Toward the end of the pandemic, my partner and I moved to Park Slope. The neighborhood was idyllic, with cute shops and restaurants, tree-lined streets and handsome brownstones. But it was a particularly painful period of our relationship because it led to our breakup.

We’ve been back together for three years and don’t often revisit that strange, turbulent time. One day, to my surprise, he brought up that there was a Burger King on the other side of Prospect Park, near the Brooklyn Museum, and he used to go there sometimes in secret.

“Why in secret?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

I scrunched up my nose, prepared to defend myself. I wasn’t that critical, was I? But who knows: it was our first time living together, and we were spending a lot of time indoors, not sure how much to socialize, figuring out the “new normal” in more than one sense. I remember doing a lot of meal prep, grocery shopping, cooking for two. Our lives were enmeshed. I doubt I explicitly offered any opinion about Burger King, but something about how I acted during that time must’ve given him the impression that I would’ve disapproved.

It’s amusing in hindsight that he would’ve kept this from me because we communicate so openly now.

And then, I remembered that afternoon we decided to get out of the house and go to the Brooklyn Museum. We were crossing through Prospect Park, and I was letting him lead, but he was vague about where he thought the museum was and didn’t give me much confidence he knew how to get there. So I whipped out my phone to check the map and told him we should be going that way instead. It was a shorter, more direct route.

He’s usually so easy-going, I was surprised by how vehemently he reacted against this. He wanted to go through the park, and that was how he was going to do it.

Now, I understand that he did know his way. Because he had been taking that route to Burger King.

From the trivial to the seismic, secrets accumulate in a relationship when one or both parties don’t feel like they can be free to show up as their full self without being scorned or criticized. Concealment is as much an act of rebellion as a defense mechanism. Children do this when they know something is forbidden. Sneaking out after curfew, smoking, drinking—doing something subversive to assert their independence. It’s in our nature to yearn for freedom. We want to feel like we are the sole masters of our own destinies.

I used to admire couples who were very intentional about their relationship. They would do things like draft shared goals and contracts and review their progress every few months. They would schedule time to check in with each other and assess the health of their relationship like a quarterly business review.

All of that now makes my stomach turn. I don’t believe in relationship contracts. I don’t believe in marriage. I would rather my partner choose me freely, knowing he can walk away without incurring any financial loss or legal burden. That’s much more meaningful and romantic to me than a ring and a vow.

When we were living together in Park Slope and going through our ups and downs, I read We Do by the psychotherapist Stan Tatkin and was convinced it was a good idea to follow one of the exercises in the book and draft a “couple’s mission statement.” And so we did. My partner read a few chapters, and shortly after, told me he didn’t think he could live with me anymore. I used to joke about how a book that was meant to fix our relationship actually destroyed it.

I was being dramatic, but in a way, the book did make things worse. When you try too hard to diagnose and treat a problem, you run the risk of overmedicating and aggravating the symptoms. We didn’t need a couple’s mission statement. We didn’t need a self-help book. We needed physical and psychological space. Freedom to do our own things apart from each other.

My cat was sick in September, and after switching her to a novel protein diet and doing an ultrasound, the vet recommended an array of options, including additional bloodwork to test cobalamin and folate, an appetite stimulant, and even steroids. It’s hard to know how much to treat a sick pet. An overanxious parent might say yes to everything. But bringing her back to the vet for additional tests that require fasting would’ve added more stress to her already stressed system. Ultimately, is it really worth it?

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a loved one is to just let them be. Let them eat when they want to, shit when they need to.

When my partner and I started talking again a few months after the break up, my coach at the time suggested I try letting things happen through me, instead of by me. The idea is that if you focus too much on the other person and how you want them to behave, you’re trying to make stuff happen, you’re trying to force your will. What’s far more authentic and enduring is change that happens through you, and you can do that by focusing on yourself and how you show up.

I love a good villain. They have to be genuinely scary but legible enough that you can understand why they are the way they are (a villain can’t exist without a compelling backstory). The best ones invite readers to sympathize with their motivations even if their methods are abhorrent.

Cathy Ames just might be my favorite female villain, and she could only have been born out of the imagination of a man.

Steinbeck, as the first-person narrator of East of Eden, depicts her as a force of psychic evil, drawing on the biblical imagery of the serpent. We are often told that she has “small sharp teeth,” and when she eats a piece of meat, “her little tongue flicked around her lips.” She’s described in foreboding terms, with men as unflappable as Samuel Hamilton shivering in her presence (“a goose walked over my grave”).

It would be pretty boring if all she is is the embodiment of absolute evil. What makes her an interesting villain is the way she’s viewed through the eyes of the male characters as a manipulative vamp (Charles and Mr. Edwards), the paragon of womanhood (Adam), and a chilling, impenetrable void (Samuel and Lee). She’s a canvas onto which the men project their fears and desires—a creature of temptation who resists being “known.” She wields her sexuality as a source of power, withholding sex from her husband on their wedding night and drugging him in order to seduce his brother who distrusts her. She’s monstrous because she’s devoid of womanly empathy and rejects every role a lady is expected to embrace: dutiful daughter, obedient wife, loving mother.

Cathy is inscrutable only in that she refuses to live up to the prevailing expectations of women. She’s actually very explicit about what she doesn’t want, telling Adam multiple times that she does not want to go to California. When he moves them there anyway and buys a big ranch, she tells him she didn’t want to come, and as soon as she can, she’ll leave. His response:

“Oh, nonsense.” He laughed. “You’re like a child away from home for the first time. You’ll love it once you get used to it and the baby is born. You know, when I first went away to the army I thought I was going to die of homesickness. But I got over it. We all get over it. So don’t say silly things like that.”

She doesn’t want to be a mother, and she has no interest in helping him build the Edenic paradise he envisions. And when she does exactly what she says she’ll do, packing up to leave after giving birth, he locks her in her room.

Yes, she’s cold and manipulative. Yes, she steals and deceives and kills. But there is a method to her violence. She’s trying to escape the boxes that people insist on putting her in.

The Netflix series makes Cathy more sympathetic by giving her a backstory of child abuse. Her sexual deviance is a result of having been subjected to unwanted male attention at an early age. Although Cathy’s evil in the book is presented as innate rather than produced by trauma, it’s a defensible interpretation in the context of the social climate of the time. It’s not so hard to imagine that a beautiful, precocious child’s abuse could go unremarked, even by the book’s male narrator. This renders her monstrosity Frankensteinian: she’s rebelling against a patriarchal society that can only accept girls and women under restrictive conditions of perfect virtuosity or total subservience.

My antennae went up when I read somewhere that she may have been based on Steinbeck’s second wife who left him after telling him she never loved him and he’s not the father of their younger son. I get why he would’ve felt hurt and betrayed, and I get the desire to write one’s enemies into a work of fiction. But there are two sides to the dissolution of every marriage…

When Adam is recovering from the devastation of Cathy’s departure, he asks his housekeeper Lee if she was very beautiful, saying he can’t remember since the last thing she did (shooting him in order to get away) was “ugly.” Lee gives him the answer he needs to hear: “To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation.”

Lee describes Cathy as “a mystery” who “is not like other people” and lacking in “kindness maybe, or conscience.” So he likely means that Adam failed to see the potential for cruelty in her. But read another way, Adam never saw Cathy as a flesh-and-blood person with her own temperament, motivations, and ambitions.

We build people into who we expect them to be, and the grander our construction, the greater the pain when they defy our expectations. But people also have a prophetic way of living up to our worst fears about them. After he’s disabused of his idealization of Cathy, Adam wonders if his twin boys are tainted with her evil, and Lee warns him that “not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them.”

One of the lines in the book that I keep returning to is:

Adam could do no dishonesty. He didn’t want anything. You had to crave something to be dishonest.

Perhaps Cathy’s greatest sin is she wants too much. And when you’re born into a society that does not guarantee women bodily autonomy, intellectual freedom, and financial independence, you have to resort to some devious machinations just to protect yourself and your interests.

East of Eden ranks up there as one of my favorite novels written by a dead white man. I found the portrayal of found family particularly moving. It’s surprisingly well-paced for 600+ pages, a gripping family saga and a meditation on original sin, choice vs. predestination, and intergenerational trauma.

Another summer draws to a close, and I’m happy to report that I did not waste it. My regret last year was not taking any time to travel since I was so focused on finishing my novel. I swore that I would not make the same mistake. This year, I booked myself on eight Mediterranean beaches, hiked until every muscle in my legs ached, sojourned upstate for a creative retreat, rented a lakehouse with friends, and collected bug bites like passport stamps.

I’ve also written half of a dirty first draft and spent two feverish weeks editing an old project (again). I’ve reaffirmed my intense love of reading. Truly, it is one of the greatest joys of life. When I’m struggling to put words on a page, sinking into a good book never fails to get me out of a rut.

As a result, I haven’t spent much time on social media, including Substack. Although I will never be the type of person who is extremely online, I’ve been feeling exuberant about the prospect of posting without any accompanying pressure or urgency. It’s been revelatory: I no longer abide by the idea of sticking to a schedule, getting a newsletter out every week or biweekly like I used to. That regimen feels stifling. The less pressure I put on myself to publish, the more spaciousness I’ll have to notice what’s genuinely exciting, the more I will want to share.

What else? I dipped in and out of Twitter and realized I don’t have the desire to come up with interesting takes anymore. I used to have “Twitter brain”: an engine that churned out quick takes and fed on validation. These days, I’d rather immerse myself in the pages of East of Eden than scroll any feed.

This summer has been a process of letting go of old ideas that no longer serve me, including the idea that I should do something simply because it gave me fulfillment a year ago.

I tried to clean out my closet and noticed I have a tendency to hold on to past and potential future versions of me. Either I need to party more, or I should get rid of that sequined bandeau that I will never find the occasion to wear. It’s equally tempting to keep an article of clothing just because it was an old favorite. Finding your style is a matter of shedding notions of who you were and who you might become and accepting who you are today.

Like many people, I was consumed by the NBA Finals and the World Cup earlier this summer. Seeing professional athletes who are the top of their game struggle to achieve an elusive dream is extremely relatable to any creative person trying to make a living from their art. When a team scores a goal in soccer, suddenly they have something to lose. As a viewer, you can feel the energy and tension in the stadium kick up a notch. Similarly, when you publish a book, you have something to live up to, a new standard to exceed. After that historic win, I kind of feel bad for the Knicks. It’s unreasonable to expect them to repeat that performance, yet inevitably, the expectation bears down on them.

One of the things I most admire about Brunson is his ability to stay focused. He was flagrantly fouled by Wemby twice without getting called. I, along with half the internet, was outraged on his behalf, screaming at the TV, while he maintained Zen-like composure. It made me reflect on the times I’ve felt wronged in a professional setting and how I responded by insisting on the idea of “fairness.”

There is a difference between advocating for yourself and going to war over a perceived injustice. Holding onto a feeling that you have been mistreated is crippling and self-defeating. You only hurt yourself in the end. The world is not built fair. Sometimes, you just have to suck it up and accept the unfairness. Choose yourself over your grievance. Brunson didn’t let those flagrant fouls distract him from the bigger prize: winning the Championship.

Okay, I know he was probably media trained and didn’t want to badmouth a superstar, but that was the perfect response. It is more powerful to let other people be your witness than to shout your complaints (or accomplishments) from the rooftops. He’s also accepting that it’s not his job to referee.

Speaking of witnessing, that World Cup final between Spain and Argentina was… not pretty. I’ve been watching Messi since he stormed onto the stage as a preternaturally gifted eighteen-year-old, so I will always root for him. Argentina as a team, though, is harder to love. It felt like the world turned on them this year. Even the commentator said something to the effect of they’re like the bad guy in a superhero movie that just won’t die.

Harsh.

Football is a religion in Argentina. They play their hearts out every game. They win with fervor—and they lose with fervor. Of course, they’re not going to go down easy. Look at the way they cried and kissed the earth every time they eked out a miraculous win in the knockout stages. I found their behavior in the final extremely consistent. If the team were a character in a novel, the way they played would’ve felt right (it was inevitable for a brawl to break out when the two sides can understand each other’s shit-talking). It’s very boring to judge people by some absolute moral standard.

I can appreciate Brunson’s and the Knicks’ ability to maintain an awesome degree of cool in the face of injustice to win a championship, and I can appreciate the Argentine national team’s total inability to do the same because it’s in their nature to fight tooth and nail for what they love. You don’t have to condone someone’s actions to understand why they behave the way they do. And understanding is always a worthwhile endeavor.

Warning: Spoilers for the movie ahead.

When I heard that the sleeper hit Obsession plays on the idea that dating and relationships can be “scary and anxiety-provoking at a very deep level,” I ran to my local theater. (You know you’re old when you get your pop culture news from The New York Times.) My novel that’s out on submission explores some of the darker themes of dating and attachment, so I was hungry for any discourse on the subject.

While the movie didn’t offer any groundbreaking revelations, it did give audiences plenty to talk about. Filmmaker Curry Barker says in a Nerdist interview:

I mean, I feel like I can be scrolling on my phone at night and I can see many scary things and not be affected at all. Then you just come across this one thing that you’re scrolling and it scares the hell out of you. It’s usually a person saying something really weird and their face is just slightly off and then you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’ And you have to turn the lights on. That’s the type of feeling that I wanted to capture so bad is this it’s human but it’s not quite human. A jump scare doesn’t get me anymore.

Masahiro Mori coined the term “Uncanny Valley” in the context of robotics to describe something that so closely resembles a human but isn’t quite human that it imprints on our brains as eerie and disturbing. It’s particularly applicable, I think, to modern dating, which is rife with psychological danger. You’re trying to ascertain the character and motivations of a stranger who’s putting on their best performance for your benefit. And when attraction and attachment enter the picture, even the most astute observer is susceptible to manipulation. (Belle Burden’s bestselling memoir is a reminder that we can find ourselves waking up next to a stranger even after twenty years of marriage.)

When we start dating someone, we’re trying to understand what kind of person they are. We’re implicitly trying to answer the question: Are they a good person? Our brain is categorizing them into familiar boxes based on their appearance, words, mannerisms, and behavior. A date can be going really well until something slips, a “glitch” that eschews categorization, a blip of inconsistency that suggests maybe they’re not who I thought they were.

Obsession is not exactly subtle in this regard. Nikki is unequivocally “wrong” the moment she reappears in the car window after Bear makes his wish. We don’t need any CGI or special effects to tell us this. We know that love can’t be coerced, so our brain registers her sudden transformation as unnatural before she starts taping doors shut and feeding Bear his dead cat.

The most disturbing dialogue in the film is when real Nikki, who is aware that her body has been commandeered by a demonic force, asks Bear to kill her, and his response is “What’s so bad about being with me?” His response struck me as so jarring and incongruous—a veritable “uncanny valley” moment—that my brain tried to erase it from my memory. The only conclusion I can draw is that the mask has slipped, and he’s revealed himself to be a selfish and oblivious brute. It’s like he has no conception that enslaving another person is wrong.

As a teenager, I used to think romantic persistence was hot. Persistence that tells you in no uncertain terms what a person wants is attractive, something Bear could not bring himself to do out of fear of rejection. But persistence that ignores another person’s agency is creepy. It stems from a long tradition that celebrates male domination and female subjugation. A respectable woman, it was believed in the Victorian era, could not truly know her own desires.

It sounds painfully obvious to say that to love someone is to respect their autonomy completely, but the temptation is always in us to fuse our desires with the person we love. What the movie grotesquely illuminates is how something we’ve probably all wished for at one point—pining over a crush or heartbroken over a breakup—is not the thing we actually want, and in fact, would be an utter violation of nature.

There’s a fine line between seduction and manipulation. Seduction works because the other person wants what’s being offered. Their innate desire has been activated. Manipulation, on the other hand, undermines their autonomy. They’re being forced to think or act a certain way, irrespective of their will. In Liquid Love, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that desire is distinct from, and almost oppositional to, love. He describes desire as “the wish to consume”—even to “annihilate”—and love as “the wish to care and to preserve the object of the care.”

I think the movie would’ve been more aptly titled Possession. It’s not a story about infatuation and limerence so much as it is about mistaking a desire for ownership and control as love. For a good portion of the movie, I was convinced that Bear’s cat had been reincarnated in the body of Nikki. In wishing for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the world,” what Bear actually wants is blind devotion and total dependence, not unlike a pet to her “owner.”

In the final scene, we’re led to believe that Entity Nikki used the willow to make Bear love her back equally. When he walks out of that bathroom with hearts in his eyes, I thought to myself, wow, that’s one way to resolve it. Get them on the same page, even if the same page means entrapment in a mutually coercive fantasy. If the movie ended there, it would’ve implied that the problem with romantic love is its asymmetry: one person will always feel “less loved” than the other.

But of course, the movie isn’t going to let either character off the hook. When the real Nikki comes back into herself and screams, it’s like she—and all of us in the theater—have just woken up from a really bad trip.

The party is over, and there are dead bodies.

The start of summer has always been a time of optimism. As a kid, those first few days of freedom were pure bliss: the entire three-month break stretching before you like taffy. Zero obligations. Pure potential.

Lately, my summers have been full of striving and grinding. Last year, I wanted to be on a beach somewhere in the Mediterranean but never got around to planning a trip because I was too busy working on my novel. By the time I looked up, it was October. People are sometimes amazed I stuck with it for so long, but the truth is, the longer it took, the more I wanted to finish it. Call it a curse or a blessing.

For the first twenty-five years of our lives, we’re trying to find our footing in the world, and the only concrete steps are the ones that lead to economic security: graduating with a degree from a respectable college, securing a good internship, a high-paying job, that first promotion. There’s a playbook to follow, and with enough discipline and grind, you have a fair chance of succeeding.

At some point, you begin to realize there are other things you might want that have no guarantee of success. These roads lead to a great unknown that inspires you to dream big, but treacherously, promises nothing.

June has felt to me like slipping down a muddy embankment on one such road. After struggling to get pregnant for over a year, I was diagnosed with unexplained infertility, which led me to IVF, which resulted in an unexplained pregnancy loss. Despite all the bloodwork and scans and biopsies and extra testing I opted into, it still failed. What’s especially cruel is “unexplained,” and I got hit with it twice. When there’s an identifiable cause, when you know what went wrong, you have the power to act on that information. But when all the diagnostics are normal, there’s nothing you can do. I will never look at small probabilities the same again. If an event has a 2% chance of occurring, I will not discount it.

This coincided with my book going out on submission. I’ve been warned by writer friends that being on sub is the culmination of your worst anxieties amplified tenfold. They are not exaggerating. Ironically, I was happier working on my umpteenth revision than I was with the novel done and out of my hands. The act of creation—whether that’s a song, a film, a book, a child—is inherently optimistic. As much as I tried to distract myself by working on a new novel, I struggled to give it my full attention. I wondered if the book I labored over for five years would ever see the light of day. I’d be lying if I said I only do it because I enjoy writing. I want to get published. I want to be read. I want to put a piece of myself out into the world.

Many years ago, when I was first querying agents, I tried to decipher some useful bit of feedback between the lines of my rejections. If one mentioned not connecting with the voice, I would agonize over my choice of POV. This was before I learned that most rejections are form rejections. You can hone your craft up to a point, but beyond that, you are at the mercy of timing and taste and luck.

For days after my loss, I kept trying to find an underlying issue. Silent endometriosis? Natural killer cells? Was I running too much? Was it that one time I thoughtlessly ordered a hibiscus tea? If I had an answer, I could do something about it. I could regain a sense of control. Just like analyzing those rejection emails, I was trying to find something wrong with me—my body, my diet, my habits—something I could fix.

They say that how you relate to luck reveals a lot about your worldview, and I do think luck has a self-fulfilling quality. People who believe themselves to be lucky tend to be more open. They increase their surface area for serendipity. They keep trying. They don’t give up.

After learning that the little life I was carrying had stopped developing, I lost interest in my usual activities. Watching the Knicks was the only thing I felt like doing, the only spot of joy in an otherwise bleak month. So many things had to align for them to win the championship, and I’m certain the power of a fervent fanbase had no small part in it. As heroically talented as Jalen Brunson is, no final is won by the sheer willpower of a single individual. Talking to Lisa Salter after Game 5, Brunson mentioned “working hard every summer.” I seized upon this because I recognized myself in his focus and discipline. As much as I know the sober truth that no amount of hard work and preparation can guarantee success—that you can pour your heart and soul into a project that never sees the light of day—I need to believe that luck will eventually find me if I keep going.

When I look at athletes who fulfill their lifelong dream of winning a championship, my joy for them is tinged with sadness. I wonder how empty it must feel to have achieved it all, to have your greatest moment in the rearview mirror. There’s so much anticipation and excitement in the journey, the sweat and grind of working at something you love, not knowing the outcome, but hoping, dreaming, believing. That, in itself, is a privilege.

Embarking on any endeavor where the outcome isn’t guaranteed requires an abundance of optimism. After my surgery to remove the unviable pregnancy, I felt intense relief bordering insanely on exuberance, and it wasn’t just because of the lingering effects of anesthesia. The worst was over: the agonizing days of uncertainty and denial, sadness and terror, acceptance and depression. It was over. I survived the thing I most feared. The only direction to go was forward. I could feel the energy of summer again. Anything is possible.

I like to think of myself as a discreet person, but there have been times I’ve screwed up. These incidents are infrequent and fairly innocuous, but I file them away because it’s important that I exercise better judgment next time. Once, a coworker slacked a few of us in a private channel about how she almost went to war with K that morning for taking the desk she booked in the office. This was obviously not a big deal, and when I sat down next to K, I made an offhanded comment like, “I heard this desk was in heated contention.” Seeing his face, I immediately knew I made a mistake. I hadn’t considered that K would not have expected R to spread the word about what happened. He got defensive, and I realized I’d inadvertently made things awkward between them. I pinged R to let her know I’d messed up. Best case, she’d shrug it off. Spoiler: she did not. She was pissed. All I could do was apologize. No matter how trivial it was, I made a careless comment. I wasn’t thinking from each of their perspectives.

The last—and God be willing, last time—I got ruinously drunk was at a house party two years ago. I’d mixed too many drinks, and at the end of the night, blacked out, vomited, and passed out. I was very grateful that a friend called me an Uber and made sure I got home safe.

The next day, I was stunned to find out that this same friend had taken a photo of me passed out on the ground and sent it to the host of the party. We all have those embarrassing photos from nights out we wish never existed, except I wasn’t doing anything mildly funny or interesting. I was slumped on the ground, unwell, unconscious.

I tried to explain to her why I was upset. It’s possible she didn’t realize how bad the night was for me. She promised not to share the photo more widely and made a point of saying she decided not to post it to the event page. Looking back at our texts, I can see myself trying again and again to explain why I felt hurt, and it’s because she said I don’t think it matters if I don’t understand it personally, and I very much wanted her to understand. She said I didn’t need to explain myself and that she didn’t think any less of me. This felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on why, so focused was I on moving past my grievance. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of our friendship. It was enough that she’d apologized. Maybe it didn’t matter that she couldn’t relate.

A few weeks ago, at a picnic, she brought up the incident out of the blue. Remember that time you vomited on a tree outside T’s apartment? I’ve always found her to be tactful, so it was surprising that she would remind me of a night she knew was upsetting to me—in part because of that photo—only to say she had passed by that tree and thought about it, and she was glad the tree was okay.

We can all appreciate a bit of comic relief in tense moments, and sometimes, laughing it off is the best thing to do. But I’m leery of comedians and their ability to make light of literally anything. Humor is a numbing agent. It desensitizes you to real emotions, to taking another person’s pain seriously.

I considered letting it go—writing it off as an off-color comment—but this friendship meant something to me, and it was now obvious that her inability to understand me in the first place was a problem. So I tried to explain that my issue with the photo wasn’t about being worried she or anyone else would think less of me, but about expecting my friends to protect my privacy and dignity. Her response was respectful, but again, she admitted, if our roles were reversed, I wouldn’t feel the way you do. She acknowledged that this doesn’t invalidate my feelings and promised she would try not to bring it up again.

I found it baffling that something I thought was simple was so hard for her to grasp. All I wanted was for her to put aside her memory of the night for a moment and take in the information I was giving her about my experience—information, I hoped, would allow her to see things differently. To her, I may have been a “sleepy drunk.” To her, it may have been a moment of levity. But I was in a bad place, physically, psychically. I wasn’t even conscious that a picture was being taken of me while I was at my lowest.

There are so many qualities I admire about her, including her total openness in sharing the details of her life. I can see how it’s possible for someone to share very candidly about themselves, yet treat another person’s vulnerability and privacy without the care they might expect. They’re using their own higher threshold for evaluating what’s embarrassing or humiliating. That, by itself, is not the issue. The issue is not being able to change your perspective in light of new information.

Imaginative empathy requires that we step outside our own frame of reference and fully inhabit someone else’s. It’s entirely possible to understand someone whose experience of an event differs from our own as long as we’re willing to go there. It may be uncomfortable. It may force us to confront the fact that we’ve caused someone pain or made an error in judgment. An apology without true understanding is just etiquette. The depth of intimacy in any friendship is measured by this capacity for understanding.

In last week’s episode of The Sunday Daily podcast, photographer and writer Andy Isaacson talks about traveling in India with a company that pairs visually impaired travelers with sighted travelers as companions. Isaacson finds himself describing “quietly prosaic” details to his blind companion Daniel that he otherwise wouldn’t have noticed:

The black and white painted curbs. The way that roadside vendors displayed their potato chip bags over the front of their stands like colored beads. The neat lane lines that were universally ignored. It was sharpening my noticing. And as I was describing these visual details, I was gaining a more vivid impression of India.

They visit the Taj Mahal, and Daniel picks up on the sound of someone running around “with bells,” which turns out to be a child wearing ankle bangles. He notices, too, that the acoustics of the tomb’s inner chamber amplify the tourists’ voices into a chorus—details that you or I might overlook.

For the sighted, traveling is like watching a film, but for the blind, it’s more like reading a book, and the book version is always better than the movie, says the founder of Traveleyes, Amar Latif. “It’s a more interpretive process in which descriptions feed imagination. The world reveals itself more slowly through these layers of sound and touch and scent.” If traveling for the blind is like reading a book, then for the sighted person guiding them, it’s like writing. What Isaacson is doing for Daniel is essentially worldbuilding.

His second companion is a woman named Candie who is more interested in the people inhabiting a place, what she calls “the reality of India.” She describes stepping off a bus, and a child coming up and patting her leg.

A sighted person might withdraw, but not knowing who or what has touched her, Candie reaches out and touches back, similar to how a kid learns about her world tactilely. Her surprise at finding a child’s rough hand (kids normally have smooth hands) leads her to imagine what kind of life the child must’ve had. Paradoxically, when we rely too much on our vision, we risk closing ourselves off and noticing less.

I was reminded of Raymond Carver’s iconic short story “Cathedral.” The narrator is insular, bigoted. He reluctantly plays host to his wife’s longtime friend, a blind man named Robert. The two have very little in common. Their conversation is stilted. They drink a lot of whiskey and smoke a lot of weed while the TV plays a program about the history of cathedrals in Europe. The narrator tries to explain what a cathedral looks like, but he’s terrible at it, so Robert asks him to draw one instead. As he draws, Robert holds the narrator’s hand while it moves across the paper in an attempt to “see” through the narrator’s eyes, a bit like Daniel and Candie being guided by Isaacson’s detailed descriptions, except in this case, they abandon words in favor of the tactile.

Robert then asks the narrator to close his eyes while drawing, essentially inviting him to step into his shoes. It’s no coincidence that it’s a place of worship they are creating (cathedrals were built in an attempt to reach God). When the drawing is completed, Robert asks the narrator to open his eyes, but he keeps them closed as if to prolong the transcendent state he’s in. Sometimes, we need to abandon the conventional tools of language and sight in order to see beyond the boundaries of our limited worldview, the story seems to say (though you could also argue they were both just drunk and high).

The best conversations are ones where everyone is building the cathedral together, so to speak. Everyone is a co-author of meaning. Disagreement is generative because each person is open to seeing “beyond.” Bad conversations tend to be one-sided or shallow. All bickering, on one extreme, or all polite agreement, on the other, both signal a lack of openness and trust.

I agree with Latif that the book version is (almost always) better than the movie. It got me thinking: what does it mean to live your life as you would read a book rather than watch a movie? I think it involves some amount of active engagement with your community and environment, slowing down so you can notice more, walking in someone else’s shoes (so important), being willing to go beyond surface-level interactions, challenging and revising your assumptions.

I love Sean DeLeone’s analogy: “If writing is talking, then reading is listening.” You can’t write if you don’t read. Fiction, in particular, opens us up to other ways of being and seeing because it activates our imagination and gives us access to another person’s consciousness. You can’t get that by watching a movie. Even in the most intimate heart-to-hearts, parts of a person’s interiority will always be hidden. What makes the act of reading transcendent is that it allows us to inhabit another person’s psyche, to see what they choose to reveal to the world and what they withhold—to find ourselves in that tension and vulnerability. Like traveling, when we return home from a good book, we see the world a little differently.

What I’m enjoying

In the spirit of reading, here are three books I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this year:

1. Kin by Tayari Jones: Heart-wrenching. You get invested in these two young women who are shaped by the same void in their lives (their mother) but whose choices take them on vastly different journeys, yet their friendship never wavers. It’s beautifully written, and the emotional payoff is well worth the slow build.

2. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe: This is nonfiction/true crime, but it’s written like the best fiction with immersive worldbuilding and shadowy, crazy-ass characters with complex backstories. It’s about ambition, class, and chasing fantasies of grandeur. It’s my first PRK, and I’ll be reading more of him.

3. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash: This book enchanted me with its wit and wry humor (the verbal pyrotechnics are dazzling) and kept me reading because each person in the Flynn family—and their travails—is rendered with such warmth and humanity.

Despite what wedding vows, social media, and rom-coms will have us believe, there’s no such thing as the perfect partner. Every person is “spiky” in their own way, to borrow a term from . What functions as their greatest strength doubles as their greatest weakness. On an episode of Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast, she talks about it in the context of investing in founders: “I’m trying to understand their core competency, almost like the dominant leg they lead with, and how that makes their other leg weaker.” But it’s equally useful for assessing any kind of partnership potential.

For example, I’m extremely driven and self-motivated (dominant leg), and I can also be very impatient (weaker leg). My partner, on the other hand, has much greater reserves of patience and is more amenable than I am. In a three-legged race, we may still come out okay. If he were equally impatient or bullheaded, there would be no checks on each other’s energies. In stable relationships, your partner’s spikiness would ideally complement your own.

The hardest thing about dating is learning to see people clearly. It requires you to first see yourself clearly, how your biases and desires color your perspective. It’s easy to become enamored with an aspect of a person and blow it up into a grand idea of who they are. There’s a quote attributed to Marcel Proust that goes, “it is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”

Sometimes, what we fall in love with is not a person but a vision of who we want to be. In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, tells the story of entering an all-consuming relationship with a musician shortly after leaving her law career. After it ended, a friend helped her see that what she was actually longing for was the lyricism and world of words he represented. I had an uncannily similar experience when I briefly dated a guy with literary sensibilities. The first thing I noticed when I walked into his West Village apartment was the bookshelf. There was Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor (a deep cut) and Peter Hessler’s River Town (a chronicle of the author’s time as a Peace Corps teacher in Sichuan, the province of China where my family’s from). I imagined him sitting on his roof, sipping an espresso, reading, while the neighborhood, steeped in bohemian history, hummed around him. One time, lying in bed, he read to me from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. I thought it was the most romantic thing.

He represented a desire that was yet unfulfilled, an idea of a “literary life.” At the time, I’d been working on a novel, but I had no writing community. On a trip to Portugal, I confronted the painful truth I already knew deep down that he wasn’t serious about me. I will admit that I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to understand him, as if he were a Henry James character I could analyze and distill into a five-paragraph essay. What was more fruitful was turning that critical eye inward. When I came home, I wrote about heartbreak, the first post on this Substack. I started putting my ideas on the internet, which I hadn’t done since the days of LiveJournal and Tumblr. Writing publicly helped me find likeminded people on Twitter. I met them IRL, and they introduced me to other writers and creatives. In reclaiming my desire for a literary life, I was able to let go of my fantasy of him. Sometimes, the wrong person walks into our life for the right reason.

A year and a half later, he reached out after stumbling upon my Substack (my tweets were popping up in his feed). He correctly surmised that the dating piece was informed by my experience with him. I hadn’t been looking for closure, but somehow, through my writing, it found me.

One of the most misleading ideas in dating is that there exists a “right person” for you. I think you can have many meaningful intimate relationships, and if you’re monogamous, then you are simply selecting one person to build a life with. Some might genuinely believe their partner is “the one,” but you don’t need that kind of conviction in order to feel happy and fulfilled. Dating has no end game. We can’t optimize our choice of a partner.

Unfortunately, social media trains our brains to keep filtering for unrealistic specifications. To feel envied is to feel powerful is Instagram’s implicit motto. By feeding us images of people living their best lives, it creates the illusion that everyone’s relationship is more beautiful, nurturing, exciting, and adventurous than our own. The comparison worms its way into our brains, making us tetchier the next time our partner does something that annoys us.

In her 2023 essay “women see in third person,” Molly wrote:

Women are simply much more inclined to strategies that guarantee safety than men. Which is all great and good until you realize how far these strategies distance you from your desires. See, that’s the catch about living life in third person: it makes it very hard to know, much less act on, what you want. [...] Living life in the third person means the possibility space of things I allow myself to say and feel are constrained to the aesthetics of how I want to be perceived.

When we curate pictures of our life on Instagram, we’re effectively narrating in the third person. I believe it is possible to share what genuinely excites us without performing for an audience. But it takes intentionality and inner attunement, and love, which is by nature an act of imagination, is particularly susceptible to the trappings of fantasy on our screens.

What I’m enjoying

• I’m late to ’s Dialectic podcast, and I’m really enjoying the expansive conversations with , , and , among others.

• I love this post from my dear friend about “going quietly public on the internet,” the first in a series about sharing online without performing. In these noisy times, this is much needed.

• Lots of people have lots of barbed opinions about the tradwife influencer novel Yesteryear by . Some of it is fair; some of it is, dare I say, envy? I certainly wish I’d written it. There’s a reflexive instinct in our culture to criticize a work of art because it makes us sound smarter. But the books I enjoy the most and can’t stop thinking about are the ones that are doing something interesting and raising provocative questions. Yesteryear certainly rises to the challenge (I’m not going to make a sourdough joke).

I’m done revising my book (again). And I suspect I’ll be picking it back up in the coming days and finishing it again. And again and again, if I’m lucky enough to sell it. Anyone who says there are diminishing returns is wrong. A book can always be improved, never perfected, because a key ingredient of art is time.

With time, not only do you sharpen your skills as a writer, you gain more experience, more life to draw upon. I can confidently say that if I work on my novel for another five years, it will be better still. But I’m not going to do that because I’m not a masochist, and I don’t want to be pushing 70 when I publish my first book. The passage of time that ripens our craft also reminds us we don’t have much of it left.

That is why, I believe, AI writing can never be as good as human writing because AI can’t experience time (ever notice that Claude is terrible with dates?).

When humans tinker with words on a page or colors on a canvas or notes in a song day after day, month after month, year after year, they are working from an altered perspective, a place of inner change. This, and our awareness of our mortality, is what gives human art resonance.

The passage of time is also the reason you can enter into a relationship with full conviction only to feel differently a year or two or ten later. That says nothing about whether the relationship was good in the first place (the past) or whether it’s doomed to fail (the future). Our internal landscapes are ever shifting. It’s totally normal to experience moments of doubt, to wonder if you’re with “the right person” and to imagine an alternate reality with someone else. Commitment isn’t one and done; it’s choosing your partner again and again.

The problem isn’t having these thoughts. The problem is these thoughts aren’t meant to be shared out loud. We need to de-stigmatize relationship uncertainty. Like many people, I felt deeply unsettled reading Lindsey Hall’s viral essay about breaking up with her boyfriend after stumbling upon his ChatGPT conversations. The outcome was inevitable and probably for the best. What’s more interesting—and concerning—is how this relationship unraveled and the questions it raises around how much candor we owe our intimate partners.

Having relationship doubts and even private thoughts as hurtful as “I’m not proud of her” or “I’m not attracted to her” is not a crime. A healthier way for the boyfriend to process these anxieties would’ve been to talk to a trusted friend, therapist, or his partner if he felt ready. But AI chat makes it mind-numbingly easy to avoid hard conversations with real people because it requires zero vulnerability to open up to a robot. And that’s why it’s the taboo topics, rife with shame, that people turn to AI for advice.

Personally, I think it’s always a good idea to ask for permission before using someone else’s laptop and certainly someone else’s ChatGPT account. Once she saw the title of that chat (“relationship issues and uncertainty”), the Pandora’s box was already open. No amount of self-restraint could’ve stopped a functioning person from reading it. And even if she’d managed to summon superhuman willpower, she would always wonder if he’s putting on a façade with her while confessing his true thoughts and feelings to an AI chatbot. It’s just as corrosive as discovering an affair.

We won’t ever know what would’ve happened to this couple if ChatGPT weren’t in the picture. Maybe it forced a conversation they needed to have. Maybe it destroyed a relationship that could’ve worked out fine if he’d resolved his uncertainties in a more productive way. It’s normal to have momentary intrusive thoughts and the occasional flare up of doubt. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chat made him spiral by amplifying those doubts. Without knowing more about their relationship, I wouldn’t assume his chat conversation provides a full picture of how he feels about her because, just like in therapy, people tend to focus on the thorns rather than the roses.

I don’t think anyone, even an intimate partner, is owed full access to our private thoughts. Nor do I think most people would want to know every thought that passes through their partner’s brain. (That would be disastrous.) Our inner worlds are sacred places—weird, wonderful, terrifying cauldrons of meaning-making—and seldom even known to us. But I do think a certain amount of candor is expected in an intimate relationship, particularly in matters that concern both people. No one wants to be blindsided when their partner suddenly decides to walk out on them.

Just as AI writing will never be as compelling as the best human writing, AI therapy can never replace human connection because the robot doesn’t learn from firsthand experience the way we do. It doesn’t care about you. It’s designed to regurgitate anodyne advice and pander to your existing beliefs because it wants you to keep talking to it. True wisdom can only be gained through the trials of experience, the friction and conflict of having tough conversations with real people who are capable of judging, loving, and forgiving you.

I never thought I’d say this: I love watching football, and unexpectedly, it’s been a gift for my writing practice.

A high-stakes competitive tournament like the World Cup or the Olympics has always been a draw for me. But not all sports are created equal. Soccer holds a special place in my heart: it’s the beautiful game, athleticism and teamwork elevated to an art form. I love the high-octane rhythm of basketball, and even baseball has its leisurely appeal at the ballpark. Football, on the other hand, was always inferior: brutish, chaotic, and unapologetically American.

For a long time, my only exposure to it was the Superbowl, and even then, it was just an excuse to hang out with friends, eat a year’s worth of nachos, and dissect the halftime show and commercials. But since September, I’ve been tuning into the regular season, watching at least a game a week.

I can no longer pretend that I’m not a fan.

And an unlikely one: my social world consists almost entirely of writers or creative tech people who have little interest in watching men in tights grunt and charge at each other. While an estimated one in two Americans watch the NFL, I can count on one hand the number of people I personally know who can tell you what a first down is. Learning the language of the game makes me feel connected to the greater part of the country that I normally don’t interact with. It’s a good feeling, particularly at a time when there’s so much to divide us, when it feels safer to retreat into our known communities.

I like that I can join the masses in catching a Sunday night game to beat the scaries. The ritual is mundane, but what makes it special is knowing I chose my way into it. Maybe as a first-gen immigrant, this nationwide connectedness that transcends boundaries feels particularly profound—a kind of belonging I wasn’t born into but can fully inhabit. I didn’t grow up watching football, so it’s not a feeling I take for granted.

Unlike prestige television where you can catch up on a season of Bridgerton or The Pitt at your own leisure, the immediacy of live sports forces people out of their siloes and into a shared space of consciousness for three hours. No one knows how this game is going to unfold, and we’re all going to find out at the same time. With so much content competing for our attention, it’s an increasingly rare experience.

It’s also invigorating watching people do hard things—whether that’s Olympic cross-country skiing or the Bills and Broncos battling through overtime. In those final fifty-five seconds, I could barely look at the screen. When the Bills lost by a field goal, I thought to myself, well, at least they only have themselves to blame. Five turnovers. So many fumbles.

It feels better to rationalize failure as a result of something we can control rather than something we have very little power to influence like a bad referee call. It’s a high agency mindset, and it’s served me well. But we can’t ignore the role of luck. You could be the best player, the best team—you could do everything to prepare—and still not win a Superbowl or an Olympic gold.

Annie Duke makes this point in her book Thinking in Bets. We often commit the fallacy of judging a decision based on the outcome without accounting for the role of luck and unforeseen events. A good decision could lead to a poor outcome. Conversely, a bad decision could result in a favorable outcome. Even fumbles involve luck: how the ball bounces, whether a defender is in the right spot, etc.

As a Type A person who likes to feel in control, I have to constantly remind myself of this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I got into watching football at a time when I was single-mindedly focused on revising and perfecting my novel. Watching a game is a mirror onto my own brand of anxiety. I might be freaking out when my team is up by seven with three minutes left, while the people in the stadium are already celebrating. My reaction to the game reveals to me my own capacity for handling uncertainty (not great). Watching football is exposure therapy for relinquishing control.

Paradoxically, it’s also made me more productive. I’m more motivated to get important work done when I have a game to look forward to at the end of a day. It gives structure to my day and prevents procrastination because the game starts at 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. or 8:15 p.m. sharp whether I’m done with my work or not. The rhythm of the game—four quarters, six timeouts, and a halftime—allows me to watch passively while catching up on emails, newsletters, and magazine reading. This is replenishing because so much of my day to day—working a high-pressure job, laboring over a novel, close-reading books to hone my craft—requires intense focus.

In a high-achievement society, we could all use a break from relentless self-optimization. Sometimes, I just want to scream at my TV and watch a guy catch a ball.

Hello! It’s been a minute.

Last fall, I took a break from Substack to focus on my novel rewrite. It’s not uncommon to lose interest in a project over time, but for whatever reason, this book hasn’t relinquished its grip on me, even after five years. Rather, the opposite: the longer I work on it, the more excited I am to get it out into the world.

Generally, I try to avoid letting one thing dominate my life. But I thought, what if, just for the final three months of 2025, I let my energy guide me instead of trying to tame or resist it? As cooler weather settled in, it felt good to sink into deep work.

My hope was to finish the rewrite before the end of the year. But creative projects don’t obey the timelines we have in mind. As it turned out, I didn’t put down the proverbial pen until January 5th, 2026. It should’ve been a day of celebration, but immediately after sending the manuscript to my agent, I thought of ten things I could’ve made better and agonized over those missed opportunities. As anyone who has ever hit “publish” knows, a perspective shift happens when we let go of a piece of writing. We start seeing it with the eyes of a reader, which stirs up a tornado of self-doubt and criticism.

For much of 2025, I felt like I was spending a lot of time on the novel, but I couldn’t tell if I was actually making progress. There was always so much more to do, and I often found myself going back to previous chapters to fix new issues. It felt like I was sprinting really hard and not getting anywhere. I took inspiration from Delia Cai’s revision tracker and created a progress log of what I did each day and how many hours I spent on it. Seeing this documented alleviated the fear that I was on a doomed Sisyphean mission. I will be doing this with future projects and recommend it to anyone suffering from “circular momentum” syndrome.

To make time for writing, I had to say no to things (of course). I have a demanding full-time job, and I would never sacrifice my health or relationships. Reading is also non-negotiable (reading is to writing as nutrients are to the body). So what gives? While I enjoy the serendipity of the occasional large social gathering, meeting new people just wasn’t a priority, so I went out to fewer parties. I also decided to get off Substack, Twitter, and TikTok, and limit my Instagram use.

I’ve always been more drawn to content that requires sustained attention. Getting immersed in a good book or a well-written essay feels more nourishing than scrolling through a noisy, high-velocity information feed. But it wasn’t until I removed those distractions that I was able to get in touch with this desire and honor it.

There are things I do miss, though. In the past, I used my Twitter account like a test lab for incubating new ideas about dating, relationships, and creative work. Sometimes, a tweet would spark a whole essay. I also met some of my favorite people on Twitter. At its best, it’s an intellectual playground where curious internet citizens share funny, earnest, astute, and sometimes, delightfully unserious observations about the world. Unfortunately, these platforms do not reward the right incentives. A better Twitter, I think, would make likes, retweets, and follower counts private so they don’t become the metrics of validation that drive behavior.

I found myself falling prey to the algorithm. Every now and then, one of my tweets would go viral, and I’d gain a couple hundred followers in a day. The dopamine hit would prompt my brain to come up with tweets in anticipation of getting more likes and retweets. I felt rewarded seeing my follower count climb, but these were vanity metrics, shallow connections, and I didn’t like what it was doing to my brain chemistry. When I stepped away, I felt like I was detoxing from bingeing on sugary snacks.

Quitting Twitter wasn’t easy. As someone who’s motivated by success, I felt guilty for “giving up,” like I was missing out on an opportunity to build an online presence, something every writer knows is to be desired. I worried I was letting people down by not offering “fresh insights.” That’s the curse of success: even a small amount of it can drive us to keep building on the momentum without asking if the gains are worth the cost, if that’s what we want to be spending our time and energy doing. There may be a season when I’ll want to focus on content creation, but now is not it.

Intention is my theme word for 2026. I want to do things with purpose while letting go of expectations. I used to live in hard mode by taking on a lot of expectations (get into a top-tier college, get a prestigious job offer, get promoted every two years, have a child before 35, etc.) or setting arbitrary goals like I must publish a Substack post every week or I need to tweet something interesting every day. There’s a crucial difference between an expectation and an intention. I intended to finish my novel by the end of 2025, and I put in the effort, but I did not force the outcome. If it takes a few more days or a month or a year, so be it. Living a life guided by intentions allows me to follow my energy while making space for the unexpected.

I spent the second half of August on a Love Island bender. It was bad. But it was also so good. Studying human drama is one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and this show is a gold mine of messy emotions.

Admittedly, it can feel like brain rot when you lose count of how many episodes you’ve blown through in one sitting, and some of the criticism levied against reality TV is deserved. Real people get thrown in situations that are designed to hijack their nervous system, fire up their insecurities, and rip open their childhood trauma. Sure, they’ve implicitly signed up for this, but that doesn’t make it any less exploitative. The shows that are about finding love get labeled “trashy” because they reveal the mean, shallow, ugly parts of human nature, the petty jealousies, the gossip and backstabbing, the cheating.

Despite the genre’s bad rap, Love Island is not without something resembling nutrition. The pressure-cooker environment the show creates compresses everything you might learn about relationships over several years of your life into a single summer. For example, Huda’s and Jeremiah’s storyline, spanning roughly 17 episodes of Season 7, is a crash course in setting boundaries and exercising emotional control. Despite the flak she got from the internet, I found Huda’s intense, visceral emotions painfully recognizable. I’ve made similar mistakes, learned the same hard lessons, in my life.

Obviously, no media can replace real-world experience, but in showing us how these men and women respond in high-pressure situations and the repercussions of their actions, the show gives us valuable raw material to extract whatever lessons we may and affirm what we know to be true from our own lives.

Every good story is a fantasy in that it engages the imagination. We would never find ourselves in some of the highly-charged situations depicted on the show, but we get to experience the drama vicariously through the islanders and exercise our own judgment in imagining what we would do in their shoes. It’s called parasocial risk-taking. It’s the reason we enjoy movies about serial killers. They allow us to simulate being in danger and rehearse our own survival strategies. It’s thrilling because we’re not in any real danger.

What’s unique about reality TV compared to scripted shows is we get to figure out who these people are and predict the choices they’ll make while they’re figuring themselves out. In the process of being proven right or wrong, we revise and confirm our theories about them. It’s like psychology and sociology 101 in action.

From a structural perspective, Love Island runs into trouble when it has both viewers ranking their favorite islanders and the islanders themselves voting for who to kick off the show. What “America” wants isn’t always what the islanders want. We want to see drama. The islanders want to make it to the end and get voted best couple. Naturally, they’re going to dump anyone perceived to be competition or whoever they don’t get along with (remember they have to be around each other 24/7). This runs the risk of killing off interesting storylines. You need flawed and “unlikeable” characters to create conflict.

Aisling Rawle’s novel The Compound—pitched as Love Island meets Lord of the Flies (or, as I think of it, Survivor)—gets around this problem by creating a closed game where the only people who have the power to kick someone out of the compound are the contestants, and the contestants only want one thing: to be the last one standing. In any successful story, the main source of tension is always tied to the character’s driving motivation. And in The Compound, the motivation for playing—winning money and fame—creates a competition for resources (including romantic alliances) in order to survive and stay in the game.

I read this novel in two blistering nights. Not since Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods has a story made me think: this is what I want to do as a writer. I would argue that it’s even more addictive than the dating show that inspired it because the stakes escalate not only through human vs. human conflict, but as the challenges progress, through human vs. nature, and ultimately, human vs. self. The book is a masterclass in tension, conflict, and stakes.

Hurtling toward the end of August, I found myself eager to wrap up my Love Island binge. It’s a seasonal indulgence best suited for the hot, languid months of summer. Once fall hits, I tell myself, I’m getting off this train. I think what all this reality TV has reaffirmed for me is my love of fiction and my raison d’être as a novelist, which is to tell stories that illuminate the tragedy and comedy of being human. I don’t care if what I write is lowbrow or highbrow, commercial or literary. My ambition as a writer is simple: I want to make people feel their emotions.

I was catching up with a former coworker I hadn’t seen in years. He expressed surprise that I had responded so promptly when he reached out (within four hours, to be exact). Because it’s so easy to contact anyone these days, he explained, people have a desire to be less available. So it’s become the norm to put off responding to texts, and sometimes, forget altogether.

I thought this was an astute observation. It reminded me of a passage from Dolly Alderton’s novel Ghosts, which is about the titular phenomenon that plagues modern dating. The main character Nina receives a long-awaited text from Max, a guy who swept her off her feet on a first date, and she debates how to respond:

I wanted to just call him, but Lola told me that was tantamount to turning up at his flat unannounced and throwing rocks at his bedroom window. I didn’t understand why a messaging process was still so necessary after you’d already met—it slowed everything down to a frustrating pace.

— Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, making plans with a friend would involve calling them and agreeing on a time and place to meet. Prior to cell phones, you’d call their house, and sometimes, their mom would pick up and tell you they went out for something and could they call back in an hour? There was some friction in the process. Not a lot. It was certainly better than the hoops people had to jump through back in the time of the horse and buggy.

These days, you don’t need to send a messenger or a telegram or, god forbid, talk to someone on the phone. You simply have to shoot off a text. And if you’re throwing a party, you can invite dozens of people you barely know with just a few clicks (thanks Partiful). It’s never been easier to send spammy invites, nor has it been so convenient to bail. You don’t even have to explain why you can’t make it anymore. Just change your RSVP, or as some people do, don’t show up at all. Call it bad form, but this type of behavior has been normalized. Soft plans—“I might swing by” or an RSVP of “maybe”—have replaced firm commitments. People postpone having to decide whether to go to your event because they don’t have to. And in some cases, let’s be real, they’re leaving their options open in case a better alternative comes along.

Just like in dating.

The very technology that has made it easier to connect with almost anyone on the planet has cheapened the meaning of “connection.” Social media values vast networks and loose ties over intimate, one-on-one relationships. To be connected means to follow each other on a social platform. But genuine connection only comes from getting to know a person individually over a sustained period of time.

It’s never been easier to enter someone’s life and just as abruptly leave it. You can match, message, and unmatch. You can go from DM to first date to ghost without incurring penalties. The prevalence of flaking and ghosting reflects a cultural climate where relationships are seen as fluid and impermanent rather than enduring. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity to describe this reality. Structures that were once considered stable like jobs, relationships, and identities have become flexible and uncertain.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change—as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

— Zygmunt Bauman

If this sounds like a situationship, you’re not wrong. How could this not have profound psychological consequences? It must affect our ability to trust, take social risks, and form secure attachments because we’re primed to expect rejection and abandonment.

Our culture prizes freedom and flexibility over commitment and stability. Geographical barriers are no more. We can move cities, countries, and continents. We can change jobs and partners, work flexible hours, and try on new identities as effortlessly as swapping profile pictures. In this fluid environment, it’s easier to make plans than to stick with them. To dream big than to build something lasting. To fall in love than to stay in love.

At the end of Ghosts, Nina comes to the realization that the disappearing men she and her best friend have been dating “wanted to want something rather than have something.”

Max wanted to be tortured, he wanted to yearn and chase and dream. He wanted to exist in a liminal state, like everything was just about to begin. He liked contemplating what our relationship might be like, without investing any time or commitment in the relationship.

— Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

In our liquid modern age, when two people who are into each other get together, there is always, always the possibility that it won’t work out. The romance plot is broken. There is no “end game.” This was not the case in Jane Austen’s time. When Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy confessed their feelings for each other, that was it. Marriage promised stability and permanence. Not anymore.

Today’s couples enter into relationships with the internalized awareness that it may not last. Because we expect impermanence, even if only unconsciously, we look for signs of incompatibility and anticipate abandonment before it happens. We’re autoplaying scripts that activate core attachment wounds like this person is going to leave me or maybe they’re not right for me. And as we all know, our mindset has an uncanny knack for shaping our reality.

My track record with journaling has been sporadic at best. As with meditation, I appreciate the benefits in theory but have a hard time maintaining a practice. None of the usual reasons people keep a journal appeal to me. I’m not interested in tracking my daily habits or making detailed accounts of my day. What I care about is developing my voice as a writer. Turns out, there’s no better tool for that than journaling by hand, the old-fashioned way.

When I was in the querying trenches, I remember agents and editors would say things like, I love voice-y books or when you find your voice, you’ll know it, as if it’s this exotic bird you have to catch in the wild and not something that lives inside your body. How hard can it be to find your voice?

The answer: very hard.

Frederik Gieschen and David Perrell pointed out a peculiar phenomenon where people—often smart, interesting, well-read people—don’t sound like themselves when they write. They come across as stiff, their sentences dry and lifeless, or as I’ve seen, overblown with purpose prose. Funny enough, the same thing happens in acting. When students are told to perform a scene or a monologue in front of a class, they switch into “acting mode.” They seem like they’re trying really hard to make you believe they feel [insert big emotion]. They sound phony.

The awareness of an audience hijacks our brains, turns us into self-conscious, overthinking performers. In the pages of a journal, we’re set free from the gaze of an audience. This alone makes journaling uniquely suitable for developing your voice. There’s also the physical movement of your hand across the page: a tactile experience that forces you to slow down and reflect, making it easier to access what feels true in your mind and body.

Many people struggle to write when things are going well in their lives. It’s a curse or a blessing, depending on how you look at it. I find I have much more to say when I’m experiencing relationship turmoil. This is pure conjecture, but I think it’s because our brains are doing so much more processing during hard times to keep us sane and functional, and all that processing is bound to turn up a few nuggets of wisdom. Plus, we tend to do more journaling and therapy when we’re going through the wringer, both of which are great for writing because they make the unconscious conscious.

We have a powerful capacity to recognize pieces of ourselves in others—even those who seem nothing like us on the surface, whose worldviews we find abhorrent. This is how actors can play despicable people, how writers can create villains that are fascinating. They find a piece of their own humanity in the character they’re portraying. It requires a tremendous amount of self-work and imagination, plumbing our own buried experiences for kernels of hard, emotional truths.

Survival is its own kind of creative act. I heard this on a podcast some time ago. The instinct to make meaning out of suffering is crucial and life-affirming. But you don’t have to be miserable to write well. We hold entire bodies of data—fragments of thoughts, raw feelings, waiting to be processed. You can’t write anything insightful unless you’ve mined your own experiences. You can’t create a compelling character if you haven’t peeled back the layers of your own emotions.

A journal can be a tool for writing. It’s also a time capsule, preserving who we are at a moment in time. It’s surprising to look back and see what was important to us at a particular stage in our lives. The other day I was flipping through an old journal from high school and came across this passage:

Now I have been very candid writing these journal entries, and this next matter requires me to be even more candid. Deep breath. Here goes: I think I have fallen for… [name redacted]. Yes, [name redacted] who used to like me in fifth grade. It seems this thing between us has come full circle, doesn’t it? Anyway, I don’t even know if my feelings for him are real or not. Am I so desperate for a boyfriend that I’m settling/pining for the last un-repulsive guy who had feelings for me? I’m very confused right now.

I can’t believe how pretentious I sounded back then. But this is gold. This is uncensored, un-self-conscious voice. This is what an actual sixteen-year-old sounds like. This has messy emotions. This feels true.

A girl I went to college with would exclusively date men who took her to Michelin-starred restaurants. She would otherwise complain if it was just a really nice fine-dining place. I found this utterly ridiculous. At 21, I couldn’t see what Per Se or Eleven Madison Park had anything to do with love. Turns out, there’s a whole world of people who put a lot of stock in economic status, and being wined and dined at a certain type of establishment signals economic and cultural capital. It’s their love language.

Celine Song’s Materialists opens with a silent scene in which a caveman gives his sweetheart a ring fashioned from a daisy. He slips it onto her dirt-stained finger. They smile, and you can tell that they’re really happy together. In prehistoric times, the film shows us, love was simple.

Fast forward 300,000 years, and we’re swiping on apps, doing mental gymnastics to figure out what a one-word text means, calculating our relative value on the “dating market,” getting all kinds of bodily work done to increase our attractiveness—and still, with all that effort, love escapes us. As Pedro Pascal’s character bemoans, love is the hardest, most elusive thing in the world. (It’s truly become a first-world problem.)

Just like Song’s first film Past Lives, Materialists features a choice between two suitors who serve as archetypes, representing different value systems. Lucy must choose between the broke, struggling-actor ex-boyfriend living with two roommates and a private equity honcho who owns a $12 million Tribeca penthouse. Unlike Nora, Lucy chooses with her heart. She ditches the rich guy, turns down a promotion, and quits her matchmaking job. She breaks out of the system and makes the “correct” choice in the moral universe of the film.

I think it’s overly simplistic to conclude that capitalism is antithetical to finding love, or that love should be unaffected by materialistic concerns. Who’s to say that our Stone Age ancestors didn’t vie for the affection of the strongest, fastest, cleverest hunter who brought back the most game? Or that my friend from college didn’t find genuine happiness and love with a high earner and fine dining enthusiast?

There’s a scene in the movie where one of Lucy’s clients has a nervous breakdown right before her wedding. Lucy asks her what she likes about her tall, handsome, wealthy husband-to-be, and she very honestly says, “He makes my sister jealous.” Lucy concludes that he makes her “feel valuable,” which puts a smile back on her face and settles any doubts. For one person, feeling valuable can mean being treated to fancy meals and vacations. For another, it can mean receiving back massages and a sympathetic ear after a hard day. It can also mean both.

Who we fall in love with is ultimately a reflection of what we value individually and how we view ourselves. There’s no escaping yourself in dating. No matter who you’re sitting across from, the one constant you come up against is your own insecurities, your own unresolved issues, your own doubts and fears.

A prospective suitor finding Sophie unattractive (“she’s 40 and fat”) says more about him than it does about her intrinsic worth. But as the matchmaker, Lucy can’t help but view this as a sign that her client isn’t “competitive in the dating market,” just as an algorithm might ding her for getting passed on.

Algorithms can predict who will get the most dates based on a few salient facts (height, fitness, age, hairline, income, etc.), but they can’t predict who we’ll fall in love with. Dating is the imprecise, unscientific mechanism through which we try to find love. As Celine Song says on The Modern Love podcast, what makes love hard is that you have no control over it, and in the modern world, all we want to do is exert control:

Go to the gym, botox, right? Everything is there so that it can increase your value in the stock market of dating. I wish that all of those efforts actually resulted in love. But I think we all ultimately know the truth, which is that none of them has anything to do with whether you’re going to fall in love. You might be in front of somebody who is perfect for you in every way and feel nothing. And you might be in front of someone who is imperfect in every way, and you just feel everything.

I wish the movie explored more fully what Lucy loves about John and vice versa. Instead, we’re expected to take their attraction as a given. We can imagine that John’s dogged pursuit of his acting career is something Lucy admires about him, a contrast to her practical, self-described “cold” and “materialistic” nature. On his part, he tells her that she inspires him to work harder and earn more, take on more catering jobs and even do dreaded commercials. (Very cute.)

If there’s any truth about love that the movie reveals, it’s this: the people we fall in love with often reveal to us untapped possibilities in ourselves, along with all of our good, bad, and ugly. The love we find, the love we accept, is the truest mirror onto our own hearts. Sometimes, we run away from what we see (like Lucy did with John the first time they broke up).

Sometimes, we stay.

Coming out of the pandemic two years ago, I was in an expansive mood. I was going out and meeting new people, attending every picnic under the sun, and spending considerable time posting on Twitter, even venturing into TikTok land. I had a shovel in hand, and I was rebuilding my life, filling a vacancy from getting out of a long relationship.

These days I notice my attention drawing inward. I think it’s a good sign: the perennials I planted two seasons ago are in bloom. The garden of my life feels full. I’m not seeking anything. I have relationships that require tending, a novel I’m re-plotting, more books to nourish me than I can possibly read, hobbies I barely have time to scratch, and a full-time job supporting it all.

Consequently, I’ve found it hard to keep up online. I spend maybe five minutes a week on Twitter. I’m always playing catch up with my newsletter subscriptions. Forget Substack notes. Forget TikTok. I don’t have time to scroll another feed.

I wish I could say I’m riding out into the sunset of digital minimalism, but the reality is, I feel conflicted and a little guilty about my unintended withdrawal from the internet. Twitter and Substack provided solace and a sense of community at a time when I was feeling adrift. In retreating from these platforms, I fear that I’m missing out on connections with people who care what I have to say. That there are even people out there who actually want to know what’s on my mind is not something I take for granted.

The few times I’ve attempted to get back into the rhythm of tweeting and partaking in the internet stream-of-consciousness have felt forced, like performing a chore. It’s become this nagging thing in the back of my brain. If I’m experiencing even this much anxiety over it, I can’t imagine what it’s like to run a massive account with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. At what point does a tool for social connection become a shackle?

Writing this Substack is a challenge because it competes with the book for my attention, and the book always wins. But what’s hard about writing a book that you intend to publish traditionally is that you don’t have anything to show for all the weeks and months and years of work you’ve put in. So even if you’re making progress, you don’t get the social validation and instant gratification of publishing a Substack post, a tweet or an Instagram reel that everyone can react to. And so I feel a tug in both directions, between wanting to burrow deep into the book and wanting to be a contributing citizen of the internet.

There’s a distinction between writing consistently and publishing consistently. If you’re serious about writing, the former is much more important. A wonderful thing about the internet is that anyone can publish anything. A terrible thing about the internet is that anyone can publish anything. Social media trains us to seek constant validation. It feels good to have people “like” what we share. It feels good to be seen.

As much as I appreciate certain aspects of internet culture’s “default public” ethos, there’s something to be said about the benefits of creating in the dark. Brandon Sanderson wrote sixteen books before publishing his first. Six-teen. It’s enough to make me not resent him for dropping a doorstop a year. He and V.E. Schwab, another outrageously prolific author, discuss his writing journey on her podcast and agree that “it’s great for your craft and your mental health to write in obscurity for a while.” We need to protect the private space of creation where artists can experiment and do deep work without worrying about the needs and opinion of the public.

Technology supposedly makes us more efficient, but is it really saving us much time when it’s eating away at our attention spans? From Cal Newport to Oliver Burkeman to Jenny Odell, many have written about how to live in an age of constant distractions. In a recent Vulture piece by Rebecca Jennings, Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, says that one way to prevent the cycle of trying hard to focus and failing is to “build the kind of life that’s full of replenishing empty space—taking a walk outside, writing poetry, chatting with a colleague, or anything that doesn’t revolve around the pressure to produce.”

Having empty space is glorious. Having empty space and not being able to enjoy it because of the pressure to demonstrate that we’ve done something productive is a tragic side effect of the internet. I still believe in the power of online communities. But I worry that the dopamine-hit mechanism built into these platforms is hijacking our ability to focus on what really matters, to create from a place of genuine passion and curiosity, rather than out of a sense of obligation, a fear of missing out.

I used to think I was avoidantly attached in friendships. I believed social commitments were a drain on my energy and preferred friends who demanded little of me. See how fraught that language is? Demands. It assumes a one-way street. Back then, I could only see two options: capitulate to someone else’s needs or avoid engaging.

Social commitments are only a drain if we don’t feel comfortable asking for what we need. Let’s say you’re getting dinner with a friend, and at the end of the meal, you feel satisfied and want to go home. But she wants to get a drink somewhere and continue the conversation. If this were me a few years ago, I would not have been able to say no. I would’ve felt obligated to keep the connection alive, even if I was tired and didn’t want to continue socializing.

I think this way of operating stemmed from two guiding misbeliefs: (1) social connection is an absolute good; not wanting it is shameful, and (2) friendships can only be positively reinforcing and affirming: if I assert a point-of-view that differs from my friend’s, it’s going to create disharmony or cause irrevocable damage to the relationship. What if she thinks I don’t like spending time with her or I’m being selfish? I was projecting my own self-judgment onto my friend because I hadn’t yet learned to recognize and respect my own needs and to effectively communicate them.

A friendship should support us as a whole person, not just who we are at our most social and amenable. One measure of the strength of a friendship is how comfortable you feel saying “no” and giving an honest reason. The best friendships are the ones where you can relax into who you are without worrying about how you’re going to be perceived. You can ask for what you need in the moment. You can be contrary.

Communicating “why” we need something is such a useful and underrated skill. If someone at work asks me to do something tedious, I’m going to feel annoyed and drag my feet. But if they tell me why they need me to do this—why it’s important to them, personally—they are bringing me along on their journey. I’m much more inclined to help when I can appreciate their purpose.

Understanding a person’s “why” goes a long way to building trust. I mean this both in a basic, mundane sense (see work example) and in the grander sense of one’s purpose in life à la Simon Sinek. We have an incredible capacity to bridge differences when we understand the other person’s desires and what drives them. We connect to motivation, not facts. Plot, not story.

In reading fiction, I can get in touch with feelings and longings I may have ignored or suppressed in my waking hours. I can experience a whole range of emotions without fear of judgment or social consequences. I love how bibliotherapist Emely Rumble puts it on the Book Riot podcast:

I can experience my jealousy, my rage, my fear, my hatred while I’m reading, and it doesn’t necessarily say anything about me as a person. Nobody is reading the thoughts going through my mind thinking, oh you’re such a bad person for having that thought or feeling that thing. We can just be our full selves, and I think there’s an authenticity that comes when we’re reading.

While traveling with a friend in Turkey two summers ago, we got into an argument about halloumi. Of course, it wasn’t just about halloumi. The problem was I felt like she had to contradict me all the time. It got to a point where I didn’t feel comfortable stating an opinion because there was a good chance she would disagree.

Me: “The halloumi’s a little too salty.”

Her: “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Me: “I’m just saying it tastes salty to me.”

Her: “But when you buy halloumi at Whole Foods and look at the ingredient label…”

I told her she had this tendency to disagree about trivial things, which put me on edge. She wasn’t aware of her behavior and speculated about why she might be doing it (my theory: she’s an engineer).

Her unfiltered ability to express exactly what was on her mind forced an open and honest conversation that helped us understand each other better. We now have a language for expressing what we need and why.

There’s so much masking that happens in social interactions. No wonder it can feel draining. We’re expending energy performing and maintaining harmony at all costs. I’m not sure it’s desirable to shed every layer of pretense, but I do believe we can get closer to our authentic selves and form deeper friendships when we understand our own needs and honor them in how we show up. Being a little disagreeable isn’t the worst thing you can do.

The best thing a boss ever did for me was to show complete faith in my ability to do a job I’d never done before.

Unfortunately, this is rare. It happens much less often than it should, which is why pivoting to a new career or getting promoted can feel like a Herculean feat. It requires someone in a position of power to take a chance on you.

Too often, we’re told we have to already be doing the job in order to get it, whether that means having the words “product manager” in your title or something more nebulous like performing “at that level.” It’s a chicken and egg problem because how do you do a job without being given the opportunity to do it? Let’s be real: people can’t just do a job on top of their existing job without executive sponsorship and more hours in the day.

When I was 24, I was working in brand communications at P&G. The brand organization was about to undergo a massive restructuring, and unknown to me, my role was on the chopping block. My manager reached out to leaders at the company I worked with in the past to ask if they had openings on their teams for me, and Tom, the global director of sales I supported in my last role, replied right away. We want her.

My manager told him he would have to transfer me into sales because the layoffs required a certain percentage in reduction of brand comms roles. I had never worked in sales before, never prospected or carried a quota or managed a book of business. I was completely untried, unproven, and unlike the typical sales person there, I did not hold a degree in chemical engineering. Yet, this director, who could’ve easily hired someone much more qualified, offered me the job of global customer development manager and said, “I think you can do it.”

I have never forgotten those words.

The job offer itself was great, but when I heard those words, I felt different. I saw myself in a new light because this director, who’s the absolute best at what he does and widely respected in the organization, believed in me. What he recognized was the value I brought as a person, not the words on my resume.

There’s a marketing concept at P&G called FMOT/SMOT. The first moment of truth (FMOT) is when a customer first encounters your brand. This could be online or in a TV commercial or an out-of-home ad. It’s an opportunity to form an initial impression of your brand. Then, there’s the second moment of truth (SMOT) when the same customer who saw the ad shops at Kroger or Target and sees Tide or Febreze or Crest toothpaste on the shelf. It’s another chance to make an impression, either reinforcing or changing their perception of the brand.

I think you can do it was a “moment of truth” for me. It didn’t just reinforce in my mind what a great leader Tom was (his personal brand), but it changed how I viewed myself. I saw opportunities that I never imagined possible, and it influenced the course of my career. Being embedded in a high-performing sales organization gave me the experience and skills to later transition to product marketing at a tech company.

Trust is earned through trust. The quickest way to erode trust in a relationship is to show distrust. Micromanaging is a sign of distrust, and so is its opposite: when someone volunteers to step up and take on a project only to be told by their manager not to worry about it. The message that gets conveyed is: I don’t trust that you can run with this and knock it out of the park. In romantic relationships, breaking into your partner’s phone or asking to know where they are 24/7 are obvious signs of distrust.

Asking someone to prove they are trustworthy—that they can do the job well or be faithful in the relationship—is a recipe for ruin. Of course, if they’ve already broken your trust, that’s a different story. But you should always start with a baseline of trust because people have a way of living up to your expectations. There’s a certain magic in the way others reflect our perception of them back to us. Assume good intentions, assume competence, assume fidelity as the starting point.

We are impressionable creatures. When a person of influence says you haven’t proven yourself capable of doing the job you want, you begin to think there is an enormous wall you have to scale. It seems daunting, near impossible, because it’s presented to you that way, and you become discouraged and lose confidence. But when a person of influence tells you they think you can do it and gives you a ladder, it might not be the easiest, smoothest path, but you feel good about your chances because they trust that you can do it. You already know it’s possible.

Who we are isn’t just a function of how we see ourselves but how others see us. As much as we’d like to not care what people think of us, we do. We can’t help it. Raising someone up can be transformative—and it doesn’t take much. I doubt Tom knows what a lasting impact those words had on me.

I love this Ad Reinhardt illustration about how to look at abstract art.

When we view a work of art in a museum, we have this temptation to try to understand the artist’s intention, as if there were a singular truth behind the piece. You either “get it” or you don’t and move on to the next one.

Formal education doesn’t prepare us to experience art on a personal level. Instead, we’re trained to analyze the great masterpieces according to the conventions of a particular movement or style, framed by the hindsight of historical context. We're taught, for example, to appreciate Le Corbusier through his influence on modern architecture, his theories about form and function, his legacy in urban planning.

Similarly, as I was reading Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, I found myself trying to figure out the author’s intention in order to piece together what’s really going on in the story. This inquiry was fruitless. There’s no one way to understand the book. Kitamura describes it as a “multiverse.” Meaning unfolds in the mutable space between the work and the audience. Re-reading Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady at thirty or forty, the story takes on a different shape than it did when one first encountered it at twenty. The text hasn’t changed, but your frame of reference has.

Audition celebrates uncertainty as a necessary condition for creating and interpreting art. In a conversation with Tess Gunty at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Kitamura said she was interested in ceding narrative authority. She initially avoided using first person point-of-view because she saw it as “an easy mechanism for narrative control.” Later, she recognized the ability of the first person to express uncertainty.

We bring so much of ourselves to bear upon a work of art: what we notice, what we ignore, what we fixate on are informed by our lived experience, sociocultural conditioning, and cognitive frameworks. Whether a piece speaks to us has more to do with who we are in this moment than any inherent quality of the work itself.

The same is true of how we view people.

We might feel instantly drawn to someone we’ve just met. Another person might touch a particular nerve. Just as we seek universal meaning in a work of art, we instinctively search for fixed truths about people. But how we receive someone has more to do with our own baggage than any innate quality of that person. This is not something we consider when we’re bickering with our partner or irritated with a friend. Because we’re so entrenched in our subjectivity, we externalize the problem as entirely “about them.”

From an early age, we were taught to weave meaning out of disparate pieces of information—that instinct to create stories is how we make sense of the world. We can’t help but narrativize. When the person you’ve just started dating does something baffling, your brain automatically tries to construct a story to explain their behavior, then searches for evidence and social validation to support it.

There isn’t a singular, objective truth about a person. How you interpret someone, how you receive them, is as close to the truth as you can get. To embrace our subjectivity is to acknowledge how much power we have in making meaning of the world around us.

In Audition, the two men in the narrator’s life, Xavier and Tomas, shape-shift and take on new “roles” in much the same way that characters in dreams do. Who they are is immaterial. What matters is how the narrator perceives them and their relative positions in her life.

In Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development, fourth-order thinking is the “self-authored mind.” This is trusting your own inner seat of judgment and authority, being able to think independently of your tribe. Imagine that instead of searching for the “correct way” of understanding a work of art, you trusted your own interpretation.

But there’s a higher order of consciousness that is the “self-transforming mind.” It’s characterized by an ability to hold multiple systems of thought, identity, and meaning simultaneously, recognizing each one’s limitations, including the self-authored one. The self is seen as fluid, evolving, and interconnected. As you transcend the orders of consciousness, there’s a shift from subject (something embedded in you that you can’t see) to object (something you can step back from and observe).

One way to practice fifth-order thinking is to interrogate your frame of reference, noticing how it shapes your perception and trying to hold multiple truths without privileging one perspective. If there was ever a novel that exemplified Kegan’s fifth order of consciousness, Audition is one.

It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave: If you’re not aware of the existence of the cave and the sun casting shadows on the walls, you would take the illusion of reality as the only truth. When you become aware of the apparatus of your mind’s eye creating meaning, you can shift perspectives. You’re no longer confined to just one way of seeing.

So “What do you represent?” is an apt question.

The danger of falling for a fuckboy is a tale as old as time. Whether lurking in the pages of 19th century literature or Hinge profiles, fuckboys have endured through the ages, leaving behind a trail of emotional wreckage. There are entire Facebook groups (“Are We Dating The Same Guy?”) dedicated to helping women weed them out by dishing tea on the various suspects in a city like New York.

Carola Lovering’s Tell Me Lies is about a toxic, on-again, off-again relationship between Lucy and Stephen that spans college and beyond. It’s an extremely triggering novel for anyone who has been in an emotionally turbulent relationship. The highs and lows, the push-pull dynamic, the cycles of pursuit and withdrawal are painfully relatable.

At its core, it’s a story about addiction—not the chemical kind (although there’s plenty of coke and booze), but the craving to feel wanted, seen, and chosen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire, but it can be easily exploited by a certain type of person.

An alarming number of women have had a “Stephen” in her past—maybe not quite a sociopath, but a serial player who ruined her and kept coming back for more. Just look at this Reddit thread:

Because the story unfolds through Lucy’s and Stephen’s alternating points of view, the reader is privileged with more information than the characters, and this contributes to the suspense. We know early on that Stephen is narcissistic, manipulative, and emotionless. On the surface, it’s inconceivable that Lucy should fall for such a terrible person who—it must be noted—has a “weak chin” and isn’t even good looking. But when you understand her backstory and the particular trauma she suffered as a child, it’s not only believable but inevitable that she should fall for his charms, and we read to find out if she can break out of her toxic cycle with him.

I inhaled Tell Me Lies on a long-haul flight, and it got me thinking about how messy and vulnerable our college years are. At eighteen, we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know what we want, and we certainly don’t know what love is. It’s all too easy to mistake sexual chemistry and emotional intensity for love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful, transformative experience.

Seeing Stephen at a wedding a few years after college, Lucy still feels viscerally drawn to him and has this very honest moment of reflection:

Maybe I didn’t always like him, but there is a difference between liking someone and loving them, and the power in that difference is enough to shape your life.

When she admits she loves him despite everything he’s done, she’s revealing how love—or what feels like love—can override reason and reshape the course of one’s life. You might argue that what she feels toward him is more like lust or emotional dependency, but that distinction doesn’t make her experience any less valid, any less powerful or real. It still hurts. It still changes her.

A friend of mine is in a situationship where neither of them talks about their dating lives, so she doesn’t know if he’s seeing other people, and he doesn’t know if she is. Instead, she’s piecing together context clues to figure out his status. This is an untenable situation, and I was surprised she was okay with it. But I think the arrangement satisfies some of her needs while keeping alive the hope of real commitment. Sometimes, uncertainty is preferable when seeking clarity could mean learning that what you want is impossible. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma: staying in a mutually tolerable situation feels safer than risking “losing it all” by asking for the truth.

In college, I dated someone who filled a particular void from my previous relationship. I felt like we were meant to be together because of how much we had in common and how intense the attraction was. This allowed me to ignore obvious red flags—like the fact that we almost exclusively hung out after 9 p.m. and rarely went on dates in public. I liked being the girl who was down-to-earth and uncomplicated, the opposite of high maintenance. For months, I didn’t ask him what we were because I didn’t want to come across as a person who needed labels to feel secure. I wanted to trust him and trust our relationship, so I kept a lid on my simmering worries. I was trying to maintain an image of myself as cool and unattached when I was anything but.

It’s worthwhile to examine why we avoid bringing up certain topics with intimate partners, what fears lurk behind the silence. The best way to test the soundness of a relationship is to make an earnest bid for what you want. But of course, that’s easier said than done. This is one of those lessons we all have to learn the hard way.

I love this Mary Oliver poem:

(Spoiler alert in this paragraph—) Midway through Tell Me Lies, I found myself desperately wanting Stephen to get punished. Believe it or not, chronic cheating, emotional manipulation, and gaslighting are the least of his crimes. I wanted to see him publicly humiliated, tarred and feathered, denounced by all his friends, and eating his heart out at “the one who got away.” But Lovering doesn’t give us any of this. She doesn’t cater to our collective fantasy of revenge, fueled by our own experiences with “Stephens.” And this is why the ending packs a punch. Just like in real life, we never find out if the toxic ex gets his comeuppance. Some stories we won’t stay in long enough to see how they end because, for our own sake, we have to GTFO.

All of the love languages—words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and touch—can be mistaken for the real thing they purport to express. What’s important isn’t what a person does but why they do it. Lucy has a powerful realization at the end that Stephen’s displays of affection—his attempts to win her back—have nothing to do with her. It’s all a game to him, with high risks and high rewards. She realizes she’s no different than any other woman he’s seduced, and this painful, clear-eyed understanding is what saves her.