seek the cover of darkness.

Your friends are up ahead, their laughter echoing, delayed, reaching you like remnants from another timeline. Behind you, your childhood home slips into darkness, its porch lamp shrinking into a pinhole like Gatsby’s green light shining across the water. For the first time in your young life, the night belongs to you, all its vastness and possibility.

You pedal faster, wind pulling at your hair, the world rushing by in an impressionistic blur of shadow and light. You feel untethered, as if leaving not just the house behind but something else—something smaller, something you’ve outgrown. A child’s sweater, a sock, a part of yourself. The quiet of the streets feels like an invitation but also, somehow, impossibly sad. You keep pedaling, pushing your adolescent body forward into the unknown.

Do you remember that feeling, when you were young, the evenings felt endless, and you’d meet a stranger at a house party thrown by someone whose name you can no longer recall? The rooms inside are loud, vibrating with muffled bass and the frenetic energy of too many voices at once. You can’t hear him over the noise, so you step outside together. The air feels like ice, startling enough to draw a sharp inhale from you while your exhales hang like smoke in the cold. You are both quiet, afraid to be the first to speak and break the seal of silence.

The stranger lights the cigarette between his lips and holds the pack out toward you—an offering. You smile, shaking your head, before looking down at your shoes to avoid confronting the exposure you feel under the warmth of his gaze. But his eyes are kind. The two of you sit down on the cold cement steps in front of the house, the warm world inside continuing without you. Friends laughing and dancing, bathed in the yellow glow of incandescent bulbs as the shapes of their bodies are projected onto the window’s closed curtains—a silent film for the passersby. You say something stupid but it makes the stranger laugh, and the joyful sound rings out into the stillness of the night air.

He holds his cigarette in one hand and, with the other, plucks a stray leaf tangled in your hair—an unrehearsed, strangely intimate gesture. And then he isn’t a stranger. He leans closer, and for a moment, you forget the cold biting at you. His lips taste faintly of ash and hops, a bitter mix you don’t expect to enjoy but do. The warmth of the kiss spreads through you, slow, electric, until you are glowing, lit from within by the wick of a secret just the two of you share.

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In case you missed it:

• Week 06.5’s Annotations (I published two last week because I fell behind) can be found here.

• This is a fun Valentine’s Day gift guide with suggestions for February. It’s free!

• I wrote an essay on Marta Becket and her life in the desert, which I think may be my favorite piece yet.

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