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In 1964, I graduated from high school. Like many teenagers, I was faced with the puzzling question of what to do with the rest of my life. Although I was popular in school and had been president of my senior class, I was actually a remarkably poor student and hated anything related to the classroom. An academic career was most definitely not in the cards for me. I had four older brothers, but none of them had ever left home for their higher education. For my parents, sending them away to study was unthinkable. The boys remained in the Midwest where they were born and raised. But when I came along, the first girl in a large Catholic clan, my parents were faced with a dilemma. Besides being a poor student, I was also an immature flower, lacking in any self-discipline and filled with an untamable sexual curiosity. It was decided that I should be enrolled in an exclusive women-only college in Manhattan (back in the day known as a finishing school) run by the same nuns that had tried to educate me from the beginning. I had never been away from home, not even to summer camp, so the prospect of this move to the East Coast presented a monumental leap forward. I was both thrilled and terrified. Looking back, I realize that there were numerous considerations for getting me into some sort of educational environment with adequate supervision. I can’t help but sympathize with my parents. What else could they do? I had grown up in the privileged suburban community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. My father was a hard-working M.D. in private practice. He was financially well off but by no means affluent. My classmates and friends, by contrast, were mostly from superrich families with fortunes that had passed down through generations. Growing up, our playgrounds were the sailing, golf and tennis clubs where our parents were members. Eventually, most of my childhood friends became debutantes and were introduced into polite society at balls or tea dances. As expected, they married well, created lovely designer homes and produced the two children that society expected of them. Leaving town at 17 saved me from this predictable fate. I will be forever grateful.

Leaving town at 17 saved me from this predictable fate. I will be forever grateful.

My Mother and I Visited New York and Fell in Love

All my life I had been sheltered in a private school run by a traditional order of French nuns. The Society of the Sacred Heart was established in Paris to educate daughters of wealthy and privileged families. There was no thought of a career in my future. In the late ’60s in the Midwest, feminism was just a distant siren’s song calling from a faraway time in the future. Since I was not cut out for university studies, it made sense that the next step on my agenda was to do some serious husband-hunting and for that, my cultural boundaries needed to be expanded. What better place than New York City? One of my childhood friends was an heiress to the Scripps publishing fortune. Anne and I had played together as schoolgirls, and she was now attending a distinguished finishing school in Manhattan. She had an elegant and sophisticated grandmother that I had always adored. Over the years, she had encouraged my friendship with Anne, entertaining us with wonderful events that were far beyond the scope of my more modest home life. To keep our girlhood friendship afloat, Grandma Ruth suggested that I join Anne in New York. She wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to Reverend Mother on my behalf and sure enough, I was invited to New York for an introductory interview. My mother booked a flight to New York and reserved a room at the Plaza Hotel. I had never been out of Michigan, so this first visit to the exotic city on the Hudson River was thrilling in the extreme. One of my fondest memories is from our first evening away from home, just the two of us, in the palatial grandeur of the fine old Plaza. Toward evening, my mother reserved a table for two in the hotel bar. We sat ringside listening to a handsome Broadway heartthrob as he sang love songs from the stage. My mother ordered her usual dry martini and I, dressed up in my best dress and feeling quite mature, sipped an alcohol-free Shirley Temple through a straw. It was sheer heaven!

The School’s Reverend Mother Was a Fun-Loving Woman

The following morning we took a taxi up Fifth Avenue to East 91st Street for my first view of the elegant residence that was to become my home for the next couple of years. This magnificent neoclassical villa had been built in 1908 and, upon the death of the owner, had been gifted to the Sacred Heart Society. Reverend Mother greeted us as we walked through the large double doors that led into the grand entrance hall. She was a round little woman dressed head to toe in the official black habit of a nun. Her head was encased in a fitted white bonnet with a sheer black veil. A small, gleaming, silver crucifix hung on a cord from her neck. Of course, I never saw her dressed any other way. Nuns always looked the same. Only their radiance was allowed to be individual. To my surprise and delight, she turned out to be a jolly, fun-loving woman. Full of energy and enthusiasm, she welcomed us warmly and took us on a tour of the magnificent house. I will never forget my first view of the elegant marble staircase that rose up through the center of the house. I had never seen this kind of grand architecture. The walls were clothed throughout in beautiful complementary shades of green and pink Italian marble. Built in a grand Rococo style, the building expressed the kind of lush excess that seemed perhaps fitting for a budding princess on her way up in the world. The red-carpeted steps of the staircase led from the ground floor all the way to the huge ballroom at the top of the house. I gazed up at the massive skylight at the top surrounded by moldings of flower wreaths and golden cherubs. I was lost in a world of wonder.Regardless of my poor high school grades, I was accepted into the school. Like so many things in life, it’s all about who you know. In early September, I packed a large trunk full of dresses, shoes and matching handbags and flew into a new life in New York City. I would never return to the country club life of suburbia.

I was lost in a world of wonder.

My Time in New York Still Feels Like a Dream

So what did one do in a finishing school in the ’60s? Well, for one thing, we were expected to learn how to play bridge. I skipped the first lesson and to this day I have never really understood how the game is played. I watched all year long, as most of the girls played obsessively at all hours of the day and night. Eventually, a house rule was established forbidding bridge before 7 a.m. Perhaps this is where I first established a lifelong distaste for table games. Another more distinctive memory is of the many sweet boys who showed up for the weekend dances in the grand ballroom at the top of the stairs. Reverend Mother extended her invitation only to boys from Ivy League schools, like Princeton and Yale. The carefully screened young men would travel by chartered bus for a few hours of non-alcoholic small talk, music and innocent flirting. These mixers happened several times a month and had a high priority on our social calendar. We were expected to show up and chat politely with an ever-evolving selection of distinguished young gentlemen. Socializing and ballroom dancing were essential skills that young women were expected to master.Other important activities on the menu were cultural events: classical theater, Broadway plays, concerts and ballet. We were fortunate to take part in all the great things that New York had to offer in those days, but I think most of us took it for granted and didn’t realize what a gift this was. We also had weekly French lessons and a visit now and then from Miss Freemantle, a professor from NYU, who tried to instill an interest in us in Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. Not much luck with that part of the program.After graduation I stayed on in the city, working for several years at one poorly paid job after another. Through sheer youthful persistence, I survived the slings and arrows of daily life in the city and with time, evolved into a stylish, sophisticated New Yorker. Eventually, I landed a cool job with a Madison Avenue ad agency. My boss was a handsome Swiss man and together we moved to Europe, made a life and I never returned. I lost touch with my friend Anne. She died in 1994, and I read the details of her murder in The New York Times. In a jealous rage, her husband smashed in her skull with a claw hammer before committing suicide by leaping from the Tappan Zee Bridge near their home in Brownsville. She was 47 years old. I was glad that Grandma Ruth, the much-loved dowager queen of my youth, had died peacefully several years before and was spared the sordid details plastered all over the newspapers.And yet, my journey from Grosse Pointe to finishing school in Manhattan lives on in my memory as a nostalgic dream that has never lost its luster.

On the day of my eighteenth birthday, I took the money I had earned as a child actor in Mexico—almost $25,000 that my parents could no longer legally keep from me anymore—and bought a plane ticket from Switzerland to South Africa. There was no plan, other than to just get down there and figure it out. With 25 grand in the bank and no responsibilities to speak of, you really don't need a plan. Leaving my friend's house—that I had been bumming around in since my girlfriend and I broke up months earlier—I got on the plane in Zurich with my laptop and the phone numbers of a few high school friends from South Africa. Off I went on one of the most ridiculous adventures of my life. Aside from getting addicted to crystal meth, I would take massive amounts of hallucinogens, smoke crack for the first time, become good friends with a professional car thief and his family, go on road trips across Southern Africa and befriend street kids in some of the roughest slums on the world's roughest continent.

South Africa and Its Slums Were a Culture Shock

Growing up in Latin America, I was accustomed to seeing real poverty—not the kind that Americans think of, where so many obese “poor” people have iPhones, fancy rims, fat government checks and a perpetual chip on their shoulder. In Africa, even in the richest nation on the continent, they have real poverty. It was astounding. What I saw in the slums of Cape Town, Johannesburg and other major cities in the region would be inconceivable to most Americans.My journey into crystal meth addiction began not long after I arrived in Cape Town, where my first task after finding an apartment was to buy a car. My original plan was to buy a four-by-four truck and try to drive across the continent to Cairo, but I quickly realized my $25,000 wasn't going to cover it. In fact, cars were not much cheaper in South Africa than they are in the West. Instead, I bought an old Audi sedan made the same year I was born that had a smashed headlight from a previous wreck. It was a great car but needed some spare parts to be in decent shape. While searching for them, I ended up getting in touch with a guy from Mitchells Plain—a rough, largely Islamic area outside Cape Town—who supposedly could get any parts I needed for cheap. Meeting him would be a defining moment of my time in Southern Africa. Let's call him Abdul. Abdul was a native-born South African of Pakistani heritage who, while technically a Muslim, did not really follow his religion in a serious way. In fact, Abdul, who ended up becoming a good friend, was a crackhead and a professional car thief, who specialized in repainting stolen vehicles, throwing new serial numbers on them, getting new papers and shipping them to Botswana to sell. His wife was a crackhead too and super sweet.

With 25 grand in the bank and no responsibilities to speak of, you really don't need a plan.

It Wasn't Difficult to Get Me to Walk on the Wild Side

Abdul got me the Audi parts I needed, but he always found a way to make sure that I had to come back for something else. I soon realized this was because he wanted me to bring him money so he could buy crack for him and his wife. No doubt Abdul thought he was using this silly American kid with too much money. But we gradually grew closer and closer, to the point that he would sit on the toilet with his pants down, pooping, and tell me to come in to hit a joint with him.One of the many times he asked me to borrow money, he offered to let me hold onto his 9mm pistol as collateral. I had no idea whether it was legal or not, and it made me uncomfortable just being next to it, so I lent him the cash without keeping the weapon. I can't remember if I ever got it back. Abdul and I would often go down to the crack house together. He would get crack, and I would get whatever else they had: pot, barbiturates, ketamine, amphetamines, coke or even crystal meth. One time we pulled up and there was a cop standing outside. “We can't go in there,” I told Abdul, glaring at him. “What's wrong with you!?”Abdul looked amused. “Oh, don't worry man,” he told me in his adorable South African accent. “That's my brother. They just pay him a bit to protect the place.” His brother was actually really cool and a lot more responsible than Abdul. The first time I freebased methamphetamine was with a beautiful blonde South African girl of British heritage—let's call her Claire—who was a friend of a friend I knew from Switzerland. For 24 hours we stayed up in my beachfront apartment: talking, drawing, writing, philosophizing, touching each other, smoking pot. It was amazing—or so I thought. Then came the comedown, which is one of the most miserable experiences a person can have. It's torture, and it makes you willing to do just about anything to get more. I knew meth was bad news, but man was it fun to chat with Claire all night. It's like your brain goes a thousand miles per hour and everything is just perfect. Once I realized I could get the stuff from Abdul's crack house, they became my regular supplier. At the time, I was paying about 10 South African rand ($1 U.S.) for a gram. When I left for Europe and then the United States, I realized how absurdly cheap that was. In Miami, the going rate was around $60 per gram. In France, I couldn’t even find it. Thankfully, the outrageous prices and my lack of money eventually forced me to quit.

Would I do it again? I don't know, actually.

I Bottomed Out and Figured Out Who I Am

For pretty much the rest of my time in South Africa—about six months from the time I started freebasing meth out of broken light bulbs to the point where my bank account got so low I couldn’t afford to renew my visa—was spent on meth and/or various other drugs. It was party after party, nonstop. Abdul had an “employee” named Peter. While Peter was technically free to leave any time, the relationship almost struck me as one between a master and a slave. Peter, a Xhosa speaker (like Mandela), slept out in the garage in a tiny little room no bigger than a broom closet, with literally nothing but a small piece of foam and some trash on the floor. Abdul would bark orders at him to go buy a cigarette (yes, one cigarette), get him a car part, grab tools or whatever. Peter was a sweet kid, and I felt bad for him, but living in Abdul's closet with a piece of foam to lay on was better than the deplorable conditions that millions of South Africans lived in—some just on the other side of the bridge, less than half a mile from Abdul's little house. The cops in South Africa—where an average of 58 people are killed per day, putting in the top ten for murder rate in the world—were beyond corrupt. But I was used to the rampant police corruption from my days in Mexico, Brazil and other poor nations. I had quite a few experiences with the South African cops, and most were pretty pleasant, actually, because they realized I was American. One interaction, in particular, has stuck with me throughout the years, even though I was plastered when it happened. It's hard to remember how many tequila shots I had at the bar that night with some friends, but it was a shitload. After making it about halfway home, I crashed my car into a roundabout. “Oh crap,” was my first thought. “I'm screwed.” The front bumper was a total mess, and the rim for one of the wheels was destroyed. But it seemed like the car was still running. Yes! Fortunately, the super-helpful police showed up and asked me what was going on. I offered them the equivalent of about $100 if they would help me get home and get my busted car back on the road. They literally helped me change the tire and waved me goodbye. We never discussed the fact that I was hammered. By the grace of God, I made it home without killing myself or somebody else that night. So what's the moral of the story? I don't know that there really is one. As a Christian today, I look back at those days in horror. And yet I recognize that it was that time that led to me being transformed, and eventually helped make me who I am today. Would I do it again? I don't know, actually. There is one conclusion I can make for sure: God was looking out for me or I wouldn't be here today.

I discovered scuba diving in my early teens, at an age when I was desperately looking for something to connect to. I like to say I grew up with seawater in my veins, with a dad who was a scuba diver in the coastal city of Karachi. I loved being out on the sea, so when I was finally old enough to get my diving certification I jumped at the chance. To be part of a world I had loved for so long—and have something that was so uniquely mine, because no one else my age even knew about it—made me feel special, and in a weird way not quite so lonely anymore. As excited as I was, I could never have predicted the way my first dive felt. It was surreal to suddenly become a part of a completely different world. The way I was so aware of each breath rushing through my equipment, the flow of bubbles each time I exhaled. How closely I saw a tiny stingray emerge from being hidden in the sand just as I was floating above, or how weightless I felt the entire time. Scuba diving offered me an escape like no other. It was a freedom from responsibilities and stresses because when I was diving I was no longer part of my everyday life. Life above the waves was forgotten for that hour. The world only came rushing back when I reemerged. A big part of my connection with scuba diving and the ocean has always been the way it’s healed me. At a time when I barely understood my own mental health and what I was dealing with, scuba diving became a respite for my anxiety. It allowed me to escape from my own thoughts and feel my mind calm down where otherwise it would be racing with thoughts I felt I could never control. The weightlessness would take over and I would lose myself in the colors of the stunning corals and the fish swimming past me as if I simply wasn’t there at all. I think I’ve always felt so pressured to act perfectly because it seems like someone is always watching me. To feel unseen, to be completely silent, was something I had never felt before—and I welcomed it greatly.

Suddenly, dives no longer felt the same.

Diving the Great Barrier Reef Was a Dream Come True—and a Wake-up Call

For my first few dives, I was so lost in the wonders around me that I didn’t think of anything but myself. Then I got a chance to dive at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It's a spot on any diver’s bucket list, and I couldn’t have been more excited to dive there. When we entered the water that day, life under the sea took on a whole new meaning. The beauty back home that I was obsessed with paled in comparison to these otherworldly colors. I remember being so excited because I got to see clownfish; marine life I had never even known of before surrounded me. Corals rose up in entire forests above and below. But right from the start, I struggled to adjust to the water. Where my previous dives felt almost effortless, this one didn’t fit right. My sinus issues acted up, meaning that I couldn’t equalize properly. Going deeper into the water made me more uncomfortable, so I kept having to increase and decrease my depth trying to find a comfortable space. During that time I noticed my fin nudge against a coral reef formation, causing a small piece to fall off. Looking back, I now realize that moment changed the way I thought about diving. As we came back up to the surface, my mother told me she’d been in Australia 20 years before, and had the opportunity to dive at the Great Barrier Reef back then as well. What she had come back to was nowhere near the same. The reef had lost most of its color, and the biodiversity and marine life my mother remembered in awe were nonexistent. Suddenly, dives no longer felt the same. I was now a lot more aware of what I was doing to this world I was intruding on. I saw divers who accompanied me spearfishing, the whoosh of the spear in the calm waters, the blood and then the lifeless fish stringing along on a line as divers continued their journey in the water. I—the intruder—was calmly swimming around while the fish whose homes we were exploring floated lifeless just a few feet away. I started thinking about my presence in the water, and what the continued impact of human interaction had meant for the oceans we explored. The Great Barrier Reef is a well-known tourist attraction so its decline has been noted, but what about the waters I had grown up on along with the countless other coral reef ecosystems and marine habitats whose destruction no one seemed to care very much about?

I’m not sure what this means for my diving future.

Good Intentions Don't Keep Us From Causing Harm

Over the past few years, I’ve become far more focused on being environmentally conscious and making an effort to learn about living sustainably. But when it comes to my diving experience, I seem to be drawing a blank. There’s barely anyone around me who’s really looked into what diving sustainably could mean. Even the community that wants to do more is held back by mounds of red tape and legislative confusion about who is allowed to take action. I’m not sure what this means for my diving future. I know that my impact on the marine life around me during the dive goes beyond accidentally breaking off a piece of coral reef. My very presence can cause harm in ways that are still far beyond my limited understanding of the environment. But I want to learn, and I want to make sure that my love for the ocean that has supported me through some of my worst times can extend into a love that takes care of it in return. The realization that our love can be damaging has been a wake-up call to the crisis we are putting our environment in, because even when we do something with good intentions our ignorance can mean we do more harm than good. Realizing my love was hurting what I loved became the reason for my journey into being more sustainable and environmentally conscious. I’m hoping that journey can help me find the answers I’m still looking for.

Here’s a general breakdown of how a normal dating progression tends to go: First date, drinks. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner. Fourth date: dinner, drinks and an activity. And here is the dating breakdown of my most recent relationship: first date, drinks and more drinks. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner. Fourth date—drinks, then casually spending 94 days in a row together, driving across the entire Eastern seaboard of America with two dogs and all of our stuff, as we attempted to navigate and survive a once-in-lifetime global pandemic.When COVID-19 started making its way across the United States in March of 2020, there were several articles about couples who just met quarantining together and some even deciding to live together. My favorite headline came from Glamour: “Are Couples Who Moved in Together for Quarantine Okay?”Many of those couples did it because of ease, some out of necessity, and some out of complete and utter boredom. It was both the most romantic and unromantic approach to dating, much in the vein of, “I want to spend every single minute with you—mostly because you are a body that just so happens to be here.”But if you were to ask me why I spent 94 straight days with basically a total stranger, my answer would be pretty simple: It just made sense. We never planned anything more than a week or two out, and like the rest of America and the world, we were forced to make every major life decision, slowly, day-by-day with equal parts confusion, uncertainty, fear and cautious excitement.

She was just fresh off a divorce and I was fresh off a haircut.

How It All Started

I met Emily at the end of February 2020 on the dating app Hinge. It’s like Raya but for poor people. Our first date was an epic bar crawl through the Gowanus-Park Slope area of Brooklyn. We had good chemistry and a fun, bombastic rapport. She was just fresh off a divorce and I was fresh off a haircut. I would describe my previous dating history as a colorful contradiction of being a lifelong serial monogamist with commitment issues—kind of like a guy who joins the Army but hates war. I later found out that I was Emily’s first online date after her divorce so, in a lot of ways, we were an ideal match because we both longed for connection. Our night ended the same way all first dates in Brooklyn end: having whisper sex in a cramped, tiny apartment so you don’t wake the neighbors who can hear everything through the adjacent paper-thin walls. While your dog watches. We then had a second date a few days later where I went to her apartment to watch Jojo Rabbit, which has one of my favorite endings of any movie ever. Once the credits started rolling, the film shows this passage:

• Let everything happen to you
• Beauty and terror
• Just keep going
• No feeling is final.
• - Rainer Maria Rilke

My Little European Jaunt During the COVID-19 Pandemic

I apprehensively decided to go through with my long-planned vacation to Vienna, Austria, where I was basically crashing my best friend’s honeymoon. Like they say, “If you can’t beat them, be a third wheel and pretend you just got married.” Our trip was fantastic and eerie, with the ubiquitous news of a looming pandemic buzzing in every bar, museum and cafe. While I was in Vienna, I maintained contact with Emily, and on my very last night in the majestic city, President Trump announced that all travel to and from Europe was suspended. Because Trump made the declaration in the middle of the night, I woke up to a series of hilarious and not so hilarious texts from my friends and family saying things like: “Hey you’re stuck in Europe forever, Emperor Trump has decreed it so.” “Can I have your dog?” “Enjoy Vienna for the rest of your life.” Luckily, my flight was the next morning so I was able to barely slip past the Trump travel ban by a day and make it back to Brooklyn safely. As soon as I landed at JFK, Emily picked me up. On the way home, I casually mentioned to Emily, “Hey I think I’m going to go to my uncle’s house in New Jersey for a week until this blows over. I’m guessing it’ll be for a week or so.” OK, so I was a little off by about 63 weeks.I asked her if she wanted to join me and used the very effective pitch that my uncle’s house happened to be a fantastic, epic and sprawling mansion in the remote woods of suburban New Jersey that was also completely unoccupied at the time. Emily reluctantly agreed to join me with her brutish, yet somehow baby-like pitbull, Taco, under the guise that she had to go back to teach at her Brooklyn high school on a moment’s notice. I am a comedian/actor/podcast host so I could be anywhere other than in my parent’s favor.

Getting to Know Your Quarantine Lover

It was here that the reality of our situation and the pandemic started actually settling in, as we silently gazed at each other in a remote, cavernous mansion in the middle of nowhere. I subconsciously whispered a key thought to myself that I know Emily was also considering, “Oh fuck, I don’t actually know you.” This was hilariously manifested in several ways including going to a pandemic-barren Whole Foods together for the first time and literally uttering these words as we nervously perused the aisles, “So, what kind of food do you eat?” It wasn’t until about a month or so of quarantine together that we even knew each other’s middle names. Our cohabitation was helped massively by the fact that Emily actually brought a get-to-know-you icebreaker card game where we were allowed to ask each other questions about our personal lives. So as the world seemingly crumbled around us, Emily and I pulled out a bottle of my uncle’s finest red and took turns pulling cards that would hopefully give us more clues about the stranger sitting in front of them. It turns out Emily was from Pottstown, a gritty but friendly suburb of Philly. She grew up as a determined, tough and chronic overachiever, and split time between her divorced parents. I was from an idyllic and boring suburb of Chicago, with a childhood riddled with joy, repression and overheated perfectionism, sometimes all at once.

Who the fuck wants to be sober in a pandemic other than Trump?

Booze Helped Ease the Tension

I think It’s important to take a timeout here and give a quick shoutout to alcohol. I was a moderate weekend drinker before the pandemic but during the pandemic, I discovered it was possible to consistently have wine teeth that resembled a boxer who had been punched in the face several times by an angry Russian with mob ties. There’s a reason that liquor stores were deemed “essential.” Alcohol calmed our nerves and allowed us to open up more quickly than if we were sober. And who the fuck wants to be sober in a pandemic other than Trump? We saw how that turned out. It makes you say dumb shit like, “Hey maybe you should drink bleach.”We spent our days in New Jersey working. She taught children and brightened young minds over Zoom, and I dreamt of new and effective ways to tell dick jokes to strangers for approval. At night, she’d cook dinner (I’m not sexist) and we had great wine and watched classic movies like Groundhog Day, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Toward the end of our first week together, my cousin and best friend Andrea started texting me, floating the idea of us driving down to Sarasota, Florida where she had a fantastic and most importantly, free house. I knew Emily was apprehensive about coming to New Jersey, so the idea of driving 1,200 miles with two dogs and a loose plan would be a stretch. So I “slow-played” the Florida trip, by casually mentioning it a couple of times. Since our first full week in quarantine went significantly well and without a hitch (other than her pitbull devouring one of my dog’s toys), eventually, and much to my surprise, she agreed.

Heading South

So, we packed up our several bags, two dogs, their beds and squeaky toys, and crammed into a rental car dead set on making it to Florida in less than 24 hours. We cruised through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, D.C., Virginia. The further south we drove, the more the landscape opened up, revealing hundreds of barren miles of highway, sparsely populated rest stops and gas stations, shuttered storefronts and sparkly, flashing neon signs that read, “Stay at home.” One particular rest stop was so deserted that several cars formed a makeshift drag race, sporadically peeling out as their tires burned rubber, scorched our eardrums and gave us the staunch impression that we were no longer under the pretense of “normal times.”Despite the palatable uneasiness of traversing a drastically haunted America, I was exceedingly grateful for leaving New York City, especially as news of the COVID-19 cases and death count continued to mount. Waking up in a Virginia hotel room the next morning, hundreds of miles away from the epicenter of the coronavirus, I couldn’t help but be thankful to be safe in a warm, clean room, with Emily and the two dogs. And it was right around this time that I began to internalize one of the greatest lessons from the pandemic: When time stops, you have no choice but to look at what’s in front of you and be grateful.

She had to go back to teach at her Brooklyn high school on a moment’s notice. I am a comedian so I could be anywhere other than in my parent’s favor.

The Pandemic Gave Me Reason to Reflect

When time and the world stop, as they did during COVID-19, you are gifted with the opportunity of seeing the wheel for what it really is, a man-made construct that can be easily flipped over, torn down and reimagined into something more humane. If pre-pandemic me woke up in that very same hotel room, my first thoughts would be along the lines of: “Email someone to try and get a job,” “Get more followers on Instagram,” “Is that how you look with a shirt off? You look like actual milk.” Instead, I quietly gazed around that Marriott Residence Inn and thought, “Wow, a room.” “Cool, a bed.” “This girl next to me is very sweet.” The beautiful simplicity of these thoughts is nothing to scoff at. We’ve all heard about beer goggles. COVID-19 gave us all the opportunity to have presence goggles, the intense ability to sit with our reality and find something, anything to truly feel and be grateful about.

Florida Was Weird Yet Great

The next morning, we did what we would later term a “full company move,” which meant once again packing up all of our stuff, our dogs and hopping into the car to continue our journey to Florida. Somewhere around Gainesville, we stopped at a gas station and saw a pickup truck full of pit bulls in cages and thought, “Oh this is the batshit Florida everyone talks about.” After hearing two different people with no masks on and very few teeth say, “I don’t care what the government says, they ain’t shutting my vape store down,” we made the sound decision to not stop again. And the even better decision to never vape. We eventually made it to Sarasota, dropped the dogs off and met my cousin on a boat that her boyfriend owned. To go from the COVID-19 hub of New York to the cool ocean waters of Sarasota is like going from a jackhammer to a back massage. The ocean air was a welcomed assault on our senses, as the teal, translucent intercoastal water lightly splashed at our feet, politely informing us that there is actually an easier way to live. And we did live that way. Here is our breakdown of how we lived for the next three months of our quarantine: seven different Airbnbs, five rental cars (changing them so many times that it began to feel like we were in the witness protection program), 120 coffees, one George Floyd rally, 14 trips to Publix, five boat rides, 25 trips to the beach, 30 straight nights of drinking, five dolphin spottings, a month of watching the documentary, The Last Dance, endless nights of card games, connection, laughs, incredible sex (some in a hot tub—sorry Emily’s body), one very negative Airbnb review and an odyssey unlike anything I’ve ever experienced or probably will experience again.

We Couldn’t Escape the Pandemic Completely

But our stay wasn’t without tragedy. Andrea’s dad, my uncle, was admitted to the ICU due to COVID complications. Fortunately, he made it through, but the same couldn’t be said for her mom, Ronda, who passed away in July of 2020. One of the last nights of our time in Florida, I got an urgent text from my sister while I was on a boat in the middle of the coast, saying that my grandma was dying and I had to say goodbye over the phone. This was extremely unsettling for so many reasons, including the fact that I was completely hammered. So Andrea and I stood at the edge of the boat as it was anchored by a nearby island, and we told our grandma we loved her and thanked her for the eight amazing children she brought into the world. During the boat ride back to shore, the sky ripped open in a reddish, purple haze, a color I never knew was possible. All you could see for miles was the horizon and the possibility of endlessly more. And at this sacred moment, maybe the most important lesson of the pandemic hit me: Somehow life continues. And the poignant words from Jojo Rabbit were replaying in my head on a loop, “Just keep going.” Now that the pandemic is seemingly coming to end, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that humans always manage to do that, they “just keep going.” Or in the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.” And it’s my biggest hope for the world that when the pandemic is finally over, we all realize we have no choice other than to dance.

I was born in the winter of 1996. I barely weighed six pounds, but I was eager to live. My mom had just turned 20 and dropped out of college to find a job because my biological dad "didn’t want us as his family.” Parenthood is tough, especially when performing both roles. During her pregnancy, her mind never stopped overthinking my future. She feared I would repeat her story: fear, anxiety and worry were the main characters. I don’t think my mom wanted me to become a woman who was afraid of living; however, unconsciously, she instilled fear in my upbringing. I got my daily dose of "Don't do this because it's dangerous" or, "If you do it, you could die" commands. She made sure I understood from a young age there were always negative consequences to every decision. I don’t judge the way she raised me, rather I aim to understand the root of her fear. I believe it was ultimately born of love—and not wanting to lose me—after already losing my dad. Death is a powerful word. It's something I have tried to avoid if possible. Every decision I made was a conscious effort to not risk my life, which my mom tried relentlessly to protect. While in high school, I said no to driving in my friends’ cars, smoking weed, drinking alcohol and swimming in the ocean without an adult. The list was endless. My mom had warned me of all the possible things that could go wrong if I did any of them. My mind was trained to see the negative. My instinct was always in survival mode.

I Found a Job During COVID in a Surfing Village

I admired other people's ability to do all the things I refused to do. I wanted to challenge my fear but I let it dictate my decisions. Until, one day, COVID-19 knocked on my door. For me, 2020 was a year full of challenges and personal growth. My grandmother and two of my uncles tested positive for the virus. When I looked into my uncle's eyes, I noticed death lurking. Only my grandmother recovered, while my two uncles passed away at very young ages. Losing my relatives, and the series of events that unfolded throughout last year, felt like a slap in the face. All those years avoiding danger to postpone death were bullshit. I realized death was the only thing in life that is granted, and the effects of the pandemic triggered me to start living life because a life chained to fear is not one worth living. In the midst of chaos, I got a job offer in a secluded surf village three hours away from the place I got so used to calling home. Even though adventure and exploring were not usually in my vocabulary and lifestyle, I decided to step out of my bubble. The ocean had always amazed me, but I was never allowed to swim unsupervised because it was home to "deadly sharks and currents," as my mom used to say. I was committed to learning how to surf despite my mom's opinion. My decision was reinforced after the first session in the water. Not because I became a pro in a 60-minutes lesson, but because my soul was reset in the process.

All those years avoiding danger to postpone death were bullshit.

I Overcame My Fears and Entered the Ocean

I’m not going to hide it: I was terrified of going into the water for the first time, especially at 23 years old without a relative or close friend. My mind thought about all the things that could go wrong before the lesson began. To make it worse, before going in, someone told me to be aware of stingrays because it was their season. Despite all that, I carried my board and paddled in. The feeling of riding my first whitewash wave was worth everything. After the first one, I kept going back for more. The adrenaline took over. My mind focused on being present rather than thinking about the 100 possibilities of dying. Surfing is the best meditation I have done. There is something liberating about surrendering to the power of a wave. After a lot of effort, practice and discipline, I swapped the whitewash for real unbroken waves. To catch those types of waves, I had to paddle far into the ocean and stay in the line-up to wait for my wave. The first couple of weeks, it was extremely hard to understand the waves. Surfing is not just about popping up on the board—if it were that simple, more people would surf. This sport is a combination of reading the ocean, understanding the wind conditions and having the self-awareness to maneuver the body on the surfboard.

When I’m not in the ocean, I crave the person I become when I am.

Surfing Has Made Me Happier Than Ever

A part of my personality consists of planning ahead and being in control. My first instinct was to try to control the ocean but, after many sessions, I learned that giving control to the ocean helped quell my fear and anxiety. I now respect the ocean. I understand it is a bigger force; thus, when a big wave comes my way and I don’t paddle out fast enough, I just dive under and surrender. This sport has taught me patience. My lack of experience in understanding a wave's language made it easier for me to wipe out. Waves would even break on my back. Wiping out in the ocean is not fun. I have a couple of scars and bruises that can attest to that. Nevertheless, the minor negative effects don’t outweigh the benefits. The ocean has been the therapist I was never able to afford. Nothing beats the feeling of wholeness I get when I start ducking the big whitewash to paddle my way into the line-up. I think this is the happiest I have been in a very long time and it's due to surfing. I feel the endorphins released as soon as I catch my own unbroken waves. This sport has the effect of a drug on me because it keeps me going back for more. When I’m not in the ocean, I crave the person I become when I am. I understand life itself is an adventure. I want to keep living my adventure and make up for all the years I was a prisoner to my own thoughts fueled by fear.

During the Nakba in 1948, when there was a mass exodus of Palestinians expelled from their own houses and lands in the place that right now is called Israel, around 3,000 people built tents in my neighborhood on the borders of Al-Bireh. My family are natives of the city and have been living in the same place for decades. Over time, as the camp grew and became more rooted, we found ourselves surrounded by crowded concrete buildings populated by more than 10,000 people, with my house in the middle. We found ourselves as a family living in the extreme conditions of our neighbors, plagued by overcrowding and inadequate sewerage and water networks. Despite the change, my family has always been welcoming to our refugee neighbors. The crowded conditions haven’t dampened the inhabitants’ genuine caring and natural bonding, which have made them resilient and steadfast. I have been told many stories about my grandmother. She was the godmother for the camp, who opened her house to those who needed help and defended her young neighbors from Israeli military attacks with her special weapon: her slippers.

I remember the sounds of bombings, shooting, arrests, and Israeli tanks and troops in the middle of the night.

My Homeland Is an Open Sky Prison

I lived through the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. I was five years old when it started. I remember the sounds of bombings, shooting, arrests, and Israeli tanks and troops in the middle of the night. I remember the shouting and wailing of mothers for the lost lives of loved ones. I witnessed my dad being arrested by Israeli soldiers. I wondered at the time where they were taking him, and if they would take me as well. Later, my mom calmed me down and told me he’d come back. After a week he did, with tears in his eyes. I didn't know what happened and no one told me. Now I am 26 years old, and I still don't feel safe. The regular midnight raids on the camp scare me. Since childhood, my worst nightmare is a tank demolishing my family house over our heads, the way I see happening to our neighbors. Living an everyday life is a dream to me. I ran to Ramallah to find a decent job where I can fulfill my dreams, but the brutal reality keeps chasing me because big cities are not far from political events. Settling down seems impossible when one day you have a job and the next you don't.

It is an apartheid wall, segregating people from each other based on identity and race.

The Wall Divides

When I want to travel from one city to another through military checkpoints, young soldiers no older than 19 point their guns at us, ready for any ambiguous move to give them a reason to open fire. I have to carry all my identification documents with me every time I leave the house, even for a short trip. Usually, the drive from Al-Bireh to Nablus takes an hour. Sometimes, we have to roam for six hours to reach my relatives' house in Nablus, crossing one checkpoint after another. Having my belongings searched by soldiers, or even being given a full-body security scan, has stripped my feeling of safety and personal privacy. In my short lifetime, I have seen the wall built around Palestinian cities and villages, disconnecting them from relatives and friends, and zoning them into fragmented IDs. To me it is an apartheid wall, segregating people from each other based on identity and race. I live one hour away from the sea but can't reach it because I need a permit from Israel. I have never been to the beach. How do I see the world? Through the eyes of my foreign friends who tell me stories about their countries, cultures and lives without borders. It confuses me. I don't know if it makes me happy or sad to hear how easy life is supposed to be. I am overwhelmed by the fact that the world is moving and I am standing still, gathering my shattered, sabotaged dreams. It is depressing to live in a reality where human needs are only measured by what you do today, not what you aspire to achieve tomorrow. In the end, my only consolation is hope.

It is my incredibly biased, objectively incorrect, but firmly-held belief that if you make it to the age of 30 without acquiring a driver’s license, you should not have to take a test to be issued one. You have already proven that you are not jumping rashly into this. Nevertheless, until the DMV gets on board with my policy change, I’d like to introduce myself, the 30-year-old without a driver’s license.The year is 2008. I am 18, recently graduated from high school and my braces have recently been taken off. It’s summer in Portland, Oregon, and I’m working most days at a running store, fitting people in shoes and watching track races from the '80s on YouTube with the passel of fit, smart twenty-and-thirty-somethings who treat me as half-little sister, half-peer—and teach me most of what I will ever learn about running. I am near-drunk on free time, warm air and the big sky open plains of my life spread before me. I’m sunburned and muscly. And then there’s Matt, one of my coworkers at the store, seven years older than me. He’s the goofiest, most interesting person I’ve ever met. Almost overnight, we go from emailing each other funny articles to running together a few times a week. He picks me up from my house or the store and we go up to Forest Park. I don’t, you’ll recall, have a driver’s license. Sometimes we stop for a bagel on the way home. Sometimes I offer him a smoothie when he drops me off. Once, after an evening run, while driving home through the pink-orange sunset and clouds of sluggish mosquitoes, he puts on “Elephant Love Song” and we sing along at the top of our untrained lungs. How wonderful life is, I finish, in a falsetto that cracks, now you’re in the world. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is yes, we turned out to be in love with each other. A couple of years later, he will drive up to Philadelphia to visit me on my spring break and, after dinner, as he’s driving me home, caught up in conversation in the dark, neither of us will realize he’s taken a wrong turn until we cross a state line. I will jokingly accuse him of absconding with me and we will both laugh as he gets off the freeway to go back, and we will both secretly wish he could take me all the way back to Virginia with him.

I’d like to introduce myself, the 30-year-old without a license.

Driving With Someone Is One of the Most Intimate Ways to Travel

How often do you ride in a car? I don’t mean an Uber. I mean a car driven by someone you know, with you sitting in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio, giving directions, providing the right amount of conversation, letting yourself be ferried from place to place. It’s a surprisingly unusual position for most adults, except for a certain subset of heterosexual women who, like my mother when we were kids, never drive when their husbands are in the car. And except for me.There are so many ways to cross this wide planet. But surely this is one of the most intimate. Ensheathed by night on all sides, reflected back to yourself in the windows, or at the copper twilight hour, a world is created unto itself for the length of a trip. Once, I went with an acquaintance to get coffee, just the two of us, and in the space of that 20 minutes across Queens on a Sunday morning, we cemented a fond respect in our shared tastes in books and music and affection for our mutual friend.

My Romantic Ride to the Beach

The year is 2018. Another summer. I am 28, have graduated college and quit the job that became a career. I’ve taken my savings and flown to Europe. It’s a hot, humid night in Palermo: The air is so thick and soft you could use it as a pillow. I have had two glasses of wine and an anchovy panini at the bistro around the corner from my apartment where the owners, bartender and waitress have come to know me. I’m sitting at the bar and the handsome, curly-haired Italian man I’ve been trying to make sexy, googly eyes at over the last few nights comes up next to me to order a beer. Empowered by white wine and Mediterranean salt air, I start a conversation. At some point, he compliments my Italian, and then I know I’ve got him because that’s bullshit—my Italian is five common phrases and then a bunch of Spanish that Italian people can mostly understand. I explain in my personal creole of English, Spanish and per favore that I haven’t been able to go to any beaches outside of Palermo because I don’t drive. I’m not, I swear to you, trying to hint at anything, but he offers to take me to a beach for locals the next day. None of the touristy places. I’m in heaven.But I don’t want to suggest that all rides home or across town—or for hundreds of miles—are romantic. They can also be the most platonic of experiences. I have also been the recipient of many well-meaning rides from coworkers, teammates and even occasional strangers. There was the woman who saw me struggling with an A/C unit in the Brooklyn Home Depot parking lot and drove me the ten blocks to my apartment. Or my canvassing partner in Atlanta, who drove us all over the Democratic areas in a pandemic, each of us in masks and face shields. We spent ten hours a day together and never saw each others’ noses. Even the boss I have now, who regularly drives me to my apartment in Brooklyn from our office deep in Queens, allows me to scan through radio stations for a song I like. I eventually land on Billy Joel’s “Longest Time” and snap in time, allowing him to drive out of his way to get me to my front door without any input on the music.

I’m in heaven.

I Will Always Cherish My Time in the Passenger’s Seat

Strictly speaking, I can’t recommend living without a driver’s license in the 21st century. There are jobs I’ve missed out on because of it. There are hours I’ve spent waiting for subways and buses. When I sat down to think about the grand adventure of moving through the world on my own two feet, I thought first of the possibilities it cut off. About being stranded in the middle of the countryside outside Palermo. About not getting to take day trips outside of Paris or hikes outside of Portland or even rent a Zipcar—that most important middle-class New Yorker ritual— and go to Storm King Art Center on a fall day.But when I thought further, all I could think about were the countless cherished hours of conversation in the passenger seat of someone else’s car. One day, and hopefully soon, I’ll get my driver’s license. I’ll make an appointment and go into the DMV and take the test, with the backs of my thighs sweating on the polyester seat. And it will be nice to have an added transportation option. I will love driving to a trailhead and leaving a clean, dry change of clothes in the trunk while I run. I will try to pay forward the thousands of rides home I’ve been given. But I can’t regret the extra 15 or so years of passenger seats, when a driver moved a pile of stuff to the backseat, murmuring apologies for the mess, ready to be enclosed together, a moving universe of two. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

At some point in the past, I heard about an activity called firewalking. Those that do it have to work for months to build resistance on their feet before they’re able to walk on extremely hot coals in places like Hawaii. It’s uncomfortable and painful but, over time, their feet adapt and are able to make it look easy. I think that’s a good analogy for how I handle the emotional stress in my life. Most of it just feels like training. The longer I live, I build up calluses to some of the most heartbreaking and earth-shattering events, and I keep meeting people who have seen different kinds of tragedies in their life. More often than not, their experiences make me question the gravity of my own. They’ve planted an empathy in my soul that’s made me conscious and careful about whom I lend my concern but, once I do, understanding and compassion blossom in a way that makes it hard to put into words.

We’re all subject to the perspective of whatever we experience—no one’s process is any more or less valid than another.

The Severity of Pain Does Not Diminish Its Validity

It’s taken years and a lot of good friends to teach me not to compare my own pain to others. There are people who have experienced trauma from a sibling constantly knocking their ice cream to the ground as kids, and that’s just as valid as someone who’s visibly seen a child die. We’re all subject to the perspective of whatever we experience—and no one’s process is any more or less valid than another. I wish I could repeat that sentence over and over again so as a culture we could decide collectively to never be dismissive of someone else’s experience. No matter what story people share with me, I make it a habit to understand how they process it. It’s so important not to judge the gravity of someone else’s experience because what could be an anthill to one person could be a mountain to someone else. True connection comes from seeing it as they do, not as you do. I’ve never experienced ice cream pranks with a sibling, but I have experienced a child dying—twice, in fact—and I can tell you that nothing prepares you for that. For nine months, as your baby is on its way, it’s easy to think about the kind of parent you’ll be. There is so much joy and desire to celebrate every day because another person loves you enough to bring new life into the world with your name. To have that taken all away can really make you question a lot of things.

How My Son Literally Died in My Arms

The date was September 4, 2008. My partner and I had gone to sleep as usual, with our five-week-old son asleep on my bare chest. Every other night, when I could hold him and talk to him, I breathed over him a prayer for all the things he would be one day. I listened to his breathing so I could feel in sync with the rhythm of his every breath, for as long as I could. I was so thankful to be a dad. When morning came, however, something was off. He was still warm as I slowly rose to wake him for his breakfast but he wasn’t moving, and his chest had stopped the normal rising and falling at some point while I was asleep. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I reached for my glasses and couldn’t find them, choosing instead to see him as best I could with my nearsightedness. Was that blood coming from his nose? My partner, in a frantic yelp, exclaimed that his face was blue. When did that happen? Where were my glasses? I tried to do whatever version of CPR I could remember, being careful of my strength so as not to crush his fragile chest. My partner was screaming something. Cover his nose? Breathe into his mouth? I felt for the air entering his lungs to come back out, to somehow let me know there was a chance of reviving him, but I knew. I looked at her. She was still panicking, but I already knew. He was gone.

He was gone.

Acknowledging the Close Connection Between Grief and Blame

I stumbled woodenly out of the bed and through the bedroom, trying to find the lights. Where was the phone? I had to call 9-1-1. The power was out, my phone was non-existent, hers hadn’t been paid. I needed to find a phone. I made my way through the little apartment complex to the payphone on the street and dialed. I didn’t know what I sounded like, and there weren’t any words to share. I had no idea what to do next, and even now remembering it, I still don’t know how I made myself finish that call and walk back into the house. My partner had wanted me to save him and I couldn’t, and now, once she figured out what happened, I knew what was coming. As I said, nothing prepares you for that. I wasn’t ready for Devin’s death, and I wasn’t ready for my partner thinking I killed him. By the time the paramedics came to ask me what happened, I had resigned to a few outcomes that were not good, and I was still processing a lot. If this was my fault, I was prepared to face the music. It would have been nice to have the person who I loved to offer a word of support and some belief that maybe there could be another answer. But it wasn’t to be had at that moment. I had a partner who was also grieving but didn’t know what happened and thought I was at fault.It would be another two weeks before I’d discover we lost our son to SIDS. But for two weeks, in her mind, I was a murderer. That was a mountain for both of us, and the choice I made to do my best—to be my own support rather than ask her to have a little faith that there was another answer—took more inner strength than I ever thought. To look someone in the face who is accusing you and choose to love them rather than lash back—to look for clarity and understanding rather than bitterness and indignance—takes a kind of inner fortitude most people only discover they have at a moment like that when they need it.

Coping With Losing a Baby to SIDS

One of the things that helped me get through it was actually heartbreaking at the moment. I had to forcibly tell myself that it wasn’t my fault and that expecting anyone else to support that understanding wasn’t their responsibility. Let me repeat that. Even if you’ve been with your partner for years, and have shared everything together, it’s not their responsibility to give you the support you’re looking for when you go through loss. We all have to decide to be responsible for how we feel about anything. In part, I think when tragedy strikes, a lot of people want someone to understand, and for people to empathize, and it’s nice when that happens. But what about when it doesn’t? What about when you go through the hardest things in your life and nobody understands? Or worse, they ridicule you for it? As long as I was susceptible to others’ support or lack thereof, it was crippling. So I started to make a habit of realizing that I might be the only one who understood what happened and just be OK with that. Putting that kind of pressure on someone who is also grieving may be something they’re not ready for—or something they don’t have the emotional capacity to offer. Learning how to be your own comfort when things go horribly wrong is a really helpful skill, and becoming that kind of friend to other people during hard times made it easier.

Losing a Child Doesn’t Have to Mark the End of Parenthood

When my first child died, I thought back to all the times I’d dreamed of having a son, and why I wanted to be a dad in the first place. I thought about all the things that I would do with him and teach him the way my dad taught me. Thankfully, I have a really attentive dad, so I have plenty of memories to reflect on, like riding around our small town in New Jersey on the back of a bicycle, like the kid from Peanuts whose mom is always running into trees. (My dad never hurt us, but the resemblance is hilarious and familiar). All of those things that I wanted to become were still present, I just couldn’t be those things with him. I was going to have to wait and hope I’d get another chance. And it’s in that hope, and the belief that I’d get another chance, that helped me get through that. I immediately recognized that it could be a completely different situation. Maybe I’d have to adopt or become a foster parent, or maybe it could be some other circumstance. But being in that situation prepared me to be ready to give my all to whatever situation came.Personally, I think that’s what suffering is supposed to do—help us find ways to support others who have gone through similar experiences, to be encouraging and inspiring to one another when we reach our lows. A wise person said to me that “We’re more alike than not,” so I’ve constantly looked at my challenges and tried to evaluate who I wish I was, were I in the other person’s shoes. I don’t recommend going through that kind of emotional training on purpose, and hopefully, whatever fire you walk through won’t be anything like that, but finding your inner strength can give hope to someone else. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give.

I am an American who has lived in Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood that has been making headlines recently as it has triggered protests leading to bombing and more violence in the Israel-Palestine “conflict.” Before moving to Jerusalem, I liked to believe that I had a neutral stance on the conflict. In my last year of studies, I was offered an internship with a UN donor agency in Jerusalem. Growing up in the States, I had always heard how amazing Israel was from my Jewish friends who did Birthright and voluntary service with the Israeli Defense Forces. I am embarrassed to admit, I moved to Jerusalem without actually studying, reading or understanding the history of the city. I was raised culturally Catholic, and all I knew was that Jerusalem was equally important to all the Abrahamic religions. At the time, all I really knew about Palestine was war-torn Gaza, which I thought was only in a conflict because of Hamas’s Islamic terrorist control over the territory. Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorists—that’s what we always heard in the U.S., and that is what I strongly believed. When I landed in Tel Aviv, my organization sent a driver to pick me up at Ben Gurion Airport. As soon as I saw him holding my name I went up to him and happily said, “Shalom,” to which he replied, “Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew, only English. I am Palestinian.” My first thought was, how could a Palestinian be allowed inside Tel Aviv? I thought they only lived on the other side of the wall, in the West Bank or Gaza. I am grateful for the patience of this man, who answered all my ignorant questions on our drive to Jerusalem without any pushback or anger. He explained to me that he was born in Jerusalem, as were all his grandparents and great-grandparents, and that he had an Israeli “blue I.D.,” which gave him permission to live in Jerusalem and travel around the rest of Israel. “Wait, you need permission to live in the city where you and your grandparents were born?” “Yes, because Jerusalem is now controlled and occupied by Israel, but Israel does not recognize me as a citizen because I am not Jewish.” I tried to act intelligent and understanding, but I am sure my look of utter confusion was obvious. “I know, it's all so complicated and difficult to understand,” he said. “But soon you will see the truth.”

What the fuck was this place?

Life in Israel Was Not What I Was Led to Believe

My office and home were located in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. In my first days living there, I would constantly get lost. I didn’t understand why the map had so many dotted lines surrounding my neighborhood, nor what they meant. Then I realized they marked the Green Line from the 1949 Armistice Agreement. While trying to figure it out, I learned that I was living in what was supposed to be left of Palestine’s capital. I read more—enough to understand that Jerusalem was half Israeli and half Palestinian, and that I was living and working in East Jerusalem, which is on the Palestinian side. But wasn’t the wall supposed to mark the Palestinian border? Why are there Palestinian neighborhoods on the Israeli side of the wall? I kept reading and asking.On my first day leaving Sheikh Jarrah, I wandered onto the tram to explore Jerusalem’s Old City. I got to see a vast variety of people: Jewish men with their long beards, curls and black hats; Muslim women in hijabs and abayas; and a lot of hipster-looking youth. Among the youth, many were holding rifles, although they weren’t in uniform. As the tram filled up, I was squished into a door. A young girl came running on and accidentally hit me with her rifle. What a radical feeling, to be hit in the chest with what appeared to be an AK-47 held by an adolescent girl. I locked eyes with her in absolute shock, as I had never had a rifle so close against my body. She looked the other way and didn’t even say sorry. What the fuck was this place? When I finally got to the Old City, I was disappointed. I had imagined a charming, lively market, but instead came across a checkpoint with a bunch of soldiers and military cars at the entrance of Damascus Gate. There were even Israeli soldiers at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And the intimidating sights only worsened when I finally crossed the wall into the West Bank. Being raised Catholic, my whole life I had sang Christmas songs about Bethlehem. I was so excited to finally be able to see the city where Jesus was born. I took a bus from the city center of Jerusalem that dropped me off just 30 minutes away. And there it finally was: the wall.In order to reach the Nativity Church, I had to cross the wall and go through a military checkpoint. I went through four turnstile doors, under what appeared to be a cage, just to enter the town where the Messiah was born. I had always thought of the Israel-Palestine war as a religious one between Jews and Muslims, but I never imagined it was also affecting the religious freedom of Christians. Later, I made the mistake of telling an airport security worker at Ben Gurion Airport that I had been to Bethlehem to visit Jesus’s birthplace, which then led to an hours-long interrogation. “Do you have friends in Bethlehem? Why did you go there if you knew it was in the West Bank? Did you take an Arab bus to get there?” “Yes, I took the Palestinian bus to get there.” That was a mistake. The officers replied angrily that there was no such thing as a Palestinian bus “because Palestine does not exist.” (That was the first of hundreds of times I heard an Israeli say that. There are, indeed, both Palestinian and Israeli buses, with differing routes.) I spoke to Arabs, because all the priests in the church were Arabs, because Bethlehem is in Palestine, and therefore there are Palestinians that are Christian and Catholic. What was wrong with that? Don’t I have the same right as a Catholic to see Jesus’s birthplace? After all, any Jewish person can get a passport to live in Israel. Why was I getting in trouble for going to see where Jesus was born?

Violence in Israel Is Inescapable

I tried to make Israeli friends. I visited Tel Aviv frequently to escape the tension in Jerusalem. But even in the vegan restaurants and gay bars, or while smoking joints at the beach, almost every single time I was honest to an Israeli person about my humanitarian work, they were quick to brush me off as a terrorist or anti-Semite. Many taxi drivers in West Jerusalem would refuse to take me to Sheikh Jarrah because “that’s where the terrorists live.” I started to lie to them and say that I was going to a hotel near my house. It became more and more evident that Israel wasn’t the amazing democratic paradise the U.S. paints it as. Every week, I saw Israeli soldiers do something terrifying. The most notable was the violence against children: I once saw Girl Scouts getting pushed around by soldiers at gunpoint. “Why do they do this to children?” I sincerely asked Israeli people. “Because they throw rocks and they are dangerous.” I literally got hit in the chest by an AK-47 held by a teen, but somehow the real threat is little kids throwing pebbles? The saddest part is, these Israeli teens have to do military service or go to prison. Without proof of completing the military service, they risk not getting jobs or apartments in the future. How could this be called a democracy?I expected to see some violence against Palestinians, but I never imagined the levels and frequency of it. I saw soldiers throw cans of tear gas at a crowd in the checkpoint; the image of a mother running from the gas while covering her toddler’s face with her hijab will haunt me forever. I saw elders humiliated and insulted by 19-year-old soldiers in never-ending lines under the scorching heat, begging to enter the cities they were born in. But the violence wasn’t just against Palestinians: I was once riding in a UN car in the West Bank when we had stones thrown at us by Jewish settlers. These are the people living in illegal, government-funded settlements in the West Bank, on the other side of the wall, in what is technically legally supposed to be Palestinian land. They hate the UN and any organization trying to respect the original border treaties. What was the point of all these treaties and a huge wall if they want—and allow—Israeli people to live on this side? The settlers don’t have to cross the wall and checkpoints because they have their own roads that are protected by soldiers. Apartheid is the only word for it.Although violence against humanitarian workers was shocking, it wasn’t the most shocking. What finally made me completely stop defending Israel was witnessing violence against the Orthodox Jewish community. We know that Israel was created to provide Jewish people a safe homeland after the Holocaust. We hear the words “Israelis” and “Jewish people” used interchangeably, particularly by Netanyahu himself. (Let it be known that the majority of the world's Jewish population lives outside of Israel.) We hear that Israel has a right to exist because Jewish people deserve to be safe. I decided to visit the neighborhood of Mea Shearim to get a closer perspective of how the Orthodox community lived. When I got there, I could hear singing and chanting. As I turned the corner, I saw a scene like something from a horror movie. Dozens of Orthodox men, with their payots (curls) and shtreimels (hats), running away from a tank that was headed towards them. The tank was hosing them down with a malodorant—the smell was so disgusting I could smell it from the end of the street. Some of the men were getting hosed so hard they were literally flying through the air, another image that haunts me until this day. I learned that the Orthodox Jews were protesting against an army draft being held in the area. They aren’t forced to do military service like other Israelis are, but there are still efforts to get them to voluntarily enlist. They didn’t have rifles like the other Israeli youth. They were singing and chanting in what was obviously a nonviolent protest, and the army came in and hosed them down with chemical skunk water. I learned that sadly, this is quite a frequent phenomenon. On YouTube, you can find plenty of videos of Orthodox Jews being hosed down by the IDF. It doesn’t seem to me like Israel is a safe place for all Jewish people. The state uses terrifying violence against some of the most religious Jewish people, yet I got called anti-Semitic for asking why the army harasses Palestinian children.

It became more and more evident that Israel wasn’t the amazing democratic paradise the U.S. paints it as.

My Time in Israel Changed My Perspective

It is clear to see that this is not an issue merely between Jews and Muslims. This is not a complicated religious conflict. This is not a “war,” because only one side has state-of-the-art military equipment paid for by U.S. aid. This is clear apartheid, and under international law, it also constitutes war crimes. There are children being killed and arrested on land where the Israeli army has no jurisdiction. Sheikh Jarrah is not a “real estate dispute”—it is being occupied and colonized. The people of Gaza suffer more under the rule of Hamas than any Israeli person does. There are Jewish people being called anti-Semitic for standing against Israel’s right-wing government (see: Bernie Sanders). Israel, with its powerful lobbies, is so good at pushing its agenda—they are world leaders at spying, censoring information and promoting propaganda. They have done a fantastic job at convincing the world that if you don’t agree with their policies and violent tactics against the Palestinian people, then you are an anti-Semitic terrorist supporter. I wish all people could see the truth with their own eyes the way I did. This is about human rights abuses; good versus bad. And in case it wasn’t obvious from all of the videos of violence making their way out of Sheikh Jarrah and beyond, the bad guy is Israel.

“You can’t even drink water?” This is one of the most common questions I get asked while fasting during the month of Ramadan. Once a year, over 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide adhere to the holy month of Ramadan, which never occurs at the same time of the year since the Islamic calendar is lunar-based. As a child, I remember fasting in the wintertime, when we would open our fast around 4 p.m. right after school. During my residency training, I recall 17 or 18 hours of grueling fasting during the dead of summer. Either way, the feeling of clarity, spirituality and closeness to God we get from our fasting is always met when the month comes to an end.During the month of Ramadan, Muslims are expected to abstain from food, water and sexual relations with spouses from dawn until sunset. Every night, people congregate at a local mosque to recite a special prayer. Many people say this tradition is to appreciate the blessings of your life and to know how those less fortunate than us may have it on a daily basis. But this is not the core reason as to why we fast. We fast so that we may increase our awareness of God and become more “God-conscious.” The analogy I give my friends and co-workers is that if I’m alone at home, or in the office, and I’m hungry or thirsty, then what’s stopping me from eating or drinking? My parents won’t know I had a sip of water. My friends or co-workers won’t know either. But we believe that God is always watching us, and so we refrain from these things. It’s this exact same sentiment that should carry on to our other actions in life. If we decide to lie, we’re reminded that even if no one else may see us, God is watching. If we are going to cheat, or speak maliciously about someone, He’s watching. This fasting mindset should carry over to our daily lives so that we may improve our character and be more upright.

We fast so that we may increase our awareness of God.

Fasting Has Given Me Better Clarity and Focus

As a physician, I regularly prescribe patients intermittent fasting to help numerous medical conditions. Many studies have shown that intermittent fasting (also known as “wet” fasting since you can drink water and black coffee or tea) has shown to decrease blood sugar levels, lower cholesterol, aid in weight loss and even help lower blood pressure. I remind my patients that there is not one single medication or pill that I could prescribe that would give them all of those benefits. But fasting does. People often wonder if fasting affects my ability to care for my patients, and I let them know that it does the opposite. There is a clarity that comes from fasting that requires the human mind to set aside the feelings of hunger or thirst and to better focus on the task at hand. In fact, there are professional athletes in the NBA, NFL and soccer leagues around the world who tend to perform at an even higher level during the month of Ramadan than outside of it.

People often wonder if fasting affects my ability to care for my patients, and I let them know that it does the opposite.

My Ramadan Practices Have Helped Me Through the Pandemic

This month is also a time where families tend to come together more often. As a kid, I remember my mother preparing the pre-dawn meals and all of us congregating around the table, eyes half-closed, eating and mumbling pleasantries. When it was time to open the fast, we all would gather once again at the table, eager to drink that first glass of water and enjoy the goodness my mother would painstakingly prepare for the entire family. Things are different now, unfortunately. Living 1,200 miles away from home, I’ve spent the last few Ramadans alone. I’ve stuck to a routine, knowing what to eat to stay well-nourished and hydrated to make things easier for me. But the last two years have been especially difficult living within a global pandemic and the normal practices and rituals of this month being put on hold.Though COVID-19 has presented medical and mental health difficulties for those of us in the medical field, for those of us fasting during this time, it’s been a true test of grit and patience. Outside of this month, I have felt the stress and pressure that the pandemic has placed on me. Whether it was patients falling ill and being hospitalized, others spewing false facts about the “fake” virus and refusing to wear masks in my office, or those losing insurance and no longer affording their much-needed health care, fasting has helped to increase my patience and keep me grounded to deal with an otherwise tumultuous and difficult time.

When the COVID outbreak appeared to be under control earlier this year, the Indian government eased the restrictions of movement for large crowds—a decision which is now turning out to be catastrophic as our country deals with the spread of a more contagious new variant of virus.It’s a catastrophic situation: Daily death figures reach new highs as gravediggers work round the clock. There’s a shortage of oxygen supplies, the menace of a black market for essential medicines, the unavailability of ventilators and beds in hospitals, and a shortage of crucial raw materials required to manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine.

For the last four days, I’ve been hearing the screams of an older lady, who lives next door.

The Real Numbers Are Being Suppressed

Official numbers report total COVID cases crossing 20 million, and more than 200,000 deaths.But medical experts believe the actual number of deaths from COVID-19 could be 10 to 30 times the official numbers. With underreporting of cases and large test positivity ratios, the true scale of the pandemic may be far worse than the numbers would suggest.Each day I am receiving calls from friends or distant relatives that someone from their family has died of COVID. So many people can’t get a COVID-19 test, hence their cases remain unreported.Most hospitals are already working at almost twice their capacity; they are not able to keep pace with the surging demand for ICU beds.

COVID Took My Grandfather

My grandfather was straight away denied a hospital bed, because saving the life of a 78-year-old person wasn’t the doctor’s priority. Lots of people who are not getting access to hospital beds are being forced to struggle and succumb to suffocation at home. My grandfather lost his life after 36 days of struggle with lung blockage.For the last four days, I’ve been hearing the screams of an older lady, who lives next door. She is dying of suffocation and lung blockage, but it seems there isn’t much that her family can do to alleviate her suffering.

The Crisis Is Leading to a Black-Market Explosion

Remdesivir, which usually costs around $50 is being sold for $1,000. Oxygen cylinders which usually cost $80 are being sold for as high as $1,400. This is the same with most crucial medicines. For my uncle’s COVID treatment in a private hospital, my family ended up paying around $30,000 in hospital bills for a one-week stay.For lower-middle-class and middle-class people, it has become almost impossible to get appropriate medical treatment in a good, private hospital. They are mostly being left on their own.At New Delhi crematoriums, corpses wait in long queues to burn. The crematoriums are running out of wood required for pyres. For my grandfather’s cremation, my family had to carry his body on a bicycle as no vehicle was available to take his body to the crematorium. At the site, the 24-hour queue was a very shocking and disheartening experience for my family.

Elections and Religious Ceremonies Are Continuing as Usual

Amidst the pandemic, the government decided to go ahead with state elections in West Bengal, where thousands of people flocked to cast their vote. Common people are paying a huge price for the government’s irresponsible attitude of giving priority to elections over putting restrictions in place.Religious ceremonies are also taking place. Mahakumbh saw a gathering of more than nine million devotees, after which the state saw a massive surge in COVID cases.

For my grandfather’s cremation, my family had to carry his body on a bicycle as no vehicle was available to take his body to the crematorium.

Ray of Hope: International Support

Many countries—including the U.S., Russia, France and the United Kingdom—are rushing critical emergency equipment to assist India in battling this deadly second wave. And the international support is giving us hope of battling COVID-19 successfully.Still, these days on social media, I don’t get to see funny memes, beautiful videos or political jokes. Instead, everywhere on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter, the posts are frantic calls to save lives from my friends, and friends of friends. Everywhere people are posting, sharing, tagging, asking for information related to ventilators, plasma, oxygen cylinders and hospital availability.I am hopeful that the situation in India will become better soon, the posts will brighten and, in some months, people will be able to live their lives again.

As a young girl, I would spend ages in sajdah (prostration) on the prayer mat, crying and asking Allah why I felt so different from the world around me. To a young, preteen me, it didn’t make sense that everyone around me was wrong. So, in the black-and-white way that I thought, that only meant that I was the one who was wrong. That it was my thoughts that didn’t make sense to anyone else and that I had to fix them. But trying to analyze my own thoughts would lead me down a rabbit hole of overthinking and feeling even worse about myself. I’ve struggled with anxiety and overthinking for years, but it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that because for so long I never had a name for it. My own lack of understanding also meant that I didn’t know how to explain my feelings to anyone around me, even if I so badly wanted someone to share in my struggle. But one thing I had always been taught growing up as a Muslim was that you’re never alone, because even when everyone in the world leaves, you always have Allah to turn to. And so that’s what I did.

I grew up amidst a general belief that mental illnesses were taboo to talk about.

I Was Taught That Having a Mental Illness Meant Being Weak of Faith

I won’t pretend I’m the best Muslim or the most consistent at praying, but I do feel a strong sense of connection to God and Islam, and I really do love my religion. I would pray constantly to God to help me make sense of how I was feeling. I also became more receptive to conversations around me at dinner parties and gatherings that would often discuss how mental health issues were more prevalent in the “West” because they were removed from religion, and how, as Muslims, our faith was strong enough to overcome that. Although prayers made me feel good about doing the right thing as a Muslim, I didn’t feel that meditative peace that I was told I was meant to feel, and that scared me. I grew up amidst a general belief that mental illnesses were taboo to talk about—that they were just a general sign of being weak of faith. After all, how could Muslims struggle with mental health when they had God to turn to, when they subscribed to the belief that everything happened for a reason? So, even when I had no words to describe what I was feeling, I recognized how people around me felt and knew that I couldn’t talk about it. With no one to turn to, I began to put too much pressure on my prayers to fix it, not realizing that the very idea of a “quick fix” to mental health was far more damaging than it was helpful. When things refused to get better, my staunch beliefs didn’t allow me to blame my prayers, so I blamed myself. Clearly, I was a bad Muslim for not being able to find relief through my religion, and it created a very confusing and yet highly dependent relationship between me and my religious acts. I would force myself to try and act more religious and then feel worse about myself. This was often interspersed with periods of feeling completely removed from my prayers and any other religious practice. Even when I did carry them out, I felt like I was just going through the motions. I just couldn’t figure out how to get it right.

I just couldn’t figure out how to get it right.

My Mental Health Is Better Now That It’s Not Tied to My Religion

Things have changed a lot since those early years when I struggled to put my feelings into words. Therapy and research, and no longer running away from my own thoughts, have allowed me to understand what I’ve been feeling for so long and to find out what I need to get better. It’s not prayer. But that doesn’t mean I don’t pray anymore. In fact, I still feel quite guilty when I don’t and I’m actively trying to feel more connected to my faith.But finally coming out from the pressure of only feeling like a good Muslim at the behest of my mental health has made things infinitely better. I know I’m not the only one who has felt alienated because of community perceptions around mental health, and while it’s easier to talk to my parents about my struggles now, most people outside my family would still tell me to pray if I told them I wasn’t feeling too great. I know that prayers do work for some people, but I can speak from experience when I say that pushing them as a universal solution does more harm than good. After years of feeling shunned and alone, my immediate reaction to conversations about mental health in public is to assume that someone will judge me for being a bad Muslim. As far as I have come, there are still times when a random comment will push me into a spiral of self-doubt once again. The one thing I wish all of us could understand is that, for someone who lives in a world of self-doubt, relationships with faith and spirituality are more fragile than most. In my world, identities are so greatly shaped by those relationships, and fixing the damage caused to them can take a lifetime.

My love for the environment started before I could even talk. Labeled a “nature girl” from toddlerhood on, I would most likely be found climbing trees or collecting bugs as a young child. In the summer, I went to nature camp, where crunchy granola counselors would instruct like-minded children about the hazards of petting a snake the wrong way (flipping their scales up apparently feels like peeling off a fingernail) and leaving no trace. (On an ill-fated camping trip, we were instructed to defecate in a bucket and shovel it onto a compost pile. Suffice to say, I can still remember the smell.) When I first heard about the concept of ecoterrorism, I found segments of it incredibly justified. I was a precocious, strong-willed preteen, and I preached the idea of purging the world of millions of humans to leave more room for native species to flourish. (Only the people I didn’t know, of course.) After all, radical problems such as deforestation and global warming require radical solutions. Driven by unbridled empathy towards all living things on Earth, I even periodically gave up my beloved chicken tenders for a very low-protein diet of carbs, carbs and more carbs. When it came time for my Bat Mitzvah, a Jewish rite of passage, I insisted that the theme be eco-consciousness. I handed out invitations that were printed on recycled paper and planted hundreds of trees in the guests’ honor. I even had a “Peace, Love, Recycle” banner draped across the walls of the venue and had the phrase emblazoned on the back of the organic cotton sweatshirts given out as party favors. They were worn by all the invitees to school the following Monday.

I Wasn’t Always Hopeless About Saving the Planet

All those years, it was so obvious to me, as it is now, that everything that humans have done—and continue to do—to modify our environment has a harmful impact on the world’s ecology. I intuitively knew that our planet was in trouble without having to be taught in school. It was a no-brainer to me; I could see it with my own two eyes everywhere I went. All the endless highways coated in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the bright lights and the noise felt—and still feels—so inherently wrong to me that the idea of denying the existence of climate change is impossible to wrap my head around. And yet, all these years later, I no longer really care about the environment. It used to be that every other word out of my mouth was nature-related. Now, I don’t spend much time thinking about it or do more than the bare minimum to protect it. Don’t get me wrong, I (almost) always recycle, drink from a reusable water bottle (filling it exclusively with tap water) and even bought a metal straw during that year-long period when sipping from a plastic one vilified you. Essentially, I do what I’m told is right by popular science, but I no longer have that same fire lit underneath me, that same drive that nearly had me signing up to suicide bomb a factory. While I cannot pinpoint an exact moment when doing more than tick the perfunctory boxes of environmentalism stopped mattering to me, I have finally figured out why it is that I no longer care.

I no longer really care about the environment.

The Origin of My Climate Hopelessness

In the face of big corporations, and yes, late-stage capitalism, I feel completely powerless to do anything. How can my actions matter when billion-dollar industries are altering the natural world on a scale I can hardly comprehend? Maybe it isn’t a lack of caring that got me here, but a sense of environmental despair brought on as a coping mechanism due to caring too much. In the convoluted world we have orchestrated for ourselves, it’s somewhat impossible to give a damn without going insane, or resorting to drastic measures such as ecoterrorism. The idea that average people are responsible for the brunt of climate change, and that our individual actions—choosing biking over driving and tofu over steak—can solve the climate crisis has been foisted upon us by a few big companies that are doing the vast majority of the harm in order to distract us from their evildoing. It is a smokescreen perpetrated by the biggest offenders to keep us consumed by guilt and focused on the steps we can take to mitigate the damage—a distraction while they loot the natural world to feed the economy. While we’re busy fighting over the merits of a vegan diet, they’re destroying the environment on a scale we can hardly fathom. In 2016, more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions came from energy production, manufacturing and industrial processes, which doesn’t even include the energy required for transportation. In transporting oil, the number of 50-barrels-or-more spills per year has quadrupled since 2000, putting our oceans and marine life in grave danger. BP, one of the largest oil companies in the world, and a repeat oil-spill-offender, even dared to come up with the concept of a “carbon footprint”—a way of measuring your own individual impact in terms of CO2 emissions—as part of a new ad campaign aimed at deflecting attention from their hand in harming the planet. It worked brilliantly, playing off of our guilt and fear, as they carried on remorselessly polluting.

There’s a Lack of Creative Problem Solving in the Environmentalist Community

Modern agriculture is another huge contributor to climate change and is often talked about in a way that inaccurately forces the practices of animal farming and pesticide use to shoulder the blame. It’s easy to get caught up in the sexier debate of whether or not we should be eating animals at all—as discussed ad nauseam in an onslaught of gratuitous pro-veganism Netflix documentaries—instead of thinking of ways that we can reformat animal agriculture to both allow us to enjoy meat and remove carbon from the atmosphere. It sounds impossible, but it’s actually based on ancestral ways of tending to the land that involves using fewer resources and makes it less financially enticing to the bigwigs in charge. Called regenerative agriculture, the concept involves allowing cows—a large producer of methane, a greenhouse gas—to roam in open-air environments, unlike the manure-filled stalls they’re currently confined to, and to graze on grasses, instead of being force-fed corn, which their stomachs are not meant to digest. In grazing on grass and allowing it to regrow in a constant cycle (before killing them for their nutritious meat), the cattle act as a carbon sink, with the plants pulling it out of the atmosphere in order to create oxygen as they grow back. Vegans prefer to hide in an unimaginative, black-and-white world, where shades of gray that come in the form of creative solutions, like regenerative agriculture, don’t exist. Its militant proponents have formed a community unable to parse through the murky reality that animals can make an excellent source of food in moderation and that they can be raised responsibly in ways that will both give the animals more dignified lives and protect the environment. They only wish to chomp on their beloved organic vegetables, which are perhaps causing just as much destruction to the land. The jury is out on whether it’s genuinely productive to label either conventional or organic farming as “worse” than the other since they’re both damaging in unique ways. While conventional farming employs pesticides and herbicides, which pollutes water sources, kills marine life and poisons human health, organic farming requires far more land use, which means more habitat destruction and less efficient food production—not to mention more (often undocumented and vulnerable) labor, which often suffers egregious abuses.

I’m right in thinking that I can’t fix any of these problems all by myself.

Overcoming Ecological Grief Is Going to Require a Collective Effort

I’m right in thinking that I can’t fix any of these problems all by myself. It’s natural that I resort to feeling defeated so that I can go on with my everyday life without being consumed by guilt. Even while writing I feel overwhelmed by the largeness and complexity of these problems, and I know I’m not the only one. These seemingly insurmountable problems have us backed into a corner of apathy, a kind of pandemic that is a far greater long-term threat to human existence than any respiratory virus.It’s incredible to think about what we could do if we cared even a fraction more than we currently do; if we figured out how to harness the power in the collective. We are at a crossroads in environmental history, and while it can feel at times like impending doom is inevitable, we must not self-sabotage or give in to the urge to silence our inner conscience out of fear that we’ve already failed our future generations. Only through a meaningful return to our roots—to ancestral wisdom instead of artificial intelligence, to the internal compass of what is good for the planet—can we reimagine modern life once and for all. Then, perhaps, we can radically alter the course of history.

Fuck Me. Where do I start? Perhaps with the fact that there was definitely no fucking this week.We’re trapped. Refugees in an arctic storm. No safe housing, no water. Nowhere to take a shit. Where am I? Siberia? Mongolia? Nope. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m in Austin, Texas. Yeah, don’t fuck with Texas. (But not in the “scared of them” sense, more in the “you’ll get screwed there” sense). My German boyfriend and I came here for some work meetings. I’ll be elated if we make it out alive. And as a couple.Let me preface this with saying that I’ve spent many-a-monsoon season in Bengal. I’ve hiked deep into the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia. I’ve waded through hip-high floods on my way to work in Shanghai. I’ve been fucked with (and fucked around with) people in places you haven’t even heard of. But this is the most awful developing nation I’ve ever visited: Texas.

This is the most awful developing nation I’ve ever visited: Texas.

The Weather Events Are Indicators of Great Change

As I scroll through the memes of “MISSING” and “WANTED: Last seen somewhere in Mexico” plastered around Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s oversized nose, I don’t even laugh. Seriously. Today, I saw ice growing on a blade of grass, 50 times thicker than the grass itself. These cacti will not thaw well. Thousands of sea turtles froze in shock.OK, we don’t have to blame it all on Mr. “Cruz-outta-here” and the state’s lack of disaster preparedness. We can also just realize that these storms—these “unseasonable” events—are starting to become the norm. That natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes and misguided arctic blasts are all indicators of great change. And at this time—perhaps more than a time ever before in our species’ history—we are undergoing that great change. Growing pains, if you will. But to be stuck in the armpit of the Americas while it’s freeze-sprayed to get the wart off? Yeah, it sucks.We have flight passes. We could leave at the snap of a finger. But, nope, the airport’s closed. The first few days, we thought it was silly—as if these Texans had never before seen snow. (My Floridian cousins didn’t until they were 14; the naivete is real.) But then, as we watched ice, half an inch thick, coating cars and roofs and chip off like thick-ass broken glass, we thought, “Oh shit, maybe this is kind of a big deal.” What is freezing rain, really? You’re either wet and warm, or you’re cold and dry. Right? I must have been sick the day of that weather class.Some insiders are saying that Elon Musk has decided to pull out of building the Gigafactory in Austin. Who’s ready for the hashtag #TexasFail? And it seems Elon’s not the only one putting a plug on the California-to-Texas brain-drain. Texas Republicans who made fun of California Democrats for wildfire power outages are tucking their tails between their legs. Oops? It’s a bit pathetic that climate change is this politicized, but karma’s a bitch.

This is the darkest shit I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Everyone Fights for Themselves in a Mass Panic

This experience was a perfect diagnosis of the neurosis of humanity today. My boyfriend couldn’t believe the hyper-individualism he saw in Panicville, USA. Everyone fights for themselves.Well, what about those people who can’t make it? What did old people do in their homes? Are they just screwed? An Uber driver told me he heard there were dozens dead across the state and more yet to be found. A six-year-old boy died in his bed.In very German fashion, my boyfriend says it’s “particularly disgraceful” how this event was quickly taken up as a campaign against renewable energy. The Texas governor said midway into the blackout that the ERCOT power problem was because Texas had upped its solar and wind power. Bullshit. In this storm? Significantly more natural gas and coal went offline than renewables. There seemed to have been a secret agenda here. Wind energy is impactful beyond belief—and yes, like natural gas wells, pipelines, coal and nuclear power pipes, they all froze. I froze, too. Thankfully, I was able to find shelter with friends —and then friends of friends. We were piled up to seven people in an apartment at one point. That place was still on the grid because of its proximity to a hospital. At the end of last week, we found out that wind and solar produced a tremendous amount, and had a smaller hit than expected. So as we warmed our hands, logged onto the internet to let our families know we were okay, I cooked our last cans of beans. I accepted food from a pregnant woman to make sure we’d survive. Literally. This was Texas in 2021: Nothing was guaranteed.“Can’t you just drive out?” asks my best friend, calling from tropical Hawaii.“I wish, but they closed the roads.” It’s really hard to picture the apocalypse.Imagine, driving on the highway, seeing 12 different car accidents in a one-mile stretch. Black ice shows no mercy. As a Tesla Uber Lux (the only one online) drove us back into our neighborhood to brave the cold night under our comforter, it was like a scene from Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City. Everywhere, all the lights were out. It was eerie and silent, and nobody was on the streets.

This Is Some Dark Shit—Literally

It’s been more than a week since we’ve gone to a grocery store. They’ve been either closed or food rationed. Sometimes they’ve turned people away. Just yesterday, we waited in line for an hour in below-freezing temperatures to get into Trader Joe’s, only to find out they had no more drinking water. Because of burst pipes and dripping faucets (to prevent pipe freeze), the increased water demand has resulted in reduced water pressure. This leads to the growth of harmful bacteria in the water. With power outages, treatment centers can’t properly treat water. Ew. We spent a day drinking only carbonated black tea. That didn’t feel good.After shopping, we drove past a homeless man and gave him copious amounts of well-seasoned olives. Fat for frigid survival. This is the darkest shit I’ve seen in a long, long time. I mean, hey, load-shedding is a thing. I’ve spent most of my adult life in India and Indonesia. I’m intimate with the concept. But “rolling” power outages when it’s solely the poor neighborhoods who go 100 hours without electricity? I think not.Meanwhile, my wealthy friend’s wife is using their sauna and heating the pool to 84 in her home in West Lake. I mean, you can’t help but laugh. ERCOT, the power company, repeatedly tells lies. Media personnel are outed for wearing t-shirts in reporting videos (apparently they had the heat on high).The mayor himself was caught in a press conference with art lighting on behind him. Sure, do as I say not as I do. My West Lake friend asks if I want to borrow a gun.Fuck.Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

The day I made my first meme for WallStreetBets, I was sitting in my office at a major bank, contemplating life and my choice to work in this industry in the first place. Management had just come by our branch and I had been told yet again that I was being passed up for a promotion. I knew that the physical branch’s footprint had been in decline and my chances of getting a commercial banking position were slim. I felt like my life was on autopilot, and an overwhelming sense of melancholy filled me when I thought about how little control I had over the course of my own existence. I remember the exact suit I was wearing, and the tie. At the end of my shift, I walked to my car in tears. When I got home I had to wait in my car until my eyes looked less puffy before I went inside. More than anything, I remember feeling the gravity of a mundane life full of responsibilities pulling me further away from the ambitions I had set for myself—from my dreams of success and a meaningful life. While I was sitting there in my car in the driveway, I opened my Reddit app and started reading WallStreetBets. At that point, I had only commented briefly on the subreddit’s Daily Discussion threads. I knew that I shared a sense of humor with the community, and I knew a fair bit about the subject matter: stocks and the stock market. I read a story from one user who gambled $20,000 on a short-term options play and came out with $1 million. "Here," I thought to myself, "is someone who took control of his own destiny."

On WallStreetBets, a loser can become a hero.

The Anarchic Appeal of WallStreetBets

For every one of these winners there were certainly tens—if not hundreds—of losers. I read their stories, too: People—mainly young men in their 20s—like me who took their small life savings and gambled it on a prayer. On WallStreetBets, a loser can become a hero. A nobody can become a legend overnight. It was like a shot of adrenaline to me and a generation of young men like me who feel the nihilism of our time. Here we were, in an age of the stagnant, the trite, the procedural, taking life-changing risks. There was something beautiful about the entire affair, something deep about the process. On WallStreetBets, risky plays—usually involving short-dated options contracts—are rewarded with ridicule or encouraged with "karma" or upvotes. Options contracts, at their most basic level, are a form of insurance. Here was a generation of men, most of whom had grown up in the shadow of the Great Recession, using the financial instruments which insure and reinsure the same system of economics that checks their ambitions and constrains their potential to break free from that very system, forever. On WallStreetBets, nothing was sacred. No individual was beyond ridicule or scorn. The language was offensive and brutal. The suicide hotline number posted at the top of the page was both a joke and a very stark reminder of the consequences that come with gambling your savings on a mobile brokerage app. But the emotions were raw and real. The consequences were potentially life-changing. I once read about how fighter pilots in World War II formed the biker gangs of the ‘50s and ‘60s when they returned home. Apparently the thrill of riding a motorcycle at high speeds was as close as they could get to flying in combat. For a generation of kids who grew up on Halo and Madden, the thrill of risking tens of thousands of dollars on tiny deviations in a stock's price sufficed to fill the gap. For my first meme, I used a well known “Sex Panther” scene from Anchorman. I'll spare you the details, but I’ll say that it was a success. I was encouraged to make more, so I did, many times over. Over time I built a following. My memes always related to the stock market, with some irreverent commentary on what was going on that I hoped would make other users see the stale ecosystem of our public equities as the comedy show it really is. From a subreddit of fewer than 100,000 users, I helped build WallStreetBets into what it is today, with a userbase just shy of nine million. Each time my content would make it to the front page of Reddit, a new stream of budding investors and gamblers—kids like me, really—joined our army. There was no hierarchy. Everyone on WSB was fair game. The moderators who cleaned up the subreddit of its most egregious content were referred to as "Gay Mods.” Why? I have no idea, but it was funny and it stuck. Outsiders were easily identifiable. One could be forgiven for mistaking WallStreetBets for just another 4chan-esque alt-right group. In fact, the subheading of our group was "If 4Chan found a Bloomberg Terminal," and it fit. But the culture was deeper than that. We eschewed politics and celebrated irony and post-irony. The ground was fertile for a market revolution. And that's exactly what happened.

Making Memes Ruined My Career (and I'm Grateful)

In late 2018, I left my job at the bank and went to work for a brokerage firm. I was given a raise, placed in a cubicle and my quarter-life crisis continued into a new phase. Once again, the feeling of stagnation was overwhelming. Once again, I felt time slipping through my hands. This time around, I was working elbow to elbow with others who had similar thoughts. Together, we created a YouTube channel to complement my content on Reddit. We made our first skit in late 2019, poking fun at CNBC and the recent WallStreetBets scandal that exploited a glitch on Robinhood's app to put "infinite money" in a user’s account. It was live-action and our faces were shown. I posted the video to WallStreetBets in the morning, and didn't think it would gain much traction. By lunchtime, at least five of my colleagues had come by my cubicle to ask if I was really the user who had submitted the video. Many of them had known me from my following on WallStreetBets, and had never spoken to me in person before. By the end of the week, management found the video and we were fired. I tried to take responsibility for it, and convince management that the other two financial advisors who were with me had nothing to do with it. I offered to delete the videos, if only to save their jobs. It didn't matter. We were all summarily let go, with a note placed on our records that would follow us in perpetuity. I tried to think how I would explain all of this to my fiancée, and how I would go on to provide for our six-month-old child. "Sorry kids, your future was ruined when dad made meme videos on the internet."Truth be told, in more ways than one, the feeling when I was let go was one of relief. I was finally in alignment with myself. When I was let go, the last words of my manager were, "And if I were you, I would delete that video if you want to have any chance of a career again.” I’m happy to tell you I didn't delete the video. In fact, I made more. Over the next three months, I found another job, and COVID came. People were stuck inside. A surge in retail trading resulted in a huge influx of traders to WallStreetBets. My content, and the community I helped build, were growing in quantity and quality.

The ground was fertile for a market revolution. And that's exactly what happened.

The GameStop Play

In early January of this year, I began to see murmurings in the subreddit about buying GameStop stock. At first, it looked like all of the other ironic plays: Here's a stock with ridiculously bad fundamentals, no hope in recovery, no future—we’re all in. It’s the same story we made headlines over already with Hertz and airline stocks. At first, I mistook this play as just another example of WSB setting up a trampoline for a dead cat bounce. I knew I was wrong when I began to see the motivations underpinning the attention we were giving GameStop. WSB isn't just about memes. If it were, we'd be no different than any other fin-twit handle or insta-finance channel. Mixed in with the memes and humor was a healthy balance of "DD," or "due diligence," which helped propel the subreddit’s current finance-related drama. DD was beginning to show that there were some very big players at risk if GameStop stock were to move higher. Basically, any positive movement in the stock would force these institutional money managers to cover their short position, thereby driving the price even higher and allowing a healthy margin of profit for all those who got in early enough to partake. And partake we did. Thousands of WallStreetBets users piled into GME stock, driving the price from around $3 a year ago to an intra-day high of $483 a share by late January. The community I had helped build blew up. Major media networks reached out to me. Friends and family who had considered my content shamefully irresponsible were asking how this whole thing worked. I felt the vindication and satisfaction of having played a part in building a community that changed the world of finance and investing forever. I felt like the Che Guevara of the stock market—an irony that fits well with that of the culture of WallStreetBets. Elon Musk and Mark Cuban piled onto the movement. AOC was on Twitch giving us kudos. President Biden was briefed on our community’s actions. Yesterday, on my way to my in-home sales job selling windows, I passed by my old brokerage firm. Through the window, I could see a guy in my old cubicle. He must have been in his mid-20s. His head was in his hands, his eyes glazed over. The next meme I make will be for him.

When I was young, I thought sex trafficking was how it looked in movies: young children being snatched from their beds at night, or while waiting for the bus stop, never to be seen again. I didn’t think it happened right in front of our eyes, every single day. I certainly didn’t think that it could happen to me. My childhood was far from perfect. My father was absent; my drug-addicted mother left me on my own the day I turned 18. Taking on the world alone for the first time in a new city can be hard, especially when the bills begin to pile up and the debt collectors won’t stop calling. I met a man through Craigslist who said he could be my sugar daddy and help me with my financial situation. I’d dabbled in being a sugar baby before, so I thought: no big deal.Within a week of our first contact, the man from Craigslist was in a car driving from Dallas to Austin to pick me up for the weekend. When he arrived, he was clean-shaven and well-dressed. He was also accompanied by another woman who appeared to be just a few years older than me. I reluctantly got in the car with them, despite my instincts telling me otherwise, and headed to Dallas, where he said he had “friends” whom I could meet and make a little extra money for the weekend.

I certainly didn’t think that it could happen to me.

I Thought He Was My Sugar Daddy; He Turned Out to Be My Trafficker

When I arrived, everything seemed normal. At first, we all hung out at a fancy hotel downtown and got to know each other. The man never made a pass at me, or even seemed to be flirting, which I felt was odd, considering the circumstances. Eventually, I fell asleep alone.The next morning, they brought me to a dingy studio apartment across town. That’s when my nightmare began.He woke me up around 8 a.m. He said his friend was on his way to meet me, and that he didn’t have much time to explain, but if I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t have to. I said I’d do it. Within the hour, a strange man was standing in the room, and it finally clicked in my head what was happening. I panicked and asked the man to leave, then burst into tears. I called the man from Craigslist, who I didn’t realize yet was now my pimp, and told him I simply couldn’t do it. He calmly told me everything was fine, and that he’d be headed up to check on me. When he came in, he immediately hit me across the face so hard my lip bled.“Shit,” he said. “I’m not supposed to mess up the face.” My beatings continued for the next three days as I was held against my will, blindfolded and handcuffed. My clothes, phone and money were all taken from me. I was naked, blinded, bound and so, so afraid. For three days, the man from Craigslist raped me repeatedly as I cried and begged for my life. He licked the tears from my face and told me he liked it better when I cried.At one point, a straw was stuck into my nose. I couldn’t see, but I was told if I exhaled and “blew it off of the plate” that I would be hit. So I inhaled, unknowingly beginning what would become a long battle with heroin addiction. For the remainder of my time with him, he fed me drugs in order to keep me obedient and dependent.Eventually, I was let free. What I didn’t know was that this was only the beginning, and I wouldn’t actually be free again for a very long time.

The Life of a Trafficked Woman

After that first incident, I tried to get away, but he knew where I lived. He found out my mother’s address where my siblings also resided. He showed up at my place, asking my roommates where I was. I grew so afraid of him hurting me or my family that I did the unthinkable and went back. I was given an apartment with another girl who worked for him and that is what we did—worked—every day for eight or ten hours. When our shifts ended, he was there to collect our money.Eventually, he started sending us out to places like grocery stores and bars, looking for girls who might be interested in “modeling,” as we were told to say. Once we convinced them to meet privately, he’d step in and take over. If there’s anything I’ll never forgive myself for, it’s getting other women involved in the same situation that was killing me.The abuse continued on through this time, and I began withering away from all the drugs. I was less than 100 pounds at one point, and I could barely stand to look in the mirror. One day, he tried to kill me over a lost bag of drugs. I wasn’t sure where it was, but he swore I was stealing from him. He chased me around my apartment punching me, throwing me and eventually shoving a rolled pair of socks in my mouth so I couldn’t scream as he attempted to choke me to death. By some miracle, my downstairs neighbor heard the commotion and she yelled up at us that she’d called the cops. He ran out of the door and left town for a while. The very next night, my roommate decided she’d had enough of pain, and committed suicide by jumping off a freeway overpass. I lost my apartment and all of my belongings, as it was under her name, so I left town and disappeared.

I began using my pain and my experience with body image struggles to help other women.

How I Found Peace and Put My Experience to Work Helping Others

Eventually, after suffering through heroin withdrawal, getting sober and the constant nightmares of what had happened to me, I made peace with what had happened. It was a beautiful feeling when I was finally set free. I’d spent so long being told that I was worthless, and that no one could ever love or respect me. It was only after I‘d reached the lowest of lows that I could finally see the highs too. This was my life, and there was still so much left to live. I couldn’t let anyone take that from me.After that, I began using my pain and my experience with body image struggles to help other women. I now operate a photography business that focuses on helping women love their bodies for what they are. We all need someone on our side, a voice to tell us that we’re doing just fine. Sometimes I feel that if someone had just been there to tell me it was okay to love myself and put me first, I would never have ended up in the situation I did. I don’t regret a single thing about my life, because it’s made me who I am. But I do wish for all women to know how beautiful and worthy they truly are. My goal in life is to help each and every woman feel that about herself. That’s what will keep me pushing forward. I will rise and be resilient.

In 2004, I was 14 years old, a freshman in high school with a newfound interest in competitive swimming. My swim coach was a young smooth-talker who all the girls on the team lusted after. My friends and I thought I was lucky because he clearly liked me more than the other girls. He used to tell me I was the prettiest girl in school. He was notorious for being inappropriate with the girls’ team. What I didn’t realize until much later was how inappropriate our relationship actually was.He made me feel special, but not in the way a great coach makes you feel special for winning first place or working hard, although I did both. This was a completely different feeling. I would feel butterflies in my stomach when he told me I looked sexy in my new Abercrombie & Fitch skirt, or when he’d ask me to roll his sleeves up for him. I was always happy to be singled out to do small tasks for him, like hold his Mountain Dew while he addressed the team during warm-ups, or help him pick out the team’s new swimsuits. He let me know all the styles that would look hot on me.

That’s where I met him.

In Swimming I Found My Calling—and Something Unexpected

It all started when I was in eighth grade. One of my favorite teachers had suggested I try swimming as a competitive sport. I was just coming into my body then; I was long and lean, which is usually a good physique for a swimmer. His wife was a math teacher who was involved with the swim team at the high school I would be attending the next year. I’d already played middle-school soccer, so I was a bit apprehensive to try something completely out of my athletic element. But I really looked up to this particular teacher. He was a very positive role model, kind and caring to all his students. I was also dating his son, who was already a swimmer. So when he suggested I try swimming, I was interested. I joined the recreational league over the transitional summer between middle and high school. That’s where I met him. Tall, slim, sandy blond hair, bright green eyes and very tan: a surfer-boy type with earrings in both ears and always in board shorts. I wasn’t a great swimmer at first—no one is. The coach told me I was a natural, though, with tons of potential, and I believed everything he said. He would work with me very—and I mean very—closely. One day he brought a digital camera to the pool deck to take pictures of me, mostly close-ups of my face. When he showed me the pictures he held the camera in one hand and put his other hand around my waist, pulling me into his side. He scrolled through the shots one by one, telling me how gorgeous and photogenic I was.I wasn’t worried about tryouts or making the team that year, since I had swum in the rec league all summer and gotten so close to him. I made the varsity team, which isn’t the easiest thing to do as a freshman. I had very good times for someone so young and who had just started swimming. When I clocked 28 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle, I was elated. I had found my calling.

My Swim Coach Made Me Feel Special

Things happened quickly from there: new school, new rules, new teachers and principals. Our swim coach was also a math teacher at our high school. He resided in a trailer classroom way out in the far back corner of the school. I started to realize that being on the swim team had its special privileges. If I was late to class, I’d go to his classroom and have him sign my hall pass. It was filled out front and back with only his initials. If I wanted to leave class early, he’d write me a note to be excused for very important swim team business. If I didn’t feel like going to class at all, I was allowed to skip and hang out in his classroom instead. He would joke that I was a badass freshman and we ran the school together. He did this for most of the girls on our team, but it was apparent to everyone that I was his favorite. He made up a nickname just for me, and that’s what everyone on the team called me. If I ever got detention, he would sign the slip, saying I had served it by picking up trash before school. Really, I was just hanging out in his classroom, sitting in his chair behind his desk—which no one else was allowed to do. At the end-of-season swim team banquet, he gave out a “Coach’s Award.” Before he named the recipient, he gave a speech praising how wonderful this person was, how proud of her he was and how much she had grown into a beautiful young woman before his eyes. I knew he was talking about me before he even said my name. Everyone did. Our relationship was closer than any of the other students or swimmers.What might have seemed innocent to everyone else most definitely wasn’t when we were alone. In between classes, before or after school, or anytime there was no one in the classroom, he would pull me from behind and lead my hips to sit in his lap. He would slide his hand over my lower back, massage my shoulders, grab and hold my hands in his, play with my hair—any sort of flirtatious touching, he did it. He would even do this in front of other students, seemingly to make them jealous, because he knew all the girls had a crush on him.

What might have seemed innocent to everyone else most definitely wasn’t when we were alone.

He Exploited Our Coach-Athlete Relationship

Things only escalated from there. I was raised by a single mom of three, and at the time, my baby brother was only one year old. She was doing her very best, but sometimes would have to drop me off early at practice or pick me up late. Oftentimes I would be the last one to be picked up, and the coach isn’t allowed to leave anyone at the pool alone. So we’d wait in the pool office talking, laughing, leaning on each other. Or we would practice on my dives. He would stand directly behind me as I bent over on the block, and adjust my hips, legs or arms accordingly.One day it was taking my mom particularly long to pick me up. I was messing around on my new phone and he asked to hear my outgoing voicemail message. He decided it was no good, and that we needed to fix it. For about a year after that, if you called my voicemail you would hear his voice: “Hey! This is [insert coach’s name]. Sorry [insert nickname he made up for me] can’t get to the phone right now. Leave her a message and she’ll call you back!” Everyone at my school who heard the message thought it was the coolest thing.When it wasn’t swim season I also played soccer and water polo. Practice was always right after school, so I had a huge bag with a change of clothes, cleats, swimsuit, water bottle and other things inside. He told me to leave my bag in his room so I didn’t have to carry it around all day. He said he liked to see me when I dropped it off in the morning and picked it up after school. He made it very obvious that he was going through my bag and looking through my clothes. He made a comment once about how sexy my thong was, and how I must drive the boys wild.At 14 years old, I was adjusting to puberty and all the feelings that came with it. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t say anything to anyone at the time. It was probably because it felt good to be paid attention to by someone your peers thought was cool and good-looking. Years later, I realized how much my coach took advantage of that. The inappropriate comments and touching—all of it was flat-out wrong. He was twice my age, and I was just a kid. Not to mention he was supposed to be my mentor, someone I should trust, an authority figure to be respected. After my freshman year, he moved on to work at another high school down the road. He sent out letters to all the parents explaining how much the team had meant to him but that it was time for him to move onto bigger things. He told me he would miss me the most.

He Kept Up the Pattern, and It Finally Caught Up with Him

At his new high school, he taught math and coached the swim team for 15 years. Our area’s high school athletic association awarded him Coach of the Year three times, and a local newspaper named him all-area coach of the year four times. My friends and I heard rumors from students at his new school that he was sleeping with girls on the swim team, and that he would go to house parties and hook up with students. We weren’t shocked. In fact, no one I knew was even really surprised. It seemed like the logical next step for someone like him.In 2018, someone spoke up. A teenage girl on his swim team accused him of inappropriately touching her butt, and another teammate said they witnessed it. She also said he made inappropriate comments about rubbing lotion on her inner thighs. After taking a sexual harassment class, the girl decided to report him. He had previously been investigated twice before this incident.He was charged with—and pleaded guilty to—a simple battery charge. He was removed from his teaching and coaching roles, and no longer works for the school board. He paid minimal fines—under $700—and was assigned community service. This man had been working as a teacher and swim coach to young girls and boys since 2003. It took 15 years for someone to call him out. I can only say that I didn’t know any better at 14 years old, but I do now. I’m thankful to the brave young girl who spoke up and finally ended it.

College was the first time in my life I suffered from tangible social anxiety.I was a solitary public schooler, dog-paddling an ocean of private school cliques, and I hadn’t anticipated how out of place I’d feel. Until I got there, all I wanted was to un-go there. I’d never struggled with making friends before. But in this new special hell, everyone’s parents owned an AGA and I didn’t know what that was. (It’s a fancy stove.) Sometimes it felt like for this reason, specifically, I was unable to form easy connections like the others did. By simple cause-and-effect logic, my parents’ oven was shit, and so I was bound to be friendless forever. Parties were an endless cycle of people telling me it was nice to meet me, when they had, in fact, met me several times before. Communal mealtimes were one giant, feverish friendship orgy, which I felt like I was observing from the outside—a kind of sad, pathetic voyeur clutching a trayful of mashed potato.

Today’s masturbatory internet landscape is defined by an implicit performance incentive: a coded instinct to make ourselves look good.

I Felt Like a Failure

If I break down how I felt about it, though, it wasn’t so much the feelings of loneliness and disillusionment in themselves that bothered me. It was more that I felt as though I was failing—fantastically badly—at something. As a woman, I’ve only ever known a world where personal appeal is of the utmost importance, and self-exposure is encouraged. From childhood, women learn that worth ties to how socially visible we are: the number of female friends we (appear to) have, and all the audaciously Instagram-worthy things we do with them. In this way, for many young (particularly middle-class) women in a pre-coronavirus world, “being busy” was rendered a kind of twisted late-capitalist status symbol. Of course, if the need to be visible in real life was a drag, the mirror-room dimension of social media made it near unlivable. Back in my first year of college, there wasn’t merely pressure to have fun and be popular (and know what an AGA was). There was also the pressure to prove it to everyone back home through Facebook and Instagram. Today’s masturbatory internet landscape—its frenzied orbit around the personal profile—is defined by an implicit performance incentive: a coded instinct to make ourselves look good. It makes sense that women are particularly deft at navigating this. As John Berger wrote, “A woman must continually watch herself”—not simply acting and existing in the world but forever considering how she appears when she does it.For better or worse, between my college years and the present day, most of my life has remained inextricable from the internet. On social media, on dating apps and professionally, as a writer. Sure, I’m no longer a sad, pathetic student trying to prove I have friends (go me), but the inclinations to posit myself as hot, funny, virtuous, successful, politically engaged and the rest have, regrettably, continued to mount. What’s more, for someone in my profession, what used to be purely social incentives—to be seen, heard, even liked—have become economic ones. On many levels, the internet has architected a system dependent on exploiting attention and, indeed, monetizing selfhood.

COVID-19 Flipped the Script

But then the pandemic hit, and the world went into lockdown. And suddenly, this world in which I'd always lived—where social visibility was paramount; where selfhood was dependent on its constant production and reproduction before an audience—was turned on its head. I couldn’t see anyone. If Instagram is, as Jia Tolentino coins it, a “three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success,” I indeed had zero to document. Hinge was redundant (*violin plays*) and career-wise, the media landscape was, and remains, perhaps bleaker than ever. All the typical means by which I sought validation were stripped away, and I was forced to confront what’s left. I can’t pretend the period didn’t fuck with me. It did. Research found that the decline in mental wellbeing during lockdown has been twice as substantial for young women under the age of 30 as it has been for men. And so sure, in the first half, I cried. I cried in the mornings, I cried in the middle of the night, I cried on my daily state-sanctioned walk (throw in a couple of panic attacks, and then it’s a party). But as the weeks turned to months, I realized something: A large part of me was enjoying the quiet. Not only did lockdown remove the pressure to be popular and sociable, but it removed the pressure to look popular and sociable. I spent my birthday drinking wine alone in my backyard, and no one could call me a loser; I spent weekends re-watching the complete Desperate Housewives boxset, and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. I had nothing to prove on social media, and neither did anyone else. It was bittersweet—miserable and magical—but, by any assessment, a long-needed escape from specific internet ecosystems.

As the 'real world' lingers once more on the horizon, we have a genuine opportunity as individuals to rethink our ties to all of this.

Work Forced Me to Appreciate Just Existing

Under capitalism, what is at first pleasure swiftly becomes a trap. I always enjoyed writing, so naturally, I felt compelled to monetize it, make it a career. Another hobby, illustration, became my “side-hustle” and I spent my free time laboring over commissions. Soon, all kinds of creativity had lost their magic, operating under this engulfing cloud of pressure—pressure to create blogs and Instagram accounts for my work, to build a brand, flog myself publically. Apparently, if you’re not somehow generating attention and capital every minute you’re awake, you’re wasting your time. But when a pandemic sparks a global recession, I’ve got news for ya: the economic side of all of that becomes kind of moot. The creative job market has become so bleak that creating for sheer pleasure has often been my only choice, while I take on less original work to pay the bills. In a kind of perversely welcome career crisis, I’ve been forced to let go of the relentless obsession with constant progression, and just allow myself to exist. Internet culture and accelerated capitalism overlap in myriad ways, but one of them is always worth remembering: in all the pursuits involved in both, real satisfaction remains, under the terms of the systems, necessarily out of reach. By definition, we want to achieve more, consume more, and project more, lest the system collapses. But as the "real world" lingers once more on the horizon, we have a genuine opportunity as individuals to rethink our ties to all of this: the pressures of visibility, productivity, success. Suppose lockdown served as a surprisingly refreshing escape from the absolutism of being busy, of being seen. Can we use its easing as an opportunity to prioritize those we actually want to spend time with? To establish who and what we need as individuals to feel fulfilled instead of merely keeping up appearances? If pre-coronavirus, it felt like there was less and less time for anything other than economic survival, could this be a wake-up call to commit to nurturing different aspects of our lives—purely for the sake of pleasure alone?And on the question of the internet, can we start thinking carefully about what we’re getting from it, and how much we’re giving it in return? To care less about our perceived, projected identities, care more about retaining our humanity, and begin to exist within a model of actual selfhood—one that embraces insignificance and mediocrity?I hope so.

I was lying on a hospital bed, my tiny arms hooked up to an IV tube as nurses went about their duties with notepads in their hands. I was three and a half years old, and I didn’t understand why I was in this sweaty, humid hospital. I was scared, so I called out for my parents. Then the anesthesia hit, and my memory ends. My life was never the same after.I don’t remember the laborious surgery that followed or the processes through which the doctors fixed my pediatric problem. I’m still not sure how to process how they sliced through my internal organs in the course of the corrective surgery. I can only theorize as to how this impacted their development from then on, and how that would affect my hormones and how those hormones would affect my life. Years of special care would follow the procedure, and years of feeling depressingly inadequate.Before I tell you the rest of my story, here’s something you must know about my present: I’m a 26-year-old gender nonconforming individual. Physically, I appear to be a man. Mentally, I feel like a woman. At times I feel asexual. When I look at the spectrum of the LGBTIQ community, I see a lot of specific identities and none of them fit quite right.But would I change anything about my journey so far? Absolutely not.

Would I change anything about my journey so far? Absolutely not.

Questioning Gender Identity in South Asia Is Especially Hard

There have been times where all I wanted in the world was to belong to a specific gender or gender identity, and not have to deal with the complexities of a laborious journey that no one around me understood. South Asia is not the best place to seek guidance as a gender nonconforming individual. Conversations there around LGBTIQ identity were usually steeped in stigma, mockery and threats of being ostracized.But things are always more complicated in Asia, with its restrictive patriarchal norms and rigid social rules. When I grew up, there was no discussion about gender. Boys and girls were segregated in schools. We were separated in other ways as well. Pink was for girls and blue was for boys. If you were a boy (or at least looked like one), you were expected to be strong enough with bullying without crying, or laugh along with sexist jokes to fit in with the frat boys.When puberty hit, I felt like an outcast. My organs, which had been through multiple surgeries as a child, refused to develop. I understand the confusing hormonal impulses stirring in me, or the attractions that they inspired. My mental health went for a toss as my parents, who had overseen the surgeries, refused to get involved. They just wanted me to just accept my outward gender and grow into it, to take on the masculine role without as much as a flutter of the eyelashes. But I felt so different. Would I ever be comfortable being with a girl? Or a guy? Would anybody accept me for who I am?

Would I ever be comfortable being with a girl? Or a guy? Would anybody accept me for who I am?

Puberty Triggered My Gender Identity Crisis

At the same time, I was struggling with puberty, I also stumbled across documents pertaining to my surgeries and the doctor who oversaw it. It took me years of mustering all of my courage, grit and confusion before I finally tracked him down and made an appointment.He was a pediatric surgeon. He was also the man who could hold answers to my physical confusion and mental understanding of gender.Sitting stiffly in a chair opposite him, I explained my situation. He had overseen my surgery some odd 15 years prior, with a promise to my parents that my future growth wouldn’t be complicated. And yet, here I was, after facing years of bullying, stigma and confusion because I’d turned out so different. I felt like an outsider, and no one could explain how could I fit in.Sitting there, I told him how wildly my hormones had fluctuated, how my organs had been stunted while other body parts had been growing in unexpected ways. He looked shocked. He tried to comfort me by telling me to spend some time squaring my physical sex with my gender identity, and eventually, I could go for corrective surgery. The word “corrective” stung. It was if my whole life until then had been one big mirage, a lie I had been living for the sake of fulfilling the roles that were expected of me.(I also learned how these so-called corrective surgeries often go wrong, especially in a healthcare system as underfunded as South Asia’s in the 1990s.)

Dating as a Nonconforming Individual Is Tricky

The first time I fell in love was with a girl. Within the first six months of our teenage relationship, she knew everything about me—about my physical insecurity stemming from this decade-old surgery, my desire to get it fixed, and the anxiety and clinical depression that it had caused.We dated for three years. At that point I still wanted corrective plastic surgery to fix my organ. I wanted kids, a home, a normal life—something easy and comfortable and uncomplicated. Or at least I thought I did. Looking back, I can see that I was looking for easy fixes, simple emotional solutions to my complex problems.All of this unloading of my history, self-harm, mental health and eventual rejection kept playing on my psyche. I stayed away from dating. In the age of Tinder, I felt like snail mail. While my friends spoke of hooking up, swiping right on dating apps and find love in the process, I was petrified of getting naked—both physically and mentally—with anyone new.There were times when friends fell in love with me, which was heartbreaking as well. I couldn’t tell them my entire story or why I couldn’t date them. There were times when I came so close, but in the end, I wasn’t ready. I walked away and cried into my pillows for believing myself to be a horrible human for turning my back on them.

It’s Time for the World to Wake Up

We live in a toxic world. As I walk by the edges of frat communities, I see the patriarchy and its demeaning language for women, minorities and everyone outside its narrow ideology. As I stand near the fringes of both genders, I see the complexities I would embrace if I choose to be on either side. It’s a hard world to be both a man and a woman. If you are a trans person of color, the equations and variables get much harder to calculate—even more so for non-confirming, physically different individuals.I’m so proud of everything we have accomplished so far as a society, but I believe the term LGBTIQ still isn’t sufficient to embrace all the identities out there that need it.Eventually, I fell in love with a Serbian man when I least expected it. It was supposed to be my first hookup, but we ended up going for long walks and talks instead. I unloaded my stories and he showed me a different way forward, where I could feel whole accepted and nurtured while holding on to my self-respect. He helped me realize that I could choose to be whomever I wanted—a man, a woman, a trans woman, or a gender nonconforming individual. The only thing that mattered was living a life of honesty and making life decisions standing tall, without any fear of stigma.But I do fear. When I see how violence against LGBTIQ individuals—particularly in black and brown communities—is still prevalent in 2020, I fear for the courage I’ve gathered so far. Like millions of others, I saw the George Floyd video. I was shattered and heartbroken to see the world in which we live laid bare. But the protests give me hope that we are somehow on the path to fixing things.

I don’t know the solutions. I don’t know if we will ever embrace people for who they are.

Embracing My Nonconforming Gender Identity

I don’t know the solutions. I don’t know if we will ever embrace people for who they are. But I hope that one day I’ll be able to share my story publicly and know that people care, and that someone out there is being inspired to choose a path they decide to take.I still haven’t discussed my dilemma with my friends. I haven’t yet broached subject of seeking reconstructive surgeries or gender change operations with my conservative parents. To the wider world, I am just a statistic, but to my own people, my decisions matter. I am done living in the shadows, waiting for the right time.So in the near future, I plan to open up about my gender identity to my own social circle so that I can create a path forward to becoming physically and mentally aligned. Maybe I’ll help others in the process. This journey is difficult, and at times it seems so hopeless to live in a shell that is not of your own making. I hope to prevail and thrive, not panic and run—anxiety be damned.

With non-essential stores reopening and much of the population flouting social distancing rules, many in England are worried that there is second wave of COVID-19 on its way.One group that is particularly fearful of one is disabled and chronically ill people. I’m one of them.I have a whole host of illnesses—arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma and the autoimmune system disorder lupus, to name just a few.While disabled and chronically ill people have been panicking that we might die, the most the government’s done is send letters to vulnerable people telling us all to stay inside. Most of us have now been sheltering in place for 13 weeks, and even though the government has hastily announced that we’re now allowed out, many of us are reluctant and wary to leave the house, fearing it’s too soon to go back to “normal.”

If it comes to this, will I be left to die?

What Happens If There's a Second Wave?

My biggest fear is that if the second wave should come, will we be prepared enough for how many new cases will come with it? And if not, who will be the ones to suffer?When the National Health Service is on its knees and has to make a decision between providing care to someone who is usually healthy and more likely to pull through, or someone with a weakened immune system and breathing problems, I know who a doctor would pick.If it comes to this, will I be left to die?This is the thought that keeps me awake at night, and makes me terrified for my equally sick grandparents and my sick friends in America, where the both the coronavirus situation and access to affordable health care is even worse.When our Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in his first press briefing, “We will lose many loved ones,” I heard, “Sick people are collateral damage. Deal with it.” It wasn’t a promise to save as many lives as possible, but more a pre-emptive admission of defeat. People are going to die, he seemed to say, and there’s nothing you can do about it.At the same time doctors in the U.K. were sending patients with pre-existing conditions and the elderly forms recommending they sign a do-not-resuscitate order should they be hospitalized with COVID-19. This made the disabled and chronic illness community terrified.There was news coming out of Italy—which was two weeks ahead of the U.K.’s rapidly increasing death toll—that doctors were having to choose which patients to save based on their healthiness before the virus struck. Coupled together, both of these things gave a strong signal that we weren’t worth saving, and that we should do doctors a favor by not making them choose.

We joked then that it might be the last time we’d be together for a while. We didn’t realize how right we were.

I've Already Been Sick Once; I'm Not Sure I Can Take Another Blow

Around this time, I began experiencing what may have been mild symptoms of the illness. I’m still not sure. I had a persistent cough. I was exhausted, and it felt like I had a massive weight on my chest, which I affectionately named “Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.” Despite my pre-existing health conditions, I wasn’t considered at-risk enough to qualify for coronavirus testing, mostly because I live in quite a deprived healthcare district and there weren’t enough tests to go around. My local healthcare authority had been advised only to give them to those with severe symptoms. Instead I was told to stay at home and isolate myself for 14 days.I recovered after ten days but my energy still hasn’t come back. I’m still not sure if it was COVID-19 or just a really bad chest infection. All I know is that I’ve never felt this ill in all my life, and that’s saying something considering I’ve nearly died at least four times.Since March 18, my world has shrunk dramatically to my house, my block where I walk the dog daily and the supermarket I visit twice weekly. I haven’t seen any family in person since mid-March.We joked then that it might be the last time we’d be together for a while. We didn’t realize how right we were.I can feel the atmosphere around me becoming less stressed. People have stopped panic-buying, and there isn’t the same feeling of terror in the air. But I think it’s far too soon to get complacent.My biggest fear right now is that I may get coronavirus in a much more vicious form than my symptoms three months ago. I’m terrified that if we do have a second wave, the sheer number of patients will overwhelm a National Health Service already at its breaking point due to years of defunding and being sold off for parts. What will happen if I need to be hospitalized? If there aren’t enough bed and ventilators, will I be cast aside for someone more likely to survive?During the first wave, disabled and chronically ill people were lucky to have the heroes in the NHS and Department of Health who ensured that we wouldn’t be left at the bottom of the heap. But with their budgets and energy depleted, will we be as lucky the second time around?Disabled and chronically ill people already have enough to struggles to manage. The burden of not being deemed healthy enough to live shouldn't be one of them.