The Doe’s Latest Stories

I never thought I’d have kids. Or rather, I thought that I hated them, and so the idea of being responsible for one just never occurred to me. Besides, I was too busy going out and grinding up against a new man every night, drinking way too much and taking enough drugs to almost bring on a heart attack, at least in my 20s. (OK, into my early 30s too.)Kids, for me, were a reminder of the bullying I experienced as a young queer person. (Even as an adult, when I encounter a group of teens, I still expect abuse.) Kids were for cis, heterosexual people. Let them have the “normal” aspirations. Let them have the dirty diapers and broken sleep.

The reality of us becoming dads is just such an overwhelming prospect.

Watching My Sister’s Kids Changed My Opinion on Having Children

Then, something changed. Was it from getting older? Getting married? Moving out of the big city I’d lived in since I was 20? Because of COVID and the subsequent lockdown in 2020, my husband and I didn’t see the point in continuing to pay extortionate rent for an urban existence we couldn’t enjoy and instead moved to a seaside town to live with an elderly member of his family. There’s nothing like a pandemic to force you to see life differently and to give you a vastly different perspective on things. Here we were, out of the rat race and done with working jobs we disliked but had been unsure before how to leave. There was more to life, you know? Truthfully, I think what really changed was actually looking after a pair of kids—my sister-in-law’s, to be exact. While she went off to work, my husband and I looked after her 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, scaring them with tales of T. Rexes, teaching them math and—my personal favorite—building forts out of Frozen merchandise. I thought I’d be so awkward with them, not knowing what to say or what to do, but I felt like a natural. Even watching them by myself one afternoon and taking them for cake—which they subsequently threw around and generally behaved like little arseholes—didn’t put me off. In fact, I quite liked it. It was nice to feel like an actual responsible adult for once.Because in my experience as a queer person, feeling responsible isn’t something that has historically come naturally to me. I know many people my age who aren’t LGBTQ+ could, and would, say the same thing, and they’re totally entitled to that. But I feel like the media, culture and our surroundings tell people like me that we should just be content having fun with our poodles and fabulous wardrobes instead of doing grown-up things. Even if we’ve wanted to feel responsible by settling down and starting families, such journeys in life and aspirations haven’t felt accessible—they’re still a cis, heterosexual “thing.” As someone who is very conscious of his queerness, I’ve gotten used to feeling othered and that I don’t quite belong. I’m also naturally a very observant person, often preferring to just watch and listen during a conversation with friends rather than vocally getting stuck in. So I can see quite keenly what kind of world I am in from the margins and what kind of life path many cis, heterosexual people are expected to follow. I’ve gotten used to seeing what feels like everyone having kids. Cis, heterosexual people don't think anything of it—why would they? For many (though not all), it's just another rite of passage that's taken for granted because it's so easy.

We just wish our family would understand how we struggle with knowing that we might never be more than “the fun uncles” to a child.

Having Children Is Expensive and Difficult for a Queer Couple

It's not easy for my husband and I to have children. The two options we’re considering are adoption and surrogacy, but the latter can cost up to $150,000 once you factor in embryo creation, fertility clinic fees and surrogate expenses, among other things. Plus, it’s more difficult in the U.K. than the U.S., where being a surrogate is essentially a business, and if you’ve got the funds, you can get one as easily as your weekly groceries. (OK, maybe not quite.) I say “considering,” but the reality of us becoming dads is just such an overwhelming prospect, especially when we can barely afford our weekly coffee budget. We’d like to become dads before we’re 40, but right now, that just feels impossible.Now my little sister has a month-old baby. She’s a weird little thing, more alien than human at this point, but just looking at her is a wondrous experience. On one hand, I’m reminded of the miracle of creating life, but again, how much easier that can be for some people. My sister and her partner didn’t necessarily plan to start a family; they just stopped using birth control—“If it happens, it happens.” What I would give to have the privilege of such flippancy. I love being an uncle, and it is far more than what some LGBTQ+ people who want their own kids have. I can’t forget how lucky I am in that respect. But is it enough to slyly teach my sister-in-law’s kids to be subversive, to think their dad is a dickhead when he flaunts his narrow-minded views at them? To look forward to reading my sister’s daughter all of the books I used to love as a youngster? It's so hard being close to them but feeling like I have so little control. We just wish our family would understand more about what it's like being LGBTQ+ and how we struggle with knowing that we might never be more than “the fun uncles” to a child.From what I can see, it’s becoming easier for LGBTQ+ people who want to become parents. The envious feelings I have as I watch our nieces and nephew grow up may one day start to ebb. But unfortunately, I don’t think there’s going to be a drastic change in our ability to have kids quickly enough. I think—or rather, I hope—that won’t be the case for future generations of LGBTQ+ people. Of that, I’m certainly less jealous.

I am a fairly levelheaded person, so it took a lot for me to fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories at first. But the pandemic and all the events that have followed have sent me straight into the open arms of online conspiracists. The downward spiral usually goes like this: Something newsworthy comes to the surface. It doesn’t sit right with me, so I head to Twitter to see what the more sensible minds are saying. Someone will mention a conspiracy theory, so I instantly head to TikTok to get more information about the theory—because that’s super logical. After watching a few videos, I Google the event, the people involved and the ensuing theory to fact-check for plausibility. When things start to check out, I wallow in despair for a while. I then talk myself out of it and convince myself the theory can’t be true.Then, the same cycle continues a few days later with a new theory.

The Great Reset Is More Than Just a Conspiracy Theory

This spiral recently happened with the cost of living increase in the U.K. Inflation is bollocks: The price of petrol is unbearable; a trip to the supermarket bankrupts me; and Thor only knows how I’m going to heat my house this winter.Logically, I know many things to be true that would explain inflation. There was a pandemic that essentially shut the world down. China, where most of our supplies come from, is still in a bit of a slowdown. There’s a war between Russia and Ukraine, two of the biggest exporters of wheat. Global warming has ruined a good few essential crops. Oh, and the whole economy setup is more fragile than a vintage china teacup. I’m no economist and I don’t really know how it all works, but could there be an argument that globalization wasn’t really the best tactic? I fully believe that the government can do better.At this point in my personal spiral is when some random person on Twitter mentions it—the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories: the Great Reset.Now, this theory wasn’t plucked from thin air. The Great Reset plan was discussed at the January 2020 World Economic Forum summit, but the plan shares very little in terms of details. It’s intentionally vague, but the premise seems to offer world leaders and wealthy corporate heads of pharmaceutical, food, oil and technology companies a role in global governance. Allegedly, each of these people would be considered stakeholders in the global economy and would therefore be answerable only to each other.You don’t need to be a seasoned conspiracy theorist to see that that’s fucked—or to see how it became a breeding ground for conspiracy. Theorists took to online forums and social media apps to express concern, speculating that the Great Reset has been in play for a long time and that COVID and its long-lasting economic pitfalls have been planned and manipulated.What’s scary is, for once, everything the conspiracy theorists are saying now seems credible.

For once, everything the conspiracy theorists are saying now seems credible.

When a Theory Is Rooted in Reality, It's Hard to Take a Step Back

The U.K. is experiencing its highest inflation in 40 years at 9.4 percent, and the U.S. isn’t too far behind at 9.1 percent. If you were trying to manipulate the economy, how would you drive inflation up even more? Product shortages—which seem to be never-ending lately. Some conspiracists even claim that employees of shipping companies are being told to delay the export of containers.Yes, China's slowed production, shipping issues and the war in Ukraine are causing delays, but are these all part of a bigger plan? Is this all intentional? Compared to the flat-earthers and the lizard people, the Great Reset is perfectly logical—which I think actually makes it worse.So here I am, Alice in Wonderland-style falling down this rabbit hole, because when big companies like AstraZeneca and Amazon get involved with world leaders and magnates like Bill Gates, there’s cause for concern.Admittedly, I’m still trying to talk myself out of this particular hole.It helps assuage my concerns that not every foreign government seems to be following the same process. Some still appear to be making decent decisions, like Finland, for example.All these current happenings might actually be knock-on effects of COVID, and it could all be one massive coincidence. Recessions do happen; it’s part of an economic cycle. It’s likely that lockdowns have been the sole cause for supply chain delays. And if this were to happen, surely there would be a massive global revolt, right? We, as a freethinking population, wouldn’t allow this to happen, would we?

All it takes is for one conspiracy theory to be right to prove that not all radicals are insane.

I'm Actively Trying Not to Believe Everything I See

While I’m going to put my faith in humanity doing the right thing, I’m also going to err on the side of caution. All it takes is for one conspiracy theory to be right to prove that not all radicals are insane.In all honesty, we do live in a really scary time, a time ripe with conspiracy theories that seem plausible but take it one step too far to be totally believable. The use of technology and artificial intelligence can manipulate any situation. Smartphones are capturing all our data. Phone tapping has already been confirmed, and the ethical lines are already highly blurred there. Maybe I should check Twitter again.

There’s nothing quite like turning a busy street corner onto Times Square for the first time.Immediately, this sense of awe and surrealism washes over you as you begin to register the larger-than-life billboards and advertisements only ever seen on television and film. The New York Times building seems to stare down at you as you drive by and gawk up at it from inside the tour bus. Flashing lights and sweeping crowds and the frightening driving habits of New Yorkers surround you, welcoming you in what strangely feels like an embrace you were always meant to experience.As a 30-something introvert who happily lives on a rural Minnesota farm with her husband and cat, I possessed no real desire to travel to New York. But when a friend asked me to accompany her for a milestone birthday trip, I agreed. I didn’t expect to enjoy the trip all that much, but New York City was eye-opening.At first, I simply hoped that I could make it the whole five days without wanting to crawl up the walls, desperately seeking a little solitude from the bustle of a city whose population outnumbers my entire state’s by about 3 million. But the trip I had such low expectations for turned out to be transformative, awakening an otherwise dormant passion for travel within me.

The trip I had such low expectations for turned out to be transformative.

Everywhere You Look, There Is Something to See in NYC

Around every corner in the city, we discovered something fun and exciting. Over here, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, surrounded by a convoy of guards cloaked in black, sporting dark glasses and armed with some sort of automatic weapons. Down the street, Rockefeller Center, covered in blooming spring flowers. Over there, the sketchiest massage parlor I’d ever seen nestled against a high-end wine bar.We spent about an hour in that wine bar, seeing all walks of life traipse in and out onto the New York streets. The bartender was stereotypically trying to make it big as a voice-over artist and podcast host. A scruffy, possibly homeless protester had to be escorted out of the upscale dining area, cardboard sign in tow.At the bar, a mysterious, dark-haired woman surrounded herself with an array of beverages but sat alone. Judging by her selection of water, tea and white wine, she appeared to be nursing a hangover. Behind her giant reflective sunglasses, she avoided any eye contact and kept mostly to herself—except to snap a photo of my friend and me at the bar. My friend spotted her in the act; she was furious, while I was oblivious to it all. No words were exchanged, and the woman suddenly vanished.When my friend told me about the photo, I found it absolutely intriguing. Who was this strange apparition? And why in the world did she decide to take our photo—without asking—and then drift away?With more questions than answers, we turned to the bartender. He told us she was a famous fashion designer, but he couldn’t remember her name and referred to her as Lady Jane. As it turned out, my friend had surreptitiously captured a photo of the woman, so we could try to figure out who she was and what she wanted to do with a picture of us. While we continued on our trip, Lady Jane continued to be a central topic of conversation—not to mention avid Googling. As the five-day trip continued, we visited the typical tourist attractions, like the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the Statue of Liberty. Standing on Liberty Island and facing Manhattan, it struck me that I was actually looking at the New York City skyline; this wasn’t a TV show. It felt surreal. All throughout the trip, I kept thinking to myself, “Holy shit. I’m actually here!”

I Needed to Experience NYC to Become Enamored With It

I never understood the appeal of New York City until I visited. Suddenly, I understood just how spectacular it really is. And when the trip was over, much to my surprise, I couldn’t wait to go back. There were so many more places to visit—just thinking of all the wine bars, restaurants, memorials and people-watching we didn’t get to during the trip was enough to make me want to plan annual trips.Meanwhile, the enigma of Lady Jane continued on for about a year. I constantly wondered who she was. A fashion designer? Merely some eccentric woman with an unhealthy penchant for sneaking photos of complete strangers? I didn’t know.But the mystery of who she was and why she took our picture was exhilarating. It compelled me to spend hours researching online, trying to match the photo my friend had taken to strangers on the internet. The little puzzle made for an interesting conversation piece on the topic of traveling, leaving me ready to pull out my phone at a moment’s notice to see if a stranger I just met happened to recognize Lady Jane from New York.Because the bartender and I both had podcasts at the time, he found me and messaged me Lady Jane’s business card. He’d found it while moving and remembered our photo incident. We had our answer: Lady Jane was both absolutely eccentric and a successful fashion designer based on the West Coast. After a year of wondering, the mystery had been solved. Honestly, the mystery was more fun.

When I arrived back home to my quiet town in farm country, I was still surprised to miss the abundance that New York City had to offer.

Visiting NYC Inflamed My Desire to Travel to New Places

The riddle of Lady Jane was just the cherry on top of a fun, surprising trip. I certainly didn’t expect to fall in love with New York City, but once I felt that undeniable connection, I knew my departure would be filled with a deep longing to return. When I arrived back home to my quiet town in farm country, I was still surprised to miss the abundance that New York City had to offer. It’s an itch that sticks with you until you return, welcoming you with its boisterous streets and the promise of hundreds more Lady Jane characters.I traveled to New York at the request of a friend, expecting little. I returned home with an emptiness that can only be filled by the discovery of new and unexpected favorite places.

Growing up in South Africa always made me feel as though I had little to brag about when in the presence of foreigners. Only when I moved to Europe several years ago did I realize how deprived I had been of small freedoms, like being able to ride your bike home from school, walk to the shops or catch public transportation. I also had to grow accustomed to having electricity 24 hours a day, stable residential infrastructure and decent public healthcare—things that would have been considered a luxury in my third-world home.However, there’s one thing I’m incredibly proud of as a South African. Since our country’s democratic turning point in 1994 and the abolition of the notorious apartheid regime, we’ve boasted one of the most progressive constitutions in the world—one that prioritizes equal rights and social justice for women, the LGBTQ+ community and other minorities. While this was never something I gave a second thought to growing up, its importance has heightened in the wake of the United States’ current battle for reproductive rights.Watching the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in one of the world’s most developed nations invokes helplessness, desperation and concern for how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision may direct the rest of the world. And although abortion access is readily available and legal in all parts of South Africa today, times like these make me think back on our nation’s past, when our constitution was vastly different.

Someone came up behind her, blindfolded her and led her to a back-alley makeshift surgery room.

In the ’80s, Abortion Was a Criminal Offense in South Africa

When my mother was 20 years old in the 1980s, she had an abortion. My parents were living in Johannesburg during a time when abortion was very much illegal under the apartheid-era National Party. They had been dating for roughly two or three years and were living together, to the dismay of my mother’s conservative parents. They had casually discussed the possibility of my mother accidentally becoming pregnant, and both agreed that they were in no position to have a child, so they would “make a plan” if the day ever came.When the day did, in fact, come and my mother realized she had become pregnant, it was simply a matter of putting their backup plan into action. A friend knew someone who knew someone who had a connection, and the appointment was set up.My father drove her to an arranged drop-off point, and she waited alone for several minutes. Someone came up behind her, blindfolded her and led her to a back-alley makeshift surgery room. She was laid down on a cold steel table and sedated while her pregnancy was terminated by people she could not see. She wasn’t allowed to look at any of her operators for fear she might expose them to law enforcement.She woke up later feeling groggy and tender and, still blindfolded, was led back to the drop-off point where my father had left her. Her blindfold was removed, and she was told to wait one full minute before opening her eyes. When she did, she was standing alone. My father then came to pick her up.This was the story my mother finally summoned up the courage to tell me when I was 18. I was horrified—not at my mother for what she had done, as was her initial fear, but that any woman in South Africa or anywhere in the world ever had to go to such extreme and dangerous lengths to get the healthcare they needed and desired. How lucky she was, I considered, that she wasn’t injured or killed in this questionable process. If someone more sinister had been responsible for her procedure, it’s anyone’s guess what might have been done to her.

What was once something that was to be feared and pitied in my mind was now liberating. Freeing.

My Mom’s Story Changed My Pro-Choice Perspective

While I vehemently believed in the right to have an abortion before she told me her story, the idea itself was still terrifying. Big, bad abortions. Things to be feared and avoided at all costs—not for the sake of the unborn but because of the trauma inflicted on the women who chose to have them.My mother’s retelling of her experience was perhaps the first time I saw a complete lack of both shame and trauma associated with an abortion. She spoke about it as though she got her appendix removed. She looks back on it, still to this day, as a minor incident in her life that left her largely unchanged. She has no regrets.She admits that probably the only time she thought back on her decision was when she and my dad started actively trying to have children, about 10 years later, and my mother suffered a miscarriage. She wondered if it was God’s way of punishing her. Luckily, her doubts were quelled when she had successful pregnancies with both my sister and me.As I got older, I was made aware of how many of her friends had similar stories. Friends in their 50s and 60s also had to duck and dive and jump through very illegal hoops to have the same procedure. Some of them have regrets or harbor guilt and shame, but a lot of them don’t. A lot of them went on to have families when they were ready, in their own time.Being exposed to these stories changed my perspective on abortion. What was once something that was to be feared and pitied in my mind was now liberating. Freeing. An expression of autonomy. Something that, under certain circumstances, could be celebratory and joyful.Surprisingly, my mother doesn’t seem to have a strong opinion either in favor of or against abortion rights today. I would’ve thought her experience would make her a passionate activist, but then, she’s not exactly the activist type. I think she believes in a woman’s right to choose, but she won’t have it out with you at the dinner table about it the way that I would. Perhaps she also doesn’t see the need, given that South Africa now provides liberal access to abortion.I openly share my mother’s story with friends and family—with her permission, of course—because I believe it serves to reinforce an important truth that I think many already know: Outlawing and criminalizing abortion does not stop abortion. For centuries, women have found ways (albeit dangerous and sometimes lethal ways) to exercise autonomy over their own bodies. They will go to the lengths they see fit because many of them would rather suffer the consequences of a crime than bring an unwanted child into the world. The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade: Women will continue to seek abortions, but they might just die in the process.

It was mid-spring of 2006. My mom called me into her room one day and told me the "weird guy" is on TV again. I saw a man walk across a pool, on top of the water in Las Vegas. That man was Criss Angel. I saw the cars he was driving, the women he was pulling and the money he was making and decided: That's what I'm doing for the rest of my life. And little did I know how insane yet amazing the next 15 years would become. So I got started, slowly but surely. I found a magic shop a few towns over from me and began taking lessons from the owner. It was there where I learned the basics. Everything else has been self-taught. Magic became my life. It is all I know. I realized very quickly how easy it is to fall in love with something to the point where you refuse to let it get taken from you. And life has tried its hardest to take it from me. It hasn't worked yet.

Magic became my life. It is all I know.

The Life of a Magician Is Feast or Famine

I have overcome so much. I was told I had the worst case of ulcerative colitis Yale doctors had ever seen. I suffered huge rejection from family because I'm the only one who hasn't held a nine-to-five job. I've been homeless three times, attempted suicide, and yet, I'm still kicking. Magic has been the only thing I've had on my side. I have no plan B. It's do or die for me. I've literally told people that I'd rather starve on the streets doing what makes me happy than sell myself to a boss who will post my job position faster than my family could get my obituary out if I were to die. But you see, the more I do it and the more I see the smiles on the faces of thousands of people every year, the more I realize that this is exactly what I was meant to do. It's the only thing I can do. I've tried other things, and I don't have as much of an interest. But that is what makes it such a fun challenge—the fact that I don't have anything to fall back on.It's kind of fun to wonder where the next meal is going to come from. I don't mean that as a desperation-type thing, more so a guessing-game-type thing. None of my jobs are consistent, and they don't all pay the same, so I could either eat cold ravioli out of a can that night or steak and lobster. I'd personally prefer cold ravioli out of a can; it keeps me grounded. It was my go-to food when I lived on subways and park benches. And if I ever make it big, I'll probably choose that just to keep me humble. I firmly believe in remembering where you got started and where you came from.

It's kind of fun to wonder where the next meal is going to come from.

Being a Magician Allows Me to Live the Life I Want

I've accomplished a decent amount of things during this short career. I've been on TV. I've had my own TV show. I've performed for Penn and Teller. I got invited to private parties in exclusive nightclubs in New York City because I snuck into other parties and did card tricks. I've opened shows in arenas, performed off-Broadway, ran my own tour twice, went viral on YouTube and, yet, I'm not satisfied. I want more because I know that I can get more. I work really hard for what I want, and at this point, I have nobody to prove myself to but myself. I set goals for myself at the beginning of every year. One year, I set the goal of wanting to perform in five different states. So I booked my New England tour and managed to hit seven states. Another year, I wanted to perform over 100 gigs and logged 148 performances. So in a sense, I was able to do what I set my mind to and more because I had a goal in mind and never gave up on it.So if I had to give anyone reading any advice on how to become a famous magician, I'd have nothing to offer because I'm not there yet. However, if I were to give advice on how to live your life the way you want to and to be happy doing what you love to do, I'd simply say this: Believe in yourself. Don't listen to people. And most importantly, never give up on yourself. You will understand why you did the things you did and why the things that have happened to you happened. But understand something: If you manifest it, it will happen eventually. If you want something bad enough, you'll figure out how to get it. Just don't give up on yourself.

The first thing I witnessed was bedlam. A sea of bodies, all sifting through piles of fabrics, sheets, soiled shirts, torn jackets, dusty blankets and discarded shoes inside eight-foot plastic blue bins, with everyone’s arms interweaving and maneuvering left to right, diagonal and across, stopping briefly to examine labels, stitching and fabric quality with a machine-like efficiency. Everyone spoke at once—chattering, shit-talking, bragging, laughing, sneering, their eyes all fixed downward as if panning for gold fragments in ancient river soil. After a few minutes, a fight broke out. This was “The Bins,” a secret world of thrift store discards where the persistent and the dogged could turn the trash of the elite class into an online resale. It was a warehouse located in a nondescript eastern corner of Los Angeles, and everything was sold for $1.50 a pound. Here, it was all about being willing to dive into scum, dried vomit, cat piss and blood, all for the chance of finding that rare REO Speedwagon tour shirt, vintage Pendleton blanket or NYFW donation dropped off by someone too wealthy to consider reselling their old clothes. Most of the time, it was shit, but if you masked up, took your allergy pills and were willing to dedicate your days searching, your rent money was somewhere inside these piles. This was the pre-COVID world in 2017.

On my first day there, everything in my cart was stolen.

Learning About Secret, Thrifted Items Was a Rite of Passage

The Bins attracted all walks of life: immigrants, hustlers, scam artists, grandmothers, hypebeasts, vintage enthusiasts and criminals. From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, eight-foot sky blue plastic bins of mystery items were rolled out every 15 minutes. Rows of eight bins sat for over an hour—then, when all the picking had stopped, they were promptly rolled into the back of the warehouse and replaced again with new bins, new treasures and new trash. It was, by most estimates, a game of chance, an adrenaline rush for those who like to gamble for their income, and by most estimates, a mere means to survive in the modern economy.The specific location of The Bins was (and remains) a trade secret. You only heard about it from a trusted friend, a benevolent seller willing to divulge their source or through a gumshoe’s desire to see the secret realms of the city. And once in there, you were met with suspicious eyes. Each morning, the cliques and crews grabbed their carts and lined them across the walls, covering their finds in blankets to protect them from thieving eyes. The floors were bare cement. You could only gauge the daylight by peering out the entrance doors, which faced a parking lot, making time feel nonlinear while inside under the enormous fluorescent panels. There was little trust in the room and even less desire to chit-chat with a newbie like me, someone who’d arrived, like many others, out of economic despair. On my first day there, everything in my cart was stolen. I hadn’t yet learned the “rules”: you don’t walk your cart in between the bin aisles. You place it on the side, like everyone else, to make room for others. It was only a few personal items, cheap and anonymous, nothing valuable. I knew that if I cried out, my tentative “place” would be lost; I’d be exiled forever, even if they allowed me to enter the doors. I said nothing and continued searching.

Each Group of Pickers Had Its Own Customs and Goals

The first few days were fruitless. While I watched experienced pickers line their carts with high-end vintage denim jackets, Supreme swag and classic American workwear, I watched others take a decidedly more pragmatic approach. The divisions between what folks collected spoke volumes as to their priorities, as well as their economic station:1. One group of Mexican grandmothers spent their entire days collecting only bras, oftentimes filling up a train of carts by the early morning. They often enrolled their daughters, sisters and friends to rely on group support (and extra eyes). All the bras would be taken back to their communities in East L.A. and resold for a slight uptick in price but still far lower than retail.2. A pair of Japanese thrift hunters—old friends from Tokyo—arrived each day with a quiet resolve. I’d watch them move between the frantic bodies of others with a stoic precision, pulling out an enviable supply of vintage American workwear. They ran a vintage stand monthly at the Rose Bowl Flea Market and ate the same rice and vegetables lunch, packed in their vintage canvas satchels, every day.3. The booksellers existed in a tiny corner of the warehouse space—the books section was a static and overwhelming hoarder's pile of books with no apparent order—scanning the barcodes of thousands of books a day, amassing a limitless supply to resell online.4. The hypebeasts moved like migrating birds, synchronized, with tattered sneakers and endless bravado. They worked in unison, lining up on entire sides of the bins as they were rolled out to maximize their chances at pulling up gold.Occasionally, a tourist or couple would arrive, having received intel about the pricing, and express their disgust at the sweat (and health risks) of searching through donations. No one at The Bins was rich. Some sold on eBay, others on Amazon. Some took their items out every day, at the same time, and brought them to secondhand brick-and-mortar shops for cash, having long since established trust and rapport in their tastes.

I considered myself lucky to be welcomed, to be supported.

This Humble, Scrapping Community Always Looked Out for Itself

After a few weeks, I began to gain enough trust to be spoken to and even in some cases, to be gifted items. Within the ultra-competitive veneer of this space existed a generous sharing economy—vintage pickers handing bras to the Mexican grandmothers or booksellers giving tips on how to sell online to teenage pickers looking to pay their way through college by any means necessary. No one recorded their good deeds; they simply did them. I was gifted vintage T-shirts, runway coats, high-end menswear and immaculate textiles, all because my fellow pickers saw I was looking for similar items. There seemed to be a mutual understanding that every person at The Bins was working on the margins of society, whether by force or by choice (some by both), and that the world “out there” didn’t exist to serve them and their communities. They had to scrounge and scrap for their place in their sun, their chance to sell those few big-ticket flips that could cover a month’s rent, a week’s groceries or basic bills to stay alive. No one was getting rich here (even if they were trying), but no one was going to suffer amidst such bounty, such treasure. The aim was to just get by and hope everyone else did the same. I considered myself lucky to be welcomed, to be supported.After two months of diving into this world, I was forced to take on production work (my job for many years) to make ends meet, but I always made it a point to return to The Bins on a free afternoon or late evening after work, just before closing. I couldn’t turn enough profit to live, so I moved on, as many of us do while existing under the boot heel of this system. We go to where we can be fed, where we can do more than survive.Work has been scarce and challenging through this pandemic, and when I find myself defaulting to the scarcity mindset that this system so relentlessly conditions into us, I remember the words so many pickers said to me when they handed me an item they knew could nourish my bank account. I would defer, saying it was unnecessary, and with a resolute grin, they would raise a hand and all say: “I have enough already.”

On March 11, 2020, a significant development was drowned out by the sound of COVID-19 coming straight for New York. While we were battening down the hatches that day, The New York Times reported that an “analysis of 27 studies involving 10,565 participants” had found that people in Alcoholics Anonymous experienced deeper and longer abstinence compared to subjects in other forms of treatment. Members of AA were also twice as likely (or three times as likely, depending on the data) to stay sober than people trying to get clean some other way. What hit me about this study was not a sense of validation, in part because many AA folks don’t believe in studies like this. (My sponsor at the time immediately told me he didn’t pay attention to scientific appraisals of AA, right after he tried to convince me that COVID-19 was no big deal. He was not my sponsor for long.) The remarkable thing about this good news is that a spiritual program has a medical outcome, one that can be measured.

AA is an anarchic, decentralized cloud of homemade faiths, and it runs better than any company I've ever worked for.

AA Is a Mixture of Homemade Faiths, and It’s All the Better for It

The program of AA does have a strong nonreligious, social component and some behavioral suggestions; it uses more than one method to bring an alcoholic toward sobriety. The central concept, though, is of “turning it over,” of abandoning the best thinking that got you here and admitting that some larger force may be at work. The genius ecumenicism of the program means that there is no specific faith that anyone needs to follow in order to get sober, just a higher power of your own choosing. There is some hair-splitting to be done here, as so many unnamed, untagged iterations of faith might not qualify as religions—nor do they need to. What AA did was to break apart the idea of organized religion, toss out the doctrine and hang on to the spirit. AA also threw out all the power and money, which may explain the lack of pedophilia scandals. AA is an anarchic, decentralized cloud of homemade faiths, and it runs better than any company I've ever worked for. It would not be true, however, to say that AA introduced me to my concept of god. Since I was fairly young, I had a feeling that god was beneath everything, like a river of fire that flowed into the trees and grass and animated whatever needed animating. God is simply a placemarking word for me, as this force is not a person, nor does it respond to questions or prayers or curses. My god is what is true and what actually exists and what makes alive things be alive. Trees are a fairly good way of capturing the tenor of this god, though god isn’t the same as nature, for me. God has to do with how we interact and the ways in which we might better incline our behavior.But until AA, I didn’t think this god had anything to do with me. I assumed god would simply rumble on, and I had no chance of aligning myself with this power. My time in the program allowed me to slow down—in fact, slow all the way down to stopping—and to abandon my thinking in favor of a blank space where only god might be, a place I could turn over my tangled and cracked ball of anxieties. When I stop thinking, the world goes on. And that’s god going on.

There’s a Connection Between a Commitment to Sobriety and One’s Faith

AA allowed me to mark the place where I could find this god again and again—a church, in the form of a meeting. The AA format was taken, at least 10 steps of the 12, from the Oxford Group, so it is fairly logical that AA itself feels like a kind of worship. Removing reference to any specific faith was a major innovation of the early AA boys and is no small tweak. A few wanted to hang on to the Christianity of the Calvary Church in Manhattan, where Bill Wilson met the Oxford Group, an explicitly Christian organization. But sticking with Christianity would have doomed AA to obscurity and possibly even the same kind of internal anguish and abuse that has more or less laid waste to the official church.Faith, set free, flourished in the program of AA, and it seemed necessary. Connecting with others is often defined as the opposite of addiction, but the fellowship itself couldn’t get the job of sobriety done. We all have to carry a sense of purpose outside meetings and beyond sobriety itself. We are not here simply to be sober, and the presence of an articulating and generating force is more important to me than sobriety itself, on many days. The idea that this feeling is a connection that has nothing to do with judgment or power or success or wealth is in the Bible, of course, but was brought back into action by AA in the early 20th century, when the Christian church was stumbling headfirst into lust and greed. Kind of insane that the drunks got the point, or brought the point back, rather.So how to see religion and sobriety together? Would AA merit being called a religion without an organizing schema? Perhaps the legacy of AA is more as a faith with a practice than the adherence to a text or set of principles, though the program has that, too. Lord knows AA has enough sayings, and there is one that answers these questions. “Faith without works is dead.” Straight out of the big book. (And, originally, the other big book: James 2:26.)

This is how I began to see that a religion is, in its most benevolent iteration, not faith alone, but a way of organizing behavior, of giving the gift of purpose.

Religion, Like AA, Works Best When It Has Purpose

This feels like the place where AA made things richer by making them simpler. In the program, we only have to stay sober and help another alcoholic to achieve sobriety. We have a task, and we can carry it out. This gives us purpose, and because AA has such a specific focus, it allows members to feel a sense of achievement. Life outside AA is a more sprawling affair, and feeling a sense of spirituality depends on different parameters, which end up being set on an individual basis—or, for anybody following a faith, a set of principles. This is how I began to see that a religion is, in its most benevolent iteration, not faith alone, but a way of organizing behavior, of giving the gift of purpose. What we all want is what dogs want—to be put to work, to have an assignment, to have a list of things to do. Practicing that in AA has reinforced my faith, as I need to feel my faith almost every time someone challenges me to explain why I might have any at all. Called upon to explain it, I feel it. Called upon to put it into practice, I help another alcoholic. Outside the program, I can use these exercises to call up my faith when I want to be connected. It’s right there. And when I need to help others, it comes more easily. My selfishness is more easily peeled away now because I have become accustomed to my faith being paired with work. It’s a slightly corny comparison, so forgive me, but it’s the best one I’ve found. The gym of sobriety gives me muscles for life and my faith is what keeps the lights on, what keeps me going. This is my way of explaining that I don’t know if an abstract faith is likely to work. Meditation brings me closer to my god, but I don’t know how long that would last if I didn’t have obligations as a sober person and as a human. If religion has faltered in the 21st century, it isn't just because the church fell on its own depraved sword. It’s because we find it so hard to conceive of or discuss a purpose separate from profit, and outside of AA, few really have a viable plan. If your faith is healthy and thriving, then God bless, literally. If it’s Islam or DSA or sword-smithing, keep doing what you’re doing. But the most reliable path I've seen in my lifetime is through a program by and for drunks, who realized that the point of life was faith and works powering each other. My god is always working. I am joining in and following suit. None of it is my idea, beyond that first decision to surrender and let something else do the thinking.

Two years ago, a then-unidentified virus, which had infiltrated my brain and central nervous system, forced me to take an urgent trip to the emergency room, suddenly and violently interrupting what would have been a glorious week in the Greek summer sun with a near-death experience.But let’s start at the beginning. It was 2019, and I had taken ten days off of work for my first proper vacation in two years. My friends had been traveling around Europe and were currently parked on the magical Greek island of Crete. I flew out on one of those cheap Norwegian Air flights that no longer exists and, when I arrived, the girls were already doing yoga topless on the sundeck and my friend had prepared a fresh summer salad of fruits and veggies picked from the garden. It looked like it was going to be a great week.The next morning, I awoke in my bed at around 6 a.m. feeling a deep sense of unease. I needed to evacuate my bowels so urgently that I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom downstairs, so I literally shat all over the kitchen floor of our Airbnb. I managed to clean it up—I knew I needed medical attention but also knew that my housemates would not be super inclined to help me if they saw what I had done to the kitchen. I threw the wadded-up paper towels into an alley outside and woke up my friends, telling them something was wrong and I needed to go to the hospital.

It was probably the most scared I have ever felt in my life.

A Near-Death Experience Is Essentially an Expiration Date

At first, they thought I was hungover and being childish. They joked around for a minute until they realized I couldn’t even figure out how to put my shirt on, at which point my friend Tim rushed me to his car. I couldn’t figure out how to open the door. He drove to the nearest hospital, which turned out to be a VA that wouldn’t admit me. They pointed us to a general hospital, but when we arrived, I couldn’t figure out how to open the automatic sliding doors of the emergency room, so I started banging on them. The doctors inside thought I was just a drunk tourist and were about to ask me to leave when Tim walked up and explained that I was very sick. All I remember from this time was that it was incredibly hot outside, and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being allowed into the hospital. I stuck my head into a nearby trash bin outside the hospital doors, found a half-empty water bottle (when you’re this sick, the glass is “half-empty,” not “half-full”) and tried to drink it. Tim stopped me and ushered me into the hospital. From this point, my memory is about half-blacked out, but I know I became incredibly cold to the point that I was convulsing and shivering violently. I begged the staff for a blanket. After deliriously screaming at some babies who were being too loud for my liking, I was shown to a triage bed and covered in what seemed like a cellophane burrito wrapper from Chipotle. They wrote the day’s date in a Sharpie on my forearm, like an expiration date. The glaring insufficiency of the blanket actually added insult to injury, crinkling loudly every time I moved. At this point, I realized I was in a Greek hospital, by myself, with no idea where my phone was, no ability to call my family and no way to communicate with the Greek-speaking doctors. It was probably the most scared I have ever felt in my life.

I Didn’t Think My Near-Death Experience Could Get Any Worse, but It Did

To make matters worse, when the doctor finally rolled up, I mustered enough strength to ask him if I was going to die. He looked at me blankly and said, “We don’t know yet…it seems you have meningitis, and we aren’t sure yet if it is the bacterial type, which is lethal and highly contagious, or the viral type, which is not.” Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more terrifying, he informed me that in order to ascertain the type of meningitis in my brain, it would be necessary to inject a large needle directly into my spine in order to extract spinal fluid that could be tested using a PCR test. I started to consider that dying might be the preferable alternative. Soon, they rolled me through the CT scan machine like a package of chicken breasts being scanned at the Trader Joe’s checkout line, then plunked me back on the triage bed and began to unsheath the needle. It was God awful. I would not wish my worst enemy to get a spinal injection. (OK, maybe my worst enemy—fuck that guy. But nobody else.) As if I was not already in enough pain, one of the nurse’s cellphones began to ring, one of those horrible, old 8-bit ringtones, like the Nokia you had in middle school. It just rang and rang, incessantly, all the while the needle was being plunged deeper and deeper into my spine. I berated her belligerently.When this was all over, I just laid there and laid there. And laid there. For what seemed like hours. My recollection of the rest of the day’s events is a little fuzzy, thanks to the inflammation of my brain tissue and all that, but I woke up the next morning in an actual hospital room. My first thought was that I was furious that my vacation was being ruined. This wasn’t supposed to be how the week went. Where were the topless yoga girls? Oh right—they were at the Airbnb, avoiding me like the literal plague for fear of their lives.

I started to consider that dying might be the preferable alternative.

Even After Nearly Dying, I Was Still Hung up on Missing My Vacation

When the doctor came in, I emphasized my dissatisfaction to him, explaining that I was here on vacation and didn’t want to be hospitalized. He informed me that, due to the potential contagiousness of my condition, I would be required to remain there for at least two more days while they awaited the results of the PCR test to make sure I wasn’t at risk of dying or infecting anyone else. Two days seemed like a death sentence. The hospital was old, dark and dreary, like a relic of the Cold War; it reeked of disinfectant, and nobody spoke English. The halls were completely desolate, with no trace of human life at all. At one point, I walked outside my room and actually thought the hospital had closed for the night and all of the staff had gone home. That’s how barren it was. To make matters worse, I had only been in the country for two days and didn’t trust its healthcare system or the competency of its doctors. Americans have this ridiculous way of thinking everything in our country is better than anywhere else. More on that later.After the doctor departed, I was left alone with my thoughts, a gown and a needle taped to my forearm injecting water into my veins. Each time the doctor came back, I asked if my test results were ready. After three very long and nerve-wracking days, he returned with the news that I had viral meningitis, not the life-threatening or contagious kind. An enormous sense of relief washed over me, but he explained that I would need to remain there for another week. To be completely honest, I don’t remember the reasons he gave now, but I’m sure they were medical and legitimate. It was crushing to me. I was happy to be alive but still couldn’t get over how gutted I was about my Greek vacation being in shambles.

Takeaways From My Near-Death Experience Story

Over the ensuing week, I learned two important, existential lessons: Tomorrow is never promised, and some things are out of our control. I vowed to cherish life and live it to the fullest, and I promised myself that when I made it out, I would get a tattoo of the date they had Sharpied onto my forearm as a reminder of the first lesson. The second lesson took another few years to fully sink in. There is actually a huge sense of relief accepting that some things are out of our control. Once I had accepted my fate that week, I slowly began to realize how grateful I was to simply be alive—and for the fantastic care that the Greek doctors provided me.After the fourth or fifth day, when I was feeling myself, I quietly and nervously informed the doctor that I didn’t have any type of health insurance at all. To my amazement, he informed me that while I would be sent a bill for the services, I could simply choose not to pay it, since I didn’t live in the country. I couldn’t believe it. If this whole episode had happened while I was home in the U.S., it would have easily cost me $30,000, maybe $50,000, to be hospitalized for eight days like that. Or, more honestly, they probably would have just sent me home with some aspirin and a prescription for something that would probably create five new problems.On my eighth and final day, I had reached complete acceptance of, and gratitude for, my situation, which I began to view as an incredible blessing. It was almost as if God had whisked me away to Greece in order to afford me free treatment for this terrible virus that would overtake my system.I left the hospital, called a cab, went straight to a restaurant and ordered so much food that it wouldn’t fit on the table. Nearby diners stared. I finished all of it, then went to the airport, grateful for the experience, the existential life lessons and the newfound knowledge of the international health care system.

Ten years ago, I finished my university degree, packed my life into two rolling suitcases, boarded a plane leaving Washington, D.C., and left my sweet American home for Wales to marry the man who is now my husband. Up until leaving, I hadn’t had to consider how to cover any medical expenses—doctor appointments, medicines, hospital treatment, etc. I was lucky enough to have both a mom and dad whose jobs included ample insurance for dependent children, under which I still qualified, while attending college. Paying for my medical care was just something I hadn’t ever worried about.Once I left the nest and came to live in the U.K., though, my adulting began, and in a matter of days, I realized that my care was now my own responsibility, including how I would ensure my medical needs were met.

Perhaps they thought it was the start of socialism, the worst enemy of the white middle class.

My Family in America Ranted About the Perils of Obamacare

The first step was getting myself signed up for a general practitioner. Bear in mind, when I first moved over, I didn’t have a job—I was here on a fiancee visa and couldn’t work—but my status didn’t affect my ability to register with a local doctor. If I had an infection, needed a test run or wanted birth control, my local GP was happy to help me, even though I wasn’t married yet. After seven months of being engaged, my husband and I got married, giving me the right to work and pay taxes into the system that provides us with the National Health Service (NHS). From what I understand, after listening to complaints from my family in the States, President Obama tried to introduce a form of healthcare that would be more accessible to all Americans, no matter their socioeconomic status.My family, a white, middle-class family, found Obamacare offensive. I’m not exactly sure why—perhaps they thought it was the start of socialism, the worst enemy of the white middle class. A couple of family members ranted about how they didn’t want to use their hard-earned money to pay for someone else’s healthcare, which would then tarnish their own care. Ironically, when they’ve come here to visit, we've had to visit the GP for them to get antibiotics that they didn’t have to pay for. The thing is, the NHS is the primary reason I would never move back to America. My husband and I work ordinary jobs that don’t particularly pay well. Yet we are privileged enough to never, ever have to worry about whether or not the medical needs of our family will be met.

The NHS Saved Me From Astronomic Bills

Let me just give you a roundup of all the NHS has done for us. Generally, we have had every antibiotic, eczema cream, reflux serum, steroid, birth control and asthma pump completely covered. To get them, we attend the GP, they listen to our complaints, make a diagnosis and then write a prescription that we take to the pharmacy across the street. With three little boys who catch every virus and infection—and a husband with Crohn’s—these expenses would add up quickly back in the U.S. Next up: having babies. It is completely unbelievable that I would have had to consider the cost of birthing a child had I lived in America. I was high-risk through each of my three pregnancies, meaning I was seen every two weeks by a specialist who prescribed a blood thinner to inject into my stomach every day.My first child was induced but waited three days to come out. His delivery was horrific and painful, and I had to stay an additional three days to recover. My second child required an emergency C-section, and I stayed in the hospital three days after he was born to recuperate after having my stomach sliced. My third was a planned C-section, but I was brought in early due to reduced fetal movement. These overnight stays and births cost thousands to the system, but we didn’t have to consider the cost as we brought life into the world.

The NHS is the primary reason I would never move back to America.

The Downsides of Having Universal Healthcare Don’t Outweigh the Benefits

The greatest cost came following the birth of my third child. Doctors quickly realized that something was wrong after he was delivered. His breathing wasn’t right due to a lung that hadn’t formed properly, and he was rushed to an NICU over an hour away and kept on the ward for a month. During this time, my husband and I were given a small flat to stay in nearby so we could easily access our baby boy. When I was chatting with one of the nurses on the ward, she told me that the cost of having a baby on the ward, before any medications or treatments or surgeries were given, was 1,000 pounds per day. Because of the NHS, we could simply focus on getting our boy better—not counting up the cost of his care. The most recent expense I have to thank the NHS for covering was my cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which I received following a period of postnatal depression. For weeks, a psychologist met with me to help me work through the severely negative thoughts I had after having my kids. She was my angel, guiding me to right, logical thinking. There is no way I could have afforded that, but it brought me out of the worst of my dark days. It was priceless. You see, the NHS is a miracle. Sure, we pay high taxes. Sure, some people abuse the system. Sure, we have to linger on waiting lists at times. But I consider those three “downsides” totally worth it for expert care that is always available no matter your circumstance, no matter your status, no matter your monetary worth. America, you have a right to be jealous of the NHS.

Five years ago, just after retiring from teaching, I was having a conversation with my good friend J, who also was retired. Both of us were in our 60s and wanted to travel and see as many National Parks as possible. “Let’s take a road trip!” one of us blurted out—and our adventure began. We agreed that we wanted to camp out most of the time (that was my crazy idea) and we started looking at maps and reading about possible destinations. For a few months, we planned the route, set dates, made campground and Airbnb reservations, bought and gathered gear. At the end of April, we packed everything we dreamed that we’d want or need into my tiny Scion xD and drove westward for a seven-week adventure that neither of us would ever forget.

I Was Ready to Take a Trip

Traveler One:I’d spent most of my adult life doing what a lot of people my age had done: building a career, raising a family, helping to pay the bills, acquiring “stuff,” etc. And I loved it! But now, my kids were grown, I was single, the commitments of teaching were gone, and I was ready to experience life in new ways, from a whole new perspective.Our adventure took us from Central Florida, through the panhandle into New Orleans, across Texas, into New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and back to Florida, making a beeline through Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. We visited over 20 National Parks and Monuments as well as a hot spring in New Mexico, a weekend music festival in Arizona, an afternoon with a Hopi guide in Navajo Nation, and a white water rafting excursion in the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River in Colorado.After driving through Texas and into New Mexico, very suddenly everything about the landscape changed. I had spent a good deal of time traveling up and down the East Coast of the U.S. and had flown to Western destinations, but I had never seen anything like what was around almost every turn in the Western states we visited. To say it was breathtaking is literally true. No photo images had prepared me for the spectacular beauty or the geological majesty of that part of the country.

I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how magnificent it all was.

We Became Expert and Efficient Campers

Camping started out as a bit of a challenge. Neither of us had tent-camped in decades, and it took us a few times of setting up and taking down to get into a routine. But within a week or so we could park, unload the car, set up camp, have a fire going, dinner prepped and a cocktail poured in about 15 minutes. Then the next morning we’d have coffee and breakfast, reverse the process and have the car loaded back up in minutes as though nothing had ever come out of it. We were a well-oiled machine.The National Parks were incredible, and because we were there in late spring before the summer tourist season, they weren’t crowded. From the Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands in New Mexico to Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, to Arches, Bryce and Zion in Utah and Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, I was in a state of constant awe. We hiked the parks most days, then went to our campsite in the evening, had a meal, and reflected on the day, sitting under a blanket of stars that filled the night sky with even more beauty. It was hard for me, I remember, to grasp it all, and I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how magnificent it all was. But five years later, I still do. And when I’m not sure of a detail or a sequence of events, I can look through the multitude of photographs that I took over that seven-week span of time, or I can call J and we can laugh and reminisce our way through my source of confusion. Looking back on that time always brings a smile and a wistful tear. It was the best possible way I could have begun my retirement. By doing so, I believe it changed the trajectory of my remaining years. I stepped into a brand new way of experiencing life, a world not clouded by fear of loss or failure, but brightened by possibility and wonder, and I honestly can’t wait to see what the next adventure will bring.

I had no fear of what might happen, I just knew we had to do it. And it was marvelous.

I Let Go of My Insecurities for This Trip

Traveler Two: I love an adventure; I love travel and discovery. And I yearn to explore and grow as a person. So it was only natural when my good friend and I began talking about a road trip that I immediately came on board and was ready for whatever that might bring. Or was I?Although I had camped only once in my teen years, the idea of tent-camping on a cross-country road trip for seven weeks as one of two 60-something women travelers sounded right up my alley. If there was an opportunity to see more of the wonders of our world up close and in person, count me in. I said "yes" immediately, but there’s a little backstory here.Trying new things has always been appealing to me, but my life hasn’t always been so free-wheeling that I would just pick up and go. Making any important decision usually meant careful analysis of the pros and cons, weighing the dangers and the possible benefits. I was not prone to making rash decisions.I had survived a challenging, though reasonably successful, high-stress career in marketing and advertising. In my work life, I focused heavily on developing a sense of security (I had no financial support other than what I created) and I single-parented my son following a disastrous short marriage. Suffice it to say, my own insecurities kept me from taking a lot of risks. So what was different now? Why and how was it that I was so immediately gung-ho to take off to places that are fraught with unknowns? That part of my story started just three years earlier following a life-changing short solo trip to Yosemite National Park in Northern California. I had booked myself a tent cabin in the park, and after winding my way through some wine country, I stopped to commune with the giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove before I entered Yosemite. It was the perfect introduction for what was to come, though I could never have anticipated it. I had planned to start with a hike up the Sentinel Dome. Billed as a relatively easy climb, it would give me a 360-degree view of the Yosemite Valley. I can still taste the excitement as I set out on my hike. But when I reached the open expanse of the top of the dome, I stopped. I had to sit down. Not because I was tired and hot (though I was both), but because this monumental place with its beauty and grandeur somehow opened my heart and altered my perception of my future. I knew I needed more of this.

The Trip Cemented Our Friendship

When I got home I decided it was time to retire, to travel and to make art. It was 2013. So, yes, fast-forward to 2016 and I was ready for a cross-country drive into places unknown. I had no fear of what might happen, I just knew we had to do it. And it was marvelous.I learned to cook over a fire and together we managed to maintain our mobile household in the back of the tiniest car on the road. We settled disagreements (usually pretty easily) and took care of each other as good friends do. We shared so many amazing times and memorable moments and appreciated the surprises around virtually every turn.

“I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you are / in case you don’t know,” Nico flatly croons on track number nine from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. There’s a menace in her ambivalent delivery, a clinical remove that still feels feverish. Heroin (and second billing) will do that, but so will a sense of fractured femininity. Nico had all of them. Thankfully, I only possess what often feels like the latter: a womanhood trained to soothe, to mollify any mufflings of uncertainty. This woman brings a lover close to her bosom, the pulsing void of her heart chambers echoing the paramour’s forgetfulness of their own light. That echo ricochets through her, dissipates into her skin, assuages the lover’s self-doubt with a steady rhythm. Woman-as-mirror, an object of comfort, a source of knowledge for other selfhoods to emerge. Mirrors are everywhere in depictions of trans femininity. Reflections are always shaking, shattered, or—as they’re employed most often—absolutely crystal clear. A truth that cannot be denied: You’re a transsexual. This strange duality is its own mirror to cis audiences’ outward liberal sympathies, which mask their collective internalized body horror. There’s Daniela Vega’s Marina standing before an undulating mirror in A Fantastic Woman; Isabel Sandoval’s Donna donning her sex worker alter ego Sofia before so many mirrors in Señorita; Lola Rodriguez’s Valeria in the bathroom confronting her pre-transition face in Veneno; and perhaps most famously, the honorable miss Buffalo Bill herself tucking her dick between her legs and murmuring, “I’d fuck me” in front of a camcorder as Q Lazzarus’s androgynous voice flatly croons in the background. (Poor tranny, the cis audience thinks, at least I’m not like that.) These are just off the top of my head. The list goes on, an infinitely refracted framing of our existence that I loathe. But inside that fractal lies a photon of light—a tiny truth that haunts me.

I truly would fuck me, thank you very much.

I Didn't Realize I Could Be Attracted to Women Until I Transitioned

Kids on the bus in middle school used to ask me if I was gay, to which I would respond a beat too late with a nervously trained affect of remove, “No, I’m bisexual.” It felt good on my tongue, something cool, slightly French, untouchably beyond the binary logic so many of my peers held. Even back then, as I turned away from their stifled giggles to face my reflection in the rattling window, I knew I could not—and would never—commit to being straight. I saw past its trappings into a void of possibility, one I lost sight of as my environment crushed me up into a kind of faggot abjection even I felt alienated from. I’ve always loved women in a deep and sonorous way, but I never thought myself capable of fucking them or calling them my romantic partners. Yet during the earliest yawn of summer 2018, two years into my transition, I sat at a bar in Brooklyn with a friend, my knee wedged between her thighs and resting up against her pussy. There I felt my sapphic affections unfurl for the first time. No language needed on my tongue; I just knew. There’s that oft-volleyed lesbian saying that goes something like, Do I want to be like her? Or do I want to be with her? Did I want to be like her, newly crafted vagina a portal to my own future? Or did I want to be with her, one of the most dynamic, jubilant, and hard-to-pin-down people I’d ever met? Just last week the two of us were texting and the exchange went as follows: me: all the men who like me are 5’8” / time to find a 5’8” futch gf instead her: i’d apply but i’m 5’9”me: okay you get a special pass / also you give 6’0” energyher: ugh i love these videos of men being towered over by women and i couldn’t find the one i *needed* / aren’t u 6 foot? :/ me: yes / i like that you don’t remember bc we mirrored each other so Our own kind of lyrics, sung euphorically from deep beneath our breasts. Today when I speak, “I’m bisexual” aloud, I often do so with a wink: I enjoy people like myself and not like myself—in the most literal sense. I conjure myself as Narcissus, staring into my own glorious image upon a mirror of shallow, still water. There I sigh and smile at myself until a suitor who mirrors my own impulses comes along, making ripples in my self-contained rapture. Artsy, stylish, electric trans women who wield words as their weapon of choice? Yes, please. I truly would fuck me, thank you very much. But what of those not like myself? How do I deal with them? The truth is, the pursuit of sex with men is easy. Capturing romance is something else, lost to me within that void of possibility I’ve been staring into since middle school. In Satoshi Kon’s anime film, Paprika, the bad guys capture the titular heroine and plot to destroy her. Still, one of the men cannot contain his feelings for her, even as he obliterates her body. “I love you, Paprika. I love you,” he says, literally plunging his hand inside her and sliding upward toward her face. He knows Paprika is the alter ego of a real human being, Atsuko Chiba, underneath, yet refuses to allow her chosen persona to exist undisturbed. Paprika is laid out atop a large table, her enormous butterfly wings spread out and pinned across the woodgrain like a prized specimen. “I love you just the way you are,” he flatly croons, lifting up his hand and ripping open her skin from crotch to forehead, revealing her human form within.

Do You Want Me, or Do You Want to Be Me?

The forced exposition of that “other”—perhaps to some more “real”—entity inside, is the ultimate gotcha moment. To have one’s physical form splayed out to be analyzed and admired, defiled and desired all at once. That pain is palpable. It is mirrored, refracted and amplified until it sears my flesh through the screen. I have the same response in Tinder conversations with men-who-might-not-be-men. I feel their hands slipping inside me when their bios read, “Just looking for someone to be sapphic with,” while they sport full beards and all the trappings of flailing commitment to an illusion of manhood. I’ve been there before, though I hate to admit it. I thought of waxing my mustache like a debonair dandy before I made my way to the laser clinic, parlayed to me through the local trans whisper network, to have it zapped off. A sensitive abstract painter who admitted to me at the tail end of that same 2018 New York summer, “I’ve thought about being a woman every day for the past three years. I talk about it in therapy all the time.” Yet the beard still lingers today, at least from what I can see in the extremely rare selfie they post on their Instagram stories. A former lover told me over the phone that they've finally begun to take estrogen, that I inspired them, years later, to finally be themselves. An almost-lover telling me the same thing in an Instagram DM. (The first and only date between the latter and myself partially centered around my outfit: short overalls with black tights and Doc Martens. It happened to be a very specific visual trigger of theirs, and I squirmed in my seat as they fawned over my look. I wonder if the sight of me was their own knee-against-pussy moment, a portal to their own self-realization.) In almost every single one of these instances, these not-quite-men-not-yet-women tell me I’m the first person they’ve made their admission to. (Poor pupa, I often think to myself as I recoil, at least I’m not like that anymore.) But as their wings begin to beat of their own accord, they produce shockwaves that send me spiraling: Do my suitors see right through my inner flame of bisexual pride? Am I actually a lesbian whose sapphic lamplight glow attracts these transfeminine admirers, coaxes them out of their shells even long after I’ve left them? That thought pulls me asunder. We both peer into each other toward deeper truths we refuse to speak into existence. For some of the dolls, being trans is about being gay, becoming a woman rightfully addicted to her own vibes (with the heady musk of heterosexual validation not far behind), and then being gay all over again in the other direction. Just ask Gigi Gorgeous, mother of all blonde trans women. Splashed across social media, she’s willingly shared with her audience of millions her very public journey from eyeliner-obsessed gay to high-octane hetero bimbo trans girl to lesbian trailblazer to pansexual wife of a transmasculine oil dynasty heir. Praise be unto our patron saint of any and all transitions, be they social or sexual. She’s on some messy and miraculous galaxy brain gender shit I could really learn from.

If I am to be a woman, I am to be a mirror.

I'll Be Your Mirror

In the meantime, I am trying not to let my fear of the unknown turn into exhaustion or resentment. Rather, couldn’t it be fun to ride the razor’s edge of curiosity and possibility? For if I am to be a woman, I am to be a mirror. That’s what tethers us together as women, even if the rope burns our hands until they bleed. Why not invert woman-as-mirror into something more expansive? A mirror-mother-lover-leader who begets yet more women into infinity. As I open my arms to hold space for these soon-to-be-women, I can see the reflection of my own face, of my own past and future, in the mirrored edges of my fingertips. I do not know yet if “lesbian” is the right word to describe how I feel, but perhaps it’s not about feelings. It’s about action. It’s about doing what must be done to ensure I have enough room to fly free and make sense of it all later. Just ask Gigi. “Let me stand to show that you are blind / please put down your hands / ‘cause I see you,” Nico sings again before the chorus hits, her delivery punctuated by the guitar’s staccato wink. An ethereal swirl of harmonized voices melds with hers, fading out together into the void as the song ends. Join me and sing along, won’t you?

I was introduced to ketamine by some friends one night before we all went out. I was hesitant to try it at first because when people describe how it makes you feel, it doesn’t seem like it would be ideal for a club. I'm surprised it's a club drug at all, actually, because it made me want to be solitary and in my thoughts. I've been doing ketamine recreationally on and off since then. I'm not a big drinker, so it’s always interesting to me when there is a party favor that’s not alcohol. In the beginning, I was just trying to have an experience. I had never done any psychedelic before ketamine. To this day I’ve done shrooms like two or three times, and they’ve been very mild experiences. I’m not very well-versed in that world. But I’ve noticed that there are times where after a night of ketamine I feel lighter, or my mind is blank in a good way, as opposed to a night of drinking. Recently I've been doing ketamine in a different setting, as part of therapy for severe depression that SSRIs haven't been able to fix. So far, it's working better than anything else I've tried.

I realized drugs like SSRIs can put you in the same place you were in before, or even worse.

SSRIs Only Made Me Feel Worse

I’ve been on and off antidepressants since my early 20s. I’m not a big fan. For me, SSRIs work as a temporary fix to lift me out of some very dark places I’ve wound up in, but then after that, you’re kind of left to coast on your own. I never truly felt like they helped me, just because the cons outweighed the pros so much. The first time I went on meds, I was struggling with depression, suicidal ideation and all that stuff, so they prescribed me Wellbutrin, which I had a very bad experience with. I couldn’t sleep on it. I felt restless and just overall crazier than I did before—jittery and weird. So then they switched me to Cymbalta, which worked better, but then something crazy happened with my Medicaid, so I couldn’t get my prescription refilled, and the withdrawals I went through were insane. I got the brain zaps that they talk about with SSRI withdrawal, and I was just balls-to-the-wall crying for days, angry. It just felt like a crazy experiment that was being done on me. From then on, I was like, I’m never doing this again. I was prescribed mood stabilizers at one point, when I’m like the least manic person that I have ever known. If anything, people are usually like, “You’re so chill,” and I’m like, “That’s just depression.” After a while, I realized drugs like SSRIs can put you in the same place you were in before, or even worse. So, what’s the point? I spent about five years experimenting with SSRIs. Now: No thank you. I’ll let my psychiatrist prescribe me things, but I take the “as needed” thing very seriously. It’s nice to know that they’re there, in the event that I would ever consider that again, which I don’t think I would ever. I have a friend who’s been doing ketamine to treat her depression for a couple of years. She swears by it, and she’s tried even more antidepressants than I have. So I did some research on my own—I watched a couple of Vice documentaries and read some articles and stuff. Eventually, I was like, “I’ve already done this recreationally, which is much more dangerous, so why not?” It’s very hard to get pure ketamine, so you don't know what exactly you're getting.

Ketamine Therapy Isn't the Psychedelic Experience You Might Expect

Signing up for it was easy. I just did over-the-phone consultation and gave a brief history of my journey with psychiatry. You have to show that you’ve tried SSRIs already and that they failed, which to me is unfortunate. It’s like saying, this is the last resort, whereas I wish I tried this before I tried all those antidepressants and maybe did some weird damage to my brain that I can‘t undo. That, to me, is the medical world being kinda backward. Whatever you imagine a ketamine clinic to look like, mine turned out to be a really plain, bare-bones medical office, where they put me in a room with a dentist-type reclining chair. "Do you want a blanket? A pillow? Do you want a room with a window?" Of course, I do. Who wants to be trapped in a room on ketamine? They recommend you bring a buddy, but people go by themselves all the time and it’s perfectly fine. Then they take your blood pressure, stick an IV in your hand and you blast off.The ketamine high is so hard to describe. It’s definitely different from other drugs I’ve taken. It’s like a movie depiction of being on drugs: It has an aspect of relieving any pain you may have in your body, so there is immediate relief in that sense. Things are floating. It’s very confusing, it’s hard to understand the very basic aspect of how you’re even in there. With the infusions, it’s an immediate k-hole like I’ve never experienced with recreational use. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience. When I close my eyes I can see myself, like a 3D model sitting in a chair, or a drone circling around me. The stories of people getting surgeries and floating out and watching themselves being operated on: That’s real. I can't even tell what I’m thinking about when I’m in the depths of it. There are definitely memories. If I remember something it is like I’m there again, which could be good or bad depending on the memory. Thankfully I haven't had bad memories come up.The experience is very cool. It can also get scary, depending on your state of mind. But you always come back, so that’s good. It’s not like you flow and just keep going and going and going. You can feel when you are starting to come back down, which can be a relief.

It's working better than anything else I've tried.

Does Ketamine Therapy Really Work? I Think So

Ketamine therapy is a very neurochemical thing. It’s not like when people do shrooms therapeutically, and they have a guide or someone taking you through the trip. At the ketamine clinic, no one sits with you and asks you questions about your childhood. The doctor told me any insight you get from the experience is secondary—it’s what the ketamine is literally doing to your brain chemistry that matters. I want to start my own ketamine clinic, honestly. Just make it cuter, I don’t know, paint the walls a cuter color.When it’s good it’s good, and when it’s bad it’s bad, just like any drug experience. My first time I cried a lot. You really just feel childlike and vulnerable, or even when you wake up from a surgery where they put you out, that same kind of whiny, like oh-my-god-where’s-my-mom kind of feeling. You definitely feel like those classic viral videos of those people coming out of the dentist, where they’re trying to grab your tongue because it feels so weird in their mouth. I can’t even write things down after. There’s no way I can be contemplative about it. The day after, it’s good to sleep a lot. Some days I’ve just come straight home from an infusion and slept. The doctor told me some people go to school after infusions, some people go to work. I’m like okay, chill out, I get it, but I am not going to do any of those things. I’m not gonna go to the gym. It’s a very chill drug but it does affect you. There’s definitely a before versus an after. I had my sixth infusion yesterday, and today I feel well-rested. It’s hard to pinpoint my mood, though. I have definitely felt worse recently, like this month. Every day just waking up with the same dreadful feeling. Today I feel better. I’ve been waking up early, which is hard for me. I would be going to sleep around 6 a.m. and waking up at like 2 p.m., and that was obviously making me feel awful. So I would say by the second or third infusion, my body just started waking up at like 10 a.m., which is rare for me. I’m also smoking less weed, which is something I have been self-medicating with for years now. I’m not wake-and-baking which is amazing. It used to be the first thing I would think about when I woke up: “Oh I feel awful, I have to smoke.”I’m supposed to go back for another infusion a month from now. I’m anxious about the money thing, though. I don’t have a job right now, and the infusions are $400 apiece. I was able to raise the money using my online presence, although I didn't say exactly what it was for, because people don’t really understand what this is. They might think, “Oh you want money so you can get fucked up?” Ketamine therapy may seem crazy, but most people use substances to change how they feel. Some people smoke weed to cope. Or they drink, which is crazy because it’s a depressant, so you’re just doubling down. I’ve thought about things like ayahuasca, which I know can be a scary process. But I see so many people who do nothing to try and fix their issues, which to me is even scarier.

I am a sacred monster.My friends Andy, Laverne and Shelly were talking after a meeting one time. “She asked me to sponsor her, but I don’t know. I'm kinda afraid,” said Laverne, a recovering coke addict. “She’s getting off heroin.”“It’s all the same,” said Shelly. “An addict is an addict is an addict, regardless of their drug of choice.” This is of course not true, but I would never say so. Because it both is, and it isn’t.“I disagree,” Andy said. “I need a heroin addict to sponsor me. The bottoms are much harsher.” I am of course Andy’s sponsor, but that is nobody’s business but ours.We are both sacred monsters.

I have been dead before. But I’m not now.

Heroin Made Me Who I Am

There was a time where, when I came back to New York, I would have people coming up to me on the street to tell me, “Oh my God, I thought you were dead.” And you know, I have been dead before. But I’m not now. I have so many gruesome horror stories I could weave through this essay about spending my 20s shooting heroin in NYC. Maybe I’ll subject you to some. Or then again maybe I won’t. Maybe it’s a little less charming without the movie soundtrack. It’s a part of my history. I was also a Girl Scout. I was on the first date with my husband, at a Santa Monica lunch joint almost eight years ago. We were sharing a Greek salad when I told him, “You know, I need to get this out of the way. I was a junkie for most of my 20s.”It’s the ultimate elimination tactic. Can you handle that? Wait for it. “Oh, wow that’s interesting,” he finally replied. “What a strong person you must be to have overcome something like that.” And I am, bless him. My slightly more conservative, double-Harvard-degree now-husband has zero concept of what being a junkie means. I think he may have been distracted by the fact that I’m also really hot. Did he know, looking at me then, that he was in for a life of purple stories and premium blow jobs? This innocence he has is partly why I married him, and why I love him so much still. I have enough knowledge for the both of us. I don’t need or want him to understand what heroin addiction looks like. Ever.I still don’t tell most people that part of my history. That I’m an addict—or more specifically, that I was a heroin addict—will always be present, despite the fact I have not touched any drugs or alcohol for 12 years. It’s complicated to explain to people, not that most are interested. Addiction is a mental illness that, if you have it, you’re regularly told is your fault. Every time you say it, you take the risk of inviting a myriad of fucked-up, insensitive comments. Most people will never understand it, unless they absolutely have to learn: the moment when we see it firsthand, intimately. Even then, people don’t get it. When someone’s significant other cannot stop using drugs—regardless of how educated or sensitive the aggrieved party might be in all other areas in their life—they always believe that if their addict “loved me enough” they’d simply stop. Police departments complain about giving naltrexone shots repeatedly to overdosing addicts who “never learn.” I have been told myself, many times, that I deserve to die. “You have a beautiful smile,” a nurse said to me in the hospital after a nearly fatal overdose. “What a waste.” I pulled out my IV and walked out the door. “Tell me something I don’t know, bitch.”

I Would Jump Out of a Window to Get High—and I Did

Addiction, to me, is the inability to stop a destructive behavior regardless of the consequences. And if you’re a heroin addict then those consequences can be severe. It has nothing to do with cognitive function; knowing that something is killing you unfortunately doesn’t do shit. Being active in heroin addiction reminds me of a time I saw a squirrel trapped in a cage, the level of frantic desperation it had made me physically sick. Imagine being so consumed with obsession and compulsion that nothing else in your life, regardless of how important it is, gets a chance to matter for more than an instant. Imagine that going on for years. Imagine being so consumed with hunger and so wild from withdrawal that when your boyfriend locks you in an apartment to stop you from using, you jump off a three-story fire escape like fucking Spider-Man, then run off barefoot into the snow to score. Essentially, imagine being a werewolf. A werewolf with a moral failing. A werewolf that could stop being a werewolf if they only wanted to. I personally don’t know anyone who ever just stopped being a werewolf. Maybe you can imagine. Or maybe you already know. If you do, then you also know that if you need help to stop being a werewolf, the foundation for almost all treatment is a Christian-based spiritual program that came out of the Oxford group in the 1930s. It’s either 12 Step, Jesus or a Suboxone prescription, and there aren’t a lot of other choices, baby. A psychiatrist once told me that only ten percent of IV heroin addicts survive. That was in 2003. I’d like to think that now, decades deep into America’s opioid crisis, kids like me who are around today would have more options and support, but, honestly, from what I’ve seen, they don’t. There’s a whole rehab industry that has sprung up, but after that 28 days—or 60, or 90—the suggestion is always to go to 12 Step. Kids like me do have people like me: the ten percent, the sacred monsters. It can be enough, if you want it. The 12 Steps saved my life; I am passionate about it. But I usually save my feelings about it for other addicts, the same as my horror stories. If someone I encounter needs to hear how I stared down fire, that addict can call me every day and I will drive an hour to pick their ass up and take them to a meeting, listen, buy them lunch. There’s something we know deeply, innately, in each other—that wound. We also know how closely death hovers. But does my Beverly Hills doctor need to know? Will it affect my care as a patient? My sister, a nurse, stepped in once when another nurse giving an ultrasound to a pregnant patient with “recovering IV heroin addict” in her chart asked if she was “terrified her baby would end up like her?” When every single phlebotomist struggles to get a blood sample on the second or third try—do I say why? Do I tell my in-laws? My adult stepchildren? My colleagues and classmates in graduate school? Someone who offers me wine at a dinner party after I’ve already declined six times? Who deserves to know this about me?There is a lot of vulnerability when I say I’m an addict. For me, it feels like it's making public that “wound,” the trauma that I experienced getting to—as Andy put it—my harsh bottom. The rapes, the assaults, the degrading sex work fueled by my frantic need for more. The deliberate overdoses. Being told by medical professionals that I wasn’t worth helping. Being rejected by family and friends. Multiple hospitalizations, three treatment centers, total insanity. It was years and years of carnage.

I pulled out my IV and walked out the door.

Addiction Is an Experience That Never Leaves You

I lost my mind deep in heroin addiction. I could not stop. When I walked past a mirror in a treatment center toward the end, I didn’t physically recognize myself—I thought I’d walked past a window with a strange girl on the other side. My arms were like hamburger meat, and my body so malnourished and emaciated that sitting in a folding chair left a horizontal purple bruise from the weight of my own thighs. And the shame, the shame. When I vocalize that I am an addict, and even more that I’m a heroin addict, all that history comes back into existence. No one can see my mental illness or my wound when they look at me. Addicts are so good at hiding it. The most dangerous thing an addict can do is hide so well that they forget it themselves. People don’t see me like that today. Not through 12 years of distance, multiple college degrees, the way that I carry myself, my beautiful family, my five-carat diamond and all the work I’ve done learning to survive living in this body with this brain on this planet. My kaleidoscopic identity falls into new colors and forms continuously, the same as all of us. I was a junkie. Now I am other things too. It’s not something you can un-know about someone, and so I usually keep it private. You take a chance; I’m not always that generous. It has taken me all of these past 12 years to accept that I am the way I am, to believe that it's not all my fault, that I have a mental illness. Heroin addiction isn’t an experience I’d wish on anyone. It drags you all the way to the bottom of human suffering, and for nine out of ten addicts, that’s where it ends: family and friends heartbroken and exhausted sitting at a wake, wishing they could have helped, powerless, having seen a vibrant, loving being fade to primer gray. In these last decades, it’s become a commonplace American tragedy, a statistic. But if you’re like me, and for some unfathomable reason you’re the one to come out the other side, you will be a new person. You will have died and have come back from the dead will spend the rest of your life shedding skins of your former bullshit self until very little remains that weren’t there in early childhood. You will have to make sense of the why; you will search to find god. And having done nothing particularly deserving to receive this pardon, you must change and find meaning. You must help others when they ask. And when you look in the mirror, you will carry all of this with you, from here till the end, because now you are a sacred monster.

The climate crisis is the greatest challenge facing humanity, with potentially disastrous ecological, economic and social consequences. And like the COVID-19 epidemic, the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on less affluent members of society who cannot easily adapt to a warmer world by running their air conditioners more often or moving to escape rising sea levels. In this way, climate change is a crisis of social justice, exacerbated by depleting land values, increasingly scarce resources (and conflicts over them) and forced global migrations. Together, these present a dual challenge to architects and designers like myself: how to mitigate, address and adapt to changing environmental conditions while creating conscientious, sustainable lifestyles that are accessible to every segment of society. Twenty-first-century architects and designers can view climate change as an opportunity for new modes of design thinking. In the past, the influence of climate on architecture has mostly consisted of new constraints on design, like certification and building standards that have modified or replaced vernacular and traditional building materials and techniques. In the future, we need to expand the lexicon of climate architecture by investigating how architecture and design can be used to visualize changing climates; address the social, economic and health impacts of climate change; and transform public space around shared resources and knowledge.

Twenty-first-century architects and designers can view climate change as an opportunity for new modes of design thinking.

Architecture’s Impact on the Environment Isn’t Obvious, but It’s There

One way we can achieve this is by recognizing ​that the notion of public spaces must be extended to include shared resources, such as the water we drink and the air we breathe. A city’s infrastructure is just as important for its public life as its squares, concert halls and coffee shops. Conversely, parks have historically been viewed as urban amenities, but their cool grasses and shady trees may be necessities in cities that will be increasingly devastated by summer heatwaves. All of these factors will come to define new domains of work, leisure, transport and infrastructure space. Architects and designers can also conceptualize materials and design elements via the natural media that make up Earth’s climate. By incorporating natural climate elements—dust, wind, clouds, water, ice and sun—into design thinking and construction, architects can give materiality to Earth’s changing climate, and make legible the problem of climate change. Take dust, for instance. Dust provides a visceral representation of atmospheric motions, and drying lakes will only increase the amount of dust in the atmosphere. ​Climate change will also lead to major changes in wind patterns, affecting prevailing wind directions and the frequency and severity of storms and other extreme events. Similarly, recent climate studies suggest a reduction of cloud cover in warmer climates, which could worsen heatwaves and social inequalities associated with shade. Then we have acid rain, melting ice-caps and rising sea levels, which have become some of the most iconic—and devastating—images of environmental change. Natural media—such as dust, winds, clouds, water, ice and sun—are foundational to how humans engage with the climate system. It’s important to acknowledge that climate change is not only a condition for us humans to adapt to or resources for us to manage. Instead, our environment is a place for shared cultural values.

An Example of How Architecture and Climate Change Are Connected

In my design practice, I am currently exploring the possibility of visualizing climate change through architecture as part of a collaboration for a combined research facility and community center in the Salton Sea. This facility will aid ongoing scientific efforts to measure, model and observe the changing dust conditions in the Salton Sea region, while also providing an amenity for the public to experience and learn about the region’s climatic changes. In the future, it will be important to see new interdisciplinary collaborations form between scientists, public policymakers, landholders and designers.The building itself serves as a didactic tool for rendering the rapidly changing climate visible, both through its scientific and educational programs and, more importantly, via a permeable membrane that envelopes the building and filters dust from surrounding debris to form a stratigraphy recording the layers of accumulation. As the sea shrinks and more of the lake bed is uncovered, the dust’s physical and chemical properties change so that, just as layers of rock record sequences of environmental change, the stratigraphy that accumulates along the building’s glass facade detail acts as an embodiment of the invisible impacts of climate change across timescales.

Over the next century, we will see a shift in cities.

Environmental Design Should Be the Rule, Not the Exception

Over the next century, we will see a shift in cities. Rising temperatures, resource scarcity and more frequent natural disasters will all reveal inequities in the way we share space. Land value will continue to reflect these pressures, and populations will redistribute as we have seen already in global conflicts stressed through desertification. In relation to building technology, climate media provides a basis for exploring specific material properties, assemblies and details for specific sites. For example, wire-mesh structures could be used to study how ice melts, breaks up and responds to shifting grounds during the collapse of ice shelves, the melting of glaciers or the gradual disappearance of winter snows. Lastly, our built environment will reveal the multiple timescales of climate change. In the case of the Salton Sea, where dust gradually builds from the drying of the lake bed, architecture links together the human timescale, the building’s timescale of inhabitation and, ultimately, the geologic timescale on which periods of environmental change are recorded. With this in mind, design provides a basis for how multiple user groups can come together to interact, exchange and adapt in new environmentally-focused commons.

"It's not all her blood,” I hear my Sergeant First Class say to the medic. I am sitting on the exam table staring straight ahead, not exactly certain where I am or what has happened.The medic looks at me and then nods at the NCO who accompanied me to the clinic. He asks if I am hurt and my response comes out as a shrug. I’m not trying to be difficult: I truly don’t know how to answer the question. I am in a daze, completely oblivious to any pain and unsure of where all the blood is coming from.The medic begins examining my head, probably due to the abundance of blood covering my right ear, neck and shoulder. He discovers small pieces of shrapnel lodged behind my ear. We will later joke how some pieces had literally pierced my ear. He picks the shrapnel out, one piece at a time, and deposits each with an audible clink into a metal pan sitting next to the exam table.He speaks slowly and quietly and says, "You know, when you get back to Anaconda, there are counselors you can talk to. Your sergeant told me this isn't your first attack. You can go home if you want. No one comes back the same after they have been through what you have been through."I nod and clear my throat to speak for the first time. I try to swallow but my throat is dry from the smoke and debris of the explosion. All I can muster out is, "Do you think I could keep a few pieces of the shrapnel? I think I can make an earring out of it."

This was my choice. I wanted to be in the lead.

My Iraq War Story

Just a few hours prior, we were on a routine return mission back to our base camp. We were truck drivers and it was May of 2004. We drove all over the country delivering supplies to soldiers. Water, food, ammunition: You name it, we hauled it. And our vehicles of choice were M915s—traveling targets on wheels.On May 25, 2004, shortly before noon, the 915 I was driving was hit by a roadside bomb. We were the lead truck behind the first gun truck.This was my choice. I wanted to be in the lead.My A-driver, my battle buddy, my best friend and soon-to-be-dad carried an M-249 machine gun. We always agreed that the lead of the convoy was where we belonged. One minute we were taking the curve upward on the ramp leading to a bridge; the next minute we were deafened by the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. The blast was accompanied by a rush of debris, thick smoke and overwhelming pressure.No sound. No sight.I must have blacked out, because the next thing I remember is the steering wheel shaking. I can't see, I can't hear, but I can feel the truck. I push down with my right foot on the gas pedal, no clue where I’m headed or what has happened.After seemingly forever—but only seconds in reality—the smoke begins to clear and I can identify my surroundings. Although I can see, I still can’t hear anything. I look over to my right and see my battle buddy covered in blood. He is holding his face, rocking back and forth. I can tell he is shouting, but I can’t hear his voice.I keep driving.He falls over on me. He begins clawing at his face. That’s when I see it. The blood is spewing from his forehead and right eye socket and his right eye is hanging from a thread. I can tell he is screaming, but I still can’t hear him. I rub his back and I tell him it's all good.I can get us out of here.

I am covered in blood.

Not All Iraq War Combat Stories End in Death

I call in a medevac and am later told I was talking in a jumbo mess of words. Clearly, the trauma from the explosion was playing with my communication skills. The truck begins to lose momentum. It's beginning to stall. I get to the top of the bridge and park it as close to the bridge as I can. I have over 20 trucks behind me that need to get by. I tell my battle buddy, my best friend, this soon-to-be-dad I will be right back. I jump out and flag down a truck. The KBR-manned civilian truck panics and drives by. The next military truck drives by. They are following protocol, but I need help. I need to get my partner medical care. I need it now.I go back to our truck and scream at him that I am going to get him out. I guide him to crawl across to the driver’s seat and I scoop him out. I drag him on to the ground and I cradle him like the little brother he is to me. Someone shows up and they hand me a bottle of water.I pour it over his head to truly assess the damage and that’s when I notice that his right eyeball is gone: It must have fallen off in the truck.I cradle him and soothe him and tell him it's going to be okay. I can hear him now. He’s saying repeatedly that he will never see his baby boy. I try to reassure him that he will see him. I tell him it's going to be just fine.Two more explosions go off.No one is hit.We get him into a truck that stops and up a few hundred yards and we create a secure site for the medevac to land. I stay with the convoy and grab all our weapons, ammunition and radio from our tuck.I jump into another truck speeding by and I think someone tells me to stay put in the truck. But I don’t. I get out and pull security.After the medevac takes off with my battle buddy, my best friend, this soon-to-be dad, we head to the closest camp in a town called Taji.I am taken to the medics.I am covered in blood.It's not all my blood.

I grew up in a small town in the north of England. It has one of the lowest progression rates to higher education and a bad reputation to go with it. Neither of my parents nor grandparents had been to university, but it was a dream of mine to go from a young age. As I progressed through school, I was consistently placed in the top ten percent of highest achievers and began to pursue my hopes of studying at the University of Cambridge. This was a dream that I could never have imagined would become a reality, but I made it with hard work and determination.I made it to Cambridge.I remember the tears of happiness when I first found out. Calling friends and family. Jumping around the living room. Is this a dream? Am I really going there? I can’t wait for all of the adventures that await me! And I certainly wasn't disappointed.

I made it to Cambridge.

Cambridge Is Not Like Home

My arrival day featured a garden party on the beautiful grounds of my Cambridge college, and despite never attending anything like this before, I immediately felt at home. I quickly formed a group of friends and was loving every minute of my experience. It was only when I began to attend my compulsory academic supervisions when the feeling of being an imposter set in.Supervisions are used for sharing ideas with peers and receiving feedback on our submitted work. While the notion of this seemed novel to begin with, I slowly began to feel out of my depth. Other students would refer to concepts that I had never even heard of and I became increasingly worried that if I asked a question to clarify my uncertainty, I might seem stupid. On a couple of occasions, I was spoken over by other students, with one bluntly contradicting my point, and again this made me feel like my ideas weren't valid. Upon reflection, I can see that it wasn't their intention to make me feel that way. Still, having never experienced disagreement in an academic environment before, I suddenly doubted my abilities.For the rest of the year, I made some contributions in supervisions that I felt would be accepted by my peers, but I failed to seek clarification on topics that I struggled with. I feared that I would be viewed as weak by other students who seemed to have a strong understanding of everything. (Almost) literally everything.These feelings of being viewed as inferior also began to manifest outside of the supervision environment. One moment that stands out to me was when I was out with a friend to collect takeaway sandwiches. When I entered the kitchen in my accommodation, there was an ongoing discussion about fine-dining experiences. Light-heartedly, I turned to my friend and said that we like fancy food as I gestured towards the paper bags on the table, containing our foil-wrapped sandwiches. To my shock, I was swiftly "corrected" by a male classmate who pointed out with a tone of disgust, "That is not fine dining," glancing down at my takeaway bag. I initially laughed it off and thought that he hadn't understood my humor, but the more I thought about it, the more it hurt.I felt like he was looking down on me, suggesting that my standards were somehow lower than his and that he was in a position to educate me about the finer things in life. I am confident that my northern accent influenced his judgment of me. Had I made the exact same comment in an accent resembling his own, I am sure that he would not have attempted to correct me. I had worried about standing out because of my voice before I got to university, and moments like this were reinforcing my concerns and again making me feel like I didn’t really belong there.

I had suddenly gone from being in the top ten percent to the bottom ten percent.

Then Things Got Really, Really Complicated

It was then the approach to exam season, and I was beginning to feel even more that I was incapable of delivering the standard that was required. One morning, as I left my accommodation block to attend a revision supervision, I received a phone call that provided me with news that would make my exam term even more difficult. My grandmother, who had been ill in hospital, had passed away. With the fear that I would fall further behind my peers if I didn’t attend the supervision, I sat there holding back my tears for its hour duration.I found the rest of the term very difficult as I slowly came to terms with what had happened while being hundreds of miles away from my family. I took a break from revision until I felt that I could focus again. Then I sat for my exams and immediately pushed them to the back of my mind as I traveled home to attend my grandmother's funeral. One of her neighbors jokingly said that I ought to have done well in my exams because my grandmother would have been shocked if I hadn’t. And deep down, I felt that I hadn’t.My results arrived and confirmed that I hadn't come close to what I would have been pleased with. I had suddenly gone from being in the top ten percent to the bottom ten percent. This was difficult to deal with. I felt like I had somehow lost the academic abilities that I was previously recognized for and that I really wasn't worthy of a place at Cambridge.

I Am Changing My Attitude

I knew that I didn't want to experience these feelings of disappointment again and thought about how I could approach my second year differently. I am worthy. I made it here in the same way that everybody else did, so why do I let myself believe that I am somehow inferior? This is the attitude that allowed me to flourish.I approached my second year with the determination to succeed and the acceptance that while not everybody will understand or relate to me, this doesn't make me any less worthy of my place at Cambridge than them. I asked questions in supervisions, I put forward ideas without worrying that they may seem stupid, and I realized that my peers really didn't know everything after all. They had simply read different papers than I. The difference was that I didn’t have the confidence to mention these things as I feared being seen as unintelligent.Somehow, after changing my approach, I found myself in the top ten percent of the next examination results, restoring a little confidence in myself.While I still think that some people look down on me because of my accent and still experience self-doubt, I feel that I am beginning to rebuild the confidence that I lost when I was constantly comparing my ability and knowledge to that of others. We are all on different journeys and we all have different experiences, but I have come to realize that we should never allow ourselves to think that we are unworthy of our achievements.

I worked in kitchens as a line cook for ten years and I loved it.I was an absolutely kick-ass grill cook and, if I may so humbly say so, just a generally talented culinary artist overall—even though I never received a formal education in the field. I started as a prep cook at age 15 and worked at the same restaurant for eight years, steadily moving up the ranks. During the last five years of my time there, I was a head line cook, working the grill alongside a fantastic crew.During that time, I saw so many nut sacks.

Working the Line in a Restaurant Is Not Glamorous

Three of the other line cooks—two men, one woman—and I worked together for five years and had the type of camaraderie that can only come from being in the weeds together, night after night. Many other personalities came in and out of the kitchen during that time, and most of them became part of our big messy family. And it was—as I imagine nearly all back houses of restaurants are—truly dysfunctional, in the sense that what held us so close together were pranks, vulgarity and general abuse.For those who’ve never had the pleasure of working in the restaurant industry, allow me to share a few examples of what a typical day in the kitchen was like.I’m facing the grill, trying to keep track of the temperatures of 30 steaks at a time, when I suddenly realize that my back is wet because a dishwasher has sprayed me down with a hose.Normal.Oh, Joe’s organizing the freezer? Let’s lock him in the cold and dark there for a few minutes!Normal.The bartender just ordered a salad for dinner. Since we have to get back at him for puking all over the rug at Asa’s house last night, we toss his salad in nothing but Tabasco sauce, then hide and snicker while we watch him take the first bite.Devilishly funny. Also, completely normal.It’s the middle of the dinner rush on a Saturday night and I’m out of filets. I head to the walk-in to grab a case and there’s Jeff in the corner, chuckling because he’s been standing in there for five minutes with his pants pulled below his waist, waiting to present his nut sack to the next person to enter.Damn, he got me. Fuck you, bud.Also: normal. So. Terribly. Normal.If you’re appalled at this point, I don’t blame you, whether you’ve worked in a restaurant or not. But what can I say? I grew up in that kitchen. Mischievous scoundrels as they were, those twisted sons of bitches were my kin. I didn’t mind the soaked back of a chef’s coat. I didn’t even mind the nut sacks.

Damn, he got me. Fuck you, bud.

My Experience Being a Line Cook as a Female

Eventually, I moved on from that spot to work at a few more restaurants, always as a lead line cook. And from that point on, at every new kitchen I’d ever cook in, I was still the only woman.Now, you might think female cooks and chefs weren’t as rare these days as they are. You might think my work experience and accolades—eight years, dammit—would be enough to warrant a little bit of respect from my new coworkers. In my experience, neither was the case. Every time I joined a new crew, it was the same story.Who knew men could be so predictable?Anyhow, it went a little something like this:Day one, I’d walk into the kitchen, with my jacket bleached, pressed and folded over my arm, and introduce myself to the first person I’d see behind the line.“Hi, I’m Rachael. I’m starting today.”“Oh, waitress?”No, dude. But I loved it when they would ask that because I used to relish in seeing the look of shock and dismay on their faces when I’d tell them what job I was there to do.The assumptions didn’t end there. The guys would coddle me, speak softly to me—even explain kitchen basics to me like how to cut a carrot. All the while, I judged them for their poorly seared scallops and the béarnaise that they could never successfully make by hand.I had to bite my tongue a lot, nod and—yep, you guessed it—smile.

Why Is it So Hard to "Be One of the Guys"?

It would go on like that for about two weeks, which is about the time it takes me to get acclimated to a new setup and a new menu. And then they’d change their tune. At first, it would be remarks like, “Wow, I never thought a girl could cook on a line.” But then the gender-charged sentiments would wear off and they would start saying genuinely complimentary things like, “We’ve never had a grill cook as good as you.” (I told you I’m an absolutely kick-ass grill cook.)To be honest, I didn’t mind having to be patient with their behavior and their coming to terms with my capabilities. It was worth it to watch so many men undergo the ideological journey they needed to realize that a pretty, well-mannered girl could hang with the big dogs behind the line and take the heat.From there on out, it was always fun. I’d run circles around the men in the kitchen while keeping my composure, and even though I’d still get the occasional sexist remark of disbelief over my abilities, they generally went from treating me like a girl to treating me like one of the guys. We’d drink beers and smoke cigarettes behind the dumpster. They wouldn’t be afraid to crack crude jokes around me because they knew I had an even dirtier one up my sleeve. The nut sacks started to come out. I formed new dysfunctional families that treated me with real respect, and I think I imparted a few lessons along the way.

They went from treating me like a girl to treating me like one of the guys.

The Same Prejudices Against Women Exist in Offices

Fast-forward three and a half years from my last restaurant job. These days I’m working in an office and seeing far fewer testicles. I love my job, and I feel respected there in many ways: for that, I feel lucky. I continue to work with a lot of men that mostly treat me as their peer—beers and dirty jokes and all. But, from time to time, I still sense them tiptoeing around me or excluding me from certain banter because I’m a “lady.”“You’re a lady”—a phrase that’s so problematic to me, yet so widely accepted in our society that when it comes out of a man’s mouth, it’s usually meant (and received) as an expression of respect. What it tells me is: You think that because I have a vagina, I’m dainty. Because I have a vagina, I’ll faint at the utterance of a dirty word. Because I have a vagina, you can’t be yourself around me, because you want to shield me from the self that you will inevitably reveal anyhow, despite your concerns for my perceived frailty.And herein lies one of my greatest struggles as a woman, something that’s hard to unpack over a round of beers at the bar with men I feel mostly equal to. I wrestle with the fact that my instinct to attribute the way they exclude me from raunchy banter to sexism will in itself be perceived as a form of female sensitivity.Instead, I’m often made to sit quietly and bitterly stew in defeat at the hands of subtle but deeply ingrained prejudice. To this day, every time someone reminds me that I’m a lady, I want to tell them about the phenomenally vulgar work environments where I was forged. I want to say to them that I’ve seen and heard way worse than whatever bad joke they just cracked. And so, regularly, I find myself sitting amongst men who are supposed to be my peers, excluded, momentarily downtrodden and flirting with the idea of just coming out and telling them, “Dude, you don’t know how many nut sacks I’ve seen.”

I was preparing for an art show. The SoHo one-bedroom apartment I had lived in for more than 12 years certainly looked like an art studio—paint and paintings strewn everywhere. Huge canvases I spent years working on layered the walls. The pages of my handmade book channeled words and drawings, some of which I remember. There was a self-portrait with the words, “I am a song” and a drawing with the words, “I’ve made my own self happy. Thank God.”In 2016, I had decided that, instead of keeping a typical Passover Seder with my family, I would make a one-take documentary film. I gave out holy matzah from Israel under the white arch of Washington Square Park while the camera captured magical encounters with passersby who stopped for matzah and talked with me, revealing themselves and interacting. Around 5:30 a.m., while watching Youtube videos of Prince (who had recently passed away), I looked behind me and suddenly saw flames shooting out of my bedroom. I quickly tried to put the fire out but got burned. It was already out of control. I woke up my neighbor, he called 911 and then I ran from apartment to apartment, banging on doors to wake everyone up. I lived on the sixth floor, and by the time I got to the fourth floor, I noticed people bringing their computers with them, so I quickly dashed back upstairs to get mine, which was loaded with tons of original music and art, and none of which was backed up.Words became imprinted in my mind: “Getting over you is what I have to do. Will take it till I’m through. I know I will get through, getting over you. We all go, round and round around with the one beyond a sound.” Smoke filled the stairwell. I got burned trying to put out the fire on my left arm. The scar looks like a teardrop, an angel marking of a survivor. A phoenix. Ultimately, numerous firemen came to put out the fire. In my apartment alone, 40 years of art and music burnt to ashes. Dozens upon dozens of journals from my youth. A wardrobe that I was notorious for having. All forever lost.

I quickly tried to put the fire out but got burned. It was out of control.

I Channel a Higher Power With My Art

I have never had a nine-to-five job. I’ve always led the life of an artist. I have performed in front of thousands and in small crowds, in psych wards, in parks, in clubs and so forth. It is a vulnerable thing to sing your own songs. To expose your truth. To imbibe your essence on stage and to truly engage. I am brave. I have had many incarnations as an artist. As a little girl, I began in musical theater. I grew up with a single mom and older sister, and the summer before third grade, my wealthy aunt and uncle sent me to a girls sleep away camp. I auditioned for the upcoming summer musical, Annie and got the part of Annie’s brother, Rooster. I was a natural. My mother, my hero, soon put me in a local musical theatre troupe where I starred in musicals. One highlight occurred during a summer tour, just before fifth grade. I starred in Alice in Wonderland. We performed for those with special needs and, after the shows, I would talk to them in the audience. I have always, in some ways, been an empath. I have a lot of compassion and have a lot of love for humanity. I once wrote in a journal, “I stand for instrument.”I am a conduit, creatrix, antenna, a vessel of expression. When I perform, I channel. I connect directly to the higher power. I am aware that I am eternal energy, a spirit, a soul living in and moving this body, this instrument, this vessel of expression. I am somewhat of a tortured artist. Prolific. Talented. But I’ve suffered and endured a great deal.

Mental Health Has Impacted My Career

Some of the best songs I wrote on my first album helped me “heal and deal and get to what’s real,” helped me get over an extreme heartache that I still live with to this day. I do feel privileged to be an artist. I want to uplift others and inspire others to do more than survive. To overcome. To prevail. To transform. To thrive. I have always been a natural performer. Always known how to sing and conjure up melodies, harmonies and words. I must have learned such skills in a past life. I am not a wife. And my great love is unrequited. A graduate of Juilliard, I had the best management, starring in independent movies, doing commercials, voice-overs and television shows, and even understudied as a lead female role on Broadway. At the peak of my career, I was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar I. I have entered states of hypomania, mania and deep depression. I have been institutionalized many times. My mental health sabotaged my blossoming career as an actress.

Since the fire, I haven’t painted as much.

I’m Beginning to Recover From the Fire’s Blaze

Some blamed me for the fire. I have no memory of lighting anything. At the time, the building was undergoing electrical work. The blaze remains a mystery to me. A trauma I am still healing from. In the hospital, I received my second round of shock treatment. My first came after a suicide attempt in 2011 that landed me in the hospital for months. I wasn’t speaking. I thought I would be forever institutionalized. It was a lot to live through. I have overcome much. Since the fire, I haven’t painted as much. I want to. I just ordered a lot of art supplies. I love drawings and expressing myself through visual art. I also reconnected to my voice. In a matter of days, I am releasing a new album, and after the new year, another one is already ready to go. Like a phoenix, I am “back in the flow, in the know, getting back my glow.” I’m in my 40s now, and I’m not on a path to becoming a typical mother. I am content that my art and creations are my children.

In 1987, when I was 13 years old, I consciously and meticulously constructed my identity as a layered collage of tribal affiliations drawn from all of my favorite records. These records still all ping me with a satisfying nostalgia, but I only have a present-progressive relationship with one of them. All those intervening years, rarely has a dozen weeks passed without a close beginning-to-end listen. And every few years it traps me in weeks of compulsive listening: the first Bad Brains album.Even so, many years later, it remains mysterious to me. I still don’t know exactly how to refer to it, its name morphing with each re-issue. “Self-titled,” “the yellow tape,” Attitude: The ROIR Sessions: all these names are descriptors of the release itself, not titles that the band gave it. (It was originally issued only on yellow cassette by the hip and obscure tape label ROIR.) Its 15 songs total less than 34 minutes, but the average song length is actually even less than that. (The three reggae tracks together take up almost half the album.) Their whiplash velocity is so fierce, it’s easy to miss the dexterous complexity flashing by at every second. Commonly known as the world’s first Black hardcore band, their vision of punk meets reggae made for a singular and tricky, irreducible aesthetic. The album is thrilling like the quick turns of a rollercoaster, and it’s comforting, years later, to know each song’s basic contours. But same as a reunion with an old friend, the established trust alone isn’t enough to sustain interest. What’s meaningful is how the shared grounding allows the old friends to move forward together. And in this way, like a routine eye exam, I can measure how my abilities to hear and imagine have expanded by listening to that first Bad Brains record.Like the Bible says of “those with ears to hear,” the record has deepened for me as I’ve aged. As a kid hearing it for the first time I felt visceral shock. Later on, I learned to marvel at its technical intricacies, then to respect its political and spiritual aspects, which aren’t mere ornamentation, but the necessary philosophical grounding that charges it.(And yes, of course, HR’s homophobic attitudes that he justifies with Rastafarianism have disgusted me a thousand times since I was 13. But I’m just talking here about the undeniable sublime singularity of their first album, the racial barriers that their very existence shattered, and the audacity of their mission statement, their “positive mental attitude” in a scene built on rage.)Now, approaching middle age, I’ve developed dozens, if not hundreds, of similar relationships with works across disciplines: novels, essays, poems, paintings, movies, DJs. And 2020 has clarified how fundamental these synergistic relationships are to who I am, who I have been, and who I am becoming.

What 2020 Took Away From Us

Like most of us who live in densely populated cities, I once enjoyed a simple camaraderie with a cast of baristas most mornings and bartenders most nights. I enjoyed casual meandering banter with co-workers and associates, and the friendly chats with people working the counters at our corner stores and favorite lunch spots. I saw live music at least a couple times a week, often performed by my friends. And all of these interactions, so commonplace and effortless to me for so many years, all contributed to my senses of self, community and world. Of course, connection is still possible now, amidst all this, when one can muster the effort to overcome the lack of social infrastructures and adhere to proper safety protocols. Short of that, there’s social media, on which people project themselves with an awareness that they will be seen by some audience—the precise psychoanalytical definition of ego. This leaves us with the hightailing news cycle that compels us to attempt to keep up with it, as it does indeed seem that our lives depend on doing so, even as its incredible clip and brutality can’t help but deaden our senses. These shells we grow are small and subconscious acts of self-preservation that allow us to get out of bed each morning. I wonder how many people in my neighborhood I walk past and, both masked, we don’t recognize each other to say hello. While everyone everywhere stood stunned and isolated by the sudden and massive cultural shifts in response to the pandemic, Republicans saw an opportunity to reshape society into their vision of minority rule by an extremist sect. But little did they suspect that the unwashed masses might summon the collective spirit to intuit the same conclusion: While everyone’s in shock, we can and must reshape things as we need things to be. Such grandiose ambitions require intention and strength, which require a sense of rooting, this same sense of rooting that’s been stripped from us as communities have shriveled. But to remain human, and to remain connected to the values that make life worth living, we require some connection to the most inspiring and beautiful elements of our history as a species. Otherwise, really who cares if the skies choke to death and the shorelines drown?

2020 has clarified how fundamental these synergistic relationships are to who I am, who I have been, and who I am becoming.

Art Is an Essential Service

One minor variation in our schedules sustains my wife and me these days, these months of undifferentiated home hours, when we’re not selling off old music gear and '90s band t-shirts. Mondays and Thursdays, for an hour each time, right when they open for members only, we drift around the Art Institute of Chicago, both of us with our own headphones on. One benefit of life during a pandemic: We can drive downtown in ten minutes and park right there on the street. Coming twice a week, we don’t feel compelled to get our money’s worth and endurance-saunter long after the art has knocked us out. We take in just an hour of ancient Chinese bowls or contemporary photography or 19th-century European portraits or whatever. These mornings are full-body bolts of inspiration. You don’t see the history of humanity at an art museum. You see the history of the evolution of perception, and the history of the evolution of struggling to express that perception. Look at it with the right eyes, and Impressionism actually is photorealism.These mornings carve our weeks like the rungs of monkey bars to hoist ourselves across the days. Something to look forward to, but also the glow they impart lingers. Those afternoons after the museum, our work—which we always love—lights us up. Those afternoons, Twitter reads like David Markson or William S. Burroughs, like of course this is the latest iteration of the evolution of the novel, completely unique and cultivated to each reader’s tastes.The other five mornings each week I walk four or five miles. I cover my various loops extending from this block I first moved to in 1994. Mornings on days after we visit the museum—Tuesdays and Fridays—my perception remains vivified, even 24 hours later. The ever-shifting ratios of repetition and variation on my walks, building to building, block to block, is beautiful. The folds and juxtapositions of building materials, an uncommonly steep staircase, a building set back an odd extra yard on its lot: It all delights me.People often question creative people about whether they wait for inspiration to strike or whether they are disciplined about their work. But the question asked as a binary is flawed. The discipline creates inspiration. When you’re at your peak conditioning and your discipline is to appreciate the immersive beauty in the world detailed in both its spiderwebs and its art about spiderwebs, the inspiration is omnipresent. But now, cases spiking, the museum has closed through the end of the year. I can comprehend the argument that the museum is “not essential,” but have a hard time believing it.

Beauty Is Our Only Defense

One a recent night, I talked to an old friend who expatriated from America 20 years ago. We haven’t seen each other in 15 years, but with Instagram and smartphones it feels like we’re in regular contact. Conversation was grounding and easy, as always, but I still got worked up. This also happened talking to another expat friend last month. They say they’re following political developments here closely, and that it’s all very alarming. They insist they understand because the lockdowns in their respective countries were intense and scary too (even if both of their countries have now been virus-free for at least four months). They chuckle about how “dystopian” America has become.But there’s a psychological barrier. These are sharp people, savvy enough to recognize dark trends and foresee their courses, active enough agents in their own lives that they decided to start over elsewhere. But they truly can’t comprehend it. A fuse blows between their ears. It’s incomprehensible, even to Americans that chose to leave, how deeply terrifying and draining and demoralizing just being present in America is right now.Our own government wants to kill us. This is the only logical deduction from their policies and behaviors. And more so, they apparently want to kill us so badly that they’ll go so far as to encourage and support illegal violence. Their warped ideological contradictions paralyze any coherent logical response, exactly as they must be designed to do. To the civilian thugs at the root, which is it? Don’t Tread on Me, or Thin Blue Line? And way up at the crown, the con-man mafioso shouting “Law and Order,” his unfounded claims of election fraud are the election fraud itself.These curly-Q inversions of reason seem to me to be the fundamental embodiment of the shorthand explanation of postmodernism that I’ve kept in my back pocket for years for my 101 students: When the representation of a thing overtakes the thing itself. Can any pithy ideological phrase more accurately describe our disingenuous elected officials and their cynical media mouthpieces and all their “alternative facts”? And all of us, stuck news-blip to news-blip, stupidly try to live our normal old lives best we can because what else do we know how to do? If this fatiguing stretch, this endurance year, this national reset, truly is the ultimate living and breathing, pepper-spray-and-baton-whacking, real-world manifestation of postmodern theory, it must be a crescendo. When a philosophical model evolves into incoherent brutality, that must be a crescendo, right? So what’s after postmodernism?

Our own government wants to kill us.

Life on Pandemic Time

The pandemic has put us in a time warp. I identify two distinct but inter-related factors behind it. First is simply the endless Present of sheltering in place. I’m being “productive,” according to the 60-plus half-done demo songs I’ve recorded that need culling. But this in-betweenness, so many hours in any one space demolishes and distorts the Present. And it has by no means bloomed into the eternal present of Zen, but more like the postmodern purgatory of those famously slowly boiling frogs. As possibilities become more and more diminished, so too does even the potential for possibilities. Turns out we need possibilities to create more possibilities. This leads to the second time-warp factor for the first time in my life, I have had zero plans, and zero ability to make plans, and everyone I know—and everyone I don’t know—is in this exact same position. But instead of it being reassuring that we’re all in it together, it’s actually more disorienting. How could it not feel like an apocalypse when everyone, and everyone that everyone knows, all have all their futures nullified so suddenly and completely?Our old lives astonish me now. Yoink any random day of the last 20 years like a lotto ball out of a tumbler and I guarantee that I interacted with more people that day than the sum of people I’ve seen this year.We do our best each day to bend the time-warp to our benefit, cultivating new dimensions to our skills. My wife is formally learning how to play bass—online lessons and scales, et cetera. I’m expanding the ways our audio software and hardware can all be routed in and out of each other differently, and of course new approaches to writing spring from this technical concentration. And coming into the world unburdened by any casual community, our music now has the space to form and find its own intentional communities. One day I devoted eight hours to getting the delay rate on a spring just right for a simple overdub accent. Anytime in my old life, I would’ve done it in ten minutes and moved on. I wonder if anyone will ever notice how perfect that spring’s delay rate is, but really I’m just happy to know for myself that it’s there.

When There’s Nothing Else Left, We Can Still Make Art

Same as that first Bad Brains record has deepened with age, so too have the fundamental ideological cliches of punk rock: being true to yourself above all else, while still prioritizing community and solidarity. Jacking up the resonance of those specific elements of yourself that square culture mocked to celebrate what makes you uniquely you. That mix of joy and rage in calling out hypocrisy, especially in people in positions of power. Kicking the legs out from under any hierarchy.The rush of all this that a teenager feels is the rush of chlorophyll expanding through the veins of a leaf, deepening its green, the thrill of life-force that air gives a balloon. It’s how you become you. As teenagers, even the most moronic jock commonly has an itch of introspective puzzling that the Grateful Dead is usually enough to scratch. But the challenge is maintaining access to that feeling as an adult. The health insurance and car insurance and mortgage and utilities and taxes and hold music, it grinds you down. It truly is a joyless system at best, even in the best of times.Now in 2020? Oof. If we’re lucky, we absorb punk rock’s fundamental lesson and slowly learn how to articulate it. Pop culture’s mythology of “making it” translates into DIY punk-speak as “making the thing itself,” as in “just do the work,” as in what the Quakers and Buddhists had in common: the work is its own reward.The Quakers and Buddhists are both essentially materialist-oriented systems of spirituality, same as punk rock. The garage-rock drunks and hardcore jocks are traditional sects; the Warped Tour is the megachurch. But there’s a kid somewhere hacking a sampler to blow out a basement’s PA with a look and a sound that has nothing in common with what we commonly associate with historic punk, but is summoning its most primal powers. It’s simple to dismiss talk of the energies of love-versus-fear as superficial mystic mumbo-jumbo. But on another level, it’s just practical common sense to keep your life-force flowing. Creativity of any kind is a self-replenishing tribute to life-force and potential. Creativity charges us. Cynicism and despair deplete us. And have we ever endured a historical moment in which it’s more imperative not only for your own good, but for the state of the nation, and the world, that you feel charged?There is no spiritual-recharge cavalry coming. Rearrange your own furniture. Tilt what you need to tilt. Change the lighting to throw the shadows however which way you need them to land.

When Tom Cruise asked me to go to the Greek Theatre with him to see Andrés Segovia, I said, “No thanks.” He was filming Risky Business at the time, but I refused. Why? I was in a story meeting with Steve Tisch about a film we just set up at Paramount. I wasn’t as nice when I vehemently yelled, “No!” to John Travolta (then making Urban Cowboy). I was on the way to a meeting at CBS and he refused to let my elevator door close if I didn’t give him my phone number. So I took the stairs. And less than a week later, driving a bit too fast on the Warner Brothers lot, I almost ran him over. I apologized, and he just smiled and said, “You must be on the way to another meeting.” I nodded and drove away at the speed limit.Think with your brain and gut, not your ovaries—or even worse, your pride. Am I catnip for Scientologists? Maybe. Who knows or cares? I’m not a person who immerses herself in celebrity news and I have no idea when Tom and John drank that Kool-Aid. The more important issue here is that I immerse myself in my meetings. There’s a reason I didn’t say “career.” That is a huge pool—an ocean really. You can drown in the ocean even if you’re an ace swimmer. The meeting is accessible, happening now, a chance for advancement, a learning experience. It’s important. I’m not going to lie, even I am impressed with my knee-jerk reaction to protect my meeting and reject the man. When I saw Rainman, specifically, the scene when Tom, dressed to kill, descends on that perfectly lit escalator, I wondered for a second or two, “What if?” But just a second or two. The “what ifs” that plague most of us are the bad decisions we make. For instance, when we blow off the passion that is our career for the sake of another kind of passion.

Think with your brain and gut, not your ovaries—or even worse, your pride.

Supportive Friends and Family Make Being a Career-Driven Woman Easier

Turns out, my friends were less surprised by my saying “no” to Tom and John than they would have been had I said “yes.” You’re right. I have great friends. It’s wildly important for strong women to surround themselves with thoughtful, unjealous, funny-as-hell, like-minded women and men. Not shaming your friend’s decisions to captain a steady course toward their goals makes the sail to success that much more achievable. “Oh my God! What’s wrong with you?!”No one said this. “It was just the Greek Theatre. A big contact. You shoulda gone just so you could write about it.” No one said this either. But if somebody had, I would have argued that Tom disrespected my time. Or, at the very least, was sure his time was more important than my meeting.Sure, there were some big reactions from my actual friends—a little salivating. Someone even wanted to play the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever album. All good. Full disclosure: My friends also knew I had a 6-foot-7 Sicilian Viking waiting for me at home. Oh yeah: the kind of man who can throw you over his shoulder when your feet hurt. This guy could cook, too! Most importantly, he read everything I wrote, loved hearing my new ideas and what happened at my meetings.So, I had a baby with him. A cheeky baby that once actually said, “If you would have gone to the Greek Theatre with Tom Cruise, I could afford to buy this sweater!” I reminded her that if I had gone to the Greek Theatre with Tom Cruise, she would not be 6-foot-1 and the sweater would be a dress.

Yep. It’s George Clooney.

Not All Actors Treat Female Screenwriters Like They’re Inferior

One final true story for the haters—just so you don’t dismiss the above and shred these happenings in the man-basher file. It’s one of those brisk, postcard California mornings, with sunshine as fierce as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’m at Warner Brothers. I park and make the long walk from the gate to the center of the lot. I see a man in shorts shooting baskets. A beautiful man. The closer I get the more gorgeous he gets. I read an E.R. stage sign. No! It couldn’t be. The man stops shooting baskets and takes a long look at the approaching female (me) walking towards him. It’s a long walk. I’m in four-inch heels. It feels like a lifetime. Yep. It’s George Clooney. I slow a bit at 20 feet. He stops doing impressive hook shots and turns to face me. He smiles. Dear God. I smile. Come on, give me a break. “Where’s your meeting?” he asks.“Malpaso. I’m a writer,” I respond.George has a big reaction. “Wow! Clint Eastwood!”I keep walking, right past George and George yells after me, “Good luck!”I stop. I turn around and I thank him. George gets it. George honors my march to another opportunity to speak my truth through my art. I keep walking. But the sound of the basketball hitting pavement, backboard and hoop ceases. I know George Clooney’s looking at my ass. I have a great ass.