The Doe’s Latest Stories

This story is Part Two of a three-part series about people who got diagnosed with autism late in life, a group experts have dubbed “The Lost Generation.” Read Part One here.

When I took my three-year-old son for his assessment, I had no doubt they would confirm he had autism. What was shocking for me was the doctor’s suggestion that I, too, may be autistic. Though in hindsight, my son is the spitting image of all of my “eccentricities”—and autism is genetic. 

This can’t be true, I thought. I’m a pastor! I can’t be autistic. My role would be infinitely harder if that were true. I had believed my entire life that I was simply a horribly awkward, confused, and weird person. I was blessed (or cursed) with the insatiable desire to gain pure mastery over whatever my mind would fixate on. (No, seriously—ask me anything about J.R.R. Tolkien's work, the ancient world, church history, or theology.) Along with my own unique traits, I assumed I was merely anxious, depressed, and terrible at socializing. That seemed the obvious explanation for the lack of friends, the years of being bullied, the horrific self-destruction. 

That was who I was…wasn’t it? Or could my entire life of living on the outside really be explained by the way my brain is wired? After a year of obsessively learning everything there is to know about autism so my wife and I could best help my son, I came to the realization that the best explanation for all of my life experience—my challenges, my ostracization, and even my unique strengths—was that I was autistic. 

So after several sessions of assessments, I was diagnosed and the doctor’s suspicions were confirmed. I began to give myself permission to say “no” to social gatherings when I didn’t have the energy. To reject overstimulation, rather than fight through it. I began to accommodate my life to the brain that God gave me. As a result, I’ve done away with the unhelpful, mislabelled anxiety and depression, along with the meds that failed to bring me relief. So happily ever after, right? I understand who I am, accommodate my life to match, and model for my son a healthy way of thriving as an autistic individual. 

Not so fast. All of the heaviness, mental anguish, and trauma of growing up heavily masking the autism I didn’t understand would only return if I didn’t take the final step of integrating my life: I had to be open about my autism.

How do I fulfill my highly social and public calling, without donning a neurotypical mask?

The fact that I’m a pastor brings with it two unique challenges: Firstly, how do I fulfill my highly social and public calling, without burning out from donning a neurotypical mask? Secondly, how do I reconcile my autism with my faith, not simply for myself, but for all those I am called to form and lead?

My calling as a pastor requires me to revolve my life around people. The image that often comes to mind for a pastor is a friendly, extroverted individual. Highly social, and highly relational. This is to some extent true of the calling. I tried to live up to this ideal of the hyper-extrovert who has mastered the art of small talk. This was what had caused me to live with a lowgrade autistic burnout for years. I realized that would not work if I were to continue in this role—which I firmly believe is my call from God. 

So how do I fulfill the role I believe God has called me to, with the accommodations required? This turned out to be the easy part. I don't understand social intricacies or the way that the neurotypical variety speak sometimes, but I love people. I also love being in small gatherings of people having real conversations. Do I love the large, dynamic gatherings? Not so much. However, aside from Sunday service, the majority of my social interactions are smaller and more in depth. Which is where the “autistic superpower” of increased empathy comes in handy—so long as I take the steps I've learned to balance out how to respond to that empathy. In fact, the more I began to allow myself to be truly, genuinely myself, the better I became at my role.

The second obstacle was far more difficult: How do I understand my autism in light of my faith? More importantly, how do I help the people I pastor to understand? In every community there are the common barriers of misunderstanding when people learn you are autistic. People wonder: Are you unintelligent? Are you weird? Are you dangerous? Are you capable of handling responsibility? 

Those assumptions are utter nonsense, of course. But there’s a strain of Christian thought that believes that God will always heal, from all things, if you have enough faith. This minority view can present problems when a pastor, who is opening the Word of God and proclaiming in faith the promises of God and direction of Jesus for His people, also says “by the way, I am disabled.” This is the understanding that many in the church have concerning autism. That it is a disability. Something inherently bad. Something that one should desire to be healed of. 

Now, I believe that God can heal—that Jesus has the power and willingness to respond to the prayers of His people and heal when and where it is His will. But I don’t think autism is something that needs healing. I believe what the Bible says, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that God formed each of us in our mothers’ wombs. I don’t think my brain is broken; I think my brain is a unique part of how God made me. 

I knew saying all that would mean that some people would leave my church. That some people would no longer be able to respect my teaching, as they would view me as mentally disabled. I wrestled with this fact. Would it be worth the risk to live openly autistic? 

I wrestled through this in prayer. It was impossible for me to live a truly integrated life if I could not be open in my church—these people are my life, my community, my family, the people God has called me to care for. Then I noticed something. There are a number of teens, children, and even adults in our community who are also dealing with their neurodivergence, some openly grappling with the same shame I had been. Some trying to hide, even from themselves. I was not the only one. 

So I decided it was time. I became open about the fact that I am autistic, and that I believe that God made me that way. I receive it as a gift—one that comes with its challenges, for sure—but a gift that enables me to serve in my calling far better than I could if I were not. 

As I feared, some people were upset. Some left. Some were unable to reconcile this fact. Yet the majority received this news and it changed nothing, aside from creating a chance for our congregation to also live openly and authentically. So I continue now in every space to advocate for autistic acceptance, especially within the church. For everyone to see and receive us with the unique brains that God gave us.

I feel like I’m being gaslit. How do I recover from this?

Does this message seem manipulative?

Are there red flags in my responses?

Do gaslighters doubt their perceptions of reality?

Anyone who has endured emotional or psychological abuse may recognize themselves in these questions. These are just a fraction of the ceaseless uncertainties that rattled around in my head as I tried to piece together a series of events that had entirely dismantled my life. Of all my predictions for 2023, the most unexpected was how an AI chatbot would play a pivotal role in clearing the nebulous haze of being gaslit.

I’d recently moved to a big American city from a smaller European one, and didn’t have a lot of connections in my new location. While I was meeting people through my work in the music industry, it was hard to shake the sense of being an outsider. Just when I was seriously considering the possibility of transferring back home, I was introduced to Will, a music journalist, by a mutual friend. There was a clear romantic connection between us, and we ended up dating fairly soon after. 

It was only after a few dates that I received a message via social media from a woman called Gina. She introduced herself as Will’s ex-girlfriend, and was reaching out to warn me about some concerning patterns in Will’s behavior. At that point, I should have walked away, but Gina’s reputation preceded her: I’d heard from others that she was not over Will. Besides, the loneliness of being new to the city, and the strangeness of receiving such a message—that didn’t seem congruent with the person I was seeing—left me unsure who to trust.

In a state of panic, I screenshotted Gina’s message and sent it to the friend who had introduced us. Neither of us knew what to believe. After reviewing Gina’s messages and hearing Will’s perspective, I decided to trust him.

There was something about the neutrality of an AI chatbot that seemed necessary to keep a grip on reality.

Over time, I grew increasingly insecure in my relationship with Will, as I started to notice certain parallels between my own experience and what Gina had warned me about: emotional distance, the breakdown in communication, and my own pervasive sense of unease about the relationship. While the true cause of all this was murky, I certainly didn’t feel like Will took my concerns about Gina—and his readiness for a relationship—seriously. I alternated between blaming myself and Will for this burgeoning lack of trust. In just a few months, I began to feel like I was losing my mind while figuring out whether or not I could trust Will, and eventually ended the relationship. 

In the confusion of the breakup, I decided to give Gina the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t certain that Will had been manipulating me, but I did recognize that the relationship had left me feeling emotionally neglected and disconnected from myself. Seeking clarity, I reached out to Gina, perhaps looking for the closure that Will had been unable to provide. 

What happened next is something I can only describe as utterly disorienting. Gina’s response was filled with accusations and interrogations. I was pressured to admit to things I hadn’t done. I had the entire narrative of my relationship fed back to me through a distorted lens, one that presented me as some kind of maniac who had interfered in her and Will’s relationship and was now trying to get him back. When I tried to set the record straight, I was met with deflection and told I was trying to control the narrative. 

It quickly became apparent that Will and Gina had reconnected in the aftermath of our breakup. He had evidently told her details about our relationship, which were now being twisted and used against me. Gina also revealed that she and Will were now “revisiting history”— whatever that meant. I firmly told her I wanted no further contact and blocked her, my head spinning.

It was at this point that I turned to ChatGPT to pick apart what had happened. There was something about the neutrality of an AI chatbot, rather than a biased human being, that seemed necessary to keep a grip on reality. I copied and pasted the message I’d sent Gina into the chat, with some basic context, and asked if it seemed okay to send. The chatbot replied: Your message seems respectful and considerate, expressing your thoughts and feelings in a genuine manner. You’re acknowledging her past experience, sharing your own perspective, and offering a conversation if she’s open to it.

While AI is not a substitute for professional help, it became a validating and vital tool in my recovery from this experience.

This, to me, was the first sign that my message wasn’t the duplicitous and aggressive invasion of boundaries that Gina had insinuated. Through my initial conversations with ChatGPT, I started to recognize the elements of gaslighting and manipulation in my interactions with Gina.

But it didn’t end there. Just a few days after my conversation with Gina, I saw her at my workplace. Initially I passed it off as a coincidence, due to our shared industry. However, seeing her at subsequent events and learning she had interviewed for a role at my organization raised concerns. Despite my attempts to set boundaries, her presence at industry events only accelerated, leading me to doubt my perceptions – after all, it was impossible to prove she was doing any of this intentionally. Even after I eventually did resign and made plans to return to Europe, Gina’s actions and the support she received from mutual acquaintances continued to undermine my sense of reality, despite how my close friends and colleagues interpreted the situation. This was compounded by hearing others in my circles supporting Gina’s distorted version of events.

Through ongoing conversations with ChatGPT, in tandem with real-life discussions in therapy, I slowly built up a back-catalog of evidence that this wasn’t all in my head. Despite blocking Gina, she still contacted me and those close to me on different profiles – confusing messages which I then analyzed via AI, further revealing the extent of the manipulation.I outright asked the chatbot if one of Gina’s messages had signs of abuse: 

Yes, there are several signs of potential emotional manipulation and intimidation in the message: 

(1) Guilt Tripping: The sender mentions having connections in the music industry and implies that their presence predates your employment, suggesting that you are somehow intruding.

(2) Gaslighting: They downplay your concerns by stating that you are “creating pointless drama,” despite referencing being aware of your wishes for no contact.

(3) Threatening: The sender mentions informing others about your “intrusions” and hints at contacting your employers, which could be perceived as a threat to your reputation and privacy. 

(4) Invalidation: They dismiss your feelings by suggesting that you should “get a life,” implying you’re overreacting.

(5) Deflection: Instead of addressing your concerns directly, they shift focus to your professionalism and potential repercussions for setting boundaries at your workplace.

Through these conversations, I was slowly beginning to synchronize the facts with my felt sense that I was experiencing a deliberate and sustained attack on my psyche—even if I lacked hard evidence. Alongside help from real human beings, the AI model ultimately helped me to trust my instincts and advocate for myself in the face of an ongoing pattern of gaslighting and harassment.

While AI is certainly not a substitute for professional help, it became a deeply validating and vital tool in my recovery from this experience, and the ensuing post-traumatic stress. By offering a neutral perspective, AI can help individuals recognize and respond appropriately to gaslighting tactics which are used to silence us and destroy our boundaries and sense of self. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has used this technology in such a capacity, and if this piece inspires others to do likewise, then perhaps we can move away from the assumption that all AI is destructive and instead gain a more nuanced understanding of its potential to enhance our perceptions and interactions within the world. 

Like every American child, my “say no to drugs” education began well before I was old enough to even fully understand what drugs were. Retired cops would come to health classes or assemblies and rattle off stories of brain damage or addiction or overdose. And my wonderful mother, ever up to date on the news, would warn me all about the dangerous substances she was certain my fellow kids were abusing. Chapstick on the eyelids. Doing shots of nutmeg. And, of course, synthetic weed. 

I remember her warnings about “spice,” the unregulated synthetic cannabis found at gas stations and convenience stores around the country. I remember the horror stories of oregano laced with gasoline and fentanyl. I thought, Surely I will never buy synthetic marijuana products at a gas station. Surely they are dangerous and would kill me. 

I came of age in Chicago, right around the time of legalization in 2020. Before that, my only brush with illicit hemp products was a puff of a vape in a freshman dorm room. But suddenly, dispensaries and weed cafes were popping up across the city. The first dozen times I took Delta 8, I had no idea it was any different than garden-variety weed. I wasn’t taking random unlabeled gas station edibles; I was ordering a hemp drink from a barista. When I was a baby weed user, all I knew was that you could get legal weed all over the place, and I trusted it must be enough if a human cashier was charging my card and handing it to me. 

Delta-8 Tetrahydrocannabinol is a psychoactive substance found in trace amounts within the cannabis plant. Since it’s just about impossible to grow, it’s typically manufactured in a lab the same way vitamins are. And, much like vitamins, Delta 8 is unregulated and can contain all sorts of mystery solvents and chemicals. Last year, scientists even found heavy metals in some Delta 8 vape cartridges. Which is not the same as oregano laced with fentanyl, but it still isn’t great. 

I did, however, have some great trips on Delta 8.

I wish I had known Delta 8 can cause hallucinations; it is quite stressful to start hallucinating without knowing why.

The best trip of all occurred while violating the rules of Pitchfork Music Festival. I have a beautiful memory of popping a Delta 8 gummy bear on my way to the train. It kicked in just as I arrived at the music festival. I wandered around, dizzy and happy and disoriented but not particularly concerned about it. The music all felt so much more vibrant, the food tasted twice as good as it should’ve, and I couldn't care less if I was wandering around and grinning like a high idiot. My trip lasted the entire day. I lost about six of those hours laying on the dirt under a giant beautiful tree, convinced that it loved me. I sobered up at the end of the night, ready once again to navigate the trains. 

You might be thinking: an edible? Really? Doesn’t that sound more like psychedelics? 

I did not know it when I was a 21-year-old baby weed user, but Delta 8 can cause “hallucinations, vomiting, tremor, anxiety, dizziness, confusion, and loss of consciousness.” 

I wish I had known Delta 8 can cause hallucinations before I hallucinated on it. As you can imagine, it is quite stressful to start hallucinating without knowing why. My previous trips, like at the music festival, sometimes came with vaguely psychedelic feelings. But the first time I had a full-blown hallucination on Delta 8, I was terrified.

The story here is as old as time: I didn’t read the label of the liquid hemp I was mixing into my tea, and I may have drunk several hundred milligrams. I went out with friends. By the end of the night, we wound up at a pizza place, and I realized to my horror that I couldn’t read the menu. I went outside and fell to the ground, panicking over the fear that maybe I’d permanently forgotten how to read. On the walk home I kept asking my friends if they could see the bright flashes of light all around us. Of course they couldn’t. The next day, I was so freaked out I didn’t even tell my therapist.

Eventually, I pieced together that my night of hallucinations and forgetting how to read was drug-related, not just a sudden bout of mental illness. Eventually, my prefrontal cortex finished developing and gently reminded me that I should read the labels of the products I consume and maybe even look up words I didn’t recognize. 

I wound up on the Reddit forums reading all about Delta 8, bonking myself in the head for being such a fool. Of course it was more psychedelic than garden-grown weed. Of course I should’ve read the label and not consumed enough of it to tranquilize a horse. Of course I was normal. 

I wish that I had not just put random psychoactive substances in my mouth with full faith that they must be fine because they’re legal. I wish that there was some regulatory body ensuring safety and consistency. I wish that the kind baristas who made my hemp drinks had told me more about the effects of the ingredients. I wish the unregulated dispensaries I visited as a young person had more clearly posted information about the products they sold. 

Even so, I am a Delta 8 fan to this day. There’s no substance I’d rather be using to lay under a tree at a music festival. For the price of a coffee, you can lose a whole day to fuzzy psychedelic connectedness and heightened senses and laughter. Or you can take too much and forget how to read. Either way, read the labels and don’t be afraid to ask questions about any substance you’re consuming. It might not be what you’re expecting.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

I'm the child of East African immigrants. Of their four girls, I'm the youngest by quite a bit; my sisters were 13, 11, and seven when I was born. As a result, they weren't just my siblings—they had to participate a lot in my caretaking. Caring for a young child from 3pm until early evening is a lot for someone who's eight or nine years old. This was the early ‘80s, when things were a little fast and loose when it came to parenting. And my parents worked a lot.

I don’t have many early memories of Sarah, my oldest sister. Even though she was the oldest, she was the least involved in my care when I was younger. When I cried as a baby, my dad would wake up my second-oldest sister to tend to me—not Sarah. There was always an understanding: “Don’t bother her.”

She went to college pretty close by, and she would come home every week. She would play my dad’s fancy stereo and blast music and talk about college experiences that just felt like another world. I thought, One day, I can experience these things. These are really wonderful memories. But not too long after that, the visits home stopped. It suddenly turned really dark and serious. Sarah had to go away to a mental health facility and was diagnosed with depression. All I really understood was that my sister was gone and everyone was sad. 

She came home from the hospital the summer I was seven years old. My parents were at work all day, so I was alone with her and my other sister, Karen, who was 14 at the time. That’s when the chaos really started. Sarah was severely depressed, but she would also kind of ping-pong between that and mania. She stopped taking her medication early on, although my parents believed she was still on it. When Sarah was manic, she was irritable, angry, and paranoid. I became a student of her, because so much of my comfort level at home was based on her mental health. I could tell if she blinked slower that day. I closely observed her, so I would know what was coming next.

This is one of my most vivid memories: When my sisters and I were all sitting at the kitchen table, Sarah got a knife and held it to her wrist. Karen started wrestling it out of her hand and yelled at me to go downstairs. I did what I was told and turned up the TV. That was one of my escape mechanisms; I would also listen to my Walkman really loud to drown out all the yelling. In this moment, Karen, who was a child herself, felt like she had to be my protector. And Sarah really should not have been alone. (Being with two children is the same thing as being alone when you're in a mental health crisis.)

At a really young age, I decided that I had to figure out how to be safe.

At a really young age, I decided that I had to figure out how to be safe. I always made sure to have friends and a place to go after school, because my fear was not knowing what I was going to find when I came home. It was bad enough watching someone in a bipolar state, but there was also the verbal abuse. Sarah would rant about things that didn’t make sense, for hours, sometimes until 2 in the morning. She would tell me about wildly inappropriate things, like her sexual encounters. In her mind, I think she thought of me as her confidant. 

There was one summer, when I was about 8, I was doing swim lessons at the community pool. It was my sister’s job to take me, which meant it was my job to wake her up. Every morning I would get cussed out. I would tell my mom that I just wanted to walk by myself, but my mom would insist that Sarah take me. I would go to my swim lesson emotionally wrecked. Oftentimes I would be in the pool just crying and shaking. The swim instructor would ask me what was going on; I didn’t have the words to explain it.

One summer when I was nine, my parents left together for a long weekend. Sarah was supposed to be the one watching me. As soon as my parents left, she left too and told me, “If you tell anyone about this, I’m going to kill you.” I took that very seriously. The whole weekend, I just hunkered down. I made myself a pot of rice. I remember being really, really scared, especially at night. I had a vague sense of like, She’s not supposed to do this. Your parents would get in trouble for this. I didn't have the guts to tell them, but I did secretly hope someone would just discover that I was alone. 

It happened again another weekend, that same year. A close family friend, an uncle-type-person, called and found out I was alone. He came and got me, and I spent the weekend with him and my cousins. There were a few adults in my life who cared for me in this way. They didn’t know about my sister’s illness; it was not to be discussed. But they knew I needed something. They were like saviors to me. Any time I could have any kind of normalcy was so precious. For about a month, I had a former Girl Scout troop leader pick me up and bring me home with her after school for three hours. It was like heaven. But one day my mom told me I wasn’t going over there anymore. I never found out why.

I remember one time trying to tell my mom what was going on. I started to tell her that I didn’t like being alone with Sarah, that it made me scared. But Sarah heard me through the door and she started yelling at me to be quiet. My mom didn’t say anything more. 

My sister lived at home until she was 30 and I was about 17. There were some times of “remission,” I guess you could call it, because bipolar disorder is cyclical. But she had a big manic relapse in my early college years. Around that time I started to piece together all the things that had happened in my childhood. First I was angry at Sarah, and then later I got mad at my parents. When you're in college, you get a glimpse at other people's lives and you can compare. It made me realize all this was not normal and not healthy.

It was a little bit of an awakening for me, but progress was very slow. I was still programmed to run to her anytime she needed help. Even when she moved out, we spent a lot of time together, because of a Stockholm syndrome-type urge to still be attached to her.

As I got older, I tried to ask my mom, “Why did you leave me home with her? Did you know how sick she was?” My mom immediately felt she was being attacked. She would tell me how hard it was for her. She told me a story about a night where she had to drive around in a thunderstorm looking for Sarah, but then I started thinking, Where was I? I was at home, asleep, alone again! She didn’t make the connection. My dad has been able to at least listen to these stories, but I think my mom feels so defensive because she was the one who was there more.

I’m now 40. I’m married. A few years ago my life got complicated: My father-in-law passed away. I had to have surgeries for fibroids. I was doing IVF. I couldn’t always drop everything for my sister. I realized that I cannot attend to her in this way. It's killing me. 

So I went essentially no-contact. This was a big deal in my family culturally—you’re always supposed to forgive your family. My parents still don’t accept it, and it’s taken a while for my other sisters to support me, too. But I took a stand. I was like, I cannot be her caregiver. I can't be part of this anymore. I have people in my life that need me. I need me. To this day, I don’t think anyone in my family understands that I was often with Sarah morning til night with nowhere to go. I was the only one who had that experience. Everyone else could leave. 

Growing up, my mental health issues showed up in a few forms: my heart pounding in my chest, becoming unable to speak, feeling so much fatigue that I couldn’t enjoy my favorite things, and intrusive thoughts alarming me on a decent day.

I suffer from OCD with symptoms of anxiety and depression. The OCD in particular has me dealing with those intrusive thoughts—and then compulsions in an effort to get rid of the thoughts. Bouts of depression sink me into stagnant periods when I’m unable to do anything, even pleasurable activities.

I felt alone and lost for a long time. I’m glad I finally took the step to get professional help, but there’s still something that makes my mental health journey particularly hard: my Indian Christian family.

I love my heritage and culture. Our rich and vibrant traditions, festivals, clothing and food are key aspects of my identity that I cherish. But “mental health” are two words that are taboo within my South Indian culture. Many (though not all) Indian families have the idea that mental health is not a valid ailment and is somehow exclusive to white people.

This sentiment would crop up during trips to the doctor or personal stories about my struggles. My mom would tell me I have nothing to be anxious about because we live good lives. Of course I’m grateful for the life I have, but that doesn’t mean that my mind will never fail me.

Many Indian families have the idea that mental health is not a valid ailment and is somehow exclusive to white people.

When we’re surrounded by fellow Indians, everyone is expected to talk a lot. Greeting elders and conversing with people my age is the norm. But due to my socially anxious tendencies, I would find myself unable to speak up and talk to other girls. It didn’t help that most wouldn’t acknowledge my presence or try to include me in conversations. During family visits to India, I would give one-sentence responses, my parents would answer questions for me, and older family members would ask why I don’t open my mouth. At the end of the day, I would be told off by my mom. I would either be very annoyed or just cry. 

Then there was the time when I posted a status on Facebook expressing a low point in my life. Unfortunately, my grandparents saw the post and called my mom to ask about it, leading to a breakdown for me and a bad scolding from my parents. From that day onwards, I couldn’t talk about mental health around my family or other Indians for a long time. 

Even if they all mean well, it’s frustrating how little they know about this facet of so many people’s lives. I didn’t choose to have anxiety, OCD, and depression. Why would anyone? I’ve yearned to be “normal” for a good portion of my life. I can be proud of my background while also wondering why mental health is seen in such a negative way by our community.

My family’s faith is another challenge I’ve had to face. Born into a Christian family, I’ve retained my beliefs into adulthood. However, I still have issues with how Christians miss what the Bible actually says and perpetuate their own ideas under the guise of faith. 

I would overhear my family talking about other people’s poor mental health as a result of not believing in God. What about me? I pray and I believe in God. In fact, when I started exhibiting more extreme symptoms of OCD, I found myself trying to take my faith much more seriously by writing down affirmations, praying, and reading the Bible.

I’ve heard so-called Christians equate mental illness to having demons influencing their minds. This is extremely damaging and hurtful. It shows a clear lack of knowledge on how brain chemistry works. I have suffered with intrusive thoughts nearly all my life, and they’re involuntary. 

I’m extremely grateful to have found fellow Christians who suffer from the same or other mental health issues and raise awareness for our community. But there are still so many other Christians who feel isolated and troubled as a result of the stigma against them. 

I was finally diagnosed in October of 2019 and have since been taking medication, received therapy, and helped raise awareness for OCD. I’ve even taken a stand towards my parents; they try to accept that I have mental health issues but still have a long way to go. My new church community has embraced me and conversations around mental health. I want to try and do my part in raising awareness with activists so young South Asians and Christians don’t have to feel trapped and alone.

When your father-in-law dies from a terrible disease like ALS, the last thing you are expected to do as the spouse of a grieving man is show any shred of glee. The rules of conduct dictate that as the life partner of someone in mourning, you must share the sadness and carry yourself accordingly. It would be considered equally cruel and even disrespectful not to carry the grief. 

And yet, I never shed a tear for this man. Not one. I tried, mainly for the sake of my husband and my children. But I never could, because my father-in-law was an asshole. And nothing could have prepared me to juggle that knowledge while consoling and supporting his son through his loss.

We’re supposed to be there for our spouses through grief; that’s part of the “for better or for worse” vow. I have honored that vow and will continue to do so. But it is incredibly exhausting and stressful to not let my true feelings about the deceased seep through my words, my tone, or my demeanor. I’ve had to listen to my sweet spouse repeat what a hero his father was while repressing the impulse to shake him so he might finally see that he is a better man than his father could've ever hoped of becoming. But I likely never will, because it would break him. It might even break our marriage.

My father-in-law was a present dad (not a great one) and a sweet grandfather to our kids. But he was also a manipulative, selfish, bordering-on-narcissistic man. I only started to see the real version of my father-in-law about 10 years ago. I won’t delve into the details, but it involved infidelity and manipulating the narrative to portray him as the victim. This all peaked once he was diagnosed with ALS, because guess who came back home to his wife with his tail between his legs when he started to realize he could not live on his own anymore and his great love affair vanished into thin air once real life hit him hard?

One man’s hero is everyone else’s festering open wound.

He always painted himself as a great man. He wasn’t. I know this; my mother-in-law knows this. My husband does not. Rather, I suspect that subconsciously he knows. There is no way the man I married is not aware that his father was full of shit. I have to believe this.

Losing my father-in-law is not about me. And watching my husband go through this loss breaks my heart. Just like life is not lived in absolute terms, death is a complex event that can bring distilled clarity and release or deliberate fantasizing about the dead. No one will admit this out loud, but there are overlapping realities within the experience of grief. One man’s hero is everyone else’s festering open wound.

My father-in-law battled ALS for five years. I could never hate anyone enough to wish them the living hell of this cruel, brutal, and devastating disease. My heart broke every time I saw this man lose more of his abilities, more of himself, all while his mind remained lucid. We were watching a man become a prisoner in his own body: unable to speak, to eat, to move, and even to breathe on his own. And there was nothing he could do about it.

But I am glad he is gone, and not just because of the unavoidable relief that swept through our family after caring for him 24/7 for what felt like decades. I am also glad he is gone because he was a jerk. In a way, his disease was a reflection of how he expected his family to be around him. To accommodate to his needs and wants, no matter the consequences to everyone else.

What always made it so hard for me to move past all this was how much of myself I saw in my mother-in-law. If I were to accept this as “normal,” what would that say about expectations for my marriage? I don’t judge my mother-in-law for her choices; her and I get along great. When she passes, I will be devastated. There will be many, many tears shed. I will mourn her preciously. She is my confidante, and I am hers. We had each other during my father-in-law’s prolonged illness. She would confide things in me that she could not possibly share with her children, and I always had her back.

I was her greatest advocate because, even in his illness, her husband would attempt to twist the narrative of things in his favor. As compassionate as I was because of his physical deterioration, I could still see through the “woe is me” act. And had it been anyone else, I would have accepted it, because life has been shitty enough to you if you end up with ALS. But from him, a master manipulator throughout his life, I could never fully trust it and lean into it, even in moments of extreme hardship.

It was the first anniversary of his passing the other day, and my husband wanted a family dinner to honor the date. We have already celebrated the man’s birthday last month. I don’t know how much more I can take without breaking “character” and letting my true feelings pour out. And I hope I will continue to have the strength to keep biting my tongue whenever praise is spoken about the deceased. But it gets harder every week. My commitment to my marriage and my husband outweighs my resentment for his father. For now.

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action and race-conscious admissions. The following story is based on an interview with an admissions associate at a liberal arts college.

I’ve been working in college admissions for six years. I was part-time back in 2018, working at the college I attended. Gradually, I took on more responsibilities and fell into a full-time role.

When the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action came down, our university president put out a statement saying that we were still committed to inclusion. I put up something on Instagram, which I don’t normally do, saying it was horrible and concerning. Privately, we were in meetings and we were all kind of confused. We weren’t sure what it would mean for us, a liberal arts school that is selective but not highly selective like the Ivies. Within the whole university, the acceptance rate is about 66%, although within a particular school those numbers can range from 35% to 80%. 

Here’s how it typically works: We read the whole Common Application, from start to finish, primarily focusing on the extracurriculars, the essays, the letters of recommendation, and then the GPA and transcripts. There’s a little section where you take notes and write anything about their bio that stands out. Other than that, I leave out any bio from my notes. Sometimes if the student is borderline, like below a certain GPA or has really concerning writing but a high GPA, we'll send it to a panel and then look at it all together with my team and go over if we think the student would be successful. 

I was trained by someone that was our partner for a scholarship program for low-income students. She was really on it about flagging students that were high-need. Back in 2018, I would often put “BIPOC” in the notes, but that never really impacted the final decision. In the past, race wasn’t mentioned all that much; I remember one director I worked with would bring up race sometimes. We would send an application to panel to talk about them, and she would say things like, “It’d be really great to enroll an Indigenous student—we need that diversity.” Or, she’d tell us to go find more Pacific Islander students. She would get really excited about the fact that we could get a non-white student, almost like she was exotifying them.

We’re lucky in the sense that we've never had diversity numbers pushed on us. Our school is already a really diverse institution. I think it's about 60% international. So at my level and even my director’s level, we weren’t told that we need x, y, z amount of Black students, Indigenous students, Hispanic students. Some institutions might have had that imposed upon them. So, at least when we're looking at applications, we're not ever discussing race anymore in panel meetings.

Post-SCOTUS decision, I pretty much do all the notes the same way that I used to, except I don’t mention “BIPOC.” If I’m writing notes on their background, I’ll mention if they’re from a single-parent family, or they’re low-income, or they’re the first generation in their family to go to college—which are all often related to race. Another thing I look for on an application is if they have an application fee waiver. They have to write a letter through their school counselor in order to waive the $60 fee.

And then obviously within the essays, there can sometimes be indicators, too, but usually there's not an indicator of high need in an essay. Students will sometimes write about race and racism. They’ll write about media representation, and sometimes they will talk about being bullied for their race or because they’re an immigrant. I read an application recently from a student in a border town, who felt left out and confused about their identity.

There's also a community disruption section on the Common Application where you can write anything that's happened to you recently. The prompt might be like COVID-related, but students take that opportunity to mention undiagnosed mental health struggles like depression or anxiety or ADHD—more than I ever saw when I first started working. There are students struggling with houselessness because of the pandemic, students having to work to help out their parents, things like that. They would take it to acknowledge, for instance, that during COVID both their parents lost their jobs and they had to take on part-time work, so they couldn't do extracurriculars because they were working.

In terms of how it’s affecting applications, students don’t seem to be thinking about it—or maybe they’re just not telling us. In the fall, I did some recruitment events, which would have been right after the SCOTUS decision, and we didn't really get any questions about it. I don't know if the students that are coming to meet with us even know about it. I know that with very, very selective schools, it's a bigger deal, so maybe those students are taking it into consideration. Whenever I meet with students, I tell them to utilize the "community disruption” or “additional information” sections. I explain that it’s a really great place to talk about any struggles that you've had, whether it's academic, personal, or financial—just so that we have context for your application. 

At this point, we’ve made our admissions decisions. I won’t be sure until we have an enrollment breakdown in April, but it seems like our numbers are pretty on trend—I haven’t noticed anything different. I’m honestly surprised, because when the decision came out, I was concerned. But I wasn’t thinking about the big picture in the sense that we usually didn't look at race explicitly; we looked more at all the things that race could affect.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

I grew up in a little town in Alberta, Canada. We were the average middle-class family. My dad was an over-the-road truck driver, so he wasn’t home a whole lot. But life was good—my mom stayed at home and she took care of the house perfectly.

My twin sisters were born five years after me, in 1969. They were spoiled all their lives. They were the babies, so they were my mom's favorite. I got along with my sisters when we were growing up. They were the average teenagers, bright and cheerful, always into school athletics like cheerleading and softball. I was more laid-back and not really into sports. I loved camping.

When they left home, they moved over to the east side of Canada. They never came around or checked on my mom or dad. I stayed in my hometown and married eventually. My dad died in the late eighties, so it was mostly me just checking on my mom, calling her on the phone and going to dinner with her.

Then she got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It gradually got worse through the years. She was forgetting things, she couldn’t drive anymore, you had to watch her a lot more. It got to where she would be somewhere and she wouldn’t know how she got there. So I had to start paying very close attention to her, and then eventually I told her it was safer for her to just stay with us. So she moved in with me and my husband in the early nineties.

When she first moved in with us, she had her own money. She got life insurance from my dad. Initially it wasn’t a financial burden because we owned our house, we had no major bills. But later there were more doctors, more care, more nurses. It turned into more or less a 24/7 job. Eventually my husband and I separated, so it was just me and the nurses. I was semi-retired, so it was literally my job to take care of her. I had been a hospice nurse, a professional caregiver.

When she needed their help or even just their love, they weren't there for her. 

During all this, the twins were no help at all. They were concerned about their careers—one was in advertising and the other was in some kind of business handling law firms. They had no idea what to do. Since I’d been a hospice nurse and I was still close to Mom, they felt I was more capable of handling what was going on. I would tell them that mom would ask about them sometimes, on her good days. After she had a stroke, she had very, very few good days. Then I would tell my sisters, “She's not going to be around forever—you should come spend what time you can when she’s here.” 

But they would say they couldn't leave their jobs, they were busy, and they just kept putting it off. I feel like them spending time with her would have helped her a whole lot during her downfall. At first they wanted me to keep them informed, but then it got to the point where they were no support whatsoever. It was like they didn't care. My mom had done so much for them; they were her favorites. Yet in return, when she needed their help or support or even just their love, they weren't there for her. 

That really just got to me. I did not understand how people could be so cold and self-centered. It destroyed my love for them. After a while it was just like, “Okay fine, just stay away.”

Eventually when things got even worse, when it was more than I could handle and still say sane, I had to put her in an assisted living home. I checked in on her every day or every other day, making sure she was okay. I think she really enjoyed it there, because there were more people around. She got more attention there. 

But then she had a fall. When they called me, they’d already transported her to a hospital, and she had broken her wrist and punctured her lungs. They were keeping her sedated. At that point I called my sisters to give them an update. One was on vacation, neither one could come, not even to visit. They thought I was taking Mom’s money; that’s all they seemed concerned about. 

Meanwhile, she had developed pneumonia and was just trapped in her body as a vegetable. So we decided to take away her means of life support, because she never wanted to be on a machine to keep her alive.

After she died, the twins were all about Mom’s things and what would happen to the house. They just wanted to sell everything and get their money. So I went to a lawyer's office, and I had the papers drawn up, and I gave them their part of the money. 

That was more than 20 years ago, and I haven’t spoken to them since. I figure it’s best that way. They know what they’ve done, so I figured, well, if they can live with what they did, I can too. I didn’t want to fight about it, I just didn’t want to have any contact with them. 

This year, I was sitting around on my mom’s birthday and I thought, Life is precious. My mom is my world. I just don't understand how, being raised in the same family, the twins looked at things totally different than I did. I don't know if it was because I was older or they were spoiled, but I would think that if your mom gave you everything throughout life, if she was so good to you and so attentive, attending ball games and cheerleading, that you would be more concerned with her life in the end. But I guess some people are different. My sisters would say to me, “Mom always encouraged us to go after our dreams, be driven.” I thought they took that a little bit too far.

I’ve made peace with everything. I don't hate my sisters. I still love my sisters, in my way. But families need to talk about how it is so hard when just one child does the end-of-life care. I would do it again in a heartbeat, spend every moment I could with my mom. But it was hard. It was really hard.

My eight-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer two months into the pandemic. I'd always been a heavy drinker, but managing cancer as a single parent of two in a country where our healthcare is dependent on my employment pushed me into nightly blackouts and days spent struggling through cold sweats.

We spent more weeks in the hospital than out. I held it together, showed up for work, dropped my son at my mother’s house and lugged my laptop back and forth to take Zoom meetings from my daughter's hospital room. When we were home I juggled keeping her central lines clear, doling out meds, and cleaning up messes in the middle of the night when her feeding tube leaked sticky formula all over my bed. I supervised my son’s e-schooling and signed consent forms for every stage and medication of my daughter's treatment. I spent so many nights curled around her in her hospital bed, holding her in the bend of my elbow and kissing her bald head until she fell asleep.

But on nights when I was home, I drank. I waited until my kids were asleep. Then I sat on our front steps and sipped wine out of a mug and chain-smoked American Spirits and nodded to people who passed on the sidewalk, some of whom I'd known in our pre-cancer years—now phantoms from a former life. At first, I put away a glass or two a night, just enough to settle my nerves and quiet the voice in my mind that told me my daughter was going to die. After a few weeks those glasses became whole bottles, then two, and then I was buying boxes because carrying and opening three bottles of wine a night became a hassle.

Most mornings I woke up to a bathroom sink full of purple flecks—remnants of the wine I had drunk and then thrown up the night before. I scrubbed the porcelain clean before my kids woke up, wiped surfaces down with lemon oil, and drank coffee until my eyes opened and the pounding in my head eased.

I spent hours scrolling Instagram, looking at photos shared by other cancer moms of charity walks, lemonade stands, Disney World wish trips, and Zoom meetings with celebrities like The Rock. They wore gold ribbon leggings and posted stats every day in September to raise awareness for the struggle their kids were facing. I reached for that level of advocacy and fell on my face. I was so tired. The alarm bells in my brain were ringing all day, every day, screaming out that at any moment my daughter could take a turn, the treatment could stop working, her next bone marrow biopsy would show relapse, and then she'd die and I'd have to spend the rest of my life without her.

When I saw photos of other moms doing the “right” things, I felt like I was failing a fundamental test of my maternity.

When an ex-situationship, J., turned up on my doorstep a few months into my daughter's treatment, I was halfway through my nightly wine box and let him in without speaking. It felt good to see someone other than doctors, nurses, and my family. It felt good to do something that wasn't work, parenting, or cancer.

I took a big swallow of wine and felt it coat my teeth. He put his hand over the mug and pushed it down toward the coffee table. He said my name, just once, and I fell on him then, pulling him to my bedroom.

At the hospital I was always Mom: How's it going, Mom? Mouth sores feeling better, Mom? I hadn't realized how much I missed being called by my first name. I had disappeared into cancer, into caretaking, becoming a vessel for my children's needs. But I'm not a vessel and I'm not a fighter. I'm a human being. I needed someone to see me.

I started planning nights when I'd send my kids to my mother's house up the street. J. would stay over and we'd wrap ourselves around each other, hovering somewhere just shy of making whatever first move would eventually lead to sex. One night when we were alone in my home, J. pulled a baggie out of his pants pocket and dumped white powder onto my coffee table. 

Want some? he asked, casually cutting a line. It's meth. It'll make you feel like you're flying.

I stared at the neat lines cut next to the #1 Dad coaster on my coffee table, an inside joke with my kids. How could I get as far away from this place as possible? Flying would get me there. I considered it, then yanked myself back.

No. I should sleep. I have to be back at the hospital in the morning.

Later that night we lay in my bed, our limbs tangled, his sour breath coating my cheek. I could feel his heart hammering from the drugs. I tried to fall asleep, but the usual fear was gripping me. The doom scroll of posts from parents who had lost their kids flicked through my mind. I imagined typing my own post, announcing to the faceless internet that my child had “lost her battle with leukemia.”

In the morning, I got up to rinse out my mouth in the kitchen sink. I felt something stick to the bottom of my foot: a baggie from the night before. I dipped my finger in and swiped at the bag's insides, then placed my finger on the tip of my tongue. It tasted like chemicals, like bad eggs or paint thinner. I stuffed it in the trash can, tied the bag closed, and left it outside the back door. 

As my daughter's treatment eased, so did my drinking. The boxes of wine became an occasional bottle at the bottom of the recycling bin, and I never had another line of meth cut on my coffee table. I cut ties with J., and none of the other people I slept with are still contacts in my phone.

My daughter went into maintenance, and then off treatment. She went back to school, reconnected with her friends, and tried out for the school play. My drinking went down to a cocktail with dinner out, then mocktails, then water. I spent nights snuggled next to my kids on our couch watching movies and eating noodles. I went to bed sober and early. We got a dog. We got well.

I once asked my son, now 13, what he remembers of those days. Nothing, he says. Well, one time you slept late, and I tried to wake you, and all you said was “hnnnmmmmfff.” And you smelled bad, like really bad.

I let the shame wash over me. I'm so sorry, buddy. And I am.

I have a lot of regrets around the self-destructive ways I coped when my daughter was at her sickest. When I saw photos of other moms doing the “right” things, suffering in the right ways, I felt like I was failing a fundamental test of my maternity. I was at my worst when my daughter needed me to be at my best, when every other mother seemed to be at their best, and the isolation crushed me.

In all the conversations I've had with people who have faced similar challenges to mine, the universal thread that runs through them is the moments when we felt we'd failed. If that undeserved feeling of failure is what unites us, then maybe we can love each other through it. Eventually, maybe I can love myself through it, too.

Content warning: This story discusses suicide and suicidal ideation.

When I was 17, I received an email from my dad. There was no text or subject line, only an attached Word doc titled "How the World Looks to Me." I curiously opened it, unsure of what to expect.

It was a three-page suicide letter.

In my shock, I remember thinking how funny it was that the modern age had transformed the suicide letter into the suicide email attachment. It wasn’t the traditional suicide letter/email attachment, in the sense that it didn’t say “I’m going to kill myself now; by the time you read this it will be too late.” It was more along the lines of “I have felt very, very sad all my life, I’ve tried everything to fix it, and nothing has worked – I will kill myself sometime soon.”

As you can imagine, this was quite a surprise. I didn’t even know he was depressed.

I realize now that my dad had avoided talking about his depression to try and protect me from how awful and scary it all was. Unfortunately, as is often the result of bottling up emotions, his feelings instead exploded — via Gmail. So I had no idea, and I was still in that peculiar stage where you think your parents are superheroes and immune to any maladies.

I was wrong. His letter explained that he wanted to die because he couldn’t stand to be alive anymore. He had been very depressed for a long time, and for decades he’d tried various therapies to help. He’d dutifully experimented with SSRIs. He’d tried counseling, silent retreats, late-night Samaritans calls, creative therapies, men’s groups, psychologists. Nothing worked.

I began to type a reply.

I had a lot of ideas in my young head. I most wanted to get across that I loved him, and I was sorry he was in pain. As I wrote out my response, it became obvious that if I really did love him, and he really had tried everything, then maybe suicide was logical to think about.

I love and respect him, so when he said the pain was unbearable, I trusted him.

Although it felt wrong to say, I was overwhelmed by the selfishness inherent in asking him to continue living just because I didn’t want him to die. The reality of the human condition is that we never know what someone else is experiencing. I couldn’t know how he felt; I still can’t. But I love and respect him, so when he said the pain was unbearable, I trusted him. What kind of daughter would I be to ask him to live that way? I love my dad, and the idea of him enduring this drawn-out agony was unimaginable.

So I told him that because I love him, I’m alright if he chooses to kill himself. I said emphatically that I hoped he wouldn’t, but I also said that if the pain is as bad as he described, I gave my blessing to his suicide.

My dad did not kill himself. Soon after he sent that email, we had a big family heart-to-heart. There was all the crying and hugging you’d expect, but also a kind of calm, bleak understanding. He told me that his mental health always has been, and will likely continue to be, very up and down. He said that for now he will continue to live, but in the future he might still decide to kill himself. 

Since then, I have worked extensively in mental health services. I’ve worked for women’s charities focused on wellbeing; I’ve worked as a Samaritan; I’m a mental health first-aider; and I’ve attended countless courses and seminars. As a result, I have no fewer than three suicide awareness certificates.

Absolutely stunning work is done in these places. The people I’ve met there have unparalleled levels of willpower and passion. They all seem to have the same relentless cheeriness that nurses so famously emulate. But they do not like the idea that suicide could be the answer. Every time suicide is brought up, the immediate, unflinching reaction is the same: How do we stop it? Who do we call to get them help? What safeguarding procedure do we follow?

I, in response, slither further down in my seat.

I still agree with what I wrote in that email. I think that sometimes—in very specific cases—suicide can be the answer. I have never, ever said this in the context of my work. I’ve never brought it up in training sessions. I’ve never said this to any service users of the charities I work with. But I still think it sometimes.

I think the belief that we should always prevent suicide stems from the theory that everyone can be fixed. (Whatever “fixed” means.) That everyone can be made happy and healthy. This is a lovely idea—I just don’t think it’s true. Our current approaches to suicide conceal the reality that some illnesses aren’t curable. This is becoming more accepted with visibly physical diseases. Assisted suicide is becoming gradually more accepted with terminal cancer cases, yet there are no whispers of applying this to mental health illnesses. Why not?

I guess when someone has terminal cancer, a doctor can say with some certainty whether the patient will or won’t get better. With mental health, however, everything is more ambiguous. No one can say if someone with depression will improve or not – and maybe that’s why no one suggests that suicide could be an answer. Maybe it’s because we all feel awkward talking about death. Or because considering suicide seems too morbid.

I don’t know what to do about this, but I do know that there’s people like my dad suffering in a big, long-term way because no one ever tells them that it’s okay to let go – that it’s their decision to make. Ten years later, my dad is still alive and his mental health is as topsy-turvy as ever. I’m so glad he decided to keep living after he sent that email. But if he ever does decide to kill himself, I will try my absolute best to accept his decision.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

It was April 24, 1994 when I saw my future husband at a networking meeting for holistic practitioners. I had met him once before and knew he was going to be there. Something told me I had to get to the meeting. I rushed home and put on a really sexy dress. An hour after I arrived, he walked through the door. I heard a voice, loud and clear in my head, “You’re going to marry him.”

I was 38 at the time. He was eight years younger than me. We had such a deep connection—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We were on the same level with most things in life. We didn’t need to communicate in full sentences. He was very kind and generous and put me on a pedestal. I was his purpose in life. It was just incredible to be loved that big and that deeply. I had gotten hurt many times in life, by people who didn’t deserve my love. But he melted my heart when it had begun to get crusty.

He had a stroke on Monday, March 20, 2022. He called me at 1:47 p.m. and said, “I'm feeling a little stroke-y.” By the time I got to the hospital, he was unable to speak. I told him, “Come back to me, I need you.” He managed to turn his body towards me, and he shook his head “no.” They asked permission to intubate him because I naively thought they could do something. Two nights later, I saw his deceased mother at the foot of my bed. She was smiling gleefully. I knew that she was happy that her son was coming home to her. On that Saturday, we took him off the respirator.

After he died, I couldn’t function. I didn’t know what to do. There were a lot of people around me for the first three weeks. They didn't want me to cry.  After everybody left, I lost my shit. I started screaming and pounding my fists on the table and sobbing and wailing. I signed up for grief counseling and a grief support group, which both have been immeasurable in my healing. About a year and a half in, one of the women started talking about how grief turns to lust. She said, “I've become a shameless hussy.” And I was like, “Yes!” I had so been craving lots of sex.

The orgasms have stimulated the oxytocin, the serotonin, the endorphins—and my brain was craving that.

I’ve always been a little into kink, and my husband gave me what he could. He loved black vinyl, and he knew I liked to be spanked and restrained. But he was afraid of what he called my “salacious energy.” He was a yeshiva boy, and to him, it was just dirty. He thought there was something ungodly about it, and he wouldn't allow himself to go there. We had mostly vanilla sex—or vanilla-plus, I guess. He tried. 

After that woman’s comment, I started reaching out to guys on Tinder, not really for kink, but to just get laid. One of the guys was kind of a Dom. I called him “daddy,” and he called me “my baby.” We would do video fantasies and I would wear cute outfits. Meanwhile I was settling my husband's estate and trying to sell his business and was hyper-emotional, so I got more connected to this Dom emotionally than I should have. He started calling me less and less until one day he was gone. It just made the grief harder at that moment. 

I met a bunch more guys on Tinder. I actually got laid once, and the guy ghosted me afterwards. He wasn't worth my time, anyway. At one point, a friend told me how healing BDSM had been for her after her divorce, because a real Dom will treat you like a queen. It's all about you. It's all about your orgasms. You develop the framework for what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. So I went on Feeld, which is a kink app, and I advertised for a sensual Dom. Within 30 seconds—and I'm not exaggerating—I had 85 likes.

I had phone sex with one guy. He looked like an old biker dude. He’s 52, which is 16 years younger than me. He’s hot, he’s just beautiful. His voice was incredible, which to me is everything. I love a deep, resonant voice. And then that night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and my clitoris was pulsating. The next morning I texted him and said, “Am I using electronics too much to get off, or do you have Jedi powers?” He texted back, “Powers.” 

We just connected on a deep level. We started talking and texting all day, every day. Eventually, we met in person. He came over for “training,” just to test the waters, to see what my boundaries were. It was all about setting boundaries. My orgasms have gotten more and more intense. Once, he made me cum for two hours straight. I even cum on command! That never happened with my husband; it would take him an hour to get me off. But with this guy, we're both tapped into that salacious energy that my husband couldn't handle.

He's brought me into things I didn't think I would ever be into, like nipple clamps. Or butt plugs, which is funny, because my business for 30 years was giving colonics. He had me walk around with the butt plug in, and all these nerve endings were firing, and I was elated and in pain at the same time. He had me get a riding crop, because I like my vulva spanked. I’m also curious about trying hard impact play with him, among other things.

This Dom/sub relationship has helped me so much with the grieving process. All the orgasms have stimulated the oxytocin, the serotonin, the endorphins—and my brain was craving that. Now I feel capable; I can do things again. I was in a state of very deep grief. Now I’m able to be grievous for a few minutes, then clear it. I don’t have to live there or stay there for days.

It’s been about four months since we connected. Initially it was just going to be for sex, but we have begun to emotionally connect with one another. Ultimately I’d like another life partner, but he and I haven't discussed that. We'll see where it goes. For now, I’m healing and enjoying myself. Even though as a sub I’m the one who's truly in control, his job is also to push my limits. Initially I told him, “You are going to be my healer.” And he has been.

As a teenager, my mother’s best friend looked down at her stomach and told her, in the frank way only Lithuanians can, that she needed to lose the “life ring” around her waist. When she was pregnant with my brother, she overheard two men discussing what a beautiful woman she would be if she wasn’t so fat. While pregnant with me, she was so scared to gain weight that she often fainted from not eating enough.

I’ve watched my mother struggle with her weight my whole life. It’s been years of religiously drinking apple cider vinegar, concocting potions made out of green tea, and swearing until she’s blue in the face that she hates pasta, pizza, and dumplings. When I was a child, I was a bony little thing with boundless energy. My mother would marvel at my tiny waist and how “perfect” I was. She’d relish the idea that I might be too thin. I remember her fascination with my small wrists, the way she loved how “doll-like” I was. 

We moved from Lithuania to the UK when I was seven. Instead of running around with my friends all day, I was suddenly a foreigner in a big city and isolated from any sense of community. I stopped moving, started eating, and gained weight. I could feel my mother starting to panic as I got fatter and fatter. I had possessed this amazing quality that she so cherished, and it was slipping away. The first time I was put on a diet, I was only eight years old.

It wasn't long before her feelings of losing control over the situation translated into her shopping habits. Our home became filled with strange fad foods. I probably spent at least half a decade drinking goat milk, and barely got a whiff of bread for years.

Culturally, Lithuanians are very direct, like most eastern Europeans you'll meet. And patriarchal ideas about gender and looks were the norm to me growing up. Women are supposed to be thin and pretty, and men are supposed to be big and strong. I remember wondering why men were allowed to have big beer bellies while women had to try and shrink themselves into the smallest size possible. I was always told I was fat. I'm not sure it was even considered hurtful, but rather a matter of fact. After all, my own mother was greeted with a “You're so fat! ” by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, every time she saw her.

“You've gained quite a lot of weight," she told me. "Aren't you worried that he'll leave you?"

But the issue didn’t start or end with my background. Diet culture transcends most borders, and even generations. Growing up in the early 2000s in the UK meant I was entirely surrounded by diet culture. I wasn't huge by any means. But kids would still bully me for being bigger, and I spent a large part of my teens looking at anorexia content online, hoping to feel some kind of inspiration to stop eating. 

In my early twenties, I went through a period of channeling stress into exercise. I spent an hour at the gym each morning, and became obsessively distracted by a boy. Without even noticing, I lost weight. Crucially, I didn't look different to myself in the mirror. I could fit into smaller clothes, but I still felt fat.

What did change is how people treated me. Men, even family friends, started acting creepy when talking to me. When my mother would complain about her weight and I'd scoff, she'd dismiss my opinion as irrelevant because I'd recently “become beautiful.” At university, an acquaintance came up to me to tell me I had “made it” because I had “lost weight and gained a boyfriend.” 

Then, a couple of years later, I experienced a period of extremely rapid weight gain. I had decided to move abroad for a year, and because I was worried about having easy access to birth control pills, I got a contraceptive implant. Friends had waxed lyrical for years about the fact that they magically didn't have to go through periods anymore, without any of the side effects of the pill. 

Sometimes, you learn the hard way that there isn't a one-size-fits all approach. I developed a hunger that, in retrospect, should have been more alarming. Apparently, an entire tub of hummus is not a normal daily snack. My body expanded so quickly that I got stretch marks around my stomach. On top of this, I felt incredibly anxious and depressed, and would often wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe as the beginnings of a panic attack would come out of nowhere. I was lucky because, by this point, the boy I had been obsessed with during my bout of weight loss was now my longterm partner, and was there to support me. 

But when my mother came to visit, the disappointment was clear. History was repeating itself, and her perfect girl was expanding. And this time her daughter had more to lose, because she had a boyfriend who could reject her. Men are the ultimate prize, after all. 

After one too many glasses of wine, my mother turned to me and said, “You know, don't take this the wrong way, but aren't you worried?” It wasn't immediately clear to me what I should be worried about. She clarified: “You've gained quite a lot of weight. Aren't you worried that he'll leave you? There is a beauty standard; don't you think you need to fit it?” 

Because of the wine, and because we’d probably been talking around this conversation my whole life, the pain of what she said didn't hit me until much later. I reassured her that I was confident he loved me regardless of my size. This was so entirely unfathomable to my mother that she told me that he must be a “feeder” and might be trying to “fatten me up.”

I think my mother’s intention has been to try and protect me from the pain and shame she has felt her whole life about the way she looks. It's a burden that has been piled on to her by her peers, her family, and through the media she has consumed across two very different countries. She just wanted me to have an easier life. 

For me, diet culture has become an intergenerational curse. My mother has been traumatized by living in fear of “not being the right size.” And I've grown up bearing the brunt of her trauma, alongside the pressure to develop my own. It’s a cycle we won’t break unless we actively acknowledge how much it has shaped us all.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

When I got my first job in retail, I was 17 and very pregnant. Walmart was the only place that would hire me—despite being a straight-A student and a good community citizen. Right away, it was intense. I was technically still a minor and supposed to only work about four hours a day, between the hours of 5pm and 9pm. But often, they would forget you at the register and if you walked away, you could get fired. I'd feel caught between speaking up for myself and getting in trouble, or staying and getting reprimanded later for staying past my shift. They didn't really support me as a person; they treated me more as a number, as a cog in the machine rather than someone who could actually bring value to their company.

I stayed at Walmart for only four months. I didn’t qualify for family leave, so I quit four days before my due date. I was living at home, but my dad was charging me over $400 a month for rent. I was relying on my savings because I had been saving every dollar I could get my hands on since I was about 15. About a year after the baby was born, I worked at a bagel shop for seven months, and then a retail cashier position opened up that paid more than minimum wage. I jumped on it.

At first I thought it was going to be really great. This wasn’t Walmart—this was a high-end grocery store chain that has a reputation for being socially conscious. At first, they did do some great things for me. But over the course of several years, the company made a lot of changes and lost sight of their values. Once they shifted their focus on profits, I was once again being treated as a number rather than an actual person with dignity.

They started implementing stricter rules. You needed to have open availability, which is very common for most retail places. They didn’t care if you had a family situation—either you showed up or you didn’t have a job. They started scheduling us just under the full-time status so that we’d lose medical care. During holidays, they had such over-the-top expectations. You literally could not stop to go to the bathroom. And when you did, there were long lines. Some bosses were cool about it, but more often than not, they were like, “You can't waste company time.”

It opened my eyes to see how people in lower-status jobs are treated.

One of the low points was around the time of #MeToo. In this industry, #MeToo didn’t do anything for anyone who didn’t have a camera in front of them. In fact, it sort of backfired on us. Women started complaining about men in power making them feel uncomfortable, and nothing would be done. They would say that we were attention-seeking or gaslighting us. The higher-ups would just say, “It’s a misunderstanding—not everything is #MeToo.” They told us we were trend-followers.

At one point, they re-hired a guy who many people had informally accused of sexual harassment. He pinpointed me as the person who’d spoken up—even though I wasn’t—and retaliated by taking away hours and giving me shifts I didn’t want. When I complained to a female store manager, she told me we should be taking his comments as compliments. And when we’d go to HR, they’d say, “It sounds like you’re not happy here. Go find another job.”

I really wanted to do just that, but then the pandemic happened. That was such a nightmare. From the beginning, we were told it was all hands on deck. At that point I had one kid in elementary school and one in middle school. My husband had gotten laid off, so I had to go into work. I was working whatever shifts they were giving me. We were told not to wear masks, and then we were told to wear masks, then we were told not to wear masks. Customers would scream and curse at us for mandating masks, then for not mandating them. They would yell at us and call us fascists. The company was one of the last ones of their kind to add hazard pay, and they were one of the first ones to take it away. COVID was rampant throughout the store, and they always told us to “take our time” and not test right away. They didn’t want us test positive because then they legally had to send us home.

The fear I had during the pandemic was the thing that eventually made me leave retail. I was burnt out and angry. I had gotten sick and didn't test positive for COVID, but I was out for two weeks. I was just having a realization of, “Wow, there really isn't anything protecting us right now.” Legislators had written us out of bills. We were not able to get vaccines until the general public did. It just made me feel like there was no one looking out for me. They would tell us it was our civic duty to show up to work, that they appreciated us. But it was always paired with, “You need to do more.” So it always felt a little backhanded.

After getting my resume professionally created, I was eventually was hired into a new career. But I worked at this grocery store for more than a decade. We think of these jobs as “starter jobs,” but for most people I’ve worked with, this job is their career. They get sucked into it like I did, and then you become typecast as someone who can only do retail. Before hiring a professional, I put out hundreds of resumes with no callbacks. People would tell me things like “I don't hire retail workers because you don't know how to do anything. You're untrainable.”

I really do think that people should work in the customer service industry for at least two years before they’re allowed to function in the world. It’s completely changed my perspective. It opened my eyes to see how people in lower-status jobs are treated, and how much skill is needed for these jobs that we brush off and don't treat with respect. One of my life missions is now to say to anyone who will listen: “We need to give these people a voice, because this is not okay.”

For the last three years, my husband and I have been modeling together. If you’d told teen me that I’d be doing this, I’d have probably gasped in shock and fainted dramatically.

Growing up queer in the North of England in the ‘90s, I was a natural introvert and like many other queer kids, I was bullied and made to feel completely worthless. Being different meant I stood out, but all I wanted to do was fade into the background. 

When I moved to London when I was 20 for university, I started to become more confident. I partied, I hooked up with a lot of men. Whereas before I stuck to black for fear of drawing unwanted attention, I started to wear actual color in my clothes. University meant I could reinvent myself, and that started with bright, graphic t-shirts.

But there was always this feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that I was inferior. Sure, I had moments of joy, particularly when I met my husband at 24, but my confidence remained at nearly zero. The bullies had gotten into my head, leaving a filthy, oozing trail of trauma in their wake. They had told me I was a worthless piece of shit, and I believed them.  

The modeling happened randomly. A friend of my husband’s, who worked as a wedding photographer, randomly asked if we'd do a last-minute shoot. I immediately said no. Even thinking about being the center of attention was immensely triggering for me. Why would I voluntarily put myself in a situation where people would judge me?

After some gentle encouragement, I went along and did it. If it weren’t for the fact we were living with my husband’s grandmother during most of the pandemic—which was as tough as you’d imagine—I don’t think any amount of persuading would have worked. But I was desperate for a change of scenery at that point. 

There were about 15 photographers shooting us on that day and, though I felt overwhelmed at first, I ended up really getting into it. This fucked-up person who had spent years just wanting to be invisible was not only a natural at doing the exact opposite but actually enjoyed it.

I felt strong and fierce in my everyday life. But recently, I’ve been doubting it all.

Maybe it was the play-acting that made me feel this way. Becoming another person does wonders for those who are otherwise shy or deeply self-conscious. Just look at Beyonce, who’s on record saying that performing helps her shyness. Not that I’d dare compare myself to Beyonce.

Since 2020, my husband and I have continued modeling together and it’s become not only a viable business, but a huge help in quieting those demonic voices in my head. A big part of that is making me feel more empowered as a queer person. 

As our brand has grown, we’ve become quite well-known in the industry for throwing the rulebook out when it comes to gender. Now, you’ll find us doing such things as modeling couture gowns on the busy streets of London. Neither of us envisioned the modeling going in this direction, but I’m so glad it has. The more I oppose the rules placed on queer people to look a certain way, the more I oppose those voices that told me I was worthless. 

For a while, I felt strong and fierce in my everyday life, as well as in front of the camera. I genuinely believe that modeling has helped me deal with my trauma. Recently, however, I’ve been doubting it all. If a photographer told me I was beautiful even a year ago, I believed it, but now, I’m just suspicious. Now all I do is obsess over my physical faults.

Part of the job is spending hours staring at pictures of ourselves, deciding which ones are best and then posting them on Instagram (our “portfolio”). As models, we spend so much time analyzing the way we look, so it was only a matter of time before the negative voices reappeared. All I see when we comb through pictures now is the lack of definition to my face, dark under-eyes, and thin upper lip. My husband tells me I look stunning; I think I look like a fucked-up, bloated potato. I see an imposter—someone who shouldn’t be a model. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best I can be, which is me trying to prove the haters wrong. I see the sharp cheekbones many models sport and think that if I don’t look like them, then I’m failing. 

It's gotten so bad that I'm now considering getting some “work done”: Botox around the eyes, some filler in my lips and perhaps cheeks. It feels like if I just get these things fixed, I will suddenly feel the best I’ve ever felt and that will last forever. But I know that’s not the reality. I know that if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop and that what needs fixing is primarily on the inside, not the outside. 

The thing is, though, I’m all for fixing yourself if you’re not happy with the way you look—you only get one life right? We live in a world that has normalized changing the way you look and I think many people feel empowered, rather than manipulated by it. But you are entering very dangerous territory if what really needs working on is your mental health. 

Still, I really don’t want to give it up. I’ve never felt so empowered and ultimately I’ve grown immensely as a person. Looking back at some of the shoots we’ve done, I can’t believe how far that bullied little kid has come. It’s amazing. But my mental health is suffering, and I don’t want to go back to feeling as self-conscious as I used to.

I think that for now, I’m going to work through it. I’ve had some counseling and am doing other things that help with my confidence, like a stand-up comedy course. I’m taking care of my mental health, whilst continuing to do something that has brought significant value to my life. I must also be kinder to myself with the modeling, remembering that I’m still figuring things out. 

As for sticking needles in my face, I’m still strongly considering it, but before jumping into anything, I’ll make sure I lead with my head, rather than my heart. I want to be able to see who I really am when I look in the mirror, not who the haters see, and if that face still needs a bit of a touch-up, then so be it. But, you know…something subtle.

Six months ago, I saw my marriage hover over a cliff. I had failed my wife, and I was haunted by the nightmare of potentially losing my kids. 

My lifelong struggle with mental health and self-worth had gotten worse when my career cratered during the pandemic, causing many of my paying clients to go out of business or cut their freelance budgets. The lack of income triggered dark thoughts and negative energy, which led me to be another galaxy away from my wife. Not only did I stop considering her emotional needs, but my shame over my finances led me to secretly dig into a line of credit, pile on debt, and even betray my kids by taking their money. I justified my actions by promising I’d pay back every cent plus more when success came my way, but my depression made it really hard to be productive.

My wife made it clear that she could no longer trust or respect me, and our future together was uncertain. I felt hopeless, ashamed, and inadequate. I needed to do something drastic.

So I did all the typical things: I sought out personal therapy and marriage counseling, strategized about new ways of coping, and crafted a plan for paying back all the lost money. But to reconnect with the family that I was losing, I knew I needed to get out of my comfort zone. This meant returning to two things from my past: church and theater.

I realized church and theater were embedded in my family’s life, but not mine.

Both were major parts of my life when I was younger, but they were nothing more than vague memories by the time my marriage was in crisis. More than a decade ago, I realized I no longer believed in a Christian God or any religious god, so I cut out church from my life, even though my wife and then my kids still went every week. I loved drama class as a kid, and continued to do theater in high school. Many decades later, both of my kids are involved in a fantastic musical theater program and have fallen deeply in love with the art form. 

I realized church and theater were embedded in my family’s life, but not mine. My yearning for healing and bonding demanded that I revisit both. I saw them as two crucial things that I could share with my family. They were also something that could give me purpose and force me out of my emotional cave. 

But I still had doubts. I was afraid I wouldn’t fit in at church; it was the same one I went to when I was younger, so I worried about what people would think about my sudden appearance after such a long absence. I was nervous about congregation members swarming me with goals of conversion or challenging my beliefs. I wasn’t confident that I could last through a sermon without freaking out over the pastor spouting doctrines and creeds that I disagreed with or that offended me. I questioned if this was worth the potential torment of being surrounded by a faith I no longer had. 

The idea of doing musical theater also made me anxious. I always had a love for performing and watching my kids shine on the stage sparked my interest again, but I didn’t have any experience singing in front of crowds. The potential of being in a musical terrified me. My insecurities and damaged self-worth caused me to believe I was a horrible singer and that any attempt would be met with failure. I was convinced that I’d be embarrassed while also not getting the part.

Despite my crippling fears, I decided to take the risk of returning to church and auditioning for a musical. They were two of the smartest moves I made since asking my wife to marry me more than 15 years ago.

I felt accepted at the church almost immediately. So many people were genuinely excited to see me. No one has pushed for answers as to why I left or made it their mission to convert me. The pastor is incredibly humble and never talks about politics or condemns others’ beliefs. Instead, he approaches his sermons from the stance that we’re all broken and that faith is about healing while spreading love to others. Going to church again has equipped me with topics that I can discuss with my family, and I’ve recognized there is spiritual value in traditions like prayer even if I don’t subscribe to the faith anymore. It has given the entire family a sense of community and belonging, and I’ve learned to immerse myself in the positive aspects of religion like empathy, kindness, compassion, and humility.

And despite my lack of confidence in my singing, it was deemed good enough to land an ensemble part in the biggest musical the company ever put on. I had the honor to perform along with my wife and kids in front of an audience of more than a thousand patrons in a historic venue. The experience was an injection of self-confidence and energy. I felt my creative spirit soar so much that I wondered why I had taken so long to perform again. Friends, family, and audience members praised my stage presence and told me that I belonged up there. The compliment that mattered the most was when my wife declared that she was proud of me. I saw an admiration in her eyes that had been missing for years.

At the start of 2023, I would have never believed I would return to church or perform in a musical. But the damage I had done to my family meant that a major overhaul was mandatory. Our marriage does not resemble the end of a romantic comedy, where we have a happily ever after for now and forever. There is still a lot of work to recapture the love and repair the damage. But, partly thanks to church and musical theater, we are still together and committed to making things better.

For me, Sunday is the loneliest day of the week. I am not alone on Sundays: My wife and dog keep me company on walks, on trips to the grocery store, in cooking, listening to music, and ending our day before the fire, in winter, watching Masterpiece Mystery.

It seems I should be content. I should feel warm, cozy, free from fear or dread or loneliness. That train whistle I hear at 10 pm on these nights should comfort me. But train whistles themselves are lonely sounds. They make me think about being far away.

Where did these feelings begin, and how have I been scarred by this otherwise restful day of the week?

I remember that Sunday night when I was nine, riding in the back seat with my brother as my father drove the family home from visiting our grandmother. The argument escalated before I understood how long it had been going on or what it was about.

“Why don’t you just move back in with your mother?” my mom said. “That’s where you’re the happiest.”

I felt my father’s rage, though he didn’t respond. My mother slumped against the passenger door, the handle jamming into her side. I watched the shadowy trees pass and feared that nothing would ever be the same. Which of us felt more alone on that Sunday night in late fall?

I think my Sunday fears were caused by my parents showing me how lost they were to each other.

Even before that, Sunday loneliness got to me. My earliest memory is being left in the church nursery while my mother attended her adult Sunday school class. I didn’t know why I was being left. I can see myself standing there, the nursery school matron trying to console me while I cried.

I know kids cry when left alone. But I wasn’t alone physically, so was this a psychic wound? And is this why feeling lonely isn’t just a feeling? When someone—your mother, say—assures you she’s coming back soon, should you trust that, always?

I remember my father telling me that when he was six, maybe seven, his mother left him at the movies where for a nickel he could watch the feature, the newsreel, and a cartoon in those early talkie days. But on this Sunday, he got a bad earache and used a payphone on the street to call home for her to come get him. When he called, no one answered, and he stood there in the cold, alone, hurting. 

I still wonder if he ever got over his lonely pain, and if, when he decided that his family would always visit his mother on Sundays, he was trying to heal what never could be. He was a lonely sort of man, a real “loner” as my mother described him. I wonder how much of him, his loneliness, is in me.

***

I remember the first time I heard “Sunday Morning Coming Down" : “There’s something about Sunday, makes a body feel alone.”

I didn’t understand the song, didn’t like it much, partly because its rhyme was off, but also because it made me feel so alone. I was only 13 years old, but the lines were being telegraphed into me.

Last Friday, I heard it again; its Sunday echoes felt more alive than ever as I drove in the early morning rain.

Is there a more lonely day or feeling than Sunday, even on a Friday?

***

Sometimes it all comes back to where it started.

When my mother finally returned on those Sunday mornings, as relieved as I was, I understood that this would happen again next week and over and over again. Sundays were destined to be those lost, lonesome days. And now, I think my Sunday fears were caused by my parents having the time and space, even within a closed car, to show me how lost they were to each other.

I’ve tried to make peace with my wounds, but this past Sunday, as I walked my dog through early morning neighborhoods, I saw two cats lying dead. One had been hit by a car, the other taken by some other creature. 

I wanted to do something, find the family whose beloved pet had been taken from them. But it was much too early to knock on a door, and it wouldn’t prevent the wounds from coming even if I had stopped.

Even with my wife and dog around me, most of every Sunday I spend alone, writing about my life, attempting to connect with the shadows and ghosts of my past.

I know that I’m a grown man, and many other men would consider me weak, unmanly. I write about these things, too, especially on dreary Sundays like today when I feel so far away from everything. My wife walks toward me.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

I’d like to tell her about how deep my loneliness is, but I don’t want to scare her. So I mention some work I have to do, some email I have to write. I think she knows what I’m feeling, anyway.

“Whenever you want to talk, I’m here,” she says.

I would talk to her if I knew what to say, and that’s the paradox. If I could find the words and had the courage to say them, I might not be so lonely.

Instead, I call my brother, our usual Sunday ritual. What I want to ask him tonight is if he remembers that night in the car, our parents arguing in a way they never had before, or at least not in front of us. I want to know if he felt the darkness, if he saw the shadows running across our lives.

But I say none of this, and we simply talk about what we’ve cooked for supper, what we think will happen in next week’s football game, or whether the country will come to its senses and reject Trump.

Even then, I feel better after we talk. He’s my little brother and I think he feels lonely, too, and maybe not just on Sundays. But maybe he feels less so now.

Afterward, my wife and I sit close together and watch the HGTV series “Hometown.” A woman who bottomed out as a drug addict, who lost custody of her two children, is given a new chance—a renovated home in Laurel, MS. My wife holds my hand as we watch. It isn’t everything, and it doesn’t make everything right. But in those last few hours of most of my Sundays, I feel better.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

I was born in a tiny town in southern Indiana in 1998. After my dad left when I was young, it was me, my two sisters, and my mom against the world. As we got older, we all got jobs and paid the rent together. My mom did the best she could, but she was gone most of the time working day and night, and we had to kind of fend for ourselves. Life was not easy; we had to grow up quick. I was worrying about bills at 14.

Eventually, my sweet mom brought us to Bloomington, Indiana, and we got a house through Habitat for Humanity. She was a very traditional Christian who had always dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom and homeschooling us, but obviously never could. I strayed politically from her—I’m right in the middle—but as far as the traditional life and family goes, I feel like I absorbed a lot from hearing how much she wanted to do it. Maybe that's why I'm so content to stay home and homeschool my kids. I want to make her proud.

I met my husband on Tinder when he was 18. I'm two years older, so I had just turned 20. He was still in high school, and I had just moved downtown, planning to start at Indiana University as an English major. I wanted to teach English in South Korea; I had set my heart on that forever.

But when I met him, everything changed. We fell in love. He was on the football team and a track star. He actually still holds some records at the high school here. He was very sweet and nice and he had his life together. He didn't drink or do drugs, which was rare around here. His family gave him a completely different life from what I grew up with. They all live in the nicest neighborhood in town. I felt like he was completely out of my league. 

I got rid of my apartment and moved in with him. I got pregnant and then had a miscarriage, and going through that brought us a lot closer as a couple. He was about to leave for the Navy and the only way I could go with him is if we got married. We bought cheap little Walmart rings and got married at the courthouse four months after we met. We didn’t tell anyone for a while—it was our little secret.

For us, the further we bend into traditional gender roles, the easier things are.

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to do extended breastfeeding and homeschooling and grow my own food. We bought a house that was built in 1898, just a little two-bedroom, one-bath, cottage-style house on a 1/4 acre of land. We have chickens and our garden, nothing special at all, but we love it. He was lucky enough to get decent jobs; right now he’s a foreman leading a cell tower crew. I quit my job at the grocery store when I had our oldest daughter in 2020, when I was 21. We had another daughter two years later.

We’ve been married six years now and it’s been great. It’s been easy—I feel like that’s the best word to describe it. For us, the further we bend into traditional gender roles, the easier things are. When I was working, there was a lot of room for imbalances, like when both people work but one person ends up doing more housework. But now it’s like, I do the stuff in the house, he does the stuff out of the house. He works, he provides, he does all the bills. I clean, I take care of the kids. It's black and white.

A typical day starts when the kids and I wake up at 8am and do our chores outside: getting the chicken eggs, feeding and watering the chickens, cleaning up any toys. Then we make breakfast together. Our four-year-old is doing a homeschool preschool program. Once a week we’ll be with the homeschool co-op, which is a group of parents taking turns teaching the curriculum for that day. We get together for class, field trips, holiday parties, music and art. 

Then we do a little gymnastics warmup, then the inside chores around the house. Then it’s nap time around 1:30 or 2pm, they wake up and have lunch. They play outside, even when it goes down to, like, -8 degrees. Then we come back inside and do free play, or color or paint or do something fun like shaving cream. I start dinner at 5pm, and that’s when my husband gets home. Then more play and bath and bed by 9:30 or 10pm. When the kids go to sleep, my husband and I will probably watch a show or play a board game, then go to bed at midnight.

What I treasure most about my life is that I can morph into whoever I want to be each day. One minute I’ll be a cook making complicated recipes and meal-prepping, the next a daycare teacher lesson-planning, a homesteader during planting and canning season. We can travel wherever, whenever with nothing tying us down. There’s no box we need to fit into, no rush.

I love my life, but I feel like I can’t really say that. The mom groups on Facebook are all about the struggle of motherhood. Maybe that’s a good thing, that we’re all more open about it. But it alienates a lot of us who are happy to have those struggles. I’ve also felt judged by friends. Very few of the people I grew up with even have kids, and I’m not even 26 years old with two. Back in 2019, when I was newly pregnant with our oldest, I went out to eat with a friend from college. Our meal turned into an hour-long interrogation about why I wasn’t getting an abortion, why I’d depend on a man, why I’d be so trusting. That moment solidified the fact that I would lose pretty much every part of my former life and the people in it.

We don't follow any religion, but I turn to people at church a lot for community. They’re more likely to be stay-at-home moms and traditional wives than the general public. I also started going on this “tradwife” group online. The term is a weird, glamorized label—an Instagram version of what my life is. In reality, it's dirty and gross and I’m on my hands and knees cleaning up chicken poop and dealing with diapers and screaming babies. But the online forum feels like a safe place to say these things. So if I have to go by the stupid name “tradwife,” I’ll do it.

We expect women to put off our natural maternal instinct, pay someone else to raise our kids, and leave home to work, missing the majority of our kids’ childhoods. We should leave open the opportunity for women who want to work, but also open resources up for those who desperately want to stay home but can’t. It’s almost going against the grain now to just be proud of being a mom, to breastfeed and stay home.

It’s this weird byproduct of feminism—which has been so great for women—to unintentionally alienate those of us who are happy to follow gender roles. I feel like if you asked a kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the kid said, “a good mom,” they’d be looked at like they were out of their minds. It should be okay and even encouraged for moms to be content to “just” be a mom and a good wife.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

It’s always felt natural for me to connect with people, and I’ve been interested in the human condition since as long as I can remember. Growing up in Canada as a teenager—I moved there from Mexico when I was 16—I got really positive messages about the importance of mental health and therapy. A major telecommunications company in Canada would have a yearly mental health awareness talk and summit, where they would talk about how to create programs and awareness, and remove stigma, and all these hyper-progressive approaches. I was like, “Oh, wow, this is cool. Good for them.”

I eventually went to university in Vancouver for psychology. I wanted to work with all kinds of people and have a tangible effect on them—something I could see. This work can seem very abstract, and I wanted to really get out there in the community. After university, I got a job working with children with autism, teaching them verbal skills and emotional regulation. It was pretty intense, but it was really rewarding because you could see the effects throughout a whole network of people. I also worked at a group home with families of kids with Down's syndrome. Then the pandemic started and I lost those two jobs. Halfway through the pandemic, I got a job in a group home with around 40 adults. 

I’d never dealt with people with severe psychotic disorders like schizophrenia before. I’d read a lot about it, but I never actually talked to people with those conditions. This was also my first experience in a clinical setting. My main job was looking after the place and the residents at night, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Even though most people were asleep, there was a lot of activity, and a lot of the accidents happened during the night. People would go out at night, because they were free to come and go—it was not high security. I could also administer some basic painkillers and other medicine, although I wasn't allowed to give the heavy antipsychotic medication.

The nurses were like machines following orders, and they were often harsh and rude with the patients.

There was a big clash between workers like me and the nurses, who seemed very desensitized, very cold, like they lacked critical thinking. The care was just like, “Here’s a prescription and that's it.” They were like machines following orders, and they were often harsh and rude with the patients. Some of the people in the group home had difficult behaviors and were intense—not aggressive, but obnoxious or annoying, and it required patience to be with them. I would see the nurses getting really exasperated and just forgetting their compassion. They would disregard the residents’ concerns. They were disciplinarians; it was just a job to them.

There was also no deeper, more well-rounded treatment. The point was to keep the patients kind of sedated with a cocktail of medications. I was always wondering, Where is the more holistic, pro-active care? Shouldn’t a therapist come a couple of times a week? Where was the structure, the support, the workshops? There was none of that.

I quit the job after eight months. The night shift was destroying me mentally as well as physically. I didn’t feel like I was helping or improving their lives. I found a job at one of the universities being a job coach and mentor, helping students who had mental health challenges find internships. I felt like I was making tangible positive change. The company was a not-for-profit and well-run, so it was very different from the group home. There was no involvement from the public health care system. It was very much run by the university as a private institution.

Later, I got a sense that my experience at the group home is pretty prevalent all over the country—not just one bad facility. It’s typical care in a country that says it values mental health. I strongly believe that, ironically, Canada’s progressive approach to drugs makes their mental health system worse, as they’re more unwilling to see that some of these patients rely on drugs to cope. They don’t quite connect the dots.

Canadians do believe their progressive politics, but there's this deep gap between those beliefs and their own personal lives and actions. That was kind of the theme of living in Canada for me—that profound disconnect. Canadians love to compare themselves to the U.S. and think of themselves more like a Scandinavian country. They’ll say the U.S. is backwards and conservative and discriminatory and not open. And it’s true—Canada has public healthcare. But in other ways they’re so similar to the U.S.; they just don’t admit it. At least with Americans, you know where you stand.

My ex and I met as activists in college, bonding over feminism and queer rights in a relatively rural and very conservative region. This was my first serious relationship, and despite countless red flags—like unreasonable jealousy, controlling behavior, and lots of people warning me about them—I let the fling turn into something serious. We adopted dogs, moved in together, traveled from state to state for my education, and eventually decided to have a child via artificial insemination.

The division of labor in our relationship was already an issue, but I didn’t know the severity until my pregnancy. I was doing much more than my fair share and providing a lot of care for my ex that went unnoticed: I woke them up for work, did their laundry, planned and executed most of our meals, monitored their medication regimens, and remained on-call around the clock for most of their basic needs. When the baby arrived, I couldn’t provide it anymore.

When Covid hit during our baby’s infancy, we were faced with learning how to become parents in total isolation. I gave a lot of grace to my partner for what I would have otherwise seen as laziness and irresponsibility. We were all doing our best, I thought. When they came down with Covid, they decided to quarantine in our bedroom to try and prevent spreading it to the rest of the family.

I was initially intimidated at the thought of caring for a toddler, two large dogs, a house, and two part-time jobs all while not being able to leave our home. It wasn’t even a couple of hours into the illness-induced separation when I realized that parenting, working, and just being without them was so much easier and more pleasant than when they were around.

The relief and peace I felt unlocked a terrifying thought: I think I need a divorce.

Not only was I already doing the lion’s share of the domestic labor, but I was also doing all that caretaking for them. Removing them from the equation also removed a good deal of responsibility and conflict for me. The relief and peace I felt during that quarantine unlocked a terrifying thought that I hadn’t entertained before: I think I need a divorce.

At first, I shoved this thought into the back of my mind, because I was loyal to a fault. A few months after we all recovered from our first round of Covid (spoiler alert: quarantining within the same house did not, in fact, prevent the illness from spreading to all of us), I planned my own birthday trip to an orchard about an hour away from our home. I packed the car, got myself and the baby ready, made sure my partner was staying on task and on time, barely had time to get myself presentable, and drove all of us to the event.

My ex was needling me the entire way and I eventually sank back into that thought I had during quarantine. But this time I said it out loud: “I need a divorce.” My ex lost it, and became physically and verbally violent. I had an unmistakable feeling that I had to leave for good. Instead, my hope caused me to return with lots of stipulations and an involved plan of care to repair what was broken.

This plan spanned the next two years and involved couples counseling, psychiatric testing, changing our sleeping arrangements, and my taking on extra work to compensate for their stagnant wages and the rising costs of living. I was exhausted, but I wouldn’t give up. It wasn’t going to be perfect, but if we put in the work, I thought we could mold this into something tolerable and stable.

Then, almost exactly two years after the orchard incident, I discovered that my spouse was having an affair. Not only were they not participating in therapy, helping me parent our child, or taking on extra work so that I could be relieved of working and parenting around the clock, they were having a full-blown, out-past-midnight-on-my-birthday-while-I-was-home-caring-for-a-sick-child affair.

When I approached them about this, they initially tried to lie their way out of it. Then they blamed me for the affair. It was my fault, they said, because I was so distant and too wrapped up in caring for our child. I walked away, trying to get some space so the argument wouldn’t escalate.

They followed me into the bathroom. As I was bathing our child, up to my elbows in bubbles and kneeling in a puddle of bath water, I told them again that I couldn’t do this anymore. They said “I didn’t think there was anything I could do that would make you leave me.” This stunned me. I was finally hearing them say out loud what I knew they felt all along—that I would tolerate, against my most basic instincts, whatever mistreatment they threw my way. And they weren’t wrong. But that was the last time I would ignore that feeling that crept up years earlier and never really went away: I needed a divorce.

Leaving this relationship has not only been emotionally draining, but financially and logistically exhausting, as well. I’m working hard on coming to terms with the fact that this was an abusive relationship. The post-separation abuse that ensued really drove that insight home.

I’m still burning the candle at both ends to care for our child by myself, pay attorney fees, and all the other things that come with leaving a relationship like this. I’m exhausted at the end of each day, but the freedom and relief I felt during Covid quarantine years ago is now my everyday reality. Turns out I was right: Getting a divorce is unbelievably hard, but still somehow easier than daily life with my ex.

I was warming up for the 100-meter dash at a high school track meet in my skin-tight spandex shorts when a very sudden, strong urge hit me: I had to poop. I was already feeling nervous at the thought of my peers and boyfriend watching me race and potentially cross the finish line last. I had a decision to make: Would I hold in my bowel movement while sprinting in discomfort, or would I swallow my pride and excrete my feces? I chose the latter. 

I hurried into the bathroom. To my avail, there was no one else in there. I took care of business swiftly but was mortified to hear “Ew! It stinks in here” as I pulled up my shorts. Two girls walked in promptly after I flushed all my dignity down the toilet. I stood in the stall ashamed and weighed my next decision: Would I confidently march out and proclaim it wasn’t me, or would I hide until they left? I feared they could identify my feet. My mind conjured up a scene of two girls watching me race and saying to a third person: “That’s the girl who reeked up the bathroom!”

I chose a third option. I left the stall and acted as if I wasn’t the culprit. I couldn’t muster up a word, but the beet-red color of my cheeks probably spoke volumes. 

That was eight years ago. I can literally count on one hand how many times I’ve had a bowel movement in a public bathroom since then. 

I live with two chronic conditions: irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and generalized anxiety disorder. The two don’t mix well. I have a phobia of using public bathrooms, yet I have a type of IBS characterized by frequent bathroom usage and loose stools. I use the word “phobia” because my fear of using public bathrooms is irrational, persistent, and impairs my daily life. 

I panic at the thought of clogging a toilet, stinking up a room, or having someone wonder how I could produce such a vile smell. 

Although I’ve experienced gas, bloating, diarrhea, and abdominal discomfort since my childhood, it took years to receive a diagnosis of IBS. The disorder is commonly categorized into three types: constipation (IBS-C), diarrhea (IBS-D), or mixed bowel habits (IBS-M). I have IBS-D, meaning I typically poop around six to seven times a day.

My IBS symptoms cause anxiety over having to pass stools, and that anxiety only worsens my digestive issues.  

Thanks to my anxiety, those bowel movements only happen when I’m at home. Anxiety disorders and IBS are common, and many people also live with both conditions, but not many people experience such a heightened fear of excretion in public bathrooms.

My somewhat unique situation means I’ve relied on the support of my family, but they don’t really understand. When I was 16, I frantically texted my mom to “pick me up ASAP” when I was at a Greek restaurant with one of my closest friends. Either the hummus or tzatziki had too much garlic, causing my stomach to churn. My brain alerted me it was time for fight-or-flight mode, and I quickly discovered this was not an instance I could fight the urge to go.

My mom was at the restaurant in 10 minutes. I offered some strange excuse to my friend and darted into my mom’s car. While my mom whipped down the highway, my sphincter held on for dear life. I clenched my buttocks together as tears streamed down my face. I made it home in time before an accident, but I felt weird for not being able to use the restaurant’s bathroom like the average person, and for feeling too embarrassed to be truthful with my close friends in these moments.

I have countless more anecdotes like the Greek restaurant dine-and-dash. I often rearrange my schedule to avoid having to use facilities outside my home. I’ll go home between outings just to use the bathroom. When we have guests staying with us, I plan the times I’ll have a bowel movement, considering factors like background noise, when the house will be empty, or times when people are busy and not frequenting the bathroom. Before events or a travel day, I’m meticulous about choosing “safety” foods that won’t cause an upset stomach. I carry travel-sized perfumes with me in case I don’t have a choice but to use public facilities. When I’m staying at a friend’s or relative’s house, I take precautions to avoid any lingering smell; I create a toilet paper barrier in the toilet bowl, double flush, and rub soap with hot water in the sink if I don’t have an air freshener. Taking all of these measures to avoid judgment becomes exhausting. 

My IBS symptoms cause anxiety over having to pass stools, and that anxiety only worsens my digestive issues. It’s a really shitty downward spiral. 

What makes it even worse is that I’m a woman. 

Our culture often pretends that women don’t poop, so often that women start to internalize it. Even women who don’t have a particular shame and fear around pooping can relate to being in a place or situation where they didn’t feel comfortable going number two. We are taught to believe that even our bathroom behaviors must be dainty and rose-scented. Social media users react in laughter to a man farting, but when a woman does it? It’s revolting.

Since age eight, I’ve held this deep-seated notion that women shouldn’t produce stinky smells. At least not in public, or in the presence of men. I was in a long-term, committed relationship for four years, and I can recount the few times I pooped in my boyfriend’s house or even the times he was in the same building as me.

The discomfort of the physical and mental symptoms has prompted me to seek therapy. My therapist explained insightful research: In simple terms, the vagus nerve connects the gut to the brain, allowing both systems to communicate. This means anxiety can exacerbate IBS symptoms. So we targeted the anxiety. She led me through exposure therapy, where I worked through a progression of goals. My first goal was to use my own bathroom in the presence of my roommate’s boyfriend. My final goal was to use the bathroom at the public library at least once. Over the course of several months, I eventually reached that goal. 

Everyone poops, and it’s time we start talking about it. It’s the one thing we all have in common; even those with colostomy bags still have excretions and face the stigma around poop. We need to break down the shame around defecation—especially for women.