I hate smoking.

And I like it.

I have had a long and strange relationship with smoking. We break up and get back together again, and this has been happening since I was twelve years old, when I smoked my first one behind a corner store a few metres from my grade school. We would sneak off school property, highly illegal according to the rules, and the taboo and minor criminality of it made smoking a symbol of rebellion and accomplishment for a seventh grader.

For more than ten years, when I was married, I did not smoke. My ex-husband did, and maybe that’s why I did not. He smoked enough for the both of us. After our separation, I returned to smoking in my worst years that came after and have to admit that, every time I stop smoking completely, always cold turkey, I return to it for the same reasons: needing to do something with my hands. Anxiety.

When I moved to Lisbon three years ago, I did not smoke. Then on a second date with a man I have had a complex and long mostly non-sexual relationship with since I moved here, I started again. He was smoking and the tension between us was high and so I asked if I could pull a cigarette from his pack and of course he said yes. A request for a cigarette is never denied, especially by a man trying to sleep with you, and I have smoked since then.

He likes to joke that he is the reason I started smoking again, blames himself, a self-flagellation I guess, maybe even a pat on the back, as being someone in my story who pinpoints when something that marks me so much began. Right now, this man and I are not speaking because we argue often about how we see the world. And I continue to smoke.

I have compared smoking to an ex that always comes back around, bad for you, but feels so good, waking you up from a sound sleep of good behaviour to ask, “Are you up?”

For years, even while I smoked, I told myself that I was not a smoker. I didn’t feel like a smoker, I just did what smokers do. Just a hobby, just for now, taking a break from being a non-smoker to enjoy the social interactions that come with having one in your hand.

But smoking that you do alone and all day is not a hobby anymore, but a habit. Unless you smoke regularly and are not one of those folks who only enjoy the occasional “vacation cigarette,” you cannot really understand the underlying secret of smokers that only smokers know: that thin, tightly packed, cancer-causing stick of tobacco is company for the moments when you are alone and need to think and be inside your head.

I always smoke when I write, and I write a lot, so do the math on that. I say that smoking and being straight are my two greatest flaws. I have many more flaws than just these two, but when I say these out loud, it makes people laugh or ask questions, and so once again smoking plays into the social parts of my life.

An online magazine recently purchased an essay from me, after reading it here on this platform. They asked for a selfie shot to accompany the story. As I went through the options in my phone, I was surprised, and a little horrified, but also amused, that the only photos I had were of me with a cigarette between my lips, giving the camera the middle finger, or both.

Next to one photo of a cigarette hanging out of my mouth was one of me at three years old, sitting on a toilet, taken by my mom. Classic ’80s. In it, I am innocent, cute, fresh and young, and have not yet done anything bad in my life. That juxtaposition of a three-year-old me and a 46-year-old me made me wonder if I have given that little girl from 1983 the life she deserved or imagined. I try. But too soon to tell. Looking at old photos of yourself as a kid will keep you humble and maybe remind you of why you have fought through the darkest years of your life to stay alive.

If you want to annoy a smoker, or even make them not like you much, tell them that smoking is bad and they should quit. We know. And we feel your judgement for something you know nothing about. The only time I listen to someone who says I should stop smoking is when it comes from someone who has known the hold it has on a person because they used to smoke, too. I do not think it’s the tobacco for a lot of us that keeps us in the loop, but the way it keeps solitary people company, the pensive, the dramatic, the intense and the sad.

Smoking is the only vice I have: not drugs, not drinking, not validation, not self-hate and certainly not men. I do not engage in other things that are bad for me, other than the occasional rage I feel for people who are not living life much at all, but judge me for living mine.

Smoking keeps me company. It gives my hands something to do between key strokes and walking and drinking coffee and observing strangers in the street so I can write about them later.

There is nothing romantic about smoking. It is an addiction of layers and magnitudes and most of us who do it want to quit. But most of us cannot figure out what to replace it with or do not want to feel the physical and psychological effects of what withdrawal from this drug, meant to keep you buying it, feels like. There is nothing romantic about it and yet, even knowing what we do about what it does to us, we do it anyway: a strange, voluntary, relenting, submissive relationship to something the size of a finger or less.

Smoking is a sign to someone else who does it that you are the same in at least one way. Pulling out my pack of cigarettes has broken down invisible walls between myself and the strangers I meet on the road: a table full of old and drunk men at a bar in rural Portugal, for example; suddenly they are telling their stories and secrets between drags as I take mental note and ask questions.

Or the men I have dated and liked in the past, and the hours of smoking in my living room, listening to music and exchanging feelings that eventually, always, evaporate like the smoke we make in the air. The women I meet who are attractive, but I am not attracted to, who are smart and successful, too, as we stand outside a restaurant together, taking a break from the boring table of pointless conversation amongst the people eating inside. As much as smoking slowly kills us all, it unites us briefly, too.

Dressed up in stylish clothes, makeup and expensive perfume, I admit that I love ruining someone’s illusion of my polish and intelligence by pulling out a cigarette and sucking on it to the end, choosing it above all social interaction around me and not caring that it will make me smell rank and look flawed.

I never throw the ends away on the ground, and am known for butting them out on the bottom of my shoe and throwing them away properly, in a trash can, even keeping them in my hand, several of them, until I find a place to discard them properly, like a lady, or at least a decent human being. Maybe this makes me a thoughtful smoker or a conscientious one, aware of herself and her dirty habit, at the least.

Even though I live in a city that smokes for breakfast, I am still that local who turns to the table next to me outside and asks, “I am going to light up, is that okay?” But I am also the person who looks at people like they are idiots when they complain that “everyone in Europe smokes.” I suggested to one woman who gave me a look of disgust that she should try California then.

Some people think smoking looks sexy, but I don’t think so. What is appealing, however, is someone doing something they know is bad and choosing it out of free will anyway. Someone who smokes is a person who is both in a self-imposed prison and liberated.

When I have stopped it, I have stopped from one day to the next; no big announcement or marathon of will, no reason or inciting incident. I just stop. This pattern flows into other relationships to things, places and people in my life - when I am done, I am just done, and I do not think about it after that, and then the addiction becomes staying away from the thing or person I have grown tired of, had enough of, or no longer like the same way.

Before criticizing a person who smokes, no one considers their relationship to the practice, to the ritual, to the way it comes into our lives every day: with coffee or a drink or a conversation while we watch the first person in a group pull out their pack or bag of unrolled tobacco to set off a feeling of wanting to join in.

When people who do not usually smoke want a break from themselves, they come to us to ask for a cigarette, and we always oblige, pulling one perfect, white stick from a pack to share our poison with you - an interesting power dynamic where, in that moment, you feel like you are solving a problem for someone who wishes to escape and be a little rebellious for a few minutes with you.

Finding other smokers in Lisbon is not hard. In fact, moving to Lisbon made it easier to join the league again. Most Portuguese people I know smoke or have in the past. It passes the time, makes people forget about their problems or poverty and brings people together in a group of other sinners who are doing conscious harm to themselves. It is an un-secret-secret society that always calls you back in, and when people do not smoke, I say “Good for you, it’s awful,” and then light mine up to show them what it looks like to give in and be a little bit bad.

I hate smoking. And I like it. But I cannot love something that does not love me back, and I know why I keep coming back to it as well. Smoking is consistent and keeps me company, and that is more than most people I know can do. So then I ask myself the hard question: is smoking the real problem in my life, or the people?

This woman liked me a lot, until she didn’t, and when she decided that, she let me know in a series of texts.

Over a couple of months, I met up with her for lunch, then coffee, then a drink after work. I was first introduced to her one evening while out with friends. She pursued a friendship with me after that. Maybe a little too hard, looking back.

People lament that it’s hard to make friends as an adult. But I don’t know that it’s harder, or that access and proximity change as we get older. Our lives fill with what Saint-Exupéry calls “matters of consequence” in The Little Prince, and our schedules become badges of identity, signalling to others that we are important, busy and needed.

I am almost certain that some of us stay in relationships or have children just to have something to do, someone to be and a purpose to follow. Friends become part of this status game too, and some people turn into what I call friend collectors. They prefer the idea of having friends to the reality of what it takes to keep and nurture those connections.

New people move to Lisbon all the time. It’s the perfect city to know everyone and still be anonymous or solitary, which suits me. I went out alone a lot in Toronto, but the places I ended up seemed to cater to people with other people. I like to show up alone, mingle, then leave alone, no one the wiser that I came by myself and left because I was done or bored or both.

I have met more people who aren’t from Portugal than people who are. Increasingly, everyone is from somewhere else. This is not a bad thing, but it is nuanced.

I have learned a lot about other cultures and lifestyles in the three years since moving here. A few patterns I have noticed: everyone seems to be in an open relationship, works remotely, or came for the sun or the tax breaks. Hardly anyone comes because they love Portugal beyond what they can take from it. Almost everyone is unsure whether they will stay in Lisbon. I am one of the few who say, “I’m going to die here.” Meaning I have picked my place to build a life, something I could never comfortably say about Toronto.

Toronto felt like my marriage - this is it? I couldn’t imagine myself dying in either because both stunted my growth and kept me from becoming the version of myself I knew I could be and wanted to be: alive and free and sovereign.

The woman I met that evening and I got along. A potential new friend. It can be hard to find love in Lisbon, but it can be just as hard to find friends. The bureaucracy alone sends people - mostly Americans - running for the hills, back to a world they understand, a bubble built for their points of view. But this woman was pleasant and smart, from a northern European country.

We had good conversations. She did most of the talking, which reminded me of the men I used to date, but I did not mind. I genuinely like hearing someone’s story and prefer not to be asked about my own. I am a good talker, sure, but I am also a good listener. I ask a lot of questions that hopefully do not feel invasive but instead help reveal something new about them to both of us.

This woman was tricky, though, because when she did ask me about myself, she seemed nosy, not curious, and the two are not the same. What she liked about me at the beginning of our short friendship was exactly what she disliked me for in the end. This arc from fascination to hate is something most of us have experienced, as either the perpetrator or the target, whether the connection is platonic, professional or romantic. What someone finds attractive about you when they meet you can become the thing they demonize you for.

I have been told that I am intense. I used to take that as an insult. I like intense people - folks with character and distinct personalities - but I have also met intensity that sucks the air out of a room. So when I used to hear “You are so intense, Sandy,” I thought of the people in my own life I could not stand for how big they felt, how exhausting. But I have grown out of that insecurity, and now when I am called intense, I take it to mean that I leave an impression, that I am clear about who I am and what I like, and that I give someone my full attention in conversation. It’s not that I am too intense, but that, compared to others, I do not leave people with the feeling of a weak, loose handshake, and most people do.

Perspective.

This woman messaged me one night, demanding answers and discussion on something she felt strongly about. I was occupied, mentally somewhere else, and I told her to back the fuck off - nicely - because I do not tolerate demands on my time, although I am always open to a kind request for my attention. She harassed and bombarded me with messages anyway. She called me names and crossed lines, and in the end I blocked her. She would have loved it if I had done that to someone else and told her about it. She would have said, “You are such a queen,” or some shit like that. But I did it to her, because she did something I did not wish to revisit with her ever again, and for that, she hated me.

I think she admired me more than she ever liked me, which happens when you have not known someone very long. As much as I love Lisbon and the way it lets me be alone when I need and in the company of others when I want, being an immigrant here means starting from scratch in every way, friendships included. What happened with her (minus the blocking) is not uncommon when you are a woman who knows herself, surrounded by people who do not.

Everyone I know in Lisbon is new to me. Although I would side with Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese writer, who said something like: it is not the quantity of time we spend with others that counts, but the intensity of time that matters, there is still something to be said for years - not months - of consistent relationships when you are building a life.

Because Lisbon is a city most people pass through, enjoy for a bit and leave once they find somewhere with a better tax system, you cannot invest your heart and soul in the new people you meet. This is partly why foreigners who settle here call the Portuguese “closed,” and why many Portuguese keep friendships they have had since grade school. I get it. The rare Portuguese person who introduces me to their friends will have me kissing the cheeks or shaking the hand of someone they have known since before they hit puberty.

After the friendship dissolved, and I did not care because fuck you for coming at me like that, I started to research whether this was a thing, a phenomenon people experience in new connections - disillusionment with someone not for what they did but for who they inherently are.

Turns out it’s a thing people do when they cannot figure you out or box you in, or when they feel competitive or threatened because you highlight a lack they perceive in themselves.

It has a name. It’s called “pet to threat.”

Dr. Kecia M. Thomas introduced this concept in a 2013 study titled “Moving from Pet to Threat: Narratives of Professional Black Women.” She co-authored it with Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Rosemary E. Phelps and Ny Mia Tran as a chapter in the book Psychological Health of Women of Color: Intersections, Challenges, and Opportunities.

I am not comparing my experience to what Black women or other women of colour face. I am highlighting that the behaviour transcends the workplace and leaks into friendships and romantic relationships all the time.

Some would reduce this behaviour to jealousy, but jealousy is an emotion we all have. This is deeper than that. The problem is people who take jealousy too far, not understanding that the spike of jealousy is a signal that what someone else is or has is possible to attain if you try. People let jealousy simmer until it becomes competition, and suddenly the person you perceive as having something more is a false, internalized barrier to you. I do not operate this way.

When I feel the sting of jealousy, I know it is an awareness of myself and what is possible if I get out of my own way. Unchecked jealousy is also the baseline of misogyny, and many women turn it on other women they perceive as threatening. This is not exclusive to women, of course. Men do it too, to us and to each other, so the jealousy is human, like most things that are disgusting. The misogyny is what happens when it is aimed at women.

Once I heard “pet to threat,” I thought about it for a few days, going back over instances I could now see more clearly, including recent ones where connections dissolved, like this new-ish friendship. She knew I have no expectations of people but maintain high standards for how I treat others and how I prefer to be treated in return. She knew I have trained myself to walk away from a friendship that feels unhealthy, weak or competitive. She loved that I was “confident” and assured in myself and my connections, but then hated me for applying this logic to her.

I would apply this to romantic connections as well. Although I have removed myself from dating for the foreseeable future because I prefer inner peace to penis, when I did date, I applied the same logic: you cannot change people, but you can change your relationship to them and move on, especially when you know you have moved from “pet” to the insidious label of “threat.”

We need one another. It is human to want to belong and feel connected. But no matter how significant or vital my relationships with other people are, the one I have with myself (and the one you have with yourself) is what determines quality of life, and sacrificing quality for quantity is not worth the misery.

Almost every time I go out to be social lately, I am reminded why, lately, I have not wanted to go out and be social.

There are always the exceptions, though: the conversations and strangers and new-familiar people to look forward to. But then there are sometimes the people who make you wish you’d stayed home.

I spent a month away from Lisbon this summer. I had wanted to do this since I moved here - to get away in August, the most manic month of the year for a lot of us. The heat here is at its peak, the tourists take up more room than usual, and the inevitability of drunk bachelor parties is that much more unbearable.

Who is raising these idiots? And worse, who is marrying them?

Anyway.

I was away in rural Portugal for all of August, in a village of fewer than 800 inhabitants, at an artist residency, writing my first book. I wrote a lot. I think. I am not done. I wrote more than I thought I would or than I thought I had in me. I went in with the idea for a novella and realized that I have more to say. Whether or not I ever try to have this book published is not on my mind. I just wanted to write this story - for me.

I am not in the book world other than reading books regularly and studying their prose, but I know writing. Even after 25 years, I am still learning about what it means to write, be a writer, and understand language and the human mind. Only a few years ago, I found the voice that you are reading right now. She is me. But like most things I don’t know how to do, including writing a book about scary things, I just started: one line, a first sentence of an idea that I had in my head.

I wrote every day, throughout the day, but usually I only write in the mornings before sunrise. Then I go for a walk to clear my head and organize my thoughts.

Writing throughout the day was hard, especially with the heat and no air conditioning or ocean nearby. By the afternoon, my brain was fried, but I wrote anyway, like army training or something - do it anyway.

The nearest beach was a river beach, about 25 minutes by car. The closest ocean beach was within an hour. I love the ocean. My friend graciously loaned me her car for the month, an early 2000s VW Golf that used to belong to her brother, God bless him. He passed away a few years ago and left her the car. Now she loans it to her friends. We say it helps keep his spirit alive, and I think it does. Every time I got into the car, I would make the sign of the cross, not religiously but ritualistically, and I would say, “God bless this journey,” and then put my hands on the steering wheel and add, “Paulo, be with me, buddy,” summoning the original owner of the car. He loved that car, and now I love that car, because it gives me wings to travel and write.

My experience in the village was expansive. I let myself only think about writing for 30 days. I got back at the beginning of September, to the other parts of my life and the people in it who simultaneously fill me up and drain me, and the transition has not been smooth. I love Lisbon, but I am starting to question the people I know in it. Not because they are bad and not because I don’t like them, but because I am changing and they are not changing fast enough for me.

I have been mostly hibernating since my return because I am transforming, and change is uncomfortable, and I prefer to do it in solitude. I am in a liminal space right now, reconsidering my relationship to conversations. When you write for a living and for pleasure, there is always a conversation flowing in your head, so the ones I have externally, with other people, can sometimes feel like interruptions to my own thoughts - my stories.

Solitude is a strong medicine for city life, but it can also become a drug. I am a bit addicted to being alone right now. I think it might be at the tipping point of getting out of hand.

Since being back in Lisbon, I have been out a handful of times. Each time I went out reluctantly. Most times I was glad I pushed myself to get outside of my house and out of my head and into the heads and hearts of other people who let me in, share their stories and thoughts, even if some of those thoughts are spiteful. Some people are so miserable and lost. I understand them because I have been that way myself. I am a lot less like that now, but I, too, have days where I am misery and spite combined, and that is why I love to live alone, not have someone to answer to, and choose how I manage my moods, alone.

Before each outing, I call my mom and complain. This is recent, and she is kind enough to hear me out, not judge me, and forgive me for my negativity. I don’t know if she does this because she is my mom or because she is who she is and just loves me. Does she love me because I am lovable or because she made me? Either way, I am grateful that my mom is someone I love from a distance and who also lets me vent. It makes us close.

No one lets me complain like my mom does, and I would not complain to anyone the way I complain to my mom. Our relationship is not perfect, it has not always been easy, and there were years we were enemy Number One to each other, but there is something about the way my mother listens that I have not found in any other human connection so far. I will miss being her daughter someday. Until then, we joke and poke fun at life and its ridiculousness together, and then I drag myself into the outside world to be social and have some regrets.

Friday night, I met a new friend and his friends. We had unexpected, wonderful conversations. I had been sick for two weeks and was barely holding myself up on my feet. But every time I tried to leave, someone else would say something interesting or smart, so I stayed. Solitude is a drug, yes, but so is smartness. And I was hungry for good talks about random things, political things, stupid things, cultural things, and for listening to how other people arrived in Lisbon, like me, to live and start again.

I hate discussions about dating, about people wishing they were not alone, about gossip, about rumours, about the opinions of other people. I am bored by that shit now. None of that on Friday. I want to have my mind changed, teach me something new, help me think in different ways. I got all of that good stuff that night and went home happy around midnight.

Slept okay. Woke up still sick. But it was Saturday morning, and that is my favourite time of the week. I went for a walk, dragging my sick ass through Lisbon to a nearby food market where there is a quiosque that serves good coffee. I text a friend who lives nearby, and as I send the message, she suddenly appears from the market with an armful of vegetables and fruit. A coincidence of divine timing. She and I sit down to have coffee and catch up on life and exchange some updates. She is leaving back to her hometown in the United States for three months. This is Lisbon: you cannot get attached to anyone because they might leave. The Portuguese are used to this and have a word for it - saudades - but I am still not used to liking people and then having to forget about them for a while or forever.

My friend and I say goodbye, and I stay at the table where we had coffee. There is a man sitting there, as it is common for strangers to share tables when there are none to spare. We start talking. Not flirting. I do not flirt anymore. With anyone. His friend joins us. They are both several years older than I am. At first, I think they are gay. But they are not. We have coffee for so long that the beer hour comes, and then we have a couple of those. We talk with a stranger nearby.

He is from Germany but speaks Portuguese, or at least he tries. He is quite good at it. He subscribes to my Substack when he learns that I am a writer. I give him advice about writing, which he asked for, because he is writing in a journal when we meet. I tell him, “This is not advice, though,” and then tell him what I did to start writing 25 years ago. He wants to write. He works in sales or something, but wants to write. Everyone wants to write. I tell him he should, because I think everybody should. I think the world would be less stupid if people wrote more, created more, and read more books. He goes home, and I continue talking with the two strangers at my table. They are both Portuguese, and we are speaking in a mix of languages. I love this about Lisbon.

We decide to go for lunch, us three, and they take me to a tasca - a traditional and small restaurant that serves home cooking - and we joke, but are also serious, that we can’t tell the “expats” about this place, because they will put it on Instagram and ruin it like they ruin everything charming and secret about Lisbon.

We have a good and tasty lunch, affordable against the expat menus of Lisbon, and then they drive me home. We exchange numbers, but they are Portuguese, and I have no idea if they will ever reach out again to hang out like they said. The Portuguese do not tend to get attached to foreigners, because we might leave.

I get home and another friend messages me. It is now 4pm. I left my apartment that morning around 10. I did not expect the day I had, but I welcome it. This is a good experience of “the outside.” I ask my friend - confirmed gay, not like the other guys I just met - if he feels like going out. He says back, “Do you?” I say, “Yes,” because I am so rarely out these days, I might as well get the most out of the rest of the day.

We meet up half an hour later near my apartment. Another quiosque. We have a few drinks. Then a few more. We smoke too many cigarettes together. We have great conversation. I like my friend; he is warm and funny and Canadian, like me.

A street musician, who I think has a horrible voice and who annoys me with his performances when I walk by, passes by us and starts to talk. I make the mistake of asking, “How are you?” and he takes that as a sign to dump on us. He complains about social media and women and the nasty comments he leaves on women’s posts. This goes on for a while, and we just let him talk. I try to share my point of view on his misogynistic point of view, and he tells me I have a point. Okay. He goes to perform. I hate every second of it, but at least he is happier now, distracted, and my friend and I resume our intense conversation over the blaring, screeching sounds of the street musician who thinks that “girls attract the bad men that come into their lives,” and does not understand that bad men never show up in our lives that way - the mask falls off once the vampires are invited in.

Now I dislike this musician for more than just his horrible voice and pathetic performances. He finishes singing and comes back over to our table to lament about women some more. Is he trying to convince us? Get us on his side? He has chosen the wrong audience for that. In the time that he stands there talking to us again, he confesses to a bad relationship he had with a woman, talks trash about her and her kid, and then says that he wishes a woman would slap him so he could punch her back. He says that and thinks he has our vote. Idiot.

He says other things, expressing his male fragility, and every sentence now is more misogynistic than the last. I eventually tell him to get going in a nice way, because I am the kind of woman who could break a loser like this with my words, and I inform him that my friend and I are in the middle of a conversation. He leaves.

A while later, my friend and I go to a gay bar, because for a straight woman, that is the only place in the city to feel safe. We drink some more, maybe too much, and dance. We look at beautiful men who are only looking at each other, and I love this, because I do not hate men. But I absolutely hate the system that tells them to hate me. These men do not hate me, they do not even pay attention to me, and that is exactly the way I like it.

Around midnight, my friend goes home and I go home, too. I call my mom and tell her I am too drunk, that this is rare for me, and I lament that I will spend my Sunday hungover and anxious, plotting a way to get that musician banned from the square where he hates every woman that walks by.

Going out in Lisbon is funny like that. Ups and downs. Waves and tsunamis of personalities, but I always manage to get a story out of it. And once again, I am reminded why lately I have not wanted to go out and be social.

What people think of you is none of your business until it costs you. This is when you get involved.

The original line belongs to Terry Cole-Whittaker, from the title of her book What You Think of Me Is None of My Business. It has been repeated in speeches, on social media and in group chats for decades, and it is half right. You cannot control what people say about you, only how you react. But when what people say about you to others reaches your income, your nervous system or the rooms you are let into, it is your business. Hurt feelings are one thing. Lost access is another.

In 2013, psychologist Dr. Kecia M. Thomas and her co-authors named a pattern they called “Pet to Threat.”1 High-achieving women of colour are mentored and applauded at work, then targeted and marginalized once they show competence and self-confidence. The framework belongs to that context first. But the mechanism applies to almost all relationships.

What someone loved you for in the beginning - your courage, your opinions, your confidence, your connections, your independence, your ambition - can become exactly what makes them feel threatened by you in the end. Outside the workplace, the power at stake is not a promotion but access: who gets invited, introduced, recommended and trusted. That is what gets cut. The more common method is simply talking shit about you.

This is control. What someone does not understand about you - how you built your work, your reputation, your life - they may try to take apart.

This meanness is genderless. I stopped dating for several reasons this year. One of those reasons was that men kept loving my independence, my opinions and my self-confidence until they held those same things against me. It got boring. Women do it to women by resenting in others what they have not yet built in themselves. I have also seen a man tear down the way another man walks, talks or presents himself because he is getting more attention. Suddenly the one everyone loved is the one who gets picked on.

When this happens, you name it and remove access as a method of self-preservation. It is not easy, but it is necessary. Not advice, of course, but it is effective.

This summer I spent several weeks at an artists’ residency in a rural village in Alentejo. I was, and am, working on my first novel. This is new for me, so I asked people in my social and business circles to give me room: do not message me with your problems, lamentations or gossip. Most respected it. Others thought my need for silence was meant to silence them. It wasn’t, but how they reacted to it was loud. Even those who knew I value solitude, especially when I work or travel, had a hard time at first understanding that this solitude applied to them. A writer sometimes just needs to write. Leave me alone.

In the village, with time away from my regular life, the pattern was obvious from a distance: the qualities that have drawn certain people to me are the ones that have sometimes worked against me. That does not mean I change who I am, only that my relationships must transform.

What most people count on is you not saying anything at all. And that is precisely when you should.

I should have gone home after the beach that Sunday afternoon, but then he asked me if I was hungry, and I was. I had a fridge filled with food I had already paid for at home, but I said “yes” to eating at a nearby restaurant because the conversation was good enough. Curiosity I guess.

I was more starved for conversation than food, so I accepted the invitation. Sand still in my hair and that familiar tightening on my skin from the salty water, the sun was still hot and the city was very much alive for a Sunday night. Of course it was. This is Lisbon.

We spoke in a mix of English and Portuguese. Any Portuguese person I meet now knows that they are going to speak both with me. I am always impressed by how fluidly my people switch between the two, and yet, I know that to most of them I am a foreigner because I was born somewhere else. I look like them, talk like them, was raised with the same or similar values, and still, I will never really know what it is to be born and raised in Portugal because I was not.

This gap is what keeps me engaged. A sincere curiosity to understand Portugal and especially Lisbon from the lens of someone who has always been here. I think some people mistake my curiosity for a deeper interest in them than I have in the subject I am asking about. Men - straight ones - especially get this confused.

This one I was with, at the beach, seemed confused. Not by my actions, but by his intentions. Men have taught me about men the most. They have taught me to be aware. A lot of my deductions have come from lived experience and observation, and these days it’s data that shows me that the bear might kill a woman in the forest, but he won’t rape her, and that is why women are not kidding when we say a bear feels like less of a threat theoretically than an ill-intentioned man with no impulse control.

After eating, we ended up at a bar in Bairro Alto. A legendary area of Lisbon to party and the oldest bar hub in Portugal that ranks up there as one of the wildest in Europe for nightlife. That is not a compliment. It has been ruined by drunk tourists who need AA and a prayer more than they need that next pint of beer.

I had made my intentions clear with my male companion that night. All day he made suggestions. But this was not a date. I had finally pulled it out of him that he had a long-distance girlfriend, 42, somewhere in Boston. He was 35. They had known each other two months, he said. I wondered why a middle-aged woman would think that a Portuguese 30-something straight man who worked in the nightlife industry was someone worth investing time and trust in. Not my business.

I continued to make it clear to this man throughout the night that my intention was only to talk about a few of my favourite subjects: Portugal, politics and polarizing topics like feminism and abortion.

When I first met him, he told me he was a conservative and that feminism was ruining the world. My thirst for conversation took over and I suggested that we discuss his points of view over coffee some time. “I’m a writer,” I told him, “and I write about the things you hate, so I welcome your point of view.”

He messaged me the next day and we made a plan to go to the beach and talk. I rarely turn down an invitation to the beach. In the summer months, I prioritize beach days because nothing alchemizes me quite like the salt water and sun. I usually prefer to go alone, but at times will welcome company if I think it can add to the experience. I do not seek company these days. I often avoid it in fact. But I said yes to his invitation to the beach because I was starved for conversation, but we all know that you should never go to the market on an empty stomach.

He worked across from my favourite Fado house in Lisbon. I had seen him over the last couple of years, one of those restaurant promoters who entices people to come into his establishment by speaking whatever language the passersby do to convince them to go inside. This did not impress me so much because the Portuguese are known for being multi-language people - they will switch to whatever language you want. I am used to it. The reason they do this goes deep.

The way he accepted rejection at his job was interesting - most people walk by him and do not answer his invitations to sit down and eat. Most do not say a word. He is invisible to them, but does not flinch. As a writer who is also subjected to rejection as part of her job, I could relate. So I was curious about that.

I like to sit and read alone, observe people. I was doing it that night we met. I had been reading I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, and he asked me about the book - a feminist novel. That was how the conversation turned to feminism, and then he told me he was a conservative and votes for one of the most polarizing politicians in the country. Only misogynists, racists and nationalists vote for him and I give all his posters the middle finger when I drive by them on my road trips through the countryside.

The beach day with him had been good and innocent fun. My boundaries are fierce and I have no problem enforcing them verbally or physically if it comes to that. Dinner after was quick and we had too much wine, but not so much that I lost my head. We ended up on the same street as his restaurant at a small and dingy bar where he knew the bartender. It was mostly empty there and the music was good so I danced a bit. All in good fun. He bought me a beer. I thanked him and set it down on a table along with my bag. I wanted to dance with ease and nothing in my hands. He turned around to talk to the bartender and I danced in place, happy to be young, alive and in Lisbon.

A group of young men walked in. I would put them around late 20s or early 30s. Foreigners from a European country. It does not matter which one. Groups of men in this age range who are in packs and drunk off their ass are the reason women choose the bear.

They were in the bar for a minute before one of them in a pink shirt looked at me, walked over to my table and flipped it. No notice, no provocation, no impulse control. My beer launched and the table went flying and so did my bag.

A nearby table filled with men sat and stared. Some laughed. But they did not intervene or correct his madness. Then the table flipper in the pink shirt left the bar with his pack and went into the street to cause more havoc.

A new hunger in me erupted. It was quiet rage.

I followed the pack of men with the pink shirt table flipper outside, not because I am brave, but because I am sick and fucking tired of men behaving like animals with no consequence.

I wanted answers. In fact, I demanded them.

I tapped the pink shirt asshole on the shoulder outside the bar and said something that sounded like a low roar:

HEY. YOU OWE ME A BEER. YOU FLIPPED THAT TABLE. THIS IS NOT FUCKING LAS VEGAS. THIS IS LISBON. IF YOU CAN’T RESPECT OUR CITY GET THE FUCK OUT. WE DO NOT WANT YOU HERE.

He was stunned, because God forbid a woman have a voice when she feels violated or unsafe. But gender is not a factor when justice is on the table to be served.

I think girls are born on high alert and then become women like me who reach a point of having looked over our shoulders with keys between our fingers long enough over the years that we are entitled to explode. In fact, we must.

I spoke firmly but kept my calm because I was so focused on what I wanted: an apology, some accountability and a new beer.

He pretended like he couldn’t understand me and lied that it wasn’t him that flipped the table and sent my drink flying through the air, disturbing my dancing and my peace. He just violated the place and left.

I told him again that is not what we do here in Lisbon, and he owed me a beer. “Be a gentleman,” I said to him, encouraging him to do the right thing, and he told me again it wasn’t him, a lie, from the man in the unmistakable pink shirt.

The commotion had drawn a small crowd outside the bar now, but still no one did a thing. This was entertainment to a bunch of drunk tourists who would be arrested for this type of behaviour in their own country for sure.

One of his friends from the pack, a man dressed in all black, started laughing, and when I looked over to find my next target I saw him recording me with his phone. A complete violation of my legal rights in Portugal, where it is against the law to record anyone against their will.

I work in tech as a strategic storyteller and know very well what people are doing with AI deep fakes and the images of women these days. This loser now recording me was the ultimate violation of my rights as a human being and as a woman trying to defend herself in the street.

I looked at him and said, “Are you recording me? Instead of getting your friend under control you are filming me?!”

He continued to laugh and record. I told him to STOP recording me several times. He did not. My warning had come and gone, and before I knew it, adrenaline and my forever-instinct to protect myself fed my next action:

With my left hand I grabbed the man in black’s hand with the phone in it and squeezed his wrist, and with my right hand, I slapped him. Hard.

The music in the street didn’t stop but I swear everything went silent and we locked eyes. If he was going to hit me back or lunge, as these types tend to do, this was the moment. I yelled at him to delete the video and get the fuck out of Lisbon or it was the cops that would appear next.

The idiot in black with the phone stared at me for a second longer and again I told them all to GET THE FUCK OUT NOW. Then I turned around to head back into the bar, but looked back to make sure these animals were not there.

I stood at the door to the bar watching them walk away. I heard some people clapping but could not hear much else over my heartbeat in my ears.

The drunk loser from the beach who had brought me to the bar stood inside, and I said to him, “What good are you if women can’t even count on men to protect us from other men?” He was too drunk and embarrassed to say anything back. I thought about his 42-year old girlfriend back in Boston who would never know, but should.

I was about to order another beer for myself when three young women walked in. “Who are you?” they said. “Are you okay?” They told me they had never seen anything like that, a woman standing up to a group of men like that, alone. They had seen the whole thing and were the only ones who asked me if I was alright.

“You are a queen,” they said to me, but that did not make me feel better. The adrenaline was starting to come down, and I felt entirely as though I had won and said the right things outside. I told them I wished we didn’t live in a world where men think they can just walk into a bar and cause havoc then record women to try and humiliate them when we stand up for our humanity. Society had let them think that they could violate our city and the people in it that way. I wondered if the mothers of those drunk men knew what losers they had birthed, and did they even have fathers to show them the right path.

“How old are you?” I asked the young women, as one insisted on buying me a beer, and did. “Twenty-two,” they said, and one was 23. We toasted, “To women!” and had a laugh for a few minutes before we hugged each other goodbye in solidarity and they left, hopefully more brave and encouraged into the night. I was twice their age, but had been them once, afraid of the way men behave in the world. “Use your voice,” was the last thing I said to them as they walked out. “When it comes to men like that, become the bear. If they won't change their behaviour, then it's time we change our response."

I was waiting at the airport and felt like I was a bit drunk. But I hadn’t had a thing to drink. Not yet. My mind was swimming though and the airport became that true liminal space between my old life and my new one that I had no plan and a prayer for. And one suitcase. Plus 700 bucks.

That was three years ago today. A lot of us who moved to Lisbon celebrate the day we arrived. An anniversary of sorts. Some of us do it quietly and alone. Some do it with drinks and new friends. Some of us throw parties. Some of us let the day pass with nothing but an afterthought once a few days have gone by since the date. In any case, all of us remember the day that Lisbon - Portugal - became home.

Even for those who go on to immediately move to other cities or rural parts of the country, there is usually a stop in a major city, like Porto, Faro or Lisbon, before they turn the keys to their temporary home that comes before their first apartment where they stay for a while.

For me, that first apartment was a room I rented from a French woman in Graça - a neighbourhood up on one of the many hills of Lisbon. From there I got a view that changed me from the inside. No matter how many times I had been there over my 20 years of coming to Lisbon, living that close to the light turned the dust inside me to diamonds. I used to run the stairs to her summit, letting my body outrun what was happening in my head. I came alive in Graça - Grace.

I have written about the experience of being at the Toronto airport before. I met a stranger at the bar there, waiting for our respective flights to other places, and we talked until he almost missed his boarding call. No flirting. Numbers exchanged but we both knew we would never call. Just a temporary human connection for two lonely people at an airport between the worlds we were leaving and where we belonged.

I ordered one glass of sparkling wine. He graciously paid for it. No expectations other than appreciating the story I had just shared about moving to Lisbon with only faith in my heart.

He told me his story, too, and then shortly after, when we boarded our separate flights, I opened my laptop to write for the first time in six months. Before that I had been lying in my sister’s guest bedroom. I was unwell. The months before that something went off inside of me and Toronto had finally broken me apart.

I do not hate Toronto. I hate who I never got to become there - the full expression of who I am. I felt held down by an invisible system that never let me grow. My immediate family is still there, and I have missed the growth of my nephew and the birth of my niece. But I chose this life anyway, so they both know that, one day, they have options that exist outside of Canada, too. My family has roots in Portugal, for centuries, lifted for the first time by my parents in the 1970s to begin a new life in Canada. Those roots are now replanted here by me - my legacy? Maybe. I don’t know.

I drank that one glass of sparkling at that airport bar and felt okay. It was a test. If I got drunk from one glass, I knew I was not better. But there was no turning back now. Even if I fell apart, I figured at least I would be in Lisbon, where the sun wakes up and goes to sleep. You only have to have experienced the light here to know what I am talking about. It is not just beautiful and warm, it is medicinal and ancient.

I left on the 6th, on a red-eye that landed on September 7, 2023, in Lisbon. I told myself I would fight to make this work, in a way I never fought before, in the many times I tried to move here. I failed every time. It nearly broke me. Not the city, but to leave it without having made it my home. My ticket was a one-way this time. There was no return flight home because I was Home now.

It took time to build a life, and I am adding to it every day. I am currently evaluating what I know life can feel like, look like and become, prepared to subtract and add experiences and people if I must.

In the last three years, I have felt my brain switch to Portuguese more fully. It really does feel like a “click” when people speak quickly and I now understand. I get jokes, stories, banter, gossip and can read fluently in a language that always felt like it was mine but also not at the same time.

In the three years since I moved here for good, I have met hundreds of people. Thousands? Probably yes. I do not remember every face or name, but I remember their stories.

I have liked people a lot. I have opened my home to those who needed some refuge from their own. I have been to the ER, I have cried, I have laughed so much, I have felt broken by the sight of people living in the street, and compassion when I helped them out. I have witnessed others nearly being robbed in broad daylight, and some buying drugs in the alleys at night.

I have seen friends in passing as I ran errands, because I could. I have dated, been disappointed, disillusioned and mistakenly in love. I have survived it all, and learned.

I have been to pro-peace marches and protests for workers’ rights. I have told stories on stages and published articles in magazines.

I have had visits from my mom and friends from Toronto. I have helped friends mend their broken hearts. I have argued with men who tried to fumble me, but who always came around again, and I have reached the end of the road with some friendships, too.

I have collected stories upon stories from people who needed to confess to a stranger who cares, and I have gone to church to pray and cry and be grateful.

I have spent nights raving until the sun comes up and then walked home still in amazement that I chose this life all by myself.

I have started an accidental life on purpose and for the first time feel like every day begins a new story. I started writing my first book here, too, and found a voice I knew was always inside.

I have had days of such alone-ness, even in a crowd of friends, and I have also felt deep connection to people I just met, reaching an aliveness I could only dream up before.

I have walked these ancient and stunning streets thousands of times, learning their curves and hills like the palm of my hand, losing and finding myself each time, in ways that have nothing to do with logistics.

I have some spent countless days and sunsets at the beach.

Some people think I am not Portuguese enough. Others say I am very Portuguese indeed. Some call me an expat, a tourist, a privileged bitch, but I am an none of those things, although they are welcome to think so. I am an immigrant in the country of my roots, a foreigner who plans to stay, build, grow and give back to the country that gave me the life I always felt was an option to live. I came with a suitcase, 700 bucks and a prayer, plus pockets full of determination, passion and grit.

Lisbon is not just a city to me. For some it is a backdrop to remain the same as they always were. For others, like me, it is a place to become new, to find footing and a forever home. But Lisbon is a chapter in all of our stories, a collective rhythm always changing and being redesigned in real time, while also strengthening her roots further into those of us who are here to feel her thrive.

I have never loved a man as much as I love Lisbon. I have never felt closer to a friend. I have never felt so much like who I am when I am here. That is not a platitude or wild idea, only the recognition of a version of myself inside a city where people have been coming for centuries to discover, and be found.

They had loved my script, they said, but they had made a short film similar to its premise the year before, so they passed on mine, but wanted to tell me that they liked it. That it was good.

That was enough for me. Someone had noticed my effort and my talent for telling a story with no words. Just one long scene of action between two strangers in a back alley. I had imagined the whole thing. My life back then was not so interesting. So I made one up.

My only objective with the submission of the script was to follow through and practice not giving up on myself.

Although winning the award and having that one scene made into a micro film would have been an achievement - to see characters come to life on a screen - I was happy that I had followed through on a promise to myself. Being acknowledged was just a bonus I did not expect, but gave me enough fuel to keep trying all these years.

One win builds on the next. Success is a compounding of effort versus some losses and enough wins to move the needle in the direction you want to take your creative work. This is what I have learned.

What I also took from that experience was something my screenwriting professor had taught me. I never forgot it. And now I want to pass it on to you.

I was working full time as an editor at a magazine at the time. The job looked better on paper than it performed in real life. My colleagues were superb, but our bosses were not. Some of us still know one another from that time in the mid-2000s when we worked there and agree that the senior editors and managers were nightmares.

To offset the depression I felt from having a job I loved but management who made me feel small, I enrolled in creative writing courses. Screenwriting was one of them.

If you have ever wondered about the magazine side of publishing, it is a business, not always the fashionable and enviable creative outlet that the movies would have you believe. You write articles to sell the ads. Not the other way around. It drains you. Sometimes people are assholes.

Anyway.

My professor - her name escapes me now, but her lessons do not - said that she was always shocked by the number of lawyers who became screenwriters. They appeared in her classes, burnt out from the business of law and manipulation and felt they had enough stories in them to write plays, movies and even books. Lawyers were the highest percentage of converts to screenwriting. Not writers. But lawyers.

At the end of that course, which lasted just one semester at a top Toronto university, she said that she would make herself available, by email, for exactly one year, to each one of us in the class who had any questions for her. A free mentorship.

I perked up.

When one of the other students - a former lawyer turned wannabe creative - asked her why she would offer such an opportunity, unpaid, she very quickly replied that, in all her years as a professor of the craft, she could count on one hand how many people actually took her up on the offer.

Her offer to mentor graduating students from her course was given freely because, in her experience, it was very rarely something people followed up on, even though each one of her students always said they would.

They did not.

But I did.

Loyalty, following through and following up are all things I do naturally. I am notorious for showing up, pulling up and doing what I say I am going to do. Of course there are some things that have fallen through the cracks over the more than four decades of my life. But, for the most part, I win because I show up to receive.

Within a couple of months, I had emailed her the script I had written. I only wanted someone with her understanding to read it and maybe tell me how to improve it. I was married at the time, sad about my job and unhappy in my relationship to almost everything and everyone. To have an email exchange with a smart woman about my work was an obvious follow-up opportunity that I was going to follow through with.

She replied shortly after I sent my three-minute script to her. Her first sentence made me feel good already, aside from the feedback she gave me about my writing: I had been the only one who had emailed her like I said I would. “In fact”, I remember her reply as if it was yesterday, “You are one of the few…ever”.

She then told me about a screenwriting competition that was about to run, whereby producers and directors scanned three-minute scripts to turn into films as part of a collective project that ran annually.

She said my story was good enough to enter and that I should. Another task to follow through with. And I did.

The reply from the collective said my script had been great, and that I would have won had it not been so similar to something they had made the year before.

I had no idea how similar my idea was to the previous winner, nor did I care. The idea was original to me. We are all having a collective human experience at the same time on Earth, so of course our stories will overlap. But of course you still write it.

But they liked my perspective, my characters and their actions. They were just looking for a different storyline that year.

Fair enough, I thought, but I had gotten what I came for, which was feedback, encouragement and more practice at following through and taking a bet on myself.

To stand out, sometimes all you have to do is stand up. Try. Most people make more promises to themselves than they ever keep, and that creates misery and an ongoing to-do list that never ends. Weight on your shoulders, not lived experience in your creative bank. Even if you do not win the prize, like having your idea turned into a movie, showing up for yourself compounds into transforming yourself into someone who, when the time is right, is ready to receive the payoff.

I’ve been thinking lately about sex and how there is nothing casual about it.

Please know that I am a straight woman in my mid-40s who has only ever dated men. I was even married to one once. This is my lens, my context. Limited, maybe, but also thought-through. I think what I share here could apply across the board though, as humans who fuck and fall in love over lust sometimes.

We can have casual sex encounters, of course, but I think that’s a decision we make, a lens we look through, a label we apply, to avoid the depth to which sex can take us; through the chemicals that start in our brains and push into our veins, oxytocin and dopamine floating through our bodies, designed to bring us close.

If we are calling sex casual, it’s because we actually know that it is anything but.

You can have a one-night stand with someone, and as long as you’re both engaged equally consenting to a tryst, it can be an intimate moment shared between two people and nothing more or less. That is then casual by definition of what happened, but not casual in the action, the sex itself.

It’s not the act of sex that makes it casual. It’s the decision to not let it go beyond much more that makes it so. Again, if sex is really casual, then why do we have to put brakes to something that we can so easily glaze over?

If nurtured, sex can be the start to a meaningful relationship and go full speed ahead to change you. I don’t think that having sex with someone makes you closer to them necessarily, but I also do not see sex as something that should drive people apart, but it can.

Recently, I stopped dating. Happily, too. It came very naturally and happened over time. Not in protest to anyone or anything and not to prove a point. It simply works for me and frees up space in all the important ways for me: emotionally, mentally, physically and even spiritually.

Full transparency: what only added to my natural, slow-growing decision that being single was best for me was observing various women in my life, dating or in long-term relationships, suffer in big and small ways due to their involvement with partners.

I do not have to be love-burned or bitter or hate men (I do not) to decide that watching someone regularly put their hand on a hot stove is not for me.

In plainer English: the juice just was not worth the squeeze.

I’ve become attached to being single. That is possible and was a process. I do not wish to be linked with anyone right now and so dating, especially casually, makes no sense.

I like my peace. I like my pH balance. I like not having to think about anyone when I wake up in the morning. In fact, my friends have often heard me say, “It’s a pleasure to wake up with no one on my mind.” This means my day is my own. I can start writing immediately without having to worry about waking someone else up lying next to me. I come and go as I please, plan trips as I see fit, and never have to check in with someone. I am free. I am not saying this is better than being attached, I am saying that it is nice to be in this position, despite society looking at a woman who is single as “un-chosen” - I am telling you that many of us just choose ourselves first.

Because I respect and understand how important and how responsibility-driven relationships can be, what compromise they require, patience and understanding, I slowly decided to just excuse myself from all of these things and put the time and energy I used to spend on someone else into myself. So I just withdrew from dating, naturally.

If I’m not seeking a relationship because I like being single so much and am enjoying my autonomy, then why go on dates, which are sometimes an audition for some temporary or long-term company? There are other ways to be social that require less prep and performance. And I am into that.

I used to go on casual dates. A lot. I would have casual sex, meaning that I already decided I wasn’t going to get attached to somebody before I even tried. I started wondering how many great men have I let go of this way before I even got to know them. A few for sure. The casual label made the choice for me before I’d even made it myself.

There is nothing casual about sex, I will say it again, only our reaction and relationship to it. If sex is casual then why can it make us jealous or hurt or both?

If intimacy through sex wasn’t something to avoid, then why do we try to do that so often?

Someone inside your body, or you in theirs, is not casual. Your feelings about it might be, but that is framing, not fact. If it was designed to just be casual, a pump and dump, then why is it designed to do so many other things, like bond us and make babies? And even though having sex with someone doesn’t mean you will be bonded to them, the potential is built in for it to happen.

So, catch fucks, not feelings? Come on now. By design, there is nothing casual here, only the way we choose to view it.

I maintain.

Bouncing from one lover to the next, of course, can be about self-exploration, exploring sexuality and desires with new people that can offer new perspectives, new kinks, new tricks, new conversations and so on. All of that is true. I have been there. But for many people, especially some of the men that I’ve dated, they claim to like variety and not get attached to anybody. Their solution is to bounce from one to the next to the next, getting over someone by getting under someone else, and so on.

Exhausting. And no fun.

If the risk of falling in love is off the table, then why even get between the sheets? I am not saying you will fall in love, I am saying that knowing if you can is also part of the discovery. You want to believe there is something two people can do together that might actually bring them closer, and treating sex like spreading butter on toast eventually took the value out of it for me.

I used to love getting ready for dates, dressing up, putting on nice perfume and makeup, only to often wind up in front of somebody that I immediately knew, maybe within the first hour of talking to them, that I wasn’t really going to be into them any further than this one night. I would think, “Ok, might as well go to bed with them and just get it over with. At least we can have some unattached fun.”

Boring.

You know what is fun though? Meeting someone you like so much that you want that physical intimacy with them and cannot get enough. Love that. Love that for my friends, too. I am a champion of love and wish it upon everyone I care about, even if I do not want it for myself right now. That is possible - not every single person wishes they were coupled, and even couples sometimes wish they were single again, too. Go figure.

I will say this though: I do not want to talk about your boyfriend. I want to talk about your dreams, your businesses, your ideas, your gossip. But not your boyfriend. Unless you are coming to me with an issue you need support with, why would I want to spend my time talking about your boyfriend when I do not want a man in my own life right now? A lot of single people feel this way, and it has nothing to do with envy - it has to do with choosing peace.

Earlier this year, I tried an experiment: staying friends with an ex-lover, sex off the table. In the end, it didn’t work out because he sleeps around so much and hurts so many women, like he hurt me when we used to go out, that I slowly started to lose respect for his behaviour. You can call it judging him, but if I do not want to be around a man-crazy woman, then the feminist in me does not want to be around a woman-crazy man. Equality.

I think my ex felt a little lost about what his place would be in my life without sex. I told him, “Look, I am not interested in your penis anymore, just your personality. I want to get to know you without the performance.” My exact words. It had nothing to do with attraction or his looks or even the way he had sex - he was great at it. But we do not see sex the same way, and I am now less inclined to support men who do not take responsibility for the emotional mess they leave behind. In the end, I wasn’t interested in giving my energy to a womanizer (he called himself that, not me), nor will I give my energy to a woman who does the same. I would rather invest my intelligence and attention in other things that propel my friends forward, not help them stay in harmful loops.

Wouldn’t it be nice to date someone without the pressure of sex, and then have the sex be the punctuation it deserves to be when the relationship starts to get to something good? I am not talking religious sanctimony here. I am talking about doing this on purpose, without the guilt of God at your back.

We’re designed to attach for different, beautiful biological reasons. This is a collective human experience and potential. In my experience and observations, what sometimes prevents us from going forward with love is that we’re afraid of pain. Calling something casual, like sex, does not take the pain away; however, it only denies that you liked someone enough to let pain exist. I think that’s beautiful, not that love should hurt, but that the loss of it does. No risk, no reward though, and no label is going to stop that from happening.

When I moved to Portugal three years ago, I would go on dates to improve my Portuguese and to learn about myself in my new life through the eyes of new people. No one pays more attention to you than someone who is trying to get your attention. So, at the time, it worked. But I noticed that people wanted things to be casual for the most part, and it wasn’t just happening to me. A lot of people experienced the same terms. Sex makes no sense here then, unless both people are equally using each other, and my personal data showed that this was not always the case. One person usually got hurt.

I think removing the pressure of performance is a really beautiful way to see the human being underneath the gender, underneath the stereotypes and underneath the patriarchy that makes many of us shut down and be the “tough guy” or “cool girl” - both of these tropes suck.

I actually support my women friends going through an era of sleeping with different people and trying new things. I have been there myself, and it is part of personal growth, provided they set the terms, too - I tell my friends that sex is not casual just because one person claims it. Both people have to mean it, and both rarely do. You might end up feeling casual about someone you sleep with, indifferent even, but to suggest that fucking is like spreading butter on toast, no big deal, is a lie we tell ourselves to survive. In that case, why even bother?

“Do you want to go to the cemetery with me tomorrow morning?” One of the artists in the residency here asked me.

“Absolutely”, I said.

We met at 8am the next day at the café in the village.

My obsession with death is not macabre. It is pure reverence for life, for living, a process and a choice.

Our fear of death comes from many things. The fear has many soft and sharp edges, but it is something real for all of us. At baseline, for most of us, the fear is that we have never not been alive in our minds, so the idea of being dead feels bigger than the living sometimes.

I want to change minds about Death.

Fundamentally, the presence of death does not freak us out as much as the idea that it is the absence of life in its place.

Death connects us as much as it will divide us in the end; it is the one thing we all have in common, even with the animals and bugs; death comes for everyone and everything, even for the billionaires who try and live forever by stealing human intellect and programming it into their machines. But machines do not have feelings or live lives like we do.

I arrived at the café to meet her for our cemetery walk. No expectations.

She brought her roommate, M, a young woman from Japan who is quiet but observant and makes art, too. After some coffee and a few cigarettes together, the three of us walked to the cemetery to visit the permanent residents there. The Forevers, I call them.

We walked in and were met with neat rows of marble sarcophagi and mausoleums, very different from the low graves and tombs we are used to in our respective home countries. Beautiful tributes were written on some of the stones, and we read them all, each one.

We looked at the dates and names for acknowledgement and out of curiosity, not nosiness; we said their names out loud, as if summoning them to life for a few moments again, something cosmic and scientific merging somehow. A prayer.

Some of the Forevers had died old. Some had died young. And now here they were, physical remains, together for always, as proof of lives that existed alongside each other, but separately, in the village they are all from. An invisible intimacy held together by eternity.

The youngest inscription we found was for a baby girl who passed away before she turned one, the same year as my birth. I looked at it with soft eyes but a hard stare and made the sign of the cross for us both. We live in dualities, and in that second, two of us were existing in different ways at once.

Being alive is a stroke of luck. Look up the probability of you being born at all. One in 400 trillion are the odds. And although that baby girl did not live beyond a year, the fact that she was born makes her entire life a miracle, an unlikely chance at all.

Walking through a cemetery is a close study of this perspective and I was happy to do it with these two artists and ardent observers of life, like me. We walked around for 45 minutes and then decided to move on as the heat started to seep into the day.

The heat in Alentejo is often joked about as “um inferno” - a hot hell - and here we were walking around the Forevers who were in Heaven.

M and I stayed behind while our other artist friend went to a nearby town for a solo day trip to discover things and watch people living their lives.

We smoked a few more cigs, M and I, and drank a little more coffee as the sun got more fiery and the locals poured in and out of the café as quickly and routinely as the coffee was poured at the counter. Some folks stayed to talk to one another before going to work, and others lingered to bake in the shade from the heat.

Many here will be buried next to one another in the cemetery.

Many of them will attend each other’s funerals.

Many of them think about this and many of them do not.

It just is what it is, as they say around here.

The Portuguese look at death the same way they look at life:

é o que é, it is what it is;

é assim, it’s like that;

é a vida, that’s life.

So make it well lived.

An outside ear might call this outlook detached or cold, even avoidant, but I was raised with these ideas too, and know it is a way to not let death get you down while you are living.

More sips of coffee and hauls on cigarettes later, I asked M to tell me about her art, her life in Japan and the many residencies she has been to around the world making and exhibiting her work. She has a thesis and study that she uses in each one.

M lit up to tell me about herself and her story. She has a calm way about her. She is 31.

She asked if I could speak English slower as I asked my questions. I realized that maybe she had missed some of what I said before at the cemetery, when I was explaining what I knew about the Portuguese relationship to death.

I asked how much English she can pick up without thinking too much. To me, comprehension is best measured in percentages, not in totality. I myself understand 98 percent of Portuguese, and what I miss, I know enough to translate in my head.

M says she gets about 80 percent of English without thinking about it, but still learning. I tell her I will also use my hands to speak from now on, as I love to do, to help punctuate certain things. She tells me this would help.

Communication is a full body language and I never underestimate the power of using as many available ways to get the message across.

M makes beautiful art. I am looking at photos of her past exhibitions: feminine, elegant, consistent, storied, and raw. Her art is a question for the viewer using a mix of new and used materials; she creates installations around the world that ask people to think about what makes them feel whole, at home, stable, sturdy and seen.

I take another sip of coffee as I read through the description of her work from a phone. I hate what technology has done to us, but simultaneously appreciate the convenience of being able to read the description of her work and look at it in the palm of my hand. Dualities.

My eyes hit on two words in her bio that make me look up from the screen. I pull the coffee cup away from my lips and set it down so I can put my hand to my chest and take it all in to my heart.

“Secure base.”

This is the question her art asks of people.

It asks what is their secure base and what do they build a life from; what does security look like, who or what is in it. Sensible yet profound questions from a young artist traveling the world and never fully speaking her native language in a single day anymore.

I make a mental note to save for later, and will only tell her why my hand landed on my heart like that if she asks.

We are done drinking coffee and decide to part ways. We hug and thank each other for the conversation, hand talking and all.

On our walk back, we finally stop at the crossroads that lead us to the different directions of our temporary houses here in the village. And then she asks me:

“What is your secure base, Sandy?”

I knew right away what to tell her from the mental note I had made in my head.

“I am my own secure base”, I say, and stop. What did I just say? But I meant it, and needed to say it out loud like that. For both of us.

Each ego death, each heartbreak, each temporary self-abandonment - to be loved, or to let myself be hated - became another brick from which to build the home I stand in now inside myself, I tell her. For many years, these bricks were my walls that kept me stuck in my own head, in my own patterns and in my own way. I am not trying to be esoteric when I tell M that it took living through the small deaths of my life to turn those bricks that once held me down into the foundation that now lifts me up into my idea of Heaven: being my own secure base that I always come back to.

We have nothing left to say. The sum of our morning came down to a cemetery and looking at art that asks questions, because artists are looking for answers, as they do.

We hug again, this time a bit longer than before at the café, and then go our separate ways.

Once the rancidity of olives hits my nose hairs as I am driving over wide hills, I know I am in Alentejo. Rural Portugal.

In the car, I blast music, sing, and sometimes let my arms be gripped in the wind and get what I call “car hair”, that particular way a whipping breeze will leave you looking both dishevelled and free.

Sometimes I pull over and soft cry in gratitude for all of this. Because I am free. Truly sovereign in every way that counts, and I was not always this way.

I spent years trapped in my body, in my own mind, a prisoner of looping thoughts and the guilt that came from knowing I was not living up to the capacity I was built for. That truth will kill you, slowly, and I am not alone in knowing this.

The rancidity I smell as I drive is now familiar and welcome. It’s not from rotting olive trees, but from the refineries all around the region, turning tiny bitter olives into streams of golden oil to feed the country and to export it around the world to those who can afford the price of olive oil these days.

Olive oil, in this economy? But here it flows, and here it grows.

Alentejo is the cork, wine and dry hot summer region of Portugal. It is also where my dad grew up. There is a particular accent here that turns up words at the end to almost sound like a question, even when they are firm and definitive statements.

I am staying in a small village of less than 1,000 people at an artists’ residency for a month. I have been here a week. Three more to go, and I will even have a birthday while here.

I came to write, uninterrupted, and guilt-free that I am not attending to my usual busy days in Lisbon: being wrapped up in dialogue I have not cared for lately and having interactions that leave me feeling lonely even when I am not alone. It was eating me up a bit, I have to say, and so to save my relationship with Lisbon, I left her for now.

To write and talk to strangers with full force, that is why I am here. And the village is my endless supply of inspiration; like streams of olive oil running from roots to refineries, the stories from people willing to tell me anything are flowing, too. Feeding me.

They say you can’t see the island when you are on the island, and lately, Lisbon has become an island of tourists for the summer. They are demanding and often lack curiosity. Although their money is necessary for our economy, many of them are from the UK and the United States, where people are conditioned to believe that money earns them power. But it does not. I wish the Lisbon people would tell them that, instead of bending to their every whim, and then complaining about it to each other in the cafés, where I am both a foreigner myself and a sister who knows their language like my own.

I love Lisbon with all my heart. In an interview recently, I said exactly that: “Lisbon saved my life”, and I mean it. The version of me I get to be in Lisbon is one that did not fit in Toronto, and I nearly died trying to squeeze myself into a box there that I never fully built on my own terms. I was born in Canada, but still do not know what it means to be Canadian.

Things had fallen apart before I moved to Lisbon from Toronto a few years ago. Real bad. I was kind of fucked up. I figured I had a 50/50 shot of everything going up in flames or working out, and if everything burned to the ground, at least I would burn in Lisbon.

Back then, with almost no notice given to my family, I packed one suitcase and a few hundred bucks, and I left. A one-way ticket with no plan and a prayer, to the city where I had only ever really felt like I was living well - not because I had a lot of money, but because when I came to Portugal, I was rich in experience, growth and culture.

August has always proven to make me a little manic. Maybe a consequence of being born in this month, I don’t know. I think that stuff is interesting, but do not believe in it. I simply think this kind of heat, in general, can make most of us go a little insane. Ocean, fresh air and open road are my remedies now. And writing. Not the tiny little pills they used to feed me back in Toronto. Those things really did almost kill me once.

This year, I decided to spend August away in Alentejo and asked my friend to borrow her car for a road trip alone. Shortly after, I learned I had been accepted into this artists’ residency to write.

And here I am.

In this village, I have access to the secret lives of strangers who have lived here all their lives. Almost all of them will die here, some of them in the same houses they were born, and the church bells will ring out to signal to the villagers when this happens, a final goodbye and procession, a tradition and Catholic custom. In fact, we heard those bells just the other day.

I watch the seniors from the retirement home each morning look out on the village square where they were just boys and girls once running around. Sad and beautiful, real and raw, they were all just babies before, and someday we will all be old like them. This is never lost on me.

Travelling alone, especially as a woman, is something people tell me I am brave for. But I do not think so. I do not have my gender on my mind all day, not even when I wake up. I am just me. And the only time my gender is an issue is when someone makes it so - staring at me, sexualizing me, being a predator or treating me like the weaker sex. Other than that, I am just having a human experience, like you, and I do not let anything stand in the way of that, especially when it comes to taking my road trips alone.

To be alone with your own behaviour, like I am 80 percent of the time, is something I have grown to love. It took pain and time though. There were periods of crying, sadness, actual loneliness, especially as an immigrant. It did not matter that I could speak the language here; I was not born here, and so for a long time I felt stuck between two worlds, until one day someone pointed out that I should start seeing myself as a bridge between the two, knowing one world enough to make a good life in the other.

Being with myself all the time has made me a more resourceful person. I am forced to rely on myself for answers and advice, and to resolve problems more quickly because of this instead of dragging out my stresses by complaining to someone else. I can run an obsessive thought into the ground, and I find I work best when there is no one there to dig that hole with me. Alone, I have become one of the best problem solvers I know, and I even turned that into a job in tech, as a strategic storyteller for geniuses.

We all have a story to tell. All of us. Every last one. Some people do not think their story is interesting enough to share. Others think they are so interesting that I, the writer they are telling their life story to, should write a book about it. I have heard that more times than you think, and interestingly, it usually comes from the least interesting people. But you are what you tell yourself you are, and some people tell themselves whatever they must to get by, even if it’s a lie.

Some strangers tell me things and say, “I have never told anyone that before,” and it is always an honour to be trusted that way. In my silence, in my pure listening and giving them a stage to speak, I hear them as clearly as I see myself.

I am a good and loyal listener, someone with strong and well-formed opinions, yes, but I do my best not to judge when the opinions of others differ from my own. If you say something ridiculous - like way off centre - I will bring it up. But that does not mean you are wrong, even if I try to change your mind. I am good at asking questions too, out of genuine curiosity, not nosiness, which is something I have developed a radar for. I know when someone is asking me something to sincerely learn about me or to try and figure me out. The latter turns me off.

I have collected notes for years, living data, about the human experience, and although I have been doing this type of work for more than two decades now, I know that I am only just getting started. These solo road trips always lead me to knowing more about myself, through the lens of strangers and their stories.

The people of this small village, who only speak Portuguese and have lived here their whole lives, are used to having a small group of rotating artists, like me, live among them. We integrate and assimilate, not like the Lisbon tourists who demand to be exactly who they are back in their home countries. Here, in the village, we are all villagers who observe. We do not make demands of one another; we make discoveries and make due.

I could not do this work with a companion. These road trips are just for me. It’s no secret that I love a muse from time to time, inspiring me as I write, but for now, I am my own muse, recording the stories of the longest members of this village.

They tell me who they were, who they are, and who they will never be, because like Lisbon is to me, this village is their island, too, and some will never get off it long enough to see it for what it is - a character in their own story. And now in mine.

For five days, in a town in the Algarve, I woke up before the sun so I could cry alone on the porch of a yurt I had rented for a few days. I wanted to grieve about the baby that never was and the mother I would never be.

I listened to the same sad songs over and over, on a playlist I labelled “Grief”, specifically to feel everything all the way. Any song that reminded me how to be sad, I added.

Years ago I was pregnant. I had a boyfriend who was irresponsible. One hundred percent of pregnancies are caused by men. That is biology. That is fact. That is not an opinion or feminist ideology.

I miscarried. Science tells us that one in four pregnancies end this way and that there are a variety of factors. I think mine was caused by stress. Being with the wrong person for you will do that, cause stress. Science tells us that nature knows what she is doing, but society tells us that a woman failed.

This story is not about loss. It is about how I let myself grieve something that we are not taught in school. Grief, unfortunately, has to happen so that you can understand it up close.

I am not an expert on grieving, although I do write about it. Sometimes the fact that grief is part of life terrifies me. That it is inevitable. No one escapes it, not even the luckiest of us.

What grief does to the brain can be horrific. Other-worldly. We are not taught how to handle this part of our humanity alongside learning about the more popular feelings like happy, sad, mad, and bored. But grief is not a feeling. It is a world of its own, and it can take your mind to the moon, put you somewhere in outer space, unreachable by reality and unresponsive to logic.

Most people fear grief and being around it. I learned back then, after my loss and losing my mind because of it, that I sort of fear people who fear grief as much as I fear grief itself. People who do not like to feel usually do not feel comfortable with how deeply I do. These connections tend to fail the most in my life.

But like most things I am afraid of, I face them head on. I believe in exposure therapy. I have been called brave for this, but I do not think I am. I am just not afraid of my own humanity.

I call facing things head on strategic. You cannot defeat a monster if you do not look it in the eye before you slay it. And although I have no plans to conquer grief, because I am only human, like you, I think avoiding it is more damaging than grief itself. I am learning more about it everyday.

My mother has stage four cancer. She is in palliative care back in Toronto, thousands of kilometres away from me, and I am an immigrant now in the country where she was born. Getting to her is not so easy. I have friends here in Lisbon, of course, but I know from experience that grief is not something most of them can tolerate to the depth in which I need. And I would not expect them to meet me in that place if they cannot.

I once had a friend tell me quite honestly that, when my mother dies, she could not be my phone call for support, that she would not be able to handle the grief or my possible wailing because it would make her think about the mortality of her own parents. This was honest of course, and I valued that she knew her limits and shared them with me, but it was still not easy to hear. Not because she would not be there for me, but because she revealed that she does not want to become someone who can be.

The search for my people who can witness grief continues.

Like most hard things we face, we have to trust that we have our own backs, and I have decided that I am going to prepare myself as best I can, to maximum ability. I have shown up for myself time and time again through the darkest years.

The first time I faced motherhood grief was in the Algarve, in the south of Portugal, in a small town in the woods, behind a mountain, on a porch of a yurt I had rented so I could cry alone.

Putting sun in your eyes first thing in the morning is an ancient method to heal yourself from the inside. Science meets nature, meets God. Crying is a release. Listening to music as you do both of these things will transport you to a place in your mind that you need to be to heal, if you are willing to go there and meet yourself.

I have learned over the years that doing things alone means that I will be okay. I am there. I will not abandon me. Developing a strong and sincere relationship with myself, after feeling lost for a long time, has been my strategy for making a content life.

I found the property with the yurt one afternoon searching online. I was specifically seeking a place with water nearby, like a pool or the ocean, and my idea was to immerse and almost baptize myself into a new and stronger existence. There was also a lot of grass to walk barefoot, and chickens roaming the property, that I called “the gals.”

It turned out that lots of people went to heal for different reasons at this place, but I did not know it at the time. I just took a shot and booked it.

Guests swim naked in the saltwater pool and sunbathe like that too. They take turns cooking in the communal kitchen while having open conversations about what brought them there. I am not really a commune type of person, I prefer solitude, but the first step in meeting my grief was accepting that I might need to welcome some people into that experience if they were willing to witness it. And they were.

My plan was to talk to no one when I arrived. But the neighbouring yurts to me each housed women going through heartache of their own. In the five days I spent there crying, we talked, held a ceremony for ourselves, and carefully watched each other move through the pain that had brought us there. We did not keep in touch after that week, for no particular reason, other than it was simply an experience of care between strangers, three women, locked in time.

Sometimes we meet people to bear witness to our humanity with such intensity that we can share a lifetime in the span of a few days. That was new for me. I am not one to usually spill my secrets or my story like that. But there I was, being witnessed in my grief, something I had prayed for deep down.

I used to cry when I looked at babies. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t envy or sadness. It wasn’t anger, although it used to be, and it wasn’t quite sorrow. It was knowing that I was looking at scenes of mothers and their babies and that it would not be me. In simpler terms, a reality check and the brutal medicine of perspective.

Physically I can still have children. I am fertile. But I do not have a partner to have a baby with. Nor do I want one. My decision to let go came from understanding that I do not wish to be attached to anyone right now, nor could I wait for that to change.

Had my pregnancy gone to full term, had he survived (I believe he was a boy), I would not be here, living in Lisbon. To have one life you must give up another, and I understand the weight and responsibility of having children so much, and respect the work so entirely, that I knew I could not sit on the fence anymore. I was not looking for anyone, and I did not plan to just for the purpose of having a kid.

I ran through my options and made plans on paper to see what would stick: donor sperm, but that would make me a single mother and I do not have the resources to hire a village and I realized it was a different family dynamic that I wanted instead. Adopting, but the challenges that come with that, especially for a single parent on a freelance income, were not in my favour. I went into magical thinking and thought of befriending a gay couple and forming a bond where I am the mother and they are the dads, because we know it takes a village to raise a child. But there are legal implications to that, and it also meant having to find a relationship with two men, although platonic, friendships are no less effort to form and hold on to, especially when kids are around. It takes years to form that sort of trust, and I am already in my 40s.

Learning through a series of tests with my doctor that my fertility was a green light only made this choice more difficult. The possibility that I could not get pregnant was not a factor - this was all on my shoulders now. Having your biology decide for you, as happens to many people, is a different kind of grief many women and men face. Without that stopping me, it was hard to have to walk away from it for other reasons.

I could have children, and I still wanted to be a mother, but I was making a choice not to because I had to.

For years, living in the space of in-between is what was really making me ache. Indecision can be a hell far worse than deciding something and then going on your way. I believe that as long as you are alive, anything is possible. But now I had decided to let go of some those possibilities for good, and I needed to accept it.

I read books on grief to help my mind understand this all: A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, about the loss of his wife and what the experience did to his own mind and reality. And also Living the Life Unexpected by Jody Day, a popular one, about women grieving motherhood for a variety of reasons, what she calls “gateway women”, who had to unlearn the idea that women are only worthy when they are chosen by a partner and blessed into motherhood.

I cannot relate to the women who are childless by choice, bless them, the ones who didn’t feel the urge, and so it was not something they tangled with, but rather observed and honoured within themselves. I love these women for their deep knowing - they feel they do not want it just as much as others feel they do.

I did feel the urge though, sometimes still so deeply that it spills into my dreams from time to time, and my almost-son comes to visit me there. I have written about this too, which means that it is a scar I can write from now, not a wound. And that is progress. I honour that brief time in my life with reverence.

I am not a mother by circumstance, like many of us, especially now, as we choose ourselves in a new era of autonomy. That has a different narrative. I cried deeply and gutturally reading about the stories of other childless mothers, feeling their pain off the page, and no longer thinking I was crazy to grieve something I never had, nor would, but wanted. The thing we all have in common is that we had to see our present differently to see what our new futures could look like.

I never found a partner to make the motherhood choice with, despite once being married for nearly a decade. Not his fault. Not mine either. It just was not our story. No one I met was The One for me in that way, and I do not believe that romance and reproducing are mutually dependent, which is why I think blended families work so well for some.

It’s not that I was not chosen by a man, but that I chose no one in the end. I have met many wonderful men over the years, some who would have made good fathers. But I wanted a good partner who would support me to be a good mother, and he did not appear.

When I saw the difficulties and struggles of my friends, alongside the joy that comes with motherhood, I found myself mostly disappointed that many partnered women seemed to bear the brunt of it alone. The truth is that, from what they told me, the presence of children can push even the strongest relationship to its brink.

There is a line in Day’s book that made me feel better, and so I repeated it to myself through the tears I dispensed all over that yurt porch last summer: You must give up hope to leave denial.

And so I did.

I gave up, not on myself, not on my body, but on the idea of being attached to anyone at this time in my life. I do not hate men. Stop right there if it is even crossing your mind. But I am not shy in admitting that I have yet to meet one not infected by the patriarchy, as we all are to some degree, yes, even women, and so I made the choice not to stop wanting to be a mother, but to want my sovereignty more.

I have worked hard to build this life that allowed me the freedom I have now. I could not find someone to match my ambitions, my care or my fire. Without this pressure of seeking someone, I saw men differently too, and was able to have more relaxed relationships without the hope that he was The One to make a baby with. Although I do not date right now, nor have ambitions to, I realized when I faced my grief that I preferred being with myself rather than compromising for anyone.

I went to that yurt, swam and sunbathed naked in the company of safe and kind women, and cried deeper than I knew I could in order to cross over into a decision that would free me from the prison of indecisiveness. I had been drowning in it for too long.

Freedom can feel scary because most of us do not use the bulk of our free will. It can feel awkward at first to feel liberated from the decisions that you did not make and embrace the ones you did.

The desire to feel pregnancy again, to birth, to mother, to care outside of myself did not suddenly just disappear. It is all energy after all, and energy is infinite, it loops. It does not disappear. I only learned to transfer its power somewhere else.

I did a few sessions of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which the Cleveland Clinic describes as “a mental health therapy that helps your brain unstick, process, and heal from painful or traumatic memories. It reduces the strong emotional and physical pain tied to past events so you can feel safe and calm”. In short, it does not take the pain away or erase the memory you wish to forget; it only moves it to another place in your brain that is more tolerable. Like grief, the urge to be a mother is an energy that does not end, but can move around and look like care in other ways, including the care you give yourself.

My younger sister has two small children, one of them less than a year old. They are the lights of my life. They are the closest I will ever come to having my own children, by DNA, and by extension of the love I have for my sister, who also came from my mother, our first home. Despite our ups and downs as a family, my relationships to both of them are the longest of my life.

In those five days I set aside to grieve at that yurt, I did not just grieve the baby I almost had, I grieved the life that we are told we should want, should have, and are “not complete women” for not achieving. Patriarchy tells us that. And because I had been pregnant before, and loved it, I grieved that too. It almost hurt more to know how wonderful it had felt, and that I would never feel it again.

Everything that saves us is a perspective we choose. And so I chose to tell myself in my hardest moments that my baby didn’t meet me in this lifetime so that I could have the life I do now. A life without children also requires sacrifice, love, care, mindfulness, and grit. I did not meet my baby, but I met this version of myself instead, in ways that I now know would not have been possible had he made it all the way to my arms.

I am crying as I write this. Just a little bit. Not because I am sad, but because I am grateful, grieved, empowered, and loved. It is possible to carry the desire for children alongside deciding that you have to move on too. Through this experience, however, my writing is finally meeting the capacity it was built for. Creating can come in many forms.

I am in awe of mothers, and always will be. I love the mothers in my life and am an aunt biologically and not, to many. I will always be a warrior for mothers and their children.

There are no right answers in life. Only the choices that are right for you. I make the choices that I do now so that my niece and nephew, and the children of my friends, know they have options too. My sister and I have become an unlikely team this way, loving her kids, who made me an aunt, which is an experience I did not know would fulfill me so much.

I have no regrets on not choosing motherhood anymore. This is possible. I am proof. But I had to feel grief all the way to understand that.

I went back to that property with the yurt a couple of months ago, almost a year later. Each morning at sunrise on the porch, surrounded by the roaming chickens, I took in how far I had come and cried, but this time in gratitude for who I get to be.

I heard yelling inside my apartment coming from the one-way street below. It wasn’t even 8am yet and the daily noise had already begun.

Yelling in my neighbourhood is not uncommon. I live downtown. The summer is when drunk tourists especially take it upon themselves to treat Lisbon like Las Vegas. Our nervous systems are rattled a lot, but we manage. I go to the beach often to reset. We engage with the vibrancy of the neighbourhood, and Portuguese people have no problem telling loud people to settle down. I have become one of those Portuguese people.

The yelling this particular morning was between a man and a woman. Something domestic. Last week, in another domestic situation, the neighbours, including me, were standing underneath the balcony of a woman crying that her girlfriend had locked herself in the bathroom and wanted to end her life. It was heartbreaking to watch someone in so much emotional pain, waiting to see if the other woman locked inside would be okay.

We, the neighbours, waited for the emergency teams to arrive and help them both. They came, and we left. No questions asked. We got involved without being intrusive, and so that still lingered as I went to my balcony this morning to see what was going on when I heard a man’s voice boom over a woman’s. Already, I was on high alert. He was out of control.

They spoke English, but with accents from countries I do not need to name. It doesn’t matter. Just know that they spoke English and so I could understand every word I heard.

I heard him yelling at her, screaming “fuck this!” and “fuck that!” and something about her mother and how he “looks after the kids sometimes”, likening himself to a babysitter. This was not just a man yelling, but a father of two young kids. Two boys. One about a year old, in the arms of the mother, and the other a toddler, standing there, now looking up at me as I looked down to yell and ask what was going on, because he was waking up the whole neighbourhood. Some men are so emotional, I tell you.

Maybe people do not know that my one-way street serves as an echo chamber for every conversation. So that is the first thing I told him, and could he settle down.

He, the emotional man, looked up at me, a bit shocked that anyone would intervene. But this is how we do it here. We get involved without intruding, and yelling like his does not fly on this street. I will tell a loud man to settle down. But he kept yelling at her, the mother, who did not raise her voice, but tried to get in a word here and there. That is when I told him to stop yelling at a woman in the street like that.

“Cut it out!” I said to him. “This is the mother of your children, and the whole neighbourhood can hear you now.”

He yelled back at me and said that I did not know what was going on and did not know the whole story. I told him the story was not my business, but a woman holding a child was, and that I did not care what she did. “She’s a woman,” I yelled down at him, “so I believe her,” to which he replied: “Yeah…figures!”

My heartbeat sped up, because now I understood that I was dealing with a man who knows exactly what he is doing, and is pissed that women don’t hate each other the way some men seem to hate everyone.

I told him again: stop waking up the neighbourhood and stop yelling at your wife in front of your kids.

I think I was clear.

I looked at her and asked if she was okay. For some reason I gave her the thumbs up to signal that if she needed backup, I was there. Now was the time to ask for it.

She nodded, embarrassed and defeated, and then proceeded to follow the mistake of a man she married to the stairs near my apartment, where he continued to yell at her as the kids watched.

Now my stomach started to hurt. Churn. And I had two options: go back in my apartment and close the windows and doors to block out the noise coming from a situation that some people would stupidly tell me is none of my business. I could ignore and wait. Or, the other option, I could go out there and tell him more closely that screaming like this, disturbing the peace, was enough.

I chose the second option. I quickly got dressed and put on my shoes, grabbed my keys, made the sign of the cross to bless what I was about to do and said out loud: God, please help me keep calm. I say this out loud several times a day, but this was the first of the morning.

They were sitting just a few steps from my building door, on the stairs, when I approached.

He was still yelling, something about “ill” and again about her mother and how he helps look after the kids when she asks. I wish I was making this up, but I do not need to.

I approached him and let out a “hey!” that felt like a roar in my body more than it sounded like one.

My focus was on him and his yapping mouth so much that I didn’t notice right away that the mother was now feeding the smaller of the two boys, breastfeeding, while the toddler looked at me with his hands pressed against his mouth in worry.

I lowered my voice, looked back at the man and said these words that I cannot forget: I do not know what is going on here, nor is it my business, and I get that marriage is hard. I have been there. But you are screaming in front of your kids. They are taking this all in, and she is feeding your son.

A stressed mother makes stressed milk, and that makes for a stressed baby. It is that simple, and I told him that. If he did not know this before, my hope was that he learned it then.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, not because I was anxious or nervous, but because I was afraid I would get louder and make it worse. I hated him in that moment so much. I hated that his boys had a father who did this in public, because Lord knows what he did behind closed doors. I hated that she did not tell him to shut up, like he needed to be told.

He quieted down when I pointed out the obvious. I thought he might tell me to “fuck off,” like violent and weak men tend to do, missing the point that this behaviour was problematic altogether. But he just said, “you have a point, you have a point, you have a point,” and looked down, and I could see the humanity sort of return to his face, stressed and recognized.

I told him that this was patriarchy, we all suffer under it, and those kids were now taking the brunt of his behaviour, even more than the mother.

Again he said: you have a point, you are right. And then we all calmed down.

I did not want to be right. I wanted men not to be this way at all. I wanted her to stand up for herself, and I wanted to not want to punch him for being so ungrateful that a woman was feeding their son from her body. Perspective is a great medicine, and now I was feeding it to him.

I told him, look, I am not saying she is right and that you are wrong. That is between you both. I am saying your kids are here. I told him that I was a neighbour, and even though they did not know me, I would take the kids for a walk so the two of them could hash out their bullshit. In that moment, maybe both of them had forgotten the kids and put their relationship first. But I follow the principles of Matriarchy by default, and always will: the kids come first.

Matriarchy, contrary to the popular belief of nonsensical people, is not about domineering anyone. It is a response to a system that hurts everyone. It is also how pre-civilization and pre-industrialization once functioned, we know this now. Patriarchy is a system of men, made by men, that hurts us all, including men. A system that told him he could yell like that, as she fed their son, and not have anyone intervene between a “husband and a wife.” Even we, the Portuguese, have a phrase that goes: entre marido e mulher, não se mete a colher, which means, between a husband and a wife, you don’t put a spoon - do not get involved. A phrase used to excuse the domestic violence that plagues Portugal, sending many women to the hospital, into shelters and to their early graves every year.

Boys are not born violent. They are taught.

These boys could grow up to think this was okay. Common. And their right to yell, disturb, and not appreciate the nature of women and their bodies that give. The kids come first in Matriarchy, and peace, safety, and children are for the betterment of humanity.

My heart was beating fast for this. Not for ego. Not for violence. Not to dominate this dysregulated husband and father, but for the truth. He was doing what he was doing because everything about our society tells him he can. I reminded him, I hope, that he cannot.

Before I left, both of them calmer, and me too, I said, “bless your family, but just please, stop. The kids.”

I was eating lunch on a roadtrip through the Algarve. I ordered a hot dish of periwinkles and rice. My grandfather, from Alentejo, once told me that we eat and drink hot things to neutralize the heat of the summer. That was one of the few pieces of advice he ever gave me before he died, so I listened. I grew up eating periwinkles - búzios - thank

s to my Azorean mom, who would make big pots of them in the summer, with crushed red pepper and salt. Living in Portugal has made my life, and my family, make more sense to me, and I spent most of my adulthood depressed in Toronto hating the place where I was born because I lived so far away from where I knew I belonged.

I was drinking a cold beer between bites of rice, I had a book to read, a cigarette on the go, and was happy. I tossed thoughts as slowly as I chewed and realized it had been weeks since I had heard from her, a long-time friend of mine, but didn’t know why.

She had seemed overwhelmed lately and kept refusing plans to meet. So I told her to reach out when she was ready. She thanked me for giving her the room, and for my patience, but gave me no reason why she needed it. I do not respond well to vagueness, but I loved her enough to let it be and wait.

After years of recognizing the signs of when someone is trying to avoid me, it wasn’t hard to figure out that something was wrong. Everyone is fighting a quiet battle, including me, so I put thoughts of her in the back of my mind and ended up in the Algarve on a roadtrip alone to get away from people, too.

I had a lovely server at that lunch. Late 50s, kind and talkative, I related to her. She made me feel at home, at ease, a skill not a lot of people have. We spoke about Portugal and how we both ended up there. She was from Russia and had lived in the Algarve for two decades, with fluent Portuguese and an accent to match.

Midway through lunch, the chef, a man in his 70s wearing a chef’s jacket in that damn heat, came to ask me how my meal was. I told him it was marvelous, and I meant it. But even if I had not loved it, I would have told him it was great. His comfort was more important to me in that moment than my honesty. I know when to put someone else’s feelings above my own.

As I continued to eat and read my book, my thoughts slid back to my friend. I sensed something was about to happen.

I thought about the last time I had seen her. We’d spent a March afternoon on the beach, an unusually warm day that reminds you summer is coming. We talked, laughed, joked and shared ideas like always. The way we spent time together was not like the way I spent time with anyone else. I liked the version of myself I got to be when we were together. That day on the beach, I felt our connection deepen. I could be myself around her and never felt that I was “too much” or “too smart” or “too opinionated” - with her I never had to shrink.

We had spent holidays and birthdays together, seen each other through wins and losses, and she liked to hear my strange stories about the men I went out with. So her recent distance felt like a flaw with her coping strategies, not a problem with our friendship. But I was about to find out that I was wrong.

After weeks of silence, while reading my book and chewing hot rice, her text came in. I only scanned it but immediately absorbed every word. She said she needed to walk away from our friendship. No reason given, just that it had not been an easy decision for her. I had no clue that she had been sitting on such an idea. My life is not a revolving door, and a text is not a knock to be let back in, so I told her in a voice note that she was free to go, but that there was no path back. Not because she chose to go, but how she chose to leave: without a conversation.

I am a decisive person. This is something I had to train myself to be, after years of sitting on the fence with big choices. Indecision is a poison you feed yourself willingly. My reply to her was immediate, un-triggered, but direct, and I asked her how I could grow from this if I had no idea what went sideways with us. She never gave me a reason. This was abandonment.

In all my years of fucking things up, I have also learned not to chase people that do not want to stay, no matter who they are. Usually I will fight for someone for a bit, making sure that leaving is what they want. Not this time though. Our friendship was profound enough that a text with no explanation pushed all my understanding to the edge.

Think of it like chopping off the head of a chicken, something not uncommon in the outskirts of Portugal. Any farmer will tell you that it is more humane to end its life with a clean, decisive sweep than to keep attacking it with an axe and making it suffer, waiting for its death. When I cannot revive a relationship, I will not keep trying. I will let it die.

The next day, to my surprise, she replied with another text, but still no answers. Despite my invitation to call me or leave a voice note, she chose more words through a screen. Her goal was self-preservation, but it came at the expense of my plea for understanding. I let all the possibilities of what I had done wrong run through my mind and then decided that none of them mattered if not one of them was worth a discussion. You cannot change people, but you can change your relationship to them, and so we both did.

Perhaps she took my patience for granted. In her text she said that our friendship clearly could not handle a “break”. But that was a diversion. It sidestepped the real question: why the break was needed in the first place, and why it arrived so abruptly. I loved her deeply. Her friendship made me a better person, and now the end of it would make me a better friend to myself.

It has been a few months since this happened and I have not heard from her, and don’t expect to. When capacity does not meet depth, there is no path forward, and in this case, no path back either. I do not feel bad about knowing who I am and how I want to be loved.

What hurt me, and perhaps this is the most relatable part of any breakup, is that I was left wondering how long she had felt this way. It’s like when a lover keeps taking from you, sleeping with you, going out with you, while in the back of their mind they are no longer in love with you, but pretend to be. How long had I been loving her while she was busy un-loving me?

I believe anything is possible. Death is the only final destination in this life. People can come back around when the time is right and the healing is done. Until then, it is over.

I do not sit where I do not feel welcome, and that is something I had to suffer through to learn. I left the city of my birth over this truth once, and a friendship is no different. Relationships to anything or to anyone must have consistency and truth in order to have value. The way someone leaves you is as important as how they decide to stay.

This is not advice. No one is the expert in who you are but you. Other people’s projections are often disguised as well-intentioned advice. But unless someone has been through what you are seeking advice about or can say with certainty that they are an expert in the subject you need help with, what is the purpose of someone telling you what they think?

I am often asked what I think about things. I don’t know if that’s because I am a writer who can articulate herself well or if it’s because I am a well-researched person who takes the time to study and think before I share what I would do in any particular situation. But mostly I think people ask me what I think they should do to solve a problem because I help solve problems of a specific kind for a living and have done that for 25 years.

I once heard that, no matter how close we are to someone or how much we tell them about who we are or how well they know us, no one will ever really know-know us because it is impossible.

No one, except you, has full access to your inner thoughts, desires, troubles, nightmares, fears or value system. No one knows you as well as you do. Everything we know about each other is shared through a filtered version of how we describe ourselves and predictive patterns that others witness in us. This is a fact. I am not making this up. We can get close. Extraordinarily close. But close is not the same as complete. Human connection will be studied until the end of time and still have no answers. The unexplained tether that we have to each other simply because we are made of the same bones, brain and flesh is otherworldly and what makes the human experience as fascinating as it is confusing, miraculous and finite.

It is our one true mission to know ourselves as well as we can. A lot of us do not like to sit with who we are long enough to understand that, whoever we are, we can change that.

The brain is plastic. Malleable. Renewable. Dementia and degenerative diseases like it are the only things that refute this. With all the things I regularly pray for, that science finds a cure for the shrinking of our brains is one of them. To live a whole life only to forget it with each passing day as you make more memories you will soon forget is one of the greatest tragedies of the human experience. We now know that many of the diseases that can attack the brain are not curable, but preventable. But I cannot get into that right now, because it will make me cry. Just know that we have more control over the health of our brains than we practice.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to know yourself. What are your thoughts saying about you to you and to you about others?

Staying present and sitting with yourself for periods of time, undistracted and not succumbing to external stimulation, is medicinal. It is a choice. It happens over time. Not all at once.

After two decades of interviewing people and hearing thousands of personal stories, a lot of us cannot be alone with our behavior. This is my observation. And that is no truer than now, as we continue to throw ourselves into our phones, which contain infinite worlds of distraction designed by people who do not give a shit about humanity.

It makes me both frustrated and happy that I will never run out of things to write about. I think I will run out of time before material. I recently cut my nails very short so I could type faster. I have a lot to say. I still will not get to it all. But it keeps things interesting.

I believe that stories will save us. Not because they just entertain and distract us, but because stories produce compassion within us.

When we understand someone else’s story we can better understand our own, which is why solitude, as much as I love it, has some limitations when it comes to growth. Without people reflecting back to us their own lived experience, it is difficult to have context for our own. This is the great tension of life, the great friction, because nothing grows in homeostasis. We need tension and friction to make things move into something clearer, something new and better formed. There is no way around this truth, but I would be open to anyone who can tell me otherwise. Change my mind.

A good friend, also a writer, recently asked me why I write. I did not have to think long before I replied: I write to change someone’s mind. Not their internal value system, but their perspective about the world, themselves, and themselves in the world. I write so that someone can see themselves in a story and feel less alone. But what I write is never advice.

A Sunday in late June in Paris. 2011.

I am 31 and married but slowly starting to not be into the idea of being attached to anyone.

This fucking scares me. He is a good guy. And everyone tells me that I am lucky.

It hits me, watching my own behavior, that I like the version of myself when I am alone.

But I am struggling with the empty spaces.

Because I have no one to answer to, I drink one night and set about Paris on foot around midnight and catch the last boat across the river, because I can.

On the way home, I pretend that I am talking on my cell phone so that any creep who might be watching me thinks that someone knows where I am. But no one does. And I start to plant seeds for trusting myself completely. For feeling free. And unbothered by the tethers of my safe and structured life back home in Toronto.

I start to practice being bored the fuck out of my mind and seeing if I can handle it. I almost break under the weight of the silence and heat in the apartment this one afternoon that I begin to try.

It feels like the only other living thing in that apartment are the tiny yellow tea roses that I bought that morning at the market. They are now tattooed on my ribs. For no reason. But maybe a reminder of my super power that started to slowly plant itself back then.

Somewhere between 2 and 4pm are what I call The Witching Hours. The hours in which we can spiral mentally, day or night. Between 2 and 4 in the morning is just as bad. Just as hard. I have had insomnia since the end of my marriage. And what used to break me waking up at 2am and pacing around to keep myself busy is now the time that I begin to write. But I had to train myself into this existence. And training only happens through action. Not through ideas or assumptions about what you are capable of when put to the test.

I have earned my super power. My solitude. Not because it was easy, but because I knew that on the other side of knowing how to be alone, and content, were the more genuine and selective choices about who I let into my life down the road.

These days, I do not fuck around with people who do not want to be around. If you want to go, please do. I would hate to think that anyone stays in relationship with me out of obligation or a lack of knowing how to leave. If you feel you need to go, then you must. And my solitude lets people know that my life is not a revolving door to run through.

In Paris, in that small, hot apartment in June, I learned to be bored and survive it.

I am not perfect at it. Sometimes I need people. I love to be in the company of loved ones who love me. But I will not keep company with someone just because I cannot be alone. I can. And I will. And typically, I must.

Sometimes it is not company I seek, but the witnessing of a fun life I have made for myself. An invitation to the things I like to do: go to storytelling events, walk around the city for hours, have long dinners and conversations, sneak into hotel pools in the summers, go to the beach in the middle of the day, and raves after midnight, just because I can.

Fifteen years after that summer in Paris, alone when I did not have to be, but chose to be, I now rarely think “who can I bring with me” to do this or that. I just go. I just do. I just live according to no one’s plan or timeline, asking no permission and giving no check-ins as to where I will be.

When I want to take a roadtrip, I no longer ask myself: Who will come with me? I just rent a car, book a hotel and go. Being in someone’s company now is the exception to the rule. Not the baseline from which I build. And I think that is a beautiful way to live.

Companionship is wonderful. I love friends and I love lovers. But I love time with myself the most. I think I have always been this way, and marriage was the detour, and so was every relationship after that, more examples of how I am happier when I am alone.

Nothing in life is free, even your freedom has a price. And that price is often bearing the weight of what it takes to really like yourself when you are with your own behavior and no external feedback or approval.

But it all started somewhere, and I can pinpoint the moment, in that hot apartment in Paris in June, when the beginning of the end started for my marriage and the life I had built with someone else since I was 18.

I watched a leaky faucet drip for two hours in that apartment, between 2 and 4, and did not get up once. I let my own skin feel gross to me, not from sweat, but from silence. The discomfort of no noise. No chatter. No plans. And no one to answer to for awhile.

I let the dead weight of summer and loneliness take me over like a spell, and from then on, I became possessed with the idea of having this freedom all the time.

I took more trips alone after that. I always invited my husband to come, but he rarely did. So I would travel to learn, to feel, to cry, to meet strangers and to write. Some of those stories took years to form. But being a writer is not just about the writing. It is about the research. A science of experience put into words that are all true.

I swear that I could feel my brain rewire itself as I sat alone watching the fucking faucet drip. I let myself be still and hate it, sweating in silence until I could not tell the difference between my own body and the sofa.

The worst possible feeling.

I let it all the way in to build a tolerance I knew would be necessary to survive what I did not yet know lay ahead for me.

It is easier to endure suffering when you know it will end. But the unknowing, and doing it anyway, is where resilience and character are won.

Call it instinct. Call it crazy. But now, I call it a superpower. Solitude has been the remedy to anything mediocre or less than I was built for.

I sat there and stared at the drip, drip, drip of the faucet, melting into the sofa as I touched on all my worst fears. I sat there until no more thoughts came and my mind went blank. I remember that I started to laugh at how this could be my life. Bored and alone. But free.

I can admit that I tricked myself into thinking that was a real taste of loneliness back then. I underestimated what leaving my marriage would do to my mind. Boredom. Insanity. Silence. It all came next. Maybe I had not trained long enough for it or maybe I left too soon. Likely not soon enough. None of it matters now, because I no longer get anxious about being anxious when I am in my own company for long periods of time.

To me, solitude is not a consequence of bad decisions anymore or even a reflection of my worth. It is the choice I make consistently so that I have options about how and with whom I spend my time.

My husband and I were attached at the hip back then, and I did miss his company while I was away. But every time I returned to Toronto after a trip on my own, I missed that alone version of myself. She was free. And being with her became my driving force into the unknown.

Some people see a single woman as a woman unchosen. I have been someone’s significant other many times, but never to my full satisfaction. I am built to love big and have yet to meet the container for that. I am looking for no one, but always open to the experience of something new.

When I hear: “Oh, Sandy, don’t worry, you’ll find someone”, I tell them I am not looking, so fuck, I hope not. Not now. Not just when things are getting good and the superpower is getting stronger. Refined yet undefined, and intense.

People are not uncomfortable with my solitude, but the lack of their own. I am proof that it is possible, but also that it is a sacrifice, built over years, and an endurance and becoming likable to yourself, which most people, oddly, are not.

After 25 years of studying people and writing about them, most of us do not really like our own company enough to be alone for more than a day or two. Maybe a week at best.

Not advice, but you are going to be with yourself your whole life. Might as well enjoy the company and learn to like who you are.

Solitude is a spectrum. For some people, it’s a snack, a break from others. For me, it is often a full meal, and being with others is the dessert or delight when I want it.

This all started with a moment. A leaky faucet, 15 years ago, and being alone with myself to a breaking point that finally, at 45, has set me free.

It was three weeks of a romance with an artist from Lisbon. Exciting. Visually perfect.

He made art for a living and lived his art for effect. Well-known for his work, although I did not know it at the time we met. To me, he was just a guy I met at a painting exhibition last spring. I would learn after we started seeing each other that his work is widely collected around the world. An incredibly talented artist.

He was 28 and I am 45. But that was not the problem, until it was. He had lived a lot, but not long enough, and time really does bring wisdom. Our gap became most evident in the final days of our relationship. Things ended slowly at first, and then all at once.

After I left his studio following our “breakup” or whatever people do when they are not officially official, but something in between “something and nothing” to each other, I started my ritual of falling apart. I have learned to do it quick.

Disillusionment is my medicine. Twenty-four hours is about how long it takes me to move on from someone who was a lesson, not a lifetime.

I got home around midnight after we said goodbye at his studio for the last time. He had rushed me towards the end of our discussion because he was on his way to see someone else. Another woman, already lined up, someone he had slept with just a day after we ended things. I did not know it at the time, but was about to find out. I have heard this strategy before and have even used it myself, but I learned that getting under someone new is not the way to get over someone who is still in your head.

When I got home from his studio, I called him to be sure. I asked the one question I forgot to ask when the end had started at my apartment earlier that evening. “Who is she?”, I asked, and he told me she was a lawyer, 30-something, Portuguese, and I laughed at the idea of this talented artist going from a writer, like me, to a billable hours-type, like her. “Have fun with that”, I said before I hung up the phone.

I had hoped he was not like the rest, but most of them can be this way - lacking in emotional development what they make up for in charm and good looks. I had been replaced, sort of, and that was a gut punch. I can admit it because it happens to all of us at one time or another. It is human to hurt, but cruel to hurt someone like this, and I told him so.

I sat down on my sofa and did nothing for a while, which was exactly what I needed to do. I let the feelings that come from being fascinated by someone slowly disappear. I hate it, I know it well, so I let it happen and I let the ritual begin.

I smoked a cigarette, turned on the music, took half a tablet of MDMA, and had a hot shower that I let fully steam my apartment as part of my ritual for falling apart. I knew I would be fine, but it would take time - just 24 hours. When it comes to heartache, I am not an expert, but am no stranger to the process.

I needed to go into the deep end of what was passing through my body and mind, a mix of disappointment, disgust and disillusionment, so that I could feel better again, and soon. It used to take weeks for me to get over someone, or the version of myself I get to be when I am with them, but now it takes a day. Getting through pain is a process, but when you know the road to get there, the path seems more clear to follow.

The moment when I know it’s over, like when he told me who the other woman was, I can begin to let the marathon in my mind go off. I do not recommend this method unless you know yourself well enough to know that you are not afraid of your own thoughts. And I am not. Crashing out over someone is a symptom, not a state, and it takes faith in knowing who you are to meet yourself again.

Possibly still too immature, possibly too unresolved, possibly not used to hearing “no” and “fuck you” from the women who come and go, The Artist was suffering from his privilege, and it showed. He was relying on things other women had let him get away with before. Like so many sexist cultures, focused on the pleasure, gaze and dominance of men, Portuguese tend to say “boys will be boys” and “men are men”, but to both of these I say fuck off.

In the 24 hours after our short-lived romance ended for good, I had work meetings and writing assignments. I didn’t have time to cry or be sad about the end of something that barely began. I had not known him for long, but I had known him well, he told me so.

He asked if we could be friends, and I said no. How someone treats you as a lover tells you how they will treat you in the after-life of your relationship, and I do not make it a habit to wander in the graveyard of what could have been. I have yet to be proven wrong about this. Instead, I let myself feel the hurt all the way, exhaust it until it is too tired to exist, and burn a bridge, not so he can’t walk back over to me, but so that I destroy my path back to him.

I walked around the city the next day, nearly 24 hours after we were over. I listened to the same song again and again, one that made me think of him for no reason: Hot Blooded by New Constellations.

I picked up my pace on the walk, to outrun the thoughts that followed me, and I let myself both hate and enjoy the specific mix of adrenaline, anger, and relief. Disillusionment, like art, is a process, not a product, and it takes effort and time to make.

I kept up my pace, pulling myself through Lisbon, my body feeling like bricks, relying on the familiarity of the city to soothe my confusion and guide my road through temporary sadness. I would miss thinking about him more than I would ever miss him at all. In my years as a single woman, it’s the myth, not the man, that often keeps me hanging on. I knew the hurt would be over soon.

I started a painting when I got home from the walk, like I always do when my feelings are too big - I paint them out. When something sweet ends on a sour note, I need to release it, and when the writing doesn’t come, the painting does.

For years, I have spread my feelings across canvases, like a final bleeding out of whatever is left over from the thing that never was. I’ve made several of these pain paintings through the years, my apartment is full of them, inspired by lovers, telling the stories of things gone wrong without words.

I took a break from painting, from smearing my disappointment across the cotton for a bit, still listening to the same song in my headphones. I sat on my sofa and lit a cigarette. Looking down at my coffee table, at a small, square note pad that’s always there so I can write down ideas that turn into essays later on, I saw something I did not expect. He had left a drawing there the day before.

I thought back 24 hours to when the breakup had started at my apartment: As I had been standing in front of him asking why he was the way he was, why he had lied, and telling him that no, we could not be friends, he was drawing me. An animal version, a frog in a dress, waving her arms in distress, my coffee table and flowers in a vase, and the candy dish he used to take from during our many hours spent together, listening to music, smoking, drinking coffee, falling in like with each other, or at least the versions of who we were together. It was all there in the drawing.

I realized he drew what he saw but could not say on that notepad, on a thin white piece of paper with a blue pen. I laughed. It was over for good, and that drawing was what he had to say about it.

A few weeks later, I had the drawing framed. A simple wooden box for my complex experience with The Artist. He had signed it, and his work is known, yes, but I framed it for the story. It hangs on my wall now, a memory of a memory of a romance that was short, but intense, like my recovery, our time together in a picture, now set to words - an unexpected collaboration of two minds, two artists, each with an interpretation of the truth.

I’d been writing quietly in my room when she called. Looking back, I should have listened to my immediate instinct, which was not to pick up the phone. But I did. And an invitation to dinner followed.

I was staying at a herdade, a rural property in Alentejo. I needed privacy and space - two things that I don’t get enough of in Lisbon because of unsustainable tourism and other things and people that drain me. I wanted to get the fuck out of town.

The owner of the herdade, a woman in her 50s, asked me to join her and another guest for dinner on that call. As women, we want to believe that others will save us, help us, and for the most part, that is true. But this was going to be an evening when I realized that I was on my own in the company of others.

On these trips, the objective is to have no objective, but to write. Meet strangers, listen to their stories, take notes, think, and see if something might become an essay. Sometimes it takes minutes to form an idea, sometimes months, sometimes years.

Strangers seem to confess more easily to people they don’t know. I am skilled at asking questions and leading people to believe that they know me without me giving away much about myself at all. This is my job, but also a tactic for survival. Not everyone deserves your story, and this night, at this dinner with two strangers, this theory proved to be true. But this is the work that feeds me, and I am careful with what I ingest.

The air in Alentejo feels lighter and cleaner, but also heavy with the scent of olive trees ripening along the roads and hills. The smell is familiar, and I have come to like it, love it, as I drive into the region that feels like a second Home.

I lit a cigarette as I introduced myself to the man at the table, the other guest. His name started with an H, like the country he was from: Hungary. Later in the conversation, he revealed that he was a doctor, a GP. I told him I write essays from a feminist lens for magazines and work in the industries of quantum security and AI. He lifted his eyebrows at that, maybe in disbelief. Although he was the doctor at this dinner party, he was likely not the smartest guest. He was a strange stranger, weirder than most I have met in a while.

He started talking. In fact, he would not shut up. This would have been fine if he had something interesting to say, but he was the type of person that speaks at you, not to you, not with you, but at your face, telling you that you are wrong about being right.

She was no better, the host. More than once she told me to listen. I have no idea why. I did not say much.

When they finally asked me how I ended up there, I replied that I was in Alentejo to touch grass, get away from Lisbon. Although I love Lisbon with all my heart, the people who fill it in the warmer months piss me off: rude tourists who stand in the middle of the sidewalks as locals try to push their way through the crowds to get to work, drunk bachelor parties, loud people who are too privileged and rich for their own good. And Instagrammers.

Fuck off.

I told them that the news of war and the online rape academy with more than 62-million hits had especially been getting to me lately, and that the people I know don’t seem to give a shit enough for my liking. I want people to care. I need it. Because nothing changes until it changes, and things need to change.

I think about my niece and nephew and the world they will grow up in and how it might implode before they get to middle age like me. God, help us all.

During dinner, as I tried to swallow my food, they told me to stop being such a “warrior”, to care less, that I needed to wake up. But the more these two strangers spoke at me, the more I knew it was them who seemed to be asleep, oblivious on purpose, to the current state of things around us.

“I am a journalist”, I said, “and do not have the luxury of ignoring my surroundings.”

The woman told me that I reminded her of Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, which I have heard before, and I do not like it. Nothing I do relates to a fictional character in a show that romanticizes female friendships, casual sex, writing for a living, and sexism.

But ok.

Label me whatever you want if it helps you make sense of things, push my identity into a box that makes sense for you. It’s like people deciding who you are according to your astrological sign without the effort of getting to know who you are as a person. Sure, go ahead if it helps you.

I am too smart to tell a strange man about my past, which is why I do not. He had been diagnosing me all evening with no invitation or data. But even in my ambiguity, he told me, unwelcome and unprompted, that I needed to “heal the little girl inside me”, if you can fucking imagine that. Creep.

They both told me that I needed to get out into nature more, but were ironically ruining my experience in it with their assumptions and one-sided chatter. They said that I should not live in the city, although neither of them had lived in cities as large as I have, so they had no context for their advice.

They told me that our destiny is already written for us, something I strongly do not believe. The host said that, for example, if her destiny was to murder me that night, then that was her destiny to fulfill, and there was nothing I could do about that. So I asked if that meant that my destiny was to be murdered then, because it made no sense. I would surely fight back. But I listened anyway, because I would have a good story to tell, and dumb people are very good at digging their own graves.

This bullshit went on all evening.

They both told me that I was “special” and they sensed that I had great work to do in this lifetime. I told them both to stop saying that, because none of us are as special as we think, and that is part of the equality thinking that I subscribe to. They did not like this, and when the jerky doctor continued to give me an unauthorized assessment of who I was, I told him I had enough.

He put his hand up, in my face, and said, “Shhhhhhhhhh…Stop!”

So I stared at him and did not flinch, amused and disgusted.

He stared back at me, exhaling heavily as if to calm himself down. I imagined that his patients had likely seen this strange behaviour before, and I wondered how many of them had been women complaining of real symptoms while he told them they needed to heal their inner girl.

It took everything in me not to ream him out, which I am very good at doing, but clearly this doctor was not well. So I said nothing more. I had a pain in my stomach, but not from the food. I felt nauseous, but not from the wine we had at dinner.

I thanked the host for the meal, said “Goodnight” and left. I was certain that I would be remembered as a lesson, and not as a likable woman, which I gave up being a long time ago.

I heard them talking about me as I walked away, which I expected, but did not care. At least they were talking about me, and not at me anymore.

After packing up my things the next day, I walked to my car to drive to the next town. I saw the doctor as I was leaving unannounced, standing alone in front of his room, stretching his gangly arms.

He said “good morning” to me in Portuguese, wanting some sort of validation I guess. But I looked straight ahead and said nothing, which said a lot. We, especially women, do not owe anyone a smile, niceness or even our attention where there is no return on investment to be kind.

These types of experiences used to bother me in my younger years, the ignorance of people, but now I just find it amusing. Write about it. And get fucking paid.

For nearly three years, I have watched my nephew grow up through video calls and photos sent through my phone. To him, I am “Tia Sandy”.

I was only in his life, physically, for a year or so, before I moved away. And most of that was during the pandemic, so our time together was limited. For the last six months, I have watched my niece, new born, do the same - grow up in front of me through a screen. This is a quiet grief I live with.

I live in Portugal and my family lives in Canada. I am not moving back and they are not moving here. This breaks my heart. But I am building my life in a place where I always knew I was meant to be. So although it is not easy, it is necessary.

I do not have children, and will not. A choice. But my sister, who is a few years younger than I am, has two. Her children are the greatest blessing of my life. I find myself making decisions so that their world will be better. My politics, my work, the money I earn, the way I live my life are all considered with their future in mind. This feels natural for me. And I do this all from an ocean and thousands of kilometers away.

Our mother has stage four cancer. There is no fifth stage. Sometimes it feels like she is living on borrowed time. I have never met a person with more will to live than my mother, who is an immigrant to Canada from Portugal, more specifically from a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Her cancer treatments are vicious, but necessary, and always break my heart.

I am building the life here now that she could not. She loves Canada, and although I do not feel the same, I am grateful to have been born in a country where my human rights, especially as a woman, were taught to me from a young age. I entered the movement of feminism at 19, but long before that knew that I was not less of a human being because I was a girl.

My parents, who were born into a fascist country at the time, fought me tooth and nail on my freedoms as a teenager, but in the end, they realized that they were raising a young woman with opinions, strong values and a deep sense of justice, which I have put into my work as a feminist writer for the last 25 years.

Now that I have a niece, my politics and direction feel even clearer. For my nephew, I want him to grow knowing that he has a choice to not let the patriarchy crush him too.

Although I did not birth them, I feel them in every step I take, every decision I make and every debate I fight for equality. They came from my sister, and she is half of me.

Yesterday, on a video call with my mom, who was looking after my niece, that sweet baby looked me in the eyes through a screen and I was overcome, as I often am, by a feeling of saudade - a profound longing - to know her scent.

“Mom”, I said, “can you sniff the top of her head for me? I bet she smells like heaven”, and my mother said, “she does”. Then she moved her face towards my niece and took several short inhales and said, “consola” from the word “consolar”, which in Portuguese means to comfort. My mom did this to my sister and I growing up, drinking us in to bring us closer and into her cells, to be comforted.

I wanted that sensory experience. The brain computes what we see and hear as if it is something that we are doing, like when we salivate watching comforting food being made or laugh when watching someone being tickled. Watching my mom do this to my niece, at my request, both hurt and held me somehow. The baby giggled and widened her eyes as mine stung with tears that I would not let run down my face for fear they would not stop. Being away from my family is a quiet grief I live with every day. I do not talk about it much, because most people I know do not get it. But this is part of my immigrant story.

My family and I have not always had an easy time being related, but we have always been there for one another in the ways that count. As I continue to build a life in Lisbon, thrive, not just survive anymore, like I did for decades in Toronto, they are the witnesses to my transformation. Sometimes my only mirrors for reminding me that I am okay, that my decision to leave everything behind was worth it, and necessary for my own contentment.

I cannot go back to Canada to visit them right now. It is complicated. And thinking about it makes me angry and I sometimes cry. But in the meantime, our calls, the packages we send back and forth and the messages we exchange almost everyday document our love for one another, our saudade.

My niece and nephew are being raised to know their tia, their aunt, in the distance and up close, through looking at my paintings hanging on their walls, through the books I send them in mail, and through the stories they hear from my sister and mom about who I am and always will be for them.

All the things I was as a little girl and young woman have more purpose for me now, and my niece and nephew continue to be light in my life and the reason why I will not stop fighting for a better world.

I do not always know what I am doing, and often make mistakes, but I do know for certain that what I do is for them and because of them, and that is enough reason to do anything at all.

I’m in some town deep in the Alentejo. A road trip that was unplanned. I needed to get away from Lisbon and stop watching the news. For now.

I am regularly disappointed by the apathy of some. Just because war and violence are not happening to us, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. My work becomes more clear to me with every kilometer logged on country roads.

My phone is silent and I get a glimpse of my face in the reflection of the screen. I am 45. But inside I still feel 17.

I have looked at this face for nearly half a century. She is older than I remember in my head. I am someone’s daughter, and sister, and aunt, and niece and friend.

My father has not spoken to me in five months. Last Christmas I found out he had been lying to our family about something quite serious. He didn’t like that I made a stink about it, about him lying to the women of our family about something that kept us all up at night. I miss him. But you cannot change a man. He taught me that. And so as I drive through the region where he was born, and half my family still lives, I cannot help but think about him. I am a fatherless daughter, and have been my whole life. I think about this. But do not feel victimized by it or even traumatized, because my father was a person -- a boy, a man -- long before me. And I love him just for existing and giving me half of my DNA.

Every day I grieve a living mother. She has stage four cancer that spreads, gets zapped, liquified by chemotherapy, and then insists on regrowing again. She is still alive. And yet. I miss her while she is still here. For all the arguments we’ve ever had, some even coming to thunderous blows and screams, she is the one person who fully accepts me for who I am. What a gift to be seen this way.

We are never alone when we are with ourselves. Wholly. Truly. And freely. And my mother is the one person on this Heavenly Earth who gets me.

My desire for freedom, my constant need to preserve the autonomy I have fought for, especially in the years following my separation from a man whom I should not have married when I was still too young to understand, does not end. But will soon. Finally. Amen.

I am pulled over on the side of the road, near a town deep in the Alentejo, where no one knows my name, and I prefer it that way. My face looks similar to the people around, but I do not know who they are. We are made from the same string of ancestry and lineages: dark eyes and hair, skin that browns easily with the slightest touch of sun, small frames engrained into us from past generations of famine, poverty and physical labour in the fields, mines and orchards, where temperatures reach beyond 45 degrees Celsius in the summer months. We are the same. But different.

I see the face, my face, of a middle-aged woman, single and free, without children -- a grief I made peace with a long time ago, an ongoing process that I honour, because it allows me to make decisions, have adventure and take risks that do not require the consideration or permission of others.

You’re going to be with yourself for the rest of your life. Make peace with who that is. Learn who you are, and why. It’s the whole job. And even if the face staring back at you gets older, the spirit behind your eyes, looking back at you in the reflection of a blackened phone screen, stays forever young as long as you have love, freedom, and adventure in your heart.

This is not advice. Only the lived truth of a sovereign woman.

If you don’t want to be written about, do not spend time with a writer. That is rare advice I will share.

It doesn’t mean a writer will write about you, most people are not as interesting as they think. Myself included. Humility is an underrated trait of attractiveness.

But if you are in contact with someone who has a compulsion to write, like I do, to tell stories, then expect that someone like me might write about someone like you.

What you might think is a mundane thread to pull up, I might be able to weave into an essay that ends with a relatable experience for the reader. My objective is the reader and my process to reach them. To change a mind. Open a new window into themselves or close a door.

This is not a threat or warning of any sort. Just a fact. You cannot like someone for what they are and then hate them for the same thing. Meaning, do not like me for the way I write but hate me if I write about you. I am still doing the thing you like, but when it doesn’t serve you, you hate me for doing what I am good at. Doesn’t make sense. But we all have done this to someone - held against them what first drew us to them. I have seen this duplicity in some people for my “directness” too. You like my directness until it’s directed at you. Even being called “direct” or “opinionated” can sound sexist. In men, it’s just called “smart” and “honest”. Those things only stand out in me because we are socialized to think that women should not speak up at all.

I don’t buy that bullshit. I am a person who speaks up. And I have noticed that people who point this out in me often don’t hate me for it, but hate themselves for not being able to do the same. In essence, I guess, they don’t hate me for what I am, but who they are not. We are all mirrors for each other and I would be lying if I said I don’t know that I have been that for a lot of people I have met, will meet or will never know again.

Being involved with a writer is an experience. Romantically, platonically or in business, writers are natural reflectors. It is our work to comment on society, even especially through fiction. I am leaning more towards it, practicing the skill of telling fake stories about real things all the time.

Last year I dated a man whom I let stay at my house. Too often, looking back, but it was comforting for us both nonetheless.

One morning, while he was still sleeping, I got up at 4am to start my work, my writing. I do this every day, mostly seven days a week. At the very least, even on the mornings when the writing doesn’t come easy, there are rituals and ways I use to keep my thoughts flowing enough to keep the work going. The thinking, the research, the pondering, and the messy notes on paper are the real work, the process too, and when that man I was seeing stayed with me, he saw it.

I did it another morning while he slept, and then another. The first time I ever let someone in that close to it. Occasionally I would take a break, as I often do, to make a coffee, pace the apartment, paint or sit and think in the dark. Most mornings I would go into the bedroom to kiss him on the forehead. Not wake him up, but to absorb this other person in my home. His warmth, his care. Sometimes I would lay next to him for a few minutes, to be held if the writing had been hard, and he’d wrap his arm and leg around me and pull me close so I could rest, knowing how much I hate to sleep, but need to.

It would fill me with enough oxytocin to go on. And I would return to the writing and feel energized somehow. This went on for weeks. And then one morning he woke up around 5am and came to join me as I wrote.

He walked over to me and said not much, and then kissed me on the head gently and asked if he could rest on the sofa as I worked. I said yes. That had never happened to me before, although I had written a scene just like it into a fictional story I never published years ago. A fantasy. A dream. A wish to be seen. Understood. I believe this is the connection we all secretly want.

He only joined me that early that one time. The other mornings he woke up as I was finishing writing, usually around sunrise, and we would begin our usual day together, over coffee and conversation. Sometimes we would talk about what I had been working on. To process the process with someone else was the feeling I did not know I needed until he did it. At the time, he liked me very much, and I felt it in the way he listened to me talk about my ideas.

He said to me, “I know you’re a writer, but I didn’t know you were a real artist this way.” He was referring to my commitment to the ritual, to the work of living my life in a way that lets the stories come. Even though that relationship failed, and the subsequent friendship crashed and burned even harder, it was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me, about me. Not that I was an “artist”, I knew that part, but that he saw it, understood it, and said so. To have a relationship to language like writers do, we need to be alone with it a lot, have a relationship to the quiet, so we can hear what is in our heads.

Loving a writer is one thing, maybe even fun or interesting for a time, but it comes with knowing how to support that side of them when you see the work being done. When you know not to disturb the solitude, but to see it, nourish it, not treat it like a quiet to overcome, then you are living with a writer. Until then, it can feel like you are just fighting against us.

You would be surprised, or maybe not, to know that a lot of lovers can be jealous of the time and attention we give to the work. To some, it can feel like we are having an affair. Absent. Quieter. Maybe even moody, sure, but loving a writer is not for the faint of heart. Writing and publishing are still largely patriarchal, and to be a woman who writes is a rebellion just by showing up. A partner, regardless of their gender, needs to know this.

Do not hate in us what you loved in the beginning. Writing is not a costume we wear. It’s not a career or a job or a hobby either. It’s a vocation, and women’s work, in general, but especially in this field does not get the same weight or respect of our male counterparts. But it will. Voices like mine are being heard and I’ve learned that a partner who can support this, even if it means just witnessing it from a sofa, close by, but unable to follow us in, is rare.

If you are not helping the work, you are interrupting it, making it harder than it already is to create. This is why I prefer gentle, secure and enamored men, to the ones who bring emotional chaos above what is necessary for the relationship to grow. The ones who take away my attention from the work that makes me an artist, an individual, creative and free, are not only removed from the space - my home - but invited to exit my entire life. Nothing, and I mean nothing, stands between a writer and her work.

I will not permit being hated in the end for what I was loved for in the beginning, and no person should compete with the writer when she is writing, because they will not win. Because even if we do not write about you, we will write in spite of you.