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I was always picked last in PE classes. “Nobody wants the fat girl in their team,” my classmates told me. “We’ll lose if you’re with us.”I hated gym class. It was a 45-minute-long hell that I had to suffer through twice a week. It included my two least favorite things: mean kids who would call me names and bully me because of my weight, and the unrelenting mid-morning heat of a small town near the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve Been Getting Fat-Shamed My Whole Life

I’ve been fat for most of my life, except for some bits here and there where I fell prey to toxic diet-pill culture and made myself lose weight in a quick and very unhealthy manner. While I can now say the word “fat” with confidence, there was a time where I would do anything I could, no matter the consequences, to be skinny—not because I actually wanted to be a size (or five) smaller but because of the constant hate and stigma I had to deal with from everyone around me. My parents, my grandmother, my aunts, my so-called friends—people around me took every opportunity to tell me how “unhealthy” I was because I was a size 14 as a teen instead of a size two and how my size would most definitely have fatal consequences later in my life. I was bullied, by friends and family members alike, into believing that my fatness would automatically cause diabetes, cancer or some other life-threatening illness. The number of times I’ve been told that “fat people are a strain to the public health system” is obscene. (Much more so than my size 22 ass in leggings and a crop top, if you ask me.) The truth is, we live in a society that makes it easy to get into a “fat stage,” with our cultural emphasis on convenience and the easy availability of highly processed foods, but also shames us fat folks for trying to “do better” by society’s twisted health expectations.

It wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I realized I had to do the work myself and slowly unlearn the toxic ideas I’d been fed—pun absolutely intended.

Having Fat-Shaming Parents Certainly Doesn’t Help

I know that if I ever get injured, my parents’ first reaction will be to tell me that my injury, no matter how minor, is somehow related to my weight and size and not to the fact that I’ve always been clumsy. I can’t ever complain about ankle, back or knee pain without my parents immediately attributing all my ailments to my fatness and not to the fact that I injured my knee when slipped over my long skirt at a dance recital when I was 11. I know that if I ever dare to think about stepping into a gym, finding workout clothes that fit me will be a nightmare, I’ll get shady looks once I’m there, and I’ll have to hear people make fun of me when they think I’m out of earshot. Not once in my almost 30 years has anyone taken the time to explain to me what a balanced diet is or to help me understand that exercising and moving my body weren’t just a punishment for what I’d eaten. It wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I realized I had to do the work myself and slowly unlearn the toxic ideas I’d been fed—pun absolutely intended—about fatness and health. As a child, I was simply told to avoid sweets and junk food and “eat as little as possible.” I was bullied into hating PE class (or really any form of exercise) while I watched family members go through a constant rotation of fad diets, “miracle” products and weight loss surgery—some that almost cost them their lives.

How to Avoid Fat-Shaming at the Doctor’s Office: Don’t Go

It’s taken me a very long time to understand that the only person who can make an accurate comment about my health is my doctor—and no, not just anyone with a medical degree. (And especially not anyone with a social media account and too much free time who’s read a bit about fitness.) One that actually knows me, my body and my medical history. Sadly, I’ve found out that coming across a doctor who will take the time to listen to what I have to say isn’t the easiest thing to do. The pursuit of health is no easy thing for us fat folks. As a fat person, I know that the first thing health care providers will ask me at any given consultation, without first bothering to ask what my appointment is for, is whether or not I’ve tried losing weight to fix my problem. Every single doctor I’ve been to in my life has asked this—even my eye doctor. I want to be able to have a regular doctor’s appointment where I can address a specific health concern of mine. Instead, I end up being subjected to an unsolicited nutrition lesson. As a result, I started avoiding hospitals and doctors as much as I could. I thought that, since the people who “knew best” were quick to suggest my body and my weight were the roots of every problem (again, without even asking what the actual problem was), maybe my family’s toxic approach to health was right after all. I thought as long as I was skinny, I’d be healthy. But even at my skinniest, it wasn’t enough. I was never “healthy” enough for the people around me, so I simply gave up on caring about it. After developing a mild eating disorder, then starting therapy and finding a very supportive body positivity and self-love online community, I realized my approach to “not caring” about health wasn’t sustainable. At some point, I’d need to address it, and I decided I would rather it be sooner than later. Slowly but surely, I learned how to respond to fat-shaming, how to ignore the negative external input on my body, my weight and my size and how to listen to what my body was trying to tell me.

I started avoiding hospitals and doctors as much as I could.

Fat-Shaming in Public Health Is Simply Not Effective

The sad part is, I’m not alone in avoiding medical care for that reason. People all over the world constantly face shame, both from those close to them and from the doctors and nurses who are supposed to be caring for them. A recent study for the International Journal of Obesity found that around three-quarters of Weight Watchers users, out of nearly 14,000 surveyed, had been fat-shamed by friends or family members at some point in their lives. Many of them specifically mentioned that these instances occurred during their childhood and early teens, and it usually came in the form of harsh criticism and mockery—not honest attempts at helping. The study also shows that they also experienced name-calling and being made to believe fat people can’t be worthy of love and affection. Why do fat people have to process and overcome such a huge amount of trauma to even try to be healthy? In allowing this to be the status quo, we have failed as a society. Our simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach to health has done little to welcome certain members of the population. Alienating, shaming and insulting those who are fat, or who don’t fit an outdated image of “health,” is not the way to go. We still have a chance to change this, to become more aware of the dangers of shame and bullying and the negative effects they have on people’s minds and bodies. Rebecca Puhl, the deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, said it best: “Stigma is an enemy to health.”

Zooming down the interstate, I gazed at the familiar sight of acres upon acres of corn, soybeans and cattle. My metropolitan life was in the rearview mirror and my picturesque, pastoral past was before me, if only for an afternoon. It had been months since I had last visited my mom, grandparents and a host of other extended family members, and I was honestly looking forward to returning to that simpler life for a brief time to celebrate Mom’s birthday.However, there was one aspect to this visit that I was most definitely not looking forward to. For the previous several months, I’d been on a very strict diet. My goal was to lose 90 pounds before my forthcoming wedding. Without a doubt, it was the hardest thing I had ever done. Yet, I didn’t call it quits like so many other dieters I had known because I had a very clear motivation. My father died when I was 12 years old, partially due to obesity. When I proposed to my now-wife, I proposed that I would not let the same thing happen to her that had happened to my mom.Like so many gatherings for so many families, mine always featured food as the starring attraction. My grandparents had worked the land themselves for years to raise cattle, pigs, chickens and produce. Who could blame them for taking pride in what they had worked so hard for? Part of our food tradition also included using old Jello salad recipes and homemade ice cream recipes that went back four generations—now, ironically for me, recipes for disaster. I had explained this to my family before I made the decision to visit. I earnestly wanted to warn them that I would not be eating the same way that I always had. Still, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

Without a doubt, it was the hardest thing I had ever done.

My Family Was Not Prepared for My Weight Transition

When I said the word diet, it meant something very different to my family than it did to me. I can’t recall any of my male relatives ever owning up to going on a diet, but for my mom, aunts and other female relatives, a diet was something you tried out for a few weeks to lose a pound or two before giving it up at the first available holiday gathering. They would never even think of losing a life-changing amount like 90 pounds. That was something you only saw in commercials.As I pulled into the county park where we were gathering, I could easily spot where our family was situated. Coolers lined the concrete-floored pavilion as Grandma comically tried to spread table cloths over the dirty picnic tables in spite of the breeze. As I got out of my car, she finished the table she was working on and came over to give me a hug.“Wow, you look so—so different!” she said.My sister was less tactful. She looked up from her phone with a contorted expression on her face and said, “You look weird. I liked you better when you were fat.”“Well,” I said hesitantly, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to this. I’m not planning on going back.”As the visit progressed, it seemed more and more like my family took my commitment as a challenge. As dish after dish was passed before me, the temptation of the food was multiplied exponentially by the remarks that accompanied them.“Who eats a hamburger without a bun? How are you even supposed to eat it?”“Surely just one scoop won’t hurt.”“I’m worried about you. You’ve got to eat something!”All of these comments were spoken in love. I know my family cares for me, just as I care deeply for them. However, my desire to please my family only made saying no that much more difficult. To reject the cooking felt like a rejection of the cook.

I Gave in (a Little) to My Grandma’s Ice Cream

Then came the greatest challenge of all. Grandma brought out a Crock-Pot filled with delicious homemade ice cream. As the scorching summer sun baked the world around me, the cool, creamy goodness, with four generations of tradition, called my name. I would like to tell you that I overcame the temptation. I would like to say that I passed on the ice cream and reached for another cucumber slice instead. Sadly, that would be a lie.When Grandma asked how much I wanted, I told her to hold the birthday cake and just give me a “little bit” of ice cream. Grandma plopped one scoop in a styrofoam bowl and reached back into the crock for more. I knew that she wouldn’t even start to question whether I had enough until another four or five scoops were in the bowl, so I quickly told her that one scoop was fine and graciously took the bowl from her hands.She commented that I wasn’t taking very much and offered more, but I declined. I looked down at the bowl and realized that she was right. There weren't more than two respectable spoonfuls to be seen. Knowing my window of opportunity was short in the sweltering heat, I quickly went to work on my small indulgence.

Those two bites were the best bites of ice cream I had ever eaten, bar none.

Rejecting Food Can Often Feel Like Rejecting Family

If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know that the first bite off of the diet is always the best. My experience was no exception. Those two bites were the best bites of ice cream I had ever eaten, bar none.I looked up from my bliss to see that I had finished eating before everyone had even been served. Grandma noticed my empty bowl and, of course, asked if I wanted more. I opened my mouth to ask for “just a little bit more,” but I stopped myself short. I thought of my dad, my fiancee and the commitment I had made. “No thanks, Grandma,” I said, smiling. “It was delicious though,” and I reached for another slice of cucumber.I went on to complete my goal of losing 90 pounds just in time to enjoy Christmas cookies at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm (in moderation, of course). Although every day of the diet was a challenge, I still consider that birthday party to be the day I won the battle over my weight. Saying no to food is a difficult thing to do, but saying no to family is almost impossible.

Taking my place in a time-honored lineage of women, stretching back generations, I was sitting on the toilet when I found out I was pregnant. It was the staff toilet at the sixth form school I was attending, and I had snuck in there so that I could pee on the stick and on my hands in privacy. I was 19 years old. Finding out I was pregnant was bad news, but it shouldn’t have come entirely as a shock. The contraceptive pill is quite hilariously ineffective at keeping you not pregnant. In the U.K., where I was sitting on the school toilet pregnant, the blessed NHS reports that nine in 100 women taking the pill will get pregnant each year. Slightly more than three million women are currently taking the pill in the U.K., which means that 30,000 women every year will become pregnant despite eating the daily hormone lozenge that makes you fat and sad and gives you blood clots and robs you of your sex drive. On that day, it was just my turn.

30,000 women every year will become pregnant despite eating the daily hormone lozenge that makes you fat and sad and gives you blood clots and robs you of your sex drive.

My Best Friend Offered Support at the Abortion Clinic

I immediately called my best friend, JC, and because she is a hero, she told work that there had been a family emergency and came to pick me up from school in her car. We drove to a supermarket and ate a depressing breakfast of morbid buffet sausages and congealed beans while we strategized about what to do next. I knew with unflinching certainty that I wanted an abortion and felt no nerves or apprehension about this whatsoever. We are taught to believe that having an abortion is a huge and life-altering decision rather than a routine healthcare procedure. The point of this is to moralize the decision and infect us with uncertainty and guilt. It also appears to be linked to the sticky but erroneous idea that women inherently want to be mothers, and therefore any decision related to mommydom should be wracked with identity-level significance. When the day of my abortion came around, JC drove us to the city where I would have the procedure done. We raved to dance tunes in the car and discussed the many and various merits of Scotch eggs as a snack food. We got semi-lost on the way and had to ask for directions from a taxi driver who was parked up on a side road. When we first asked for directions to the “Marie Stopes” clinic, as it is hygienically referred to, he had no idea what we were on about. “The abortion clinic,” I said and smiled in case he felt the need to offer any condolences. “Oh yes, of course, love. Off you go up this main road here…” He was very nice and gave us top-quality directions because we arrived at the clinic four minutes later. We spoke to the very nice lady at reception. “One abortion, please,” I requested, which made JC snort, and to her credit, the nice lady at the desk smiled too. The abortion procedure itself was uncomplicated. I have had more unpleasant and stressful haircuts.

The abortion procedure itself was uncomplicated. I have had more unpleasant and stressful haircuts.

I Was Fortunate to Have a Network of Care and Compassion

JC and I celebrated the fact that this was a free and easy to access procedure by having a posh lunch and doing a bit of shopping. We sat in a lovely outdoor dining place with a view of the fancy shops all around the nice part of town we were visiting. There was a jeweler with a burly security guard at the door for whom we spent a gleeful hour making up a life story. The highlight was that his name was Boris, and he had a catheter fitted because he was never allowed to leave his post at the jeweler’s door and had, in fact, been standing there since 1998. The only painful part of the whole day was the *insert deluded branch of Christianity here* women who were praying outside the clinic for the murdered soul of the 8mm glob of cells in my uterus. Presumably, God had revealed to them that this was a better and more pious use of their time than, say, litter picking or volunteering at a children's shelter or any other activity that would yield a net positive impact on the planet. When JC dropped me off at home, we said, “I love you,” like we always do. I ordered takeout and rolled around in bed watching films and bleeding what appeared to be chunks of uncooked liver into my epically proportioned sanitary pads. My mom checked in on me every now and again. I felt totally looked after, extremely relieved that my life would not be destroyed by enforced parenthood, which I absolutely did not want, and my belly was full of curry, which is truly a utopian trifecta. JC and I still chat about Boris and what he might be up to and how his catheter is doing. We reminisce about our great day out and sigh with deeply felt relief that I’m not a parent. I wouldn’t recommend getting abortions as a fun new hobby or anything, but if you do find yourself in need of one and you are fortunate enough to live in a place where women are given more legal rights than a corpse, then I encourage you to enjoy the day in whichever ways you can.

Just after my 50th birthday, with three kids finally out of the house, I found myself single and without a career, broke and struggling. Then a friend offered me a job to be a driver. Twice a month, I would join another driver to transport a few duffle bags of homegrown Colorado weed across Middle America to Missouri. I’d get paid $2,000 in cash in St. Louis upon delivery, and my friend (we’ll call him Bob) backed the deal with an assurance that if I hit any legal trouble, he would cover all the fees.The job was never something I thought I would do, but I desperately needed the money. Somehow, I just knew I would be alright and things would work out if I said yes. A gut instinct. It was a family business anyway. Bob and his wife, Amy, and her son Eddy ran the trade together. So I accepted his offer and took my first drive in October of 2014.

The job was never something I thought I would do, but I desperately needed the money.

I Began My Journey With a Driving Partner and a Fake Backstory

I parked my car in the grocery store lot on time at 7 a.m. and waited to see Bob drive up. I would drive whichever car followed Bob’s, alongside a man I’d never met. Bob had said I would make more than the other driver because Bob needed me to play the part of a seasoned Midwest mother with a black lab to round out our cover. We were to be a retired couple hitting the casinos for a weekend vacation. A car with Florida license plates stopped.“Hey, partner,” I said, opening the back door to let “our” dog, Lenny, take the back seat before I took the front.The man smiled and said his name was George. He was clean-shaven, dressed in a collared shirt and long pants. I had on a loose-knit sweater and my best mom jeans with a shawl slung over my shoulders to fit the image of a mature woman who might play bridge or lap the mall. We headed east on the interstate with our car in the lead. Bob and Eddy were in the decoy car with Colorado plates following behind. George and I corroborated our story, but we didn’t talk about what was in the car, how much or what it cost. It was easier if I didn’t touch anything and knew as little as possible. If I had given any thought to the amount or the risk, I would have panicked, so I kept myself busy smoking cigarettes and going over the safety measures. Everything was triple vacuum-sealed and then placed in charcoal bags to throw off any scent in case of a canine unit.George had been driving for Bob for two years and took the first shift heading east across the Colorado plains. He began to chat and told me he was raised in New Hampshire, lived as a boat bum in Florida and was now semi-retired in Denver, skiing weekdays and painting cars out of his garage. I liked his East Coast drawl, which leant to the collection of stories about everything lobster. He was nice, and I listened politely to an hour of old-timey stories until we found his playlists of ’90s grunge rock. Rage Against the Machine played and gave the two of us something to focus on until my time to drive.As George drove, my role was to be on the lookout for speed traps. Bob had advised looking out for state troopers parked above underpasses or hiding behind billboards to clock speed. I also played up appearances. If we spotted a state trooper in the distance, which George often inconspicuously pointed out, I would do “womanly” or “touristy” things to look normal, like file my nails or point at the horizon and feign amusement for God knows what since Nebraska was as flat as a pancake. We drove past state troopers not a mile over or under the speed limit, heading on to our night stay after a 12-hour drive.

I Battled My Nerves as We Approached the Drop-Off Location

I took the morning shift and headed to our first drop-off point in Iowa City. George eyed our scheduled rest stop to ensure that we were clear of the police, and we were instructed to keep moving down the highway if there was any doubt. After the all-clear, Bob backed into the empty spot next to us and George got out to help Bob unload the small bag from our trunk to his—ten pounds of bud worth $12,000, I found out later. Bob drove off to take an upcoming exit, and we headed past him to the following rest stop. The wait was unnerving, but after 20 minutes, we received the mile marker in a text message and began the last four-hour stretch down the gauntlet toward St. Louis.We made it to the city in the early morning. The highways were surprisingly crowded as I gripped the door handle of the passenger seat and tried to focus on Bob in the decoy car who had taken the lead. There were so many cars and after hours of Middle America dead land, the traffic moved around us at a careless pace. Cars crossed lanes without warning, semis flew past in the far lane and we were flowing in traffic, adjacent or ahead of at least one cop car. I knew it was irrational to be pulled over in traffic, but my heart still fluttered. The people were restless after the tragedies of Ferguson, and the city screamed with police presence. Bob took an exit toward downtown and led us to a popular casino’s parking garage. He was a high-roller with some professional experience in cards and no one looked twice at his bi-weekly visits. We circled up to the top floor of the parking garage and pulled into vacant spots among the fully packed garage. The men got out and headed to unload the bags as I let Lenny out to play as a distraction. The trunks clicked close, and Bob came around to give me a hug. He left me with a box of Hot Tamales and a box of Junior Mints instructed for George. I put the boxes in my purse. Bob and Eddy would head to the final drop-off, but our part was done. I could finally exhale. Had I done it? Was it that easy? I wondered. I opened the box of candy to see a wad of $100 bills and a bag of seven pre-rolled joints. I lit one and the two of us chain-smoked as George made the tight corners down nine floors of the parking garage.On the road, George called his son to tell him that everything had gone smoothly—that he was safe. We hadn’t talked about family in the 16-hour journey, but now I knew we both had adult kids. I found myself wishing I had someone to call and tell I was safe, but there was no way I was going to call my kids. I didn’t want to involve them. Though the money was needed, it didn’t make me proud.

The amount in the 120 pounds of duffle bags was worth over $200,000. If caught, I would have been booked with a felony with a minimum of 10 years and up to life in prison.

My Decision to Run Drugs Was Strictly Financial

The amount in the 120 pounds of duffle bags was worth over $200,000. If caught, I would have been booked with a felony with a minimum of 10 years and up to life in prison. I didn’t acknowledge it. I kept my mind on the music and the story, and I didn’t allow myself to think anything differently. It worked, and I drove again. Then again. Then again, tri-weekly, for four more years. Each drive became a little less tense and more routine. George and I were never pulled over, never had an accident and never raised suspicion from onlookers in crowded places. We never talked about the if. The more I drove, the less I dwelled on a moral compass—what I saw was medicine. It was really after I met the dealer in Iowa City that I realized I could finally tell my kids, who worried but supported my ways of making money. I had expected some over-tatted ruffian or a guy in a suit like in the movies to be at the other end of the Iowa drop. Instead, there was a farmer with his wife and baby, whom he had brought to a fast-food parking lot we’d begun meeting at instead of the rest stop. I cooed at the baby while the weed exchanged trunks and thought about my kids. This was his way of making a buck, as it was mine. He told me later how he was trying the best he could to make a life for his family. Trying, like all of us, to do what he could with what was offered in order to survive.

It all started with an itchy patch in my gluteal cleft—my butt crack, in layman’s terms. It continued to spread, an angry red swath of skin that was equal parts itchy and incredibly painful when I tried to scratch. Thinking it must be a yeast infection that migrated south by mistake, I tried every tube of anti-fungal ointment that my local CVS had to offer.Nothing worked, and the patches continued to spread, onto my genitals, then legs, then back, then ears, nose, eyelids, breasts, underarms, hands and lips, until I was a miserable, unsightly wretch. The first dermatologist I went to, a Harvard Medical School diploma glinting on her wall, said that it looked like dermatitis—a fancy word for swollen skin that doesn’t point to any particular cause. She sent me off with three expensive prescription creams that did little to alleviate my symptoms.Then I went in for a biopsy with another doctor, who suspected it could be psoriasis, an autoimmune condition characterized by a hyperactive immune system that begins attacking the skin, causing it to rapidly create new skin cells at a rate up to ten times faster than normal. The new skin cells build up, unable to shed quickly enough, causing the signature red, itchy, scaly patches to form. He was right.He broke the news that this was a chronic condition that I’d likely be managing for the rest of my life. The prognosis was relatively bleak: I could try specific topical treatments that were extremely effective, but being on them for longer than a few months at a time put me at higher risk for cancer. Then there were injectable drugs that intentionally weaken the immune system, costing tens of thousands of dollars, which have a whole host of other potentially life-threatening side effects.

Within just one appointment, she asked me to radically upend my diet.

A Friend Recommended I See a Nutritionist

This was all that Western medicine had to offer me, and I was exasperated. I had already felt extremely depressed, brought on by self-esteem that was practically nonexistent because of my unsightly appearance and the accompanying shame spirals that went along with realizing that I cared so much what I looked like, letting it rule my life. Now I was left feeling like the medical establishment wanted nothing to do with me, like I was a problem they were too ashamed to admit they couldn’t solve.Finally, a friend recommended her nutritionist to me, and I gave it a chance, willing to try anything, even though I had been brought up to believe that doctors were the only ones who held the keys to optimum health. Within just one appointment, she asked me to radically upend my diet, which was relatively healthy to begin with. Having no other options, I obliged.It started with a three-month abstention from gluten, dairy, sugar, fish high in mercury, alcohol, spicy food, nightshades (a family of plants including peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and white potatoes) and coffee. I was also to abstain from cooking with oil (I could add it to foods afterward, but cooked oil has toxins). I was to start my day with celery juice (full of phytonutrients), lemon water (to detox) and a whole host of vitamins and supplements. I was vegetarian at the time, but I added back grass-fed beef and organic chicken because there was so little else I could eat.The first ten days, I cried a lot, which happens to be a symptom of withdrawal from sugar. The following months were hard and often socially-isolating, as I couldn’t indulge in a coworker’s birthday cake calling to me from the office kitchen or even go out for a nice meal with my boyfriend. I actually saved money, despite spending nearly double on groceries from the fancy organic shops.

I Quickly Learned the Impact That Food Has on the Body’s Overall Health

It wasn’t quick or high tech or sexy; it was mundane and so slow it was practically imperceptible. But my nutritionist was right, and, even when I doubted her and wanted to quit, after many months of munching on raw fennel and pretending that 100 percent dark chocolate tasted sweet, my skin healed. In fact, not only did it heal, but I was met with a whole host of other benefits, from clearer skin to stronger hair, more energy, less anxiety, increased athletic performance and a ridiculous libido.Food-as-medicine was never an avenue considered by the three dermatologists I saw before I sought other nontraditional, non-Western avenues of care. They never once asked about my diet, a pillar of health that likely has a greater impact on curing—and preventing—disease than any modern remedy we have at our disposal.On a macro level, we all know that a salad is better for you than a brownie. But on a micro level, we don’t often think about how the vitamins, minerals, complete proteins and healthy fats we ingest are the only resources our bodies have to carry out everyday functions on a cellular level, whether it’s regulating hormones, thinking thoughts or growing fingernails. If we’re not supplying our cells with the proper array of nutrients, we won’t be functioning properly. At best we’ll feel like shit, and at worst we’ll get sick.

On a micro level, we don’t often think about how the vitamins, minerals, complete proteins and healthy fats we ingest are the only resources our bodies have to carry out everyday functions on a cellular level.

The Right Ingredients Can Build a Healthy Foundation

My illness and epiphany are not so unique, except for the fact that they happened young, in my early 20s. As I get older, I’m watching more and more of my friends join the unfortunate club of chronic disease, coming down with everything from Candida infections to cystic acne, from Crohn’s to depression.They get frustrated with the lack of care options and disillusioned with Western-trained doctors treating the symptoms instead of the root cause, playing whack-a-mole as new problems pop up but never catching the proverbial rodent underground. Finally, they also search for other ways to heal themselves, ultimately discovering what I know in my bones to be true—that a nutritious diet is the cornerstone of vibrant health.It gives me hope that we are unintentionally creating a sort of grassroots movement towards building the healthcare system that we want to see and one that doesn’t rely on a house of cards built by insurance companies and expensive drugs. We are returning to the simple, ancient conclusion that we can heal ourselves if given the right ingredients. If we listen closely to our bodies, we can find the answers we desperately need in order to heal—not at the pharmacy but at the farmer’s market.

In 2017, I suffered a seizure in my sleep, went to an urgent care center and found an egg-sized tumor in my brain. The doctor said it was just like a “piece of flan,” and they’d cut open my skull and scoop it out, no problem. In the ambulance on the way to the ER, I was strapped to the gurney and was told I had cancer. Apparently, I was a seizure risk, and the ambulance EMT knew my diagnosis before my doctor did. Two weeks later, I was wheeled into a brightly lit operating room with wires running the length of my body and a giant X marked on the side of my head where the tumor was. A nurse took my hand as the anesthesiologists put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply.The next thing I remember, I woke up in a hospital room hooked up to an IV with a catheter in my urethra, a dry throat and a dull pang in my skull. I reached up and felt the staples and dried blood around a patch of shaved hair. I was thirsty, I wanted the catheter out, but neither request was granted. The nurses said I wasn’t ready to regain control of my bodily functions so shortly after the procedure.The proceeding weeks led to a diagnosis (grade 3 brain cancer; the EMT was right), rest, radiation, more rest, chemotherapy, diet changes, micro-seizures in my leg and moderate exercise. The hair that had grown in around my scar fell out once and for all while the radiation beams permeated my scalp. I was told it would be the max amount of radiation my body could receive in this lifetime and it could do damage in the long term; nevertheless, it was the best bet for zapping the remaining 80 percent of the tumor that the surgeons couldn’t take out.

It’s not until now, four years later, that I am beginning to confront the depth of this experience and the proximity I feel to death that will stay with me moving forward.

My Tumor Forced Me to Reflect on My Past Experiences

It’s not until now, four years later, that I am beginning to confront the depth of this experience and the proximity I feel to death that will stay with me moving forward. I’m also starting to trace back my history and pick up on some of the cues that led to my diagnosis with the big C.I’ve heard that head trauma can stay with you and have long-lasting effects. We see it often in athletes who have suffered numerous concussions. I know this to be true. I was hit over the head with a Jack Daniel’s bottle, right where my tumor eventually grew, when I was jumped in Sydney outside my old apartment back in 2007. That head trauma led to my first partial scalp shaving, some stitches and a temporary Franciscan friar haircut, with the weird bald spot up top as the stitches healed and the scar remained hidden beneath my thick hair.Shortly after that episode, I left my life in Sydney and moved to L.A., ready to start fresh and find a new path for my professional and personal endeavors. Life there was pretty awesome for a while—I was building my own company, rode my bike all over the city, lived in a sweet spot for not too much money, had amazing friends, a cool girlfriend, a community and I was finding new opportunities to step into interesting positions of leadership.

My Symptoms Started With My Right Foot

Things started getting weird for me around 2014. I had been living the dream, building my own business in L.A. for five years, and it started to falter. The business model was evolving, and I was still holding a vision for a company our customers didn’t seem to want. I was also paying myself next to nothing to build a company where I was quickly losing passion. It felt like the ship was sinking, but I had no way to escape.I sought other outlets for my passions, making music and creating new creative outlets and opportunities. I tried to get serious with my new love interest, a woman I had been long-distance chasing for a while who had a son with her ex in the midst of our on-and-off courtship. Throughout all this, my body was quietly degrading.The physical signs started with my right foot. I was limping, and it felt numb at times. I couldn’t flex my toes anymore, and it was harder to rub them together. I felt frustrated by this new lack of mobility, but my friends all suggested they had similar deficiencies, so I ignored it for a while.Sometimes, I thought it was because of the thin-soled shoes I got during my last trip through Tijuana—other times, it seemed I wasn't exercising or walking the right way. I thought it was just a foot thing, nothing major. Eventually, after a while, noticing the limp and numbness getting worse, I made an appointment with a foot doctor. Two weeks before that appointment, I fell ill with a severe fever, suffered a grand mal seizure in my sleep, went to urgent care the next day and discovered the tumor in my brain.

This is not a story about life with a brain tumor so much as it’s a message to pay attention.

It’s Crucial to Be in Tune With Your Body

This is not a story about life with a brain tumor so much as it’s a message to pay attention. When things are off in our lives, the body can take the stress in strange ways. If we don’t pay attention to the small dissonances in our physical and mental health, they can turn into big, life-threatening conditions. I’m grateful to be alive writing this today, but my diagnosis isn’t great.Please, take some time to check in with yourself today. Consider what isn’t in alignment from the professional to the personal and consider finding some professionals to help you get back to health. One of the hardest things to do is to ask for help, and sometimes it’s even harder to know we need it. Let this be a reminder that both asking and checking in are key to living fully.

Shortly after I read about President Biden’s plan to send people door-to-door to “encourage” everyone to get the COVID vaccine, I had a terrifying nightmare in which someone came to my home to jab me in the neck with the vaccine. I woke up, thankful that was just a dream. Until I remembered that this situation really isn’t that far from reality these days. I grew up hearing that experimental drugs are bad, that a woman should be able to choose, that it’s “my body, my choice.” But, in my experience, those things don’t seem to apply in today’s world, at least when it comes to COVID-19 and vaccines. I feel like a constant ball of worry, grappling with the fear of being forced to get the vaccine and the question of whether I’m being unreasonable in my refusal to willingly take the dang thing. Here’s just a glimpse into what’s rolling around in my mind about these vaccines and the questions I wrestle with daily.

New Drugs Without Much Data Are Bad…Right?

Back in college, I once considered signing up for human experiments because they paid money, and I was broke. Now I’m quite glad that I never actually became a human guinea pig; I shudder to think of the side effects I could be experiencing now because of some experimental drug I would have ingested just for a few bucks. I flash back to this near miss when I consider the COVID-19 vaccines. Do I get one, knowing full well that it’s really new and we don’t have a ton of data on it yet—and that the manufacturers have zero liability if something should go wrong in my body should I take it? Or do I just say no like I was taught to do? I am probably one of the worst people at being sick. I hate it. And everyone around me hates it because I cannot hold in all my sniveling misery—I cry and complain and generally suck to be around. If there was truly a cold and flu vaccine that prevented me from ever getting sick, I’d be one of the first to sign up. But I’ve gotten the flu vaccine before and ended up horribly ill—worse than I can ever remember in my life—and I was sick a lot as a kid, so I have some experience here. In this way, I struggle with getting a COVID vaccine because the other shots meant to prevent illness didn’t work for me. Getting the flu vaccine and then spending a week on the couch (twice) sicker than ever makes me wonder: If I get the COVID shot, will I actually avoid getting COVID? Or will it be like the flu vaccine where I’ll get COVID worse than ever?

I struggle with getting a COVID vaccine because the other shots meant to prevent illness didn’t work for me.

My Body’s History of Weird Reactions

Further complicating things is that I have weird reactions to random things. I’m allergic to Zoloft and break out in a rash, which, as you can imagine, was rather depressing to find out—if you’ll excuse the irony. I also wound up in the hospital once from taking sulfa drugs for a UTI. Then there’s the laundry list of random soaps and lotions I can’t use. My skin freaks out when I use Aveeno lotion, for crying out loud! Given my propensity to react badly to random things, I am horrified at the potential reactions that I might experience if I give in and get the vaccine. I also have friends who have gotten the vaccine and had devastating side effects. One of my friends was told by Mayo Clinic doctors to get it because it would protect her immunocompromised husband, who is on dialysis and will need a kidney transplant. She was the best organ donor match for him. Until she got the vaccine. Now she’s got fibromyalgia and can no longer donate an organ to him.I am heartbroken at my friends’ tragedies and outraged that they are being largely ignored by the medical community. And that heartbreak and outrage are confirming to me that this vaccine is likely not going to be a safe thing for my body.

My Voice Isn’t Welcome in Medical Debates

I once made the stupid mistake of condemning the violence, crime and looting that happened in June of 2020 on Facebook. I quickly found out how nasty the people on my friend’s lists were—one guy went so far as to presume he could somehow divine my entire thought process (he was way off) and assume that I was the worst, most racist person on planet Earth before unfriending me. I sucked it up and learned an unfortunate lesson: As a conservative, my voice and my opinion are silenced, especially when it comes to anything COVID-related. I learned that lesson again just recently when a school principal I’m friends with mentioned how worried she was about masks and that the new variants are impacting the unvaccinated only. I told her that wasn’t true, that vaccinated people have also been hospitalized and died—she shut me down immediately and wouldn’t even listen. I had to bite my tongue so hard and walked away so angry because she refused to even allow room for me to have an opinion.I do not want the vaccine. But that doesn’t mean I think other people shouldn’t get it if that’s what they want. And I don’t silence people who think differently about it than I do

As a conservative, my voice and my opinion are silenced, especially when it comes to anything COVID-related.

I’m Still Scared I’ll Be Forced to Take the Vaccine

In some ways, I feel like I’m crazy. I battle between thinking I’m overreacting and buying into a conspiracy theory. But I also feel that I’m being gaslit and that I’m actually interpreting all the craziness correctly as some larger and more terrifying plot (for what, I really don’t know). I feel like I am selfish because I’m not getting the vaccine.But then I think…wait a minute. It’s basically a brand new medical treatment and people with legitimate questions are being shut up. People I know are experiencing tragic consequences because they took the COVID vaccine. And the world is nuts, and so I keep my resolve to not willingly get this thing injected into my arm. And I remain terrified that, despite the phrase “my body, my choice” being drilled into my brain, I will be forced into taking a vaccine that I do not want and that, quite frankly, could even kill me.

We grew up in America. Uh-mer-ick-uh. The land of the free and the home of the brave. Or so they told us.We were programmed with so much number-one entitled elitism, fueled by ashes of the Cold War and planted by seeds of innovation to come. Zapping TV dinners taking in Hollywood’s sovereign content, the U.S. bulldozed psyches globally, tainting the flavor of Globalization 2.0. With Coca-Cola and McDonald’s up its sleeve, American neo-imperialism crawled into global reality—blue-, red- and white-washing every continent.What effect did that narrative have upon those at home on good ol’ American shores? From the consequences of Vietnam to the Gulf War waddle to the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Could the U.S. populace have a conscience?

This place is fucked up.

America Is a Nation Without an Identity

With a mere two true border countries—“America Lite” up north and the hired help down south—we face few consequences for our behavior. Humans define themselves by “the Other.” And since the nature of Americanness became a melting pot of possibility, most melded to fit in. Immigrant children refused to learn their parents’ native tongues. Tales of the Old World died with our grandparents.This land on which we stand is not ours, stolen by diseased blankets and conquistador trickery. Even the indigenous population of the U.S. has an identity crisis.This place is fucked up.Spring is making its way around the corner as I take a weekend getaway strolling rainy Tallinn streets. As I look up at classic Estonian buildings, deformed under the weight of time, reading signposts dating back to the 1400s, I take in a fresh breath of Nordic air and feel what it’s like to have culture. History. Meaning.My travels through Bratislava to Budapest and Brussels to Bordeaux have shown me that people who have place create meaning around time and space. And over the trajectory of time, they weave a story of who and why they are. This is cultural history.

Our Cultural Melting Pot Has Drowned the Unique Flavor That Makes Us Special

My Jewish ancestors came to the U.S., chased out of Eastern Europe by the czar in the late 1800s. Third-generation American, I don’t deny how lucky I am, how being born upon Yankee soil gave me a leg up in the world. I wouldn’t be who or how I am today without that.But gratitude doesn’t dissuade my grimace. I can be thankful for being an American and still be disgraced at the lack of culture it harbors.In some ways, minorities stuck together to preserve tradition. But in many other ways, a blasé form of political correctness makes the disparate seemingly mainstream. Messages of tolerance and acceptance put forth an agenda of sameness, leading the American psyche to focus so hardcore on the latest release of InstaNetflixNow that we’ve forgotten where we came from. We’ve become so self-obsessed that we’ve forgotten why we’re here.My holiday takes me to the Estonian countryside, where I swing on a giant wooden plank built for 12, a local tradition. My strawberry-bearded Estonian friend tells me their history is riddled with witches, ceremony and traditional hunts for nonexistent fern flowers (as an excuse to make love in the forest). The Midsummer festival gathers a tribal reality of animist sun-worshippers, reconnected to natural cycles of reality on this planet earth. It seems each action has a superstition and each tradition a ploy for preservation.We go for a walk through the woods, and as I follow his stout calves along the path, the endless sea of ferns sprawling across the forest floor flood my optical scope. I feel for a second like I'm tripping, yet I'm as sober as daylight. I ask him if he is used to this euphoric reality, and he responds by delving deep into Estonian mythology. Loosely translated, this is how ferns are thought about: "The fern blade keeps the lightning bolt away and the wolf from holding its tooth. It shines like the sun and shines in all the colors of the rainbow and is more beautiful than the water rose on the Amazon River and the morning star in the sky."You're tripping with me now, right? In the end, he says yes; the quiet of the forest and the deep connection to the drastic changes in seasons keep him as grounded as his great-grandfather and his great-grandfather's grandfather. Their way of life is simple, only lightly changed by invasions and cultural conquests of religious conversion. Otherwise, he sits there before me, piercing sky blue eyes atop the long strawberry beard, sure as day: He knows who he is. Of course, his ancestry traces back to the Vikings; he has no doubt about his identity.I can’t say the same.

Could the U.S. populace have a conscience?

Americans Need a Common Purpose

It’s not that anything is wrong with the United States. (OK, I may be biting my tongue there.) It’s just that we’ve lost all sense of history and deeper meaning. We are culture orphans living in a land of milk and honey. But the cows are locked up and the bees are dying. We’ve killed history, and no one knows their origin story anymore.Some would argue that this hotbed of cultural enmeshment sings to the tune of country music and bluegrass. That the Appalachian Mountains still echo the settlers’ songs. That some unique form of original American destiny was laid down here, on the whipped Black backs of imported slave labor. Looking back, we don’t have much to be proud of.We project into the future, build tall buildings and get obsessed with buying things online to make our kids look cuter. But have we forgotten how to write poems with pens?Have we lost the visions of our ancestors or even the nation’s founders' dreams?When politics become reality TV and the stock market can be swayed by the masses, have we not become a pigpen of toddlers, wading around in our own mess? Without being held accountable by the Other (aka border nations) and minimal hindsight from whence we’ve come, we cannot reliably plot a course for the future.I sigh, wishing I could know what my lineage cared for, to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. Likely they just wanted a better life. Nostalgia creeps up my spine. Was another strip mall, Target or Walmart paving their way across the country what they had in mind? Corporate slavery and media hypnosis?We can’t win. Should we even try?I long for a sense of national purpose informed by the past.And I’m afraid I won’t find it here.

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

It wasn’t my first drink that I kept trying to recall. When I drank, in my late 20s, I wanted an entire stretch of time to come back: the years leading out of my teens into adulthood. Why wouldn’t I want it all back? This was when I could get drunk after shows, during shows, on the way to places, coming back from places and then sweat it all out only to wake up with only a faint headache. But I didn’t miss the physical resilience most—what I wanted back was that feeling of infinite time, a relation to the world that has nothing to do with the drinking. But the drinking was the only tool I had to mess with time.Drinking did not, it turns out, make me younger. I did keep trying to drink myself into a state where I thought I could replay certain memories, soak my brain to the point where the associative properties would allow me to drunkenly slide across the border back into a better drunk with a younger self.As I drank into my 30s and 40s, I found myself hoping for very specific states of mind: the plaza in Rome where we sipped rosé after a day of walking; the dive bar on Houston where it was always dark and crowded even when it was high noon and only two people were at the bar. I began my drinking career a lightweight and found myself later becoming a full-blown alcoholic simply by trying to remember the easy, breezy days when I did, in fact, drink without disaster. The heavyweight got heavy by chasing the light.

The Slide Begins

One of the confusing things about addiction is that not every story is a straight line, and not every subject falls down over and over in increasingly embarrassing circumstances, progressively getting worse after starting from bad. Sometimes an addict walks through the world, more or less blending in— normal as a sandwich—until the light cuts on and bang: The slide begins.Part of the nostalgia in drinking is wanting back that choice, the act before the first drink, where a clean person was choosing to get dirty. In this, one both feels the world before drinking and simultaneously recaptures the ability to believe in choice, to remember being a person with will, not somebody helpless before their urges. A drunk will always look to the past because, with enough oomph, and enough drinking, it feels like the past can become as immediate as the drink itself, that fast-acting medicine. The weepy, melancholic effects of drink encourage a sort of misty-windowed time travel. That it isn’t real is, of course, a distraction diminished by the drink itself. Why do we think war stories are the love language of bars? We brag not only of our triumphs, but we also brag of not being drunks, of being able to stop doing the thing we obviously can no longer stop doing.I often thought of a specific time we were touring in England (when I was in a band, five lifetimes ago). One night, we took to the basement of a pub, which was essentially a bar under a bar. A band of small men from Glasgow decided to drink competitively with us. I’d be lying if I said that it was an enjoyable night, or that I felt good the next day, but I want to go back to the moment of drinking as if it were a harmless sport, the time of not knowing I was an alcoholic. Back then, I was able to think my relationship to events was simply a matter of willpower and stamina, that my misdeeds and adventures were all actions under my control. And we never really know if, maybe for a few moments back there, that this was actually the case.

When we drink, we want to kill time, fool it into looking elsewhere and let us not think about every rotten thing we’re drinking over.

I Drank to Fool Time

There is also a very powerful ambient nostalgia, one not tied to specific memories but to a sort of psychic buildup. It happened recently in a most powerful way. I was bicycling up through Lower Manhattan, moving onto Pitt Street when the golden hour sun hit the front of a building to my left. Some wooden chairs and a table were in front of a closed restaurant, and the overall effect was calm, quiet, open. The sweating side of a wine glass filled with rosé popped into my mind’s eye. Was it from three years ago in Brooklyn? Was I remembering 10 years ago on a roof in London? Had I still been drinking, I would have wanted to chase the possibility that I could Lego my way into an association, attach a new drinking memory to a better, older one and somehow become as calm and happy as I was that late November afternoon in Boston, just watching my friends do nothing much at all other than be with me.Because the alcoholism has to push us backward. Who’s ever sat at a bar and thought, “Man, I’ll be even drunker in two weeks!” (I should add that maybe someone has, so let’s soften that idea.) When we drink, we want to kill time, fool it into looking elsewhere and let us not think about every rotten thing we’re drinking over. Within that airy state of denial, anything but the present will look good. The appeal of the past is that it is not today, and a hard drunk will eliminate the pesky truths, perhaps the fact that the day in question was no better today but four drinks in, who can really say? The past never arrives with all of its tags and details and full transcripts. It’s always a fragment, soaked in whatever we had in hand.

The fact that I was drinking had nothing to do with the magic of the moment.

Drinking Didn’t Make the Magic—The Moments Did

But the pernicious nature of drinking is that, of course, even the sober alcoholic knows it was never all bad—hell, some of it was the best. And so were I to drink a beer today, let’s say a middling beer, I’d want to recall the evening on the eastern coast of Turkey in a small fishing village in 1992. We had driven all day in a half-operational Mercedes, its transmission wrecked by mountain roads. We were arriving at sunset, and there was only one place to eat. We found a parking spot on the hill under the dining porch area. The restaurant was set into the side of the steep hill that carried on down to the sea.We could not yet speak even the simplest Turkish phrase, so we simply mimed fish and a can that one drinks from. Miraculously, we got grilled sardines, caught that day, and two cans of Efes. The fact that I was drinking had nothing to do with the magic of the moment. I was there with my beloved, exhausted and dusty and entirely at peace. But for the longest time, I thought the Efes had something to do with it.

When we think of the term nostalgia, we’re taken back to a snapshot in time: perhaps a first kiss, a perfect vacation, a high school graduation. It’s a privilege if your idea of nostalgia is one of boy bands, Nickelodeon and summer flings, because for me, I’m nostalgic for the healthy, uncomplicated body I used to live in.I’m 36 and a mother of one. I also have Crohn’s disease (a chronic illness that causes me pain, fatigue, diarrhea, abscesses and much more). I’ve had it for a long time now, so much so that it’s a part of me. Yet, it doesn’t stop me sometimes yearning wistfully for the person I once was without it. The person who didn’t have constant blood tests, who didn’t need to set reminders to take medication and who didn’t think about her body beyond whether that dress she bought made her look fat or thin. But is nostalgia with chronic illness a healthy thing?

As soon as I realized I had begun to accept it, I felt my whole body relax.

The Difference Between Nostalgia and Anger

When I was first diagnosed many years ago, I was living abroad as an ex-pat and enjoying my 20s. The day I was diagnosed, I’d actually booked (and ended up canceling) a booze cruise the following evening. While my friends took to the sea without me, I sat in a hotel room near the hospital reading pamphlets, scouring the internet and trying to understand my new reality.One of the most difficult things of those early weeks—far worse than the medication side effects that were to come—was finding out who I was now. Within the first month of being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, much of my identity as a healthy person felt lost.All the things I’d loved to do pre-diagnosis now felt impossible, whether that was drinking in bars until 2 a.m. or taking a spontaneous weekend trip. People were kind and understanding, but I still found myself sitting next to them, feeling as if the only thing I had to contribute to a conversation was my medication and my illness.As is the fast-paced nature of ex-pat life, those around me constantly had plans, desperate to see as much of the world as possible. That was me once, but now I felt too scared to make any. I’d scroll through my phone looking at pictures I’d taken, and they already felt alien to me. I had forgotten what it was like to take your health for granted, to think about it only when dealing with an occasional bout of stomach flu or a winter’s cold. Now it was on my mind constantly.But, and it’s important to say, I wasn’t nostalgic. If you are new to a chronic illness diagnosis, you can’t expect to feel nostalgia for your past straight away.Instead, I was angry. Angry that my life felt frozen in time while others around me carried on. Angry that my illness meant, already, I couldn’t go back to who I was. Angry at the doctors, at the medication, at myself. Each reference to the past made me furious, and I hated looking at old photos or even thinking about them. Now I know that I was actually just going through the stages of grief.Is it wrong to say when you are diagnosed with a chronic illness that you grieve for the life you had and the person you were? Maybe. But it was still my reality. Plus, anger is the second stage of grief. I’d already gone through a brief bout of denial when I just ignored the doctor, drank tequila shots and pretended I was cured, but, thankfully, this was only fleeting. Unlike denial, anger hung around much longer.

I’ve learned that looking back and taking the time to reflect on how much an illness has changed your life is not necessarily a bad thing.

I Needed to Accept My Illness to Feel Nostalgia

Two years after my Crohn’s diagnosis, I was sitting in my doctor’s office and I suddenly realized that I was no longer angry. I felt present in the meeting, discussing a treatment plan and my symptoms. I had accepted this was my new life, but I had also not let it control my life.I realized that years had passed and my Crohn’s was still here. But so was my husband, my dog, my work and my family. Perhaps Crohn’s hadn’t taken so much as I had thought it had. As soon as I realized I had begun to accept it, I felt my whole body relax; I had been fighting against it for so long. What if I had just worked with it instead?To accept my present, I also had to accept my past. Which meant it was finally time to actively look back. I watched my wedding video. I printed off photos to make scrapbooks. Sure, I felt wistful with short pangs of regret, but mostly, I felt like anybody else looking back at moments in their life. In short, I felt nostalgic.

Why Nostalgia Is Important for Those With a Chronic Illness

Nostalgia is actually really important for people who have a chronic illness like me. I’m not saying we should live in the past and obsess over our pre-illness selves, but I’ve learned that looking back and taking the time to reflect on how much an illness has changed your life is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, nostalgia means I do think about the possibilities I could have had as a 100 percent healthy person. Still, I acknowledge that these are just some of the many paths my life could have taken.My illness changed the course of my life forever, but, in truth, it wasn’t all bad. I now have a two-year-old son, and my illness meant I received amazing specialist care throughout my pregnancy. I quit my previous employment because it wasn’t compatible with my life post-surgery. Now I work for myself as a writer, meaning I can do what I love and spend more time with our family.I can’t pretend that nostalgia means I wish I didn’t have my illness or that I don’t sometimes feel a pang when an old photo pops up on my screen. Still, I look back at my past just like everybody else does—with tinges of joy, sadness and embarrassment, and mostly wondering what the hell I was wearing.

Last night, I was browsing social media when I came across an image of a spot known to me as Ynys Llanddwyn. The tidal island is synonymous with Dwynwen, the Welsh patron saint of lovers. The poster—an Englishman—had tagged the spot “Lovers’ Island,” dubbing his version “more poetic” when pressed by locals. The rest of the world knows these isles as a United Kingdom, but what they may not realize is that Wales became an English colony way back in the 13th century. “Cymru,” the native name of our land, refers to “friends” or “fellow countrymen,” while Wales derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “foreigners” or “outsiders.” As a kid, I watched cartoons and bickered with my brother in Welsh. My classmates and I recited the Lord’s Prayer in Welsh. When a boy broke my heart, I cried to my mam in Welsh. Today, I communicate with my colleagues and thank my bus driver in Welsh. I tell my hairdresser my holiday plans and speak to my grandparents’ grave in Welsh. I make love in Welsh.But in 1536, Henry VIII's Act of Union named English the only legal language of this land.

It may now be recognized as a bilingual nation, but Wales has had to fight for its rights.

There’s a Long History of the English Admonishing the Welsh Language

In 1847, a school report known today as the Treachery (or Treason) of the Blue Books (and written by three Englishmen) blamed the Welsh language for stupidity and insolence, even taking the opportunity to attack the sexual morality of Welsh women. In 1870, an education act stated that children must be taught in English only. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, schoolchildren caught speaking their mother tongue were forced to wear a heavy wooden plaque around their necks. The child found wearing the plaque—reading W.N., or Welsh Not—was physically and psychologically abused. Generations of children missed out on a life of bilingualism because parents made a conscious choice not to pass on the language. And it wasn’t only the rights of schoolchildren that were disregarded.In 1965, one of Wales’ last exclusively Welsh-speaking communities was drowned to provide England with drinking water. This brings us to the present day, with the 2020 Annual Population Survey putting the number of Welsh speakers at just 29.1 percent. Despite the Celts existing on these shores long before the Anglo-Saxons, the highest echelons of British government still refer to Welsh as a foreign language, taking umbrage when an MP wished her House of Parliament colleagues a happy St. Patrick’s Day in both Welsh and Irish.The London-centric British media, meanwhile, flits between treating Welsh as the butt of jokes and with outright contempt. On UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, a Sky News presenter questioned whether Welsh is the world’s most pointless language. One of the U.K.’s most respected travel journalists, Simon Calder, chose a flight to our capital of Cardiff to ponder the necessity of bilingual announcements, attempting to draw a correlation between the "extra guff" to wade through and plane crashes. A recent travel listicle deemed it worthwhile to share with the world our most “Unpronounceable Welsh Town Names,” while another respected travel journalist asserted we don’t deserve to reclaim the native name of our tallest peak lest we had the audacity to build a cafe on top of it. Then there’s the National Health Service boss, who compared treatment of non-Welsh speakers to that of Black people during South African Apartheid, while the boss of a national supermarket chain referred to the language as “gibberish,” having previously called it a “dead language that sounds uncannily like someone with bad catarrh clearing his throat.” Oh, and not forgetting the wrongly jailed postmaster who was prevented from writing letters to loved ones in Welsh.

Wales Has Always Had to Fight for Its Language

Welsh-speaking communities are being decimated as young locals are priced out of the towns and villages they grew up in, while holiday homeowners rarely bother learning our language because everybody speaks English anyway, right? Historic property names are lost in favor of twee, Airbnb-friendly titles; as I write this, a home named Fferm Tan y Mynydd, which translates to Farm Beneath the Mountain, has been renamed Forget Me Not Cottage.And after all this, we’re meant to be grateful. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”It may now be recognized as a bilingual nation, but Wales has had to fight for its rights. The reason we have bilingual government documents is because activists refused to pay an English language tax bill, going to court a dozen times in eight years while losing their possessions to bailiffs and even enduring jail time. The reason we have bilingual road signs is because Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) took it upon itself to deface and remove English-only signs. Our Welsh-language television channel exists largely because an activist threatened to starve himself to death. And even still, Brits complain about this “waste” of taxes. As if we don’t pay our own.

My culture is not a story to be erased.

I Long for a Time When I Could Speak Welsh Without Justification

British schoolchildren were recently urged to sing a song in celebration of “One Britain One Nation” day, on its surface a bid to unite all who choose the U.K. as their home, but viewed by many as a desperate bid to Band-Aid the gaping chasm between England and its neighbors. The song concludes, “Strong Britain, Great Nation. Strong Britain, Great Nation.”I don’t expect my bus driver to speak Welsh, and though I live in a predominantly English-speaking suburb, I still trill “Diolch!” at the end of my journey to demonstrate that Welsh is a living, breathing language. A person who knows me through the medium of English will never know me at my very core. I am nostalgic for a time I never experienced—a time when I wouldn’t have had to justify the existence of a language I use to interact with the world. My culture is not a story to be erased and forgotten.

I’m about to be 28, and I can’t even say it out loud. Since I was a teenager, I’ve dreaded my birthday. I spend it thinking about dying (what a fun day to be around me). I’m another year closer to the end of my life, and the only way to ease my mind is reassuring myself that everyone gets older. Entering my mid-20s sent me into a deeper spiral, knowing 30 was just around the corner.I know 30 years old is still young, but my brain has decided otherwise. “You’ve peaked. You had a great run, and now you’re old, ugly and unsuccessful,” it tells me anytime I look at old photos or think about myself in my early 20s.So I stop scrolling through photos. I avoid walking by my old apartment and places I hold the most memories, like going out with my coworkers to the bar next door, staying till close and sneaking up to the roof, or living with four strangers turned friends who shared their clothes and danced with me in the kitchen. I’ve convinced myself turning 30 means the end of an era of feeling youthful, attractive and carefree. I’ve romanticized my early to mid-20s, which is why I have trouble letting them go, but I forget at that time, my life was anything but carefree. The reality was, I had a million problems with seemingly no solutions.

I dated a construction worker I met on Tinder. He said his own name after we had sex.

Seeing the World Through Rose-Colored Glasses

At 22, I had $18 to my name. I stopped taking public transit to save money, which meant riding my bike in the rain in 30-degree weather. I worked in the box office at a comedy club and walked dogs on the weekends. Both paid very little for the shit I dealt with. I held my tongue when customers complained that the comedians weren’t funny, something I couldn’t control, as comedy is subjective. My hands went numb while I walked someone else’s dog in the freezing cold, and I gagged as I cleaned up the accident they had in the house. I started my “career” in stand-up, which meant doing open mics seven days a week without pay and getting booked at bar shows five people might attend. I couldn’t afford to fly home for the holidays, so I would spend six hours on a bus with a seat next to the bathroom and no leg room. I dated a construction worker I met on Tinder. He said his own name after we had sex. At 23, I adopted a dog I had to rehome because I couldn’t afford to take care of him. I thought about him every day, how I lost a best friend. I found out a few weeks later he was put down for “aggressive behavior.” I still can’t forgive myself for that.At 24, I had a boyfriend who forgot my birthday and told me it was my fault. He spent more money on coke than he did on me, and he had a single mattress on the floor with no sheets. I stayed with him for almost a year.At 25, I fell in love with an abusive narcissist. I woke up wondering what we were going to fight about that day, what he was going to tell me I did wrong. He told me he loved me but only talked about himself. I left the day he grabbed me. At 26, I spent the night in the emergency room after a manic episode and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I kicked and screamed the whole way there, but deep down, I knew I had to go. Doctors told me I needed therapy, but I don’t believe it helps, and I feel selfish talking about my problems when others have it much worse.

It’s taken a while to realize I’ve been unconsciously misremembering the past.

Overcoming the Rosy Retrospection Effect

Today, at 27, I have my dream job as a writer. I have a savings account. I can afford to fly home for Christmas. I go dancing with my friends. I have my cats and my dog, and after five years, I’m moving out of my outdated, overpriced apartment to something I’ve worked hard to afford and deserve. My ambition has gotten me here, and I’m excited to see where it’s going to take me next.It’s taken a while to realize I’ve been unconsciously misremembering the past. One day while scrolling through my Instagram, I reminded myself not every day was a good one like I portrayed. Of course, some days I still tell myself there is nothing like being 23, when I felt young and pretty with my long, thick hair; when I thought every night was a party, with no responsibilities the next day; and when I had all the time in the world to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Here’s the thing: I still feel beautiful (my hair isn’t as long and thick as it used to be, but we can’t have everything). I still party and go out for drinks with my friends. I still have time to figure out what to do with my life, but I don’t have to—I already did. I still have a good life. I need to remind myself that getting older doesn’t mean you stop making memories; it means making more.

I don’t remember exactly when I started burying memories of my childhood, but it was around the same time I moved halfway across the country from the sparsely populated and deeply conservative Western state where I was raised.I do remember when I began realizing that looking back on my childhood was painful. It was around 2015, when the internet became obsessed with nostalgia, and every social media platform was inundated with “only ’90s kids remember this” memes. Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It promises comfort—a brief return to the beauty and simplicity of youth before you were corrupted by the realities of adulthood. But in order to be tempted by nostalgia, you have to have something beautiful to look back on, and revisiting my childhood means opening a thousand doors I purposefully closed a long time ago. Memories from my childhood, even the good ones, are like threads sticking out of a sweater. I know pulling on one will be disastrous, unraveling a past that I have no interest in revisiting. I have purposefully built a new life for myself in a different city, surrounded by a community of people who helped me create a life as an adult that looks nothing like my adolescence.

To be tempted by nostalgia, you have to have something beautiful to look back on.

My Family Was the Perfect Target for the Christian Homeschool Movement

I grew up in a deeply religious, working-class family in a small city in a mostly rural state—the kind of place people stop at on their way to a national park. My family bobbed at the surface of the poverty line my whole childhood. Some years we treaded water, and other years we drowned.My dad worked long days at tough jobs, coming home with rough hands and tired eyes, but we still had endless family conversations about budgets and making food stretch until the next payday. The constant stress of living in financial limbo as a child, worrying about losing your home or not having enough to eat, is a fear that lingers well into adulthood. Poverty is its own trauma. I was aware of the cruel and callous nature of the American economic system before I had the language to describe it. My siblings and I weren’t protected from the reality of our financial situation. We began contributing to the family financially as soon as we were old enough. Because we were homeschooled, this involved spending time every afternoon helping with a home-run business, starting in our tweens.

For My Parents, Evangelical Homeschooling Was a Way of Instilling Christian Beliefs

My parents decided against public schooling smack in the middle of a homeschooling boom among evangelicals in America. Whether or not my parents were even aware that they were participating in this trend at the time, I don’t know, but their goals were the same. They wanted to educate us in a vacuum, sheltered from the evil influences they saw around every corner in the secular world, with the goal of creating godly men and women who would bring honor and glory to God. Everything from sex to drugs to liberal ideology was a threat to our souls in the most literal sense, and my mother especially became paranoid about their potential effect on us. She saw demons around every corner. The devil was hiding in the details: the music we listened to, the movies we watched, our conversations with friends. She would spend hours scrolling through our family computer’s search history, writing down websites we visited or the names of songs we listened to, trying to root out the evil that she felt was seeping into our adolescent lives. We didn’t have the ability to set boundaries with her, and she regularly reminded us by going through our phones or ransacking our rooms without our knowledge. When she did find evidence of wrongdoing—a text about a boy, a forbidden CD—she would seem almost triumphant, as if the find proved that her constant vigilance was not in vain.

Homeschooling Was Simply Not a Productive Learning Environment

Our conservative Christian homeschool curriculum varied year by year. We had “science” books that said the earth was 6,000 years old and watched docudramas for history class. We all fell grades behind in math. After I had fallen so far behind it couldn’t be ignored, our dad would come home from his long workdays to spend hours trying to explain complex algebraic formulas to me until I was frustrated to the point of tears. We tried “unstructured learning” for a while, which in function meant we learned little and studied almost nothing. My older siblings begged our parents to let them go to public school, but they were told public schools didn’t offer a quality education.As we aged into our teen years, it became clear that we were on our own. The majority of our education was self-taught. Knowledge was a resource we were starving for, and because we were so far behind, we were desperate to learn any way we could. My siblings’ reaction to our parents’ overbearing strictness was absolute rebellion. After all, if they were going to be punished for the most minor of infractions, why not really push the boundaries? They snuck out late at night to meet up with friends, drank when my parents were away for the weekend and smoked weed in the park after dark. They were often caught, of course, which resulted in a total upheaval. Whenever a wrongdoing was discovered, the house would be filled with yelling and slamming doors. There was crying, there was screaming, there was literal wailing and gnashing of teeth.

It Really Took a Toll on My Mental Health and Well-Being

For my part, I became a straight-laced do-gooder with an anxiety disorder. I went to youth group weekly, two separate Bible studies and church. I never touched alcohol, I never lied to my parents about where I was or what I was doing—and I was a complete mental wreck. I struggled with depression and was constantly afraid of stepping out of line. I carefully followed my parents’ rules, but in my heart, I began questioning the church’s oppressive theology, and I couldn’t shake it. In my late teens, I discovered something about myself that made my relationship with religion even more fragile: I was queer. Looking back now, it was obvious and had been for years, but at the time, it was a terrifying discovery. What was I supposed to do with the knowledge that one more thing about me didn’t fit into the world I was brought up in? It would take me years to tell anyone and the better part of a decade for me to be open about it with most of my friends. It took until my early 20s for me to leave the church, but the day I made the choice, a weight was lifted off me. I no longer had to contort myself into the mold of the Christian woman I was told I had to be. I didn’t have to wage an internal battle between what the church believed and what I knew was right. I was free.

These cultural points, which were so meaningful to others, held no sentimentality to me.

Nostalgia Is Painful for Me, but I’ve Come to Terms With It

Now that I’m older, I’m able to see that my parents were motivated by an all-encompassing fear of the world. I truly believe that although their actions did damage, they knew no other way, and their intentions were good, however misguided. I wonder how much of my trauma was caused by trauma they were never absolved from. Still, a part of me mourns for the lost childhood I could have had. I wish I had been allowed to be carefree in the way so many of my peers were. I don’t relate to many of my friends’ formative adolescent experiences: first romances, school dances, field trips.For a long time, I struggled to understand the pop culture references that came up in everyday conversation at work or parties, and it became my mission to consume as much as I could to make up for it. If someone made a reference I couldn’t parse out, I would immediately find out as much as I could about the subject online. I watched every season of Friends, I binged RuPaul’s Drag Race, my Spotify filled with ’90s grunge and early-’00s R&B. I fell in love with horror movies, which had been strictly off-limits in my youth. In my early 20s, “You don’t seem like you were homeschooled,” became a common refrain from people who would find out about my background. It felt like a small reward for my anthropological efforts. “I try not to,” I would reply. But these cultural points, which were so meaningful to others, held no sentimentality to me. The usual markers of American youth are foreign concepts to me, experienced only vicariously and in hindsight. I’m jealous of my friends’ rose-colored retellings of their own pasts and their capacity to long for that period of their lives instead of trying to ward off memories. The things that do remind me of my childhood—the car radio that was permanently set to a Christian station, yellow-tinted Sunday school rooms with walls covered in Noah’s Ark characters, the empty lot where my family’s first trailer sat—are like the first layer on a bandage over a still-healing wound. I could try to peel it back, but I know what’s underneath.I wish that looking back on my life was appealing instead of painful. Many people in my generation find nostalgia bewitching, but it holds no such allure for me. But there is a bright spot: I love the life I’ve created for myself, and I know my best years are ahead of me.

There was never a dull moment in my grandmother’s house.Built in the 1960s, the place was always crackling with energy and buzzing with the hustle-bustle of four families, its staircases and floorboards creaking under the stampede of running toddlers. Growing up, I saw my four uncles live there with their families, each of which consisted of three kids. My cousins, siblings and I—ranging in age from 5 to 15—spent our childhoods running around the three-story house, playing hide and seek and numerous games behind its stairways and inside its many rooms.My mother, aunt and uncles had extremely fond memories attached to their birth home. At times, when the entire extended family would gather there, the house would get so loud that neighbors would sometimes complain of the ruckus we were creating. All of this changed in 2018, however, after my grandfather passed away due to old age. He was followed closely by my grandmother, who was the heart of the place, six months later.The house still had 20 residents, but the place lost its charm. Even with so many people living together, the energy of the house fizzled out. Eventually, two of my uncles lost their jobs and, after leaving no stone unturned to make their ends meet, had to resort to selling our ancestral home.

It was like someone had set fire to the only family album we had.

Without Its Home, the Family Became Resentful

That was a turning point for our entire family. We had all grown up listening to the countless stories preserved in each nook and cranny of my grandmother’s house. To have all that history taken away from you in a moment shook everyone. To add insult to injury, the new owner of the house demolished the residence, since it was an old structure. It was like someone had set fire to the only family album we had.As time went on, all my uncles settled into their separate homes with their respective families. However, it was as if the entire family had lost its anchor. For one reason or the other, they all relocated four to five times in a matter of three years, which was a lot of moving for people who had lived in one place for the majority of their lives. In their free time, my uncles, one of whom is a creative director at an ad agency and the other a writer, wrote several nostalgic poems and drew sketches of the house.Its sale also opened a Pandora's box of seething resentments between the siblings. Long-buried, years-old bitterness came to the fore. It used to be tradition for the entire family to descend on my grandma’s house each Friday. Now, months would go by, and no one would meet. No one could peg down exactly what went wrong.

The entire layout of the house was an exact replica of their childhood home.

My Uncles Built a Replica Home

After about three years, one of my uncles brokered a huge business deal which resulted in him suddenly having a lot of cash. Since he and my other uncle’s children had grown up living together and were extremely close, he decided to build a house for both the families. When it came to architecture, the ancestral home was used as the blueprint.There was a lot of excitement for this project and everyone contributed to the design of the new family home with great zeal. It was almost as if everyone was chipping in to mend the broken pieces of our family. After two years of planning and toiling, my uncles finally succeeded in rebuilding their childhood home.The entire layout of the house was an exact replica of their childhood home. Their families were giddy with excitement to be living together in their old (new) house. It was a strange feeling to see nostalgia resurrected in such concrete terms. When the house was completed, my family and I also spent a night there. The house seemed familiar but still weirdly alien.

Nothing Could Replace the Nostalgia of Our Ancestral Home

Eventually, my uncles settled in with their families. Things were going well, and it seemed like things were back to normal after a long break.However, this feeling fizzled out after about six months. Once the initial excitement died down, it sunk in that a replica couldn’t replace the actual house. A replica also couldn’t be a Band-Aid solution to fix issues between the siblings.My uncles eventually realized that while they had recreated the house from their nostalgia, they weren’t able to recreate the memories. Where the hallways and corners of the original house were crammed with stories, the identical hallways of the replica housed no such nostalgia. It was a heartbreaking epiphany that nostalgic memories couldn’t be conjured by recreating remnants. The past can be replicated but not resurrected.

Most people I know yearn for their childhood, for those so-called “simpler times” when naps and playtime were fundamental parts of our busy schedules and when our biggest responsibility was making sure we brought the right toy for whatever playdate our parents had set up for us. Nowadays, we hear a lot of talk about nostalgia and adults dreaming about the days when life was better, with no social media to distract us and kids could just be kids. As children, we tend to see the positive in everything. The good, the bad and the in-between are all filtered through the rose-colored glasses that our innocence and blissful ignorance grant us.Whenever I think back on my childhood, the first thing I can remember is wearing poofy dresses, huge hats with flowers on them and hair bows twice the size of my head. I remember getting birthday presents from every single member of my extended family and spending every holiday possible running around my great-grandmother’s backyard with my many cousins. There were yearly trips to my grandparents’ summer house in Texas and a few trips to SeaWorld and Disney World. I had a favorite stuffed toy the size of an adult and a favorite cow costume that I refused to take off—yes, I was very into cows back then. I had more Barbie dolls than I could ever play with and every snack a kid could ever want in the kitchen, ready to be devoured. I guess I was what many would consider a somewhat spoiled child. Not that I don’t agree now, but back then my life seemed pretty average.While most of those quick memories are seemingly happy ones, upon further reflection, there were some very dark parts to growing up the way I did. See, the thing about children’s innocence is that those rose-colored glasses aren’t great when it comes to filtering out trauma. We might think that a trip to Disney World is nothing more than a nice family outing, but really it’s your parents’ last attempt at giving you all the memories of a happy family before they break the news that they are getting a divorce. And, sure, my life as a kid was nothing short of privileged. But behind every Barbie doll and every makeup kit I received as gifts, there was a darker reality I couldn’t yet understand.

There was a darker reality I couldn’t yet understand.

I Avoided Contact With My Mother

Growing up, I knew exactly where my favorite dulce de leche cookies were hidden in the pantry; they were next to a small acrylic box containing my mother’s vast collection of caffeine pills and over-the-counter painkillers, her favorite snack. Every day after I was done with my schoolwork, I’d sneak away to the kitchen, grab a few cookies and run back to my room, leaving a trail of crumbs behind me that my nanny had to clean up quickly before my mother got home. While enjoying my cookies, I’d hide away in the room I shared with my younger sister, take all my Barbie dolls out and hope with all my heart my mother would get home, take her pills and quietly go into her room for the night.I learned at an early age it was easier to avoid contact with her as much as I could. Some days were good. If she was in enough of a decent mood, she’d take me and my siblings out on picnics to one of the prettiest public parks in our town, or we’d spend the day lounging at the country club pool and ordering as many french fry plates and tomato juices as we could stomach. She would talk to my teachers and plan “princess for a day” days for me at school, a weird attempt to make me hate the private school where I was constantly bullied over my weight a little less. Looking back, though, these extra-special treatment days I got only made kids bully me harder. At least she tried sometimes.

At Grandma’s house, nothing could go wrong.

Going to My Grandma’s House Was the Highlight of Childhood

Most of the time, though, she’d get home “too tired” to deal with her kids and would either lock herself up in her bedroom until the next morning or take out all her frustrations from work on us. I remember standing in front of the gold entryway mirror wall in my underwear a few times and being told I was too fat to ever be loved by anyone. “You’re nine and you look pregnant.” Mind you, she was never around long enough to make sure I had healthy meals but always long enough to make sure I knew I was somehow wrong for not eating healthily. There were days when I’d be dropped off at my grandmother’s place after school, and I honestly can’t remember a better feeling than seeing our driver take the turn to Grandma’s street instead of driving straight towards my house. At Grandma’s house, nothing could go wrong. I’d eat all the snacks I wanted, I’d spend hours watching Disney Channel and playing with all the vintage toys that used to belong to my mother and her siblings. The best part? I usually got to sleep over at her place and got to continue the fun and relaxation until late at night.Aside from days at Grandma’s, the only thing that would keep me sane was counting the days until I got to spend a weekend at my dad’s place. Those six days a month away from all the drama and fear of my mother’s house were always the highlight of my young life. It didn’t matter if all we did was hang out on the couch and watch “movies with a message,” his favorite genre. For a few nights, I was happy.

How Much Happiness Did I Actually Have as a Kid?

Now, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad. Most of it, maybe. But I do remember being a happy child, despite all that I had going on. I fondly remember being an absolute show choir nerd and reading books upon books, filling up my time with fun adventures and characters. I remember sneaking into my grandpa’s study to watch some scary movie my cousins and I were way too young to be watching and helping my grandmother make her famous quiche. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, though, how much was actual happiness, and how much of it was just my brain protecting me and covering up the painful truth with a happier memory? I guess I will never know for certain, so all I’m left with is the knowledge of what was, what should have been, and how I can be better because of it.

I was six when the Spice Girls helped launch Channel 5 in 1997. I loved the Spice Girls. When no one was looking, I’d join in with them. They’d tell me, “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want,” and all together we’d respond, “What I really, really, really want is a ziggy cigar.” It was great. Although, I have to admit, I still have no idea what a ziggy cigar is. Channel 5, as a youth in the U.K., was also great. It meant television from overseas. It even felt distant, the way the satellite video crackled and hissed, filling the screen with the pale fog. Years later, I remember coming down and seeing that Channel 5 had fixed its reception. Shows came in crystal clear. This magical, foreign channel looked just like any others. It felt like part of my childhood had died. Channel 5 brought shows like Xena: Warrior Princess. I remember telling Dad that I liked the show, but I didn’t like how she used her legs to grab men by the head. It wasn't realistic. Not even Conan would use his thighs to snap someone's neck. “But that’s the whole plot?” Dad said. He loved Xena.

That was part of old television—you had to do the best with what you had.

Boring Television Filled the Background of My Childhood

Some television wasn't good. Stuff like The Golden Girls, a show about old ladies talking and little else. The poor satellite signal made it difficult to hear what the women were saying, not that it mattered much. There weren’t any swords or monsters, so I wasn’t interested. Still, boring television was a big part of my childhood. The droning of garden programs and the endless repeats of shows like Airwolf. I remember the first time I heard the name Airwolf. In my mind, it was going to be werewolves flying about in jet planes. Unfortunately for me, this wasn't the plot of Airwolf. I was very disappointed. But that was part of old television—you had to do the best with what you had. I remember sitting with my mom watching Rocky for the fifth time that week. There was nothing else on, so we started this Mystery Science Theater 3000 voice-over. Each of us would take turns dubbing the character's voice. The aim of the game was to make the character say something silly and make the other person laugh.Then there were VHS cassettes. These were little black rectangles filled with tape. One of my favorites was Goosebumps, “A Night In Terror Tower.” It was about these American kids who visit an English dungeon and get transported to the Middle Ages. The episode was 40 minutes long and split between two tapes. I only had the first half and didn't get to see the end for 15 years. It would stop right where the kids were told they'd be burned for witchcraft.I watched the tape religiously. I loved everything Goosebumps. I even had the bedspread, something which I still own to this day. And though it was annoying never getting to see the end of the episode, in my frustration, I'd stare out of the window and come up with my own endings.

My Dad Ruined Cereal for Me

I also loved all things horror, so you can imagine my joy when Sugar Puffs cereal released their new ghostly pencil toppers. They were called Glo Ghosts and looked like Casper’s evil friends painted in bright colors. I remember pestering my mom to get a box and opening one the next day. Dad came in and sat next to me. “You know where Sugar Puffs come from, right?” he asked. He’d already stopped me from eating Nesquik by telling me it was rabbit poop. “Why else would they put a rabbit on the box?” he’d suggested. “What does bee poop look like?” I asked, assuming he was making the same joke with this cereal’s mascot.“Oh, nothing like that,” he replied, watching me let out a sigh. "But,” talking in that tone of his, "Don't you think they look like bees?"I looked at the spoon. “No, they don't,” I said. “Bees don't sit still; they fly about everywhere. Everyone knows that.”"Yes," he said. "Well, the ones that are alive, anyway."I remember then wondering if a bowlful of bee stings could pop your belly from the inside. I like to tell that story at family gatherings. Dad doesn't mind. He enjoys it—you can tell by the way he sits in the corner, wearing that same smile from my childhood. You didn’t have many options when I was a kid, but you always had a choice. Want to get mad that you only had half of a video? Sure, it makes sense. Cry that your favorite pencil toppers meant eating a box of dead bees? Well, it is terrible. You can complain and moan when someone turns Channel Five into one endless rerun of M*A*S*H. Or get embarrassed when you realize your dad is some kind of fairytale trickster.

Can you own the moment when things aren't going the way they should?

My Limited Options Allowed Me to Own the Moment

Or, if you like, you can do something with it. Me? I still watched Channel Five, even though I couldn’t always hear what was said. I still sat down with Mom and watched Rocky, even if I had nothing funny to say. I never ate Sugar Puffs again or got another Glo Ghost, but I did learn something from my dad. Something about the power of words. I didn’t have everything I wanted growing up, but I did have a choice. When things got rough, I'd ask myself, “Can you own the moment?”Childhood can be boring, and I doubt that's changed. At least in my day, I could blame it on the limited options, which is a shame for all you new people. Still, the question remains: Can you own the moment when things aren't going the way they should? No doubt, we'll always have some excuse, something to blame, someone to point the finger at. But the truth is, there's nothing quite like taking these moments and turning them into something we can enjoy. It's not easy, not at the start, but it's better than sitting there with no option but to suffer.How to do it? Now, that's the easy bit. You just sit down and get it done. Don't worry if you're too embarrassed. Just pretend you're someone else. Put on a silly voice, like me when watching Rocky with my mom. You might not be able to change the world to make all the problems go away. You're only human, after all. But you can pay attention. And, in the end, if nothing else, remember this: You can do a lot worse than bring laughter to a tired old show.

It was the last day of December, and I was drinking like it was the end of the world. I was out with my best friend and his sister. I had work at 4 a.m., and I had promised myself that I would only have one drink. My spouse at the time was out of town—on a camping trip in the Grand Canyon with someone who they had told me they had feelings for—after saying that, at this point in our marriage, it would be extremely difficult not to cheat on me. It was on this night that I realized that I was going to be getting divorced. I didn’t even need to talk to my spouse to know that as soon as they got back, it was over. So, I decided that I would start drinking the way that I did before I got married. When I was 19, my friends and I were notorious for throwing ragers every weekend. We had two people in our group who were 21, so everyone would pitch in anywhere from $20 to $30, and they would go to the store and buy all the alcohol they could, which usually turned out to be a lot. We would start every party the same way: We had three ceramic shot glasses that could stack on top of each other perfectly. We would pick three different types of booze, pour them into the shot glasses and then stack them. The rule was you had to be grabbing the next shot as you were taking the one prior. We taped 40s to our hands, we took shots on empty stomachs and we would sing sea shanties so loud that the neighbors complained.The day after my bender, I was so hungover at work that my colleague took one look at me and literally begged me to drink some water. It was a horrible day, but I felt like I had reclaimed something in me.

I drank too much, and it deeply satisfied me.

My Spouse Made Dealing With the Divorce Particularly Difficult

My spouse and I went out to breakfast that weekend and decided to end our relationship. We had already stopped living together and we never had kids, so there wasn’t much to figure out. Two days later, they started seeing the person with whom they had gone to the Grand Canyon.Leading up to this point, a couple of things had happened. The first was that my spouse had kicked me out. They told me that they thought that some space would be beneficial to our relationship and that not living together would actually make us stronger. The second was that every time we hung out, they would tell me that they were still unsure about whether they wanted to be with me—and that even if we were having a good time, it didn’t change the situation that we were in. The last major thing that happened is that my spouse had actually ended things with me, then called me the next day crying to say they had changed their mind. This all happened over the course of six months.

Drinking After My Divorce Meant I Was Fun Again

I had reconnected with a girl that I had gone to high school with, and we went out for half-priced wine at a local bar. I had a similar experience to a New Year’s Eve that night. I drank too much, and it deeply satisfied me. This girl and I started dating a week later. Even though I now worked a job that started at 4 a.m., I started to stay up drinking every other night. We went out to bars and art galleries, we bought bottles of wine and six-packs and we stayed up until 2 a.m. I thought that what I was feeling was becoming myself again. When I got divorced, I had a sort of catchphrase. I would say, “I used to be fun before I got married.” I had decided that my life had become boring because of my spouse, and what I needed to do was to somehow go back to being 19. I had to recapture the person I was before. I had to be fun again.I dated that girl for six months, and I’ve never been more exhausted in my entire life.

I dated that girl for six months, and I’ve never been more exhausted in my entire life.

I Realized I Was Really Dealing With Divorce Anger

I don’t think in all this I ever thought about what it really meant to live as if I was 19 again. At that point in my life, I was perpetually hungover and deeply depressed. I thought all of my friends hated me, and I was convinced that I was incapable of real intimacy. I was so deeply insecure at that age, and it was obvious to everyone just how badly I needed external validation. I was not, in fact, fun. Nostalgia can be a tricky thing like that, though. When I was younger, I was miserable. By the time I was getting divorced, I was miserable. But they were different. I labeled the early miserable period as “better” and tried to mimic the behavior of that time in my life. But the problem was that I wasn’t 19 anymore, and nothing I could do would change that. I could do everything in the same way that I had when I was 19, but it didn’t matter. That point in my life was over. No matter how much better I perceived it, it was gone, and it was never coming back. I was so angry about the last six months of my marriage—angry about how quickly they moved on, angry at myself for letting things drag out for that long—that I just wanted to exist in a time before I met them. But I did meet them. And I grew and changed immensely because of it. I was a different person, and I had to learn my way in the world as that different person.

Writing this piece was harder than I thought it would be. When I proposed the topic, I didn’t take into account the level of personal excavation that it would require. I study history, the politics of memory and how institutions help to structure our memories and notions of the past. This has always come easily to me, memorizing facts and stories from the past, because it’s all very removed from my own experiences. I am able to keep my history at arm’s length while diving deep into other’s pasts, spending hours in archives and libraries studying points in time. Before writing this, I had never really thought about the clear contrast in my life—between my ability to remember facts and stories about historical figures and my inability to do so for myself. When it comes to the study and exploration of my own historicity, I draw a blank. While I’m writing this, I am also working on my dissertation, rattling off facts and anecdotes about the artist and her muse central to my topic. Tapping into my own memories and my personal relationship with my past has proven to be much harder.

How am I supposed to apply this to my own life if I can’t remember my history?

It’s Hard to Understand Who I Am Without Context

I recently wrote a piece critiquing the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir, exploring the complexities of government-manufactured memories and the role of trauma in the fabrication and loss of certain memories. It felt almost obvious for me to make some of these connections—war being a clearly traumatic event one might attempt to block out of their consciousness. Currently, my therapist and I have hit a wall. She wants to tap into an aspect of my childhood that most likely is the reason for certain patterns in my present regarding romantic partners. This boils down to memories of my parents and how they interacted with me. I attempted to jog my memory with photos and meditation, but nothing came up. The cliche is that history is doomed to repeat itself. But how am I supposed to apply this to my own life if I can’t remember my history? As I get older, I am starting to notice my own patterns with friends, family and partners and how it could be helpful to have some context as to why I do and say certain things. Some of it is positive, and some is negative. My deep insecurities and need for affirmation are things that most likely began in childhood. My tendency to pick clearly unavailable partners—something I am trying to work on—probably came from my relationship with my parents and them not being available. In my studies, I learn about the cyclical nature of history. It’s in my nature to observe patterns and connect points in time and people to those points.

I Get Somatic Sensations in Intimate Settings

In studying other histories, I have come to better understand my own defense mechanisms. Maybe for me, my acute amnesia is not from a specific traumatic event causing PTSD but a steady flow of events. Trauma is such a complex idea, and the word recently has become more readily used in society. Trauma is relative. What might be a traumatic and distressing event for one may not have the same psychological impact on another. My own personal blind spots are manufactured by my desire to enjoy life and new experiences without the constant reminder of my past. It seems to bother other people more than it bothers me. My parents get upset when they say, “Remember when…” and I don’t. Sometimes I feel frustrated, mostly because it feels lonely to not remember. Although many people have similar experiences of not being able to recall their childhood, I can feel isolated from my family, as though I’m not in on the private joke, even though I was there. I am grateful, at least, that I don’t have immediate access to some of the more painful memories, such as sexual traumas from my early 20s. Every once in a while, I will get a shiver throughout my body. It’s the closest thing I have to a memory of these experiences. This somatic sensation will happen when I’m in an intimate setting and my body is reminded of something, triggering a physiological response. It’s fascinating to me how my body has stored all of the information, reacting quickly to situations that feel reminiscent of past negative sexual experiences. But my mind still can’t make the connection as to what specific memory this bodily response is coming from.

Trauma is relative.

I’m Reconsidering My Relationship With Memories

My therapist practices psychosomatic therapy. At first, I found it really frustrating being asked where I felt sensations in my body after saying certain things. I was unable to track where I was physically holding certain emotions. I have had gastrointestinal issues for as long as I can remember—stomach aches, ulcers, allergic reactions to foods, bloating. You name it, I’ve had the symptom. I started to track this more carefully, following patterns and situations in which I had an IBS flare-up. More often than not, it wasn’t related to the food I ate that day. My diet rarely changes, and I know what works for my body. It was when I felt uncomfortable, scared and lonely that my stomach would swell and cramp, a physiological warning sign that something wasn't right. Through writing this I have been able to reconsider my relationship with my own memories, as well as the memories of others. I think for my own sake, it’s helpful to look at how learning about history unrelated to my personal experience can inform the way I deal with my present as well as my past. The way other people chose to live, their actions and decisions, all can show me how to use this lack of memory and draw from external ideas and realities.

At my majority-white high school, all the Black girls knew we were on thin ice. The moment we stepped onto campus, it was obvious that there was a ladder, and we were at the bottom of it. This was true in every way: In class, it was assumed that we were only there to fill a quota and that we weren’t as smart as the other kids—which wasn’t helped by the fact that most of us came from lower-income backgrounds and were unprepared by our public middle schools. When it came to relationships, forget about it. We knew who the “pretty” girls were, and they weren’t us. And all the coveted leadership positions were taken up by a string of preppy kids straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog. From almost our first moments on campus, we banded together because it was clear that no one would reach out to us first. It was funny (almost), so we laughed about the social hierarchy and vented to each other. But overall we acquiesced to how things were and braced ourselves for the next four years. I’d attended private, predominantly white institutions my whole life, so I thought I knew how it would all go: some eye-rolls, some microaggressions, but nothing I couldn’t handle. What I didn’t know was how dire it would get and how the “grin and bear it” attitude I adopted to protect me would wind up hurting me instead.

We did what we could to handle it, but we quickly learned there’s only so much we could take.

I Expected a Hard Time—but Not This Hard

At first, things went exactly as we expected: the racist microaggressions from our peers, the constant undermining, our low social standing. We did what we could to handle it, but we quickly learned there’s only so much we could take. Eventually, it went beyond being undermined, and we started to actually believe the things everyone around us thought. Because it wasn’t just the other students who were doing us harm, but the whole structure of the school, which, as it became painfully clear, had no interest in supporting us.Our faith in ourselves dwindled. I knew that I had earned my place at school, having been valedictorian of my middle school and scoring higher on standardized tests than many of my friends, but I started to believe that I was less valid for being there than my peers. The structure of the school seemed to confirm it. Resources seemed hard to access, and there were barely any Black role models. While many of my white peers struck up close relationships with teachers, there were almost no Black faculty I could relate to or ask for advice. And the lack of prominent Black figures reaffirmed to me that the school was not set up to celebrate and support me.The main gap in the support system was the lack of mental health support for Black people. I knew most of my white peers went to therapists at home, took medication or went to the school’s counselors, but none of that felt accessible to me. My few interactions with the therapy department in meetings or group sessions were resoundingly negative—one of the few times I tried to advocate for myself as a Black woman, the head counselor shut me down instantly and gaslighted me for speaking up. Message received. With no Black therapists and no one paying attention to us, it was easy for the Black girls to fall between the cracks.This became abundantly clear with the first suicide attempt. It was the spring of my freshman year and I was already feeling the weight and loneliness. The only respite was in commiserating with other Black women, so I knew all the (very few) Black girls on campus. When one of them, a junior, left school in the middle of the semester due to “mental health issues,'' it wasn’t long until I found out that she had attempted suicide, alone in her room.The whole thing was couched in secrecy and shame. The school never addressed it directly, but they went out of their way to remind us of all the mental health resources we had available. Among the Black women, this was almost laughable. And though we were surprised at the news, it made some kind of morbid sense. We knew that girl was struggling, but, from where we saw it, there was nothing that she could have done. Her helplessness was our helplessness.

I didn’t want to be miserable, so I wouldn’t be.

Since I Couldn't Get the Help I Needed, I Pretended Like I Didn't Need It

The next spring brought another suicide attempt from a Black girl I considered one of my biggest mentors. Again, the school covered it up with secrecy and never addressed the pattern of Black girls crying for help—not even when there was yet another suicide attempt that fall. While a few white students left the school for mental health reasons, the only suicide attempts during my time were by Black women. Despite that obvious pattern, there was still only silence from the administration and therapy department about the lack of mental health access for Black women. Since there was no help coming externally, I decided any change would have to come from inside.It was a very conscious decision, looking back, to decide to enjoy the rest of my high school experience. It was a month into the first semester of my junior year, shortly after the third and final suicide attempt I would witness during my time. I remember sitting on my bed and having an epiphany: I didn’t want to be miserable, so I wouldn’t be.Obviously, this was simplistic, but it served as a mantra of sorts for the next two years. There were obviously the same external factors, and also the obstacle of my own mental health issues, but I had spent the previous two years feeling like I was drowning. It was time, I resolved, for a complete mindset change. I was going to “buy into” the school the way my white peers did and start focusing on the good instead of the bad.I thought hard about the few positive things I had at school and decided to dig deep into them: the wealth of knowledge I had access to, the passionate instructors and the few deep friendships I had made. I would keep my focus on them. And honestly, it worked. My memories of those last two years are a whirlwind of conversations that weren’t just commiserations, late nights making new friends and a deep investment in the things and people I was passionate about.Even my friends look back and say I had a personality shift those last two years. It was deeply intentional. Though there were low moments and hard times, I accepted them as part of life and tried to move on from them quickly by reaching back into my well of positivity. This was maturity, I thought. It was certainly better than drowning.Years have passed and overall, it worked. My memories of high school are mostly positive, and I still have deep friendships with many of my peers. There may have been bad times, but I can’t help thinking of only the good when I look back: the unmatched sunsets, the hours spent at the dinner table or laughing up the library, the green grass fields of my youth.

Reconnecting With My Black Classmates Helped Me See My Experience for What It Really Was

I thought this nostalgic perception was a good thing—wouldn’t I rather love my past than hate it? But then in the summer of 2020, when seemingly everyone was having revelations about racism, I unexpectedly had one of my own. I thought I knew about systematic racism, and I was happy to hear people talking about it, but I didn’t anticipate a learning experience for myself.When my Black friends started speaking out about their high school experiences, I began to rethink my own attitudes about mine. It wasn’t that I had closed my eyes to the worse aspects of that time, but by tamping them down in my mind, I had minimized their scale. This repression felt good for a while, allowing me the space to focus on more positive things, but it was a form of delusion that hit me full force when I heard what my peers had to say.They didn’t have the same forced nostalgia that I have. I’d brushed aside microaggressions, like people asking to touch my hair. I’d laughed away their comments calling us “affirmative action cases” (despite being Ivy League legacies with buildings named after them at their colleges of choice). Most of all, I thought I was doing what was best, taking some sort of high road of delusion.But it was more than just little things. Some talked about feeling so undesired in high school that they have been in a string of abusive relationships since. Some talked about their years of therapy and losing their sense of self after being forced to feel ashamed of their Blackness. Hearing their experiences while uncovering my own traumas and giving myself space to feel them has made me realize that maybe it is time to pull off my rose-tinted glasses.Some of my peers, who had let themselves feel their pain more fully while we were at school, are better adjusted now and can speak about their experiences more eloquently than I can. Talking to them candidly in a way I had spent so long considering “wallowing” has illuminated the depth of the trauma I had experienced, even when I was smiling and laughing and ostensibly having a good time. By listening to my friends outline how their lives have been continually impacted by the behaviors they adapted to survive in high school, I had another revelation: I hadn’t found some great maturity in my “buy-in” ethos. It was just another way I learned to survive.Now, realizing that my mentality often caused me to minimize my pain and brush off the bad, I am giving myself space to process the things that I once pushed aside. I’m trying to have a more balanced picture of my life there, one which gives sufficient space to the things that hurt me, while being thankful for the things that I gained.With distance, I think of high school as a place of extremes. My only choices seemed to be drowning or denial. In trying to reconcile my nostalgic perception of high school with acknowledging my trauma, I’m working to heal and process in a healthy way. There are moments where I still think of high school as a beautiful place filled with laughter and sun and fresh fruit, which yes, at times, it was. But now I’m letting the smoke clear from my less beautiful memories, less joyful days, and I’m willing to admit that it wasn’t always that way. Nostalgia is good but it won’t help me now.

Growing up, I used to dream of the freedom of fading into the background of a busy city street. I’d be on my own to find out who I am when no one is silencing me. I’d find my own tribe of people who loved me for who I was, not in spite of it.In my daydreams, I live a life like Andie Anderson, the ambitious writer Kate Hudson played in How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, with a career on the rise, a fun love life and a group of friends to have adventures with and fill in for family. And like Andie’s, my own family would be nowhere in sight, unable to reach me. I’d be just another person in the bustling city, unreachable and untouchable, deliciously anonymous, free from the implicit rules of being the scapegoat daughter.

I failed at finally feeling free.

My Small Town Life Keeps Me Close to My Abusive Family

Life ended up taking me in a different direction than my big city dreams. It turns out that I’m actually more of a small town, open spaces kind of person, one who fell in love with a kind man who loves her back. I like roots and staying in one spot where I know people, from the friends who lift me up in times of crisis to the pharmacist who keeps lollipops behind the counter in a special bin just for my kids.All of this is good, but, unfortunately, it means I’m rooted just a few minutes' drive from where I grew up. Some of my old classmates still live here, old acquaintances who remember me and my parents and siblings—former neighbors who suspect the abuse and dysfunction I grew up with that my parents and siblings turn a blind eye to. Although I don’t speak to some of my family, divorce—and my mother’s subsequent move over a thousand miles away—has made it possible to still have contact with my father, a conservative bigot who has never respected my boundaries or beliefs. I kept in touch mainly to maintain a relationship with my two younger siblings. Unfortunately, the older I get, the more I see my parents in them and the more of my parents’ scapegoating behavior I see rubbing off on them. Growing up, my siblings and I didn’t see eye to eye on everything, but we were a team, mostly having each other’s backs. As we grew up and I pulled away from the physical and mental abuse, my siblings sympathized with my parents and tried to pull me back into the fold.“You don’t see what you are doing to them,” they’d tell me, trying to convince me to resume a relationship with my mother or just see my father more regularly. I have tried for years to set boundaries by limiting contact and only seeing my parents on my terms to free myself of the effects of a lifetime of emotional abuse and a childhood of physical abuse. I failed at setting up strict enough boundaries. I failed at finally feeling free.Until 2020 happened.

COVID Gave Me the Distance I Needed

When the world locked down, a lot of people lamented the loss of contact with their families. We missed Easter gatherings, then summer barbecues, then the fall and winter holidays. Loved ones mourned missing major family milestones, from birthdays to births. While the world cried, I finally found the freedom I was looking for in my small house just a few miles from where I grew up feeling so trapped.Sure, we had to cancel a trip to Disney World, and we couldn’t go to the beach or the pool—all minor inconveniences of privilege. But on the other hand, we also didn’t have to endure the family outside our home that makes life so stressful.When the rest of my family gathered for the first time after the lockdown for Easter 2020, I firmly said no, citing my health conditions and my son’s premature birth that put me at greater risk for catching COVID. I made it clear we were hunkering down until all of this was done. That Sunday, my little family and I had a peaceful day full of bubbles and homemade pasta instead of tension, insults and drama. It was the best holiday of my adult life.My family accepted my decision, at least for a little while, particularly after two of them caught COVID last summer. I spent a blissful summer without a single invitation coming from their direction. My birthday came and went with no obligatory dinner, then the same happened on Father’s Day. I didn’t feel pressured to host a barbecue or meet anyone to drink in their driveway. The pressure to be a part of these fraught relationships faded like an old photo, while the colors of my real life grew more and more vivid. For the first time, the gaslighting stopped. There was no one telling me I was less than or stupid, or worthless because I’m a woman, especially one who dares to live life according to a different set of beliefs and morals. There was no one trying to change me into the fundamentally different person they’d prefer me to be.In my family’s absence, I thrived. There was nothing to disrupt the peaceful bubble we built, even in the midst of the chaos of COVID and the rising political tensions. Even as the world fell apart around us, I found myself enjoying spending time barefoot catching fireflies and looking for frogs with my daughter. We did puzzles and art projects and rigged up a makeshift Slip ‘N Slide. The rest of society may have been living in fear; I felt safe for the first time in my life. I stopped having panic attacks and nightmares before family obligations because there weren’t any.Like the garden we grew together last summer, I bloomed into the best version of myself, growing confidence I didn’t know I was capable of and finally chasing after my bigger dreams—the ones my family were always putting down. I made art. I wrote. I came up with wacky projects to do with the kids and watched as my husband would listen to my ideas carefully and figure out ways to make them work. No one put me down.

In my family’s absence, I thrived.

The Pandemic May Be Ending, but I’m Not Going Back to “Normal”

When summer’s golden days ended, my little bubble embraced backyard s’mores and homeschooling. We continued to build each other up. When the holidays rolled around, we spent them eating too much in our pajamas and baking way too many cookies for just four people. There was none of the annual stress of cleaning the house or cooking a massive meal for people who would only make me feel bad in the end.2020 showed me exactly how life can be when I can’t see my abusers. It was sweet and well deserved.Now that 2021 is here and the world vaccinates and reopens, I miss the early days of the shutdown and the sweetness of last summer’s solitude. With reopening comes the familial expectation that I will emerge from my bubble and go back to how things were in 2019, where I showed up to all of their obligatory events and dealt with all their inevitable abuse.But I’m not going back.While I’m glad the world is getting back to normal, I miss having my decision to opt out of life with my family of origin at least marginally respected. I miss not having confrontations over my boundaries. Now that they expect me to jump back into the dysfunctional family life, I miss the simplicity 2020 showed me. I learned how easy my life can be when I am free of my abusers. It showed me I don’t need a crowded city street to disappear into in order to find freedom. I can find it even when the world locks down.I hold fast to the lessons I learned during my peaceful year of lockdown. I won’t forget them, and I won’t go backward. I don’t miss the family members who don’t respect me and treat me like garbage, and I don’t feel guilty about cutting them out of our lives. I don’t miss them. I’m holding firm to cutting off contact with the people that make me feel bad about being me. I’ve finally learned how it feels to be free. It feels too damn good to ever stop.