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It was 2008 when I made the move from a friendly working-class city to the big lights of London. After studying over the summer for a short post-graduate diploma, I had secured a great entry-level job at a major fashion company in the epicenter of the capital. I was over the moon to have snagged such an opportunity, but I’d felt nervous as hell since my interview. The offices were something out of The Devil Wears Prada—all clinical white surfaces, monochrome decor and a reception area filled with expensive candles. The women who worked there were also unlike any I had met in real life. Many of them looked like they had stepped straight out of a magazine. The style of the moment was ultra-glam, four-inch Christian Louboutin heels, trophy handbags and sharp-shouldered jackets—a far cry from the high-street midi dress and pleather boots I was wearing. On my first day, I tried to look as fashionable as I could with my budget wardrobe, but I felt inadequate and out of my depth. Don’t get me wrong, I loved fashion—that’s why I was there in the first place—but it was very clear that this wasn’t a place where quirky vintage and high-street finds would be considered in vogue. Still, I wanted to make the best of it and show them I was far more than my bargain wears.

I had an upset stomach five days a week for nearly a year.

My Colleagues Were Terrifying but Ridiculous

A few weeks into my new job, I was a mess of excitement and nerves. I loved the energy of the place, the glamour and the excitement, but the pressurized day-to-day atmosphere around the office was seriously terrifying. I had an upset stomach five days a week for nearly a year. Class and accents are a big thing in England, but I’d never realized quite how much until this point. My previous life had only led me to meet people from a similar status to my own. This was a different story. My colleagues came from some of the best private schools in the country and their accents ranged from well-spoken to downright plummy, and, boy, did they let me know I was different. One colleague started to correct my sentences under her breath, while another casually referred to me as “guttural.” I also started to hear that a few of the bitchier girls were referring to me as stupid—a lazy judgment often made about those from less monied backgrounds. I chose to ignore the abuse and carry on as normal, but there were moments when it just felt ridiculous. “I’m going to make a coffee,” my desk buddy said. “Oh, would you mind making me one?” I asked, smiling up at her. “OK,” she huffed, rolling her eyes. “But please, please don’t ever ask me again. I don’t make other people drinks.” I laughed at the ridiculousness of her comment, given that making cups of tea (or coffee) for others is somewhat of an English pastime. I hoped that perhaps she was joking, but her stern stare reminded me that this was fashion: Being rude was a badge of honor, and normal codes of politeness were thrown out of the window. I longed to be back home in the pub surrounded by the comfort of my very down-to-earth friends and not these Anna Wintour wannabes. While intimidating and haughty, the more senior staff were much kinder, but they still had their moments. One morning I was beckoned over by the head of a department for a chat. I was wearing a blue and white, ’60s-style, polyester dress that I had recently picked up in a vintage store. I felt good.“It’s so hot in here today,” I said nervously, trying to ease the tension as she looked over my work, pen in hand and brow furrowed. Her desk was placed at the top of a long line of desks; the closer the staff member was to her vicinity, the more important they were deemed. “Good job you’re dressed for summer, then,” she replied, to a rapture of titters from her deputies. It was the midst of winter and, yes, perhaps my dress was a bit summery, but I thought my wool cardigan balanced it out. How wrong I was, apparently. Suffice to say, I never wore the dress to work again.

Being rude was a badge of honor, and normal codes of politeness were thrown out of the window.

My Fashionable Bullies Actually Helped Me Grow

After a while, I started to see the funny side of their critiques and developed a much tougher skin. I stood up for myself more often and sometimes came back with quippy comments of my own. Rather than trying to change myself to fit in, I wore my accent and identity with pride. Perhaps I was a bit of a fish out of water, but I was there all the same, and I was damned if I was going to let a group of snotty women make me feel otherwise. My change in attitude worked in my favor. I started to earn the other girls’ respect, as well as a promotion over them—much to the horror of those whose educations had cost fortunes more than my own free state-school studies.Over the course of the next four years, I saw and heard things I probably never will again. There was the time that a stylist was openly bullied by her boss into traveling to the U.S. with two models for a week-long shoot. She was told, in front of an open-plan office, that there was only enough budget for the three of them to share a single bed in a crappy motel. I also overheard staff members talk openly about their eating disorders, asking each other if they were eating today or not. Then there was the memorable personal shopper who’d forgo lunch in favor of five Diet Cokes each day. Her “dietician” had apparently told her it was fine—healthy, even. Another coworker once spent her entire month’s salary on a pair of designer shoes, only to regret it hours later. She broke down crying at her desk in remorse and had to eat beans and frozen vegetables for the rest of the month. Another one carved “I hate this place” into a freshly painted bathroom wall that sat off the main reception space. It took HR a week to remove it and months for staff members to stop talking about who did it. Then for a hellish year or so, I had a boss who remains one of the most ridiculous people I’ve ever met. She was high maintenance, mean and not very good at her job, but she covered it up—for a while, at least—with an attitude so bad that her colleagues were scared to question her capabilities. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to me for days, withhold important information I needed to do my job and openly mock my work, framing it as constructive feedback that the whole office needed to hear.

I Don’t Miss My Fashionable Life

Fashion was everything in that place, and making totally ludicrous decisions—such as bankrupting yourself to buy the latest must-have item or burning out to meet a deadline—was not just accepted but actively encouraged. None of the junior staff earned that much money, but we were reminded on an almost daily basis of what covetable positions we were in. If we wanted to complain about how much pressure we were under or how little our paychecks were, there were a hundred other girls waiting to take our places.In hindsight, it feels like a vivid dream where my imagination exaggerated the personalities and events that I experienced during that part of my career. But no, it was all real, and I’m sure there are carbon copies of those people all over the fashion industry still making silly demands and playing caricatures of themselves in an attempt to progress in their careers. Now, as a freelance writer with no colleagues to entertain me, I relish my solitude and peace of mind. Occasionally someone from that period of my life will pop up on Instagram and I’ll laugh at how much they’ve changed—or how much they haven’t—and find comfort in the fact that I came out of it unscathed, with a few great anecdotes and a much better wardrobe.

A line of models snakes backstage out onto the stairwell. Nobody talks. We stand rigidly, listening to bland Euro-electronic music thump, waiting for the queue to move. The director sports an extensive electronic headset. They mouth “go”—the show begins.Model after model saunters off, like products down a factory assembly line, until it's your turn. Darkness gives way to blinding light as you step onto the runway. Your pace is hurried, a firm posture and relaxed shoulders contrasted by spacey, tired eyes with a detached look teething with understated hostility. You strut to the camera at the end of the runway, pose, turn around and walk back from whence you came. Just as you took the space of another model, you are swiftly replaced in a constant feedback loop. So on and so forth. I’ve taken on the view that walking the runway has its own metaphorical dimension, structurally mirroring the alienation, disembodiment and velocity of life under modern capitalism. On the runway, you are a willing participant while also utterly disposable. While you may move your body across the runway through your own agency, you are governed by a flow of movement outside your own control, directing you towards a trajectory not your own. There’s a nihilism to the model walk, to the facial affectation of depressed ennui tirelessly beating forward, dragged along like a link in a chain. I don’t think the resemblance between the runway strut and the stress-filled walk to work are coincidental.

I still find myself vulnerable to the delusion of glamour.

Fashion Turned My Life Upside Down

In 2017, I was discovered by a model scout on Tinder. Coming from a working-class family, I was tantalized by the mere possibility of entering a world several social strata above me. It was like hearing beautiful music muffled through a door that was closed to me. Suddenly, a pair of keys was dangling in front of my eyes. I am one of six children. We grew up raised by a single mother in a two-bedroom house. Walking a runway seemed ludicrous when your day-to-day problems were about rationing food stamps to last the month. There are two periods of my young adulthood separated by a chasm—one side is a vast, ambiguous swirl of scarcity; the other is where terms like “Fashion Week” hold actual weight. I had never experienced shame toward my upbringing until I made that step to the other side. Glamour is the currency, both ephemeral and material, that validates the existence of high fashion. Subsisting by its own internal logic, glamour is abstracted and made unattainable, while contradictorily attached to a price tag. According to Ashley Mears, professor of sociology at Boston University, “This is precisely how glamour works: through disguise. Glamour, after all, has its roots in medieval Celtic alchemy. Glamer is a spell, a magic charm, that is cast to blur the eyes and make objects appear different from, and usually better than, their true nature.” High fashion exists within the continuum of modern capitalism, so the coercive nature of glamour has direct, material consequences. This relationship is exemplified in the now-infamous cerulean top scene in The Devil Wears Prada. The protagonist—a misfit hired as an assistant to the Anna Wintour-esque editor-in-chief of a prestigious fashion magazine—watches her boss painstakingly choose between two near-identical belts. Scoffing at their similarity, the protagonist assumes the popular belief that the logic and decisions of high fashion are incidental, obscure and irrelevant to those outside its aristocracy. The editor proceeds to ruthlessly admonish her naivete:“You go to your closet and you select out, oh, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”The film portrays this consumer pyramid from a place of admiration, legitimizing high fashion while failing to consider the human and environmental consequences of these systems.

I remember an intrinsic sense of wrongness at these massive altars of waste.

Fashion Creates a Shocking Amount of Waste

In high school, long before I was a model, I worked in the backroom at a local T.J.Maxx in the Inland Empire, outside Los Angeles. The corporation's business model centers on purchasing surplus merchandise from manufacturers and department stores that overbuy, symbolically scrapping the excess production dispelled at the bottom of the consumer pyramid. For hours, I sorted shipment after shipment of “tragic Casual Corner.” Day in and day out, I unboxed a constant onslaught of fast fashion, pleather Michael Kors purses and marked-down accessories—all cheaply produced and packaged in extraneous styrofoam. At the end of my shift, my final task was to fill a compactor with all the trash. During my stint at T.J.Maxx, I was constantly shocked at the number of steel dumpsters we’d fill in a single day. I was too young to have the language to understand why this was unsettling, but I remember an intrinsic sense of wrongness at these massive altars of waste.“Glamour” is validated by its illusory power to obscure the material labor that produced it. At the same time, it’s validated only by its contrast to those outside it—those who produce it. The vast majority of items I sorted were produced by sweatshop workers in China and Southeast Asia, mostly Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Of the few items proudly advertised as “made in America,” there was a high likelihood they were created either with prison labor or by underpaid immigrant workers in downtown LA’s garment district. Despite the worlds of distance between Marshalls and Marni, high fashion and fast fashion are inexorably connected. I’ve been on both sides and I still find myself vulnerable to the delusion of glamour. Regardless of my origins, political ideations and lived experience, I walk when the director, sporting the extensive headpiece, mouths “go.”

What do you think of when I say the word “wedding”? Flowers, dancing and family, usually. What about the bride? I bet in most of our minds, she’s blushing and beaming in a floor-length, nipped-in, meringue-white gown. I bet she’s thin, slender and lean—unlike me.When I got engaged in Iceland back in June 2017, I was euphoric. I couldn’t wait to spend my life with my best friend and soulmate of three years. But after the high of the engagement—telling my friends and family while showing off my gorgeous ring—came a crushing low. I was fat, and I had to find a wedding dress.

I was fat, and I had to find a wedding dress.

My Weight Wasn’t an Issue Until I Decided to Get Married

Let me tell you now that weddings aren’t made for fat girls. Bridal magazines are full of trim white brides no bigger around than my thigh. Bridal shop racks are full of tiny dresses made for smaller women. The thought of trying one on under the burning eyes of a petite dressmaker made me sweat profusely.Instead, I turned my eyes toward the big bad world of online shopping, where I discovered a bridal boutique that I’d seen celebs like Fearne Cotton wearing on Instagram. I laughed in the face of ridiculous, encrusted, floor-length meringue dresses and decided to go bohemian. I found a champagne-colored gown with hand-stitched flowers, beads and sequins scattered all over a tiered skirt and zip-up back. It was beautiful, and it was me. I ordered my size and waited eagerly for it to arrive.My weight had never gotten in the way of my life, my career or my relationship status. I’d never let it define me or let myself become a fetish. My dating life wasn’t ruled by being a bigger girl—I was in control, not my weight. I was attractive because I was confident, happy and comfortable in my skin, and it showed. I wore what I wanted and not what I thought I should wear for being bigger. When it came to friendships, I wasn’t the jovial fat girl in my friend group—although I was the biggest girl at school—but the successful, career-driven one that always craved more. Or at least that’s who I was until I tried on my dress. Staring at myself in the mirror, surrounded by my family (and their deafening silence), my eyes filled with tears. It didn’t fit. The back didn’t even come close to zipping up. My mum held the fabric together while I forced a smile and sent a picture to my bridesmaids. When I was finally alone, I sobbed.

I Was Willing to Change Who I Was to Fit In That Dress

I was determined to fit into that dress. I convinced myself that I just needed to lose half my body weight.I turned to exercise. I ran aggressively and obsessively. I researched wedding diets online, of which there are an obscene amount. I even came across workout gear emblazoned with the phrase “sweating for the wedding.” I had somehow convinced myself that starving to fit into a dress I’d wear one time, for one day, was the most normal thing in the world.Instead of helping my husband-to-be with seating plans and flower arrangements, I starved and ran and ran some more. I was losing weight, but I was also drastically unhealthy. I skipped breakfast, ate very little and refused to have fun. I was a shadow of myself.And yet, it still wasn't enough, and I punished myself for it. I hurt myself with insults, telling myself I wasn’t good enough, that I was letting myself down. In my depression, I starved myself some more.About three months before the big day, I tried my dress on once more. The zip still wouldn’t budge. The dress claimed to be my size, but in reality, it was at least two or three sizes smaller than I was. I’d need to cut off a limb or completely rearrange my entire bone structure for the ridiculous thing to fit.And then it hit me: My weight had never defined me, so why was I letting it ruin my life and my chance at a perfect wedding day? In reality, it wasn’t me that had the problem. I was the average dress size for a woman in the U.K. I was healthy, active and—most importantly—loved. I’d loved myself until I tried on a dress that was made for an idealized woman by an industry that has a skewed, toxic idea of what the picture-perfect bride should look like: slim, slender and serene.That wasn’t me, so I decided to be myself instead and take back the dress and the body that I loved.

I wanted to proudly show off my body, back rolls and all.

I Couldn’t Fit in My Dress, So I Made the Dress Fit Me

“Cut it up,” I told the seamstress that I’d been recommended by a family member. I smiled as I watched her blades glide through the exquisite fabric. At first, when I walked in, I had no idea what I wanted her to do to my dress. But I wanted the control. I didn’t want the dress to rule me and my thoughts any longer. I instructed her to cut the back clean out of it and stitch in a gold satin ribbon that wrapped around my waist and flowed down my back. I wanted to proudly show off my body, back rolls and all. On my big day, my dress shimmered across my body as I walked down the aisle. I walked with my head held high and my bare back on display. I didn’t wear a bra either or worry about what my big breasts looked like in swathes of fabric without support. I was the perfect image of a confident, blushing bride. I grinned as I saw my husband’s eyes well up at the sight of me.“You look beautiful,” he whispered through his tears.“I know.”By discarding that piece of fabric that once clung to my back, I felt like I’d shed years of prejudice about my weight, years of misjudgment from other people—mainly women—that I was too fat or too wobbly. I’d shed hatred for myself and gained love, pride and respect—from myself, first and foremost.When I look back at my wedding photos now, I don’t see the back rolls on display. I see a woman who is completely and utterly happy. She is serene and smiling, and she is herself. She is loved.Now, how’s that for a fat girl?

I don’t think that I’m more pessimistic than the average person. I’m certainly prone to a mercenary kind of pragmatism in my more introspective moments, but I consider myself a fairly “glass half full” kind of person. Having said that, I think Clubhouse is contributing to a breakdown in the healthy formation of relationships. This is not a new sentiment, and it has been levied against any number of social media apps currently plaguing the masses. But Clubhouse is a specific kind of bleak, foisted on us at the most opportune moment of isolation and craving for human interaction. I’m not given to indulging in conspiracy theories (unless they’re so entirely ridiculous they have a ring of truth), but its explosion as the newest, shiniest, most exclusive app at the height of pandemic paranoia feels sufficiently suspicious to me.Clubhouse is a mobile-only social media app that allows users to create audio-only chat rooms. It allows users to host these rooms in a live format where thousands of people can join in as listeners or active participants, subject to the whims of room moderators. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like The Next Big Thing in social media. There’s no endless timeline to scroll, no "like" counts to silently scrutinize, no virtual marketplace to peruse. Android users couldn’t join until May 2021. But its user base now numbers more than 10 million, spanning the globe despite its limited feature set. Clubhouse’s soaring popularity has inspired copycats from competitors with far more longevity like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Slack.How did Clubhouse become such a runaway success in such a short period of time? What experience does it provide that so clearly and consistently draws people in?

Clubhouse is a specific kind of bleak.

The Secret to Clubhouse's Success? False Intimacy

By my estimation, Clubhouse has managed to capture our collective attention by perfectly mimicking the natural experience of forming relationships at a time when our ability to do so has been severely hindered. Clubhouse has removed the screen and impersonal text, reintroducing tone and context to conversations. It returns tonal variety, texture, timbre and even humanity to conversations—while global health and science bodies tell us to avoid these things for our collective safety. Clubhouse was the closest approximation to in-person interaction that was available when the world was locked down. I can’t explain why predecessors like Google Hangouts, Skype or WhatsApp didn’t capture the public’s imagination during the pandemic in the same way. Maybe it’s solely the appeal of something new and relatively exclusive, or maybe it’s because we’ve stopped trying quite so hard and we’re all getting too ugly to look at. Maybe it’s the ability to see a list of the room’s participants before joining a conversation. This, combined with Clubhouse’s demand for a functional cellphone number and its beta status (which it just recently evolved out of ), encourages a feeling of exclusivity and privacy. Whatever the reasoning is, Clubhouse is the hottest, newest thing, and I hate it.I’ve limited my Clubhouse usage since my initial obsession began in June 2020. I joined Clubhouse that month after being invited by a fellow photographer. I intended to use it for networking purposes, but I was quickly sucked in as more and more friends, colleagues and the occasional nemesis joined. I would spend hours on the app, searching for rooms about photography or sex work or organizing that I could join, either as an active participant or just to listen in.

We Should Watch Who We Let Our Guard Down With Online

My greatest frustrations, borne from my experience being cyberstalked and a long-running fear of police surveillance, were the rooms where sex workers frequented. It’s no secret that social media platforms have targeted sex workers following the passage of SESTA/FOSTA and the recent press surrounding SISEA. Secretive algorithms, vague content moderation rules and an inconsistent appeals process for account deletion have left sex workers scrambling to find and keep communities, build networks and offer material support to each other.The appearance of Clubhouse, a new app with little to no guidance on allowable content, and its wider strategy for longevity, was like a beacon—a beacon that eroded all sense of apprehension and basic rules for internet safety. A beacon that encouraged strangers to admit to felonies to each other, with no real assurance as to who was listening beyond a phone number whose true ownership could easily be changed, manipulated or otherwise concealed. After the initial honeymoon period, I started feeling an apprehension about what I was doing that I couldn’t explain. Opening the app felt like a chore, another opportunity to monetize my existence. One room after another boasted titles like “HOW TO BECOME A CLUBHOUSE INFLUENCER” and “GETTING PAID TO HOST THIS ROOM” or “FREE IG AUDITS WITH PR GURU TO THE STARS.” Even rooms related to photography or writing were touting claims like “MAKE $80,000 YOUR FIRST YEAR AS A PHOTOGRAPHER” or “SEO TIPS TO MONETIZE YOUR BLOG.”Inside rooms that were supposedly an opportunity to connect with others, I was admonished to add my Cash App to my bio so I could receive tips for sharing hard-won advice. I’ve felt this malaise before with other apps, but this was different. It was a tangible drag on my mood that eventually led me to block notifications at the iOS system level and eventually stop using the app altogether. After a measured return to Clubhouse—joining in very specific rooms at predetermined times—I get it now. I’ve done my best to limit my exposure to it, but there’s just something about Clubhouse that inspires people to overshare and trauma dump without knowing exactly who’s on the other side. The app encourages a false sense of intimacy—everyone on there is a friend of a friend. By keeping the app invitation only and tying those invitations only to numbers saved in your contacts, Clubhouse has created an environment where every user is possibly one degree of separation apart.There’s a devious ring of truth—albeit a surface-level one—to the experience. The world doesn’t seem that big on Clubhouse, unless there’s a global finger wag in your direction if you aren’t staying as isolated as possible. In a new world, where it’s possible for public figures to lose work and favor for not embracing COVID distancing and safety guidelines, the need to connect is greater than ever. The idea that anyone on an app with 10 million users could be in the contacts of your best friend has to do something to your psyche. Combined with being trapped alone with your own thoughts—plus maybe a husband, kids or an overbearing in-law—for 18 months, it’s a recipe for a perfect emotional storm.

We Think We Know Our Favorite Internet Personalities—but We Don’t

Is it any wonder then that, despite knowing the general insecurity of social media and the danger of saying anything in a roomful of strangers, people will unload their trauma on Clubhouse without a second thought? I felt a twinge of this discomfort with the rising popularity of Tabitha Brown, the vegan cooking “internet auntie” on TikTok. Brown’s content is usually focused on creating vegan alternatives to common Black Southern dishes, working as an actress and interacting with her family. Occasionally, however, Brown will reply to a comment or message, usually thanking her for her soothing voice and kind spirit because it made them remember a parent or teacher.Those made me uncomfortable—first because I don’t like when it's assumed that a Black woman, particularly an older one, is assumed to be willing to take on the emotional labor of any and everyone who finds them sufficiently comforting. And secondly, I didn’t like the idea of teenagers and young adults flocking to an adult on the internet with their deepest insecurities, shame and concerns for the world. Again, this is my own post-stalking paranoia speaking, but it made me feel weird in ways I wasn’t sure how to articulate. Is her voice soothing? Sure. But not enough to unload a running commentary on my ever-present anxieties. But when I voiced this, the most consistent feedback was that I should stop trying to play pop psychologist. So I did, even after learning that her husband was a cop.While Clubhouse mimics the intimacy of a person-to-person conversation, it cannot replace the experience of building a true relationship. It cannot replicate the building of trust needed for true vulnerability between two people. And so, the tenuous beginnings of a relationship are fractured at the first sign of conflict. Simple miscommunications and natural disagreements are pathologized as abusive or manipulative by a rapt audience of spectators.

Clubhouse is the hottest, newest thing, and I hate it.

The Internet—Particularly Clubhouse—Is One, Big Trauma Dump

I should admit that I came of age on Tumblr. I’m no stranger to internet friendships that fade into nothingness or those that result in extremely public, extremely embarrassing fits of pique. I’ve spent years attached to my phone, at first because I was being paid to, then because I’m mentally ill. But after years of therapy, a lot of edibles and a stint of freelance writing, I am proud to say that I think I’m getting over my internet addiction (or maybe I’m just getting old). The constant churn of social media, now with its new trauma-dumping feature, is getting to me. Then again, here I am telling all of my innermost thoughts and feelings to the internet at large.I’m hesitant to say “everyone go to therapy” because, in essence, that also means telling all of your secrets to a stranger, but I don’t have any other answers. Unlike seeing a licensed professional, one trained to help guide you through the admittedly painful process of understanding yourself, Clubhouse has become a designated zone for trauma dumping. One where unsuspecting, unconsenting audience members are treated to a full-color reenactment of a strangers’ worst trauma. The audience is given no time to adjust or decide if they’re willing to take on the role, the intimacy of being in possession of this knowledge and the resulting emotions. And there’s no plan in place for any emotional distress felt by the audience, no mitigation strategy for anything these stories might trigger. Whatever tender feelings the false exclusivity of Clubhouse may generate, there is no guarantee that everyone in these rooms is a friend or one step removed. Friendship is not conferred by proximity or shared space. It’s grown alongside time spent building and resolving conflict and cultivating trust. The intimacy of real friendship is more than temporary because it is hard-won.

A good ring is something everyone should have on their hands. A ring that represents you, that tells something about you, that defines you. People instinctively pay attention to your hands, so wearing the right rings for the right occasion is important. Rings can introduce you to everyone you meet and introduce you to others without ever having to speak. Rings can also reveal the brightest and the darkest parts of our past. Those with a metal circle around their finger will sometimes communicate more than they want to. The rings will not give details but will leave hints and clues about what the person wearing them is trying to explain or hide. That is why it’s so important to choose the right ring—it will present you to the world.

One does not simply wear a ring of a skull with demon horns to a wedding in a Catholic church.

Three of My Rings Always Stay on My Fingers

I really love rings. Every time I find one that I like and fits my style, I buy it and put it into rotation with my others. The rings I use depend a lot on the occasion—the outfit I’ll be wearing, the place and mood of the situation and the people who are going to be surrounding me. One does not simply wear a ring of a skull with demon horns to a wedding in a Catholic church.Of course, it’s important not to sacrifice all your style just to fit into the group. If you are like me and use more than three rings (I use eight; four on each hand), I recommend you take only the ones that best represent you when going to fancy and elegant settings. At these kinds of events, like weddings or funerals, I wear only three of my eight habitual rings: the left ring finger and both middle fingers. Some represent the past, some represent the future and all have meaning for me. One ring symbolizes couple love, which, in my case, references the fact that I’ve always had trouble finding the right one. I’ve tried so much and put effort into it, but I realized I would never find her. Another—the one I wear on my left middle finger—has the shape of a Nordic wolf’s head, with small and fine carvings that make the animal look calm and humble and not hostile as often presented. A third, on the right middle finger, symbolizes family bonds and, in my case, those who gifted it to me.

My Best Friend Saved My Life, and I Became Part of the Pack

The story behind the wolf ring is a bit dark, and I hope nobody can identify with it by having suffered the same. Years ago, I was part of a group of people, similar to a small gang. We never did illegal stuff. Instead of being the typical junkies, we were teens who helped others without asking for anything in return. People in our hood called us "Wolves" because we always moved in groups and we helped each other out like a real pack.Yes, we did smoke cigarettes and drink sodas while chatting in our free time, but there was almost always something we could do to help—big or small. We helped the local market stores get rid of criminals and helped out people (mostly our same age) if they were being picked on or harassed by bullies. We helped people in the market unload their merchandise off trucks. Sometimes we even helped with night patrol of the neighborhood. We tried to make the world a better place with small acts.One day, I tried to commit suicide. I was immersed in a massive depression and emotionally and physically worn out. I was going through a lot at the time. I didn’t tell anybody about it, but somehow, my best friend, Romo, who was also a Wolf, found out and arrived in time at my house to stop me. He ripped the knife out of my hand and beat me up until I couldn’t stand up.I still remember what he said when I was on the ground, laying against the wall, looking at him. The tears in his eyes held a mix of anger, sadness and desperation. His words were like a slap to the face mixed with a bucket of freezing cold water: “Don’t be stupid! There are people out there that depend on you, that need you. If you die, who is going to look after them? They need you to guide them, to help them, so you better be the one they need you to be, or I’ll be here again to prevent you from killing yourself, brother. Never forget they need you. I need you. I love you, brother. I love you so much, and I will always be by your side, want it or not, so you better get used to it.”After that, he apologized for hurting me, and we both went to my favorite restaurant for dinner. Two weeks after that event, I received the terrible news. Romo had killed himself. He hung himself from a handrail. I was devastated. I felt broken. Without me telling him, he found out about me and saved me, but I wasn’t able to do the same for him. I crumbled into pieces.The Wolves were worried for me, so one day they showed up at my house and gave me a small but beautiful gift: a ring in the shape of a Nordic wolf’s head. They told me that if I ever needed them, they would be there by my side, and that that ring would be proof of it.

My Wolf Ring Reminded Me I Had a Life Worth Living

Time passed by, and after almost a month, another tragedy occurred. Three armed robbers tried to rob a store at night. Obviously, my friends, who were on night patrol, went to help and stop the robbery, but those criminals fired their guns and ran away. The next morning, I found out what had happened: The three robbers shot my friends, the ones who I had the honor and luck of calling my brothers, as well as the store clerk. They took the money and fled the scene.I was destroyed. There is no existing word to describe the pain I felt and the suffering I went through in that moment. Those who I considered my family, my brothers, were now dead. I felt completely bleak and alone, broken and with no hope. Two days after my friends died, impacted by the depression, the sadness and the emptiness in my heart, I decided to try to take my life again. But then I looked at my left hand and saw the silver wolf on my finger. I remembered Romo and what he had said to me the night he stopped me from killing myself. I moved the knife away from my throat, dropped it and then dropped myself onto the floor, bursting in tears because I had no one left in this world. That ring helped save my life.

That ring helped save my life.

My Rings Remind Me of Everything I’ve Been Through

Another ring I wear has the shape of a jackal. In ancient Egypt, jackals were loyal to their own and took care of their group. I bought this ring a couple months ago as it made me remember my past. It gave me the opportunity to give everything I have lived a new meaning and look at it from a new perspective. It gave me the opportunity to take my open wounds, close them and turn them into scars that will mark my story in me.When I look at them, they will show me everything I have been through, good or bad, that has forged me and made me the person I am today. Those are the meanings and stories behind my main rings. In my daily life, I use more than just those three, but that trio never falls out of rotation. They always stay in their place, on their own finger. A ring can mean lots of things. It can have a simple story or a very complex and deep meaning. You can also find your own, one that becomes part of you.

Every three months or so between 1978 and 1981, CBS flew me first class to Manhattan, put me up at the Plaza Hotel and paid all my expenses. In return, they picked my brain about their soap operas (officially renamed daytime stories in the iconic 1982 film, Tootsie). This California girl is a story savant, but back in the Paleolithic age, I had a lot to learn about style. On that first trip to New York, everything I packed was polyester. Do you really need to know anything else? Trust me, you can’t get into the Russian Tea Room wearing tight white jeans and a Hawaiian shirt unless you’re Gilda Radner. I stepped up my game for the next trip, buying a dry-clean-only dress at Contempo Casuals. It was better, but the paparazzi aggressively turned away from me as I left the hotel.It all changed a few months later: the night my belt broke at Studio 54.

My Boyfriend and I Celebrated Our Successful Work Trips

On this trip, I didn’t fly solo. I brought my boyfriend, a dentist turned band manager. I had a meeting. He had a meeting. I pitched ideas for shows like Search for Tomorrow to Bill Bell and his five assistants. My boyfriend pitched his band Rhoads to concert booking agents. Bill Bell was impressed I had sold three original soaps to prime-time networks without ever having worked as a writer on a daytime show. The booking agents were impressed that the lead singer for Rhoads (named for guitarist Randy Rhoads, who left Quiet Riot to team up with Ozzy Osbourne) was famous Randy’s little brother, whose real job was a delivery boy for a local L.A. florist. So, I started coming up with story ideas: What if no one knows she used artificial insemination to get pregnant? What if her priest is being kind to her because only he and her doctor know she has a brain tumor? What if she and the priest have sex and, then, the brain tumor vixen doesn’t know if her baby’s daddy is the sperm donor or Father O’ Flynn? I had multiple situations in which every character on every show could shock America. Meanwhile, my boyfriend told the promoters that the drummer in his band, Nick Menza, was being scouted by Megadeath.Turns out soap operas love brain tumors, and Rhoads was signed as the opening act for the Foghat tour. Time to celebrate! And since it didn’t matter what it cost because we weren’t going to have to pay for it, why not go to Studio 54, the hottest club and disco in the whole damn world?

Why not go to Studio 54, the hottest club and disco in the whole damn world?

Studio 54 Was a Feast for the Senses

I had a dry-clean-only dress. It wasn’t a Halston. It was definitely not a Studio 54 dress. And unfortunately, it wasn’t the Rudi Gernreich minidress my dad brought home in the early ’70s—a neon-yellow jersey material with see-through plastic in places you don’t want your dress to be see-through. I would have killed to have had that dress in my suitcase. Instead, I put on my black front-and-back V-neck dress. Then I cinched the belt, making the dress very short.The only weapons I had were genetic: nice legs and huge, real boobs that pointed straight forward, like they’re saluting. I went braless because, well, just because. Also, there’s that Italian Viking boyfriend. Gorgeous and 6-foot-6-inches. He didn’t like to wear underwear, either. We had a lot in common. We also got in. Really, I have no idea how or why. The only thing I know for sure is it wasn’t my style. Until my belt broke. Hang on, I’m getting ahead of myself.What can I say about Studio 54 that hasn’t already been said? Only that it was more than any photo or film can show. The music massaged your ovaries. It was so loud I knew I would need a hearing aid when I got old, but I didn’t care. The lights were cosmic in that they felt like a natural phenomenon. I knew it wouldn’t be too long before I had a blinding migraine and would need a Quaalude. Well, I came to the right place for all of that.Celebrities made eye contact with you at Studio 54. We were all in the moment together. Grace Jones danced by in a neon green onesie, and she was so beautiful I forgot to breathe. Anyone you saw up close—or could reach out and touch—you danced with, even if only for a few seconds.

He didn’t like to wear underwear, either. We had a lot in common.

My Belt Blunder Became a Big Hit

I was in the bathroom when my belt exploded. It didn’t just break; it totally shredded. My dress, once ruched into a mini, fell hard. It was now just below my knees, which meant that the V’s in the neck and back also fell. The front V stopped beyond my navel. The back V clearly introduced the crack of my ass. I didn’t know what to do, so I threw my belt away and walked tall out of the bathroom into a pack of gay men who discovered me and dragged me to booths where the really important people were hanging out. “Look at this dress!” Everyone was looking. I was spun, touched and interrogated. Who is the designer? “God,” was my answer. And they accepted it. I danced that dress off and back on the rest of the night, happy I had said no to Playboy years before and that the remarkable phenomenon that was Studio 54 was my coming out party. This history is requested by my daughter’s friends, like Adriana Mencias, a talented stylist from Tucson, and my Beverly Hills forever friend Mario Gonzales, tailor to the stars. Mario can vouch for the fact that although I still have very little style, I continue to walk tall.Always remember: Today’s fashion blunder is tomorrow’s haute couture.

I’m staring into the void of my wardrobe, deciding what to wear. The task seems impossible. I’m overwhelmed by the juxtaposition between overtly feminine and lazily boyish, too much effort and not enough. I hold comfort in my left hand and composure in the right, weighing them up—on one side, baggy jumpers and velvet flares, and on the other, crisp cigarette trousers, a white shirt, French tuck. With all this fuss, you’d think I was going somewhere exciting (a date, perhaps), but no. I’m dressing for therapy.This shouldn’t have been new to me. I had my first round of therapy at 8 years old, where we explored my obsessive-compulsive disorder through art projects and sandboxes. I would visit my counselor on a Thursday afternoon in a little office at one end of my primary school, wearing my school uniform. But I don’t remember seeming self-conscious about my appearance back then.It seems that the overthinking, indecisive tendencies towards fashion appeared later on. I started having therapy for my OCD again when I was 17, and I remember telling my new counselor how low I was feeling. She responded, “But you look well.” Maybe I would still have become anxious around dressing for therapy without her comment, but regardless, her disregard of my internal feelings in favor of my appearance did something to me. It was as if I realized that I had to look a certain way in order to have my sadness taken seriously. I was wearing a ’60s style mini skirt in a retro orange and white print and a black roll neck jumper (nothing fancy), and yet this level of effort had unlocked my therapist’s true thoughts: “This girl is dressed nicely so she must be fine.”

I don’t remember seeming self-conscious about my appearance back then.

I Often Conformed to Gendered, Formulaic Ideas of Fashion

Once I had this realization, dressing for therapy became much harder. As women, we are raised to view fashion as a seminal form of self-expression. As little girls, pink and fluffy magazines showed us what our favorite Disney stars were wearing and where we could buy affordable dupes. As teenagers, we watched hauls and unboxings of online orders on YouTube. Even now, my social media algorithm is full of this Mean Girls “get in loser we’re going shopping” mentality, played out by influencers who have cultivated an aesthetic via six-figure sponsorship deals with Fashion Nova.Fashion is the currency in which our gender trades. If you dress well then people respect you. But suddenly, within the four walls of a therapist’s office, this was turned on its head, and the priority was to look as unpolished as possible.Week by week, I used this knowledge to my advantage. When I was feeling lower than usual, I’d wear no makeup and all-black, ill-fitting clothes, but when I felt better, I’d make more effort, adding pops of color or nice jewelry. There was a formula to it, which I appreciated. If you wear X it’s because you feel like Y and will get a Z response. But nothing could prepare me for the lack of rules when dressing for my most recent round of therapy. It had been difficult before, but throwing the mixed emotions of sexual assault into the fire made it even harder.

I Worried My Outfits Would Challenge My Appearance as a Victim

Due to the victim-blaming culture we live in, the automatic response to women being assaulted is, “What were you wearing?” This meant that when I attended therapy to discuss my trauma, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the connotations of my outfits. Would my therapist think I “deserved it” if I wore a skirt? Would she think I was “over it” if I wore jewelry? After all, putting effort into my appearance had previously been synonymous with not being taken seriously.However, even the “safe” option I’d established with my last therapist—simple black clothing, a ponytail, minimal makeup—didn’t sit right with me. I was terrified that if I looked ugly then my new therapist would think, “Why would anyone want to assault you?” It’s an awful thought to admit out loud, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s worried about it. When society takes every step to make you doubt yourself and your story, the last thing you want is your therapist disbelieving you, too, because you don’t fit the mold of a victim. When you’re being observed for 45 minutes every week, it feels natural to feel exposed. You can’t control your past or how you’ll present it to the stranger sitting in front of you, and you definitely can’t determine what they’ll ask or how you’ll respond in the moment. Out of this loss of power emerges the desire to control the one thing you can: your appearance.But when I met my new therapist, she taught me that therapy should be a nonjudgemental space. “I’m here to make you feel better,” she said, “not to undermine your feelings based on how you look.” This made me realize that my overthinking was not only unproductive, but that ultimately, no one was looking at me through the critical lens through which I viewed myself. I’ve experienced enough trauma—why should I let something as insignificant as my clothes affect my mood? And that’s not to diminish the impact an outfit choice has, but to remind us that unpacking your internal emotions should take priority over how you’re externally presented.

Why should I let something as insignificant as my clothes affect my mood?

It’s Important to Never Feel Judged by a Therapist for What You Wear

Some things I learned: If you feel insecure about your outfit, try to address your fear in your session. After all, where is the best place for honesty if not in a counselor's office? Or, if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then consider shopping around until you find a therapist you don’t feel judged by. This may not be an option for everyone, but lots of programs offer the chance to transfer therapists within your first two to three sessions if you’re not getting along.Maybe one day I will get my hands on one of those machines from Clueless that decides your outfit for you. Until then I’ll have to decide for myself every day. But clothes don’t have to be restrictive or judgmental—in fact, they can be liberating, exciting and fun. If fashion is our currency, then I might as well spend it in the way that makes me happiest and ignore the little voices in my mind that tell me otherwise. You deserve to feel well dressed, regardless of what you’ve been through.

I scrutinized my reflection in the mirror before walking out the door. My shiny black heels matched my pencil skirt. The hem of my crisp white blouse with flutter sleeves fell to exactly the right length. My skin tone was even—glowing, actually—thanks to an expensive primer and foundation I’d picked up at Sephora. My perfectly applied eyeshadow distracted from the dark circles under my lower lids. I ran my hand through my brunette hair. A large clump of hair came away with my hand. I sighed. Then I reached for my comb and painstakingly twisted my lackluster locks into an updo. Now, no one at work would ever know I was so sick I could barely function.Four years earlier, during college, I’d been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. My diagnosis followed months of my hair falling out, crippling fatigue and severe brain fog. Unable to keep food down, I’d lost 10 pounds over just a few months. I barely had the strength to hold my head up while sitting in class. And the grueling physical pain of my illness was matched by the emotional devastation of being diagnosed with a lifelong condition. In addition to the deep grief I felt at losing my chance at a normal life, the reactions of my peers and family left permanent scars on my heart. A few people close to me openly rolled their eyes or even smirked when I talked about the pain I lived with every day. Several family members simply refused to believe me. Speaking openly about my pain didn’t bring me the empathy and connection I needed; it left me feeling broken and rejected. After too many painful interactions, I stopped speaking about my disease almost entirely. Because my illness is invisible and left no marks on my body, I was able to hide it. Afraid of looking sick, I stopped dressing for myself and lost sight of my own personal style. Fashion became not a means to express myself, but a way to shield myself from the world around me.

Fashion became not a means to express myself, but a way to shield myself from the world around me.

Each Day I Had to Create the Illusion of Normalcy

I was determined to have a career like any other person my age, even though each morning was a battle. I hit snooze on my phone’s alarm over and over before finally dragging myself up into a sitting position on my bed, where I had to sit for a minute to summon the energy to shuffle slowly to the kitchen for coffee. I’d poured water into the coffee machine the night before, knowing I’d be too physically weak and exhausted in the morning to lift a large cup of water and empty it into the machine’s tank. I sank into a kitchen chair as my coffee brewed, the fog of exhaustion in my brain too thick for any thoughts to penetrate. I carried my cup of coffee back to my bedroom, then set it on the table beside me as I put on my disguise. While I blasted rock music to try to wake myself up enough to drive to work, I dabbed concealer on the bags under my eyes. I winged my eyeliner more and brightened my eyelids with extra eyeshadow to make me look awake. When choosing clothes, I avoided the interesting cuts and bold colors I liked, instead picking traditional silhouettes and neutrals. The goal was to blend in, not stand out. By the time I stumbled out the door each morning, the illusion was complete: I looked like a normal 20-something woman, even if I felt like a walking corpse.My impersonation of a healthy person never failed to disguise the pain I lived with each day. Often, it worked too well. “You look so healthy,” a woman once said to me as I stood at the sink in the ladies' restroom. “Are you a dancer?” I had just finished dumping my lunch in the stall because I was too nauseated to stand the smell of it.“A healthy girl like you?” a coworker laughed when I pressed the elevator button. “Why aren’t you taking the stairs?” I stared at my shiny heels, unable to answer.

Hiding My Illness Only Made It Worse

Many of my friends and colleagues had no idea I lived with a chronic illness. I made excuses to not stay out late and avoided any activity that involved walking long distances. Even when standing in the middle of a group of friends, I didn’t feel I was truly a part of any group. There was too much of myself that I was hiding.The charade came crashing one day when my disease spiraled out of control. In a month, I lost my ability to walk, drive or even have a simple conversation. I abruptly quit my job. My doctor pumped me full of steroids, which made my cheeks puffy, tore out my remaining hair and deposited lumps of fat in random places on my body. I was completely unrecognizable from the woman who had spent such care choosing her makeup and clothes each morning.All the makeup in the world couldn’t cover my swollen cheeks, deformed from the steroids. No amount of beautiful clothes could hide the fact that I was in a wheelchair. My recovery was grueling. I had to relearn to walk, my leg and abdominal muscles burning as I struggled to lift my feet an inch off the floor. But if there was a silver lining to my episode of severe illness, it was this: I was finally free from hiding.

The goal was to blend in, not stand out.

Accepting My Illness Freed Me

When I was finally well enough, I went shopping with my caretaker. As I searched through racks of clothing, I didn’t look for the most professional-looking pencil skirts or neutral blouses. I chose red flowery skirts and daring asymmetrical tops. I experimented with sparkly green eyeshadow and blue eyeliner. I discovered a piece of me that had lain dormant for far too long. As I relearned how to walk and speak, I relearned what style I truly liked.Several years after my recovery, my face and body have returned to normal. My hair has grown back. I chopped it into an asymmetrical pixie cut, no longer caring what my colleagues or clients think. I sit at my mirror each morning, swiping on dramatic eyeshadow or a bold red lip. I pluck jeans and a red shirt from a closet full of clothes that I love. Then I step outside, ready to face the world as my true self.

I capture the experience of a new city in scent bottles. I hold keen interest in pursuing adventure and travel, and because of my work, which requires me to travel extensively for client meetings, I get to visit all parts of the world and explore new cities almost every three months. (At least, in pre-COVID times.) Staying in a hotel in a new city, with different culture, food, travel, weather and clothes, provides lots of memories to cherish and remember. But because I personally am very sensitive when it comes to memory, over the last 12 years, on each business trip, I have been buying perfume bottles to capture my experiences in each city. It may seem weird, but it’s my style to capture and relive my experiences in those scents. It’s given me time to reflect on what I’ve learned, the people I’ve met, the food items I’ve tried and the adventures I’ve taken.Remembering the smell of a location or view of a scenic place that your heart longs for dearly—be it a tropical island, a lush mountain, an afternoon lunch amidst a city’s hustle-bustle, a wildflower meadow, a blue sky or a late night in a hotel with torrential rain outside—helps you reflect on all the experiences you’ve had in the past. In the same way, the fragrance of different perfumes helps me to time travel, makes me feel like I am actually at all those places I once visited, giving me the same adrenaline rush of experiences playing sports. Whether it’s the memory of relaxing on the beach while getting tanned by the sun or swimming in the ocean or traveling in a lightning fast bullet train, I let the fragrance of my perfumes take me to those places.

I have a full collection of 41 perfumes and fragrances from the 41 different cities I have visited over the last 12 years.

My Scents All Have Their Own Stories Baked Into Them

I have a full collection of 41 perfumes and fragrances from the 41 different cities I have visited over the last 12 years. Each perfume bottle and the memories associated with them are precious to me. New York’s Calvin Klein perfume holds a romantic scent with balanced sweet notes. It takes me back to my days there in 2010, when I had a brief but fulfilling relationship with a local guy there. I had a great time and am now filled with memories of walking the streets together at midnight and long drives on the weekends. The sycamore wood perfume of Gianni Versace holds memories of my experiences of staying in hotels in Rome. I remember having gelato en route to work, as there were seemingly thousands of gelaterias selling scoops of classic flavors and whimsical originals, and seeing a street artist paint a beautiful picture in under 15 minutes. The engaging scent of Guess perfume from California holds my very dear memories of being at Disneyland. The Ma Vie eau de parfum by Hugo Boss reminds me of the confidence with which I was able to give product presentations to my clients successfully, as well as sitting on the balcony during a dry summer with low humidity and cool evenings. Scents from Bombay Perfumery in Mumbai evoke sweet memories every time I open a bottle of its long-lasting fragrances. They’re particularly special because in this city, I found my life partner, with whom I’ve spent many dates in different restaurants and beaches. Knowing my love for perfumes, he gifted me a bottle from Bombay Perfumery, and his gift has remained with me since.

On any given day, at any random time, I feel the urge to open a random perfume bottle and time travel to all the places I’ve been.

The Perfumes Have Eased My Recent Lack of Travel

Currently, the pandemic has caused a hiatus in my expeditions. Almost all my work is from home. I do miss traveling, but at the same time, I like getting more time to spend with my loved ones. During this time, all of my perfumes are coming in handy to relive those moments. On any given day, at any random time, I feel the urge to open a random perfume bottle and time travel to all the places I’ve been. In that way, my bottles are my go-to place whenever I feel the need to take a break from the present. These days, I feel people make so much effort and spend money on having new experiences but spend little time reliving or thinking about the amazing experiences that they have had in the past. The ability to remember and cherish the beautiful moments of life is really a gift worth having.

I turned 30 this year. This birthday met me with a highly unoriginal dose of trepidation and terror because I am a sack of watery carbon in the shape of a female. Having grown up on Earth, I have been socialized to believe that it’s important that I’m attractive. We are taught about what is attractive and what isn’t through films, advertisements and social media. In the 1950s, women were encouraged to look as much like Marilyn Monroe as they could, to embrace the soft feminine aesthetic with curled hair, red lips and rosy cheeks. Lovely. In the 1990s, women were encouraged to look like they were in the final moments of inoperable stage four cancer, complete with hollow eyes and a doleful, faraway sadness. In the 2020s, women are encouraged to look as much like Kim Kardashian as they can. An ethnically ambiguous, urban aesthetic with aggressively contoured faces and a generously upholstered bottom. In and amongst the vicissitudes of women's attractiveness, there is a common strand that links these caricatures of successful femininity: You must always be young.

You must always be young.

The Status of My Face at 30

I looked in the mirror on the morning of my 30th birthday and studied my face with effortless derision. Below is a list of unacceptable things I found there:Yes, I can raise my eyebrows and scowl in consternation, but at what cost? Botox, I thought.

Marketing Botox as a Preventative Measure Is Straight-Up Wrong

Botox is the injection of botulinum toxin into the soft tissues of the body. Botulinum toxin is a neurotoxic protein that is produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, and it works by stopping the release of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. This causes flaccid paralysis. Botulism killed a lot of people in the 1800s by paralyzing their lungs and suffocating them to death. Now we pay an aesthetician £200 to inject it into our foreheads so we don’t look old. Or surprised. Botox used to be available only to Hollywood celebrities and the like, but over the last 10 years, it has been cleverly presented as part of a modern woman's feminist/empowered self-care routine. It’s working. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports that there has been a 22 percent increase in the number of millennials getting Botox between 2013 and 2018.For example, social media describes Baby Botox for those 25 and under as a preventative measure that will mean you need fewer treatments in the future. Preventative medicine is defined as any medical treatment that aims to avoid disease and illness. Do we now consider lines on our foreheads to be a disease? More to the point, had I missed my chance to prevent my forehead disease? I was well over the hill of 25 and was already using the creases in my head to store spare change and lip balm. I decided to set out in search of some older female role models who might be able to help me make a decision on what to do about my face.

Do we now consider lines on our foreheads to be a disease?

Botox Is Just Another Way to Monetize Fear

Let’s look to the movies for some help since Hollywood-ness represents an enduring type of celebrity for the common folk to revere and emulate. Since the beginning of the Academy Awards in 1929, 13 women aged 50 or over have received an Oscar for Best Actress. Over the same period of time, 22 men aged 50 or over have been awarded an Oscar for Best Actor. Overall, female Oscar winners were nearly 10 years younger than their male colleagues. Unless you are Jane Fonda, then women in Hollywood over the age of 50 just sort of disappear.Let’s get really real with ourselves and each other:Refusing to engage in the above activities makes us feel shame. Shame is the fear that if people know X about us, they will not like us anymore. This is famously a highly effective technique for controlling people's behavior. The expectation that we should be beautiful and young creates an ambient level of anxiety in our lives about the day where we will inevitably fail at this task and will be cast out of society like a deformed newborn of Sparta. Or a 51-year-old Hollywood actress. It is more difficult to agitate for social change, start a business or leave the house at short notice when we are constantly distracted by how young and pretty we are managing to be at any given moment. I have a theory that we do not see saggy, wrinkly, old women in Hollywood for the same reasons we do not see hairy, ugly, makeup-less women in Hollywood. Nobody can make money from saggy, wrinkly, hairy, makeup-less women. We don’t need any products or services to become wrinkly and hairy—we can do it for free, all on our own, as the morning of my 30th birthday proved.

Aesthetic Self-Care Isn’t Self-Care at All

I shave my legs, wear makeup and engage in all manner of other forms of dark sorcery in order to comply with the myth of womanhood that I have inherited and that I despise. I am not better or wiser than you. But when the wool is being so effectively pulled over my eyes by The Corporations, or The Patriarchy, or Big Pharma, or whatever other snowflake boogeyman of the hour, I am at least not also pulling the wool over my own eyes.The rhetorical sleight of hand that positions Botox as something that we will all inevitably need, rather than as a gendered and unnecessary surgical procedure with attendant risks, is patronizing and annoying. Getting Botox is another way to adhere to tedious and limiting patriarchal visions of femininity, where, in order to be rewarded with status, women must be conventionally attractive—thin, white, infantilized and, most importantly, young. We insult our own intelligence by pretending that getting Botox “'just makes us feel better” without critically analyzing why it makes us feel better because we are rewarded when we conform. I’ll see you down at the clinic, and when you tell me I am a sanctimonious hypocrite, I won't look surprised.

Sometime in the last decade, my jeans stopped fitting. In theory, I should just be able to buy a bigger pair to reflect my expanding borders and general middle-age drift. But the problem has proved, like my body, to be less defined—and more shapeless—than I had hoped. I cinch my belt, and I feel the flatulent “oof” of mortality and failure as my pants sag perpetually, and somewhat mysteriously, kneeward.“Wait a minute,” close readers familiar with pants are no doubt saying. “You are fatter, and yet your jeans are falling down? What?”I, too, ask “what?” in that tone, many times a day, as I stand up and my jeans don’t follow along in the accustomed fashion. My understanding of physics and basic pants-ness is this: When you get fatter, your jeans get tighter. At some point, you reach an uncomfortable juncture where you can’t button the jeans. You are then faced with a moral choice. Do you buy bigger jeans? Or do you continue to wear the much too tight jeans for some months in the sad, vain hope that the restriction of blood to your lower half will inspire you to eat less, exercise more and lose weight? When that fails, you buy bigger jeans.And yet, as if I am living in some unusually boring Kafkaesque nightmare, my jeans don’t work like that. I am, according to the scale and various unforgiving mirrors, more than I once was. But my pants have not become tighter. Instead, they keep falling down. Tightening the belt is ineffectual. When I walk the dog, traipse down supermarket aisles or just stand up in COVID isolation to grab a snack, the jeans slide down. I am constantly hitching them up.

This made me feel old, awkward, disproportionate and fat.

How to Keep Pants up With a Big Belly: Buy Bigger Pants

I consulted with my wife, who is better at clothes than me. She suggested the problem was that as my belly had gotten bigger, I had started cinching my jeans lower. Bigger pants buckled higher was her prescription. So we got bigger pants, and I buckled them higher. This made me feel old, awkward, disproportionate and fat. My lower half appeared to be in the grip of some sort of pants python intent on swallowing my torso. A small price to pay for pants that didn’t fall down. But, unfortunately, the pants gods rejected my bargain of increased body negativity for increased butt security. The pants did not cease to scroll down. Instead, they scrolled down with even more determination. The threat of catastrophic drafts and perhaps illegal public disrobing loomed. “Look at this!” I said to my long-suffering wife, demonstrating the strategic and moral problem. She recoiled in horror and a certain amount of giggles. Also in perplexity. Obviously, bigger jeans were not the answer. So back to the old, slightly less ill-fitting jeans I went.I more or less expected getting older to be an exercise in humiliating corporeal failures, and I haven’t been disappointed. Once I was thin and fit and could clean dog poop out of the backyard without straining my back. I could look at reflective surfaces without existential despair. The strain and the despair are unpleasant, no doubt, but on the other increasingly withered hand, I still have a full head of hair at 50, and I’m not going gray. Time is cruel, but it could be crueler. I didn’t expect these jeans to fit forever. I have seen old people and can extrapolate; I always knew my body would betray me at some point.

I Thought I’d Eventually Develop a Sense of Style, but That Day Never Came

I did hope, though, that as I got fatter, I would also get wiser. Vaguely, I dreamed that there would come a day when I would understand my own clothes.I was an extremely unstylish child. This was certainly my parents’ fault to some degree; these days they mostly wear T-shirts with college logos and fanny packs, and incriminating photos from past decades confirm that this is consistent with their history of sartorial apocalypse. Pictures of me from the same era feature a lot of unwieldy collars and enormous glasses. I remember one pair in particular that I wore for a week or so before some not especially benevolent peers pointed out that they had little Superman icons on the corner screws. “So are you Clark Kent?!” the wits exclaimed. I might as well have worn Underoos to school.I knew dimly that my clothes made me look like a fool and a target, and I tried as best I could, like the first primordial lungfish, to thrash and gasp myself into a better, less drab existence. In college, my roommate had a black biker jacket, which I thought was cool. So I bought one myself. Often, we would hang out together in matching outfits, like sad tourists who had wandered into the wrong gay bar. It will give you a sense of how good of a friend, and how lovely of a person, this was when I tell you that it was only years later that he mildly suggested that copying his outerwear was not the best choice I had ever made for either of us.

I more or less expected getting older to be an exercise in humiliating corporeal failures, and I haven’t been disappointed.

Perhaps Flattering Clothes for a Big Stomach Man Don’t Exist

Eventually, I met my wife, and she started buying my clothes, and that was certainly a lot better for everyone. But you can’t exactly say that you’ve found a style of your own when your wife is buying your clothes. I don’t necessarily look (too) terrible, but I also still don’t know what I’m doing. Younger me thought at some point I might learn a foreign language, learn to read music and learn to dress myself. These did not seem like immoderate ambitions. But the years pass, and we all learn that there is no dream too small to end in failure.We have since discovered that slacks and other pants that are not blue jeans don’t slide from my hips in quite so prompt and terrifying a manner. There is still some hitching, but not as much. I prefer jeans, but as we’ve established, my clothing preferences aren’t to be trusted, and anyway, the jeans don’t prefer me. If there are clothes that do, it seems clear at this point that I will never find them. I dreamed of better things than Superman glasses and ended up in a motorcycle jacket. It’s time to admit that I’m going to die in the wrong pants. It’s not great. But there’s some freedom in accepting you’ll never fit, like those jeans—so long constricted, yearning to let it all hang out.

About five years ago, I started to think about a future quest. I knew that my daughters would be going off to college, freeing up my day-to-day parenting responsibilities. I also believe that I have some sort of nomadic gene. My paternal grandmother came from a family of gypsies and I have an uncle and cousin who have both taken long solo treks in their lives. Over the past year, all of our worlds have changed with COVID-19. I decided to find the silver lining. Since many of us had to work from home, this was the prime time for me to change my home to an RV. I wasn’t too concerned about getting the virus, as the vast majority of my experiences were going to be alone and outdoors. Most importantly, my four-month “work from home” trip around the country has continued to fulfill two voids in my life. The first is endurance. I used to be an ultra-marathoner and loved challenging all aspects of my mind and body. Going away for four months by myself would certainly provide that for me. I would be away from my girlfriend, my dog, my family and friends. I would have to re-invent my routines and learn how to live on the road in an RV, not for a long weekend or two-week vacation, but for 127 days. I needed to figure out how to pull a travel trailer, manage my water, find internet, sustain propane and electricity and, my favorite, deal with sewage—something the stationary world takes for granted.The second reason is simply that I love to travel and explore. The combination of the two led me to this incredible journey.

I’m Able to Work as I Zigzag Across the West

I started the drive from my hometown in Virginia and worked my way to Austin, Texas, taking a southern route to California. From there, I zigzagged up the three Pacific Coast states, hitting Yosemite, Sequoia, Lake Tahoe, Crater Lake, Bend, Oregon, the Oregon Coast, Portland, Olympic National Park and Seattle. That entire leg took me two months. Then I started the second leg, heading east through Washington to Coeur d'Alene, Missoula, Montana, the Sawtooth Mountains, Sun Valley, Grand Teton National Park, Salt Lake City, Zion, Bryce, Monument Valley, Arches and, as of this writing, Canyonlands. In total, I’ve traveled over 13,000 miles, stayed in 60 different locations and hiked more than 300 miles since beginning in late February. At the same time, I decided to keep working my full-time job during the week, connecting to the internet with a portable hotspot with great success. Fortunately, being in the West, my day ends on East Coast time, which gives me extra hours to either travel or explore. So far, I haven’t missed a beat at work and have gained the freedom to explore this amazing country.The biggest challenge has been the distance from my girlfriend, family and friends—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be away from them. I miss my people, and I look forward to hitting the Virginia soil again. However, even on my own, I haven’t always been alone.

In total, I’ve traveled over 13,000 miles, stayed in 60 different locations and hiked more than 300 miles.

I Have Met Plenty of Characters During My Travels

One of the ways in which I find a home for Earl (the affectionate name for my travel trailer) is by using an app called Boondockers Welcome. It connects RVers like me with hosts, people around the country who open their backyards, fields and driveways to travelers. Most are located in rural areas, and the hosts are typically retired and want to give back to the RV community. Thus far, everyone that I’ve met along the way has been extremely gracious. Take Ted, from Alamogordo, New Mexico. I arrived for a two-day visit to see White Sands National Park and other local attractions. Earl and I pulled in around 6 p.m. on a Wednesday. Ted, an elderly, small-statured man, was there to greet and direct me to the spot on the side of his house. As I disconnected the trailer from my car, I asked Ted if he could recommend a place to grab a bite to eat. “Sure, I can cook you up a nice meal if you would like?” he said. Going into the trip, my goal was to keep an open mind and have an attitude of “yes.” I didn’t miss opportunities. So, after disconnecting and getting settled in, I entered Ted's home as he was cooking dinner. We chatted for a while and I learned that his wife passed away the previous year and that he had two grown children with families, both of which were not in the area. I can safely say his dinner was one of the worst-tasting meals of the trip, but one of my favorite experiences. Getting to know someone completely out of my social circle and learning about our commonalities was refreshing and promising. With so much division in the country, I have learned—through this conversation and so many more—that we’re all essentially good people with so much to share, but we let small percentages of difference get in the way. Once the evening came to an end, I wanted to return the favor to Ted. I offered to buy him dinner for the next evening. I gave him an easy option: “Anywhere he'd like.” He chose to eat Long John Silver’s. I hadn’t had that…ever, but it was ten times better than the first night’s meal.

Hiking the National Parks Has Been the Best Part of the Trip

We often gravitate towards National Parks and monuments, iconic parts of the U.S. landscape. However, some of the best places I’ve been are the lesser-known spots. For example, there’s a state park outside of Salem, Oregon, called Silver Falls. It contained one of the most spectacular hikes, with ten waterfalls (three of which you could walk under) over a seven-mile trek. Another great find was Serene Lake on Mount Index in Washington State. It’s a solid hike to the top, where there’s a beautiful lake, jagged mountaintops, vast views and a waterfall to boot.People often ask about my all-time favorite hike. To make the top of the list, it has to be challenging, scenic throughout and have a great ending, whether it’s an up-and-back or a loop. Mount Rose in the southern portion of Olympic National Park takes the first-place prize. I hiked it with my friend Mark, and we knew it was going to be tough (it had a 3,000-foot elevation for three miles). Basically, it’s a switch and straight all the way. To add to the difficulty, there were two feet of snow for the last 100 yards. The hike was in an old spruce forest with excessively large trees. As we walked up the mountain, the view of the lake continued to expand and we knew that if the clouds cleared up at the summit, we would be in for one heck of a panoramic view. After two and half hours, we finally made it to the top. The clouds had moved on and the view was spectacular. What made this extra special was the Canada Jay sitting on the spruce next to me at the summit. We had a staring contest for a while, and neither he nor I were budging. So, I decided to be Dr. Doolittle and put trail mix on my hand. Funnily enough, the jay swooped down onto my hands and casually pecked at it, avoiding the M&M’s (it probably knew there was some sort of unnatural food coloring). He left just as quickly as he arrived. I did it again, adding more trail mix to my hand, and quickly found more friends. This continued for several minutes, and by the time I stopped, there were three or four more jays eating from my hand. It was one of those amazing moments, sitting in such a beautiful place, experiencing nature.

This trip has been epic.

The Trip Has Taken Me Out of My Comfort Zone

This trip has been epic. I have met so many wonderful people, visited countless places, including farms, wineries, parks, cities and small towns. I have not really had a single mechanical issue, as I knock on wood for the 43rd time. One of my more memorable encounters was meeting Rick and Judy in Hailey, Idaho, just outside of Sun Valley. When I pulled up to their home, I noticed a class-A RV in the yard. These are the large, bus-shaped rigs that are often used as a celebrity’s tour vehicle. Typically, during a stay, you may have a cordial “hello” and a brief conversation. But as I was getting ready to leave, Rick sparked up a conversation and invited me into the “palace” to meet his wife, Judy. Both retired, they sold everything and have been living happily on the road for the past three years. We spent the next hour talking about family, our experiences on the road and why flavored bourbon is underrated. As I left the RV, we realized we would be in the same place the next week, so we planned another dinner and drinks in their rig in Pocatello, and then again on Antelope Island, Utah the next week. I’m not sure when I will see them again, but when I do, we will certainly pick up where we left off—with a cherry-flavored Jim Beam on the rocks.If there’s a space in time where you can afford to make something like this happen, you should ask yourself, “Why not?” It’s taken me way outside of my comfort zone, but I couldn’t be any more grateful for the forever experiences I’ve had over the past several months.

I used to dream of Italy, fantasizing about Roman piazzas and great Florentine works of art. I saw myself wandering through the rolling vineyards in my very own Under the Tuscan Sun adventure. Only, instead of craving midlife reinvention and rejuvenation, I longed for the adventure and opportunity to find myself, the one I’d missed out on when I skipped my study abroad semester to stay close to my then-fiancé. Seven years and a lifetime later, I still dream of Italy. I no longer picture myself taking in art or strolling through vineyards. Instead, I remember the adventures my husband and I secretly shared, getting lost and found in the ancient hamlets high above the sea, before starting our family. There are no photo albums on social media, no pictures displayed in our home to commemorate our three-week sojourn. There are just discreet memorabilia and the knowledge that you can, indeed, make both limoncello and grappa in your bathtub. We guarded our adventure and kept it hidden from everyone else, telling almost no one we were going away for three weeks. We wanted to be free from the judgment of his overly frugal, far too pragmatic and very disapproving parents. He wanted to give me the Italy I missed. I wanted a last bit of romance and exploring. We both wanted an adventure that was only ours.

There’s Something Calming About Reliving Our Italian Adventure

“Tell me about Nocelle,” I said, through gritted teeth, amid a long labor with our daughter.And so my husband told me when all was said and done, and I could have a glass of wine, that we’d make some alcohol in our bathtub as they did in Nocelle. I laughed and held onto that thought for the rest of my labor. Several years later, I woke him from a dead sleep, choking on my heartbreak. Our son had died a month earlier and I was drowning in grief. “Remind me how we got lost on the mountain,” I whispered. “Make me remember. Tell me about the grappa.”He’s the only one who knows about our misadventures there. He knows how the planning we put into our stay fell apart. He knows how lost we got, time after time, including on the cliffside hike, and did everything wrong but managed to come out triumphant and intoxicated with the adventure we would never have here, in our real life.And so, he tells me the details of the little bed-and-breakfast we booked in the ancient village of Nocelle on the Amalfi Coast so we could hike a trail, aptly named the Path of the Gods. The misty little village of Nocelle is set high in the Monti Lattari, the surreal mountain range that juts dramatically out of the impossibly blue, hazy Mediterranean Sea. Nocelle was our second stop in Italy, and in our short time on the Italian coast, we learned where I got my, ahem, creative sense of direction.

Navigating the Amalfi Coast Was Not Easy—For Us, at Least

The inn’s website said it was only a few hundred meters up a staircase from the beach near where the ferry from Capri would deposit us. We never found the stairs. Instead, we ended up making a long, albeit very scenic, trek on foot carrying backpacks stuffed to the brim with everything we’d need for three weeks abroad via the windy cliffside roads that connect the resort town beach below to the ancient village.When we made that trek to the village, we scaled the second hillside with our bags in tow, rather cluelessly trying to figure out the directions to where we were staying. The first time had been hours after our arrival in Italy when we reached Capri. There, it took us a few confusing hours to figure out that what the Italian maps and directions say are roads are actually ancient footpaths between rocky walls. After a disorienting yet giddy night spent traveling over the Atlantic, stopping briefly in Germany to board a puddle jumper, where I sat wedged in between my husband and an older Italian woman, who gripped my hand at takeoff and landing muttering what I imagine to be a mix of swear words and prayers, the confusion made sense. Of course, we struggled to get acclimated to the Italian style of directions. But by the time we had left Capri for the mainland, we’d had a few days to orient ourselves and shake off the dreamy disorientation. Or so we thought.The short trek up the cliffside staircase was supposed to take no more than 30 minutes. Since we never found the stairs, we walked up the mountain on other roads and paths. The walk turned into a multi-hour adventure through a torrential thunderstorm in the dark, leaving us trying to find this tiny and impossibly old settlement on top of the mountains.

There were no roads, no people.

What Better Way to Prepare for a Hike Than Pasta and Wine?

When we finally burst through the door of this charming inn, we were soaked. My ponytail clung to my back. The inn’s owner, a kindly man named Pepe, fussed over us, handing us towels and exclaiming over our waterlogged selves. He showed us to our room and directed us to a nearby restaurant that was supposed to be closing for the evening. “Tell them Pepe sent you,” he said. “They’ll take good care of you and send you back to me with full bellies so you are ready for your big hike tomorrow, yes!”When my husband recounts this part of the story, his voice turns effervescent. It bubbles up on the end of every word, the way Pepe’s did, and bounces along. He laughs over the way the restaurant owner didn’t even blink an eye when we showed up that first night, my hair still dripping from the rain, and no other patrons inside close to closing. “Pepe sent us?” I remember saying, fully expecting the annoyed treatment we’d get in the States if we showed up sopping wet to a beautiful restaurant. The man’s face lit up, “Ah! Pepe!” He welcomed us and proceeded to serve us all kinds of delicate pasta and wine before sending us back to the inn where we slept the sleep of people both deliriously tired and happy.

Turns Out, Sticking to the Path of the Gods Hiking Trail Isn’t as Simple as It Sounds

The next day, we were ready for our hike. At breakfast the next morning, we sat out on the patio, listening to the church bells ringing below and breathing in the sweet scent of bougainvillea as we gawked at the surreal view of the sea below and the shrouded cliff tops above. Ever the gracious host, Pepe came over to talk to us about our hike. “Make sure you take the time to see the town on the other side! Very pretty. You’ll love it. And see the church. And just stick to the trail, you’ll get there easily!”Excited, we set out for the day, following signs to the path. We had nothing with us but a little cash, the bread and water we had bought from a small store, and a camera to take photos we would never get to share with anyone. Signs made the path easy to find and follow at first. As we wound deeper through the cliffside trail, it narrowed in spots. I was acutely aware of the striking cliff that ended just to my right and tumbled down into the rocky shore, but the view was worth it.We could see why the legend said the Gods took this road down to the sea to visit the sirens that enticed Ulysses. Plus, until we reached the village at the other end, there was nowhere to turn off the path and get lost. Of course, as soon as we were in the charming old village, we went off in search of the landmarks Pepe had told us about, totally unaware that the village was a hub to several trails that crisscross the cliffs. Naturally, we chose the wrong one to take back and found ourselves looping around the same area of the cliff, weaving our way gradually lower and picking up a ragtag group of followers: a goat and a very friendly dog that followed us for the better part of two hours. The trail made its way so deep into the countryside that there were no homes around, not even the old ones that were built into the cliffs. There were no roads, no people. We knew a road closer to the sea that connected the towns on the coast and tried to make our way down to find it.But the path we were on disappeared. Maybe the Mediterranean vegetation grew over it or maybe it just wasn’t very well-traveled, but we could barely make it out. Common sense and conventional wisdom would tell us to stay put and hope someone found us. This was truly the path less traveled, though, and we knew no one was going to find us. So we pushed on, coming finally, thankfully, to a solitary house on the hillside. We didn’t speak a lick of Italian, but we knocked anyway, trying to gesture and explain to the little gray woman who opened the door our situation. Bewildered after several minutes, she pointed and gestured in a direction.It was enough for us. We went the way she gestured. There was nothing but sea and hill in sight. Finally, as the sun was starting to sink into the sea, we heard a road below. We followed the sound until we saw it, a ribbon of pavement cut into the cliffs with actual cars. We scrambled down the cliffside, happy to find some vestige of our bearings again. The plan was to walk, sticking to the road, back to a town where we could find a bus.

At home, this is how we’d die. Chopped up in the back of some guy’s car.”

Leave It to a Good Samaritan to Rescue Us From Our Disastrous Situation

Just a few minutes after setting out on the road, a car slowed. A man was driving and he rolled his window down as he approached us.“Americans?” he asked.“Si,” I nodded. “You need help? We don’t see many people walking on this curvy road.”“Scusi,” I recall saying, ushering my husband aside. To him, privately, I whispered, “What do we do? Do we let him help us? At home, this is how we’d die. Chopped up in the back of some guy’s car.”The man cleared his throat. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. My husband saved face for me and my serial killer paranoia. “Do you think you could tell us how to get to a bus station or a taxi stand?”The man shook his head. “The buses aren’t running here anymore. They stopped when the tourists went home last month and start again when they come back. Where are you trying to go?”“Positano. We can catch the local bus there to Nocelle?” my husband asked, seeking confirmation.“Yes, but it may only go halfway to Montepertuso this time of year. No more buses from here to Positano today though,” the man said.“How far away is it?”“Far to walk on a dangerous road,” he said, opening his door. “Come, I have to pick my wife and bambino up from the hotel but I am glad to take you there and help you get back to where you need to be.”My husband and I had a conversation with our eyes. We were tired, hungry and sunburnt. The idea of walking back for miles along the windy road was a lot. In the distance, we could see rain clouds and flashes of lightning. Imperceptibly we agreed.“OK,” my husband said and we got into the car, taking a chance on Italian hospitality and a little luck.

Our Adventure Hiking the Amalfi Coast Is Our Rock

The man was good to his word and ushered us back to his lavish hotel where we waited in the pretty golden lobby. While he rounded up his wife and two kids, someone gave us fresh bread and olive oil and bottles of water. Then he ushered us all back into the car, making small talk about his family and our trip while he drove us directly to a taxi stand in Positano, where he saw to it that we were going to be taken directly to the mouth of Nocelle, as close as the driver could get us to the inn in the carless town.As we got out of the car at the mouth of the village, the storm that had been blowing in from beyond the horizon unleashed. Torrential rain fell and turned the narrow, walled streets into a shin-deep river. We waded through the water, unable to believe this was happening on the last leg of our journey, but started laughing, giddy with relief that we made it back. We stumbled through the door of the inn, laughing and more waterlogged than the night before. Pepe looked up from his soccer game and shook his head at us.“Are you ever dry?” he asked, fetching us towels again. “Go back to the trattoria and tell them Pepe sent you.” He practically pushed us out the door to the flooded streets so we could slog our way through the water to eat our fill of delicate pasta and be regaled with stories of homemade grappa and limoncello. It’s our private reminder that we can navigate our way through a million misadventures and still make the best of things, still find a way to appreciate and enjoy what comes our way as long as we do it together with humor. And when it’s too hard to do that, we can always make liquor in the bathtub.

It was my girlfriend Liv’s 21st birthday. Because I have ADHD, I naturally had forgotten to get her a present. That day I was meant to be meeting her to spend an evening drinking cocktails at overpriced bars. Instead, I spent a guilt-fueled morning gathering a collection of token presents for her, so she wouldn’t instantly remind me that I was the worst boyfriend ever. The problem was that none of the presents was quite “right.” After all, this was her 21st. I had to get her something spot-on. Fast forward six months to the summer we were traveling through China. On one train ride, I had been flicking through a Lonely Planet travel guide when suddenly I saw my way out of the predicament of the present. We’d just finished the summer teaching in Chinese classrooms and earning our TEFLs (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). Then a few weeks traveling the big cities: Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an.

In Beijing, I Finally Found a Nice Present: A Bag of Weed

By the time we got to Beijing, it was time to spring my surprise. I snuck out of the hostel early and spent the morning alternating between the fire that was the Beijing smog and the frying pan of Beijing’s smelly, crowded subways. I returned an hour or so later, feeling both lighter due to the pride that filled me and heavier for all the camping gear I carried. I sat at the entrance to the hostel and got chatting with a traveling group. They were heading to Shanghai that day and had some weed on them. Do I want to buy it? They can’t risk taking it through the airport-style security you must go through to get on China’s high-speed trains. Weed is especially rare in China. So, what do I say? “Sure!” This is a camping trip, after all. I return to our room to explain to Liv what her birthday present is—a camping trip on the Great Wall of China. She asks me if it's legal to camp on the Great Wall. Not exactly, I explain. But it’s 13,000 miles long; they can’t patrol it all, right?

Our Journey to the Wall

If you ever go to Beijing and visit the Great Wall, you’ll probably go to Badaling. It’s the part of the Wall that you see in tourist pictures, all rebuilt and shiny new, prepared for your tourist photos. That was not where Liv and I went. We went up to Gubeikou—via six hours of bus rides with three changes. We’re trying to avoid being caught, remember?So, we get to Gubeikou and to the gate that admits entry onto the Wall. No other English-speaking tourists must ever make it this far because the admittance attendant didn’t have anything to say to us other than “closed.” However, we hadn’t come this far to turn back now. Plus, I was still trying to redeem myself for forgetting my girlfriend’s 21st birthday. As I said, it’s a big fucking wall. So, we simply walked away and began to climb again. An hour and a half later, we had hiked high enough away from the small village below us and up onto the Wall. Our tent was made and basecamp was established for the night. Liv offered me a wink and a wry smile that said “Well done, you.”

I’m not the live-fast-die-young type. Let me grow old in a care home somewhere.

Danger Lurks on Hidden Corners of the Great Wall of China

At this point, I pulled out the weed. It was pre-rolled so no messing about. We smoked and smoked and watched as the sun set. At that moment, we were a little pearl in a giant oyster of a Chinese summer adventure. It is remarkable how quickly a picture-perfect scene can be so quickly disrupted by the eerie, unnerving descent of nightfall. For weeks, we had taught in classrooms and toured the big cities. Now, up here on the hills of remote China, it was quiet. Too quiet. Unnervingly quiet. There wasn’t even a dog howling at the moon. Then we heard it. The sniffing “What was that?” said a startled Liv.I brushed it off. “Nothing, of course, just some animal.” Right?But the sniffing grew louder. Without any light whatsoever, it was too easy to let the shadows play with our imaginations. “James,” Liv said, “What animals do they have in Northern China?”We had Chinese SIM cards, so we quickly loaded up Google to settle our nerves. No such luck. Our search revealed that they have both bears and wolves in this part of China. Now we’re panicked.We rush into the tent. Inside it, I try to collect myself. Liv has lost her head. She’s sharing her location to her group chat and telling her friends to make sure her mum knows she loves her. I interrupt that there’s no time to think about that now. Sending those kinds of messages would somehow make this whole nightmare more real.

I Probably Should Have Done More Research

How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I check? Surely this isn’t how I’m going to go? To a fucking bear on the Great Wall out in the middle of nowhere? I’m not the live-fast-die-young type. Let me grow old in a care home somewhere. “Liv. What if we get outside of the tent?”“What?!”“If it is a bear, what if we go out?”Liv looks at me like I have lost my mind. (At this point, there’s a good chance that I have.) If it merely smells us, it might come to investigate. But on the other hand, if it sees us, then it might turn and leave us alone and go hunt some smaller prey. Between us, we can look big in the dark, right?She leans forward and says I should go first. We find the time to rock-paper-scissors. My heart is banging.I lean forward. Liv lets out a scream with anticipation. I turn around to shush her sternly, fully aware I have no idea whether a scream makes a situation like this better or worse. There is no precedent for the process of my decision-making. Every reaction is now a hot mess of instinct, conditioning and my brain scrambling to piece together any scrap of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls that I’ve caught over my life.The sniffing grows ever louder. It’s screaming in my head over against the absolute silence from a petrified Liv in the corner.I lean for the zip. I take several attempts to grasp it because my hand is shaking so much. Eventually, I manage to steady my nerves long enough to take hold. Do I do it slowly or all at once, like a Band-Aid?Band-Aid. Go! Zip open. I clamber out. My best foot forward. Or kind of forward. It's shaking so much that it oscillates six inches either way with every inch that I creep forward.I see what’s going on and my brain pieces it together even though it’s forgotten all other functions. I scream. Liv practically backflips in fear. She has no idea what I’ve seen.The weed’s got us way too high. I still hear the sniffing still but it’s not a bear or a wolf. It’s a rabbit. A big rabbit I must say, but a rabbit, nonetheless.

My nervous system managed to spare me just a little blood for one essential purpose.

I Thought I Was Going to Die—and It Made for the Best Sex of My Life

I turn to her with a huge smile on my face. I can’t even explain at first. God, it really is the biggest kind of rush thinking you’re going to die. Now don’t get me wrong. At this point, I realize I never was in any actual danger, but I thought I was. I genuinely believed I was going to die and so my nervous system acted accordingly. Blood had drained away from every non-essential area and was coursing through my body. I mean coursing. My heart was throbbing right into the underside of my ribcage.I started to laugh and I just. Could. Not. Stop. Liv looked angry, as if she were going to kill me. Still laughing, I leaned in and kissed her. It was meant to be a quick kiss. A reassuring kiss. However, the combination of adrenaline and relief, it turns out, makes for a potent aphrodisiac.I tried to pull away, but she pulled me back in. She kissed me hard. I could feel her breath panting. There was something in her breath, a heavy breath outward, the kind that would usually be rude, right in my face. She opened her eyes but didn’t look up when I pulled away.A switch in my mind just flipped. My heart hadn’t slowed down from the scare, but my nervous system managed to spare me just a little blood for one essential purpose. And so it went—the hottest, most passionate, most animalistic sex that I ever had. There we were, young, alive and fucking on the Great Wall of China. Happy Birthday, Liv.

There were four of us in a caravan of motorbikes, rounding switchbacks through an endless wall of clouds. It was the first of our four-day journey through the Hà Giang mountains in the north of Vietnam, and we were surrounded by the ghostly gray of precipitation—riding not above or below the rain, but straight through it as it formed. Visibility was cloaked in silk smoke, and oncoming silhouettes became clear only when they emerged from the mist within a car’s length of sight before disappearing behind me when they passed. I noticed cement barricades on the outside of the mountain, spaced too wide to save a motorist who took the gravel too fast or who might have to swerve to avoid a truck taking the corner too wide. I was in the lead as we passed a yellow sign with the incline number of 10 percent and a stencil outline of a vehicle heading up a pencil-thin line. Somewhere above us was the resounding echo of a truck’s horn threatening oncoming traffic, each blare sending chills through my body already shivering from the cold wind and mist. I was disoriented by the noise, hunted by the sound moving around the mountain above me. My husband passed to head the charge, and I was relieved. I had begun to doubt myself on the unfamiliar bike and thin road. Having driven a motorbike in the city daily, I expected the open road of the mountains to be an easy transition, but these were weather conditions I hadn’t planned for.

How far could I have seen had it been a clear day?

A Hà Giang Motorbike Trip Is Every Traveler’s Dream

Because of its level of difficulty, the Hà Giang loop was a keen draw for adventure tourists. I had been dreaming of making the trip since arriving in the country four years earlier. I wanted to see the natural beauty of the North and ride through quaint villages to experience the culture of the Hmong people, but here I was, in the most luscious and beautiful peaks of Vietnam, taunted by grey where I should have seen the pastels of an open landscape. I white-knuckled around the switchbacks as we climbed further over the mountains, counting each passing kilometer marker, wishing for a hot shower and hotel bed. Again, the call of the truck above. I lost my husband’s brake lights in the clouds, but I could hear him laying on his horn. I swerved to the outside of the mountain and hit my brakes, blaring my own horn and letting the truck pass. The top of its front tire was at the height of my chin, and the gust as it blew past shook my bike. I finally took a breath. It was going to be a long four days through the mountains, and my gut churned wondering what the point of the physical torment of driving would be if we missed all the views.I had an A4 paper map of the loop in my pocket, safe from the humidity. I thought about how we were missing the view of the Twin Mountains and Heaven’s Gate as we drove. I pictured us moving along the thick red highway line of the map past designated sites and I wished we had booked the trip a week earlier to miss the rain. The journey was broken up into four parts to divide the driving time evenly and ensure we had plenty of time for stops on the third day over the Ma Pi Leng Pass—the best views above the Lô River. I had ached to see it for myself, and because of the pandemic, I ventured to hope our group would be among the only ones on the road.

Traveling Further Into the Mountains Gave Way to New Culture

We collected kilometers of distance in the clouds on day one. Turning over day two, Mother Nature eased her grip and we awoke to mild fog. The day warmed as we continued our drive over the second pass of the journey, the Thẩm Mã Pass. I gripped the handlebars of my bike, stiff on the road, which from above looked like an asphalt dragon slithering up toward the flower fields of Lũng Cẩm. Along the road walked dozens of children and elderly women, each dressed in clothing thicker and more colorful than I’d seen in the cities. Clothes like in the women’s museum back in the capital from the Hmong, Lolo and Han people of the far North—vibrantly colored cloth, intricate floral embroidery, long pleated skirts, long sleeves and headscarves or headbands with loosely hanging beads. Some carried woven baskets on their backs, stacked full of flowers packed stiff as straws, heading to the top to await tourists. We stopped to mingle among the handful of young Vietnamese travelers taking the same path. A woman whose wrinkled face spoke of a long life of working in the sun stood beside me with a thick bouquet of small blossomed buds wrapped in string. I smiled and nodded as she gestured for me to hold them. If I did, I would have to buy them, so I exchanged the bouquet for the equivalent of a dollar and strapped them over my backpack, hoping they would bring us good weather. As we moved from the thick red line on the map to a thin yellow one directing us to the flag tower, the roads also thinned. It felt like we should have been heading over mountains to go north, but instead, we wound through them on a flat road closing the gap between the borders of Vietnam and China. We arrived at the flag tower and followed the thin herd of spectators to the top, which offered a 360-degree view of hills giving way to more hills dropped along the landscape like melting Hershey’s Kisses. The clouds had thinned above the tower, but the true depth of the landscape was blurred by haze. No amount of blinking would move the mountains into a countable order. How far could I have seen had it been a clear day?

Getting High, and Taking in the Long Day

There was a village circled on our paper map near a flag tower, and I was excited by a night's stay among the people who lived there. We passed closed doors and quiet houses on the one-way path in the village. While there were signs for homestays and hostels, no one answered our knocks. Finally, a young woman emerged from a homestay, and through patient translation, we arranged three rooms in her family’s place. We were told dinner would be at seven. At sunset, the four of us followed a trail out to the edge of the village and found refuge behind a cluster of boulders where it didn’t feel so disrespectful to get high. I took the joint and melted into the exhaustion of the day, wishing tomorrow’s views would surpass the previous day’s. I gazed past the drop-off as the valley extended north to dusk gnawing at the light of day. We had made it to the edge of Vietnam, far beyond the cities and deep into the mountain ranges—a place where humankind was a blade of grass whipped by the winds of nature. I could make out a road on the east side of the valley slicing through a compound of homes where lights were on for the evening. Then, below us, an archaic loudspeaker crackled to life. I was accustomed to the loudspeakers on city corners, but out here, where water buffalo trafficked the paths between homes, it was abrasive. The announcements were in Vietnamese, a second language of most Hmong people here. The words then subsided to music, filling the valley with echoing instrumental dullness.

Settling in and Indulging Late Into the Night

We headed back to the village, where a few children were playing at an intersection between alleyways. I drew out the sparklers from my backpack that I had brought for such an occasion. I managed the lighter and sent the first young boy into the dark to draw circles before he came running back, eager for another. The excitement drew more children, and soon we were in the company of 20 kids who all wanted to play. I couldn’t supply the sparklers fast enough. The night air was filled with the continuous crackle of fire. I tried to be fair in giving the sparklers out, as the kids returned, more eager to hold fire than before. As my stock dwindled, I noticed a young girl in a dress taller than all the others had put out her hand. I gave her my last sparkler. She took the metal wand between her fingers like the stem of a flower and then turned to hand it to a younger boy who was out of breath having made it to the commotion late. She helped him draw his first circle of light in the dark sky. As his sparkler fizzled out, I showed my empty hands. The kids waved and said thank you, then turned to one another chasing and playing as we headed back for dinner. The table had been set with a multitude of plates filled with steamed rice, chicken, tofu in tomato sauce and seasoned vegetables. Afterward, with full bellies and plates cleared, our hosts, a young man and his sister, joined us until the night hours were lost to card games and a never-ending pitcher of home-brewed rice wine.

Motorbiking Through Vietnam Was Everything I’d Hoped For

On day three, the sun had finally broken from the hold of the clouds. I should have been elated, but the lingering rice wine pinched my stomach, and I dreaded the six-hour ride ahead. We followed our way out of the village on a road adjacent to a massive six-lane highway under construction across the Chinese border. I steadied my focus on the road, and not the growing need to hurl my breakfast over the front handlebars. The map took us southeast through the city of Dong Van as we began the Ma Pi Leng Pass, what I had been most looking forward to. I had accepted my headache and began melting into the mountain curves swept as dust over an unfolding paper fan of lime-green ridges. As we drove farther, the peaks overhead towered taller, and the drop to the river steepened. I wondered how people could get to the rice terraces overhead without sliding down the mountain. I finally gave in to the openness around me. I let my friends pass. I wanted to be alone in the scenery, lost in nature and as far away from the sounds of civilization as possible. This was the beauty I promised myself. This was the adventure. I howled and sang off-key, taking the road slowly and letting the landscape swallow me whole, revived from the morning’s rough beginning. The journey was more thrilling and spectacular than the paper map or any photograph could portray—me, the bike and the open road snaking around green-tipped peaks.I pulled over so I wouldn’t be distracted by the motor. The steep mountains formed a crown around the rice fields while the sun struck through the clouds and fell on the water. Shattered by thousands of sprouting blades was the reflection of clouds painted gold, the world flipped upside down. The valley wasn’t named on our map. We had run our tires toward what we knew, what was labeled. Taking a night in the neighboring village we had caught up with people again and a handful of other riders for the evening. It was odd how the map, a basic outline of the area, could affect what I felt would be the most valuable sections of the journey. I had finally seen the Hà Giang mountains. I had climbed the flag tower and spent time in a local village, eating local food, mingling with local people. I had leapt into the cold current of a waterfall. I had wrapped up the trip into a tight bow, with day four’s journey being mechanical. A return to the start.

I finally gave in to the openness around me.

By Day Four, I Had Mastered Motorbiking in the Mountains

We ignored the advice from our host to avoid the local road, the crossed-out road on my map. There were no designated sites or labels for places to stop along the way—the road was a shortcut back to the highway connecting to Hà Giang. We drove a paved road chopped by long stretches of bumps, dirt eroded and embedded with rocks having melted off the mountainside from the previous rainy season. I flicked between gears with an odd comfort. The stiffness in my posture from the beginning of the trip had eased and though I was driving a motorbike on the rough patches like straddling a jackhammer, my body had adjusted. My arms and torso were fluid with the jostle of the bike and I began to glide over gravel. Other motorists passed me—or I them—in movements like ducks on water. I rounded corners shaded by palm leaves larger than bedsheets and saw children along the road waving. It felt good to wave. Around another corner, I waved preemptively at a toddler whose attention was occupied by a group of baby chicks in the grass. He didn’t wave back. I came down around a corner opening up to a valley and saw a figure walking up the highway shaded by a black embroidered parasol. Moving closer I saw it was a woman dressed in black with a vibrantly colored fringe. My engine was revving as I let second gear control my descent and wondered how far she had already walked. I stared, guilty of how tired I felt sitting. Where was she walking? She waved from the shadow of her parasol and I hurried to return her wave before passing. I wanted to look at her again, so I pulled off the road to look back. My husband had also pulled off the road far behind me but ahead of the woman. I couldn’t hear the exchange, but I saw he was asking to take her photograph. She laid down her parasol to straighten herself. Picking up the parasol again, she stood still for the frame as she had maybe done before. Maybe she was accustomed to photographs, or maybe she had said yes because he had asked rather than just taken.I admired how he asked for permission, and I felt I had neglected to do the same, to ask for a kind of cultural permission to be here and to form thoughts about the things I saw. I floated through the mountains presuming to know just because I could see it, yet I never asked any of the people I saw about their life. Would they have wanted to share with me? I had begun the journey with high expectations to see beauty and experience the people, but what had that meant?

In the End, I Couldn’t Help but Question My Experience

I realized I’d wrapped up the wrong experience to take home and write about—or at least not the whole picture. I’d been focused on myself, obsessed at first by lack of sight, where I had missed a greater picture. I had no effect on this place. The landscape remained spectacular whether I saw it or not. The children would keep playing or chasing ducks or carrying flowers. These were people like anywhere, making a life, building a home, working, playing, walking. Each individual turned over a new day here as in the rest of the world, whether tourists came tearing through the roads or not. I had been looking for an experience to unlock from the outside and quite uncomfortably found a greater experience on the inside. I was in awe of these mountains, and I wanted to romanticize life here, grinding the landscape down to a few sentences in my notebook, but I realized as I watched the woman continue up the hill, that this place and the people here did not exist for me.

In February of 2018, I had a lot going on. At 21 years old, I was living a life of adventure as an American studying in a cozy little city in the Black Forest of Germany. Having moved to this charming postage stamp corner of Western Europe just eight months earlier, I was on my first extended school break and ready to “backpack across Europe,” as Americans do. I had a new (American) boyfriend and an itch to see the world.We had big plans and no idea how they would actually work out. Our itinerary included a few days in Amsterdam; a few days visiting my partner’s friends in a nearby town; a few days in London to visit my best friend; two weeks on a tiny farm outside Nuremberg, where we would volunteer; and a week in Meknes, Morocco, to visit my partner’s best friend. Tucked in there was a visit home to America to visit my sick grandpa. For added adventure, my partner and I decided that we would hitchhike the leg of the journey between Amsterdam and London, hopping from car to car from the Netherlands, through Belgium, to the coast of France where we would catch a ferry across the English Channel. Neither of us would have dared to hitchhike in America, where doing so is notoriously unsafe, but the regularity and relative safety of hitchhiking in Western Europe had us excited to give it a try.

Hitchhiking in Europe Is More Complicated Than I Thought It’d Be

It didn’t take too long for the enchantment to wear off. Trying to get out of Amsterdam proved to be a huge hurdle, and we spent several hours standing on street corners, walking miles to find a spot where we thought we might have a better chance of being picked up. Our difficulty finding a ride wasn’t the only issue I experienced, however. While in Amsterdam, I had begun to get sick. With body aches and fatigue, and two Achilles tendons that felt like they were about to give up, I began my hitchhiking journey feeling less than optimal. But still, I felt optimistic: I had my partner with me, whose male presence made me feel safe; and I was American, a status which always lent me a certain level of protection, at least in this part of the world.We actually turned down the first person who offered to pick us up. After pulling up alongside us and quickly discovering our American status, the driver promptly mentioned the U.S. border wall with Mexico, saying something along the lines of, “That Mr. Trump’s got the right idea!” Neither of us felt comfortable getting in a car with such a person, so we declined his offer.Eventually, after changing our hitching location once again, we struck gold: a Belgian surgeon named Frank picked us up in a Jaguar and drove us into Belgium. The absurdity of being picked up in a Jaguar was not lost on me, and Frank told us he helped out hitchhikers about once a month or so. In order to flag him down, we waved our passports around, in addition to our hitchhiking signs, advertising that we were there legally and therefore a safe bet to give a ride to. On our journey, Frank explained that it was illegal as an E.U. citizen to give rides to illegal migrants, which is why he always checks passports before he picks anyone up. Our passports, at that point, were our best friends, a neon beacon that we were worthy and safe.

It didn’t take too long for the enchantment to wear off.

To Make Matters Worse, I Got Sick

As the day of hitchhiking progressed, my health situation deteriorated. Travel is always exhausting, no matter the circumstances, but the added element of standing on roadsides in the cold (remember, this was February) didn’t help my already fragile health. I began to feel feverish, and my body ached. Periodically, I would experience a strange metallic taste in my mouth. I longed for a bed and some warm covers, the relief of which was still many hours away. The day became hazy, but I distinctly remembered being picked up by a fun couple in their 30s or 40s, driving a van and wearing cool hats. They were blaring jazz from the stereo, and the man told us he played an instrument. I don’t remember now what that instrument was, though it might’ve been violin, because my partner played as well and made plenty of conversation with him. At one point, he asked us to pull out some sheet music he had in the backseat and my partner pored over it while I sat next to him in misery. This was the fun hitchhiking experience I’d been imagining, but here I was, too sick to enjoy it. My eyes burned and my head pounded. I sat hunched over with my head on my knees. I remember the woman in the passenger seat telling my partner, “Take care of her.” I felt grateful but, more distinctly, I felt sorry for myself.

Seeing the Effects of Xenophobia in Europe Was Devastating

They dropped us off about five miles from the coast of France in Calais. We stood with our signs at the edge of a roundabout near a highway overpass—we were weary, cold and, in my case, ill. But this location was different from the others. We weren’t the only ones hanging around, but we were definitely the only ones getting a ride: all around us were migrants, disheveled and skinny, as car after car passed them by. It was clear that they had been there for a while, and I could tell that many were living under the nearby overpass. The surrounding grass on the sides of the road and the middle of the roundabout were littered with discarded clothes, a testament to the many who had gone before and the length of their struggle here.And there we stood, my partner and I, shiny blonde Americans in our nice backpacks, pale white in the winter sun, passports out, confident in our ability to get a ride. A new feeling entered the mix of discomfort and self-pity I was feeling: shame. I had spent the whole day feeling frustrated, sick and sorry for myself, and suddenly it all felt so trivial. The privilege afforded me by my nationality and skin tone had never felt so acute than at that moment. I felt embarrassed to be so callously advertising my “fitness” for catching a ride right in front of these people, whose predicaments had been criminalized by an unsympathetic world. Because my country was in France’s good graces—and, therefore, the E.U.’s good graces—I pretty much had a free pass. But not the migrants under the bridge. They were part of what Western Europe was describing as an immigration “crisis,” in which refugees from Middle Eastern countries had their safety and quality of life threatened.

A new feeling entered the mix of discomfort and self-pity I was feeling: shame.

My Own Xenophobic Experience Was Nothing Compared to That of the Refugees

Inside the little German city in which I lived, there was a large refugee population, but they seemed to be more or less welcomed by the people. There was refugee housing and plenty of programs for helping people integrate. Upon arriving in September of 2017, I had been impressed by the way refugees were treated there in comparison with the way the U.S. treated them. But standing on that roadside in France, I became aware of exactly how xenophobic the region could be. Unbeknownst to me, several months from then, I would witness an anti-refugee protest and march in that “friendly” little city in Germany I now called home. For the next year, I would experience discrimination at the hands of Europeans for being American, and for not speaking German very well. The disdain I felt from them was shockingly vitriolic, and it affected my confidence and self-worth dramatically.

Discovering the Ultimate Symbol of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Europe

The next people who picked us up also told us that it was a crime in France to give a ride to an illegal migrant. When they dropped us off at the ferry that would take us to England, I was shocked by the optics of the place: 20-foot steel fences topped with barbed wire encircled the port, painted an imposing stark white. It looked as if we’d been dropped off at a maximum-security prison, not a major European port. Later, I found out that that fencing had only been erected three years earlier by Britain in an attempt to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the U.K. It is called “The Ring of Steel.”The foreboding feeling given off by the fence was enough to intimidate me, a traveler who there legally. I felt as if I, myself, were doing something wrong. And yet I passed right through into the ticket office because for some reason I had a right to be there. Me, traveling for fun, needing no visa. I had permission to pass right on through, while those who actually needed the safety and the opportunities offered in the U.K. did not. Later, upon my arrival in London, I would go straight to the NHS, a random foreigner becoming a burden on their overtaxed health system. And yet, I was allowed.In an ironic twist of events, my partner was denied entry into Great Britain. Why? Because he had lost his passport. Suddenly, he, too, was there illegally.But that didn’t last long. We tracked down Frank, the first person to pick us up, after figuring out that his Jaguar was where my partner’s passport had been lost. There are only so many hospitals in Belgium, so finding one that employed a surgeon named Frank was actually fairly easy. He even offered to drive all the way to Calais from Belgium to bring it to us, even though it was now close to 9 p.m. The amount of courtesy extended to us from this virtual stranger was overwhelming. No one had extended any courtesy close to that level to the people waiting under that bridge. I don’t know whether Frank was sympathetic to migrants or not but, even if he was, the law made sure he didn’t act on it.

The Guilt of American Privilege

My partner and I ended up getting a hotel in Calais for the night. He got up early to take several buses back to Belgium, while I, feeling sicker than ever, took a hot bath in the old pink tub in the bathroom. When I finished, I left the hotel and began a several-mile walk back to the port to finally catch the ferry. By myself, with painful joints and an aching head, I silently walked alongside meter after meter of this “Ring of Steel” until reaching the ticket entrance once again. A few hours later, as I watched Dover’s famed white cliffs approach through the ferry window. But I didn’t feel excitement or joy. Instead, I wondered if this moment would ever come for those migrants back in Calais under the bridge.

We run a private members club in New York City offering sex-and-cannabis-positive experiences, events and education. We opened it five years ago to fill the gap that we saw in the city for an elevated experience for all genders, identities and orientations looking to explore empowered pleasure. If you’re feminist, sex-positive, poly, queer, kink-friendly, and/or a cannabis consumer—or like us, all of the above—it’s very easy to feel like you’re “too much” or “too lewd” or whatever in just about every space you’re in. But at our club, there’s no judgment, it’s just community and acceptance. Pre-pandemic, we were in expansion mode. We’d begun hosting massive parties for up to 400 members at spots around the city. We were working on a travel show with a famous TV person’s production company, in which we’d bring the philosophies developed at our club to new countries through elaborate sexual stunts. Membership was booming, with plans to open doors in other cities. And then: nothing.

Going virtual showed us the potential for our community and made the goal of building a global community of sexy fucks more attainable.

COVID Stopped Us in Our Tracks

Last March, nearly every project we had going was halted. We had to close down our clubhouse in SoHo. We lost a second unit for our expansion that we had just started renting. We were set to hit $1.5 million in revenue for 2020, and then the world stopped. The week we went into lockdown, one of us was flying out to a music festival in the Caribbean for a birthday trip. The next day all flights were canceled. We realized this would be the last time in a long time we’d be able to party like this. When the following Monday rolled around, we knew we needed a plan. Once we deleted our events calendar and ripped apart the megabed, it was as sudden as a slap in the face: the play parties we went to just weeks ago were a thing of the past. We needed to pivot fast, not only for ourselves but also for our team, our performers and all our members.Pure necessity inspired our virtual play parties. We had a community of people looking to us to be there for them. We launched online chats through WhatsApp to keep people connected, before eventually moving to Discord. At first, we were hesitant about the virtual parties. The thought of having to be on camera felt like torture, especially during those first few weeks of COVID when it was hard not to feel like the world was coming to an end. (One of us grew up in a doomsday cult, which didn’t really put us in a good mindset for a global catastrophe.) But we knew we had to be strong for the membership and to come up with something that could keep us together.

Video Sex Parties Gave Us a New Way to Connect

The virtual parties launched and it was definitely a bit awkward at first. The idea of getting naked on camera was new for so many of the people who joined in. But it was also exciting, and there was a feeling of relief once people started getting comfortable. I remember having sex with my partner for the first time on camera and just feeling so sexy. Members from all over the world were joining in and, within a few weeks, we had an event that people loved and came back to. But gosh, it was a nightly learning lesson. (It turns out a double-ended dildo is an effective prop for a ring light!) Our virtual play parties really showed us that our members feel the same way we do: that our club isn’t just about the sex or the play, but more about the community. We had 30-plus couples dialing in every weekend from around the world: Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, London, Sri Lanka, Columbia and across the U.S. Our host would open up with erotic readings and games of Truth or Dare. Members would show up in lingerie and show us their toy collections. They couldn’t leave their homes, but they could look forward to these virtual meets. For many, it was the escape they needed. It gave them something to get dressed up for and excited about. By the end of each party, various screens would be filled with solo and partnered couples coming together. We’d spotlight people who were being extra sexy and you could see how watching someone in pleasure would get others to do the same. As stressful as the time was for so many people, going virtual showed us the potential for our community and made the goal of building a global community of sexy fucks more attainable.

After COVID, we’re predicting the Whoring Twenties.

Quarantine Only Made Our Community Stronger

The community is now building fast. I feel we’re stronger now because so many saw us fight to stay alive during a time when many places closed down. We have a waitlist for new locations and all the international press we received has brought in a lot of people offering to fund. The goal now is to make our little club for the adventurous more accessible, a place as common as an Equinox or SoulCycle—a reminder for people to prioritize their sexual health, to connect to a community and to make an effort to be better lovers. To be someplace that will be there for them even when the world feels like it’s ending. Everyone is eager to come to events. Folks who weren’t interested in the club before now can’t get to it fast enough. The whole experience taught us a lot. It showed us the power of our community. It showed us that even in the worst of times they will be there to support us and keep us going. It made us realize that this is so much more than just a fun time but something bigger that we need to keep building. The pandemic made our New York City club international. It opened the door for our club to exist in more places and attracted serious funding to make that opportunity real. The main change now is that we’re less worried about our future. COVID changed many peoples’ perceptions of sex and intimacy. It made those quarantining alone more aware that they wanted partners, and helped couples realize that they might want to spice things up. It gave people time to consider the things that make them happy in their lives and made sex a higher priority. People are leaving COVID with a greater sense of desire to not be stuck in the things that made them unhappy. We’re seeing it in people not returning to low-paying jobs and we’re seeing it in people not returning to low-libido lifestyles. After the Spanish Flu, we had the Roaring Twenties. After COVID, we’re predicting the Whoring Twenties. It’s more than just a hot vax summer, it’s a hot vax lifestyle and one we’re expecting to be a major part of.

I’m on an 18-foot inflatable raft. The river is a milky, opaque gray-brown color, heavy with glacial silt. It winds around and between mountains, still young and jagged, deep green at the bottom with spruce trees and dwarf birch. As the mountains slope up, the green becomes sparse until disappearing altogether, giving way to bare rock. There’s wind between the mountains, which are still young and jagged, deep green at the bottom with spruce trees and dwarf birches, and as they slope up, the green becomes sparse until disappearing altogether, giving way to bare rock. The sun beams down on the boat and bakes me inside of my drysuit. I drip with sweat inside of this teal-colored, expensive and glorified trash bag as I push the oars.“I wanna fall out! Swim a rapid!” I’m brought back to reality as the rowdy guys in my boat talk about their ambitions for the trip. This is my last but third trip of the day and it’s past 6 p.m. I’m tired, I’m hungry and my arms ache. By the end of this trip, I’ll have rowed 33 miles today. You’d think after rowing that many miles every day, your arms would eventually adjust.I smile at the guy who wishes to fall out, “Yeah, it’s not really that fun. I can vouch.”All the guys laugh and talk amongst themselves about how it definitely would be fun to swim a rapid. One of them says, “Yeah, I wanna fucking flip!” He looks back at me.I smile, politely. “Again, not really as fun as you’d think. Some rivers, that can be fun. This is a really high-volume river and all of this water was glacial ice yesterday. It’s maybe 33 to 35 degrees.”I tell them about how a light body floats much faster in water than a raft, especially with this amount of water—how if we flipped, everyone would go flying fast in a different direction. How with water this cold your muscles start to seize up pretty quickly and you almost instantly lose your breath. But, they don’t see this as a warning. Instead, it's a challenge. The guys probably don’t remember that we’re in Denali National Park. For a portion of the trip, we are not near a road. Or about how the closest hospital is a couple of hours away. But, my job is to keep others safe while maneuvering through rapids on a glacial river—and I think about these things all the time.

With water this cold your muscles start to seize up pretty quickly and you almost instantly lose your breath.

Being a Female Raft Guide Isn’t Always a Good Thing

The person who assigned this group to me was probably trying to do me a favor. Pairing a group of rowdy, overly masculine men with the only female raft guide on the trip can be smart: she can flirt, give a big smile and receive a hefty tip in return. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.From the moment they came over to my boat, I could tell they were disappointed. They had hoped to have been paired with the guy with long dreads or the dude with wild eyes and a beard but instead got assigned the woman. I could also tell by their eyes and attitude that they were doubtful I could row through rapids or row at all. The top tier of the layered cake is that I, a woman, would be rowing them through the rapids, and what an emasculating experience that is. Apparently.Knowing this, and perhaps trying to stomp my foot down to prove them wrong (anything you can do, I can do better…), I toy with uncertainty a little more than usual. Not because I want to flip, or I want any of them to swim —I don’t—but because I want to show them the force of the river. I want the waves to smack the boat and jumble these boys around. Plus, I know this river (as much as a river will allow one to know it). I know where flirting with uncertainty is OK, and where it’s not.

A Class IV Rapid Changed the Mood in the Raft

After a couple of warm-up rapids, we enter Ice Worm, one of the river’s Class IV rapids. I briefly explain our “line” to them and the river sucks us into boiling water. As far as Class IV rapids go, Ice Worm is fairly easy. It’s only rated so because swimming the rapid is especially dangerous. The moves are not hard to make in an oar raft, but if you were out of the raft you’d be sucked down, punched around, pulled every which way by the water.“Forward two!” I yell to them, and they paddle as I row. We ride a pillow of water directly adjacent to the Mouth. I shout out to them, over the roaring rapid, pointing with my head, “That there’s the Mouth. If we went in there, it’d eat the boat alive!” The boys look over, wide-eyed, staring into the massive hole as we power by, flirting with the edges. Looking into the Mouth—a whirling vortex larger than our 18-foot inflatable raft, churning and swallowing the surrounding water—it’s easy to imagine being eaten alive.I break their trance and yell “Forward two more!” as we punch through Liquid Linebacker, a stout, ever-standing wave. The men get bounced around in the boat and laugh and shout, elated. They’re enjoying themselves, and while they are still overly confident, with a conquering-type attitude toward the river, they have at least shut up about wanting the raft to flip. The Mouth will do that to a person.

Taking on the Toughest Rapid on the River

Soon enough comes Cable Car, the second of the Class IV rapids. I do not like to toy with uncertainty in Cable Car. In fact, I don’t like to toy with Cable Car at all. It’s my least favorite rapid on the river and makes me sick to my stomach. I get the bad kind of butterflies and sweat and I shake a little. Every day. Even if I run the rapid three times in a single day. There are two ways of passage through Cable Car: the centerline, which is the easier of the two, and the left line, which requires ferrying across the river partway through the rapid, making your way from river right to the middle-left. I hate the right line, and I always fear that I may not make it. However, whoever is leading the river flotilla chooses which line to run, and today the guy in front wants to run right, which means I’ll have to as well.At the top of Cable Car, there’s a hole about three times the size of the raft – a hole that even could swallow the Mouth. When entering Cable Car, you can’t let the raft get caught up in the "fun" entrance waves, because that behemoth hole is directly where the waves will take you.I use my strength to pull the boat backward, ferrying across the entrance waves to reach the river’s left side. “Right side back, left side forward!” I yell to the men in my boat, doing the same with my oars to turn the raft around. My heart races as we glide past the hole, and I yell over the gurgling, frothing water that I’m happy we’re not in because it’s the last place on this river I’d ever wish to be. I angle the boat to ferry across the river and shout “All Forward!” over the river’s rumble with as much gusto as I’ve got. My heart attempts to break through my sternum and I can feel my hands shaking on the oars as I stand up to get more leverage, pushing with my arms, using every bit of strength I can muster. In the center of Cable Car, there’s another hole, not nearly as big as the first, but steep and possibly more violent. I know that hole has caused many a boat's demise in this rapid. On more than one occasion, it has almost been my own demise. I know I shouldn’t stare at it—never stare where you don’t want to go, always stare in the direction you aim to head. But I can’t help it. The hole is mesmerizing. Chalky, glacial water rooster-tails up at the bottom, crushing back in on itself. The hole is utterly terrifying.

My heart attempts to break through my sternum and I can feel my hands shaking on the oars as I stand up to get more leverage.

Sometimes, Being a Raft Guide Is About Teaching Life Lessons

My breathing quickens and sweat is pouring down my face as I yell again, “Keep it forward, together and hard! Use your bodies, guys!” I don’t think we’re going to make it, but there’s still a slight chance. “Come on guys! Keep it going!” Nope, not happening. We’re definitely going to hit the right side of that violent hole.“Stop! Right side forward!” I do the same with my oar, straightening us out. The only chance we’ve got to make it through the hole right-side-up is to hit the hole head-on—never, ever, ever hit a hole sideways, every river guide learns early on. I shout for the guys to lean in, and as much as I want to close my eyes, I know I can’t, so I give one more power push as hard as I can—V for victory, we call it, arms pushing the oars up together in front of my face—as we smash through the hole. Or, as the hole smashes us. I fly forward a bit, and the guys in the front are knocked into the middle of the raft. Today, the river gods have allowed me safe passage. Hopefully tomorrow they’ll grant me the same.After Cable Car, the guys in my boat are oddly quiet. They no longer dream of wanting to flip the raft or even swim. Instead, they seem entranced by the water, the way it rushes through the steep walls, carving through mountains.Perhaps the river has taught them a lesson in humility.

I stood on the slip road to the M25 motorway in London with my thumb out and my cardboard sign wafting in the wind. I wanted to go to Morocco. Five days, 1,800 miles, three trucks, one car and one bus later, I arrived in Marrakesh, a world away from my safe university life. I look back now, 20 years later, as a parent with a five-year-old daughter and wonder, “What was I thinking?” Sometimes, the craziest ideas make the best adventures.Two years earlier, I had been working my university summer on a holiday camp in the south of France. It was my first experience outside my life's trajectory—go to school, get good grades, graduate university and have a nice, stable life. Suddenly I was mixing with people from different countries, cultures and life paths. I wanted more of that. So, at the end of the summer, as our months of fun and freedom had come to an end, some of my new friends said they were going to buy a van and drive down to Morocco. “I'm in,” I said and rang my mom to tell her my plan. Well, you can probably imagine how that conversation went. As confident and worldly as I felt after a summer in the sun, there's nothing like a dose of reality from your mother to bring you crashing back to earth. I eventually headed home, back to university and “real life.”

Sometimes, the craziest ideas make the best adventures.

I Decided to Hitchhike to Morocco

But dreams of souks and steam baths never left me. So it was fate, I guess, when a few months before my finals, I was offered the chance to take part in a charity challenge by hitchhiking to Morocco with a university friend. Yes, I should have been studying and yes, the safety concerns were legitimate, but I was adamant I would go. Plus, we would hitchhike in pairs, so what could possibly go wrong?As I was standing on that slip road the wind caught my backpack and almost knocked me into the oncoming traffic. Suddenly, the reality of what I had committed to hit. I had been pretty sure I was worldwise (despite never traveling further than France on my own), but now I felt about as small and insignificant as the pin I'd placed in the map to plot out our route. Soon, we were on our way by truck across the Channel and hurtling through France overnight, taking turns sleeping in the driver's cab bed. Somewhere in the middle, our driver dropped us off and we started again. Relieved to see someone pull over after a short while, we didn't notice the hole in the windshield until we were well on our way. That, coupled with the fact our driver made us duck down every time we saw a police car, we made a swift exit at the next service station.A few hours later, refueled and refocused, we wound our way through the Pyrenees in a new truck driver's care. We stopped to make deliveries, drank coffee with the locals in smoky cafes and were introduced as “the English travelers” to men idling away the time by playing chess in the village square. It wasn't the quickest or most direct route over the border into Spain, but then, the best ones never are.

We Received All Kinds of Help Along the Way

Later that night, we arrived in the city of Cordoba, exhausted and ready to find a hotel for the night. It was getting dark as we trudged the streets, soon realizing that the local Easter celebrations were in full swing and there was no room at the inn. Literally. We were starting to get a little concerned until a local hostel owner took pity on us and offered to let us stay in his apartment for the night. We were too exhausted to venture out and enjoy the celebrations and settled for the sounds of late-night parties drifting softly through the open windows. We were so close now it felt like I could taste the African air. I was itching to get going on the last leg of our adventure. Waving goodbye to the kind apartment owner, we pulled our original, crumpled sign out of our backpack once more. “Morocco,” please. Our final lift was nothing like the last. In a cloud of dust, a woman in a sports car with its roof down pulled over and asked us what we were doing. Unlike our previous drivers, she spoke perfect English and was fascinated to hear about our journey. We squeezed into the backseat, buffered by our backpacks and her bull terrier dog, who was wearing a diaper. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The dog was in heat and, apparently, this ingenious and stylish Spaniard thought her leather interior was too smart for that. Waving goodbye to our (wo)man's best friend, we traveled the last few miles to the port via bus and sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar by ferry to a new continent. We had made it. But our final destination was still a good distance as we headed for Marrakesh, the heart of the country. A hot, no-frills, no-sleep night train awaited to courier us through the parched and dusty countryside.

There was no room at the inn. Literally.

The Trip Allowed Me to Live Outside My Comfort Zone

As the sun rose, the overnight train pulled into Marrakesh and my senses were assaulted with the smells and sounds of exactly what I'd been looking for: souks full of unnamed spices, richly colored fabrics and exotic dishes. And the overwhelming feeling of being far outside my comfort zone. I would love to say to my daughter “Do what I say, not what I did,” but I can already see in her eyes that she is her mother's child. And her mother has had some pretty exciting adventures.

I have a thing for little-visited parts of the world, breakaway regions and remote places. So, in 2016, I planned to visit one such place for a week—an island which you have to see to believe its strangeness and beauty. An island like nowhere else: the Socotra Archipelago in Yemen. An archipelago is a group of islands, and these remote ones are home to around 800 rare species of animals and plants, which is why Socotra was named a World Heritage Site. The four islands and two islets that make up the archipelago are part of the country of Yemen, but they’re on their own in the northwest part of the Indian Ocean, between Africa and the Middle East. Based on a 2004 census, there are only about 40,000 people living here and, because it's a nature reserve, most of the people who visit come for eco-tourism.

An island like nowhere else: the Socotra Archipelago in Yemen.

In Recent Years, the Island Has Attracted Many Tourists

Socotra has been nearly impossible to reach for the last few years because of the ongoing civil war in Yemen. But with a lot of effort and arrangement, I managed to get a tourist visa and book my itineraries. I had contacted Socotra Eco-Tours for setting up a tour of the island. I had a whole seven days to explore this amazing and lesser-known destination. During the flight to Hadiboh, I did get to see many Socotra people, who were going back after a visit to mainland Yemen. Most were men, in the typical Socotra outfit: a short-sleeved shirt, sandals, a turban and a fouta—a sarong-like wraparound skirt. I could only talk to some people around me in hand gestures because nobody shared a common language. The outside world has come to Socotra in a mediated way, through television, mobile phones and the internet, and in a literal way, through tourism. Though recent political unrest temporarily limited foreign travel, over the previous decade the island’s beautiful beaches, rugged mountains, unique biodiversity and ancient culture attracted a burgeoning number of travelers.

The Wildlife on the Island Is Breathtaking

During the first two days, I made lots of friends there. My local tour guide was very fond of songs and sang a Soqotri one to me the whole day and explained its meaning. He told me that people there are used to singing because they don’t have electricity outside Hadiboh, the largest town.Before coming to Socotra, I had heard a lot about the famous dragon blood tree. Plants on the islands take on some strange shapes to adapt to the hot and dry climate, but the most famous is probably this tree. It sounds scary, but it’s the dark red sap that gives them their name. The sap has been used for centuries in medicines and dyes, and the trees have large, round branches shaped like umbrellas. Because of its isolation over the last couple million years, Socotra is full of many endemic plants and birds found nowhere else, which is why it’s called the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. But Socotra isn’t just home to plants and animals—people have been living on the islands for thousands of years. They have their own Soqotri language, and the islands have been part of trade routes for centuries, with found artifacts from sailors dating back to the first century BC. Since it’s so far away from everything else, the archipelago has largely been left to itself, which is a good thing for the unique wildlife that lives there.I had conversations with other tourists as well; they were few in number but had come there from different parts of the world–Australia, Russia and the Netherlands. At night we ate dinner together near the campfire and most of them shared that the island's uniqueness has made them want to visit that place.

Life on Socotra is tough.

Visiting Socotra Instilled Gratitude in Me

In the following days, I got to see so many amazing beaches. Omaq was the most beautiful and serene beach I’d ever encountered. Late in the afternoon, we drove over to Hayf sand dunes to watch the sunset and then we headed back to Omaq under the lights of the moon and the stars. That evening, I sat out on the beach and talked to fellow tourists. I also got the chance to travel to nearby villages and talk to locals. The primary occupations of Socotra residents have traditionally included fishing, raising goats and cattle, and cultivating dates. A traditional festive meal starts with a glass of warm broth and goat bones, while the main meal includes goat meat and rice. Soccer is a popular sport on the island. Most villages have a team and tournaments are regularly organized. One night, I stayed in a village to enjoy their traditional activity in which people gather in mountain villages to recite poems in their own language. That experience was truly humbling. But I believe life on Socotra is tough. Over the centuries, Socotrans developed practical ways of dealing with grazing, wood harvesting, land ownership disputes between clans, water-resource use and similar issues. Conservation was the only option for survival in the harsh island environment, and it had the side effect of protecting Socotra’s outstanding biodiversity.Later, on my way back home, I reflected that the experience of Socotra had instilled a feeling of gratitude in me, towards the normal day-to-day things I get to see and experience. I can’t wait for the day I can make it back and travel to Socotra again.