The Doe’s Latest Stories

For just $99, you can have your DNA sequenced by one of at least two companies who claim to be able to reveal or confirm critical information about you. This information could arouse suspicions of infidelity or alert you to latent health conditions. It’s all waiting for you at the click of a mouse and twist of a vial cap—the truth, allegedly. Your genetic history and mine have been on the market for over a decade now. TV commercials show expressive, happy faces as graphs and maps unfold to reveal their ethnic origins. For a country that harbors so much science denialism, DNA tests seem to have taken off into the mainstream and become techy add-ons to the American family tree. But for me, a multiracial Black-American woman with generation-wide gaps in my family history, no amount of marketing will make me want to exchange my spit for a chart. My ancestry is not data.

I realized that because my explanation did not contain a country of origin, people viewed my African-American identity as a farce and a pity.

Our Family History Is Full of Surprises

For the first 15 years of my life, I believed that the last person in my lineage to immigrate to the United States was my paternal grandfather’s father. He came on a boat from Ireland, married and died of pneumonia in the late 1920s. However, it turns out that the last to immigrate was actually on my mother’s side. As my aunts discovered from a comprehensive search on Ancestry.com, my maternal great-grandfather disembarked a boat from Havana in New York City around the time my paternal great-grandfather died, heading to the same Catholic heaven they both believed in. He would later abandon my great-grandmother and their three sons, who all bore Spanish names. He named my grandfather after himself, a legacy that ended abruptly. I do not know what he looked like. My mother’s family is a generally light-skinned bunch. My mom always hated when people asked her if she was biracial or “from the islands.” “I’m Black,” was her retort, stated decisively despite her petite stature. That pride was not shared by all of her siblings. I know this by the way they handled this ancestry situation. Suddenly, some were ready to throw American Blackness aside for Latinidad, failing to recognize that great-grandfather’s census documents listed “Negro” next to “Naturalized,” clear as day. “We’re not really Black,” I overheard one holiday. By the time I was 14, I was no stranger to being told I wasn’t really Black by strangers who interrogated me about what I was. They would insist that I was mistaken, that I was actually Arab or Puerto Rican. They winced at the word “Black,” as though it was a dirty secret that I should not speak of. I realized that because my explanation did not contain a country of origin, people viewed my African-American identity as a farce and a pity. But I never expected to hear this sentiment from my own family.

Our New Family History Was Tricky to Navigate

From the inside, we still seemed Black. We still ate the same foods and carried the same linguistic tendencies passed down from our Southern ancestors. Yet I noticed odd subtleties on some family members’ social media. “Being Latino” memes were being shared, with awkward references to “Qué Pasa, USA?” made. “I know you didn’t really watch that,” I thought. I chuckled at a mechanically translated status update in Spanish, a language I studied for ten years. I wasn’t laughing at them—I was just as excited and confused by the introduction of this new puzzle piece. I wanted to fit it in too, but not in a way that denied my—our—Blackness. During one of many private identity crises, I told my boyfriend that I didn’t feel accepted by anyone. At 18, I felt rejected by white and Black people alike. People readily accepted me as Latina, but it wasn’t that much of my heritage, and I knew nothing of Cuban culture. Self-righteous and annoyed, he texted, “I’ll buy you a DNA test and you can get this over with.” Rage boiled within me, steeped with years of jokes from friends about how I didn’t know what I was. It made me feel like an animal, a mysterious creature that needed to be identified, typified, and contained. He wanted science to intervene and uncomplicate me because to him, my non-whiteness was burdensome and my Blackness wholly intolerable.

My ancestors did not survive to become data points. They survived so that I could know I am whole.

We Can’t Trust Science to Define Who We Are

Science is not a white invention, but it has been used in service of white supremacist societies to “prove” that those of European descent are more human than the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Heads were measured and humans caged in exhibition halls to demonstrate the savagery of The Other. The American-born field of eugenics was founded to justify the enslavement of African people and the genocide of Native people. Nazis took notes from the United States as they plotted to codify anti-Semitism. In the DNA of modern science lies a tightly coiled streak of racism. I am a who, not a what, and therefore a DNA test cannot tell me anything useful. Answers do not reside within my blood. I do not care to see my heritage approximated with vague labels that reinforce the same stereotype as the kids who joked that I “must love watermelon” believed: that all Black people are intrinsically the same. This science birthed the idea that anyone with “one drop of Black blood” could be enslaved as well as the accompanying vocabulary of mulatto, quadroon and octoroon. This matrix of mythology gave scientific legitimacy to slavery, Jim Crow, lynching and mass incarceration. My ancestors did not survive to become data points. They survived so that I could know I am whole. One of my aunts purchased a DNA test several years ago. It didn’t receive much attention in the family gossip mill and I’ve never seen the results. She mentioned that the largest percentage was labeled Senegalese. This does not make me Senegalese—Senegal did not exist when my ancestors were taken. Are we Cuban, then? Sort of, yes, given that had my great-grandfather not absconded his culture could have been part of our lives. Our African lineage was scattered across the Atlantic world by force. The way we choose to make sense of it is deeply human, individual and unscientific. It is rooted in choice. This year, I spent $40 on virtual conga lessons, $50 on used books about history and I watched Roots (on Hulu, to which I already subscribe). I cried generously. For less than $99, I feel closer to knowing my ancestors than before. I grow closer to them every time I read, sing or dance through our collective history and add my own contributions. I am not seeking proof, for there is no one to who I need to prove myself. Instead, I am opening my heart to my ancestors. I trust them to tell me the truth.

The other night in bed my wife gazed into my eyes and then recoiled in horror.“Your eyebrows!” she said. “What has happened!?”It's all too true; over the last couple weeks it seems like my eyebrows have reached some sort of hideous aging threshold and have turned into old man bushy ape-brows, all thick and bristly and intense. I waggled them suggestively.“On the downside, my eyebrows are repulsive,” I said. “But, on the upside, you need never have sex with me again!”My wife laughed, because even after twenty years and the unfortunate eyebrow situation, she still thinks I'm kind of funny. Also, she laughed because what I said was true: We are not doing much of the sex. I can't honestly even remember the last time we had sex. There was, I think, a handjob in the last six months. Actual full-on sexy sexing with penetration and thrusting and all—over a year. Maybe more.The sex death of our universe is not, in fact, about my eyebrows. It's not because we've grown apart, either, or because my wife does not understand me, or because she understands me all too well.It's mostly because she has chronic pain issues.Over the last few years, her occasional migraines have stopped being occasional, and become an every day, twice on Sundays—sometimes more than twice on Sundays—gauntlet of pain and despair. Cannabis helps, but, despite a lot of doctor's visits, she hasn't gotten much relief. Working is difficult. Sex is more difficult than that.

I would be lying if I said I didn't miss sex.

How to Survive a Sexless Marriage in a Culture That Claims It’s Impossible

I would be lying if I said I didn't miss sex. Like most couples, we did a lot of fornicating early in our relationship, back when our eyebrows were young and new and filled with concupiscence. She had to get her clitoris ring out because my penis was too large and too often inserted for clitoris ring comfort. I fisted her so often that her vaginal juices exacerbated my eczema. Police chastised us for making out in my car. There may have been light bondage. We may have hired a sex worker, because my wife may be bi. There were fluids and dirty talk and embarrassing hickeys and general naughtiness. It was fun. It gave us stories to tell our grandchildren. Or rather, stories to adamantly not tell our grandchildren.And then we had a kid, and got older and creakier and more boring, and the sex faded into the background—until my wife's migraines finally put a stake through its heart for good.Our culture is constantly telling me that that stake through the heart of the fucking is also a stake through the heart of our marriage. Novels and television shows and relationship advice columns assure me that if the passion has gone, someone is going to start to cheat, and soon there will be tears and bitterness and drama. My wife will notice my eczema flaring up and suspect. I will hit the wall in rage like Adam Driver, but, you know, with bushier eyebrows and less brooding appeal. And then we'll have to hire lawyers and start divvying up the books and the cats and the large dog and the large high-schooler.It's true that the future is always in motion, and you never know when you're going to turn into Adam Driver. But, overall, divorce and moving out seem pretty unlikely, and not just because of the difficulty of assignations under lockdown. (Not to mention the difficulty of moving out.)

There is no one I would rather laugh with about not having sex.

Staying Faithful in a Sexless Marriage Is Easy When You Love Your Partner as Much as I Do

My sex drive hasn't disappeared. But that's why God invented masturbation and, shortly thereafter, internet porn. It's not necessarily an ideal solution in every way, but the fact that our basement floods semi-regularly isn't ideal in every way either. Not everything in a marriage or in a life is going to be perfect bliss.Different people are different, of course, and how much, and what kind of imperfect bliss you can reconcile yourself to varies wildly. Some people, I'm sure, would find a sexless marriage intolerable, just as some people would find a polyamorous marriage intolerable, or a kink-less marriage—or what have you. I don't think anyone is bad or immoral for wanting more sex in their marriage, or for feeling they can't adjust to a sexless marriage.But I do resent all the cultural scripts that tell me that I'm boring or broken or that my marriage is doomed because I'm not fucking enough. I'm all for normalizing kink, but we should also be willing to normalize kink-lessness. Lots of sex isn't a moral failure, weird sex isn't a moral failure, and not having sex isn't a moral failure. The amount and kind of sex you have doesn't have to define a relationship. Or a marriage.Because, clitoris ring or no clitoris ring, I love my wife. She's my sweetheart still; the person who I want to lie down beside each night and my cuddle partner. There is no one I would rather laugh with about not having sex. We've been together for more than two decades, and we've had maybe two fights in all that time. We share cats, we share books, we share the large high schooler. I still make her laugh, and vice versa. Sex just isn't the most important thing. If I'm given the choice of sex with someone else or no sex with my wife, it wouldn't be close. I'd choose my wife every time. And I do so every day.

I skimmed over the directions, grabbed the small vial out of its box, popped off its cap and I very carefully spit my saliva into the jar. I wiped off my shirt, and then silently questioned the insanity of this approach—I mean, here I am, voluntarily giving my DNA to a company that likely might turn around and sell it later. A piece of me hated that I was taking these steps, unearthing “my story.” My identity had come to this. But, like anyone who had their identity stolen under the myth of the “American Dream,” I was desperate for answers.Growing up, I always envied white people because of their wealth. I don’t mean monetary wealth; rather, their wealth of information—the photo albums, the diaries, the birth and death certificates, the oral histories—and those priceless artifacts that tell their story. I always wondered why my family didn’t have that, too. My mother should have been able to show me the faces of my elders through frozen moments captured on film. My father should have been able to read me their words from journals and manuscripts passed down across generations. I should be able to give my daughter those moments and words to carry across time.I can never get over all of the lost stories. Who were these people? What did they love? Did they ever find their dreams? What were their passions? Did they ever dream of me? Did they pray for me? What was Africa like? What tribe do we originate from? What is our true language? Who was our God? When they died, did they have peace? Did they fight? Were they leaders like me? Who the fuck are we?! I mean, isn't that the whole point of language in the first place? To communicate the vital and necessary information that we need to survive. Instead, it's been used as a weapon to marginalize and control the masses. Who could have guessed that the cause for so many of my tears could be boiled down to the fact my ancestors were legally stopped from reading and writing, from speaking their native language, from having a family, from loving each other. I didn’t know it was possible to miss so many at the same time. I didn’t know it was possible to miss people I'd never met.

I can never get over all of the lost stories.

I Wanted to Go to My Homeland

I grabbed my passport, threw my backpack over my shoulder, shoved my cellphone into my pocket, grabbed my suitcase and double-checked for my passport. Then I headed downstairs, climbed into a black SUV and made my way to the airport. I was scared for so many reasons. In a few days, I would be filming as the lead in my first feature film, and we were shooting the entirety of the movie in Lagos, Nigeria. I had never been out of the country before, let alone Africa. I anticipated that I would be rejected by locals, who, in their minds, saw me as an “American,” not a person of West African descent—not one of them, not family. Only as a watered-down version of what’s real.I knew nothing about Africa—I might as well have been visiting another planet. I recalled what I was taught to believe about Africa, and it inspired this arrogant feeling, this idea that I was better simply because I was raised in the U.S., that I was smarter or better off despite our ugly history. In some strange way, I really believed that and hated that I did. I was embracing thoughts that weren't really mine; like an animal, I was following my basic conditioning without question. I learned not to beat myself up about it, because at the end of the day, it wasn't all my fault. I was just doing what I was told and now that I was asking these questions, I finally had the power to change it. All of these rising insecurities were a byproduct of my need to be accepted and, deep down, I just wanted to go home and feel loved. My mind couldn't stop thinking about what was stolen from us. From me. It made me angry to think that I didn’t have a home. I think about my ancestors as a compass, a guide to returning home where people and stories unlock our identity. How many healers, prophets, artists were stolen from me? I always dreamed of home when I was a child, but those dreams didn’t have a language or words, it was all feeling. When I would hear stories of my classmates going home to Mexico to see their abuelos and abuelas, I envied them. I wanted what they had. I wanted to have somewhere to go. I cried as I conjured up those emotions. I used to think I didn’t care about my history. It wasn't that, I was just hurting just like anyone else that didn’t have a place to call home.

I knew nothing about Africa—I might as well have been visiting another planet.

My Character Struggled With His Nigerian Identity

I tried to swallow those thoughts and get into character. At the end of the day I wasn't going home, I was just going to work. This wasn't a vacation, this wasn't about me. I was being hired to tell a story. I needed to focus.I could heavily relate to my character. In his mind, he couldn't identify with being Nigerian—these weren't his people. Taught that allegiance to his country superseded his ethnicity and identity, he was convinced that he was an American. He was sent to Nigeria to learn about his roots and would ultimately end up email scamming others in order to get back home. Our ideas were the same, but we really related in our pain. At the end of the day, we didn’t belong, we were homeless. We had no soul, no identity. For some of us, to be American means to be nothing.As the plane made its final descent, I listened to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. I wondered if the rapper ever considered if his music could be the soundtrack to a stranger's journey. I kind of felt like Santiago, from The Alchemist, when he set out on his mission to find the pyramids. I was also searching for something that I couldn't even imagine, hoping that I'd recognize it when I saw it. As I stepped off the plane, I felt like a fish out of water, the prodigal son making his return.

Going Home Was a Necessary Start

In between set-ups, I talked to a man that strangely resembled a distant relative. In an alternate reality, he could be like an uncle or a father of sorts. He spoke to me with a conviction as if I was a lost boy wandering in his village and he was responsible for me. I told him how I didn’t have a home and I knew nothing about the people that came before me. All of those stories, all of that history, all of that love was lost forever. He looked at me like I was a book he was reading, and seemed to know the answers to the puzzle I’d been trying to solve my entire life. “You may not know exactly what country you are from and that doesn't matter,” he told me with a soft confidence. “This is your home, your people come from this land. Yeah, you may not know exactly what country you’re from. So, pick one! You need to go to Ghana, go to the village.” A few days later, while filming at the airport, I received an email notification. I had finally received my ancestry results. The ethnicity estimate read 31 percent Cameroon, eight percent Ghana, 22 percent Other, and 39 percent Nigeria. A weird excitement washed over me. I felt a little closer to finding out who I was. I had a sense of direction now. I had finally found the pyramids.There was still so much that I didn’t know, that I wanted to know, but this was a start. We finished principle photography, the film went to a major film festival, and is now on Netflix. But my greatest accomplishment was finding out what home looked like.

Every year when I drive up the winding one-lane road to our house in Arlia, a small village in the mountains of Northwest Tuscany with a population of about 40, I wonder how I got here. I have a house in Italy, an Italian passport and a thoroughly modern American-Italian family. To those who know me and my parents, this would seem highly implausible because I essentially grew up in a 1950s American family. It was the Cleaver family without the Beaver. But there was another story in the background—it just didn’t impact my family life. My maternal grandfather, Giovanni, came to the United States through Ellis Island as a child with his four brothers and sisters. They were all born in Filignano, in what is now called Molise, Italy. My maternal grandmother was born in the United States, but her family came from Basilicata and Campania. My father’s side of the family, who arrived in the United States in the 1890s, traced their relatives to Ireland.My mother, Jeanne, was one of 15 children born to Giovanni and Michaelina Margharita Verrecchia. They lived in an Italian area of South Philadelphia. After their first six children were born, my grandfather officially changed his surname when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. This was a very common practice for immigrants as the government thought it would be easier for Americans to pronounce their names and maybe make it easier for them to assimilate.

My Family Assimilated Into American Culture

It appears that assimilation into American society was the real goal of my grandparents. None of the 15 children learned to speak Italian. My mother told me that as a young girl when a package was delivered to the house from a department store, the name on the package indicated Margaret Jones or Smith, as my blue-eyed grandmother didn’t want the store clerk to think she was Italian. Only one of the 15 children married another Italian-American. And my grandmother refused to attend the wedding because she wanted her daughter to marry a “real” American. My grandparents were very pleased when my mother married a guy who was a “real” American whose parents were born in the United States. My parents eventually moved from the city into the suburbs, where I was raised without any real connection to the culture or heritage of my maternal grandparents. My mother never really felt the immigrant experience growing up. She was, in fact, shielded from it on purpose. For example, I never recall my mother cooking anything Italian except the spaghetti we had once every two weeks. Sauce never simmered on the stove; rather, it came from a jar of Ragu. Our traditions were all new ones: no special dinner on Christmas Eve, and no special baking that I can remember. In fact, unlike in Italian culture where the discussion, preparation and consumption of food is central, my memories of food were almost non-existent save for ice cream and apple pie. I do not recall any serious conversations about my Italian or Irish heritage at all.

I Became Exposed to the World in High School

What I do remember from my childhood through teenage years was how both my parents encouraged me to embrace life and interact with the larger world through education, politics and travel. The idea of travel really captured my interest. After a brief ten-day trip over Christmas, when I was a sophomore in college, I decided I wanted to go and spend the summer traveling in Europe. I still have a newspaper article by the journalist Russell Baker, writing for the then International Herald Tribune on August 13, 1970, entitled “The Student Prince.” It was a piece directed toward all the parents worrying about their children traveling through Europe that summer with nothing more than a backpack, youth hostel card and maybe a Eurail Pass. I was one of those lucky students traveling for four months without a real plan other than a desire to see and soak up a life different from mine. It may sound overly romantic, but my life really did change that summer when I met an Italian boy from Naples at a tram stop in Munich, Germany. Little did I imagine that the meeting would lead me up the one-lane road to Arlia. Oreste and I spent a couple of days visiting sights in the city, but it was the conversations that we had about the world that perhaps gave us a reason to stay in touch over the next ten years. In the interim, Oreste would go on to live in France, England and, for a brief period, in North Africa, while I spent three years teaching in Germany and traveling every summer. When we finally decided to meet again ten years later, we decided that perhaps we might make a go of it.Before moving forward together, Oreste suggested that I come and spend a month at his parents’ house in Naples. He said he didn’t think I could really know who he was unless I better understood where he came from, in terms of his family and the place where he grew up. Spending that time with his parents was eye-opening, to both Italian culture and, more importantly, how Oreste was still shaped by his childhood in Naples. Oreste and I soon moved to Singapore, where we got married, and lived there for two years. Family reasons brought us to the U.S. We soon found jobs and moved to Miami, Florida.

It appears that assimilation into American society was the real goal of my grandparents.

Latin-American Communities Kept Their Culture in America

Interestingly, Miami in the 1980s was a city of recent immigrants. At first, primarily Cubans, then South Americans, all looking for a better life economically and/or to escape political regimes. The difference was that assimilation was not their overarching goal. Rather, it appeared that maintaining close ties to their heritage and culture was of great importance for the immigrants and for their children. They kept their language and customs alive, while also finding good jobs. Living a successful life in Miami did not mean losing sight of one’s past—it only enhanced one’s life. This was definitely not the experience of my relatives 50 years earlier. What a shame. Oreste made sure that our small family kept our Italian culture alive. My children, Adriano and Giovanna, have Italian passports and both took Italian classes in college. Food and its many traditions are central to their identities. Both know how to cook native meals, learning first-hand from their grandfather and father. We celebrate Christmas Eve traditions from Naples and expose them to their heritage through music, movies, books and travel. As a result, they have both spent a lot of time in Italy with their grandparents and uncles.

I’m Glad My Family Has Embraced Its Italian Heritage

After we retired, Oreste and I discussed the possibility of buying a house in Italy and split our time living between there and Miami. Adriano and Giovanna could not have been more supportive. A major factor in our decision to buy was that they would have a place in Italy after we were gone. They have both spent extended periods of time at the house. They feel it as home, as do I. So here I am at 71 learning the language and immersing myself in the Italian culture and traditions. If only my mother or my grandparents could know that after all this time, I would appreciate the heritage that was always mine. If they had only known that it was possible to assimilate in a new country and still keep your culture and traditions close, thereby enriching your family’s life.To me, that is the beauty of America. It may not always seem so with today’s fraught rhetoric on the subject of immigration, but one can be truly American and yet something else as well. As I drive up the road and catch a glimpse of my home, I know how lucky I am. Not just because I have a home in Miami and Arlia, but because I know my children will always know and feel that their lives, like mine, have been enriched by Italy’s culture and tradition.

I was six or seven years old when I first learned that I was adopted. My siblings and I were playing in our family’s suburban backyard, equipped with a swimming pool and a clubhouse, while my mother and father gathered palm fronds and threw them in a garbage bin. When they were finished, my dad took off his gloves and corralled my two brothers, my sister and me over to a spot by the lake. As I sat crisscrossed and picked at blades of grass, my parents informed us that while they did not bring us into the world, they were our “real” parents in every other sense of the word. Then they offered to answer our questions, and that’s how we learned that we had three other half-siblings, and all sharing the same biological mother. I’ll call her Jane. Jane was unfit to take care of us, for reasons I wasn’t yet ready to understand, but my mom had assured me that one day I’d be able to meet her and find out for myself.

Our Unique Family, and How It Came to Be

Before we moved to the suburbs, my parents owned and operated a jewelry business together in the city. My mom and dad had been married for six months when they applied through the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to become foster parents. Shortly thereafter, they were in a meeting at their bank when HRS called to deliver news that there was a healthy baby girl in need of a foster home. Two weeks later, my parents picked up my five-month-old sister, Rita. My birth mom had attempted to take on the onus of parenting my older sister by herself, just as she had twice before, until the state eventually terminated her parental rights. This time didn’t prove to be any different. When Rita was 12 weeks old, Jane called the police sounding agitated and incoherent. When a squad car finally pulled up, Jane ran out into the street and set my sister on the hood. She told the police and an HRS protective investigator that she was at her “wit’s end” because my sister wouldn’t stop crying. Once again, Jane relinquished her child to the care of the state. My parents loved Rita. They’d bring her to work with them, keeping her in the back office of the jewelry shop and taking turns caring for her while the other worked up front. Photo albums and home videos from that time reflect the happiness and love that my parents poured into this new life. They nurtured Rita in the ways that my birth mom couldn’t. My mom stayed in touch with Jane’s brother John. Uncle John lived just a few hundred miles away, and would often drive up to see us, bearing gifts and bizarre stories. He’d spent his early 20s investigating some of the first American UFO sightings, and recounted his excursions to anyone who would listen. We all loved Uncle John, and his presence in our lives reinforced the common link between the siblings. One day, a couple of months after Rita’s first birthday, Uncle John phoned my parents’ townhouse in the city. My mom answered. “Jane had another baby,” my uncle reported. “It’s a boy.”

Jane was unfit to take care of us, for reasons I wasn’t yet ready to understand, but my mom had assured me that one day I’d be able to meet her and find out for myself.

Our Birth Mother Wanted to Take Care of Us, but She Couldn’t

I was 13 years old when I first heard Julian’s story. At this point, I’d spoken to my birth mom over the phone a handful of times, mostly on holidays. Our conversations could at best be described as whimsical, but the truth was she was mostly erratic and difficult to keep up with. My mom, who worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, explained to my siblings and me that Jane had schizophrenia. My dad never tried to conceal his disdain for her. When she’d call the house, he would intentionally let the phone ring until it went to voicemail. We were in the family minivan one afternoon when tensions had begun heating up, as they often did. My dad was angry that my younger brother Tommy and I had been skipping out on Sunday school. At the time, my dad was being sued by a former business partner who was trying to steal the company, and it was wearing on him. After I retaliated by confronting him about forwarding Jane’s calls, he finally collapsed under the weight of it all. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he yelled. My dad is six feet, four inches tall, and a powerhouse of a man. When he raised his sonorous baritone to a shout, it was terrifying. Then, in a slightly softer voice, he said, “She almost killed your brother Julian.”By the time Jane gave birth to Julian, there were numerous hospital records expounding on her mental illness, and the hospital staff was instructed not to leave her alone with the baby. But through cunning, Jane managed to exit the hospital with Julian in her arms. At the height of winter, she got on a plane with my one-week-old brother and flew across the country, living as a vagabond and sleeping on sidewalks. She kept this up for weeks until she finally capitulated and called my Uncle John to bail her out. He pleaded with her to come back and grant parental custody of Julian to my parents. When Jane handed off my brother at the airport, she told them that he had a cold. His diaper was many sizes too large and desperately needed to be changed.

Julian Almost Died, but Our Birth Mother’s Illness Affected All of Us

The next morning, as my parents got ready to take Julian to the doctor, he stopped breathing. My dad was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher as my mom performed CPR on my newborn brother. My mom went with him as he was airlifted in a helicopter to the hospital. At five weeks old, Julian weighed less than his birth weight. He’d contracted pneumonia while in my birth mom’s care, and spent a week in the intensive care unit as my parents waited for him to recover. “One more day and he would’ve been dead,” my dad said in a broken voice. He was behind the steering wheel, sobbing now as he finished telling Tommy and me about how our brother had narrowly escaped death. I felt a lump rise to my throat, and I couldn’t speak. I’d never been so angry in my entire life, sitting there reliving my father’s trauma, trying to picture my life without Julian. As the years went on, I began dissecting my own feelings of rejection and guilt. There were countless instances in which my mom came home from a 13-hour workday to hysteria and chaos. Many objects were broken or completely destroyed from us fighting, playing or a combination of the two. It was becoming more and more apparent to my mom that while all of us were healthy, intelligent children, none of us had passed through Jane unscathed.

My parents didn’t just deal with our bad days. They were right there for the good ones, too.

My Parents’ Selflessness Saved Our Lives

When my sister Rita got addicted to drugs and started stealing money out of my mom’s purse, my mom didn’t give up on her. She did everything she could for Rita, paying for multiple stints in rehab until Rita finally got clean. When Tommy got kicked out of school, my dad added 40 minutes to his morning commute, without protest, in order to take my younger brother to school the next district over. But my parents didn’t just deal with our bad days. They were right there for the good ones, too. When Julian displayed an affinity for acting, my mom and dad were in the audience when he performed as the lead in our high school play. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve looked up to find my parents settling into the crowd at one of my gigs. My parents chose us and accepted us, and never gave up on us. They kept my siblings and me together, and a collective sense of camaraderie has flourished among the four of us. We all share a bond that will forever unify us, distinguish us and strengthen us. The continual selflessness and support from my parents encouraged me from an early age to begin cultivating a sense of gratitude. It continues to inspire me to act selflessly. And while I occasionally contend with feelings of guilt and imposter syndrome, I never lose sight of how grateful I am to be here, every single day.

“You’re not your parents’ real child.” If these words were true, then the miracle of adoption wouldn’t be as incredible as it is. The chances, the decisions and the choices that had to be made and taken for my journey to become a reality are nothing short of a miracle. The reality is that there’s a stigma in this world about adopted children. People are conditioned to associate biological relationships as the determining factors of a family, but really, “your family” is composed of those who fight for you, love you, support you and raise you every single day. I write this with the full understanding that not all adoptions are seamless or positive experiences in totality, and I know that there are adopted children struggling with their families. They are second-guessing themselves and those around them, and my particular story is a fortunate one, something not every adopted child has been blessed with. However, I do feel that the majority of adoptions take place with the best of intentions. To those struggling, however, I see you and don’t want you to feel that this piece delegitimizes your experience.

How I even came to be at that orphanage during that window is a mystery and miracle unto itself.

My Adoption in Russia Was Highly Unlikely

Prior to smartphones, flip phones and reliable computers, my South Carolina-based parents were able to locate a toddler in an orphanage 5,302 miles away in Moscow, Russia. Conditions were incredibly poor there. Cribs lined the walls, mirroring the setup of an animal shelter, and there was a “staging” room where children would be placed if they had the opportunity for adoption. Dressed in lackluster clothing, the child would see toys for the first time, and a photographers’ camera angles would attempt to hide the malnutrition and lack of mobility by propping the child up against a rocking horse. The conditions can’t be blamed on the caregivers who dedicate their lives to caring for the children who live there. They simply do the very best with what they’ve got, which isn’t much.From there, videos of the child would be sent to prospective families. Next, the agency required multiple visits with the child, regardless of where the adoptive parents lived. In my case, this meant that my family had to spend extensive time in Moscow on multiple trips to get to know me, and more importantly, to let the orphanage know them. These touchpoints along the way are part of the long battle that ensues to gain the privilege of adopting a child, but the bonds that it forms, if done properly, are tantamount. This entire process took place, by chance, within the 22-year time frame in which the United States and Russia were allowing adoptions—a rare pause in the two countries’ tumultuous relationship that lasted from 1991 to 2012. How I even came to be at that orphanage during that window is a mystery and miracle unto itself. I have never felt more like my parents’ “real” child. While my birth certificate may read Russian, a DNA test would later reveal that I was 99.4 percent Armenian and .6 percent Central-South Asian (Pakistani region). The complexities of how I even ended up in Moscow with that genetic makeup just add to the nearly insurmountable odds of my adoption.

The reality is that there’s a stigma in this world about adopted children.

I Was Bullied for Being Adopted

Growing up adopted presented some challenges, as you may expect, but thankfully in my situation they weren’t internal, meaning they weren’t challenges born from within the home like many other children face. As long as I can remember, my adoptive parents made sure I understood that I was adopted and what that meant, so that I would be well-equipped to face bullies throughout life who didn’t understand.The most common example of bullying would be the “Oh yeah? Well, you’re adopted” jokes, or the ever childish “Your parents don’t even love you,” or “You’re not even your parents’ real child.” That’s where they missed the mark though. Yes, I am not biologically related to my parents—you got me. But being one’s genetic offspring doesn’t give an individual a parent. I’ve come to learn in my journey being raised by non-biological parents that genetics has nothing to do with it. Love and support, however, has everything to do with it, and because of this, any attempt at being bullied would simply get deflected. I think I was spared the harshest of bullying because, physically, my appearance loosely resembles that of my family. We all have olive skin, dark hair and brown eyes; I fall between them in height; and I’ve got a full beard, similar to my pop’s. At first glance, you wouldn’t suspect that we weren’t biologically related unless you studied our facial features closely. If you asked, my mother would tell you a beautiful story with tears in her eyes about how God put me on this earth away from them, and they just had to find me. My father would then chuckle and smile with pride and love in his eyes.

Biology Does Not Determine Your Real Parents

Ask any adopted child and they’ll tell you the number one question always asked is, “Do you ever think about searching for your real parents?” While I understand I don’t speak for the entire adopted community, my answer is simply “no.” I’ve been blessed with an incredible family through and through, and I don’t have any memory of my biological parents. At this point, I barely remember my orphanage, so there’s no emotional tie or bond to anyone prior to the family I know now. I was willingly given to an orphanage prior to being adopted, and that’s a pretty clear message in itself. Now, there’s the continuation of the battle on the homefront. When a child has been through trauma at an early age, there is a high risk of overstimulation, which can lead to mental shutdowns and the like. In my case, due to malnutrition and lack of muscular development within the confines of my crib for the first nearly two years of my life, I struggled with fine motor skills and needed therapy for years after my arrival to accomplish the most simple tasks like fastening buttons or snaps. However, when I think about what the alternative could have been growing up in that Russian orphanage, I am incredibly thankful for that one-in-a-trillion chance to make it.My first name is a Russian one that remained unchanged upon my adoption. It’s a proud symbol of my story and my parents’ fight to get to me. So my message is simple to adopted children around the world: Not only are you your parents’ “real” child, but you were fought for, your family endured and overcame obstacles that the world will never know just to have the opportunity to love you. Absolutely no one can take that away from you.

In 1995, after he lost his wife to leukemia, my grandfather wrote letters nearly every week and mailed them to his three children. The letters lay out in incredible detail my grandparents’ lives and the lives of their family and friends. In 2020, my grandfather died due in part to complications from COVID-19. I saw him lifeless for an hour or so after his death, and I missed his spirit; when I got back to my room, I returned to his letters. In a masterful one postmarked July 1, 1999, the date of my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, my grandfather encapsulates every five years of their lives in a concise paragraph.This list includes their fifth wedding anniversary when they lived in Paris and their baby, my mother, slept in a dresser drawer; their 15th anniversary, when they moved into “a lovely Eichler house in a liberal ghetto in far-right Orange County;” and their 30th anniversary, when my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia, but beat the odds, living for 17 more years. When he reached the 50th anniversary, he wrote of my grandmother: “We have lost Molly…I feel sad. But much sadder for her. She was giving so much. She had so much more to give.”

When I got back to my room, I returned to his letters.

I Bonded With My Grandfather During Long Drives

After her death, my grandfather, in his 70s, still treasured companionship. By luck, he reconnected with a former college sweetheart, Amy, and they lived a beautiful life together in Santa Rosa for 17 years. After Amy died in 2013, my grandfather moved down to Irvine to be closer to my family.At the time, I was a 28-year-old artist, and my 90-year-old grandfather, still full of vigor and with a healthier body than mine, wanted to see all of the museums in Los Angeles. So I drove from my apartment in Culver City down to Irvine back up to museums in Los Angeles then back to Irvine. He didn’t mind the gridlock; we had a lot of time to talk.Looking back, I don’t remember all of the words we said, I primarily remember wanting to learn from him. I remember doing my best to catch all of his personal history. Sometimes I would retell the stories back to him, hoping they would stick. But what I mainly remember is our energy, our laughter, and our ability to know each other as friends despite the generational divide.

My Grandfather Gave Me Advice on Love

When I was 20 years old, I came out as gay to my grandfather in a postcard. I told him that I hoped I could find the loves that he had found. I hoped my life would be as simple and loving as his life. I don’t remember us formally talking about the postcard; I knew he and Amy just wanted me to be happy. Years later, on the freeway, I would bring up my new relationships to him shyly, hoping to glean some important knowledge that would turn my love life around.In one conversation, I remember him telling me that early relationships are so fun and full of possibilities. I never thought dating was fun, but he made me think I could appreciate the unknowing. I wanted to ask him more questions, but I usually let it go after ten minutes or so. Perhaps I was more uncomfortable than he was in talking in detail about my dating life. Though I had good reason to believe we had different perspectives on love.For an audio project in 2014, I asked him for advice on love. He prefaced in a joking tone, “Dammit if you weren’t a homosexual, I’d have a good one for you.” And as I laughed loudly into the microphone he said, “Maybe it applies, maybe it applies.” I agreed and told him I would let him know. “The only thing I succeeded with in my life was marrying two superior women,” he said.

My grandfather knew how to live a full life.

Over Two Marriages, My Grandfather Showed Me How to Live Fully

On July 1, 1949, my grandfather married my grandmother, Molly, in downtown Manhattan. He writes of the marriage venue as tragic at first: “The district is dingy. Papers are flying about on the street in the wind.” But quickly turns upbeat in relating the “charming” chapel and “dignified” officiant. And when the moment comes, he nearly leaps from the page: “We are married! It is as if a great burden has been lifted from me. I have never been so happy. I am floating with joy.” He shared a grand and interesting life with my grandmother, who he described as an influential social worker, a successful lyricist, an elegant dresser, a rose among thorns.Almost 47 years later, and after a loving life with Molly, he reconnected with Amy. She had lived a full life of her own as a chemist and writer with seven children and an array of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My grandfather and Amy married months after their second first date and lived happily together in Santa Rosa, making strawberry pie and carbonara, attending symphonies, finishing crossword puzzles and enjoying time with friends.He ended his letter in the present. “When I got up this morning and walked into the living room the sun, filtered by the trees, was streaming in through the French doors bathing the room in light. The light reflected off the prism Molly bought and created a rainbow on the wall above the fireplace. I am an unusually lucky man.”My grandfather knew how to live a full life. It’s unclear how many times my grandfather struggled in his life. He wrote about his fair share of difficulties. But they were always tinged with a sweetness of appreciating life. I, too, wish to appreciate life and love through his eyes.

Your ancestors can sneak up on you in unexpected ways. Throughout my life, I've carried my Judaism pretty lightly. I don't go to synagogue or believe in God. I married an equally churchless and unbelieving Christian, and our home is mostly devoid of seasonal rituals, aside from the general celebration of consumerism at the appropriate time in December. My parents sent me to Hebrew school when I was young, not out of any great devotion, but to get us out of the house on weekends. (And because, in my dad’s words, "5,000 years of tradition—you ask yourself do you want that to end with you?") But their half-hearted efforts weren’t enough to carry on to the next generation. My daughter doesn’t go to Hebrew school, and all that tradition is "fucking kaput," as God says in the Bible. (I assume, since I haven't read most of it.)I come by my secularism and alienated indifference to heritage honestly, from my forefathers before me. My maternal grandfather, a successful patent attorney, swapped his multisyllabic, Eastern European, very Jewish last name to a two-syllable, quietly-assimilated white appellation because he was sick of antisemitic discrimination. His wife, like many reasonably well-to-do Jews at the time, converted to Christian Science for a while and retained that religion's confused mistrust of doctors into her 90s, much to the annoyance of her children. I'm reasonably certain neither grandparent went to temple for the last four or five decades of their lives. When I eat a bacon burger on Shabbat, I am keeping the faith handed down to me by my assimilated and aggressively indifferent forefathers.

I’m Part of a Rich Tradition of Indifferent Jews

Those indifferent forefathers could include a lot of famous names. Jewish atheism has an illustrious tradition. Freud, Marx, Einstein and countless other crotchety spiritual forebears picked up their pens, looked over their period glasses, and killed their God (and, not by accident, also the God of those smug Christians who’d been trying to convert them, often violently, for millennia). But while I do take some pride in the Jewish legacy of deicide, I think my own very Jewish distance from Judaism may be in some ways less militant and more a matter of happenstance agnosticism. Right now in the U.S., Jewish public identity mostly focuses on two deeply intertwined themes: the Holocaust and Israel. One of the things I learned in Hebrew school, back when my parents were half-heartedly trying to keep tradition alive, was that my neighbors, as pleasant as they seemed, could at any moment join in a genocide. They told me I’d better give some of my allowance money to Israel every year so we'd have a place to go when my friends and gentile teachers decided to gather together to firebomb my house.

When I eat a bacon burger on Shabbat, I am keeping the faith handed down to me by my assimilated and aggressively indifferent forefathers.

We May Not Be Religious, but My Family’s Politics Makes Us Very Jewish

The paranoia had some merit, no doubt. I experienced antisemitic bullying as a kid, and my hometown is now a bastion of Trump supporters. I occasionally see high school acquaintances and beloved former coaches posting George Soros conspiracy theory garbage. But, at the same time, the paranoia about the Holocaust isn't exactly my paranoia. Both sets of my grandparents left Eastern Europe in the early part of the 20th century and had been in the U.S. for 30 years before Hitler shuffled bloodily into power. I didn't lose any extended family in the ensuing slaughter. Israel was never our refuge; America was, for better or worse, Soros conspiracy theories and all. The trauma of the Holocaust wasn't precisely my trauma. Neither was the heroic narrative of Israeli salvation. Instead, for my paternal grandparents especially, Judaism was more about a secular day-to-day. My grandfather was heavily involved in the Jewish Community Center movement. I vividly remember my confusion when my slow-walking, nondescript grandpa was greeted at our local JCC like visiting royalty. My grandmother was very involved in the Jewish education organization ORT. They were both social workers and organizers and, like many Jews of their time and era, lefty socialists. (My grandfather's brother was named after Eugene V. Debs.)I don't even know where any of the Jewish Community Centers in my city are, but the lefty socialism—that's stuck with me. Evangelical Christian pro-Israel boosterism and a few high-profile right-wing assholes like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Miller can make it seem like Jewish people are mostly Republican. But the truth is that Jews generally are left-leaning sorts. About 70 percent of us vote Democratic in most elections, probably because right-wing populism has never gone very well for us. And historically Jews have been involved in a lot of lefty movements and activism. German Bundists thought that socialist revolution was the path to equality for all, and ardently opposed what they saw as the more provincial goals of Zionism. A community that's been in diaspora so long has perhaps a unique perspective on the ills of nationalism, just as a persecuted religious minority, constantly told to worship a God who supposedly hates them, has a unique skepticism.

They were both social workers and organizers and, like many Jews of their time and era, lefty socialists.

Making a Tradition of Being Non-Traditional

The thing about diaspora is that it's by definition all over the place. Traditions are always disparate things, but for Jews, especially, the thing that binds us together is often not having things that bind us together. For any important historical event, you can find a lot of Jews who can say, "I wasn't anywhere near there." Disconnection and even disavowal is a big part of the Jewish experience—from forced conversions to surreptitious name changes. Nothing is quite as Jewish as marrying a non-Jew, never going to temple and celebrating “Hanumas” with a plastic tree and a bunch of presents.So 5,000 years of tradition doesn't actually quite end with me, I guess. I hope to pass on to my non-Jewish Jewish daughter her grandparents' talent for critical doubt, their adaptability, their ability to make community anywhere they went, and their belief that everyone deserves justice, equality and freedom, no matter where they live. We don't have any God to bless her. But maybe that can be a blessing too.

I come from a history deep-rooted far beyond the United States being a country. I’m one of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, or what we would call North America. I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams, an answer to a prayer made seven generations ago. “Time immemorial” is meant to describe our relationship with those we have come from, but they’re just as, if not more, present in my life today. The words I’ve used to move people don’t use today’s semantics; rather, they synthesize an ideology that stretches beyond the pitfalls of expression. It’s a feeling that normal words fall short in describing, but this is my attempt at trying, for a moment, to meet you halfway. My halfway starts with time immemorial.There are many theories as to how my people came to be here, many of which are based on a whitewashed history. If you’re reading this and aren’t surprised, I applaud you. For my mere existence as an indigenous person is often a topic of discussion, tales of being wiped out as some remnant of the past. I assure you I’m very much alive, thriving and sometimes, despite my very best, just surviving. My people are just one of the many tribes that exist here today. Over 500 tribes are federally recognized, many others have state recognition and some tribes don’t have any sort of formal representation. Some of us who are represented don't need representation because we are far older than the current governing body. Theories of ice bridges and great migration have been debunked as far as the timeline goes. We have creation stories of my people emerging from the earth, occupying a timeline with no specific date but events.

I come from a long line of warriors who have seen the real changes of time.

I Often Think About My Ancestors’ Hardships

I remember an elder talking about how life always finds a way. “Roots versus concrete? The concrete never stood a chance,” she simply said. We are and will continue to be here. Now, what does time mean to me? It may not look like the same hourglass that most are used to seeing, as the small grains fall on top of one another, stacking themselves higher until there are no more granules left in the container. What if I told you the hands that tick by on a clock are the same hands that gently shift the hourglass on its top? It's a little unsettling to think of time as being an illusion and a construct. Of course, I see the effects of time passing as I find myself with new white hairs of wisdom. As the year goes on and seasons change. I feel the gradual push and pull of the moons as she changes into her different nightly attire. I speak with my elders, and in times of need, I often consult with my ancestors. We believe in a timeline that’s not linear but spiraling. I’m talking about a deep sense of time, one that spans back far beyond any sort of my actual recollection. I grew up in a time pre-internet, which may sound unfathomable, but where I grew up we didn’t have running water or electricity, and for many, that’s still a daily reality. I’m talking of my ancestors. I think back to a rich history of elders before me that I can count back seven generations long before contact with early settlers. I think of all the beautiful life that was present here and all the hardships and sacrifices my ancestors had to endure for me to even be here now. When I say I'm my ancestors’ wildest dreams, I may very well be. I’m deep-rooted in my culture and will be in the next generation of ceremony keepers, with a language as old as this land. I speak with my ancestors as they are now part of that landscape, laid to rest in human form. I often sit and ponder about my grandpa who was known throughout our region by many. He lived through arguably one of the most challenging times to be Indigenous. Over his 107 years, he saw a pandemic not of this current time but of days past. A couple of World Wars and the expansion of the great Wild West that encroached so heavily on his homelands. He was a simple man, who went by horse and buggy to sell his fur pelts and raise his sheep, all while actively having a bounty on his head for being indigenous. Within his lifetime, he saw his way of life and religion outlawed.

We believe in a timeline that’s not linear but spiraling.

I Want to Keep My Indigenous Culture Alive

Now, why is all this relevant? Because I come from a long line of warriors who have seen the real changes of time. With an unwavering determination to survive, they were the definition of resilience. When I came into the picture, I stuck with them closely and, despite not speaking any English, a language I was forced to learn as my second, I was able to communicate mostly beyond words. My grandparents were traditional and yet so far beyond modern. The simple way of life that their parents taught them was not something fading away into the past but actually accelerating us into the future. They taught me what it is to have compassion and spirit. That all living and nonliving things possess an energy force that’s not always detectable to the human eye. When we speak of Mother Earth, we mean our actual mother who birthed us into existence. My mom was taken away as a child, along with her siblings, and violently indoctrinated at a religious, government-funded assimilation school. Her language and heritage was actively targeted as being “less than.” She was told not to speak her language and faced repercussions for doing so. “They told us we couldn’t speak our language out-loud,” my mom would tell me, which at the time was scary. But her older sister turned to her and told her, “They don't want us to speak our language out loud and we won’t. We will whisper it.” She and her siblings did just that. At night, alone in their bunks, they whispered their mother’s tongue and kept the language alive, risking severe beatings and much worse punishments. My mom always told me to speak the truth even if your voice shakes, and sometimes, just like them, I just want to be heard and seen. I want to let you all know that I’m still here, I exist and that I matter. This is my ultimate truth-telling.

I’ve always been curious about the connection between genius and madness. I’m not sure if I qualify as a genius, but I have certainly entered states of madness. True genius, of course, would be overcoming my own madness—to get my art out into the world and begin feeling happy and fulfilled. On my father’s side of the family, I’m the third generation to receive shock treatment. There might have been more if it had been available. I received two full rounds after a suicide attempt and another after a blazing fire in my SoHo one-bedroom apartment, which was also my art studio. Some blamed me for the fire, and I ended up in the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital. The art of my life will be surviving some truly hard times the way my ancestors did.

On my father’s side of the family, I’m the third generation to receive shock treatment.

My Mental Illness Feels Like Karma

Both my grandfathers died young, before I was born. My great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, named me Vichna, which means “tender” in Yiddish. And my father gave me my English name, which means “strong.” I am both tender and strong, filled with intense fragility. My mother’s Yiddish name is Goldy. She is like gold. The other day I was talking to my sister about how our mother, a single mom, has the most solid mental health of anyone we know. I have to remember that I have her DNA in me—every bit as much as the DNA on my father’s side that has brought me a karmic mental illness. I have always had that feeling with my father, who was cheating while I was in my mother’s womb. He left the day after I was born, then came in and out of my life. For a decade, I had an order of protection against him. In my mid-20s, he reentered my life, and soon after, I was diagnosed with bipolar I. His mother suffered from depression, and although I was a young child, I always felt understood and connected to my grandma Vera. She used to look deep into my eyes and tell me, “I understand you.” She would also say, “My favorite color is the color of your eyes.”I have lived through a great deal being bipolar: Ten hospitalizations. Suicide attempts. Two full rounds of shock therapy. Unfulfilled love. The one I recognized as my twin flame never saw me being the mother of his children. I am 45, he is 48, and now he has a baby. I dream about him. My dreams didn’t come true with him. I felt for sure that he was my life partner.

My Mother and Father Have Shaped Me in Different Ways

I was always a natural performer. A graduate of Juilliard, I looked forward to a flourishing career and had top representation. People projected I would be a star. The summer before 9/11, I went to Burning Man and soon after was hospitalized against my will, officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 26. Before that, I had no real mental health challenges. I was bullied in elementary school, like so many others. I did, and sometimes still do, keep my room like a nest. Beyond messy. Both of my grandmothers had a huge impact on my life. On my mother’s side, thank goodness, there is no mental illness. My mother made a living as a school teacher, yet in some ways, I see her as an artist. She is very intuitive and creative and capable, able to knit, sculpt, make jewelry and complete the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in record time. I recently requested a certain design for an interesting shawl-scarf and my mother made it the very next day. She is the most loving force in my life. My relationship with my mom stays constant. We touch base every day. My father, meanwhile, passed away in August. He was sick, depressed and suffering for over a decade. After his third wife separated from him, he became agoraphobic. He was a brilliant yet tortured soul. In some ways, however, I feel relief after my father’s passing. I shared his pain. He wasn’t a good dad—I feel bad to say it, but it’s true. He was a wild guy until those last years when he deflated and gave up. He lost his will. A highlight of my relationship and knowing him was in the music. He caught on early that I was gifted musically and brought me to a professional recording studio to record three songs when I was in elementary school. One of them was James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” He proudly attended many of my concerts and left me the original bass guitar he first learned on. It needs fixing, but I will play with it in his honor.

I have lived through a great deal being bipolar.

I Have Forgiven My Father, but Still Struggle

Just today, my stepmom sent me a card I wrote to my father in 2009, when he started to fall into a deep, stoic depression that he never escaped. “You are epic,” I wrote. “So powerful and brilliant. There is more happiness, peace and purpose in the world and in yourself for you to discover. This is not the last chapter. You will get through this and break on through to the other side. I believe in you so much. I love you so much. I am proud that you are my father, and I am proud to be your daughter. I am on your side. We are sensitive. We are strong. We are survivors.” I am sad that he never did, in this lifetime, “break on through” his depression. In his final months, he fixated on his regrets and mistakes and sought forgiveness. I told him I forgave him. In many ways, I am still processing his loss. I do not want to end like him. I am now stable, on medication, still living with heartache and unfulfilled dreams. It is a daily struggle. In my most prolific times, I was hypomanic. Channeling. Fully connected to the higher power. Madness? Genius? Who knows? All I know is round and round we go.

My grandmother’s house was always my sanctuary as a child, a second home. My mother was her eldest daughter, and they were unquestionably close, with a bond that was evident to me even as a small child. We visited her there at least three times a week, where she and my mother would sit for hours chatting out their lives. Her phone number is one of the few I still have memorized to this day from dialing it so often in my youth. I always suspected that my mother’s family was different from others. There was always someone coming or going from my grandmother’s old Victorian redbrick in one of Dublin’s more affluent suburbs, whether it was one of the many university students who lodged with her or a friend or an acquaintance calling to say hello. I grew up with a vast number of people who were intricately linked to my family in some way, although often in ways that were never fully explained. Caroline was considered family, even though we weren’t blood relatives. Nora and Katherine also spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s home, but their relationships with her and my family were unclear to me. It never fully made sense to me how my elderly grandmother had acquired so many much younger female friends, who so clearly held her in the highest regard. Then there was David, a Black man in his late 20s or early 30s who came all the way from Chicago to Ireland to visit my grandmother when I was a child. He piqued my curiosity to no end. I had never met a Black man before, and the obvious affection that he seemed to hold for my grandmother was baffling to me. There were a lot of references to how much he had grown, and what a fine man he had turned out to be, which just confused me all the more, as I had never even heard his name mentioned before his visit. My mother hosted a lavish lunch for David, and I will never forget the tears of happiness in his eyes as he clutched my grandmother’s hand before departing. Episodes like David’s visit were commonplace during my childhood. It was only as I got older, and friends began to ask who these people were that orbited my grandmother, that I began to question them.

I always suspected that my mother’s family was different from others.

How My Grandmother Was Caught Up in One of Ireland’s Biggest National Scandals

Ireland in the 1950s and '60s was not a pleasant place to be if you found yourself to be pregnant and unmarried. It was during this time that my grandmother, a midwife by profession, ran a private nursing home from her imposing abode. In 1954, the U.S. Embassy in Dublin reached out to the Irish government and advised them of a spiraling number of American women who claimed to have given birth in Ireland and were requesting their children be added to their passports before their return to the U.S. After an investigation, it was established that unmarried Irish women were giving birth in private nursing homes like my grandmother's, and their babies were then handed over illegally to an American couple. Birth records and certificates were falsified to list the adoptive parents as the birth parents, money changed hands and everyone went on their way. The investigation revealed that a man believed to be a prominent public figure in Irish life, referred to as “Mr. Big” (not Chris Noth), was behind the scheme, but despite a thorough investigation, my widowed grandmother was the only person ever charged in connection to a scandal that involved hundreds of people. There were dozens of nursing homes in Ireland who were no doubt following in my grandmother’s footsteps, and a network of doctors, priests and other such higher-ups padding their wallets from the black-market baby boom. None of them were ever investigated. Many believe that my grandmother, who was not a particularly wealthy woman, agreed to take the fall for Mr. Big to keep his name out of the news. In reality, she only received a slap on the wrist for her part in the scheme. It seems it was in everyone’s interest to keep the whole torrid affair as low-key as possible, especially after rumors came out suggesting that half of the babies born at my grandmother’s nursing home had been fathered by prominent political figures. To this day, there are hundreds of people out there whose birth certificates are nothing but a work of fiction.

There are lots of opinions about what my grandmother did, and her role in one of Ireland's most shameful scandals, all of which are relevant.

By Breaking the Law, She Built a Family

Of course, I never knew any of this as a child. All I knew was that my grandmother was a woman of immense strength with more allies than I could count. Never once did I get the impression that people disapproved of her in any way. In fact, it seemed to be quite the opposite. Why, I have to ask myself, did these women who gave birth in my grandmother’s home stay in her life? Why did they seem to have nothing but love and admiration for her? The truth is, she helped women find a solution to an impossible situation that would have ruined their lives. And for that, they were forever grateful. Caroline was one of the young girls who came to my grandmother’s house at the age of 15, when she found herself pregnant by a much older man and the orphanage where she lived refused to let her stay. My grandmother took her in, and after her baby was born and given up for adoption, Caroline stayed. She became part of the family, and to this day, she is my aunt. She has nothing but kind words and love for my grandmother, who passed away many years ago. When she got married, my grandmother traveled to London to give her away. My mother was her bridesmaid, and I was her flower girl. There are lots of opinions about what my grandmother did, and her role in one of Ireland's most shameful scandals, all of which are relevant. But she was a product of the time, and I try to hold on to the fact that the people who came to her in their time of need felt loved and supported at a time when their country had turned its back on them.

Almost 20 years later, I am still haunted by the vivid memory of the forced removal by federal agents of my Muslim Yemenite husband, an experience that filled my children with terror and shattered my fantasy of America as the land of the free.The horrors that follow were triggered by my husband's honest response to questions he was asked by a newspaper reporter while enjoying some coffee at a café. What seemed like a harmless exchange led to a long legal struggle against the same government that we all believe is protecting us. Because of my husband’s religion and ethnicity, his candid remarks in response to the reporter’s questions were sufficient cause for the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Forces (JTTF) to label him a “terrorist.” This new label automatically made my husband an enemy of the state and brought JTTF agents to our door.

My Husband Was Abruptly Taken From Us

I vividly remember my husband just finishing his shower in preparation to attend a mosque to celebrate the last day of Ramadan. At that ungodly hour, seven JTTF agents burst into our apartment, and my two children, ages four and six, were awakened by the noise as they ransacked our apartment in search of God knows what evidence. My two children scurried around the living room, crying and grabbing my husband's legs and yelling "Baba, Baba, please don't go." I held my two crying children and watched as agents flew off with my husband.Their mad search produced nothing in terms of evidence. Despite the fact it all happened in a matter of minutes, it left me clasping to my crying children with fear and a feeling of having been violated. I was filled with rage.The ensuing days were torturous. I felt so lost and desperate. My mind and heart were playing games. It was most difficult to grasp the idea that this was all happening in America, where I came to experience a higher sense of justice, freedom and opportunity. The challenging reality of the shadow side of the American Dream began to unfold. I wanted this situation to be over. I moved around with a thunderstorm over my head.

I was filled with rage.

I Witnessed Prejudice and Racism in the Legal System

My kids kept me going. As a mother, I had a need to protect them. My heart broke into pieces each time I told them the story that Baba had gone away to work. In truth, he was isolated from his family and starving because the holding facility where he was being held refused to honor his religious dietary restriction. He was getting weak and losing weight. I had to travel two hours to receive my reward of a one-hour visit. I was overwhelmed—the visitation restrictions felt inhumane, especially the inability to touch or show my husband affection.I felt trapped. How could I go against the United States government? I was losing hope after weeks of trying to find legal representation. How would I find an attorney that would not continue to repeat “It is a lost cause,” with the added note: “It's best that you and your kids go back to Ecuador.” They often failed to notice that my children were in fact American-born citizens. I witnessed the level of prejudice and racism that embody the American legal system and the chambers of so-called "justice."I remember the first lawyer, who called himself "a patriot," refused the case, claiming, “there is no hope for your husband” and urged me to drop the case. He added: “I don’t want to defend someone who is accused of terrorism.” I was unable to sleep, felt exhausted, gained weight and was now also losing my hair due to anxiety. Somehow, after weeks of searching and a good chunk of our savings spent, I found a courageous attorney who agreed to take the case.

I have learned to breathe wisdom and possibility into these dark memories.

My Children Have Become Survivors Through This

It took six years of our lives, because as our attorney put it, “We are going head to head with a prosecutor who favors deporting or jailing Muslims.”For six years, the FBI followed me and my family’s every move. Finally, the judge declared that there was no evidence to indicate terrorist activity and declared that my husband was free of all charges. It was found that my husband had done no wrong and that by speaking his mind during an interview he was merely exercising his freedom of speech, his First Amendment right. I look back and wonder sometimes how this nightmare was created in my children’s minds and hearts? I especially contemplate how all this affects the unborn child I was carrying during this time. I have learned to breathe wisdom and possibility into these dark memories. I have trained my children to be survivors and to stand against injustice with the faith and courage that truth will prevail.

As a child, I always stood in the middle between the Chinese and Black side of my family. I was the ideal genetic combination of my parents, too light-skinned to be my mothers’ daughter and too nappy-haired to be my father’s. As I grew up, I started to realize that the dark color of my skin, and more so my mother’s dark chocolate skin, was a problem for the paternal side of my family, and unfortunately to my dad, too. I was a sweet and innocent child negotiating a racist conflict in my own home. I never really wanted to take sides, and how could I when deciding meant choosing between my parents who I dearly loved? I did not care about being biracial, and I would have never noticed it had they not made a big deal out of it. My paternal grandfather was a vicious man with a small-town, racist mentality. He would have preferred my dad marrying a white or mixed-race woman, but even he married my grandmother, a Black woman of lighter skin tone like me. There is so much irony in my family hating my mother when they, too, were partly Black. How much Black is acceptable before it becomes too much Blackness?

His biggest obstacle was ignoring his own shortcomings.

My Father Resented My Mother’s Blackness

Growing up, I always felt I was never enough for my father because he made me feel little. It didn’t matter how hard I tried to satisfy him, how excellent of a student I was—he always found a reason to put me down and make me feel I wasn’t good enough. I grew thinking that I was at fault and that I needed to fix something in myself. The guilt started to make me feel indifferent and pushed me to distance myself from him. His high demands and his desire to be seen in the community as an important figure sadly did not match his behavior at home. He wasn’t a bad father, but it was very difficult to relate to someone who treated my mother so poorly. His biggest obstacle was ignoring his own shortcomings.There was always this silent, tormenting pressure coming from my dad. I started to negate my identity and felt like I needed to fit into his expectations, sometimes without noticing it. In my town, all the Black girls relax their hair to straighten it, a testament to the instilled rejection of our own Blackness. I was one of them, suffering the burns that all of those chemicals cause just to look a little whiter, or, in this case, a little less Black. This intrinsic and cultural division was so prevalent in my town, which was mainly populated by Black people. We all fell into the hatred brought by colonization and it kept pulling us away from who we really were. In theory, the relaxer did work. I looked more Asian with my processed hair. But that only changed things on the surface.It wasn’t just my father’s negative enforcement I had to face. Everything around me validated that I wasn’t good enough, that my people were not good enough: the media; my all-white dolls with thin lips, blonde soft hair and blue eyes; my mixed friends, who were indifferent about creating relationships with Black people. I just couldn’t be something I wasn’t. Black was written all over me. I clearly remember telling my friends that when I grew up I would reduce the size of my lips because they were too thick. There were always these constant personal criticisms: Why did I bite my nails? Why didn’t my genes contain more of my Chinese side so I would have softer hair? Why this and why that?

I do miss him.

I Have Learned to Embrace My Black Identity

During my early childhood and teenage years, I didn’t feel pretty and used arrogance to cover up her insecurities and fragilities. As I became older, I started resenting my dad because of the way he treated me and my mother. At the same time, the hatred my dad had for my mother started to bleed into me, and I started resenting my mother for being Black. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I started digging deeper into my family and tying up all the loose strings of my life and heritage. I still have memories of going out to parties at the houses of other Chinese families and feeling so awkward because I didn’t resemble them. My father always compared me with other girls who had long soft hair, giving me insecurity without realizing that he had married a Black woman and therefore had a young and beautiful Black daughter. The food was always delicious but I never really felt welcome. I was not one of them.Until this day, I still have a bumpy relationship with my father, and since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve had another falling out. I don’t really feel connected with his side of the family and I am not really sure if I want to make an effort to make things better. As far as my mother goes, I learned to love her Blackness and mine, too, including my curly afro hair. I still have differences with her, but they are not based on my father’s hate.I do miss him. Despite all of our differences, he is still my father. Maturity has made me see him more as a human being with all of his baggage. I still hope and pray that one day we will come together and cry about all of the time wasted fighting our differences and his stupid ideas. It might sound cheesy, but love is thicker than blood, and I don’t care anymore about what type of heritage runs on my veins. All I care about is letting go of the things that hold me back. I hope I can find the courage to make the first step once again because it is more painful not to.

We sat opposite each other, in a gin bar in my university city. This was the first time he’d come to visit, and he looked like a stranger, with aged eyes and greying hair. Before I’d even finished my drink, he was ordering us another, as if he couldn't stomach my presence sober. But his financial generosity was never matched in emotional availability, and after a few units, he looked across the table and told me he didn’t love me. My dad.And then, in the very next breath, he offered me a proposition: “Come work for me.” A few years ago he’d started a recruitment company from his kitchen table, hoping for a greater life-work balance, but it ended up having the opposite effect. The offer wasn’t about me gaining office experience, but him having more time to play golf or meet the boys at the pub, while someone else did his administrative work.I couldn’t think of anything worse, but for some reason, I told him I’d think about it.

I’ve Got Daddy Issues, and for Good Reason

My apprehension towards the role didn’t have to do with the job itself, but the man who would be managing me. If even Beyoncé struggled to deal with having her father as her boss, then surely it would be impossible for me. My dad wasn’t the usual, embarrassing-but-endearing dad who wore ugly flannel shirts and plaited your hair wrong. Our relationship has always been strained. There wasn't one monumental event that ruined our relationship—just a gradual, dull flame that slowly turned it to ashes. I didn’t know if adding work into the mix would cause it to snap entirely.My mum often tells me a story that I think sums my father up. The night she went into labor, my dad refused to drive her to the hospital because he’d already made plans that night. She later discovered the nature of those plans when she found a stranger’s lipstick in the glove compartment of their car.My dad was objectively uninterested in his family and distracted himself with every other branch of his life that didn’t involve his wife or child. Late nights at the pub meant he missed bathtime again. Another overtime shift meant he wouldn’t be coming home tonight. This intensified, until he was forgetting birthdays, and spelling my name wrong the times he actually remembered to write a card.Eventually, my parents divorced, and my mum moved us away from the infectious nosiness of a countryside village, where everyone knows the business of your failed marriage. My father became physically distant, which gave him an excuse for his emotional unavailability.He'd promise to come to my primary school plays and leave me scanning the crowd as I recited my lines to his empty seat. He'd make fun of my hook nose, and when I broke it, he called it an improvement. When I was struggling with my mental health, he tried to persuade me not to get therapy. When I told him about men who groped me in clubs, or ex-boyfriends who took advantage of me, he told me it must’ve been “something I’d asked for.”He would offer me nothing but silence for months, until eventually I’d buckle and visit him, only to arrive and have him go through my bags, read my diary and micromanage every element of my weekend.But he was performatively affectionate, which reduced my ability to criticize him. His veil of financial generosity ensured that onlookers saw nothing but a generous father spoiling his child. He’d regularly post on Facebook about how proud he was of his daughter, when he hadn’t called me in months. And now with this job offer, my dad was yet again presenting himself as the hero and me as the ungrateful villain, never satisfied with his effort.

I couldn’t think of anything worse.

COVID Gave Me Two Choices: Work for My Dad or Don’t Work at All

When he’d made his proposition, I still had ten months until I finished my creative writing degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the careers department told me there were options. I could intern at a magazine with glossy pages and backstage passes to London Fashion Week. Or I could be a teacher, enriching the lives of spotty teenagers with the microcosm of Of Mice and Men. Or even a children's publisher, doing PR for whatever might be the next Harry Potter.The world was my oyster. Until it wasn’t.As spring crept in, COVID-19 cases crept up and the U.K. went into lockdown. Yes, we were healthy and resilient graduates, but as the mass redundancies started, we also realized we’d all be jobless.As we entered a recession, my creative degree was an ineffective shield against unemployment. I was rejected and ghosted by the few opportunities I could find. Moving back home wasn't an option, but I couldn't seem to find work either. And then I remembered my dad’s offer.I’m aware that it’s a luxury to have a job offer in a pandemic, and I am immensely grateful for my privilege. COVID continues to push many to Universal Credit or food banks, and I would never want to undermine how truly awful that is. But accepting a job with the man responsible for two decades of emotional abuse wasn’t easy either.

The world was my oyster. Until it wasn’t.

What It’s Like Having an Emotionally Abusive Father as Your Boss

We spent a week together while he trained me. We sat across the kitchen table and I would ask him a question four times before it would penetrate his eardrums and he’d give his response in the form of a cold glare. He spent a suspicious amount of time playing golf or at the pub, spending his five-figure commission while I ran his company for minimum wage.But during that week we probably spoke more than we ever had before. I genuinely thought this might be a turning point—if he loved his business, and I was his employee, then he would have to love me.For a while, it seemed like it might work that way. Even after my training, he’d call every other day to talk business, and he’d become involved in other strands of my life by default. We’d even go to conferences together in Manchester or Southampton. For the first time ever, he’d verbally express pride when I did my job well.But the serotonin rush of our sudden proximity still can’t fill the father-shaped void in my family tree. The more we speak, the more I expect regular contact, which he fails to maintain. He’ll tell me he needs me at 8 a.m., so I’ll be ready at my desk at 8 sharp, but he won’t send any tasks until the afternoon. I put my days off in our shared calendar weeks in advance and yet he’ll still email me obsessively with urgent things to do. I work 12-hour days and he guilts me into working more.He is everything he’s always been—demanding, impatient, selfish—but now on a magnified scale. The realization that nothing has, or ever will, change within our relationship is difficult, but if anything, I’m glad I took this job. It’s taught me that there is no Dad of the Year waiting for me around the corner. This is it. He’s never going to wake up, like Tom Hanks in Big, as an adult with an awareness of his actions and a desire to alter them.Perhaps my father really doesn’t love me or perhaps he just can’t verbalize it. All I know is that working for him hasn’t fixed anything. Instead, I need to focus on accepting our relationship for the broken vase that is it, rather than trying to stuff it full of roses.

I’m a publicist for a firm that handles a little bit of everything: film, fashion, music, athletes, tech and brands. I help to tell the story of anything that I think that has a good story that should be told. We get hired usually directly by an artist, or by a third party to make sure that the project is written about and talked about. So that could be anything from setting up a TV appearance or photoshoot to an interview, to helping engineer the strategy for an entire campaign. I got into publicity because when I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I played instruments and knew enough about music, and was looking for a get-rich-quick scheme to get out of credit card debt after a year out of college that I spent living like I could make $100,000 out of a $30,000 salary. Of all the ridiculous ideas I had, one of them was to get into the entertainment industry, because I thought I could make a lot of money quickly. I took an internship after I graduated from college, and one of my mentors told me I should be a publicist because I talk a lot. This was surprising to me because I’m not really a social butterfly.

Working in Publicity Gave Me a Front-Row Seat to the Decline of Media

I also wanted to become a publicist because I used to be obsessed with magazines, Vogue, Rolling Stone, the fancy art magazines that were $20 a pop. I was initially interested in the glamour of it: setting up photoshoots, going to award shows, telling stories. To me, writers are some of the most important people because they are literally transcribing culture. But I came in right as iPods were starting to happen, and streaming music and social media started a few years later. Suddenly online presence was something people were thinking about, and print magazines seemed outdated quickly. I truly believe that writers and journalists are artists too, but that’s being stripped away because now the expectation is just to be fast and get the dirt. There are a lot more people contributing opinions to culture now, and there are some writers who just look for quick hits and aren’t necessarily as good as those that truly know the craft of storytelling. They might be super in touch with what’s going on in their corner of things, but in general, I think while many millennials know a lot of information about the past five years, most don’t know the deep, far-reaching history of what they’re writing about. There used to be a lot more competition amongst entertainment writers and editors in that way—Ivy League grads or personalities with their own followings based on their expertise. Writers who are worth their weight wouldn’t take the penny-a-word rate these days just for the clout.The power dynamic in my job has changed 180 degrees since I started. Before, media had much more control and brand power. Young artists aspired to be in Rolling Stone, or in Vogue, or on TV, and it used to be that they probably wouldn’t get there without help. And I entered into it just at the time as those walls were being torn down because of the internet.

There’s a very antagonistic relationship between publicists and the media and it’s becoming even more tenuous.

I’ve Got More Power as a Publicist Now—but Should I Have It?

Things used to be a lot more black and white. If the artist wanted to be in the magazine, they accepted the offer and let the magazine do their thing. Now, the artists expect to control everything in the same way that they control the narrative on social media. They don’t want to see photos of themselves that they don’t like. They don’t want to do interviews where they might get asked weird questions that they don’t want to answer. And publications are more and more willing to meet their demands to get to the audiences they’ve built. So there’s this real question of who has the power? Why does Kim Kardashian need Vanity Fair to say that she’s worthy of praise? She has more social media followers than they do. She can sell things on her own without that co-sign but it’s a different audience. But that brand is still coveted in culture and entertainment. It's becoming a vanity plate in some ways to get those co-signs, when a lot of the time it’s the celebrity bringing weight to the publication, and not the other way around. There’s the notorious story of Beyoncé’s publicist going around asking people to take photos down online that she thought were unflattering. Now clients expect publicists to scrub the internet of certain photos they don't like, or make sure their name is never mentioned alongside their ex. The blessing and the curse of the internet is that it’s really easy to make those changes, so we can make it like something never existed. There’s a very antagonistic relationship between publicists and the media and it’s becoming even more tenuous. Now it’s even worse because everyone wants approval before things go to print—the text, the photos, the layout, the team at the magazine doing the work. This year has brought a new unprecedented level of those expectations, and I feel like I have vetted some big asks before. Not only do the artists want to approve of the photos and the way they’re retouched, not only do they want to approve of all the creative teams, not only do they want to approve of the writer, but they want to see the layout of how it will look on the paper, just to make sure they like every tiny detail. At a certain point, I find myself asking, what’s the magazine's job here?

Journalists Need to Relearn How to Ask Tough Questions

The thing is that a lot of the time I’m actually on the media’s side. I think they should say no to these kinds of asks, even though that's not the stance I can take when I’m acting on my client’s behalf. As someone who likes to read spicy interviews, or see photographers and stylists get artists to take risks, I don’t think subjects should be set off-limits, or that the artists should have complete control. The person being interviewed should just know how to answer tough questions, or figure out what the answer is, or swerve when they need to, or else they shouldn’t do press. Now we’ve created this softball culture where the most famous celebrity in the world can go on a major talk show and promote their product and make charming small talk but will never address whatever their elephant in the room is.I think there's something to be said for seeing that people are human, seeing that they have stretch marks, or that they have struggled with substance abuse or mental health stuff. Because most of us don’t have the perfect come-up or the perfect life. I don't really love having to tell a journalist, “Don't do this, don't do that,” but it’s part of my job, which is to protect my client and make sure that they feel comfortable. And hopefully, the writer can figure out how to ask something beyond the usual clickbait questions.

I don’t know if my job will exist in the same way in ten years. The media side of this industry is running on fumes.

Old School Media Is Heading Toward Extinction—and Old School Publicists Might Follow Suit

I don’t think there is a cookie-cutter strategy anymore of how someone can become famous. A few decades ago, it was like, send the project to the media outlets and try to get your client on TV or radio. Now there are artists that have literally billions of streams and the press don't necessarily care about them. And the fans don’t care that the press don't write about them because they don’t read the press anyway. They go straight to Netflix or Spotify, they go straight to TikTok. Artists still want the media to give them praise, though. There's still that vanity plate of, ”“I made it into the print issue,”.” But there’s a smaller and smaller group of people that care. And I think within the next few decades, the power of a critic’s expertise—and the idea of caring that the person talking about your art who actually knows what the fuck they are talking about—won’t matter. It's the “junk food for the soul” era.We don’t have the kind of common culture that we used to. There’s still Rolling Stone and Vogue and the last of these sort of bigger brands that were the last behemoths of their time. But do those brands have as much tangible influence as a meme artist on Instagram with ten million followers? Those brands hold the weight from a different time, but in 50 years what will those brands mean? Will anything right now last more than ten years? Maybe not. The power’s being parsed out. So maybe being on TV or in a magazine won’t be the end all be all. It’s now like, you could be a completely independent artist or a scripted show based only on social media that no one’s even heard of, and then go make millions of dollars off.Publicity has become a harder and harder job. There’s an emotional toll because you literally have people who are creating art and pouring out their souls, and sometimes we have to just say, “Sorry, PItchfork just doesn't like you.” Or, “Sorry, no one cares that you took four years to make this beautiful project that I love, but it's hard to get anyone to care about it because you decided to release it during Christmas break.” I don’t know if my job will exist in the same way in ten years. The media side of this industry is running on fumes. It’s all based on what these brands were 20 years ago, or new brands with no proven history yet. Everything is so much more disposable now. The reality is, an artist can get a glam team to come make them look good, put it on their own social media, Facetune it up, and push it themselves—directly to their fans and consumers. And getting on some big social media person’s radar can be a bigger deal than being buried on the back-end of a mid-tier magazine's website. I don’t think things are going to work this way very much longer. Everyone's struggling to keep control.People don’t buy into media brands the same way anymore. People buy into characters and stories and moments. Media was this way to tell people stories and get the word out, but with the internet, you don’t need a daily newspaper, you don’t need a monthly magazine, you don’t even need a weekly magazine. You have Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and whatever else. News travels at an exceptional rate now, and there doesn’t necessarily need to be somebody filtering it that's not the person who made it.

"You're not just talking! You could radicalize people!"Those are the hurtful last words I heard from my family before I made my decision to stay in conservative talk radio this year. The last year hasn’t been an easy ride, and sometimes it’s a nightmare, but there is a point to what I do.Despite having a father who was on America’s Most Wanted, a single mother with a fake name for witness protection, I had a pretty normal childhood. We lived in the Deep South during the '90s. Our area was very diverse, and we were poor. We got evicted three times in one year. My entire family is Democrat because "Democrats are for the working people.” I remember being a child and my grandfather telling me how great Bill Clinton was. He'd say, "If he keeps this economy going, we should throw him an intern a week." He meant “to sleep with."

I remember being a child and my grandfather telling me how great Bill Clinton was.

I Did Not Start My Career as a Conservative Talk Radio Host

This was not an uncommon thing to hear behind closed doors about a Democratic politician. No one was shocked, or outraged at the moral decay. It is something I will always remember, and it is why I drifted away from that side of politics. In fact, I rejected politics altogether as silly. It was just another problem that was out of my control, so I wouldn't spend any time thinking about it. We had a hard enough time eating. I didn’t think about being a "conservative talk show host.” I didn't even meet a Republican until I was 16. From what I was told, this Republican probably stole everything he had to get "rich,” and he might even eat babies.He didn't, and he never turned out to be evil. In fact, he took me away from gang life, put me in private school, helped my mother, and took me in like a son. He had the same backstory as me. He grew up very poor in Washington, D.C., and he worked nonstop until he was a very successful real-estate developer. He used his extra money to help my family and other poor families in my neighborhood. It unraveled every talking point I had heard my entire life.He put me through a Catholic college where I studied finance, and helped me start a career in human anatomy and chemistry. I soon became prominent in radio as a teen debating some tough opponents. I didn't lose. Debates were always a rush for me, but then I was fired for breaking the main rule of radio: You don’t ever insult your sponsors. I’d spent a week analyzing data on how harmful one of our new sponsors could be to our audience. All of it was true, and I was ostracized, but I didn’t regret it.

I Got Into Right-Wing Radio for Personal, Not Professional, Reasons

After this, I took jobs in high-risk security while developing my tech career. I was very successful and rose to prominence. Unfortunately, my company took social positions in the middle of a growing culture war, which kept heating up until 2019. Some stances that my employer took could possibly lead to Christianity being persecuted in America. I put my faith above all else, so I opted out. I know it sounds ridiculous. However, I was working in health radio for the cultural abortion debate during 2011. I remember standing firm that life started at conception, and this was my line. My opponents, who were pro-choice, always stated that if anyone could prove life started at conception, they would adopt my worldview.Eventually, modern science did announce that a human life started at conception, so I figured I would get apologies. I didn't. The line just moved further. People started questioning when a baby could feel physical pain, when a baby could think, when a baby could care for itself, and more. Not only was this disgusting for me, but it was highly dishonest. I always believed I was debating in good faith with people who could have their minds changed. I still think like this.I left the world of fitness radio to work in telecom for five years. My highest position was “executive in training," and I was part of the largest merger in American history. As our company grew, so did hyper-partisan divisions within the company. As a public corporation, we were forced into choosing social positions to boost our stock price, and we did not want to “offend” the “cancel-culture warriors.” In 2017, most of the social positions we took included attacking my own conservative Christian values. While it harmed me personally, I was more afraid of the consequences on consumers and the world my son would grow up in. A telecom company with the power to shut off your “connectivity” to the outside world should not be choosing any sides in a culture war. It is dangerous, and the next logical step would be to ban cellular service to people that disagree with the social policies of the company. After all, “you can just go to a different company," even though our tax dollars went to funding our growth.I had to push back. While I could not affect change inside the company, I wanted to talk to all the people who were being silenced by technology companies to see if they were as “toxic” as they were portrayed.

Discourse Is the Key to Bringing Americans Together

My radio career started with a small podcast for a Christian website. This gave me access to people who were having their speech banned by large tech platforms, not just publishers. It was very small to start. I did not care about the views, and I just was happy to speak to these “social outcasts” in the conservative Christian world. I started the radio project because I could no longer stand by while people were smeared by the mainstream media for debating theology or politics. I do not believe any topic should be banned from public view, conservative or progressive. All arguments should be presented to the public, but this was not happening. The culture war was turning to violence, and I watched a new political movement becoming very powerful.This is the party of silence. They have no interest in debate, understanding or common ground. If you don’t agree with them, they will viciously attack you until you can’t provide for your family. I was more concerned with the conservative Christians because of my experience, but I would go to bat for any person who was not calling for violence. I was eventually asked to leave my tech position for undermining “company values," and made radio a full-time gig.

It doesn’t matter what you believe. You are always welcome on my radio show.

My Conservative Talk Radio Podcast Provides a Voice for Those Who No Longer Have One

I scored my first major interview with a Christian who the media has smeared as a Nazi. He had an enormous following but had been banned from social media and the public square because of his deep Catholic beliefs. This only made him dig in deeper, and I watched the evolution of him becoming more radical as he was being silenced. I didn’t trust the media much, and I wanted to find out who he was for myself. I was shocked that he immediately accepted, and he has helped me through the turmoil of changing professions. Since then, I've conducted 150 interviews with major public figures. Almost all of my guests have been removed from the literal "public square" and internet. You will never hear their point-of-view unless you specifically look for them.While most people think that I’m providing a platform to "hate figures,” I still don’t understand the concept unless they advocate violence or racial supremacy. On a personal level, I have never interviewed someone who didn’t try to help my family, even when they disagree with me or my views. I am multi-cultural, and I would not expect a Nazi to speak to me. The experience itself was enough for me to do conservative Christian radio full-time for free. “De-platforming” was becoming more common in 2019, and I believe this directly correlates to the violence you see today. It seems obvious. If you cannot speak to your "political enemies,” the next step is going to be more fragmentation of society, tribalism, then violence.It doesn’t matter what you believe. You are always welcome on my radio show, and I try to show the absurdity of “cancel culture.” If you think someone is "hateful" and take away their ability to speak, make a living or participate in society, you’re going to create the monster that you claim you are fighting—and we cannot afford for that to happen when things are escalating daily. Because I have taken this stance, I am now guilty because of my associations. I have been blackballed from work, threatened and randomly attacked. All because of a free radio show that advocates not silencing people with conservative Christian worldviews. In the same way that cancel culture radicalizes people, I have now been forced to make a living in radio because of how I am judged by employers.I wanted to prove that everyone I spoke to was a human worth listening to, even if you disagreed with all that they said. Most of the people on my show have been forced into hiding, lost income, jobs and will never have a public minute away from harassment. It is easy to blame them for holding a public position you would find to be disgusting. It is much harder to get to the root of why they feel that way and befriend them. One day your views may be considered "disgusting" and "hateful" by mainstream culture, but you will have a show where you can present your ideas without fear. You cannot ban thoughts. You can only present ideas and gain feedback. That is my mission, even if some people think I am leading a Christian, right-wing audience into bad ideas.

We were told we were there to change the world. We were told our jobs were the most important in the world, that we were making a difference to the people who needed it most. In reality, we were there to help the partner pay off his house in Beverly Hills. When I first was confronted with the reality of this, I was shocked. Then slowly, over time, I became numb to it. Almost like the adage about the frogs in boiling water. Every new hire went through the same journey. Their first day: bright-eyed and beaming about making the world a better place, changing lives, helping people. Then slowly, the joy would get drained out of them.There is a dark humor to it all. An absurdity. That the most soul-sucking job I have ever done was charity work. But of course, it wasn’t funny at all. It was a lie to make money dressed up in the veneer of philanthropy. The way it worked was this: Celebrities would sign on with us for philanthropy consulting, and we would help them choose a cause to “own,” whether it be childhood hunger, maternal mortality, climate change, pet adoption. We would build a nonprofit around their name, use the nonprofit to raise funds and then funnel some of those funds into the cause. Still, quite a bit went into the pockets of our agency’s partners.

We were there to help the partner pay off his house in Beverly Hills.

Celebrity Philanthropy Is a Front for Agencies

At this particular agency, there was jealousy and possessiveness. There was fear of clients being stolen by underlings only one or two years out of college. There was emotional (and physical) abuse—along with a lot of low-key star-fucking happening. The partners constantly talked about who the biggest celebrities were, which ones had the biggest social media followings. They didn’t want people to think they were actually like this, though, so they had to couch it in pseudo-philanthropic language.“I bet Jay-Z’s following could really get activated around a prison reform campaign,” they would muse. “Can you check how many Facebook fans and Twitter followers he has?”The message to us was: “Of course we aren’t thinking about them as celebrities. We don’t want their money. We want their activism.”But we all knew this was a lie. They wanted as many celebrity names and celebrity foundation logos on their website as possible, so that it would make the next celebrities that much more eager to sign on. Adding people to emails who had nothing to do with the client’s account. Looping people into conversations just to show how big the company was. Exploiting clients in order to get others to sign on while never hiring enough staff members to actually do the work they’d promised to their clients. They stacked each of us to work on five, six, seven clients, paying us less in a year than a single client paid in three months. It was essentially a pyramid scheme—a great one.Because once a celebrity starts a nonprofit, especially one bearing their name, they can’t give it up. They might as well tell People magazine, “I used to care about other people, but I don’t anymore.” No one would do it. So, they’re stuck.The partners knew this and leveraged it endlessly. Thus, all of their efforts were focused on business development, getting new clients, adding more names to their roster and very little was actually done on the back end. It was a shell company to run money. And the worst part was, our company wasn’t unique. Most celebrity philanthropy agencies operate similarly.

One Story Sums Up Why It Was One of the Worst Jobs Anyone Could Have

A particularly bizarre aspect of working for this agency was that the partners were always very nervous about employees poaching their clients. So sometimes, counterintuitive as it may seem, they would try to make us look bad, just to ensure the clients would never leave with one of us. One day, we had a meeting with an A-list celebrity couple client. We drove up together—one of the partners, who I’ll call Jan, along with my colleague Haley and me. When we arrived, Haley and I were told to wait in the car while Jan went in first to “discuss some private matters.” She told us she would text us when it was time for us to come in. It was a hot day—90 degrees in L.A. Thirty minutes passed. Then an hour. An hour and half. Finally, the client texted me directly. “Where are you?” So the partner hadn’t even told her we were waiting in the car? It didn’t make sense. I texted back. “We’re waiting in the car outside.” She came rushing out the front door. “Are you okay?” She was aghast. I tried to downplay it. “We thought you had a private meeting with Jan so we were waiting for it to end. We’re okay!” I smiled to show her just how okay we were.“She told us we were waiting for you to show up,” the client said. Jan had been trying to make us look bad. She’d done this kind of thing before. I just shook my head. “We’ve been here an hour.” I was always trying to cover for their bad behavior, to downplay how horribly we were treated. In truth, it had been an hour and a half. The client frowned at this revelation. “Come inside and have some coconut water! You must be so hot!”

Believe It or Not, the Situation Escalated

After we got inside and guzzled about a gallon of water each, we joined them in the living room where they were arranged on a massive sectional. My plan was to pretend that there was no issue. “Why did you leave them outside?” The client flashed an angry look at the partner. She feigned shock. “I had no idea they were here! Sorry—I must not have gotten your text! My service is terrible up here.”Obviously, there was no text as we’d driven together. She was lying. But worse, she was mad at us for telling the truth. We could tell from the way she clenched her jaw, tightly enough that you could see its inner workings from the outside.The meeting began. But she was mad. She interrupted and dismissed us every time we talked, as if to prove how much we weren’t needed at the meeting. She glared at us when the clients weren’t looking. And finally, she picked up a tennis ball, gooey from the client’s dog’s continuous gnawing, and did something low, even for her. She pretended to throw the ball for the dog. The first time, it hit Haley’s feet. The dog snapped it up and brought it back to her. Jan continued talking and threw the ball again. It hit Haley in the stomach, then rolled back to the ground. The dog brought the ball back to Jan. She threw it again. This time it hit Haley squarely in the face. “Ouch!” Haley yelped. She had been silent until then, but the ball was wet, and Jan had thrown it incredibly hard.The client stopped talking, eyes wide, and turned to Jan. “Jan, why are you throwing the ball at her? You’ve hit her three times!”Jan instantly gave us all a smile, one that she probably thought made her look like an innocent child, but instead made her look like a witch. In a baby voice, she said, “I didn’t mean to hit her! My aim just isn’t that good.” Then she smiled at Haley. “I’m so sorry,” she said. But we knew she wasn’t. And we knew we would pay for this later.

At times it felt worse than working for a cigarette company or a for-profit prison.

I’ve Never Felt Worse Than When I Was Doing Celebrity Charity Work

After about six months there, I was fully disillusioned, not with celebrity philanthropy, but with these agencies. Very little money was going to the actual causes the agencies dreamed up for their clients. The vast majority was instead lining the pockets of the partners, helping them build their business. At times it felt worse than working for a cigarette company or a for-profit prison. At least those businesses didn’t lie about what they were doing, didn’t operate under the marketing of doing good and changing the world.I wrote a letter telling the partners exactly what I thought of them. What I thought of their operation, the way they were treating their employees, the way they were decidedly not changing the world. I didn’t have anything to lose. I traveled the world alone after that, trying to erase the ickiness I felt deep in my bones by moving as quickly as I could from place to place. I hoped, deep down, that by absorbing enough new experiences, I could somehow replace my memories of lying constantly—to clients, to the partners, to myself.Years later, when I read The Devil Wears Prada, I laughed out loud. It felt as if the partners had based their personalities, their entire business style, their ethical code on the Anna Wintour character. It was almost too cliché. I quickly amended the title: The Philanthropist Wears Prada.

Like many wide-eyed dreamers, I found myself in New York City waiting for the train in a piss-stenched Manhattan subway platform at 21 years old—cold, miserable and broke. As I watched trains pass and crowds collide, I often questioned whether I was just tired or actually wanted to die. I had been up since 5 a.m., spending my day on set as an unpaid production assistant, or a script supervisor, or perhaps I was building props. Maybe it was a late night, and I’d left my apartment in the afternoon to attend my second job, where I guided celebrities down the red carpet at big-name movie premieres and sat special guests in the seats. Either way, I knew one thing: This lifestyle wasn’t sustainable.

I Moved to New York and Chased My Ambition

Two summers ago I decided to move to New York City; it had been a pipe dream for a while as a young theater kid turned pop-culture-obsessed adult. I came close to moving once before, picking up an Americorps gig right over the Hudson River in Newark, but I ended up leaving early. I returned to live with my father after long commutes became combined with the dread of working in an industry (education, at the time) that I felt zero passion for. But this time, I enrolled in a graduate school program focused on media and creative industries, as I was otherwise reassured that my communications degree would get me nowhere. During my first night in the city, I called my father crying, yearning to return home. I moved into a tiny third-floor apartment in Northern Brooklyn that I shared with three—sometimes five—roommates. It was the middle of the summer. I saw cockroaches scurry across my barren bedroom floor and heard scratches in the walls, which may have been my subconscious tricking me (the interior of my building was filthy and I had definitely seen a gaggle of rats in the entryway). “They don’t show the actual roaches and rats in rent,” I cried into my phone, cursing myself for my ignorant idealization of the starving artist trope (and my year-long lease).Otherwise, I was blessed and settled into two jobs very quickly. One was a retail position at a Soho pop-up shop for the television show Friends. The company that hired me also staffed the merchandise booths at a good amount of Broadway shows. I had my “in” and I had it quick. The second job I nabbed prior to my move—a special events assistant that helped primarily with red carpet movie premieres. I remember the post-interview build-up after I got the job, despite the warning messages on Glassdoor forums. “It’s a really cool opportunity,” the interviewer assured me over the phone. “We get really busy most months, especially during awards season.” Throughout the moving and settling down process, I channeled a similar kind of energy and excitement—a giddy optimism that comes with finding yourself for the first time. At this point in my life, I was living independently and I was truly exploring my interests and dislikes—my sexuality, my love for sipping cocktails in dark bars, my introverted nature. With graduate school, there is no big mixer or forced days filled with icebreakers: I was a new girl in a new city. I gushed about this to my friends online and offline. “Yeah, movie premieres. Big deal, huh?”

I had my 'in' and I had it quick.

Red Carpets and After-Parties Became My New Normal

My first premiere was a walk in the park. I was assigned to seat guests at a small premiere for an Alec Baldwin movie. He wasn’t in attendance, but actor Matt Bomer showed up last minute and we quickly arranged the accommodations to get him a prime seat in the house. I stood in my designated area and observed him boast to his friend, “Want a chickpea? I brought my own snacks.” It remains one of my keenest moments.The next premiere was for a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch. On red carpet duty, I escorted the movie’s director, a short, stout man, through photography and interviews and joked to him, “You survived the hard part, now you get to go enjoy your movie!” Nothing frazzled me at this moment. Cumberbatch arrived later and was as handsome and suave as expected. He made small talk to the three of us standing there before gliding around the carpet. It was simple. I stayed quiet and did my job. I watched the other women chat about their outfits and their high-profile jobs and what auditions they went to that week. I noted how one of the other workers wasn’t in dress code. The following premieres were a blur. I grew more confident and found myself exchanging pleasantries with my coworkers and bosses. The founder of the company began showing up more, only ever popping in to berate staff. Whispers of “he scares me” filled each room. Months down the line, I was invited to work an after-party and jumped at the prospect. It was another all-star event—a motivator that I still don’t understand to this day. What was I expecting? A Disney wish-come-true? To be discovered as a low-level employee who is secretly harboring some worthy, forbidden talent?During the tour of the after-party venue, my supervisor scuffed up a placemat. We stood there and watched her call over the newest coordinator to scold him. She made him hustle to pull it back together. Later that night, I was sent messages of varying degrees to “make sure all of the guests are comfortable,” and to “make sure they are all sitting in their labeled seats,” but “don’t be too direct, just make sure everybody is having fun.” It was overwhelming to say the least. The cherished workers stood around drinking cocktails and mingling, occasionally biting at me to fix a placeholder or to rearrange the tables. But I told myself in Liza Minnelli’s voice, “That’s showbiz, kid.”

Recurring moments like this taught me this lifestyle is unsustainable, and that the constant promotion of fake it until you make it is incredibly harmful.

The Glamour of My Job Quickly Wore Off

One of my most harrowing experiences came after an event in which Sarah Jessica Parker attended. She was the caricature of New York City herself, the leading image of all of my Sex and the City fantasies. After the guests were seated and the movie began playing, all of us gathered in the venue’s entrance. This was the first time I was in a group that was invited to eat the fancy leftover food from the reception.“Did you guys see Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoes? They were gorgeous. I just wanted to hug her,” I gushed happily. “Well, I hope you didn’t,” one of my co-workers, a woman who had worked there for much longer than I had, responded. She was close friends with two of my supervisors.“I mean, of course I didn’t.” I said, avoiding eye contact as she stared at me skeptically. I had basic sense, I read the same handbook as everybody else. At this moment, my facade slipped. I wasn’t a gritty, unbreakable New Yorker. I wasn’t a child of a movie producer, just working to get a better feel of the industry. I didn’t have a high-paying job at Viacom. I stood around the table and watched the final slider not be eaten. I turned to the woman next to me who had hardly eaten. “I’m a vegetarian, so I’m not going to eat it,” I joked. “I wasn’t waiting for your permission,” she told me, not looking up from her phone. “I’m on a diet.” These interactions weren’t idiosyncratic. At first thought, I am reminded of the time where Jessica Walter, the matriarch from Arrested Development, yelled at me for asking to see her guest’s ticket. My assignment was ticketing and I had no idea who the guest was as the two arrived at very different times. My job was simply to look at tickets and see if they had a reserved seat or not. I remedied the situation by grabbing her sparkling water and some popcorn, despite it being a self-served event. I’m also reminded of actor Patricia Clarkson getting worked up because I asked if I’d spelled her name correctly on my whiteboard (used to help photographers identify talent), when I saw her give it a funny look. “If the photographers don’t know who I am by now, my entire career has been a waste.”

The Industry Attacked My Worth and Self-Perception

Recurring moments like this taught me this lifestyle is unsustainable, and that the constant promotion of “fake it until you make it” is incredibly harmful. I slowly felt my passions and my buoyancy fade away. My days and nights became filled with pretending like I didn’t care, and watering myself down to fit in with pseudo-socialites and privileged members of the upper-class—people generally able to live their life with little care because of their profession. Meanwhile, the only space I have in my closet-sized kitchen is for frozen meals from Trader Joe's, and every night I sleep caressing a can of Raid. These last few months have provided me with many moments of clarity. I have been without a job and the recipient of endless rejection letters since March. I’ve reflected on the good and bad of my experience, and found myself at a stalemate, knowing whole-heartedly that my life’s work has been altered. I’m a transparent person. I rarely have to question my authenticity. I am malleable and breakable. Many people assume my hopefulness, wonderment and awe gets in the way of my expertise; they instantly place me in a box labeled “fragile and incompetent.” Maybe there’s a place in this glamour-driven industry for me and maybe there isn’t. However, what I know for certain is my worth. I will not allow it to be faked and watered down to placate those who can’t be bothered to remember that we’re all composed of the same cells.

The first time somebody asked me if I believed in the theory of evolution, I was 25 years old. I literally laughed in the poor guy's face. Let's call him Joe. My less-than-flattering response to Joe's question wasn't out of malice. Not at all. It was just such a ridiculous question that I couldn't even imagine he might be serious. Turns out, he was very serious. Then he told me he believed the earth was about 6,000 years old. At that point, it became difficult to contain myself. Really? Did people this ignorant and ridiculous really exist? In America? In the 21st century? Wow.Growing up at ultra-elite and highly secular international schools across multiple continents, it never would have occurred to me to make fun of creationists, mostly because I didn't even know they existed. The fact of evolution was a universally assumed truth. It was a presupposition that I had not even spent time considering, any more than I spent time considering whether the moon might be made of cheese. After all, it seemed so logical and obvious, how could anyone question it, except perhaps the most unhinged religious fanatics or people living in remote jungles untouched by civilization?Indeed, my unconventional upbringing and education outside of the United States had been saturated with the evolutionary worldview that I was—to borrow an old cliché—like a fish oblivious to the water that surrounds it. In fact, I don't remember hearing a single person dispute the supposed fact of evolution for the first 25 years of my life. After all, I was receiving a world-class education at schools alongside the children of billionaires, CEOs, political leaders, media barons and other ruling-class elites. Obviously, I was being taught the truth and could be proud of it, even snobbish. Right?

Really? Did people this ignorant and ridiculous really exist? In America?

I Was Confronted by an Evolution Denier

Even after becoming a Christian in my early 20s, the thought that evolution might not be real was unthinkable. It didn't cross my mind. At all. Instead, the implicit assumption, even after accepting that the Bible was true, was that the Book of Genesis must be metaphorical. Surely evolution must fit in the story somewhere; maybe God used evolution to create mankind, and Adam and Eve were the first highly evolved monkeys. Or something. That is what many self-proclaimed Christians believe to this day, so my beliefs were hardly out of the ordinary.But then came the day I'll never forget. After taking on contract work for a prominent conservative organization headquartered in Northern Virginia, I flew across the Atlantic to begin training. I was the only one who came from overseas for the job and was thrown into a dorm with a bunch of other young guys from colleges across America. As we were filing into the conference room for our daily training, the aforementioned Joe asked a question that would eventually shake my worldview to the core.“So, do you believe in the theory of evolution?” Joe asked.“What?!” I blurted out before literally laughing out loud in his face. “Theory?!”This guy has got to be pulling my leg, I thought to myself. I mean, really: Who could ask such a dumb question? Why not ask whether unicorns were hiding under my bed? It would have been just as sensible, if not more so. At least, that's what I thought.Then, he told me he believed the Bible “literally” and that God had created the world about 6,000 years ago in seven days. I believe the Bible, too, but this was all way too much. Surely we could be Christian without giving up common sense and basic science, right? What in the heck was I doing around people like this anyway? Were other people here this unimaginably brainwashed and naive? Little did I know that within a few years, I would be eating some gargantuan pieces of humble pie. Despite the absurdity of it all, Joe's question refused to dislodge from the fever swamps of my mind.

I even decided that I needed to re-examine all my beliefs and presuppositions to make sure they were grounded in reality.

My Belief in Evolution Changed on the Internet

After being expelled from high school, I went through a major reckoning of sorts. When I was 18, taking hard drugs in South Africa's wine country with some beautiful girls, I had this pseudo-epiphany (as often happens when people ingest such substances). I realized that the “justice” system, policing and pretty much all of modern man’s systems were deeply flawed, if not ludicrous.In college, while doing court-ordered community service at an actual Communist library, I picked up a book on the Federal Reserve and the money system. I realized that the deception ran deep. At some point, I even decided that I needed to re-examine all my beliefs and presuppositions to make sure they were grounded in reality. Was one-plus-one really two? And yet, it never occurred to me to add evolution to that list.A couple years after returning to Scandinavia to be with my partner, I came across a YouTube video about evolution by Kent Hovind. He talked so ridiculously fast that just listening to him was entertaining. But then it started getting uncomfortable. He pulled out a high school science textbook and went through the parts on evolution: Millions of years, images of monkeys turning into ape-men and then homo sapiens. Finally, Hovind started explaining why these textbooks weren’t just flawed but there was evidence that macroevolution does not happen. "Were the fossils really created by Noah's flood?" he suggested.One of the examples that pierced me involved bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. In my textbooks, this was “proof” of evolution. But in reality, it was nothing of the sort, Hovind explained. Rather than becoming more complex to resist the antibiotics, the bacteria were actually losing genetic information that made them susceptible to antibiotics. The same was true for the infamous example of dark moths overtaking lighter moths in London as the city got more polluted. Yes, natural selection was weeding out genetic programming that was unsuited to the conditions, but it wasn’t adding any new genetic information, merely subtracting. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.Could I have been deceived? I had to know more.

Creationism Is Widely Believed In America

Over the coming months, I fiendishly watched everything I could find by Hovind and others on the internet. Especially interesting to me were debates these creationists had with biology professors and other supposed experts. In vain, I searched for credible information to debunk what Hovind was saying. Then I started gobbling up books on the subject, too. Finally, I came to the inevitable conclusion that I had been deceived and that I owed poor Joe a serious apology.Now that I'm back in America, at least for the time being, I also realized that I'm not alone. Depending on what poll you believe, half or close to half of the American population rejects the evolution hypothesis, as I call it. Just a tiny minority believes it came from slime that turned into fish that turned into monkeys that turned into humans with no help from God. Films like the 2017 documentary, Is Genesis History?, are turning the tide, too, despite generations of only-evolution in public schools.A couple of years ago, I even went to an evolution conference in Istanbul, Turkey, that featured prestigious scientists from around the world. The Turkish government had ended the teaching of evolution in schools, and I wanted to learn more. It was an incredible opportunity to interact with scientists and experts from around the globe who thought “outside the box.” And I'll be forever grateful.More importantly, the whole experience with Joe and his question offers a series of valuable lessons: 1) Question everything. 2) Be tolerant and respectful of others' beliefs. 3) Just because you received a fancy, overpriced education doesn't mean you know more than anybody else—in fact, you might know less. 4) Science and scientists are fallible, and just as susceptible to group-think and peer pressure that afflict the rest of us. 5) There is a good reason that the scriptures have been revered down through the ages, making the Bible the best-selling book of all time. I’ve learned never to laugh at anybody's seemingly silly questions ever again.

Charli D’Amelio. Ever heard of her? Chances are, if you were born before 1997, probably not. If it weren’t for my time as a high school substitute teacher, I’d have idea who she was. Basically, she’s a millionaire, social media icon and one of the hottest names in pop culture right now. And all it took was one viral video. In June of 2019, D’Amelio posted a video dancing alongside her friend on TikTok, the social media platform created for short music, comedy and talent videos. Within 24 hours, the video had more than one million views. Since then, she’s amassed a following of around 100 million followers on the appIn addition to her growing popularity, she has a net worth of $4 million, making her second in Forbes’ list of highest-earning TikTok “stars.” (I refuse to seriously call anyone who gets famous via Tiktok a “star.”) If you Google her name, she’s defined as an “American dancer” but her style isn’t something you’d see on So You Think You Can Dance—it’s not lyrical, contemporary or ballet. It’s mainly arm movements to popular hip-hop songs. Listen, if I can do these dances, that’s saying something. I’m aware I’m publicly hating a 16-year-old, but as someone working towards a career in entertainment, it’s frustrating to watch someone get everything you want overnight for dancing to “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy. But congrats to Shaggy for making a comeback. It’s no secret making it in the entertainment industry requires a bit of luck, but I wish that luck would have fallen on someone who works harder, someone who actually deserves it, like American Idol contestants…or me.

And all it took was one viral video.

Let's Be Real: I Deserve Fame More Than She Does

I’ve spent so much of the last five years sitting at open mics, waiting hours to get on stage to talk for three minutes. Do you know how many dick jokes I’ve had to listen to the past five years? More than anyone should. When I die, I’d like a log of all the hours I’ve spent at open mics, and how many emails I’ve sent to shows asking to perform. On second thought, I don’t want to know. Because she has such a large following, major brands have reached out to D’Amelio to promote their products and services. Some brands have even collaborated with her, hoping to gain more exposure. I’ve complained to so many people about this, about how insane it is posting 15-second videos on an app and suddenly you’re the face of Jif. Why not me? I love peanut butter. Of course, there are those who disagree with me (pro tip: don’t say anything to upset Gen Zers, they’re terrifying), like my younger cousins, who idolize D’Amelio. She’s someone they aspire to be. (I was hoping for RBG or Greta Thunberg, but we can’t have everything.)D’Amelio’s even famous enough to have tabloids reporting on her. The New York Post recently released an article discussing the influencer’s loss of one million followers after she received backlash from a YouTube video. Why is this news? There are people dying. Apparently, her fans perceived her behavior in the video as “bratty and ungrateful.” She responded by giving a teary apology on her Instagram. I want millions of people to think I’m bratty and ungrateful! I deserve it more than she does! She recently tweeted showing off her new hair, which got more than 25,000 likes. I consistently tweet jokes I wrote and average around 20 likes. Maybe I should be tweeting more about my hair? I know I’m really picking on D’Amelio, but she’s not the only creator who’s gained popularity from the app. There are several users who produce content similar to D’Amelio, like Addison Rae, a 20-year-old with more than 70 million followers. In a recent YouTube interview, Rae says she puts a lot of thought and effort into her videos. She posted a ten-second video lip-syncing to Drake, wrinkling her nose and pouting her lips. Anyone want to guess how many views it got? 3.2 million. I’m sorry, what?

Why not me?

Today’s TikTok Stars Were in the Right Place at the Right Time

I guess when you have millions of followers who adore you, you can post anything you want, but if all it takes is posting a video of a silly face, why aren’t we all social media icons? I make plenty of silly faces and haven’t earned a single dollar for it. I did post one of my standup clips that got more than 500,000 views, but I got more comments telling me I wasn’t funny and that all women do is talk about sex. It wasn’t my favorite thing I’ve ever heard, but it wasn’t my least favorite. Of course, not everyone on TikTok is the same. I’ve seen plenty of videos I really enjoy, but most of the creators don’t get the recognition they deserve. Let’s all give up and start dancing to Shaggy. That seems to be the ticket in. Long story short, D’Amelio and Rae are examples of being in the right place at the right time. They’re cute and likeable, teenagers who boys want to date and girls want to be. Will their success last forever? Who knows? Do I hope they’ll have to get real jobs someday and put “TikToker” on their resume?Absolutely. Moral of the story: Stay off TikTok unless your dreams have already come true. Now if anyone needs me, I’ll be begging bookers for a spot on their show.