“Surfing isn’t so much a sport as it is a place.”

— Matt George, interview with The Inertia

There are places I can describe with eloquence, places where language flows off my tongue, where an achy abyss becomes tangible in the mind’s eye within several sentences—and then there is Hanalei Bay. The world is incomprehensibly large, yet in Hanalei, it’s easy to forget there’s anything beyond the edge of its kingdom. No matter how far I wander, I measure every place against it.

Few places in the world grab me by the tongue, a cosmic shush sent from oblivion-- it renders me speechless. Hanalei doesn’t want me to speak. It asks me to listen. If I go quiet, if I stop, she will tell me what I need to know. What about myself do I need to confront? Hanalei will tell me. She won’t be gentle. She will expose the parts that stay hidden in plain sight, like the enraptured edges of a simmering swell making its way between Flat Rock and the Bowl. It’s an arena of bewitchment, a place to be reckoned with. The Bay will call out my fears, my doubts, my insecurities, until I’m left with a choice: terror or ecstasy? Without the Uncles, I would never have experienced the latter. The Uncles showed me how to dance with the terror and find ecstasy on the other side.

I stop mid-paddle out into the Bay, turn my gaze from the horizon, and relish in the spectacle of it all: the view, the water, the sheer improbability of my life. No matter how many years ticked by, no matter how normal my life began to seem, I’d always whisper in astonishment, how did I get here? What did I do to deserve this? My idle board would sway with the water, small ripples clapping the rails. The roar of the wave in the distance muffled and diluted, the echoes of children screaming and laughing closer to the Pier. I’d wade there just beyond the reef’s edge, hugging my board and resting my chin on the bumpy wax, looking out clear across the Bay to Middles, the wave on the farthest left side.

Middles always spooked me. Strong currents, sharks. A place with an entirely different personality. The water is deep and unknowable there, the wave breaking over a ledge. A very deep one. Anytime anyone had a harrowing tale of losing a board and almost drowning, it was at Middles. The wave was infamous for its hold-downs, leaving its victims breathless in a deep and unknowable place. Yet I surfed some of the bigger waves during my years on Kauai there, but it never seeped into my insides the way the Bay did. I was always a guest at Middles. The Uncles out there were men of intensity, a different breed of man. They banged their chests like gorillas, posturing for dominance, claiming waves like demigods, as though the ocean belonged to them. Maybe a part of it did. Out of the water, they were kind. They served the community. They taught me about the water, about confidence and intuition, the ripples over the water as a set approached minutes later. It wasn’t psychic; it was experience, like a 2^nd pulse. But in the water, it was their territory. I left the deep ledges to the hardcore Uncles; I preferred the other side. The Bay side. She wasn’t gentle, but she had redeeming qualities. Middles, I think, did not.

Surfing the Bay is different than surfing somewhere inside the Bay. The Bay is an umbrella term for a Point on the far right side that dissolves into smaller, knowable breaks. Picture a swell rolling toward the reef. The reef shapes it into a wave, and that wave can peel along the reef through a series of sections: The Point to Flat Rock to The Bowl. A skilled surfer might connect those sections into one long ride, but they don’t always link up. Swell direction, size, tide, all affect how the wave breaks. Depending on the size of swell, I usually sat somewhere between Flat Rock and the Bowl. On the biggest days, I’d hover on the outside of the Bowl. The safest place. I was a risk taker but a calculated one.

After a few years of paying my dues on the Hanalei shore breaks like the Cape, Pine Trees, Grandpa’s, the Pavillion, and the Pier, and getting my sea legs back, growing in confidence with an unforgiving ocean, it was time to expand my horizons. It was time to surf The Bay.

*****

Years later, after paying my dues and earning my stripes, I’d become a fixture in the Bay. Paddling out felt less like surfing and more like arriving at a gathering already in progress. Andrea, Debbie, Morgan, Bri, Auntie Maureen, Uncle Jeff, Uncle Craig, to name a few. Someone was always there to talk story, to fill the quiet stretches between one set and the next. The Bay had its own rhythm, a revolving cast of surfers moving in and out with the tides and the hours of their lives. I was a mixed bag. But when the tide lined up and work allowed it, I gravitated toward the Bay around noon, when the sun was high, and the uncles were out. Lunchtime: otherwise known as Uncle Hour.

In Hawaiʻi, you don’t have to be related to someone to call them Auntie or Uncle. People give the titles out of respect and affection, as a way to acknowledge the people who look out for you, teach you, and make you feel like you belong.

On a bluebird afternoon, as the sky shed its morning bruises and the ocean settled its stomach, it felt as though heaven had come down to meet us. We were in on a secret, one no Surfline camera could give away. I’m sitting somewhere inside the Bowl, talking to Bri, remembering a recent session at a different break, where we’d charged amongst the men. On longboards, nonetheless.

Our friends had cheered us on from the beach. We’d branded that day into our memories, bringing it up whenever we crossed paths in the water. We’re laughing about our broken amygdalas when Uncle Mark paddles up beside us.

My girls!! he says.

Uncle Mark was something of a legend. Most people knew him as Papa Sau, the man who shaped most of the boards on the island. He’d shaped all of mine. Once, back in California, I was carrying my 9’2” Papa Sau noserider back to the car when an older gentleman stopped me.

Is that a Papa Sau? As in Kauai Papa Sau?

Yet Mark didn’t care about notoriety. He just happened to shape magical boards. It was an honor to be a member of his tribe. An honor to be one of his.

As the swell started to pick up that afternoon, the waves stood taller and required more attention, more devotion. I was a calculated surfer, I knew my limits. I knew how to use fear to my advantage, to stay smart, to avoid putting myself in a place where something bad could happen. Yet the Uncles taught me a lot about my limits. They taught me how to test them and expand them with quiet calculation and a little guts. I sit closer to the channel, the place where the waves typically don’t break. Yet I knew what was coming, and suddenly, someone else does too. Uncle Mark appears next to me. We exchange pleasantries; we have ideas for a new board I want shaped, but for the most part, we stare at the horizon in silence. And somewhere within that silence, was a man who taught me tenderness by generosity. A man who saw what I was capable of before I could see it myself. Few men have done that good in my life. My father never did. The Uncles always seemed to know how.

Far out, I see a ripple forming. Lines gather across the horizon, one after another. The second stands taller than the first, the third taller. I squint my eyes, wondering if what I’m seeing is true. The waves begin to shift. We call it a swinger when the wave shifts unexpectedly, bending toward the channel. That’s where I’m sitting. They are coming straight towards me. Behind me, the lineup erupts. What was once a quiet stillness has become a chaotic frenzy. Some surfers paddle toward the waves, trying to get into position. Others scramble for safety. I glance at Uncle Mark. He smiles. He knew what I knew.

Second one, he says. Second one looks the best. Let the first go.

I try to contain the unease rising inside my chest. Instead, I exhale hard, as if I can release the pressure valve with breath. I consider switching places with Uncle Mark, but I know he wouldn’t let me. The first wave passes beneath me, lifting my board over its enormous shoulder. Someone farther inside catches it. As they drop down the face, I lose sight of the top of their head. That’s when you know it’s getting big.

TURN NOW! Uncle Mark yells. The only direction I want to turn is toward shore. But when an Uncle tells you to go, you go. Period. No questions. I swing my board around, say a quick prayer, look over my left shoulder to align with the peak, and paddle. The wave has so much gumption that I only manage two strokes before it lifts me. I straighten my arms, my body folding into an upward-facing dog. I steal a glance over the ledge. It’s steep. I’m close to bailing when I hear Uncle Mark yelling, “GOOOOOO!” My feet are quickly where my hands were; I throw my hips forward and manage some style amid the terror.

I take the drop late, the wave pitching beneath me, and somehow I’m still on my feet. Somehow, my hair is still dry. Then I hear the cheering. Uncle Mark. All the other Uncles scattered across the water. Their voices floating over the noise of the ocean. They will always cheer for their girls. I drive higher along the face, gathering speed, pressing into my front foot. I take half a step, then retreat, finding my way back into the wave’s pocket. When I finally kick out, I point at Uncle Mark. He punches his fist toward the sky. Then he turns and paddles straight into the next wave of the approaching set.

*****

I didn’t yet know that the Uncles would find their way into other parts of my life. That these men, who taught me to trust them in the water, would show up for me on land in ways I’d never known a man could. One would be there when I needed him most. And one day, the name itself would find its way home with me, on four little legs with a wagging tail.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Meanwhile, In My Head:

What I’m Writing: Part Two! And another labor of love and perfectionism that will be under wraps until Venus and Mercury go direct. 😂

One Small Favor: If my writing has made you laugh, feel a little less alone, or reconsider a man you absolutely should not reconsider, give some thought to becoming a paid subscriber. Everything this Substack earns goes right back into my writing, whether that means taking workshops (Ellen Bass workshop coming up) or continuing to hone my craft. Eventually, I hope it’ll pay rent. But we start where we can.

Another Read to Consider:

                                               My personal poetry is a failure

                                               I do not want to be a person

                                                  I want to be unbearable.

                                          Lover to lover, the greenness of love.

                                                             -Anne Carson

He looks at me like he wants to eat me. Not in a way where I’m some meaty, juicy, ripe flesh of a woman, the kind to throw in a bedroom. No. He looks at me as if he ought to saw off half my skull, and eat my brain with a spoon. He loves my brain. They typically all do. Until they don’t, but that’s another story.

I don’t melt at his adoration, his earnest supply of affections. I don’t give myself over to him at a single glance. He looks at me, and most of me wants to bolt.

I have that itchy-skin feeling that makes me want to crawl right out of my epidermis. Pull the zipper down my spine, peel it off like a wetsuit—step out of my remains, leaving a puddle of blood at my feet. Barely recognizable, stripped of my face and token flow of blonde hair, minimized to muscle and bone. I decide to keep my skin on for the sake of I don’t know, living, but I’m still agitated and shifty, tugging at anything that might loosen that claustrophobic feeling. His willingness feels repulsive, his appetite for me off-putting. But there’s this smidgen of me that knows better, the part that grips the chair with both hands, despite the inherent, toxic tendencies I’ve grown accustomed to. If I’m supposed to be attracted to what’s good for me, to men who don’t leave me obsessing and guessing, then why am I so repulsed by it?

I’m a flame, and men have a habit of mistaking that for beckoning. I seem to attract moths, though they tend to arrive as men in disguise. The moths are clever. They come with the promise of something they have no intention of giving. These MothMen are drawn to me. They gravitate toward me by animal instinct, as if I’ve kept the porch light on. Yet these days, I’m switching off the light and trusting that whatever finds me in the darkness will knock on my door. And maybe, emphasis on the maybe, I’ll let them in. Attracting emotionally available men in the darkness has to be better than attracting them in the light. It’s healthy in theory. Subliminal, at best.

Yet the unhealthy is what my bones know, what my nervous system remembers. It craves what it knows. The pattern isn’t exactly subtle. The data does not work in my favor. The men I’ve been involved with romantically are like masculine grenades, leaving me obliterated by their emotional baggage and obliviousness to their own emotional shortcomings. I know this. I know my patterns. I recognize theirs. I’m choosing a different kind of man. Or I’m trying to. The problem is, different can feel an awful lot like the ick.

We sit on his couch, and I’m running from my repulsions in the same way my father did. The difference is, I don’t resort to the same liquid crutch he did. Self-awareness doesn’t make me immune to my own bullshit. Meanwhile, I find myself on the opposite side of the playing field. Rather than the chaser, I’m the one being chased. He’s the offense. I’m the defense. Him, the cat. Me, the mouse. Him, the sober, hopeful, pining one. Me, the avoidant drunk. The pendulum swinging to the other side means I’m getting somewhere, doesn’t it? If only I could get it to land somewhere in the middle. It would make my life a lot easier. Spare me the dramatics, at minimum.

However, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? I sit there with my legs crossed, twirling my hair between fingers, nose buried in a wine glass, body humming as this white elixir whirls away through my blood stream. It was the fifth. I drank a bottle already. It was an accident. Yet this compulsion is never an accident. He grabs my glass and sets it down on the coffee table. I’m like a toddler who’s had her lollipop taken away. I could probably make my bottom lip quiver on command. I can see the grip of my fingerprints catch the light as I watch the smooth and stemless glass drift from my crutch. That crutch of looking at myself. I get so tired of doing that sometimes, you know? Drinking away my own reflection feels better. At least in the moment. I’m woozy as I turn to fix my gaze on him. His green eyes looking both hopeful and heartbroken.

So, when will you be done with the chaos, Amanda?

I hate it when people call me Amanda. It’s the name of a former life. Everyone on the mainland calls me Amanda. It makes me feel like I’m in trouble. I’m rattled. Am I in trouble? I swallow the lump in my throat. I eye the wine and want to eliminate the remains in the single gulp. I’m tempted to cackle in his face, loud enough for the walls to vibrate. My issues quiver in the space between us, impervious to his proximity.

I want to hold his face between both palms and deliver my message with the gravity it deserves:

BUT I AM THE CHAOS.

Instead, I sit there, sitting on my hands. Uncomfortably shifting. The air dense with my silence. He adds, softly:

If you’re looking for chaos, you won’t find it here.

Meanwhile, In My Head:

What I’m reading: Sarah Hepola’s new memoir The Only Thing There Is to Want. Sarah wrote her previous memoir Blackout, and TOTTITW is just as worthy. Elle’s Substack Midlife, Allegedly is a new favorite. I read her essay below while in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and I was laughing out loud. Garnered some weird looks. Recommend:

Midlife, Allegedly

I Think I Might Be Having a Midlife Crisis. Unfortunately, I’m Also Quite Excited About It.

The first sign was that I couldn’t stop laughing…

Read more

22 days ago · 6 likes · 9 comments · Elle W

What I’m Writing: I am now a person who has multiple projects going at once. First, a little more levity for (likely) next week— some Uncles in Kauai, my dog, and the men in this world who we can actually trust. Second— what do quantum physics and rejection have in common? You’d be suprised.

One Small Favor: If my writing has made you laugh, feel a little less alone, or reconsider a man you absolutely should not reconsider, give some thought to becoming a paid subscriber. Everything this Substack earns goes right back into my writing, whether that means taking workshops (Ellen Bass workshop coming up) or continuing to hone my craft. Eventually, I hope it’ll pay rent. But we start where we can.

Another Read to Consider: A few weeks ago, an essay I wrote a long time ago was featured in Open Secrets Magazine. Read it here:

Open Secrets Magazine

Hand Over Mouth

It’s my favorite picture. The one with my hand over my mouth. Tears falling from my eyes that show a wild, joyous expression. Hand over mouth with all my fingers glued together, a muzzle, a container of triumph as if it could burst through the seams, the mouth being the place where it leaks first. I selfishly hoard the…

Read more

25 days ago · 26 likes · 12 comments · Amanda Blackwell

“All the “not readies,” all the “I need time,” are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a “completely ready,” there is never a really “right time.”

As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one’s nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Content warning: This essay contains a brief, non-graphic depiction of sexual assault and explores themes of trauma, memory, and its lasting effects. Please take care while reading.

“Damn mama, you look smokin’ hot.” The words yank me out of my own head. I stop mid-step, digging my heels into the curb, and slowly turn around. The voice comes from a man leaning out of of a bright yellow Penske truck window, his elbow resting casually on the pane, smiling at me as if he’s done me a favor. A moment ago, I was someplace else entirely—lost in thought, mentally writing this exact essay while I moved through the drab monotony of being an adult with responsibilities. Because in order to write this essay, I must be brave. Being brave requires mental rehearsal, a barrage of personal pep talks-- I was trying to hype myself up to be the person who could write such a thing.

Now I’m standing in the middle of a parking lot, looking at a stranger who has decided my body, my existence, my womanhood is his business. I bargain with myself for a minute. I could do what I normally do, which would be to ignore the man. Turn my nose up at the air and posture myself as an unbothered woman. Yet now I am deeply bothered. If I don’t give the five-year-old attention, the five-year-old will eventually stop the unwanted behavior. This was a grown man. I’m done treating men with the tenderness of a child. NOT TODAY. I screech. The story of the Cornell 7 had just leaked a few days ago. This scumbag of a man poked the bear; now the claws come out. I’m a human being; I’m not some ornament to ogle at and use at your disposal for whatever sick thoughts you might have. I’m paraphrasing, but I think I let him off easy. There were many things that I could have called him, things I could have said-- all of which would have landed me in detention with a mouth full of soap in my younger years. He responds with some unpleasantries. I don’t even hear them. It’s the kind of reaction you get from a man who sees a woman as an object at his disposal, as though his unsolicited assessment of my body is some kind of gift. As though I should be grateful to hear that I look hot.

He probably thinks I’m a crazy bitch. In another lifetime, a public outburst such as this would warrant a lobotomy. I’d be labeled with a fancy hysteria diagnosis and thrown into an asylum to silence me. Historically, women weren’t diagnosed with hysteria because they were broken; they were diagnosed because they existed in a society that declined to let them be fully human. Men needed a fancy name for what happened when women pushed back. He’s one of those men. The kind who thinks I’m overreacting. I’m doing no such thing. I’m carrying an entire lineage of oppression, and like most women, I’m trying to take some of the weight off my back. We’ve all had enough of the terrible men. Some of us are just done pretending otherwise.

I make my way into the grocery store, and a woman who witnessed the entire interaction locks eyes with me. She says quietly Are you okay? Men are awful, I know. I take a deep breath and nod silently. Maybe that will change, she says. Maybe things are changing for us.

I sure hope so, I think.

I really hope so.

*****

I told myself I’d never write this essay. I told myself that I’d never tell anyone about what happened to me. I told myself that this story would likely follow me to my grave, because only about two people know that it happened. The man who did it, and my therapist. That’s it. My family doesn’t know. My best friend, who I’d tell anything to, she doesn’t know. No one I’ve dated knows. Hell, my dog doesn’t even know. People knowing would mean that they know about the night that I willingly walked into an assault. That I was drunk and wearing a dress that showed too much leg. I was assaulted because I was asking for it. I didn’t want to become another example of a woman who would be told that it was me who was at fault. It was me who let it happen. For a very long time, I believed it was true. That it was my fault.

During the #MeToo movement, I watched thousands of women come forward and tell their stories of assault. I never did-- my brain had already done what it sometimes does when something is too painful to hold. My brain had protected me by burying the memory so completely that I forgot it had ever happened. I didn’t know I had forgotten. I didn’t know there was anything to remember. It’s strange how our bodies know any truth that the mind suppresses. I felt on edge every time a woman came forward. Not because I didn’t like to hear her free herself from the shame that is tied to sexual assault, but because it did something to my body and I had no idea why. I braced for reasons I was unaware of. Overly emotional. I’d cry hysterically after learning of a friend and her own contribution to the #MeToo movement. Why does this make me so emotional? I’d think to myself.

When the movement began gaining momentum in 2017, I was living in San Francisco and reckoning with my own life. For the first time, I was beginning to see the prison my mind had constructed around me. Something, I realized, wasn’t right. It’s not normal to starve yourself or exercise for five hours a day. It’s not normal to work three jobs, fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. It’s not normal for my body to shake constantly, as if I’m freezing, when I’m not cold at all. I spent so long convincing myself this was discipline, ambition, resilience—that maybe I was simply asking more of myself than others did. I was beginning to understand that what I had called strength might have been a distraction. And eventually, disappearing entirely.

*****

It’s 2022. My sacroiliac joint, or SI joint, had been nagging at me. I’d often stand up after sitting for a while, clutching my lower back. I’m getting too old, I’d joke to myself, or to others if there was an audience. My young, otherwise able body, the one that that surfed every day, ran, and practiced yoga religiously, often hurt. It was beginning to feel like a broken piece of furniture held together by a few remaining screws. Years of wear and tear will do that to a person. I booked an acupuncture appointment to ease the pain. Christine, my acupuncturist, is dainty, earnest, and mouse-like. Her voice is pitchy and sweet, as if she were perpetually careful not to harm anyone. She moved about the world with quiet efficiency. I’d often linger after our appointments to talk story, as they say in Kauai. Nobody is in much of a hurry on the islands. Making time for one another is embedded in the routine of everyday life. A quick run to Foodland could take a few hours, and no one would think twice about lingering in the parking lot to catch up.

Christine was wildly passionate about acupuncture. She’d spent more than five years studying in China under her mentor, and we could talk for hours about the body as a place where emotions take up residence. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, even the organs have their own emotional associations: the liver, anger; the spleen, worry; the lungs, grief; the kidneys, fear. Christine knew I was in recovery from an eating disorder, and I loved picking her brain about the relationship between the body, our emotions, and memory. Like me, she could talk about it endlessly. Her own struggles with chronic health issues had steered her to Chinese medicine, much as my own had influenced my interest in the body and all the ways it keeps score. Even after COVID, she continued to wear a mask while treating patients. Like so many healers, she seemed to navigate a body which demanded more than she wanted to give. She was sensitive to her surroundings, and her own health had made her intimately familiar with living inside a body that didn’t always cooperate. I believe what happened while in her care was able to resurface because I felt safe and understood.

Christine greets me in a mask, her eyes radiant and nurturing, the rest of her face concealed from view. The typical laundry list of ailments I needed addressed was short that day. Help me with this pain. My hip is killing me. SI joint has made my entire pelvis seize. Straddling a surfboard more than fifteen hours a week does little for an SI joint, right? Christine did as I asked; soon my hip resembles a voodoo doll. As the chi began to move through my body, that familiar, liminal hum spread over my consciousness. I relaxed into it, drifting into the state of serene suspension. My parasympathetic nervous system took the reins. I was neither asleep nor fully awake. My mind wandered where it pleased, and for once, I let it.

Then, suddenly, an image appeared—one I couldn’t place, yet somehow recognized. It’s of me. I’m not viewing from inside the memory, from my perspective-- I’m above it. I’m curled into a fetal position on a bed that wasn’t mine. It’s twilight. I’d likely managed an hour or two of sleep before waking abruptly, as if my body had decided it was no longer safe to rest. Shame seemed to creep into every crevice. It was all I could hear, all I could see. Shame. Shame. Shame. Because even then, even in those terrifying moments when I recounted what had happened, I blamed myself. Like most trauma, it is remembered in fractals—broken mirror pieces reflecting a story in fragments. The brain cannot always hold the burden of the whole story, so it keeps the pieces in their own tidy boxes. I remembered what had been buried deep in the crevasse of my brain, and perhaps my hip, too, but I still couldn’t recount the details.

What I remember are single images and my mouth leaking the words NO. No, no, no, no, no. Please. Stop. No.

My eyes startle open, and I’m back on Kauai. I’m on the North Shore. I’m in Christine’s office. I’m getting acupuncture. It’s Thursday. Tears are pooling down the side of my face, and whatever parasympathetic state my nervous system had relaxed into is gone. My heart is racing, my body viscerally remembering something blocked and heavy. I have the sudden urge to eject. I yelp for Christine, and soon her dainty personhood is next to me, concern palpable through her mask-covered face. A memory came up, I say. I must have dissociated from it for all these years. I can’t lie here. I need to go. With quiet efficiency, Christine removes the needles from my hip and puts her hand on my shoulder. Are you okay? she says. No, I say. But I think I will be.

I walk to my car in a daze, hovering above my own feet. Tourist children in water shoes run past, cups of red and blue shaved ice dripping down their wrists. I barely see them. I barely hear them. I am a horse with blinders on. I crawl down Kuhio Highway and arrive home, not knowing how I got there. Miraculously, it’s a Thursday. I see my therapist on Thursdays. Our session is in an hour. I get back in my car and drive across the way to Anahola Bay. I walk straight into the ocean in my clothes. I swim over the reef and let the current carry me. My hair sticks to my face, and I don’t fix it. I let the water hold me, cleanse me, baptize me. I’ve never been religious, but I’ve never wanted to feel purity as desperately as I did in that moment. Purity is a sick cosmic joke, a construct men and religion have used to shame women into believing they are the problem. Not the men who took something from them. Not the men who made them feel unclean. The women. The idea of purity has been a burden women have to bear.

I feel disgusting.

Am I disgusting?

Later, I tell my therapist what happened. I see it land on her face. After we work through some of the initial turmoil, she suggests we start a new EMDR target. We’re going to revisit the memory, not necessarily to change what happened, but to change how it affected my sense of self. EMDR helps the brain reprocess traumatic experiences—it untangles what happened to me from what I’d come to believe about myself because of it.

For months, I sit down every Thursday and put myself back in that room, back into the fetal position, and work through the belief that I am disgusting. This is part of why I’ve never felt the need to tell this story. One, I know my experience is minor compared to what many women have endured. But minor doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean it didn’t leave a mark. And two, I’m privileged to have had access to a therapist who specializes in EMDR-informed therapy, someone who helped me rewire my brain—not just to undo the belief that I was disgusting, but to untangle the shame, pain, and programming that came along with it.

I don’t think any woman ever fully makes peace with a sexual assault, but I believe I’ve come close. Close enough that the people who have loved me, dated me, or known me deeply have no idea it ever happened. I am the Trojan horse. I carry secrets hidden in plain sight.

I can’t stop obsessing over women who don’t have resources. The women who aren’t just victims of their assaults, but prisoners of them, too. The women who don’t just endure assault in an evening but endure it as the only version of love they’ve ever known. The women who have been taught that it’s normal to have their bodies used. The Epstein survivors. The women who were molested as children. The little girls who their own mothers trafficked them. Raped by their fathers. Their neighbor. Their creepy Uncle. The women who have endured such cruelty that it should make all of us want to hurl. Those are the women I think about. Those are the women who matter to me. I don’t want my one night of decisions that led to a terrible outcome to take anything away from what happened to them. I don’t want my privilege to go unacknowledged, and I don’t want to take anything more from women who have already had so much taken from them. But I can recognize that other women have endured circumstances I cannot imagine without making my own pain illegitimate. All victims are hysterical in one way or another.

And now it’s time we stop swallowing our screams.

One in three women are victims of sexual assault. I’m telling this story not because I want sympathy, but because I want to point to the systematic cruelty women have endured for centuries. Women have many secrets, and I think it’s important to keep some of them to ourselves. Yet this is no longer a secret that needs to stay in hiding. I’m writing this story because if a man looks around at the women in his life, more of these women than he can imagine have been assaulted. A man’s mother, wife, sister, cousin, aunt, his wife’s therapist, boss, housekeeper, nanny, even his own daughter. What happened to me is not an isolated case. It is a prime example of our society’s dehumanization of women. Why do we have to carry the blame for this type of behavior? Why do I have to spend my time and resources recovering from such an act while the men go on their day eating chicken wings and watching football? I don’t have answers to these questions, and this story doesn’t get a happy ending. I hope the ending is still writing itself. But what I’ll say is this: It’s okay to tell the truth and make noise, no matter what. It’s okay to put shame to rest and find bravery in our stories that are terrifying to tell. Not everything we carry is ours to keep carrying. Some things can be set down. Some things can finally lie to rest. Certain burdens were never ours to bear. And this story? This story is no longer mine.

If this writing speaks to you and you’d like to join in on the movement to end sexual violence against women (and men), consider donating to RAINN. RAINN is the largest anti-sexual-violence organization in the United States. It operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, supports survivors, and advocates for policies to prevent sexual violence and hold perpetrators accountable.

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“This is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.”

-David Whyte

The guttural wail of the fog horns tosses me out of a dreamless sleep. I lie there, silently, waiting for the low lament to resume. The horns reclaim their groaning, and suddenly it’s 2017. I feel like I have somewhere to be. I have somewhere I need to get to. Somewhere I need to go. The fog horns go on with their ominous melody, their call of yearning, and I soften. I’m not in that life anymore, although some unconscious unearthing in my body would tell me otherwise. It recalled so ferociously that life-- the one where I ran so hard, escaped so well. The one where my busy-ness was not a triumph but a coping mechanism.

I had moved out of my Lower Nob Hill apartment a few weeks before I left the city for good, crashing with my best friend who lives in the Marina. The Marina is where all the privileged, Ivy League types live. Where you can find a woman in her prime walking her Goldendoodle with one hand, sipping a pumpkin spice latte with the other. Athleisure is not a concept but a uniform. Essentially, she is me, and I am her. I loved moving from the frenetic pace of Lower Nob Hill to the Marina in those last weeks-- just a block from the Bay and Golden Gate views. Alexandra’s place is so close to the water, Karl the Fog swallows it before he reaches the rest of the city, enveloping that little corner of the city first. The fog horns sing a melancholic song of my last days in San Francisco. The body remembers, the horns being the doorway to a barrage of memories that have not come up for air in almost a decade.

I was teaching a full load of students at the ice rinks in Oakland and San Jose, picking up weekend shifts at the wine bar, teaching fitness classes, squeezing in part-time content marketing for the studio. After leaving the corporate life, I kept so many balls in the air that I’d forgotten what it felt like to have empty hands. It takes a while to let them all drop gracefully. Until the day I left, my schedule was packed to the brim. I kept moving, kept performing, kept convincing myself I could make it to the bitter end. To the finish line. My body had other plans.

A few weeks before my final day in the city, my body quit the protesting and gave up entirely. The finish line was so close, yet I never crossed it. I had to withdraw from the race early. It would take another decade to understand the depths of my autoimmune disease—and, for a long time, I would blame San Francisco for giving it to me. I left without a proper goodbye. I had no last look over my shoulder. No ceremony. No acknowledgment that I was leaving behind a city I had once loved fiercely. I left San Francisco forgetting why I loved her in the first place.

It happened this time of year. Early October, when she is at her best. Like any tumultuous relationship, when she’s good, she’s so good. Can’t stop licking your lips good. Fall in love in 24 hours good. Call your Mom and ask for grandma’s ring good. It’s hard not to fall for her. When she’s up, the whole city seems get high with her-- the sunshine transforms the city. You see skin on everyone’s legs. Most are love drunk on a restaurant patio. The dogs. The dogs are everywhere. Everyone reeks of sunscreen. The whole city seems to have loosened from their rigidity into perpetual happiness. She’s so easy to fall for under those ripe conditions. I fell for her. In October 2015-- I was seduced by San Francisco.

I finally hit my limit from the nagging each time I talk to Julie, my childhood friend—come up she says. I know you, she says. You’ll love it, she says. Fine, I say. October was an easier time to make the trip. The skating season didn’t begin until February, and I wasn’t convinced there would be another season for me to come back to. I had started to pour all my training energy into the professional circuit. It wouldn’t kill me to leave for a few days.

The trip moved quickly, each day giving me another reason to believe I had found my way into something I’d never forget. It was the kind of weekend that feels more like a dream than a memory. Julie’s neighborhood. The charm and grit of Lower Nob Hill. Being able to walk almost anywhere we decided to venture to. The city in October was alive, and I slipped into the version of San Francisco I fell for shortly before I called her home.

I had yet to experience the lessons. The car getting towed. The smashed car windows. The homeless man I’d step over most mornings from my building stoop. The terrifyingly low bank account. The corporate success that brought more misery than fulfillment. The summers that demanded a parka instead of a bikini. The alluring tech bros and the first taste of a man’s Peter Pan syndrome. The pinnacle of the Eating Disorder. The privilege that handed adult money to young people who probably shouldn’t have it. The drugs, the lust, the greed, the grime, the judgement, the ambition, the insecurity, the frenzy, and the rush.

October in San Francisco has a way of concealing all of it. On the final day of the trip, Julie and I started at Ocean Beach, at the edge of the city, where the streets finally surrender to the ocean. We lounge in the sun in a quiet meadow in Golden Gate Park. We eat at a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant—the best I’ve ever had—and end the day on Haight Street, in a grimy but charming jazz bar called Club Deluxe. The saxophone had me swooning. The Greyhound with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice had me buzzing. The man at the end of the bar glancing my direction had me reeling. And then the thought comes to me, fully formed, and it immediately escapes my mouth:

I’m moving to San Francisco.

We clink our Greyhounds together. The bartender buys us the round, treating my declaration as though it were a Pulitzer. Meanwhile, the seriousness of my own words terrifies me. That moment changed the trajectory of my life. I had become a person bewitched and would surprisingly follow through on my resolve. This wasn’t a pipe dream. This wasn’t one day, I’ll come. I had made the decision, and suddenly, the life I had been yearning for had a tangible date on the calendar.

A month later, I signed a corporate offer letter. I said goodbye to my life on the ice as I knew it. It was time to grow up. Time to become a part of the world—the one with a desk, a commute, and a shiny 401(k). I had no idea what I was leaving behind, yet it didn’t even matter.

San Francisco or bust.

*****

It’s been 9 years since I left San Francisco for good. I roll down the back windows of my truck as we slow on 19th Street. Almost there, baby, I say to my dog, his face hanging out the window, tongue flapping in the wind. A day or two earlier, I called my best friend. I’d had a difficult week, one that ended in a way I never intended. It felt incomprehensible to let myself marinate in this razor-edged reality of rejection I have recently been confronted with. I needed to get away. I never thought San Francisco would be a place I’d run toward. I always thought it would be somewhere I’d be running from. Yet it was October. I knew that if I needed something sparkly in this month of Indian Summer, San Francisco would show up.

For more than a century, San Francisco’s fog horns have called through the fog, warning ships when they can’t see what’s ahead. Each horn has its own pitch and rhythm, a kind of map engineered by sound for finding a ship’s way when the city and its cliffs disappear into the haunting haze. I used to think the fog horns were part of the city’s romance, the chorus of a song marking the end of my time there. It was a season of my life when I couldn’t see very far ahead. I took the risks and I made the moves anyway. I learned to trust my feet beneath me and the faint sound of something calling from somewhere beyond the fog. At one time, the horns were the song of goodbye. Now they have new meaning.

I spend my days visiting the city by playing tourist in my old life. I play with my dog on the Marina Green as the sunset sets the sky on fire, throwing a red haze across the bay—beyond the Golden Gate bridge, beyond Alcatraz, all the way to Coit Tower peeping out in the distance. When I was working in the corporate world and quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) unraveling inside, my friends would urge me to meet them in that precise place to shake me out of the overwhelm. I spend a morning wandering aimlessly up Polk Street, memories existing everywhere at once. I stop at Saint Frank, Jake’s1 favorite coffee shop, and order his drink-- a double macchiato, extra hot. I raise the cup to him and cheers to him in heaven, mimicking his stupid Australian accent. The going-away party I planned but never made it to would have been the last time I saw him. Instead, I stand here years later, drinking his coffee order in his city, thanking him quietly for the romance we had. Some people’s presence leaves, and somehow their memories stay exactly where you left them. Jake is everywhere. I finally say goodbye to him where I was always meant to: in the city I’ve made peace with. The city I never stopped loving. I only forgot that loving something deeply doesn’t mean it won’t leave a wound. Loving often comes with a price, and I’ve learned of my willingness to pay it.

Later, I make my way to the Castro. I’m surrounded by men, yet I feel safe. Protected. Lately men have been more terrifying than safe. The Cornell 7 have only amplified these feelings. Here, I’m reminded that goodness exists. The gays love their heterosexual girls, and I love them ferociously back. I love their shorts, somehow shorter than mine. I love the pitchy yelps they make when they see me, unexpectedly, for the first time in years. I love when they pet my hair, tell me I look the same as I did, and proudly let me claim my status as their fruit fly. They know how much I adore them, how much I would fight for them--because they would fight for me, too. Women and gay men know something about one another: what it means to live in a world where safety is never guaranteed. What it means to have to fight, often fiercely, to become exactly who you are. In the Castro, I’m reminded of who I am because of where I’ve been. And for the first time, I don’t wish I’d been anywhere else.

Maybe that’s what the fog horns were trying to tell me all along—you don’t have to see what’s in front of you to make your way home. Sometimes you must listen for the sounds that beckon you to safety. San Francisco has always known. I just had to make peace with her before I could hear it.

1

Jake was an Australian man I dated for a good amount of time during my first year in San Francisco. He died tragically a few years ago. Here’s the full story:

Amanda Blackwell

That Can't Be True

How close does the dragon's spume…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Amanda Blackwell

“In water, like in books—you can leave your life.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

I hated deep water as a kid. I loved the ocean in a conditional way. A conditional way meaning I loved being in the ocean if I could touch the bottom. I’d go no further out than waist deep, maybe chest high if I was feeling brave. I had been afraid to be swept away, afraid of what lurked below. I’d push my sun-bleached, toe-headed hair from my forehead as I stood in the middle of the whitewater with a body board in my hand. I’d wait for the soft froth to come towards me, jump on my belly mimicking a penguin-- and ride all the way to the shallows, giggling. I’d run back into the ocean until the depth coaxed my hips—repeat. Ride and giggle, ride and giggle. My father would be watching, casually perched on the rocks. He’d sit there, turkey sandwich in hand, studying my frenzy. Eventually he’d finish his sandwich and wade out into the water towards me, his raised voice bleeding into the ocean breeze, “Amanda, you have to go deeper.” He was always such an advocate for doing things the right way and not the fun, safe way. “No way,” I’d screech. “I’m scared of deep water!” I had no desire to wade into unknown territory, the terrifying place where I could not touch the bottom. No stern voice could coax me into the depths that I had feared.

When the sun reached its seasonal peak and the Summer heat blazed its way through a sticky, humid Hawaii, I was pulled under by an invisible malady. Maybe something related to Chronic Illness. A flare up, maybe. I was probably stressed. Doing too much. Not resting enough. Maybe I could drink some more green juice. Wait, or is it celery juice? Isn’t that supposed to cure, like everything? That’s what everyone in LA says. Maybe I’ll try that.

It turns out you can’t put out a fire with a garden hose. I had begun a swift and sudden spiral to a dark, sick, lethargic and apathetic place. My existence was minimized to the horizontal position, where everyday a sort of symptom roulette. I’d wake to a cocktail of illness, buzzed on ocular migraines, nausea, a left ear that had felt like it had gone deaf, a fatigue so deep it was as if it had me in its jaw. After a few weeks of watching way too much Bravo, I’d felt my brain cells disintegrate too. The scary thing was, I didn’t seem to care. Yet words would still come to me. I’d find it in myself to laugh and wanted to write a poem called “Thoughts from the Horizontal Position”. A broken body, but a brain that still seems to hum. A sign of life. Often words would swirl and I want to write them down, yet my notebook is too far away to grab, my fingers too tired to type, and my brain too foggy to remember the stanza I just sung in my head. I remind myself that poetry doesn’t have to make sense but for some reason I want it to. I want anything to make sense. I treat the unknown own as a problem to be solved. The unknown is my Achilles heal.

Yet it’s ironic that I find solace in a place that holds no form, that has no sense or predictability. The ocean is the most humbling, arbitrary and uncertain place to surrender to. I understand that I’m primed for the unstable. I understand how rogue waves come out of nowhere, and sometimes you’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes I’ll be pulled under and into the liminal space where I cannot breathe. The ocean is a purring pet on your lap one minute, and an untamed, unforgiving beast the next. The ocean guarantees nothing to anyone. It makes no exceptions.

I had flown across the Pacific yet again, to my hometown of Ventura, California. I flew from the island of Kauai that I had lived on for the last 6 years, to be with my family. To be held, to be cared for, to heal. It turns out, living on an isolated island with my existence defined by the couch is not a way to live a life. I needed with a sense of desperation to live a life off my couch, with even just an inch of vitality.

I arrive in Ventura, a place with its own heartbeat. The heartbeat of my childhood, my pubescence, my teenage angst, my confusing early adulthood, the place that has only been the echo of home since I’ve been planted elsewhere. Strands of history continually reminding me of the familiar, of where I came from. The grocery store has a story to tell, the street where I would sell lemonade, the park where I’d attend soccer camp, the trails I would willingly run, the Foothill road my first love would hold my hand as we cruised among the street lamps, the pharmacy where I bought my first panic pregnancy test. The imprint of the bench at the Point where I would sit, sipping my coffee on misty early mornings, procrastinating my drive to the rink. Before surfing hung a noose around my neck, I was a figure skater—and sometimes my life on the ice was hard and cold and skating in circles had begun to wear on me. As the hot coffee would make its way down my throat, I’d imagine myself hanging up my skates and exchanging them for a surfboard. I’d fantasize about becoming one of those surfers, mystified by their stillness, the passivity of waiting for the ocean to call the shots. Yet I was a figure skater. My water was the frozen kind. The kind without depth.

I eventually actualized my post-childhood surfing fantasies after living in Hawaii, and had non-negotiable schlepped a surfboard across the ocean to Ventura. Healing often means fueling your soul, even if I’m unwell, even if it means I’m horizontal for the remainder of the day. I wake up at the crack of dawn to get in the water, where I pull on my constricting, nuisance of a wetsuit that feels like a second skin, yet the nostalgia of neoprene tickles my nose. It marries the scent of the Pacific, where here it is dense, it’s heavy. It coats the nostrils like it has a secret to tell. The rocks littering the shoreline are an obstacle course, where my toes melt into the water, where it’s so cold that it I squeal through gritted teeth. I paddle and feel something touch my finger tips, pull my hand out of the water and peel the seaweed off like a slug on the pavement. This is different, I think.

The Pacific may appear to be different, yet it still speaks the same language. It still hums between sets, it still stirs as it stands, it still collapses into itself, sometimes violent foam, sometimes soft and simmering froth. It grips me in a familiar way, yet I look down at my feet and I cannot see the depth. I cannot see what’s under me, and part of me is soothed by this. We cannot fear what we cannot see— but how true is that, really? As a child this unknown terrified me. As an adult this ignorance comforts me.

Here, the ocean yields to a different octave, it sings the songs of my past. Here, the ocean is still this inexplicable place I am tethered to. Here, the ocean still heals me. Here, I paddle into the early morning marine layer, my toes cold, my heart warm-- the oceanic cathedral where nothing exists but water and swell. The squawk of pelican coaxing me out of the spell of my sick body, reminding me I will heal. Reminding me wherever I am in the world, the ocean is where I’m at home. Here I’m not in paradise, but perhaps a different version of it. Here, I cannot see the bottom.

Here, I no longer care.

“It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

““The pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo”

-Andrea Gibson

I’m sitting at the dinner table of my childhood home. Family and extended family are nestled on its periphery, a warm and inviting scene at first glance. The big pine table was one of the first foundational purchases my parents made as newlyweds, just shy of 22 years old. Building a life together, buying furniture. The fragility to come disguised with a smooth, waxed finish—an underbelly of broken bits glossed over with swoop after swoop of Pinesol. The hope and harsh reality energetically strapped to the tables’ legs.

Dad is on one side, Mom on the other. They are separated, unlike my brother and his wife, and his in-laws, who sit nestled close together, elbows brushing with each sip of Pinot. My Dad is physically there, his body in the chair, his broody aura, his hunched posture, his harsh presence. Yet mentally, he’s somewhere in the stratosphere, staring off into a place far away from the polished, glossy, big pine table. He eventually snaps out of his atmospheric comatose to grab the bottle of wine and generously pours himself a glass. It was the sixth or the seventh. I lose count, but my mother doesn’t. Her disapproving glances are missed by my father because of the general distance between them. It’s the way she has looked at him for the last twenty years of their marriage.

Our table conversations are always filled with familial and wisecracking humor. Stories of the past, tales of the present, things that embarrass certain family members, snarky banter. Something is said, and five minutes later Dad chimes in on a topic that was left long ago. I shake my head and laugh because he’s “just Mike Blackwell.” His tendencies for missing social cues and needing to internalize before he speaks is something I not only understand but can laugh at.

But the truth is he’s drunk.

But the truth is he’s removed.

He’s drunk and removed.

I exaggerate these words because that’s exactly how I would describe the majority of men I have chosen to be in relationships with throughout my adult life. Somewhere along the way, my father’s indifference became a language I learned to speak fluently—and a pattern I kept looking for in other men.

****

I got dressed that day and wondered to myself what a woman is supposed to wear when she is breaking up with her boyfriend. All black, like I’m attending a funeral? Florals to bring light to the situation? Sweats to show that I have had a difficult time getting out of bed, perhaps garnering a bit of sympathy? Do I do my hair? Do I look my best so I can remind him what he’s missing? Do I care? Why do I even care?

He gets out of his car and looks at me with eyes down casted, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. It’s peculiar how this soon-to-be assassin could look so defeated. He’s hiding his gauntlet of ultimate dismissal—a glorious act, I imagine. I hold eye contact to see if he will meet me. He doesn’t. Truthfully, I don’t think he ever did. Yet there’s an air about him, like he cares as much as he can to be the good guy, just enough to forgive himself, while remaining removed enough to cause no harm. No harm to him, anyway. That burden is left for me.

I have learned enough through therapy and endless sessions centering around my drunk and removed father to not point fingers, to simply be curious and ask questions. Questions I don’t want to hear the answers to. So I do the right thing. I ask the questions. I listen while quietly wincing inside. Nails on the chalkboard of truths-I-don’t-want-to-hear. The truth is difficult hear, but it’s essential. Sometimes it’s easier to look directly into the sun instead of a mirror.

When the conversation is over, when the relationship has officially run its course, when it’s stamped with its own expiration date like I’m some gallon of milk, I excuse him. He gets out of the car, no air of grief or sadness, perhaps a little relief. I watch him walk away, with his hands in his pockets and veering right to check the surf. There’s a certain inner casualty that happens to a woman when she feels as insignificant as a stubbed toe—the kind of pain you’re expected to laugh off because, technically, nothing happened. Something inside of us—something inside of me—croaks at the whims of a man who both discards me and refuses to see me. Perhaps that something is my unanswered moans, meant to sound something like hope. Yet this isn’t the kind of inner casualty that gives way to new life. Perhaps it does, eventually. For now, it is the kind of demise that leaves a stench on everything it touches. An entire foundation of simply existing now reeks of loss. I’m building an entirely new vocabulary around the word decay. I’m writing the eulogy, part of me is embalmed, formaldehyde tickling my senses—and his brain thinks, “Wow, I wonder what the surf is doing.”

I drive away so I don’t have to witness his next moves. I imagine him getting in his car, forgetting it all happened, taking a quick stop at the liquor store and buying a six pack on his way home. I should really cut back on these, he thinks to himself. Yet the warm tingly numbing elixir is the only salve he needs from looking at himself. From looking at me. Does drunk and removed ring a bell?

There’s nothing more heartbreaking than to be held at the whims of an indifferent man. It’s true that there’s a kind of relational hierarchy to be found in the grandeur of uncaring. It’s a genius protective mechanism. It makes one less vulnerable to others. The less you care, the more of the upper hand you have. Yet that protection can also come at a steep price—there’s a depth that will never be stirred; there’s intimacy that will never be touched. I’ve come to find much greater value in my vulnerability, in my feeling, in my depth. Even if it’s like participating in a relationship that sits too close to the bone of my own history. One that keeps repeating itself.

*****

Time heals all wounds. History repeats itself. I hear this jargon. I laugh at the clichés. It’s as tender as it is repulsive. Time doesn’t heal the deepest wounds, the ones closest to the bone. Imago theory states that we attract partners who mirror the wounds of our caregivers, in search for a better ending. We want to rewrite our own history. Our history lives inside of us, and time is not an answer. Time is not the eraser. Time is not invisible ink. Time lessens the sting, and it is then buried into the deep ravines of our being. Time only blurs the experience. What we bury, we also carry. It will return for its haunting eventually.

My choices are the equivalent of gulping my younger self’s grief. I’m tending to my wounds with different flesh, a different face, a different body. Rotating doors of relational mirrors. Relational band aids ripping off before the blood has a chance to clot. Time does not heal all wounds, our choices do. History does not repeat itself if we remember to choose differently. I don’t think I need a removed, indifferent man with a band aid. I refuse to keep introducing my younger self to the same wound wearing a different man’s face—because at some point, I was the one bringing him through the door.

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

-Charles Bukowski

I drove to the rink an hour and a half away so no one would recognize me. Anonymity felt important. I didn’t want to jump back into the world I had convinced myself had broken me. I wanted to dip my toes in. I didn’t want anyone to ask me why I’m coming back because I didn’t have the answer to such a complicated question. I wasn’t coming back. This was definitely not a comeback. Don’t get any crazy ideas, I’d tell my mother. I was simply seeing why I loved to skate in the first place because I had looked at figure skating in the same way that I looked at some ex-boyfriends: what was I thinking?

Once upon a time, it wasn’t obsessive or perfectionistic or laborious. It was beautiful and cathartic—the way I made sense of myself in a world that could be difficult and unrelenting. I called it my church. I glided on the fringes of frozen water and swore to be baptized by it. Yet I forgot why.

I wanted to remember that. I feel like I owed myself that. To remember the why. Adult me had survived disappointments, but adult me was running out of answers. For some reason, my ten-year-old self seemed to know more about life than I did. I consulted her, but she did nothing for clarity. All she could say was: Go. Don’t be annoying. God you can be so annoying. Stop living in your head. Just go.

Good to know she hasn’t changed much.

*****

I had that feeling where my happiness needed a place to go, otherwise I’d implode into stardust. Skating a perfect program at Nationals is one thing, doing it twice when the stakes are higher is another. Have you ever delivered under a pressure so immense it could practically break the sound barrier? Mine was a pressure of my own making, built slowly from expectation until there was hardly any room left to breathe. Meeting that expectation in a few moments is a super power.

Competition ice made me want to run every time, yet I kept coming back, returning to the pain as if it had something left to prove of me. Despite the need to bolt, I’d done it again. Two perfect programs. I walked away from that Nationals in Cape Cod, Massachusetts as a two-time National Champion.

I watch that video of me at Nationals to remember that feeling. Exuberance exploding like a firecracker, a smile so wide I had to open my mouth to contain it. The elation felt so overwhelming; I had no choice but to weep. Ironic, isn’t it? We cry in our grief, and we cry in our joy. Tears don’t pick a lane. But what I want to remember is that joy that brought me to tears. Joy of that nature feels so overwhelming because it is created solely by the self. I did that. Do you see what I just did? Do you know how impossible these hurdles felt? Yet look at you. There is something intoxicating about realizing you are capable of creating a feeling that no one else can give you. And once you’ve experienced that kind of joy, it’s hard not to spend the rest of your life searching for another way to find it.

When I forget what I’m capable of, I watch the video of me at the end of my last program at Nationals. It’s so easy for me to get caught in the idea that pain is our currency for existence, something we must withstand continually. But what if joy is the souvenir we’re supposed to collect? Pain is often the loudest voice in the room, but what if I stopped mistaking volume for truth?

*****

I arrive at the Cube in Valencia. I don’t have a familiar parking spot, the little corner beneath the fir tree where there was always plenty of shade. I used to leave my car at my old rink for hours at a time, as if I knew exactly where I belonged. Yet this wasn’t my home, it was the house of a distant cousin. I was a visitor. It was perfect. I waltz into the strange familiarity of an ice rink, where everything feels foreign and familiar at once. I hoist open the heavy double doors, and the smell hits me before anything else—sweat seeped into every nook and cranny. Burnt rubber. Damp carpet. The stale, humid stench of an ice rink. Every rink wafts the same scent. To anyone who hasn’t spent their life in a rink, it might seem like something to escape. To me, it smells like a place I never really left. Little boys as tall as my hip run by in hockey garb, a coach is talking to a helicopter parent who looks concerned; an entire microcosm of my existence came flooding back, like it forgot I never left.

I find a spot in the corner upstairs and get my body to revive itself. I’m not 10-years-old anymore. I can’t hop on the ice and go right to a double salchow without 30 minutes, at minimum, of warming up. The last thing I need is a pulled hamstring. When I sit down to lace up my skates, I pull them from my bag and stare at them, suddenly unsure what to do with something that once felt like an extension of my body. I had these boots custom made during my time in the Bay Area, where I drove to Harlick and met the legends that made the same boots for Peggy Flemming and Scott Hamilton and Kristy Yamagucci. Harlick was a family business. When they found out they had been making my boots since I was 10, they gave me the royal treatment. A tour of the shop. Stories of the greats coming to visit. I had finally lived within proximity and could finally see where all that magic happened. I got those boots just months before I decided to move to Hawaii. They were practically new. I feel a pang of disappointment. I feel sad about the what-ifs.

I get on the ice and feel the unease of familiarity. My body knows what to do before I do. It’s eerie, like a ghost lives inside me and comes out when provoked. I’ve been haunted by ice my whole life, I think. I hover close to the boards, sticking to the periphery, my bag hoisted over my right shoulder and water bottle in a gloved hand. I look down and squeeze my feet together in the same way I used to teach my little ones.

I think of my former student, Shirley. When she came into my class on a Saturday morning, I learned very quickly that she was a crier. I coached for so long that I knew the criers were masking their fear, so I hoisted her on my hip and told her she doesn’t need to be scared. That I’ve got her. She eventually stops crying, yet every time I try to set her down, her legs collapse like they forgot how to work. Waterworks ensue. I pick her up again. I hold her the entire class. Later, she would take private lessons with me. By then, Shirley loved to skate. She smiled the entire time. I’d always joke that I wasn’t the coach to take a skater to the Olympics, I was just there to turn the criers into smilers. I laugh to myself at the memories, remembering I had a knack for teaching children how to love skating. That knowledge might come in handy.

*****

When I left skating, I was curt and decisive. I never wanted to look at a sheet of ice again. The deciding came all at once. There was no bargaining, no thinking about it. It was decided-- like something took my brain and manipulated it to see beyond what my limited perspective could see. I knew I had a problem. I knew that walking into an ice rink was the equivalent of an alcoholic walking into a bar. I had an eating disorder, and figure skating was not the healthiest environment for me. I had finally quieted the charade of maybes and what-ifs—those small, persistent questions about whether I should leave for good. Because whatever had made its way into my thoughts had gumption behind it, like something cosmic had rearranged itself around an inevitable resistance and obliterated it entirely. The idea to leave figure skating, eject from my life in San Francisco and move to Hawaii didn’t seem like some far-off idea I’d consider eventually. No. Every part of me was pressing the eject button, and I couldn’t get away fast enough. I was building a new reality with desperation and urgency, one on an island as far from figure skating as I could get. I thought if I could put enough miles between myself and the ice, I could finally outrun the girl I had become because of it. So I ran, and I called it saving myself.

*****

I set my bag down near the penalty box, my water bottle on the boards. I take a deep breath. Then I take off.

I had been here before, coming back to the ice like some masochistic boomerang. I stopped skating sometime around high school after breaking my tailbone twice, which was about as brutal as it sounds. I had been exhausted by the mental hurdles and time demands. I wanted to live a normal life, for once. I wanted high school to be high school--not just a major life event I orbit around, never fully stepping inside. I left back then for less dramatic reasons. Later, I’d come back to the ice in my twenties. A chunk of time had passed, yet that first return felt like magic. My twenties felt like one long search for something to soothe what was broken in me. And somehow, the ice felt like medicine. I needed skating then. It gave my brain an off-switch. It felt euphoric, like a love story I didn’t have language for. Yet now, in this return, I had lived an entirely new life. I created an ecosystem that even forgot about the existence of skating it my life. It was just something I did a long time ago.

This time, I don’t need to grip onto figure skating. I don’t need it to fix me, and I don’t blame it for breaking me. I’m only answering to its mysterious pull.

The first laps were not whimsical or easy. I felt the labor, the struggle, the pain. My body was not as young as it once was, aches presented themselves that weren’t there before. Yet instead of constriction, it felt like a release. Like the struggle and the pain of doing what I had once loved felt like the point. How I’ve denied the struggle, hated it even, but what if that was the lesson all along? What if I loved the struggle, but hated how my mind punished me for it?

*****

I return to the rink and hour and half away every Tuesday for many consecutive weeks. To feel my body ache and hurt and struggle, but it felt different than it ever had. During my time in Hawaii, I healed myself. Not by grasping onto something to fix me, but by learning how to stay with myself through the hard parts. I learned to quiet the cruel, unrelenting voice in my head and change the way I spoke to myself. Slowly, my mind became a gentler place to live. And when I stepped back onto the ice, I realized just how much I had changed—not because the old voice was gone, but because, for the first time, I knew how to quiet it. The struggle my body felt didn’t feel like punishment—it felt like liberation. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped fighting myself. Something in me had finally learned how to turn punishment into overcoming.

When I left skating and San Francisco, the decision was immediate—as if something beyond my understanding took my brain and manipulated it to see beyond what my limited perspective at the time could see. It had surpassed the initial thoughts of maybe I have an eating disorder and I can’t do this anymore. It wasn’t just that. Whatever had made its way into my thoughts had gumption behind it. It had momentum. Like something cosmic had rearranged itself around my resistance and obliterated it entirely. The idea to leave figure skating, eject from my life in San Francisco and move to Hawaii didn’t seem like some far-off idea I’d consider eventually. No. This body informed my thoughts which were beyond possibility. I was reorienting myself to a new reality. One on an island as far away from figure skating I could get.

We all just want someone or something to point a finger at, to place the blame on. It’s hard to admit that sometimes, we are the problem. Every story has its perpetrator. Every story has its victim. Victim is an easier role to assume; it eliminates the burden of accountability. Being accountable feels equivalent to someone chewing too loudly, nails on a chalkboard, when a man with a ridiculous opinion has a microphone—and shouldn’t. Accountability is cringy, and I don’t particularly enjoy taking it on, although sometimes I’d tell you otherwise.

All of that to say, I blamed figure skating for almost everything. I blamed it for the eating disorder. The crippling perfectionism. The endless chasing of perfection that, underneath it all, was just another disguise for a more inherent desire—to be loved, I think. I blamed it for anything fragile or tender within me. Everything vulnerable and defenseless. I took the easy route, pushed the eject button, and left. I moved to Hawaii. I said goodbye. I didn’t look back for a very long time.

I thought I had failed when I left, but that’s the lie they tell you about failure: that it means the story is over. If you do it right, failure begets an appetite for resilience. And resilience is a noiseless chamber. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t ask to be witnessed. It simply sits there, waiting for you to notice what you’ve survived.

Later, I’d return to the rink that raised me. The one I took my first laps in my first pair of pearly white skates. The one I came back to in my twenties, the one I created a whole identity around. I walk in, and I’m surrounded by people who have championed me for decades. I wonder what I was hiding from, driving so far away to not be seen. I feel at home, like I always have, and wonder what I was hiding from. When I tap my coach on the shoulder who became a pseudo family member, she looks at me as if I never left. Her eyes become teary and mine follow.

It’s strange how we avoid the places we spend years trying to escape only to find that we never really leave them. Ice is slippery, skating is still hard no matter how easy we make it look, the smell is still terrible- and somehow, I am home.

Just watch for my comeback. This time it will be epic.

I’m not the story you made of me.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit’s Manifesto

You live your life your way and leave me alone.

—Mary Oliver

A note on names: Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people mentioned in this essay. The stories and experiences are my own, but certain details have been altered for privacy.

Amanda was born a mouth, and then she grew around it. My brother has been saying this about me, his little sister, since before I knew to question it. It’s interesting what such a minuscule sentence can do to a little girl: how quickly it can turn a personality trait into a character flaw. I was essentially born without an indoor voice and have spent the rest of my life being told that it was a defect, that it was something to be fixed. I’ve always assumed my brother was referring to my voice and the volume of its projection, but as I’ve matured, I’m aware he may have been accidentally describing something larger, something more significant.

---------

I’m at soccer practice at the ripe age of eight, my sunbaked blonde hair is holding on for dear life in a disheveled ponytail, flyaways sticking to my forehead. I am red-in-the-face, and although I’m only eight, I don’t tend to mess around on a soccer field. My coaches have affectionately gifted me nicknames like “Spark Plug” and “Baywatch” over the years. I intuitively knew I had the habit of being a favorite among coaches, yet I’d never say that out loud. The daughter of one of my coaches, Julia, happens to be on my team, and I’m learning she is a bit of a nightmare. She’s on the sidelines, throwing a temper tantrum—and her mother, my coach, is visibly annoyed. I ignore Julia’s antics and don’t care much for her attention-grabbing annoyances. I continue to mind my own business.

Within minutes, I have that visceral feeling of my skin tightening, my throat closing, my insides rearranging themselves, and a flutter surfaces from beneath my ribs. The feeling I’ve done something significantly wrong begins to reveal itself. I take off, a slow trot accelerating to brisk jog, and notice an incessant tug to look over my shoulder.

And there it was.

Eyes are on me.

A look of contempt from Miss Julia Harrow herself—the one who would famously throw a temper tantrum at every soccer practice.

She’s looking at me like she ought to put me on a kabab and roast me for dinner. She whispers to a teammate, not breaking eye contact. They both start laughing. I look behind me, no one is there. It’s me, I think. They are laughing at me. They are mocking and glaring at me as if my audacity to exist was repulsive, disgusting even. It was the first of many times I would see that look—the same expression, rotating from face to face, from girl to woman over the years. My inherent refusal to shrink, my taking up space was a problem to be fixed. Julia Harrow found the need to encourage said fixing, even throughout middle school.

I am cripped with insecurity by the time I’m twelve and tiptoeing through tumultuous sixth grade. I am awkward and pale from living inside an ice rink, and although I skate like a gazelle, my presence and posture off the ice is hunched and hiding. I am the product of a terrible haircut; the inevitable adolescent frizz has given my shoulder length bob its own personality. I had yet to be introduced to the miracle tool that would eventually become a straightening iron. I have bangs that are curled with a looped precision that would make Tara Lipinski jealous—those iconic bangs looked like they were cut in 1998 and never got the memo. A swipe of blue eyeshadow and glitter rims my eyes; my tropical fruit-smelling Smackers lip gloss has been smothered over my mouth with reckless abandon. I avoid mirrors--I can’t stand my smile with all that metal in the way. The only thing I have going for me is a brand-new matching set from Limited Too- an icy blue skort and coordinating v-neck sweater. I was a walking snowflake.

At the time a local dance studio would host ‘socials’ bi-weekly for middle schoolers, and my angsty pre-teen self lived for them. I was excited to attend the last social before Christmas; I arrive giddy and ready to swoon over boys from other schools. My excitement immediately dwindled as I walked in-- Julia Harrow’s narrow eyes from across the dance floor are burning into mine like they could seer off my eyelashes. It was the first time I had seen her in a few years. We were separated after elementary school and that one season of soccer, and I was relieved we ended up at different middle schools. I had made the choice to go to a different high school than I was zoned for and wanted to grow up and attend school around the same crowd I’d be going to high school with.

I rush into the bathroom. I hide in a stall to get away from the girls gossiping about boys and reapplying layer after layer of Smackers lip gloss. I sit down, putting my head in my hands, contemplating my next move. I could go home. I could call Mom and fake a sudden illness. I don’t have to face her. But wait, I should face her. Should I? Yes, I should. Yes, I will. I get up, put a cloak of armor around my fragile adolescent neuroses, and emerge from the bathroom gathering all guts and hopeful glory. Said guts and glory lived a short life, unfortunately. I tried though, didn’t I?

I sat down with my friends as the dancing started, friends who I watched slowly disappear as they were asked to dance with their crushes. One by one, they left my side until I was the only one left without an invitation. I look around. What’s wrong with me? I ask, silently. Later, I would find out that my hiding in the bathroom was of most benefit to Julia Harrow. My disappearance meant that she would tell all the boys we knew to not to ask me to dance, under any circumstance. You can imagine what such an experience can do to the psyche of an already insecure twelve-year-old--it was unfortunate that all the boys submitted to Julia’s demands.

Later, in high school, I’d eventually emerge from pre-teen pubescent awkwardness. Most of my nagging ugly-duckling beliefs had been brushed off—my smile was pearly white, and my hair had grown long with light-catching been-at-the- beach-all-day highlights. No more frizz, thanks to the straightening iron. The ugly duckling I’d grown accustomed to was growing into a swan. I survived most of high school unscathed by the likes of Julia Harrow by mere lack of proximity-- minus the random run-ins at our rival high school’s parties we’d sometimes crash on a Friday night. Julia was old news, but little did I know, she would be replaced and replicated by an equally cruel perpetrator.

-----

It’s Friday night, and I’m dancing on the sidelines with poms in my hand, the black and gold ribbons in my hair blow in the breeze, decorating my high and mighty ponytail. I’m being especially loud and admittedly obnoxious after my handsome 6’4 boyfriend, our team’s star wide receiver scores a touchdown. Before he joins his team for celebratory chest bumps and a few whacks to the helmet, he points at me and I subsequently blow him a kiss. I know, eye roll. It’s not the NFL, but we have our little ritual of celebrating—we do this the entire season. It’s offensively cliché: the football player, the cheerleader-- my life may have been worthy of a high school movie. I’m jumping up and down, cheerleader turned kangaroo, basking in the-soon-to-be-win. I was different than the cheerleaders you see in the movies, tilting their head saying what’s a touchdown? I know the game better than most, some boys included. Sometimes the wrong cheers were called for the wrong point of the game, and I’d yell down the line WE ARE NOT ON OFFENSE, do you see our quarterback on the field? I roll my eyes at the ignorance. I know the plays, the formations, and I know when my boyfriend is “going long” and his spiderman hands will cradle the football like one cradles a newborn straight into the endzone. When my boyfriend scores a touchdown, it’s not just about him and our silly high school romance. It’s about the team. It’s about the win. I was emotionally invested, and that likely was a bit annoying. I’ll admit. I was voted “Most Spirited” by my senior class, for god’s sake.

By senior year, Stephanie Warner had decided she did not appreciate any of this. It started small. A little mocking here. A little mirroring there—parroting my loud celebrations, pretending to blow a kiss at her imaginary boyfriend. It was small enough to dismiss, and easy enough to laugh off. Then the small things grew fangs and began to show their teeth.

She put bugs in the coaches’ ears, my position in formations in the front began to dwindle towards the back. She made up gossip about me. Found new ways to turn whoever would listen against me—she’d find new tactics to make me the punchline of a story I didn’t volunteer myself for. What had once felt like a few stray splinters became something more deliberate, more difficult to outrun.

By the time basketball season rolled around, I had begun to dim. I became more careful with my voice, my laughter, my movements. I learned to watch myself before anyone else could. I withdrew from high school cheerleading in a way I didn’t anticipate, changing my focus to competitive cheer with my teammates I could be myself around. She took a time when I should have been becoming more of myself and made me afraid of the parts of me that were easiest to see.

Since my school days, I’ve encountered plenty of Julias and Stephanies--it’s a pattern I haven’t escaped. What’s strange, is how often the circumstances have followed the same script: I’m minding my own business, being myself—authentic, loud, occasionally too much—and someone I had given very little thought to suddenly turns themselves into a human spear and decides I am the very thing they need to pierce. I learned very young that you don’t have to do anything wrong to become someone’s target.

When the same pattern has perpetuated itself enough, I stopped wondering why someone is being cruel and started to wonder what they saw in me. Why I deserved that sort of treatment. It’s classic societal conditioning. It’s human nature to shape our entire personalities on the premise of what other’s think. It’s natural to use cues from others to shape our personality. We are a tribal species, and our lizard brains liken inclusion to survival. We will adapt to be liked because our lives once depended on it.

I have a natural-born defiance to not conform to the idea of a quiet, subservient woman, and the cruelty of some little girls and women has over time carved me into a shape more palatable, and more compliant. Other’s discomfort has become a mirror, and I’ve spent years mistaking their reflection for my own. I lowered the octave of my voice. I became more subdued. I was less inclined to make myself seen. I bargained with the parts of myself that were too much, too loud, too enthusiastic, too emotional, too visible and even too insecure. Fortunately for me, acting from a place that isn’t authentic is not sustainable, and like a leaky faucet, the truest parts of me have always found ways to seep out.

This is not a story about little girls, adolescents and women who have hurt me. I don’t want to write a victim’s memoir. There are enough stories about women hurting women—what I’m asking is why we keep handing each other the weapons. Cruelty, in essence, is a tool to eliminate competition and project one’s internalized insecurity onto its subject. A woman can easily make others uncomfortable with her confidence or agency, and my experiences over decades is the prime example of that. Females will willingly excommunicate one another in order to build a fortress around their fragility and lack of confidence.

It’s a societal and systematic issue, and it’s not as individual as you’d think. A woman does not bully another woman because she’s jealous. She bullies another woman because she sees an aspect of the victim that she has disowned from herself. The parts of her personhood that she has been conditioned to not only hate in herself, but project the hate onto others. If she has been told she’s too loud, she will hate the loudness she sees in others. Men aren’t the ones mainly forcing women into submission. Often, it’s women doing it to one another—a brilliant piece of conditioning, if I don’t say so myself. The system is most effective when it no longer needs anyone outside of us to enforce it--the perpetuation coming from the very people who could have been our allies: women who share our gender, our history, our wounds. And the most successful tormentors don’t stop at bullying their victims. For me, they got inside my beliefs about myself, my insecurities, the parts of myself that just want to be liked and included. These women and girls had taught me to see myself through the same distorted lens. That is where the real damage was done. I became the one holding the muzzle over my authentic loudness, my inherent too muchness.

Since women are at times powerless towards societal conditioning, we find power where we can. Because females have historically lacked institutional power, we have mastered psychological warfare instead. We have learned to grasp at straws and swing them as swords.

As I get older, I’ve learned how to handle these types of traumas. It’s a natural evolution for a woman to grow into herself and shed all the layers of conditioning until she’s ripe in authenticity. My evolving has been no different. There’s hope, too. I notice women championing each other, I notice women seeing the flaws in our oppression and policing. I have no desire to dim myself for the sake of someone else’s comfort. I see women joining hands in the same revolution. As a former competitive figure skater, watching the Milan Olympics this last year, and seeing our gold medalist Alysa Liu hug Ami Nakai as she learned of her bronze medal, showed me that I am not wrong. A former sport constructed on the drama of female rivalries and cruel competitors has turned into a testament of friendship and championing one another. If it can happen in figure skating, it can happen anywhere.

I used to get so angry at my brother for naming the part of my personality that I spent years denying, hating even. I can, however, admit that he was right. I think I was born to be loud for a reason--maybe all those years of being told to lower my voice, to dim the “too much” were never really about volume. Maybe they were about making myself easier to tolerate and easier to contain. I have no desire to be contained anymore. So yes. I am loud. I’m loud simply because I’ve got shit to say.

“We were together. I forget the rest.” -Walt Witman

My new neighbor sat in the center of the lawn, her legs crossed like Buddha, like applesauce, like Shiva, like a prayer, like a grandmother. She looked about my age--picking at the grass, her long chestnut braid falling down the middle of her back, wearing a sad but expectant look. It was if she was waiting for someone. Who was she waiting for? I ride my bike back and forth on the sidewalk, trying not to look at her. I can’t help myself. She catches me. How embarrassing. Big brown expectant eyes are on me. I smile. She smiles back. I continue on--I do another loop, tormenting myself to break the ice. Just talk to her, I think. As I make my way to the front of her house, I take a deep breath. I stop my bike, the pink one with the streamers on the handle bars. “Hi! I’m Amanda. You must be my new neighbor. I live right there,” I say pointing down the street. She looks excited, like she must have been waiting for me, like she must have known I’d come. “Hi, I’m Monique! We just moved here. Do you want to be friends?”

If only adults could make friends that way. You look at someone, they look at you, and you decide to be friends. You make a verbal agreement. That’s it. It’s done. We make things so complicated now. Coordinating schedules, various life paths, the kids, the not having kids, the courting, the slow process of unfolding. Why can’t we just look at each other and say, “Do you want to be friends?”

It seems like we never really left each other after that day. Do you want to come inside? she asks. I leave my bike on the grass, toppled over like a gravestone of its lonely rider. Her Mom stands over the stove, swaying her hips, doing the cha-cha, hand in the air like it’s carrying a macarena. She brings the wooden spoon to her mouth and does a wiggle. Delicioso, she says. Later, we sit at the dining room table; she spoons into my bowl a heap of rice, beans, and ground beef with flavor that popped. Cuban cooking is otherworldly. I inhale an entire bowl. Are you sure your parents feed you? They feed me, just not like this! They laugh, vivacious and with their whole bodies. They lived like that in Cuba, her family. Her parents tell a harrowing story of their escape when they were small children. They had miraculously boarded one of the last planes to leave when Castro’s dangerous guerilla revolution had gained momentum. Rick’s father was held at gunpoint, in front of his children—yet somehow his father boarded the plane unscathed. They left their homes in Cuba, they left everything material behind-- but carried their culture with them as if it was the only bright thread connecting them to the life they left behind. Cubans are a special kind of people. They never hold themselves back. They live expressively and lively and viscerally and richly. They paint their worlds magenta and chartreuse. If they love you, they tell you.

They told me they loved me after a few weeks. It made me uncomfortable. My parents didn’t even do that. Well, my mother did when she would tuck me in, when she would say goodnight-- but she hasn’t done that in a while. I wasn’t sure if my father even knew what that meant. He didn’t know what love was. But Monique’s parents? They loved me. And they told me. They told me all the time. I love you mijah, they would say, as if I was one of their own.

Once, in middle school, we both wanted layers cut into our hair like Rachel from Friends. Face framing, bouncy perfection. My haircut was later; my mother wanted Francine to do it. We only trusted Francine. We hop into her Dad’s white Cadillac, the beige leather seats cooled by the air conditioning always blasting, no matter the weather. It was a luxury. My parents didn’t turn the air on like that in their cars. In Cuba, Rick would say, we didn’t have air conditioning. We crank it here, mijah. Because we can! We tell him to play our favorite Jennifer Lopez song, the bass vibrating our kidneys, people looking at us from the street to see where the commotion was coming from. We get to the hair salon in the mall. She wants layers! We say. The hair stylist looks at us, two earnest 12-year-olds. She grimaces telling us that layers are high maintenance. They require blow drying. Styling. Let’s try something else. What about a bob? What about bangs? An hour later, Monique’s hair is done. She has a bob. She has bangs. She looks at me. I look at her. She hates it. We immediately start laughing. Bright, vivid laughs. With our whole bodies. They taught me how over the years. You look so cute, mijah! Rick says. Rick would say she looks cute no matter what her hair looked like. She starts laughing. I hate it! She looked like Lord Farquaad. She says it will grow out, and it did eventually. Her long chestnut braid was down her back after one trip around the sun. Only Monique could laugh at a bad hair cut, even at the tender age of 12, even if the boys were repulsed by it.

As we got older, as high school loomed over our heads, her parents tell us they are moving to Colorado, to be with family. We are devastated, but we don’t know it. When she hugs my mother on the day we say goodbye, she doesn’t let go. She is crying with her whole body. Always her whole body. We promise to be best friends forever.

Later, when I was starving myself, I learned that she was starving herself, too. Later, when I learned she had lupus, I had just gotten my Hashimoto’s diagnosis. Two girls who once laughed with their whole bodies had grown into women learning, in different ways, what it meant to live inside them-- even if our bodies weren’t skinny enough, even if our bodies weren’t perfect, even if our bodies were sick. We both had to learn the hard way to stop treating our bodies like problems to solve. Maybe that is how we will always be connected: by the bodies that betrayed us, the bodies we betrayed, and the bodies that kept us here anyway.

Maybe we never healed when she moved away.

Maybe we were never supposed to.

But sometimes I still think about that little girl on the pink bicycle, circling the block, trying to work up the courage to say hello. She didn’t know it yet, but she was about to meet someone who would teach her how to laugh loudly, eat hungrily, love extravagantly, and take up the whole damn room.

I just wish we had both remembered those little girls in our darkest of dark nights. Maybe they could have saved us. Maybe we just forgot they were still there.

Because the stakes are so high, because we are so overwhelmed by both the power and the fragility of love, we regularly find ourselves catatonic with confusion about what it all means and what it asks of us. We mistake much for love— admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love— an idea bagged with millennia of cultural mythologies— and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

-Maria Popova

He zeroed in on me, squinting his eyes, right eye squeezed tightly shut, a wink held with intention. His mouth watering, heart thumping, pupils dilated, precision and focus right on the bullseye-- the center target must have been somewhere on my chest. He knew what he was doing. The guy, he knew how to hunt. But this wasn’t some duck hunt. It was me he was after. He sat down, looked at me in the eye and said, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Those first bomb-dropping, explosion-inducing words he ever spewed at me.

I know. I’d roll my eyes, too. If I’d had a water glass in my hand, I’d have raised it to my lips, mid-sip, spitting it out, a watery projectile straight at his face. My intuition, my inner bullshit meter in the red. I’d laugh, sort of cackle-like.

Ha ha, you’re full of shit, I’d say.

Instead, my eyes narrowed, chucking that one line at him. You know the one.

I bet you say that to all the girls.

He laughed. Looked both ways like he was crossing the street into this appealing territory that was me. No, he said, I don’t.

I rolled my eyes. But still, somehow--believed him.

When he later told me I was home, I believed him. When he told me I was his everything, I believed him too. When he would send a message in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday: Amanda Lynn Blackwell, I love you. I believed him. I screenshot it for safekeeping. When he had tears in his eyes the first time we parted ways, returning to his work-life on the mainland, the start of our intermittent long-distance love- I believed in his sincerity. When he told me I was everything he ever wanted, his dream girl, I believed that too. When told me he’s got me, and I’m safe, and if I’m ever scared of the carpet being pulled from beneath me, he’d say, that rug is gorilla glued to the floor, babe. I believed him.

Love bombing is a modern and buzz worthy term coined for the mostly avoidant types, the kind that both ache for love but tragically want nothing to do with it. It’s a heart-wrenching epidemic in modern dating, and these relationships flow in and out like the tides. They leave as quickly as they come.

How often do we jump into relationships with an almost panicky sense of urgency, while simultaneously being yanked by the person on the other side? It’s seemingly difficult to pump the breaks when the whirlwind feels so good. It’s a special kind of exhilarating. It’s satiating. It feels easy. It feels right. Yet there was a voice inside of me, a notch above muted, a quiet whisper that said slow down. Like an alcoholic who can’t have just one drink, my historical ache for love will insinuate the rush, the too-soon all-in, despite a quiet nudge from intuition.

Sometimes, when others want to alleviate my pain, they tell me I still have lessons to learn, cognitive dissonance to re-write. These lessons often arrive on a carriage pulled by my lovers-- they keep me captive, the nestle themselves inside my organs and tissues until I learn from them. These lessons will keep calling until I answer. I glance out my window, and there they are. They wait in a blacked-out SUV parked outside my house. They are annoyingly patient and relentlessly persistent. They follow me like a shadow, running red lights, on my tail, cannot be avoided. They don’t care how fast I drive to get away—they will always catch up. They won’t leave until they have taught me exactly what I need to know.

But that whole falling for him part? I was hijacked. It was easy.

I picked him up at the airport for the first time after his few-week work stint. I meet him at the curb, and my heart spills into my belly. He’s standing there and I zero in on him as if he’s the only person standing in this tropical airport terminal. His dark shades, his salt and pepper five-o-clock shadow, his casual coolness that makes him look both broody and alluring, and I wonder how it’s fair that a man could be this good-looking. I sharply suck in a pile of air between my front teeth, hold it in, and spew it out as I push open the driver’s side door. I’m pulled towards him like he’s yanking on an invisible rope tethered between us, where he drops his surfboard he carries in his hand and kisses me like we are anywhere but the airport. With tender urgency. Not the kind where he wants to throw me into a bedroom, but the kind that asks, where have you been all my life?

He gets into my car and grabs my hand. I roll the windows down and tell him my air conditioning broke and I’m sorry but don’t worry, I’ll drive fast. Both of us were oozing under a layer of humidity that dampened our necks and glistened our faces, but he didn’t flinch at my minor shortcoming. He tells me he will fix it. He follows it with I got you and I melt because it’s like rubbing a sweet, soothing salve onto all my wounds. It’s the words I ache to hear. That someone has got me.

He squeezes my hand as I smile over at him.

I tell him, You know, I’m really just a mess when it comes down to it.

He says, I love your mess.

I say, I’m not so sure about that, and he looks at me dead pan and says, Yes. I’m sure.

He then laughs to himself and mentions something about kicking an hour glass over on its side and time stopping. My eyes are wide as I look at him, that warm Hawaiian air kissing my face. Who’s the writer here? I say. He laughs.

You can have it, he says. You can have it all.

Weeks later, I felt the shift, and I felt it immediately. It was swift. It knocked the air right out of me. He had a certain way with words, they hit me right in the jugular. He knew how to hook me, and he knew exactly how to do it. Yet when his steady stream of love bombing began to quiet, I tapped my ear as if I was tapping a vein. More I whispered, mirroring an addict. I needed his validation. I was high on it. He gave me my fix. I needed him to stay and fill my tender voids like he promised- but without his words, I knew where it was headed. Inaudibly, as his words slipped, I knew he had too.

I had left it all outside. His things. I watched him grab it all without hesitation, through this small crack in the door. Men like him know how to leave without much thought. A form of torture, a relational inferno--watching a man you love’s feet moving in the opposite direction. I lay there dormant, buried inside myself, tragically stoic.

After he drove away, and the hum of the truck melted into the highway traffic, I got up. Women who had obsessed over men and their unavailability had repulsed me from a young age, and I still refuse to be that type of woman. I am not a pathetic woman. My mother did not raise a pathetic woman.

In the aftermath, all that remained of him was the brief whiff of his clothes that had hung next to mine, where I am caught off guard one morning as I’m wrestling through my sock drawer. He physically left, but this residue of him lingered. The pieces of him that I saw whenever I looked in the mirror-- the parts of me that I had continued to turn away from. I had wanted to come back to myself. To peer under the bed and stretch my arm out to the wounded girl that hid underneath, telling her it’s safe, that I have her, that we don’t have to go through that again.

When I say that I was love-bombed, I don’t mean in it the same way that I was destroyed. Perhaps parts of me went missing into the catacombs of hope, including my better judgement. But sometimes we need to be destroyed to become something else. Sometimes we need to get flattened to rearrange ourselves and grow taller, more whole, more aware. Sometimes we need to stumble away from men like these to know we will never put ourselves through turmoil of that nature again. Years later, he would emerge from where he went, resurrecting with regret. He’d apologize with faux sincerity, waving a white flag, finding some way to wiggle back in. He thought I’d be waiting for his return, thumping my tail like an old hound at his arrival, but I know better. Lovebombers will eventually stew in a regret of their own doing, and come back around when they realize what they left. These days, I know fools gold when I see it. There was nothing to do but walk away with a knowing I’ll carry with me: I might be easy from some to leave, but I’m undoubtably harder to forget.

“Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.”

-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I sit in that condo that’s not mine. It’s not anyone’s. At least not anyone who is here. Let’s try to find somewhere by the beach, we thought. That would be nice. That would make us feel better. Yet we did not go to the beach. Not once. We did not go to her for the reprieve she was intended for, the one that we needed. It was winter. It rained. It rained almost every day. The weather will mirror you in that way. It’s weeping when you are.

I sit on the bed. Not my bed. A bed. I feel that primal tug, that feeling that you get when you want to be somewhere that belongs to you. Nothing belonged to me. Whatever did, it doesn’t any longer. I let myself go there for a few minutes. I know it will ache when I’m done. I’ll be homesick for a home that is no longer a home. But I do it anyway.

I’m in my little house at the nape of Kalalea. The place where the Dalai Llama said was a vortex. Where souls enter Earth to inhabit bodies. A birthplace from another realm. My little house sat below it. I let that mean something. It had to mean something.

I spent a lot of time in my house. In my little house. With the kitchen outside, with the bathroom an entirely separate structure. Not an outhouse. A bathroom. A proper one. With wood floors and cabinets and lights and hot water. But you had to go outside to get inside. If you know what I mean. My little house didn’t have an address. It did, for formal reasons. Yet the postal service didn’t think it was an address. But I did. My little house was down a dirt road without a name. I gave directions based on landmarks. Once you see the 15-mile- marker, pay attention. When you come up on the big yellow sign, turn right on the dirt road. My neighbor Jeff lived down the road, he fixed my surfboards. They would sometimes hit the reef and get an ouchie. I always tried to pay him. He never let me. I miss when people did things out of goodness, for no other reason than to be good. In my little house, my desk was makai facing. Meaning the side where the ocean lives. It was littered with Post-It notes. Like my thoughts threw up and needed somewhere to go. Lines I’d think of at random, ones I wanted to use. The trades would sweep through the screen door like a kind of mercy. The windows were always left open. Sometimes, the Post-Its would blow away. Like being swept up by language. I loved that. I loved catching them mid-air. Little love notes I could hold in my palm.

My couch had a bookshelf worth of books stacked on the back. Everything was bright. Yellows. Pinks. Blues. It was inviting. It was cozy. And everything was mine. My little house lost her appeal when I got sick. Not cough cough sick. Sick sick. Sick in my bones sick. Sick in everywhere sick. I hated being in my little house. I hated sweating from that perpetual horizontal position, in the tacky and honeyed Hawaiian heat. I needed to leave my little house. I had to get out of my little house. Yet in that other house, in another state, the one by the beach that we never went to, the one we had to be in after the flood, the one that didn’t belong to us—I wished desperately for my little house. I wished desperately to reach through the film of that last month. Find the frame where everything changed. That one image where everything was taken away. I want to reach my hand through the frame and change the story. I want a different story. This was supposed to be a different story. I left my home on that little island and think that was it. That was the thick of it.

I think that I can leave it all behind.

I am wrong.

*****

He looked so out of place in my little house. Like he didn’t belong there. He was all limbs. Too much appendage for my little house. Too much man for my little house. Yet he stayed in my little house when he came to see me. Can you blame him? You offer a man who likes you a place to stay in Kauai, he will probably take it. He will book a flight right then. But it’s not like he was a free loader. He packed two extra bags for me. Two big ones. He paid the baggage fee to bring them home. He helped me move so many of my things across the Pacific. He was useful. He had a purpose. He liked being needed.

*****

I was captivating when he met me. The girl who lives in Kauai. The girl transitioning back to California. The girl that has lived many lives. The girl with a story. The girl with many stories. The girl who writes them. I was original. You couldn’t replicate me. I was never one to conform. I grew up in our California town, but I wasn’t branded by it. I wasn’t a 9-5’er looking for a picket fence. He knew this. How could it not add to the romanticized perception he had of me? On our first date we sat at a park. My now favorite park. The one with the dead people buried in its dirt. Who buries people in a park? It probably wasn’t a park when they were buried. It was probably a proper Cemetery. Then they made it a park. They call it “Cemetery Park”. The people who made these changes were not creative. We sat on a blanket in the park, late in August when the fog has lifted and the ocean sparkles. The time of year that’s full of promise. We gaped at the ocean because she was sparkling. She does that late afternoon, before the sun goes to sleep. She sparkles. I seemed to be sparkling, too.

He was even-keeled. Practical. Not a dreamer like me. Yet he was earnest and curious and good looking. He had a square jaw. Blue eyes. He dressed like he was ready for an adventure. A Patagonia ad. He would say “uh huh” in a way that meant “tell me more”. He often took his sunglasses off so he could look me in the eye. To prove a point. To prove to me that maybe I could trust him. Look me in the eye. See? Not so bad. Trust me. I know you want to.

Maybe. One day.

I’ll think about it.

*****

It’s 3 in the morning. I send him pictures of everything under water. The Christmas tree. My grandmother’s china. The pots. The dishes. The carpet. The couch. I had shipped my car back to the mainland-- it was just picked it up from its adventure crossing the Pacific. On a great big cargo ship. The car was under water too. The pictures I took on my phone looked like something you’d see on the news. Eventually the pictures made it on the news. But that night, at 3 in the morning, I sent the pictures just to him. No lengthy explanation. Just pictures. A Morse code of images translating the message: “SOS”.

He calls me at 5 in the morning, groggy. I could hear the worry in his voice. I tell him the story before I perfect the rehearsed one. I learned quickly that everyone just wants the gist of it. The bare bones. Spare me the details. Less horror, less utterable. Just tell me what happened. I tell him what happened. I feel my mouth forming words, but I have no idea what I’m saying. I think I make a joke. My car missed Kauai and wanted to go for a swim. Ha. Ha. He probably laughs. He says he has to go back to sleep. He says he will call me before his first patient. He asks if I’m okay. I tell him yes. I was okay.

I probably was not ok.

After the flood, he swooped in. Wearing a cape. What do you need? Yes, sleep here. Leave a toothbrush. I will drive you. You should eat. You’re not eating. Let me feed you. He took the shell off his car so we could use the board rack. I had to get my board to the water. We’d surf together a lot those first few weeks. I make him ride my pink and turquoise 9’2. He loves it. He loves surfing on my pink board. He says it protects his masculinity. Things are okay then. In the water. There is a nameless gaping hole to be filled and he fills it.

*****

Somewhere along these months, I realized what I called salvation was only a placeholder. I began to feel burdensome and pathetic. I was asking for too much when I really wasn’t asking for anything at all. It was just his assumption of the right thing to do. Yet I wanted to stop the needing. I wanted to stop gripping onto a person. People, I realize, are fallible and they will disappoint you. I wanted to feel alive again, but I was organizing myself in this transactional dynamic where it felt that I was taking more than I gave.

Someone once told me that it’s good for a man to feel needed, it gives them purpose. If you hand a man a pickle jar and ask him to open it for you, there’s not a single man that wouldn’t want to open that pickle jar. Men, I believe, have a tendency to be attracted to vulnerable women. Not in a malevolent way, like he would eat a lady alive, but in a way that he knows he can be of service. He can be of use. He has value he brings to the table. The moment I told him I’m going to focus on self-reliance, everything changed. I either took his value away or gave him permission to do what he wanted to do for months-- find the right time to erase himself from the story.

Soon after, he would sneak through that first opening. Soon after, he would spit catastrophe in my face. At a time he thought was acceptable enough to remain the good guy. That was important to him. Posturing himself as a good guy. But him and I, we can agree on something. It’s all just a disguise so he could do things like brush his teeth and meet himself in the mirror without flinching.

*****

Years later, I find a paragraph in my Notes on my iPhone:

He sometimes has so much curiosity and asks the right questions, yet it seems like he has only skimmed the surface. The facts. But what about that syrupy nook, the pulpy pit of me? I want to hand him my stories, shove them under his nose because it’s a golden ticket to my seedy neurosis, to my hallowed heart, to the parts of me I haven’t revealed. Don’t you want to plumb my soul? Don’t you want to see the velvet that spews from my tongue? Don’t you know there’s an achy abyss that only language can touch?

He never really did appreciate my writing. That’s because he never bothered to read it.

*****

This is where the narrator comes in with a broom, where the tidying up is done. This is where the narrator makes something beautiful out of the piles of proverbial devastation. Because what happened and the story of what happened are never the same thing. Emily Labarge writes in her memoir, Dog Days: “This, in the end, is what stories do, should be tasked with doing: creating possibilities that don’t yet exist, that evade or refuse the conventional, hackneyed, easily recognizable, particularly concerning, a life and its experiences—its mourning and melancholy, trapped in their endless metonymy. You can’t stay in either state forever, you have to leave the bell jar eventually. This, in the end, is why we have to be careful about what we tell and why we tell it.”

I tell this story as if I am a victim because I had assumed the position of a victim. How can a person do this to me, in my darkest hour? I despised him with clenched fists and brute force. He would eventually reach out for reconciliation, where I’d obliterate his character before he had the chance to apologize for it. I’m not proud of that person. I wish to eradicate that person. I was throwing a glorified temper tantrum-- stomping my feet, red in the face, claiming the unfairness of it all, wanting a different outcome. I was unable to see clearly. My perception was dark and gloomy. Darkness has a way of over-shadowing the smallest of light that remains.

Have you ever watched a boxing match and think, how is that guy getting hit so many times? And he’s still okay, standing on sea legs, still swinging about. Because when you take enough blows you eventually learn something: you can survive the hit. That’s a superpower. Knowing you can be hurt and you’ll still be okay.

If we’re going to give one another anything, it might be permission to be imperfect. To make wrong decisions. To take wrong turns, to go to a place and figure out it’s actually not the place. That’s the message I believe we should be sending one another. Yes, I got knocked around. I believed in this person, I believed in this life, I trusted this person, I trusted this life, and I was still disappointed. I was wrong, not because I was tricked or fooled, but because I forgot to pay attention. I try to remember the part I play in everything that happens, especially relationships. It only benefits me in the long run when I stop pointing fingers and start looking inward. The answer to what happened is not I’m never going to do that again. The answer to that is: I learned something from that, I survived that, I contributed to that, and I’m going to keep moving forward. Maybe I’ll get hurt again, and that’s ok. I can handle that.

I used to think safety meant that if I hold on tightly enough, that nothing could be taken from me. A home. A person. A life. I don’t want to become someone who lives in self-preserving shallows, with a disillusion that it will protect me from life’s more difficult seasons—because I’ve learned that they happen anyway. I don’t want to grip so tightly that nothing can surprise me. I don’t want to mistake self-protection for a life. I want to be willing to be wrong about people. I want to love things remembering the impermanence of it all, knowing that at any time, they could be removed. Maybe the home I left and the home that went underwater were never places I could keep. Maybe resilience is less about knowing what will happen to me and more about trusting myself to handle whatever does.

Share Amanda Blackwell

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker

I’m hiding under the bed, the carpet scratching the delicate and ripe skin of my cheek, my heart pounding erratically into my temples, my body feverish and frantic. I’m barely four years old, not taller than the countertops, my eyes so humongous and blue that they take up the entirety of my face. My dimensions make me appear more prey than predator, my features owl-like: all eyes, little else to see. My cheeks are pudgy, nose littered with freckles. I’m small but mighty, I’m dainty but driven, and I’m every definition of cute— but curious.

I learned how to be a person in pre-school. I learned that green means go. That red means stop. And yellow was always up for interpretation— at least that’s what I overheard the adults say. I learned my name, my address, my phone number. How to be kind to other children. How to say “please” and “thank you”. How to tie my shoes. How to use a fork and knife. How to stop, drop and roll if I caught on fire. And of course, the number to call in an emergency. Three numbers, impossible to forget.

That trifecta of numbers taunted me for days. 911. My teachers, getting down on our levels, eyes to my humungous eyes, telling the class that the number was for emergencies only— which is counterintuitive for a four-year-old. You can’t tell a little person to ignore temptation. A four-year-old is all instinct and impulse. The pre-frontal cortex still has more than a decade before it’s completely formed. Consequences? Not sure what those are.

I sat there in the upstairs den, the area connecting my brother and I’s bedrooms upstairs. It was a crisp fall afternoon; our house sat quietly on the street across from the park in San Jose, California. It was the last house we lived in in San Jose. We moved a lot. I was cross-legged and fidgety on the plaid Dad chair, staring at it. The phone. The big red button. It sat heavily in my lap, its spiral cord looping back to the wall—a time when connection still had a tether. It was the ’90s, when telephones and their chords were always visible, never cordless. I’d pick up the phone, dial 9, then hang up. I didn’t want to get into trouble, I didn’t mean any harm. I’d add another digit. 9-1. Hang up. I took a deep breath. I should just do it. Just do it. What’s the worst that can happen? I dial the three numbers. It doesn’t even ring. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

I slammed the phone down with urgency and terror. I had thought that it would ring a couple of times-- I had thought that a voice of a stranger wouldn’t come through in an instant. The phone in my lap rings, and my pulse leaps ahead of me. I throw the phone onto the side table, and crawl into the safe space under my bed. It’s where the monsters at night slept, and I was a monster. I was a bad kid. I didn’t want to be a bad kid. I wanted to be a good one. I wanted to be good and not press the big red button. How could I be so impulsive? I hear my Mom downstairs, talking to the operator. She apologizes, knowing who it might have been that called the triple digit emergency line.

From there I saw my curiosity as not something to love, but something to be tortured by. My inherent curiosity became a warning, legitimized by the idiom I’d been humming since memory made a home in my head. Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity killed the cat. I loved cats. I didn’t want them to die from pressing big red buttons like me. It also lived within story, with Adam and Eve, with Pandora’s box, with wanting to know being the poison, not the cure. As I grew up through my personhood, curiosity was not an investigation but an assimilation. How can I be the good girl? How can I control my impulses? How can I be safe in the not-knowing? What a terrible way of existing, in the service of that ideal.

Eventually I learned that curiosity is more of a shedding than rule-breaking. My desire to know would later be what my well-being depends on. Because the more that I know, the more I want to know. Every answer has taught me to ask a better question. Curiosity didn’t make me less safe. It eventually made me less afraid. The big red button taught me that curiosity will always tempt me toward the unknown. Growing up, I learned I didn’t have to press it—I only had to be brave enough to wonder what was on the other side.

“When adults can’t speak to their discontent, when they can’t quite figure out what it is they’re wanting, they will try anything. They drink or commit adultery or quit their jobs or run away or live vicariously through their kids or stonewall their husbands. They knock things off the counter just to feel some control. They burn down their own house to escape it, without really knowing where else to go. This is the tragedy of being an animal with a mind. We are punching the walls to stop the ache in our chest.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins

I am somewhere along the teenage years. My eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, my hair is littered and coifed with highlights, and I have a devoted relationship to my straightening iron. My jeans are low and flared and I paid extra for their holes. My Abercrombie polos alternate between various shades of Easter egg-- butter yellow and cupcake pink. Sometimes, I layer two at a time. My skin has miraculously cleared from the Proactive my Mom bought off of an infomercial—she seemingly cared about my vanity more than me. She’d passionately deny this, even now, but what boomer mother doesn’t want their daughter to be the prettiest in the room? I am more concerned with my social life than my grades, yet I’d never say that out loud. I’m smart but I don’t know it yet. I maintain an unremarkable B-average from minimal effort. I’m not valedictorian by any means, yet tirelessly maintain the persona of the ‘good girl’. I move through life with a low-grade fear of having done something wrong. Coincidentally on weekends I stammer through the sand at high school bonfires, my face hot from its fumes, a bottle of Captain Morgan in my hand, slurring my words after one sip, two sips, three sips. My body small enough thanks to teenage metabolism, my tolerance low enough to reap the benefits without the excess. Yet I was always a fan of the excess. Ask my father. He taught me what that meant.

At home I’d hide in my bedroom, doing the dilly-dally dance of avoiding homework. The next morning I’d be hunched over in the passenger seat, frantically conjugating French verbs on the way to school. At night, hidden in my bedroom, my homework untouched, I typed my way through the procrastinating on AOL Instant Messenger. I’d do 500 crunches every evening with strawberrygrl4ever, our nightly Britney Spears’ inspired core workout. I had desperately wanted to resemble the pop princess in my crop top and middrift exposing cheer uniform. Mom would call for dinner, if I happened to be home—if practice didn’t run late or I had no social escapades to attend. I’d reluctantly remove myself from my cocoon, my bubble of high school body dysmorphia and social atrocities to eat dinner with Mom and Dad. My brother left a long time ago to the East coast for art school— that was over 8 years ago. He never came back after he graduated--he got out while he could. It still never felt right with him gone, and I’d often wish he was there to protect me, even if he never stepped into that role growing up. He had his own way of dealing with things. He ejected himself from the enmeshment, from the family. At least when he was home his physical presence pulled all the attention from me. I’d often wish his aloof, broody presence was there for the sake of a warm body. That’s really all he was, what he contributed to my world at the time. A warm body constantly fighting to claim the dial-up internet connection, reminding me that I’m the annoying little sister, that my existence only meant that I was taking. Since I was born, that’s all I ever really did. Take away his resources. A few days after I was born, he asked my parents if we could return baby-me to the hospital. Growing up, I always felt his feelings never changed.

At the dinner table Dad does not ask me how my day was. He shows no curiosity about track practice or cheerleading practice. He doesn’t know the names of the same friends I’ve had since I was 12. He was still a journalist at the newspaper back then, moved to the higher ups of editorial staff, his career at the epicenter of what it means to be a man. Later, he would be laid off and forced into retirement. That’s when the nightmare really started. But he was still somewhat of a nightmare back then. Just not a drunk one. He barks about my grades, he barks about my backpack in the hallway, he barks about whatever shortcoming that comes to his attention in the moment—and his daughter will coincidentally move through life carrying the feeling of perpetually falling short. The only thing tender about him was the ribeye cooked rare on his plate, bleeding into his potatoes and green beans.

By the time I reached mid-twenties I had grappled with a sort of existential dread, wondering why the blueprint for life my parents passed onto me felt like fumbling my keys in the dark; why I could do everything right and still arrive somewhere that felt so undeniably wrong. My college years folded into the years before, becoming an extension of high school years—relying on my intelligence to get by with minimal effort, investing more energy into my social life than academic life. I was running on the residue of dreams that weren’t my own, carried by whatever current happened to find me—all while doe-eyed, drunk, and directionless. By senior year, I gave up. I gave up my stilletos, animal print club dresses, vodka sodas, my embroidered sorority letters and unintentionally went into hiding. The depression was subconscious. Freud is nodding in his grave. I’d cocoon myself in the two-bedroom apartment I shared with a sorority sister, spending most days horizontal. I rarely left my bed except to satisfy the basic requirements of being a person. My favorite way to pass the time was unconscious and asleep.

Moving home after college, still in a fragile and directionless state, I fell in love with a heroine addict. He drew out the grittiest corners of my humanity--the parts that chased darkness out of curiosity, then stayed long enough for it to detonate any remnants of my collapsing self-worth. I saw a therapist after that. Once. She asked if anyone in my family was an addict. I told her the truth, but why did that matter? She told me a fact that was too gargantuan to hear: I loved an addict because my father was an addict. This was 2011. No one spoke about therapy, about mental health, about attachment trauma. These types of conversations had yet to make their way into the cultural zeitgeist. The idea of my father being the reason for my choices was too big to metabolize, although part of me felt it to be true. Naturally, I ghosted the therapist. I wasn’t ready to face whatever damage my psyche had been harboring.

Instead, I chased approval. Since my collegiate academic accomplishments were sub-par at best, I returned to competitive figure skating and gathered medals the way some collect evidence. Winning soothed something in me, but only for a moment. Each victory offered a brief hit of relief before the ache returned, louder than before. When I got sick of chasing medals, I found my way back to the blueprint that had originally been set out before me. I moved to San Francisco while simultaneously shaking hands with The Man—where I put on a pencil skirt, acquired a fancy 401k, my own health insurance, a dreadful big-city commute and a shiny desk I had the pleasure of being chained to 40 plus hours a week. I replaced medals and trophies with the thrill of seeing my name at the top of a sales report. The validation came dressed differently, but it worked the same way. Until it didn’t.

When a galaxy stops producing the conditions for new stars, it dies. When there is no cold hydrogen gas, which is the fuel for star formation, the galaxies turn red. They are called Red Orb galaxies. The galaxy dying means it finally gets to be itself—unapologetically explosive, magma-like. I like the idea that the galaxy has been harboring centuries of cosmic mistreatment and misunderstanding, and its finally to the end of its life where it doesn’t care about the universe in all of its flaws, in all of its shortcomings. The galaxy wants to be big, unashamed and angry. The galaxy turns red. Like the dying galaxy, I have also turned red. Like many children who don’t see the flaws in our parental figures or upbringing until later adulthood, it can feel a lot like rage. We see the implications of our caregiver’s upbringing, of our siblings’ dismissal, and see how we have carried these burdens of belief with us, and how they have more or less influenced decisions we have made that we are not proud of. Scientists are still researching red orb galaxies, some calling them “red monsters”. I’m not a scientist, just a nerd who can read, but I do know that energy never dies, it evolves. And Red Orb galaxies are able to form stars with much higher efficiency than typical galaxies from the same era. Where there is death, there is also growth. Anger has the opportunity to alchemize once we see vulnerability, once we can see things differently.

Nothing that’s happened to us has to become our entire identity. Which is to say I think broken people do that a lot. Make their brokenness who they are. Walk around carrying a scarlet letter of brokenness and letting it dictate their identity and personhood. I’ve done this. I’ve once made the broken who I was. Yet the stories we tell about ourselves are not fixed. The story I tell of my father not being available for trust or compassion or even love was always a story I made about me. But what if it was never about me? What if it was just capacity? Unconditional love is all we really need as children but it rarely works out that way. We as adult humans with free will can in fact reinterpret what we internalized as children, as teenagers, as adults. We can do this without having to change the story itself.

As an adult, I’ve wasted so much energy trying to fix or change the people in my life who were incapable of showing up how I needed them to. When I started “the work”, I thought salvation would mean changing the people that disappointed me. I thought I could communicate my way through fixing someone like my Dad, thinking “if he would just put in a little effort, maybe things would be different.” I think everyone goes through this stage of magical thinking when healing—which is just therapy jargon for reinterpreting. We use the word healing because it conveys a kind of fixing, but really all it is is learning to view our experiences from a different angle.

I started to ask myself questions like “Why am I trying to force this man to be something he had no capacity to be? And why am I continuing this narrative about fixing my Dad, when he has no desire to be fixed?” Lydia Yuknavitch, the ambassador of reinterpretation once wrote: “I am trying to learn how to stop carrying dead weight, what to put down in the good dirt. I know about the ways death leaves a black hole. I know about how people come to think they have to carry that hole in them their whole life, generation after generation.” We will always have opportunity to set the old story down.

What I’ve learned in my excavating is that being loved is different from being cared for. Someone can love you and still not know how to care for you. Anyone can love someone, but few know how to connect in a healthy way.

The beautiful thing is that stories can be rewritten. Not because the past changes, but because the meaning we make of it does.

And sometimes that’s all healing is: telling yourself a truer story.

“So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I’m trying to tell you the truth of a woman like me.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

I never really liked the waiting. Which is ironic because in Hollywood, the only guarantee is the waiting. Waiting for the casting director. Waiting for the call back. Waiting for the agent. Waiting for someone, anyone, to call your name because one day it might mean something.

I’m waiting again, which is never an easy feat for a 10-year-old, 60-pound spitfire. I’m sitting with my arms crossed on my lap, fidgeting as if it would make the time crawl faster, the minutes drag quicker. My feet are methodically tapping a time step that would make Ginger Rogers proud, yet I notice the fatigue creeping in despite my adolescent restlessness. The thought of it bulldozes my eyelids. I blame the weariness from sitting hours on the 405– the bane of Los Angeles you avoid until you can’t.

It was a call back for the Disney audition. Disney. They called me back. I had been rejected for the better part of a year, intuiting that perhaps it had something to do with my face or my hair or my height. Yet my headshot said Ford Models, Children’s Department which ultimately tells casting directors don’t skip on this one. Ford didn’t represent children who are meant to expire, Ford represented talent carrying the seeds of stardom. “Oh my gosh! She’s so cute. This is exactly the look we going looking for. I really like this one.” The petite blonde woman peels her head away from the corner of the doorway, her hair in a glamourous updo and Chanel No. 5 taking up the entire room. She spoke about my appearance to the casting director— as if I was invisible and without a working ear canal. I smile to myself as I perched restlessly and anxiously in the sterile office-- alone. A rare occurrence. Typically I’d waltz into rooms with 10 other blonde haired, blue eyed girls who like me formed entire identities by people paying attention to them. We’d stand in a line, little girls more like cattle at auction than sensitive children with complexities and angst. We’d stare down a camera and smile at casting directors announcing our names and how old we were, as if the flexion of our voice was the ticket to getting the part. Yet it was often never about the performance. They were looking for something. Something cursory and superficial— that’s Hollywood for you. Even the children aren’t exempt.

I don’t know who decided I could be a child star, me or my mother.

I was lured by the photoshoots and validation from industry professionals by having “the look for stardom”—whatever that meant. I just liked playing pretend, whether I was a nosy loudmouth smarty pants, selling one of those fancy Papermate pens. Or a pink-consumed, ribbons-and-ruffles girly journeying to the far-off land of Rainbow Princess Barbie. I went to a lot of Barbie auditions. Yet I could play a part-- I could be enthusiastic and cute, just how casting directors preferred to choose little girls in castings. That and people paying attention to me. Did I mention that I loved when people paid attention to me?

I stared down a camera lens, the expanse of its eye penetrating into my pupil, as it clicks and hums to regain focus. The camera lens was this soulless contraption without substance or story, with its reptilian blink and big brother gaze. It was a machine. I was tired of staring at a lens. But this was Disney we’re talking about. I tuck my apprehension away and nail my last line, the one where I’m asking the man who played my father if we could keep the puppy my character found. “Can I keep it?” I say, feeling the ache of wanting a furry companion, not much pretend involved. But I was so sick of looking into the gaze of a camera that never really saw me. I wanted real pupils. Reactions that didn’t click or hum but smile and applaud.

Eventually Hollywood’s lust wore off, and I grew tired of the 405, late nights driving home from auditions, and constant rejection. I no longer wanted to entertain the idea of other adults playing my parents, or memorize lines, or be forced to hold hands with disgusting boys because the script said so. After the Disney callback, they wanted me back again.

This time, I didn’t want them.

Something churned in my stomach as I listened to my mother hang up the phone with my agent. She was too excited to finish a sentence, beaming with pride over a daughter she believed was living the dream she’d never had the chance to chase.

But it didn’t feel like my dream anymore. It felt disgusting and superficial and weird.

During that time, I frequently escaped into the 90’s adaptation of A Little Princess. The VHS was a permanent resident in the VCR where the only buttons I’d press in relation to the movie were rewind and play. Never eject. The story follows Sara, the daughter of affluent Captain Crowe as she settles into boarding school-- her father being called away to fight in the ghastly trenches of the first world war. When news arrives that Captain Crewe has been killed and his fortune has been lost, everything changes. Overnight, Sara goes from privileged student to unpaid servant. To cope in the hardest of times, Sara relies on story telling--my favorite being about Prince Rama and Princess Sita. Before Rama leaves to hunt a magical deer, he draws a circle around Sita and tells her that as long as she stays within it, no evil can touch her.

I told my mother, “No. I won’t go to another audition.”

It was the first circle I ever drew around myself, and I braced for what came however I disappointed her. Her silence. Her pained expression. The time wasted on her behalf, all the sacrifices she made. The look that made her disappointment feel indistinguishable from anger or resentment.

I spent years searching for the circle again. As a little girl, no one had drawn one around me, so I learned to sketch my own—clumsy at first, then darker and thicker with every friction. Today, I imagine drawing it not around myself, but around the child I once was. The one who navigated Hollywood not knowing what it would eventually mean—because what I needed most was a place where I could be cherished, where I didn’t have to earn love. Where no one asked me to become a character with the perfect look to be chosen. Where I could finally stop auditioning for approval. Where the role I’d been searching for is simply and wholeheartedly-- being myself.

Like this essay? Here’s a few others:

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

-Mary Oliver

I used to love pouring Elmer’s glue on the palms of my hands to the very edges of my fingertips. I’d let the goo ooze over the skin of my hands, sliding into the lines and crevices as I sat patiently waiting for it to harden. The glue slowly transformed from opaque to clear, from the outer edges inward. I waited, feeling the damp turn crisp before it was time to peel. I had to learn the hard way a few times to make sure the glue was completely dry for ultimate removal satisfaction.

It’s funny how I’d find this sense of gratification from adding a layer and instantly removing it. It was like removing a part of myself. My one-of-a-kind fingerprints, the divots and crannies that belonged only to me. If only another layer below could be removed. My real skin. Maybe layer after layer I could peel it off, again and again, all the way to the bone, and soon there would be a fragment of me left.

There’s something so indulgent, so satisfying about the removal of sorts. You know. Taking off your bra at the end of the day. Wet socks. Letting your hair down. Breaking up with a toxic boyfriend. A stubborn coffee stain on white t-shirt. A scab. Sand from the bottom of your shoes. The deep, earnest, withdrawing exhale after breathing in deep. They say that we inhale the deepest when we are nervous or on edge because we are inherently predisposed to be ready to run. Like the running and exhaling become symbiotic with one another. Is removing and exhaling the same as running away? If you would have told me that the exhale directly correlated to losing weight or to shedding another layer, I’d forget how important the inhale was too. I was constantly ready to run. I was constantly wanting to shed.

So maybe that’s why I loved peeling back the artificial layers of glue. That this child’s play was really just a subconscious desire to not be in this body of mine. That I hated how it was my representative, my identity– a tiny cloak of impression that tucked behind the layers beneath. Why can’t we just be glimmering stardust, a fraction of matter floating about a vast, open space? Just little dots floating, all the same. Instead, I had this meat suit. Instead, I had this body. One that I didn’t want to live in.

When I decided that I might have to actually accept the fact that I should possibly start to enjoy this body I inhabit, my therapist pushed me back to my yoga mat. “This is the next step of recovery”, she said. To get into my body, and not be my body. Yoga was a tough subject. It was a practice I had used to elongate myself, yet another tool to modify the body I had been given. Actually practicing in the way the practice was intended to be practiced did not concern me. Mindfullness, being in the body, even peace, was not what I cared about. I just wanted to morph into a gazelle-like creature with long legs and a slender torso.

This time, I wanted to get better. I’d try to re-frame, give this whole “just being” thing a try. So I went back to my yoga mat, 15 pounds heavier than the last time. I parked myself straight into the corner of the room slightly away from the ability to catch glimpses of myself in the reflection of the mirror. I felt proud and safe in my internal, non-reflection cocoon—and then I looked up. I saw bodies with abs and minimal belly fat, skintight Lululemons and thin faces with sunken eyes. I saw my former self in them.

I still wanted to be them.

Not this 15-pounds-heavier recovery body. And so began the reunification of the internal battlefield of me and the yoga mat. Me vs. the necessary 15 pounds. Me vs. the new, growing cellulite. Me vs. a self that was no longer consumed by hunger. Me vs. a body that I never thought I’d be able to live in.

While sweat started to seep out of every crevasse of my body, I wanted to remove that extra layer yet again. I stood there in Warrior Two with my front leg bent, hips square, back leg straight and arms in a horizontal line extending from my shoulders– and imagined myself peeling of this extra layer like I was Elmer’s glue. The extra layer I had not embraced, hated even. I made plans and yet another contract to get back to overexercising, dieting, restriction, no carbs or sugar or even joy. I could not handle the layer.

I went back to my therapist and told her about my plans to relapse, venting about my experience on the Yoga Mat Battlefield, and she said something that I still reach for when I’m struggling in my body.

“Who’s voice is that, on this what do you call it? Battlefield? You, or your eating disorder?”

I still witness others in their own version of the yoga mat battlefield. I see them suck in their bellies—not because the posture asked them to but because it’s a more tolerable view. I wonder how hungry they are. Still, I let my belly go. I hold the pose.

I will not let the yoga mat win, which is really just the eating disorder. It’s my voice that wins. The real and true one. The one that holds the pose and could care less about the reflection in the mirror.

The resistance I choose to create starts with me on my yoga mat, with Elmer’s glue dried on my palms. This time I won’t peel it off.

“Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”

—- Melissa Febos

No one knew about us. I use the term “us” loosely. Whatever “us” was, it was a hush-hush whirlwind that glittered simply because we believed it was forbidden. It’s sometimes amusing to know you have a secret to keep, isn’t it? It’s even more amusing, more fun, having a secret to keep that resembles a love affair that should, under no circumstances, ever happen.

We were stealthy teenagers out past curfew, looking over our shoulders, parking cars in inconspicuous places. We lived on the outermost island in the Kingdom of Hawaii. This wasn’t a typical Kauai vacation. This was our life— and living on small island means there’s a certain paranoia that comes along with island gossip. The wrong person getting a hold of some dirt or insider info about a secret love-affair can have people giving you the eyebrow at Foodland within an hour. Coconut wireless travels fast. We kept our whereabouts a secret out our sheer will to survive. This was a classic case of self-preservation. We didn’t need our names on the tips of unwarranted tongues. In turn, it remained a secret held tightly between pursed lips. A secret connection with undeniable intrigue, with secret interactions on secret beaches. Secret seconds of eye contact held in public spaces— lingering a second longer than what I’d consider platonic. But hush hush. No one can know. We are just friends.

His mystery was magnetic, slightly intoxicating. It drew me in, a curious attraction that felt lodged in the belly of my throat. It blocked airways. Never catching a full breath, only stealing gulps from a tryst that could never sustain me. Whenever his name rolled off my tongue, I would impulsively gulp the trouble along with it, as if it was more sweet than sour. I was aware that it was the latter, but I’d drink it in by the spoonful. Trouble has a way of tasting like the answer, doesn’t it? Gulp gulp! If I was honest with myself, it was tart and bitter and maybe repulsive. I just kept convincing myself there was honey there.

He had a dark side that was more exposed than hidden. The kind that was a cryptic forcefield, something attractive about the fact that he inexplicably stewed in his pain. Removed. A recluse. A puzzle I wanted to solve. Unavailability I wanted to coerce. A problem I wanted to fix. Oh, it’s always the problem I want to fix. His shut-off faucet of being available in a way I deep-down- desired left my mouth dry like sandpaper. A dry, course thirst to never be quenched. I’d want to wrap my hands around his torso and force him to look me in my eyes, but I kept my hands in my pockets. He was uncomfortable with hugs and affection. Like a feral cat, if you get too close too soon—he will bolt in the other direction. Still, I laid out my traps.

Timing was impeccable when we frequently started communicating. I had just left the blue-eyed man and I was in a fragile, grasping sort of crumbled state, unhinged in anguish, and he held the shiny promise in the palms of his hands that gave the possibility of distraction. Shiny things can have this inescapable appeal when you’re not in the right state of mind. He temporarily provided the fleeting guarantee of feeling desired or wanted or chosen that had been absent from the man who came before him. In my not-so-conscious mind he had the potential to fill the gaping hole and fix the wrongs of yet another one who decidedly wouldn’t or couldn’t love me. The irony wasn’t lost on me. He was another digression. Another repeated pattern. The cycle continued.

But listen. I’m no victim here. He and I, we are more alike than I’d like to admit—attraction when it is unfitting is all a silly game we play.

Sometimes you’re the cat.

Sometimes you’re the mouse.

A sweet, fiery, passionate, Brazilian man with oozing good looks briefly enters the picture, coming at me like a tiger, assuming the position of the wild feline pounce. He’d say preposterous things like “I like you”. He feels me shift uncomfortably; the air becomes dense with a long pause and no reciprocation. “Why you so closed off?” he says in a thick Portuguese accent, the kind that can’t be taken seriously.

My mind quickly flashes to the sweet of his skin touching mine on the nights I should have left. The nights I should have left before I’d hold the regret for days and weeks and maybe forever in my body. But his skin—the only tender, soft thing about him.

I still long to touch it.

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“Love is not love

When it is mingled with regards that stand

Aloof from the entire point.”

William Shakespear

My algorithm thinks I hate men. Which can be true. At times. Truthfully, I love men. I really do. My eye may be twitching when I say such a thing. It sort of feels like a lie, yet every part of me wants to believe it. I have the misfortune of existing as a straight woman, cursed into loving the male form-- for better or for worse. There are times when I am livid with men’s existence, where my algorithm has oriented itself around this sort of exasperated bitterness. The internet, I’m finding, conspires with me a little too easily. There is endless access to outrage, to validation, to whatever dark resentment I’m trying not to feed—and occasionally, I feed it anyway. Don’t tempt me with a good time. There’s something bonding and ferocious about joining hands with other women throughout the world, rapport through a hand-held screen-- sharing our grievances, honing our primal rage, thousands of voices shouting through the void: “Do better!! I’ve had enough”.

Once, in 8^th grade, I came home from school exasperated, frustrated and full of fury--as much as a four-foot-eight, seventy-five-pound blonde with braces and the energy of a tiny woodland creature can be. I was easing myself out of my identity of a figure skater—ditching independent-study P.E. and learning how to exist at school for a full day like a normal kid.

I was one of the only kids in my grade excited about P.E. I found my afternoons in the ice rink to be lonely and isolating, where I’d often sit on a bench in the middle of the refrigerator, thinking about what my friends were doing on the vast fields of Cabrillo Middle School. They were out in the sun, hair blowing in the wind, baggy grey PE shirts tied up with a hair tie, oversized and unflattering blue gym shorts rolled once (maybe twice if the teacher wasn’t looking). I wanted to be normal. I wanted to decorate my gym locker with stickers and stock up on deodorant and various scents of Smacker’s lip gloss. I wanted to gossip with my friends as we got dressed. I wanted to sometimes forget to take my clothes home over the weekend, leaving them musty and rotting in my locker. Beyond the ache for inclusion, what I really wanted was to play. I was an athlete. I wanted to run the mile. I wanted to be too tiny for basketball but try anyway. I wanted to play first base for kickball, return to the game of soccer, and dominate in four-square. I wanted to get dirty and sweaty and be the version of myself that didn’t have her hair in a bun, or wear rhinestone dresses, or isolate herself from her peers for the sake of more training time. In 8^th grade, I finally got my wish. I ditched independent study and enrolled in PE. I finally had my shot at normalcy.

It wasn’t long before my excitement dwindled. Physical education was co-ed. Whatever sport we were partaking in that week, the boys played with the girls. I came home upset that day, full of fury, because the boys kept putting the girls in the outfield during kickball. Who made them the boss? I wanted to play first base. I didn’t want to twirl around in kickball Siberia with the rest of my gender blowing on dandelions, rolling my shorts 3 times since being farther away meant we were harder to see. I wanted to be in the action, not outside of it. I spent too much of my adolescence in the periphery.

The next day when I came home, my Mom asked me how kickball went. “Great!” I said. “I played 1^st base.” Mom said she was happy they let me. I corrected her. “They didin’t let me.

I told them I’m playing first base. End of conversation. They didn’t have a choice in the matter.” Although I was a firecracker, although I refused to be minimized by my gender, it was the first time I realized boys had the capacity to take something I’m equally entitled to away. It was the first time I felt bulldozed by gender, that my joy had been taken because of my femininity. I realized boys moved through the world entitled to their wanting, while I had to make myself feral just to reach for the same things. Something in me hardened after that. Resentment planted its seed, and it’s been continuously watered since.

I’m 38 and still single. When people ask me why, I tell them I’m one more disappointment away from dissolving. Yet I’ve noticed fewer people ask lately—as if the state of the dating biosphere speaks for itself. The current dating landscape confuses what love actually represents, what it energetically carries. Love in its highest expression has been replaced with indifference, with treating people as commodities, with passive men who are in their 40’s and “unsure of their dating goals”.

There’s usually two types of single women hovering around my age: those who haven’t given up, and those who have. I’ve landed somewhere in the middle, if not towards the latter. I’m not out in the trenches, I’m not on the dreaded dating apps, and I’m not actively seeking someone or a relationship. That doesn’t mean I’m in this vast space of nothingness; men still come and go. Most of the time, I’m happy to let them go. I’ve kept myself like a candle flame, shielding it with both hands whenever the wind picks up. Too often, men have come through my life like sudden gusts, and I’m beginning to wonder whether I have another match left to strike. Yet I still haven’t given up, but I also haven’t done anything tangible to change my reality. This doesn’t mean I don’t desire a man. I do. Sometimes I long for it. Sometimes the longing in me doesn’t emerge quietly—it detonates. The thing is, now I just let it happen. For years I reached for validation, for someone to alleviate the discomfort, a warm body to fill the void, bouncing from one shiny object in the form of a man to another. I didn’t know how to be alone. Like many women around my age, my late twenties and early thirties brought about a reckoning of sorts, where life pushed me to the edge of my resilience bucket. I had two choices: continue on with suffering, or do something about it. I resisted therapy for a very long time, although I knew it to be a necessary step. It’s kinda funny how we don’t believe the things we know. I spent the better part of eight years working with a therapist, and as healing started to occur, something profound took its place. I no longer feared being alone. I no longer associated being alone with loneliness. I no longer grasped for straws in the male form, I no longer needed it to affirm my worthiness or even my existence. Many women like me are in this stage of life. We’ve done the work on ourselves; we don’t need a partner, yet we desire it. Therein lies the problem.

There has been a significant cultural shift for women, because for the first time in the history of the patriarchy, we don’t need men to survive. Single women make up about 13% of homeowners, 10% for single men. Women don’t need a man to own property, to open a bank account or have a credit card. Women no longer have to ask for permission to exist freely. We no longer have to stay in broken, dangerous or unfulfilling relationships for the sake of survival. Because women have grown their independence, because women have done the personal work to liberate themselves from the idea that being in a relationship and happiness are not mutually exclusive, we desire a relationship that’s symbiotic. Emotionally fulfilling. We want a partner with the capacity to better our lives, not take from it. Have you ever thought about your mother? How she may or may not have had a happier life if she wouldn’t have had children and maybe married your father? How many women do you know in a relationship or marriage with a man and seemingly better off? I’m lucky to know a few of these women with wonderful partners; I look to them and see possibility because there are good men that exist in this world. But they are the minority. Most men are stuck in their old ways of thinking, and they haven’t caught up with the empowered, emotionally and financially capable woman. They haven’t done the necessary work to better themselves and ultimately better their relationships. I got a glimpse of this in middle school, the entitled bulldozing man, and little did I know I’d be facing similar challenges as I creep into middle age.

Men and women are seemingly at an armistice, struggling for power, wondering who will wave the white flag first. Our culture seeks dominance, where most of us stay safe by choosing power over love. Love cannot exist if power, dominance or wanting the upper hand is how romantic relationships are approached. I’m guilty of this. Having the upper hand coincides with safety, with control. If I am in control of my feelings, my attachment, my vulnerability, then I am safe. I withhold constantly. Venturing out into the unknown territory of letting go, the uncertainty of giving a part of myself to another, is half the battle. Becauase once the tether is released, the other person has power over me, my emotional state, the fate of my heart. It’s terrifying. I’m often more interested in protecting myself from the risks of love than the actual experience of it. I tend to deny my own sneaky ways of sabotage, yet rarely admitting: “I am more interested in being safe than I am being loved”. I have to continually remind myself that power struggles are the currency of war, not love.

I’ve now been in more relationships than I can keep track of. I’ve had men take my joy away in a similar way they did in 8^th grade, with entitlement and lack of remorse. I’ve been ghosted, I’ve been avoided, I’ve had men choose other women over me. I’ve come close to marriage. I once picked out an engagement ring with a man, and we booked flights to California so he could ask my father’s permission. He left me a few weeks later. No explanation. No conversation. Poof.

I’ve become something of a wounded warrior. Yet statistically speaking, there’s one common denominator with all of these failings: Me. I’m the common denominator. I’m part of the problem. It’s hard to admit sometimes, that we are the biggest contributors to our own realities. Truth has a funny way of aching until it is acknowledged. It’s not just men who have made dating incredibly difficult-- there are also terrible women. Some I know who milk men dry for their resources, for their kindness, for their generosity. I’m not that type of woman, but I’m far from perfection. For me, real love exists when I recognize my part in every broken relationship, and taking that knowledge into how I can change moving forward. I’m not a victim to my circumstances. I’ve likely pushed men away with my attachment trauma, with my occasional neurosis, withholding crucial communications, not asking for my needs to be met, stubborn tendancies. I’m also drawn to choosing unavailable men, where I choose to ignore the red flags, and I choose to act surprised when things go astray. How can I blame the man when I was an equal accomplice to my experience, despite my intuition telling me otherwise? Hating men doesn’t solve the problem, because I believe we aren’t actually angry with men when it comes down to it. We are angry with ourselves for not listening to our intuition, for giving the dumpster-fire in the form of a man a chance despite palpable warning signs. We are angry because we offered our most tender selves—our hearts—to men who were incapable of meeting us with the same depth, care, and courage. Our projected anger solves nothing, and I can’t continue to invest my energy, my resentments, my traumas, and my fears into the place where love lives.

Despite the internet telling me otherwise, despite my history, despite my well-armored defenses, I still hopelessly believe in love. And hope, I’m finding, is not a shortcoming or a talisman floating in the ether— it’s an anchor, a pillar, a backbone. What is longing for partnership without hope’s scaffolding to hold it up? Hope is what we cling to to keep us upright. I know love will settle into me one day, and I know I will settle into it. I know there’s someone out there for me, and I know I’ll have my wishes granted before I croak. But as Jane Austin wrote in Persuasion: “I’m half agony, half hope.” I still carry hope—heavy across my shoulders, lodged into the stiffness of my neck. Because someone has to keep the light on for love, even after learning how easily it disappears. For reasons I cannot fully explain, that someone is still me.

I thought I’d be in Kauai forever. Yet I’d never say that word. Forever. I know it’s a nonsense word. Forever doesn’t exist, as much as I’d like it to. Yet forever soothes my fallible human brain into safety. It craves this sense of solidarity, of assuredness—but we know how quickly life can turn itself on its head. Forever is a bunch of baloney--even the galaxy our planet floats in will eventually collapse, the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, the ocean will dry up, the mountains will crumble into the soil where they came. It’s all so heartbreakingly fleeting. Sometimes eternity wanes before we want it to.

Which is to say I found myself horizontal again-- on my couch in the middle of July. The tacky and honeyed Kauai heat made me feel agitated, the perpetual sweat accumulating on the small of my back felt achingly claustrophobic. The incessant pulsing around my temples felt like my heart wanted to rearrange itself inside my body and find a new home within my skull. At times I wanted to let out a guttural, primal wail, but that seemed to take up too much of my limited battery power. I was emptied. Lifeless. Getting up was a chore. Moving was a reminder that my limbs were lead. Lethargic isn’t a word that has enough oomph to give language to how I felt. I was depleted, dull, ground to the end like an overused, unsharpened pencil. Have you ever had those dreams where someone is trying to hurt you, and you can’t seem to get away? You command your legs to move, and it’s almost like they forgot how? It was like that. Being awake during a dream I wish I had control over. I spent weeks in perpetually the same position, the fibers in the couch molding to my body, leaving a stark outline as if I was the victim of a crime scene. It was insufferable to feel left-out from life as the world continued to hum around me. I wanted more than anything than to be swept in the inertia of doing and productivity—yet I was left behind, forgotten even. Alone in my suffering, while damp and rotting.

Survival is an interesting word, because it suggests that a person continues to live despite their circumstances— yet I wouldn’t label my existence as living. The only thing that felt like I was living a life was that I was awake for it.

It all sounds very dramatic, I’m aware. But my body in decline brought out a certain feeling of terror—- the all consuming exhaustion paired with the unknown of what was causing me to feel so lifeless was a special kind of agony. Countless blood tests, consultations with doctors— I was worthy of being on an episode of Mystery Diagnosis. It took weeks to get to the bottom of my decline.

Tropical, wet, and muggy climates like Kauai are fine for most bodies and a death sentence to others. Unfortunately for me, my body was the latter. The heavy rainfall that keeps Kauai so lush and green is a catch-22. Pair the rain with the humid air that hangs heavy, thick like syrup, creating a vortex of moisture. It makes anything that comes in contact with water is impossible to dry out. Anything that gets wet, stays wet. Including houses. Businesses. Cars. Clothes. It’s everywhere. Mold thrives in these environments, and mold toxicity can be poison to a human body without the immune function to fight it. If a body has a chronic illness or autoimmune disease— toxicity will grow like cancer. It will spread to the bloodstream, respiratory functions, the entire endocrine system. A body like mine has no fighting chance.

I had heard of people getting mold poisoning on the island- and it was always those like me. Women, sensitive types, always looking for a cure to their chronic health problems— with diets, supplements, treatments like Ozone therapy and glutathione injections, red light, infared saunas, alkaline water. You name it. We’ve tried it. Seekers of anything and everything that could possibly make us feel normal, even for just one day. A good friend of mine had a sister who had found herself under the grip of mold poisoning, and it branded in my brain. I was told the symptoms of her stark decline, and I had thought to myself, “I hope that never happens to me.” Most with mold toxicity move off-island shortly after discovering the root of their health problems. My heart broke for them. Maybe a little bit of the empathy was a sort of clairvoyance, my future self beginning the long process of processing a grief so big it would feel too ginormous to feel all at once. The sooner the grieving started, the less painful it would be. I didn’t know that then, but I certainly know that now.

I spent that summer both horizontal and inhabiting a sort of messy middle—suspended between California and Kauai. I flew back and forth, coming and going, seeing if my health would improve in a drier climate. I was constantly oscillating between thoughts of both truth and delusion. The truth was, Kauai made me sick. The delusion was me refusing to accept it. I’d land in my hometown in California with my parents to detox, following a strict mold poisoning protocol. I had to somehow convince myself that leaving Kauai was the right choice. I wrote during that time, “Often endings are messy and tangled and bleeding and I often don’t know where the the end begins and the beginning ends because it can be so confusing when I’m living in the messy middle. Or is this the end? Or the beginning? I don’t know. I just wish someone would tell me where I am in this story so I could know how long I need to hold on, or if it’s really okay to just—-let go.”

I surprised myself with the ferocity of my attachment to my life on the island, even if it had sucked the vitality out of me. It’s a hard thing to give up, the island life. I wasn’t ever supposed to leave. Isn’t that how it always works? Nothing is how it’s supposed to happen. You make a plan, the universe laughs.

Sometimes our fates arrive as illness and not stark revelation, and I didn’t get the forever on Kauai that I wanted. Acceptance was creeping its way into my conscious during my times in California. It was hard to ignore that I was slowly being brought back to life. My health inched towards equilibrium and inevitably brought me closer to a definitive answer to leave. The irony of my quiet acceptance to move away from Kauai-- is I thought it would bookend my despair and put an end to the difficulty. Yet when I left, I now can’t help but think I wasn’t fleeing sadness but more so running towards it. Life wasn’t done with me yet. What was to come was the year when life asked me what I was made of. And it was the year that I had to prove it.

There’s something that’s changed about me that I didn’t expect— this healing has made my degree of empathy tearable like tissue paper. I will rip at anyone’s pain. I will feel deeply for their experience—simply because I gave myself permission to feel for my own. Before I arrived at that painful pinnacle, I was a hard-ass. I’d tell others to toughen up because that’s simply what I told myself. No time to feel. Being raised by baby boomers, it’s a common ideology. Suck it up, stop being a baby. Whether it was my experience or someone else’s, life was meant to be zambonied—-a little toughness can smooth anything over.

I don’t recognize that person anymore. I’m now transparent. A permeable membrane. An “empath”— even if I cringe a little at that hippie rhetoric. It doesn’t bring enough to the table. Transparency feels more true. There’s a ripeness in me, so sweet that it feels like I might rot. I not only feel my own pain— I will feel your pain too.

When I see ICE running through fields and arresting farm workers, when a big beautiful bill does no justice to language because it’s anything but beautiful, when greed is the status-quo, when our tax dollars are being spent on concentration camps, when children are swept away in flood waters which could have been prevented— my stomach has no choice but to do a tap dance. I feel like I might die because I feel an ache in my chest so big, so gargantuan, that it can’t only be my own experience but layers of everyone else’s suffering too.

I’m aware that I’m shouting into the void of

my own echo chamber, and those who support this heartbreaking monstrosity will either not see this or not read it. It’s near impossible to change anyone’s mind when it comes to morals and ethics. Everyone has their minds made up no matter what side they land on. What this administration has created lacks foundational empathy, but most of us know that.

These are damaged, broken men who have been running our country, and the world. They don’t give a shit about anyone else except for themselves. These policies are the equivalent of writing on tombstones. They claim to be religious, to worship a god of their own making, bending text in a book so they can fall asleep at night. They are forgetting about the hungry children, our elders, immigrants feeding their families in Mexico, the struggling middle class, millennials who can’t get a break. They have their heads buried in the sand with green dollar signs in their eyes.

The mark of any divine intelligence, god by most people’s vernacular, is to empathize with others— those marginalized, those struggling. To care for the planet, advocate for the environment, protect the ancient wisdom found in trees or the big blue. To embody god-like qualities, this divine intelligence— it’s not grandiose. It’s quite simple, really. If you want to be a decent human being, sometimes you dont start with others. Empathy is an inside job. You start with yourself.

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It wasn’t anything special that day. Small. Slightly offshore, wind clapping the surface making tiny ripples, not ideal for surf. It was the middle of January and despite the afternoon sun, the water still had a frigid bite. I talk to an Uncle in the lineup who I see some mornings at California St., where he asks what I do for a living. I tell him I’m a writer. “What kind of writing?” He asks. “Well, I write for a surf magazine for one.” He ushered me to take quite a few waves after that. Sometimes I wish he hadn’t. One of them, a perfect little peeler-- I kick out and miss my board, grabbing the rails in the mushy throes of white water. I feel something in my shoulder singe. My neck tightens. I’m fine, I think.

I wasn’t fine.

I didn’t think I could live without her. Surfing. The ocean. I mean it. Being without it would feel like a tiny death, or a big one—depends on the day. If I’m going to be spending my life slowly dying, then it’s the only way I know how to live. Which is to say I’ve depended on the ocean in a way that modern psychology would call “codependent”. But it’s one-sided. The ocean doesn’t really give a shit if I’m surfing or not. Maybe that’s why I love her so much. She exists without giving a shit about anyone. Yet she’s cradled me in times of desperation. Through breakups, through chronic illness, through leaving my home in Kauai, through a devastating natural disaster, through loss, through grief, through transformation. It’s a place I go to escape gravity. It’s a place where truth is present, or it is lost completely.

Once, last winter, my parent’s home flooded at one in the morning shortly after I moved back to California from Kauai. Staggering sea legs had new meaning, where I left the home I loved to lose the only one I had. I was a refugee of my own life. After the flood, I’d crawl into the icy pacific and find my breath again. It didn’t matter where I was or what new definition of home I’d try to contort into meaning— the ocean speaks the same language no matter where you are in the world. It breathes life. Sometimes the darkest of pain makes me hear the water more. It reminds me of the very reason I’m alive in the first place.

If you ask any surfer, they will talk about the sport it as if it has a noose is around their neck. It’s more than a hobby or a way to move the body, it’s a spiritual experience. My favorite surf writer, Matt George, says “I believe in the cosmic connection of our sport. I believe that surfing is something extraordinary in the natural world.“ When I write for the magazine and profile a surfer, I always ask about the beginning. How they got hooked. They always return to their first wave. They remember it. Ask any surfer about their first wave. They will tell you about it with a gaping smile. Once you drink the surfing addiction kool-aid, it’s impossible not to ask, “How could my life just be this?”

The oyster, like many near shore species, depends on the tides for sustenance, for survival. I had once identified greatly with the oyster. But I am in fact, a human with a fallible body and a bum shoulder whilst recovering from surgery. I’ve once oriented my relationship with surfing as a constant struggle between want and need, survival versus extinction, death versus living, lost and found. Yet I’ve surprised myself with the months and months that wear on that I can in fact, survive without it. Need is a bit dramatic. We can learn to live without the things we love, no matter how fiercely we cling onto them. I’ll find my way back again. My body will heal. It will coax me into falling in love with life again. More living, less dying. You live a little more fiercely when you orient your life with mother nature and the big blue. Soon, I will. And I can’t help but feel like the absence of surfing from my life has needed to be displaced, only so I can find it again.

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