The Doe’s Latest Stories

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

It was the summer of 1973 when I discovered I was pregnant. I was taking a hiatus from school at UCLA and I was working at the undergraduate student body government offices. My boyfriend was a year older than I was and we were in love. Actually, we were engaged when he left for a months-long trip to Europe. 

While he was gone, I missed my period. I went to a doctor because I was worried—they didn’t have home pregnancy tests back then. I was shocked when I found out, because he was the first person I had ever had relations with. We used condoms, and one must have broken. I don’t know how it happened. I was scared, but I was hopeful because we were engaged and I loved him. So I thought we could work it out.

Unfortunately, when he came home, he told me that he'd met someone else. 

Of course, I was devastated. It was just a terrible situation. I never told him I was pregnant because what was the point? He was moving on. Even when I randomly saw him years later, I never said anything. I was living with my parents and just didn't know where to turn. I grew up in a traditional Jewish family in Los Angeles with my two siblings. My parents were absolutely devoted to each other. They were married for almost 60 years before my dad passed away. In my house, sex was not talked about. And it was shocking to me to get pregnant because I was always the goody-two-shoes and never got in trouble. I thought, It couldn't happen to me.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if abortion hadn't become legal earlier that year.

I would come into work and I'd be crying, because I’d been hiding all of it at home. Finally, I confided in my office coworker, a dear friend, who told me that Roe v. Wade had been decided in January. I was a little bit oblivious, I have to admit. I was a very sheltered and naive 21-year-old. I didn't know anyone who had had an abortion. This wasn't something we talked about.

I was just really lucky to have this coworker who was a little bit older than I was and very motherly. She asked me how I felt about keeping the baby, and I said, “I just don't think I can. I don't think it's something that I envision for my life. I do want children. I always wanted children, but not this way—you know, without a father.” So that's when she started investigating alternatives. I went to Planned Parenthood and I had counseling. My friend helped me arrange everything and came with me to the facility. She took me home to her house for a few days so that I didn't have to face my parents right away.

The actual abortion was very painful and I was scared to death. Getting over something like that doesn't happen overnight. There's that guilt that persists. Now, in retrospect, I know I did the right thing, but at the time you question yourself. 

My life is wonderful now and I have a beautiful family. I have a husband to whom I've been married for 46 years and we have two adult children who are raising their own families. I went on to get my teaching credential. I taught for many years and enjoyed my chosen path. But sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if abortion hadn't become legal earlier that year. My sister basically had the same situation I’d been dealt, but she's seven years older than I am, and she didn't have the options available to me. Her option was to marry the person who got her pregnant, though they did not love each other and never would have married. But, he married her, and they were divorced within a year. Their daughter is wonderful, but my sister never remarried. She led a single life and she made a life for herself, but not the one she would have chosen.

As for me, at one point, I asked my husband, Would you have been interested in me if I had a child? And he said, That’s not even the point, because we probably wouldn't have met. I would have been under very different circumstances. And, you know, he’s right.

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

My brother and I have always been really close. Being born just two years before him, I don't have many memories of when he wasn’t here. He was always the sweeter out of us two—I was usually the one with an attitude and getting into trouble. He was really caring and loved making arts and crafts for people. He was very smart and did really well in school.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when he started having a hard time. At one point he started getting into smoking weed—which I think is wrong but not out of the ordinary for a teenager. Then he started getting into huge arguments with my mom and running away and trying to be really difficult on purpose. The first incident with a gun that I can remember was in the fall of 2021, a few months before I was supposed to go away for college. He posted something on social media that made it clear he had a weapon. The police came to our house and found that he had actually built a gun. He was put in a program that was supposed to help him, but, essentially, he got away with it.

From there, it just got worse. I think he began getting really comfortable and thinking, “Well, now I can kind of do whatever I want without having to face the consequences.” There was one big event that happened while I was away at college: My mom and my stepdad moved down South and they brought my brother and my older sister along with them. The night before they were supposed to leave, he was really upset. Which is understandable, because he had lived in the West his whole life. But usually he’s pretty mature through change, so it seemed random. Eventually they did all move down there, and my mom started my brother in an alternative school to help out students like him.

Things were going a little better for a while, until my mom noticed that my brother was ordering a bunch of packages in the mail. She looked through his closet and found that he had built another gun. He was extremely angry and he took the gun and pointed it at himself. He told my mom and my stepdad that if they didn’t leave him alone, he was going to kill himself. 

He was sent to a mental facility for a few weeks, but they told my mom that they didn’t really have a reason to keep him, that he didn’t seem suicidal. They said, “There's nothing to worry about. We’re not the type of place for him.” Which seems really weird, but he was good at bouncing back. He’d misbehave and then the next week he'll be back to his old self—doing amazingly in school, making everyone happy. So maybe when they evaluated him, they were like, “Oh, we don't see anything wrong. We think he can be sent back into normal society.”

There were opportunities to get him help. I think people were lazy and didn't want to deal with it.

Typically, Black men and boys are treated more harshly and given fewer chances for rehabilitation in comparison to other races. In my brother’s case, though, I think the people trying to help him knew that and therefore tried not to treat him more harshly because he was Black. They purposely did not punish him as much as he should have been.

Instead, he was prescribed some medicine and sent back home. The medicine did help for a while. He was really calm, but he also wasn’t himself. He was kind of just there and he wouldn't really interact with us. He'd be in his room all day and wouldn’t really laugh about anything. He  went through the motions of his day with no real personality. 

He didn't like how that medication made him feel, so he stopped taking it. One day, he told my mom that he wanted to go live with my dad back West. My dad has been in and out of our lives, so it was surprising that my brother wanted to go live with him. 

My dad said, “If you come with me, I'll give you a car and I'll let you have freedom and I'll treat you better.” He basically bribed him. I don’t think my dad realized the severity of the situation—I think he just wanted to be a cool parent. In the South, my mom didn’t allow him to have a car. He had a strict curfew. She was keeping an eye on him. Everyone tried to tell my dad, “This is not a good idea.” But at that point, my mom was really tired. She'd gone through a lot with my brother. Eventually she just said, “Okay, whatever. If you want to go, you can go.” So about a year ago, my brother moved back West to live with our dad.

That was the last time we saw my brother. There's a lot of things I don't know, but I do know that he wasn't being watched. He wasn't being punished. He wasn't being helped. Because of his past, a condition of him being able to go to his new high school out West was that he’d be checked for weapons every morning, which made complete sense. But other than that, he was left alone.

The day the incident happened, I was on the West coast, far away from my family. I had come back from class and I saw a missed call from my mom. She told me she had gotten a call from a woman who said my brother was “involved in a shooting.” Those are the words they used. They didn’t say if he’d shot someone or if he’d been shot.

Until you are that person that's dealing with a mental illness, it's really hard to judge.

Here’s what happened: He shot two deans who were checking him for weapons, and then he ran. [Editor's note: Both deans were taken to the hospital and survived the shooting.] It seems like it escalated because, that day, he refused to let them search him like they normally did. But we didn’t know any of that yet. I kept refreshing Google, and the hardest moment of that day was when I refreshed it and a picture of my brother popped up. It said, “This is the shooter. We're looking for him.” My brother was a minor—they didn’t even tell my mom before they released his photo.

I was a mess. I was crying out of shock, like I could not believe that my brother shot someone at school. Everyone had seen what he did and was posting about it. I don’t want to say it was embarrassing but…well, yeah, it was embarrassing. Then reality started to set in: I knew he was going to take his life after doing something like this. At nine o’clock at night, I got a call from my aunt and she told me they had found a body and they were pretty sure it was my brother’s.

I don't think anyone really knows what went on that day except for my brother and those two deans. When you think “school shooter,” you usually think of a white man rampaging through the school shooting students. I always thought of what happened with my brother as more of a shooting that happened to take place in a school. He did not harm or try to harm students. He was not bullied and was not trying to retaliate. That doesn’t make what he did any better, though, and it doesn’t tell us why he did it. It’s so hard to find a reason for any of it. He was going through stuff that no one will ever know. 

I think he needed a lot more help than they were giving him. He should have been sent to a long term facility. There were opportunities to get him help and show him that there are consequences, and I just think people were lazy and they didn't want to deal with it, or they were trying not to be unfairly hard on him because he was Black. 

Until you are that person that's dealing with a mental illness or whatever he was dealing with internally, it's really hard to judge. That being said, it was no one else's responsibility to make him do the right thing. It was my brother’s responsibility to stay out of trouble and take help when offered. He was 17. That's old enough to know right from wrong, to know you should not be taking a gun to school or shooting anybody. What he did only gives people who want to treat Black men like criminals more space to do so. 

Although I don't agree with what he did, he really was a good guy. He loved his family and he loved the people around him. There were so many people who loved him back. A few moments before he decided to kill himself, he left my sister a voicemail on her phone. It sounded like he was driving, and he said: “I’m sorry. I'm sorry that I had to do this. I love you, and I love everybody.”

In an idyllic western town six hours south of the Canadian border, I met President Theodore Roosevelt at the post office. Well, not the actual man, of course—this guy, dressed in an all-white 1900s hiking suit, was one of the many historical interpreters that wandered around town. Guys like him were the reason I’d come here: to manage a tiny theater next to a national park.

In that moment, while setting up a P.O. Box to mail letters to my boyfriend, I envisioned the utopia I’d hoped for, clicking through my mind like projector slides. I’d work a summer in the West among cheerful peers. We’d eat buckets of carbs and take hiking trips together on our days off. I’d see more stars than I’d ever seen before, I’d encounter wild buffalo, I’d go drink for drink with dead presidents. And, at the end of my utopian vision for summer, I’d have been good at my job. Everyone would like me. They’d extend my contract for the fall musical. They’d extend my contract for the Christmas show. They’d extend my contract indefinitely, and I’d become the face of the local theater, and my boyfriend would move out and buy us a cabin and we’d live like cowboys forever.  

Some of the utopia turned out to be true. I spent my nights stargazing. I spent my mornings hiking. I made a couple of friends, and we’d get sloshed at the saloon that dated back to the 1860s. I loved my job for a couple of months. It was my dream job. I sold tickets and greeted guests and wrangled shows into existence. It was the kind of work I’d imagined myself doing since I made my dolls act out plays as a kid. 

And since some of the fantasy was true, it was very easy for me to ignore the rest. It was easy to ignore the all-white exhibits at the company-owned museums. Easy to ignore the way international workers never got promoted to managers. Easy to ignore my rejected request for a pride event, easy to ignore the careless way my peers talked about cities and guns and transit and families. 

Everyone was so nice. We all smiled and said hello to each other when we passed by on the sidewalks. We all behaved as though we were working together towards something greater than the individual. That the stories we were telling about history were true and good.

This visibly pro-white organization seemed to send one message: Our mission was to secure the future of the white race.

The stories we were telling about history were, generally speaking, untrue and foul. The true story of the Wild West is entangled with the stories of Black and Indigenous cowboys innovating the ranching industry and creating a new American culture. The story of my company was that male white ranchers and male white billionaires and male white presidents were the only important people to ever exist. 

It took a while for me to explore my company’s range of museums and performances. We ran multiple shows per day at various venues all over town. There were a handful of historically preserved houses among the museums. If I were a different person I would have immediately recognized the red flags of the first museum I stepped into. I would have looked closer at the exhibits glorifying white expansion into the western United States. I would have thought a bit harder about the musical portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt saving the day at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Instead, I decided to try not to worry about it. 

I have a theater degree. I took four years of script analysis classes. I could not prevent myself from eventually seeing the subtext of the stories I was complicit in producing. And, when I thought about it, I realized there’s something very fishy about insisting that Roosevelt secured America’s freedom during the Spanish American War. I don’t believe that annexing Cuba has anything to do with American freedom. I would suppose that, actually, most historians do not think that the Spanish American War was a major win for the civil liberties of Americans. 

When I looked even deeper into the text of each story, I concluded that the true mission of my company was not to preserve American history. We were surrounded on all sides by Indigenous reservations, but the only thing we could talk about was white heroes from the past. We scattered each story with white-people love songs, white-people gospel music, and of course, plenty of white country tunes. I hate to say it, but white people singing songs about getting married and having lots of babies in the context of a visibly pro-white organization seemed to send one message: Our mission was to secure the future of the white race. 

I thought it was just in my head. And when gossip corroborated my findings, I didn’t take it seriously. It took revisiting each museum, re-watching each musical, and hundreds of conversations about the company’s past. Long-time technicians told me about the countless people who spoke up about microaggressions and never got their contracts renewed. Actors told me they used to write grants until they noticed the company rejected anything that might increase diversity. I wrote a land acknowledgment for my venue and was encouraged by several higher-ranking coworkers not to announce it. 

And then one day, I was sitting behind my desk listening to a local complain about crime in Chicago, a city he’d never been to. I felt like a bad person for choosing to work there. It didn’t matter that the work was fun. I’m sure it’s also fun for the engineers who build nuclear bombs. Working here felt like reorganizing the stockroom at a racism factory. It suddenly felt so goofy and awful. I was not a cartoon villain, I was just the evil front desk receptionist. 

But we were all living in our fantasy worlds. When I’d ask my co-workers, “This place is kind of racist, isn’t it?” I’d be met with a whole lot of sputtering and denial. Even well-meaning liberals like me were too blinded by our career aspirations to notice that we were working for a propaganda organization with oil barons on the board. 

After two months I canceled my contract and sped out of town. I don’t know how to undo my crime of administering racism. I see it now in my city, too. When I go to the opera, I am looking at the happy white faces of every worker, imagining that I am them, imagining that I am unaware forever.

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

Growing up, I basically had two dads: the dad that was there every day and raised me, and the dad that I knew to be my biological dad. The latter was the man that my mom was married to when she became pregnant with me; let’s call him Sal. He was my legal father. I had visitation rights with him after they divorced.

Then, when I was around 9 or 10 years old, my mom let me know that while she was married to Sal, she was the victim of a sexual assault by a coworker, and I was the result of that. My mom is very Christian and conservative, but she was never shy about teaching us things, so I had a full understanding of what sexual assault was at that age.

When I found out, I immediately started sobbing. Sal had known he wasn’t my biological dad for a while. It was a big part of the reason for their divorce. The man who raised me—I’ll call him Jim—is my older brother's biological father, so he was already in my mom's life when she met Sal. When my mom got pregnant with me, Sal and his whole family thought that my mom had had an affair with Jim, and that she lied about the assault to cover it up. My mom refused to abort me because of religious reasons, and at first was going to give me up for adoption, but then she changed her mind at the last minute and decided to keep me.

After I found out about the failed adoption, I remember feeling a particular kind of warmth that my mom had chosen me over her marriage. Sal was not a good husband according to her, so I didn't really feel guilt, per se. But I was definitely devastated to learn that Sal wasn't my real dad. I spent my first 10 years on this earth believing that's who he was. Around that time, visitations with Sal stopped, and I wouldn’t see or hear from him for another decade.

The thing I wanted to know the most was what my real biological dad looked like. I didn’t have a clue beforehand that Sal wasn’t my dad, because I’ve always looked more like my mom. She’s Black and Sal is white, and I’ve always had the skin tone of someone half Black and half white. My mom told me, “If you want to look him up, I support that.” But I decided against it. I think it was because I had my dad, Jim. In my head I was like, “I already have a dad that has loved me as his own from the day I was born. I don't need anyone else.” I’d actually wondered myself whether Jim was indeed my real dad. I always had an essence of doubt about my mom’s sexual assault story—until I did 23andMe.

Oh my God, was I excited. I finally had some answers about half of who I am.

My boyfriend and I did it together for Christmas, on a whim, when I was 23 years old. At that point, I hadn't thought about my biological dad in years. When we got our results, I got a notification that said I shared 25% of my DNA with someone. At first, I didn't do the math and realize, Huh, 25% is a lot. But then I got a message from a gentleman who was born in the ‘60s—about 30 years older than me—wondering how we were related. I’ll call him Mike. I saw my biological dad’s unusual Italian last name on this guy’s list of family surnames.

I responded to the message with my father’s name—let’s call him Larry Piedenero. “Do you know Larry?” I asked.

He said, “Larry is my biological father.” 

Mike told me that, like me, he’d never met Larry. He was the product of a one-night stand, and his birth mother had given him up for adoption. He said that Larry passed away two years ago, and that he had at least three other children. Mike had tracked them down and met them, along with some members of Larry’s extended family.

I ran into my bedroom with tears in my eyes. I told my boyfriend, “He’s my brother!” It felt surreal. I felt like I was reading a movie script. I was just in utter shock and disbelief. And then once I settled down, oh my God, was I excited. I finally had some answers about half of who I am.

Mike put me in touch with the rest of my siblings on Facebook. Larry’s first daughter was born in 1958, two years before my mom was born. The last one born before me was born in 1965. Later, we discovered a fifth sibling born in 1963. I’m always waiting to see if more of us pop up, because 1965 to 1996 (when I was born) is a very long break.

The siblings had built out the whole family tree on ancestry.com. And they sent me pictures, including of my dad. I never realized how deeply I needed to see a picture. They also told me a little bit about him: He was apparently a genius, and a writer like I am. He wrote for a lot of newspapers in the 1960s, and even after that. He was quite a progressive man; he wrote an op-ed criticizing the grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the cop that killed Eric Garner in 2014. He wrote another one about the racist comments made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Reading those articles, I felt a bit of pride. It was the first connection I felt to this man who I can never fully know. Most of Larry will forever be a mystery to me.

I never told the other siblings that my dad sexually assaulted my mother. I didn’t need to tarnish whatever memory they might have had of their dad. Also, it was a joyous, positive moment for me, and I didn’t want to to ruin that feeling of happiness. When I called my mom to let her know everything I’d discovered, she was really supportive. And she gave me permission to not hate him. She told me, “He was deeply misled man with a lot of emotional turmoil. But he was not a monster.” Even in that moment, the first emotion she had was grace for me. She was putting my needs first, as she always has.

So I decided, Let this be a joyous family reunion. And I will let the tragedy be my burden and no one else's.

More than anything else, it felt so good to have an answer. I’d always had this weird feeling that there was something missing from me. I did not feel complete. Now I had some people to ask questions and fill in the details. I had people who could relate—literally.

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

When I was prescribed fentanyl patches for my chronic pain, I didn't think anything bad would happen. I had this false sense of, I can be strong enough, smart enough to not get hooked. My dad was a heroin addict—I was not going to end up like him.

Honestly, I thought, Fantastic. This is going to give me my life back. And it really did help. It was great. Until it wasn't. 

I was 32. I was raising my two kids who were 12 and nine. And I was in nearly constant pain. I was born with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. Your ligaments and tendons don't hold your joints together properly, which means chronic joint pain and muscle pain. I was working fulltime caring for people with severe developmental disabilities, transferring heavy people from wheelchairs to beds. There were people with violent behaviors, and you could get injured just ducking and dodging. I would often get partial hip dislocations at work.

To manage the pain, I was using a lot of cannabis, which was illegal in Florida, where I lived. I eventually got arrested for smoking in my car. I was put on probation, which involved drug testing, so I couldn’t use cannabis anymore. That’s what led me to a pain management doctor in the first place.

Here's the thing about these doctors: I didn't feel like I was in a doctor's office. There was not a discussion of what my pain was like or ways to mitigate pain without the medication. In “pill mills” like this, the waiting rooms are full of people who look like they're in varying levels of distress. Some people look like they're in withdrawal, very fidgety, sweaty. It had an uncomfortable feel—a little sketchy and shady.

I started wearing the fentanyl patches, and it was really helping with my pain. I had more energy. I felt a sense of wellbeing from the medicine. But one day, my pharmacy was out of the patches, and I experienced my first withdrawal. It was absolutely horrific. Chills. Sweating. Air and clothes hurt my skin. I constantly felt like I had to pee. I had diarrhea. I was nauseous. No energy. Light hurt my eyes. That was when I realized that my body was addicted. Eventually, I was getting the urge to put on a patch early. The patch is supposed to last for three days, but after only two, the pain would come back worse than before.

I get so angry thinking about the fact that cannabis is illegal while opioids are widely available.

On that last day, I was doing whatever I could to get through the day: taking lots of Tylenol and ibuprofen, drinking tons of coffee. But I was still in so much pain. I became less and less available to my kids. I wasn't going to tell them that Mommy's detoxing; instead I would say, “I’m just not feeling good today. Tomorrow will be a better day.”

The breaking point was about a year after I’d been on the patches. My pharmacy was having supply problems, and I was in bed for an entire weekend. I just went from the bed to the bathtub, because being in hot water was the only thing that brought any relief. I said to myself: I can't do this anymore.

My pain doctor prescribed me methadone. That was such a mental hit for me: I felt like I had become those junkies I had judged before. I started tapering off very slowly, shaving a little bit off of the pills each week. During this time, I started to think about moving to a state where it was legal to take cannabis. My brother was in Washington, and he knew all about my pain. He said, “You'll love it here. And there's legal cannabis.”

I started going back and forth from Washington to Florida, flying back every time I needed to pick up my methadone prescription. When I got my very last one, I moved my family to Washington permanently. I survived that slow, slow tapering by having a joint in my mouth all day long. It was the only thing that took the edge off the pain. 

I found a doctor who would prescribe cannabis. I brought this thick stack of medical records and the doctor glanced at it, checked off a few things, and gave me the paperwork to get my card. It was so brief, so nothing. It was a joke. I'm not mad at it because I think cannabis should be available to everybody, but nothing about the process felt medical or like health care. The doctor was sort of knowledgeable about pain and inflammation, but he didn’t give me a regimen or anything. I was kind of disappointed. I wish we had holistic health care in this country, where doctors could counsel effectively on using cannabis.

I get so angry thinking about the fact that cannabis is illegal while opioids are widely available. I think about how it was in Florida, where my doctor was handing me fentanyl like it was nothing and the cops were throwing me in a cage for a plant. That's insane to me. Of course it’s individual, but opioids should never be prescribed for chronic pain. They just shouldn't.

I know my addiction wasn't a failure on my part—it was a process of physiology—but there’s still shame. I hardly ever talk about it. My experience made me have more empathy for addicted people. Even my father, who’s a hard person to have empathy for. Ask anyone: He’s an abuser and manipulative. But I do believe I inherited the connective tissue disorder from him. And he was probably treating physical pain by doing heroin.

More people should know that cannabis can help with opioid addiction. There's probably a lot of resistance to the idea of getting off of one drug and using another. Don't get me wrong: Cannabis is a drug. But it's not the same class of drugs as opioids. It does not erase the perception of pain like opiates do. You do have to shift to accepting a certain level of pain. It doesn’t produce the same type of euphoria. Opiates make you feel like nothing is wrong and everything is great. You can solve every problem. So I understand why people lose their lives to this stuff.

I’ve figured out what works for me. I vaporize full-spectrum oil, once per hour, all day long. Getting the right dose can be a very delicate dance of enough THC where you're getting some pain relief, but not so much that you are cognitively impaired. I also had to learn meditation and breathing techniques. I started exercising. I started therapy. I implemented everything I possibly could to try to live with this pain without being shackled to a drug that almost ruined my life. Without cannabis, I would not be functioning. I wouldn't be a wife, mother, a friend. It’s not dramatic to say that it saved my life.

Ever since seventh grade, I have always been known as “that girl in the hijab.” I’m 17 now, and on a good day, I become an ambassador for Islam, subject to answering the many, many questions people have. On a bad day, I’m the symbol of oppression, everything that westerners despise, a clear contrast to the supposed freedom we’re granted in the west. Or else I’m a target for those with bigoted views that love to taunt us:

“You’re the bomb, get it?”

“Oh, you poor thing.”

“Dirty terrorist.” 

The hijab is a simple piece of cloth. Yet the world has woven many complexities through its threads.

I was surrounded by powerful women who wore the hijab, the most notable being my mother. Despite being a direct target of microaggressions because she was a Black Muslim woman, my mother commanded a room. She drew the respect of those who stood against her and showed a kinder, gentler side to the ones she loved. She was quick to correct a wrong and always told me to never, ever let my hagg (honor) be taken away from me. I remember an instance when my sister was called a racial slur by a construction worker while we were driving. My mother turned the car around and demanded to speak to his manager and wouldn’t leave until the issue was resolved. I knew I wanted to be just like her.

When I was in elementary school I decided to wear the hijab. I went to a school in Alberta, Canada that had an Arabic program; it was majority Muslim, so there wasn’t much of a ruckus. But I was never consistent with it. I took it off one day, kept it on the other, never really caring about it. My mom and dad never told me to wear it, but I think they were amused by their daughters’ antics, especially when my sister took her hijab off after gym and started fanning herself with it.

I wear the hijab because it has become intertwined with who I am. It shows that I am a Muslim, and I’m proud of it.

In seventh grade, I decided to start wearing the hijab for real. When I look back at those photos, I cringe—only because absolutely no one could call their fashion sense back then acceptable. I wore the hijab because I wanted to get closer to my deen (religion) and have something in common with my sisters. We were like a hijabi trio, the hijabi Power Puffs, one more thing that could link us all together. 

In high school, I continued to wear the hijab, because I saw it as a form of protest against western standards, where short skirts were the norm and being ranked the prettiest was the best thing that could happen to a girl. It was a protest against the idea that a girl had to show a little skin in order to rise to the top. I’m not anti-feminist; I believe in women's rights. But if one woman has the right to uncover, why can’t I have the right to cover?

I wear the hijab because it has become intertwined with who I am. It shows that I am a Muslim, and I’m proud of it. It also creates an understanding between me and other hijabis. I can see another hijabi in the middle of nowhere and we’d still have a special connection. We know that we have each other’s backs and wish peace unto each other. It’s a special bond that can’t be explained but is deeply cherished.

There are lots of Muslims in my community, so deciding to wear a hijab was pretty easy. But that’s not the case for everyone. When my cousin started wearing one in her white-majority school, she faced many instances of racism and Islamophobia. When my friend started wearing it in junior high, her friends kept telling her she looked prettier without it and that “she should take it off.” There are women who get attacked for wearing one, spit on and even stalked, simply because of a piece of fabric.

In certain parts of Canada, I am not allowed to become a teacher, simply because I wear a hijab. In France, wearing a hijab or abaya to school is illegal; there was even an instance where a girl’s teacher forced her to take off her skirt because it was “too long” and therefore “too religious.” In Belgium, there is a hijab ban. In Britain, I can get laid off for wearing one. These are all considered lands where freedom is upheld, but apparently that only applies to those who fit the mold.

Think about how western society views nuns. These are women who cover their hair and aren’t allowed to get married; who are devout, pious, who please their God and who are accepted by society. They’re seen as symbols of devotion, but when many people from the west see a hijabi, they think of oppression. They think of a terrorist. They think of a poor, misguided immigrant. Hijabis can see themselves, thank you very much. We see beautiful, courageous women who proudly showcase their faith, despite the burden society places on them.

My mom used to brush my hair while Sex and the City played in the background. Even though I was a semi-literate five-year-old who would rather eat worms than kiss a boy, I understood enough of the show to know two things: I wanted a wardrobe like Carrie’s, and I wanted to be a writer, clacking away on my laptop for hours each night. 

So I worked to turn my goal into a reality. I wrote stories with glitter gel pens in fuzzy diaries in elementary school. I took newspaper classes in middle school and then high school. At college, I worked at a news station. Once I graduated in 2017, I started freelancing for the entertainment sites I’d dreamed about working with. I did it. I’d done it.

My secrets for success included having a unique writing style and parents who paid my way. I could afford to take low-paying (and no-paying) internships at the big, glossy companies, who were more than happy to pay me pennies to trail their writers around.  

For the most part, I wrote puff pieces about trending topics on social media and fashion round-ups. Every once in a while, an editor would ask for a personal essay about a random event in my life. I’d write them with the intention of making the reader laugh. I figured there was plenty of terrible news out there; people came to these entertainment sites for just that—entertainment.

But something changed around the 2016 presidential election. The rise of pay-per-click content meant the more eyes on your piece, the more money it made. It turned out that laughter, while enjoyable, only sometimes yielded the most profits. Polarizing content, however? That could pay at least the electricity bill. 

A new system emerged: Take any Trump quote and explain why it’s bad. Entire business models were based on this strategy. The articles practically wrote themselves.

Was I now writing for attention first? Had profit outranked entertainment?

With the rise in Trump content also came the rise of racial awareness in American society. That’s when editors started asking me to lean more into my Blackness: Can we have something about what it was like for you to grow up Black in a red state? How close do you live to this officer-involved shooting? Have you, like, ever been the victim of a really bad hate crime? 

These assignments were a far cry from my usual topics, but I wanted more industry exposure. I knew what people would click on. I had no control over what headline the editor would choose for the articles they commissioned, but I maintained relative control of the piece’s narrative. Except it doesn’t matter if people read the whole article—it’s the clicks that count.

For the first time, I received hateful comments full of racial slurs and threats of violence. I’d respond by saying I never intended to make anyone angry. 

The messages started coming even when I hadn’t published an article recently. That meant the piece had gone viral multiple times and continued to reach new areas of the internet. I’d never had any training on what to do if I was being harassed. The messages got meaner. I stopped replying. I took my email out of my Twitter bio. 

Meanwhile, Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein piece for The New Yorker dropped, kicking off the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, any piece exposing (or accusing) a famous man of sexual misconduct would bring in a tidal wave of clicks. 

One of the lifestyle companies I interned-then-freelanced for stumbled into a #MeToo piece of its own. An anonymous tip had come through about an incident between a famous comedian and a young woman. The site hardly ever ran serious, newsy pieces, but this story seemed like it could earn a fair amount of views. And honestly, what was the worst that could happen? 

The story exploded on the internet. 

The girl who anonymously came forward with the story got doxxed. The lead writer of the piece also got doxxed. The accused man disappeared from the public eye. Legitimate news organizations criticized the company for dangerous, irresponsible, and just-plain-bad reporting. Men called it a smear campaign against all men. Women said it delegitimized the stories of “actual victims.” The company that published the story went into panic mode, sending unprepared staffers into interviews and navigating how to move forward from a very public fallout.

I had nothing to do with the writing, editing, or legal approval of that story. But somehow, I still felt implicated in the fallout, felt guilty for participating in the system that’d created the story in the first place. I felt bad for the girl who came forward with a traumatizing event only to be mocked by the general public, I felt bad for the comedian who (to me) genuinely seemed unaware of how his actions came across, and I felt bad for the writer who became a punching bag for the far-right. Who benefited from this story? Not the company that published it, because that company no longer exists. A once-powerful #MeToo movement was now up for debate because of what people considered irresponsible reporting. So what was it all for? 

When I started my professional writing career, I wrote to make people laugh. I wrote for media outlets whose goal was to keep people entertained. But somewhere along the way, everyone’s intentions became distorted. Was I now writing for attention first? Had profit outranked entertainment?

I took a step back from writing for media and entertainment. I still work as a writer, and I don’t regret the majority of the content I churned out in the clickbait trenches. I do, however, regret how easy it was to lose sight of my initial goals as a writer. And I still think a lot about how my own words may have negatively impacted society.

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

Let’s call it The Club. It was beautiful. Luxurious. I really, really wanted to work there. It had and still has a reputation for being the absolute best. They provided their trainers with a ton of in-house education. I’d been in the fitness industry since 2006; this is where I wanted to be.

I was hired as a junior manager in downtown Manhattan in 2018. Within three weeks I received a promotion, an $11,000 raise, and a transfer to a club on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t that surprising because I had a lot of experience, and I had the numbers to back it up. But the same day I transferred, the outgoing manager—a Black woman I’ll call N—issued a warning after only a tiny amount of small talk. She told me that K, the junior manager to whom I’d be a supervisor, had a thing for young Black women. “I see you coming in as a young, vibrant Black woman, and I don’t want you to struggle in the way that I did,” N said. “If I were you, I would set a boundary early on so you can get him to do work.”

I remember thinking, “Okay, that is a red flag.” But I wasn’t about to quit. I started working at the club and it turns out N was right. K made every effort to talk to me about Black women he had dated, Black women he was crushing on, Black women at the gym who he thought had great tits. “Look at her ass,” all that bullshit. That’s inappropriate talk for anyone at work, let alone your supervisor. At the same time, though, he went out of his way to let me know that he didn't think I was qualified for the job, that I should have “started from the bottom and worked my way up.” He told the staff I didn't understand The Club’s culture, and therefore they didn’t need to listen to me.

I don't like when people are interested in me simply because I'm a Black face attached to a vagina. I don't stand for it. But to do that and also be incapable of showing Black women any respect, particularly to your supervisor, is disgusting to me. Those two things would be reprehensible separately. Together, they made me sick.

K was also disparaging about our Black employees. He would constantly call them lazy. We hired a guy who was Black and so excited to be there, just a sponge for knowledge. He would show up early and stay late, would do everything in his power to prove that he was dedicated to working at The Club. But K would say, “You know, he’s is a really nice guy, but I don't think he's going to make it as a trainer. I don't think he has what it takes.” You're telling me you’re happy to let him clean the gym and pick up food for the staff meeting, but you’re unwilling to support him in the role we actually hired him to do?

I’ve never experienced that kind of direct, entitled, open racism—certainly not in the workplace.

I started witnessing racism and sexism almost daily. I didn’t go to human resources about every single thing—I didn’t want to put a target on my back—but I felt I had to report the more egregious incidents. Typically, HR would address the problem. But then immediately after, I would be written up for being late. It was retaliation and it wasn't subtle. Literally the day after I would call HR about something, I would get called into the office and my job would be threatened.

One day, a membership advisor called me and told me a man had just signed up for a membership and wanted to work with a trainer. “A white male trainer,” she specified. I tried to clarify: “Is he describing someone he saw during his tour or something?” She double-checked with him: “No, just any white male.”

I told her, “First of all, I highly recommend never calling a Black woman ever again to say that someone is requesting to work with no one of their gender or race. That's offensive. But more than that, I can't grant that request. It would be a liability for the company if employees learned that they did not receive work on the basis of their race and gender.” She insisted she was just trying to make sure we were providing good customer service to our members. I responded that racism is not customer service.

I've dealt with racism my whole life; most Black people will say that they have. But I’ve never experienced that kind of direct, entitled, open racism—certainly not in the workplace. I called the general manager right away and let him know exactly what happened. The next afternoon, I sent him and HR an email detailing the incident. That same day, the general manager informed me that he was writing me up for being late. He also let me know that my job was on the line: If I got written up again, he said, I was going to be fired.

Was I technically late? Yes. But everyone knew that managers’ arrival times were never meant to be hard directives. The culture at The Club was that every single manager was late a lot of the time, and no managers at this location were ever written up for being late. Even K was shocked that I was being written up.

In large, coastal, urban cities, the majority of staff at gyms are people of color.

Later, I found out my general manager went behind my back and granted the new client’s request. He told K I was unwilling to provide customer service to our members, so would he pair the man up with one of the only two white male trainers? Context is important here: In large, coastal, urban cities, the majority of staff at gyms are people of color. Personal training is a career where, without a college degree, you can get certified and make hundreds of dollars an hour and have health insurance. Health and financial stability are hard to secure in underserved communities.

In the end, HR wrote up the general manager and the membership advisor. But the two of them kept their jobs. Management allowed the new member who’d made the discriminatory request to keep his membership, and to continue training with whichever white male trainer he preferred. 

Three months after this incident, I was fired.

My first thought was that I was going to lose my health insurance. I had struggled with an eating disorder for years, and the stress at work had made it much worse. It was the first time I’d had to seek clinical treatment, and if I lost this job I wouldn't be able to afford it. So I begged them to let me stay. Just give me another job at another location so I can keep my health insurance. It didn’t work. They still fired me.

Eventually, I went to a lawyer, who referred me to a litigation firm. The lawyers were incredible and supportive from the beginning. We sued The Club for subjecting me to a hostile work environment and for firing me because of my race. The jury believed me. I won.

A lot came to light during my trial. There were texts and emails with racist inside jokes. There was the time K called a Black woman “autistic” in a meeting. It turned out that the general manager who wrote me up for being late was late himself 57 percent of the time—even more than me. Yet most people named in my case still work at The Club. K has a better title now and makes more money. So does the man who hired me.

Still, I’m glad I did it. The jury agreed on a landmark award which was primarily punitive damages, but the money was never really the point. Part of it is because I knew what happened to me was wrong. Part of it was because I was leaving behind a staff of people of color who I feared would continue to be subjected to this if I didn't say anything. And part of it was because of my grandmother, the one on my dad’s side. She immigrated here in 1966, during the civil rights movement, to seek a better life for herself and my father. She came here with a Master's degree and had been a teacher and a nurse in Guyana. Here, she was put in ESL classes, even though Guyana is an English-speaking country. When she started working as a nurse, they put her in the lowest roles. They acted like she was incompetent. She dealt with the same shit I did. 

So when I told her what happened to me, her immediate response was, “I didn't come here in 1966 for you to lay down and let someone do this.” She always made it clear that it was my moral and social responsibility to speak up, because we have to protect the people we can.

On squealing wheels, they roll me through the hallway. Lying on my back on the hospital bed, I’m holding my eyes toward the ceiling where fluorescent lamps pass me by, one every few meters, accelerating my nerves. The smell of alcohol indicates our arrival to the operating room.

They put the bed in a corner and leave me alone with the sounds of the hospital: beeps and mumbles of pain. I sit up and cross my legs one last time with that little extra between my legs. My thoughts go blank, like the colorlessness that surrounds me. I tell myself not to cry but feel my eyes fill up with tears nonetheless.

Here I am, about to undergo my long-awaited sex reassignment surgery after almost six years of transitioning. Ever since I was a child, my brain guided me in the direction of glitter dresses, Barbie dolls, and oversized heels instead of race cars, the color blue, and rough play with fellow boy toddlers. It always felt like I had little control over the things that made me the woman I am today. Still, I have so many questions: Why me? Why am I like this? Why do I have to alter my body in order to be happy?

Suddenly, a group of doctors and nurses appears from between the curtains. I don’t know any of them until the last person emerges: Professor Monstrey, the famous plastic surgeon I’ve had multiple appointments with over the last four years. His name, almost pronounced as “Monster,” always felt ironic to me, but in this moment, while he's drawing lines and crosses all over my body assigning where to cut, where to take, and where to build, it doesn’t feel quite so ironic. Without even noticing the wetness on my cheeks, they leave as quickly as they came, and I’m alone again, with my tears blurring the black markings across my chest. 

A few minutes later, they roll me into the operating room. There’s a single bed in the middle of an open space. The walls are white, the floors tiled whiter. I see shimmering metal tools, laying on paper-covered tables. I see the anesthesiologist preparing her machine to put me in an eight-hour sleep. She asks me questions, but I can’t really hear them. I count down, breathing gas into my lungs.

Ten, nine, eight, white, seven, black, six …

In the aftermath of my “trans”-formation, I began to question all I was and all I had become.

The first thing I remember seeing is my parents smiling down on me. My mom laying her cool hand on my glowing forehead, my father taking his usual distance by the end of the bed. The days after that are a blur. I remember my boyfriend at the time bringing me food I shouldn’t eat. I remember the nurses ripping open the bandages on my wounded body and me feeling like they would rip me open with it, my guts spilling over the sheets. On the sixth day of the healing process, all spent in the bed, I’m able to take my first steps towards the bathroom. 

When I lay my eyes upon my new naked flesh for the first time, my reflection, and the image of myself, shatters. Pale white skin, laced with black thread holding pieces of blue, purple, swollen flesh together. Blood, almost black, flaking around new body parts. Eyes sunken. Ribs counted. Legs trembling. What have I done? 

I let my fingers shakily discover the newness of what I see in front of me, traveling around skin unknown. They slide along the curves of my breasts. Their hardness reminds me of a Wilhelm Lehmbruck statue I once saw in the MoMA in New York City. There, I held my palm on the naked marble girl’s breasts like many before me had done, noticeable from the discolored area on her chest. She was called “The Kneeling Woman.” 

Soon after that I fall to my knees, too.

I weep. First in silence, then like a newborn baby, unaware and unprepared for the world she just entered. I had always thought of the surgery as my salvation, the last step to completion, to womanhood. What I found instead was the realization that it was only the beginning of a new inferno. The perplexity, the abnormality I witnessed in that mirror. I felt I could never be a true woman if all this was the price of becoming one. 

For as long as I can remember, I have been searching for the definition of my femininity. I wanted to conquer femininity. Obliterate it, even. Only now, I feel like femininity might have conquered me. I realized that when the doctors cut open my body and built a sculpture of flesh between my legs, the price I paid was a piece of my humanity. I felt machinelike, alien. A composition of meat and flesh and discolored skin, like a Picasso.

And so, in the aftermath of my “trans”-formation, I began to question all I was and all I had become. I have always proclaimed that my mind was female from the moment I was born, but having the surgery reminded me that I will never truly know how female neurons fire away thoughts. I will never feel the softness of naturally occurring breasts or the pain of a menstrual cycle.

I will never feel life growing inside my belly.

Did I regret it? I didn’t think so. What else was I supposed to do with the body I didn’t want? Just like every living thing, I followed Darwin’s survival of the fittest: I adapted to my surroundings in order to stay alive. The other option would’ve been extinction. 

Still, the people around me were puzzled. “Isn’t this what you wanted all along?” they asked. Even Professor Monstrey, who praised me as one of his finest creations, waved off my dilemma using words like “petite” and “delicate,” and said things like, “Look at you, you’re so feminine. Your features don’t show any sign of the other sex. How can someone so beautiful have these issues?”

“Thank you, doctor” is all I owed him.

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

My wife and I have a consistent habit of deciding to do something on a certain schedule, and then jumping to do it earlier. We did that with marriage, with buying our house, and we did it with having our kid earlier, too.

We were both 25 when my wife found out she was pregnant. When the baby arrived, we were in the fray for about three months. The lack of sleep was tough, but everything else felt pretty decent. I was slowly growing closer to my son, which took a while. I didn’t think, “Oh my God, this is my everything” the moment I saw him. I really had to develop a relationship with him.

My son is nine months old now, and I’m starting to feel more and more separate from my friends. I had really close friends in college, and I lived in a house with four of them. After college we kept in touch; we were all around for each other’s first jobs and our first houses or apartments, and the parties that accompany those. Now I don't have time for evening parties, or really anything past 6 p.m. I have a 9-to-5 job, and I also run a small business that I opened two years ago, which I work at three evenings a week. We try to split parenthood duties evenly. During the evenings I work, she’s bearing the brunt of parenthood, so if I went out any other night, it would put even more burden on her.

The distance from my friends has happened gradually. It wasn't one incident—it was all these small things over time. You get invited to a housewarming party, a Halloween party, a Christmas party, a New Year's Eve party. They all start at 5 or 6 p.m. and my son goes down at 6:30 p.m. And I think, Well, I can't even come early and hang out because he's going to fall asleep in the car and get fussy and we're going to have a bad day the next day, so I guess I better just stay home and take care of him. It was one missed event after the next, after the next, after the next. All of a sudden, I'm in the group chat and they're having these inside jokes and I'm like, Man, I just don't know what they’re talking about. Those moments are the worst—the conversations I'm not able to be a part of because I don't relate, because I wasn’t there.

Whenever I get an invite that I have to turn down, there’s that fear of, “When are those invites going to stop coming? And then, “When are we just not friends anymore?” It's been nine months—can we last a year? Should we just stop now?

I don’t want to express that I have any faults, and losing friendships and needing community feels like a fault.

My wife hangs out with her friends maybe even less than I hang out with mine, but she does communicate with them more. She’ll call or text her friends. I don't call or text much with mine; we mostly hang in person. I think that verbal communication helps her because she needs more words of affirmation-type support, whereas I’m more about quality time.

I do have a couple of friends with kids. One of my college roommates, J, is a little poetic and has existential ideas about life. I thought he'd be one of the last to have kids, but he was the first of the group. He's actually got a third on the way. You’d think we would bond over our fatherhood, but he’s in school to be a doctor, and his wife is studying to be a nurse practitioner. They have way less time than even I do. Our get-togethers are few and far between. And when I do see him, he's extremely tired. I also have a friend from high school who just had a kid, but he lives about two hours away. I saw his son the week after he was born, and that was nice. But we're all young working professionals, and finding time in the evenings or weekends can be hard.

I don't have any new friends from dad groups or the playground. I live in a small town, a suburb of a larger city in the Midwest. There are only 18,000 people in my town and I live on a country road. We don't have many neighbors, and the ones we do have are older and their kids are older. We're not super-involved in our community—we kind of go to work and come home. We've visited a couple of churches and there does seem to be a lot of younger adults there with kids. I've also been introduced to some dads, but it's hard to follow up on those and I'm a fairly shy person to begin with. So to make those new friendships can take a lot of effort and feels very foreign to me. I have these ideas of where I could meet people and then I never execute them, like a running group or a woodworking group. I always have the idea, like, “Oh, I could do that on a Saturday.” But then I never do; something comes up.

I don’t really know why dads don’t connect with each other more. Maybe a reason would be our pride. I don’t want to express that I have any faults, and losing friendships and needing community feels like a fault. It's hard to expose yourself like that. Reaching out and saying “Hey, let’s be friends”—that’s being pretty vulnerable.

Before I had kids, people would tell me these things like, “Enjoy your sleep while you have it,” or “Enjoy your time while you have it.” As dumb as it sounds, I just didn't think about what that meant. It turns out babies don’t just wake up and go back to sleep, you have to rock them or feed them and then before you know it an hour goes by. All my time goes to chores and watching my son. If I’d known all that, maybe I would have put a little more thought to the gravity of having a kid. Not to say that I have any regrets, but I could have been a little more prepared mentally for that transition and understanding the effects it could have on my social life or my marriage or my relationship with my parents. So I would say, if you think you’ve thought about parenthood enough, think about it a little more.

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

My earliest memory of gaming was when I was around seven or eight years old, playing Super Mario World with my uncle. He said he remembers feeling sad for me because I would just run and inevitably die at the very beginning level. A couple of years later, my mother’s boyfriend, essentially my stepfather, ended up taking his own life. My mother was never really the same. Even though she was alive, she wasn’t all there for many years after that. Video games are the one thing I remember making me feel comforted. I’ve been using video games as a coping mechanism for 20 years.

By the time I was 15 or 16, I was playing PlayStation 2. It was socially acceptable to play video games for hours on end, but I started to notice that I didn't care how I was doing in school. I decided at a very young age that I was going to drop out; school wasn’t really for me. I just felt like an outcast. I knew I was intelligent, but I hated the social construct and academic structure of school.

So I started playing video games more and more. I was failing school and spending hours on X-Box 360. I wanted to become a professional gamer. During my morning shower, the first thing on my mind was, How am I going to get to the top ranks today?

I lost my first love because of gaming. I was 19 or 20. We were wildly in love with each other. At first, I gave her the time she deserved and she gave those feelings back to me. I actually moved in with her because my home life was so stressful. I lived with my grandmother and my two half-siblings. The house was so dirty, and all I did was stay in my room and play video games out of habit. So I moved in with this girl, but after the honeymoon phase of our relationship, the same thing happened at our house: I ended up building a gaming computer and just reclusing in our bedroom and playing Counter-Strike. I was getting really good, but for what? I don’t really know.

It was so pathetic in hindsight, so ridiculous. She became unhappy because I was spending more time on the computer than on making an effort to have a meaningful relationship. So she dumped me, which makes total sense. I was really, really hurting. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with this girl. That's when I really started to think, Whoa, video games are overlapping into my life in negative ways.

When I play video games now, I can no longer shake the feeling that I am wasting valuable time.

After that, I dated girls on and off in my early twenties. I was never a bad-looking guy and I always had pretty decent luck with girls. I could get in short-term relationships, no problem, but I wasn’t in anything long-term for a while after that. Ever since that first breakup, I learned how to be an individual, not totally codependent. I never threw my heart over the fence again because I knew how bad it could hurt.

Then there were the years where gaming and drinking mixed together. I started drinking a lot. I'm very predisposed to addiction; I’m a product of two people who have addiction problems. I love alcohol deeply, but I don’t love that it causes me to make decisions that absolutely do not serve me. Drinking and gaming is something I can get sucked into until the early morning hours.

This combination cost me my last job. I was working at a call center, and I was burnt out and miserable, so I was coping with video games and playing them until 9 a.m. when I had to start work at 11 a.m. Playing video games felt good. They were fun. There are no bills to play in video games. And when you play them, it makes you feel like you are somebody. It attaches onto your self-worth. You can develop and grow a skill that doesn't translate into the real world, but you can be praised for it among your peers. And when I would drink, it would enhance my immersion in the game and my ability to not care about the outside world. It would let me enjoy video games as much as I did as a kid.

When I was 24, I met my now-girlfriend at a New Year’s Eve party. We’ve been together for five years. Recently, gaming has crept back into my life in a way that is not good at all. It’s a cycle I’m really trying to break. One night I blacked out and said really mean things to her, like I didn’t need her, I could literally be fine without her. I almost lost her because of that, and she’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. I remember just waking up and thinking, I have to change something. 

I’ve been unemployed for four months now. I’m pushing away my girlfriend. She loves me so much, so she puts up with a whole lot. I’ve been trying to make more effort to spend every minute I can with her. I do love her deeply and she loves me more than anyone I've ever met. I'm realizing now that our relationships with people in the real world are worth so much more than playing video games with others who are also, for the most part, coping with the stresses of real life.

Video games, in the end, are patterns of light on a screen—red, blue and green pixels arranged in a way that stimulates your brain and releases dopamine. They’re wonderful forms of entertainment, and one day, I hope to return to them in a healthier way. But for people like myself who are prone to addiction, they can become a safe place where progress in the real world can stand still.

It’s easy to become trapped in your own limitations and comfort zone. I have realized that video games no longer serve me. Most times when I play them now, I can no longer shake the feeling that I am wasting valuable time. Every hour is one I could have spent growing a skill or furthering real-life hobbies. I know this, yet it’s still an addiction, and my brain inevitably craves it.

Lately, I’ve had a paradigm shift in my thinking: Life is going to become my video game, and I am going to win—or, at the very least, try as hard as I have to win in virtual worlds.

The doctor examines me, tells me to smile, pucker my lips, lift my eyebrows. She takes pictures and videos of me, looking at my face with an exact and judging eye. At this check-up, she will determine whether I need Botox, my last hope for gaining any more symmetry in my face.

In my profession, it’s not unusual for someone to give me direction, critique my face, and offer me Botox. I’m a 38-year-old actor who, in the past, has proudly declared that she would never get “work done.” But this is something different.

A year ago my boyfriend, K, gave me Covid, which sparked Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS)—an illness with the most beautiful name that no one knows how to say. In a sudden act of betrayal, the immune system begins to eat away at the nerves, causing paralysis. There is no cure, but after an IV treatment the body slowly heals itself, recovering each nerve, one millimeter a day.  By the time I was admitted to the hospital, I couldn’t stand on my own and my face was completely paralyzed. I could only move my jaw up and down and roll my eyes. I looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I was finally able to come home after a monthlong stay. I could now move the left side of my face and walk a few supervised steps with the rollator. I developed excruciating nerve pain about a week after my release. When I cried, the strong side of my face pulled my weak side over, contorting my features into a grotesque, unrecognizable expression. K was the only person I let see this. When I wasn’t in too much pain, he would take me out for fresh air in the wheelchair or with my walker so I could practice walking.

Pretty quickly, I realized I couldn’t wear my “before” clothing. My oversized Carhartt jacket and dirty sneakers used to read as cute and rustic when I was an attractive, vibrant woman. But in a frail, disabled body with a crooked face, they made me look like an addict lingering outside a methadone clinic. When I ran into familiar faces, my distorted self was met with their looks of confusion and overwhelming pity. Strangers would quickly look away in discomfort or pretend not to see me in the first place. Or maybe they really didn’t notice me at all. Before all this, I might have looked away, too.

I felt ashamed that my beauty had made me feel special in the first place.

I was not used to these looks, or used to the lack of looking. Ever since I can remember, people have told me I was beautiful. It wasn’t until I went through puberty and grew breasts—very perfect-looking breasts—that I started to believe them. I put a lot of effort into not seeming outwardly superficial and vain, while privately thinking my beauty made me special, made me a better person. 

During my freshman year of high school, I had my first real kiss. That same year, at 14, I rushed to lose my virginity: I let my crackdealing drummer boyfriend fuck me as the credits of Stigmata rolled because I was excited to get it over with. At 16, I started dating men in their twenties. I would go to bars busting out of altered t-shirts I bought in the kids’ section of Salvation Army. I began the lasting habit of walking down the New York City streets while holding the gaze of nearly every eye I felt. 

Suddenly, almost overnight, I felt the absence of all this. I didn’t feel special or better anymore. And I felt ashamed that my beauty had made me feel special in the first place. 

The first time I saw my naked body in the mirror, three weeks after my hospital stay, I was horrified. Normally 130 pounds, I was now down to 92. My ribs and collarbones were protruding. Two little toothpick legs sprouted from a mound of wild pubic hair. I was reminded of those old photos from Auschwitz. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream “help,” but wasn’t sure to whom.  I turned around and looked at the buttcrack between two pieces of skin hanging off my back. I turned forward and looked at my flat stomach and my pronounced hip bones. Well, this part I like, I thought, which made me hate myself a little. 

A few months in, I started to get noticeably better. I was walking on my own and gaining weight, little by little. My boyfriend and I experienced a kind of intimacy not many couples get to share. As my body began to grow curves again, there seemed to be a second chance at puberty. He told me it was erotic to watch me get stronger, to watch my body fill out, my hips grow, my ass get fat. I had to relearn how to kiss; our kisses evolved over the months as my mouth found new movement. There was such devotion in his lips adapting, generously filling in the space. When we finally had sex for the first time again, it was careful and loving and busting with pent-up lust. Not only did it bring extreme pleasure to this foreign body that had been trying to escape pain for months, it felt like it erased my original virginity story, which had nothing to do with pleasure.

Part of me wonders if my relationship with K blossomed because my supply of admirers was cut off. There was no distraction. I had to be still and available with one person. Because of this, I could feel the power of that next-level intimacy. I had broken free from seeking sexual validation from every person on the street. I even felt gratitude for my fucked-up face and my illness. It led me to a place of clarity and freedom I may never have found. 

A year after the GBS, I’m back to a body that looks more like me. Although a bit thinner, I have curves and breasts. My face doctor says that recovery after a year is minimal. That my face will never look the same. I see unfamiliar lines around one side of my mouth and my neck looks stringy and tense. My features move differently, unevenly. But you can’t tell if I'm not talking or emoting, or if you’re a stranger on the street.

Mostly, I don’t look for people’s eyes anymore. I’m not sure if this is because I feel more secure or just less desired. Sometimes I think about what would have become of me if I were alone in all of this, if I had no one to be my sexual reflection. Would I have filled the space with something more? Would I have been a stronger person for it? My friends have been impressed with how well I've handled all these changes. Perhaps I had been ready to let that version of myself go even before GBS. There is sadness, there is grief, and there is fear that she will come back.

It was the early morning hours of July 19, 2023. I listened to the “clacks” from a set of real-life handcuffs as they were being secured over someone’s wrists. Those wrists were mine, latched over my bruised, shaky arms by a young police officer. She told me she was 22, and her favorite show was Friends. That’s the kind of small talk you make with the person stuck supervising you so you don’t make a run for it. At the age of 34, it was humiliating. Also, I hate Friends.

Fortunately, it was nearly 4 a.m., so nobody except the ER staff witnessed my perp walk to her squad car. I couldn’t believe it was real. I don’t get put in handcuffs, I’m not “that” kind of person.  I’m just your garden-variety, Midwestern, married mother of two, with a successful albeit stressful career in hotel management, and an unremarkable life otherwise. How did I get here?

Back in 2020, everything was going according to plan for me and my husband. The only problem was that I was deeply terrified of being a mom, often ruminating for endless hours over my fear that I wouldn’t love my children. I was convinced I’d become some soulless shell of myself with no identity except motherhood. And what if I couldn’t handle it? Like… me, raising another human being? Shouldn’t you need, like, a permit for that?

Those fears turned out to be unfounded. I love my children, and I’m still pretty much “me.” As for being able to “handle it,” well… I quickly learned that even with assistance from family and friends, there was no “village” coming to help me with all that laundry, there was no wet nurse to deal with my excruciating inability to breastfeed. For me, motherhood was just pain, exhaustion, pure love, joy, depression, smiling, endless crying… and wine.

Ah… wine.

The golden elixir that eluded me for nine long months. (Twice!) For both kids, postpartum hit me hard, and my bleak, sleep-deprived existence was brought back to life after only a couple of glasses of my beloved chardonnay when my second son was only 11 days old. I celebrated that first glass’ instant relief on social media to the cheers and congratulations of others. People understood, they got it: Parenthood is so hard, and we deserve that evening libation. At least, that’s what I was being told: “Relax. You’ve earned it.”

Reminders are everywhere of how moms “deserve” alcohol, how women love wine.

Women’s alcohol consumption had already been on the uptick for 20 years prior to the pandemic, but it skyrocketed during and after. The abrupt closure of schools and daycares forced many mothers into the primary caregiving role. Those stressors combined with the isolation from social support networks, the blurring lines of work-life boundaries, and the already rapid normalization of "wine mom" culture in social media no doubt contributed to the 320% increase in alcohol consumption in women with children five years or younger. Women like me.

Every mom knew I drank wine. And why wouldn’t we? The entire world is giving us tips like which Thermos can fit a full bottle of wine. Memes abound telling women like me that “it’s okay, motherhood sucks sometimes, work sucks all the time, so fill that glass to the brim!” I saw a meme the other day that said, "Getting ready to go back to work after the holidays" over a photo of someone pouring red wine into an empty Vitamin Water bottle. Obviously, it’s a joke, but… is it?

It took about three months for my “couple of days a week” habit to become a daily occurrence, one that I looked forward to all throughout my grueling, stressful workdays. I’d come home and not even have my coat off before holding a crying infant with a fussy toddler at my feet. Eight thirty p.m. for the first glass made its way down to 7:30 p.m., then 6 p.m., then 5 p.m., then as soon as I got home. Then before I got home. Then finally, by the summer of 2023, before I left work.

The spiral was gradual and insidious. One night, I was so drunk I couldn’t walk up the stairs, prompting my husband to give the ultimatum that I either quit drinking, or quit the family. You’d think the threat of losing one’s children would be enough to “just stop.” But rarely can you cure addiction on your own by “just stopping.” 

So what did I do? I hid it, of course. I’d stash the sacks from wine boxes in my work bag, initially so my husband wouldn’t find it, but eventually the temptation became too great. Wine was too risky, but a pint of liquor fit nicely in the bag’s pocket. My final weekend at work, I had gone without sleep for 30 hours—working an unexpected overnight shift, and unable to sleep it off because even though I stayed at the hotel, all I did was drink. I went home around noon on Father’s Day and continued to drink, picked a fight with my husband, then stormed out and made my way to the row of small-town bars.

My judgment was overwhelmed by the blur of consuming alcohol for more than 12 hours. I went from bar to bar, ordering a double shot of whiskey, which I’d down in one sad gulp before closing out my tab immediately and heading to the next. Eventually my sister called in a welfare check to 911, and a nice police officer named Ryan kept calling my cell phone. I emphasized that I wasn’t going home—I said I was going to jump from a bridge somewhere.

If they hadn’t found me, I probably would have. They picked me up after I left my last bar without having bought a drink, thanks to losing my debit card along my stumbling, suicidal journey. Taken to the ER, I was as professional and kind as I knew how to be, while still defiantly trying to convince them it was all a big misunderstanding, despite my BAC at .30, nearly four times the legal limit. If I’d gotten that last double shot, I’m certain I’d be in coma territory.

After three days in detox, I went home and cried in the arms of my husband while he sobbed into my shoulder. I never went back to my job, choosing instead to focus on maintaining sobriety—which proved to be unspeakably difficult while being a new stay-at-home-mom. No more escaping to work, no more escaping to booze.

Still, with the help of medication (Naltrexone was a miracle) and tons of therapy, I’m living a sober and present life with a newfound obsession with baking sourdough. The struggles of motherhood are still ever-present, and I regularly grieve the loss of my evening wine. Reminders are everywhere of how moms “deserve” alcohol, how women love wine. I just remind myself that it took less than nine months to go from “a glass to unwind,” to “two bottles to function.” The best advice I can give is: If you start to ask yourself if your drinking habits are becoming problematic… they probably are.

Since filing this copy, the author has been displaced two more times, both in the arid strip of Al-Mawasi, and the first was after narrowly surviving an Israeli raid that killed three others and wounded 15 people. The author’s wife, who is five months pregnant, is gravely malnourished. In one incident, she needed medication which they only managed to find beneath the rubble of a demolished pharmacy. This is a winter/spring dispatch, but as autumn rushes in, the author says that their circumstances have only gotten worse.

June 2024: For months, I had stayed in that displacement tent for no reason other than its location: its proximity from the wall that separates us from Egyptian soil. It’s the closest I can be from an exit from the war on Gaza, from the hell that life has become. Here, there is no mobile network, no connection to life, literally and metaphorically. It was a barren desert. But I could see the light on the other side. 

Until we were forced to move again, when the Israeli army began its ground operation into Rafah. And that hope of being just physically near an escape, although impossible, was lost.

***

I’m thirty years old, and the war has stripped everything around me bare, leaving only the echoes of one defining reality: Losing the house I had spent the better part of my pre-war days dreaming of and setting up to be my shelter and sanctuary, ending with piled up loans of more than $10,000. 

The house was in the neighborhood of Al-Amal in the south of Gaza city. Al-Amal stands for “hope” in Arabic. Every tiny detail in that house was picked with care. The location, the pale shades for the paints and the furniture, and the stark contrast in the plants scattered throughout our home. Down to the small basil plant on the kitchen’s windowsill, which I’d spray with water every day while enjoying the view from our kitchen’s window, that overlooked a kindergarten in the neighborhood. The joyful sight and melodic laughs of the children seeping into our home each morning were just as integral, to me, as the window itself, or the kitchen. It had become part of the house’s personality, and a part of my daily expectation of life. 

But in November, the window shattered. The kindergarten was demolished. The dream house was gone. 

***

You expect circumstances to change as you grow, and your skills to develop. But in a war, what happens to you, on you, around you, is beyond all expectations.

Life as I know it was completely altered. In the blink of an eye, the room that once contained the pampered comfort of an air conditioning system has morphed into a void similar to a messy birdhouse: Every detail was smashed into tiny bits. The details were lost and for that brief time I was in that house before we fled, there was nothing about it I could recognize.

It was in November, after the only truce we’ve had in a months-long relentless bombing. It was instant, life-changing, and ground-shattering. The sound of the deafening bombings engulfed us like lava and so did the debris, yet the high pitches of bullets, sources of which were unknown, still pierced through our ears. 

Life altered course at that moment. And the race for survival began. My wife and I raced out of our matrimonial house which we had only moved into three months before the war, and rushed into the streets. There, my wife suddenly collapsed, having seen a body that had been split into two halves by a concrete rod.

We left everything behind and fled for our lives, to the safety of an area they promised to be safe, in the coastal town of Al-Mawasi. 

I held tightly onto the hands of my father and wife, since I wasn’t sure if any of my other family members had come out alive. In a daze, we stood at a crossroads, my eyes pacing across the faces rushing and hurrying past, looking for a familiar face, or a face of a family member who is still alive. I asked the familiar faces for the faces of loved ones. Everyone was doing the same, looking for surviving loved ones. 

But then this little boy I knew told me that he saw my two brothers and that they’re looking for me. Two of my brothers were alive! Reassured, we kept asking around, and learned that my six other siblings were at a public hospital, sheltering from tank bullets.

Relieved that my family was safe, I had to now think of how we’d survive. I scurried in search of a blanket, a mattress, or a nylon cloth to shelter my wife and father on this rainy day. By the sea, at the end of a day that seemed too long, too daunting, I leaned against a wall by the raging sea as the bitter cold ravaged my drained body. I held my wife’s hand and wept. Wept over a past that was wrecked in minutes, and a future that is exhausting to keep up with. 

At that moment, I thought of our wedding photos we’ve only just received, and how they were lost. 

Ultimately, I found a piece of nylon and brought some wooden logs and boards, the price of which, months into the war, were a fortune: one wooden board costs $10 when it used to cost only $1. We improvised a tent so small that it did not exceed three meters wide, to accommodate nine people: me and my wife, my parents, my siblings, their spouses, and their kids—including two infants. 

In this desert by the sea, the sky was overcast with clouds and the strong winds were blowing away the tent's corners that almost got dislodged. The rain poured down on us and the wind became so violent. The tent did little to shield us from the cold, and with the little clothes we had, we were exposed to nature’s cruelty, alongside Israel’s brutality. 

In January, we moved again, this time to Rafah, right by the border with Egypt. Perhaps that is a good thing: on the other side of the border, there is no war and no bombs. Now we have reached a place of hope. Maybe it is a pseudo-hope, but it does not matter.

We had to improvise yet another makeshift tent in Rafah. Living in a tent is nothing short of torture. The most basic things needed planning. Like cats, we learned to dig holes in the ground to relieve ourselves. And in Rafah, we had to walk three kilometers each day to get 16 liters of water. Power outages were chronic. I almost forgot what lights look like. 

But I saw them on the other side of the wall separating Egypt and Gaza, where only the rich of us can go. 

***

Even in hell, money talks. 

Food has never been this costly. Even to the richest of us, it is too expensive: $3 for one lemon, one tomato is $1, and the same for a potato.

Escaping is not impossible, but only possible if you can afford paying $5,000 per person to cross the Rafah border. The rich were able to get away and make it to safety and left everything behind for the poor to wrestle with.  

I am still waiting for a change in humans’ consciousness, in the way the world sees us. For them to realize we’re humans worthy of a normal life. For them to bring an end to a war, and that I don’t have to travel eight kilometers to get an hour of internet to hear their silence as they watch us get killed.

I long to see a toilet that has running water inside it. The open sewage and trenches have filled our camp, and diseases are eating away at our bodies, and the heat is eating away at our skins, and the smell of death lingers and lurks everywhere. 

But at least in Rafah, there was always the hope of being close to the border. Perhaps one day they’d open the border and let us leave the hell that is Gaza, we thought.

And then on May 6, Israel closed the crossing shut, its tanks drew in, and we were pushed back into Gaza and away from the borders. We no longer can see the lights on the other side of the wall from where we’re now displaced, in Khan Younis. We’re thrust back into the midst of the war, which doesn’t seem to end.

This piece is published in collaboration with Egab.

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

I’m 18 years old, and I don’t have any maternal instinct. I really don’t get it. Why would people want children at all? It’s such a huge hassle, so much mental energy, physical energy, and money.

I had a nice upbringing: I’ve lived with my parents my whole life, and I have a really good relationship with them. I was always a creative person, and they gave me the opportunity to do what I wanted. They bought me supplies for art and stuff like that. I remember I did play with one of those baby dolls you have to take care of, and I always thought that was really fun. However, I definitely preferred animal toys. I would always pretend to have a dog or an imaginary creature. So even when I was young, I was never really in the mindset of, “I want to be the mom of a baby.”

I don't have any direct siblings; I do have a half brother, but he’s older than me and I don't really see him. I’m not actively around children, except when I had an internship at a kindergarten for a few weeks, and when I see my cousins, but I barely ever see them. I have a nine-year-old cousin and she's super sweet; I really love her. But I'm barely ever in a context with people who have children or just children in general.

I do see children at my job. I work in retail at a drugstore, and I always see parents coming in with children. Often, their kids run around the store, crying and yelling. And the parents are exhausted. When I hear from relatives that have children, they barely have time because their child is sick, or maybe they are sick...there’s always something going on, something that is just not at all appealing to me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m wrong for feeling like this.

Sure, it’s kind of cute to imagine having a child with a person you love. I remember feeling that way with my ex right around the time that I volunteered at the kindergarten. I did find it really sweet. And when you're really in love with someone, you might imagine stuff that you don't usually do. But even though it might be nice in your head, it just does not add up to be something that's worth it for me personally. 

A majority of people around me talk about how they want to have kids. This is especially hard when you're looking to date someone, because most people want children. It’s just biology, that people want to reproduce, and obviously there's nothing wrong with that. But I do feel kind of out of place for not having that feeling. Sometimes I wonder if I’m wrong for feeling like this, because there's a lot of people who say that you're not normal if you don't want children, that you lack empathy.

Of course, these feelings can be normal, too. My boyfriend and family know how I feel; they are all accepting of it and they don't mind. And I'm very grateful for that, because I do hear that a lot of people get pressure from their family, especially their grandparents, who lived in a different time where having children was really important. But thankfully that's kind of changing now that everyone can choose for themselves. At work, I got some harsh feedback once. There's one coworker of mine who had a child even though it was unplanned, and she's really happy with it now. I was like, “I don't want children because it just consumes you. It becomes a massive part of your life and also part of your identity.” She got offended about that, but I stand by that statement, based on what I can see from other people. Having children influences you a lot.

I think the idea of having kids is pushed a bit too much on us. People will ask you and your partner if you're going to have kids and it's not really anyone's business. Just asking someone doesn't hurt, but if it's pressuring, that's not okay, because it does boil down to what the person actually wants in their life.

I live in a conservative part of Austria, and I went to an agriculture school growing up. We had a whole class on taking care of children. Our teacher at the time was against abortion and was glorifying the whole ordeal of being pregnant and having a child. I think instead we should all be taught about the risks of being pregnant and how serious it is to carry a child. A lot of people don't know this and then still have children and then are overwhelmed with it.

Personally, the idea of being pregnant scares me. I have a phobia of nausea and vomiting, so just knowing there’s a possibility of hyperemesis or even just regular morning sickness, which is one of the most common pregnancy symptoms. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. It really takes a ton of your body's energy, because you’re growing a whole person. I could see why someone would put all their energy into a baby because they want it so badly. But as someone who doesn't feel that way, I just want to focus on the people that are already here. Maybe this sounds mean or self-centered, but I don't want to have to put someone else's well-being and health over mine this way.

Like many queer people, I was tormented by my peers as a young person. Bullied for being effeminate and for preferring to hang out with girls, kids at school made my life hell. I was mocked and ridiculed, made to feel like I was a worthless piece of crap, as though all that mattered was the way others perceived me—which was something “other,” a freak.

Now, I'm a proud queer man in my late thirties and I no longer recognize that boy. I'm married, vocal about speaking up for myself and for the LGBTQ+ community, and taking positive steps to deal with my trauma through therapy.

It’s taken a lot of hard work to get to where I am today and to feel more comfortable and content with who I am. Like most other people, I had to face and overcome many obstacles, as though I were competing in some sort of life Olympics.

When you’re part of the LGBTQ+ community though, it feels—at least for me and others I speak to—as though you never truly overcome those obstacles and you never really leave your trauma behind. Because there are triggers everywhere and the abuse doesn’t stop when you reach adulthood. Someone can shout something hateful and discriminatory at you because they perceive you as less, and instantly you are transported back to those childhood days. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking around my city, minding my own business, when a group of young people started shouting and mocking my queerness. Fortunately, it didn’t escalate into violence, but if I hadn’t walked off quickly with my head down, I think it might have.

I'm terrified of young people—partly because of the childhood PTSD, and partly because they have so much bravado and arrogance.

Up until that point, I felt positive and energetic and happy, but the experience immediately cast a dark cloud over everything. For days afterwards, I felt hyper-aware of the way I looked, of the way I walked and talked. I’m aware of the dangers I face as a queer person, but I  normalize them and try to get on with my life. Experiences like this put that danger to the forefront of your mind. Plus, I pride myself on being strong and outspoken, things I couldn’t be in that moment. I despised feeling so powerless. 

I’m still terrified of young people, and teenagers specifically. My heart feels as though it’s going to burst out of my chest, like I’m John Hurt in Alien, if I see a group of them walking towards me on the street. Partly it’s the childhood PTSD, partly it’s the fact they have so much bravado and arrogance. Yes, they’re part of a comparatively queer-friendly generation, but as a general rule and from my personal experience, many teenagers still do not respect their elders and fail to see the consequences of their actions.

So why, if I’m so fearful of young people, am I starting a book club just for them?  

I've been the manager of my local library for two years and have been running an adult LGBTQ+ book club for almost that long. I've formed a strong community of like-minded people, with a vast array of different ages and backgrounds and I really feel like I'm making a difference in people's lives. There's been mention of us doing an LGBTQ+ book club for younger people, and until now, the idea of running it myself has been too scary. 

But something happened recently that changed my mind. We were reading Alice Oseman’s graphic novel Heartstopper for book club, and two girls aged 10 and 11 turned up. This group is marketed quite clearly as being 18+ so I was shocked to see them, but after speaking to others in the club and agreeing we’d keep the conversation PG-13, I decided to just embrace it and see what happened. Plus, one of their moms was with them.

It ended up being pretty amazing. Though she wasn’t massively forthcoming about it, it sounded like one of the girls identified as queer and we relished in asking her questions—albeit in an empathetic, respectful way. She seemed to really come out of her shell, which was wonderful to see. I wish I’d had a group of LGBTQ+ adults and peers to speak to at that age. 

Running an LGBTQ+ book club isn’t just about reading. For me, it’s about forming a community, about having open, honest conversations with others like you. It’s about creating a safe space. At the end of that Heartstopper session, I felt fired up and inspired. Young people need this, too, I realized. I have the opportunity to put young LGBTQ+ people in a room together, away from whatever hostility they may face outside. I have the opportunity to impart something on to them. I can educate and support. 

You could argue that the young people in this new book club will be LGBTQ+, so why should I be scared of them abusing me for my sexuality? But I can’t stress enough how anxious any teen makes me; it’s just so deeply ingrained. 

I’m having a meeting with a colleague who works solely with young people to get some advice, but this will mostly be about structuring a book club when it’s not for adults. I’m going to start planning what we’ll read, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and some graphic novels too. I love programming and curating, so I’m very excited about this part.

I still don’t entirely know what I’m getting myself into, and maybe that’s a good thing. I’m working through childhood trauma with my therapist, so I’m hoping this will help me cope with running the book club and if I find it too much, I can always stop. But my focus has to be on the main reason I’m doing this and that’s to give young LGBTQ+ people the space and support that I never had. Plus, if I don’t run this thing, then nobody else will and it not existing at all is just not an option for me. Not now.

Wish me luck.

My mom often caught me sniffling in my room after my boyfriend, Chase, and I got into an argument on the phone. She’d knock on my door, climb in my bed, and hold me. One day, she looked me in my tear-filled eyes and said, “He’s not the one for you.”

She said this because she hated to see me sad all the time, but there were tons of good reasons to break up with him.

Chase threw utensils in my direction, slammed doors, yelled in my face, and had his hands a little too aggressively close to my body at times. I was a teenage victim of purity culture who thought I had to continue dating him since he’d seen me naked. I thought his behavior had to be accepted. Within the first three months of our relationship, Chase had coerced me into having sex with him, and I was convinced I was going to hell if I did not marry him. He talked about our wedding regularly. As I came to my senses, I started to realize that dancing with the devil in hell sounded more appealing than standing at an altar with him on Earth. 

It took me two years to listen to my mom and break up with Chase. He told me if I ever broke up with him for good, he would have no more reason to live. He and I had broken up twice during the relationship, but the last and third time was permanent. I felt secure in my decision because I was beginning to meet other people in college who treated me with respect and kindness. I felt free. I felt happy. I felt like myself. 

However, just as I was moving on, my mom seemed to change her opinion of Chase. 

“That’s not fair," she said. "He’s like the son I never had.”

I rarely visited my parents after Chase and I broke up because he lived five minutes away from my home. I didn’t want to risk seeing him. To my surprise, while home for Christmas break, I found out Chase had been making trips to visit my parents. He told them how much he regretted treating me the way he did. 

Chase was persistent. He began going to my house twice a week while I was away at school to cry to my mom. My mom has a nurturing soul, so she consoled him. I’m not quite sure what their relationship looked like when Chase started begging my mom to talk some sense into me and give him another chance, but I have to tell myself it began innocently with good intentions– at least on her end. 

Chase probably seemed to have good intentions from her perspective, too. He could be kind and respectful when he wanted to be. This act of his nearly convinced me to be his wife. Although he didn’t succeed in tying the knot with me, he’s laced knots around my mom’s brain, convincing her that he is what’s best for the both of us. He’s still part of my life nearly three years after our breakup because he and my mom talk every day.

I began to notice some strange details when I finally decided to visit my parents. I walked in on my mom unpacking clothes Chase had gifted me while we were together, even though they no longer fit me. I noticed that a Polaroid of Chase and me on vacation moved from my desk drawer to the pantry cabinet in our kitchen. I noticed the shower in our guest bath had products in it, even though there were rarely guests in our house. I recognized these products: Every Man Jack body wash and Dove shampoo. My dad strictly used Dial. Chase’s belongings remained in that shower, and there weren’t pink bacteria stains underneath the bottles. 

One day at breakfast, I blurted out to my mom, “Can you please stop talking to Chase?”

She jerked her head in a way that seemed like she wanted to deny it, but instead she said, “He comes to the door, and I can’t just turn him away.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You don’t owe him anything.”

“I know, but you should see him. He’s pitiful. He cries in my arms and you know he doesn’t really have a mom. I can’t just cut him off cold turkey. You should really give him another chance. He loves you, and he’s different this time.” 

I remember singing that same song when I was still in a relationship with him, in an attempt to convince her not to hate him. Now she’s the one trying to convince me. For months after that confrontation, I begged her to stop everything with him. 

“I just wish you would be on my side and trust me when I tell you that he has manipulated you into believing he has good intentions,” I said.

“I’m not taking sides,” she told me. “My relationship with him has nothing to do with you.” 

“But I’m your child,” I said. “It's either me or him.”

“That’s not fair. He’s… he’s like the son I never had.” 

She has an actual son, my brother. He was diagnosed with autism at a very young age, and my mom thought that was God’s punishment for her having a divorce prior to her pregnancy. I have to believe she made that comment about Chase being the son she never had in the heat of the moment. I have to believe she didn’t actually mean that. 

I’m not entirely sure if my mom and Chase still communicate as regularly as they once did, but I know that body wash and shampoo still sit in the shower. I know that Polaroid is still in the peanut butter cabinet. I know my mom has Chase’s text notifications silenced in her phone. I also know that they Snapchat because she doesn’t know how to turn off in-app notifications. I know that Chase has my mom’s contact saved as “Mom❤️” because one of his new girlfriends reached out to me asking why that was the case. 

My mom and I haven’t talked about their relationship in quite some time, and I’m sure she thinks I’ve decided to let it go and move on. I haven’t done either of those things because I don’t know how. All I’ve done is avoid the topic by choosing not to bring it up to her. Every time I’m with her and hear her phone ring, I think it’s him. Every time I leave my house, I think he’s on his way there. Their relationship makes me wish mine and Chase’s never happened because I know he’s saying the same sweet nothings to her like he said to me. She refuses to stop, and there’s nothing I can do about it except cry. I always cried to her about everything that hurt me, but now I can’t because he is attached to her shoulder, and she is attached to everything that hurts me.

Editor’s note: After The Doe published our series on late-in-life autism diagnoses, we received an outpouring of feedback from readers who’d had similar experiences. These are just a few of the compelling stories that were shared with us.

I'm 37. I got diagnosed three weeks ago. I've been sucked into a whirlpool of recollection, reconciliation, and relief. I can't begin to describe how humanizing it has been. I have always, always felt like an alien. Now I know I am an alien, and not just... broken.

—Uhbeep

I felt great about it and so relieved after a late diagnosis at 35. Then I started telling people, and their reactions were so overwhelmingly negative that it hurt badly. There is so much stigma. Half of the people I considered friends aren’t in my life now, or they just aren’t talking to me anymore.

Anyone who makes it through a late diagnosis is a hero. On top of negative reactions to something that felt joyous to me and like a beautiful discovery, there’s almost no support for adults.

—Luuxedeluxarts

Whenever my childhood would come up in conversation, I used to tell people my mother was a sociopath, and my father was a pedophile. That shut people up real fast when they didn't understand why I'd gone no-contact in 2015 at the age of 34. Both of my parents are undiagnosed autistic, as are my sister and most of my relatives on both sides—small-town Hoosiers who don't trust doctors. Some on my father's side even believe autism doesn't exist.

Sadly, like many, my own journey to diagnosis came with the loss of my entire family because it meant breaking abuse cycles in a large family with multiple narcissistic-type personalities. Like toxic family systems do, mine was all too eager to make me the black sheep when I became too physically disabled by the progression of my then-undiagnosed rare genetic diseases (and subsequent autistic shutdown) to withstand the abuse. Mom had already convinced everyone I was a liar when I was in kindergarten after I outed our father for molesting us, which made it easy to convince them my disability was an act as well, and they withdrew their support entirely.

My mother and her siblings were put into an abusive group foster home when she was eight years old because their mother was institutionalized under a diagnosis of paranoid delusional schizophrenia. Treatment at the time for schizophrenia included electroshock therapy, and my poor grandma Vivian was ruined by it. I only ever saw her twice in my life, and she was terrified and mute the entire time. Knowing what I do now about not just my own autism but also my other genetics, I can't help but suspect Vivian might have actually been autistic with adrenal issues like me. If she'd had a proper assessment, diagnosis, and supports, maybe she could have been the loving woman and mother she wanted to be, and the decade of abuses my mother endured in foster care wouldn't have made a monster out of her.

That's where part of my moxie comes from—vindication for Vivian. If I can help anyone avoid the kind of path my maternal bloodline laid out for her, her children, and her grandchildren, then I will have made this world a better place.

—TwiggyJenLandia

My son was just diagnosed and he is 14. The diagnosis explains so much. My husband, on the other hand, was just diagnosed with ADD at 48 and he feels like he was cheated in life. Had he been diagnosed and treated as a kid, his life could have been so different. He has struggled so much with job loss because of his lack of focus and feeling like he is worthless when he was fired. He always felt like he was giving each job his all. He is still struggling to this day [because] his doctor won’t give him the proper medicine due to previous drug abuse.

—Jjillwalls

"It's like having a key for the locked door that has always been in front of me."

[I was also] diagnosed with ADHD and autism at 47, added to my previous diagnosis of depression and anxiety. [I’m] finally pursuing and getting treatment. It's like having a key for the locked door that has always been in front of me. One of the things that isn't said in mental health is that if you have a co-occuring disorder, and you treat some and not the other, they will all become worse. We need insurance to recognize mental health care as health care. We need testing, treatment, and medication covered by health care. We need all of those costs to stop being so prohibitive that people wind up where people like us are today. It isn't our fault. It isn't our parents’ fault for living in a world where these conditions were not public knowledge and were spoken of as threats rather than care. Make no mistake that we are here because of the greed of others.

—Onelettername

I grew up with multiple diagnoses: borderline personality disorder, anxiety, depression. Those diagnoses answered some of the questions I had about why I move through the world the way I do, but not all of them. It wasn't until I finally figured out that I have a combination of autism, ADHD, and complex PTSD that I fully understood who I am. I thought I couldn't possibly be autistic because all the representations of autism I saw were the stereotypical “Good Doctor” or “Rain Man,” and that wasn't me. I was lucky to have autistic friends who taught me how differently autism can present in different populations. 

Finally finding that combination of diagnoses immediately ticked every single box as to why I have issues with canceled plans, sensory issues, fear of abandonment, and crippling inability to keep up with “adult” tasks like cleaning and budgeting. My whole life, it felt like everyone else was handed a how-to manual, and someone forgot to give me one. A classic square peg in a round hole. Finding out my brain is literally wired differently brought relief and grief in equal measure. Relief that there was an answer that made sense, and grief that I was battling uphill my entire life, more than 35 years, before I finally understood what caused my issues, and what accommodations I could make in my life to alleviate many of the symptoms. 

The more I talk to other late-diagnosed folks, the more I hear the same story repeated back to me by so many women and AFABs [people assigned female at birth]: Autism is critically underdiagnosed in female and minority populations, and we are being failed by the medical community at large, forced into diagnoses that explain some but not all of our issues. And more often than not, we find ourselves masking and forcing ourselves into decades of uncomfortable situations, which leads to burnout that can take years to recover from and overall lowers our quality of life. 

—joyhobbit

When I was six, my dad told me that if I missed a prayer, I would make up for it in hell by praying on a praying mat of red-hot steel. That was the moment I became a praying, practicing Muslim. He instilled in me the very fear of God that would eventually steer me away from hijab.

Growing up as a Muslim girl in Egypt, I knew that I would become a woman once I got my period, and women wore hijab. I put on my headscarf when I was 16 because every hair that a man sees on my head equals a sin for me. That’s what they told me, and I did it myself out of fear. 

All my friends started wearing hijab. My cool, older cousin was wearing hijab. She was trendy. Her mom treated her like an adult. All the mature women wore hijab, and that’s what I wanted to be.

After graduating high school and then going to college, my insecurities overcame my religiosity. I couldn’t find anything to wear that didn’t make me look 10 years older. I would see 40-year-old mothers wearing the same blouse as me, while other girls my age would wear jeans and a simple T-shirt and put their hair up in a bun.

I wore a headscarf and thick glasses with frames that bent the scarf around my face. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror and be pleased. I was envious of other women, and then I became envious of men. 

I felt restrained in hijab. I felt like I was lying to myself, pretending to be someone I was not.

I was taught that hijab protected me from the prying eyes of men. I was taught that to be unseen, unnoticed, and unmemorable makes me more valuable, desired, and marriageable.

“Would you eat an unpacked piece of gum?” My father would compare a non-hijabi woman, who “definitely” won’t get married, to an unpacked piece of gum that won’t be eaten.

But it didn’t make sense. I didn’t understand why I had to wrap my head in a piece of cloth in the scorching heat, just to avert the eyes of men who could sexualize me. It didn’t make sense that I, a five-foot, 21-year-old woman, was a sexual being —a siren of some sort, irresistible to men. Why did men get to feel the air in their hair? Why did they get to wear whatever they wanted? Don’t people know that a man with well-defined biceps is attractive to some women? Why isn’t he covering up? 

I felt restrained in hijab. I felt like I was lying to myself, pretending to be someone I was not. It wasn’t even because I was wearing the hijab; I wasn’t even sure I felt like a woman. I just wanted to be human. I didn’t feel that different from men. I didn’t feel like my body was my only redeeming quality, my only valuable possession. I am a person with feelings, values, ideas, hobbies, memories, aspirations, and goals. 

I slowly grew resentful of the organized religion that wanted to reduce me to a sexy body reserved for a man. But after 15 years of praying and having my religious compass guide my every move, it didn’t happen overnight. I was still fearful.

I started searching within the pages of the Quran, the holy script of Islam, for a reason why I had to be tucked away, and continued to pray nonetheless, with one foot in heaven and another in hell. I read about the hijab in the hopes of finding that it was not a main pillar of Islam. Instead, I learned that, just like every religious script, every verse of the Quran could have multiple interpretations depending on the interpreter.

“Why was a holy text up for interpretation?” I would ask myself. Why wasn’t it clear and straightforward? Why do I trust a person who is interpreting through glasses tinted with their own ideology, beliefs, values, learning, and agenda?

I began to have an identity crisis that had me grappling with conflicting religious, cultural, and personal beliefs about femininity and sexuality. 

Much like Alice in Wonderland, I went down a rabbit hole where human evolution collided with Adam and Eve, and geological evidence crashed Noah’s Ark. 

What started as a simple act of trying to be true to myself completely tore down and clawed at my indoctrinated beliefs. I found that most of what the people around me preached and did was not even just about religion; some wore the hijab to keep appearances, and behind closed doors had sex outside of marriage, a sin in Islam. Most of them would swear on Allah’s name with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

I learned that for the 13 centuries that Egypt has been a Muslim country, cultural norms and Islamic practices have intertwined. I found that lots of people around me were more concerned about being called out for not being good Muslims than disappointing their God and going to hell.

Reading under the blanket in dim light, I became agnostic. 

I took off the hijab against my father’s will. The first time I went out without the hijab felt strange. I couldn’t believe the air was blowing away my hair. I couldn’t believe that I was just like every other man: free, valued for my essence and not the hidden parts of my body.

Some of my friends were glad I was happy, but others looked at me from head to toe. My close relatives looked away upon first seeing me, the way one would after walking in on someone in the bathroom.

While everyone knew I took off my hijab, from the cashier working in the local supermarket to my uncle abroad, only a selected few accepted my newfound disapproval of organized religion. And I learned that I can be true to myself — to a limit. 

It wasn’t like I disagreed with Islamic teachings to be kind, generous, respectful, or honest; I just didn’t need to pray five times a day, sacrifice a lamb in a religious ritual, or save my “virginity” and not express my love for my boyfriend through physical touch.

I started living a double life. I know who I am. I have my own values, morals, and ways, and I share myself with those who respect and love me for who I am. 

Years later, I still would rather be comfortable with who I am than make everyone else comfortable, sacrificing myself in the process. I continue to willingly and contentedly play for both sides. I am a professional liar about my religious beliefs by day and a vigilante who follows her own moral code by night. My family, coworkers, and the world around me don’t know who I am, and they don’t need to. Sometimes I have to lie to protect myself. Sometimes it’s not easy. Sometimes it’s okay.

My best friend Taylor and I had been in each other’s lives since we met in second grade. From chasing each other on the playground to boyfriends and breakups to moving out of our parents’ homes, we had witnessed each other’s life milestones. Despite spending four years apart in high school when we went off to different schools, we remained close. It seemed we were destined to be friends for life. Until she started dating Andy. 

At first, I thought she was just having a fun fling as he seemed like a casual, flirty type. However, as time went on, they became more serious. They started spending more time together, going on out-of-town trips and meeting each other’s friends. As I was Taylor’s best friend, Andy and I started becoming more acquainted with each other. 

One day when Taylor and I had met up with some mutual friends, we took a selfie together and she sent it to Andy. He responded with an eggplant emoji followed by one word: “threesome.” When she showed me his response, I was appalled. I thought it was disrespectful for him to suggest such a thing with his girlfriend, but Taylor didn’t seem upset. In fact, she was amused and said it was all in jest. Since she didn’t take it seriously, neither did I and we moved on.

One evening two months later, Taylor invited me over to Andy’s house to hang out with them. I didn’t think much of it as it was something we had done a couple of times before. I got there excited to have a night of good times playing card games while having some drinks.  

I decided to give us some space and let things eventually return to normal. Except they never did.

But this time around, I found myself in a bizarre situation. After I lost a round of poker, Taylor reached out to tickle me. Then Andy joined in and they were both tickling me. This was something that had never happened before and, feeling uncomfortable, I quickly pulled myself away. We continued on with the games, but Taylor started disappearing from the living room quite often. The first time I barely noticed; I assumed she had gone to the bathroom. The second time, though, Andy inched closer to me on the couch and touched my thigh. This happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to respond before Taylor abruptly returned. Andy didn’t move back to his original position but removed his hand from my thigh and pretended like nothing had happened. 

My initial thought was that Andy was just being a sleazebag, and I made a mental note to tell him off the next time Taylor went to the bathroom. This moment eventually arrived, and once Taylor was out of earshot, I turned to give him a piece of my mind. However, Andy was already prepared with his next move. He grabbed my face and kissed me. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I smacked him as I pulled away and was hurling insults at him when he told me that Taylor was aware and okay with it. I didn’t believe him; I thought he was just taking advantage of her absence to make moves on me, and I quickly moved to the carpet to create distance between us. Taylor eventually returned and we carried on with our game night. She inquired why I was on the floor and I mumbled something about needing to stretch my legs. 

A few minutes later, Taylor joined me on the carpet. I thought nothing of it until Andy started rubbing both of our necks. I pushed his hand away but he continued with his advances. Then Taylor left the living room to “go get more ice.”  This time, her absence was for quite an extended period of time. Andy asked me to come join him on the couch and when I refused, he started tickling me again. I was really annoyed at this point and called him out again, but he once again mentioned that Taylor was aware and was waiting for us to “warm up” before she joined us. 

At this point, I started to believe Andy as I noticed how often she had disappeared throughout the night, each exit lasting longer than the previous one. Taylor ended up leaving the room about seven times and every time she did, Andy’s advances got more aggressive. At one point, he even unzipped his pants and asked me to suck his erect member ( I didn’t). Eventually it was clear that the threesome was something they had actually spoken about and agreed on. Feeling uncomfortable with the situation, I excused myself and left. 

A week later, I met up with Taylor and asked her what happened that night, and if she and Andy had intended to have a threesome. She vehemently denied that anything had been planned and quickly changed the subject. There was a sudden tension in the air and the rest of our hangout was awkward. When we parted ways, I decided to give us some space and let things eventually return to normal. Except they never did. After that ordeal, any time we’d hang out, I would feel her being cold and distant. I tried to address the fact that we were drifting apart, but she said that she was just preoccupied with work. Eventually, she stopped calling or responding to my texts. We haven’t seen each other in over a year now.  

I always thought our friendship was rock solid and that no one could come between us. To know that it ended because of a failed threesome is perplexing. Sometimes I miss Taylor but most of the time, I’m angry at her. I feel like she had no regard for our friendship and placed little importance on it if she could let it go so easily. And she ended up marrying that sleazebag. I attended the wedding but I wasn’t even on the lineup as one of her bridesmaids. That part really hurt. 

Some of our mutual friends have asked what happened between us; I often tell them that we just grew apart. They know it’s a lie, but I can't offer them the truth, because I don’t know it, either. One day, I hope I’ll be able to give myself the closure I never received.