My Vietnamese mom never learned how to swim and had no interest in swimming whatsoever. I was born in Pensacola, FL, spoiled because I grew up spending many a weekend playing on white sand beaches until I was 8 years old and we moved further inland in Florida. She would go to the beach wearing capri pants and long sleeved shirts with a wide-brimmed hat …

Read more

We came to Vietnam for my husband’s work opportunity, and I was reluctant from jump. I carry a lot of emotional baggage about Vietnam that I never had about Thailand. My mother is Vietnamese. She met my father during the war, when she was his translator, and I grew up with two parents with wartime PTSD. I didn’t hear heartwarming stories about her home country. She renounced her citizenship in the ’70s when she became an American citizen. My mother’s immediate family immigrated to the US in 1987 and they didn’t talk about the past with much fondness, either. I never learned my mother’s language, and the parts of the culture I did absorb were disjointed, like islands floating in a sea of emotional ambivalence.

After my dad retired from the military, my mom went to nursing school and took a job at a VA hospital. We left the beachside Florida city where I was born, home to the naval base, for a town two hours from the nearest beach, smack in the middle of a swamp. She worked evening and night shifts, and every holiday she could, because those hours paid more. Secretly, I think she also preferred patients who were sleeping, since it required less bedside manner. She is a survivor. She was kind, but not always nice. I have similar tendencies.

Growing up, I never saw another face like mine until university, and even then part of me sought kinship where none could be found. I wasn’t white enough to be white, but I wasn’t Asian enough to be Asian. I was a not-so-secret third thing. I don’t feel connected to my heritage on either side, yet part of me will always long for roots running deep into soil. I’m more of a bromeliad: no roots I can sense, drifting through space and time, taking in nutrients from whatever is around me.

The last time I was in Ho Chi Minh City, I had a terrible migraine almost the entire time. This visit hasn’t proved gentler, tbh. It’s a harsh place to exist, doubly jarring after rural Northeast Thailand, where our apartment was sandwiched between two rice fields. The traffic and sirens are constant, and horn honking is a form of communication. I’ve always said, somewhat jokingly, that I’m not a city person, and so far that remains true. Big city life has an intensity and urgency that doesn’t fit my general constitution. I’m often tired, and every outing feels like an enormous production.

I can’t help thinking my impressions are colored by the emotional baggage my parents packed neatly and handed down like an inheritance. Are my experiences authentic, or are they colored by gray lenses? Most of our time in Vietnam has involved two medical crises and daily trips to and from the hospital, where I felt like I was riding a unicycle on a tightrope over lava, juggling puppies. Now my husband’s health is stabilizing, and he continues to wean successfully off the corticosteroids used to treat the autoimmune condition that triggered his stroke. I’m finally taking a breath. I was so tightly strung that it took several days to unwind. When I’m stressed, I can get harsh, with myself and with others, tbh, and that harshness is starting to mellow. I’m yawning a lot even when I’m not tired, and beginning to relax the hypervigilance that comes with any intensity in my life. It has kept me safe, and it will likely rear its head in these moments for the rest of my life. CPTSD causes lasting changes in the brain, and recovery is less about the absence of symptoms than about learning to live with and manage them when they return.

I’ve focused on the cons, but what about the pros? There is a tremendous amount of convenience here, though you pay for it. If you have less money, you pay with your time and effort as much as your wallet. You can get just about anything delivered, and with a quickness I rarely experienced in smaller towns and never experienced in rural areas.

The food here nourishes a part of me that I compartmentalized in Thailand. Yes, you can find Vietnamese restaurants there, and Thais often holiday in Vietnam, but the food was made to suit Thai tastes and didn’t match the textures and flavors I was exposed to growing up. My mom often made hủ tiếu, a common breakfast dish my grandmother sold to make money. My mom knew the recipe by heart. I have yet to find a version in Vietnam that approaches hers, which is a compliment to my mother’s culinary skills. I enjoy the food here more than I did in Thailand. I love Thai food, too, don’t get me wrong. There’s just something in the flavor profiles here that feeds my soul.

A part of me feels connected to this place, even though I grew up without the stories of my mother’s youth that would contextualize it. It might be wishful thinking, but there’s a strange familiarity. My mom grew up in Saigon. She was always a city girl, as my father would say, and had no knowledge of farming. Saigon has been densely populated for a long time, and its streets and alleyways are labyrinthine. You’d get lost without a guide, and even Google Maps is more reliable in some areas than others. Riding through the city on the back of a motorbike taxi, hearing a language that feels familiar even though I was never taught it, I feel closer to a part of myself I didn’t realize existed. Intellectually, I know half my heritage is rooted in Vietnam, but growing up in the US with a mother who rarely spoke of her past left me with a blank space in my understanding of myself.

My mother’s father disowned her for marrying an American, and from what I can gather, the family had to wait until he died to make any moves. Such is life with a controlling, abusive man. I am intimately familiar with the dynamic myself. My mom married my dad at 19 but had nightmares about her father well into her 30s. She might still have them; she wouldn’t tell me. For three years, nine of us squeezed into a three-bedroom house: our family of five plus my grandmother, my uncle, and my two aunts. They all continued their studies. My uncle and one aunt became pharmacists, and my other aunt became a nurse, like my mom. This is the immigrant’s story that contradicts the narrative being pushed by nefarious individuals in the political sphere. They came with little and worked hard to become successful, contributing members of society who pay taxes and often care for people who openly curse their existence. Seeing the way immigrants are spoken of in the country of my birth has permanently broken my heart. That’s all I can say about that.

I am wandering and nomadic because I feel like I have no roots. It’s not that I don’t want roots, I just wouldn’t know what to do with them. I saw a post on Threads the other day asking about ancestors, and it occurred to me that mine wouldn’t be proud of me. My existence isn’t something either side would be likely to embrace.

What does that mean for me? Am I destined to wander the world, a lost soul searching for connection where none can be found? Not really. I’ll be forever grateful to my dad for insisting that my siblings and I were first citizens of the world, and second, citizens of the US. I am part of a bigger family: the human family. That means living with the ambivalence of relatives who dislike me, but I’ve also met plenty of people, related by blood or not, who opened their arms simply because I was someone they knew who needed an embrace.

So here I am in Vietnam, facing the complicated feelings that come from my complicated origins and past. There’s no neat and tidy ending to this. Is there ever one in a human story? I have a rare and beautiful opportunity to do some composting, taking those complicated feelings and turning them into a medium for growth. I’m transforming the shit into nutrient-dense soil. It’s not just for me. It’s free for anyone to take. Bring a wheelbarrow. Come get your compost.

We had been in Vietnam for about a week and were still settling in. It was a Wednesday. He woke up seeming drunk, and he overslept and missed his first training session at his new job. I feel bad about it now, but at the moment I was irritated. He left for work on a motorbike taxi, and I expected him to be himself by the time he got back. Instead he see…

Read more

I’ve always wanted to live outside of the US. I grew up hearing my dad tell stories about his travels. He’d lied about his age to join the Army - it was just a little fib because he was maybe a year shy of being 18 years old. He wanted to travel and as the sixth child in a family of eight children in rural Kentucky raised mostly by his grandparents because his father died of mustard gas poisoning in a VA Hospital when he was young, traveling or attending college was merely a pipe dream. He made it happen. I come from a long line of people who are so strong willed that they were able to move what seemed impassable mountains to pull a reality towards them that didn’t exist until they made it so.

My mom was the eldest child of a third wife in Vietnam who had to sell tobacco to GIs to pay for her own schooling. She was able to make her own dream of living in a different country come true. After they got married, because my dad was in the Navy, they traveled to several different places. My older sisters were born in Maryland and Hawaii. I was born in Florida. All of us kids were encouraged to travel from an early age.

The first time I left the country, I was 15 years old. My parents allowed me to attend a summer program in an international boarding school outside of London where I was lucky enough to study Shakespeare. It was my first time on a plane. I remember sitting next to an older gentleman who drank almost continuously throughout the flight while droning on and on about how his wife was Asian sitting several rows behind us. I was just trying to read. We were chaperoned by resident advisors who I saw as adults, but in retrospect, knowing that they were college students themselves, were more like older kids themselves. They did a great job, we had lots of enrichment experiences seeing Shakespeare plays performed in the theater and botanical gardens. That experience lit a fire in my belly and I wanted to travel the world. I didn’t really have a specific plan, just this deep yearning to see and experience things beyond what I was familiar with.

This is why it didn’t occur to me to feel daunted by planning a road trip for a month in Europe in the summer of 2006, where I drove from Amsterdam to central Italy. I remember I navigated the entire continent using a road atlas published in 1997 that I checked out from my local library and then faithfully returned when I got back to the US. My only regret for that trip was enduring the company that I invited along (see my previous essay for those horrible details). After meeting my now-husband online and scrolling through his photos of travels in China, Thailand, Russia, central America, I discovered that I had a curiosity about the continent of Asia.

The only stories I heard growing up were from my parents. Vietnam was part of the First Indochina War the year my mother was born. France withdrew from Vietnam in 1954, and the Geneva accords split the country in two. She was a young child during the unstable transition after French colonial rule ended, and she lived through the most intense years of bombing, air raids, and military presence as a teenager and young adult.

My Dad traveled to Japan in the Army as part of the occupation of Japan after the end of WW2. He was the only man in his platoon to survive Korea. Almost all of the stories he told from that time drifted off without an end when he realized his audience was too young to handle the barrage of horrors he had endured. After an honorable discharge from the Army he wandered across the US for a while and then joined the Navy and handled supply chain in Saigon during the Vietnam war. My mom was his translator. As a result of both his and my mother’s experiences and wartime PTSD, they never suggested that I explore that part of my identity or that part of the world. But seeing and hearing about my future husband’s life on the other side of the planet made a restlessness invade my consciousness.

Flying to Thailand with my 10 year old and 6 year old children was certainly a brave thing to do, but it just seemed like a natural next step. I arrived carrying the emotional baggage my parents had given me, looking for evidence of the world that they had left behind. Of course none of that was evident in Thailand. This was an entirely new place. Yet it felt weirdly familiar at the same time.

Within days of our arrival, James was asked to step in at the last minute for a Muay Thai fight because the originally scheduled fighter had disappeared without notice. They needed someone to step in to take his place. We were riding around on his motorbike searching for khao soi, a Northern Thai curry noodle soup made with chicken and garnished with pickled mustard greens and fried noodles. We pulled over to look at a temple - there are so many Buddhist temples scattered all over the city and countryside in Thailand, some tucked away down nondescript alleyways. Upon reading his text messages and accepting the fight, he pulled his shirt off outside of the temple and asked me to take a photo for the promoter. I’ll have to let him tell the story of that particular fight. There were several hard kicks to his nuts. I’d never seen bruised balls before.

While we were staying in Chiang Mai, we decided to take a weekend trip to Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon. I think it’s a good idea to take a trip with the person you’re involved with early on in the relationship because it accelerates the revelation of their true self. People tend to reveal parts of themselves that they would rather not show in other circumstances when they feel stressed out, and while travel can be fun, exciting, and be full of adventure and new experiences, there is also a lot of stress involved.

You’d think that I’d have more curiosity about my mother’s homeland. I don’t speak Vietnamese and that part of my culture always seemed strangely distant from me. This might be because my mom carried so much trauma from her childhood, and she just didn’t have it in her to share her culture without remembering the trauma. I’ll never really know. Unfortunately, the entire time I was in Ho Chi Minh City I suffered from a terrible migraine that left me hiding in the bedroom with the lights turned off most of the time. My body was resisting accessing this place as a homeland for me, while my mind was busy telling me it was no big deal and I didn’t feel much of anything at all. Looking back, I realize that I was probably having a migraine from all the intellectualizing. A week from now, I’ll be back in Vietnam for the first time since this brief visit in 2019. This time I will be feeling the feelings, and at least now I have a place to put whatever I find this time.

After 2 months in Chiang Mai we traveled all the way down to Hua Hin after getting a one month extension to our initial two month visa. Why? Because of YouTube videos. That was it, that was where the idea came from. Never underestimate the value of watching other people’s travel vlogs. It was just a 3 hour van ride from Bangkok to Hua Hin, and there was a growing population of foreigners who were longtime residents of the area - that population has grown steadily and there are all sorts of businesses that cater to foreigners there, now. We enjoyed our time there so much, that was the place we decided to stay for several months when we returned to Thailand in 2025. It’s a nice entry point to Thailand that is palatable to foreigners, where more people speak English and there are more western-style accommodations. Bangkok is a massive, bustling city but if you’re prone to sensory overload and prefer to have easy access to nature and green spaces, it’s not as easy to live in. Hua Hin was idyllic. There was a beach that we had to drive to see because we chose to stay up in the mountains, and I ended up using a Japanese style room with tatami mats as flooring for my office.

At the end of our month, after my 30 day tourist visa extension expired, I had to return to the US. I was reluctant to leave but less experienced with international travel, and the children wanted to see their grandparents and cousins. I didn’t want my time with James to end. We had a blissful 3 months, and I’d never had such an easy and peaceful time with a partner before in my entire life. I grew up expecting that fighting was just a normal part of a partnership. The pattern that I’d been presented with had been replicated in every one of my friendships and partnerships. My time in Thailand felt like a beautiful dream that had to inevitably come to an end, and I braced myself to have a long distance relationship. I was shocked when James gently suggested returning to Florida with me. It seemed silly and didn’t make sense, even though it was what I wanted more than anything else. He was a professional fighter and I lived in a part of Florida where there was absolutely no MMA scene whatsoever, much less any Muay Thai fighting. Yet again, I cried happy tears. I couldn’t believe that he was willing to abandon the land of smiles to accompany me back to a place that held so much suffering for me.

Even though it didn’t make sense, really none of our relationship made any sense. I started to relax into a sense of deep safety that I had never felt before in my life. I knew that my children’s father wouldn’t be able to lay hands on me as long as James was by my side. But he would still be able to access our children. When we returned to Florida, the kids went to visit their biological father for the weekend…and he decided not to return them for a week. It was the first time that James saw me ugly cry as I begged my children’s father to just let me speak to them at least. James and I had planned to travel to Europe after a brief stay in the US, and I planned to enroll the children in Florida Virtual School, an online public school option available in Florida, so they could continue their studies while they traveled in Europe. Their biological father had a different plan. He enrolled the children in public school and sent them to school on their first day without lunches and with no school supplies. I was then invited to pick the children up from school because he was too busy to pick them up and needed a break from the children. The rumblings of COVID began as we continued to plan for our trip abroad, and eventually the whole world shut down. We were stuck in Florida for the time being, my children shifted to virtual school, and our whole world turned upside down for the next few months…

To be continued…

Read more

Our landlord here in Sisaket, Thailand feeds four soi dogs. These dogs can show us a map of every way a creature learns to survive, humans included. White King fights for the top of the hierarchy because that's the only currency he trusts. Aa-Chi holds territory with a calm that can tur…

Read more

It took 10 years to leave an abusive relationship that began in 2006. I guess you could say it’s almost like I got a graduate degree in this particular topic because I sunk so much of my life into the relationship, including all the years in therapy during and after the relationship ended. I want to talk about my experience, but I should lead with the fact that this isn’t going to be a pleasant story, and it’s not the kind of story people usually want to read. There’s no single evil foe. There’s no magical deus ex machina, and the ending isn’t clean. The triumph is just – getting out. Getting out of an abusive relationship is weirdly similar to an animal caught in a trap chewing its own leg off to get free. You get out, but you don’t get that leg back. It’s a Pyrrhic victory, a victory won at tremendous cost to myself.

I met that man when I was doing cocaine like it was my full time job, so the relationship was already a castle made of sand from its inception. We broke up and got back together so many times, I lost count. That’s the first thing I should say. If you take anything away from this story take this advice: if you’ve broken up multiple times - stop getting back together. It’s like a dog going back to eat its own puke. That way lies madness.

I like to use the concept of Hell Gates from Dante’s Inferno to describe choice points in our lives with thresholds made of intensity and suffering that lead to liberation. There were so many hell gates that opened up right in front of me - I studiously turned away from all of them until my child was involved. Then, I charged through the gate like a mad woman and nothing could stop me. By then, the gate had grown longer, more convoluted, and more perilous, but there was nothing that could stop me from forcing my way through.

But why did you stay?

People will ask this question like there is a simple answer. I look back and wonder why, myself, years later from a place of safety where I no longer have to fear the person closest to me. Why was I trapped in a prison of my own creation? There was something about the intermittent reward system, and I was addicted to the intensity - when you are put down into the lowest of lows and someone briefly offers you respite, it feels even more seductive because of the contrast. Conflict and coldness trigger cortisol and adrenaline spikes; when peace returns, the drop in stress mixed with bonding hormones like oxytocin creates an intoxicating cocktail that creates an artificial but very intense sense of contentment. My brain, always ineffectual at producing adequate amounts of dopamine, chased those dopamine spikes whenever we reconciled.

He had an amazing talent for making objective reality seem negotiable. I would seek clarity and try to talk things out, but he knew how to talk in circles in a way that would make me feel like I was going crazy. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him, no matter how I asked, begged, screamed, cried. He would withdraw into the silent treatment, happier to simply not answer or interact. He lived in a world where the only truth that existed was his own. There was no such thing as objective reality.

Meanwhile, in those intermittent moments of peace when the dopamine spikes were giving me the high I was seeking, we continued our death roll. He was always whispering in my ear. Even in those moments of quiet or peace, he would casually remind me that I was naturally repulsive and unlikeable. I wasn’t good at being a person. No sane man would want a woman like me, who had experienced multiple sexual assaults as a child. I was too broken to be tolerated by anyone but him. I grew to believe that I deserved him. I was unworthy of kindness or tenderness. This was my lot in life.

I went to Europe for a month the summer of 2006 with my abuser. I had planned the trip myself and (stupidly, in retrospect) I invited him to join me. He just had to pay for his own plane tickets, because I had already arranged everything myself and it was easy to have an additional person share my hotel rooms and the house I’d rented in Umbria. It was a disastrous journey. I considered rescheduling my flight home to leave early by myself several times. At one point, in Bagnoregio, Italy, he’d gone off on his own to watch a World Cup match at a cafe with our rental car which also happened to have our passports in it. Around 3am, I became concerned, because the match had ended several hours ago.

I set out on foot to find him. I walked down the alleyway lined with abandoned houses that were now occupied by hundreds of feral cats that I’d taken to feeding at night by leaving food out in the little courtyard in front of the rental, so they were all friendly and curious. Their eyes peered out from vacant windows and amongst the rubble of a few houses that had fallen into ruin. Bagnoregio isn’t a large city. I walked to the cafe where he said he would watch the match - it was dark and empty. I kept walking across the city and eventually tracked him down in a brothel. I saw the rental car parked on the street. When I pushed the door open, all the men in the bar scattered like cockroaches except him. He was too wasted to care, slumped over a beer at the bar. He laughed when he saw me, an infuriating and derisive laugh, when I asked for the keys to the rental car. Instead, he forced me into the car and drove so fast and recklessly that he almost ran into a building. Once the car stopped, I scrambled out and scurried to the rental house, crying. He stumbled after me. I wanted to sleep in the bed, but he thought he should get the bed and I should sleep on the sofa. In the tussle that ensued, he elbowed me so hard in the face that I was sure I would lose my two front teeth for a few days. Our reunion that night was not tender. I had a long history of cPTSD by the time I met him, so my life had accustomed me to making the best of bad situations. I swore to myself that when we returned to the US I was done with him. And I was, for a time. But I kept going back. I was so chaotic and had such low self esteem that his treatment of me didn’t register as abusive or toxic.

No one will save you

The first time I tried to leave – to truly leave, not just leave and go back – I learned the bitter truth: the family court system is not a neutral referee. I naively thought, if I just show up and tell the truth, the judge will understand. The truth is that abusers often use the family court as a tool of abuse; this is called legal abuse, or litigation abuse.

The pattern was relentless and terribly consistent: I was required to comply with every court requirement. I attended the class on coparenting after separation or divorce. I supplied the required documentation and financial disclosures. He complied with none of it and never faced any consequences from the court. My history of sexual assault and therapy to address complex trauma was used against me as evidence of instability, and his lawyer argued that this made me an unfit mother. He’d been stopped by police so many times because he was driving drunk, but somehow he was always able to talk his way out of it and was always given a warning instead of any legal consequences. In fact, this is why I’d stopped calling the cops when he went on his drunken rampages. The cops would always show up and stand in the driveway, talking about hunting and fishing, joking and laughing with him. I was crying so much that they warned me that they’d take me into custody if I didn’t calm down.

Any emotion I showed in court made me look “hysterical.” If I was calm and composed, I was a “cold, unfeeling mother.” During our custody battle, our son was diagnosed with autism and began daily intensive speech and occupational therapy 5 days a week. That man attended one singular IEP meeting and he was effusively praised for being such a loving and involved father. Meanwhile I attended every single meeting – we had, at minimum, two meetings a school year but it was often more than that – always with my folder of documents and printed out research studies to support my requests for accommodations, and this was just expected of me.

At one point I sought couples counseling, but I now know that this is usually a mistake in an abusive relationship. He weaponized any vulnerability that I displayed in the session and masterfully manipulated the therapist, a solidly Christian and patriarchal man. He gained new tactical language to escalate the emotional abuse. My attempt to heal our relationship left me retraumatized and I grew more socially isolated as time passed. My friends and siblings withdrew because the chaos and my continuing efforts to endure the suffering were painful and confusing to witness.

I didn’t win the custody battle. In the end, the court ordered that we share 50/50 custody. I would get no reprieve from dealing with my abuser. I was ordered to have regular contact with him and he was given leverage he could use against me whenever it suited him. I watched my son’s developmental regressions. This man told me that he could make all this go away if I voluntarily returned to the prison of his creation. I made the calculated decision to reconcile with my abuser. I had a plan. I would stay with him until our nonverbal child was able to speak.

There was no safe place to land for me. No one would protect me from him, and the system seemed to punish me for efforts to escape. I had to figure this out on my own. Something changed in me in a devastating and very permanent way at that point. My heart hardened but I found a steel core in the center of my being that I didn’t know existed before this choice point. I began to play a dangerous game of chess.

I fell pregnant with my second child shortly after I made the calculated decision to reconcile. It set back my timeline for freedom, but I used his birth as another leverage point. I had always done the nighttime parenting with our first child. The arrival of a second child while the older child was undergoing significant intervention to help him learn how to speak and attain his physical milestones was all too much for their father. I was easily able to convince him that he needed to move into his own bedroom so that he wasn’t disturbed by the children and their frequent night waking. I set up a lovely little room for him with his own TV. In return, I had a space to myself and a door I could lock. It was the first bit of ground I was able to gain on my own terms - and I did it through my own wiles, not with the help of an agency, the police, or the family court. They were of no help to me.

I quit my job working for Catholic Charities at the end of my maternity leave because I discovered my work insurance wouldn’t cover a tubal ligation. My children’s father expressed the idea that I should have more children. I was desperate for that to not happen. I underwent surgical sterilization in order to prevent that further possibility. Quitting my job meant I could get on Medicaid to help me pay for this goal, because I wasn’t in a financial position to afford it myself. Of course there was financial abuse happening during this entire process. He didn’t really pay any bills, and had drained away any savings I managed to scrape together.

I took the GRE when my youngest son was 4 months old, frantically pumping milk and shoving a granola bar into my mouth in the bathroom during the 15 minute break I got during the exam. I finished my second Master’s degree with a perfect GPA while parenting an infant and a preschooler who required daily speech and occupational therapy. My plan was to get a PhD and secure a position at a university far away from him. I thought that if I just proved that I was good enough, the court wouldn’t deny me. The plan and the relationship ended up imploding at exactly the same time.

How I actually got free

He stalked me for years after the split in 2016, and there were about 4 different visits from the Department of Children and Families because there were reports of neglect. They usually visited me because they couldn’t find him, and the advice was always the same: go back to family court and go through the arduous process of custody redetermination. The family court system showed me that it was not a place where I could get help. My years getting support services from the local domestic violence shelter had provided me enough evidence in the support groups, private therapy, and in my meetings with the lawyer that provided free legal advice. Every trip to family court would just be another opportunity for the system to fail me. I no longer had the money or will to gamble on it.

I got some great advice from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure of all places. It was in episode 6. During a fight, one character compares another character’s obsessive drive to figure out the enemy’s stand to a dog locking its jaws onto a toy and pulling on it relentlessly. I had a dog who loved to play tug of war, so the analogy was immediately evocative. My years of therapy had already introduced me to the Grey Rock Method*, which is usually a short-term strategy to employ while working on a long-term solution. But to extend the Jojo analogy a bit - a dog will often tug on a toy as long as you are tugging back. Stop tugging and it eventually loses interest. It’s the same principle. I gave him nothing. I restricted our interactions to email, even blocking him on my phone. I stopped letting him even hear my voice. I never responded the same day to any messages unless they were urgent and dealt specifically with the wellbeing of the children. I responded with one sentence only, regardless of how much he wrote.

In a way, this strategy worked exactly as it was supposed to. I slowly faded from his mind. I continued my own process in therapy and also started pursuing things that brought me joy - one of which was growing my community of dark humored misfits on my meme pages on Facebook and Instagram. But another part of the process was very weird to observe. It was like the real me faded away from his mind and what remained was a projection of me that he created that he kept fighting with. He would resurrect old phrases, old bits of therapy speak from couples counseling, old triggers, and words that had belonged to a previous version of me that no longer existed. He was trying to bait a reaction from someone who no longer existed. It was like not watering a tree to kill it. The tree withered slowly, sprouting back every now and then to be bothersome, but withering nonetheless. He stopped wanting overnights with the children as they got older. Then the spaces between the lunches and dinners he asked for grew longer and longer. While the custody agreement remained, he just slowly stopped wanting to see the children.

At what cost?

The kids didn’t open up about what happened to them during their time with their biological father until we had moved across the country because my husband was working as a wildfire fighter during wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest. The physical distance seemed to help them relax. What I learned was hard for me to hold. I grieve it. Some of these events took place so long ago. I was devastated to learn these kids had held the truth in their hearts and coped without my help or support. They did it because they didn’t want to worry me. But now that we had James in our life, they were no longer afraid and they knew I had someone I could lean on. But I don’t know what I could have done differently. The law required that I share custody with my abuser and my only alternative was to borrow money to pay for another roll of the dice in a system that had failed me over and over again.

I won, but the cost was so great. I lost so much: over a decade of my life, the safety that I can’t somehow retroactively provide for our children, the version of myself that had faith in the system of laws and their enforcement. This is what it is to win a Pyrrhic victory, to win but with such great losses that it’s just another version of loss.

I’m not writing this to give a tidy ending, though. I’m writing this in case there is someone standing in front of their own Hell Gate right now. If just one person reads this and realizes that they don’t have to keep entertaining a relationship with someone who is not capable of loving them well, that’s enough for me.

*This is a post-separation, low-contact version of the Grey Rock Method, and it is not a strategy to try while still in physical danger.

Suggested Reading:

1. On the Grey Rock Method and co-parenting with an abuser https://talkingparents.com/blog/grey-rock-method

2. The Year I have No Photos of: if you want to read more about what happened in 2016 when my PhD program and my abusive relationship imploded at the same time.

Read more

It had been a struggle to get my children’s father to sign the paperwork to get them passports. I had one thing that he wanted, beyond his overarching desire to possess me and our children as if we were objects: he wanted his guns back. I had hidden them when I initiated our separation because I knew that statistic without having to look it up. I’d sat in enough therapy sessions and support groups to have it memorized. Leaving an abusive relationship is the most dangerous part. I actually tried to get rid of them by turning them in to the police, since they weren’t registered to anyone. But I was told that surrendering my stalker’s illegal weapons to the authorities made me the thief, and that I should give the guns back to him.

I hadn’t planned to use the guns in this way, but I was desperate. And desperate people make trades that they never imagined making. In the end I took a calculated risk - I offered a trade: I would give my ex the unregistered guns that I’d hidden from him when I split up with him in exchange for his signature on the passport paperwork. Surprisingly, he agreed. I told James that I might end up dead before I ever left the country, but I did what I had to do. There’s something in the core of my being that helps me face challenges like this, and I’m grateful for that part. I’m not brave, really. I just do it scared.

It was the first time either of my kids had been on an airplane. They were excited for the adventure, mainly because this is how I have framed everything for them since they were old enough to understand what was happening around them. Whether it was the countless hours I spent in waiting rooms and appointments getting my oldest son diagnosed with autism and ADHD or the subsequent hours of speech and occupational therapy that he went to every single day after school, which led to him learning how to speak when he was 5, toting his younger brother along with us, it was an adventure. I framed it this way for myself, too. Six hours to get my driver’s license renewed at the DMV? It’s an adventure - there’s people to meet and a goal to accomplish. I grew up voraciously consuming fantasy novels as a form of escapism, and if I learned anything from those books, it was that adventures have good and bad parts to them, but they all help with character development.

I didn’t sleep at all on the flight. The boys curled up like puppies in their seats, leaning into each other and then onto me. I don’t sleep well on public transportation anyway. “You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby.” I made the best of it. I watched so many movies, and I listened to “Weightless” by Marconi Union on loop because I’d learned that it could reduce anxiety, and I’m a sucker for evidence based research. I sat by the river of my thoughts, watching the turbulence and wishing for peace, but knowing that nothing could tame the wild horses pulling the chariot of my mind until I was on solid ground.

I already had contingency plans if James didn’t show up at the airport to meet us like he had promised, because a lifetime of unkept promises by people who had claimed to care about me made it so that I couldn’t trust that expectation. I would get a Grab, because he had advised me to download that app before I left - Uber doesn’t exist in Thailand. I had a screenshot of the Airbnb listing and the phone number of the owner’s sister, who lived in the condo complex and managed everything for her. This was before eSIMs became widely available, and I knew not to get a SIM card at the airport because (1) I was exhausted from not sleeping for 28 hours and (2) I was advised that the rates for everything were more expensive at the airport.

I was actually surprised when I saw him there. Looking back now, there was no reason to feel surprised. This is his nature. We hugged for a long time and my kids were excited to meet him. They had a positive association with him mainly because they would see me smiling at my phone and ask why, and I would tell them it was James. My youngest son was mesmerized with the photos of James in the Muay Thai ring and the MMA cage, slapping people in the face with his foot or punching an opponent so hard that a shower of sparkling sweat droplets glimmered in the foreground of the photo. He rode his motorbike to the airport, so he arranged a songthaew to take us to the condo where we were staying for the next 2 months. A songthaew is like a truck that has benches built onto the bed with an awning over the top that transforms a pickup truck into a makeshift minibus.

The driver had his wife or girlfriend riding shotgun with him. My younger son had these awesome high-tops that had lights encircling the sole of the shoe. You had to use a USB charger to make them light up, and the driver’s companion got a big kick out of the lights in his shoes and she told me the boys were “narak narak” (very cute). We drove for a suspiciously long time, longer than I expected and longer than really felt right. I started doing math that I didn’t want to do. How far are we from the airport? No one knows exactly where I am and unfamiliar places are always more menacing in the dark. My anxiety quietly overtook my mind – what if I was being trafficked? It would be so easy to disappear three foreigners. But people who want to traffic you are rarely this jovial and friendly, are they? Then I took a deep breath and sat back onto the bench, trying to relax as we trundled along the highway, watching the road shoot out behind us like a river of asphalt rushing out from under the tires. If I die now, I’ll die happy because I’m on an adventure. No regrets. Eventually the fear loosened its grip, as it always does - just wait 90 seconds, as I always tell my kids.

The driver pulled over and called out to someone who was walking on the road, who he apparently knew and who had more English than he did. It became a group effort to get us to where we needed to go. The driver had this random pedestrian explain to me that he couldn’t locate the condo, and asked if we had a phone number. I had to show the screenshot to the driver, who used his own phone to call. The condo owner’s sister answered, thankfully, and she was able to give him the right directions. We ended up at the condo before James did. I was anxious about his safety and called his good friend who was also living and working in Thailand at the time, Dominique - this was a man James referred to as his brother, so I trusted him. He told me to sit tight and wait, that he would try to find him. Meanwhile my kids explored the condo in delight. We’d never lived in a place with stairs, and I graciously gave up the master bedroom to the two boys because they had to share a bed, and that was a king sized bed with enough room for the two of them, with a TV they could hook up their gaming console to. There were mangoes, mangosteen and sweets made of puffed rice set out for us, and bottles of water in the fridge. Someone had thought of us. Such kindness felt unfamiliar. I didn’t expect this kind of familial welcome.

James showed up shortly after that. I forced the boys to shower after their long journey and all the recycled air in the plane and tucked them into bed. They were asleep within minutes.

James called Dominique to reassure him that he was safely at the planned location. I was exhausted but happy, and James was also overjoyed and excited. We had the type of reunion that one might expect long distance lovers to enjoy, though neither of us had really discussed anything about being in a relationship other than being very good friends.

The next morning we ordered McDonald’s for delivery because the boys requested it - they slept 13 hours straight and woke up ravenous, and after the ordeal of traveling and changing planes and picking at airplane food while surviving on packed snack foods, I didn’t attempt to challenge the palate of my older son who has ARFID. They enjoyed the novelty of familiar fast food in a different country. Frankly, American fast food in Thailand is superior, in every way, to American fast food in America.

Within the first few days of arriving, we did have “the conversation.” I cried when he told me; I cried a lot in that first week. They were happy tears, but also, they were tears of grief. When James brought me coffee in bed, I was moved to the point of being speechless. I wordlessly accepted the coffee mug and then burst into tears. Ten years of learning to want less had worn me down and it was strange to accept something being handed to me that I didn’t have to “earn” first. He was surprised that I cried, but he handled it like a champ. He grew up in a house full of girls, he was no stranger to tears. When he cooked for me, when he foraged for streetfood snacks and provided a bountiful spread of foods that were new to me for me and my youngest child to sample, when he went out of his way to ensure that my older son had his safe food, when he was tender and caring and kind – I couldn’t wrap my mind around being treated like this after living in a famine of affection.

He sounded surprised, himself, when he told me that he loved me and asked if I wanted to be in a relationship. I agreed without a moment’s hesitation, with tears of joy. I also found it hilarious when we made things “Facebook official” and one of his friends reacted by commenting “No way!” I’d broken my vow of celibacy and now I broke my vow to be single for the rest of my life because my picker was broken. That’s how it started. It turned out that there was more adventure in store for me on the other side of the Pacific Ocean than I’d let myself imagine.

To be continued…

James and I walk through the same story from this week's Substack essay (a year of celibacy, a 4am tutoring schedule, a frie…

Read more

I made this meme back in 2018 right after I started talking to the man who would become my husband on Facebook. I didn’t know then that I was actually making a visual thesis statement.

In 2018, I was working 7 days a week tutoring EFL (English as a Foreign Language), working with Chinese students online. I was up at 4am Monday to Friday and 3am on weekends. It was a punishing grind, but it allowed me to discover that I flourished when working for myself in a way that I did not when I was working for someone else, because every ounce of effort was rewarded with income. There was no unpaid labor, just output and result that was directly connected.

I had ended a decade-long abusive relationship and then jumped immediately into another longterm relationship. Unsurprisingly, that relationship imploded, so I made a decision: voluntary celibacy. I was opting out of performing or seeking approval. I had mortgaged so much of my self-worth to be seen as desirable. I decided to stop paying into that account. This decision liberated me in a way that I couldn’t anticipate.

So, when my husband and I started chatting every day, there was nothing at stake. I didn’t really want anything from him other than conversation. I had this bizarre schedule; no one I knew was awake when I was working. I’d lob bits of odd personal lore into the chat like hand grenades and then duck and cover, half expecting it to land wrong, but it never did. He met everything with curiosity and thoughtful questioning instead of judgement. He was living the kind of unrooted, adventurous life that I had long wanted for myself when I was in my 20s, but had quietly buried. Seeing his photos on my feed and reading his status updates germinated a seed that had been slumbering in the soil of my mind for over a decade.

Quality Suffering

Buddhist philosophy found me first, in the serpentine fashion that characterizes much of my life. I was in highschool and my older sister was hyperfixated on martial arts (specifically Aikido) and Eastern philosophy. Later, in University I took as many elective courses on Asian religions as I could find. Our Vietnamese mom was raised Buddhist, but she left that practice behind after marrying our American father and coming to the US in the early ‘70s - oddly enough they both chose to convert to Roman Catholicism and my sisters and I did 9 years in Catholic school. Part of my curiosity came from a desire to find a connection to this half of my ancestry, because my mother was not communicative about that half of our ancestry. This is the way of many people who’ve fled a country with a war still in their nervous system.

But mostly, what drew me to Buddhism was this idea that a mind could be trained similar to how we train our physical bodies. I learned to observe the flow of my thoughts the way you might sit beside a river. When I was caught up in thoughts, it was like I waded out into the river and was caught up in the current. The current is restless and relentless. Themes and ideas can reappear, like leaves that have been shed from a tree growing up river, similar but distinct.

All life is suffering, according to the First Noble Truth. The Second Noble Truth traces the root of suffering to its source, the way you’d trace a river upstream - suffering comes from attachment: to living beings, to inanimate objects, to ideas, to beliefs, to feelings - because everything is temporary. The thing you love so much will always, inevitably, leave you through separation or death.

By the time I met the man who would become my husband in 2018, after a lifetime that earned me a cPTSD diagnosis before I had a decade-long abusive relationship, I understood the suffering part of the first noble truth, maybe too well. I also understood loss so much more. My dad, my safe parent, died when I was 26, sending me into a year-long grief spiral. I’d lost friendships, jobs, pregnancies, pets, relationships, and the version of me that had long planned to pin my identity to being a researcher in academia. Somewhere along the way, I gained perspective: loss is always a constant, I choose to love in the face of loss. My heart is already broken, so I might as well find some sweet succor, even if only for a moment.

Nothing to lose

There was no real risk in talking to a man on the other side of the world. I had nothing to lose but a good conversation. He could fall in love with someone tomorrow, I thought, and I would still want to be his friend. I’m embarrassed to admit that this was the first time that thought had crossed my mind. Because I had a history of seeking validation by being seen as desirable, my relationships had been transactional. I got what I wanted and I gave what I thought they wanted: a projection of a person shaped to their preference, barely real at all. With him, there was just our daily ping pong of conversation because neither of us had a reason to sell the other a manufactured version of ourselves - that polished projection, built for public consumption, that hides all the outcast parts of ourselves that we’ve been taught, through exposure or experience, are unsellable.

He ended up stuck in the US for longer than expected after he visited for the holidays and I decided to go through the herculean logistics of arranging childcare so that I could fly to Idaho to meet him IRL. He was incredulous: “you want to come to Idaho? Are you sure?!”

I was born and raised in Florida, so the inconvenient snow that he begrudgingly tolerated was a novelty to me. That weekend was basically a 48 hour first date that we still joke about.

Shortly after I returned to Florida, I started looking into travelling to Thailand. He offered to show us around - he spoke passable Thai and knew the ropes. He met us at the airport and ended up hitting it off with my kids. He spent 2 months with us in Chiang Mai, traveled with us down to Hua Hin, and then chose to come back to Florida with us, to my surprise.

We came together as friends first, without any idea that we would eventually get married. Along the way, I became happier - not because I’d found permanence, but because I stopped needing anything to be permanent. I relaxed into the knowledge that everything is temporary, including both happiness and sadness. I would rather have some happiness than none. Happiness doesn’t have to last to be worth having. It just has to be real while it’s here.

Everything is fleeting, including sadness. That’s not a reason to grieve now. It’s a reason to allow myself to fully savor the flavor of the present moment. Ice cream is delicious because it melts.

Read more

The NeverEnding Story is one of my top ten all-time favorite movies. There’s a scene where Atreyu (my middle-school crush) finally discovers what The Nothing actually is. It isn’t a monster with evil intent in a dramatic sense. It’s what’s left when a place stops being imagined into, when all the hope, curiosity, and wonder drains out until there’s nothing where a world used to be. G’mork tells Atreyu that he’s helping The Nothing because people who have no hopes are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power.

I don’t think it’s a fantasy throwaway. Increasingly, I’m starting to think it’s a business model that is actively being applied to all of us, relentlessly driving us towards a cliff. Or, maybe we’re running there like lemmings? But what if I told you that idea of lemmings running off a cliff is, itself, a fabricated media myth? It comes from a 1958 Disney nature documentary that staged the footage. The crew herded the animals off a cliff for the shot. Even our metaphor for mindless self-destruction was staged for us.

The Nothing doesn’t need a villain

No evil entity has to conspire to make you numb. I feel numb so often these days. There are too many inputs, I’m inundated with too much information and too much emotional manipulation. When that goes on long enough, the part of you that discerns and sorts true from false, urgent from manufactured, or differentiates what is you from externally installed programming, gets exhausted from overload because the inputs are relentless.

That’s our Nothing - not necessarily stemming from malice, just the relentless process of erosion. A void spreads because nobody’s dreaming against it anymore, because dreaming takes energy we don’t have left after doomscrolling.

That erosion is useful, though. G’mork wasn’t being philosophical, he was explaining an incentive structure.

I’m now going to once again bring up my current hyperfixation, good ol’ Edward Bernays. He was a horrific visionary. He saw this coming, and he monetized it, like a true American.

In 1928, Freud’s double-nephew (Bernays’s mother, Anna, was Freud’s sister, and Bernays’s father, Ely, was the brother of Freud’s wife, Martha Bernays), the man who more or less invented modern public relations, said: the conscious manipulation of the masses isn’t a corruption of democracy, it’s a necessary invisible government running underneath it.

He wasn’t hiding the ball. Bernays had spent WWI helping to sell a war to the American public through the federal Committee on Public Information. When peacetime came, he simply pointed the same machinery at cigarettes and soap.

His most famous trick was the Torches of Freedom campaign. That campaign sold women cigarettes as a product by selling them an identity and convincing them that this product could give access to that identity. Smoking was marketed as a symbol associated with liberation. Lucky Strike was the incidental prop.

Modern advertising still runs on this template: you don’t sell the object, you sell the feeling the object lets someone briefly borrow. You can’t buy attractiveness, liberation, or desirability. You can buy things that you’ve been psychologically manipulated into associating those qualities with in the hope that this purchase will act like a magic spell that has the power to change you.

The banner that outlived the hotel

In Thailand you can often see old advertising vinyl repurposed as shade cloth. Once, I saw a sun-bleached Best Western banner, tied over a noodle cart that was nowhere near a Best Western, now useful in its second life as a makeshift awning providing shade. The hotel’s offer was irrelevant. Nobody’s booking a room off that tarp (hopefully). But the emotional architecture is still up there, doing ambient work on everyone who walks by, because that was never really advertising for a hotel. It was advertising for the feeling of arrival, of being taken care of and welcomed, and those vibes don’t expire when the banner gets thrown away in favor of the next new campaign. The banner gets repurposed as literal infrastructure, holding the sun off somebody’s noodle cart haunted by the ghost of the emotions it was designed to elicit.

We are oversaturated with those ghosts, now. It’s not the products you’re drowning in, it’s the residue of ten million campaigns’ worth of manufactured longing still humming along in the background of everything, attached to nothing in particular.

The mechanic is the same one abusers use

Hot take: advertising and narcissistic abuse run on the same architecture. First, manufacture a gap; you’re not enough, not safe, not loved, not free. Step two: be the only sanctioned party who can bridge that gap. Both advertising and gaslighting get weaker when you can name what’s happening, but both also get stronger the less you trust yourself and your own read of reality.

I have an unfortunate amount of experience with this because I spent a decade in an abusive relationship along with over a decade in individual and group therapy trying to rebuild a sense of what was actually true. Gaslighting makes you doubt your own mind, your instrument for checking facts. Crazy-making plants invasive weeds that take over your ability to trust yourself like a psychic kudzu.

For a long time after I escaped that relationship, I couldn’t trust my own perceptions. I didn’t need to relearn willpower and critical thinking skills. I relied on a small circle of people I trusted, who I could hold my read of reality up against and ask: is this real, or is this the story he needs me to believe?

So what do you do when the manipulator is systemic?

This is the question of the hour. I don’t think there’s a clean answer. The closest answer is close to the one I had to accept about my abusive relationship itself: you cannot out-discern an opponent who controls your reality and doesn’t give a shit about your well-being beyond the value that can be extracted. That was true of one man. It’s true of an advertising apparatus built by entire industries of behavioral psychologists and public relations specialists. “Just think more critically” is as useful as “just trust your gut” was when my gut had been deliberately distorted and twisted until it was broken. That puts the burden back on the person with the least power in the exchange.

What actually worked at the personal scale wasn’t discernment in isolation. It was community reality-testing, with a group of trusted people outside the system who could tell me when something didn’t add up. I think that’s the only piece that scales, but it scales imperfectly: not more individual vigilance - maintained relationships with people, with accountable journalism, with anything that isn’t optimized to keep you engaged and values money more than you. Authentic connection can happen online or IRL. The way ads are subtly woven into social media platforms has distorted this in the last decade. But I remember a time when the Internet was new, the before times, before algorithms were optimized to sell everything with the side effect of creating an echo-chamber that polarised us so much that division has been the main topics of conversation. My support circle came from that space.

The rest of my proposed remedy is slower and less satisfying to hear: regulation, transparency, collective pressure on the platforms actually running the machine. That timeline is not “by Tuesday.” Anyone that says that is trying to sell you something. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m planting ideas wherever I can, like Johnny Appleseed.

Remember how the book actually ends: Bastian doesn’t defeat the Nothing with strength. He beats it by believing Fantasia is real, and by giving it a new name. This isn’t a fix handed down from outside, it’s an act of authorship. Which, it turns out, was the thesis of this essay before I ever put a monster in it: if nothing means anything on its own, you’re free to make your own meaning. That is my secret weapon that I wield against The Nothing. Preferably you’re making your own meaning with a few people you trust standing next to you, telling you when you’ve wandered into someone else’s story instead.

Read more

…there wasn't one.

I have oodles of pictures of my kids' infancy, right up through 2015. Then there's a year-long gap that falls precisely on 2016. It was the year my lifelong dream of being a researcher in academia crumbled into nothing, the year a decade-long abusive relationship finally imploded, and the year I started a Facebook meme page embracing absurdity, because I saw myself lying face-down on the hallway floor of the house I grew up in and something broke open inside me. I saw, clearly, how absurd it was that I'd let myself be so broken by external circumstances when the fundamental nature of the human experience is grounded in impermanence and loss.

Why no photos? I probably took some and deleted them in a fugue state of depression. I was already losing my faith in academia at the start of that year.

The dream, and how it died

I had a research interest that drove me to get a second Master's degree: maternal and infant nutrition, specifically the informal communities of practice that had sprung up online around pregnancy, breastfeeding, and infant care. I'd participated in these communities myself when i was volunteering with a breastfeeding support group on Facebook, struck by the sheer volume of questions from mothers who had no in-person community to lean on.

So I found a Health Education and Behavior program and got that second degree. In retrospect I should have stopped there. But I soldiered on; suffering is the price of success, right? Almost immediately there were strange obstacles. A professor I had good rapport with suddenly wouldn't write me a letter of recommendation. The dietitian I was pointed to as a mentor ran meetings that felt stilted, like I was wearing shoes two sizes wrong. Subtle signs, everywhere, that the path was going to end in destruction. I was climbing Dante's Mount Delectable, beset on all sides by hideous and terrible monsters.

By then I was serving on the boards of two nonprofits: the Florida Breastfeeding Coalition and Breastfeeding USA. I had represented Florida at the USBC National Conference two years running, presenting my own research the second year. I sat on a national think tank on health equity in breastfeeding. I had a six-year-old and a two-year-old. From the outside, I looked accomplished.

Inside my home, there was constant chaos. My children's father was an alcoholic, and abusive, and controlling. I paid for school through a fellowship and loans I took out to cover the bills. I handled every single night of parenting alone and felt "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” as Bilbo Baggins put it so eloquently.

That summer I declined to present my dissertation research at a national conference. My advisor presented it for me instead… without crediting me. A friend of mine, not realizing I was her mentee, posted a photo of the poster on her Facebook timeline, proudly emphasizing how impressive the work was and attributing it to my advisor. Every name on the research team was listed except mine.

I reported it to the dean. She had tenure. I was an awkward doctoral student who didn't bring the department much prestige. My former mentor wrote to my fellowship committee claiming I'd done no work at all, and I lost my funding. I was told I could continue if I found a new mentor and paid my own way. I gave up. I was the second person in my family to make it to a university. I didn't know I'd broken an unspoken rule.

The water bottle

While all of that was happening, my children's father would disappear for days at a time, leaving me to parent alone. My youngest was getting ready for preschool. I was distracted, as always. He asked for water. I told him to grab a bottle from the fridge. He was proud he'd opened it himself. He took a sip and said it burned his mouth.

We'd been battling for weeks about the temperature of his food; if it was too hot, four-year-old logic said it would stay hot forever. I used to take his plate away, wait a beat, and hand it back pretending it was a fresh one, now magically cool.

Exhausted, I snapped that I didn't have time for this. I poured the water out in the sink. As it swirled down the drain, the smell of vodka hit me. My son burst into tears and ran to his room, slamming the door as I chased after him in a panic. I broke the door with my elbow. I called in sick to work and told his preschool he had a fever. I knew exactly what had happened: his father had been hiding vodka in Publix water bottles to drink on the go.

Years of being treated like garbage, I could tolerate. I couldn't tolerate my child being put in harm’s way. I was able to stand up for him in ways that I couldn’t stand up for myself. I will always be grateful for my children - they have been the best and most challenging teachers. It’s not necessarily a role that anyone would approve of - to put that responsibility on a child? But teachers come in all shapes and sizes. They don’t hold the responsibility in being my teachers. I hold the responsibility of learning the lessons. I will always be thankful that I found the courage to leave because of my child.

Leaving

I'd been seeing a therapist since 2011, referred through a domestic violence shelter. It's common for survivors to lean on shelter services for years, because leaving is a process, not a single moment. With their help I built a safety plan. I took a calculated risk and hid every one of my ex's unregistered guns in the attic, under the insulation, because I knew the highest-risk moment for a DV survivor is right after she leaves.

At one point he brandished a machete in front of our children and told me he'd chop me up and feed me to alligators. Somewhere along the way I'd lost all my fear. I had nothing left to lose. My flat, unflinching response knocked the wind clean out of his sails, “if you're going to do it, do it and get it over with. I'm tired.” He didn't get the fear and emotional intensity that he was seeking to feed whatever it is that goads him into being a monster. I had nothing left to give.

The nightmare didn't end there. During an HR investigation later that year, I told the investigator I had nothing left to lose, that they'd already taken everything from me. He squirmed uncomfortably, but offered not one word of kindness. Something about me was apparently off-putting. I wasn't sad. I was furious, and the fury seeped out of my skin like a miasma that made people want to back away.

My ex kept haunting me. We shared custody. He never paid child support because he “doesn't believe in it.” He'd take the kids and simply not bring them back for days. He'd break into my house and I'd find him asleep on the sofa, or in the garage. He'd park in the driveway and just sit there, for hours.

I resigned from every nonprofit board. I survived on food stamps, welfare, and the kindness of former colleagues who visited and quietly handed me cash. I took it. There was no room left for pride in the ashes of my former life.

The meme page is born while the hits keep coming

Through all of it, I kept posting on my personal Facebook to an audience of former classmates and distant relatives who simply didn't get it. Being in crisis taught me that most people had a tenuous connection to me at best, and it was one that could only tolerate good news. My personal propaganda sucked.

So, I started a meme page and poured all the dark humor into it instead. *Everything is terrible, let's have pancakes.* I was profoundly, isolatingly alone. But even then I could laugh. I've always had a weird, dark sense of humor. I inherited it from my dad. Even though he'd been dead for a decade by then, it kinda felt like he was still hanging around and looking out for me. He had a crazy train wreck of a life, himself. That's another story.

My department sent a letter demanding I repay my final semester of fellowship funding. I mailed them a dollar bill and a note calling it my "good faith repayment" for the value of what they'd granted me. I never heard from them again, except for the periodic call-center employee asking me to please donate to the school that had destroyed my hopes and dreams. I've croaked my sob story to a few unsuspecting strangers on those calls.

The professor kept her tenure and eventually retired. May she rot in hell. A year after I quit, a woman from her research team also quit in disgust and called me out of nowhere to commiserate and admit that she had felt badly about not standing up for me when I went down in flames. A few students did manage to graduate under her. I give them a bombastic side-eye to this day, especially the ones who try to add me on LinkedIn. What in the entire fuck is up with that?

Two years after I started the page, the man I'd eventually marry in 2020 sent a friend request from across the planet. He recognized the dark humor and saw a kindred spirit. In retrospect, I can say it was all worth it to find a partner like him. Walking through that fire changed me in many ways - it made me a better person. I had to proof and bake, like a loaf of good crusty sourdough.

From the Ashes

Now I can look back at that gap in my photo library with something closer to a wry smile. Yeah, that was the year I lost everything. It sucked. It was the worst thing I'd been through since my dad died in 2006. But I'm glad it happened.

It took that kind of loss to see that the things I'd used to define myself were just constructs. Clothes I could take off, like an old worn-out suit. You still need clothes to move through society, obviously. But now I get to choose which ones I wear and pick an outfit other people might not understand, might find outlandish or silly. The clothes aren't for them anymore. They're for me. I get to curate the identity I bring to other people: I keep the pieces I want, and drop the ones I don't.

It really is true that you find freedom on the other side of losing everything.

I look older now. But I have peace in my eyes, and these days I'd rather have peace than youth. I'm not here to tell anyone else what to choose… that's the whole beauty of free will. Pick your poison. But don't pick it blind. Know the consequences. Know thyself.

Choose wisely. And if you can laugh at it, you can live with it.

Read more

How did we get here?

My husband sent me a meme this week that Facebook dug up from his memories. It was something he’d seen back in 2017, when he was just a guy quietly following my page, still a year out from actually friend-requesting me. This is a love story, I promise – stay with me here. I will tell you the entire story, in several parts; it just so happens that memes are a fundamental part of the story.

The meme opens gently: “in case no one told you today,” and seven bullet points of pure sincerity follow the initial gentle opening: You’re beautiful; You’re loved; You’re needed; You’re alive for a reason. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see stitched on a pillow, or proudly typed by someone who found God in a group chat.

Then, here comes bullet point eight: “you are one of seven billion human beings on a tiny rock orbiting around an average star in a gravitationally unstable system which is one of 100 billion other stars in the galaxy which is one of an estimate 2 trillion and is really just a slight inhomogeneity in the distribution of matter in the universe which is slowly cooling down until there will be nothing left but useless light before the fabric of space and time itself is torn to pieces.”

It’s tucked in there, a footnote from the void, just some light emotional whiplash.

Live Laugh Love has become the punchline to so many jokes at this point. It’s bland, nice, and forgettable. The kind of thing you scroll past either without absorbing or while laughing quietly to yourself. The cosmic scale paragraph is just despair with good vocabulary.

I Heart Huckabee’s

This is basically the whole plot of the existential comedy that is one of my top 10 movies of all time, “I Heart Huckabees,” if you strip out the jokes about oil executives and Naomi Watts’ overly-animated and slightly unsettling high kicking commercials. Albert Markovski spends the movie bouncing between two camps: the existential detectives, played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, who insist everything is connected and meaningful in a blanket-y, cosmic, “the universe is one thing and you’re a stitch in it” kind of way, and Caterine Vauban, who insists on the opposite. Nothing is connected, nothing matters, cruelty and meaninglessness are the foundation of existence.

Albert gets dragged back and forth between them like a man being fought over by two different religions. The movie’s actual answer to this symbolic tug of war isn’t “pick a side.” It’s that you need to go all the way down into the meaninglessness and sit on it, like an egg until it hatches, before the connectedness on the other side can crystallize. You can’t shortcut to the warm fuzzy blanket version of existence. You have to embrace the harshness. You have to go through the goo phase that happens when a caterpillar is snug inside its chrysalis. But ultimately, the warm and fuzzy, harshness, and everything in between, are all part of The Blanket™.

The Way of Absurdity

That’s absurdism, basically, with more steps. Camus wasn’t selling optimism. He was saying: yes, the universe is indifferent; yes, it will not answer you; yes, you will ask it for meaning and get static. We have free will, so we are free to make our own meaning. It doesn’t matter if any greater meaning actually exists, there is no need to figure out who granted you permission, because nobody’s in charge of granting anything. The desk is empty. Go ahead. Do the thing. Be free. It’s a freedom so expansive that it can feel terrifying. There is no ground beneath your feet. It’s all shifting sands. Build your sandcastles, knowing that the tide will eventually return to erode the work that you put into building. This is the nature of being a meat popsicle.

When I saw that meme, I didn’t think the physics paragraph was undercutting the affirmations. I think it’s the only thing that makes them survive. “You’re beautiful,” when asserted by a stranger on the internet, is just noise.

There’s no way to verify it. There are no stakes, no weight. But let’s take a closer look: “you’re one of seven billion people on a cooling rock in a dying universe, and…“ that comma is doing the heaviest lifting here. Everything before the comma is true, scientifically speaking. And everything you decide to hang after that comma is entirely, terrifyingly, up to you. That comma is the floor, where you will find yourself laying - facedown, defeated. You’ll get back up and fall back down. The floor is always there to welcome you back. That’s where I started Cheerful Nihilism. Like everyone who is alive, I still visit the floor from time to time. I like to joke that I have a timeshare there. Who else is aware that they are participating in that timeshare in the oubliette? Fist bump of solidarity.

I didn’t find my way to absurdism by feeling good. I got there by feeling like a piece of shit someone stepped on and then scraped off their shoe on a dirty curb - rock bottom (I hope we’ve all heard of this place by now). And from rock bottom, laughing was the only thing I had left. Everything can be taken from you but the attitude you take in response to your circumstances. That’s the one thing that we all own. As my favorite existential psychologist, Viktor Frankl, famously said in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

From my prostrate position on the floor, I zoomed out for a second and saw myself laying there, so overwhelmed by grief about losing my lifelong dream of working in academia and the immense risk that you have to take in order to leave an abusive relationship because you can literally lose everything, including your life. Something broke inside of me – in a good way – and I was able to see the absurdity of my position. I was distraught about loss when, in the grand scheme of things, loss is the fundamental underpinning of what it means to be a human being. We build, it crumbles. We win, we lose. Anything taken by force must be held by force, and the strength behind that force will always, always, inevitably die out. We invest so much time and effort to resist the impermanence of life. You can carefully save and lose everything because of illness, war, or natural disaster. You can faithfully eat a nutritionally dense diet full of fresh vegetables and lean protein, get the recommended number of minutes per week of cardio, and regularly strength train with carefully calculated progressive overload and exquisitely refined form, and still die of cancer unexpectedly. We try to find footing on solid ground while the ground erodes beneath our feet.

Cheerful Nihilism isn’t cheerful despite the nihilism. It’s cheerful because I went all the way through it, Huckabees-style, out the other side. The cold part isn’t the opposite of the warm part. It’s both. It’s the only road there is. What happens in a meadow at dusk? Nothing. Everything.

So: you’re one of seven billion people on a small rock, in a universe that is slowly, indifferently, coming apart at the seams, and you get to decide what goes after the comma. That’s not despair. I mean, if your first reaction is despair, that’s fine. Mine was, too. But eventually, if you stay the course on that underworld journey, you’ll discover that that’s the only real freedom on offer. Take it or leave it, but know that not making a choice is just letting someone else make the choice for you.

And now for something completely different…

Somewhere out there in 2017, a guy scrolled past this exact meme, didn’t screenshot it, didn’t say anything. He just reposted it and quietly kept reading a stranger’s absurdist meme page for another year before he saw a picture of me modeling a merch drop that I was once again running to stay afloat in desperate times, and he decided to friend request me. I don’t know what he decided would go after his comma that day, but I’m glad it eventually involved me.

His profile picture made it clear that he was a professional fighter. This wasn’t the first time a professional fighter slid into my DMs, but my previous experience was dead in the water after a few days of disappointing and somewhat flaccid conversation. This time, I looked through his profile pictures, as one does, and the profile picture that prompted me to accept his friend request was the one immediately preceding his profile pic at the time. It was him slapping another fighter with his foot - that kind of hip mobility had me intrigued.

At that time, I’d chosen to be celibate for a while. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Being a moderately attractive woman on social media means a steady stream of random dudes sliding into your DMs. I’d never had a healthy romantic relationship in my life and at that point, in my late 30s as a single mom with 2 kids, I assumed that my picker was broken, and that I simply didn’t know how to be in a romantic relationship. I’d been in therapy for seven years by then, with the same therapist I found at a domestic violence shelter in 2011. She was excellent. That’s a topic for a different essay.

I messaged my future husband first, because of who I am as a person. I’m a ‘rip the band-aid off’ kinda gal. He responded the next day, and I was pleasantly surprised that he wrote in complete sentences and had a reasonable vocabulary. He’d lived a rich life, full of travel and strange, fascinating stories. He was a genuinely good storyteller, and I was a little envious. We got along so well that we ended up talking every single day. There was no effort extended to produce a projection consisting of only the palatable bits of who I was. I would throw lore into the chat like a hand grenade, thinking this would be the tidbit about me that would make this interaction implode. And yet he was always able and willing to volley it back to me.

He was on the other side of the planet, and I was up at 3 or 4 a.m. tutoring Chinese kids online, so our schedules lined up almost by accident. Neither of us was looking for a relationship, so we just connected. We were just two people talking with no expectations attached.

It turns out that was the magic formula that finally taught me what a healthy attachment looked like.

… to be continued

It’s not two wolves fighting inside you, it’s more like siblings: connected, always bickering, unable to resolve the ongoing conflict. The same mechanism that turns a Kentucky feud into generations of blood, or a longstanding conflict between nations into a genocide.

James and I talk about what real repair requires: ad…

Read more

Recently, I was demonetized, and my reach has been restricted severely on Facebook and Instagram. I went from having a reach of 100 million+ to 6 million. My page is not being recommended, and every time I log into Meta Business Suite, I'm confronted with a slowly decreasing follower count. I would be lying if I said it didn’t break my heart a little bit as I see my follower count and reach continue to plummet into the Bog of Eternal Stench.

All 1.5 million followers of my page on Facebook belong to Facebook. All 412k followers of my account on Instagram belong to Instagram. All 87k followers of my account on Threads belong to Threads. I don't think I can actually call any of it mine. I spent nine years building this audience organically, and I never owned anything. I did all of this for Meta. Yes, I’m bitter.

More lore from the floor, to contextualize why I think of these pages as my babies: during the time I was with my abusive ex (2006 to 2016), he convinced me I was "naturally repulsive," and that people just didn't like me because I was "off-putting." This is part of the game of abusive relationships that hinge on power and control manipulation - social isolation is the name of that game. His words, on endless repeat, played into insecurities I'd carried with me since elementary school, when I couldn't read unspoken social cues and got by studying girls I'd noticed were more socially fluent than me. I spent many years imitating their language patterns and behavior, sometimes with socially disastrous results, trying in vain to build a version of myself that was more palatable to people. It was easy to exploit those baked-in vulnerabilities. I don’t even think that this was a conscious impulse on my ex’s part. It’s part of the dynamic and I’m sure people who’ve had similar relationships can recognize the patterns. For me, making a page on Facebook, at the end of that decade as our violent and unstable relationship sputtered to a close, was an act of quiet defiance.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, online friends weren't considered real friends. Some people would still argue that. I remember scurrying home to get on BBS and whiling away the hours of my work study job at University talking to anonymous accounts on message boards, carefully avoiding mention of my habits when I was hanging out with people IRL. For twenty-five years, the friends I've made online have been present for me in ways people IRL simply weren't. In that time, I have been held up by so many hands. For most of the years I ran that page on Facebook, I wasn't even monetized. I made a little from merch drops, and sometimes, in desperate circumstances, I had to ask for donations just to keep the utilities on, or the car running, or my kids fed. The community I built on the shifting sands of a platform with no customer service and unfathomable moderation algorithms healed me in ways I'm still finding words for. So even the possibility of losing contact with those people in a single unappealable moment gives me a faint echo of the devastation I'd feel if it actually happened.

I should have seen it coming. I was an early adopter of technology from a young age. The first computer I ever used was a Commodore 64 my older sisters played around with BASIC on, when I was five or six, and I learned to load my favorite games off it by ear, practically - good ol’ Dragonsden and Kickman. I resisted getting a smartphone for years because I worried I'd get more addicted to screens if I could carry one in my pocket. Spoiler alert: I did. I have watched interface after interface come and go, watched people get attached to a specific piece of software that was forgotten just as quickly as it was adopted, and somehow I still managed to have this weird blind faith that this one - this one company, this one platform - would simply always be there, and I'd always be able to reach the people I'd found through it.

Something shifted in 2019-2020. I noticed that my most contentious posts (the ones that drew angry reactions and ended in mult-comment arguments nested in the comments) got dramatically more reach than anything else I made. Trolls have always existed; there were pot-stirrers on message boards and BBS forums long before Facebook existed. But the density of the hateful voices, and the financial reward for provoking them, keeps climbing. Unhappy people make more purchases. For a lot of accounts, rage bait stopped being an unfortunate side effect and became a structural element of the posting strategy, because it's what the algorithm pays out on. Leveraging dissatisfaction isn't a bug in the business model. It is the business model. The irony of social media becoming a bastion of antisocial behavior shouldn't escape anyone's notice - least of all mine, since I built a home there before I understood the term and conditions.

I'm not alone in this, and that's exactly the point. Since mid-2025, creators across Facebook have been describing the same pattern: a monetization restriction that lands with no cited violation, no real explanation, and for many who try to appeal there’s no human on the other end of it. In March 2026, Meta formalized new rules about what counts as "original" content, and accounts that don't meet the bar can be quietly reclassified so they stop reaching anyone who doesn't already follow them. You’re no longer eligible for organic discovery, you don’t appear in Explore, and you’re not included in suggested content, even while your account itself stays technically active. When Meta's own Oversight Board reviewed the pattern in June 2026, it didn't find a glitch. It found a system: account governance it described as lacking transparency and consistency, producing removals that are often not just unexplained, but also unexplainable. So, this isn't a story about one algorithm having a bad month. It's a cautionary tale about what happens to anyone who builds something durable on land they were only ever allowed to borrow.

I don't have a tidy way to get that home back; because of my loss of income after being demonitized, I don’t have the extra cash to even pay for a domain name, but I’m working towards that. I've stopped assuming the platform will hold a home for me. I'm building something smaller and slower now. Now, I just have a lil’ old newsletter that’s being sent directly to people who choose it, that no algorithm can throttle and no policy update can erase overnight. It won't reach 100 million people. It doesn't need to. It just needs to be mine. I should have done this years ago, but hindsight is always 20/20 as they say. Thank you for coming with me. Thank you for being here. You helped me rebuild my faith in humanity many years ago, and you remain an island of solace in a sea of disappointment.

Suggested reading:

ALM Corp (2026). Meta’s New Original Content Rules (2026): What Every Creator on Facebook and Instagram Must Know https://almcorp.com/blog/meta-original-content-rules-2026-facebook-instagram-creators/

Atalay, A. S., & Meloy, M. G. (2011). Retail therapy: A strategic effort to improve mood. Psychology & Marketing, 28(6), 638-659. https://scispace.com/pdf/retail-therapy-a-strategic-effort-to-improve-mood-x5o3hbpqlr.pdf

Bodle, A. (2012). Trolls: Where do they come from? https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/apr/19/trolls-where-come-from

Gruet, S. & Lawton, M. (2024). What is Rage Bait and Why is it so Profitable? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp555xy5ro

Jadhav, A. (2026). How Meta Built an Enforcement System Publishers can’t Challenge. https://interestingengineering.com/culture/meta-facebook-enforcement-system-monetization

Read more